Monday, December 17, 2012

The Sandy Hook Elementary massacre: Strange details... (UPDATE)

This post will be written far too rapidly, since the sun will rise soon and I have not yet slept. (One of those projects kept me up all night.) Yet I feel compelled to dash off a few notes about the recent school massacre. Although I don't want to give any credence to the wacky (and predictable) right-wing conspiracy theories involving mind control and the Great Gun Round-Up, the Newtown school tragedy does offer some legitimate oddities worth pondering.

1. We still don't have any explanation for the early "second shooter" sightings! As I said on Day One, even if those stories were in error, we still deserve an explanation for disturbing on-site reports like this one:
Police reportedly questioning someone. Witness says the man was led out of the woods by police in handcuffs.
2. We had more than the usual amount of misinformation in the early stages of this story. First the shooter's name was given as Ryan Lanza; the gunman turned out to be his younger brother Adam. We also heard that the mother was a teacher at the school; she wasn't.

These are serious journalistic mistakes. How did they occur?

3. Adam Lanza was a 20 year-old computer nerd. Yet so far, it looks as though this guy has left no internet traces. That's bizarre. Downright unheard-of.

4. We have conflicting reports about Adam's mother, Nancy Lanza. People who knew her have said that she was a wonderful person who gave to charity and socialized with the neighbors. Yet other accounts have held that she was a highly reclusive individual who was hard on her son.

It seems clear now that Nancy Lanza was indeed a gun enthusiast. More than that: She reportedly was a "Doomsday prepper" -- a survivalist. Most survivalists keep compounds in rural areas. Nancy set up shop in a mansion in an upscale Connecticut neighborhood.

Some have challenged the "prepper" account on the grounds that it stems from but one source -- an interview given by her former sister-in-law Marsha Lanza. However, the Washington Post and other sources indicate that Nancy allowed no-one inside her home. She acted as if she were hiding something. The landscaper was paid out of doors, never stepping foot inside the house.Very unusual behavior, that. When Nancy showed off part of her gun collection to the landscaper, she did not invite him in. Instead, she brought the weaponry outside.

(Come to think of it -- what kind of person feels compelled to brag about her guns to a landscaper?)

Her strange, secretive behavior suggests that Marsha is telling the truth.

5. A friend of Nancy's has told reporters that she was a "responsible gun owner." Oh really?

She kept guns in a home with a child she knew to be psychologically unstable. Instead of keeping firearms out of the clutches of her sick kid, she taught him how to operate semi-automatic weaponry.

I don't care what your stance is on gun control. Even the staunchest of Second Amendment fundamentalists must understand this point: Anyone who shelters a young man displaying psychotic behavior and violent tendencies shouldn't keep guns in the house.

Nancy clearly was not a responsible gun owner. I suspect that she was so enmeshed in the survivalist mindset that she lost sight of her clear duty -- a duty owed to her son, to her community, and to herself. She paid dearly for that error.

The prepper community will not be able to spin away Nancy Lanza's behavior. This is bad for them.

6. Peter Lanza's background probably has no relationship to the his son's outbreak of mad violence. Still, it is worth noting that, according to a number of published reports, the elder Lanza was the main tax guy for General Electric financial. One article reported that he earns a cool million a year. (When he divorced Nancy, he gave her that huge house plus a handsome annual payment.)

He is also the VP of G.E. Capital.

Was Lanza involved with, or cognizant of, the G.E. accounting fraud scandal that came to light in 2009 -- and which nearly everyone has forgotten about?

You may recall that G.E. shocked many Americans by finding ways to avoid taxes altogether.
General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn't pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.
Peter Lanza had to be involved with that.

7. A number of sites report that Peter Lanza was set to testify in the Libor scandal. I don't know exactly what he was expected to say.

You know who else was  -- reportedly -- going to testify vis-a-vis Libor? Robert Holmes, the father of James "Joker" Holmes, the Colorado killer who shot up the theater showing The Dark Knight Rises. I emphasize the word "reportedly" because I haven't yet seen mainstream confirmation. (The allegation has received a lot of play on conspiracy sites.) However, it has been established that the elder Holmes worked for FICO.

