Navy Yard Shooter was a HP Subcontractor

Looks like the shooter was employed by HP:

Hewlett-Packard Company released this statement on Aaron Alexis, the alleged Navy Yard shooter, who worked for a subcontractor of HP: 

“We are deeply saddened by today’s tragic events at the Washington Navy Yard. Our thoughts and sympathies are with all those who have been affected. Aaron Alexis was an employee of a company called ‘The Experts,’ a subcontractor to an HP Enterprise Services contract to refresh equipment used on the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) network. HP is cooperating fully with law enforcement as requested.”

via Alleged Shooter Was an HP Subcontractor | The Weakly Standard.

Interesting.

BREAKING NEWS: Shooting at Navy yard in Southeast Washington D.C.

Via Navy.Mil:

WASHINGTON (NNS) — Several people were injured and there are reports of fatalities in a shooting at the Washington Navy Yard Sept. 16.

An active shooter was reported inside the Naval Sea Systems Command Headquarters building (Bldg. 197) on the Washington Navy Yard at 8:20 a.m. (Eastern Time).

Emergency personnel remain on scene and a “shelter in place” order has been issued for Navy Yard personnel.

This release will be updated as new information is confirmed

From Twitter:

(removed video – did not work…)

Update: CBS Washington has a live blog up and running. From the blog:

Update #2:

Video from CBS:

Update #3:

Via Defense One:

Breaking shooter description: Black male w/ dark complexion, approximately 5’10” to 6 feet tall, 170 pound with a black shirt and black hat.

There are conflicting report of more than one shooter. Stay tuned, as this sort of information does change rapidly. Updated! See below…

Update #4:

And already the neocon right starts the stupidity:

Hmph, maybe Ed Brayton has a point. I’ll just call her the stupid bitch daygo of the day.

Update #5:

Speaking of Stupidity:

Via BuzzFeed:

Translation of Russian tweet:

Translated from Russian by Bing Translator
New shooting NAVY HQ in Washington-the lone shooter and 7 corpses. No one is surprised. Visual Confirmation “u.s. exceptionalism”

Nice. Communists gloating over American deaths. 😡

Update #6:

Some interesting photos from the scene at BuzzFeed.

Update #7:

Fox News is now reporting that one shooter is now dead. Updated! See Below!

Update #8:

Smoke Break! Be right back!

Update #9:

I’m back! Much better! *cough* *cough* 😀

Update #10:

Eyewitness account via NBCNews.com:

WASHINGTON — Two workers at the Washington Navy Yard who came face to face with the gunman in a dimly lit hallway recounted Monday how he silently raised his rifle and opened fire on them.

Don Andres, a legislative aide to Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., describes to MSNBC’s Chris Jansing the scene near the Washington Navy Yard, where 12 were wounded and at least four people died after a shooting at the headquarters of the Naval Sea Systems Command.

“We’re lucky he was far enough away he was a bad shot,” said Terrie Durham, a civilian employee in the Office of Naval Sea Systems Command.

Durham and co-worker Todd Brundivge were in their office Monday morning when a fire alarm went off, followed by an announcement of an emergency and orders to leave the building.

“I was on the phone and someone came up to my desk and said, ‘This is not a drill. Someone had just been shot. There are shots in the building,'” Brundivge said.

“So I hung up the phone and started to try to get people out of the building.

Update #11: Fox News is now reporting that one shooting is now dead, and that Navy police and DC police are looking for two other shooters. Terrorism, at this time, is not suspected; that this is an isolated incident. I will refrain from my commentary in a news post. Hopefully, the police and Navy Police find out is going on and the motive for this. My thoughts and prayers to victims and deceased and their families. 🙁

Oh, BTW, when I refer to commentary; I am referring to motive. Fox News is pushing the terrorism motive hard. I won’t do that. It is too soon to speculate and I won’t do that here. Anything else, is fair game.

Update #12: Some interesting news via ABC News:

…and here is some weapons grade stupidity, props to Hotair.com for finding this one.

Here’s the video:

Wow… Just wow…. 🙄

Update #13: Still no word on motive. One shooter has been ID’ed and they are still looking for a second shooter. I will take this off sticky and move on.

