LAPD’s Death Squad
From the Examiner:
My grandfather was a hired gun for a rail road which has long since gone out of business. After returning from World War I, he found employment with the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1920’s.
Hired gun is an accurate description of law enforcement in those days. Most people “learn” their history from movies and television. Hollywood’s historical timeline seems to end with Westerns depicting the era of the great cattle drives of the later 1800s and pick up again with depression era gangster movies and the ubiquitous obligatory Irish cop.
Combine all that with most Hollywood writers being from New York and in the business to entertain and not inform and we have a very uninformed populace.
Contrary to the myth of the Wild West, which was never very…
Russian Lunar Rover Found: 37-Year-Old Space Mystery Solved
From Science Daily:
A researcher from The University of Western Ontario has helped solve a 37-year old space mystery using lunar images released March 15 by NASA and maps from his own atlas of the moon.
Phil Stooke, a professor cross appointed to Western’s Departments of Physics & Astronomy and Geography, published a reference book on lunar exploration in 2007 entitled, “The International Atlas of Lunar Exploration.”
On March 15, images and data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) were posted. The LRO, scheduled for a one year exploration mission about 31 miles above the lunar surface, will produce a comprehensive map, search for resources and potential safe landing sites and measure lunar temperatures and radiation levels.
Using his atlas and the NASA images, Stooke pinpointed the exact location of the Russian rover Lunokhod…
An Introduction to Some of the Most Deranged Comics of the Golden Age
Via Technoccult:
Occult author Bill Whitcomb introduces some of the most deranged comics of the golden age:
Dr. Mortal — The monster building mad scientist
711 — Inmate by day, superhero by night
Madame Fatal — The first cross-dressing superhero.
Theodore Roosevelt – Monster Hunter?
The Bull-Moose is the first person I would choose for my early 20th century Tennessee monster hunt!
From the Examiner:
The year is 1918 and some thing is stalking the woods around Knoxville, Tennessee.
The mysterious beast is killing farm animals – hogs and calves and the occasional hunting dog – and residents are afraid to leave the house at night. Children are kept home from school. Local efforts to stop the beast have failed so desperate residents make a plea to America’s foremost outdoorsman and big game hunter to come to their aid.
President Theodore Roosevelt.
The former president’s glory days were behind him at this point in his life. His health was poor. He was sixty and suffered from severe rheumatism and carried a bullet in his chest from a failed assassination attempt in…
‘CIA Experiment’ Sends French Village Mad
From News.com.au:
A US writer has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA spiked a French village’s food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD.
The Sun online reports journalist H P Albarelli Jr came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of a biochemist who fell from a 13th floor window two years after a mystery illness that caused an entire French village to go temporarily mad 50 years ago.
Hundreds of residents in picturesque Pont-Saint-Esprit were suddenly struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations on August 16, 1951.
At least five people in the southern French village died and dozens were locked up in asylums after witnessing terrifying hallucinations of dragons and fire.
In the horror scenes an 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a…
Vampire Exorcism Skull Found in Venice
Move over Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, looks like the Old World had their fair share of these abominations. Christine Dell’Amore reports on National Geographic:
Among the many medieval plague victims recently unearthed near Venice, Italy, one reportedly had never-before-seen evidence of an unusual affliction: being “undead.”
The partial body and skull of the woman showed her jaw forced open by a brick (above) — an exorcism technique used on suspected vampires.
It’s the first time that archaeological remains have been interpreted as belonging to a suspected vampire, team leader Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist at the University of Florence, told National Geographic News.
“I was lucky. I [didn't] expect to find a vampire during my excavations,” he said. Belief in vampires was rampant in the Middle Ages, mostly because the process of decomposition was…
Was Foot a National Treasure or the KGB’s Useful Idiot?
From the Telegraph:
Why did the former Labour leader take money from Moscow for years, asks Charles Moore .
We have a habit in this country of turning certain people into “national treasures”. If they go on long enough, and have enough charm, we tend to forget what we once disliked about them. This has happened to Tony Benn, who was once routinely depicted by cartoonists as wearing jackboots. It has come perilously close to happening to Ian Paisley. It happened to Michael Foot, who died this week.Like all dear old “characters”, Foot had his props – the thick spectacles, the knobbly walking stick, his dog Dizzy, and that hotly debated garment worn at the Cenotaph. He had an eccentric way of speaking, which involved shouting at the end of sentences. And…
Millions of Ethiopian Famine Aid Used to Buy Weapons
From the Telegraph:
Millions of pounds of Western aid money intended to buy food for starving Ethiopians during the country’s 1984 famine were instead used by rebels to buy weapons, an investigation has found.
