The Assassin
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Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I make Cybele look like Angelina Jolie.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Watching a lecture about America's entrance into WWI, and I learned about a german dissident who likely had an equally sensational impact on American political culture as did the January 6th insurrection. In fact the political cultural climate described here seems similar to our own now, in certain ways.
As America scratched its head over this alarming event a second attack was already unfolding: on July 3, 1915 a mysterious assailant forced his way into the Long Island mansion of J.P. Morgan and shot the powerful banker twice before Morgan’s butler incapacitated him with a large piece of coal to the head. Police detectives took the would-be assassin into custody and began to unravel an ambitious if implausible terrorist plot, and the identity of the even more bizarre individual who’d planned it.
The would-be assassin identified himself as Frank Holt, a German-American immigrant who’d most recently worked as a professor of German at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Holt explained that he wanted to highlight America’s complicity in a grand conspiracy to destroy his beloved German fatherland; he blamed Morgan for arranging loans to Britain and France.
Cut from this article: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/65842/wwi-centennial-terror-attacks-us-capitol-jp-morgan
After watching this talk:
July 2-3, 1915: Terror Attacks on U.S. Capitol, J.P. Morgan
At 11:40 pm on July 2, 1915, a bomb exploded in the reception room of the U.S. Senate chamber in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. No one was injured but the attack on the seat of the nation’s government made headlines across the U.S. While authorities hunted for clues, a letter received by The Washington Star took credit for the attack, calling it a symbolic protest against the war in Europe and America’s role in it as one of the main neutral weapons manufacturers.As America scratched its head over this alarming event a second attack was already unfolding: on July 3, 1915 a mysterious assailant forced his way into the Long Island mansion of J.P. Morgan and shot the powerful banker twice before Morgan’s butler incapacitated him with a large piece of coal to the head. Police detectives took the would-be assassin into custody and began to unravel an ambitious if implausible terrorist plot, and the identity of the even more bizarre individual who’d planned it.
The would-be assassin identified himself as Frank Holt, a German-American immigrant who’d most recently worked as a professor of German at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Holt explained that he wanted to highlight America’s complicity in a grand conspiracy to destroy his beloved German fatherland; he blamed Morgan for arranging loans to Britain and France.
Cut from this article: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/65842/wwi-centennial-terror-attacks-us-capitol-jp-morgan
After watching this talk:
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
With his unflattering history discovered, Muenter killed himself by jumping to his death on July 5, but one more attack was still underway. It turned out that in between planting the bomb in the U.S. Senate reception room and shooting Morgan, Muenter had stopped in New York City and slipped aboard the Minnehaha, a merchant ship carrying munitions intended for the Western Front, to plant another time bomb. The bomb exploded on July 7 but produced minimal damage.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
These are Tyrone Slothrop levels of swift havoc being wreaked.
IdleRich
IdleRich
So Muenter was Holt? I haven't watched the videos but that is the only way your quotes make sense together.
I suppose his real name was Muenter and he'd done some bad stuff he was ashamed of (not like setting off bombs or shooting people) and so he changed his name to Holt?
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Haha the one paragraph I didn't quote was the one that explained this:
However Holt was soon discovered to be Eric Muenter—who at various times also went by Erich Muenter and Erich Holt—formerly a German instructor at Harvard University who had, for unknown reasons, poisoned his wife back in 1906 before disappearing. Muenter fled Cambridge for Nevada, created a new identity as Holt, and secured a teaching post at a college in Texas under his new name. He later moved to Ithaca and entered the faculty at Cornell.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Damn. How big was the academic community at that time? I'm thinking that if I murdered my wife and went on the lam after changing my name, then I would probably seek a job in a different sector. Of course things aren't so totally connected as they are now but even then I thought that people would move from college to college and also travel to conferences and the like. Perhaps he knew that soon he'd be blowing up and killing more people so no need to hide for long.
Crime has got so much harder these days. With fingerprints, DNA, cctv and instant messaging it's a miracle that anyone ever gets away. A famous one who fell victim (if that's the right way to say it) to improved communications was Dr Crippen. He killed his wife then jumped on a ship from Liverpool to NY and the authorities were all like "oh no, he's getting away really agonisingly slowly but there is absolutely nothing we can do, he will get to New York before we can and disembark and just melt into the throng, never to be seen again" - and then some clever clogs said "No need to worry guys, I've invented radio, just speak into this tube and tell the American police what he looks like and they will be there with eight weeks to spare".
