slinkimalinki posted:

It's unnerving for me because most cults would never have appealed to me even at my weakest points. This one though - if you watch the beginning of the doco, it's easy to see the appeal. Completely racially integrated at a time of great racial turmoil; based on ideas of sharing wealth and supporting the poor; full of hip young people. It's really easy to see how smart, sane people got drawn in.

Icon Of Sin posted:

Following the rabbit hole of the Bloop I went to the list of other strange sounds in the ocean. Some of them are seasonal, and others are one-time events that just make you wonder what exactly the planet is doing where we aren't looking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unexplained_sounds

And of course the page has a link to random hums (like in Taos, NM), the general article about numbers stations, and random sonic booms like are rumored to happen occasionally on beach that is only about 10 miles from where I live (Carolina Beach, NC). I didn't find a wikipedia article on them, but there's this: http://www.rense.com/general13/mysterybooms.htm saying that the booms date back to at least the 1850's.

quote:

Shortly after ten-thirty in the morning on Wednesday, March 19th, a real-estate agent named Paul Alarab began hiking across the Golden Gate Bridge. Midway along the walkway, which carries pedestrians and cyclists between San Francisco and Marin County, he stopped and climbed the four-foot safety railing. Then he lowered himself carefully onto the bridge’s outermost reach, a thirty-two-inch-wide beam known as “the chord.” It is on the chord, two hundred and twenty feet above San Francisco Bay, that people intending to kill themselves often pause. On a sunny day, as this day was, the view is glorious: Angel Island to the left, Alcatraz straight ahead, Treasure Island farther off, bisecting the long gray tangent of the Bay Bridge, and, layered across the hills to the south, San Francisco.

Alarab turned and looped a thick rope over the railing, then wound it around his right wrist five times and grabbed it with his gloved right hand. His weekday attire usually consisted of a business suit with a “Peace” T-shirt underneath, but today he wore black gloves, black shoes, black pants, a black T-shirt, and black sunglasses. Through the palings of the bridge rail and the rush of traffic, he could see the mouth of the Bay to the west and the Pacific beyond. Clasping a typed statement to his chest with his left hand, he leaned backward, away from the railing, and waited for help to arrive.

Alarab, a forty-four-year-old Iraqi-American, was a large, balding, friendly man who kept a “No Hate” sign in his office at Century 21 Heritage Real Estate in Lafayette, across the Bay. The day before, he’d told a co-worker that the prospect of civilian deaths in Iraq made him sick to his stomach. Alarab had chosen this day, the first of America’s war against Saddam Hussein, to make a statement of opposition.

Responding to a “10-31,” bridge code for a jumper, four uniformed California Highway Patrol officers soon arrived at the rail, joined by three ironworkers who had been repairing the bridge. Alarab told them that he wanted to speak to the media. As it happened, a number of TV crews were at the south end of the bridge, filming standups about heightened terrorism precautions. A Telemundo crew came out, and Alarab began to read a declaration about Iraq’s defenseless women, children, and elderly. “Wake up, America!” he said. “This war will be known as ‘the war of cowards and oil’ across the world!”

As a Coast Guard cutter idled in the fifty-five-degree water below, the bridge’s guardians tried to talk Alarab into coming up. “When CNN gets here, I’m back over the other side of the railing,” he promised. One Highway Patrol officer said, “Hey, don’t I know you?” Alarab squinted, and said, “Oh, sure!” They had met during Alarab’s previous adventure on the bridge: in 1988, seeking to publicize the plight of the handicapped and the elderly, Alarab had climbed down a sixty-foot nylon cord into a large plastic garbage can he’d suspended beneath the bridge. His weight proved too much for the apparatus, and the can broke free with him inside. “It seemed like the fall lasted forever,” Alarab said afterward. “I was praying for God to give me another chance.” The fall broke both of Alarab’s ankles and three of his ribs and collapsed his lungs, but he lived—becoming one of only twenty-six people to survive the plunge from the Golden Gate. “I’ll never put my life on the line again,” he said at the time.


Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,” he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

Kevin Hines was eighteen when he took a municipal bus to the bridge one day in September, 2000. After treating himself to a last meal of Starbursts and Skittles, he paced back and forth and sobbed on the bridge walkway for half an hour. No one asked him what was wrong. A beautiful German tourist approached, handed him her camera, and asked him to take her picture, which he did. “I was like, ‘gently caress this, nobody cares,’ ” he told me. “So I jumped.” But after he crossed the chord, he recalls, “My first thought was What the hell did I just do? I don’t want to die.”

Paul Alarab never told his colleagues about his first experience on the bridge. He didn’t even tell his wife, whom he married in 1990 and divorced in 1995. The only hint of his fascination was his business card, which he resisted changing despite his boss’s complaint that it looked unprofessional. The card featured a photo of Alarab on the shore of the Bay; behind him lurked the Golden Gate.

On that March morning, facing the camera, Alarab read an ambiguous handwritten addendum to his statement: “I would sacrifice myself as a symbol of children that will die. If you are antiwar, e-mail me at alarabpaul@hotmail.com.” After forty minutes, CNN had not arrived and it seemed that Alarab had done all he could. It was 11:33 a.m. He bent to put his statement on the bridge, then placed his cell phone on it. He then unwound his wrist from the securing rope and stepped off the chord. The officers on the walkway craned their necks in a horrified line, watching him fall.

At a 1977 rally on the Golden Gate supporting the building of an anti-suicide barrier above the railing, a minister, speaking to six hundred of his followers, tried to explain the bridge’s power. Matchless in its Art Deco splendor, the Golden Gate is also unrivalled as a symbol: it is a threshold that presides over the end of the continent and a gangway to the void beyond. Just being there, the minister said, his words growing increasingly incoherent, left him in a rather suicidal mood. The Golden Gate, he said, is “a symbol of human ingenuity, technological genius, but social failure.”

Eighteen months later, that minister, the Reverend Jim Jones, who had decamped with his People’s Temple to Jonestown, Guyana, ordered his adherents to kill themselves by drinking grape Kool-Aid mixed with potassium cyanide. Nine hundred and twelve of them did.

Every two weeks, on average, someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. It is the world’s leading suicide location. In the eighties, workers at a local lumberyard formed “the Golden Gate Leapers Association”—a sports pool in which bets were placed on which day of the week someone would jump. At least twelve hundred people have been seen jumping or have been found in the water since the bridge opened, in 1937, including Roy Raymond, the founder of Victoria’s Secret, in 1993, and Duane Garrett, a Democratic fund-raiser and a friend of Al Gore’s, in 1995. The actual toll is probably considerably higher, swelled by legions of the stealthy, who sneak onto the bridge after the walkway closes at sundown and are carried to sea with the neap tide. Many jumpers wrap suicide notes in plastic and tuck them into their pockets. “Survival of the fittest. Adios—unfit,” one seventy-year-old man said in his valedictory; another wrote, “Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache.”

There is a fatal grandeur to the place. Like Paul Alarab, who lived and worked in the East Bay, several people have crossed the Bay Bridge to jump from the Golden Gate; there is no record of anyone traversing the Golden Gate to leap from its unlovely sister bridge. Dr. Richard Seiden, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Public Health and the leading researcher on suicide at the bridge, has written that studies reveal “a commonly held attitude that romanticizes suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge in such terms as aesthetically pleasing and beautiful, while regarding a Bay Bridge suicide as tacky.”

Unlike the Bay Bridge—or most bridges, for that matter—the Golden Gate has a footpath adjacent to a low exterior railing. “Jumping from the bridge is seen as sure, quick, clean, and available—which is the most potent factor,” Dr. Jerome Motto, a local psychiatrist and suicide expert, says. “It’s like having a loaded gun on your kitchen table.”

Almost everyone in the Bay Area knows someone who has jumped, and it is perhaps not surprising that the most common fear among San Franciscans is gephyrophobia, the fear of crossing bridges. Yet the locals take a peculiar pride in the bridge’s notoriety. “What makes the bridge so popular,” Gladys Hansen, the city’s unofficial historian, says, citing the ten million tourists who visit the bridge each year, “is that it’s a monument, a monument to death.” In 1993, a man named Steve Page threw his three-year-old daughter, Kellie, over the side of the bridge and followed her down; even after this widely publicized atrocity, an Examiner poll that year found that fifty-four per cent of the respondents opposed building a suicide barrier.

The idea of building a barrier was first proposed in the nineteen-fifties, and it has provoked controversy ever since. “The battle over a barrier is actually a battle of ideas,” Eve Meyer, the executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention, told me. “And some of the ideas are very old, ideas about whether suicidal people are people to fear and hate.” In centuries past, suicides were buried at night at a crossroads, under piles of stones, or had stakes driven through their hearts to prevent their unquiet spirits from troubling the rest of us. In the United States today, someone takes his own life every eighteen minutes, and suicide is much more common than homicide. Still, the issue is rarely examined. In the Bay Area, the topic is virtually taboo. One Golden Gate official told me repeatedly, “I hate that you’re writing about this.”

In 1976, an engineer named Roger Grimes began agitating for a barrier on the Golden Gate. He walked up and down the bridge wearing a sandwich board that said “Please Care. Support a Suicide Barrier.” He gave up a few years ago, stunned that in an area as famously liberal as San Francisco, where you can always find a constituency for the view that pets should be citizens or that poison oak has a right to exist, there was so little empathy for the depressed. “People were very hostile,” Grimes told me. “They would throw soda cans at me, or yell, ‘Jump!’ ”

When Paul Alarab was pulled from the Bay at 11:34 a.m., he was unconscious and badly bruised. The impact had ripped off his left glove and his right shoe. The Coast Guard crew, wearing their standard jumper-retrieval garb to protect against leaking body fluids—Tyvex biohazard suits, masks, gloves, and safety goggles—began C.P.R. Half an hour later, Alarab was pronounced dead. Gary Tindel, the assistant coroner of Marin County, who examined the body on the dock at Fort Baker, at the north end of the bridge, observed that “massive bleeding had occurred in both ears, along with apparent grayish brain matter in and around the right ear.” Tindel brought Alarab’s antiwar statement and his cell phone back to the coroner’s office in San Rafael. Soon afterward, the cell phone rang. It was Alarab’s ex-wife, Rubina Coton: their nine-year-old son had been waiting more than two hours at school for his father to pick him up.

“May I speak with Paul?” Coton asked.

“I’m sorry,” Tindel said. “You can’t.” Tindel explained that he was with the coroner’s office and suggested that Coton call back on his office phone. When she did, he told her that her ex-husband had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Please don’t joke,” Coton said.

Tindel described Alarab’s outfit, but Coton didn’t recognize the clothes. Then he told her that the corpse wore a yarn necklace. And she recalled, suddenly, that their daughter had made such a necklace for Paul.

Jumpers tend to idealize what will happen after they step off the bridge. “Suicidal people have transformation fantasies and are prone to magical thinking, like children and psychotics,” Dr. Lanny Berman, the executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, says. “Jumpers are drawn to the Golden Gate because they believe it’s a gateway to another place. They think that life will slow down in those final seconds, and then they’ll hit the water cleanly, like a high diver.”

In the four-second fall from the bridge, survivors say, time does seem to slow. On her way down in 1979, Ann McGuire said to herself, “I must be about to hit,” three times. But the impact is not clean: the coroner’s usual verdict, suicide caused by “multiple blunt-force injuries,” euphemizes the devastation. Many people don’t look down first, and so those who jump from the north end of the bridge hit the land instead of the water they saw farther out. Jumpers who hit the water do so at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures. “It’s as if someone took an eggbeater to the organs of the body and ground everything up,” Ron Wilton, a Coast Guard officer, once observed.

Those who survive the impact usually die soon afterward. If they go straight in, they plunge so deeply into the water—which reaches a depth of three hundred and fifty feet—that they drown. (The rare survivors always hit feet first, and at a slight angle.) A number of bodies become trapped in the eddies stirred by the bridge’s massive stone piers, and sometimes wash up as far away as the Farallon Islands, about thirty miles off. These corpses suffer from “severe marine depredation”—shark attacks and, particularly, the attentions of crabs, which feed on the eyeballs first, then the loose flesh of the cheeks. Already this year, two bodies have vanished entirely.

On December 17, 2001, fourteen-year-old Marissa Imrie, a petite and attractive straight-A student who had planned to become a psychiatrist, left her second-period class at Santa Rosa High School, took a hundredand-fifty-dollar taxi ride to the Golden Gate, and jumped to her death. Though Marissa was always very hard on herself and had lately complained of severe headaches and insomnia, her mother, Renée Milligan, had no inkling of her plans. “She called us ‘the glue girls,’ we were so close,” Milligan told me. “She’d never spoken about the bridge, and we’d never even visited it.”

When Milligan examined her daughter’s computer afterward, she discovered that Marissa had been visiting a how-to Web site about suicide that featured grisly autopsy photos. The site notes that many suicide methods are ineffective (poison is fatal only fifteen per cent of the time, drug overdose twelve per cent, and wrist cutting a mere five per cent) and therefore recommends bridges, noting that “jumps from higher than . . . 250 feet over water are almost always fatal.” Milligan bought the proprietor of the site’s book, “Suicide and Attempted Suicide,” and read the following sentence: “The Golden Gate Bridge is to suicides what Niagara Falls is to honeymooners.” She returned the book and gave the computer away.

Every year, Marissa had written her mother a Christmas letter reflecting on the year’s events. On Christmas Day that year, Milligan, going through her daughter’s things, found her suicide note. It was tucked into “The Chronicles of Narnia,” which sat beside a copy of “Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teenagers.” The note ended with a plea: “Please forgive me. Don’t shut yourselves off from the world. Everyone is better off without this fat, disgusting, boring girl. Move on.”

Renée Milligan could not. “When I went to my optometrist, I realized he has big pictures of the Golden Gate in his office, and I had to walk out,” she said. “The image of the bridge is everywhere. San Francisco is the Golden Gate Bridge—I can’t escape it.” Milligan recently filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of her daughter’s estate against the Golden Gate Bridge District and the bridge’s board of directors, seeking to require them to put up a barrier. Her suit charges, “Through their acts and omissions Defendants have authorized, encouraged, and condoned government-assisted suicide.” Three previous lawsuits against the bridge by the parents of suicides have all been dismissed, and the bridge officials’ reply to Milligan’s suit lays out their standard defense: “Plaintiffs’ injuries, if any, were the result of Plaintiffs’ own actions (contributory negligence).” Furthermore, the reply says, “plaintiffs cannot show that Ms. Imrie used the property with due care for the purposes it was designed.”

