Confirmed: Aurora cops will not confirm it, but FoxNews says a second source does confirm that Holmes' hair, and his goatee, was painted (or dyed) red.

Covered earlier in updates to the last thread, but we need a new thread, and it now seems like theories are converging on this one:

He was a lunatic who thought he was Batman's murderous archnemesis, The Joker.

“We have some information, most of it is public. It clearly looks like a deranged individual. He had his hair painted red, he said he was ‘The Joker,’ obviously the ‘enemy’ of Batman,” [New York City Police Commissioner] Kelly said at a news conference after noon.

Kelly said the NYPD is stepping up security at movie theaters around the city after suspect James Holmes walked into a Colorado movie theater during a midnight showing of the new Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises” and opened fire, killing 12 people and injuring dozens more.

Couple of points: If that newer picture of Holmes (in the orange shirt) is a mug-shot (which I'm not sure it is which it's not), then Kelly seems wrong that he "painted" his hair red. But he could have worn a wig.

Actually, I sort of wonder about Kelly's report: Why did no victims at the theater say his hair was painted red? Seems like a major detail.

But assuming Kelly has some information through a friend in Aurora's police (which Tony Aiello claimed earlier), I think we can take his basic claim -- that the killer was animated by a Joker delusion -- as being what police are looking at.

Update: The presser made no mention of red hair, nor of any Joker connection. I suppose it's possible they're holding back some information, but I'm not sure I see why -- they do that in cases where the suspect is at large and they want to make sure they have a way to discern false confessions from true ones.

He did note the killer's dress in detail, consisting of helmet, throat protector, bulletproof vest, black tactical gloves, etc.

Hmmm. Maybe Kelly is just flat wrong, and maybe I'm wrong for pushing this Joker notion.

Live Feed of Presser: From the Colorado police.

Romney's Comments: These are from hours ago, but are worth a look. Transcript/excerpts at the link, video below.

Update: ABCNews is also reporting Kelly's claims -- red hair, said he was The Joker.

Unemployed: Hey, let's blame this on Obama, Brian Ross. He was one of the millions of college students frustrated by a lack of jobs.

Mai says the mother told him Holmes couldn't find a job after earning a master's degree from a public university in California.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:48 AM | Comments (352)
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See end of post for big updates, including "Dog that didn't bark."

Yup. Couldn't wait to make that connection.

By the way: There are 24 James Holmes located in Aurora, Colorado alone. Idiots, like Brian Ross, who find a record on Google but don't exclude the possibility it's another James Holmes are amateurs. Even I know better than that.

Pro-Tip: Your job is to find the James Holmes, not merely a James Holmes. I've got a page open with around 6000 James Holmes in the US. Several of them, I'm sure, are Occupiers.

A few of them might traffic the racist hate-site ABCNews!

Is that where James Holmes got his sick ideas from? Stay tuned.

The Brian Ross Experience: Iowahawk has studied the techniques of master news investigator Brian Ross -- 33rd degree black belt in looking things up on Google -- and is emulating him.

In his Twitter feed, IowaHawkBlog is posting every single mention of a "Brian Ross" he finds in public records.

Hey, This Must Be Rush Limbaugh's Fault: So sayeth the genius lefties on Twitter, complied by Twitchy.

Breitbart Interviews the Completely Innocent James Holmes Smeared by Brian Ross. Well-played.

ABCNews and Ross initially blamed this mistake on "social media" -- i.e. "we got from our crazy liberal buddies on Twitter so it's their fault."

Um, no I get lots of tips during things like this. I don't just post them immediately because "CharlieBrownsDildo" found a single MySpace reference to a James Holmes.

And, by the way, CharlieBrownsDildo has three times the credibility of Brian Ross. And yet, I wouldn't just throw up a Wild Ass Guess on a whim.

The Dog That Didn't Bark: Given we now know his birthdate and both of his street addresses (his family's, and his own, in Aurora), and yet we have no records of political activism after hours of digging, I'm going to guess myself: This is a Loughner situation.

But There Was Some Barking Of a Different Kind: A source for the FBI says he was obsessed with Batman.

