Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 5

The Khan Abides

Granted, I haven’t posted in a whopping eleven days—the longest dry spell in Microkhan history. But rest assured, I have not abandoned this endeavor after a measly 1,559 entries. I have just been so engulfed with the pregame for The Skies Belong to Us, as well as a pair of absorbing Wired projects, that I’ve scarcely had a spare moment to notice that the Grand Emprette has now mastered the art of sitting up, let alone keep pace with this site. I’ll try my best to improve my performance between now and the book’s June 18th launch, but please understand that we’re dealing with extraordinary circumstances over here; things may be more sporadic than any of us might wish.

I’ll try and give you reason to keep checking in, though, by promising to hold some giveaways of limited-edition skyjacker trading cards. Gimme a week or so to come up with a tough-enough trivia question, and we’ll go from there.

The Rise and Fall of R.I.S.E.

The two young men above once dreamed of committing a truly dreadful act: poisoning Chicago’s water supply, in order to kill millions and further the ambitions of their revolutionary organization, R.I.S.E. Mainstream press accounts of their failed caper describe them as incompetent fools, but this case study gives them credit for developing some biological agents that at least had the potential to cause grave damage. More important, the case study delves into the specifics of the duo’s motives, which could only have been concocted during a drug-fueled bout of sexual frustration:

R.I.S.E. was apparently founded in mid-November 1971. The precise meaning of the group’s name is unknown, but one police informant indicated that the “R” stood for Reconstruction, the “S” for Society, and the “E” for Extermination (the source could not recall the meaning of the “I”).

Schwandner articulated the group’s ideology in a six-page “manifesto” that he kept in a binder in his apartment…The manifesto started with an assertion that mankind was destroying itself and the planet, and that the only way to preserve the environment was for the human race to be wiped out except for a select group of people who would live in harmony with nature. According to the document, the world would be a better place if it were inhabited only by a small group of like-minded people who agreed on how to address its problems. With the ultimate aim of repopulating the planet, Schwandner planned to recruit people into the group who would select a mate of the opposite sex. He reportedly envisioned that R.I.S.E. would ultimately include sixteen people, comprising eight male-female pairs.

Once their plan was foiled, the pair fled to Cuba, where they suffered through a predictably awful spell in prison. Stephen Pera was the lucky one, in that he eventually got to return to the U.S. and get off with a light punishment. Allen Schwandner does not appear to have been ; sometimes the wages of youthful idiocy is death.

The Narcissism of Scoundrels

After six years on the run, con man David Scott Srail was finally nabbed at a San Antonio airport last week. His capture was due in part to the efforts of a Florida woman, Jacira Paolino, whose daughter was swindled by Srail. Since virtually the moment that Srail went on the lam, Paolino has maintained a website detailing his crimes—a site that includes a four-page handwritten letter in which the scammer unwittingly reveals the depths of his narcissism. Read the whole thing if you have even the slightest interest in the psychology of sociopaths—Srail goes to amazing lengths to make himself an object of pity, when the real purpose of the letter is to inform a victim that all is lost. The lack of conscience layered beneath the veneer of empathy is quite a wonder to behold.

A Rule Made to be Broken

Over on the ol’ microblog, I probably link to a half-dozen intriguing tales per day, most of which I forget about a few moments after posting. But every so often, one of the stories I toss into the flotsam sticks with me for days, even weeks, to the point that I need to sit down and figure out why it’s still occupying space in my head. Such is the case with this complex prison saga from Alaska, which centers on a guard who was fired for violating a workplace rule: he brought a pocket knife into the facility. But his violation was only discovered after he used that pocket knife to save life:

When Spalding ordered inmates into lockdown, most went to their cells. One refused. “Let’s do this,” the inmate said to him, the same phrase used the day before.

Spalding figured an attack was coming and tried to leave. The inmate, a muscular 22-year-old serving seven years for robbery and assault, got between him and the door. They stared at each other. Then the inmate punched him in the head, Spalding said. Spalding tried again for the door.

“About that time, someone jumps me on the back or someone hits me from behind, I’m not sure what. But there was contact,” Spalding said.

A tornado of fighting men lurched toward the locked door. “I’m getting hit, punched, stuff like that, the whole time,” Spalding said. A third inmate joined in. “If I don’t do something now, I am dead,” Spalding remembers thinking.

He was pressed against a glass wall as he fished for his knife. “I finally get it out, I open it, I turn and then just start thrusting at anything that moved,” Spalding said.

He remembers falling to the floor. “They are putting the boots to me.”

The attack seemed to go on forever but lasted less than a minute, he said.

“One of them said, ‘Hey guys, he’s got a knife,’ ” and the inmates backed off, Spalding said. He got up. Everything was red from blood running into his eyes.

As the story makes clear, the security situation within the prison was so woeful that several guards felt compelled to carry added protection, despite knowing full well that they risked their jobs by doing so. They obviously feared for their lives more than they feared for their employment.

The question, then, is whether they had exhausted all other avenues to address their security concerns before going vigilante on the situation. At what point do we accept that people have no choice but to take the most extreme measures to protect themselves, even when those measures run contrary to established laws? There’s so much rich philosophical terrain to explore in this tale. Though for those directly involved, such questions are probably secondary to more basic issues, like when they’ll get their next paycheck.

The Perception of Risk

It’s a good thing I didn’t encounter this graph until after the Grand Emprette joined us here on Spaceship Earth. It’s a salient reminder that the simple act of producing life is still several times more hazardous than any thrill-seeking leisure activity, no matter how seemingly nuts.