As Joseph Strauss, the chief engineer of the Golden Gate, watched his beloved suspension bridge rise over San Francisco Bay in the nineteen-thirties, he could not imagine that anyone would use it without due care for its designated purpose. “Who would want to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge?” he told reporters. At the bridge’s opening ceremony, in May of 1937, Strauss read a statement in a low voice, his hands trembling. “What Nature rent asunder long ago man has joined today,” he said. The class poet at Ohio University, class of ’91, Strauss also wrote an ode to mark the occasion:

As harps for the winds of heaven,
My web-like cables are spun;
I offer my span for the traffic of man,
At the gate of the setting sun.

Three months later, a forty-seven-year-old First World War veteran named Harold Wobber turned to a stranger on the walkway, announced, “This is as far as I go,” and hopped over the rail. His body was never found. The original design called for the rail to be five and a half feet high, but this was lowered to four feet in the final blueprint, for reasons that are lost to history. The bridge’s chief engineer, Mervin Giacomini, who recently retired, told me half seriously that Strauss’s stature—he was only five feet tall—may have been a factor in the decision. Known as “the little man who built the big bridge,” Strauss may simply have wanted to be able to see over its side.

In May, 1938, Strauss died of a heart attack, likely brought on by the stress of seeing the bridge to completion. A plaque dedicated to him at the southern end of the bridge a few months later declared the span “a promise indeed that the race of man shall endure unto the ages”; at that point, six people had already jumped off. And at the dedication ceremony A. R. O’Brien, the bridge’s director, delivered a notably dark eulogy. Strauss “put everything he had” into the bridge’s construction, O’Brien said, “and out of its completion he got so little. . . . The Golden Gate Bridge, for my dead friend, turned out to be a mute monument of misery.”

In the years since the bridge’s dedication, Harold Wobber’s flight path has become well worn. I spent a day reading through clippings about Golden Gate Bridge suicides in the San Francisco Public Library, hundreds of two- or three-inch tales of woe from the Chronicle, the Examiner, the Call-Bulletin: “police said he was despondent over domestic affairs”; “medical discharge from the army”; “jobless butcher”; “the upholstery still retaining the warmth of the driver’s body”; “saying ‘goodbye’ four times and looking ‘very sad’ ”; “ ‘sick at heart’ over the treatment of Jewish relatives in Germany”; “the baby’s cries apparently irritated him past endurance”; “footprints on the fog-wet girders were found early today”; “using his last nickel to scratch a farewell on the guard railing.”

The coverage intensified in 1973, when the Chronicle and the Examiner initiated countdowns to the five-hundredth recorded jumper. Bridge officials turned back fourteen aspirants to the title, including one man who had “500” chalked on a cardboard sign pinned to his T-shirt. The eventual “winner,” who eluded both bridge personnel and local-television crews, was a commune-dweller tripping on LSD.

In 1995, as No. 1,000 approached, the frenzy was even greater. A local disk jockey went so far as to promise a case of Snapple to the family of the victim. That June, trying to stop the countdown fever, the California Highway Patrol halted its official count at 997. In early July, Eric Atkinson, age twenty-five, became the unofficial thousandth; he was seen jumping, but his body was never found.

Ken Holmes, the Marin County coroner, told me, “When the number got to around eight hundred and fifty, we went to the local papers and said, ‘You’ve got to stop reporting numbers.’ ” Within the last decade, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Association of Suicidology have also issued guidelines urging the media to downplay the suicides. The Bay Area media now usually report bridge jumps only if they involve a celebrity or tie up traffic. “We weaned them,” Holmes said. But, he added, “the lack of publicity hasn’t reduced the number of suicides at all.”

The Empire State Building, the Duomo, St. Peter’s Basilica, and Sydney Harbor Bridge were all suicide magnets before barriers were erected on them. So were Mt. Mihara, a volcano in Japan (more than six hundred people jumped into it in 1936 alone); the Arroyo Seco Bridge, in Pasadena; and the Eiffel Tower. At Prince Edward Viaduct, in Toronto, the site of nearly five hundred fatal jumps, engineers just finished constructing a four-million-dollar “luminous veil” of stainless-steel rods above the railing. At all of these places, after the barriers were in place the number of jumpers declined to a handful, or to zero.

“In the seventies, we were really mobilized for a barrier at the Golden Gate,” Dr. Richard Seiden, the Berkeley suicide expert, told me. In 1970, the board of the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District began studying eighteen suicide-barrier proposals, including a nine-foot wire fence, a nylon safety net, and even high-voltage laser beams. The board’s criteria were cost, aesthetics, and effectiveness. In 1973, the nineteen-member board, most of them political appointees, declared that none of the options were “acceptable to the public.” (The laser-beam proposal was vetoed because of the likelihood of “severe burns, possibly fatal, to pedestrians and personnel.”)

In 1998, a company called Z-Clip suggested that one of its livestock fences serve as a barrier. The seven-foot-tall mesh of wires had originally been used in Chile to keep cattle out of pine-seedling plantations, and would cost a mere $2.3 million to $3.5 million. The bridge board would not approve it, however. Barbara Kaufman, a board member, said that the fence resembled the “barbed wire at concentration camps.”

Tom Ammiano, a leading candidate for the mayoralty of San Francisco this fall, is among the bridge’s most liberal supervisors. He says that a barrier is no longer being actively considered, and that only he and three or four other board members favor one. “There’s a lot of white Republicans on the board who resist change,” Ammiano told me. He laughed darkly, and added, “The Golden Gate is an icon, my dear.”

The most plausible reason for the board’s resistance is aesthetics. For the past twenty-five years, however, three hundred and fifty feet of the southern end of the bridge have been festooned with an eight-foot-tall cyclone fence, directly above the Fort Point National Park site on the shore of the Bay. This “debris fence” was erected to keep tourists from dropping things—including, at one point, bowling balls—on other tourists below. “It’s a public-safety issue,” the bridge’s former chief engineer, Mervin Giacomini, told me.

Another factor is cost, which would seem particularly important now that the Bridge District has a projected five-year shortfall of more than two hundred million dollars. Yet, in October, construction will be completed on a fifty-four-inch-high steel barrier between the walkway and the adjacent traffic lanes which is meant to prevent bicyclists from veering into traffic. No cyclist has ever been killed; nonetheless, the bridge’s chief engineer, Denis Mulligan, says that the five-million-dollar barrier was necessary: “It’s a public-safety issue.” Engineers are also considering erecting a movable median to prevent head-on collisions, at a cost of at least twenty million dollars. “It’s a public-safety issue,” Al Boro, a member of the Bridge District’s board of directors, said to me.

A familiar argument against a barrier is that thwarted jumpers will simply go elsewhere. In 1953, a bridge supervisor named Mervin Lewis rejected an early proposal for a barrier by saying it was preferable that suicides jump into the Bay than dive off a building “and maybe kill somebody else.” (It’s a public-safety issue.) Although this belief makes intuitive sense, it is demonstrably untrue. Dr. Seiden’s study, “Where Are They Now?,” published in 1978, followed up on five hundred and fifteen people who were prevented from attempting suicide at the bridge between 1937 and 1971. After, on average, more than twenty-six years, ninety-four per cent of the would-be suicides were either still alive or had died of natural causes. “The findings confirm previous observations that suicidal behavior is crisis-oriented and acute in nature,” Seiden concluded; if you can get a suicidal person through his crisis—Seiden put the high-risk period at ninety days—chances are extremely good that he won’t kill himself later.

The current system for preventing suicide on the bridge is what officials call “the non-physical barrier.” Its components include numerous security cameras and thirteen telephones, which potential suicides or alarmed passersby can use to reach the bridge’s control tower. The most important element is randomly scheduled patrols by California Highway patrolmen and Golden Gate Bridge personnel in squad cars and on foot, bicycle, and motorcycle.

In two visits to the bridge, I spent an hour and a half on the walkway and never saw a patrolman. Perhaps, on camera, I didn’t exhibit troubling behavior. The monitors look for people standing alone near the railing, and pay particular attention if they’ve left a backpack, a briefcase, or a wallet on the ground beside them. Kevin Briggs, a friendly, sandy-haired motorcycle patrolman, has a knack for spotting jumpers and talking them back from the edge; he has coaxed in more than two hundred potential jumpers without losing one over the side. He won the Highway Patrol’s Marin County Uniformed Employee of the Year Award last year. Briggs told me that he starts talking to a potential jumper by asking, “How are you feeling today?” Then, “What’s your plan for tomorrow?” If the person doesn’t have a plan, Briggs says, “Well, let’s make one. If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back here later.”

The non-physical barrier catches between fifty and eighty people each year, and misses about thirty. Responding to these figures, Al Boro said, “I think that’s positive, I think that’s effective. Of course, you’d like to do everything you can to make it zero, within reason.”

Despite the coroner’s verdict, Paul Alarab’s loved ones insist that he didn’t jump off the Golden Gate. Having viewed the Telemundo tape, they believe that when Alarab was putting down his antiwar statement he slipped and fell. An accident is easier for friends and family to accept, whereas suicide leaves behind nothing but guilt. It’s impossible to know whether any one suicide might have been prevented, but many suicidal people do indeed wish to be saved. As the eminent suicidologist E. S. Shneidman has said, “The paradigm is the man who cuts his throat and cries for help in the same breath.”

Those who work on the bridge learn to cope with the suicides they can’t prevent by keeping an emotional distance. Glen Sievert, an ironworker who has often helped rescue potential jumpers, told the Wall Street Journal, “I don’t like these people. I have my own problems.” Even Kevin Briggs, the empathic patrolman, was surprised to learn, when he and some colleagues had a week’s training with a psychiatrist earlier this year, that suicidal people “are real people—not crazy people but real people suffering from depression.” Nonetheless, Briggs remains opposed to a barrier. “The bridge is about beauty,” he told me. “They’re going to jump anyway, and you can’t stop them.”

Mary Currie, the bridge’s spokeswoman, is an intense woman with short dark-blond hair. Last February, she went on a foot patrol with five Golden Gate patrolmen so that she would understand that detail better. Currie told me that her group stopped to assess a handsome middle-aged man who’d been at the south tower for two hours. “He said he was just taking a walk. But we all had a feeling,” Currie said. “Still, you can’t gang-tackle a guy for taking a walk. Five minutes after our last contact with him, he walked to the mid-span and looked back. We all took off after him; I was only twenty feet away when he went over. We saw him go in, feet first.

“The other guys felt they’d followed procedure, done what they had to do, didn’t get him, and they’ve moved on. But I had nightmares for a week. Should I have grabbed his ankles? Should there be a barrier? I finally decided it was this guy’s choice. I have depression in my family—I’ve had some myself—and you just have to fight it.” After a second, she reversed herself. “You know, if my mother had succeeded in killing herself—and she tried—I would be much more devastated, and my thinking would be . . .” She shook her head, banishing doubt. “That bridge is more than a bridge: it’s alive, it speaks to people. Some people come here, find themselves, and leave; some come here, find themselves, and jump.”

The bridge comes into the lives of all Bay Area residents sooner or later, and it often stays. Dr. Jerome Motto, who has been part of two failed suicidebarrier coalitions, is now retired and living in San Mateo. When I visited him there, we spent three hours talking about the bridge. Motto had a patient who committed suicide from the Golden Gate in 1963, but the jump that affected him most occurred in the seventies. “I went to this guy’s apartment afterward with the assistant medical examiner,” he told me. “The guy was in his thirties, lived alone, pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.’ ”

Motto sat back in his chair. “That was it,” he said. “It’s so needless, the number of people who are lost.”

As people who work on the bridge know, smiles and gentle words don’t always prevent suicides. A barrier would. But to build one would be to acknowledge that we do not understand each other; to acknowledge that much of life is lived on the chord, on the far side of the railing. Joseph Strauss believed that the Golden Gate would demonstrate man’s control over nature, and so it did. No engineer, however, has discovered a way to control the wildness within.

Falukorv posted:

Yeah i might be wrong, it is insanely bitter but according to this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strychnine_poisoning#Notable_strychnine_poisonings) several people have been fooled anyway.

But even if you can taste the bitterness, one might be fooled anyway if it's laced in a drink that is expected to have a bitter taste. Like a guy in that linked who drank it from cough syrup, which is essentially a foul tasting concoction of bitter plant-based alkaloids in the first place.
So if you can trick someone that they're drinking medicine, you can also trick them into drinking strychnine.

Anyway, surprising to hear about this more modern cases, as strychnine is something i imagined people were doing pre-1930's. You know, royal assassinations, 19th century crime novels type poo poo.

quote:

Oskar Dirlewanger, the notorious leader of the SS Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger in the Second World War, was known to have murdered several Jewish women by stripping them naked and having them injected with strychnine. He and his officers then watched them convulse until death, just for their entertainment.

quote:

He was invariably described as an extremely notorious figure by historians and researchers, including as "a psychopathic killer and child molester" by Steven Zaloga,[1] as "violently sadistic" by Richard Rhodes,[2] as "an expert in extermination and a devotee of sadism and necrophilia" by J. Bowyer Bell,[3] and as "a sadist and necrophiliac" by Bryan Mark Rigg.[4] World War II historian Chris Bishop called him the "most evil man in the SS."

quote:

After the end of World War I, Dirlewanger, described in a police report as "a mentally unstable, violent fanatic and alcoholic, who had the habit of erupting into violence under the influence of drugs,"[9] joined different Freikorps right-wing paramilitary militias and fought against German communists in Ruhr and Saxony..

