Revealing What Has Been Hidden in Front of Our Eyes

I would like to bring your attention to the subject of Incline Railways known as funiculars in this video.

This type of incline railway works like an obliquely-angled elevator, in which cables attached to a pulley-system raise- and-lower the cars along the grade.

Two cars are paired at opposite-ends and act as each other’s counterweight. As such, there is not a need for traction between the wheels and rails, and thereby allowing them to scale steep slopes, unlike traditional rail-cars.

Thing is, there used to be a lot more of them than there are now, and incline-railways were a worldwide thing.

We are told that the first railway in America was an incline-railway built in Lewiston, New York between 1762 and 1764.

It was called Montresor’s Tramway, and said to have been designed and built by British engineers at the close of the French and Indian War (1756 – 1763) to haul goods up the steep slope at the Niagara River near the Niagara Falls escarpment at Lewiston, New York.

No longer in existence, we are told it was located where the Earl W. Brydges Artpark State Park, otherwise known as the “Artpark,” is today.

Lewiston is described as the first European settlement in western New York, established in 1720.

Lewiston lies half-way between Fort Niagara in Youngstown, New York, and Fort George in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, where the Niagara River meets Lake Ontario, and Niagara Falls, a group of three falls that straddle the international border between the United States and Canada.

Further south, Fort Erie in Ontario is located across the Niagara River from Buffalo, New York, where the river meets Lake Erie.

It is interesting to note that there is an incline railway that is still operational today at Niagara Falls in Ontario, approximately 5-miles, or 8-kilometers, south of Lewiston on the Niagara River.

The Falls Incline Railway is located next to Horseshoe Falls and links “Table Rock Center” and “Journey Behind the Falls” on the Niagara Parkway with the “Fallsview Tourist Area.”

We are told it was built for the Niagara Parks Commission by the Swiss Company Von Roll, and began operating in October of 1966.

The other historic Incline Railways of the Niagara Falls region between the United States and Canada included:

The Prospect Park Incline Railway at Prospect Park in New York, said to have been built in 1845, and completely removed in 1908 after an accident killed someone.

It was then replaced by an elevator that operated between 1910 and 1960 until it closed, and replaced by the current Prospect Point Observation Tower in 1961.

Then in 1869, the Leander Colt Incline Railway was said to have been built on the Canadian-side of the Falls, near the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge, but damaged and abandoned 20-years later in 1889.

Another Whirlpool Rapids Incline was said to have been built in 1876 near the Leander Colt Incline, but damaged by fire in 1934 and replaced by the “Great Gorge Trip” of the Niagara Belt-Line, a train route around Niagara Falls…

…which later became the “White Water Walk” where you can take a leisurely stroll where the Niagara Belt-Line once was.

Lastly, we are told the Clifton Incline was built in 1894 to serve the Canadian-side of the “Maid of the Mist” boat.

It closed in 1976 and reopened in 1977 as the “Maid of the Mist” Incline, and closed again in 1990.

Almost 30-years-later, in 2019, it was re-opened as the Hornblower Niagara Funicular, and operates today for Hornblower Niagara Cruises.

There were two historic incline railways that operated on the Niagara Escarpment in Hamilton, Ontario.

One was the Mount Hamilton Railway, also known as the Wentworth Street Incline, which started operation in 1895 and ended in 1936.

The other historic incline railway in Hamilton was the Hamilton and Barton, also known as the James Street Incline, first opened in 1892 and operated until 1932, when it was shut down for the given reason of financial losses.

As an interesting aside, compare the Niagara Escarpment on the left in appearance with the Endless Wall at New River Gorge State Park in West Virginia on the right.

Another Incline Railway still in operation today in Canada is the Old Quebec Funicular, located next to the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City.

It first opened in 1879. In the well-over 100-years it has been operating it has been closed and renovated twice.

The first-time was when it was severely damaged by a fire in 1945, after which time it was rebuilt and reopened in 1946.

The second-time was when a cable snapped in 1996, killing a passenger, and the funicular wasn’t reopened until 1998 as an inclined elevator, since the cars are independent of each other.

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, there are two remaining incline railways, out of what was originally seventeen on Mount Washington, named the Monongahela and Duquesne Inclines.

The Monongahela Incline on Mount Washington was said to have been designed by Prussian-born engineer John Endres of Cincinnati, Ohio, and started operating in 1870.

It is the oldest continuously operating funicular in the United States.

Interesting to note that 1870, the same year the Monongahela Incline became operational in Pittsburgh, was also the same year John D. Rockefeller and Henry Flagler, founded the Standard Oil Company.

The Standard Oil Company was an American oil producing, transporting, refining, marketing company…and monopoly, which exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity.

Were they making existing rail transportation infrastructure operational until they had the modes of transportation invented to replace them – specifically the introduction of gasoline-powered road transportation? 

Let’s see more of what the historical narrative has to say about these incline railways!

The Duquesne Incline was said to have been designed by Hungarian-American civil engineer Samuel Diescher.

Completed in 1877, the Duquesne Incline rises 800-feet, or 244-meters, at a 30-degree angle up Mt. Washington.

It was closed in need of repairs in 1962, but reopened the next year after local residents raised funds to restore it, and it has been completely refurbished since then and is one of Pittsburgh’s most popular tourist attractions.

Oh yeah, before we leave Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the Forks of the Ohio River for Cincinnati, Ohio, on the Ohio River, it is also interesting to note that the petroleum industry in the United States began in earnest in 1859 when Edwin Drake found oil on a piece of leased-land near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in what is now called Oil Creek State Park.

For this reason, Titusville is called the Birthplace of the Oil Industry, and for a number of years this part of Pennsylvania was the leading oil-producing region in the world.

Cincinnati had five historic incline railways.

Mount Auburn was Cincinnati’s first incline railway, which started operating in 1872.

In 1889, there was a terrible accident where a malfunction caused the car to careen down the track with 7 people in it, causing death and destruction along the way.

It was remodelled, opening again in 1890, and only operated for another 8-years. Control of it passed into the consolidated system, and it was demolished and abandoned.

Public stairs, known as the Main Street steps, replaced the Mount Auburn Incline.

In 1875, the Price Hill Incline was the next to open in Cincinnati.

It was the steepest, and shortest, of the five, and carried passengers and freight.

It was privately-owned by the Price family, and carried passengers to the Price Hill House at the top, a restaurant and entertainment venue.

The incline stopped operating in 1942.

This is where the Price Hill Incline was located.

Cincinnati’s third incline to open was the one on Mount Adams, the longest-running of the five, operating from 1876 until 1948.

The incline of 945-feet, or 288-meters, took 2 minutes and 20-seconds to go from the bottom to the top.

For almost twenty-years, from 1876 to 1895, the Highland House at the top of the incline was a destination for food and entertainment.

This was the former location of the Mount Adams Incline.

Opening the same year as the Mount Adams Incline, the Bellevue Incline, also known as the Elm Street Incline and the Clifton Inclined Plane, started operating in 1876.

It was 1,000-feet, or 305-meters ,- long and the highest in elevation of the five inclines.

The Bellevue Incline ran between the Jackson Brewery and McMicken Hall, the University of Cincinnati’s first college.

The Bellevue House opened the same year as the incline, and served Moerlein beer, and had entertainment like music and bowling.

Bellevue House unfortunately burned down in 1901 and the Incline closed 25-years later.

The fifth and last incline railway was said to have been constructed in Cincinnati in 1892.

It had no entertainment house at the top to draw passengers.

It closed in 1923, the second of the five to close-down.

Moving west across the country to look at some of the historic incline railways there, in Duluth, Minnesota, the Highland Park Tramway Line served Duluth Heights via an Incline-Railway from 1892 to 1939, which was the last piece of the electric streetcar system to be dismantled, as the rest started going away in the early 1930s.

In Iowa, the Fenelon Place Cable Car is found in Dubuque’s Cathedral Historic District, and is described as the world’s steepest, shortest scenic railway, said to have been built in 1882 for the private-use of J. K. Graves, a local banker and State Senator.

It is still in operation today.

There was an historic Incline Railway at the Royal Gorge in Canon City, Colorado.

George Cole of the Royal Gorge Bridge and Amusement Company was given credit for the design and supervision construction first of the Royal Gorge Bridge, at the time World’s Highest Suspension Bridge, composed of 2,100 strands of wire that are anchored in granite walls and suspended from four towers rising 75-feet, or 23-meters, above the roadway.

It was said to have been constructed between June and November of 1929 (which would have been the year the Great Depression began).

The bridge is contained within the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park, a theme park on the edge of the gorge around both ends of the bridge, which itself was said to have been built as a park attraction and not for actual use for road transportation.

George Cole was then credited with the construction of the world’s steepest incline railway in 1931 to transport passengers from the canyon rim to its floor and back.

A wildfire in 2013 damaged the Incline Railway as well as most of the park’s buildings and aerial tram.

The park was rebuilt and reopened in 2015, but the Incline Railway was among the attractions not restored as it was destroyed beyond repair.

Like the historic railroad that once-traversed the Niagara Gorge in New York and Ontario, there is a rail-line running through the Royal Gorge in Colorado, only this one is still in operation today, year-road, between Canon City and Parkdale, Colorado.

In California, I found several historic incline railways, one of which is still in operation and others are not.

Angels Flight on Bunker Hill in Los Angeles, which first operated from 1901 until 1969, is still in operation today.

We are told that it was moved a half-block south from its original location when it reopened as a tourist attraction in 1996, and has run almost continuously since then, with a few exceptions, like closing for nine-years following a fatal accident.

Angels Flight has a decidedly Moorish-looking appearance….

Court Flight also on Bunker Hill opened in 1905 and ascended 200-feet, or 61-meters, at a grade of 43-degrees. It functioned for only 39-years, closing in 1943 we are told because of low-profitability during World War II.

The Los Angeles and Mount Washington Incline Railway in Los Angeles opened in 1909.

Passengers could ride the incline railway to the top for 5-cents, and they could visit Mount Washington Hotel at the top, a grand hotel.

Alas, less than only 10-years after it opened, city inspectors determined that the railway was unsafe due to a worn cable and subsequently shut it down in 1918.

The Grand Hotel at the top of Mount Washington became the International Headquarters for Paramahansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship in 1920.

The Santa Catalina Incline Railway on the privately-owned by that time Santa Catalina Island climbed above the Avalon Amphitheater starting in 1905 as a tourist attraction, until its closure after a fire in that devastated Avalon in 1918.

Moving on to incline railways, AKA funiculars, around the world, here are more examples.

In the United Kingdom, there is history of at least 40 of them that I can find a reference to. Though quite a few of these funiculars are still in operation today, quite a few are not.

There is the water-powered Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway in North Devon, which is the highest and steepest water-powered funicular in the world, at 862-feet, or 263-meters, -long, said to have been built between 1887 and its opening in 1890.

The Clifton Rocks Railway in Bristol, England, was an underground funicular railway that first opened in March of 1893 and closed in October of 1934, and funded by George Newnes, a publisher and proprietor of the Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway.

Like what we saw in Niagara Falls region with the historic funiculars at the Niagara Gorge near the Whirlpool Rapids Bridge between New York and Ontario, and in Colorado with the Royal Gorge Bridge and Incline Railway, the Clifton Rocks Railway upper station was near the Clifton Suspension bridge, and it linked to Hotwells and Bristol Harbor at the bottom of another gorge, the Avon Gorge.

The existence of the Clifton Suspension Bridge was credited to the famous prolific British civil and mechanical engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, called “one of the 19th-century engineering giants.”

The Aberystwyth Cliff Railway in Aberystwyth, Wales, is the longest electric funicular in the British Isles, at 778-feet, or 237-meters-long, and the second-longest after the Lynton and Lynmouth Cliff Railway.

It first opened in August of 1896, and is still in operation today.

Kings Hall was at the top of the Aberystwyth Cliff Funicular and was a favored entertainment venue there for concerts and dances.

It had a great dance floor, and said to have been built in the Art Deco Architecture style in 1934 (which would have been between World War I and World War II).

Major band concerts were also held there, like Led Zeppelin in January of 1973 during their Strange Affinity British Tour in 1972 and 1973.

The King’s Hall was demolished in 1989, for the given reason of apparent structural weaknesses and disrepair…

…and it was replaced where it stood on the corner of Marine Terrace and Terrace Road by the King’s Hall residential flats and commercial units.

In Australia, the Cloudland Funicular ran from the Main Road straight up to the Cloudland Dance Hall in the Bowen Hills suburb of Brisbane.

The funicular was demolished in 1967.

The Cloudland Dance Hall, also known as Luna Park, was a huge thing during the 40’s when the US troops were stationed there.

Like Kings Hall in Aberystwyth, Wales, the Cloudland had a great dance floor.

Also like Kings Hall in Wales, it was demolished in the 1980s, and the Cloudland Apartments occupy the former location of this iconic landmark.

In New Zealand, the Wellington Cable Car funicular is still operational today, and first started operating in 1902.

It connects the shopping district of Lambton Quay with the suburb of Kelburn.

The line consists of a single track with a passing loop in the middle for the two cars.

The Tunel Funicular in Istanbul, Turkey, first opened in 1875, and is the second-oldest fully-underground urban railway in the world after the London Underground, which opened in 1863.

The Tunel also has a single-track with a passing loop for the two cars.

It connects the quarters of Karakoy, the modern name for the old part of the city originally known as Galata and Beyoglu, originally known as Pera.

The Tunel’s existence was credited to French engineer Eugene-Henri Gavand, who in 1867 visited Istanbul, which was then Constantinople, as a tourist, and came up with the idea of designing a funicular to help all the people who were struggling to get up-and-down the steep Yuksek Kaldirim Avenue.

It was said to have been constructed between July of 1871 and December of 1874, and officially opened in January of 1875.

I can’t find anything about Eugene-Henri Gavand except for this book attributed to him about the Tunel.

The Buda Castle Hill Funicular in Budapest, Hungary, first opened in March of 1870, the same year as the Monogahela Incline in Pittsburgh and the founding of Standard Oil, and around the same time that the construction of the Tunel in Constantinople that we are told was starting in 1871.

Part of the destruction of the Buda Castle complex during World War II, it reopened in June of 1986.

