9/11

For The Record: We should have built them back, on the exact spot, just like it had never happened. Not left a gurgling pit of remembrance, up the street from a mosque. Their precise restoration would have been a far more fitting memorial than would a hole in the ground. The twin holes should have been radioactive craters in Mecca and Medina. With a list of the next 20 locations to be forever expunged published and promulgated worldwide, pour encourager les autres. Ask Carthage how that worked.

 

Today, I remember and mourn the departed from that horrible day, as the last Americans to live their entire lives, until the last desperate hour or so, in something akin to freedom, never knowing or imagining the nannyist police state our homegrown terrorists in our own government would emplace in the aftermath of actual terrorism. And because many of the victims did what real Americans do: they ran into burning buildings, to help their fellow citizens. They took on serial killers with rolled up magazines and butter knives. They died as a sacrifice to a bloated bureaucracy that had grown stupid, fat, and complacent, and wholly abrogated its mission to preserve liberty, and then turned around and made it ten times worse in the aftermath for the free people, rather than the perpetrators.

And that's it.

The endless wars in service of the military industrialist complex, the serial rapes of the Bill of Rights, the demagoguery by an endless conga line of liars, cheats, and thieves, I give no thought of whatsoever.

It's another anniversary for me. That day, that very morning, twenty years ago today, was the first day I was employed to work in the Emergency Department. I'd been a nurse for six years, but spent most of that as the medic on motion pictures and television shows, but having decided that wasn't why I became a nurse, decided some weeks earlier to return to the hospital, and get into the game, get paid for what I was worth, and make an actual difference, instead of merely doing my best to make sure my services were never needed by watching over the pampered playthings of the studio industry.

I had finished all the b.s. HR classes the previous week, and was driving in to work from 5:30AM PDT that fateful Tuesday morning to begin my first shift in the world's busiest E.R. About halfway to my first day at work, the first plane crashed into the Towers. Bound to the limitations of radio, I assumed it might have been another overcast day, and some wandering pilot had clobbered the skyscraper, much like the lost pilot who had done the same thing to the Empire State Building decades before.

Shortly before arriving at work, the second plane hit.

I needed no one in officialdom to confirm for me that we were, at that point, being hit. Two collisions isn't a coincidence.

My fellow Southern Californians, many sitting at home and watching what transpired on a bright, crystal clear morning in the Big Apple on their televisions, had already reached that same conclusion.

I know this, because I was approaching the nexus of three of the busiest freeways in Los Angeles, at a quarter to 7AM local time on a weekday. And I was absolutely alone. It was like being Charlton Heston in The Omega Man: driving on deserted freeways and streets at what should have been the busiest part of the day.

I got to work in time to hear management tell the previous night's shift they were all being held over indefinitely, "because planes may start coming down into downtown Los Angeles any second. We just don't know, and we're Main Trauma receiving for the whole downtown."

And then, shortly afterwards, I watched the Towers collapse, live, on the waiting room TV.

First one. Then the other. Watching what appeared to be tens of thousands of people snuffed out in an instant left an overwhelming dread, and a numbing shock. It made for a pretty memorable first day on the job.

So I've spent most of my professional career with the entire nation at war. I helped train nurses and medics who later deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, again and again, because U.S. big-city trauma centers, at that time, were seeing more gunshot wounds in a month than the Marines saw in the first six months in Afghanistan, so such centers were the keepers of the keys to how to do trauma medicine right. Until endless tar-baby retarded slogfests over there turned into an orgy of maimed and shattered people, from IEDs from here to Hell.

I watched as liberty turned into a police state, rather than common sense precautions. We should have known how wrong and how badly this was going to go, when instead of depriving the terrorists over there of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we did it instead, Japanese Internment Camp levels of wrong, to our own free citizens here. And then doubled down, every single time. Our leaders never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

I watched another generation of vets become the new Vietnam vets, used and abused, for nothing, and discarded both en masse and one by one, in return for giving arms, legs, and souls to a pointless effort, because some jackass thought we could impart democracy to people who can't even read, and then twenty more thought that gender and perversion and whiteness were more important enemies to fight than people willing to fly airplanes into buildings in service of their 6th-century way of thinking.

I even had the chance, as a disaster turned into an endless and pointless meat-grinder, to rejoin the military. They moved the goalposts that far, out of sheer desperation, that guys formerly retirement-age were now inductee age, including me, if I'd wished it. I did the math on that: now single, combat arms, prior-service Marine NCO, trained trauma nurse. And realized I'd probably be shipped to the Baghdad ER after a cursory two-week indoc and OCS, and spend my entire career trying to turn meatsacks blown inside out back into the brave soldiers and Marines they were mere minutes earlier, while dodging incoming rockets and mortars myself. There's a reason I don't work the cancer or burn wards (it's spelled Kobayashi Maru), and the dotMil already had not one, but four bites at the apple for my services from my earliest youth, and managed to not need me for anything more hazardous than killing people off in Cold War "peacetime", with a tedious predictability. I have the multiple DD-214s to prove my readiness to offer my body for this country, but five times was a bridge I could not cross. I stayed where I was. And now, despite all our nationwide efforts, my wars, rather than being distant memories, are the nightmare future of my every waking day, stretching beyond any horizon of things to come that I can see. So don't worry, kids, if you couldn't get to SWAsia. The fallout from the first 9/11 means very soon, the war will be on your doorstep, and it's gonna be an all-skate boogalooapalooza. Guaran-damn-teed.

