Related: Another Fort Hood Fraud?
The prescription drug angle is now being played down, and I must confess I never realized how powerful the pharmaceuticals are when it comes to the propaganda pre$$. It's big time promotion of what they call biotech.
"Fort Hood gunman had argument with other soldiers
FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) — The Fort Hood soldier who gunned down three other military men before killing himself had an argument with colleagues in his unit before opening fire, and investigators believe his mental condition was not the ‘‘direct precipitating factor’’ in the shooting, authorities said Friday.
The base’s commander, Lt. Gen. Mark Milley, offered those details a day after saying that Spc. Ivan Lopez’s mental condition appeared to be an underlying factor in the attack.
On Friday, Milley said that an ‘‘escalating argument’’ precipitated the assault. He declined to discuss the cause of the argument but Chris Grey, a spokesman for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command based in Quantico, Va., said the military has not established a ‘‘concrete motive.’’
And because Lopez is dead, he added, ‘‘the possibility does exist that we may never know why the alleged shooter did what he did.’’
We don't know why planes disappear, we don't know this, don't know who the Target hackers are, don't know where the terrorists will strike, but we have all this global surveillance spyware that apparently is a big waste of time and money.
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Lopez initially began firing near an intersection, then traveled to several nearby buildings, went inside and kept firing. While driving to those locations in his vehicle, he fired indiscriminately at other soldiers, Grey said.
Grey also confirmed for the first time that the military police officer who confronted Lopez exchanged words with him before firing a single round at him that apparently missed. That’s when the gunman put his .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol against his head and pulled the trigger one last time.
Authorities have interviewed more than 900 people in their investigation, Grey said.
Also Friday, Lopez’s father said his son had struggled with the recent deaths of his mother and grandfather and the stress of being transferred to a new base.
Lopez’s father, who shares the same name, said his son was receiving medical treatment but was a peaceful family man and a hard worker.
‘‘This is very painful for me,’’ the elder Lopez said in the statement issued from his native Puerto Rico. He called for prayers for the dead and the 16 people who were wounded in the rampage.
‘‘My son could not have been in his right mind,’’ Lopez said. ‘‘He was not like that.’’
Wednesday’s attack was the second at the base since 2009, when 13 people were killed by Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan, who had said he was angry about being deployed to Afghanistan and wanted to protect Islamic and Taliban leaders from U.S. troops.
Lopez, an Army truck driver, did a short stint in Iraq in 2011 and told medical personnel he had suffered a traumatic brain injury. The 34-year-old was undergoing treatment for depression and anxiety while being evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder, base officials said.
But officials said Lopez did not see any combat in Iraq and had not previously demonstrated a risk of violence. He seemed to have a clean record that showed no ties to potential terrorists. Lopez had arrived at Fort Hood in February Fort Bliss, another Texas base near the Mexico border.
A family spokesman said Thursday that Lopez was upset he was granted only a 24-hour leave to attend his mother’s funeral in November. That leave was then extended to two days....
That is not a reason to go on a shooting rampage. They are reaching.
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The fact that the website gives me a New York Times update is suspicious.
Let's give it a look-see:
"Argument came before shooting at Fort Hood; Specific soldiers were not targeted" by Manny Fernandez | New York Times April 05, 2014
KILLEEN, Texas — The Army specialist at Fort Hood who killed three and wounded 16 of his fellow soldiers Wednesday had an angry dispute over a leave request shortly before the shooting rampage, a law enforcement official said Friday.
This is the lame excuse they are coming up with?
After a meeting where he had sought a leave to attend to family matters, he was clearly agitated and disrespectful, said the official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation.
Fort Hood officials and a spokesman for Army investigators declined to comment Friday about the meeting and its role in the shooting, but they confirmed in an afternoon news conference that the specialist, Ivan Antonio Lopez, became angry with soldiers from his unit before the attack.
But he was adjudged to be no violent threat or anything, and the leave was extended?
Two of those he killed were in his unit, a transportation battalion of the 13th Sustainment Command.