Related:

Others: WJLA-TV, ThinkProgress, Crooks and Liars, CNN, Talking Points Memo, Mediaite,NPR, Daily Kos, Gawker, Macleans.ca, Scared Monkeys and National Review, Yahoo! News, The Moderate Voice, Guardian, Talking Points Memo, New York Times, Defense One, Mediaite, The Gateway Pundit, Business Insider, Washington Monthly,American Spectator, Shakesville and The Raw Story, Weekly Standard, Hot Air, WND, NBCNews and Ed Driscoll, ABC News, The Lonely Conservative

Detroit Free Press Special Report: How Detroit went broke

This is a very interesting report and it is coming from the Detroit Free Press which is basically liberally biased.

Here is the meat and potatoes of the report:

For this report, the Free Press examined about 10,000 pages of documents gathering dust in the public library’s archives. Since most of those documents have never been digitized, the Free Press created its own database of 50 years of Detroit’s financial history. Reporters also conducted dozens of interviews with participants from the last six mayoral administrations as well as city bureaucrats and outside experts. Among the highlights from the review:

■ Taxing higher and higher: City leaders tried repeatedly to reverse sliding revenue through new taxes. Despite a new income tax in 1962, a new utility tax in 1971 and a new casino revenue tax in 1999 — not to mention several tax increases along the way — revenue in today’s dollars fell 40% from 1962 to 2012. Higher taxes helped drive residents to the suburbs and drove away business. Today, Detroit still doesn’t take in as much tax revenue as it did just from property taxes in 1963.

■ Reconsidering Coleman Young: Serving from 1974-1994, Young was the most austere Detroit mayor since World War II, reducing the workforce, department budgets and debt during a particularly nasty national recession in the early 1980s. Young was the only Detroit mayor since 1950 to preside over a city with more income than debt, although he relied heavily on tax increases to pay for services.

■ Downsizing — too little, too late: The total assessed value of Detroit property — a good gauge of the city’s tax base and its ability to pay bills — fell a staggering 77% over the past 50 years in today’s dollars. But through 2004, the city cut only 28% of its workers, even though the money to pay them was drying up. Not until the last decade did Detroit, in desperation, cut half its workforce. The city also failed to take advantage of efficiencies, such as new technology, that enabled enormous productivity gains in the broader economy.

■ Skyrocketing employee benefits: City leaders allowed legacy costs — the tab for retiree pensions and health care — to spiral out of control even as the State of Michigan and private industry were pushing workers into less costly plans. That placed major stress on the budget and diverted money from services such as streetlights and public safety. Detroit’s spending on retiree health care soared 46% from 2000 to 2012, even as its general fund revenue fell 20%.

■ Gifting a billion in bonuses: Pension officials handed out about $1 billion in bonuses from the city’s two pension funds to retirees and active city workers from 1985 to 2008. That money — mostly in the form of so-called 13th checks — could have shored up the funds and possibly prevented the city from filing for bankruptcy. If that money had been saved, it would have been worth more than $1.9 billion today to the city and pension funds, by one expert’s estimate.

■ Missing chance after chance: Contrary to myth, the city has not been in free fall since the 1960s. There have been periods of economic growth and hope, such as in the 1990s when the population decline slowed, income-tax revenue increased and city leaders balanced the budget. But leaders failed to take advantage of those moments of calm to reform city government, reduce expenses and protect the city and its residents from another downturn.

■ Borrowing more and more: Detroit went on a binge starting around 2000 to close budget holes and to build infrastructure, more than doubling debt to $8 billion by 2012. Under Archer, Detroit sold water and sewer bonds. Kilpatrick, who took office in 2002, used borrowing as his stock answer to budget issues, and Bing borrowed more than $250 million.

■ Adding the last straw — Kilpatrick’s gamble: He’s best known around the globe for a sex and perjury scandal that sent him to jail and massive corruption that threatens to send him to prison next month for more than 20 years. The corruption cases further eroded Detroit’s image and distracted the city from its fiscal storm. But perhaps the greatest damage Kilpatrick did to the city’s long-term stability was with Wall Street’s help when he borrowed $1.44 billion in a flashy high-finance deal to restructure pension fund debt. That deal, which could cost $2.8 billion over the next 22 years, now represents nearly one-fifth of the city’s debt.

With all the lost opportunities over decades, with Detroit’s debt mounting, with the housing crash and Great Recession just over the horizon, 2005 turned out to be the watershed year.

Although no one could see it at the time, Detroit’s insolvency was guaranteed.

via How Detroit went broke: The answers may surprise you — and don’t blame Coleman Young | Detroit Free Press | freep.com.

