Timesuck with Dan Cummins

In the final days of World War II and in the next few years after the war was over, the U.S. government helped hundreds and hundreds of Nazi Scientists whose knowledge and expertise was deemed crucial to the development of advanced weapons - no matter HOW complicit they were in heinous Nazi activities - to relocate to the States and become integral pieces of the US military-industrial complex. The...

Shaka Zulu! I'm guessing you've heard the name. Also guessing you know very little about his story. Most don't seem too. Which is a shame because it's such a great story! Shaka took the small Zulu tribe from less than 2,000 members to around 250,000 in just a dozen years. He took them from being one of many militarily inconsequential bands of Africans living in what is now South Africa to the powe...

Can you imagine fighting a war for a country that had removed you from the land your ancestors lived on for centuries - a country actively trying to erase your language and culture? That's exactly what the Navajo Code Talkers did in WW2. The Navajo code talkers took part in every assault the U.S. Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. They served in all six Marine divisions, Marine Ra...

Viktor Frankl and his logotherapy. This is the topic we examine this week to carry on the Timesuck tradition of ending the year on a little inspirational note. Frankl had everything taken from him - his parents, his wife, his career, his home, and more - all taken by the Nazis after they stormed into Vienna during WW2. Shortly before the Nazis arrived, Frankl had just opened his own psychoanalytic...

Phillip Markoff. AKA, the Craigslist Killer. On the surface, Markoff seemed like a normal guy. A guy on the path to a lot of success. He was a six-foot-three, athletic-framed, blonde hair and blue-eyed, soon-to-be doctor. A studious kid in his second year of med school in Boston. He was ambitious. He finished his undergraduate degree in just three years. He seemed like he had a good head on his sh...

General Butt Naked aka Joshua Blahyi is a complicated figure. He is now a Liberian Christian missionary helping victims or Liberia's first civil war rebuild their lives. In the early 90s, he was one of Liberia's most brutal warlords. While literally naked, and often while wielding a machete, he led an army of coked-up, brainwashed child soldiers into committing almost unimaginable atrocities. He c...

The Dark Ages. We attempt to suck a MASSIVE topic today. A thousand year's worth of European history. And actually, since we compare life in the Dark Ages to life in the Roman Empire, we end up covering two thousand years. The period between the fall of Rome in the fifth century and the beginning of the Modern Age that began sometime in the 14th century was an especially terrible time to be a Euro...

Robert Ben Rhoades, born in 1945, started driving big rigs across America's interstates and major highways in the mid-1970s, and he seemed to most like an unassuming and harmless trucker for the next fifteen-ish years. He wasn't. He was a monster. The Iowa native's childhood had ended abruptly when his dad was arrested for an alarming crime and, after the way his father responded to this arrest, l...

At the height of her career, sharpshootin' Annie Oakley the talented sharpshooter was the most famous woman in America, if not the world - dazzling audiences and setting records as she fired at clay pigeons, birds, glass balls and performing a wide array of "How in the Hell is that possible?" trick shots. Annie's love of guns began in her childhood, when she didn't use them to entertain, but to su...

Life was NOT easy on the American frontier for European and American settlers in the 19th century. You lived off the land or you died trying. You were always one wrong move from freezing or starving to death. You had to defend your property from horse thieves, bandits, and American Indian tribes understandably pissed off that you'd just settled on land they still felt belonged to them. And if you...

Breaking an unbreakable code to save, at the very least, millions and millions of lives. To possibly stop Hitler from taking over the world. That was the unimaginably stressful task assigned to a select group of codebreakers during WW2. And, the codebreaking all-stars were initially primarily composed of a group of POLISH mathematicians - I know, right? JK. And then later, British, French, and Ame...

Knock, knock, Meatsacks. Who's there? John Haigh. The Acid Bath Murderer. Between 1944 and 1949, John "the Acid Bath Murderer" Haigh killed between six and nine people. Several of them were his friends. And that fact didn't cause him to hesitate shooting them, or beating them to death. The gruesome way he disposed of his victim's bodies after he killed them shocked 1940s England and led to his nic...