Again: I would advise against cobbling together any oddball conspiracy theories tying points 6 and 7 in with the shootings. I'm not out to get Pater Lanza. Obviously, I feel feel sorry for any father who has to deal with what he must be going through right now.

But...cah-MON. You gotta admit: A possible Libor connection to both the Colorado and Connecticut events is just plain freaky.

One final note. If Nancy really was a prepper, she was probably in communication with the kind of rednecks who would automatically presume Peter to be a tool of the Great Illuminati Conspiracy. I'd like to know more about that marriage. Did Nancy's firearms fetishism create the tensions that led to divorce?

UPDATE: Here's another source for the story that Peter Lanza and Robert Holmes were to testify as part of the Libor scandal. (Thanks, Lambert!)
Both men were to testify before the US Sentate in the ongoing LIBOR scandal. The London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor, is the average interest rate at which banks can borrow from each other. 16 international banks have been implicated in this ongoing scandal, accused of rigging contracts worth trillions of dollars. HSBC has already been fined $1.9 billion and three of their low level traders arrested.
Fascinating. But I cannot come up with any comprehensible scenario connecting the Libor testimony with the shootings. And my imagination is as good as anyone else's.

26 comments:

b said...

GE Capital used to own a big chunk of the store card business in the UK, before selling it to Santander, Lord of Subprime. Part of this business involved tricking people into getting 'store cards', and then 'upgrading' them to credit cards, hoping the poor schmucks didn't notice.

So much in the UK - procedures in the private market, official administrative procedures, and a lot of cultural stuff, including ways of talking - is structured around getting people into the biggest possible amount of debt, and making things easy for the debt collectors to suck their blood.

I could list numerous examples that don't get mentioned in the media but are familiar to tens of millions of people in their everyday lives.

There's a simple solution here: put all usurers up against the wall. If any of them repent when they're standing there, shoot the fuckers anyway. God'll know his own.

Preppers have got it right that a breakdown is coming. The economy depends on production. Contrary to what Michael Bloomberg and others have said, usury isn't equivalent to helping people by providing water, fuel, or air.

I actually thought everyone in the US knew about preppers (it's a much smaller thing here in the UK); until I realised recently that this isn't true.

Is the shooting going to raise the profile of prepperism in the US?

Ramifications?

Anonymous said...

You do realize that a company the size of GE has likely hundreds of VPs? And a VP is not that senior?

Woman Voter said...

After reading to accounts of both Lanza and Holmes' fathers supposedly about to testify in the LIBOR scandal I went to sleep. The coincidence is possible, but my stomach sank. I also wondered why no one has mentioned the second son whom the media identified as the shooter yet he was at work.

If you can find any information or debunk the stories it would be appreciated.

Anonymous said...

The LIBOR scandal reveals vast criminality atop the financial institutions. So does the Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank (HSBC) payout of $1.9 BILLION dollars in penalties, for laundering over $800 million in Sinaloa drug cartel monies among other criminal clients.

Wachovia had laundered drug monies into the securitized mortgage instrument markets prior to its collapse and takeover. Historically, we find that CitiBank laundered billions for the brother of the president of Mexico, as did Boston based banks and brokerage houses for other drug cartels.

So we have corrupt banks with very nasty clients as a feature at the heart of our financial arrangements worldwide.

With literally the largest money possible at stake, it's fair to surmise that along with vast bribery, threats and actual violence are among the key tools to keep knowledgeable insiders from spilling what they know.

As money would be no objection, mercenaries or the paramilitary capabilities of the nasty clientele would be more than adequate for these purposes.

XI


Anonymous said...

Joseph; Your GE Capital find is pure gold. When these horrific events occur, my mind immediately looks for the common cues.

Lanza was reportedly, Asperger's or mildly autistic.

Those with emotional instability, could easily be dismissed as nutty, therefore requiring little else in the way of explanation. But that's exactly why they would be good candidates for MK/Ultra Monarch.

