Mishaps of Paddle Steamer General Slocum. Recent Possible Aligner Activity.

As a useful reference I thought I would make a definitive (everything I have noticed) list of the mishaps of Sidewheel Paddle Steamer General Slocum. Slocum was launched 18 April 1891. In my opinion, besides the horrific 1904 Slocum fire, with its many alignments, and the onboard riot of anarchists 20 days before McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist, it's for whatever reason just the mishaps of summer 1894 that align well with assassination.

• 10 August 1891. Florence Schermack, 12, drowns after falling off dangerously crowded dock at Jewell's Wharf, foot of Fulton Street, Brooklyn, she being one of about 800 passengers unloaded there from General Slocum in dark at 8:30pm or so.
• 13 August 1891. Runs aground on mud bank off Rockaway Beach during low tide. Passengers have to return to NYC by LIRR.
• 15 August 1891. About 10am Slocum runs into SS Monmouth off Pier 6, North River [a former name of the lower Hudson River], off Rector Street.
• 29 July 1894. Slocum loses electrical power and lighting after striking sandbar off Rockaway with about 4700 on ship. Pandemonium ensues onboard.
  • Six years to day before assassination of Umberto I of Italy.
  • Sixteen years to day before Slocum, TX, massacre.
  • Twenty-one years to day before Matheson fire (day before Black Tom Explosion).
• 15 August 1894. Slocum runs into sandbar again. Stays aground all night.
  • The assassin of French President Carnot is executed the same day. Elliott Roosevelt died the previous day.
• 1 September 1894. Slocum's rudder falls off or is heavily damaged after backing into tugboat Robert H. Sayre shortly after leaving Jewell's Wharf, Brooklyn.
  • Same day as Great Hinckley Fire that may have killed Thomas “Boston” Corbett. Robert H. Sayre had saved about half the passengers of the James D. Nicol when the latter sank off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, 24 June 1894 (the day after the Albion Mine disaster and the same day that President Carnot was assassinated).
• 8 July 1898. Slocum crashes head-on into starboard side, amidships, of Steam Lighter Amelia in afternoon. Amelia deems it necessary to beach herself on Governor's Island.
  • Probably insignificant, but same day that con artist Soapy Smith was killed in “Shootout on Juneau Wharf”, Skagway, Alaska.
• 17 August 1901. The General Slocum is carrying about 800 anarchists from Paterson, NJ, on an excursion from Jersey City to Rockaway. A group of likely inebriated anarchists decide sea is too rough and that Slocum should turn around. Possibly mutinous riot ensues and Slocum does turn around—to police dock near Battery, where seventeen rioters are handed over to police.
  • Twenty days later, on 6 September 1901, President McKinley is fatally wounded by an anarchist assassin perhaps influenced by anarchists associated with Paterson.
• 15 June 1902. At 4pm runs aground at Far Rockaway while dodging yacht 400 yards from Seaside Hotel.
  • Two years to the day before Slocum fire.
• 3 July 1902. At 7am, the cook on General Slocum possibly murdered, purportedly by porter from St. Thomas, West Indies (newspaper says cook expected to die).
• 6 July 1902. Collides with Thomas Patten, morning, Battery, during competition to enter pier vacated by Bay Ridge.
• 9 August 1903. Some buckets on one paddle wheel damaged and box about this paddle wheel crushed during heavy seas while returning to Manhattan from Rockaway Beach. Likely a comparatively minor incident.
• 15 June 1904. Slocum catches fire at Hellgate, East River, with 1029 dead. St. Vitus day in Gregorian Calendar (Catholic liturgical calendar).
  • Same day that Hitachi Maru shelled and sunk (1086 dead) by Russians during Russo-Japanese war.
  • Day before Nikolay Bobrikov, Governor General of Finland, assassinated.
  • Thirteen days later, on 28 June 1904, SS Norge sinks (635 dead) after striking Hasselwood Rock off Rockall, the deadliest ocean liner disaster in the Atlantic before Titanic. Norge sinks on St. Vitus day in Julian calendar (Serbian Orthodox liturgical calendar), ten years to the day before Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are assassinated in Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip. St. Vitus day is the day Serbs commemorate Lazar of Serbia, who died in 1389 leading the Serb forces in the Battle of Kosovo (15 June 1389 in Julian Calendar).
  • Six years to the day after Slocum fire, on 15 June 1910 (St. Vitus day in Gregorian, Catholic calendar), Herzogivinian Serb Bogdan Žerajić attempts to assassinate Governor of Bosnia-Herzogivina in Sarajevo. The day before Princip assassinates Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Princip would visit the the grave of Žerajić.
  • On 14 October 1912, exactly six months after Titanic hit iceberg, and exactly one year before Senghenydd Coliery disaster, John Flammang Schrank wounds presidential candidate and former president Theodore Roosevelt in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with a shot to the chest from a .38 revolver. Schrank claims that a young woman who perished in the Slocum disaster had at that time been his fiancée (it is dubious that she had ever been his fiancée). In Schrank's pocket when arrested was a note on which he had written the phrase “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott”. This phrase is the title (in German) of Martin Luther's hymn translated in English as “A Mighty Fortress is our God”. The hymn was purportedly being played by the band of the General Slocum as it was about to leave the dock on its fateful voyage. The Chicago Tribune of June 17, 1904, says the hymn was sung: THE SONG ON THEIR LIPS AS THEY SAILED AWAY TO DEATH. "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." 17 Jun 1904, Fri Chicago Tribune (Chicago, Illinois) Newspapers.com.
  • On 15 June 1881, Guiteau bought the ivory-handled British Bulldog revolver which he used 17 days later to assassinate President Garfield. Kaiser Wilhelm II started reign 15 June 1888. The Sanriku tsunami earthquake killed about 22,000 in Japan on 15 June 1896. On 15 June 1920, three black men were lynched in Duluth, Minnesota. Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Wilhelm Pieracki was assassinated in Warsaw on 15 June 1934 by elements associated with the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists); in particular, Stepan Bandera supplied the bomb and gun used during the assassination, and later he led the OUN radical faction OUN-B, the so-called Banderites, who during German occupation helped slaughter many Jews and ethnic Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia notwithstanding that during the middle of the German occupation Bandera was held prisoner by the Nazis. George Dasch and his fellow saboteurs left Lorient, France, 26 May 1942. His mission included blowing up the Hellgate Bridge, which was probably about where the General Slocum fire started going in a big way. Instead, Dasch called the FBI office in Manhattan on 15 June 1942, to give himself up.

