Friday's Swedish Terrorist Attack

You look at what’s happening. We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris. We’ve allowed thousands and thousands of people into our country and there was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. There was no nothing. So we’re going to keep our country safe. 

~ President Donald J. Trump, Melbourne, Florida, Saturday, February 18, 2017.

First there was the historical noting of the "Bowling Green Massacre," and then came the recalling of the "Atlanta Attack." Now there's a call for us to "look at what’s happening last night in Sweden." 

The list of "alternative reality" events grows.

Are we to consider that there is an alternative parallel universe where recent terrorist attacks have occurred in Bowling Green, Atlanta, and Sweden? What if those locations are now on the short list of potential targets of the future? What if a room of comedians and political cartoons are making all of this up? If 2016's word of the year was "surreal," what word can describe 2017?

The source of Trump’s remark is unclear and the attempts to explain it have already begun. But the working solution appears to be linked to Fox News' Carlson Turner airing an interview on Friday, February 17, 2017, with filmmaker Ami Horowitz, whose new documentary examines whether high crime rates in Sweden are related to its previous open-door policy on people fleeing war and persecution. No "real" Swedish terrorist attacks happened on Friday, although a President or someone on his staff watching Fox News seems to have thought so.

We have been down this road in the recent past.

U.K.'s The Guardian detailed the growing list of non-existent terrorist attacks issuing from the Trump administration, as partially quoted here:

Trump’s comments come after Kellyanne Conway, one of his senior advisers, was ridiculed for blaming two Iraqi refugees for a massacre that never happened.
At the start of February Conway cited the fictitious “Bowling Green massacre” in an interview backing the travel ban imposed on visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Two Iraqi men living in Bowling Green, Kentucky, were arrested in 2011 over a failed attempt to send money and weapons to al-Qaida in Iraq. They are currently serving life sentences for federal terrorism offences, but there was no massacre, nor were they accused of planning one.
On 29 January, the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, referred three times to an attack in Atlanta – where a string of bombings were carried out in 1996 and 1997.
Later, in an email to ABC News, he wrote that he “clearly meant Orlando”.
Forty-nine people were killed and more injured in the attack at Pulse, a gay nightclub in the Floridian city in June. It was carried out by Omar Mateen, a US citizen born in New York to Afghan parents. Afghanistan is not on the list of countries under Trump’s travel ban.
Trump has repeatedly accused what he described as the “dishonest media” of producing “fake news”. He repeated the attack on Saturday stating: “When the media lies to people I will never ever let them get away with it.”
He added: “We are not going to let the fake news tell us what to do, how to live and what to believe,” he said. “We are free, independent people and we will make our own choices.”
After Trump’s remarks in Florida, the Swedish news outlet Aftonbladet posted a story about crime that really had occurred in Sweden on Friday. Non-fake news it ran included: “Due to harsh weather in northern parts of Sweden the road E10 was closed between Katterjakk and Riksgransen” and “a man died in hospital, after an accident in the workplace earlier that day”.
Source.

Melbourne Attack

#BREAKING:  Eyewitness of #MelbourneAttack says driver shouted "Allahu Akbar". Assumed terrorist drove car into crowd near the Bourke Street Mall. At least three (some reports say five) killed, including a baby, and over 20 injured. January 19, 2017, local time.

The thin man was hanging out the car window screaming, "Allahu Akhbar, Allahu Akhbar, Allahu Akhbar!"

Apparently tentatively identified as a Greek male who has converted to Islam. May have Kurdish ties, as well.

The attack reminds commentary observers of the attacks in Nice and Berlin, and the ongoing series of car rammings of groups of people in Israel.

Murder on Twilight Beach Road

Rising baseball star Christopher Lane, 22, grew up in Oak Park in Melbourne, Australia’s north and was in America on a sports scholarship. His life ended in a random killing in the USA.

Lane was jogging through an area of "high dollar homes" after leaving the home of his American girlfriend, Sarah Harper, when he was followed and shot at the intersection of Country Club Road and Twilight Beach Road. Lane, of course, means a narrow way,  passage or track between walls, hedges, or fences.

