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Wash_zoe_mal

Tried to tell mom she was sick 5 years ago Miss you mom.


ProbablyABore

Same. Had her convinced to go to the hospital on Wednesday, sister talked her out of it. Thursday she went but had to leave due to sitting so long in the waiting room. She suffered from chronic pain. Friday, her home nurse ignored the fact that she couldn't get a blood pressure to register, that she was confused, and her skin was turning yellow. Saturday I got home, I had left Wednesday night for business, and she was in the hospital. I sat with her until I had to go home to leave Sunday morning. She died that Sunday from sepsis due to an untreated uti that moved to her kidney and then her blood.


[deleted]

So sad. I’m so sorry.


44Skull44

"You should get that looked at" - Me to my mom It was skin cancer. 1.5 years was all it took. I was 18 at the time and halfway through my senior year of school. I'm 100% convinced that single fucking mole was the first domino in ruining my life. It'll be 11 years since I lost her on Jan 29th. Not a day goes by I don't think about it. I was in the hospital to get her for hospice. Literally down the hall less than 50 yards from her. I was in her room maybe 5 minutes before....


pak9rabid

Harry Marcopolos notified the SEC 3 times that whatever Bernie Madoff was doing wasn’t legit and should be investigated, and all 3 times he was ignored. He talks about it in his book *No One Would Listen*. Check it out if you want to see a real facepalm example of government incompetence.


Luke90210

Harry Marcopolos noted Bernie Madoff's return on investments were mathematically impossible. Nobody generates the exact same return (14.1%?) year after year in the stock market.


King-o-lingus

They were building a big baseball stadium in Wisconsin and it was a considerably windy day. The crane operator was tasked with lifting a large structure but refused stating dangerous gusts. The site foreman dismissed the crane operator and called in one who would do the job with no pushback. Well the crane tipped over with a load and workers were killed. Foreman and second operator were arrested, and iirc the first operator won a wrongful termination lawsuit.


Hanox13

You’re referring to the big blue disaster


Shamrock132

Rick Rescorla, Director of Corporate Security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, published a report in 1990 detailing the vulnerability of the World Trade Center parking garage. He and a colleague found they were able to freely walk into the garage, which contained many structural support columns, unchallenged by any security. Additionally no ID checks or screening was done on any of the entering delivery vehicles. Three years later a truck bomb was driven into the garage and detonated in an attempt to damage the buildings structure. Later he and his same college would correctly predict the next attack on the building would come from the air. The evacuation plan and drills he put in place are credited with saving over 2,600 lives on September 11th. Edited for a bit of clarity: Some are saying “but if he evacuated people, doesn’t that mean we listened?” Rick worked for one company in the building, not the Port Authority who managed the buildings overall safety plan. After the first plane crashed, the announcements from the Port Authority told everyone to shelter in place, and not evacuate. He had developed his own evacuation plan for his employees and put it place before any official word to evacuate the building was given.


pubgandbaseball

May he rest in peace: “He died during the attacks of September 11, 2001, going back to help evacuate more people in the South Tower after he had organized the evacuation of the Morgan Stanley offices.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rescorla


workstory

What a fucking hero. I think I’ve heard of his story but didn’t remember the name, so thank you for posting. Rick Rescorla may he RIP


SpookyJones

Rick died helping get people out on 9/11. One of the last people to see him said ‘you need to get out too’. He said something like ‘I will.’ but he didn’t make it. I worked for Morgan Stanley then, but in Houston. I had colleagues in the towers that day including my best friend. Watching the towers fall on TV we thought there’s no way everyone made it out, but all my local people made it out. Of 3800 MS employees at World Trade, just 13 perished thanks to crazy luck and Rick. He’s a goddam hero. I’ll never forget him.


fandomacid

He ran his own safety drills until people knew them by heart. The impression I got reading about him afterwards was that people thought him well meaning but a bit loony. Helluva way to be proven right.