As one bitterly accurate brilliant wiseass put it this week, we spent two decades, trillions of dollars, and thousands of wasted lives, to replace the Taliban with...the Taliban.

Only government can fuck up something so simple in so colossal a way. It wasn't hubris, or anything so complex. It was purely and simply what happens when the stupidest, most evil, and most power-hungry incompetent and corrupt people in the room have been given the keys to the machines for 40 years, non-stop.

Looking at the America of today, twenty years onwards: if you told me terrorists wanted to destroy the biggest corporations we have, along with the Pentagon, the Capitol, and the White House, and then they did it, the average bystanding American would look at that act, and vote any such groups a perpetual monetary allotment in the high 10 figures per annum, make them our firmest allies, and send them our undying thanks. Because the kakistocracy who thinks they're running this fornication of the original intent have done a much better job of wiping their asses with the Constitution, and setting it on fire, than terrorists would have if they'd crashed into the National Archives with a 20MT nuclear weapon that detonated on impact.

Don't get me wrong, the terrorists of 9/11/01 are perpetrators of one of the vilest crimes in human history. Not for what they did, which was intrinsically horrific and evil enough. But for the avalanche of serial failures of our would-be overlords inflicted on a once-great nation since, from the inside, that have gotten us to where we are now:

So far past Totally Fucked, we can't even see Totally Fucked with a telescope pointed far behind us.

For unleashing that, there is no circle of Hell low enough, nor everlasting enough, nor flames hot enough, to provide suitable recompense for what they unleashed.

And the internal conflict upon which brink we're all teetering - make no mistake, it's going to tip into that abyss - is going to make this country's last Civil War look like a church picnic egg toss.

If you can't mourn that catastrophe, I don't know you, and I don't want to.

May God have mercy on the enemies of this great people. For I shall have none.

Boo!

You were going to get carved jack-o-lanterns, but it wasn't scary enough, so I went with witches instead.

Sorry about your lunch, but a little baking soda and seltzer water should get most of that out without needing dry cleaning.

"The horror. The horror..."

 

Because in fall, the dead arise and prank the living, and frightful undead creatures shriek at and torment innocent bystanders.

For Republicans, that's called Halloween.
For Democrats, it's called Election Day.

Happy Halloween.

These Aren't The Drones You're Wishing For...

h/t Bayou Renaissance Man and CDR Salamander

We've talked about drone attacks before hereabouts.
Did we ever.
So have a lot of others.

Capabilities have mushroomed, and prices drop. This is how tech goes from evolutionary to revolutionary. For all values of that last word.

The day of the drone assassin has arrived.

In November of 2017, The Daily Beast broke the story of the first illegally weaponized drone found in Mexico. It was a relatively primitive version that sported a homemade shrapnel bomb and was found in the back of a vehicle belonging to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), in the state of Guanajuato.

Then, about a month ago, evidence surfaced that CJNG had already advanced their drone designs considerably.

On July 10, the house of a Mexican public safety officer was targeted in a drone attack in Tecate, Baja California—a border city in the larger Tijuana-San Diego municipality that falls within CJNG’s established territory.

According to a new report co-authored by Dr. Robert Bunker, of the U.S. Army War College, the Tecate drone managed to drop its payload ISIS-style on the officer’s residence. Although the attack was apparently meant as a warning—since the grenades still had their safety pins intact—it also showed a clear step up in cartel-drone enhancement, including a second unmanned aircraft that conducted reconnaissance on site.

“Of the two drones, the Tecate one has far better lethality than the one in Guanajuato—we are comparing military grade grenades versus an IED,” Bunker told The Daily Beast.

“This is still an evolving global threat,” Bunker said. “The next firebreak, now that earlier ones have recently been broken in Mexico and Venezuela... would be weaponized drone incidents taking place in either Western Europe or in the United States. You can’t get much closer to the U.S. than Tecate, Mexico for an incident like this.”

There's still the occasional Baghdad Bob "expert" certain that this isn't happening (even as events and people who study this for a living tell them it already has), but some people go through life as Mayor Vaughn in Amity, denying reality while townfolk keep washing up in pieces on the beach.

Nobody's telling you to panic, or try knee-jerk bans. That horse left the barn decades ago.

FFS, my former artillery platoon commander transferred to the 1st RPV Platoon (Provisional) in 1985, over thirty years ago, when military drones were off-the-shelf homebuilts, and Israel had cobbled the tech together (along with the IAF) to wipe out every SAM site in the Bekaa Valley two years before that, with no friendly losses. In both cases, they recruited guys with civilian RC experience, and stood up units that relied on ancient engines and Styrofoam to build militarily significant machines with technology three generations earlier than what kids can have Amazon ship to their doorstep now.

Twenty years ago, we were using camera-armed drones to fly film shots that blended seamlessly with ground shots to fly a camera perspective down from 5000' to right in a window of a given house and down the hall.

If you can do that with a motion picture camera, it's obvious to anyone with two brain cells and stray voltage that you can do the same thing with a few pounds of high explosive.

And as usual, the profit motive (in this case drug money) and paramilitary desires for the perfect bomb have crossed the streams, and they're only getting better at it every day.
The progress from the drones seized in November, and the attack in July with a better version, was 9 months. Think where they'll be 9 months from now.