The funicular links Adam Clark Square and the Szchenyi Chain Bridge at street-level to the Buda Castle above, the palace complex of the Hungarian Kings.

The Szchenyi Chain Bridge was said to have been designed by English engineer William Tierney Clark, and built by Scottish engineer Adam Clark starting in 1840 and opening in 1849, and that it was the first permanent bridge to cross the Danube River in Hungary.

At the time of its construction, it was considered one of the modern world’s engineering wonders.

As I mentioned previously, these incline railways known as funiculars were a worldwide thing.

Other historic and present-day locations include:

Jacob’s Ladder on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean.

A two-car inclined railway to carry cargo between Jamestown and the Fort was said to have been constructed in 1829 .

The power supply for the incline railway was a team of three-donkeys that rotated around a capstan connected to the cars by iron chain and pulleys.

Then in 1871, termite damage to the wooden ties of the railway led to the Royal Engineers to removing the cars, rails and associated machinery of the inclined railway.

Today, what became known as Jacob’s Ladder is a staircase leading from Jamestown, the capital city of St. Helena, up to Ladder Hill Fort and the suburb of Half Tree Hollow.

In Valparaiso, Chile, the oldest of the incline railways known as the Ascensor Concepcion, is still in operation today.

It first opened in 1883 to transport passengers from Elias Alley on the Plan de Concepcion, or the flat part of the city where public and commercial buildings are found, to the Gervasoni Promenade on Concepcion Hill.

The total railway length is 226-feet, or 60-meters, and it climbs 154-feet, or 47-meters, above sea-level at a 46-degree angle.

In Hong Kong, the Peak Tram started operating in May of 1888, and was said to be the first funicular in Asia.

Now owned and operated by Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels (HSH), it runs from Garden Road Admiralty to Victoria Peak, covering a distance of .87-miles, or 1.4-kilometers.

It is a single-track-line with a passing loop, and two curves, one at the bottom and one at the top.

There are many more examples to choose from, but here’s a couple more to leave you with before I end this post.

In India, there is an incline railway known as the “winch train” to get up to the Murugan Temple in Palani in southern India’s Tamil Nadu State.

It was said to have been first commissioned in 1966 originally to help get the elderly, sick and handicapped people to the temple at the top of the hill.

And lastly, the Penang Hill Railway that climbs Penang Hill outside of George Town in Malaysia’s Penang State.

It is a single-track railway with a passing loop that passes through a tunnel that is the steepest in the world.

The construction of the Penang Hill Railway was said to have started in 1909 and officially opened on January 1st of 1924.

The given reason for it having initially been constructed was for the British colonial community to enjoy the cooler air of Penang Hill.

As you can see from the examples provided in this video, there used to be a lot more of these inclined railways than there are now, and they were all over the world, including one on Saint Helena, a small island in the South Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa.

Of the Incline Railways no longer in existence, they were typically either deemed no longer profitable, unsafe, or destroyed by fire.

The same is true for historic trolley parks, most of which are long gone due primarily to fire, though a few amusement parks remain in their original locations, but without the trolley, like Camden Park in Huntingdon, West Virginia.

Of this type of incline railway still in operation today, they either operate as part of the tourist industry, or are still operating as part of the public transportation system.

It certainly appears as if those behind the reset of history didn’t want to keep any of the highly-advanced rail infrastructure found around the world that was problematic in our historical narrative unless they could profit from it or it made practical sense from a public transport sense to keep it in place.

Something to think about when trying to piece together what has taken place here without our knowledge or consent.

I am giving an overview of history since 1945 in this series, with an eye towards uncovering the patterns that give insight into the world we live in today, and in this part will be focusing on events that took place between 1993 and 1995.

So far, patterns uncovered since 1945 show events and people being manipulated for particular outcomes, and deceiving us about what was really going on to gain our consent…

…seeing hereditary rulers being taken down and replaced with new governments, with examples of like communist, socialist and autocratic-theocratic, leading to genocide and repression of millions of people…

…since the 1980s, multiple events seeding our collective Human consciousness with the notion we could meet a violent and horrible death, anywhere and anytime…

…and at the same experienced the rise of the personal computer, internet, and world-wide web.

Starting in the 1990s, at the same time we saw the fall of the centralized communist systems of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, we saw the rise of war and violence between different ethnic groups in the former republics of the countries, resulting in the genocide of the people…

…and the destruction of infrastructure in this civil and political warfare…

…the First Gulf War in Kuwait…

…violent weather…

…violent earthquakes…

…and airplane, and other transportation disasters as they have been occurring quite frequently from what I have been finding in the historical record in both the 1990s so far, and also in the decade of the 1980s that I looked at in the last part of the series.

I will now pick up the 1990s in 1993, where I left off.

The European Economic Community eliminated trade barriers and created a European Single Market on January 1st of 1993.

It was comprised of the 27 member states of the European Union, and the four non-member states of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland.

It referred to the European Union as one territory without any internal borders or regulatory obstacles to the free movement of goods and services, with the stated goal of guaranteeing the free movement of goods, services, capital and people, also known as the “four freedoms.”

EuroNews was launched in Lyons, France, on the same day, a multilingual television news network aimed to cover news from a Pan-European perspective.

This neon-green cube has been the new EuroNews Headquarters since 2015.

I don’t know, what do you think?

It was constructed at the confluence of Lyons’ Rhone and Saone Rivers…

…which is described as being transformed into a dynamic business and commercial hub from what was a run-down and neglected area.

It almost looks as if the old masonry building is being imprisoned in the new architecture!

I can think of another city at the confluence of two rivers that was once a busy commercial hub back in the day.

This city is Cairo, the southernmost point in Illinois, which is situated at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

Cairo is largely-abandoned today, and is considered a ghost town.

In its heyday, Cairo was an important city along the steamboat routes and railway lines. 

Fort Defiance, described as a Civil War-era fort, was located right at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

On January 3rd, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and U. S. President George H. W. Bush signed the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, also known as START II, banning the use of Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) on Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs).

Funny thing is, the treaty never really went into effect.

While it was ratified by the U. S. Senate in 1996, the Russians ratified it in 2000, and instead withdrew from the treaty in 2002.

The Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) came into effect instead in June of 2003 through February of 2011.

It reduced the number of strategic warheads count for each country to 1,700 from 2,200.

The fifth-largest robbery in U. S. History took place on January 5th, which was the theft of $7.4 million stolen from the Brink’s Armored Car depot, in Rochester, New York.

I looked at two big robberies in the last part of this series, the still-unsolved, largest art theft in U. S. history on March 18th of 1990, at which time twelve paintings and a Chinese Shang Dynasty vase, all together worth $100 to $300 million, were stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Art Museum…

…and the City Bonds Robbery in the City of London, which took place on May 2nd of 1990, the largest robbery in world history where a courier was robbed of 301 bearer-bonds, worth 292-million pounds, and 299 of the bonds were ultimately recovered.

The City Bonds Robbery was believed to be a sophisticated global operation which involved the New York Mafia, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and Colombian drug barons.

In the Brinks Robbery, an Irish Priest in New York and an ex-guerilla fighter from Northern Ireland were eventually convicted of the robbery, for the stated reason of helping the Provisional Irish Republican Army.

On the same day as the Brinks’ Robbery, on January 5th, the MV Braer, a Liberian-registered oil tanker, ran aground at Garths Ness in northern Scotland’s Shetland Islands when it was enroute from Bergen, Norway to Quebec, Canada, loaded with 85,000-metric tonnes, or 94,000-tons of crude oil, causing oil to leak into the sea.

The reason given for the oil tanker’s grounding was that it had lost power after seawater contaminated the ship’s heavy fuel two-days earlier, when a pipeline on deck broke loose.

While there was an immediate environmental response, and work was being done to contain and clean-up the spill, it spread northward up the west side of the Shetland Islands.

So there was lots going on here related to the January 5th spill…

…when along came what became known as the Braer Storm, named after the MV Braer, on January 8th, which was the most intense extra-tropical cyclone ever recorded over the North Atlantic, the lowest low ever…

…and was the fastest-deepening, mid-latitude depression in history, with central pressure dropping 78 mbs in a 24-hour period, which resulted in what is called “Explosive Cyclogenesis,” or the explosive genesis of a cyclone, and took place just west of the Shetland Islands.

It caused severe blizzards across most of Scotland, and the final break-up of the MV Braer oil tanker.

Was it just a coincidence that the major environmental disaster of the MV Braer spilling its oil into the sea and the most intense extra-tropical cyclone ever recorded formed within days of each other in the vicinity of the Shetland Islands? Or not.

Something to think about.

The Polish Ferry Jan Heweliusz sank, as a result of hurricane-force winds, off the coast of Rugen in the Baltic Sea on January 14th, the most deadly peace-time maritime disaster involving a Polish ship, killing at least 54 of the passengers and crew.

Bill Clinton was sworn in as the 42nd-president on January 20th.

The first World Trade Center Bombing took place on February 26th.

A truck bomb was blown-up below the North Tower of the complex, in the parking garage.

The truck contained a 1,336-lb (606 kg) urea nitrate-hydrogen, gas-enhanced device, which was said to have been intended to send the North Tower crashing into the South Tower.

This is what the U. S. State Department website says about it:

“On February 26th, a bomb exploded in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. This event was the first indication for the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) that terrorism was evolving from a regional phenomenon outside of the United States to a transnational phenomenon.“

From what the State Department had it say about it, it sounds like the first World Trade Center bombing in February of 1993 marked the beginning of acts of terrorism in the United States, and took place just a little after a month after Bill Clinton took office.

The investigation into the bombing led to ties with Al-Qaeda, and in March of 1994, four men were convicted of carrying out the bombing, which killed six people and injured over 1,000.

Two days after that, on February 28th, the Waco Siege began in Texas.

The Waco Siege involved the law enforcement siege of the Mount Carmel Center compound of the Branch Davidians, located 13-miles, or 21-kilometers, northeast of Waco.

The information that is found in the historical record is that due to suspected stockpiling of illegal weapons, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) had obtained a search warrant for the compound, and arrest warrants for the group’s leader, David Koresh, and several others in the group.

When the ATF attempted to serve the warrants, a gunfight ensued, and four officers were killed along with six Branch Davidians.

With the failure of the ATF to implement the search warrant, the FBI initiated a siege of the compound.

After 51-days, the FBI resorted to a tear gas attack to force the Branch Davidians out.

What came next was a fire that engulfed the Mount Carmel Center, that was ultimately officially blamed on the Branch Davidians themselves …

…that resulted in the deaths of 81 Branch Davidians, including women and children.

On March 5th, Macedonian Palair Flight 301 on a flight to Zurich crashed shortly after take-off from Skopje, killing 83 of 97 on-board.

At the time, it was the deadliest plane crash in the history of the country.

The cause of the crash was attributed to atmospheric icing and pilot error.

On March 11th, Janet Reno was confirmed by the Senate and sworn in as first female U. S. Attorney General the next day.

The Bombay bombings occurred on March 12th, killing 257 and injuring an estimated 1,400 more.

The Bombay bombings were a series of at least 12 bombings that took place in one day.

The bomb attacks started at 1:30 pm that day, when a powerful car bomb exploded in the basement of the Bombay Stock Exchange building.

The car bomb severely damaged the 28-story stock exchange building and other nearby buildings.

Following the bombing of the stock exchange, car and scooter bombs exploded throughout the city, and suitcase bombs were exploded at three hotels, like the Hotel Sea Rock.

The estimated number of deaths and injuries from the Bombay bombing spree were at least 257 fatalities, and 1,400 injuries.

The Great Blizzard of 1993 took place between March 13th and March 15th, bringing record snowfall all the way from Cuba to Quebec.

Also dubbed “The Storm of the Century,” it formed over the Gulf of Mexico on March 12th, and was notable for its massive size, intensity, and wide-reaching effects.

Heavy snow was reported in places like Alabama, the Florida Panhandle, and Georgia, and the storm also brought hurricane force wind-gusts and record-low barometric pressures.

The 32-year-old actor Brandon Lee’s death took place on March 31st, the son of martial artist and actor, Bruce Lee.

Brandon’s cause-of-death is cited as being shot in the abdomen by a gun with defective blank ammunition at the Wilmington movie studios on the set of “The Crow” in March of 1993.

Brandon Lee landed what was to be his breakthrough acting role in “The Crow” as the lead character, Eric Draven, a murdered musician who was resurrected by a crow, and went on to avenge the deaths of himself and his fiancee.

Brandon Lee had finished most of his scenes before his death, so the film was finished through script re-writes, a stunt-double, and digital effects, and the film was dedicated to Brandon Lee…and his fiance, Eliza Hutton.

Sounds incredibly similar to the death of the Australian actor Heath Ledger in 2008, who was said to have received inspiration for the make-up for his role as the Joker in “The Dark Knight” from Brandon Lee in “The Crow…”

…and who, at the age of 28, also died before the filming of the movie was complete, in his case from “acute-combined drug-intoxication” after he had finished filming his role a few months prior…

…and while he was in the middle of filming his last role in “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.”

Back to 1993.

In April & May of 1993, the Four-Corners area of the American Southwest was hit with an outbreak with the newly-recognized pulmonary Hantavirus syndrome.

This region is largely-occupied by the tribal lands including the Hopi, Navajo, Ute, and Zuni.

This was the first-known outbreak of Hantavirus in the United States, and said to be carried by deer-mice, and was said to have been spread through contact with “aerosolized” deer-mice droppings…

… in enclosed spaces in and around those who contracted the Hantavirus.

The Great Flood of 1993 occurred in the United States between April and October, when the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers flooded large parts of the American Midwest.

One of the most costly and devastating floods ever to occur in the United States, the cost in damages was said to be $15-billion, and the flooded area totalled around 30,000-square-miles, or 78,000-kilometers-squared.

Repetitive and persistent storms bombarded the Upper Midwest with considerable rainfall, with many areas across the north-central plains having rainfall 400 to 750% above-normal.

The Srebrenica Massacre took place in Bosnia on April 12th, at which time the Bosnian Serb Army launched an artillery attack on Srebrenica, and Bosnian Muslim enclave that believed it was under UN protection, and had numerous Bosnian muslim refugees from surrounding settlements coming there.

The artillery attack left 56 dead and 73 seriously wounded, including 14 children who were killed when an artillery shell hit a school playgorund.

