As you probably know, there was recently a tragic movie theater shooting in Aurora Colorado. James Egan Holmes allegedly walked into a crowded movie theater armed with a shot gun, hand gun and semi-automatic rifle and began shooting the audience. Twelve were killed and seventy injured in one of the worst such incidents in history. His motives are unknown but it’s quite clear that his intention was to kill a large number of people.

I will refrain from making any statements on my opinion regarding gun control measures, concealed-carry permits or other such policy issues as it relates to this event. While I do have opinions on these matters, I find it opportunistic and untactful to use a tragic event as an excuse to make political statements or try to score some kind of publicity points.

There is one thing worth addressing, however. Shortly after the events in Colorado conspiracy theories started flying about how Holmes was not really just an angry and spree mentally ill shooter but actually part of a thick government plot.

The accusations focus especially on DARPA, an agency of the US Defense Department which is tasked with financing the development of advanced and often exotic technologies. DARPA and it’s predecessor ARAP have financed projects aimed at the development of everything from advanced space surveillance systems to driverless vehicles, directed energy weapons and even the Bell Jet Belt. It also was the agency which developed ARPANET, the wide area network that would eventually become the internet.

Apparently Holmes worked at one point for an organization of an agency that also had worked on a project or two with DARPA. How sinister

In response to this ligation, I’d have two major questions to ask the conspiracy theorists.

1. Exactly what was the point of the attack? Is it just that DARPA and the reptilian, alien, Illuminati masters are meanies and enjoy killing random people for the sake of it? There’s no indication that those who were shot were in any way involved with anything that would be a threat to any conspiracy nor is there any apparent attempt to use this attack as an excuse to invade a country. So is it just because they’re evil like that or what?

2. They sent a guy into a theater with guns to shoot people…. really? What the hell is that about? I thought these were supposed to be the masters of every sci-fi technology imaginable. Couldn’t they do things with a bit more technical elegance? Why not use a magic nanotechnology robot swarm to kill people or a genetically modified virus beamed from a magic underwater satellite into their minds? (and yes, I realize that makes no sense) Couldn’t they at least use nanothermite or something?

Take this article for example, which pretty well sums up the kind of things being stated about Holmes:

Appearing on the Alex Jones Show today, investigative journalist Wayne Madsen said accused shooter James Holmes had a number of links to U.S. government-funded research centers, including the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

James Holmes was one of six recipients of a National Institutes of Health Neuroscience Training Grant at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver, Madsen writes for the Wayne Madsen Report.

“The Anschutz Medical Campus is on the recently de-commisioned site of the U.S. Army’s Fitzsimons Army Medical Center and is named after Philip Anschutz, the billionaire Christian fundamentalist oil and railroad tycoon who also owns The Examiner newspaper chain and website and the neo-conservative Weekly Standard,” Madsen explains. “The Anschutz Medical Campus was built by a $91 million grant from the Anschutz Foundation.”

Holmes also worked as a research assistant intern at the Salk Institute at the University of California at San Diego in La Jolla. The Salk Institute teamed up with DARPA, Columbia University, University of California at San Francisco, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Wake Forest University, and the candy bar company Mars “to prevent fatigue in combat troops through the enhanced use of epicatechina, a blood flow-increasing and blood vessel-dilating anti-oxidant flavanol found in cocoa and, particularly, in dark chocolate,” according to Madsen’s research.

The DARPA program was part of the military’s “Peak Soldier Performance Program,” which involved engineering brain-machine interfaces for battlefield use and other bionic projects.

In addition, James Holmes’ father, Dr. Robert Holmes, worked for San Diego-based HNC Software, Inc., a company that worked with DARPA to develop “cortronic neural networks” that enable machines to translate aural and visual stimuli and simulate human thinking.

The Holmes family appears to have deep connections to the military-industrial complex. Lt. Col. Robert Holmes, the grandfather of James Holmes, was a graduate Turkish language graduates of the Army Language School, later the Defense Language Institute, in Monterey, California (the same military installation, incidentally, where alleged 9/11 hijacker Saeed Alghamdi trained).

The elder Holmes, Madsen notes, more than likely worked in intelligence. “Typically, U.S. military officers conversant in Turkish served with either the Defense Intelligence Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency at either the U.S. embassy in Ankara or the Consulate General in Istanbul, or both,” he writes.

“Was James Holmes engaged in a real-life Jason Bourne TREADSTONE project that broke down and resulted in deadly consequences in Aurora, Colorado?” Madsen concludes. Operation Treadstone was a fictional top-secret CIA project under which the character Jason Bourne underwent behavioral modification.

Okay, so lets break this down a little. Holmes was a graduate student in neurology, and nobody disputes that. It does make it a little weird that such an apparently smart person would go off the wall like this, but the fact that he was a graduate student in such a field makes it pretty damn mundane that he’d have been part of a research program under an NIH grant. Graduate students are generally involved in research (that’s pretty much what they do) and the National Institutes of Health awards many millions of dollars in research grants to schools around the United States every year.

The Anschutz Medical Campus is just a campus of the University of Colorado. It’s where anyone who goes to that school and was involved in the biomedical programs would be. The campus is located on part of the grounds of what had been the US Army’s Fitzsimons Medical Center. The Fitzsimons medical center was a major military hospital for much of the 20th century. In the late 1990’s, the US Military began to consolidate and close many facilities around the US including major medical facilities. Part of this was due to the end of the Cold War, but it was also because of changes in patient care that did not rely as heavily on centralized institutional long term hospitals. The facility was deemed unnecessary and operations were moved elsewhere.