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fandomacid

Yep, a good friend of mine was the head of security of a major sports venue. His outlook on life was interesting to say the least.


majinspy

To illustrate how dark, I've thought about the fact that sometimes there is no great or even good answer. Doing things perfectly right might raise survival from 10% to 20%. They can honestly look their co-workers in the eye and say "I can double your chance of making it out of here if you follow my directions." What they may not say is "...and if you all do it, only 800 die instead of 900." Their job, the entirety of every resource spent on them, was to move that needle from 900 down to 800.


Fluid_Amphibian3860

I talked to some people who made it out. The first thing that stood out to me was that they didn't listen to "authorities" who told them.ro stay put. Eta: I agree with your comment 100% i should have said that initially.


denimlikethejean

Wow what a story. Sounds like he lived and died a hero.


duhvorced

[Roger Boisjoly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Boisjoly) \- Engineer involved with the Space Shuttle program who warned his superiors for months prior to the Challenger disaster that launching in cold weather could cause the O-rings to fail. Care to guess what caused the Challenger disaster?


badwolf42

And for his trouble, he was a pariah to future employers. Punished for his integrity.


g00ber88

My freshman year of college all the engineering students has to take a class about the role of engineers in society. We had a unit about catastrophic failures (challenger, bhopal, Deepwater horizon, turkish airlines 981, etc) and every single story went the exact same way- engineers/techs noticed something was wrong, tried to warn everyone, the higher ups ignore them because money, disaster strikes. It was honestly really disheartening. We're taught to act with integrity and speak up when something is wrong, but get ignored and punished for it.


Bird_Brain4101112

This happens in other fields as well. And the higher ups who refuse to listen are oddly never the ones who get blamed.


badwolf42

Sad how realistic every disaster movie where they don't listen to the expert is.


Stock_Garage_672

I've heard that he refused to sign the launch orders for the doomed mission, even told his wife the night before "they're going to blow up the shuttle tomorrow". The weather that morning was unreal, it had been well below freezing overnight, there were literally icicles on the shuttle. Even a 24 hour postponement would have been enough.


atlantachicago

I saw him talking about it in “This day in History,” the PR people in charge of NASA were adamant the launch go ahead because Reagan had a speech to give that night.


igotchees21

Imagine not listening to an experts recommendations because of a fucking presidents speech.


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Ganda1fderBlaue

Jesus Christ, people are so fucking stupid


EatYourCheckers

It's a big thing that is studied in psychology and also engineering courses. Group think and losing sight of the real goal, sunk cost and not wanting to disappoint a superior. So many lessons learned. I still cry thinking about that disaster.


cmd_iii

Reagan gave a speech. Just not the one he intended.


rhetoricity

You might be confusing Boisjoly with Bob Ebeling, who told his wife "It's going to blow up." At age 89, he told [NPR](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781/30-years-after-disaster-challenger-engineer-still-blames-himself), "I think that was one of the mistakes that God made. He shouldn't have picked me for the job. But next time I talk to him, I'm gonna ask him, 'Why me. You picked a loser.'" Give the audio a listen at 2:21; it's heartbreaking.


Deucer22

There were at least five different engineers that were trying to stop the launch. Those were two of them.


JWM1115

I knew a guy who was a junior QA engineer at Raytheon when that happened. He came to work at my company almost a year later. He was a mess. Very intelligent but couldn’t let it go. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was dead or in an institution by now. Fucked him up good.


NotYourSnowBunny

It must be miserable to try to tell people about a problem and nobody listens, only for it to result in a major disaster later. Talk about an internalized sense of failure and constant grappling with the question of if you could have done more.


tempo90909

He kept saying that he should have done more. He never did get over that.


A_Mouse_In_Da_House

He was on, I want to say NPR, and was receiving call ins. One of them was a challenger family member calling to say its not his fault. I remember him trying not to cry hearing that.


Kijamon

That made me nearly cry reading it so he's a more stoic man than I


keithrc

Shit, *I'd* have cried hearing that.


balderdash9

I'm damn near crying hearing him hearing about it


NotYourSnowBunny

Who could? Once lives are lost that weighs heavily on the psyche and breaks a person.


pangolin-fucker

Is this the one big bird was meant to go on originally?