Even though the UN declared Srebrenica, and several other Bosnian cities, as Safe Areas on April 16th, it was considered to be one of the most controversial decisions of the UN, and the resolutions were unclear about how these areas were to be protected in a war zone.

It led to a diplomatic crisis, and another massacre took place in Srebrenica in July of 1995, one of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II, when more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed by the Bosnian Serb Army.

On April 24th of 1993, the IRA detonated a powerful truck-bomb, loaded with fertilizer, on Bishopsgate, a major thoroughfare in the City of London, London’s financial district.

This is a view of the nearby Wormwood Street after the bomb detonated, for which there was a telephoned warning about an hour beforehand.

It took place on a Saturday, resulting in one-death, 44 injuries, and severely damaged St. Ethelburga’s, the smallest and one of the oldest churches in London…

…which has since been restored…

…and wrecked the Liverpool Street Station…

…and the NatWest Tower.

As a result of the bombing, combined with the bombing of the Baltic Exchange in the City of London the year prior, a “ring of steel” was implemented to protect the city.

Most of the Zambian National Football team died in a plane-crash in Gabon on April 27th, enroute to Dakar, Senegal, for the FIFA World Cup Qualifier against Senegal.

They were in a transport carrier of the Zambian Air Force, and the official investigation concluded that the pilot had shut down the wrong engine after an engine fire, causing the plane to lose all power when leaving the airport in Libreville, Gabon, and the plane crashed in the ocean.

On May 4th, The United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNISOM) II assumed Somalian duties after the dissolution of the US-led United Task Force (UNITAF).

UNISOM II was tasked with establishing a secure enough environment to carry out humanitarian operations by any means necessary.

The Nambjiya Mine disaster in Zamora, Ecuador took place on May 9th.

It involved a landslide that took place in a remote mining settlement in southeastern Ecuador, near Peru.

The Nambjiya Mining settlement, known as the “World’s Most Dangerous Gold Town,” is situated in a valley 2,600-meters, or 8,530-feet, above sea-level, with most of the houses built right on the tunnel entrances to the mines.

On this day, a large part of the mountain, above the mines and part of the town, collapsed, with estimates of the death toll ranging between 85 and 400, and is considered to be one of the worst mining disasters ever, even though mining was said to have continued in the settlement in the unaffected areas after the landslide.

The location of the landslide itself is an official graveyard.

The next day, on May 10th, a fire at the Kader Toy Factory fire took place in Bangkok, Thailand, killing 188 people and injuring 469. It is considered the worst industrial fire in history, with most of the victims being young women from rural Thailand. The toys, stuffed toys and plastic toys intended for export, were manufactured primarily for Disney and Mattel.

The fire exits drawn in the building plans were in fact not constructed, and the existing external doors were locked.

The fire started in the part of the building where fabrics, materials, and plastics were stored, providing fuel for the fire.

It is interesting to note that when I was investigating fire disasters back in the 1980s, locked doors were a common occurrence, with examples like the Cinema Statuto Fire in February of 1983, in Turin, Italy, that killed 64 people, and was the largest disaster in Turin since World War II, with the fire was said to have started from flames spread by an old curtain, and that the burning of the theater seats created hydrogen cyanide fumes, of which inhalation was the primary cause of death of the victims.

All but one of the theater’s emergency exits was said to have been closed and locked…

…and the Alcala 20 Nightclub in Madrid, Spain, in December of 1983, in which 82 people were killed and 27 injured, where an exit on the upper floor was locked, and a main exit to an adjoined building was closed with an iron-grille during the fire.

On May 17th, the new Pentium Processor was unveiled, the newest and fastest microprocessor created by the Intel Corporation.

There was a plane crash in Colombia, on May 19th, that killed all 132 people on-board after the aircraft collided with a mountain on approach to Medellin.

The crash was attributed to bad weather and pilot error.

Typhoon Koryn caused massive damage to the Philippines, China, and Macau between June 26th and June 28th.

It was the first typhoon, and it was a super typhoon, of the 1993 Pacific Typhoon season, which had no official bounds.

In a normal year, tropical cyclones, which can turn into typhoons, form between May and November.

In 1993, the season started in February and the last storm dissipated on January 1st of 1994.

Forty tropical cyclones formed in 1993, with 30 becoming tropical storms, 15 becoming typhoons, and 3 becoming, like Koryn, becoming super typhoon.

A typhoon, which is a tropical cyclone that forms in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, is classified as a super typhoon when it has wind-speeds of at least 120-mph, or 190-km/h.

President Bill Clinton authorized a cruise missile attack on Iraqi intelligence HQ in Baghdad on June 27th after an attempted assassination of George H. W. Bush in Kuwait in April.

On the night of April 13th that same year, when George H. W. Bush was scheduled to visit Kuwait City the next day to commemorate the International Coalition Victory against Iraq, Kuwaiti officials arrested 17 people in connection with a plot to kill Bush using plastic explosives hidden in a vehicle.

The authorized attacked was comprised of the launch of 23 cruise missiles by two U. S. Navy warships into downtown Baghdad, was claimed by the U. S. to hit the Iraqi intelligence Headquarters, and the Iraqis claimed that nine civilians were killed in the attack and 3 civilian houses destroyed.

Hurricane Calvin landed in Mexico on July 7th, which was 2nd hurricane on record to make landfall in Mexico. It was said to kill an estimated 30 to 40 people.

Throughout its journey along the Pacific coast of Mexico, it dropped heavy rainfall, and causing property damage, mudslides and flooding.

A magnitude 7.7 EQ hit southwest of Hokkaido on July 12th, and generated a tsunami.

The hardest hit location by these events in northern Japan was Hokkaido’s island of Okushiri, where 165 people were killed as a result of the earthquake, with the tsunami, and large landslide.

On July 26th, Asiana Airlines Flight 733 crashed into Mt. Ungeo in Haenam, South Korea, killing 68, with two survivors.

The cause was attributed to pilot error after two previously failed landing attempts because of bad weather.

The Royal Plaza Hotel at Nakha Ratchasima in Thailand collapsed on August 13th, killing 137 and injuring 227.

The collapse of the building took less than 10-seconds, which was attributed to gradual deformation from creep that weakened all the ground floor support columns.

The only part of the building left standing was the front elevator hall, which was said to have been separately built from the rest of the structure.

It was one of the most fatal and disastrous man-made accidents in Thai history, which took place only three-months after the world’s worst accidental loss-of-life fire in an industrial Building at the Kader Toy Factory in Bangkok, Thailand.

Hurricane Gert started out as large tropical cyclone that formed from a tropical wave in the Caribbean Sea, and became the 7th-named storm, and third hurricane, of the Atlantic Hurricane season.

It caused extensive flooding and mudslides throughout Central America and Mexico between September 15th and September 21st.

Hurricane Gert left behind disrupted road networks for extended periods of time, which hampered rescue missions and relief efforts in badly-flooded regions.

Damage costs amounted to $170-million, leaving private property, infrastructure, and farmland in ruins.

On September 22nd, the Big Bayou Canot Rail Disaster took place, near Mobile, Alabama, killing 47 people and injuring 103.

It involved the derailing of an Amtrak train on the CSX Transportation Big Bayou Canot Bridge after a towboat pulling heavy barges collided with the rail bridge eight-minutes earlier, causing a displacement of the span of the bridge and deformation of the rails.

It was the deadliest rail accident in Amtrak’s history, and the worst rail accident in the United States since the 1958 Newark Bay Rail accident, where 48 people were killed.

The pilot of the tugboat pulling the barges was said to have made a wrong turn in foggy conditions on the Mobile River, and entered the Big Bayou Canot; was not properly trained on how to read radar; and mistook the bridge on the radar for another tugboat.

After the accident, the pilot was not found to be criminally-liable for it.

On September 24th, the Cambodian monarchy was restored with Norodom Sihanouk as its king.

It is interesting to note that during his lifetime, Cambodia was variously called: the French Protectorate of Cambodia, until 1953; the Kingdom of Cambodia, from 1953 to 1970; the Khmer Republic from 1970 to 1975; the People’s Republic of Kampuchea from 1979 to 1989; the State of Cambodia from 1989 to 1993; and again the Kingdom of Cambodia, from 1993 to the present.

King Sihanouk abdicated in 2004, and the Royal Council of the Throne chose his oldest son, Norodom Sihamoni, as his successor, who is still the King of Cambodia.

King Sihamoni lived outside of Cambodia most of his life, having been educated in Czechoslovakia.

He is not married, and has no children.

Back to 1993.

A 6.2-magnitude, relatively shallow earthquake, known as the Latur Earthquake, shook Maharashtra, India, on September 30th.

As a result of the earthquake, approximately 10,000 people died; over 30,000 were injured; and around 50 villages were destroyed.

The Battle of Mogadishu, part of the broader Somali Civil War, took place between October 3rd and 4th in what was known as “Operation Gothic Serpent.”

It was also known as the “Black Hawk Down” incident.

The battle was a disaster for coalition troops and resulted in a major strategic victory for Somali National Alliance forces under the leadership of Mohamed Farrah Aidid.

The Battle of Mogadishu remains one of the most heavily devastating battles American troops ever experienced in close combat.

On October 10th, less than 3-months after the July 26th crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 733 into Mt. Ungeo in Haenam, South Korea, the South Korean Ferry Soehae capsized in the Yellow Sea, off Wido, South Korea, killing 292 of the 362 on-board, with 70 rescues.

Factors attributed to the capsizing of the ferry included: overcrowding, with 141 more passengers than safely allowed; harsh weather conditions; and a thick rope that was found wrapped around both propellor shafts, which was said to have been left behind by fishing operations.

On October 21st, a coup in Burundi resulted in the assassination of the new-elected President Melchior Ndadaye, who won the country’s presidency in a landmark, multi-party election in July of this same year.

His assassination sparked the Burundian Civil War, which we are told was the result of longstanding divisions, like in Rwanda, between the Hutus and Tutsis.

An estimated 300,000 died as a result of the Burundian Civil War, with children being used on both sides.

The German, then Belgian, colonial rulers of the region of Ruanda-Urundi, found it convenient to rule through the existing power structure, in which the Tutsis were the aristocrats & rulers.

The colonial powers fostered ethnic differences between the minority artistocratic Tutsis and majority Hutus, and Ruanda-Urundi became two countries upon independence in 1962.

Believed to be Nilotic origin, meaning indigenous to the Nile River Valley, the Tutsi people are historically a very tall people.

The Burundian Civil war lasted from October 21st of 1993 until May 15th of 2005, and the Rwandan Civil War started on October 1st of 1990, and ended on July 18th of 1994, with the end of the Rwandan genocide. More on Rwandan Genocide coming up in a close look at 1994.

The Maastricht Treaty took effect on November 1st, formally establishing the European Union.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed the legislative houses of United States, Canada, and Mexico between November 17th and November 22nd.

NAFTA created a trilateral trade bloc in North America, with the elimination or reduction of barriers to trade and investment between the three countries.

On November 20th, an international passenger flight travelling from Geneva, Switzerland to Skopje, Macedonia, crashed into Mount Trojani near Ohrid Macedonia, killing all 116 on-board, and was the deadliest plane crash in Macedonian history, taking place only a little-over eight-months since the prior deadliest place crash in Macedonian history on March 5th, 1993, as mentioned previously.

The cause of the accident was attributed to pilot error.

President Clinton signed NAFTA into law on December 8th.

On December 10th, id Software’s Doom was released, becoming a landmark title in first-person shooter video games for MS-DOS.

Players assumed the role of a space marine, named Doomguy, fighting his way through hordes of invading demons from hell.

Hmmmm.

Makes me wonder what they were trying to tell us here. Boy, if we knew then what we know now, as I really think hordes of demons is what we have all been dealing with here, without knowing it!

The next day, one-block, of three-blocks, of the Highland Towers near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, collapsed on December 11th.

The collapse buried the building’s occupants under tons of debris, with a total of 48 bodies found and two survivors.

The cause of the collapse was attributed to a major landslide caused by heavy rains that burst diversion pipes.

So far in 1993, as in the last parts of this series focusing on the 1980s and 1990s, we are seeing the same pattern of violent weather around the world…

…weather anomalies like the Great Blizzard on the East Coast and Great Flood of 1993 in the Midwest…

…earthquakes in different parts of the world…

…worst disasters ever of their kind happening one day after the other in different parts of the world…

…plane and train crashes…

…sinking ships…

…buildings just collapsing…

…civil wars…

…terrorism, and much more along these lines going on 1993.

So, what happened in 1994?

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was established, on January 1st, exactly one-year to the day after the European Economic Community eliminated trade barriers and created a European Single Market as previously mentioned.

On January 14th, President Bill Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin signed the Kremlin Accords, which ended the pre-programmed aiming of nuclear missiles towards each country’s targets, and provided for the taking apart of the nuclear arsenal in the Ukraine.

The 6.7 magnitude Northridge Earthquake took place on the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday in Los Angeles on Monday, January 17th, leaving 57 dead, and 8,700 injured.

It was the highest-ever, instrumentality recorded earthquake in an urban area in North America.

The 1994 North American cold wave took place during January of 1994, with extreme cold events taking place between January 18th and 19th, and again between January 21st and 22nd, and 67 cold temperature records set on January 19th, with Indiana and Kentucky setting state records on that same day.

The cold wave caused an estimated 100 deaths.

On February 6th, the Markale Massacres took place in a marketplace in Sarajevo.

On this day, a 120-milimeter mortar shell hit the middle of a crowded marketplace during the Bosnian War, which was part of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, between Bosnian Serbs and forces of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

As a result of this incident there were 68 dead and 144 injured, and it was never conclusively determined which side had fired the shell. The UN ultimately concluded that it was impossible to determine which side had fired the shell.

Baruch Goldstein, a physician who followed the far-right, ultranationalist Meir Kahane, opened fire inside the Cave of the Patriarchs, also known as the Ibrihami Mosque, in Hebron in the West Bank on February 25th, and killed 29 muslims, and injured 125 before he was beaten to death.

As a direct result of the massacre, Jewish Israelis were barred from going into major Arab communities in Hebron…and the Israel government also expelled Arabs from certain streets near Jewish settlements in Hebron, where many had homes and businesses.

On March 14th, Apple released Power Macintosh, ten-years after the release of the first Macintosh computer.

