Random Politics Stuff Thread...

[bbgun]

do they think that drug mules are actual mules? wouldn't put it past them.

 

[Cotton]

do they think that drug mules are actual mules? wouldn't put it past them.

The also think that Navy Seals are actual seals that have terrible taste in clothes.

 

[jsmith6919]

 

[jsmith6919]

 

[jsmith6919]

Earliest I remember is Iran hostages

 

[bbgun]

the two assassination attempts on Ford

 

[jsmith6919]

 

[Cotton]

My earliest major historical event is probably the Challenger explosion. I do remember the assassination attempt on Reagan but that is very vague.

 

[jsmith6919]

My earliest major historical event is probably the Challenger explosion. I do remember the assassination attempt on Reagan but that is very vague.

I remember watching the Challenger explosion live in High School. Seeing that and the second plane hit the towers live I'll always remember

 

[Cotton]

I remember watching the Challenger explosion live in High School. Seeing that and the second plane hit the towers live I'll always remember

The towers were my second biggest holy fuck moment. I thought it was a joke at very first. And then...

I was devastated as was most of the country. Absolutely terrifying.

 

[jsmith6919]

The towers were my second biggest holy fuck moment. I thought it was a joke at very first. And then...

I was devastated as was most of the country. Absolutely terrifying.

I was working nights at the time as the foreman for a company re-doing the AC system at the Carrollton Halliburton plant, I had only been home a couple hours and my brother called and woke me up and I turned on the tv right before the second plane hit. Surreal shit for sure.

 

[Smitty]

Hm.

What counts as major? Certainly remember 9/11. Remember the Bush-Gore election disaster. However in the four years before that (96-00) the world was relatively quiet. Any time before that, I’d have been 12-13... I’d have memories of hearing about the stuff concurrently but not actually witnessing them. Like the ‘96 Olympic bombing or the Oklahoma City bombing, like I more remember it being talked about in school rather than truly remembering witnessing it.

Hmmm. OJ Ford Bronco chase I remember watching on TV live as it happened, and the trial, in 94-95. That would probably be the right answer for me. Nothing that important happened in 92 or 93 besides the Cowboys winning the Super Bowls (which I also remember). I guess I also have a decent memory of Clinton defeating Bush in the ‘92 election, but not Bush defeating whoever the fuck in ‘88.

 

[jsmith6919]

decent memory of Clinton defeating Bush in the ‘92 election

I always feel a little bad thinking back to that election because I voted for Perot and the 3rd party vote that election def gave Clinton the win

 

[bbgun]

I voted for Perot

me too

 

[bbgun]

had he stayed in the race the entire time he might've pulled it off

 

[yimyammer]

me too

I did too, was so pissed when he dropped out, it looked like he might have won it had that not happened

The first event I remember is Soldiers who were POWs coming back from Vietnam, one of the kids I grew up with hadn't seen his dad since he was like 2 or 3 and always seemed sad. I hope the return of his dad made his life better, seemed like he moved shortly thereafter

The next event was local, but really stands out because of my age and my circumstances when it happened. A train carrying chemicals exploded and the fireball was said to have been seen for miles. I was 11 years old and my mom had left me at the house solo while she was on a date or something. I was watching a movie Called Sybil that already had me kind of freaked out and right when an especially scary scene took place, I feel and hear a huge boom and thought something had smashed into my house or exploded. I was so scared, it took me a while to get out from under the covers to see what had happened. As I walked down the hall, all I could see through the front window was flames so I figured there was a huge fire and maybe my house was on fire. I work my way to the front door and to my relief, many of my neighbors and friends were all hanging out in my front yard watching what had happened. So I went outside & joined them and was immediately comforted by being around others and learning the fire and explosion had happened miles away. Despite being so far away, we could feel the heat from my front yard:

The next even was The Miracle on Ice, it was pure joy and still is to watch on replay

 

[Sheik]

This conversation made me recall the Marcus Wesson murders in 2004 that happened locally. Crazy whacked out shit. I have/had a friend who worked with one of the daughters. I remember him saying she was super normal at work. The whole family slept in coffins and the dad(Marcus Wesson) got most of the daughters pregnant, had multiple children with his children. Nuts.

But yeah, that, 9-11, Waco, 11-3-2016, those are what made me go “holy shit”.

 

[yimyammer]

So I've been talking to this guy who restores cars off and on over the last couple of years, he's a pretty nice guy, very candid and claims to be dating Matthew Perrys sister for several years. Anyway, we're chatting and he proceeds to tell me about how when he and his brother were 11/12 they watched their father murder two people from England by tying weights to them and throwing the in the ocean to drown, fucking horrendous

Here's the article link: The haunting story of two little boys who watched their father kill in cold blood

The act of evil that unfolded in front of Vince and Russell Boston was something that no adult, let alone a young child, should ever have to witness.