The question isn't whether it's going to happen, it's what's going to be done about it.
Airplanes started WWI with guys on opposite sides waving at each other, until one day some took along a pistol, then a rifle, then someone figured out how to rig a machinegun to fire through the propellers, and in under two years, shooting each other down went from ancillary effort to the entire point of the exercise. And in only thirty years (and two helpful world wars), that technology progressed from stick and fabric kites, to supersonic.

We're humans; this is what we do.

Making objects into tools, and tools into weapons is in our DNA.
Ask Abel.

Well, There Goes That Clever Plan...

h/t Irish

Dear Fucktard Army minions,

The FBI has already declared you a terrorist organization.
When you telegraph your clever idea on the Internet, a week in advance, you sort of defeat the idea of nobody catching on to you.
Anybody doing any rioting on November the 4th will therefore be YOU, and "popular opinion" is liable to heavily favor simply leaving your shotgunned @$$#$ for the local police forensics squad, followed by the coroner's meat wagon.
You're welcome.
And thanks a pant-load for making IDing you by your M.O. 100% foolproof.
Good luck picking the buckshot out of your liver. Your special kind of stupid is gonna leave a mark.

Everybody else:
I note purely as a random observation that one cannot obtain ballistic information from buckshot or slugs from smoothbore weapons, and that there's little in the average city short of thick concrete or brick walls that provides cover against the latter. They penetrate both sides of car bodies as if they weren't even there.
And first aid for such wounds tends to be rather resource-intensive, in a shredded beef sort of fashion, and that it's hard to escape if one's knee(s) look(s) like something that fell into a wood chipper, and one subsequently bleeds out whilst writhing hither and yon.
Which tends to repel boarders, and  also disincline similar behavior amongst one's newly-demoralized colleagues.

Just saying.

Bring the stupid, Snowflakes. This will not turn out the way you imagine, but it will end your vexations in a way familiar to people not raised on sugarplum wishes and infantile tantrums.

Welcome To My Nightmare

h/t Bayou Renaissance Man

Well, color me unshocked:
A couple of weeks back, Peter noted that hobby drones could and would be weaponized.

I agreed.
No shortage of jet-fuel geniuses were certain that it couldn't happen, because reasons, and "the payload capacity can be measured in grams".

Well, so can an 800 pound gorilla, Genius.

Now comes news that we're there.
Now.
$#!^, meet fan:

(CARTELISTAN) Mexican police discovered four men carting a kamikaze drone equipped with an IED and a remote detonator last week, in what analysts say is an example of cartels figuring out how to weaponizing UAVs.
The disturbing development is a manifestation of something top American security chiefs warned Congress about earlier this year, when they said they feared terrorists would begin to use drones to attack targets within the U.S.
Drug cartels had already been turning to drones to smuggle their product into the U.S., and had begun using IEDs in their turf struggles — but now at least cartel appears to have put the two technologies together, according to Mexican reports analyzed by Small Wars Journal.

The drone-IED combination was found in central Mexico, by federal police who did a traffic stop on a stolen pickup truck with four men in it.
Police found an AK-47, ammunition, phones and what the Small Wars Journal authors said appears to be a 3DR Solo Quadcopter, which retails for about $250 online. Taped to the drone was an IED, which could be trigger by remote detonator.

As Peter further noted in today's post:

The hobby drone referred to at that link, the 3DR Solo Quadcopter, costs only $199 from online retailers such as Amazon.com.  It can carry a payload of 1.1 pounds, according to its user manual - and Mexican drug cartels were obviously using that capability to the full.

1.1 pounds.
The weight of a US M67 frag grenade, with the pin pulled, helpfully snuggled into a cut open half of a soda can.

Rig a tip over/release mechanism, drop from 390' AGL up and it detonates on impact. A bit higher gets you an airburst.

A few of those, and you can beat the Vegas shooter's tally in seconds.

We won't even talk about some whackjob terrorist waiting for a press conference on the South Lawn of the White House. Or some future Inauguration on the Capitol steps. The Secret Service has to be sweating bullets the size of goose eggs about now just thinking about that security nightmare.

Do one with 1# of thermite and a fuze, and exactly as I noted in comments at the earlier post and you can take out a fully-fueled jetliner queued up for takeoff.

Or a space rocket launch.

Or an armed strategic bomber back on nuclear alert (like we're phasing back in, right this minute).

Do the same thing over a fuel tank, and you get one helluva fire.

Do half a dozen in the Wilmington/San Pedro refinery farms south of L.A., and you start more fires in five minutes than the entire county could put out in five days.

Freeways at rush hour? Times 10 or 20 locations at interchanges?

How about someone taking out a few power distribution station transformers, and wiping an electrical grid off the map?

Do it at the Sabine Pass LNG terminal (or wait for Long Beach CA or Cove Point MD LNG terminals to open up in a couple of years), and you unleash the equivalent of an atomic blast.

For the cost of $200 of drone, and $50 of chemical components, using a cell phone trigger that's been in use in SWAsia since before 2002. And now found in Mexico. (Found by accident, and unlikely to be the only one; it's just the first one we know about.)

We won't even talk about what a pound or so of C-4 would do. Let alone several dozens of them. (World Series? Superbowl? Malls at Christmas? Wall Street at the opening bell? A handful of FAA Center air traffic control buildings, simultaneously? The imagination boggles.)