It was the first Macintosh to use the new PowerPC Microprocessors, a Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), created by the 1991 Apple – IBM – Motorola Alliance.

On the same day of March 14th, the Linux Kernel version 1.0.0 was released after two-years of development by Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds.

A kernel is a computer program that has complete control over everything in the system, and is in the core of the operating system.

The Linux Kernel software is a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) that anyone is freely-licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way.

It is deployed on a wide-variety of computing systems, such as embedded devices, mobile devices, personal computers, servers, mainframes, and supercomputers.

Hmmm. Does this mean that something or someone has control over my computer devices at all times?

Is this what updates my computer and cell phone whether I asked for it or not?

US troops were withdrawn from Somalia on March 15th.

As part of Operation Restore Hope, they had arrived in Somalia on December 9th of 1992, and greeted by the glare of television lights, which I remember watching on TV when it happened with my husband, and we were both thinking how crazy it was that a military landing was being televised.

By the time U. S. troops were withdrawn in March of 1994, they left behind a country plagued by bandits and looters, with many Somalis needing to scavenge for survival.

The Green Ramp Disaster occurred on March 23rd, when two military aircraft collided in mid-air over Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina.

The Green Ramp was a grassy area at the end of the one of the east-west runway at the Air Force Base that was used by the Army to stage joint-operations with the Air Force.

A little after 2 pm on that fateful day, a fighter-jet conducting a simulated “flame-out,” which is the run-down of a jet engine due to the extinction of the flame in the combustion chamber, collided with a C-130 transport plane.

At an altitude of 300-feet, or 90-meters, above-ground, the nose of the fighter jet severed the right elevator of the C-130, which is what controls the aircraft’s pitch, or angle, of the wing.

The C-130 managed to land safely, but pilots of the fighter jet ended-up having to eject, and the fighter jet ended up hurtling towards the Green Ramp.

Long-story short, the burning wreckage of the fighter jet ended up directly in the area where the mass of Army paratroopers were situated.

It killed 24-members of the U. S. Army’s 82nd-Airborne Division and injured around 100.

The causes of the fatal accident were attributed to both Air Traffic Control and pilot error.

The Palm Sunday tornado outbreak occurred on March 27th, the biggest of 1994, in the southeastern United States.

It was the third notable tornado outbreak to occur on a Palm Sunday, with the first two occurring in 1920 and in 1965.

The weather system caused 29 tornadoes, killing 40 people, injuring 491, and causing $140-million in damages.

The deadliest storm of the outbreak produced an F4 tornado that devastated Piedmont, Alabama, striking three churches in mid-Palm Sunday service.

There were 20 people killed at one of the churches, Goshen United Methodist Church in Cherokee County, including the 4-year-old daughter of the pastor.

The supercell that formed this tornado tracked for 200-miles, or 322-kilometers, across north Georgia, to South Carolina.

Is it just me, or does the path of the 1994 Palm Sunday Tornado Outbreak mirror the goldbelt in the Southeastern United States?

The first Gold Rush in U. S. history was in North Carolina starting in 1799, and the second in north Georgia, starting in 1828.

Weird coincidence, or is something else being reflected here, like perhaps weather manipulation on a sacred day for Christianity, through the lands of the original people of North America.

On April 6th, both Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira died after surface-to-air missiles shot down the jet they both were on, after a regional summit that was held in Tanzania, as it was getting ready to land on a clear day near Kigali, Rwanda.

This event was taken as the pretext to begin the Rwandan Genocide, one of the bloodiest events of the late-20th-century, which began on April 7th.

The immediate backstory to this was the signing of the Arusha Accords in August of 1993, which was a set of accords and power-sharing agreement signed under in Arusha, Tanzania, to end the, by that time, three-year-old Rwandan Civil War, by the government of Rwanda, and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

The Rwandan Civil War itself had radicalized internal opposition, and the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic (CDR) embraced the Hutu Power ideology of Hutu advancement and the ethnic-cleansing of Tutsis, which led to the Rwandan Genocide.

The predominately-Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front was portrayed as an alien force that was intent on reinstating the Tutsi monarchy which was in existence until it was abolished after the Rwandan Revolution between 1959 and 1961, and replaced by the form of government of the Republic of Rwanda, which was predominantly Hutu.

It is important to note that the minority Tutsis and majority Hutus spoke the same language, had the same traditions, and inhabited the same places.

The large-scale killings of Tutsis by ethnicities began within a few hours of the death of the Rwandan President.

The Crisis Committee headed by Theoneste Bagosora, Chief of Staff of the Ministry of Defense, considered the primary organizer of the genocide, took power in the country, and according to the historical narrative, he immediately began issuing orders to kill Tutsi to Hutu paramilitary groups like the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi.

The Hutu population was said to have been armed with weapons like machetes, clubs, blunt objects, etc, and prepared during the preceding months, and were said to have carried out the orders of their leaders without question as the result of a Rwandan tradition of obedience to authority.

The military pictured in this photo were French, who were sent in to rescue French citizens, and were accused of not doing enough to stop the genocide.

Also, checkpoints were set up around the Rwandan capital city of Kigali by the paramilitary groups, where anyone with Tutsi ethnicity on their national identity cards were immediately killed, as well as house-by-house searches for Tutsis living in Kigali.

During the 100-day period between April 7th and July 15th, members of the Tutsi minority group, as well as some moderate Hutus and Twa, an indigenous pygmy tribe, were massacred by what were described as soldiers, police, militia, and gangs, with death total estimates for this period of time ranging between 800,000 and 1.1 million.

We’ll see how the Rwandan Genocide ended when we get to July of this year.

Well, let’s see: the Presidents of two neighboring countries with Hutu and Tutsi populations assassinated by surface-to-air missiles as their airplane was getting ready to land at the airport of the Rwanda’s capital city, Kigali; Rwandan Hutu citizens armed with deadly weapons for months in advance; and the genocide primarily of Rwanda’s Tutsis beginning within a few hours of the President’s death.

Hmmm.

Did the beginning of these divisions start, say when the region became part of the German East Africa between 1885 and 1918, and then the divisions continued after it was handed over to Belgian Colonial Administration starting in 1916 when the region of Ruanda-Urundi was occupied by the Belgians during World War I, until so-called independence in 1961, after the Rwandan Revolution and the mysterious death of the Tutsi King Mwami Mutara III Rudahigwa of Rwanda, who he died unexpectedly in 1959 after visiting a Belgian doctor in Burundi, where he had gone for a meeting with Catholic missionaries, which sparked the beginning of the Rwandan Revolution.

China Airlines Flight 140 crashed on April 26th while landing at Nagoya, Japan, killing 264 people.

It was the deadliest accident in China Airlines’ history, which is the national carrier of Taiwan, also known as the Republic of China

Just before the routine landing of the flight, the takeoff/goaround setting on the autothrottle was somehow triggered, and the pilots’ lost control of the aircraft, which ultimately stalled and crashed. Of the 271 people on-board the plane, 264 were killed.

On April 27th, South Africa held its first multi-party elections, and the first election in which all races were allowed to vote.

The election marked the completion of a four-year process that ended Apartheid, which was the the system of institutional racism that existing in South and Southwest Africa that started in 1948.

Nelson Mandela won the election, and was sworn-in the following month, on May 10th.

On June 30th, an Airbus 330 crashed in a test flight in Toulouse, France, killing 7 people.

We are told the test was meant to test the performance of the aircraft in simulated engine failures after take-off.

The Airbus management did not expect the test to be hazardous, and were seeking to promote the plane to potential customers, and so had invited four passengers for the test flight – two Airbus executives and two Alitalia pilots.

As a result of the crash, all seven people on board were killed, and the investigation commission found that the crash was related to a long list of factors that none of which would have caused the crash in isolation.

Also on June 30th, Tropical Storm Alberto formed, and ended up producing extensive flooding over portions of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, causing 32 deaths and over a billion-dollars in damage.

It was the first tropical cyclone and named storm of the annual hurricane season.

Now back to Rwanda.

Rwandan Patriotic Front troops captured Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, on July 4th, which was considered a major breakthrough in the Rwandan Civil War as it led to the Rwandan Patriotic Front taking control of the rest of the country by July 18th.

Rwanda has been ruled by the Rwandan Patriotic Front since then as a Unitary President System with a two-house Parliament since then.

Paul Kagame, the Tutsi leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, was first elected President in 2000, and has been Rwanda’s President ever since.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon on July 5th, which started out as an on-line bookstore, when he was on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Seattle.

Bezos was named the wealthiest man in modern history when his net-worth increased to $150-billion in 2018,and he was the world’s first centribillionaire on the “Forbes Wealth Index,” in which he has a net-worth of 1-billion units in any given currency.

On July 18th, a suicide bombing targeting the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA )in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 85 and injuring 100s.

The bombing was Argentina’s largest terrorist attack to date.

The bomber drove a Renault van full of 275 kilograms, or 606 pounds, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil explosive mixture in the Jewish Community Center building in the commercial area of Buenos Aires.

No suspects have been convicted of the bombing, and while Iran has been suspected as having a role, no definitive action has never been taken.

The release of the IBM Simon Smartphone took place on August 16th, and was the first commercially available smartphone and distributed by BellSouth Cellular Corporation.

It was a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), or hand-held PC that functioned as a personal information manager, and had a battery that lasted only an hour.

On August 31st, the Provisional Irish Republican Army announced a conditional cessation of military operations after 25-years of violence and terror, which held for 18-months, with the exception of a few politically-motivated killings here and there, until February of 1996.

USAir Flight 427 crashed in Hopewell Township on approach to Pittsburgh International Airport on September 8th, killing all 132 on-board, and was the deadliest air disaster in Pennsylvania history.

As a result of the severity of the crash impact, the bodies of the passengers and crew were severely fragmented, leading investigators to declare the site a biohazard.

After the longest investigation in FAA history, lasting four-and-a-half-years, it was determined that a rudder malfunction caused the plane to crash.

The U. S. staged what has been termed “bloodless” invasion of Haiti to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power on September 19th, code-named “Operation Uphold Democracy.”

It was designed to remove the military regime installed after the “coup d’etat” in 1991 that overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide after having been elected at the end of 1991, and in-office for only a few months.

A diplomatic American delegation comprised of Former President Jimmy Carter; Sen. Sam Nunn; and retired General Colin Powell met with General Raoul Cedras, the military leader in charge of the government.

He apparently agreed to step-down with the threat of a U. S. military forced-entry invasion, after he was shown a video-feed of U. S. Special Forces, like the 82nd Airborne being readied to go, unless he complied immediately.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide was returned to Haiti in October of 1994 after 3-years of exile, and while there was a change of authority ceremony between President Bill Clinton and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in March of 1995, a U. S. troops under the UN remained in Haiti until 1996, and some kind of UN-Peacekeeping force remained in place until 2000.

On September 28th, the MS Estonia ferry sank in the Baltic Sea, killing almost 900 people, with 139 rescues.

It was one of the worst maritime disasters of the 20th-century.

According to the official report of the disaster, the bow-door had separated from the vessel, pulling the ramp ajar, rapidly flooding the vessel that was already listing from poor cargo distribution.

The power failed; search and rescue was inhibited; and a full-scale emergency wasn’t declared for an hour-and-a-half.

In what sounds like Keystone-Cops-level incompetence, the official report criticized the passive-attitude of the crew, failing to notice that water was entering the vehicle deck, delaying the alarm, and providing minimal guidance from the bridge.

World Wide Web Consortium founded and led by Tim Berners Lee became the main international standards organization for the WWW on October 1st.

It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lab, with funding from the European Commission and DARPA.

The consortium is comprised of member organizations that maintain full-time staff to work together in the development of World Wide Web standards.

A rainfall event between November 4th and 6th caused flooding in the Piedmont region of Italy that killed an estimated 77 people…

…after one-third of the rain that falls in one year fell in a 72-hour period, and caused $14.5 billion in damages.

The Brazuole Bridge bombing took place on November 7th.

It involved the explosion of a bomb around 7 am underneath this bridge in Lithuania on the Vilnuius-Kaunas Railway shortly before two passenger trains were scheduled to cross the bridge.

We are told a rail disaster was avoided because one of the trains was warned by a local resident, and slowed down in time to cross the bridge on the side that was relatively undamaged, and alerted the other train in time for it to stop before it got to the bridge.

No one has ever been charged in connection with the bombing, though it was alleged that members of the Lithuanian National Defence Volunteer Forces was behind the bombing, after a stand-off occurred between some of its members and the Lithuanian government in 1993.

Also on November 7th, the WXYC student radio station at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill provided the world’s first internet radio broadcast.

Hurricane Gordon hit Central America, Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Haiti, and Southeastern US on November 8th, causing 1,152 fatalities and $594 million in damages.

It was a long-lived, as it finally dissipated on November 21st, and was the last hurricane of the season in 1994.

Notice the curvy, looping track of the Hurricane Gordon.

Damage was the heaviest in Haiti, where the storm dropped 14-inches, or 360-mm, of rain in 24-hours, resulting in extensive landslides and flooding that destroyed 3,500 houses and damaged another 11,000 or so more, and killed over 1,000 people.

Interesting that this extreme weather devastation in Haiti took place the month following the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Boris Yeltsin ordered troops into Chechyna on December 11th, thereby starting the first Chechen War, which lasted until August 31st of 1996.

Russian federal forces attempted to seize the mountainous country of Chechyna, but were ultimately set-back by Chechen guerilla warfare, leading to the cease-fire in 1996 and Yeltsin signing a Peace Treaty with the Chechens the following year.

The Battle of Grozny in the First Chechen War in which Russian forces captured Grozny after two-months of heavy fighting, however, caused enormous destruction and casualties amongst the civilian population, and was the heaviest bombing campaign in Europe since World War II.

Why was all of this happening to this small republic?

The reason we are given is that the Chechens wanted their independence from Russian Federation, the name given to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic after the Soviet Union dissolved.

The initial release of the Netscape Navigator 1.0 web-browser by Netscape Communications Corportion was on December 15th.

It was the world’s first commercially-developed web browser.