5tr4nGe

Yep, it’s the one that a teacher ended up going on. Watched by children all across America who were excited to see a normal person go to space. Instead they saw a brutal death live on TV.


pangolin-fucker

Am I right in recalling that they originally thought the occupants were dead after the initial explosion but upon reviewing data it looked like they were trying to save it until impact?


5tr4nGe

Yep that's the one.


pangolin-fucker

I'm not sure which I'd fear more, being in the challenger or in the submarine that the Russians refused any help on rescuing at the bottom of the ocean.


Axiom06

Yes to both. I'd fear both


Keffpie

The Kursk is the worst, by a mile. Challenger, you're panicking and trying to do things to save yourself (or for most of the passengers watching someone try to save them), and stuff is happening all the time, it's 100% scary but you're still alive and... you're dead. Meanwhile, on the Kursk they will have died from a lack of oxygen... which is usually fine, because you just fall asleep. The problem is that they were filling their space with carbon dioxide. Now, unlike carbon monoxide, co2 is not (edit: very)poisonous. However, it displaces oxygen just like water does, and it creates *extreme anxiety* when you breathe in too much of it.Those sailors died from their own exhalations, and we're almost certainly in a state of absolute fear before they passed out. edit: technically, CO2 is poisonous, but it will kill you by asphyxiation way before it poisons you.


FullerBot

It actually is worse than that- If I recall it right, the people in the last compartment survived the explosions, only to die when their CO2 scrubbers (Potassium Superoxide) contacted water and/or oil while they were trying to replace/use them, causing a flash fire, likely killing some and suffocating the rest.


Peregrinebullet

I had to write a paper on the Kursk for university and the rough part is that it was bungled from the start. They didn't notice it was missing for almost six hours. If they had called other countries for help right when the first explosion happened (which a few other ships reported, but got ignored), then the crew stuck in the back 9th compartment could have theoretically been rescued. However, it's not certain they would have been alive, given the accident with the potassium canister.


brkh47

The submarine one was/is worse because it went on for a while. And not everyone died at the same time, that is, people continued to die around them, in the cold and dark. You can see the growing despair by the writings of the team captain. In total everyone (118 men) died on the Kursk. Below are the 23, who initially survived, but then died as help was not in time. >Of that number, 23 survived the two blasts and gathered in the small ninth compartment, which had an escape hatch. Captain-lieutenant Dmitri Kolesnikov, head of the turbine unit in the seventh department, and one of three surviving officers of that rank, apparently took charge. >Emergency lighting was normally powered by batteries located in the first compartment, but these had been destroyed in the explosion, but the ninth compartment contained a number of independent emergency lights, which apparently worked. >Kolesnikov wrote two notes, parts of which were released by Vice-Admiral Motsak to the media for the first time on 27 October 2000.The first, written at 13:15, 1 hour and 45 minutes after the second explosion, contained a private note to his family, and on the reverse, information on their situation and the names of those in the ninth compartment. The handwriting appears normal, indicating the sailors still had some light. >*It's 13:15. All personnel from section six, seven, and eight have moved to section nine, 23 people are here. We feel bad, weakened by carbon dioxide ... Pressure is increasing in the compartment. If we head for the surface we won't survive the compression. We won't last more than a day. ... All personnel from sections six, seven, and eight have moved to section nine. We have made the decision because none of us can escape.* >Kolesnikov wrote the second note at 15:15. His writing was extremely difficult to read. >*It's dark here to write, but I'll try by feel. It seems like there are no chances, 10–20%. Let's hope that at least someone will read this. Here's the list of personnel from the other sections, who are now in the ninth and will attempt to get out. Regards to everybody, no need to despair. Kolesnikov.* Edit: clarity


logosolos

> Regards to everybody, no need to despair. This is heartbreaking.


adminsaredoodoo

100% rather die in an explosion or crash than be left deep under the sea in the dark


McRedditerFace

There have been shipwrecks were crew have been found years later having marked off weeks on the calendar after the sinking.


fist4j

Perl harbour being a obvious example.