Must have been a nasty shock for the evil doctor though. I like to imagine him on the cruise, laughing evilly to himself "Aha ha ha, they will never catch me now aha ha ha" for however long the journey was. I guess he must have been on some boat that did it quickly - some super fast steamer or the like - or else they would have been able to send something faster, but even so I imagine he had quite a lot of time to bask in his triumph, interrupting the nightly bridge games when he broke into uncontrollable peals of maniacal laughter every time he thought of the frustration of the lead-footed british bobbies shaking their fists at him from the docks while he glided effortlessly away into the night....
So radio made it a lot harder to get away, fingerprints meant that you couldn't just say "No I've never been there, can't help you, sorry" any more, DNA made that even harder. And now with UK* police procedural telly programmes a lot of them the sergeant says "Check the cameras" and then it's "I think it was that guy with the knife that stuck it in his face, he's the one we want."
It's almost like Minority Report where the pre-cogs know who will commit a crime before they do it, it's almost impossible to even conceive of a crime that you could get away with... the bad guy comes up with one though and when you watch it you probably think "Oh that was pretty clever actually, I hope he defeats that smug dwarf". We are not there yet but someone committing a crime has to think about how to outwit all of that as a matter of course before they even get on to trying to fool any detective or novelist or whatever who might be trying to catch them. I think that in our society the main thing that stops people being caught is a lack of resources.
*I believe China is the country which watches its citizens most through CCTV, but the number two in that dubious chart is the UK. I don't know if that means more cameras per head of population or per square kilometre or what, but the basic point is that the UK has a lot of cameras and they are spying on you all the time. I remember @DannyL telling an anecdote about a demonstration of the power and usefulness of police cameras. The gist of it is that for some reason he was in a police station (why were you in a police station Dan?) where they gave him a demonstration of their awesome power, and further illustrated it with the following story; police guy was doing a routine scan, flicking between fifty to a hundred screens like you see in films. "Exterior of wall G ok clear, give me road section D... home in on that, no it's just a cat, ok let's scan along road F very carefully... clear... go back to that kebab shop there is often trouble there... can you see if they have any specials left? zoom in on the board there. Fuck it... ok try the other kebab shop..." and so on...
In other words, it began just like any other ordinary evening for the guy invisibly spying on ever... I mean watching over us to keep us safe. It began that way, and it carried on that way... and then, it happened, at some point, he saw a car parked on a dark side street.. a very strange place to park a car, and straight away he jerked into alertness, senses tingling, he didn't know how he knew but somehow he knew, there was something going on with that car, something was not right!
So our hero ordered the camera to zoom in, realising as he did so that the light was on in the car and that there was actually someone in there, something was definitely up... zoom in closer, gimme more (at this point I want you to imagine your are watching some film with Tom Cruise or similar working for the CIA or whatever and he's barking instructions at the poor guy controlling the camera), yeah, move to that bit there, no left a bit, out a bit, and can you improve the resolution? And finally, as the vignette swam into focus he realised that there WAS a man in the car, alone, making regular jerking motions... as a very experienced wanker the police man knew that there was only one possible explanation for what was happening. Some evil sick perverted bastard had taken advantage of the fact that he was completely alone in his own car on a deserted street at night with no lights on it... and decided to commit a flagrant act of gross public indecency. And there was only one thing for it, they had to send a team in and arrest him...
Imagine being one of those cops, knocking on the window, excuse me sir, were you masturbating a minute ago? I'm afraid you have to come with us... as Dan told me, they actually showed the clip and the demonstrator said - of Dan - to one of the other police "one very impressed young man" and Dan said "That's not impressive, mine is much bigger than that" - ok that bit isn't true, but what is true is that in actual fact Dan was completely unimpressed and thought that it was a massive misuse of resources to build this incredibly sophisticated surveillance network that was second only to China's and then to use it to zoom in on some hapless guy who would have been completely alone if the police hadn't been spying on him and who decided to unwind at the end of the day by pulling himself off - and then to fucking arrest him! Probably in China they would have let that one slide... seems completely nuts to me.
Although I did see one of those cheapo telly programmes they use to fill up the schedules based around police camera footage and there was a similar kinda thing, some kids were walking home from a club or something and they stopped by like a park bench to chop out a line - caught on cctv and so the controller "Sent in a team to intercept them" (ie told Dave and Bill to wait at the next corner and grab em) and arrest them. Which, well ok, I guess it is illegal, but it seems crazy when you hear the police refusing to investigate some much more serious things.
Crime has got so much harder these days. With fingerprints, DNA, cctv and instant messaging it's a miracle that anyone ever gets away. A famous one who fell victim (if that's the right way to say it) to improved communications was Dr Crippen. He killed his wife then jumped on a ship from Liverpool to NY and the authorities were all like "oh no, he's getting away really agonisingly slowly but there is absolutely nothing we can do, he will get to New York before we can and disembark and just melt into the throng, never to be seen again" - and then some clever clogs said "No need to worry guys, I've invented radio, just speak into this tube and tell the American police what he looks like and they will be there with eight weeks to spare".