In 1934, he was convicted and sentenced to two years imprisonment for sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl from the League of German Girls (BDM), as well as the illegal use of a government vehicle and damaging said vehicle while under the influence of alcohol. Dirlewanger also lost his job, his doctor title and all military honours, and was expelled from the NSDAP. Soon after his release from the prison in Ludwigsburg, Dirlewanger was arrested again on similar charges for criminal recidivism. He was sent to the Welzheim concentration camp, as was standard practice for deviant sexual offenders in Germany at the time.

quote:

At the beginning of World War II, Dirlewanger volunteered for the Waffen-SS and received the rank of Obersturmführer. He eventually became the commander of the so-called Sonderkommando Dirlewanger (at first designated as a battalion, later expanded to a regiment and a brigade, and eventually a division), composed originally of a small group of former poachers. Later, Dirlewanger's soldiers were mostly recruited from volunteers among the ever broader groups of German convicted criminals (civilian and military) and concentration camp inmates, eventually including even mental asylum patients, interned gypsies, and (at the end of the war) political prisoners sentenced for their anti-Nazi beliefs and activities.

quote:

The unit was assigned to security duties first in German-occupied Poland (General Government), where Dirlewanger also served as an SS-TV commandant of a labour camp at Stary Dzików. The camp was a subject of an abuse investigation by the SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who accused Dirlewanger of wanton acts of murder, corruption and Rassenschande, that is the crime of sexual relations with non-Aryans (Morgen consequently himself got reduced in rank and sent to the Eastern Front).[18] According to Morgen, "Dirlewanger was a nuisance and a terror to the entire population. He repeatedly pillaged the ghetto in Lublin, extorting ransoms."

quote:

In January 1942, however, the local Higher SS and Police Leader, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger threatened: "[Unless] this bunch of criminals disappears from the General Government within a week, I will go myself and lock them up."[23] In February, the unruly unit was promptly reassigned for anti-partisan duties in German-occupied Belarus, "with a speciality of 'pacifying' an area by slaughtering every man, woman and child." "Dirlewanger's preferred method was to herd the local population inside a barn, set the barn on fire, and then shoot with machine guns anyone who tried to escape."[6] Rounded-up civilians were also repeatedly used as human shields and marched over minefields.[7] In Masters of Death, Richard Rhodes wrote that Dirlewanger and his force also "raped and tortured young women and slaughtered Jews Einsatzgruppen-style in Byelorussia beginning in 1942."[2] Snyder cautiously estimated that the Sonderkommando, by then regiment-sized, killed at least 30,000 Belarusian civilians



In Warsaw, Dirlewanger participated in the Wola massacre, together with police units rounding up and shooting some 40,000 civilians, most of them in just two days.[6] In the same Wola district, Dirlewanger burned three hospitals with patients inside, while the nurses were "whipped, gang-raped and finally hanged naked, together with the doctors" to the accompaniment of music.[6] Later, "they drank, raped and murdered their way through the Old Town, slaughtering civilians and fighters alike without distinction of age or sex."[7] In the Old Town – where about 30,000 civilians were killed – several thousand wounded in field hospitals overrun by the Germans were shot and set on fire with flamethrowers.[6] Reportedly, "the Dirlewanger brigade burned prisoners alive with gasoline, impaled babies on bayonets and stuck them out of windows and hung women upside down from balconies."

"After the door of the building was blown off we saw a daycare-full of small children, around 500; all with small hands in the air. Even Dirlewanger's own people called him a butcher; he ordered to kill them all. The shots were fired, but he requested his men to save the ammo and finish them off by rifle-butts and bayonets. Blood and brain matter flowed in streams down the stairs".

quote:

He died after World War II while in Allied custody, apparently beaten to death by his guards.

Sand Monster posted:

This likely was discussed in the last thread, but I was reading about the helicopter accident on the set of The Twilight Zone: The Movie (resulting in the deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two children) and it is all kinds of scary how reckless some people were and how it could have been prevented:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone:_The_Movie#Helicopter_accident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_Zone_tragedy
http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/not_guilty/twilight_zone/1.html

That last link is particularly thorough.

quote:

The Circumcellions or Agonisticis[1][2] (as called by Donatists) were bands of Berbers considered as heretical[3] Christian extremists in North Africa in the early- to mid-4th century.[4] They were initially concerned with remedying social grievances, but they became linked with the Donatist sect.[4] They condemned property and slavery, and advocated canceling debts and freeing slaves.[5] Donatists prized martyrdom and had a special devotion for the martyrs, rendering honours to their graves.

quote:

The Circumcellions regarded martyrdom as the true Christian virtue...they focused on bringing about their own martyrdom.

quote:

On occasion, members of this group assaulted Roman legionaries or armed travelers with simple wooden clubs to provoke them into attacking and martyring them. Others interrupted courts of law and verbally provoked the judge so that he would order their immediate execution (a normal punishment at the time for contempt of court).[6] The sect survived until the fifth century in Africa.

Because Jesus had told Peter to put down his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane (John 18:11), the Circumcellions piously avoided bladed weapons and instead opted for the use of blunt clubs, which they called "Israelites." Using their "Israelites", the Circumcellions would attack random travelers on the road, while shouting "Laudate Deum!" ("Praise God!" in Latin.) The object of these random beatings was the death of the intrepid martyr, who sought to provoke the victim to attack and kill them.[7][8][9

Stare-Out posted:

Pretty much everyone is hard pressed to name someone killed on September 11th. It's just how it is, and it is hosed up.

quote:

911 Dispatcher 8695:


No, no, very hot, no fire for now, and no smoke right? no smoke, right?

Melissa ***: (felt it might be best to censor her last name even though it's found online of course)

OF COURSE THERE'S SMOKE


911 Dispatcher 8695:


Okay dear, I'm so sorry, hold on for a sec, stay calm with me, stay calm, listen, listen, the call is in, I'm documenting, hold on one second please...

Melissa ***
:


I'm going to die, aren't I?

911 Dispatcher 8695:


No, no, no, no, no, no, no, say your, ma'am, say your prayers.

Melissa ***:


I'm going to die.

911 Dispatcher 8695:


You gotta think positive, because you gotta help each other get off the floor.

Melissa ***:


I'm going to die.


911 Dispatcher 8695:


I already notified the lieutenant that there's five people on the 83rd floor, very hot and smoky, so they won't overlook you, okay dear?

Melissa ***:


Can you...can you...

911 Dispatcher 8695:


I already did that dear.

Melissa ***:


Stay on the line with me please, I feel like I'm dying.

911 Dispatcher 8695


Yes ma'am, I am going to stay with you.

Melissa ***:


They're here?

911 Dispatcher 8695:


Are they inside with you yet dear?

Melissa ***:


No

911 Dispatcher 8695:


Okay, stay calm until they get inside.

Melissa ***:


Can you find out where they are?

911 Dispatcher 8695:


Okay, stay calm, stay calm, stay calm until they get inside.

Melissa ***:


Can...(voice stops)


radio traffic between Dispatcher 8695 and an unknown

peter gabriel posted:

This was HUGE news when it happened and is still heart breaking today to me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Bulger

Poor James

quote:

In April 2010, a 19-year-old man from the Isle of Man was given a three-month suspended prison sentence for falsely claiming in a Facebook message that one of his former work colleagues was Robert Thompson. In passing sentence, Deputy High Bailiff Alastair Montgomery said that the teenager had "put that person at significant risk of serious harm" and in a "perilous position" by making the allegation.[78]

In March 2012, a 26-year-old man from Chorley, Lancashire, was arrested after allegedly setting up a Facebook group with the title "What happened to Jamie Bulger was f**king hilarious." The man's computer was seized for further investigations.[79]

On 2 March 2010, the Ministry of Justice revealed that Jon Venables had been returned to prison for an unspecified violation of the terms of his licence of release...

On 21 June 2010, Venables was charged with possession and distribution of indecent images of children. It was alleged that he had downloaded 57 indecent images of children over a 12-month period to February 2010, and allowed other people to access the files through a peer-to-peer network.

He pleaded guilty to charges of downloading and distributing child pornography, and was given a sentence of two years' imprisonment.[101] At the court hearing, it emerged that Venables had posed in online chat rooms as 35-year-old Dawn "Dawnie" Smith, a married woman from Liverpool who boasted about abusing her 8-year-old daughter, in the hope of obtaining further child pornography. Venables had contacted his probation officer in February 2010, fearing that his new identity had been compromised at his place of work. When the officer arrived at his flat, Venables was attempting to remove or destroy the hard drive of his computer with a knife and a tin opener.[3] The officer's suspicions were aroused, and the computer was taken away for examination leading to the discovery of the child pornography, which included children as young as two being raped by adults[102][103] and penetrative sex with seven- or eight-year-olds.[3]... On 4 July 2013, it was reported that the Parole Board for England and Wales had approved the release of Venables.[115][116]

On 3 September 2013, it was reported that Venables had been released from prison.[117]

quote:

The dame de voyage (French) or dama de viaje (Spanish) was a direct predecessor to today's sex dolls that originated in the seventeenth century. Dames de voyage were makeshift masturbatory dolls made of sewn cloth or old clothes, used by French and Spanish sailors while isolated at sea during long voyages.[1]

quote:

White Coke is a moniker for a variant of Coca-Cola produced in the 1940s at the request of Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov. Coca-Cola was presented to Zhukov by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower—himself a particular fan of Coca-Cola.[1] Zhukov liked it and asked for its color to resemble vodka so that he would not be seen drinking Coca-Cola in public,[2] as it was regarded in the Soviet Union as a symbol of American imperialism.[3]

Marshal Zhukov placed the request with General Mark W. Clark, commander of the US sector of Allied-occupied Austria, who passed the request on to President Harry S. Truman. President Truman in turn contacted James Farley, chairman of the Board of the Coca-Cola Export Corporation—at the time busy establishing thirty-eight Coca-Cola plants in Southeast Europe, including Austria. Farley tasked Miladin Zarubica—a technical supervisor for The Coca-Cola Company, a son of a Yugoslav immigrant and a wartime PT boat commander, sent to Austria in 1946 to supervise establishment of a large bottling plant—with fulfilling Marshal Zhukov's request. Zarubica found a chemist who could remove the coloring from the beverage, thereby granting Marshal Zhukov's wish. The colorless version of Coca-Cola was bottled using straight, clear glass bottles sporting a white cap with a red star in the middle.[4][5] The bottle and the cap were produced by the Crown Cork and Seal Company in Brussels. The first shipment of White Coke consisted of 50 cases.[3][6]

Wildeyes posted:

quote:

TO: BARIL/DPKO/UNATIONS

NEW YORK



FROM: DALLAIRE/UNAMIR/KIGALI

FAX NO: MOST IMMEDIATE-CODE CABLE-212-xxx-xxxx

INMARSAT:



FAX NO: 011-xxx-xxxxx

SUBJECT: REQUEST FOR PROTECTION OF INFORMANT

ATTN: MGEN BARIL



ROOM NO: 2052

TOTAL NUMBER OF TRANSMITTED PAGES INCLUDING THIS ONE: 2

1. Force commander put in contact with informant by very very important government politician. Informant is a top level trainer in the cadre of interhamwe-armed militia of MRND.

2. He informed us he was in charge of last Saturdays demonstrations which aims were to target deputies of opposition parties coming to ceremonies and Belgian soldiers. They hoped to provoke the RPF BN to engage (being fired upon) the demonstrators and provoke a civil war. Deputies were to be assassinated upon entry or exit from Parliament. Belgian troops were to be provoked and if Belgians soldiers restored to force a number of them were to be killed and thus guarantee Belgian withdrawal from Rwanda.

3. Informant confirmed 48 RGF PARA CDO and a few members of the gendarmerie participated in demonstrations in plain clothes. Also at least one Minister of the MRND and the sous-prefect of Kigali were in the demonstration. RGF and Interhamwe provided radio communications.

4. Informant is a former security member of the president. He also stated he is paid RF150,000 per month by the MRND party to train Interhamwe. Direct link is to chief of staff RGF and president of the MRND for financial and material support.

5. Interhamwe has trained 1700 men in RGF military camps outside the capital. The 1700 are scattered in groups of 40 throughout Kigali. Since UNAMIR deployed he has trained 300 personnel in three week training sessions at RGF camps. Training focus was discipline, weapons, explosives, close combat and tactics.

6. Principal aim of Interhamwe in the past was to protect Kigali from RPF. Since UNAMIR mandate he has been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali. He suspects it is for their extermination. Example he gave was that in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1000 Tutsis.

7. Informant states he disagrees with anti-Tutsi extermination. He supports opposition to RPF but cannot support killing of innocent persons. He also stated that he believes the president does not have full control over all elements of his old party/faction.

8. Informant is prepared to provide location of major weapons cache with at least 135 weapons. He already has distributed 110 weapons including 35 with ammunition and can give us details of their location. Type of weapons are G3 and AK47 provided by RGF. He was ready to go to the arms cache tonight-if we gave him the following guarantee. He requests that he and his family (his wife and four children) be placed under our protection.

9. It is our intention to take action within the next 36 hours with a possible H HR of Wednesday at dawn (local). Informant states that hostilities may commence again if political deadlock ends. Violence could take place day of the ceremonies or the day after. Therefore Wednesday will give greatest chance of success and also be most timely to provide significant input to on-going political negotiations.

10. It is recommended that informant be granted protection and evacuated out of Rwanda. This HQ does not have previous UN experience in such matters and urgently requests guidance. No contact has as yet been made to any embassy in order to inquire if they are prepared to protect him for a period of time by granting diplomatic immunity in their embassy in Kigali before moving him and his family out of the country.

11. Force commander will be meeting with the very very important political person tomorrow morning in order to ensure that this individual is conscious of all parameters of his involvement. Force commander does have certain reservations on the suddenness of the change of heart of the informant to come clean with this information. Recce of armed cache and detailed planning of raid to go on late tomorrow. Possibility of a trap not fully excluded, as this may be a set-up against this very very important political person. Force commander to inform SRSG first thing in morning to ensure his support.