So like in 1993, we are seeing the same patterns of major hurricanes and tornado outbreaks…

…weather anomalies like the North American Cold Wave and the excessive rainfall causing the destructive flooding in Italy’s Piedmont Region and in Haiti…

…earthquakes like the Los Angeles Northridge Earthquake, the highest-ever, instrumentality recorded earthquake in an urban area in North America…

…more plane crashes, like USAir Flight 427 in Pennsylvania; China Airlines Flight 140 in Japan, and the Green Ramp Disaster in North Carolina and Airbus 330 crash in France, both of which had emergency situation flight training going on at the time of the deadly incidents…

…near train crashes, like the narrowly-averted train disaster in Lithuania with the Brazuole bridge bombing minutes before the trains’ scheduled arrival, unlike the Amtrak train crash at Big Bayou Canot in 1993, where the incident causing the bridge collapsed also happened minutes before the train wreck…

…and again in 1994, like 1993, we see sinking ships, like the MS Estonia Ferry, one of the worst maritime disasters of the 20th-century…

…massacres in different places…

…out-and-out genocide for one-hundred days in Rwanda…

…along with civil wars and other wars…

…and major bombings like the AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

More of the same kinds of thing that we saw in 1993…

…in addition to the progress that we saw being made in 1994 in relationship to the development of the PC, Internet, and mobile phone…

…and on-line business models and services.

So, now let’s take a look and see what happened in 1995.

Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established on January 1st, to replace the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which had been established in 1948.

Negotiated and signed trade Agreements by the bulk of the world’s trading nations that serve as the legal ground-rules for international commerce are at the heart of the WTO.

On January 17th, the 6.9-magnitude Kobe, also known as the Great Hanshin, Earthquake struck southern Japan. Aftershocks of the earthquake lasted for days, with 74 of them being strong enough to feel.

Close to 6,500 people lost their lives as a result of the earthquake, with approximately 4,600 from the major city of Kobe, with the epicenter of the earthquake being 12-miles, or 20-kilometers, from the center of the city center.

Irreparable damage from the earthquake included nearly 400,000 buildings; numerous elevated road and rail bridges; the majority of the quays in the port Kobe at 120, the total of which had numbered 150; caused 300 fires; and disrupted water, electricity, and gas service.

The fires in Kobe incinerated the equivalent of 70 U. S. city-blocks.

Here are some examples of what the historical architecture looked like in Kobe.

On February 13th, twenty-one Bosnian Serb commanders were charged with Crimes against Humanity in the United Nations.

The Serkadji Prison Mutiny took place, in what was formerly known as the Barberousse Prison, in Algeria between February 21st and 23rd.

Apparently the immediate cause of the mutiny was a recently-appointed guard who supplied prisoners with four guns and three hand-grenades, after a prior escape attempt failed.

After killing four prison guards, the mutineer prisoners started opening cell doors, and after security forces stormed the prison, somewhere between 96 and 110 prisoners were killed, with eight later being executed for their part in the mutiny.

On February 26th, the United Kingdom’s oldest investment bank, Barings, collapsed on February 26th.

Barings was founded in 1762 by Francis and John Baring in order to provide service to the huge expansion of world trade that was coming into being in the latter-half of the 18th-century.

The first offices of the bank were located in Cheapside in the City of London, the historic and modern financial center of London.

The cause of the crash of the United Kingdom’s oldest investment bank was apparently a rogue securities broker in Singapore by the name of Nick Leeson, who allegedly lost somewhere around $1.4 billion in unauthorized trades in futures contracts on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and he was arrested for his crimes days later, on March 2nd.

Leeson was in Changji prison in Singapore until 1999, when he was released from his sentence early.

While in prison, he published an autobiography detailing his crimes in 1996, called “Rogue Trader.”

Among other achievements since his release from prison in 1999, Nick Leeson held a senior management role as Chief Executive Officer for Galway United, an Irish association football club in the League of Ireland, a position which he resigned in 2011 when the club suffered financial difficulties…

…and has been a regular guest on the after-dinner and keynote speaking circuit.

Nick Leeson is listed as having a net worth of $3 million.

Not bad for a guy that confessed to, was convicted of, and served prison time, for securities fraud of a magnitude that took out Barings Bank!

The Tokyo Subway Sarin Gas Attack took place on March 20th.

In five coordinated attacks carried out by the Aum Shinrikyo personality cult movement led by Shoko Asahara, the perpetrators of the attacks released sarin gas, a chemical warfare agent classified as a nerve agent, on three lines of the Tokyo Metro during rush hour, killing 14 people and injuring in some fashion approximately 6,500 people.

The subway lines that were attacked served the part of Tokyo that houses the Japanese Parliament.

Police arrested senior members and leaders of Aum Shinrikyo after the attacks in a raid in May of 1995, several of whom were sentenced to death and later executed in 2018, including the cult founder Shoko Asahara.

On March 31st, TAROM, the flag-carrier airline of Romania, Flight 371 from Bucharest to Brussels crashed in after entering a nose-down dive after take-off in Bucharest, killing all sixty people on-board.

The cause of the crash was attributed to the captain losing consciousness, and unable to communicate with his co-pilots, and auto-throttle failure.

The Samashki Massacre took place on April 7th during the First Chechen War, in which Russian troops were reported by 128 eyewitnesses as engaging in a “cleansing operation” in which there are estimates as high as 300 of civilians killed in the village of Samashki.

They were said to have arbitrarily shot civilians and burned down houses with flame-throwers, among other things.

On April 19th, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murragh Federal building in Oklahoma City took place.

Called the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U. S. history, we are told it was carried out by anti-government extremist Timothy McVeigh, who was helped by his friend Terry Nichols, in retaliation for the federal siege of Ruby Ridge in 1992, and the federal Waco Siege, which ended in the deadly fire of the Branch Davidian compound on April 19th in 1993.

As the official story goes, McVeigh planned for the bombing to take place on the second anniversary of the fire that ended the siege in Waco, and selected the Murragh Federal Building in Oklahoma City because it met his criteria of housing at least two federal law enforcement agencies.

McVeigh and Nichols stockpiled the materials they needed to manufacture the fertilizer bomb, including forty-one 50-pound, or 23-kilogram, bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer; seven crates of tovex explosives; shock tubing; 500 electric blasting caps; and ANFO, which is ammonium nitrate fuel oil.

Several days before the bombing, McVeigh rented a Ryder truck under an assumed name, and he and Nichols drove to Oklahoma City, where they parked McVeigh’s getaway car a few blocks from the Federal building, a 1977 Mercury Marquis which is now an exhibit at the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum.

What we are told is that McVeigh and Nichols drove to pick up the bomb materials from storage Kansas and drove to a state park in Kansas to build the truck bomb, filling 13 barrels each with 500 lbs, or 230 kilograms, of mixed chemicals, using plastic buckets and a bathroom scale, and added the explosive devices needed to the truck in order to detonate the bomb.

The next day, McVeigh drove the Ryder Truck to Oklahoma City at dawn, and parked it at the building’s drop-off zone for the daycare center after having lit timed fuses, and headed towards his getaway vehicle after getting rid of the keys to the truck.

The Ryder rental truck that contained 4,800-pounds, or 2,200-kilograms, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane and diesel fuel mixture, detonated in front of the north side of the building at 9:02 am, creating a 30-foot, or 9.1-meter, and 8-foot-deep, or 2.4-meter crater on NW 5th Street next to the building, and the blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings in a 4-block radius, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings, resulting in 168 deaths, including children in the daycare center, and injuring hundreds more.

McVeigh was arrested within an hour-and-a-half of the explosion, as he was pulled over for driving a car without a license plate, and arrested for having a concealed weapon.

The subsequent investigation into his connection to the Oklahoma City bombing ultimately led to McVeigh’s conviction and death sentence, and Terry Nichols’ conviction and life sentence.

McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in June of 2001.

There was a gas explosion at a subway construction site on April 28th in Daegu, South Korea.

At least 101 people were killed, including 42 middle school students, with estimates of around 200 people injured.

The gas explosion was said to have result from construction workers accidently drilleing 31 holes through a grout curtain into a gas pipeline, resulting in gas leakages into the construction site that went through a sewer, and the explosion was caused by an unknown fire at the site, creating a 164-foot, or 50-meter, high pillar of fire.

The private parking lot on the construction site collapsed, and 60 buildings and 152 cars were damaged as a result of the explosion.

Established in 1985, the funding for the National Science Foundation Network, or NSFNET, was stopped by the U. S. Government on April 30th, making the internet totally privatized.

The NSFNET backbone service was no longer central, but still remained central to the infrastructure of the expanding internet.

On May 10th, a runaway locomotive fell into an elevator shaft in the Vaal Reefs, a gold mine near the town Orkney in the northwest South Africa.

History’s worst elevator disaster ever, the locomotive landed on the elevator cage carrying miners, causing it to plunge 1,500-feet, or 460-meters, to the bottom of the shaft, and resulted in the deaths of 104 miners.

The 7.0 Neftegorsk Earthquake struck northern Sakhalin island on May 28th.

The most catastrophic earthquake in the known history of Russia, the earthquake resulted in the deaths of almost 2,000 people in the oil town of Neftegorsk, over half of the population, and almost all of the deaths were from the collapse of residential buildings.

On June 29th, the Sampoong Department store collapsed in Seoul.

It was the deadliest peacetime disaster in South Korean history, killing 502 people and injuring 937, and the deadliest modern building collapse until the 9/11 Collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.

The cause of the collapse was attributed to structural overload and punching shear, which is defined as a phenomenon where a concentrated force on a slab causes a “shear failure cone” that punches through…

…and ultimately primarily blamed on the ignorance, negligence and greed of Lee Joon, the chairman of the Sampoong Group’s constuction division and store owner, and his son Lee Han-Sang, the CEO of the department store , both of whom served prison time for criminal negligence in their alleged roles in the collapse of the building.

The second Srebrenica massacre took place in Bosnia on July 11th, in which upwards of 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys native to Bosnia were killed by units of the Bosnian Serb Army under the command of Ratko Mladic.

The last major battle of the War for Croation Independence was Operation Storm, major operations of which took place between August 4th and 7th, and follow-up operations between August 8th through 14th.

NATO and the United States were also involved in Operation Storm, the largest land-battle in Europe since World War II, and was called a decisive victory for the Croatian Army and a strategic victory for the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina against the forces of the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK) by the time it was over.

We are told that 150,000 to 200,000 Serbs of the area formerly held by the RSK had fled, and that a variety of crimes were committed against the Serbs who remained there by Croatian forces.

Later, three Croatian generals were tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for war crimes in what was called a joint criminal enterprise to force the Serb population out of Croatia.

On August 7th, the Chilean government declared a State of Emergency with respect to what became known as the “White Earthquake” in southern Chile.

The “White Earthquake” was a weather event involving intense winds, cold, snowfall and rain that primarily caused widespread agricultural and structural damage and great disruption to the lives of the people living there, with only a few human deaths reported, though the lives of hundreds thousands of sheep were lost or left in critical condition, with the most heavily impacted area shown in red on this map of Chile.

On September 3rd, eBay, the multinational e-commerce corporation, was founded as AuctionWeb in California by French-born, Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre Omidyar, and it soon became the first online auction site allowing person-to-person transactions…

…and on September 9th, SONY entered the video game market with the release of Playstation.

Interestingly, Sony, the name of a multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan…

…was also the acronym for Standard Oil of New York, founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1870.

A commuter train slammed into a school bus in Fox River Grove, Illinois, on October 25th, killing seven students.

The school bus, driven by a substitute driver, was stopped at a traffic light, with the rear portion of the bus hanging over railroad tracks when it was struck by a commuter train heading to Chicago.

It was one of the worst grade-crossing accidents in U. S. History.

The cause was attributed to bus driver misjudgment and traffic signal timing issues with the railroad, which were supposed to be coordinated with the highway traffic signal.

On the very next day, October 26th, there were two disasters in the world.

One was an avalanche that struck the village of Flateyri, Iceland, destroying 17 houses, and in the process killing twenty people. Twenty-one people managed to escape these houses after the avalanche and four were rescued alive.

The same day as the avalanche in Iceland, there was a fire in the Baku Metro, the capital of Azerbaijan.

It resulted in what has been called the world’s worst deadliest subway disaster, killing 289 people, including 28 children.

It was said to have been caused by an electrical malfunction, though the possibility of deliberate sabotage was not excluded.

On November 1st, all participants in the Bosnian Civil Wars began the peace negotiation process, with the Presidents of Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia meeting with US, British, French, German, and Russian officials at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

Typhoon Angela, also known as Rosing, which dissipated on November 7th, had left parts of the Philippines devastated on a track that started out as a tropical disturbance in the Marshall Islands pn October 25th, and moved west, turning into a super-tycoon by November 1st before it hit the Philippines.

Typhoon Angela wreaked havoc over the regions of metropolitan Manila, Calabarzon, and Bicol, and when all was said and done with the Typhoon, it had caused over 10-billion Philippine Pesos in damages, destroying over 96,000 houses, as well as bridges and roads.

Angela was one of the most intense typhoons ever recorded.

On November 16th, a UN tribunal charged Bosnian-Serb President Radovan Karadzic and Bosnian Serb Commander Ratko Mladic with genocide and Crimes against Humanity during the Bosnian War.

The Dayton Agreement ending the Bosnian War was reached on November 21st, and signed on November 24th.

It created a single sovereign state known as Bosnia Herzegovina, composed of the largely Serb-populated Republika Srpska, or Serb Republic, and the Croat-Bosniak populated Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

On November 22nd, there was an earthquake, with the epicenter in the middle of the Gulf of Aqaba, the narrow body of water that separates Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula from the western border of Saudi Arabia.

At least eight deaths and thirty injuries were reported as a result of the earthquake, and damage to buildings occurred in places like coastal cities of Eilat, Israel; Aqaba, Jordan; and Nuweiba, Egypt.

American Airlines Flight 965 crashed into a mountain in Buga, Colombia on December 20th, with the cause of the crash was attributed to pilot error.

Killing 151 of 155 passengers and all eight crew members on-board, it was the deadliest aviation accident in Colombia’s history, and the deadliest air disaster involving a U. S. airline since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.