Recent possible aligner activity.

So while preparing this reprisal of the weirdnesses concerning the General Slocum disaster, a disaster that took place some 119 years ago, I noticed some current, quite recent weirdnesses possibly suggestive of recent Aligner activity. As mentioned in a recent post from this March, the 18 June 1975 Paul Lentz case seems like it might refer to the 25 May 1896 axe-murderer attack on the Buxton family (which took place in Gaithersburg, Maryland), and also to the 17 June 1905 Ransom train wreck in Finksburg, Maryland. Well, on 25 May 2023, whadya know, there was a train derailment "at the Wesley Road crossing" some seven-tenths of a mile from the location of the 1905 wreck, on the same old Western Maryland railway line. (As for the distance, I am going by a map of the 1905 collision on the Facebook page of the Carrol County Railway Historical Society—it's definitely worth noting that a sign near the Whistlestop indicates (if it wasn't destroyed by the recent derailment) that the 1905 collision was 300 yards [east] from the Whistlestop Cafe and Train Station in Finksburg, which would put the collision just 230 feet from the crossing at Wesley Road. It's also worth noting that in 2005 the Whistle Stop Cafe and Shops held a commemoration of the wreck according to a 2005 Baltimore Sun article.) And on 18 June 2023 a submersible vanished while diving the Titanic site. But why Titanic? One possibility (besides that sheer randomness produces mere coincidences on occasion) is that Lentz was murdered on the day of the execution of the assassin of the Saudi king, a king born 14 April 1906, six years to the day before Titanic struck the iceberg. The king's assassin was born 4/4/44, exactly 24 years to the day before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Like I said, it may be significant that Lentz's body was placed not too far from a named place called South Covell, considering George Covell was the heroic engineer of westbound passenger train No. 5 in the 1905 Finksburg wreck that was just one day off from being 70 years to the day before Lentz was last seen alive. (Something else I've noticed for years that I didn't mention in the earlier post is that there is a Hope Hill Cemetery near the body recovery site in Urbana just as the railway men on No. 5 who constituted most of the fatalities in the Ransom wreck were returning home from working on a train wreck in Mount Hope, Maryland.) On 4/4/44, or perhaps 4/5/44 according to some authorities, Germans used tanks [as in the Tank Road near where the Carroll County Railway Historical Society places the Ransom wreck] of the 5th-SS-Panzer Division Wiking to (temporarily) prevent the capture of Kovel (formerly in Poland, now in northwestern Ukraine) and its garrison by the Soviets, one of Germany's last victories on the Russian front, even if merely a temporary tactical one (the First Ukrainian Front under Ivan Konev took Kovel for the Soviets on 27 June 1944). Kovel wasn't just a problem for the Russians during WWII—indeed, the Brusilov offensive of 1916 during WWI was tactically successful everywhere for the Russians except when it came to capturing Kovel, which they could not manage. The Russian loss in 1916 at the Battle of Kovel is considered a leading cause of the 1917 February Revolution which deprived the tsar of his power. In particular, Arch Duke Paul, the uncle of the tsar, led an imprudent attack on Kovel with a frontal assault using the most elite and loyal Guards Army composed of 60,000 Preobazhensky and Semenovsky Guards troops, notwithstanding the charge would necessarily be through an area heavily guarded by well-positioned machine guns. Apparently Paul, like many aristocrats of the time, had the notion that warfare should be by gallant direct charges rather than cowardly flanking maneuvers. Machine guns don't care, and the Guard Troops were slaughtered en masse. So there you go, Paul Lentz may have been targeted because of his first name. His surname may have got him noticed as well, what since "Lentz" sounds rather like "Linz", the Austrian city Hitler considered his hometown and which he lived more-or-less near (in various communities) until he moved to Vienna in 1907. The deadliest naval loss during WWI for the Austro-Hungarians was the sinking of SS Linz off the coast of Albania at (according to most standard-looking accounts on internet) 0:45 19 March 1918—perhaps the SS Linz disaster spirits might have been blamed for Hitler's failures as if they hated Linz and anyone associated with it—if so, there may have been special efforts by superstitious Nazis to appease the SS-Linz-disaster spirits. It's worth pointing out that the first name of Katherine Mary Lyon, 10, the younger of the Lyon sisters who vanished on the day of the assassination, possibly might have had some significance to the aligner weirdos in Montgomery County from the axe murderer attack on the Buxton family having been the day before the sidewheel paddle steamer Katherine disaster. As for Kathy Lynn Beatty, 15, who was fatally injured in an attack in nearby Aspen Hill a little over a month after Lentz was murdered, I don't have any information that Kathy Lynn Beatty was actually named "Katherine", which thus seems dubious, but aligner weirdo(s) may have figured it was sufficiently probable, or that her having a first name that is often a short form of "Katherine" would be close enough to being named Katherine so as to have considered her a more aligned target than otherwise. On April 4, 1975, what would have been the thirty-first birthday of the assassin of the Saudi King, someone called the Lyon family with a demand for ransom (homonymous with the Ransom train wreck) in exchange for their daughters. Another curiosity is that Abraham Zapruder was from Kovel. Zapruder was born in Kovel on 15 May 1905, slightly more than one month before the Ransom wreck and exactly nine years after the Sherman tornado in Texas, which recall was the first massively deadly tornado of the May 1896 tornado outbreak sequence.

