Mao Zedong's name is associated with one of the heinous totalitarian regimes of the 20th century - if not one of the most heinous regimes in the history of the world. Due to famines brought about directly by his brutal policies and political "purges" he authorized, roughly 45 million Chinese citizens died. Possibly tens of millions more. Chairman Mao is responsible for more noncombatant deaths than Hitler and Stalin combined. So doesn't that make him the worst mass murderer of all time? We take ...
Apr 05, 2021•3 hr 42 min
Robert Pickton was born in 1949 just outside of Vancouver, CA, in Port Coquitlam, on a pig farm. His parents were Helen and Leonard Pickton, two insanely filthy human beings who couldn’t have cared less about clean clothes or a house that wasn’t full of animal shit or even about bathing their children, Robert, his sister Linda, and his brother, Dave. Robert would live on the family farm his entire life before going to prison for the murder of six women. Police had evidence that he killed at leas...
Mar 29, 2021•2 hr 16 min
We got a wild one today. Today's Suck is really three Sucks in one. There is the abduction of Steven Stayner, the backstory of a notorious pedophile, Kenneth Parnell, and the story of serial killer, Cary Stayner aka the Yosemite Killer. In late 1972, Steven was abducted on the way home from school, at the age of seven, and he wouldn't see his family for another seven years. And that entire seven years, he'd be assaulted by Parnell. And then, after escaping, he'd move back into the room he shared...
Mar 22, 2021•2 hr 18 min
Today we take a huge deviation for the type of topic we typically cover here on Timesuck. The Space Lizards on Patreon vote on two topics a month through the app, and for today, they voted in my grandfather who passed away back on December 23rd. Probably the most influential person in my life. Today, I cover how the Hall family ended up in Idaho which leads to a history of Idaho settlement. My great-great-grandfather was one of the area's first homesteaders. I also share a lot of stories from my...
Mar 15, 2021•2 hr 16 min
Founded in 1974 by a man named Joe Ricci, the Elan School was supposed to be someplace where you could send your troubled teen so they could be rehabilitated and put back on the right track. But in reality, it was a cruel and chaotic nightmare where students were constantly being pressured to confess to things they’d done “wrong,” called “guilts,” which often were things as silly and not-wrong as having a crush on someone or smiling too much. At Elan, student was pitted against student in insane...
Mar 08, 2021•2 hr 25 min
Blackwater. Now known as Academi. Once known as Xe Services. A private military company. One of many PMCs very active in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of this century. One of many employers of "security contractors" contracted by the Department of Defense, or State Department, or the CIA to work alongside - or sometimes in place of - active military personnel in war zones around the world. What, exactly, do companies like Blackwater do? Is it a good or bad idea to privatize the milita...
Mar 01, 2021•2 hr 24 min
The Great Emu War! Such a weird and fun tale to tell. What an odd historical period. As World War I came to an end, Australia - whose economy was tanking, tried to figure out what to do with their returning veterans. They decided to give many of them parcels of land in Western Australia where they could grow wheat. And then the Great Depression hit. It hit countries all over the world, and few harder than Australia, and it hit few Australians harder than many of those veteran farmers. They now s...
Feb 22, 2021•2 hr 6 min
Dante's Inferno! One of the most influential literary works ever written. Put to parchment in the early 14th century, Dante's opening third of the Divine Comedy presented a clear vision of Christian Hell, wherein nine descending circles, Dante, guided by the ancient Roman poet, Virgil, witnesses various types of sinners receiving poetically fitting forms of punishment. In today's Suck, we learn about the nature of epic poems, layout several examples of epic poems that came before Dante, and lear...
Feb 15, 2021•3 hr 34 min
This might be the first episode to get me death threats. The Turkish government does NOT like being accused of genocide, and neither do many of its citizens. But during WW1, genocide is exactly what the Young Turks orchestrated. Roughly 1.5 million Armenians were killed. And between 1900 - 1923, up to 4.3 million Armenian, Greek, Assyrian, and other smaller ethnic groups of Christian were massacred by the Ottoman Empire and their successors committed to the racist and xenophobic ideology of Pan-...
Feb 08, 2021•2 hr 29 min
The Denver Airport was built by the New World Order. The Denver Airport contains the international headquarters of the Illuminati. Collectively, the Satanic art installations of the Denver International Airport point towards an impending planned apocalypse. The Denver International Airport is built atop a massive underground city built to house the global elite after the lizard Illuminati brings about the apocalypse. These are just SOME of the conspiracies that have floated around on the web reg...
Feb 01, 2021•2 hr 14 min
Possibly the most meticulous Serial Killer the world has ever known, Israel Keyes spent years planning murders all across North America. Burying what he dubbed “murder kits” in various locations across the United States, he would travel thousands of miles to uncover a kit, racking up lots of frequent flier and rental car miles - before picking a random victim to slaughter. This careful planning, and the extreme lengths to distance himself from any connection to the disappearances of his victims,...
Jan 25, 2021•2 hr 16 min
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 US wanted them to continue their work on creating atomic bombs, weaponizing plagues, making chemica...
Jan 18, 2021•2 hr 20 min
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 powerful Zulu Nation - one of the mightiest African military powers on the entire continent. He was a br...
Jan 11, 2021•2 hr 23 min
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 Raider battalions and Marine parachute units, transmitting messages by telephone and radio in their na...
Jan 04, 2021•2 hr 14 min
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 private practice and was developing his own school of psychological thought - logotherapy, based ar...
Dec 28, 2020•2 hr 17 min
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 shoulders. He didn't. Towards the end of his short life, Phillip was hiding a secret life from his fam...
Dec 20, 2020•2 hr 19 min
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 committed child sacrifices and regularly engaged in cannibalism. And there were others nearly as brut...
Dec 14, 2020•2 hr 27 min
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 European peasant. During the Dark Ages, you were bound to spend almost your entire life toiling over a s...
Dec 07, 2020•2 hr 27 min
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, life seemed to spiral out of control for the man who would soon introduce himself to others as either...
Nov 30, 2020•2 hr 54 min
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 survive. Literally. Born Phoebe Ann Mosey, Annie picked up her father’s gun when he died, and she hunt...
Nov 23, 2020•2 hr 18 min
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 lived in or traveled around Cherryvale or the Osage Township in rural southeastern Kansas, you had a...
Nov 16, 2020•2 hr 55 min
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 Americans helped them. They were all racing against the clock to deconstruct the most powerful encoding...
Nov 09, 2020•2 hr 13 min
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 nickname. After his murders, Haigh would dump victims' bodies into a tub of sulfuric acid and transform...
Nov 02, 2020•2 hr 7 min
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 a summer camp, NXIVM was FOR SURE a cult. People started publicly worrying about how dangerous this ...
Oct 26, 2020•2 hr 22 min
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 name “Babushka Yaga” due to rumors of cannibalism, her interest in the occult, and the fact that her o...
Oct 19, 2020•2 hr 13 min
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 scientific community. But that hasn’t stopped people from continuing to believe in it. Today, we’ll ...
Oct 12, 2020•2 hr 58 min
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 question every known pervert, petty criminal, and person with a history of mental illness and violence ...
Oct 05, 2020•2 hr 2 min
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 was the REAL prophet that should lead his new religion. After the LDS church excommunicated him, Imma...
Sep 28, 2020•2 hr 11 min
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 Egypt. He did all this in a little more than a decade after taking power at the age of twenty, unti...
Sep 21, 2020•3 hr 30 min
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, looting, and brutalizing their fellow civilians. The LA riots happened just under thirty years ago, yet fr...
Sep 14, 2020•2 hr 18 min