So, once again in 1995, as seen in this video in the previous two years of 1993 and 1994, we have seen recurring patterns of major earthquakes in different parts of the world, in this case Japan, Russia, and the Sinai region in the Middle East…

…a super typhoon wreaking havoc in the Philippines and the same in Chile with weather-event called a “White Earthquake…”

…more plane crashes…

…more massacres and genocide…

…more terrorist attacks…

…many other disasters…

…and more internet, on-line business model, and video game development milestones.

One more thing to mention before I end this post, bringing “Seeing World History with New Eyes” up to the year of 1995, is a curious pattern that has emerged in my research of the 1990s thus far.

Starting with the Baltic Exchange Bombing in the City of London in 1992, I am consistently finding the use of truck-fertilizer bombs in terrorist attacks that are incredibly destructive when detonated.

The Baltic Exchange Bombing in April of 1992 was the biggest on mainland Britain since World War II, and caused extensive damage to the Baltic Exchange building and its surroundings.

Same thing happened again in the City of London the following year as mentioned earlier in this video, a truck fertilizer bomb detonated this time in Bishopsgate, exactly a year and two-weeks after the Baltic Exchange bombing.

This bombing led to the implementation of the “Ring of Steel” around the City of London.

Earlier in 1993, the first World Trade Center bombing in February involved the detonation of a truck fertilizer bomb parked below the North Tower.

The bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) Building in Buenos Aires in July of 1994 involved a suicide bomber driving a van full of 275 kilograms, or 606 pounds, of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil explosive mixture in the Jewish Community Center building in the commercial area of Buenos Aires, for which there suspects but no convictions…

…and the Oklahoma City bombing in April of 1995 involving a truck fertilizer bomb in which the primary accused was arrested within an hour-and-a-half of the bombing, and who was executed several years later.

Why did truck fertilizer bombs become a thing in these terrorist attacks?

How did the terrorists have access to the quantities of materials and know-how needed to construct a bomb that creates this kind of devastation?

This graphic shows the occurrence of ammonium nitrate disasters since 1900…

…including the storage-silo explosion involving ammonium nitrate fertilizer in Oppau, Germany in 1921…

…the ship carrying the ammonium nitrate chemical that exploded in Texas City in Galveston Bay in 1947, the deadliest industrial accident in U. S. History…

…the 2004 explosion of a train carrying ammonium nitrate in Neyshabur, Iran…

…the 2015 explosion in Tianjin, China, of a storage warehouse…

…and the 2020 explosion in Beirut, Lebanon.

Is there something else going on with these apparently randomly occurring ammonium nitrate explosions in different places around the world over the years, and if there is, is there a connection to the truck fertilizer bombings that I have identified so far, starting in the 1990s?

I am showcasing unlikely pairs of historical figures in the National Statuary Hall who have things in common with each other in this new series called “Snapshots from the National Statuary Hall at the U. S. Capitol.”

In the first segment of this series, I paired Michigan’s Gerald Ford, a former President of the United States, and Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederate States of America; and in the second segment, I paired Dr. Norman Borlaug, Ph.D, often called the “Father of the Green Revolution; and Colorado’s Dr. Florence R. Sabin, M.D, remembered as a pioneer for women in science; and in the last segment I paired Louisiana’s controversial Governor, Huey P. Long, and Alabama’s Helen Keller, a deaf-blind woman who gain prominence as an American author, lecturer, political activist, and disability rights activist.

In this segment, I am pairing Henry Clay, described as an attorney and statesman from Kentucky, and Lewis Cass, described as an American military officer, politician and statesman from Michigan.

They were both contemporaries and major players in historical events during the time period in American history between Henry Clay’s birth in 1777 and death in 1852; a; and the birth of Lewis Cass in 1782 and his death in 1866.

I am taking an in-depth look at who is represented in that National Statuary Hall in the U. S. Capitol building in Washington, DC, in a series which I am approximately halfway through in which sculptures of prominent American historical figures are housed, two for each state.

My attention was drawn to it as worth investigating because I encountered two historical figures in my research who are represented in the National Statuary hall – Father Eusebio Kino, a Jesuit Missionary and Cattle rancher, for Arizona, and Mother Joseph Pariseau, who we are told was a Catholic sister and self-taught architect, for Washington State.

The appearance of these two historical characters in the National Statuary Hall made wonder who else was chosen to be represented there and what could possibly be going on here.

Henry Clay represents the State of Kentucky in the National Statuary Hall.

Henry Clay was an attorney and statesman, who served in both houses of Congress; as the ninth U. S. Secretary of State; ran for U. S. President three times; and helped establish both the Whig Party and the Republican Party.

Henry Clay was born in April of 1777 at the Clay Homestead in Hanover County, Virginia, the 7th of 9 children born to the Baptist minister John Clay and his wife Elizabeth.

His father died in 1781, and his mother subsequently remarried, to Captain Henry Watkins, a successful planter.

When Watkins moved the family to Kentucky in 1791, Henry Clay remained in Virginia.

He ended up becoming a clerk at the Virginia Court of Chancery, where he got the attention of George Wythe, a professor at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, signer of the Declaration of Independence, mentor of Thomas Jefferson, and judge on Virginia’s High Court of Chancery.

Wythe chose Clay to be his secretary, a position he held for four years.

During this time, Wythe influenced Clay’s view that the United States could help spread freedom around the world.

Clay finished his legal studies with Virginia Attorney General Robert Brooke; was admitted to the Virginia Bar in 1797; and moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he set up his law practice.

Henry Clay married Lucretia Hart in April of 1799, the daughter of Colonel Thomas Hart, a prominent businessman and early settler of Kentucky, and they lived at first in downtown Lexington.

We are told the Clays started building Ashland, a plantation outside of Lexington, in 1804.

Ashland encompassed over 500 acres (or 200 hectares), on which Henry Clay’s slaves planted crops of corn, wheat, rye, and hemp, the chief crop of Kentucky’s Bluegrass region.

He also imported Arabian horses, Maltese Donkeys, and Hereford Cattle as livestock.

The Maltese donkeys were one of the large breeds of donkeys bred by Henry Clay, and George Washington among others, to produce the American Mammoth Jackstock to be used as work animals.

Shortly after arriving in Kentucky, Henry Clay entered politics, and was a member of the what was called the “Democratic-Republican Party,” also known as the “Jeffersonian Republican Party,” that championed republicanism, agrarianism, political equality, and expansionism.

He clashed with state “Democratic-Republican Party” leaders over a state constitutional convention.

Clay was an advocate for direct election of public officials and the gradual emancipation of slavery in Kentucky.

The 1799 Kentucky Constitution included direct election of public officials, but not Clay’s plan for gradual emancipation, and instead retained the pro-slavery provisions of the original Kentucky Constitution of 1792, under which Kentucky was accepted as the 15th State admitted to the Union by the U. S. Congress.

Clay won election to the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1803, where he was quite active, among other things initiating the partisan gerrymander of Kentucky’s electoral college districts, which insured that Kentucky’s electors voted for Thomas Jefferson in the 1804 presidential election.

Clay’s influence in Kentucky politics was such that the Kentucky Legislature elected him to the U. S. Senate in 1806, which he served in for two-months before returning to Kentucky, at which time he was elected as Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives.

In 1810, Henry Clay was selected by the Kentucky Legislature to fill the U. S. Senate seat left vacant by the resignation of Buckner Thruston to become a federal judge.

Clay quickly became a “War Hawk,” favoring expansionist policies.

He was a fierce critic of British attacks on American shipping and supported going to war against Great Britain…

…and advocated for the annexation of Spanish West Florida.

Henry Clay was elected as Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives for the 12th Congress, held between March 4th of 1811 and March 4th of 1813.

Both Houses of Congress had a Democratic-Republican Majority in the 12th Congress.

Historical events that took place during the 12th Congress included:

The Battle of Tippecanoe fought on November 7th of 1811 in Battle Ground, Indiana, where William Henry Harrison defeated Tecumseh’s forces of a confederacy of tribes opposed to European-American settlement of the American Frontier…

…the New Madrid Earthquake on December 16th of 1811…

…Louisiana was admitted to the Union as the 18th state on April 30th of 1812…

…the War of 1812 began when the United States declared war on Great Britain on June 18th of 1812…

…Detroit surrendered to the British on August 16th of 1812…

…and the Battle of Queenston Heights in Upper Canada took place on October 13th of 1812, the first major battle in the War of 1812, resulting in a British victory.

Altogether, Henry Clay was elected to seven terms in the House of Representatives, and was elected Speaker of the House six times.

Henry Clay’s first run for the Presidency of the United States was in the 1824 election.

There were five candidates representing the Democratic-Republican Party, including Clay, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson.

Clay fell behind in state electoral votes, effectively knocking him out of the race, and he threw his support behind John Quincy Adams, who was elected President by the House of Representatives, and Henry Clay became Adams’ Secretary of State.

Followers of John Quincy Adams became known as National Republicans, and followers of Andrew Jackson became known as Democrats, and Andrew Jackson won the 1928 Presidential election.

It was during the Jackson Administration that the U. S. Congress authorized, and the President signed into law, the Indian Removal Act of 1831, which authorized the administration to relocate Native Americans to land west of the Mississippi River, something which Henry Clay was opposed to.

Henry Clay returned to Federal office in 1831, when he won election in the Kentucky Legislature to the U. S. Senate, and with Adams’ defeat in the 1928, Clay became the leader of the National Republicans, who nominated Clay for President in the 1832 election.

Jackson, a popular sitting President, won re-election.

Several of the things that happened during the second Jackson Administration revolved around banking and financial matters.

One of the policies pursued by President Jackson and has Secretary of the Treasury, Roger Taney, involved removing all federal deposits from the national bank and placing them in state-chartered banks, a policy seen as illegal by many since federal law required the president to deposit federal revenue in the national bank so long as it was stable.

This policy of removing deposits united Jackson’s opponents into one political party, which became known as the Whig Party, which had been the name of an earlier British political party opposed to absolute monarchy.

The American Whig Party base consisted of wealthy businessmen, professionals, and large planters.

Clay chose not to run in the 1836 election because of the death of one of his daughters, and the Whigs were not organized enough to nominate a single candidate.

Despite the presence of multiple Whig candidates, Martin Van Buren, a Democrat, won the 1836 presidential election.

Van Buren’s Presidency was negatively impacted by the Panic of 1837, a financial crisis that touched off a depression until the mid-1840s.

Clay and other Whigs argued that Jackson’s policies had encouraged speculation and caused the panic.

As the 1840 Presidential election came closer, many thought the Whigs would gain the presidency because of the economic crisis.

Though Henry Clay ran in this election, he faced a number of issues facing his electability, and the Whig party member William Henry Harrison was elected that year.

Harrison had the shortest presidency in U. S. history, dying from pneumonia 31-days after his inauguration in 1841.

Harrison was succeeded by his Vice-President, John Tyler, another Whig.

Tyler disappointed his fellow Whigs by not signing a bill to reestablish the National Bank, an important part of the Whig Party platform, and they ended up voting to expel him from the party.

Clay won the Whig presidential nomination in 1844, and faced Democrat candidate James Polk, who won the election that year.

Henry Clay returned to his career as an attorney after the election of 1844.

The Mexican-American War started in 1846 over the disputed border region between Mexico and Texas.

Clay gave a speech in November of 1847 in which he was highly critical of the war and attacked President Polk for fomenting the conflict with Mexico.

Also, by 1847 General Zachary Taylor, who commanded American forces during the war, emerged as one of the Whig candidates for the Presidency.

Henry Clay announced his candidacy for the nomination in April of 1848.

Taylor ended up winning the Whig nomination at the 1848 Whig National Convention, and the ultimately the Presidency that year, with Millard Fillmore as his running mate.

Interesting to note that Zachary Taylor died in July of 1850, allegedly after consuming copious amounts of raw fruit and iced milk at a July 4th fundraising event at the Washington Monument, became severely ill with a digestive ailment, dying several days later, and Millard Fillmore became president.

Henry Clay accepted re-election to the U. S. Senate in 1849, and was directly involved in formulating the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills that defused a political confrontation between slave and free states on the status of U. S. territories gained as a result of the Mexican-American War.

Henry Clay died from tuberculosis in June of 1852 in his room at the National Hotel in Washington, DC.

The National Hotel building was demolished in 1942.

Henry Clay was the first person to lie in-state in the U. S. Capitol Rotunda.

The remains of Henry Clay and his wife Lucretia are encased in marble in the mausoleum in the center of the Lexington Cemetery, with the 120-foot, or the 37-meter, -high Henry Clay Memorial towering above the mausoleum.

Some interesting points of information I found in researching Henry Clay.

One was that he was a Master Mason.

Another was that Henry Clay’s cousin was another influential 19th-Century Kentucky politician Cassius Marcellus Clay…

…the namesake of Cassius Marcellus Clay, better known to history as the famous 20th-century boxer Muhammed Ali, who was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky.

No indication there was a direct connection, just that the more recent Cassius Marcellus Clay was named after the famous 19th-century Kentuckian, but definitely find this to be interesting nonetheless.

Lewis Cass represents the State of Michigan in the Statuary Hall.

Lewis Cass, an American military officer, politician and statesman, was a U. S. Senator for Michigan and served in the cabinets of two Presidents, Andrew Jackson and James Buchanan.

Cass was born in October of 1782 in Exeter, New Hampshire, near the end of the Revolutionary War.

His father Jonathan was an officer who had fought under George Washington at the Battle of Bunker Hill which took place in June of 1775.

This illustrated view of the Bunker Hill Monument was circa 1848, and said to have been built between 1824 and 1843, and credited to the architect Solomon Willard as the first monumental obelisk erected in the United States.

Cass attended the Phillips-Exeter Academy, established in 1781 by Elizabeth and John Phillips, a wealthy merchant and banker of the time.

His nephew, Samuel Phillips Jr, had established the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in 1778, making it the oldest incorporated school in the United States.

These two schools have educated several generations of the Establishment and prominent American politicians.

The Cass family moved to Marietta, Ohio, in 1800.

Marietta was the first permanent U. S. settlement in the newly established Northwest Territory, which was created in 1787, and the nation’s first post-colonial organized incorporated territory.

The Northwest Indian War took place in this region between 1786 and 1795 between the United States and the Northwestern Confederacy, consisting of Native Americans of the Great Lakes area.

The Territory had been granted to the United States by Great Britain as part of the Treaty of Paris at the end of the Revolutionary War.