American is very well armed. 88.8 weapons for each 100 persons. Getting these weapons out of circulation would seem expedient for any who seek absolute control of the population. What better way than through the exercise of Democracy itself? Right now, anti-gun nutz are ranting on blogs about banning firearms, just as the NRA is reflexively, defensively encouraging the other side to 'arm the teachers', as they do in Israel. What better way to manipulate the masses to eschew private firearm ownership than the slaughter of children?

But that's a conspiracy, isn't it? After all, aren't we taught daily how crazy conspiracy theorists are?

Ben

Joseph Cannon said...

I am fully aware that GE probably has many VPs. I've also read that Peter earns a million or more a year. Even G.E. cannot have THAT many employees in that salary range.

So he's important.

As for the MKULTRA thing -- I would stay away from that. I've seen zero indication that anything like that is in play, and I see no reason to search for outre explanations. I mean, who had access to this kid? As far as I can tell, no-one did, except the mother.

Provisionally, I think it's more likely that we have here is a case of a young man with genuine anti-social tendencies, living in a home with a gun nut. She could not give up her psychological addiction to guns even though, for her own safety, she should have kept her home clear of such things.

Anonymous said...


"But...cah-MON. You gotta admit: A possible Libor connection to both the Colorado and Connecticut events is just plain freaky."

So, freaky, as in coincidental? What can we speculate from disparate facts, not connected?

The boy was wrecked with guilt over his Father's corruption, so he killed 26 people?

Ben

Joseph Cannon said...

Ben, I don't have an explanatory scenario. Neither does anyone else, although some so pretend.

I say "it's freaky" because, well, it's freaky.

Isn't freaky enough?

Anonymous said...

'Isn't freaky, enough'

It's too tragic not to have some meaning.

Ben

Joshua Laudermilk said...

@Ben,

Right, so you call the anti-gun folks nuts and and the pro-gun NRA folks are the sane ones. Conspiracy theorists are fucking crazy (way too many loose screws in their psyche), that's a fact, so if it is taught all day, it's a truth. All conspiracy theorists, with a handful of exceptions that I cannot even name because I literally don't know of ANY, are tied to extreme forms of right-wing ideologies, extreme conservatism and extremist religion and dominionism. Conspiracy theorists makes mainline Republicans look like dutch liberals, that's how far fucking to the 'Right' ya'll are, so far right you drove right off the cliff. Any system of government and control apparatus that conspiracy theorists would use to replace the current system is quite dramatically worse than the PTB that we already have. In other words, I'd choose the CIA running the show over you and your fellow conspiracy theorists running the show any day of the week. The JBS is still running, go join the JBS and NRA if you have such mistrust of our current government. I'm so sick to my stomach of this bullshit and the kinds of ideologues that conspiracy theorists push. It's overdue time to put the kibosh on the conspiracy theorist communities. As someone over at ATS correctly observed on self-reflection of the ATS community and other conspiracy theorist communities, conspiracy theorists "largely consists of a fringe community of disaffected crazy blabbering idiots that no sane representative would ever listen to.
Don't take the comments posted on this forum seriously.......Jesus nuts, homophobes, right-wing borderline fascists and phony libertarians.....".

Jay

cracker said...

Freaky is a slam dunk, but maybe it's just one of those coinkydinks like the fact that at least one teacher and several children say there were two shooters who "ran away into the woods" just like witnesses at the Sikh temple shooting near Milwaukee said there were multiple shooters and so did witnesses at the Andre Breivik incident in Norway and witnesses at Denver and Tucson. One shooter is all you get, and that's been the pattern for 50 years. No conspiracy, shooter's dead or captured and crazy, end of story.

As a footnote to the Libor scandal, Zerohedge website has a fresh story regarding the UBS bank negotiating over a penalty of 1.5 billion dollars and perhaps as many as 36 bankers going to prison (I'll believe it when I see it. We have people walking the streets of the US who have stolen billions). This is just one of the banks involved and more will be revealed as time goes on. When people finally realize the extent of world wide criminality that is still labeled as "banking", what will their reaction be? Will they rise up and start shooting bankers? Is someone worried about that?