13. Peux Ce Que Veux. Allons-y.

quote:

We have to start with the case of "Jack the Ripper",
who was it appears, just a code-name for a high-level
british secret society entertaining themselves with
satanic ritual murder. Amongst those -rumour goes-,
was none other than "Prince Albert Victor" Duke of
Clarence and Avon, heir of Prince Albert and Queen
Victoria. Those were the days when that royalty was
still called by its true name "Saxe-Koburg-Gotha"
from Germany, before they changed to "Windsor" in
1917, to appease the masses during WWI. Prince A.V.
was born 1864, and conveniently "died" in 1891 (fact
disputed by many), after a big homosexual scandal in
a brothel involving some high profile politicians; maybe
1 gay scandal and 1 suspicion of being the Ripper, was
one too many 1's for the Crown, who legend says just
sent him out of the country forever in secret. This
satanic clique is thought of as having an obsession
with English Gematria codes, so numeric "signatures"
are thought to be (key: a=1, b=2, ..., z=26):
[ALBERT=58="Jack the"] [RIPPER=82=PAV/ETR]
{pav/etr: full 1st/last initials of PrincE AlberT VictoR}

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Albert_piercing
Then there is the famous "Prince Albert Piercing" in
the Penis gland , unclear referred to him or his father.
Then there is The Ripper letters, with clue lines as:
"Funny Little Games", "They Say I'm a Doctor Now",
"Trade Name", etc:
[ LITTLE GAMES = 123 ]
[ PRINCE ALBERT = 123 = DUKE OF CLARENCE ]
Full 1st/last initials "Prince Albert Duke of Clarence":
[ "a PADOC/ETEFE = 81 = "Trade Name" ]
1st Duke of Clarence died in the Tower of London:
[ Tower = 81 ]

So if they secretly exiled him for being a bloody psycho,
where did he go...? This is where the rumours lead to
none other than...Hitler. Starting with a striking physical
resemblance, they look IDENTICAL, comparing pics of
"young Hitler". It is of course a strong historical anomaly
that a low-level man like Adolf, with dropout 'education',
definitely low IQ, who was rejected twice at the academy
trying to become a painter, and who came with Hysteria
during his WWI in the front, would become the powerful
and astute manipulator of masses and kings. His parents
Alois & Clara Hitler had 5 children, of which just Adolf &
Paula survived; she lived to old age and changed her name
at Adolf's request during his glory years, so no one knew
he had a sister. She worked as his house tender woman,
died without children in 1960. Was he just ashamed of her
low class, or was she a SIGN his family did not match his
supposed Fuhrer persona, so he hid her...? Their parents
died in 1903 and 1907, Adolf did not register for military
service in 1909, it took 4 years for authorities to catch up
with him. It is unkown where he was, and scanty facts
speak of him showing odd behaviour, depression, crying
looking at the wall. Adolf visited Liverpool in his youth,
had a british cousin/nephew (William Patrick) there. To
make matters worse, there are also strong rumours the
"original" Adolf was actually Baron Rothschild's bastard
grandson, as his grandma was a house/slave of his, and
it is well known he abused her during her entire life.
When during WWI the SS Office of Genealogical Research
decided to propagandize about the nazi leaders glorious
"aryan genetic roots", in shock they discovered this, and
promptly retrieved the project (it meant Adolf was jew).
This 'dark secret' has been cited to explan his hatred for
jews, as psychological projection. However since Hitler's
body "was never found", there is no way to look for DNA
evidence of him traced to the Prince Albert lineage. See?
This would explain -conspiriologists say-, why he could
just not die like everyone else, and some say he never did
die in 1945, but retired to idyllic Bariloche-Argentina, so
beautifully similar to his beloved Bavarian Alps, under the
known protection of Juan Peron (1946 to 1952 and on).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Per%C3%B3n

So goes the CASE OF A SUBSTITUTION, where exiled
heir to the british crown Prince Albert Victor assumes the
identity of one obscure irrelevant Adolf Hitler, chosen not
only based on his name, but on the Rothschild 'dark' blood
lineage (illuminati top players often have bastard offspring
that they place high in "opposite camps", so they control all
sides of every artificially created conflict). Thus Adolf and
Eva Braun did not have offspring neither, that would give
away Dna evidence as well. A strange case of... Zero Dna!?
So the story goes, in Nov 18-1908, young Adolf left his old
address without a forwarding address; enter the famous
"lost years of Adolf". Rumour goes exiled Prince Albert
Victor had been studying Architecture in the meantime
-as it was one of his passions-, thus this would also explain
the inexplicable, that acc. to none other than master architect
of the 3rd Reich -Albert Speer-, Hitler was a "good architect"
(in his own words). How come? Unless he was Prince Albert
student of Architecture of course. He and Speer would go on
to re-design Berlin, a habit still continued up until his very
"death"; models of their majestic urban/arch plans have been
reconstructed, and they are pretty darn good. Never mind
how an obscure low IQ low-class abnormal depressive guy
without any formal education could have achieved such...
Hitler painted as well, and eerily both Arch. & Painting are
2 passions of one Prince Charles. Paula H. had no contact
with Adolf during is 'alone' years and military career; she met
him again in Vienna in the 1920's. During official 12 July '45
interrogation by the allies, she declared: "I never saw him
from 1908 until 1921 (that's 13 years, and she was the only
relative that could identify him). And he added: "I did not
recognize him at first when he walked into the house". Was
she aware he was NOT the original "Adolf". It appears so;
until 2005 it was thought she was a bystander in the nazi
period, only relation to Adolf being her working as his maid
at first, and then he got her a job as secretary in a military
hospital (he gave her their father's military pension as well,
that he had lived-off during his 'alone' years, it was quite a
decent wage). However only in 2005 it was revealed she had
been engaged to one of the most notorious euthanasia doctors,
Dr. Erwin Jekelius, but Adolf did not allow her to marry him.
Docs that prove this are suspected of being fake, but there is
something funky with her "innocent" story. At any rate Adolf
gave the name "Frau Wolf(f)" for her to use per life. And yes,
her own vagaries after her mother's death (1909), are unkown.
Why would anybody forge her docs? Distraction of the truth?
[Paula Hitler=123=Prince Albert=Duke of Clarence]
Did this numerological coincidence keep her alive?

Now on Queen Victoria's side, the british dynasty name is
"Mountbatten/Battenburg":
[ ADOLF HITLER = 110 = BATTENBURG ]
Was this numerology the reason to choose "Adolf Hitler"
as identity-theft victim on the part of a numbers obsessed
Albert Victor? Let's keep in mind that also there is a Rhyme
relation, as: "r-I-pp-ER" rhymes with "h-I-tl-ER".
And then of course the famous legend of Hitler having been
bisexual in his lost years, a rumour than continued on during
his glory years as Fuhrer, the other nazi leaders nicknamed
his former jail partner after the Putsch (Rudolph Hess)
"Frau Hess" -Mrs. Hess-', for this reason. Psychological
studies conducted by allied intelligence services on Hitler,
state that he had a sexual perversion, wanting to see (and
else) defecate a young woman. The urban lore about Hitler's
lost years in total debauchery, is well-known. The point is,
this woud match a debauched Albert Victor's personality,
both sexually, and his lust for blood. If there's any truth to
any of this, naturally. But other "clues" can be found.

We observe the ritual codename "RIPPER" contains an
all-too-obvious giveaway clue "PR" (PR-ince), whereas the
other "Adolf Hitler" of alleged identity-theft, was born in
April 20: ""a-PR-il". Hitler's birthday was lavishly & ritually
celebrated each year, with famous international dignataries
always invited ceremonially, including Vatican top envoys.
You'll also notice the name for his book "Mein Kampf":
[ MEIN = 41 = DUKE ]
Particularly revealing is the last name he chose her sister
to change to -"Wolf(f)": [ WOLF = 56 = APRIL ]. While
on the other hand he chose for sole partner "Eva Braun":
[ BRAUN = 56 = APRIL = WOLF = ALOIS ]
"Alois" being Adolf''s father. Also eeringly plausible as
another reason to riskily let Paula Hitler live on:
[ PAULA = 51 = GOTHA ]
Prince Albert Victor's last name: "Saxe-Koburg-Gotha".

Besides this, as the "Branau" location-name became then
later a nazi term (New Branau, etc) -for Eva Braun-one
may also conclude the real reason he chose her as partner:
[ BRANAU = ENGLAND ]
So a distinct picture begins to emerge of this identity-theft
scenario as quite plausible, with Albert Victor methodically
and obsessivelly/ritually laying out all the proper clues his
royal dignity wold merit, for posterity and for enjoyment of
the secret elite. And last -but not least-, the also inexplicable
anomaly of Hitler always carrying in his hand a WHIP; it was
actually a dog-whip, and this could have been a clue as to his
royal former british hunting days, as well as a pun for his
sado-masoquistic excesses. Did the Ripper disguise his knife
inside a dog-whip...? Do the numbers again:
[ WHIP = 56 = BRAUN = WOLF = APRIL = ALOIS ]
Yes, it helps to observe, reversing "56" to "65" (mirror No.):
[ 65 = PRINCE ]

quote:

The Murder of a Daughter
by Benjamin Franklin

Saturday last, at a Court of Oyer and Terminer held here, came on the Tryal of a Man and his Wife, who were indicted for the Murder of a Daughter which he had by a former Wife, (a Girl of about 14 Years of Age) by turning her out of Doors, and thereby exposing her to such Hardships, as afterwards produced grievous Sickness and Lameness; during which, instead of supplying her with Necessaries and due Attendance, they treated her with the utmost Cruelty and Barbarity, suffering her to lie and rot in her Nastiness, and when she cried for Bread giving her into her Mouth with a Iron Ladle, her own Excrements to eat, with a great Number of other Circumstances of the like Nature, so that she languished and at length died. The Evidence against them was numerous, and in many Particulars positive; but the Opinion of the Physician who had visited the Child, that whatever Usage might be given her, the Distemper she laboured under was such, as would of itself in all Probability have ended her Life about the Time she died, it is thought weighed so much with the Jury, that they brought in their Verdict only Man-slaughter. A Verdict which the Judge, (in a short but pathetic Speech to the Prisoners before the Sentence) told them was extreamly favourable; and that, as the Relation of their hitherto unheard-of Barbarity had in the highest Manner shocked all that were present; so, if they were not perfectly stupified, the inward Reflection upon their own enormous Crimes, must be more terrible and shocking to them, than the Punishment they were to undergo: For that they had not only acted contrary to the particular Laws of all Nations, but had even broken the Universal Law of Nature; since there are no Creatures known, how savage, wild, and fierce soever, that have not implanted in them a natural Love and Care of their tender Offspring, and that will not even hazard Life in its Protection and Defence. — But this is not the only Instance the present Age has afforded, of the incomprehensible Insensibility Dram-drinking is capable of producing. — They were sentenced to be burnt in the Hand, which was accordingly executed in Court, upon them both, but first upon the Man, who offer’d to receive another Burning if so be his Wife might be excused; but was told the Law would not allow it.

The Pennsylvania Gazette, October 24, 1734

quote:

Ther was a youth whose name was Thomas Granger; he was servant to an honest man of Duxbery, being aboute 16 or 17 years of age. (His father and mother lived at the same time at Sityate.) He was this year detected of buggery (and indicted for the same) with a mare, a cowe, tow goats, five sheep, 2 calves, and a turkey. Horrible it is to mention, but the truth of the historie requires it. He was first discovered by one that accidentally saw his lewd practise towards the mare. (I forbear perticulers.) Being upon it examined and committed, in the end he not only confest the fact with that beast at that time, but sundrie times before, and at severall times with all the rest of the forenamed in his indictmente; and this his free-confession was not only in private to the magistrates, (though at first he strived to deney it,) but to sundrie, both ministers and others, and afterwards, upon his indictemente, to the whole court and jury; and confirmed it at his execution. And whereas some of the sheep could not so well be knowne by his description of them, others with them were brought before him, and he declared which were they, and which were not. And accordingly he was cast by the jury, and condemned, and after executed about the 8 of Sept 1642. A very sade spectakle it was; for first the mare, and then the cowe, and the rest of the lesser catle, were kild before his face, according to the law, Levit: 20.15 and then he him selfe was executed.* The catle were all cast into a great and large pitte that was digged of purposs for them, and no use made of any part of them.

quote:

Shortly before sunset on May 25, 2003, Ben Charles Padilla boarded the plane with a hired mechanic from the Republic of the Congo. Neither man was certified to fly the Boeing 727, which normally requires a three person aircrew. Both men were working with Angolan mechanics to get the plane flight-ready.

The aircraft began taxiing with no communication between the tower and its crew. The plane was maneuvering erratically, and, without clearance, entered a runway. When the aircraft started taxiing down the runway, the control tower tried to make contact, but there was no response, and the tracking transponder was turned off. With its lights off, the aircraft took off, heading southwest over the Atlantic Ocean. Neither the airplane nor the two men have been seen since.[9]

benito posted:

Jean Thurel lived from 1698 to 1807 and spent 90 years of his life serving as a French soldier under everyone from Louis XV to Napoleon I.

quote:

"When I reached Dirlewanger's staff I was met by a strange sight.The Brigadefuhrer,a not very appealing adventurer type,was sitting at his desk with a live monkey perched on his shoulder. The monkey was said to have accompanied him everywhere,including Poland.When I discovered that the staff was packing up I ordered them to stay on the spot.....The unit was,as suggested before,a wild bunch. One company---communists who were expected to "prove themselves" on the front---had just deserted to the enemy.

FourLeaf posted:

Arrest Made In 2010 McStay Family Murder Case

TheFallenEvincar posted:

Christ, reading that New Yorker article on Willingham both terrifies and enrages me. I can't even bear finishing it to the end. Some of these people are loving animals and come off as criminal as the actually rightfully convicted murderers.

quote:

At 3:55 pm, Brink's guards Peter Paige and Joe Trombino emerged from the mall carrying bags of money. As they loaded the money into the truck, the robbers stormed out of their van and attacked. One fired two shotgun blasts into the van's bulletproof windshield, while another opened fire with an M16 rifle. Paige was hit multiple times and killed instantly. Trombino was able to fire a single shot from his handgun, but was struck in the shoulder and arm by several rounds, nearly severing his arm from his body. The criminals grabbed $1.6 million in cash, got back in their van, and fled the scene.

