ComradebotLord of DinosaursHouston, TXRegistered Userregular
An entire thread about badass stuff and people from history, and no one has yet to mention Aaron Burr? He testi-killed Alexander Hamilton, (supposedly) plotted to form his own empire west of the USA, and at Valley Forge a traitor soldier put a gun to his head, and he responded by, in a single motion, drawing his sword and slicing the man's arm off (along with part of the musket).
He was truly the most Alpha of all the American Founding Fathers.
Henry Morgan also deserves props for being a hugely successful pirate who in fact was able to retire and live out the rest of his life boozing and whoring. Most Pirates just got executed or killed.
Julius Caesar had a nice run in with pirates one time.
On the way across the Aegean Sea, Caesar was kidnapped by pirates and held prisoner. He maintained an attitude of superiority throughout his captivity. When the pirates thought to demand a ransom of twenty talents of silver, he insisted they ask for fifty. After the ransom was paid, Caesar raised a fleet, pursued and captured the pirates, and imprisoned them. He had them crucified on his own authority, as he had promised while in captivity—a promise the pirates had taken as a joke. As a sign of leniency, he first had their throats cut.
One of the more impressive things about Caesar is that his name managed to be a royal title even into the 20th century. Talk about an enduring legacy!
One more reason to fear bears. They can help load artillery.
The Janissaries were very interesting because the whole, "kidnapping the children of our enemies to raise as shock troopers" was and is completely horrible, but they lived much, much better than the average peasant soldier and could advance very high in society, receiving excellent education and eventually political power if they were talented enough. They had retirement pensions for crying out loud!
I'm not sure how true this claim is, or how widespread it was, but I remember hearing that once Ottoman occupation of Eastern Europe had been established for a while and the Christian population knew how much power and prestige a Janissary could attain that the recruitment method shifted from kidnapping to a sizable number of peasant families volunteering their male children to be recruited.
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DeadfallI don't think you realize just how rich he is.In fact, I should put on a monocle.Registered Userregular
edited May 2012
Pirates, yes.
Ben Hornigold, one-time mentor to Blackbeard, was so good at piracy that towards the end of his career he pretty much just started dicking around for shits and giggles. Like when his crew got so drunk they tossed their hats overboard, so he captured a ship and took every single hat onboard. Then he left the confused and now hatless crew unharmed.
Some people saw it as an opportunity true, others found it profoundly insulting and humiliating. It depends on what region and what time period you're talking about. Early Janissaries were much more often forcibly conscripted.
You could be fat and happy as a Janissary assuming you survived. That doesn't mean every culture is going to be lining up to give away their children (yes yes, many people volunteered for the Janissaries I know).
On the topic of colorful people from history who didn't kill a bunch of people, might as well re-post something I wrote a while back about one of my favorite non-military oddballs from history, Jack Parsons, the '30s and '40s rocket scientist who invented solid rocket fuel.
Being a rocket scientist in '30s America was already enough to qualify you as insane if not downright suicidal. Before WW2, rocketry had next to zero credibility with the scientific establishment, who considered it the stuff of trashy science fiction pulp magazines. Not to mention that whole "it involves explosions that can very easily kill you, and everyone around you" stigma.
On the plus side, this left the "I am a rocket scientist" bar low enough that Parsons, a college drop-out and self-taught chemist, could just show up to the California Institute Of Technology and jump right in to blowing shit up with some CIT grad students dubbed "the Suicide Squad". Which is a good thing, since he developed the advances to solid rocket fuel and rocket-assisted aircraft takeoff that eventually helped jump-start the American space program. The "Suicide Squad" founded CIT's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is now part of NASA, and Parsons even has a crater on the Moon named after him.
So what makes him notably more eccentric than his fellow pioneering rocket scientists?
Jack Parsons thought he was the Antichrist.
The same urge to explore the unknown that inspired Parsons to tinker with explosives and rockets inspired him to delve into the occult. He eventually became a devotee of infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley, also known as "The Great Beast", "The Wickedest Man In The World" and "Oh, That Guy Ozzy Wrote That Song About". By the time Jack Parsons and the other rocketeers at the Jet Propulsion Lab had become well-paid government employees, Parsons was also leading the California chapter of Crowley's "Ordo Templi Orientis" organization.