So where's the genius that assured us a coupla weeks back that the carrying capacity on these things was measured in grams?
Yeah, turns out that would be 500 grams, to be precise.

Every invention in human history has been weaponized, in about 0.2 seconds. Hobby drones are no different.

And as fast as Amazon can think of using them to deliver a package, and we can think of the reasons why that might be a bad idea, Dirkadirka Imawannajihad on Bakalakadaka Street can think of a few hundred reasons why it's perfectly suited to his purpose.

Duh.

And the new price of a precision-guided munition has been dropped to $200, available on Amazon.

As sold.

As weaponized by Mexican cartels.

Sleep tight.

Las Vegas Still Makes No Sense

Everything about this case leads nowhere. Exactly as I suspect was intended from the outset.

We know Stephen Paddock was found dead at the scene.
We know 197 people were shot, ostensibly from a suite comped to Paddock, from a pair of rooms he began staying in 6 and 1/2 days prior to the shooting.
We know in it were found thousands of rounds of ammunition and 23 weapons, at least 20 of which were nothing but props, and which the carting to the premises was nothing but theatre, and not expediency.
We know that Paddock acquired 33 of the nearly 50 weapons he owned in the last 12 months.
We know he stayed at hotels overlooking several other concert sites recently.
We know he had 10-20 or more 100-round Surefire magazines that fit all the .223 AR-type rifles found in Vista Suite 32-135.
We know Paddock had virtually no online footprint, no political or religious affiliations, a far-beyond-comfortable nest-egg, and no discernible reason(s), neither personal, mental, or physical, to shoot 197 strangers and kill 58 of them, plus himself.
We know cameras were placed to allow a shooter inside the suite to see the approach of police coming up a long corridor to the room.
We know the emergency stairwell right outside his suite door was secured shut.
We know that a hotel security person, and a maintenance worker, were summoned to the exact floor and wing in question mere minutes before the shooting, by an unsecured door alarm three doors down from Paddock's rooms. How convenient.
We know someone inside the room fired several bursts at both of these men, at spitting distance, yet managed only one superficial injury to the guard, and none to the maintenance man.
We know that hotel security was notified within seconds, several minutes before shooting began on the concert, but that it took the police 18-19 minutes to arrive on the 32d floor, and who waited another hour and change after that to enter the suspect suite.
We know that over several minutes after that, hundreds to thousands of rounds were fired, ostensibly from the suite, at a concert site packed with attendees, at a range well within the effective range of an AR .223 rifle, and at a rate boosted to near full-auto cycling by the use of bump stocks.
We know that target was nearly the size of a WWII aircraft carrier.
We know no one on the ground immediately beneath the hotel reacted untoward after the initial bursts.
We also know that the initial pounding or shooting out of the windows on the 32d floor also produced no alerts, alarms, or anything else below.
We know that most of the exits from the concert venue were locked, trapping attendees in a large, stadium-lit killing zone for minutes during the onslaught, with a rat maze of obstacles to contend with to attempt to flee.
We know that after the initial burst down the hall, and after finishing the 6-minute killing bursts on the concert, no further fire was placed on either venue, and that it was several minutes, perhaps as many as 10, between the end of firing from the suite, and the arrival of the first LVMPD officers at the hallway landing on the 32d floor.

And that's everything.

We don't know why Paddock (or whoever) did this.
In fact, we don't know of any motive whatsoever, we have every circumstantial reason to suspect he did not, except for the fact that he was found dead in the room, with one bullet through his head.
We don't know the estimated time of his death.
We don't know how many rounds were fired.
We don't know how many expended brass shell casings were recovered from the suite and adjoining rooms.
We don't know how many shooters there were.
We don't know who came and went from his suite in the days and hours before the shooting, nor who might have left in the minutes after it.

And then there are the questions.
Why should any wealthy retiree decide to kill three-score strangers, just for the helluvit?
Where did Paddock's money actually come from? (You don't win millions at video poker. But it's a great way to launder millions playing video poker, while losing a token amount; call that a laundry service fee.)
Why would a guy with two planes, several houses, and no worries shoot hundreds of strangers?
Why not just crash a plane into them, and vastly increase the tally of dead, assuming you were going to do that at all?
Where did Paddock fly to and from, from the day he got his license to the day he died?
Where did he regularly disappear to in the years before his death?
Why is one of his planes now owned by a VA LLC whose profile screams "CIA cover company"?
Why is there a number of discrepancies between federal records and registrations for his aircraft, and that of a private site that notably simply mirrors federal records?
Who has the power to scrub flight plans, and fiddle registration numbers?
What trips, and where, did Paddock take to and from anywhere since, say, 9/11/2001, when federal records-keeping should have notably become more comprehensive?
Where did Paddock - if he did it - sight in his weapons and practice with them? (I'm good, but no one just wakes up one day and opens fire on a crowd at optimum sniping ranges and hits center of mass, at night, with cold shots, from never-fired weapons, on bump-fire. No fucking way.)
Where did Paddock learn to shoot? Not from family, military, or any other discernible sources, yet everything about the act, including the paper calculations found on the paper near the body, bespeaks of training and education in the gentle art of killing people with a sniper's meticulous precision that he shows no evidence of ever having received, save by osmosis from gun oil.
I could go on, as I have only a hundred more, because so far, every fact revealed about this case produces five necessary new questions for every one it answers.