As I said above, we should have some partisan activism records on him by now, if there were such records. So I think we should consider that, like Loughner, he had an entirely different trip, a weird psycho thing animated by strange mindthoughts that would sound crazy to us, so we don't even consider them.

Not for nothing, but he was a neuroscience student, and then dropped out. Not to impugn those who work in neuroscience, but there is an old bit of Wives Tale Wisdom that says mentally unwell people are very attracted to psychology. They want to fix themselves, you know?

Neuroscience is not quite the same as psychology, but it's pretty close. Clarification: I meant that if you buy the Crazy People Are Attracted To the Science of Crazy, it's "pretty close" in that respect. If you want to know why the Voices In Your Head tell you to Kill, Kill, Kill, neuroscience is a good bet.

I didn't mean that neuroscience (which is a rigorous science) was just the same as psychology (which is 20 credits of mostly bullshit courses in college, then you get to write a book called "Crazy Hungry: How the New Science of Obesity Can Help You Lose 20 Pounds In Time For That Wedding!").

Joker Killing? Tony Aiello, a reporter with CBSNews-NY, says:

Tony Aiello @TonyAielloNY 12m
NYPD Commissioner Kelly is said to be tight w/Aurora Chief Dan Oates, who rose to Dep. Chief during 21 years w/NYPD

#BREAKING: NYPD Cmsr Kelly says CO suspect Holmes had "hair painted red, he said he was The Joker." Armed w/shotgun, AK47, 9mm, knife.

Like I said, while everyone starts attempting to anti-draft this character on to the other team, we forget the basic rule of lunatics: They are filled with lunacy, and do not act according to the sorts of things rational people would consider sound motives.

Update: Business Insider notes this angle, but only repeats Tony Aiello's twitter mentions of a possible Joker Motive.

Posted by: Ace at 08:06 AM | Comments (573)
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I'm not a big proponent of the death penalty, particularly in light of the steady trickle of years-after-the-fact conviction reversals due to better processing of DNA evidence. But I'm willing to make key exceptions.

The bastard, the young punk who shot up the Aurora theater filled with adults, teens, and kids is one.

This strikes close to home, literally. My wife and I live in Parker, which immediately south of Aurora. The theater complex in which we see 90%+ of our movies is actually in Aurora, though it's a different complex than where the vicious attack occurred. And, yes, we've gone to midnight showings.

I'm currently on the road, though on my way home -- I'm writing this from the Admiral's Club in the D terminal at DFW Airport. Knowing our movie habits, one of our daughters called me from California just to be sure we were safe; my wife's brother, for the same reason, caller her at 7 am this morning. I've texted another daughter who actually lives in Aurora and who, like me, is an avid movie-goer and may well have gone to a midnight showing of Batman last night. I still haven't heard back from her, and I hate the fact that she could well have been there and that perhaps she was, and that I just don't know.

[UPDATE (1215 ET): She's fine. Finally heard back from her while waiting to board my plane. But she's worried about some friends that she hasn't heard back from yet.]

My wife told me on the phone a while ago that the shooter didn't kill hiimself, didn't do suicide-by-cop, but simply surrendered. He clearly wants to live to enjoy the notoriety, the platform he will have for weeks and months and years to come.

Fine. Give it to him. I won't say that hanging's too good for him; I'll say instead that hanging is just the start. ..fritz..

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:44 AM | Comments (124)
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"When Obama Calls" -- funny.

I'm watching the coverage of the shooting in Aurora. There's really nothing to report, apart from the guy's name. more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:27 AM | Comments (12)
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Hey, Friday, how you doin', gurl?

There was a mass shooting at a midnight screening of the Dark Knight Rises near Denver. At least fourteen are dead, dozens more are injured after a man wearing body armor and a mask came through an emergency exit and started shooting into the audience. He apparently also used tear gas in the theater. They have the man in custody.

NY Daily News reports that, for the first time, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, and CW (CW, really?) were completely shut out of the Best Drama category for the Emmy Awards.

I got nothing else.