And by "leading the organization", I mean "living in a mansion with a bunch of other eccentrics, doing lots of drugs and having orgies under the guise of 'sex magick' rituals".
When Parsons' wife left him (shocking, I know), he decided that the best way to snag himself a new partner was to perform a sex magic ritual known as the "Babalon Working", which in addition to altering the fabric of the cosmos and ushering in a new era of Dionysian sensual liberation would summon forth a living female embodiment of the Biblical Whore Of Babylon. Once she appeared, Parsons would then fuck her brains out as part of some other, even more esoteric magical sex ritual.
(Or in other words, what the plot of Weird Science would have been if they'd never invented computers.)
So Jack got his ritualistic freak on while another member of the O.T.O. took notes. Because apparently masturbating can only punch holes in the fabric of the universe if someone else is watching. Within days of the ritual, a sexy redhead named Marjorie showed up at the O.T.O. mansion and hooked up with Parsons, who declared the ritual a smashing success. Since he thought he was now fucking the Whore Of Babylon in an effort to usher in the apocalypse, he declared himself to be the Antichrist and started writing unauthorized additional chapters to Crowley's books on the subject.
Crowley didn't take this too well, and kicked Parsons out of the O.T.O.. Around the same time, Parsons lost his government job due to a combination of his eccentric lifestyle becoming public knowledge and the science of rocketry becoming complex or at least academically acceptable enough that self-taught amateurs like Parsons were no longer invited to blow shit up with the more book-smart scientists.
He then took some private sector gigs, and founded a boat company with the half-sister of his ex-wife and her new husband, the former O.T.O. member who took those notes during Parsons' big sex magic ritual. This turns out to be a horrible idea, as said half-sister and husband ran off with all of Parsons' money not once, but twice.
Parsons, broke and out of work, moved back in with his mother and took random movie special effects jobs, all while continuing both his chemical and mystical experiments. Eventually one of those chemical experiments went terribly wrong, when Parsons dropped a coffee can full of unstable explosive material and set off a massive explosion that blew off one of his arms and chunks of his jaw and his three other limbs. This explosion didn't kill him immediately, however, as he lingered for several hours before eventually dying. His mother, upon hearing the news of his death, killed herself.
Oh, whatever happened to the guy who watched Jack Parsons ritualistically masturbate and then twice scammed him out of his hard-earned cash? He combined his love of ripping people off and his love of writing and after a long and controversial career of doing both, died at the age of 75. His name?
The founder of the organisation was Fritz Todt, death ist Tod in german.
Another insane roman emperor was Elagabalus.(He was only named like that after his death)
But there are 800 traditional sources about him, only between 24 and 43 can be verified.
He is a good example of history forgery. Nowadays, most of the weird, decadent things attributed to him are considered as false.
In fact he probably was just a puppet emperor, and victim of an aristocratic smear campaign. Possibly also a xenophobic reaction because he was from the East and had a different cultural background.
Most of these weird stories are plain wrong unfortunately.
in 356 BC, the temple of artemis in ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the world, burned down
the fire had been set by a guy named herostratus, who wanted to be remembered forever
so, 2800 years and running
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KwoaruConfident SmirkFlawless Golden PecsRegistered Userregular
I like pompei, it was a pretty amazing thing
I seem to recall some months back they discovered a bunch of graffiti on the walls, one piece of which was all "sorry ladies but I'm only banging dudes now"
Ben Hornigold, one-time mentor to Blackbeard, was so good at piracy that towards the end of his career he pretty much just started dicking around for shits and giggles. Like when his crew got so drunk they tossed their hats overboard, so he captured a ship and took every single hat onboard. Then he left the confused and now hatless crew unharmed.
That's my kind of pirate.
"I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde
Just let that name sink in for a moment. Just let that title sink in, because none of your foreign heroes and explorers have anywhere near the class of this dude. This dude, people didn't believe he actually existed, even at the time of his death. He was a living legend, a name whispered in hushed tones between European aristocracy. Hey, is that Drake bastard out conquering the known world again? You bet your ass he is, Mister Ambassador. Now eat your shrimp.