A recurrent pattern in those disasters that the aligner weirdos seem to be interested in is the phenomenon of two disasters occurring on consecutive days and then another disaster happening three days after the second disaster. Lo and behold, looking things up, the 1905 Ransom train wreck arguably starts out such a sequence. Indeed, looking at Blanchard's list of American disasters, you can't help noticing that the Mentor, Ohio, train wreck (21 dead) of 21 June 1905 was exactly four days after the Ransom wreck. And the Mentor wreck was not just any train wreck, but a train wreck officially believed to have been caused by sabotage, probably officially listed as the second deadliest (behind the 24 dead of the 12 August 1939 wreck of the City of San Francisco in Harney, Nevada) such US train wreck. What's more, Mentor has a spooky assassination reference inasmuch as President Garfield lived in Mentor immediately prior to becoming president 4 March 1881, about four months before he was fatally wounded by an assassin on 2 July 1881. And investigating 18 June 1905—70 years to the day before Paul Lentz would be attacked—reveals that (according to many short American-newspaper articles of 18–19 June 1905) there was a mine disaster in the Ivan Colliery in Khartsisk that killed about 500 on or about 18 June 1905. (The American newspapers tend to suggest the disaster happened 18 June 1905, while the British newspapers tend to suggest the disaster happened 17 June 1905, the same day as the Ransom wreck, of course.) Very little is online about the Ivan Colliery disaster, I'm thinking because probably Imperial Russia didn't want the incident publicized or investigated well. After all, it was less than a month before that Russia had suffered defeat at the Battle of Tsushima. Almost all the articles mention that the story came from "Ekaterinoslav", which means "Glory of Catherine" in Russian, and was founded as a city by Catherine the Great in 1787, and is nowadays known as Dnipro. I mostly think "Khartsisk" refers to the city that nowadays is usually named Khartsyzk in English. Khartsyzk lies just east of the city of Donetsk. Formerly, Donetsk used to be part of the Yekaterinoslav Governate (American newspaper articles tend to suggest that Khartsyzk, too, was part of Yekaterinoslav Governate (on occasion apparently called Katherinoslavia), whose capital was the city of Yekaterinoslav). Donetsk in 1905 was referred to as Yuzivka, being named after the Welsh businesman John Hughes ("Yuz" sounds like "Hughes"), who built coal mines and a steel plant in the region. I don't know though—honestly, I'm not really sure that Khartszyk actually was part of the Governate of Yekaterinoslav in 1905 since old maps of Yekaterinoslav Governate put Yuzivka right near the eastern edge of Yekaterinoslav Governate, which might put Khartzyk in the Don Host Oblast until after the First World War (an area east of Donetsk purportedly officially joined Ukraine in 1920, and only the eastern part of this addition was later taken away in 1925). ANYway, the reporters reporting to the western newspapers about the accident were in what was then called Yekaterinoslav, "Glory of Catherine". And the mine disaster was near what is now called Donetsk, a city that was in Yekaterinoslav Governate near the center of the Donets Basin ("Donbas" for short) coal region: "The industrial development of the Donbas began in the 1870s when railroads linking it with central Russia and the sea were constructed, and particularly when the first Catherine Railroad (1884, now known as the Dnipro Railroad) and the second Catherine Railroad (1902), which linked the Donbas to the Kryvyi Rih Iron-ore Basin, were built [emphasis added by me]."