At least some of that money was likely to have come from the £150 million raised by Live Aid and Band Aid. More than three million copies of Do They Know It’s Christmas sold in just five weeks in late 1984 to raise funds for the estimated eight million Ethiopians facing starvation. Up to a million died.
According to a report published on Wednesday, rebel soldiers disguised themselves as grain traders and handed over sacks of sand hidden beneath genuine food aid, in return for cash from Western donations.
The rebel army involved, headed by Ethiopia’s current prime minister, Meles…
‘Jew Süss’: The Most Notoriously Anti-Semitic Movie Ever Made
Living in downtown Manhattan, I regularly go by the peerless Film Forum cinema, which is currently playing Harlan: In The Shadow Of The Jew Suss. I was curious to know what it was about and conveniently Larry Rohter obliges in the New York Times (I’ve also included a clip from Harlan’s film, Jud Süss):
In the history of the cinema, the German director Veit Harlan occupies an especially ignominious position. It is his name that is attached to “Jew Süss,” perhaps the most notoriously anti-Semitic movie ever made, a box office success in Nazi Germany in 1940 that was so effective that it was made required viewing for all members of the SS.
But what motivated Harlan to write and direct such a film? Was he a Nazi true believer, an opportunistic careerist or just a filmmaker too fearful of retribution to say no to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief…
U.S. Returns 1,000 Historical Artifacts Stolen From Iraq
From Middle East Online:
US officials have returned more than 1,000 archaeological and historical items stolen from Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion, Iraq’s ambassador here said Thursday.
Six pieces ranging from an ancient Sumerian stone tablet to an AK-47 rifle bearing Saddam’s image were handed over to Iraq at an embassy ceremony on Thursday.
“As Iraqis, we remain steadfast in our effort to return each and every one of these cultural treasures to their rightful home,” Ambassador Samir Sumaida’ie said at the ceremony.
Baghdad’s envoy said that the Iraqi National Museum lost some 15,000 items due to looting after the collapse of law and order due to the US-led invasion. Half of the items have since been found and returned “due to the diligence of our allies,” Sumaida’ie said.
Items returned included an Iraqi…
The Ghosts of Purim Past
From Slate:
Much like Halloween, the Jewish holiday of Purim carries a veneer of boisterous and innocuous fun overlaid on some ghoulish history. Of all the “they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat” holidays in the Jewish calendar, Purim has been the most responsible for shaping the Jewish view of other nations—and the theology behind that worldview has rung many alarm bells over the potential for Jewish violence.
Anyone familiar with the Bible can joke about the seemingly endless array of tribes with peculiar-sounding names, from Jesubites to Hittites. But one tribe’s spiritual legacy is very much alive today and embodies the most controversial commandment in the Bible: Amalek is the nation that attacked Israel at its weakest point during the Exodus story, and God’s quest for revenge is total—commanding…
The Virginia Colonists at Jamestown Practiced Cannibalism
Here is another chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, inspired by historian Howard Zinn, who passed away earlier this year.
For more on Russ Kick check out his website, The Memory Hole.
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During the harsh winter of 1609–1610, British subjects in the famous colony of Jamestown, Virginia, ate their dead and their shit. This fact doesn’t make it into very many U.S. history textbooks, and the state’s official website apparently forgot to mention it in their history section.
When you think about it rationally, this fact should be a part of mainstream history. After all, it demonstrates the strong will to survive among the colonists. It shows the mind-boggling hardships they endured and overcame. Yet the taboo against eating these two items is so overpowering that this episode can’t be mentioned in conventional history.
Luckily, an unconventional historian, Howard Zinn, revealed this fact in his classic, A People’s History of the United States. Food was so nonexistent during that winter, only 60 out of 500 colonists survived. A government document from that time gives the gruesome details:
Anarchy On The High Seas
One imagines that Hollywood studios will be bidding furiously for this raunchy tale, as described by Reuters:
Violence, drunkenness and all manner of debauchery featured on a six-month voyage on a migrant ship bound for Australia 170 years ago, a newly discovered diary reveals. The raunchy tale of anarchy on the high seas is recorded by a junior officer, James Bell, aboard “The Planter” which sailed to Adelaide from Deptford in east London in 1838.