Cult! Cult! Cult! The NXIVM Sex Cult! Founded by Keith Raniere in 1998 - at its height, NXIVM counted thousands of members, including celebrities, heirs and heiresses who all paid thousands, and sometimes MILLIONS of dollars to attend a never-ending series of classes at various NVIXM training centers. Lying at the intersection of a multi-level marketing scheme, a self-help group, and occasionally...

For roughly fifteen years, an unassuming Russian woman named Tamara Samsonova may have secretly murdered between ten and perhaps as many as fourteen people. When she was finally arrested in 2015, she was sixty-eight years old and just weeks removed from her final, gruesome murder. Her age and the way she dismembered her victims' bodies led to her "Granny Ripper" nickname. She was also given the na...

I bet you've heard of Flat Earthers. But have you heard of… Hollow Earthers?? Variations of Hollow Earth Theory propose that our planet Earth is either entirely hollow or contains a substantial interior space. Maybe several spaces. Multiple worlds within worlds. Notably suggested by Edmond Halley in the late 17th century, the notion has been disproved time and time again by, basically, the entire...

The Boston Strangler! The residents of Boston, in late 1962 through the summer of 1964, were terrified of a man the newspapers dubbed "the Boston Strangler." A sadistic serial rapist and murderer who was somehow seemingly tricking one area women after another into letting him into their homes where he'd then proceed to strangle and rape them. Police in five different jurisdictions scrambled to que...

The Immanuel David Cult! Not much has been written about Immanuel David compared to more notable cult leaders like Jim Jones or David Koresh - but he was just as delusional and, in his own way, just as destructive. Immanuel David was born in the late 1930s to seemingly normal parents - he had what was likely a great childhood - and then, not long after converting to Mormonism, he decided that he w...

Alexander III, king of the ancient state of Macedon aka Macedonia - one of history's greatest military commanders. And he was even more than that. He was also a scholar, a lover of literature and the arts, a deeply religious man. Undefeated in battle, he unleashed his army on countries great and small to forge an empire that stretched over three continents, from Greece to India and as far south as...

LAPD and California Highway Patrol officers chased, arrested, and beat Rodney King, a twenty-five-year-old Black man, in 1991, and the fateful encounter would lead to a verdict of "not guilty" for the four officers that brought the city of LA to its knees. Long standing racial tensions bubbled over the surface, and inflamed by a video of the altercation, people took to the streets, burning, lootin...

The Titanic sank in the early hours of April 15th, 1912. The luxury cruise liner that some thought of as being "unsinkable" turned out to be very, very sinkable. After smashing into an iceberg on its starboard side, it took less than three hours for the Titanic to become completely submerged, and over 1500 people would be dead. And then the Titanic would remain, undisturbed, on the ocean floor, fo...

Wow. This is a really, really crazy tale. Sacramento's Richard chase was very mentally ill. He was a paranoid schizophrenic who did not do well when he was off his meds. He was also a sadistic monster and its hard to give him a pass on the heinous acts he committed because of his psychological state. He brutally killed strangers and desecrated their bodies. He killed men, women, and children. He l...

Who joins the gang that kidnapped them and held them for ransom and helps them rob banks long after they're free to leave? Patty Hearst did that in 1974. And who the Hell is Patty Hearst? She's the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, a man who created the largest newspaper, magazine, newsreel, and movie business in the world in the early 1900s. Patty is the daughter and granddaughter of bill...

What the Hell is going on in Northeastern Utah? If you just drove by, you might think that Skinwalker Ranch is just an innocent-seeming 512-acre parcel of land about 150 miles southeast of Salt Lake City. But this small patch of high desert ranch-land, and the Uintah Basin around it, is arguably home to more paranormal sightings over the last eighty years than any other similarly-sized geographica...

Walt Disney! How much do you know about the mind and the man that built one of the ten biggest media empires in the world? How did the production company behind some animated short films in the 1920s morph and evolve into the media behemoth Disney is today? Did Walt come from money? Did he luck into a few amazing opportunities? When did Disneyland open? Was it successful early on? Are a variety of...

Investigating the investigators today! Talking about the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit. Looking into how a small group of special agents introduced the term "serial killer" into our lexicon, and then studied infamous serial killers like Ed Kemper, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and others to try and understand the minds of some of the sickest, most dangerous members of society, in an a...