Something linking Ukrainian history with May 25 is that on May 25, 1926, the thirtieth anniversary of the Oxford, Michigan, tornado, Symon Petliura was assassinated. Petliura had been Chairman of the Directorate of the Ukrainian People's Republic from about the start of the Ukrainian-Soviet war in early 1919 and continuing in the period of the exile of the Directorate after the Soviets took control of Ukraine. The assassin Sholom Schwartzbard is believed to have killed Petliura because he was avenging the loss of thousands of Jews during the pogroms of 1919-1920, and more particularly the loss in the Odessa Pogrom of 15 members of his family, and he blamed Petliura, or because Schwartzbard was a Soviet (NKVD) agent (according to KGB defector Peter Deriabin) acting under orders (or both). Petliura was born in 1879 on May 22, another date that has lately been connected to weird incidents (possibly because Lockerbie is arguably the first place of consequence on the railroad north of Quintinshill, and the Quintinshill train wreck was on May 22, 1915).

Let us extend the date range away from the June 17 date of the Ransom train wreck and see if we can catch additional weirdnesses—seems like maybe the disaster killers get obsessed, at least for a few years, with particular date ranges. Do let us try, say, 13–24 June.

• June 13 in 1977 was quite interesting, being the date James Earl Ray was recaptured after escaping from Brushy Mountain Prison for a few days as well as the date of the triple girl scout murder in Locust Grove, Oklahoma, and of the murder of postulant nun Roberta Elam near Wheeling, West Virginia.
• On June 14, 1946, President Trump was born in Jamaica Hospital, in Richmond Hill, Queens, NY. June 14 was the date of the 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire (72 dead) in North Kensington, London, UK. Grenfell Street, Kew Gardens, is about the same distance from Track Two of the nearby LIRR as Austin Street, where Kitty Genovese was first stabbed in full view of the Mowbray apartments in front of her apartment building (she was stabbed again and left for dead, recall, at 82-62 Austin Street, on the other side of her apartment building)—both streets are more-or-less opposite the spot, on opposite sides of the tracks where (according to the testimony of Conductor Austin of Train No. 174) Motorman Benjamin Pokorney made the mistake on Track Two that likely mostly caused the 1950 Kew Gardens or Richmond Hill wreck—which street is closer may well depend actually on exactly how far right-of-center Pokorney stood (engineers look out the right side of the cab in America just like they do in the UK, which I have heard has to do with many of the first locomotives in the US being of British manufacture). The rear brakeman, Bertand Biggam, of Train No. 780 recuperated after the wreck in the same hospital that Trump was born in. Recall the submarine SS Thresher sank the day Oswald shot at Gen. Edwin Walker. The day after the sinking, Vice Admiral Bernard Lige Austin was appointed to oversee the official investigation of the sinking, which issued its conclusions on June 5, 1963. It was Vice Admiral Elton Watters Grenfell, Commander of the Atlantic Fleet's Submarine Force, who did by telephone tell the wife of Thresher's skipper of the loss of the sub. Grenfell is a fairly uncommon name—there are only about 710 people in the 2010 United States census with the last name Grenfell. Though not I suppose particularly directly relevant, it's worth mentioning since I am discussing "Grenfell" to mention that at the start of his career, Francis Bowes Sayre, Sr., a son of the Robert H. Sayre that the tugboat was presumably named after, did work for a mission in Newfoundland that was led by one Wilfred Grenfell. Francis Sayre would marry a daughter of President Woodrow Wilson. Later, Alger Hiss worked directly under Francis Sayre, which is interesting because recall that arguably the most important New York City official to visit the Kew Gardens wreck in its immediate aftermath was Thomas Francis Murphy, who was the prosecutor who won a conviction against Hiss that was just twenty-seven days before the 17 February 1950 Rockville Centre train wreck that presaged the Kew Gardens wreck that would happen about nine months later. Wilfred Grenfell introduces the movie Viking, a fictional account of the sealing ship SS Viking (as in the SS Viking Panzer division), which on 15 March 1931 blew up while the movie was being made (28 dead). June 14, 1891, was the Munchenstein railway bridge disaster in Switzerland. Also, early in the twentieth century there was another Vice Admiral Grenfell, namely
• June 15, 1904, of course, was the General Slocum fire on the steamship headed on the East River to the picnic grounds in Locust Grove, Eaton's Neck, Huntington, Suffolk County, Long Island, NY, USA.