OK first things first, he was the second person to circumnavigate the Earth. Ever. And unlike that dick Magellan he had the British dignity to not fucking die halfway around in some Godless tropical hellhole. He stood on the prow of his ship as he sailed it all the way up the Thames right into goddamn London itself, victorious and full of glory, applauded on his route by what was described as 'All of England'.
Well anyway, before that, after making his way to Argentina, he put in at some completely random bay that fifty years earlier Magellan had used to execute some mutineers. Upon finding the bleached skeletons swinging from, and I quote, 'poorly constructed Spanish gibbets', he discovered one of his own ships was rotting. So he burned it and executed the captain for not upholding the English naval standards.
Once he made his way into the Pacific, on his expedition to circumnavigate the globe, he stopped off at some Spanish colonies for a spot of 'light pillaging'. With a fleet outfitted for navigation and endurance, not combat, he massacred them so hard that he actually had to dump cargo at Lima because the sheer amount of plundered gold was weighing down his vessels.
Motherfucker was so good at this that not only did the Spanish name him 'The Dragon', but a bounty 6.5 million dollars (adjusted) was placed on his head by the King of Spain, that's six times the bounty put on Bin Laden. They hated him.
So Drake, the world's ultimate pirate, practically overflowing with booty decides not only to press on regardless, but he does so despite disease and the loss of another ship, and some crew which he used to found another English colony, this time in California. As though there weren't enough English colonies out there.
Drake gets back to England with more gold than the entire Empire had earned in a year, hands it all over to the Queen for an ungodly reward, and then becomes the Duke of Ash. Just look at that title and weep because you are never going to be 'The Dragon, Duke of Ash'.
The rest of his life was relatively uneventful. Except for, you know, destroying the Spanish Armada, flawlessly raiding yet more Spanish towns, this time in Spain, pillaging and looting to essentially no limit, and finally being buried (in full military dress) within a stone coffin at sea by a royally hand picked crew of the finest sailors in the entire Empire, brought together for that one purpose from across the globe. He was buried by the goddamn Sea Avengers.
His flagship, the Golden Hinde (another badass name, by the way) single-handedly paid off England's entire foreign debt. Think about that for a moment. One man, one ship, one crew, stole so much gold and jewels and treasures and valuable sea charts, and founded enough colonies and outposts and trading ports, in one journey around the world, that they bankrolled the largest Empire the world has ever seen, or ever will see. Badasses to the end. National heroes. Legends.
I am in tears
Just too bad that facial expression smacks of constipation, really
An entire thread about badass stuff and people from history, and no one has yet to mention Aaron Burr? He testi-killed Alexander Hamilton, (supposedly) plotted to form his own empire west of the USA, and at Valley Forge a traitor soldier put a gun to his head, and he responded by, in a single motion, drawing his sword and slicing the man's arm off (along with part of the musket).
He was truly the most Alpha of all the American Founding Fathers.
He was truly a colossal dick. But guess who's on the $10 bitch? That's right, Hamilton. Aw yeah.
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KwoaruConfident SmirkFlawless Golden PecsRegistered Userregular
I seem to recall some months back they discovered a bunch of graffiti on the walls, one piece of which was all "sorry ladies but I'm only banging dudes now"
except the language was way more flowery
They discovered some graffiti which, to this day, continues to baffle academics. The words are easily read, but the meaning isn't quite clear. Is it a declaration of love? Is it an insult? Is it an advertisement for a business?
The words read; "Secondus is a cock sucker of rare ability."
On the topic of colorful people from history who didn't kill a bunch of people, might as well re-post something I wrote a while back about one of my favorite non-military oddballs from history, Jack Parsons, the '30s and '40s rocket scientist who invented solid rocket fuel.
Being a rocket scientist in '30s America was already enough to qualify you as insane if not downright suicidal. Before WW2, rocketry had next to zero credibility with the scientific establishment, who considered it the stuff of trashy science fiction pulp magazines. Not to mention that whole "it involves explosions that can very easily kill you, and everyone around you" stigma.