Officials stressed that they had still not established a clear motive.
But in an interview with a local Mississippi television station, Theodis Westbrook, of Smithdale, Miss., the father of Sergeant Jonathan Westbrook, who was wounded in the attack, said he was told that a soldier came to Fort Hood’s personnel office, where Jonathan Westbrook worked, to get a leave form.
When one of the soldiers told the man to come back the next day to pick that form up, the man left, then returned with a gun and opened fire.
“The first guy he shot right in front of my son was killed, and then he turned the gun towards Jonathan, aimed it, and fired,” Theodis Westbrook said. “I don’t know how many times he fired, but he hit my son four times.”
The Army has said that Lopez had been undergoing evaluation for post-traumatic stress disorder and treatment for depression and anxiety, but the post commander, Lieutenant General Mark A. Milley, said on Friday that his “underlying medical conditions” were not a direct factor in the shootings.
“We believe that the immediate precipitating factor was more likely an escalating argument in his unit area,” Milley said.
On his Facebook page, Lopez expressed a variety of concerns — including outrage at Adam Lanza’s shooting rampage in Newtown, Conn., the fear he felt in a convoy in Iraq, and, more recently, anger with Army bureaucracy.
How interesting that the staged and scripted hoax is found on a Facebook page.
He arrived on base in February after being transferred from Fort Bliss in El Paso.
It was unclear how his writing might help explain his increasingly troubled state of mind.
Why am I sensing a cover story being put up? Any hacker can put up a Facebook page, right?
“Given that the alleged shooter is deceased, the possibility does exist that we may never know exactly why the alleged shooter did what he did,” said Chris Grey, a spokesman for the US Army Criminal Investigation Command in Quantico, Va., the lead agency investigating the shooting.
Lopez’s father released a written statement, in Spanish, on Friday in which he suggested that mental illness must have played a role in his son’s actions. “My son could not have been in his right mind,” said Ivan Lopez. “This is not who he was.”
The statement, released in Guayanilla, Puerto Rico, where Ivan Lopez grew up and where his family still lives, said that the deaths of his mother and grandfather, along with “the recent changes he experienced in his transfer to the base affected his condition as a result of his experiences as a soldier.”
He was divorced from his first wife, who also lives in Puerto Rico with their two children.
His second wife and a child lived with him in Texas.
The troubled Facebook posts and comments Ivan Lopez made in the last two years appeared as posts from “Ivan Slipknot,” his Facebook identity and a reference to a favorite heavy metal band, friends said.
Oh, for crying out loud! The propaganda is as loud as that crap, and as deafening!
On March 1, the day he purchased the .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol he used in the attack, Ivan Lopez wrote an especially angry and vaguely threatening post. “My spiritual peace has all gone away, I am full of hate, I believe now the devil is taking me.”
The post was unclear about whether he was referring to an actual robbery, or a figurative robbery in which he was, perhaps, denied something that he felt was owed to him.
So now all bloggers are suspect, right? Anyone who issues forth criticism or frustration at the state, government, or controlling interests?
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Anything unclear about THIS?
Related:
"Shaneice Banks, a 21-year-old business management student who lives downstairs, said that hours before the shooting rampage Wednesday, she ran into Lopez when he came home for lunch. “They get an hour to come home,” Banks said. “He was going to his car and I was like, ‘Hey, how’s your day going?’ And he seemed perfectly fine. He was like, ‘Day’s going pretty good. I’ll see you whenever I come back home.’”
Gee, so what could have happened to him in just a few hours?
He should have went back to school:
"Colleges preparing to help a new wave of students who served" by Susanne M. Schafer | Associated Press April 05, 2014
COLUMBIA, S.C. — After five years in the Marines, including a tour in Afghanistan in which he saw buddies die in combat, Andrew Kispert found going back to college as a new veteran one of his biggest challenges yet. For starters, there was the strangeness of resuming civilian life.
