JULY 2 — 1881 Pres. Garfield assassinated; 2016 Third Man Records launches the Icarus; 1776 2nd Continental Congress drafts Declaration of Independence
JULY 2
President Garfield is assassinated.
Now, we’ve heard the stories about his long brutally painful death which lasted months, and I go into detail on that on the death of President Garfield on my September 13th ep. Charles Giteau, who was simply trying to save the Republican Party, didn’t really assassinated Garfield, the voices in his head told him, and he was simply handling a much needed divinely ordained “removal” if you will.
The actual brain of Giteau is currently in a jar at the Mutter Museum in Philly, if you want to check it out, but there’s nothing that’s that exciting about it. It looks like a jar of artichoke hearts. The question is, what inside that brain triggered Giteau to kill the president?
He had been a social misfit. Giteau had no friends, a father who was convinced Charles was possessed by the devil, a wife who left him, once chased his sister with an ax (careful there, it’s not a toy) and couldn’t hold a career whether he was trying to be a preacher or lawyer. He was a failure in nearly every part of life. He loved the Republican Party and wanted to help out in any way possible by annoyingly hang around the party office and the White House asking everyone for a job, until Secretary of State James Blaine finally told Giteau to take a hike and never come back.
Legend has it, that’s what triggered Giteau into shooting the president. No conspiracy here; nothing to see, the only weird thing about the case is that we can still see the killer’s brain if we pay a visit to the museum in Philly. A presidential assassination without a conspiracy? Not so fast. When inaugurated, President Garfield said a couple interesting things in his speech. One of them about Mormonism, went like this: “… The Mormon Church not only offends the moral sense of manhood by sanctioning polygamy, but prevents the administration of justice through ordinary instrumentalities of law. Was it the Mormon mafia who planted ideas into Giteau’s head? Like many conspiracies, I highly doubt it. Mormon leaders expressed nothing but deep sorrow in Garfield’s death, comparing the president’s behavior to the actions of Jesus Christ himself.
On a different note, he said something else in his speech regarding Black Friday. Black Friday is when banker Jay Gould cornered the gold market, and I cover it in detail on my September 24th ep. “Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce…and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate. ” That’s not what the banking industry wanted to hear, and was a direct threat to their business.
Is it possible that a banker whispered something in Gateau’s ear, giving him yet another reason to kill the president? I don’t know. You’d have to ask Giteau’s brain on display in a jar full of alcohol and water at a museum in Philly. Giteau killed him because he was schizophrenic and mentally unstable, period,. End of story. Or is it.
Draw your own conclusions.
1937 – Amelia Earhart disappears.
The Lockheed plane she was flying was last reported near Holland Island in the Pacific ocean. Earhart and her navigator, Frederick Noonan, were attempting to fly around the world, and part of that journey included a fuel stop at Howland Island near New Guinea.
The last time the US Coast Guard ship Itasca had communicated with her, she reported being lost and low on fuel, and then she vanished. Amelia Mary Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic. She received the US Distinguished Flying Cross for this record. According to Wiki, she set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences and was instrumental in the formation of the Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots.
Earhart joined the faculty of the Purdue University aviation department in 1935 as a visiting faculty member to counsel women on careers and help inspire others with her love for aviation. She was also a member of the National Woman’s party, and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. Very cool.
But getting back to her disappearance. An exhaustive search of the surrounding area by the Coast Guard and US Navy found no physical evidence of the fliers or their plane. There’s the traditional belief that her plane simply crashed and sunk. Then there’s the Gardner Island hypothesis, which claims she headed south towards the Phoenix islands, now called the Republic of Kiribati, about 350 miles southeast of Howland Island.
Then there are myths and legends, like the one that says she faked her death and spied on Japan see for FDR, another that she was captured by Japanese, another that she was part of the Tokyo Rose theory in which female English speaking Japanese broadcasters spread propaganda for the sake of lowering American morale, another that she wound up in New Guinea, and yet another one that suggested she faked her death and changed her identity to that of a new York banker named Irene Bolam.
2016 – Third Man Records launches The Icarus Craft
…which plays Carl Sagan’s “A Glorious Dawn” in the stratosphere. Now, music being played in space was of course nothing new at all. Jingle Bells being the most legendary, but also some surprises: Jimmy Buffett’s Cheeseburger in Paradise, The End by the Doors, Across the Universe by the Beatles, To the Moon and Back from Savage Garden, Galileo by the Indigo Girls, even Knights of the Round Table by Monte Python.
What was unique about A Glorious Dawn was the fact that it was vinyl and was played on a space proof turntable.
Jack White, perhaps best known for being the frontman for rock band White Stripes, was getting ready to celebrate the anniversary of his independent record label Third Man Records, and wanted to do something special, and creating a turntable and record that would withstand the harsh conditions of outer space would be taken on by engineer Kevin Carrico.
Sagan’s Glorious Dawn, remixed for this occasion to include vocals from Stephen Hawking, would be repeated as the turntable rose inside the balloon for about 80 minutes to its ascension. If you’ve ever used a record player for anything, you can imagine its trip up to space had to be tight; with a sturdy phono cartridge, stylus, and onboard flight computer programs designed to keep the record playing while it was safe to do so. Once the record player was released from the balloon, it went into turbulent mode where the record continued to spin but the tone arm was lifted from the record surface to protect the needle and the record.
…A piece of paper, called the Declaration of Independence, drafted b y some dude named Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776, established a very powerful statement by the second continental congress against the British crown. The vote for adopting this declaration was unanimous, with only New York abstaining. According to archives.gov,
“in this declaration, in exalted and unforgettable phrases, Jefferson expressed the convictions in the minds and hearts of the American people.”
The political philosophy of the Declaration was not new; it’s ideals of individual liberty had already been expressed by John Locke and the Continental philosophers. What Jefferson did was to summarize this philosophy in Self Evident truths, and set forth a list of grievances against the King in order to justify before the world that the breaking of ties between the colonies and the mother country.
The delegates voted favor of this on July 2, 1776, and John Adams wrote that July 2 would be celebrated as the most memorable era in the history of America. Close! The declaration was adopted two days later, on July 4.