It’s worth noting that this graph would have an even more disturbing tilt if it wasn’t using British figures for maternal mortality; the rate in the United States is far worse. And then there’s Benin.

Everyone’s a Critic

In 1973, after a student complained about the language in Slaughterhouse Five, the administration at Drake (N.D.) High School decided to take rather dramatic action (see above). When informed of what had been done to his creation, author Kurt Vonnegut responded in the appropriate manner:

Vonnegut, asked for his reaction, said, “It’s grotesque and ridiculous. It’s like asking how do I feel about man-eating sharks.

Once the initial shock had worn off, Vonnegut dashed off a more eloquent letter to the offending school. It is of course to his great credit that the incident is now recalled with noticeable embarrassment by the people of North Dakota. Images of book incineration rarely, if ever, age well.

Bound for Moscow

The low-grade 1972 thriller Skyjacked plays a brief but important role in my upcoming book. Here’s a brief excerpt of the chapter in which I describe why this lesser Charlton Heston flick made a splash at the box office:

The film was controversial due to its subject matter, and numerous TV stations refused to run ads for it; one station manager in Washington, D.C., said he feared the movie would impel viewers with “impressionable minds” to seize planes. But Skyjacked nevertheless opened strongly at the box office, drawing moviegoers curious to experience the terror of life aboard a hijacked jet.

Despite an all-star cast that included Rosey Grier and Yvette Mimieux in addition to Heston, Skyjacked was a dreadful movie riddled with plot holes. Based on a pulp novel called Hijacked, the movie was a halfhearted whodunit in which the skyjacker initially communicates his threats by anonymously scrawling messages on a lavatory mirror. It is no great shock when the culprit is revealed to be a stereotypically frazzled Vietnam vet, played by the thirty-one-year-old . Upset over his treatment by the Army, Brolin’s character decides to escape to the Soviet Union, where he is certain that he will be given a hero’s welcome. His daft plan unsurprisingly fails, though not until the Boeing 707 is on the ground in Moscow.

Strangely, Heston doesn’t get the honor of dispatching the traitorous Brolin. That feat is instead accomplished by (SPOILER ALERT!) the Soviet military, which rather randomly decides that this crazy hijacker won’t fit into the dictatorship of the proletariat. Brolin really should have chosen a more laid-back destination.

A Koan for Our Times

Apologies for the sporadic posting these last couple of weeks. I’m neck deep in a million things as the book nears publication, including those all-important updates on Skyjacker of the Day. Fear not, though, this enterprise still lives, and posts shall be issuing at more traditional rate starting early next week.

For the moment, though, I’d like to direct your attention to this Utican tale of a mass-murder survivor, which delves into one of Microkhan’s favorite issues: how a brush with catastrophic death alters the soul. The protagonist of the story, a 66-year-old barber whose co-worker was killed, is obviously still coming to grips with why he was spared, and how he should proceed with the precious time he has remaining. There’s a point in the story where he flicks at the notion of karmic reward, but I much prefer the inquisitive sentiment he expresses in the kicker:

Seymour knows there wasn’t much difference between him and the other well-respected and much-loved men who died that day.

“So what saved you?” Seymour’s mother asked her son.

“He missed,” Seymour replied.

Out of the mouths of the nearly murdered, wisdom flows.

Lord of the Elvers

If you want to know why elver-related crime is on the rise in Maine (and elsewhere), look no further than the chart above, which shows just how valuable those wriggly little creatures have become in the past few years. As this dissection of the political tussle over fishing licenses reveals, the Asian appetite for baby eels is having a significant ripple effect on the Down East economy:

Landing records reflect the impact of market price on the size of Maine’s recent annual eel harvests. In 2008, Maine’s eel catch weighed in at 6,951 pounds, with a value of $1.5 million, or $216 a pound. By 2010, the take was down to 3,185 pounds with a market value of $585,000, or $184 a pound. Both the harvest and its value spiked in 2012 at 19,000 pounds worth $38 million at a record-high per-pound price of $2,000.

My hunch is that the elver bubble is set to pop, mostly because prices have reached the point where it makes more sense for restaurateurs to try and fool diners than buy the genuine article. What percentage of those who consume elvers at the end of the supply chain can really tell the difference between the bona fide foodstuff and a cheap imitation? Certainly far less than the warring factions in Maine might care to admit.

Money Equals Life

The Papuan taipan is arguably the deadliest snake in the world, but not only because of the intensity of its venom. The creature kills humans at such an alarming rate primarily because the antidote to its bite is too expensive for most Papuan medical facilities to afford. That unfortunate fact could soon change, though, thanks to research out of Costa Rica’s Instituto Clodomiro Picado, which is developing an affordable taipan antivenom called TaipanOx-ICP. This fascinating interview about the medication’s upcoming clinical trials sheds light on why creating antivenoms is such a labor-intensive exercise:

Anti-venoms are made by immunising a horse with selected snake venoms, so that the horse makes antibodies and these antibodies are extracted from the horse’s plasma and refined so that they’re fit to be given by the intravenous route to human snakebite victims. And the Costa Ricans, as I say, have found a much simpler, less expensive, but no less safe and no less effective method.

If anyone can point me toward a readable history of antivenom development, I’d be much obliged. I’d be interested to know how horses were settled upon as the ideal animals for antibody production. Were other animals tried out first, with disappointing results?