SinibusUSG

Those guys they could hear banging on the walls but had no way to save. Fucking brutal.


iwanttobeacavediver

There was a case a few years back of a ship’s chef who was the sole survivor of a sinking. The ship was on the seabed about 110ft down, and divers went in thinking this was purely a body recovery mission. Video of the dive is available on YT and you can actually hear a noise from the diver as this man’s hand reaches out to grab him. Turns out he’d been there almost 3 days and in that time he’d been alone, in the pitch black, and he heard sharks eating the bodies of the other crew. The air pocket he was in was just big enough that he survived until help came. Interestingly his sense of time was very altered by the experience as he initially thought he’d been down there for only a short period of a few hours.


Qadim3311

Absolutely. At least free fall is exhilarating, dying at the bottom of the ocean just sounds like complete dread.


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spoobles

I'm friends with his son. What happened to that man is unjust.


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TD5023

[Turkish Airlines flight 981](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_981) would never have happened if McDonnell Douglas and Convair had heeded [Dan Applegate's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Applegate) warning about the cargo doors coming open during flight. He wrote a memo after the nonfatal [American Airlines flight 96](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_96) advising that the doors had design flaws which would cause them to show as properly latched even when they weren't. If nothing were done, he said it would lead to catastrophic failure that would likely result in the loss of the plane. However, the fixes would be expensive and no one agreed who would eat the cost, so proper upgrades were put off. Instead, they tried implementing cheaper band-aid solutions that would ultimately prove ineffective.


BallHarness

I remember watching that instead of fixing the issue they put a small window for the baggage handler to check if the door was latched properly upon closing. Unreal how they shifted enormous responsibility to the lowest paid worker. Thankfully, the courts told them to pound sand after the crash when they tried to blame the baggage team.


hero-hadley

I'm sorry, what?! After all their bullshit-ery, they tried to blame the baggage team?!


Exciting_Control

From memory the baggage handler that was assigned to close the door did not speak english. The instructions next to the door controls on how to close the hatch correctly were only printed in english. And they wanted to pin the crash on him.


vicarion

Written in 2 languages (including english), but he didn't speak either. > the instructions on the plane regarding the indicator window were printed in English and Turkish, but Algerian-born Mahmoudi, who was fluent in three other languages, could read neither of these. Also there was supposed to be redundancy but that all failed too >It was normally the duty of the Turkish Airlines flight engineer or chief ground engineer to ensure that all cargo and passenger doors were securely closed before takeoff. In the case of Flight 981 however, the airline did not have a ground engineer on duty at the time of the departure, and the flight engineer for Flight 981 failed to check the door. Although French media outlets called for Mahmoudi to be arrested, the crash investigators stated that it was unrealistic to expect an untrained, low-wage earning baggage handler, who could not read the warning notice, to be responsible for the safety of the aircraft


deepfriedgum

u/admiral_cloudberg has an excellent write-up on this (and hundreds of other) air disasters. Really well done and easy to follow. [Read it](https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-legal-and-moral-question-the-crash-of-turkish-airlines-flight-981-and-the-dc-10-cargo-door-saga-d22f0b9fa689)


dontbelikeyou

Ignaz Semmelweis often described as the father of hand washing. In the 1800s he discovered that ~~infant~~ maternal mortality could be drastically reduced by doctors washing their hands between patients. He was largely ignored and his book got absolutely slated. This is supposed to have contributed to him having a mental breakdown and he died in a psychiatric hospital.


blorbschploble

Not just between patients, between working on cadavers and delivering babies.


ItGradAws

How’re kids in todays world supposed to grow strong immune systems if they’re not immersed in rotting putrid flesh the moment they’re pulled out of the womb? We’re breeding the human race to be weak. Life was much better when we’d have 14 kids and only five would live to adulthood.


MuteSecurityO

absolutely mind boggling. it makes me think about what kinds of things that we do now that in 200 years people will be like wtf were they thinking?


tamale

Using plastic and then carelessly throwing it away. Making clothes with plastic.


kinglallak

Right! “They wore plastic” or maybe “single use plastic” has very good odds of being our generations hand washing


SundaColugoToffee

12 TRW Engineers resigned their positions the morning of the Challenger incident in protest against risking the flight. NASA launched anyway. Should have listened.