This should be a textbook example of why progressive politics and governance simply does not work.

Others:  Hit & Run and Betsy’s Page

I still do not trust the Russians

Rod Dreher is quite happy that we have supposedly avoided a war with Syria. I guess he trusts a leader of a Nation that has lied to the United States many times before.

He writes the following:

I’m sure Sen. John McCain is on the verge of spontaneously combusting this morning over the news from Geneva. We are going to hear from the GOP’s superhawk wing that Obama has gone wobbly, has caved, has revealed himself to be a squish. It is up to what I hope is a newly emerging Paulite (Rand) wing of the GOP to stand up to the usual hawkish Republican claque. I do not believe that every Republican, at least at the grassroots, opposed Obama’s proposed war on Syria simply because it was Obama’s idea. Those Republicans who did allow themselves to be driven not by principle, but by uncut partisanship, in opposing the president’s plan must be made to consider the principles at issue in this episode, so that when a future Republican president starts up with the same belligerent nonsense, they will resist it just as strongly.

HA! Laughing Good luck with that one! As long as those who were directly involved with the rigged trial of the Lord Jesus Christ are running the Republican Party, this will never change, ever. Frustrated Last time I checked the Podhoretz and Kristol families were not hurting for cash and still had a good amount of influence within the Republican Party.

Nice thought, but no, that will never change. Everyone that has resisted the hawks on the right has been beaten in an election. Perfect example? Romney. Kristol did everything he could to keep Romney from getting elected. Kristol also recently pronounced Palin is not having a future in politics.  Furthermore, Kristol was one who basically got Glenn Beck taken off Fox News. Because Glenn dared to call Kristol to the carpet on Iraq.

No, Syria is not a sign of the Lord’s return.

This frothing at the mouth stupidity makes the entire Christian world look ignorant.

A recent survey has shown that nearly one in three Americans believe that Syria’s ongoing civil war is part of the Bible’s plan for the end times. One in four believe that a possible U.S. attack on Syria could lead to the Battle of Armageddon. And one in five believe the world will end in their lifetime.

Amid an increasing number of stories in the media on the linking of the Syrian crisis to biblical prophecy, Nashville-based LifeWay Research asked three questions about Syria and the end of the world as part of a telephone survey of 1,001 Americans between Sept. 6 and 10.

The survey found that 32 percent of those polled agree with the statement, “I believe the battles in Syria are all part of the prophecies of the Book of Revelation.” Forty-nine percent disagree.

The study also found that 26 percent agree with the statement, “I believe that U.S. military intervention in Syria might lead to the Battle of Armageddon that’s spoken about in the Book of Revelation.” And 18 percent agreed to the statement, “I believe the world will end in my lifetime.”

LifeWay Research president Ed Stetzer was surprised with the results.

via 1 in 3 Americans Link Syrian Conflict to Bible’s End-Time Prophecy, Survey Finds.

The Bible is quite clear:

But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is. For the Son of man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch. Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning: Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch. — (Mark 13:32-37 KJV)

and…:

But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up. Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh. Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. Verily I say unto you, That he shall make him ruler over all his goods. But and if that evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; And shall begin to smite his fellowservants, and to eat and drink with the drunken; The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of, And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. — (Matthew 24:36-51 KJV)

There are some who like to make a huge deal out of the “seasons” of the Lord’s coming. Jesus did not have kind words for those people either:

The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would shew them a sign from heaven. He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed. — (Matthew 16:1-4 KJV)

Two things about the above scripture; one Jesus was speaking of those who wish to see some sign that God might actually be real and Jesus might actually have been his Son. You know, like Pentecostal Christians? Two, I believe Christ was also referring to those who get so wrapped up into when the Lord will be returning. I mean, there are people out there that have made a rather nice cottage industry out of trying to predict when the Lord is coming back. Most of them have been quite wrong about it too and have lead many a Christian astray because of it too.

The Word of God is clear, NO MAN, AT ALL, knows the day of Christ’s return; if they say that they do, they are lying and attempting to prey on people’s paranoia of the end times. This is another thing that really bugs me, a lot. I realize that I have survivalist links on this blog, and I also have advertisements for emergency food and such. However, there are some people that get wrapped up in survivalism and prepping, as it is called now; almost to the point of it being some sort of a religion. This is unhealthy for Christians, and yes, even Fundamentalist Baptists, like myself.