The official narrative is plainly bullshit.
A security guard with no guard papers.
A killer with no motive.
A sniper with no training.
"Mental illness" pulled out of the hat with much hand-waving, but only to explain the final 72 minutes of a case that demonstrates anything but that. (If you go there, you're a retarded jackhole building castles in the sky with cotton candy. Quote me.)
Dozens of weapons with no purpose.
A convenient alarm right by the suite, just before the attack. (Pull the other leg, it's got bells on it.)
An ear-witness, miraculously not killed by hundreds of rounds fired at him in a straight hallway at mere yards, who then disappears the minute scrutiny turns to him.
All potentially corroborating video and electronic evidence of the Official Narrative hoovered up (you should forgive the unintentional pun) immediately afterwards by the FBI, and unreleased two weeks later, conspicuous by its total absence, and which would shut down further speculation in three seconds if the narrative were anything close to the truth.
A sheriff who can't get the most basic facts of the case assembled coherently, despite two weeks and multiple attempts. (And with the Bureau's vulture sitting on his shoulder and looking shark-eyes at him for every word of every press conference since Hour One.)
A total official stonewall until all further information is squelched and pinched off.

Nearly two weeks later, there are still stories full of metric fucktons of derp; and others full of well-informed clarity, but even the best of them only add questions far more than answers.

(And sorry boys and girls, but wild flights of "the belt-fed .30 cal", pseudo-scientific analysis of shitty audio and shakycam cellphone vids, and tales of multiple shooters from hysterical victims fleeing for their lives, all the way to "The One-Armed Man On The Grassy Knoll" theories, aren't helping anything along. Corroborated evidence beyond hearsay, or it didn't happen, capice?)

This is all - everything we've been told to "just accept" - so much horseshit.
Fifty eight people were killed, and 197 shot, in service of nothing whatsoever but a bullshit narrative, which serves nothing, so far, except the agenda to overturn the Second Amendment, and restrict the liberty of millions of people who didn't do it.

And, just saying, but isn't it miraculous how there were no mass shootings for pretty much the entire last administration - oh, except for some "workplace violence" at Ft. Hood - but totes coincidentally, both of the last two Republican admins get, respectively, 9/11, and now Vegas, both at the end of their first summer in office?
After being hamstrung in both cases by overweening, overwhelming, well-orchestrated astroturf campaigns and frothingly insane attempts to completely de-legitimize their elections?
I'm sure that doesn't mean anything, and it's all pure random chancey happenstance.
Move along. Nothing to see here.

If anything substantial comes to light, I'll come back to this. But nothing more seems to be forthcoming at this point.

By Official Design and Intent.

If they wished it were otherwise, they could be doing daily show-and-tell with bank records, flight records, travel records, a parade of the dozens to hundreds of corroborating witnesses, and hours of video from the Mandalay Bay Resort security cameras.
They have not done so, deliberately, and probably because they don't have anything that would show that, and what they do have undermines it, wholesale and totally.
Chew on that for awhile.

The only thing they produce by that is uncertainty, and widespread unease and distrust.
Chew on that for awhile, too.

This entire case is a naked man with a rhinoceros in his armpit trying to do magic tricks and pull it out from under his handkerchief.

"Nice try, genius, but we can see the rhinoceros!"

Repeat After Me

There's no sense posting much else.
What you're watching in living color 24/7 has a name:

The Stonewall Defense.

 

No matter what you see, hear, uncover, question, associate, or just ask about, the narrative has been settled on by TPTB, and this is what you're going to get.

 

Every time.

All the time.

Time after time.

 

Anything outside the lines drawn above will be dismissed or ignored until you go away.

 

Left unspoken is the benediction: "So shut up and stop bothering us, already!"

The guy is supposed to have Jack Ruby'ed himself (how convenient!), left a poster-boy gun-hater panorama for future use, and they wrapped this one up in two hours.

Feel better now?
 

More Poking Around Vegas

NBC News pic above embiggens. The Mandalay Bay has 43 floors. The top three are penthouse suites. Douchebag's can be located by counting down the right edge of the Mandalay Bay tower from 40 to get to 32, which was Douchebag's suite. (To help you out, the same Vista suites on 37-36-35 directly over his are all lit up). Note that it's blacked out above, not lit up. It took LVMPD 1 hour and 12 minutes from first 911 call until they kicked in his door, and found him dead after eating his gun. 
He's in a 32d floor Vista suite, for three nights, which goes for about $700/night. (If he also had the adjoining room to the left side of the below plan, add another $200-500/night).

His suite "just happens" to be one at the tip of the North leg, the only one (of three possible) that gives him the best unobstructed views to the music festival, but also puts the main Hotel driveway on the Strip, where police would arrive, right under his nose the entire time. So he can see everything: the entire Strip, McCarran Airport, the festival, the main freeway, the whole ball of wax.

Then there's the weapons (reportedly 35 so far, including 10 rifles, with a guesstimated cost to him of somewhere around $22K). Rather a lot for a non gun-guy "who hangs out, and eats burritos." Then modifications to the ones used in the attack to give him near full-auto rates of fire. Plus the ammunition.

And he apparently went back and forth between the two windows, which among other things, would make it harder to pin him down, or return effective fire, and if he swapped weapons at each one, they could cool off between magazine dumps from each one. So we've got a pretty well-thought-out plan of action for a mass murder, and we're already at somewhere around a $25K investment or more he made in this "random senseless act".
As if.