• June 16, 1883, is the date of the Victoria Hall stampede (183 dead) in Sunderland, England, opposite Mowbray Park, that killed just children, and of course June 16, 1904, the Bloomsday, is the day General Bobrikov was assassinated the day after the Slocum disaster. In 1925 on the same date you've got the Rockport train wreck which recall may be a reference in the 1974 murder of South Trimble, Jr. (and a possible reference in the 1975 murder of Kathy Beatty as well, what since the wreck was caused by Hazen Road, which actually crossed the railroad at the western corner of Beattystown, NJ).
• June 17, 1905, we have just seen is the date of the Ransom, MD, train wreck.
• June 18, 1975, we have just seen is the date of the murder and execution of, respectively, Paul Lentz and the assassin Prince Faisal bin Musaid. And of course this year on June 18 the Titan submersible imploded near the Titanic wreck site.
• June 19, 1938, is the date of the Saugus, Montana, train wreck. Saugus, Montana, an unincorporated community about 10 miles southwest of the town of Terry, Montana, has same name as Saugus, California, the town that in 1928 was closest to the St. Francis Dam that collapsed two days after James Earl Ray was born. On November 14, 2019 (the anniversary of the 1970 Huntington, WV, Flight 932 disaster that killed most of the Marshall University football team) there was a mass shooting (five shot, two fatally, besides shooter) at Saugus High in California. Rep. Katie Hill was a 2004 almnus of the same Saugus High. She resigned eleven days before the shooting, after having had an affair with a female campaign staffer which she admitted to having been inappropriate.
• June 20 is a date comparatively free of notable disasters and weirdnesses—the most significant disaster for our purposes is probably the quite deadly June 20, 1956, crash of Flight 253 (74 dead) in the Atlantic Ocean off Asbury Park, NJ, which for ten days (June 30, 1956, Grand Canyon collision) was the deadliest ever air disaster befalling scheduled commercial flights (the foiled Christmas 2009 Underwear Bomber attack also happened on a Flight 253).
• June 21, 1905, gets you back to the Mentor train wreck mentioned earlier.
• June 22, 1893, would be the loss of HMS Victoria caused by the error of Admiral Sir George Tryon. June 22, 1918, would be the Hammond or Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train disaster in Gary, Indiana, as the train was headed to its destination in neighboring Hammond.
• June 23, 1944, is the date a tornado of the Appalachian Tornado Outbreak devastated esp. the Pleasant Hill section of Shinnston, West Virginia, and nearby locations in West Virginia. Another tornado in same outbreak struck several places in Pennsylvania, including Dry Tavern, where Debra Lynne Makel, 8, would go to school before being attacked October 5, 1973, and murdered, after being dropped off by the school bus near her home and (probably) entering her house.
• June 24, 1894, recall, is the date that French President Carnot was fatally shot and that the tugboat James D. Nicol sank in (arguably, esp. to aligner weirdos) a foreshadowing of the General Slocum disaster. In 1971 on this same date, the agency whose forerunner was responsible for the St. Francis Dam disaster suffered another disaster with the Sylmar tunnel explosion (17 workers dead). In 1973 on this date, as mentioned a few posts ago, there was the arson fire (32 dead) at the Upstairs Lounge, a gay nightclub in New Orleans. June 24, 1975, Eastern Airlines Flight 66 went down (113 dead) from wind sheer from a microburst when on approach at JFK airport, the same day Edna Christine Thorne, 15, vanished in North Philadelphia near the site of the 1943 Congressional Train wreck (79 dead) that happened on the anniversary of the 1901 President McKinley assassination. Finally, June 24, 2021, was the collapse (98 dead) of the Surfside Condominium building in Florida.

Crumbley, the Michigan Oxford Township shooter, was apparently born April 28, 2006. I noticed this was exactly three weeks after a tornado destroyed 80 residences in Hendersonville, TN, where Taylor Swift at the time was living and going to high school, I believe. The tornado is usually called the Gallatin tornado since all seven fatalities associated with the tornado were in Gallatin, which borders Hendersonville. Meh, three weeks is a space, and so I probably shouldn't have even mentioned it except that the Highland Park shooter was apparently obsessed with "4-7" (and arguably its transposition, "7-4", since his mass shooting was in 2022 on 7/4), and the 4-7-2006 Gallatin tornado could be a possible explanation of this obsession (along with the 4-7-1911 Throop mine disaster near Scranton, where President Biden grew up).