Must have been a nasty shock for the evil doctor though. I like to imagine him on the cruise, laughing evilly to himself "Aha ha ha, they will never catch me now aha ha ha" for however long the journey was. I guess he must have been on some boat that did it quickly - some super fast steamer or the like - or else they would have been able to send something faster, but even so I imagine he had quite a lot of time to bask in his triumph, interrupting the nightly bridge games when he broke into uncontrollable peals of maniacal laughter every time he thought of the frustration of the lead-footed british bobbies shaking their fists at him from the docks while he glided effortlessly away into the night....
So radio made it a lot harder to get away, fingerprints meant that you couldn't just say "No I've never been there, can't help you, sorry" any more, DNA made that even harder. And now with UK* police procedural telly programmes a lot of them the sergeant says "Check the cameras" and then it's "I think it was that guy with the knife that stuck it in his face, he's the one we want."
It's almost like Minority Report where the pre-cogs know who will commit a crime before they do it, it's almost impossible to even conceive of a crime that you could get away with... the bad guy comes up with one though and when you watch it you probably think "Oh that was pretty clever actually, I hope he defeats that smug dwarf". We are not there yet but someone committing a crime has to think about how to outwit all of that as a matter of course before they even get on to trying to fool any detective or novelist or whatever who might be trying to catch them. I think that in our society the main thing that stops people being caught is a lack of resources.
*I believe China is the country which watches its citizens most through CCTV, but the number two in that dubious chart is the UK. I don't know if that means more cameras per head of population or per square kilometre or what, but the basic point is that the UK has a lot of cameras and they are spying on you all the time. I remember @DannyL telling an anecdote about a demonstration of the power and usefulness of police cameras. The gist of it is that for some reason he was in a police station (why were you in a police station Dan?) where they gave him a demonstration of their awesome power, and further illustrated it with the following story; police guy was doing a routine scan, flicking between fifty to a hundred screens like you see in films. "Exterior of wall G ok clear, give me road section D... home in on that, no it's just a cat, ok let's scan along road F very carefully... clear... go back to that kebab shop there is often trouble there... can you see if they have any specials left? zoom in on the board there. Fuck it... ok try the other kebab shop..." and so on...
In other words, it began just like any other ordinary evening for the guy invisibly spying on ever... I mean watching over us to keep us safe. It began that way, and it carried on that way... and then, it happened, at some point, he saw a car parked on a dark side street.. a very strange place to park a car, and straight away he jerked into alertness, senses tingling, he didn't know how he knew but somehow he knew, there was something going on with that car, something was not right!
So our hero ordered the camera to zoom in, realising as he did so that the light was on in the car and that there was actually someone in there, something was definitely up... zoom in closer, gimme more (at this point I want you to imagine your are watching some film with Tom Cruise or similar working for the CIA or whatever and he's barking instructions at the poor guy controlling the camera), yeah, move to that bit there, no left a bit, out a bit, and can you improve the resolution? And finally, as the vignette swam into focus he realised that there WAS a man in the car, alone, making regular jerking motions... as a very experienced wanker the police man knew that there was only one possible explanation for what was happening. Some evil sick perverted bastard had taken advantage of the fact that he was completely alone in his own car on a deserted street at night with no lights on it... and decided to commit a flagrant act of gross public indecency. And there was only one thing for it, they had to send a team in and arrest him...
Imagine being one of those cops, knocking on the window, excuse me sir, were you masturbating a minute ago? I'm afraid you have to come with us... as Dan told me, they actually showed the clip and the demonstrator said - of Dan - to one of the other police "one very impressed young man" and Dan said "That's not impressive, mine is much bigger than that" - ok that bit isn't true, but what is true is that in actual fact Dan was completely unimpressed and thought that it was a massive misuse of resources to build this incredibly sophisticated surveillance network that was second only to China's and then to use it to zoom in on some hapless guy who would have been completely alone if the police hadn't been spying on him and who decided to unwind at the end of the day by pulling himself off - and then to fucking arrest him! Probably in China they would have let that one slide... seems completely nuts to me.
Although I did see one of those cheapo telly programmes they use to fill up the schedules based around police camera footage and there was a similar kinda thing, some kids were walking home from a club or something and they stopped by like a park bench to chop out a line - caught on cctv and so the controller "Sent in a team to intercept them" (ie told Dave and Bill to wait at the next corner and grab em) and arrest them. Which, well ok, I guess it is illegal, but it seems crazy when you hear the police refusing to investigate some much more serious things.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
My god Rich, your post responding to the article is twice as long as the article itself.