Trombino survived his injuries, and continued to work for the Brink's company for the next 20 years until he was killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks while making a delivery in the World Trade Center North Tower

Zeroisanumber posted:

I worked that job in college. The sad thing is that if the robbers had just drawn down on them, the guards would've almost certainly given up the cash without a fight. There's no loving way that a couple of working joes are going to take a bullet for someone else's money.

theflyingorc posted:

I'd be interested in this, too. Similarly, there's two British celebrities named "Ian Watkins". One of them molested children and was a super evil person, the other one is just some guy in a band. The one who isn't a child molester constantly gets E-mails and messages calling him a pedophile because people think there's some benefit to saying "I HATE YOU" to a celebrity, but don't think it's worth checking to make sure they've got the right person.

Three-Phase posted:

Want to know what one of the proposed alternatives by Roger Fisher to the nuclear football was?

The guy would have a briefcase containing a knife. The man carrying the briefcase would have the launch code surgically implanted in a device near or under his heart. If the president wanted to get the code out, he'd have to take the knife and cut the guy open to get the launch codes, killing him in the process.

This proposal was shot down because it was said that the president would be too traumatized by having to kill him to get the launch codes. (The hundreds of millions of deaths in nuclear fire and fallout, well, that's not so bad.)

muscles like this? posted:

Well, one thing that every network has is pre-written obituaries for pretty much every major world figure. They just need periodic updating for any big changes and a blank spot at the end of date of death/age at time of death.

quote:

CANTOR FITZGERALD AND ESPEED STATEMENT REGARDING DISASTER AT HEADQUARTERS AT ONE WORLD TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK

11 September 2001 --- The London offices of Cantor Fitzgerald International and eSpeed International are doing everything possible to assess the situation at their world headquarters at One World Trade Center in New York City.

Both companies had operations on the 101, 103, 104 and 105 floors. Approximately one thousand people are employed by the two companies at the World Trade Center. Currently we are unable to determine how many employees were in the building at the time of the attack or confirm if they were safely evacuated.

"All of our thoughts and prayers are with our NY colleagues and their families and friends at this time," said Howard W. Lutnick, Chairman of both companies. "In a very difficult and confused situation we are doing all that we can to determine more about the situations of colleagues."

The companies ask that anyone who can confirm the safety of any of the potentially affected employees to phone 212-704-8188. Relatives and friends who wish to enquire about employees should call
(from inside the US) 866-326-3188
(outside the US) +44 (0)20 7894 3721.

quote:

Cantor Fitzgerald lost over two-thirds of its workforce, considerably more than any of the other World Trade Center tenants or the New York City Police Department and New York City Fire Department. CEO and chairman Howard Lutnick, whose brother was among those killed, vowed to keep the company alive

Khazar-khum posted:

Jahi McMath--dead or deceased?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahi_McMath_case

The family has gone to incredible lengths to alienate people, too. And it can't be healthy to have a corpse in the house with little kids.

Temaukel posted:

I can't believe cases of penis removal as punishment (or for reasons other than sex-change penectomy) are so commonplace, especially in China:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_removal#2010s




e:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northstar_%28rap_group%29

quote:

On October 22, 1985, in Sydney, Australia, a 5-year-old Cambodian boy had his penis reattached after his forty-year-old mother severed it. The mother thought that her husband's spirit was inside the penis.[57]


On July 14, 1997, Earl Zea had cut off his own penis with a pair of gardening shears and flushed it down the toilet in an attempt to deter a gay man named Ronnie Fountain, from stalking him. Both men appeared on The Jerry Springer Show in an episode titled "I Cut Off My Manhood", in which Fountain claimed they were lovers, but Zea denied it. Earl was later prosecuted for filing a false police report about being assaulted while he was asleep, only to admit it was out of self-mutilation. A follow up episode, explored Earl and Ronnie's lives since then.

On August 19, 2001, in Battambang, Cambodia, a 23-year-old Cambodian man, Rin Bros, was dragged from a police station by a gang of women who severed his penis and chopped it to pieces. They then killed him by beating and stabbing him. Bros was accused of three rapes and was being questioned by the police before the women stormed the police station and killed him as soon as they heard he was there. The police took no action and just watched the women during the murder, and none of the women were arrested or punished.[95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102] A Cambodian newspaper described the incident as "Angry women undressed the man and cut his penis off with a knife and chopped it into small pieces like pork."[103]

quote:

...After the war, an entrepreneur by the name of Glenn Odekirk saw a new future for the roomy Catalinas as extreme luxury flying yachts. They were to be the epitome of glamorous travel that he called Landseaire.

“It seemed like no one was getting real utility out of a private airplane”, Odekirk was quoted in a Flight magazine article in 1953. “Normally, it’s just a means of transportation in which you ride from here to there with varying degrees of comfort. So, I decided to build an aerial luxury yacht in which you can land and live almost anywhere in the world with all the comforts of home.”

He invited some fellow executives from the Southern California Aircraft Corp., family members and two attractive blonde aspiring actresses to lure the interest of the LIFE magazine camera lens. The day spent sightseeing along San Diego’s coast was meant to generate publicity for Oderkirk, who was hoping to sell his planes to wealthy American industrialists.

"Noise is kept to a remarkably low level by a 4in-thick lining of Fiberglass. A Landseaire costs a lot of money—$265,000 is the basic price— something not far short of £100,000. This, coupled with heavy operating costs, virtually lifts the craft beyond the reach even of most millionaires. ...Sleeping accommodation is provided for eight persons in three double beds and two singles. Near each bed are an individual light, radio switch and speaker, curtains, vents for air conditioning system, and a telephone. Occupants may contact the shore by means of a marine ship-to-shore telephone. In addition to this item of ‘electrickery’, the converted aircraft are fitted with no fewer than seven communications receivers, two transmitters, a broadcast receiver, FM-AM radio and a built-in television set!

Overall carpeting adds further to the comfort. A shower bath, in waterproof plastic, runs hot and cold water. The w.c. is electrically flushed when on water; in the air a chemical toilet is used. The galley, in white porcelain and stainless steel, rivals the equipment of the most modern kitchen. A three-plate cooking range, oven, large refrigerator and frozen-food unit are installed."

A wealthy Californian industrialist, Thomas W. Kendall, who had been inspired by Oderkirk’s flying yachts and wanted to keep busy during his retirement, decided to purchase a dozen PBY WWII Catalinas to convert to luxury amphibious flying machines.

In 1959, along with his wife and children, he decided to test one of his creations on a year-long world-wide tour. In Egypt, they were joined by another LIFE photographer, David Lees, and carried on down to the Strait of Tirana, between Egypt’s Sinai and Saudi Arabia.

It was here that their dream voyage would turn into a living nightmare when the family and their guests were suddenly ambushed on the beach by armed Bedouin tribesmen serving in the Saudi Arabian army. Despite Kendall’s claims that they had hoisted their American flag above the pilot’s compartment that morning, the Bedouin soldiers allegedly suspected the Kendalls were Israeli commandos in disguise.

The harrowing ambush is described in this gripping account written for LIFE magazine by Thomas Kendall himself:

"After a late lunch I went up on the wing to check the left engine. Bob was in the water checking some equipment in the nose. Stephen and Paul were wading in the shallows about 60 feet away, playing with our bright blue rubber life raft. Everyone else was in the plane. When I finally buttoned up the engine, I stood up and glanced around. Except for the boys, I saw nothing but rocks, low hills and empty sand. I looked at my watch. It was 4:32 exactly. Then I heard what sounded like distant firecrackers. My first thought was that some local Bedouins were celebrating the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, which was then in progress. In Luxor, Egypt, our last stop, they had celebrated by firing off a cannon. Suddenly, I noticed little splashes in the water beside the rubber raft. Somebody was shooting at the children …

As I ran I shouted for everyone to lie down on the floor because we were under fire. Mrs. Shearer ran with me to the tail and we watched our small sons dog-paddling very slowly toward the hatch, just their heads above water, towing the raft for cover between themselves and the bullets…

By now machine-gun and automatic-weapons fire was hitting the plane, I don’t know how long we stood there screaming at the children to hurry—it felt like eons…

The ambush lasted 30 to 40 minutes, and only the cowardice of our attackers saved our lives. If they had come closer instead of hiding behind a knoll three quarters of a mile away, I am certain we would all have been killed.

After a while we saw the upholstery was smoldering from a tracer bullet. I knew gas must be leaking everywhere. I could either stand up to start the engines and maybe get shot, or I could stay on the floor and maybe get us all burned alive. When I got up to go to the pilot’s compartment to throw some switches so we could get out of there, there was another burst of fire and I felt a blow in the right side. The bullet entered just below my ribs and it spun me around and threw me about six feet. I fell down backward. When Mrs. Shearer heard me grunt that I’d been hit, she raised her head to look at me. Just then a bullet hit her right arm, exactly where her head had been. She clawed a big chunk of metal out with her fingernails but there were two more pieces she couldn’t reach. I was dazed for a moment but she gave me a towel and then, somehow, lying on her back, she lifted the seat up so I could reach under and connect the batteries. Then I went forward to the cockpit to throw the switches."

The Saudi Arabian government never accepted responsibility for the ambush, for the Kendall’s injuries, or for the property lost.

More than 50 years on, the ambushed flying yacht (what is left of it) is still where the Kendalls were forced to abandon it.

Mak0rz posted:

What a fascinating story. How the gently caress did they all (?) manage to get out of that alive

quote:

"I ordered everybody out through the pilot’s hatch and they made for the shore 100 yards away. The water was only five feet deep. There was oil and gasoline all around us. We had 900 gallons of fuel and it was pouring out of the perforated tanks and splashing off the wings like a heavy rain off a roof. I still don’t know why we didn’t go up in flames. David Lees helped me wade ashore. Stephen kept saying, ‘I love you, Mother’, and Mrs. Shearer kept saying, ‘I love you, Steve.’

When I reached the beach I lay down, lightheaded and really feeling the pain. Everyone was standing around barefooted, dripping wet, and smeared with oil and blood from the mirror cuts and our wounds. We were all in bathing suits except my wife and Susan and Mrs. Shearer, who had on shorts and blouses. Stephen and I had shirts. Paul was clutching the big American flag which he grabbed when we abandoned ship. He didn’t once let it out of his sight until we got back to civilization.

Bob went back to the plane to get some first-aid supplies. After a while the others heard him in the cockpit babbling and laughing and acting strangely. When Susan and David Lees went after him, they found him giddy and half-asphyxiated from the gasoline fumes. They couldn’t make him come out. At last my wife waded and swam back to the plane. ‘Bob,’ she called, ‘I need you. It’s your mother.’ That got him to stick his head out so David could grab him and haul him ashore.

We saw our attackers for the first time when three trucks carrying 60 to 80 men came bouncing over a hill a mile away. The men were screaming barbarically and firing wildly in our direction. We all stood up and put our hands in the air. Paul waved a white T-shirt and his flag. As they approached I decided to walk forward and meet them. David Lees tried to come with me, but I told him to stay back with the group and if I got shot to see that they take cover as best they could.

Those soldiers were the fiercest looking men I have ever seen. They were Bedouin tribesmen serving in the Saudi Arabian army. Many had long matted hair and their teeth were filed. Most wore a scarecrow combination of tribal dress and khaki uniform. They were all wild-eyed and highly excited, showing their guns. A man running toward me alongside the first truck was screaming and pulling the pin on a phosphorous grenade. Two other men jumped off the first truck and all three shoved their rifles into me while the rest continued on to where my family was waiting. I was in considerable pain and could barely hold my hands up, and I had nothing but bloody bathing trunks and a sports shirt, but they frisked me. Then they stepped back apace and all three pointed their rifles at my chest. I watched their fingers, which were literally twitching on the triggers. I said, ‘American, American.’ Finally, one of them repeated the word so I knew he understood. He was about 50, bald, with crossed bandoliers on his chest and a red, checkered Bedouin skirt tied over his pants. The youngest man, about 20, had a red and white sweat rag around his forehead and a bandolier around his waist. The one with the grenade wore a G.I. uniform and a steel helmet. He had the pin out of the grenade, so he had to hold down the grenade trigger with one hand and handle his rifle with the other. I just stood there wondering which one was going to go off first.

A wild desert ride

When the trucks got to the others, Paul showed our flag and someone gave them our American passports, but this had no effect. Later we learned that most Bedouin troops are illiterate and that even the general who had ordered the attack could neither read nor write.

In 5 minutes the soldiers had used their keffiyeh headdresses to blindfold all of us except the 3 youngest children. Then they shoved us into two of the trucks and started off across the desert. We were lying on the floor under some filthy camel blankets, bouncing over the rough, rocky desert.

I was in extreme pain and felt myself going into shock. One minute I was in a rosy, relaxed glow and the next moment, I started shaking with uncontrollable chills. Miriam and Kathy were lying next to me, trying to warm me. Under Bob’s direction, 11-year old Stephen tore his shirt and used half of it to make a pad for my wound. He tied the other half around his mother’s arm, which stopped the bleeding somewhat.

I didn’t want to frighten the children, so whenever I felt a bad time coming on I said to them in a normal voice, ‘Now I am going to put on a big act to see if I can scare these fellows into taking us to a hospital right away. So when I start making a lot of noise and moaning and shaking, don’t you worry about it.’ Then I’d relax and let myself go a bit, and that helped.

After two hours’ ride we stopped at their camp, and the soldiers took everybody but me out of the trucks. They apparently figured I wasn’t worth unloading because I was going to die anyway. Finally I slipped off my blindfold and got out of the truck myself. I fainted at least five times in the process, the last time as I jumped to the ground. It then took me five minutes just to get up on my feet. The Arabs just watched to see if I was going to make it.

I walked toward the only building in the cluster of tents. No one tried to stop me. Inside, I found my family and they helped me lie down. The children put some blankets over me. We were under guard in a bare 12-by-12-foot adobe room with a dirt floor. There was a single kerosene lamp, and a chest which our guard sat on.

Men kept milling in and out to look at us, and one of them brought us a handful of small tomatoes to eat. Much later, we were fed some sickly sweet tea and rice. One Arab gave Paul a huge white floppy robe, and he stood in the corner looking like a shmoo, still holding on to his American flag. Mrs. Shearer was the only one of us who smoked, and an old Arab kept offering her cigarettes, holding them so she had to stretch her hand way out to get them. He was watching the rings on her finger.