Further reports indicated that shooting platforms for each window were constructed, to elevate him and give him a better view of the target.

He was also a private pilot with two airplanes and an instrument rating, and his most recent physical indicated he needed reading glasses.

This was meticulously planned and executed.
And this is still one helluva lot of secret squirrel and sniper tradecraft for a non-military retired 64-year-old aerospace accountant, who needed reading glasses, wasn't a "gun guy", and had no notably strong political/religious preferences whatsoever.

 

 

Lifted from comments:

here's a vid link courtesy of Feral Irishman (Irish, in comments)

 

And his thoughts:

I found this at another site. Does it sound like multiple guns? Especially at the 2 min mark.

FWIW

There is a lot of stuff floating around the internet and we will have to wait for it to filter out but none of this is making sense.

One such point earlier this morning the daily mail reported 2 officers were hurt confronting the gunman. Then we are told suicide.

Who knows.

My response:

1) No, the video doesn't sound like two guns. The problem is, the shooter's window(s) have the SW tower wing at a 120-degree angle, which reflects the original gunshot sounds out of sync with direct-line sounds, and it's a wall of glass.
using walls and buildings to misdirect the report is something I read about as early as the early '80s in the stories about Carlos Hathcock, something he did specifically when sniping, whenever possible. Maybe just happenstance in this case, but physics is still physics, and sound does what it does.

2) The Mail is in London, and I expect they did their reporting from in front of the TV, unless they happened to have someone in Vegas covering OJ's release, but they wouldn't likely be that plugged in to the local PD. I suspect their reports from early on are just so much noise, rather than light.

3) The video was good in one respect: I knew where the shooter was in those shots, and I couldn't see anything identifiable as muzzle flash (crappy camera quality? + shaky cam), even when pointed right at the correct spot. Notably, they were pointing cell cams mostly at the wrong spot, which underlines what I said in (1), above, about picking gunfire out with all those echoes.

4) That initial burst from the first video sounded like a serious mag dump. Audio analysts will be counting and isolating the shots, but somebody sounds like they had way more than a 30-shot banana mag. I heard 45+ one a quick count, and the vid picks up partway through the first mag. Maybe a drum, Beta-mag, or one of the 60-round Surefire's?

Time will tell. But the more I dig, just asking basic questions, the more this smells like a meticulously planned op, and not some "just snapped" whackjob deciding to fire up a crowd for the helluvit, on a whim.

5) Douchebag's daddy was a psychopathic gunman and bank robber, who died in prison after being on FBI's Most Wanted List when Hoover was Director. I have zero problem concluding the apple didn't fall far from the tree here.

Add this to the puzzle, this time from  100% F'ed Up:

Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told reporters Monday that ammonium nitrate, a chemical compound used to make homemade bombs was found in the Las Vegas shooter’s car.

We are learning more about the background of the shooter including his gambling habit and ownership of several properties that police are now scouring for evidence. Paddock moved 27 times! He lived in Texas and Florida before ending up in Nevada. 

He owned two planes and a $400,000 house in a retirement community. His brother claims he was a multi-millionaire: 

The brother of alleged Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock said Monday he was a multimillionaire who worked in real estate. 

The Associated Press reports that Eric Paddock said his brother also worked as an accountant and that he was unaware of him having any money problems.

So...how many multi-millionaires develop a sudden interest in machineguns, bomb-making, and mass murder out of the blue at age 64, and how may aerospace accountants gamble and make millions in real estate?

And this from NBC, demonstrates federal leakage from a three-letter agency:

“The suspected gunman behind the Las Vegas massacre made several large gambling transactions in recent weeks, according to multiple senior law enforcement officials and a casino executive.
On several occasions, Stephen Paddock gambled more than $10,000 per day — and in some cases more than than $20,000 and $30,000 a day — at Las Vegas casinos, according to an NBC News source who read the suspect’s Multiple Currency Transaction Reports (CTR) and a casino gaming executive.
According to a U.S. statute, a CTR is a Treasury- and IRS-mandated report that casinos have to file when “each transaction in currency involving cash-in and cash-out of more than $10,000 in a gaming day.”

Nobody dumps federal IRS CTR forms from an active investigation at that level, unless they were told to do it. 
This is a f**king movie plot, not a crime scene.

And somebody isn't assembling facts, they're weaving a narrative.

Patsy?
Bureau?
Agency guy?
Terrorist?

Spin the wheel. I have no idea.
But I do know one thing:

This is not the work of a cook.

Things That Make You Go "Hmmmmm..."

So "Mr. Not A Gun Guy" with no prior military service or training, rented two rooms, for three days, at weekend rates during a music festival across the street, from the highest vantage point, covering two different directions, in a hotel where 2/3rds of the rooms could never even see the venue because they face the wrong way, and had 30 weapons in total, including at least 10 recovered in the hotel, and had either illegally modified semi-auto weapons or legally purchased full-auto weapons (with a six- to eight-month wait for the BATFE approval on that) and ammunition sufficient to shoot something approaching 300 people, from mag after mag after mag, and took his time (several minutes) hosing down throngs of unsuspecting random strangers across the street before committing suicide, but he supposedly "just snapped".

(cough)BULLSHIT!(cough)

This has to be about the most meticulously-planned mass-shooting in US history.