These incidents involving mass murder and troubled young men like Adam Lanza seem to be coming with increasing frequency: Connecticut,
Colorado, Wisconsin, Norway, Tucson (may not be in time sequence and I'm sure I've forgotten some). A person with a conspiratorial frame of mind might almost think there's a pattern here. Or maybe Big Pharma is just handing out the wrong kind of prescription drugs and no one is following up on the aftermath of nationwide drug usage as part of everyday life.

b said...

"I mean, who had access to this kid? As far as I can tell, no-one did, except the mother."

His psychologist?

The 'security officers' who 'monitored' him?

That's from the Daily Telegraph. Curiously the psychologist is mentioned in the headline and strapline, but not in the main part of the article.

b said...

The psychologist presumably being school shrink Mary Sherlach, who was one of the people murdered. Here's her website.

On 'prepping', you gotta wonder what kind of nutcase isn't stockpiling food at the moment, if they've got the means to do so!

The Libor connection is weird. The Libor case could be what triggers the economic breakdown. Work that one out!

Meanwhile the Zionist Daily Mail says that "(i)nside the home is expected to be confirmation that Nancy Lanza was a survivalist, who was stockpiling food".

I wonder how many weeks' supply she had. How serious was she? Being a gun nut surely isn't particularly rare in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if all she had was a week's worth of beans.

Then again...who knows what advice regarding economic collapse her ex-husband might have given her?

Joseph Cannon said...

Jay, you raise a point that has been a minor theme of this blog for a while. There have indeed been left-wing conspiracy theorists. We're talking about a tradition that harkens back to the JFK assassination controversy, to the investigations of the CIA in the 1970, and to radical journalism of the sort Ramparts and Covert Action used to publish.

Guys who hail from that tradition are still around. I link to Dave Emory, to CTKA and to Lobster.

The lefties often display a greater concern for evidence and a greater tolerance for scenarios that go against their preconceptions. Also, these people tend to be more well-rounded -- they've all "gone to college;" they care about art and literature and history and science and all of that good stuff.

By contrast, right wing conspiracy theorists are usually ignorant rednecks who take no pleasure from reading. They think Thomas Kinkaide was a really good artist. They either own "Precious Moments" collectibles or they know someone who does.

Let's be clear: In the world of left-wing conspiracism, there were and are a lot of paranoid, obnoxious and just plain IMPOSSIBLE people. That's why I had to break off all personal relations with anyone in that subculture. They simply aren't pleasant to be around.

If you spend much time around them, you start turning into your worst self. You turn into one of THEM -- a perpetual outsider. It's like catching a fever that never quite goes away. I decided I'd rather have some of life's normal pleasures -- a girlfriend, a dog, the occasional vacation. Stuff like that.

At any rate, the tradition of left-wing conspiracy theory has been swept aside in recent years. These days, when you say the words "conspiracy theory," you're talking about right-wing fruitcakes. You're talking about people like Alex Jones. This belief system traces back to the wacko lineage established by the JBS and the Bundists.

While the lefty paranoids can be unpleasant and difficult and (sometimes) just plain nuts, the righties are reactionary, hyper-macho, well-armed, fanatically religious and downright dangerous. They are the worst people in the world.

And Fox News is their television channel!

Anonymous said...

Dang, joseph. That's the best post I've read. My hat's off to you, Dude. Although more restrained, and perspicacious, you have rivaled my Hero Hunter S Thompson, and you sound like a sober Matt Taibbi, but you ring the bell, for sure.

Ben

cracker said...

Labelling Nancy Lanza a "prepper" and a "gun nut" may be doing a disservice to the dead. Is anyone who has more than a week's supply of groceries a prepper? Doesn't the Mormon church recommend its members have a year's supply of food? That means there are several million preppers around just counting Mormons. And that would include Mitt Romney. Is anyone who owns a gun a "gun nut?"
Next you'll be telling me that if I don't believe everything on CNBC that I'm a conspiracy theorist.

Skipping the Libor story, which I still can't determine the veracity of, this story has troubling questions. Joseph pointed out some: no internet footprint for a computer nerd. Here's a few more. How does a shy nerdy 20 year old kill over two dozen people and only leave one slightly injured person behind? The odds are astronomical. One would think the number of wounded would equal or surpass the number of dead. Also the FBI reported that there were 223 shell casings (from an assault rifle) all over the floor of the school. But when the dead body of Adam Lanza was found, he had only two handguns with him? So where's the assault rifle?