IdleRich
IdleRich
And the footnote is longer than the post. But it's a great footnote. Basically imagine that you are reading Infinite Jest and this is one of David Foster Wallace's enormous footnotes, I only regret I did not put any footnotes within the footnote, in fact I'm kicking myself for it. Though to be honest, the footnote is really just relaying something that Danny L told me once. In case you are too lazy to read it I will summarise it for you. Long story short, Dan was being shown round a police station, I forget why, I think it must have been work experience or something. And this guy was really proud of all their cctv, how much it covered and the way that they could zoom in and stuff, and he told Dan about how one time they were able to use it to catch a guy having a wank in his car, a guy who thought that he was safe cos he was miles away from anyone, in the dark, and he thought that no-one could see him and so it was a fairly harmless thing to do. But it turns out he wasn't alone and unseen, cos the police had used the awesome power of their sinister surveillance machine to zoom in on his todger and then they sent a team of cops to go and arrest him. And Dan was horrified by this ridiculous waste of police time and resources and the fact that they would use all this technology to bust some guy who was harming no-one, and while Dan was standing there in silence thinking "Who is this fucking moron and why is he telling me this stupid story?" the bloke misinterpreted his silence and said to one of his colleagues "One very impressed young man".
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
In b4 @mixed_biscuits with "'harming no-one'? Ending the lives of hundreds of millions of potential babies before they were even born, more like!
"
vershy versh
Well-known member
Someone was saying the other day that Abe has to be up there as one of the most successful political assassinations as the bloke not only killed his target but also achieved his wider aim of exposing the links between Japanese politics and the Moonies and even managed to generate public sympathy after explaining his motives.
Shinzo Abe’s Assassin Succeeds in Turning Japan Against ‘Cult’
The shooting of ex-PM Shinzo Abe has blown open secret ties between Japan’s ruling party and the mass-marrying Moonies.www.thedailybeast.com
/cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuters/LNYMKQGCLFPJPFRXHVFNE4DC4M.jpg)
Japan probes Unification Church after backlash over ruling party ties
Japan launched a probe into the Unification Church on Tuesday that could threaten its legal status, after the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in July revealed its close ties to the ruling party and triggered a public backlash.
www.reuters.com
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
This Unification Church even has a scary name. It could be the name of a sinister end-times cult in a dystopian video game.Japan probes Unification Church after backlash over ruling party ties
Japan launched a probe into the Unification Church on Tuesday that could threaten its legal status, after the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in July revealed its close ties to the ruling party and triggered a public backlash.
vershy versh
Well-known member
Not immediate public level but Freddie Scappaticci’s tale is so fuckin warped
He headed the Ra’s internal investigation unit, ie a sanctioned headcase knocking squad seeking out and killing supposed informers. Problem with Freddie was his status as the British govt’s highest placed provo asset (made public anyway). The perverse outcomes of such an asset also mean he must have killed plenty of official British assets who’d infiltrated the Ra’s ranks as a means to protect his own position and influence, which MI5 would’ve been all over too
There’s been plenty of literature on The Troubles in recent years but the story that stinks the most are the actions (and the inherent meaning) of this cunt’s long, drawn out arc. He never got so much as scratch and is still a free man. Clearly still has friends in high places
Apparently he died a few days ago.
Man suspected of being Stakeknife, Britain’s top spy in IRA, dies
Death of Freddie Scappaticci, who always denied he was mole, puts question mark over inquiry into his alleged crimes
www.theguardian.com
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
An attack on an incumbent PM in Japan now, although unclear if it was meant to be fatal:
www.theguardian.com
Japan’s PM escapes explosion unharmed after suspected attack
Man detained after what looked like a smoke bomb was thrown at Fumio Kishida just before speech
www.theguardian.com
vershy versh
Well-known member
Someone was saying the other day that Abe has to be up there as one of the most successful political assassinations as the bloke not only killed his target but also achieved his wider aim of exposing the links between Japanese politics and the Moonies and even managed to generate public sympathy after explaining his motives.
Shinzo Abe’s Assassin Succeeds in Turning Japan Against ‘Cult’
The shooting of ex-PM Shinzo Abe has blown open secret ties between Japan’s ruling party and the mass-marrying Moonies.
"In REVOLUTION+1 Masao Adachi constructs a semi-fictional narrative around the assassination of Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe in July 2022. Drawing on details from the life of the assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami, Adachi tells the story from Yamagami’s perspective, focusing less on his broader political beliefs and more on his increasing resentment toward the church that caused his family’s ruin."