The woman "roommate" LVMPD was looking for was "coincidentally" in Australia when this happened.; is a Phillipine immigrant who was formerly (or is currently, it's unclear) married to a barking leftard moonbat; and the picture she claims was taken of her and Shooter "in L.A." :

Paddock and Danley (her face blurred by posting site) in Los Angeles...or Dubai?

was one she had previously tagged online as being taken in Dubai.

 

For those unawares, Filipinos are frequent guest worker hires for Middle East work to do the menial tasks rich Arabs won't do themselves, and Paddock worked in aerospace/engineering or somesuch, which would make a Middle east trip or work assignment possible/plausible.

 

Show of hands: everyone who's hooked up with a married émigré from a country with an ongoing Muslim terrorism problem, and who was with her in the world capitol region of Muslim terrorist problems, who's retired, but blew $15-50K on weapons, ammunition, and a 3-day stay in the ideal sniper roost for a full-auto attack on a crowd of packed targets, coincidentally, with no one being the wiser, and for whom the FBI could rule out any terrorist connection entirely within 60 minutes of the incident, please raise a paw.

Sh'yeah, thought so.

"Just snapped", my ass.

This is all fishy as hell, and the stink gets bigger by the minute.
Whole lotta tradecraft goin' on there for some crazy schlub.

In Stalag 17, one of the guys imprisoned in the konzentrationschlager for several years gets a letter, and can't wait to meet "his" new baby, who "just happens" to look like the milkman, according to his wife in the States.

Paddock is starting to look like the milkman's kid here.

Vegas Shooting - Updated

This story is developing minute-to-minute, and will be updated as possible.

Unidentified victims on the ground immediately after the Las Vegas shooting.

Those of you waking up will hear, or have heard, that there was a mass shooting in Las Vegas.

Suspect on 32d floor fired approx. 300Y across street, from Mandalay Bay hotel into crowded music festival.

At this point, Vegas local Sumdood (unidentified as of this moment) unloaded what multiple video recordings make plain was easily 100+ rounds on what had to be either extremely rapid semi-automatic, or possibly full-auto fire, from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, onto fans crowded into the Harvest Festival country music concert event below.

Another victim awaiting rescue down after the shooting stopped.

At this moment, the shooter (there apparently being only one) was taken out by LVMPD SWAT after exchanging fire with the police, in a rather one-sided event, once they figured out which floor and room he was in, and is dead on scene.

At least 20 victims at the concert below are reported dead as of now, including two police officers, and 100 more people are injured, many of them critically. The death toll is likely to rise.

Bystanders carrying woman gunned down at concert to help.

No information on the shooter - other than that he was a local resident - has been released yet, including possible motive(s), the weapon(s), how many rounds fired, etc. are available at the moment, and per LVMPD, their investigation is ongoing. The believe they have the one and only shooter, but they're looking for his female companion, one Marilou Danley.

Kudos to Las Vegas Police for finding the sumbitch, and killing the fuck out of him on the spot.

I won't speculate who'd open fire on a huge crowd of country music fans with hundred(s) of rounds, and stick around afterwards for a certainly and actually suicidal confrontation with the police, exactly as transpired.

Best wishes to the victims and their families, and congrats to the police who took care of business. If there are any accomplices, I hope they get them all the same way as efficiently as the first one.

UPDATE: NBC News ID'ed shooter per PD as Danley's roommate/bf:
 

The suspected gunmen in the Las Vegas shooting has been identified as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock from Mesquite, Nevada, according to NBC News.

CNBC  and ABC have both also upped the tally of victims to 50 dead and 200 injured, but based on no discernible sources anywhere, at this point. Caveat emptor. I hope they're both wrong about those numbers. 20 is bad enough.

Daily Sheeple's site has reported that approx. 45 minutes before shooting, a "crazy woman" got into altercation at concert, and told everyone there they were all going to die:
 

In yet another startling revelation in a night full of pure craziness, an eyewitness to the shooting in Las Vegas that left at least 20 people dead and over 100 injured has claimed that a women pushed her way to the front of the concert 45 mins before the actual shooting and threatened everyone around that they would soon be dead.

“So there was a lady who pushed her way forward into the first row and she started messing with another lady. She told us we were all going to die tonight – it was about forty five minutes before the shots were fired,” stated the witness.

If that mystery woman turns out to have been Marilou Danley, she's looking at conspiracy and accessory charges, unless they happily shoot her on sight as well.

Ominous Escalation

These are terrorists. Open season, no bag limit.

So, having lost at persuasion, lost at intimidation, and lost at petty violence, terrorists at Berzerkely Antifa are quadrupling down, and now openly stalking and targeting College Republican members in real time, and tweeting their whereabouts, as related yesterday on the Daily Caller website:

Antifa in Berkeley has been stalking University of California – Berkeley College Republicans, listing them by name and alerting others to their physical whereabouts in real time.

This August, one of the students named by the Twitter account, Ashton Whitty, was tracked down by members of Antifa and cornered at a gas station, where they pummeled her vehicle. Whitty relayed the encounter to Fox News, which showed footage of the violent incident.

 1) Stalking is a felony in California. Doing it openly just exposed the entire cascade of Twitter posts and contributors to prosecutorial investigation and discovery. So the Antifa-tards are still just as clueless as ever.