On the plus side, this left the "I am a rocket scientist" bar low enough that Parsons, a college drop-out and self-taught chemist, could just show up to the California Institute Of Technology and jump right in to blowing shit up with some CIT grad students dubbed "the Suicide Squad". Which is a good thing, since he developed the advances to solid rocket fuel and rocket-assisted aircraft takeoff that eventually helped jump-start the American space program. The "Suicide Squad" founded CIT's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is now part of NASA, and Parsons even has a crater on the Moon named after him.
So what makes him notably more eccentric than his fellow pioneering rocket scientists?
Jack Parsons thought he was the Antichrist.
The same urge to explore the unknown that inspired Parsons to tinker with explosives and rockets inspired him to delve into the occult. He eventually became a devotee of infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley, also known as "The Great Beast", "The Wickedest Man In The World" and "Oh, That Guy Ozzy Wrote That Song About". By the time Jack Parsons and the other rocketeers at the Jet Propulsion Lab had become well-paid government employees, Parsons was also leading the California chapter of Crowley's "Ordo Templi Orientis" organization.
And by "leading the organization", I mean "living in a mansion with a bunch of other eccentrics, doing lots of drugs and having orgies under the guise of 'sex magick' rituals".
When Parsons' wife left him (shocking, I know), he decided that the best way to snag himself a new partner was to perform a sex magic ritual known as the "Babalon Working", which in addition to altering the fabric of the cosmos and ushering in a new era of Dionysian sensual liberation would summon forth a living female embodiment of the Biblical Whore Of Babylon. Once she appeared, Parsons would then fuck her brains out as part of some other, even more esoteric magical sex ritual.
(Or in other words, what the plot of Weird Science would have been if they'd never invented computers.)
So Jack got his ritualistic freak on while another member of the O.T.O. took notes. Because apparently masturbating can only punch holes in the fabric of the universe if someone else is watching. Within days of the ritual, a sexy redhead named Marjorie showed up at the O.T.O. mansion and hooked up with Parsons, who declared the ritual a smashing success. Since he thought he was now fucking the Whore Of Babylon in an effort to usher in the apocalypse, he declared himself to be the Antichrist and started writing unauthorized additional chapters to Crowley's books on the subject.
Crowley didn't take this too well, and kicked Parsons out of the O.T.O.. Around the same time, Parsons lost his government job due to a combination of his eccentric lifestyle becoming public knowledge and the science of rocketry becoming complex or at least academically acceptable enough that self-taught amateurs like Parsons were no longer invited to blow shit up with the more book-smart scientists.
He then took some private sector gigs, and founded a boat company with the half-sister of his ex-wife and her new husband, the former O.T.O. member who took those notes during Parsons' big sex magic ritual. This turns out to be a horrible idea, as said half-sister and husband ran off with all of Parsons' money not once, but twice.
Parsons, broke and out of work, moved back in with his mother and took random movie special effects jobs, all while continuing both his chemical and mystical experiments. Eventually one of those chemical experiments went terribly wrong, when Parsons dropped a coffee can full of unstable explosive material and set off a massive explosion that blew off one of his arms and chunks of his jaw and his three other limbs. This explosion didn't kill him immediately, however, as he lingered for several hours before eventually dying. His mother, upon hearing the news of his death, killed herself.
Oh, whatever happened to the guy who watched Jack Parsons ritualistically masturbate and then twice scammed him out of his hard-earned cash? He combined his love of ripping people off and his love of writing and after a long and controversial career of doing both, died at the age of 75. His name?
I find it really goddamn hard to sympathize for the Confederate army when their standard MO was to "shoot every black soldier on sight whether they've surrendered or not."
It's enough to make one cheer for Sherman as he marched to the sea.
Yeah Lee was brave and what not, but still, the Confeds were dicks.
sherman probably didn't do that much damage
the csa destroyed stuff as it retreated
read lies my teacher told me
no, he very much did
lies my teacher told me is pop history and not always accurate
It was exaggerated by whining civilians/soldiers who were damn lucky all they lost was their property. That tends to happen when you, you know, lose a damn war. Anyway, I'm just not particularly sympathetic to the South at that time.
Abloo abloo my kids cried and they had my stuff hauled off by black people! She was lucky her Northern brethren were quite merciful in other ways.
