What really happened in the Colorado Springs shooting?

Emergency responders escort bystanders away from the active-shooter threat at the Centennial medical park on Friday, 27 Nov 2015. (Image: Colorado Springs Gazette)

Will we eventually know what really happened in Colorado Springs this past week?

That’s a good question, now that the city’s mayor has already pronounced the shooting incident to be an act of “domestic terrorism.”  (For some reason, our authorities don’t seem able to jump to conclusions quite as quickly when a suspect shouts “Allahu akbar!” while attacking American servicemen.)

The drumbeat of a narrative emerged almost instantly, about Planned Parenthood being attacked because Colorado Springs is a “hub for conservative Christians” (whatever that is) who are implicitly slavering to shoot up abortion clinics.

A counter-narrative is also circulating, with some reports suggesting that the shooting attack on Friday had nothing to do – at least nothing that goes to motive – with the Planned Parenthood location on which subsequent news coverage has centered.

Oregon killer singled out Christians to shoot them in the head

Chris Harper-Mercer at MySpace.

The killer at Umpqua Community College (UCC) in Oregon was identified on Thursday evening as Chris Harper-Mercer, 26, of Torrance, California, a Los Angeles suburb.  As Howard Portnoy reported earlier, Harper-Mercer died when police shot him to end his killing spree.

A lot of rumors are flying around the web among him right now.  There is zero substantiation, from what I can tell, of a report that he was a Muslim.  (Charles C. Johnson of Got News posted that report, but his website is hammered right now and the link doesn’t come up.  Here’s one of many citations of the Johnson report.)

However, eyewitnesses came forward in the hours after the massacre to report that Harper-Mercer asked each student in turn, in the classroom where he was shooting them, what religion they were.  He shot the Christians in the head.

Pravda has uproarious ‘evidence’ CIA shot down MH17 in Ukraine

This definitely rivals the awe-inspiring oeuvre of such past masters as Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose.

It’s not exactly in the same genre, of course.  It’s more like a live snippet from a sort of Protocols of the Elders of Langley.  Komsomolskaya Pravda (“Young People’s Truth”) has perpetrated a cheesy deception: purportedly an audio recording of CIA agents talking to each other about their preparations to shoot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine.

As Mary Chastain indicates at Breitbart London, it’s a thigh-slapper.  The hilarity builds slowly as we hear two “Davids” — a “Hamilton” and a “Stern” — exchange the most stilted, overscripted conversations since Thomas Edison first recorded factory workers reading nursery rhymes.  Both “Davids” have funny (peculiar) accents, one British-sounding, the other with American overtones, but oddly plummy consonants on the margins.  It’s as if the K. Pravda production team for this moronic audio thinks American spies — or any other Americans, for that matter — actually sound like the anchors on Russia Today’s English-language news channel.

What Rachel Dolezal should have done to be successfully transracial

Rachel Dolezal, prematurely transracial. (Image: KHQ)

From here, it looks to me like Rachel Dolezal, the white Washington woman who calls herself black, has some problems.  She seems to have been making up falsehoods about herself and her life for years, and passing them off as the truth.

The need to present herself through a series of falsehoods may well come from genuine and powerful urges.  Reportedly, she is the adoptive sister of black siblings, added to the family by her white parents, and that probably has something to do with why she wants to be seen as black.  I’ve read and heard variously today that she claims to have suffered abuse as a child – some of it involving a “baboon whip” acquired by her parents in South Africa (who never went to South Africa until after she was grown up and married) – and that she has filed police complaints about racist “hate crimes” committed against her, and told people that an unrelated black man was her father.

Bruce/‘Caitlyn’ Jenner and the collapse of the Western mind

Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker.” (Image via bigthink.com)

There is no way to write comprehensively about a subject this big in one post, and I won’t try here.  I want to just highlight a few points that have struck me forcefully this week, as the spectacle of media fawning over Jenner – whom I will call XY Jenner – unfolds before us.

The first and most basic point is that we have a body of empirical knowledge that tells us XY Jenner is a human male, and that he cannot be made female.  If one day we will have the ability to manipulate DNA in such a way that that is possible, we don’t have it today.

The concepts of “gender,” and nature-vs.-nurture, are meaningful ones.  But the evidence of our eyes, and the sum total of our shared knowledge, tell us that male (XY) and female (XX) correlate powerfully with “man” and “woman,” to such a pervasive extent that there is no value for our lives in tossing that assumption aside.