2) Given the real damages, this also opens the entire group to being sued into the limelight, by name, and then civil-suited out of existence. The KKK says "Hi!", Antifa. Which should prove especially fun for those older than 18, like faculty and such, who have actual jobs, plus houses, property, etc., all of which are seizable assets.

3) If the local Berkeley law enforcement isn't up to the task, there is always the county sheriff, the California Highway Patrol (the de facto state police hereabouts, and not under local lefty control), and the ever-popular federal authorities. Given DHS' moving Antifa from nuisance to terrorist organization, this last under the current administration, it's liable to provide a boon to giving the Frisco FBI something fun to do over in the East Bay area, in a kicking down doors and punching hippies sort of way.

4) Given the recent Crowder video, where Antifa has openly and expressly moved from taunts, rocks, and piss-bombs to shivs and firearms, these still mentally handicapped @$$holes are now potentially lethal criminal terrorist mentally-handicapped @$$holes, which is articulable justification for fear, and responding with an appropriate level of deadly force. Two to the chest and one to the head is always a good drill, boys and girls.

5) If you're a College Republican, esp. at UC Berzerkeley, and from a CA home county that'll let you get a CCW, do so. It doesn't avail you on campus, but at that point, better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.

Even lacking a CCW, prosecuting someone who defends him- or herself from criminal assault by shooting the terrorists in the face is going to be a monumental hurdle, even for the leftards running things in the area, given the fact that even Nancy Pelosi has publicly turned on these @$$holes. And it's pretty safe bet that your legal fees are going to be crowd-funded like a US senate race in about a heartbeat.

It just boggles the mind that after Bike Lock, Moldylocks, et al have been doxxed and outted for far less egregious acts, these $#!^-for-brains dipwads think escalation to outright felony and attempted murder is going to work for them in anything less than a Ten Most Wanted Poster sort of way, but that's the problem with starving kids intellectually, and then feeding them nothing but Leftard bullshit when they hit university: some people only learn a lesson when it enters their head at a couple of thousand feet per second, and lodges in the medullar region.

Well-played, fuckwits. Your ball.

Just like playing blackjack at a Vegas casino table, there's one problem with playing with the Right like this:

We aren't "playing".

Now You Know Why Antifa Has Been Classified As A Terrorist Group...

 

Steven Crowder and his producer on Louder With Crowder infiltrated the Salt Lake City Antifa-tards, caught them on video planning to stab and shoot people, and turned it over to the police there, getting arrests prior to Ben Shapiro's speech there on Wednesday (SLCPD apparently taking a day off from beating up nurses), but when they showed the video to every news organization there, including ABC Nightline, they couldn't get them interested in the slightest.

 

 

Let's Not Jump To Any Hasty Concl...

h/t Conservative Treehouse

Link

Church shooting puzzler:

guess the race of the shooter
guess the religion of the shooter
guess the motivation of the shooter
You can score yourself in a day or two.

For now:

Police say the gunman wore a neoprene ski mask when he shot and killed a woman in the parking lot of Burnette Chapel Church of Christ, as the service was ending shortly after 11 a.m. With his blue Nissan Xterra still running, the gunman then entered the rear sanctuary doors of the church and began “indiscriminately” shooting, police said.

After identifying the shooter, who had two pistols, in the afternoon, police said Samson was a legal U.S. resident but not a U.S. citizen, who came from Sudan in 1996.

The great pity is nobody capped him where he fell, just to be sure.

Sudan is 70% Muslim by population, and only 5% Christian anywhere, so the odds are way over to one side on this one - if the media ever coughs up the truth. But so far, no statements to the effect that he was calling out "Aloha Snackbar!" as he went about his chosen mission today.

Antifa's Civil War

Kenny nails it. Outta the park.
An excerpt:

They’re talking about starting their little war by shooting cops and first responders. Okaaay… let’s see how that works out for them. First off, other than the inner cities, cops are largely looked upon by the general public as their protectors. Those of you that have been reading my writings for any period of time know that I spent a few years of my life living on the wrong side of the law and you’ve heard me say that I generally prefer to handle my own problems without getting the cops involved. That being said, I’ve also stated that I feel a lot better knowing that there’s a cop eating a donut just a few blocks from where my elderly mother is sleeping alone at night. The simple fact of the matter is, there’s a lot of people that depend on their local PD or Sheriff’s Office for their safety and well being. The general public is not going to put up with people shooting at their protectors. 

Other first responders? Who are they kidding? If they start shooting at firemen and paramedics, they’re going to open up a can of worms like they ain’t never seen before. Everybody supports their local fire department and paramedics. We all depend on them and most of us have used their services at one time or another in our lives and been damned glad they were there. Those people are the ones that showed up when Grandpa had his heart attack or when Johnny got into an accident on the freeway or when Junior was playing with matches and set the house on fire. If antifa starts shooting first responders, they’re going to be strung up en masse from power poles by people that had never harmed a fly in their lives before. 

Shooting ordinary citizens? That should be interesting. That old man that retired from his accounting firm a few years ago and now spends his time tending his roses was awarded a Silver Star for heroism in Vietnam. He had no problem killing to defend his Brothers then and he’ll do it now to defend his family. The same thing goes for that guy in his late 20s that manages the local Burger King – he was a squad leader in Afghanistan. Or how about that middle aged housewife that will defend her children to the death? Not just them, but there’s a whole lot of law abiding people that have never taken any crap off of anybody.

RTWT.