Three teenagers, 15, 16, and 17, two black, one white, decided to make a name for themselves, and kill someone. They murdered Lane during a random drive-by shooting in the town of Duncan, Oklahoma. Local law enforcers noted that the alleged killers came up from behind Lane, shot him in the back with a small-calibre handgun and sped off. The alleged suspects are named Chancey Luna, Michael Jones and James Edwards.

Lane's murder has shocked the residents of Duncan, a quiet city of 25,000 people in southern Oklahoma, and his teammates at East Central University, where Lane won a scholarship to be the team's catcher.

ECU's mascot is the tiger.

The town has had only one other murder the past five years. Source.

Duncan, Oklahoma once adopted the slogan, "The Buckle on the Oil Belt". Its main claim to fame is as the birthplace of the Halliburton Corporation. Erle P. Halliburton (statute above) perfected a new method of cementing wells, making oil production much easier and more profitable, and established the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company in 1919. He died in 1957, at which time the company had 201 offices in 22 states and 20 foreign countries. Halliburton maintains seven different complexes in Duncan plus an employee recreational park, but the corporate offices relocated first to Dallas and later to Houston.
Halliburton operates the Halliburton Technology Center in Duncan. In 2010 Halliburton announced that 150 jobs in the center will move to Houston over the following two years. Source.

For more insights and information on the background and details of this murder, please see the Red Dirt Report.

Andrew W. Griffin / Red Dirt Report

Florida Joker Arrested

An allegedly unstable Joker copycat (who use to live in a trailer park named Aurora) was arrested on September 5, 2012, after he walked into a Melbourne, Florida movie theater dressed as the "infamous Batman villain, The Joker," reported the media on Wednesday.

The individual is being held in the local jail's mental health ward. He was identified as 21-year-old Christopher Sides of Cocoa, Florida, and was arrested on a warrant for a previous felony charge.

Booking photo for James Eagan Holmes, Aurora, Colorado, allegedly for July 20, 2012.

WFTV learned Sides has been involuntarily committed for mental health issues three times in the last three years. Sides was arrested Wednesday morning after theater-goers reported a man wearing Joker-like makeup at the Premiere Theater on West Hibiscus Boulevard. The caller said the man was pacing outside the theater before entering the building. Police said they confronted Sides as he was leaving through the front doors of the theater. According to police, Sides had purchased a ticket to see The Expendables 2.  

Police said they learned Sides, who had bright pink hair and white and black face paint, had a warrant for his arrest for failure to appear on a previous misdemeanor charge. He was taken into custody for the warrant and transported to the Brevard County Jail. Police said Sides made no threats at the theater and was cooperative with officers. He did not have any weapons on him, police said. However, Sides gave investigators no explanation for his hair and face paint and claimed he had no knowledge of the massacre in which James Holmes is suspected of killing 12 people in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in July. 

WFTV was there when Sides was taken to jail. Reporter Kevin Oliver said Sides was grinning ear-to-ear with makeup running down his face, even sticking his tongue out at WFTV's camera. WFTV's Renee Stoll spoke with some of Sides' friends Wednesday night. One man said he doesn't think Sides would be capable of hurting anyone, while othersdisagreed, calling him unstable, with a past to prove it. "I didn't think he was that type, but I knew he was weird," said one friend.

Former neighbors of Sides said they could never forget a neighbor like him. They said he caused a lot of trouble before he was evicted. "He dressed like a female. He walked around like a girl," said Trina Kitchen. 

"I cleaned this unit out and there were sex toys in here and everything, so he was weird," said former neighbor David Springer. 

"He was very unstable, swinging samurai swords. He's had a lot of confrontations with a lot of the neighbors," said former neighbor Joe Astrologo.  

But one friend of Sides said he is just misunderstood. "He was never a violent person, just an exhibitionist is the best way to put it. [He] liked the attention," said Sides' friend. 

Sides' bail amount is set at $5,555.

(Thanks to Chris, Travis, and Doug for initial news tip.)