Category: Flotsam-and-Jetsam

‘Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes’ Review: A Good, Standard Serial Killer Profile

With the release of so many true crime documentaries from Netflix that feature incompetent police, bungled investigations and an often, at times, unnecessary “artsy” vibes, one longs for the old days of true crime where the most interesting thing to discover was the nuts and bolts of how a famous serial killer operated. This is the best thing Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes has going for it.

LINK: https://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillbarr/2019/01/18/conversations-with-a-killer-the-ted-bundy-tapes-review-netflix-true-crime-truecrime-making-a-murderer/#6877fec02927

Worst mass extinction event in Earth’s history was caused by global warming analogous to current climate crisis

  • The Permian period ended about 250 million years ago with the largest recorded mass extinction in Earth’s history, when a series of massive volcanic eruptions is believed to have triggered global climate change that ultimately wiped out 96 percent of marine species in an event known as the “Great Dying.”
  • According to Justin Penn, a doctoral student at the University of Washington (UW), the Permian extinction can help us understand the impacts of climate change in our own current era.
  • Penn led a team of researchers that combined models of ocean conditions and animal metabolism with paleoceanographic records to show that the Permian mass extinction was caused by rising ocean temperatures, which in turn forced the metabolism of marine animals to speed up. Increased metabolism meant increased need for oxygen, but the warmer waters could not hold enough oxygen to meet those needs, and ocean life was left gasping for breath.

LINK: https://news.mongabay.com/2019/01/worst-mass-extinction-event-in-earths-history-was-caused-by-global-warming-analogous-to-current-climate-crisis/

Sun will turn into a crystalline ball bringing doomsday on earth: Study

The study revealed that the sun will one day turn into a crystalline ball, thus triggering doomsday on the entire solar system

Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, a top researcher at the University of Warwick’s Department of Physics has predicted that the doomsday on the earth will be triggered when the sun will turn into a crystalline ball. The researcher made this grim prediction after discovering that white dwarf stars usually turn solid at the end of their lives.

Tremblay revealed that the sun will also face a similar fate in the future, and it will happen in about 10 billion years. It should be noted that the entire life on earth depends on the sun for its survival, and in its absence, the entire solar solar system will become totally uninhabitable.

LINK: https://www.ibtimes.co.in/sun-will-turn-into-crystalline-ball-bringing-doomsday-earth-study-789882

Inside the Unabomber’s odd and furious online revival

A TV drama has rekindled interest in anti-technology terrorist Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. Ironically enough, his followers now congregate online

n 1978 Ted Kaczynski began building letter bombs designed to kill. They were made out of smokeless powder, match heads, nails, potassium nitrate, razor blades, and various other caustic substances. Kaczynski, a former academic and an alumnus of Harvard University, killed three people with these bombs and injured 23 others. His targets were airliners, university professors, and academics. Some of the bombs missed their targets and blew shrapnel into the bodies of postal workers and receptionists. The attacks were unscrupulous and vicious.

Kaczynski, dubbed the Unabomber by the FBI and the media, evaded capture for almost 18 years. He’d been hiding out in a self-contained wood cabin in the forests of Montana, writing a manifesto under the pseudonym “Freedom Club” (or FC) on a portable typewriter. After releasing his 35,000 word manifesto titled “Industrial Society and its Future” to the media in 1995, it became apparent that Kaczynski was fighting, in his mind at least, against the rise of technology and the perceived sickness it had infected the world with. The Unabomber was a militant neo-luddite.

Twenty-two years after Kaczynski’s bombing campaign and imprisonment, he now has a new following. Ironically enough, they all congregate on the internet.

LINK: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/unabomber-netflix-tv-series-ted-kaczynski

Serial killer known as China’s ‘Jack the Ripper’ executed

A man who earned the nickname of China’s “Jack the Ripper” for the slayings of 11 victims was executed Thursday, according to reports.

Gao Chengyong, 54, was sentenced to death in March during a court appearance in Baiyin, China, for robbery, rape, murder, and defiling the dead, according to the South China Morning Post.

Gao was charged for the murders of 11 women and girls between 1998 and 2002, reports AFP. Gao targeted young women wearing red and followed them home, sometimes mutilating his victims, said the report.

LINK: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/01/03/serial-killer-nicknamed-chinas-jack-ripper-executed/2470690002/

 

Lars von Trier Isn’t Evil and that ‘The House That Jack Built’ Is Art

Admin note: After watching the director’s cut of this last night, I am convinced that Lars von Trier has read our homepage and is simpatico. Ok, may not, but it certainly could be the case. Watch the movie and decide for yourself.

Matt Dillon opens up about playing a serial killer in Lars von Trier’s gruesome new film, and grapples with the controversy it caused.

[Editor’s note: This article contains some spoilers for “The House That Jack Built.”]

Before Matt Dillon agreed to play the title role in “The House That Jack Built” — a disturbing and inflammatory epic about a frustrated serial killer who preys on a wide variety of women across the long span of his adult life — he asked writer-director Lars von Trier why he wanted to make such a film. According to Dillon, who spoke to IndieWire over the phone, von Trier replied that he was interested in painting a kind of self-portrait: “‘Most of the male characters in my films have been fucking idiots, but this guy is like me. [Of all the characters I’ve ever written], Jack is the one closest to myself. Except I don’t kill people.’”

LINK: https://www.indiewire.com/2018/12/matt-dillon-interview-lars-von-trier-the-house-that-jack-built-1202028057/