‘‘The hardest part is the culture shock,’’ said Kispert, a 27-year-old veteran student at The Citadel in Charleston, who expects to graduate next year with a degree in political science. ‘‘It’s the shock of no longer being in the military and under that strict regimen.’’
You could have reenlisted.
Tens of thousands of new veterans are expected to return to the workforce or to college in the next several years as the military downsizes after wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and as the Pentagon budget is pared back.
How am I to go forward when that is a lie?
See:
"The deal buoyed Wall Street investors. Guggenheim Partners, a financial services firm, concluded that as a result overall Pentagon spending will remain relatively the same for the next several years before it begins to grow once again, at about 2.5 percent per year."
Some paring back.
Also see: It's a Wonderful Bridge
Vets don't jump any more than other people according too the Pentagon. They bring the mental baggage with them, and the war-waging Pentagon or the drugs it prescribes could never be responsible.
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Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has proposed even steeper cuts in his latest budget, which would reduce the Army alone to its smallest size since before World War II, about 440,000 troops if approved.
And that means more veterans on college campuses everywhere.
The challenges of helping the veterans go to college and stick with it until they graduate was the focus of a major conference Friday at the University of South Carolina that drew representatives from schools as far away as California and Arizona and as close as Mississippi and the Carolinas.
I'm not opposed to veterans getting everything they deserve; however, I am getting tired of their elevation above the rest of us and the general war-worshipping militarism that has accompanied all these wars based on phony purposes. Regular civilian Americans are hurting, too.
For Kispert, life after the military meant overcoming a sense of isolation he felt with younger college students who had never experienced combat.
‘‘You can’t really strike up a conversation too well because you haven’t gone through the same experiences,’’ Kispert noted.
No disrespect intended, but that is condescending.
Currently, there are more than 100 veterans enrolled at The Citadel, where about 60 percent of the alumni are veterans, and which has a veterans’ services center. It recently ran an ad campaign urging veterans to finish their degrees there.
Kispert, who takes day classes with cadets but does not participate in the military system, says being at The Citadel has helped.
‘‘I’m still surrounded by a military lifestyle, which has helped me say goodbye to one chapter of my life and open up a new one,’’ he said.
It looks like we all will be until this empire goes kaput.
Karen Pettus, director of disability services at the University of South Carolina, said schools across the country are trying to get ready, adding, ‘‘We all know there will be a significant increase of military veterans on campuses in coming years.’’
Among the challenges, schools will have to work with returning veterans on establishing their academic credentials and finding areas of study that take advantage of skills learned in the military.
I surrender.
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Related: No Guffaws in Georgia
Expect more reports of shootings on campuses with war-wounded vets taking classes, real or scripted and staged psyops.
"Biotech sector fears financial squeeze" by Robert Weisman | Globe Staff April 03, 2014
CAMBRIDGE — As the pressure to make health care more affordable mounts, Massachusetts biotech companies and medical device makers are warning that lower costs for consumers could be bad for business.
Companies and investors in the life sciences cluster — a crucial part of the state’s economy — say that new restrictions on payments for drugs and other medical products will stifle innovation and harm patients, according to a report scheduled to be released Thursday at a state biotechnology gathering.
The 115-page study, called Impact 2020, was prepared by Weston consulting firm Health Advances for the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, a trade group convening its two-day annual meeting in Cambridge. In some ways, it puts the industry at odds with what has become a paramount social cause: providing medical care for everyone at reasonable prices. But the companies say their products, though costly, save money in the long term by keeping people out of the hospital.
While the state has spent decades building one of the world’s largest biopharmaceutical sectors, the MassBio report says industry leaders will have to fight to preserve and expand it in the face of formidable challenges —such medicines frequently cost patients and insurers tens of thousands of dollars a year, but can take drug makers a decade and as much as a billion dollars to develop.
Yeah, the poor, poor pharmaceuticals! C'mon!
If companies can no longer make reasonable returns on their investments, “this entire sector could disappear overnight,” said Harvard Business School professor Vicki Sato, a molecular and cell biology specialist who advised Health Advances on the study....