Alcohol-fueled acts of “great violence” involving officers, mates and even the ship’s doctor are all recounted. In the green vellum-bound journal, Bell tells how the captain regularly entertained two of the 11 daughters of a doctor-preacher from Liverpool called McGowan.
He wrote: “our captain of course could not want a mistress till he returned to his own in…
The Tattoo Used in Auschwitz Was Originally An IBM Code Number
Here is another (controversial) chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.
For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.
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The tattooed numbers on the forearms of people held and killed in Nazi concentration camps have become a chilling symbol of hatred. Victims were stamped with the indelible number in a dehumanizing effort to keep track of them like widgets in the supply chain.
These numbers obviously weren’t chosen at random. They were part of a coded system, with each number tracked as the unlucky person who bore it was moved through the system.
Edwin Black made headlines in 2001 when his painstakingly researched book, IBM and the Holocaust, showed that IBM machines were used to automate the “Final Solution” and the jackbooted takeover of Europe.…
A History of American Tax Revolts (Photos)
Newsweek presents:
Nobody likes taxes. But some people really don’t like taxes. Joseph Stack, a software engineer in a long-running feud with the Internal Revenue Service, crashed his small airplane into an Austin, Texas, office building that housed nearly 200 IRS workers on Feb. 18, 2010. Stack and a man believed to be an IRS employee were killed in the crash. The Austin attack is just the latest in a long history of protests against the government’s power to tax. Before the United States even existed, patriots staged the Boston Tea Party in protest of the British crown’s taxation of the Colonies.
See the photos and read the stories of the history of tax revolt in America on Newsweek
Life Magazine’s Maps Of A Nazi Invasion Of America
The blog Ptak Science Books has an interesting slice of history: an extensive series of maps originally published in Life Magazine in 1942, detailing a number of ways in which the Axis powers could have successfully invaded the United States and taken over the country.
The companion article was titled “Now the U.S. Must Fight for Its Life” and intended to make readers consider the possibility of the United States losing World War II and falling under Nazi control. Thankfully, these are maps of a history that never occurred.
10 Families Who Killed Together
From the interesting folks at WeirdWorm:
The family that plays together stays together so what does that say about those folks who get a little rough? The mothers who arm their offspring, the brothers who take out their elders or those large extended families who make the neighbors very nervous are not the Norman Rockwell type, but they are in a weird way far more interesting.
1. The Harpe Family: No Angels Here
The new world held out hope to the cousins Micah and Wiley Harper, but only because the fledging country didn’t know them. After migrating with their families from Scotland as children the pair changed their names to John and William. Because of their constant habit of remaining together the pair was given the witty nicknames of Big Harpe (William) and Little Harpe (John).
The Harpes not exactly men given to more empathic endeavors left home just out of their teens to become slavers or overseers in Virginia. The American Revolution presented them with better opportunities as Troy outlaws where they learned such useful skills as pillaging livestock, burning crops and raping young farm girls.
There was a downside to their new lifestyle namely a country side from North Carolina to Kentucky, who knew them and wanted to see them both dangle at the end of twin ropes. The men took up with at least three women and produce many children who traveled with them.
1,000 Architects & Engineers Call for New 9/11 Investigation
From Yahoo News:
Richard Gage, AIA, architect and founder of the non-profit Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc. (AE911Truth), will announce a decisive milestone today at a press conference in San Francisco, as more than 1,000 worldwide architects and engineers now support the call for a new investigation into the destruction of the and Building 7 at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
After careful examination of the official explanation, along with the forensic data omitted from official reports, these professionals have concluded that a new independent investigation into these mysterious collapses is needed.Mr. Gage will deliver the news around this major development, accompanied by signers of the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth petition. The press conference will be held concurrently in 38 cities in 6 countries.
These prominent…
Zimbabwe Displays ‘Ark of Covenant Replica’
From BBC News:
A wooden object claimed to be a replica of the Biblical Ark of the Covenant has gone on display at a Zimbabwe museum.
The “ngoma lungundu” belongs to the Lemba people – black Africans who claim Jewish ancestry.
They say the vessel was built almost 700 years ago from the remains of the original Ark, which the Bible says was used to store Moses’ 10 Commandments.
For decades the ancient vessel was thought to be lost, until it was found in a storeroom in Harare recently.
Tudor Parfitt, who rediscovered the artefact three years ago, told the BBC he believed it was the oldest wooden object ever found in sub-Saharan Africa.
“On each corner there is the remnants of a wooden ring, and obviously at one point, it was carried by inserting poles…