The area had previously been prohibited to new settlements, and was inhabited by numerous Native American peoples.

The British maintained a military presence and supported the Native American military campaign.

While the Northwestern Confederacy had some early victories, they were ultimately defeated, with the final battle being the “Battle of Fallen Timbers” in August of 1794 in Maumee, Ohio, which took place after General Anthony Wayne’s Army had destroyed every Native American settlement on its way to the battle.

Outcomes were the 1794 Jay Treaty, named for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay, the main negotiator with Great Britain.

As a result, the British withdrew from the Northwest Territory, but it laid the groundwork for later conflicts, not only with Great Britain, but also angering France and bitterly dividing Americans into pro-Treaty Federalists and anti-Treaty Jeffersonian Republicans.

The 1795 Greenville Treaty that followed forced the displacement of Native Americans from most of Ohio, in return for cash and promises fair treatment, and the land was opened for white American settlement.

Lewis Cass studied law in Marietta under Return Meigs, Jr, who among other accomplishments, became the first Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court in 1803, and Cass started his law practice in Zanesville, Ohio.

Cass was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives in 1806, and the following year, President Thomas Jefferson appointed him as the U. S. Marshal for Ohio, the oldest U. S. Federal Law Enforcement Agency having been established by the Judiciary Act of 1789 during President George Washington’s administration to assist federal courts in their law enforcement functions.

Cass joined the Freemasons as an Entered Apprentice, the first degree of Freemasonry, at a lodge in Marietta in 1803 , and by May of 1804, he achieved the Master Mason degree, the third-degree of Freemasonry.

He was a charter member of the Lodge of Amity No. 5 in Zanesville, admitted in June of 1805…

…and was one of the founders of the Grand Lodge of Ohio in January of 1808, serving as its Grand Master multiple years.

During the War of 1812, Cass rose through the officer ranks to become a Brigadier General in the U. S. Army in March of 1813.

He took part in the Battle of the Thames, also known as the Battle of Moraviantown near Chatham, Ontario, and today’s Moravian on the Thames First Nation reserve, a branch of the Lenape who were converted to Christianity by Moravian missionaries from Pennsylvania, one of the oldest Protestant denominations.

At the time of the battle, the community of this First Nation, known as the Christian Munsee, was burned to the ground and rebuilt at its current location.

The Battle of the Thames in Ontario was an American victory in the War of 1812 against Tecumseh’s Confederacy, a confederation of Native people’s from the Great Lakes region, and their British allies.

As a result of the battle, Tecumseh was killed, his confederacy fell apart, and the British lost control of southwestern Ontario.

Cass was appointed as the Governor of the Michigan Territory by President James Madison in October of 1813, a position in which he served until 1831.

During this time, he travelled frequently to negotiate treaties with Native American tribes in Michigan, in which they ceded substantial amounts of land.

Cass was one of two commissioners who negotiated the Treaty of Fort Meigs, also called the Treaty of the Maumee Rapids, resulting the ceding of nearly all the remaining lands in northwestern Ohio, and parts of Indiana and Michigan, of the Wyandot, Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa, helping to open up Michigan to settlement by white Americans.

In return, land was allocated for reservations and financial compensation via annuities of various amounts for different lengths of time.

Other examples of the involvement of Lewis Cass with these land-acquiring treaties included, the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw with the chiefs and members of the Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatomi Tribes, in which they ceded 6-million acres of land, for which they were promised up to $1,000/year forever, and hunting and fishing rights on the land.

Cass was also involved with the 1821 Treaty of Chicago, in which he travelled to Chicago to try and get more land from tribal nations in Michigan.

As a result of this treaty, more Potawatomi, Chippewa and Ottawa tribes ceded land – this time nearly 5-million acres of the Lower Peninsula .

In return, they were promised about $10,000 in trade goods, $6,500 in coins, and a 20-year payment valued at about $150,000.

And where did all these treaties land them, like the Potawatomi?

A very long way from home!!!

Cass resigned as the Governor of Michigan in 1831 to become President Andrew Jackson’s Secretary of War, a position he would hold for the next 5-years.

As President Jackson’s Secretary of War, Cass was central in implementing the Indian Removal policy of the Jackson administration after Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830.

The Indian Removal Act was directed specifically at the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeastern United States – the Cherokee, Creeks, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw – though it also affected tribes in Ohio, Illinois and other areas east of the Mississippi River.

Most were forced to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska.

Cass was appointed as the U. S. Minister to France by President Jackson, starting in 1836, and he held this position until 1842.

Then in 1844, Cass stood as a Democratic candidate for the Presidential nomination, but lost the nomination that year to James Polk, who defeated the Whig candidate Henry Clay to became the 11th President of the United States, serving from 1845 to 1849.

Cass was then elected by the Michigan State Legislature in 1845 to serve as its United States Senator, a position he held until 1848 when he resigned in order to pursue an unsuccessful run for President that year.

He was a leading supporter of the Popular Sovereignty doctrine, which held that the American citizens of a territory should decide whether or not to permit slavery there as a middle position on the slavery issue.

Popular sovereignty was applied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which passed Congress in 1854, but was most notable for stoking national tensions over slavery on the road to the American Civil War and leading to “Bleeding Kansas,” a series of violent confrontations between 1854 and 1859 over a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the Proposed state of Kansas.

After his loss to Zachary Taylor in the 1848 election, Cass was returned to the
U. S. Senate by the Michigan State Legislature, serving from 1849 to 1857.

He ran and lost for President a third-time in 1852, losing the Democratic nomination that year to Franklin Pierce, who became the 14th U. S. President.

A few years later, in March of 1857, President James Buchanan appointed an elderly Lewis Cass to serve as the Secretary of State in his administration around the same time he was retiring from the Senate.

During his term of service as Secretary of State, Cass delegated most of his responsibilities either to an Assistant Secretary of State or to the President, though he was involved in negotiating a final settlement to the 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, which limited U. S. and British control of Latin American Countries.

Cass died in June of 1866 in Detroit, and was buried in the Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit, Michigan’s oldest continuously operating non-denominational cemetery, having been dedicated in October of 1846.

Interesting to see so many classical-looking stone masonry tombs in Elmwood that are entombed in the earth surrounding them.

Descendents of Lewis Cass included great-grandson Augustus Cass Canfield, long-time President and Chairman of the Harper & Brothers Publishing Company (later known as Harper & Row)…

…and grandson Lewis Cass Ledyard, a New York City lawyer, personal counsel to financier J. P. Morgan, and a President of the New York Bar Association.

I am showcasing unlikely pairs of historical figures who are represented in the National Statuary Hall who have things in common with each other, as mentioned at the beginning of this post.

In this pairing, Henry Clay and Lewis Cass were both acknowledged Freemasons…

…both men served as Secretary of State, Henry Clay during the administration of President John Quincy Adams, and Lewis Cass during the administration of President James Buchanan…

…and both men unsuccessfully ran for President three times, Henry Clay in 1824, 1832, and 1844; and Lewis Cass in 1844, 1848, and 1852.

The next unlikely pairing from the National Statuary Hall that I am going to showcase for things in common is Dr. John Gorrie for Florida and William King for Maine.

In this new series called “Snapshots from the National Statuary Hall at the U. S. Capitol,” I am showcasing unlikely pairs of historical figures in the National Statuary Hall who have things in common with each other.

I am pairing Louisiana’s controversial Governor, Huey P. Long, and Alabama’s Helen Keller, a deaf-blind woman who gain prominence as an American author, lecturer, political activist, and disability rights activist, in this segment.

In the first segment of this series, I paired Michigan’s Gerald Ford, a former President of the United States, and Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederate States of America; and in the second segment, I paired Dr. Norman Borlaug, Ph.D, often called the “Father of the Green Revolution; and Colorado’s Dr. Florence R. Sabin, M.D, remembered as a pioneer for women in science.

A statue of Huey Pierce Long is in the National Statuary Hall representing the State of Louisiana.

Huey Pierce Long, Jr, was an American politician, serving as Louisiana’s Governor and as United States Senator. 

He was  assassinated in 1935.

Nicknamed “the Kingfish,” he rose to prominence during the Great Depression as a left-wing populist in the Democratic party who was critical of President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, which Long didn’t think was radical enough.

Huey Long was born in August of 1893 near Winnfield, Louisiana, the seat of Winn Parish.

His family lived in a comfortable farmhouse, and were well-off compared to others in Winnfield.

In the 1890s, Winn Parish was a bastion of the Populist Party, a left-wing political party that emphasized the idea of “the People” versus “the Establishment.”

In the 1912 election, citizens of Winn Parish voted more for Socialist candidate for President Eugene V. Debs than any other candidate.

When Long was in high school, he and his friends formed a secret society, with a mission to “run things, laying down certain rules the students would have to follow.”

Cautioned by his teachers to obey the school’s rules, some of the rebellious things Long did included distributing a flyer that criticized his teachers and the necessity of a recently-mandated fourth year of secondary education, and successfully petitioning to fire the principal, though he never finished high school.

And even though he won a full academic scholarship to Louisiana State University, his family couldn’t afford to cover his books or living expenses, so he became a travelling salesman instead.

In 1911, at the urging of his mother, he attended seminary classes Oklahoma Baptist University, but only for one semester because it didn’t suit him.

Then, in 1912, he attended the University of Oklahoma College of Law in for a semester, where apparently his grades were poor because he was distracted by the gambling houses when he was attending classes there.

While working as a salesman, Long met his future wife Rose McConnell, who he married in 1913, at a baking contest he promoted to sell Cottolene Shortening, a brand of shortening made of beef suet and cottonseed oil that was produced in the U. S. from 1868 until the early 20th-century, the first mass-produced and mass-marketed alternative to lard, a natural cooking fat derived from rendered pig fat.

Long enrolled in the Tulane Law School in 1914, concentrating on the courses necessary for the bar exam.

He passed the bar, and received his license to practice law in 1915.

Long established his private law practice in Winnfield in 1915, where he represented poor plaintiff’s, mostly in Workers’ Compensation cases.

In 1918, he entered the race to serve on one of the three-seats on the Louisiana Railroad Commission.

His message to the voters throughout his career as an elected official, in a nutshell, was that he was a warrior from and for the people, battling the giants of Wall Street, with too much of America’s wealth being concentrated in too few hands.

He won by just over 600 votes.

While serving on the commission, he forced utilities to lower rates; ordered railroads to service to small towns; and demanded Standard Oil to stop importing Mexican crude oil and use more oil from Louisiana.

Long became chairman of the commission in 1922, known by then as the “Public Service Commission.”

Huey Long announced his candidacy for Louisiana governor in August of 1923.

He campaigned throughout the state, as well as in rural areas disenfranchised by the Louisiana political establishment, known as the “Old Regulars.”

He did not make it past the primary that year, even though received 31% of the vote from the electorate and carried 28 parishes, more than his opponents.

It was the only election Long ever lost.

Long spent the next four years building his political organization and reputation.

Also, Government mismanagement as a result of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 from the people affected by it aided Huey Long.

The most destructive river flood in U. S. history, it was estimated to cost upwards of $1 billion in damages, and caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom joined the “Great Migration,” also known as the “Black Migration,” from the rural south to the industrial cities of the North and Midwest, that took place roughly between 1910 and 1970.

He launched his second campaign for governor in 1927, using the slogan “Every man a king, but no one wears a crown.”

Among other things, he used trucks with loudspeakers and radio commercials in his campaign.

He won the 1928 election for governor with 96.1% of the vote in the general election, and was the youngest governor elected in state history at the age of 35.

Upon entering office on May 21st of 1928, Long fired hundreds of opponents in the state bureaucracy at all levels, and replaced them with patronage appointments of his political supporters, who were expected to pay a portion of their salary into his campaign fund.

This was his office in the Old Louisiana Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge, said to have been built under his supervision in 1930, and inspired to resemble the White House in Washington, DC.

It is now an historic house museum under the stewardship of an organization called “Preserve Louisiana.

The previous Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge, the Knox Mansion said to have been built in 1857, was demolished by convicts from the State Penitentiary under the direction of Huey Long.

After Long had strengthened his control over the state political apparatus, he proceeded to push bills through the state legislature to fulfill campaign promises using aggressive tactics to ensure their passage.

Long met considerable resistance from legislators after calling the legislature into special session in 1929 in order to enact a 5-cent per barrel tax on refined oil production, and his opponents introduced an impeachment resolution against him with nineteen charges listed.

He was ultimately impeached on eight-of-the-nineteen charges in the Louisiana House but avoided conviction in the Senate, in which conviction required a two-thirds majority, particularly when fifteen Senators signed a statement pledging to vote not-guilty regardless of the evidence.

In March of 1930, Long established his own newspaper, called the “Louisiana Progress,” which promoted his political aims and attacked his opponents.

The newspaper was renamed “The American Progress” in 1935, and went national to promote Long’s “Share Our Wealth” program and his ambitions for running for President in 1936.

Not long after his impeachment proceedings, Long announced his candidacy for the U. S. Senate in the 1930 Democratic Primary.

By this time, Huey Long was known as “the Kingfish,” a name he bestowed upon himself after an “Amos ‘n’ Andy” character from the radio show which first aired in 1928, and was later turned into a television series from 1951 to 1953.

The Kingfish in “Amos ‘n’ Andy” was a man whose life revolved around his lodge, the Mystic Knights of the Sea.

The radio show had black characters, but was created, written, and voiced by two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who also happened to be Freemasons and Shriners.

Long won the Senate seat for a term that started while he was still Governor of Louisiana.

This led to a showdown between Long, and his Lieutenant-Governor Paul Cyr, who declared himself the State’s legitimate Governor in October of 1931, and who threatened to undo Long’s reforms.

Using a combination of the Louisiana National Guard and the Louisiana Supreme Court, Long successfully prevented Cyr from claiming the Governorship because he had vacated the Lieutenant-Governorship and had the court eject Cyr, making Long both Governor and Senator-elect.

He was able to concentrate his power into a political machine, and continued his practice of a patronage system placing his supporters into positions of influence and power.

Long’s opponents argued that he became the dictator of Louisiana.

Long’s legacy as Governor of Louisiana was said to be his creation of an unprecedented public works program resulting in the construction of roads, bridges, hospitals, schools and state buildings, which would have taken place during the Great Depression.