For a time we played word games to keep the children from thinking about what the rest of us were thinking about. It was cold and windy and after a while we all huddled together on the floor and tried to stay warm.

About 1 o’clock they got us up to load us back in the trucks. They tried to take the women first, one at a time. I got in the way and protested that we would all stay together. I didn’t have to put it into words—I just looked them straight in the eye and they got the idea.

I think by this time it had occurred to them that they might have pulled a colossal blooper. When they took us back to the trucks, we feared they would drive us out into the desert, shoot us and pretend we never existed. As we were climbing aboard the trucks a man pulled Mrs. Shearer’s wedding ring off her hand.

A mile from camp we stopped at a tent where we met a man who could speak a little English. He told us we were being taken to a hospital. Half an hour later the trucks suddenly turned back to camp and we were dumped back in our adobe room. The man who spoke English told us a wireless message had come through saying that in the morning the ‘Big King’ was coming to see us.

I was in great pain during the bitter cold night. My abdomen became so swollen that twice I almost stopped breathing. At daybreak they gave us some English canned pineapple and more tea and again spoke about the ‘Big King’ who was coming. The soldiers got all dolled up in clean uniforms. Peeking through the cracks in our boarded-up window we could see a welcoming party assembled, wearing long blue robes with gold braid.

About mid-morning I was lying on the floor with my head propped against the wall, still without bandages or first aid of any kind, when the guard brought us in a soft mattress and put it on the wooden trunk. It was not for me. The ‘Big King’ came in and sat down on it. He was Prince Khalid ibn Saud, one of King Saud’s sons. He wore flowing white robes. He was tall, courteous and very quiet. With him was a Saudi Arabian Air Force officer who interrogated us in English and translated for the prince.

It became clear at once that the ambush, the attack and the treatment we had suffered were all due to the Arab’s fanatic fear of Israel. They had somehow convinced themselves that all of us, including my wife and children were Israeli commandos in disguise. Their first question was: what had happened to the jet fighters that had escorted us onto the area? Next they asked us about the battleship that had sailed in behind us, and about the Israeli troops that were massing to support our invasion.

We said we had seen no other men, planes or ships and were simply a family of American tourists. They asked why we had returned their fire if we were not Israelis, and why we had thrown our guns overboard and why we had refused to surrender.

Despite our protestations they continued asking variations of the same outlandish questions. We found out later that the interpreter was not translating correctly. He was not giving Prince Khalid the real story because he did not want the Saudi army to be shown up as cowards and drat fools. I asked for a doctor and lifted my shirt so the air force officer who was interpreting could see my wound, but when they left I realized he had not told the prince anything about it. The prince was sitting on the other side and could not see for himself.

Prince Khalid and his retinue went off to inspect our airplane. After he left ,he had a soldier bring us a canteen of his private water. It was delicately scented with rosemary.

That afternoon, soldiers blindfolded us again, put us back in the trucks and hauled us two hours across the desert, right back to where the airplane was.

The prince had set up camp near the plane and we were taken to a tent of our own that looked like a stage prop from The Desert Song. It was striped in brilliant colors and it had padding and oriental carpets on the floor. During the afternoon, the soldiers brought up a few of our clothes which they had salvaged from the plane and spread them on the ground to dry.

We couldn’t believe our eyes when an American stuck his head in our tent and said, ‘Hi.’ He told us he was a Saudi Arabian Airlines pilot who had flown the prince down. This American pilot had been trying to get a chance to speak to us all day. He told us that the king was embarrassed and wanted to hush up the whole incident.

Soon the soldiers found the pilot talking to us and insisted he leave our tent. He gave us some vitamin C tablets which was all the help he could offer. Later we heard him arguing with the prince, trying to get permission to fly us out right away.

In the evening they turned on electric lights powered by a portable generator and fed us one great bowl of lamb and rice which we ate Bedouin style with our fingers. After nightfall there was a good deal of activity because during Ramadan the Moslems fast all day and then have a big feast after dark.

Our American friend had advised us to leave the lights burning in our tent, and all night long Bedouins came wandering in and out and peered at us through slits in the canvas. One of the officials who had visited us with the prince that morning said to me, ‘How come you got hurt? You weren’t hurt this morning.’

The prince slept most of Friday and we didn’t see him until the afternoon. In mid-morning a soldier brought us the first-aid kit from the airplane, but the bandages were soaked with sea water. The only thing usable was some weak antiseptic which we used to wipe off our wounds.

In mid-afternoon a plane arrived from Tabuk with an Egyptian doctor, and anaesthetist and complete field operating equipment. They had come prepared to do an abdominal operation in a Bedouin tent with sand blowing all over everything.

But after giving me a cursory examination the doctor said that since I was still alive, it was unlikely that I had a bullet in me. He painted my side with Merthiolate, slapped a bandage on, gave me a shot of penicillin and told me I was ready to travel.

With the American pilot’s assistance I hobbled down to the prince’s tent, with some reluctance, to thank him for his hospitality. I shook his hand with my left hand as I normally do, because my right hand was injured in an accident years ago. Afterward the pilot told me I had given the prince a terrible insult because Arabs use their left hand only for toilet purposes.

At 7:30 we landed at Jiddah. Two limousines pulled right up to the airport ramp and whisked us away to the Kandara Palace Hotel nearby. We were held in seclusion at the hotel for five more hours of interrogation. All during that time we were denied the opportunity to make any telephone calls. The major interrogating us threatened to hold us there incommunicado ‘until such time as you have given us all the information we want.’ I finally got so furious that I refused to say another word.

Things were at a stalemate when suddenly, about midnight, U.S. Ambassador Donald Heath, his wife and several members of the embassy staff walked into our room accompanied by a high official of the Saudi Arabian Foreign Ministry, Sayyis Omar Sakkaf. Ambassador Heath routed his excellency out of a big end-of-Ramadan ball in order to force his way in to see us.

In the ambassador’s presence we told the full story of what happened to us. Then Mrs. Shearer and I were taken to the hospital for x-rays. The doctor’s report on me was a masterpiece of evasion: ‘One opaque F.B. [Foreign Body] of metallic density is seen in the abdomen at the lower pole of the right kidney at the level of the upper margin of the third lumbar vertebrae. Its shape resembles a bullet.’

We remained in Jiddah at the hotel for three weeks, recuperating from our experience, giving details of our story to the American officials and presenting our claims to the Saudi government. While we were there we were told that the officer in charge of the troops which ambushed us had already been court-martialled and beheaded, and that the soldiers who had stolen jewelry, furs and other valuables from the plane would have their hands cut off.

I don’t know about all that. All I know is that when Ambassador Heath fired off a strong protest to the Saudi Arabian government he got back a fast answer: the government refused to accept any responsibility for the ambush, for our injuries, or for the property we lost. As far as Saudi Arabia was concerned, the incident was at an end."

quote:

In 1798, soon after landing in Egypt, Napoleon Bonaparte issued a remarkable document in Arabic in which he informed the Egyptians that he hard arrived to "restore your rights from the hand of the [Muslim ruling] oppressors" and called on them to remain neutral in the contest ahead, threatening them with dire punishment should they disobey his orders.1

In an unlikely and obscure echo of Napoleon's famed appeal, President Franklin Roosevelt in October 1942 issued a similar proclamation in the Arabic language, this one ostensibly addressed to the entire Muslim world, but to North Africans in particular.2 October 1942 was the moment when British forces stopped Hitler's Afrika Korps at El Alamein; for the first time in two years, the Allies felt confident that they would keep the Germans out of the Middle East, and they sought to take advantage of this change in fortune to win Muslim favor. Roosevelt's appeal was part of this effort.

" Praise be unto the only God. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. O ye Moslems. O ye beloved sons of the Maghreb. May the blessing of God be upon you.

This is a great day for you and us, for all the sons of Adam who love freedom. Our numbers are as the leaves on the forest tress and as the grains of sand in the sea.

Behold. We the American Holy Warriors have arrived. We have come here to fight the great Jihad of Freedom.

We have come to set you free. We have sailed across the great sea in many ships, on many beaches we are landing, and our fighters swarm across the sands and into the city streets, and into the wide country sides, and along the highways.

Light fires on the hilltops; shout from your housetops, and from the high places, and say the sound of the drum be heard in the land, and the ululation of the women, and the voices even of small children.

Assemble along the highways to welcome your brothers.

We have come to set you free.

Speak with our fighting men and you will find them pleasing to the eye and gladdening to the heart. We are not as some other Christians whom ye have known, and who trample you under foot. Our soldiers consider you as their brothers, for we have been reared in the way of free men. Our soldiers have been told about your country and about their Moslem brothers and they will treat you with respect and with a friendly spirit in the eyes of God.

Look in their eyes and smiling faces, for they are Holy Warriors happy in their holy work. Greet us therefore as brothers as we will greet you, and help us.

If we are thirsty, show us the way to water. If we lose our way, lead us back to our camping places. Show us the paths over the mountains if need be, and if you see our enemies, the Germans or Italians, making trouble for us, kill them with knives or with stones or with any other weapon that you may have set your hands upon.

Help us as we have come to help you, and rich will be the reward unto us all who love justice and righteousness and freedom.

Pray for our success in battle, and help us, and God will help us both.

Lo, the day of freedom hath come.

May God grant his blessing upon you and upon us.

- Roosevelt"

If the text of the appeal sounds more like the Qur'an than FDR's fireside chats ("Our numbers are as the leaves on the forest trees," "say the sound of the drum be heard in the land"), this is no accident. The text was written at the president's request by two Americans in Morocco attached to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Gordon H. Brown and Carleton Coon (the famed anthropologist), then it underwent an unexpected permutation. After Brown and Coon had written the order in English, they gave it to one of their spies, an Arab code-named Pinkeye, and he began to read it aloud in the manner of a holy man reading the Koran. Struck by the lyricism that crept into the text as he declaimed it, the agents decided to use not their own text, but a revision based on Pinkeye's rendition.

quote:

...What the film does do fairly well is offer DeMille-style spectacle, from the train wreck scene (done with models and miniatures) to the flooding of Ur and the Temple of Jaghuth. The problem with the Old Testament sequences–and this turned out to be a major problem–is that Zanuck and Curtiz decided to flood the specially designed sets with nearly 15,000 tons of water instead of relying solely on the aforementioned miniatures. The inherent danger was obvious to head cameraman Hal Mohr, who said to the director, “Jesus, what are you going to do about the extras?,” to which Curtiz allegedly replied “Oh, they’re going to have to take their chances,” leading Mohr to walk off the project. Just as he feared, the torrents of water dumped onto the sets tossed actors and crew members around and slammed them into concrete sets (among the thousands who endured this 1920s version of “water torture” were a pair of struggling actors named John Wayne and Andy Devine–good luck trying to spot them in the final film, though). When the shooting was finished, three extras reportedly drowned, one lost a leg from his injuries, and at least a dozen more suffered broken limbs or other serious injuries. The stars were not immune, either, from their extended time in the ice-cold drink: Williams sustained two broken ribs, O’Brien lost several of his toenails, and “Little Wounded Bird” Costello contracted pneumonia.

quote:

My Life for Ireland (1941). An anti-British propaganda film made by the Germans. During the epic final battle scene, several extras were killed when one of them stepped on a live land mine.

quote:

The Conqueror (1956). The exterior scenes were shot on location near St. George, Utah, 137 miles (220 km) downwind of the United States government's Nevada Test Site. In 1953, extensive above-ground nuclear weapons testing had occurred at the test site, as part of Operation Upshot-Knothole. Director Dick Powell died of cancer in January 1963, Pedro Armendáriz was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 1960, and committed suicide in 1963 after he learned his condition had become terminal. Susan Hayward, John Wayne, and Agnes Moorehead all died of cancer in the 1970s. Cast member actor John Hoyt died of lung cancer in 1991. The cast and crew totaled 220 people. By 1981, 91 of them had developed some form of cancer and 46 had died of the disease. Several of Wayne and Hayward's relatives also had cancer scares as well after visiting the set. Michael Wayne developed skin cancer, his brother Patrick Wayne had a benign tumor removed from his breast and Hayward's son Tim Barker had a benign tumor removed from his mouth.

quote:

During production in Mexico in 1967, one of the film's stuntmen was attacked and killed on camera by a shark that was supposed to have been sedated. When the production company used the death to promote the film, (even retitling the film to Shark!)[1] Fuller, who had been arguing with the producers on several major issues relating to the film, quit the production

quote:

Second Unit Director John Jordan refused to wear a harness during a bomber scene and fell out of the open tail turret 4,000 ft. to his death

quote:

Boris Sagal, a film director whose most recent movie credits included the ABC television miniseries ''Masada,'' died Friday at a hospital in Portland, Ore., of injuries he suffered five hours earlier after being struck by a helicopter blade. Mr. Sagal was 58 years old.

The accident occurred at the Mount Hood resort of Timberline Lodge, where Mr. Sagal was in the third day of filming the NBC television movie ''World War III,'' starring Rock Hudson and David Soul.

George Brady, a spokesman for the lodge, said the accident occurred just after Mr. Sagal and the film's crew landed in the lodge's parking lot after returning from a day of shooting background scenes for the movie.

Mr. Brady said Mr. Sagal suffered head and shoulder injuries. He was flown 60 miles to Emanuel Hospital in Portland, where he died after emergency surgery. ...

quote:

Thirty years ago this week, a Hollywood star was decapitated while shooting a scene for a movie. The actor was Vic Morrow, the veteran star of the TV series Combat. He was killed, along with child actors Renee Chen and Myca Dinh Le, by a falling helicopter during filming of The Twilight Zone, a feature-length adaptation of Rod Serling’s television series.

Morrow played a bigot who skipped through time getting a taste of his own medicine. In the scene that would prove fatal, he was earning some Serling-style redemption by trying to rescue a pair of Vietnamese children from an American air raid. Mainly, the setup was an excuse for director John Landis to capture immense explosions on film.