It sucks when civilians suffer in war, but given how awful social institutions in the south were during, and after, the war there was no way they were going to change without it getting beaten out of them.
You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
--William Tecumseh Sherman
Letter to the city of Atlanta, 1864
two things are completely fucked with your thinking
first, you are attempting to validate the murder of civilians during war time because you do not agree with their value system, which is something a fucking sociopath would say
and two, the north has effective socio-economic slavery and their biggest industry was textiles
take a guess where the fucking cotton came from
if you decide to also completely destroy the infrastructure of the place you're supposedly liberating, you should probably think twice, especially when you come from an equally morally questionable position
A: Those civilians were not killed/or raped, specifically the ones I posted. Sherman did not order any mass executions last time I checked. They had their property destroyed which is pretty damn mild in comparison to most Total Wars. They got off lucky to be honest.
B: I'm not saying the North wasn't sinless, but Jesus Christ, have you read about some of the atrocities committed by the Confederates? The quicker they got stamped into the mud the quicker the most destructive war in American history was brought to a close. Hindsight is 20/20, Lincoln wanted the war to end NOW and Sherman helped deliver.
Total war is not something you want to be on the receiving end of, it's pretty goddamn awful. I'm not sure there are 'nice' ways of conducting a war however. Are you implying that a speedy Northern victory would somehow not have been preferable to the alternative of more battles of attrition? We don't know how much the March shortened the war, but we do know it had a big impact on Southern morale which certainly didn't hurt the cause.
Sherman had terrorized the countryside; his men had destroyed all sources of food and forage and had left behind a hungry and demoralized people. Although he did not level any towns, he did destroy buildings in places where there was resistance. His men had shown little sympathy for Millen, the site of Camp Lawton, where Union prisoners of war were held. Physical attacks on white civilians were few, although it is not known how slave women fared at the hands of the invaders. Often male slaves posted guards outside the cabins of their women.
But thanks again for leaping to conclusions. That's always nice.
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
A: Those civilians were not killed/or raped, specifically the ones I posted. Sherman did not order any mass executions last time I checked. They had their property destroyed which is pretty damn mild in comparison to most Total Wars. They got off lucky to be honest.
B: I'm not saying the North wasn't sinless, but Jesus Christ, have you read about some of the atrocities committed by the Confederates? The quicker they got stamped into the mud the quicker the most destructive war in American history was brought to a close. Hindsight is 20/20, Lincoln wanted the war to end NOW and Sherman helped deliver.
Total war is not something you want to be on the receiving end of, it's pretty goddamn awful. I'm not sure there are 'nice' ways of conducting a war however. Are you implying that a speedy Northern victory would somehow not have been preferable to the alternative of more battles of attrition? We don't know how much the March shortened the war, but we do know it had a big impact on Southern morale which certainly didn't hurt the cause.
But thanks again for leaping to conclusions. That's always nice.
They got off lucky to be honest.
this is what I was talking about slick
and Lincoln never wanted the war, Sherman just wanted to destroy shit, he didn't give a good goddamn about freeing slaves
which is why he did stuff like this
As for the fate of those slaves who chose to flee their plantations and follow Sherman's army, a Confederate officer estimated that 10,000 followed, and hundreds died of "hunger, disease, or exposure" along the way.[10]
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
total war is fucking awful and attempting to validate it by saying" the south did awful things!" completely misses the fucking moral implications of what you are suggesting
A: Those civilians were not killed/or raped, specifically the ones I posted. Sherman did not order any mass executions last time I checked. They had their property destroyed which is pretty damn mild in comparison to most Total Wars. They got off lucky to be honest.
B: I'm not saying the North wasn't sinless, but Jesus Christ, have you read about some of the atrocities committed by the Confederates? The quicker they got stamped into the mud the quicker the most destructive war in American history was brought to a close. Hindsight is 20/20, Lincoln wanted the war to end NOW and Sherman helped deliver.
Total war is not something you want to be on the receiving end of, it's pretty goddamn awful. I'm not sure there are 'nice' ways of conducting a war however. Are you implying that a speedy Northern victory would somehow not have been preferable to the alternative of more battles of attrition? We don't know how much the March shortened the war, but we do know it had a big impact on Southern morale which certainly didn't hurt the cause.