Silas Duane Boston's mugshot at the time of arrest

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The act of evil that unfolded in front of Vince Boston was something that no adult, let alone a young child, should ever have to witness.
Dumbstruck by shock and fear, the youngster and his brother Russell, then aged just 12 and 13, watched on helplessly as their father, Silas Duane Boston , hogtied a young couple, covered their faces with plastic bags, weighed them down with enormous metal gears and pushed them off his boat to their deaths.

Vince's voice is calm and measured as he speaks about the day he witnessed the horrific final moments of Manchester graduates Chris Farmer and Peta Frampton, off the coast of central America in the summer of 1978.
"I was just in shock, my knees were just shaking. We didn't say anything, we were speechless, it's like watching a horror movie in real life."
Manchester Grammar School old boy Chris, 25, had just qualified as a doctor, while Peta, 24, a former Whalley Range High School girl, had just qualified as a lawyer when they left to travel the world in 1977.

Chris Farmer and Peta Frampton grew up together in Chorlton (Image: Penny Farmer)
They would never come home.

Now the story of their tragic fate, their family's decades-long search for answers, the bravery of the killer's two sons, and how he escaped justice after an evil past, are all told in a new podcast series.
In one of Peta's many letters to her family before she and Chris vanished, she explained that they had met an American named 'Dwayne' who offered to take them from Belize to Mexico as crew members on his 32ft wooden sailing boat, the Justin B, with his young sons.
At some point during the journey, Chris had chided Boston for bullying one of the boys.
The drunken skipper had taken a swing at Chris but missed, falling into the ocean.
Humiliated, he vowed revenge.
Speaking to BBC 5 Live journalists Dan Maudsley and Stephen Nolan for Paradise, the podcast about the case, Vince recalls in graphic detail what happened next.

Vince Boston saw his father kill two people (Image: BBC)
His father ordered him and his brother Russell to hide all the knives on board.
Then, after beating Chris so hard with a club that it broke, he tied the couple up.
Vince was made to stand guard over Peta.
"She said 'you are going to burn in hell'. I didn't say anything", Vince recalls. "I probably in my mind agreed with her. She was scared and angry as she should have been.
"When she told me I was going to burn in hell I think she realised it was pretty much over. I think she knew what her fate was at that point. She wasn't crying or whimpering, she was strong and angry."
Vince recalls his father cruelly telling the couple, whose faces were covered with bags, that he had brought them to shore to drop them off, in what Vince believes was an attempt to keep them calm.
Instead, he had sailed further out into the ocean before carrying out the murders in front of the young boys.

Left, Chris Farmer with a young Vince and Russell Boston and left, their father, who killed Chris and his girlfriend Peta Frampton in front of the boys (Image: MEN)
"There was nothing to say. It was like watching a horror movie unfold. We couldn't have talked him out of it at that point. There was nothing to say. What could we have said?” adds Vince.
The couple's bodies were later found in the water by fishermen.
Incredibly, in the years that followed Vince and Russell spoke out a number of times about what they saw, firstly to their grandmother and later to the authorities.

But with law enforcement unable to discover the identities of Chris and Peta, the case went cold in the States.
Meanwhile, in the UK, Chris's late father, BBC journalist Charles Farmer had gathered a dossier of evidence, with the support of the Foreign Office, linking Boston to his son's murder.
But it would still be almost 40 years before an incredible breakthrough - made after Penny Farmer, Chris' sister, turned detective.
“You had these two cold cases on either sides of the Atlantic and the miracle bit is they came together at the same time, each realised the other had the bits,” explains Dan Maudsley.
"GMP had the retired detective's files and letters, they had all of that, and over in America they had the two boys, their testimony but they didn't have any paperwork, they couldn't even find details of the victims.
"Finally they put them together at the same time and that was the moment everything changed. That's how it had been for 38 years.
“Two sides reaching out at different times, neither with the full picture and neither came together until that moment in 2015."
That was the year Chris's sister Penny went looking for the Boston brothers on Facebook, and was stunned to not only find them, but Silas Duane Boston's profile.

Penny Farmer tracked down her brother's killer on Facebook (Image: Penny Farmer)
Using a pseudonym she made contact with Vince Boston, who told her he had witnessed his father commit the murders.
Penny was able to convince GMP to reopen the cold case.
Finally, the pieces started to come together, and in 2016, Boston was charged with the murders of Chris and Peta.
But the case would never get to court.
Boston died just two weeks before pre-trial hearings were due to begin in the US. Seriously ill in hospital, he chose to withdraw treatment, effectively ending his own life.