It's also suggestive of spookiness that there was a mass shooting in Richmond, Virginia, in Monroe Park on June 6, 2023, the 55th anniversary of the death of RFK, near a Belvidere Street. (Recall the coincidences connecting "La Salle" hotels both to the date and time of RFK's shooting and also to the South Shore Line accident in South Bend that took place the same day as the Belvidere tornado.) In Richmond, "Belvidere" seems to refer to an old mansion originally named "Belvidere" that burned down February 5, 1854, 130 years to the day before Jessica Hatch was last seen alive in Richmond in 1984. But police seem to think the mass shooting was motivated by a personal dispute, and so quite possibly all or mostly coincidence as regards the Richmond mass shooting.

The 5 August 2023 murder of Rachel Morin is interesting because it happened in Bel Air, MD, where John Wilkes Booth was born, especially since Oswald's rifle traveled in Chevy Bel Airs owned by Ruth Paine and Buell Wesley Frazier in it's last two trips by automobile before the assassination of JFK. And the murder was on the 30th anniversary of the Holly Piirainen case. Of course, it could all be coincidence.

After writing the above, I can't help feeling how nerdish listing all the coincidences is. There is the danger if I limit myself too much to the process of finding the weirdo coincidences that I could lose touch with the emotional underpinnings of the killings. The truth is sacred, but what is even more sacred is to present the truth sacredly. With the aligner weirdos, yes, I could limit myself to robotically listing in basically a giant list the quite possibly weirdo alignments I've discovered, but since the purpose of what the aligner weirdos were doing was in all likelihood a deceptive one, it seems prudent to present those truths along with other truths that get into the underlying motives of weirdo behavior, so the behavior will tend to be suitably mocked and hated. I imagine it will at first be amazing to most people just how long a history what I call Alignism has. This history suggests a very strong tendency of Aligners to copy other Aligners—this fondness for copying makes me a little leary of nerdishly just pointing out all the stuff Aligners have done, lest they might decide to copy some of it. On the other hand, part of the allure of Alignism I suspect to reside in its initial mysteriousness. What typically happens, I posit, is that at first Aligners come across as having intimates who can hate, which has a certain appeal to those worried about the Aligner being addictive, because it is hard to feel love from addiction as if from a love potion without the addiction making one love everything, akin to Oberon's potion. Hate is difficult when under the influence of a love potion, and so if a sordidly controlling zombifier has zombies that seem to be able to hate, that can make the zombifier seem less sordidly controlling than he actually is.

Recall that at the end of a previous post I mentioned I've been thinking about how natural female cruelty relates to the loving feelings they may have in their chest. It takes time to come up with inspiration all by myself, and impatience is no virtue, especially there. No, but I do think there's something to one or several girls or young women in such a huggy situation holding back from hate per se, and resolving to imagine killing on account of whether it is beautiful to her or not that such killing occur. Still, I don't mean it isn't okay if she likes to imagine torturing bad males to death because it is pleasant to find it beautiful to imagine loving one male while also torturing another to death. Under ordinary circumstances, it would seem rather flippant for a female to imagine getting off on torturing someone to death without focusing on the sexual hate that to the extent her hate is morally justified and in particular compatible with love of sacred beauty does mitigate the cruelty toward him, but since she simultaneously has a huggy attraction in her chest to the chests of girls full of hate toward what she finds it beautiful to imagining torturing to death, it's not in the aggegate so flippant that the beauty of her analysing the greater beauty of the sex and cruel acts as a whole is counteracted in the situation where she simultaneously feels love in her chest for the fruitfulness of what could go between her lover and the hater girls—the hater girls have so much hate it rather covers the aggregate need for hate. The benefit of a huggy female with cruelty motivated by or through her sense of beauty is that without a female like that, female sexual cruelty might lead to a kind of dangerous automatic hate for relatives of the hated if it were just up to the hater girls or her lover just wanting to please and thereby attract the hater girls. Also, torture seems especially sacred when females are enjoying killing people just because it hurts some hated relative of the person killed. Torture is a directly mean and cruel act—it would be difficult for a female to torture someone unless there is much direct hate toward the actual person tortured or a sense that the torture is beautiful and right. It behooves the male in such a situation to encourage his lovers to torture what they are going to kill anyway by having more loving feelings toward them when they are torturing and terrifying. This is very controlling behavior, of course, on the part of the male, but so what? I really believe that to the extent people imagine a situation where human sacrifice priestesses or authorized murderesses or whatever you call them are killing a certain number of people in ritual killing, they will come to the conclusion that it is very sacred for the female to kill males with sexual torture (if they are killing anyway), and especially is this the case if females are getting off sexually on hurting people by killing the latter's relatives.