But thanks again for leaping to conclusions. That's always nice.
They got off lucky to be honest.
this is what I was talking about slick
and Lincoln never wanted the war, Sherman just wanted to destroy shit, he didn't give a good goddamn about freeing slaves
which is why he did stuff like this
As for the fate of those slaves who chose to flee their plantations and follow Sherman's army, a Confederate officer estimated that 10,000 followed, and hundreds died of "hunger, disease, or exposure" along the way.[10]
Lincoln totally authorized Sherman to do what he felt was necessary, so I'm not sure how you can demonize Sherman and not Lincoln. It wasn't like Lincoln was complaining at the havoc Sherman was wrecking.
Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift – the capture of Savannah. When you were leaving Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful; but feeling that you were the better judge, and remembering that 'nothing risked, nothing gained' I did not interfere. Now, the undertaking being a success, the honour is all yours; for I believe none of us went farther than to acquiesce. And taking the work of Gen. Thomas into the count, as it should be taken, it is indeed a great success. Not only does it afford the obvious and immediate military advantage; but, in showing to the world that your army could be divided, putting the stronger part to an important new service, and yet leaving enough to vanquish the old opposing force of the whole – Hood's army – it brings those who sat in darkness, to see a great light. But what next? I suppose it will be safer if I leave Gen. Grant and yourself to decide. Please make my grateful acknowledgements to your whole army – officers and men.
It's also unfair to blame Sherman for civilian refugees following after his army when he couldn't do anything to protect them. He was on a military raid, not a rescue mission. You're mixing issues here pretty badly.
An entire thread about badass stuff and people from history, and no one has yet to mention Aaron Burr? He testi-killed Alexander Hamilton, (supposedly) plotted to form his own empire west of the USA, and at Valley Forge a traitor soldier put a gun to his head, and he responded by, in a single motion, drawing his sword and slicing the man's arm off (along with part of the musket).
He was truly the most Alpha of all the American Founding Fathers.
He was truly a colossal dick. But guess who's on the $10 bitch? That's right, Hamilton. Aw yeah.
Hamilton was also, shall we say, a unique character. One of my many favorite Hamilton stories is that when he was accused of corruption he responded by publishing a book that said "I'm not corrupt, I was spending my own money on blackmail payments to some dude so I could keep fucking his wife. Totally legit."
An entire thread about badass stuff and people from history, and no one has yet to mention Aaron Burr? He testi-killed Alexander Hamilton, (supposedly) plotted to form his own empire west of the USA, and at Valley Forge a traitor soldier put a gun to his head, and he responded by, in a single motion, drawing his sword and slicing the man's arm off (along with part of the musket).
He was truly the most Alpha of all the American Founding Fathers.
He was truly a colossal dick. But guess who's on the $10 bitch? That's right, Hamilton. Aw yeah.
Hamilton was also, shall we say, a unique character. One of my many favorite Hamilton stories is that when he was accused of corruption he responded by publishing a book that said "I'm not corrupt, I was spending my own money on blackmail payments to some dude so I could keep fucking his wife. Totally legit."
That was probably not the best PR move he ever did.
Still, that he was crazy enough to jump into the fortifications at Yorktown with fixed bayonets earned him some serious brass balls.
Oh yeah, and Benedict Arnold saved America.
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
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SIR Francis Drake.
He was truly the most Alpha of all the American Founding Fathers.
Erk! Yes, yes.
One of the more impressive things about Caesar is that his name managed to be a royal title even into the 20th century. Talk about an enduring legacy!
I'm not sure how true this claim is, or how widespread it was, but I remember hearing that once Ottoman occupation of Eastern Europe had been established for a while and the Christian population knew how much power and prestige a Janissary could attain that the recruitment method shifted from kidnapping to a sizable number of peasant families volunteering their male children to be recruited.
Ben Hornigold, one-time mentor to Blackbeard, was so good at piracy that towards the end of his career he pretty much just started dicking around for shits and giggles. Like when his crew got so drunk they tossed their hats overboard, so he captured a ship and took every single hat onboard. Then he left the confused and now hatless crew unharmed.
xbl - HowYouGetAnts
steam - WeAreAllGeth
You could be fat and happy as a Janissary assuming you survived. That doesn't mean every culture is going to be lining up to give away their children (yes yes, many people volunteered for the Janissaries I know).