Joseph Cannon said...

cracker, the prepper story comes from Marsha Lanza. If you question it, take the matter up with her. For my part, I think that Nancy's extreme reluctance to let people in her home is very suggestive.

You know what else is suggestive? Her collection of semi-automatic weapons!

Of your questions, I think the most confounding one would be the lack of an internet trial for Adam. That makes no sense. The kid was tech savvy. He must have been online, perhaps using a pseudonym. If he was really savvy, he used a VPN or Tor -- in which case, it may be difficult to track down what he was getting up to.

I assume one of these days we'll learn where the rifle was found.

Joseph Cannon said...

oops. I meant "internet trail."

Andy Tyme said...

Joseph, your 4:29 comment above pretty much answers the nagging questions and doubts I've harboured about you for the past several years -- all the while I've continued to value your nevertheless outstanding, sometimes astounding skills as a web-researcher.

Thank you so much for this candid and trenchant bit of self-revelation. I can see now that you are at heart a "trauma survivor" (of extremist political discourse, not brute physical violence) who has subsequently constructed, in desperate, agonized self-defense, a substantial blind spot regarding those most terrifying of all conspiracy theories... and in your current dissociative (from the grimmest of grim reality) state of mind you have become bound and determined to NEVER, EVER EVER gaze into that abyss again.

Therefore it is perhaps pointless to advise you that leftist conspiracy theories have most definitely NOT been "swept away" by the current popularity of rightist ones. And you are dead wrong too in your horrendously under-informed claim that Fox News is the "favourite channel" of the Alex Jones/John Birch/Willis Carto crowd. Au contraire, mon ami! Most of them despise that slimy network's warmongering, Wall Street-coddling stream of lies and drivel with just as much vehemence and bile as do the lefties, albeit for somewhat different reasons.

Anonymous said...

Andy Tyme said... 12:54 AM
"..somewhat different reasons."
... what, if we read "..exactly adverse motives, and methods of reasoning." ?
->

b said...

"They think Thomas Kinkaide was a really good artist. They either own "Precious Moments" collectibles or they know someone who does."

So if Derek's mother owns Precious Moments collectibles, that makes Derek worthy of contempt? Of course it doesn't. Not even if he wears a 'wifebeater' and comes from Baltimore. His mother doesn't deserve any either. Elsewhere, Joe, you were opposing the alternatives to Stratfordianism because of the lack of solidity of their main foundation - the snobbish insistence that someone from Shakespeare's alleged background in Warwickshire couldn't possibly have written so well about Italy, about high politics, etc.

That's what I love about this blog - you flaunt your contradictions, which (the way you do it!) indicates great honesty! :-)

There are people who like Malevich and Stockhausen who've thought about their tastes about the same amount as Derek's mum who likes Kinkade.

iwarmonger0 said...

According to new research, the Libor connection only appears to come from one site and it is one known for disinformation. At this point, this "fact" must be taken with a grain of salt.

Joseph Cannon said...

iwarmonger, thanks. I'll update the info soon.

b, the lad from Warwickshire you mention was certainly interested in improving his mind. Most of the wifebeater-clad ninnies around here have no such intention.

I guess the Precious Moments reference really goes to the fact that we have two separate cultures here in America -- and the separation seems to widen more each year.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Samantha Causey said...

Full evidence that this is a hoax. If this evidence doesn't make you believe that this is a hoax then please try to explain to me that this REALLY did happen.....

http://www.trulia.com/schools/...

Principal from 2/15/2005 is Donna Page.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/17/...

School Psychologist: Mary Sherlach.

Vice Principal: Vice Principal.

First Grade Teacher: Kristen Roig.

Schools website

http://newtown.sandyhook.schoo/...

Principal: Donna Page.

School Psychologist: Nancy Hasbani.

Vice Principal: Cathy Mazzariello.

First Grade Teacher: Kaitlin Roig.

Joseph Cannon said...

Samantha, none of your links go anywhere.

Perhaps you could submit another comment...? This time, simply say what you mean to say without relying on links.