The Denver shooting is less than six hours old and already I see people using it to make political comments. The Left is already muttering about gun control. The Right is already muttering about the Left muttering about gun control. I'm happy I'm going to be on a plane for most of the morning, so I won't accidentally see any more of that garbage.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (819)
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History's Bloodiest Wars And Who To Blame

From our own beloved pixy.

Looking at this table I'm thinking that China has been just a little too quiet for a little too long. And if Lewis Richardson got it right, we are getting near the statistical due date for a 10⁹ death conflict.

And to make up for all that I offer you some kittenz:

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:10 PM | Comments (753)
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I might have added in the headline -- it was also, implicitly, anti-cancer-survivor, too. The writer has always had, she said, and "unappealing and didactic" hostility to people with too strong a "will to live."

Also, apparently, an unappealing hostility to look up the definition and usage of the word "didactic," as commenters noted two days ago.

So, Tablet's comment on this article is We hear you, and we're happy to have provided some lively debate, and so you're welcome.

IÂ’m used to our pieces eliciting strong emotions. But the reactions to Anna BreslawÂ’s article have been exceptional. For some readers, her piece explored the consequences of growing up in one specific family touched by an enormous Jewish tragedy, and publishing it asserted the message that young people neednÂ’t express only safely held conventional wisdoms to be involved and engaged with Jewish life.

Which readers were those? Which readers wrote, "Kudos, I've been meaning to say Holocaust and cancer survivors have had it too good for too long but never had the guts"?

But others saw in it a blanket condemnation of all Holocaust survivors—an impression that caused many to wonder why Tablet published it.

Yes. In some languages, "others" means "everyone."

....

What does the intense response to this piece say about what the rules here should be, about what precisely the red lines are in Jewish communal discourse?

The rule should be, "Don't publish people who have more psychotropic medication prescriptions than published articles."

Jeffrey Goldberg says that won't be enough:

Breslaw clearly needs help. Tablet needs to ask itself why it would publish such a horror. It also needs to provide evidence to back-up Breslaw's insinuation that Elie Wiesel has manufactured incidents of betrayal. If Tablet can't do this, then it needs to apologize to Wiesel. While Tablet is at it, it should apologize to those victims of the Nazis who remain alive today -- those "race-conniving, indestructible, taking and taking" Jews of Breslaw's demented imagination.

She does need help. From what I can tell, she is a narcissistic hysteric who is butthurt about her relations with her father and grandparents, and so began spinning some Greater Narrative of Historical Import to explain, essentially, why she doesn't get invited to Pessach any longer. She thought maybe Hitler victimized her (hey, he's important!) not by killing millions of people, but by making her Dad an asshole.

Thus does she trace the history of the twentieth century in the lumps and striations of her doodie.

Thanks to CharlieBrown'sDildo.

Posted by: Ace at 04:14 PM | Comments (171)
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Oh, Nancy. You are such a ghastly embarrassment.

Facing questions about why she and other top Congressional officials wonÂ’t release their tax returns, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) downplayed her previous demands for presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney to release his, calling the issue a distraction.

As recently as Wednesday, Pelosi had strongly urged Romney to provide further disclosure of his tax returns. But today, while maintaining Romney should release more documents because of “custom” and “tradition,” Pelosi said the issue was trivial compared with economic issues.

“We spent too much time on that. We should be talking about middle-income tax cuts,” Pelosi said after answering two questions about the issue.

A dirty old whore just emailed me to say, "Say, that Nancy Pelosi really is a dirty old whore, isn't she?"

Via @comradearthur. The story, I mean. Not the dirty old whore.

Posted by: Ace at 02:53 PM | Comments (152)
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Bad News: Obama's constant screaming has pulled two states out from under Romney back into toss-up status.

Good News: Obama's constant screaming and whining has apparently cost him a considerable pile of states as well: more...

Posted by: CAC at 02:27 PM | Comments (130)
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You're poorer than Canadians -- Canadians!

And what makes it worse -- you didn't even build that.

Posted by: Ace at 01:49 PM | Comments (160)
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