Being a rocket scientist in '30s America was already enough to qualify you as insane if not downright suicidal. Before WW2, rocketry had next to zero credibility with the scientific establishment, who considered it the stuff of trashy science fiction pulp magazines. Not to mention that whole "it involves explosions that can very easily kill you, and everyone around you" stigma.
On the plus side, this left the "I am a rocket scientist" bar low enough that Parsons, a college drop-out and self-taught chemist, could just show up to the California Institute Of Technology and jump right in to blowing shit up with some CIT grad students dubbed "the Suicide Squad". Which is a good thing, since he developed the advances to solid rocket fuel and rocket-assisted aircraft takeoff that eventually helped jump-start the American space program. The "Suicide Squad" founded CIT's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is now part of NASA, and Parsons even has a crater on the Moon named after him.
So what makes him notably more eccentric than his fellow pioneering rocket scientists?
Jack Parsons thought he was the Antichrist.
The same urge to explore the unknown that inspired Parsons to tinker with explosives and rockets inspired him to delve into the occult. He eventually became a devotee of infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley, also known as "The Great Beast", "The Wickedest Man In The World" and "Oh, That Guy Ozzy Wrote That Song About". By the time Jack Parsons and the other rocketeers at the Jet Propulsion Lab had become well-paid government employees, Parsons was also leading the California chapter of Crowley's "Ordo Templi Orientis" organization.
And by "leading the organization", I mean "living in a mansion with a bunch of other eccentrics, doing lots of drugs and having orgies under the guise of 'sex magick' rituals".
When Parsons' wife left him (shocking, I know), he decided that the best way to snag himself a new partner was to perform a sex magic ritual known as the "Babalon Working", which in addition to altering the fabric of the cosmos and ushering in a new era of Dionysian sensual liberation would summon forth a living female embodiment of the Biblical Whore Of Babylon. Once she appeared, Parsons would then fuck her brains out as part of some other, even more esoteric magical sex ritual.
(Or in other words, what the plot of Weird Science would have been if they'd never invented computers.)
So Jack got his ritualistic freak on while another member of the O.T.O. took notes. Because apparently masturbating can only punch holes in the fabric of the universe if someone else is watching. Within days of the ritual, a sexy redhead named Marjorie showed up at the O.T.O. mansion and hooked up with Parsons, who declared the ritual a smashing success. Since he thought he was now fucking the Whore Of Babylon in an effort to usher in the apocalypse, he declared himself to be the Antichrist and started writing unauthorized additional chapters to Crowley's books on the subject.
Crowley didn't take this too well, and kicked Parsons out of the O.T.O.. Around the same time, Parsons lost his government job due to a combination of his eccentric lifestyle becoming public knowledge and the science of rocketry becoming complex or at least academically acceptable enough that self-taught amateurs like Parsons were no longer invited to blow shit up with the more book-smart scientists.
He then took some private sector gigs, and founded a boat company with the half-sister of his ex-wife and her new husband, the former O.T.O. member who took those notes during Parsons' big sex magic ritual. This turns out to be a horrible idea, as said half-sister and husband ran off with all of Parsons' money not once, but twice.
Parsons, broke and out of work, moved back in with his mother and took random movie special effects jobs, all while continuing both his chemical and mystical experiments. Eventually one of those chemical experiments went terribly wrong, when Parsons dropped a coffee can full of unstable explosive material and set off a massive explosion that blew off one of his arms and chunks of his jaw and his three other limbs. This explosion didn't kill him immediately, however, as he lingered for several hours before eventually dying. His mother, upon hearing the news of his death, killed herself.
Now Jack Parsons is a footnote in the history of space exploration, but has developed a cult following, no pun intended, amongst folks who can say the phrase "sex magick" without laughing.