At the controls of the helicopter that was “bombing” the village was Dorcey Wingo, an actual Vietnam veteran. Wingo was new to the movie business, so even when the rehearsal explosions that buffeted his chopper scared him witless, he swallowed his concerns, especially as Landis, who had a reputation for being dictatorial on set, screamed expletives into the California night...

quote:

The helicopter went out of control.
In the water, Morrow dropped Renee Chen. He grabbed at her but the helicopter's right skid slammed into the child, killing her. Then its whirling main rotor ripped off the middle-aged actor's head and the head, a shoulder, and an arm of 7-year old My-ca.
"That's a wrap!" John Landis shouted through the loudspeaker and the standard, banal words signaling the end of filming day sounded sickeningly incongruous. "Leave your equipment where it is. Everyone go home. Please, everyone go home.

quote:

Rocky IV (1985). Demanding a sense of realism in the boxing match between Rocky Balboa and Ivan Drago, Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren agreed to legitimately spar with each other. Stallone was airlifted from Canada to St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California, and placed on intensive care for eight days after Lundgren delivered a hard punch to his chest, causing his heart to swell and his blood pressure to exceed 200.

quote:

...when the film was scheduled to premier in the United States another Muslim extremist group staged a siege against the Washington, D.C. chapter of the B'nai B'rith under the mistaken belief that Anthony Quinn played Mohammed in the film, threatening to blow up the building and its inhabitants unless the film's opening was cancelled. The standoff was resolved" after the deaths of a journalist and a policeman, but "the film's American box office prospects never recovered from the unfortunate controversy."

quote:

Al Akkad and his 34-year-old daughter, Rima Akkad Monla, were killed in the November 9, 2005 Amman bombings in Amman, Jordan.[

quote:

In accordance with Muslim beliefs regarding depictions of Muhammad, he was not depicted on-screen nor was his voice heard because Islamic tradition generally forbids any direct representation of religious figures. At the beginning of the film, the following disclaimer is displayed:

"The makers of this film honour the Islamic tradition which holds that the impersonation of the Prophet offends against the spirituality of his message. Therefore, the person of Mohammad will not be shown (or heard)."

This rule extended to his wives, his daughters including Fatimah, his sons-in-law, and the first caliphs (Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali ibn Talib his paternal cousin). This left Muhammad's uncle Hamza (Anthony Quinn) and his adopted son Zayd (Damien Thomas) as the central characters. During the battles of Badr and Uhud depicted in the movie, Hamza was in nominal command, even though the actual fighting was led by Muhammad.

Whenever Muhammad was present or very close by, his presence was indicated by light organ music. His words, as he spoke them, were repeated by someone else such as Hamza, Zayd or Bilal. When a scene called for him to be present, the action was filmed from his point of view. Others in the scene nodded to the unheard dialogue or moved with the camera as though moving with Muhammad.

The closest the film comes to a depiction of Muhammad or his immediate family are the view of Ali's famous two-pronged sword Zulfiqar during the battle scenes, a glimpse of a staff in the scenes at the Kaaba or in Medina, and Muhammad's camel, Qaswa.

Random Stranger posted:

I just posted about this in CD the other day. Most of The Conqueror's reputation as a deadly movie is a result of people going, "Aha! They got cancer! It must have been from working on the film!" even though the cases occurred over decades and the number of people who worked on the film and got cancer wasn't significantly greater than the cancer rate in the general population.


Edit: I thought of a related Wikipedia article that people might not know much about : Cancer clusters. They're pretty tricky because while they might indicate a problem, at the same time they'd occur pretty regularly just due to statistical probability.


So out of all the times people go, "Hey, there's a lot of people around here getting cancer..." it turns out to actually be a problem only about ten percent of the time.

quote:

The men were on a fishing expedition. On Friday night a 25,000-ton
Japanese freighter bound for Brisbane ran their boat down in Moreton Bay near Moreton
Island. No one on board the freighter noticed they hit the small boat. Unable to find life-jackets or free their dinghy, the three men clung to a blue ice-box they found floating in the debris. They managed to remain afloat throughout the night and all day Saturday but were drifting farther from the island. The sharks appeared at 16h30 on Sunday. As the first man was dragged underwater by a shark, he managed to say “Goodbye, mates, this is it.” The
second man succeeded, for a time, to hold onto the ice-box despite injuries inflicted by the
sharks. Harrison continued to cling to the ice-box and kept kicking the sharks. At 17h45 he
was rescued by charter fishing boat operator Richard McMullin who spotted the blue ice-box floating in Pearl Channel, and dragged Harrison on board

quote:

...“Private Sammy Levine was a soldier mate of mine on the staff of No.4 General Hospital,
a field hospital serving the troops in Egypt. Sammy served as a handyman in the unit. He
could always conjure up something out of nothing, and as was fitting to his calling in the
Army, was a champion "scrounger" of articles not obtainable by the unit; as such he was
invaluable and very useful. Sammy was a quaint phlegmatic character, and was much
thought of generally; he was always on hand to conjure up anything required at short
notice. Now, Sammy had a pal, a small monkey acquired in Kenya which accompanied
him to Egypt when the East Africa campaign packed up. Wherever Sammy went the little
pet was on his shoulder.
“Some years after the War I met an ex-soldier and over a cup of tea this chap mentioned
that he was a survivor of the torpedoedNova Scotia
, and in discussing the circumstances of the tragedy, we discovered that we both knew Sammy Levine and that the last he saw of Sammy was from a small raft on which a few survivors were clinging;
there was no space for another person, and some yards away Sammy was swimming
with his monkey on his shoulder when he was taken by a huge shark. Both he and the
monkey disappeared.
“So passed Sammy, not much of a parade-ground soldier, but a wizard at his own
calling, and much loved by his comrades.

quote:

DATE:
1820s
LOCATION:
The incident took place at Sweetwater Point in
Pittwater, Tasmania, Australia.
42º52’S, 147º27’E
NAME:
Amphibious Jack
DESCRIPTION:
He was a male.

ENVIRONMENT:
“The shallow lake of the Pittwater, whilst it
abounds with edible fish, abounds also with sharks of a most
peculiar and ravenous nature.”

NARRATIVE:

“Not having been very successful in their collection of shell-fish, one man, more courageous than his companions, with a loud code notified his intention to swim over, get some of our oysters, and tell us the last news of the Bushrangers. He was, however,
earnestly cautioned against entering the channel, by our lime-burners, some of whom had been attacked by a shark, nearly opposite to the spot where he was then standing. The poor fellow — who was called “Amphibious Jack,” from his skill in the art of swimming —
declared he had no fear, and he came over and bring on his back the few oysters he had collected, saying which, he plunged into the channel. The narrow strait was nearly passed
in safety, and the self-approving man, laughing aloud at the alleged danger, was attacked by two of these ruthless monsters. One of the seized the poor victim by the calf of the leg,
and instantly shook him down, whilst the other, in the heat of the desperate struggle, seized
the oyster sack, and bore it off in triumph. The heart-rending cries of the unfortunate suffer — who was violently and almost hopelessly contending for his life, and was visible above
water alternately with the flashing tail of his fierce adversary — were quickly responded to by the lime-burners, who, seeing that the shark had accidentally floundered with his human
victim into shallow water, instantly armed themselves with pickaxe, spade, and crowbars, and rushed to the rescue. The finny monster was too deeply engaged to notice his own danger; and notwithstanding that he had severed and devoured the entire calf, he continued
to hold the mutilated leg — repeating at every instant the powerful and peculiar jerks which all fish can give in their own element. Added to the blind desperation of the shark, the water,
rendered turbid with blood and sand, effectually obscured his vision, and thus favoured the approach of the man with the avenging pickaxe which, with a hearty curse and powerful arm was sent clean home through the head of the formidable fish. The shark released his hold
of the lifeless man and escaped into deep water.”


INJURY:
Fatal. “The main arteries of the leg of the poor sufferer were so effectually severed
that the scarlet tide of life had finally ebbed.

angelfisher posted:

Teenager Marie Robards murdered her 38-year-old father by putting barium she got from her school's science lab into his refried beans. The poisoning symptoms resembled a heart attack closely enough that no one suspected foul play for a minute.

If she hadn't broken down and confessed to her friend during an assigned reading of Hamlet, no one would have found out.

I saw a Forensic Files episode on it with a really corny setup of the Hamlet scene. Here's a recounting of the case from Texas Monthly.

quote:

Marie Robards was released in 2003. According to public records she is married and goes by a new identity.

quote:

DATE:
1853
LOCATION:
The incident took place in the Atlantic Ocean
near Fernandina Bar on the coast of Florida

NARRATIVE:
Captain Hanscheldt was knocked overboard. “A large shark, seen at the side, had now disappeared and all to be seen of the captain was a bloody streak in the water. The skipper had dressed to go ashore to call on his sister, who was on a visit to Fernandina from
Charleston. Captain Hanscheldt had just said,
looking at the shark, ‘I hope it is not me you are waiting for, old boy’.”

quote:

DATE:
Saturday
June 16, 1923
LOCATION:
The incident took place at Bellambi Reef, New South Wales, Australia.

NARRATIVE:
Four miners — J. Rigby, B. Powell, G. Clarke and J. Butler — were fishing
when they noticed a disturbance in the water. Ahead was a school of sharks making straight for their boat. The men tried to maneuver the boat out of the way when they saw a dorsal fin
dart beneath them. The boat shuddered and the next instant a gaping hole was ripped in the bottom. The boat heeled, filled with water, and wallowed, with the men struggling to cling to its side. One of them, J. Rigby, a good swimmer, volunteered to swim to shore. He
had only gone about 20 yards when he gave a cry and disappeared. Another man also tried to swim ashore, but the lines of the boat became entangled in his legs, and a second man
became exhausted and sank. The lone survivor, John Butler, was rescued by the collier Kurrara which was unable to locate any of the other missing men.

quote:

DATE:
Reported September 2, 1951
LOCATION:
The incident took place in the
Fitzroy River near Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia

NARRATIVE:
Dr. Joske was sailing single-
handedly around the world on his luxury yacht,
the 45-foot ketch
Christine.
The vessel was luxuriously appointed, and had a two-way wireless and radio
telephone with a range of 500 miles. He had sailed around
the Australian coast and spent two months in Brisbane
before leaving for Bowen. His last contact with the shore
was by radio with the Government radio station. He was
then at Port Clinton, 60 miles from where the yacht was found by the ship
Caledon two days later. The Caledon radioed that the ketch was drifting in a dangerous position
and apparently needed assistance. When the police
arrived, the Christine was aground. A blue and gold flag was flying at the masthead and a spanner was lying on the deck, suggesting that the yacht may have had engine
trouble. Dr. Joske’s body was lying amidships, one arm
tangled in the rigging, the other arm dragging overboard in
the mud. Police theorized that Dr. Joske was attacked by a
shark either while leaning over the side or swimming near
the yacht and that he managed to scramble back on board before dying.

INJURY:
His right leg was missing at the hip and bowel
was protruding through a gaping wound in the abdomen.

duckmaster posted:

Alistair Wilson was shot and killed on his doorstep in 2004. It remains unsolved and what makes it unnerving is that the police still can't work out a motive.

Timeline:

Wilsons wife answered the door one evening to a stocky man wearing a baseball cap who asked for him by name. She went to get him, and he had a short conversation with the man before being handed an envelope and going back into the house. He told his wife he didn't know who the man was but went back to the door and was shot three times. The killer took the envelope with him when he fled. The gun was found in a drain a few weeks later by a council worker.

Wilson was a local bank manager and it was speculated that he had been pressured into money laundering for a criminal gang. Extensive searches of his work records by a specialist team who presumably know what they're doing turned up nothing. It was then speculated that he had borrowed £50,000 from loan sharks for a business venture, although why he hadn't done this by remortgaging his £250,000 house wasn't clear, and he had £10,000 in his bank account. The police refused to comment, so we don't know if it's bullshit. His wife inherited £140,000 (that money plus half the house) although that seems like a tiny amount to kill someone over and she hasn't remarried and has kept up the grieving wife act for a decade so she's probably genuine. They didn't appear to have any major marital problems and he wasn't mixed up with drugs, gambling or any of that fun stuff.

The police apparently have "very limited" information about the envelope he was handed although they refused to comment on it until late last year when they said they may release that information soon.

We've all got things going on in our life that, if you used your imagination, could be used as motives for murder. But with this guy every line of investigation has hit a brick wall.

It's like someone just picked his name out of the phonebook and went round to shoot him.

quote:

For a tropical island, Clipperton doesn’t have very much going for it. The tiny, ring-shaped atoll lying 1,000 kilometres off the southwest coast of Mexico is covered in hard, pointy coral and a prodigious number of nasty little crabs. The wet season from May to October brings incessant and torrential rain, and for the rest of the year the island reeks of ammonia. The Pacific Ocean batters the island from all sides, picking away at the scab of land that rises abruptly from the seabed. A few coconut palms are virtually the only thing that the island boasts in the way of vegetation. Oh, and the sea all around is full of sharks. It isn’t much of a surprise that Clipperton Island is decidedly uninhabited.

This was not always the case, however. Over the course of the island’s modern history, four different nations--France, the United States, Britain, and Mexico--fought bitterly for ownership of Clipperton. It was desirable both for its strategic position and for its surface layer of guano, since the droppings of seabirds (as well as bats and seals) are prized as a fertiliser due to their high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus. Each of the four countries in turn attempted to maintain a permanent presence on Clipperton between 1858 and 1917. When a contingent of Mexican settlers did finally gain a toehold on the atoll, they were forgotten and left stranded on the island with a delusional man who seized the chance to become a dictator.

The island’s English name comes from a tenuous association with a British pirate, but the first modern explorers to claim Clipperton were the French, in 1858. Their intention was to land on the island’s shores and read out a proclamation, but this proved to be difficult; approaching the island with the ship posed a significant risk of running aground on the coral reef, and smaller rowboats were thwarted by sharks and fickle tides. Desperate, the French resorted to sailing around the perimeter of the island while reading the proclamation out to its coastline. Then, satisfied, they departed. Although they were aware of the guano, they felt it was likely to be of inferior quality, so they left it at that.