Infrastructure attributed to Huey Long includes:

The Huey P. Long Bridge, a cantilevered, steel through-truss bridge carrying six-lanes of U.S. 90 and two-tracks of the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad across the Mississippi River, said to have been constructed between January of 1933 and December of 1935…

…the Field House at Louisiana State University, said to have been constructed in 1932 with a post office, ballroom, gymnasium, and the largest swimming pool in the United States at the time…

…the swimming pool of which was abandoned after the Natatorium for the LSU swim teams was completed in 1985…

…and the new Louisiana State Capitol building in Baton Rouge, said to have been constructed between 1930 and 1931, and inaugurated in May of 1932.

The Louisiana State Capitol Building in the middle brings to mind Moscow State University on the left, said to have been built in the Stalinist Architectural style between 1947 and 1953, and on the right, the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia, said to have been built starting in 1922, and opening in 1932.

Long continued to effectively maintain control of Louisiana as Senator, and by 1935, his consolidation of power led to those in opposition to him forming what was called the “Square Deal Association” in January of 1935, which included two former governors and the Mayor of New Orleans.

On January 25th of 1935, armed “Square Dealers” seized the East Baton Rouge Parish Courthouse.

In response, Long had the Governor, his long-time friend and supporter, Oscar Allen, call in the National Guard and declare Martial Law, banning public gatherings of more than two people and forbidding criticism of state officials.

The Square Dealers left the courthouse, and the only resulting incident was a brief armed skirmish at the airport, leaving one person wounded but no fatalities.

In the summer of 1935, Long called for two special legislative sessions, which passed laws further centralizing Long’s control over the state, and which stripped away the remaining powers of the Mayor of New Orleans.

On September 8th of 1935, Long was at the State Capitol to pass a bill that would gerrymander the district of an opponent, Judge Benjamin Pavy.

After the bill passed, Long was shot in the torso at close range, according to the official narrative, by a lone gunman, Baton Rouge physician Dr. Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of Judge Pavy.

Dr. Weiss was immediately shot by Long’s body-guards, with his autopsy findings showing that he was shot over 60 times.

Long’s funeral was held in Baton Rouge on September 12th, with an estimated 200,000 people in attendance, and he was buried on the grounds of the Louisiana State Capitol complex and memorialized by a statue of him directly facing the State Capitol building on his gravesite.

So, here we have a man who was beloved by the People for his anti-establishment rhetoric, and hated by his enemies, whose ambition for power was dictatorial in nature and whose platform was radical socialism, even though he was called a “Populist member of the Democratic Party,” and was also credited with monumental building projects as part of his legacy.

Something seems very fishy about this man and his whole story, leading to more questions than answers.

Who was this guy?

Travelling salesman, turned attorney, turned politician, turned virtual dictator?

What was really going on here?

I mean, doesn’t he even loo like he is telling a fish story in this photo of him?

Telling a “fish story” is slang for an improbable, boastful tale after the tendency of fishermen to exaggerate the size of the fish they have either caught or lost.

Helen Keller is one of the two statues representing the State of Alabama.

Helen Keller lost her sight and hearing after becoming ill at the age of 19-months.

Helen Keller was born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1880 at a home still standing today called “Ivy Green.”

Tuscumbia is the county seat of Colbert County.

Tuscumbia was the traditional territory of the Chickasaw people, one of the Five Civilized Tribes of the southeastern United States that were relocated by the U. S. Government to the Oklahoma Territory during the 1830s.

Until the age of 7, Helen communicated by home signs.

Her mother sent her and her father to Baltimore in 1886 to see an ENT specialist, who referred them to Alexander Graham Bell, who referred them to the Perkins Institute for the Blind in South Boston, who sent Anne Sullivan to work with Helen at her home in Alabama, and who became her teacher and life-long companion Ann Sullivan, and taught her how to speak, read, and write.

Helen physically attended the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston, starting in 1888…

…and the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston in 1890, founded in 1869 and the oldest public day-school for the deaf and hard-of-hearing in the United States…

…and the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York from 1894 to 1896.

Helen Keller gained admittance to Harvard’s Radcliffe College in 1900, and graduated in 1904 as the first blind-and-deaf woman to receive a Bachelor of Arts Degree.

It was during the time that Helen Keller was attending Radcliffe College that she met the Standard Oil magnate, industrialist, and financier Henry Huttleston Rogers through her admirer Mark Twain, and Rogers and his wife paid for Helen’s education there.

She also corresponded with the Austrian Jewish philosopher Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was credited with discovering her literary talent.

Wilhelm Jerusalem wrote a psychological study in 1890 on Laura Bridgman, the first deaf-blind American child to gain an education in the English language, and who gained celebrity status after meeting Charles Dickens in 1842, and he wrote about her in “American Notes.”

It is important to note that the famous American author who admired Helen Keller, Mark Twain, was a member of the Bohemian Club of Bohemian Grove fame…

…and the famous British author Charles Dickens wrote a lot of books about orphans and workhouses.

Helen Keller learned to speak, and for the rest her life gave speeches and lectures, becoming a world famous speaker and author.

She travelled to twenty-five different countries, and gave motivational speeches, in particular about deaf people’s conditions.

In 1909, Helen Keller became a member of the Socialist Party, and in 1912 she joined the IWW.

She supported Eugene V. Debs, five-time Socialist candidate for President of the United States, in his presidential campaigns.

The Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, was founded in 1905 in Chicago by people like Eugene V. Debs, and Bill Haywood, an active Socialist and Marxist.

The IWW was founded at a convention in Chicago of 200 Socialists, Marxists, and Anarchists

The IWW contends that all workers should be united as a social class to supplant capitalism with industrial democracy.

In 1915, the Helen Keller International organization for research in vision, health, and nutrition, was founded by her and George A. Kessler, a businessman known as the “Champagne King,” who owned a wine import company.

Notably, George A. Kessler was one of the 761 survivors of the 1,960 people on-board the RMS Lusitania when it sank during World War I in May of 1915 after having been torpedoed by a German U-Boat.

Helen Keller was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Helen Keller died in her sleep on June 1st of 1968 at her home in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Her funeral service was held at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, and her ashes said to be buried next to her constant companion Anne Sullivan in a crypt in the Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea at the National Cathedral.

As mentioned previously, I am showcasing unlikely pairs of historical figures who are represented in the National Statuary Hall who have things in common with each other.

In this pairing, Huey P. Long and Helen Keller both had far left-learning political views.

Huey P. Long’s ambition for power was dictatorial in nature and his platform was radical socialism, even though he was called a “Populist member of the Democratic Party,” and Helen Keller was an active member of the Socialist Party.

Huey Long’s home parish of Winn Parish was a Populist Bastion that strongly supported the Socialist candidate of Eugene V. Debs in the 1912 election, and Helen Keller was also a strong supporter of his presidential candidacy as well.

And both Huey P. Long and Helen Keller had a connection to Standard Oil, albeit Huey Long’s connection was adversarial with his demand to Standard Oil to stop importing Mexican crude oil and use more oil from Louisiana when he was on the Louisiana Railroad Commission, and Helen Keller was the beneficiary of Henry Huttleston Rogers, the Standard Oil Magnate, paying for her college education.

The next unlikely pairing from the National Statuary Hall that I am going to showcase for things in common is Henry Clay for Kentucky and Lewis Cass for Michigan.

I have decided to showcase unlikely pairs of historical figures who have things in common with each other in the National Statuary Hall in this new series, “Snapshots from the National Statuary Hall at the U. S. Capitol.”

In this segment, I am pairing Iowa’s Dr. Norman Borlaug, Ph.D, often called the “Father of the Green Revolution; and Colorado’s Dr. Florence R. Sabin, M.D, remembered as a pioneer for women in science.

In the first segment, I paired Michigan’s Gerald Ford, a former President of the United States, and Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederate States of America.

I am currently approximately half-way through a series in which I am taking an in-depth look at who is represented in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, DC, in which sculptures of prominent American historical figures are housed, two for each state.

First, Norman Borlaug, one of the two statues representing the State of Iowa in the National Statuary Hall.

The other was Iowa’s Civil War Governor, Samuel J. Kirkwood.

Dr. Norman Borlaug was an American Agriculturalist who led initiatives around the world that lead to significant increases in agricultural production, we are told, known as “The Green Revolution.”

Norman Borlaug was born in March of 1914 on his Norwegian great-grandparents’ farm in the Norwegian-American community of Saude, Iowa, in Chickasaw County.

Borlaug worked on the family farm west of Protivin, Iowa, from the ages of 7 to 19, raising things like corn, oats and livestock.

He attended the one-room New Oregon #8 rural school in Howard County, Iowa, through the 8th-grade, a building that is owned by the Norman Borlaug Heritage Foundation as part of his legacy.

For the remainder of his secondary-education he attended Cresco High School, excelling in athletics.

He received his higher education at the University of Minnesota, where he received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Forestry in 1937, a Master of Science degree in 1940, and a Ph.D in plant pathology and genetics in 1942.

Borlaug was employed as a microbiologist by DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware, between 1942 and 1944, where it was planned he would lead research in agricultural bacteriocides, fungicides and preservatives.

With the entry of the U. S. into World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th of 1941, his lab instead was converted to conduct research for the U. S. Military, like the development of glue that resisted corrosion in the warm salt water of the Pacific; camouflage; canteen disinfectants; DDT to control Malaria; and insulation for small electronics.

The Mexican President Avila Camacho, elected in 1940, wanted to augment Mexico’s industrialization and economic growth, and the U. S. Vice-President Henry Wallace, who saw this as beneficial to the interests of the United States, persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to work with the Mexican government in agricultural development.

They in turn contacted leading agronomists who proposed the Office of Special Studies within the Mexican Government to be directed by the Rockefeller Foundation, and staffed by Mexican and American scientists focusing on soil development; maize and wheat production and plant pathology.

Borlaug was tapped to be the head of the newly established Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program in Mexico, a position which he took over as a geneticist and plant pathologist after he finished his wartime service with DuPont in 1944.

In 1964, he was made the Director of the International Wheat Improvement Program at El Batan on the outskirts of Mexico City, as part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research’s International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (or CIMMYT), the funding for which was provided by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and the Mexican Government.

Interesting to note that Borlaug felt that pesticides, like DDT, had more benefits than drawbacks, and advocated for their continued use.

Borlaug retired as Director of the CIMMYT in 1979, though stayed on as a Senior Consultant and continued to be involved in research in plant research.

He started teaching and doing research at Texas A & M University in 1984, and was the holder of the Eugene Butler Endowed Chair in Agricultural Biotechnology, for which he advocated the use of as he had for the use of pesticides, in spite of heavy criticism.

Norman Borlaug died at the age of 95 in September of 2009 in Dallas.

There is a memorial to him outside of the city of Obregon, at CIMMYT’s Experiment Station in Mexico’s Sonora State, where there are miles and miles of cultivated land, where tractors plow the land, airplanes spray pesticides on the crops; mechanical harvesters reap the wheat; trucks carry the crops to town from where they are shipped around the world.

Among other awards in recognition for his achievements, Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970; the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977; and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2006.

It is interesting to note that the old Des Moines Public Library Building has been the Norman E. Borlaug/World Food Prize Hall of Laureates for the World Food Prize since 1973, an international award recognizing the achievements of individuals who have advanced human development by improving the quality, quantity, or availability of food in the world.

The old Des Moines Public Library Building was said to have been constructed in 1903, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977.

The World Food Prize is awarded here in October of every year and the World Food Prize Foundation is endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation.

It is also interesting to note that in Norman Borlaug’s home state of Iowa, Power Pollen is located in Ankeny.

Power Pollen’s mission statement is to preserve and enhance crop productivity by enabling superior pollination systems.

Well, that sounds great, but when I was looking for information on Power Pollen, I encountered the information that in 2021, Power Pollen announced a commercial license agreement with Bayer Pharmaceuticals designed to help corn seed production.

And what’s wrong with that picture?

Monsanto was acquired by the German multinational Bayer Pharmaceutics and Life Sciences Company after gaining United States and EU regulatory approvals on June 7th of 2018 for $66-billion in cash, and Monsanto’s name is no longer used.

Next, Dr. Florence R. Sabin is one of the two statues representing the State of Colorado.

The other is NASA astronaut Jack Swigert.

Dr. Florence R. Sabin was an American medical scientist.

As a pioneer for women in science, she was the first woman to become a professor at a medical college in the Department of Anatomy at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1902…

…the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1925…

…and the first woman to head a department at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1925, when she became head of the Department of Cellular Studies and where her research focused on the lymphatic system; blood vessels & cells; and tuberculosis.

The Rockefeller University was founded in 1901 by John D. Rockefeller, and was America’s first biomedical institute.

Florence R. Sabin was born in Central City, Colorado, in 1871, to a mining engineer father and schoolteacher mother.

Her mother died in 1878, and she and her sister went to live with their uncle in Chicago, before moving to live with their grandparents in Vermont.

In 1885, she enrolled in the Vermont Academy at Saxton River, where she was able to develop her interest in science.

She attended Smith College in Massachusetts, and graduated in 1893 with her Bachelor’s degree.

In 1896, Sabin enrolled in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, which had opened in 1893, and she graduated in 1900.

Her two major projects were on producing a 3D model of a newborn’s brain stem, which became the focus of the 1901 textbook “An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain,” and the second was on the development of the lymphatic system in the embryo.

In her retirement, she became involved in Public Health in the State of Colorado at the invitation of the Governor at the time.

Among other things, as a result of her work, the “Sabin Health Laws” were passed, modernizing public health care in Colorado by providing more beds to treat Tuberculosis, which led to a reduction in the number of cases.

Florence R. Sabin died at the age of 81 in October of 1953, and her remains were interred in the Fairmount Mausoleum at the Fairmount Cemetery in Denver.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this video, I am showcasing unlikely pairs of historical figures who are represented in the National Statuary Hall who have things in common with each other in this “Snapshots from the Statuary Hall” series.

In this pairing, Dr. Norman Borlaug and Dr. Florence R. Sabin both worked under the auspices of the Rockefellers in their careers, and both researched and taught in their respective academic fields at the University Level.

The next unlikely pairing from the National Statuary Hall that I am going to showcase for things in common is Huey P. Long for Louisiana and Helen Keller for Alabama.