Oh, whatever happened to the guy who watched Jack Parsons ritualistically masturbate and then twice scammed him out of his hard-earned cash? He combined his love of ripping people off and his love of writing and after a long and controversial career of doing both, died at the age of 75. His name?
http://i.imgur.com/tAcFo.png
http://witnesstheabsurd.tumblr.com/
http://i.imgur.com/OPLlE.png
Commission me at http://tinyurl.com/cv3h2pl
!
The founder of the organisation was Fritz Todt, death ist Tod in german.
Another insane roman emperor was Elagabalus.(He was only named like that after his death)
But there are 800 traditional sources about him, only between 24 and 43 can be verified.
He is a good example of history forgery. Nowadays, most of the weird, decadent things attributed to him are considered as false.
In fact he probably was just a puppet emperor, and victim of an aristocratic smear campaign. Possibly also a xenophobic reaction because he was from the East and had a different cultural background.
Most of these weird stories are plain wrong unfortunately.
the fire had been set by a guy named herostratus, who wanted to be remembered forever
so, 2800 years and running
I seem to recall some months back they discovered a bunch of graffiti on the walls, one piece of which was all "sorry ladies but I'm only banging dudes now"
except the language was way more flowery
as I understand it, anyway
That's my kind of pirate.
Steam: Chagrin LoL: Bonhomie
Swear to god I saw someone this morning parked diagonally across two handicap spaces
Sore tempted to key the sumbitch or something except as dank as that truck was no one would have noticed
Just too bad that facial expression smacks of constipation, really
He was truly a colossal dick. But guess who's on the $10 bitch? That's right, Hamilton. Aw yeah.
liberals would have you be a bottom on all tax issues
They discovered some graffiti which, to this day, continues to baffle academics. The words are easily read, but the meaning isn't quite clear. Is it a declaration of love? Is it an insult? Is it an advertisement for a business?
The words read; "Secondus is a cock sucker of rare ability."
Well it's a good thing I'm a power bottom then
thank you for reposting this amazing tale
@keith
lies my teacher told me is pop history and not always accurate
two things are completely fucked with your thinking
first, you are attempting to validate the murder of civilians during war time because you do not agree with their value system, which is something a fucking sociopath would say
and two, the north has effective socio-economic slavery and their biggest industry was textiles
take a guess where the fucking cotton came from
if you decide to also completely destroy the infrastructure of the place you're supposedly liberating, you should probably think twice, especially when you come from an equally morally questionable position
B: I'm not saying the North wasn't sinless, but Jesus Christ, have you read about some of the atrocities committed by the Confederates? The quicker they got stamped into the mud the quicker the most destructive war in American history was brought to a close. Hindsight is 20/20, Lincoln wanted the war to end NOW and Sherman helped deliver.
Total war is not something you want to be on the receiving end of, it's pretty goddamn awful. I'm not sure there are 'nice' ways of conducting a war however. Are you implying that a speedy Northern victory would somehow not have been preferable to the alternative of more battles of attrition? We don't know how much the March shortened the war, but we do know it had a big impact on Southern morale which certainly didn't hurt the cause.
But thanks again for leaping to conclusions. That's always nice.
this is what I was talking about slick
and Lincoln never wanted the war, Sherman just wanted to destroy shit, he didn't give a good goddamn about freeing slaves
which is why he did stuff like this
Lincoln totally authorized Sherman to do what he felt was necessary, so I'm not sure how you can demonize Sherman and not Lincoln. It wasn't like Lincoln was complaining at the havoc Sherman was wrecking.
It's also unfair to blame Sherman for civilian refugees following after his army when he couldn't do anything to protect them. He was on a military raid, not a rescue mission. You're mixing issues here pretty badly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman's_Special_Field_Orders,_No._15
Regardless, the south got off lucky and the war was shortened. Hold whatever feelings you like about it.
Hamilton was also, shall we say, a unique character. One of my many favorite Hamilton stories is that when he was accused of corruption he responded by publishing a book that said "I'm not corrupt, I was spending my own money on blackmail payments to some dude so I could keep fucking his wife. Totally legit."
I sincerely doubt that's possible
That was probably not the best PR move he ever did.
Still, that he was crazy enough to jump into the fortifications at Yorktown with fixed bayonets earned him some serious brass balls.
Oh yeah, and Benedict Arnold saved America.
it's you