Here is why I say this: I, as a Independent, Fundamental, King James Bible-Believing Baptist — happen to be of the pre-tribulation belief system. So, why would I go out and spend all that money for prepper supplies and other such stuff? I AM NOT GOING TO BE HERE, WHEN THE WORLD IMPLODES!  My Bible tells me that the Lord is going to return BEFORE the tribulation is going to start. This is why I accepted Christ as my personal Saviour in the first place! To avoid the tribulation and go to Heaven! So, why would I worry about what is going to happen in this old sin-depraved world?

So, to my fellow believers; fret not about the Lord’s return. It will happen. We just do not know when, and instead of spending time fretting about when the Lord’s return is going to happen; how about trying to bring more people to saving knowledge of Christ? It only makes sense.

Enjoy your Sunday! Update: Um, Oops. Surprise Today isn’t Sunday, it’s Saturday. DohSorry about that, I got a little ahead of myself! The above is still true. Happy Even if the writer is a little goofy and doesn’t know what day it is… SillyLaughingHee hee

-Patrick

So much for a stable and secure Iraq!

I guess Bush did get that one wrong. 🙄

BAGHDAD (AP) — Officials in Iraq say a suicide bomber has attacked a funeral for members of an ethnic minority in the country, killing 11 people.

Police say a suicide bomber set off an explosive belt inside a funeral held by members of Shabak minority near the northern city of Mosul on Saturday afternoon. Authorities said that at least 13 were wounded in the attack.

The Shabaks are ethnic Turkomen and Shiite Muslims. Most of them live in villages east of Mosul, the provincial capital of the ethnically mixed Ninevah province that is predominantly Sunni Muslim.

Officials in nearby hospitals confirmed the death toll. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to journalists.

via Suicide bomber attacks Iraq funeral, killing 11.

This is what happens when America get involved in the affairs of sovereign Nations. Hopefully, it will never happen again.

Ray Dolby, Audio Pioneer dead at 80

Sad news to report:

SAN FRANCISCO –  Ray Dolby, who pioneered noise-reducing and surround-sound audio technologies which are fundamental to the music and film industries, has died aged 80, the company which bears his name announced Thursday.

Dolby had suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease for a number of years, and was diagnosed with acute leukemia last July, it said, adding that the Oscar-winning scientist died at home in San Francisco.

“Today we lost a friend, mentor and true visionary,” said Kevin Yeaman, President and CEO of Dolby Laboratories, the company which the young Dolby created in 1965.

‘Today we lost a friend, mentor and true visionary.’

– Kevin Yeaman, President and CEO of Dolby Laboratories

“Ray Dolby founded the company based on a commitment to creating value through innovation and an impassioned belief that if you invested in people and gave them the tools for success they would create great things.

He added: “Ray’s ideals will continue to be a source of inspiration and motivation for us all.”

via Ray Dolby, audio pioneer, dies aged 80 | Fox News.

 

 

Republican Anarchy eh? Hell Yes!

I love it:

The House was scheduled to vote yesterday on a continuing resolution, which is a measure to not shut down the government. Ultraconservatives have been demanding that the House refuse to continue funding the government unless President Obama agrees to defund Obamacare. House leaders have pleaded that this approach is doomed. Instead they came up with a plan to keep the government open, attached to a separate bill defunding Obamacare. Or, as Senator Mike Lee succinctly and correctly explains, “It is not a plan to defund Obamacare — it’s a plan to facilitate the passage of a CR [continuing resolution] in a way that allows people to claim that they’re defunding Obamacare without actually doing so.”

But some ultraconservatives still want to go with the defund-Obamcare-or-shut-down-the-government plan, as opposed to the pretend-to-defund- Obamcare-or-shut-down-the-government plan. It only takes about seventeen of them to defect to dent the Republicans majority, which gives a tiny fringe enormous power. What does the vote delay mean?

via House Republican Anarchy Update — Daily Intelligencer.

Anarchy!

My new theme song, and it should be the guys in the house:

youtube placeholder image

It’s about damned time those bastards in the house grew a pair! 😀

Others:  Politico, Salon, BuzzFeed, Wonkblog, The Plum Line, National Review and Balloon Juice, Michelle Malkin, Politico, The Raw Story and Weasel Zippers