The military did retain part of the property, which continued to be used for a reserve medical center and possible future facilities for a Veterans Affairs medical center. However, much of the facility was transferred to civilian use. It’s not unusual for the closure of a major military campus to result in its transfer to a university or medical center. When these large facilities are shuttered, they remain as massive vacant properties, often with numerous large buildings that had once been a cornerstone of the local economy. Efforts are typically made to re-purpose as much of the area as possible to uses like industrial parks, civic activity centers or some other civilian use.

In the case of the Anschutz Medical Campus, the University of Colorado became a major tenant. This was initially known as the Fitzsimons Medical Campus, but the name was changed in recognition of major grants made by Philip Anschutz and his foundation Anschutz is a billionaire interpenetrate whose money was made in the petroleum industry and through a variety of ventures since the 1960’s. He identifies himself as a conservative Christian, but that’s really neither here or there. His foundation has given money to numerous universities and other causes. There’s nothing unusual here. Universities receive huge grants for expansion from various deep-pocketed donors all the time and it’s not uncommon to name major projects after the contributor.

So the fact that Holmes went to a campus on a former military hospital site and named after a conservative Christian billionaire is really neither here nor there, especially considering he’s one of thousands who did so.

Like many thousands of others, he also worked as a research intern at the Salk Institute, a medical research institution of the University of California. Like any medical institute, the Salk Institute gets its share of funding from federally-funded medical research grants. These grants come from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and some from defense-related organizations. One of the main tasks of DARPA is to provide grants to universities and other research institutes to conduct research in various areas that could benefit the military. This includes medical research. They apparently funded some research at the Salk Institute (and by DARPA standards, rather mundane research, related to how diet might improve the endurance of troops on the battlefield.) There’s no evidence that Holmes was even involved in this program.

As for his Father, he apparently worked at HNC Software. HNC Software is a company which produced computer software for business and government which included neural network technology and various predictive and learning-algorithm software. Their primary sector appears to be related to financial service systems. This area of software is a major growth area which has become an important area of research for a number of companies. It’s also of interest to DARPA and it seems that they have, at least once, had a government contract with DARPA. The research they were involved with was related to the use of computer algorithms that process visual data in a manner similar to the human brain. In principle, this could be used to recognize objects and has a variety of potential defense-related applications, including target identification and detection, terrain-based navigation, automated security and vehicle guidance.

As for his grandfather: if you live in the United States and are of Holmes generation, there’s a pretty good chance that at least one of your grandfathers, and quite likely both, were in the military at one time or another. The Army Language School, now known as the Defense Language Institute is a military training center for foreign languages. It’s hardly unusual for members of the military to require language training, since they usually serve overseas. Thousands of military personnel were taught foreign languages at the institute during the Cold War. The face that Holmes Grandfather was schooled in Turkish is hardly unusual. Turkey was a vitally important ally during the Cold War and the United States had large military assets based in Turkey, including nuclear missiles and aircraft bases. Holmes Grandfather might well have been part of a military intelligence unit, or he may have been involved with the logistics of US Asserts based in Turkey or he may have been part of a US diplomatic mission in Turkey. Whatever the case, none of these jobs are unusual or sinister.

“Was James Holmes engaged in a real-life Jason Bourne TREADSTONE project that broke down and resulted in deadly consequences in Aurora, Colorado?” Madsen concludes. Operation Treadstone was a fictional top-secret CIA project under which the character Jason Bourne underwent behavioral modification.

No. No he was not. Just a nut with a gun.

Now (at the risk of becoming the next target) I could also spin this one against myself:

Steve Packard has been involved with a huge number of questionable programs and individuals over the years. His first job was at a company known as “Radio Shack” which is one of the largest retailers of cancer-enducing and mind-controling wireless devices in the US. Radio Shack has been known to sell products from companies including Motorola, IBM and Texas Instruments, major players in the military-industrial complex.

Packard has been associated with the vaccine-pushing “skeptic” movement and has been photographed in public with a number of well known conspiracy deniers including James Randi, Michael Shermer and Hal Bidlack, who was also a pentagon insider who claims to have witnessed the 9/11 attacks directly and who has a history with the US Air Force. He’s also been seen with NASA-insiders such as former NASA employee Phil Plait. As recently as 2003, Packard was known to have traveled to Cape Canaveral, allegedly engaging in financial transactions with NASA at the visitor center gift shop.

Packard’s family connections to conspiracies run deep. His father is employed with Deloitte, a multi-national company that has numerous contracts with the US government and foreign governments. His father was previously employed in a number of other companies engaged in business with the government.

Packard’s grandfathers both were involved with the US military as well as several of his great uncles. One grandfather was a radio officer who may have had access to classified information including convoy movements. His other grandfather was stationed in the Pacific in defensive position in support of US military facilities. While in the Pacific, he nearly died from Dengue Fever, which may well have been part of a government-sponsored program to produce secret biological weapons. His maternal grandfather later stated he “didn’t like to talk about the war,” leading many to question what he had to hide.

Members of Packard’s family have been found to have worked for major defense contractors including Raytheon and Pratt and Whitney. One of his Aunts was a university professor at Uconn, a university which has received numerous research grants from the federal government. His uncle works for the Veterans Administration, which is overseen by the department of defense and another uncle is a professor of economics, and therefore clearly a reptilian.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2012 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Culture, Just LAME. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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