Perhaps the most important moral truth as regards, licit, authorized killing is that it should be democratically controlled. There's a big difference between authorized murderess and murderess. A murderess that is not authorized is just a murderer in the common sense, a definitely vile thing to be. But maybe in some societies people as a whole vote that some beautiful wise-looking females should be able to murder a certain limited number of hopefully evil people. Nowadays, such authorized murderesses (as at times I prefer to call them) would be described as human sacrifice priestesses, and would tend to be assumed to be behaving to appease some spirit or god of sorts, I suppose. But that's a bad sort of killing if the killing is a sacrifice to humanity or, even more importantly, a sacrifice to life on earth or the universe itself, and killing for a god reminds me of killing for some evil, nasty controlling zombifier. I don't think humanity nowadays tends to get whatever inclinations some otherwise fairly ordinary people may have toward ritual killing in the latters' imaginations or all the important basic moral principles that could make such killing behavior most moral or least immoral. But as I say, I do think humanity right now (at least in fairly democratic countries) would tend to get that ritualistic killing would work better if it were more democratic as to who if anybody gets to be authorized to do the killing. But as for torture, I do believe there is a natural tendency for humans to naturally see the advantages of females killing with sexual torture when they are killing people anyway from sexual hate, but certain obvious confusions indeed probably now confuse people who haven't felt or thought much about the matter, as is often the case, since people probably consider it quite unlikely that, at least in fairly democratic countries, replacing some of the justice system with authorized murderesses would be a system that has much of a chance of happening anytime soon. Probably nobody or almost nobody is holding their breaths awaiting for authorized murderesses even if they might admit there is the advantage of killing would-be evil criminals before they commit the selfish acts of greed that law on the other hand can protect us against only after the crimes have been committed.

It is not particularly difficult to get at why people are hesitant to admit that it is better if females getting off sexually on killing people are more particularly getting off on killing people with sexual torture. Obviously most sexual violence nowadays is perpetuated by males, mostly against females. So-called sexual violence committed by males tends to be associated with sodomy. Usually the violence is against the female being sodomized, something which sodomy facilitates because semen contains algesic chemicals like PGE2 that increase sensitivity to pain, presumably making torture more effective when the PGE2 gets absorbed by the digestive system to have systemic effects (or at least that's my theory). But males can also trick or force a sodomized person to commit violence on others, which may satisfy the sodomizer's selfish interest by making the sodomized person look able to hate, a hate which would suggest the sodomized feels actual love rather than a mere sordid addiction to the male on account of love-potion-like chemicals in semen causing a chemical addiction to the sodomizer—obviously that sort of sexual violence is evil. At any rate, sexual torture committed by males one would expect to be associated with sodomy, or more precisely, the physical abuser putting semen into the digestive system of a victim of violence to make his violence more terrifying, thereby making his torture more terrifying. And it is very important that females be true to their own natural feelings in their sexual desires, and so rape, a sexually violent act, is very bad. At any rate, sexual violence committed by males is very bad, and if the violence involves torture, that torture presumably makes the violence even worse. Males committing sexual violence, and more particularly male sexual violence involving torture, is strongly suggestive of behavior that is nasty and rapacious and therefore bad either way. Part of the confusion is that male sexual violence tends to be controlling, and since sodomy tends to be associated with the male being behind the female, tends to involve the male being behind the female. Indeed, as we have seen, there are good reasons for males having sex with females getting off on cruelty to encourage the female to get off more on torture than just killing, which can be looked at as controlling. Also, there are technical difficulties with a male having sex with a female who is torturing someone else to death. The person being tortured needs must be in front of the female, which causes her front side to be occupied as it were, making it awkward to have sex with her from the front while she is actually torturing. But this is basically not of any philosophical significance of course so long as sex rather than sodomy occurs—not significant enough to dwell on. And the more the male gets off and finds it beautiful to force the female to torture, a good thing, the more he may want to look at least somewhat at the male being tortured by her, to make sure he is full of agony and terror, and it is hard for the male and female to face the same direction (toward the tortured male's face) when they are having sex while being pointed in opposite directions. Of course, the female face being expressive is something any decent male will want to look at when having sex, and similarly, she may well often want to look at her lover's face as well, so it would be well for the female to turn around occasionally (making sure the hopefully evil male she's torturing to death can't get at her) or at least turn her head back often to exchange looks with her lover, and at times maybe much twisting can to some extent supplant facing the same one direction. But that's probably enough said about something like sexual direction that's plain awkward and slightly embarrassing to talk about. Of course, since sex with females having cruel feelings tends (in my theory) to involve intraejaculate sperm selection, it is especially important for a male having such sex to have clean feelings during and before such sex; an approach is for him to try then to be quite intellectual about unclean depravity to the extent it is necessary to consider it.