Silas Duane Boston's mugshot at the time of arrest (Image: BBC)
It was a devastating blow to two families who had already waited almost 40 years for a chance to see justice.
But now they have been given an insight into what could have happened if the trial had ever come to pass.
The Paradise podcast has explored for the first time exactly how public defender Lexi Nagin would have fought Boston's case in court.
She would have alleged that the brothers were trying to frame their father for Chris and Peta's murders, to see him punished 'by proxy' for murdering their mother Mary Lou, when they were toddlers.
The young mother had disappeared in 1968. Sacramento Police had files implicating Boston in her death, and the boy's grandmother had even told them that he was responsible for ending her life, fearful he would lose his children after the couple separated.

Russell and Vince's mother, Mary Lou (Image: Manchester Evening News)
In a further devastating blow, the podcast reveals that when the FBI searched the Guatemalan cemetery where Chris and Peta were buried in 2016, they were unable to find their bodies.
The defence would have gone on to challenge the forensic dental examination which identified Chris and Peta’s bodies in 1979, asserting it would never have stood up in court.
It was a defence case which had the potential to turn what appeared to be an open and shut case into a notoriously difficult to prosecute 'no body' case.
But there remains absolutely no doubt in Penny's mind as to who is responsible for the brutal murders of her brother and his girlfriend - although the idea a trial might have ended in anything other than a guilty verdict troubles her.
"It's only since Dan started doing the podcast that we realised the case wasn't as watertight as we were led to believe," Penny told the Manchester Evening News.
"Boston died two weeks before mum and I were due to give pre-trial evidence.
"Never for a moment did we doubt that we were going to win it.
"Absolutely he was 100 per cent guilty, so there's no real doubt, but when you go into a trial situation you have to put that belief aside.
"I find it scary to think that we might have gone in, with the FBI not having done all their work that they promised.
"It would have been absolutely gut wrenching to face Boston and for him to walk away.
"Not only that but those two sons had been brave enough to give evidence - it's scary to think that we could have gone into that trial and lost it. Strange things do happen in court rooms.
"It was a much more complicated case than we had been led to believe. We felt it was a done deal.

Chris Farmer with his mother Audrey at his graduation (Image: Penny Farmer)
"My mum in her 90s, that trip to Sacramento, had he been found not guilty, I hate to think what would have happened.
"That would have been a massive blow, we know he was guilty but proving it is another thing."
Penny has previously published a book, Dead in the Water, which documents the long search for the truth about what happened to Chris and Peta.

"Penny's book is the story of Chris and Peta's lives and the story of how this finally got Boston arrested, the remarkable work Penny did pushing it forward with GMP," explains Dan.
"The podcast moves it on to what would have happened at the trial, in doing that we realise it's not as straightforward as the prosecution were letting Penny believe.
"It seemed so cut and dried and it wasn't and it's in doing that and realising that we need to investigate that we start to go looking for things.
"Without giving too much away, what we found is not what we set out to find.
"We find some pretty interesting things and it makes us start to question what happens after the late 1970s, when the Farmers had been so active pushing this forward with GMP, what happened in that gap between 1979 - when that dossier was all there with pretty much the evidence that went forward in this case - and 2015 when finally things did get moving.
"This trial never did happen, there were answers the family were looking for and denied hearing.
"That was the original premise of the podcast. We would go to the States, interview everyone who would have been involved in the court case and try to piece it back together.
"Of course when we did, we found that it wasn't as solid as we thought it was going to be, that was the shock.”

Charles Farmer with his wife Audrey, Peta and Christopher (Image: ugc)

"I'm grateful that Dan has picked up the baton where I couldn't go any further with my book," adds Penny.
"We as a family were delighted to be part of the podcast, it's taken things on a further stage, it gave me an opportunity to go to central America to meet Vince.
"It was a great opportunity when I went with Dan to Belize and Guatemala.
"It completed the whole case, I just felt that we had gone that extra mile to get all the extra information. As a family we absolutely wanted to know all the details. For us it completed the whole thing.
"It's just amazing that things are still being found out about the case. In a way it's the trial we never had, that's how I perceive it to be."

 

[Chocolate Lab]

Gosh, he doesn't look at all like an insane murdering lunatic

 

[Cotton]

Hm.

What counts as major? Certainly remember 9/11. Remember the Bush-Gore election disaster. However in the four years before that (96-00) the world was relatively quiet. Any time before that, I’d have been 12-13... I’d have memories of hearing about the stuff concurrently but not actually witnessing them. Like the ‘96 Olympic bombing or the Oklahoma City bombing, like I more remember it being talked about in school rather than truly remembering witnessing it.

Hmmm. OJ Ford Bronco chase I remember watching on TV live as it happened, and the trial, in 94-95. That would probably be the right answer for me. Nothing that important happened in 92 or 93 besides the Cowboys winning the Super Bowls (which I also remember). I guess I also have a decent memory of Clinton defeating Bush in the ‘92 election, but not Bush defeating whoever the fuck in ‘88.

Dukakis.