Yeah, your health is all bu$ine$$ pi$$ in my Globe.
Unlike the Malaysian jet and the other things cited above that have disappeared, this indu$try awa$h in money is going nowhere.
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Also see: JP Morgan Healthcare Conference Helps Lay Biotech Pipeline
Keep those wars going!
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"As wars wind down, soldiers return with new anxieties" by Jack Healy and Serge F. Kovaleski | New York Times April 06, 2014
KILLEEN, Texas — Pastor Randall Wallace of the First Baptist Church has watched thousands of troops head off to war and then come home to Fort Hood, the expansive base that defines this flat patch of Texas tattoo parlors, pawn shops, and vinyl-sided bungalows.
“These are heroes,” he reflected, “and yet they have problems. Sometimes, it’s too much alcohol. Sometimes, it’s too much stress. And then they wind up in the crime section, and we’re burying people,” he said in the wake of Wednesday’s shooting spree by a soldier, the second in five years, that left four dead and 16 injured.
For a decade, Fort Hood, which rose from cotton and corn farmlands as a training ground for World War II tank destroyers, was like a Grand Central Terminal for waves of troops heading out to Iraq and Afghanistan weekly.
Men and women alike, volunteers all, deployed from this self-contained city where the streets on the base are named Hell on Wheels Avenue and Tank Destroyer Boulevard. Then they came back, many in need of counseling.
To many who live or pass through, this is a primal slice of Americana shaped by patriotism, pride, and a shared sense of mission, a company town where the company is the US military and the heroes are ordinary soldiers. It’s the kind of town where the Taiwan Dragon Chinese restaurant, about a mile from the base, places the photos of soldiers — not celebrities — on its walls.
But now the wars are ending and the stress of combat and multiple deployment is being compounded or replaced by new anxieties. The number of soldiers assigned to the base has fallen from highs of more than 50,000 troops, and could continue to shrink as the Army moves away from wartime footing. And soldiers, so many who had planned to make a career in the military, are looking at an uncertain path.
So I'm told. I'm not seeing it.
A local nonprofit that advocates soldiers’ rights says they are coming in regularly to deal with discharges from the military that have left them with few options for work.
That is such at odds with the advertisements on television saying service will get you a leg up, or the well-publicized campaigns to hire vets -- all in the midst of a five-year economic recovery.
The base, which sprawls across 340 square miles, has an annual economic impact of roughly $25 billion and has a footprint as large as the city of Dallas. About 41,000 soldiers are stationed there, and every day, thousands of civilian workers drive through its gates to work, and veterans head in to exercise at the gym or catch up with old buddies.
“When they talk about Daytona, they talk about racing,” said state Representative Jimmie Don Aycock, who represents the area. “When they talk about Detroit, they talk about cars. When they talk about Silicon Valley, they talk about chips. When they talk about Killeen, they talk about soldiers.”
But they have often been troubled soldiers. The shooting last week brought back sickening memories of the November 2009 rampage on the base where a former Army psychiatrist, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, killed 13 people. Most of the pain, however, plays out in private.
“Suicide, spousal abuse, sexual assault, and mental health problems in general are issues that have come to the forefront in the last decade or so that my army, in my day, did not see with this level of frequency,” said Sam Floca Jr., 72, who is currently the honorary colonel of regiment at Fort Hood, an unofficial honorary title that he uses to provide a link between past generations of soldiers and current ones.
“It is more acceptable to talk about mental health issues today,’’ Floca said. “A soldier is not viewed as an outcast if he or she talks about mental health.”
As the wars dragged on and soldiers returned home after multiple punishing deployments, the pain increasingly has been felt at home, though incidents reported to the authorities have receded in recent years.
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UPDATE: Churchgoers near Fort Hood seek solace
FURTHER UPDATE: Army releases detailed account of Fort Hood rampage
Why would I want to read more official lies?
Also see: Mothers quilt against gun violence
They do not mean something like this:
Man fatally shot by Boston police on domestic violence call