(October 11, 2023 update) The obsession of the aligners with Sayre may go back farther the 1894 activities of the tugboat Robert H. Sayre. Abraham Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth was named after John Wilkes, a former mayor of London. One of John Wilkes' close associates was Stephen Sayre, who allegedly tried to hatch a plot (the Sayre Plot) to kidnap George III when he was to open parliament on 26 October 1775. Later Wilkes spent a year or so in Russia at the court of Catherine the Great, more-or-less pretending to be an American diplomat (he also spent some time trying to gain a footing in the Prussian court). From the little that exists about him on internet, he spent a good deal of effort trying to convince the American government that he deserved pay for his diplomatic activities. Sayre's actions are are somewhat reminiscent, for example, of the preposterous attempts of the nobody Charles Guiteau to convince the Garfield administration that he was owed a consulship in as he suggested Vienna or Paris.

It's worth considering that in 2016 an individual from a small town named after Robert H. Sayre at first purportedly plotted to blow up the federal building in DC which shares a name with the West Virginia mine disaster of April 28, 1914, and then tried to blow up a building in OKC (reminiscent of the horrific 1995 bombing believed by the FBI to have been planned at the James D. Nichols farm).

If there is indeed interest from aligners with the Khartsyzk mine disaster that happened about the time of the Ransom train wreck, I have a feeling that at least in 1916 this interest was centered on nearby Yuzovka (named after an individual named "Hughes") basically being homonymous with the surname of Charles Evans Hughes, Sr. The Summer Street retractable bridge disaster that sent Trolley No. 393 into Fort Point Channel in Boston, MA, happened the day of the 1916 presidential election. Hughes was favored to defeat Wilson, and at the time of the accident, it presumably seemed likely to most people that Hughes would win. The trolley accident possibly wasn't even an accident at all, but a deliberate act of sabotage to try to suggest that Hughes' administration was cursed by the trolley disaster gods, much as the Victoria trolley disaster that happened on the day of the coronation of Nicholas II may have been used in attempts to make Nicholas II's reign seem cursed. Hughes was generally seen as more for entering WWI than Wilson was (though not so against the Central Powers as Theodore Roosevelt was). Of course, Wilson quickly joined the fight anyway on the side of the Allied Powers, not long after the start of his second term. Indeed, America formally declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917 (Wilson's second term started March 4, 1917). Perhaps the Summer Street trolley accident being useful for little but a pointless joke after Wilson won may have made it seem to the aligners that it needed a purpose, partly causing them to manipulate things so that the storming of the Winter Palace was on 7 November 1917, the first anniversary of the Summer Street trolley disaster. Hughes went on to be Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

It's worth considering that "Hughes" appears somewhat more often than one would expect in the circumstances concerning the JFK assassination. Just seconds before Oswald started shooting, Robert J.E. Hughes' film of the motorcade shows the window Oswald shot from. Officer Tippit was retrieved from the scene of his shooting by an ambulance from the Dudley M. Hughes funeral home. Judge Sarah Hughes it was who swore LBJ in as president aboard Air Force One as it was sitting at Love's Field. The Texas Theatre was owned for a while in its early history by a company controlled by magnate Howard Hughes. I doubt any of that is anything other than coincidence, though perhaps some of it could be more than that. Still, even if it is all coincidence, those coincidences could be used later to cause aligners to feel it is right to be more obsessed with "Hughes" than a normal person would think reasonable. But there is at least one coincidence with Hughes in the circumstances of the JFK assassination that I suspect indeed is intentional. In the famous picture that Marina took of her husband Lee holding his recently purchased guns not long before (according to testimony of Marina) his attempted assassination of Edwin Walker, Lee Harvey Oswald is also holding two radical leftist publications, one of which is the March 11, 1963 issue of the Militant (the other was the March 24, 1963, issue of the Worker). Published in this issue of the Militant was a letter signed "L. H." listed under the heading "News and View from Dallas" on Page Seven which discusses (among other things) the independent candidacy of H. Stuart Hughes in the Massachusetts Senate race in which JFK's brother Teddy was the democratic candidate. It is believed (e.g., by Gerald Posner) that the letter was indeed written by L. H. Oswald. H. Stuart Hughes is the grandson of Charles Evans Hughes, Sr.

It's worth listing the dates involved with Oswald buying his guns (there is some uncertainty, especially in the date he picked up the guns):

• 28 January 1963. Oswald sends mail-order coupon (dated 27 January 1963 in his writing) with $10 to Seaport Traders for Smith and Wesson .38 revolver (balance of 19.95 payable on delivery when gun is picked up at Railway Express Agency office, along with $1.27 for postage and shipping).
• 12 March 1963. Oswald sends $21.45 money order and a coupon from the February issue of American Rifleman for 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, complete with 4x scope.
• 20 March 1963. Both guns are shipped.
• 25 March 1963. Oswald picks up both guns, the rifle at the Post Office, the revolver at the Railway Express Agency office.