The next country to claim the island was the United States, in 1892. Unlike the French, the Americans suspected that Clipperton’s guano was extremely valuable, and they annexed the island under the auspices of the U.S. Guano Islands Act. A small crew of American miners spent the next few years on the island attempting to turn a profit, but poor market conditions and expensive resupply-trips intervened. Then, in 1897, the Mexicans decided they’d had enough of the United States occupying an island so close to the Mexico coast. A small group of Mexicans sailed over, lured two of the three Americans away, and left a Mexican flag in place of the American one that had been flying from a forty-foot pole. The U.S. backed off and gave up its claim to the island, but France and Mexico were unable to come to an agreement. To complicate matters, an English company then decided to try a guano-mining operation of their own, insisting that they did not care who owned the island. Mexico allowed them to proceed.

The British had high hopes, and got straight to work building a new settlement on Clipperton. They put up houses, constructed an enclosed soil garden, and planted more palms. But the island was pretty much as inhospitable as ever, and the mining, which began in 1899, did not prove to be lucrative. Although the Clipperton guano was of fairly good quality, there was now too much competition in the market for it to be worthwhile. By 1910 the British decided that the effort was futile, and removed all of their employees except for one island caretaker. The island’s other claimants, France and Mexico, signed an arbitration treaty leaving the question of Clipperton’s ownership to King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy. He began his deliberation.

quote:

In the meantime, Mexico sent over a group of 13 men from their army to guard the island, including a de facto governor by the name of Ramón Arnaud. Wives and servants followed, and a number of children were born on the island in the early 1910s. An American ship was wrecked on the island in 1914; rescue came quickly, and the Americans advised the Mexicans to leave. Arnaud declined; all he did was expel the last remaining Brit from the island, sending the man and his family away with the Americans. With their last employee expelled, Britain stopped paying attention to Clipperton; meanwhile, Mexico was taking increasingly little notice of it themselves owing to a developing revolution in the country. Without any explanation, ships stopped arriving at Clipperton. The tiny community was dependent on the mainland for food and information, and soon their cache of supplies began to dwindle. In this case, no news was bad news.

At this point there were approximately 26 people on Clipperton Island: 13 soldiers, about 12 women and children, and a reclusive lighthouse-keeper named Victoriano Álvarez who lived alone at the base of a sheer cliff below the lighthouse that the Mexicans had constructed in 1906. The island’s vegetable garden had been lost to the elements, and the only types of food available from the island itself were birds, bird eggs, and fish. There were also a few coconuts every week, but these were not a sufficient source of Vitamin C, and the islanders--especially the adult men--began getting sick with scurvy. One by one, they started dying; their fellow islanders buried their bodies deep beneath the sand in order to make them inaccessible to the crabs. Arnaud was mildly alarmed, but he was reluctant to abandon the island. At any rate, he knew that any attempt to reach the mainland would probably end badly; the one boat that the islanders owned did not have enough fuel for a trip over to Acapulco, and rowing it would be extremely difficult with only five men remaining on Clipperton, all of them suffering the effects of undernourishment and vitamin-deficiency.

The situation took another turn for the worse when Arnaud spied a distant ship, and talked the three other soldiers into joining him in the rowboat and going to the ship for help. Out on the water there was no sign of any such ship; it is quite possible that Arnaud had been deceived by an illusion. Angry, the three other soldiers attempted to overpower Arnaud and seize his weapon. Several of the wives watched helplessly from shore. The struggling mass of men fell overboard, and all of them drowned in the waves. Only hours later, two unrelated emergencies arose almost at once: a hurricane appeared offshore, and Arnaud’s heavily pregnant widow went into labour with the couple’s fourth child. The women and children took refuge in the cramped basement of the Arnauds’ house, and Alicia Rovira Arnaud gave birth to a son, Angel. Mother and baby survived, but the islanders emerged from the basement to find their buildings torn to pieces.

Just then, Álvarez the hitherto-unassuming lighthouse-keeper abruptly arrived at the destroyed settlement, collected the weapons, and threw them into the deep waters of the lagoon. Saving one rifle for himself, he announced to the women and children that he was now the king of the island. With that, he began a campaign of enslaving the women for whatever purposes he desired. One mother-daughter pair who refused to obey him were raped and shot to death. The rest were given regular beatings at the minimum.

Months passed, with Álvarez borrowing whichever female islander he wanted whenever he wanted: when he’d had enough of 20-year-old Altagracia Quiroz, he moved on to 13-year-old Rosalia Nava, and then 20-year-old Tirza Randon. The strong-willed Randon was far and away the most outspoken about her hatred of Álvarez, but was unable to think of a way to escape. “King” Álvarez was aware of the chance of being discovered by passing ships, especially since he knew that Alicia Rovira Arnaud would immediately tell all to any outsider who appeared. Consequently, Álvarez singled out Arnaud for threats, telling her that he would kill her the moment anyone from the outside world came into view.

Álvarez was almost certainly mentally ill. He had been belittled for much of his life on account of his African heritage, which was as stigmatised in Mexico as it was in the United States at the time. Years of isolation on Clipperton could only have amplified his anguish; lighthouse-keeping was notorious for causing madness.

Somehow, life at the colony went on for nearly two years under Álvarez’s reign of terror. The women and children divided up the coconuts and the leftover scraps of materials following the storm. Álvarez went on cycling through his trio of women. In the middle of July 1917, he got tired of Tirza Randon again, and decided that his next target was Alicia Rovira Arnaud, whom he had not pursued earlier. He picked up his rifle, took Randon back to the main settlement, and informed Arnaud that she was to present herself at his hut by the lighthouse the following morning. Sensing an opportunity, Randon informed Arnaud, “Now is the time.”

On 18 July 1917, Arnaud and her seven-year-old son, Ramón Arnaud Jr., set out for the lighthouse-keeper’s hut, accompanied by Randon. Álvarez, sitting outside roasting a bird, was in uncharacteristically good spirits; however, he was not happy to see Tirza Randon back so soon. “What are you doing?” he asked her, and attempted to shoo her off. Instead, she ran into Álvarez’s hut, returned with a hammer, and upon a signal from Arnaud, took the hammer in both hands, swung, and struck Álvarez in the skull. And then a second time. Arnaud sent her son inside the hut, and meanwhile Álvarez shook off Randon, grabbed an axe, and went after Arnaud. Arnaud yelled to her son to get Álvarez’s rifle. He did, but in the meantime Randon had landed another good swing on Álvarez, and he fell to the ground. She had most likely killed him by this point, but she allowed her rage to lead her to a knife, return, and stab the body repeatedly. In hysterics, Randon then began slashing at the dead man’s face. The dictator of Clipperton Island had met his end.

Even as the three still stood alongside the expired tyrant, little Ramón spotted something on the horizon that the community had not seen in nearly two years: a ship. The USS Yorktown was an American gunboat patrolling the west coast of North and South America, looking for German U-boats in accordance with a rumour that the Germans had established secret radio and submarine bases in the Pacific. Clipperton Island fell right along the Yorktown’s route, and certainly qualified as a potential hiding-place for the enemy.

The Yorktown circled Clipperton and made an attempt to send a smaller boat ashore, but the Americans were unable to reach the island and the boat returned to the ship. The islanders were devastated to see this retreat; just when they had caught sight of an opportunity to escape, it had disappeared. The women even briefly discussed whether they should just give up and either shoot each other or drown themselves in the lagoon. Fortunately, though, the Americans made a second attempt at sending their boat to Clipperton’s shores, and this time they were successful.

Arnaud met the Americans and frantically indicated the islanders’ desire to leave as soon as possible. Several members of the crew accompanied the women to the settlement in order to collect a few possessions, and others investigated the lighthouse. The Americans noted that the children were all small for their ages due to malnutrition; in particular, two-year-old Angel Arnaud was suffering from rickets and could not walk. Eleven-year-old Francisco Irra carried Angel on his back all the way to the American boat, and the sailors took the Clipperton Island survivors--three women and eight children--to the Yorktown. Álvarez’s body was left for the crabs.

Yorktown captain Commander Harlan Page Perrill later wrote in a letter to his wife:

"I noted the women and some children gathering along the beach and you can imagine my surprise when the watchers on the bridge reported that they were getting into the boat. Speculation was rife. When Kerr got alongside and made his [oral] report, he revealed a tale of woe absolutely harrowing in its details."

Navigator Lieutenant Kerr’s official written report of the Clipperton Island rescue divulged no details whatsoever about the anti-social lighthouse-keeper; Kerr and Perrill were both eager to protect Randon and the other survivors from the potential legal and social repercussions of the final altercation between the women and Álvarez. For seventeen years, neither man would say a word about what had really happened on Clipperton Island between 1914 and 1917.

The Yorktown briefly suspended its German-hunting and set a course for Salina Cruz, Mexico, where a number of the women and children had family members. They sent ahead a wireless message to the British consulate in the city asking for help in locating relatives. The islanders all experienced some seasickness but liked the environment of the ship, and the sailors grew fond of the children. On 22 July 1917, the Yorktown reached the mainland.

Right after the ship anchored, a boat appeared carrying Felix Rovira, the father of Alicia Rovira Arnaud. He had been regularly questioning Mexican authorities as to the fate of his daughter, only to have been told repeatedly – and erroneously – that all of the Clipperton Island colonists had died. Rovira and his daughter and four grandchildren had a reunion so moving that a number of the sailors burst into tears. A small fund that the crewmen had established to help the survivors start new lives on the mainland was turned over to them. The local citizens were deeply grateful to the Americans for the rescue, and threw a party at a local hotel for the sailors and the survivors.

Initially, Perrill had supposed Alicia Rovira Arnaud to be around forty years old. In reality, she was only twenty-nine, and the other women were several years younger. Nine years on Clipperton Island through an incredible gauntlet of hardships had taken their toll; however, eleven of the settlers had made it through. Their story was passed from person to person in subsequent years, and came to be known all over the west coast of Mexico.

Victor Emmanuel III of Italy finally made up his mind in 1931, awarding Clipperton Island to France. There have been occasional presences on the island since as the result of French/American military activities, scientific expeditions, and the occasional brief set of castaways. Ramón Arnaud Jr. even revisited the island with a team of biologists led by Jacques Cousteau in 1980; seventy-year-old Arnaud was pleased to see his place of birth in spite of the trauma. But no one has tried to live permanently on Clipperton since the last settlers were rescued by the Yorktown. Even without a crazed lighthouse-keeping rapist-tyrant, the island is very poorly equipped for comfortable human habitation.

quote:

For centuries sailors have been telling stories of encountering monstrous ocean waves which tower over one hundred feet in the air and toss ships about like corks. Historically oceanographers have discounted these reports as tall tales-- the embellished stories of mariners with too much time at sea. But in the last eleven years scientists have discovered strong evidence indicating that such massive rogue waves do exist. The phenomenon has become the subject of recent scientific study, but their origin remains a mystery of the deep.

About one ship is lost every week in the world's oceans, mostly due to poor seamanship or severe weather. But it now seems likely that at least a small percentage of sea disappearances are due to encounters with these destructive waves. Over the years experienced captains have made very credible reports of meeting behemoth waves which appear spontaneously, cause extensive damage to their ships, and shrug back into the sea just as mysteriously as they had appeared. One account describes the appearance of a giant wave trough which onlookers likened to a "hole in the sea", followed by a twelve-story-tall "wall of water." To further compound the mystery, some such waves have been said to appear mid-ocean, and often in calm weather.

On the open sea, waves can commonly reach seven meters in height; or even up to fifteen in extreme weather. In contrast, some reported rogue waves have exceeded thirty meters in height. Curiously, rogue waves are often seen traveling against the prevailing current and wave directions; and unlike a tsunami, rogue waves are localized and very short-lived. Most modern merchant vessels are designed to withstand about fifteen tons of pressure per square meter, but these unusual waves exert a pressure of about one hundred tons per square meter. Needless to say, a rogue wave means big trouble for any ship it meets.

Encounters with rogue waves have been rare but memorable. In 1933 in the North Pacific, the US Navy transport USS Ramapo triangulated a rogue wave at thirty-four meters in height. In 1942, the RMS Queen Mary was transporting 15,000 US troops to Europe when it was hit by a twenty-three meter wave and nearly capsized. The giant vessel listed by about 52 degrees due to the impact, after which it slowly righted itself.

In 1978, the 37,000-ton MS Munchen radioed a garbled distress call from the mid-Atlantic. When rescuers arrived, they found only "a few bits of wreckage," including an unlaunched lifeboat with one of its attachment pins "twisted as though hit by an extreme force." It is now believed that a rogue wave hit the ship, causing it to capsize and sink. No survivors were ever found.

In 1996, the Queen Elizabeth 2 encountered a rogue wave of twenty-nine meters, which the Captain said "came out of the darkness" and "looked like the White Cliffs of Dover." London newspapers said that the captain situated the vessel to "surf" the wave to avoid being sunk.

Despite these and other encounters with rogue waves, scientists long rejected such claims as unlikely. Anecdotal evidence is often unreliable, so researchers used computer modelling to predict the likelihood of such massive waves. Oceanographers' findings indicated that waves higher than fifteen meters were probably very rare events, occurring perhaps once in 10,000 years. That all changed in 1995 when a freak wave hit the Draupner North Sea oil platform. The oil rig swayed a little, suffering minor damage, but its onboard measuring equipment successfully recorded the wave height at nineteen meters.

More recently, satellite photos and radar imagery have documented the existence of numerous rogue waves, and it turns out that they are far more common than previously thought. During a three-week study in 2001, radar scanning detected ten monster waves in a 1.5 million square kilometer area. Satellites and direct observations have also established that rogue waves can happen anywhere, but they are most numerous in the North Atlantic and off the western shore of South Africa. In spite of their frequency, monster waves rarely meet with sea vessels because they are so short-lived.

The cause of rogue waves is still an area of active research. One theory under investigation cites "constructive interference," which is a result of several smaller waves overlapping in phase, combining to produce one massive wave. Another working hypothesis is based on the "non-linear Schrödinger effect," in which energy is "soaked up" from neighboring waves to create a monster wave. Still other researchers are looking into the possibility that wave energy is being focused by the surrounding environments, or that wind action on the surface is amplifying existing effects.

Science is necessarily skeptical of things which are beyond our observation, but now that rogue waves are a measurable phenomenon they have been officially upgraded from legend to reality. This recent finding is very telling about how little we really know about our world's oceans, and how many secrets the sea must still hold.

Rabbit Hill posted:

Welp, add this fucker to the list of worst humans in history.