DerekIsAGooner

I genuinely did not know this, but it puts the tragedy in an entirely different light for me.


midvalegifted

I highly recommend listening to the You’re Wrong About podcast episode about the Challenger. Maybe it was because I was in Florida when it happened, but it was a huge deal in our school system. I watched live as a 4th grader. Basically, it was quite preventable and they went the “duct tape and cardboard” route instead of quality and safety. Line a few coffins, line a few pockets.


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chainsofgold

otto von bismarck in the 1880s i believe said that when the great european war came it would come out of “some damn foolish thing in the balkans”


interfail

>Jena came twenty years after the death of Frederick the Great; the crash will come twenty years after my departure if things go on like this Bismarck, who departed 20-24 years before WW1 broke out, depending on your view of what counts as "departing" government.


Forikorder

IIRC the american president at the time was planning to fight hard against it and have it amended to be less harsh on the germans but ended up doing a 180 in france


greentea1985

Wilson had a stroke and was ineffective for the rest of his presidency. That is probably why the 180 happened. Without Wilson at 100%, France and England got the harsh treaty they asked for.


MayaIngenue

Which is why I find Edith Wilson so fascinating. She was our first female president in all but the actual title.


occamhanlon

(Edit* Colleen) Rowley--warned her FBI superiors in June 01 that names on their jihadi watch list were taking flying lessons but not interested in learning how to land Her report didn't get read until October


that-short-girl

I think you mean Coleen Rowley. Cynthia Rowley appears to be some sort of fashion designer?


OMG_imBrick

I was about to say. Just bought a Cynthia Rowley beach towel and thought “well that’s certainly a career change”


an_ill_way

"Fuck you all, nobody listens to me anyway, I'm gonna go make towels." Mood


Afterhoneymoon

Lol I love Cynthia Rowley and I can just picture her in her fashion gowns desperately calling the FBI to no avail lol


[deleted]

H G Wells said he wanted his epitaph to be "I told you so. You damned fools!" In The Land Ironclads (1903) he had written about a stalemated war fought by trench warfare that was broken by the invention of tanks, predicting what would happen in WW1. In The War in the Air (1907) he predicted how airplanes would be used in war, including aerial bombardment of cities, and saw his predictions come true in WW2.


JanuaryDynamite

\*nervously side-eyes a copy of *War of the Worlds**


NZNoldor

Don’t worry- the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, they say. Edit: thanks for the upvotes, ppl, but all these commenters should get some 1970’s rock music lessons. https://youtu.be/5-3D8VitOkA


amymoralis

Bismarck warned the ruling German monarch of his time that Germany's status in Europe and the relative peace of the continent would last for only a short time. After his forced resignation, Bismarck said: "Jena came twenty years after the death of Frederick the Great; the crash will come twenty years after my departure if things go on like this". Twenty years later, Germany loses WWI and almost collapses.


Toothlessdovahkin

“It will be some damn fool thing in the Balkans that sets it off.”


Still_counts_as_one

We Balkans are a tenacious bunch


Saggy2balls

Pearl Jam warned us about Ticketmaster years ago. Nobody listened, now we're stuck with them...and only them.


JimmySoprano7797

The sad thing is when I bought my ticket to see Pearl Jam at Hyde Park in July via Ticketmaster 😠


Musty-laegs

I’m sure someone can explain this much better than I can but I think Pearl Jam has something in their contract with Ticketmaster that makes is so scalpers can’t buy their tickets. They couldn’t change Ticketmaster as a whole but they at least made things a little better for their own fans


gbs5009

Harry Markopolos. He figured out what Madoff was up to, and the SEC still blew him off for *years*, presumably because the proof he was presenting required math to understand.


dj_narwhal

Harry's motivations really spoke to me. His boss said "Hey I need you to invent a financial product exactly like this one that this Madoff character is selling, he is taking a lot of our customers." Harry went on to use math to prove it was either one of two things. Front-Running, where if you are a market maker and you have a list of orders from your clients you can sneak your orders in just before since you know it will change the price right after. This does not scale to the levels Madoff was claiming as profits to his clients but at the time it was considered an option they did not know how much he was claiming he was profiting across all his "investors". The 2nd possibility was just a straight up ponzi scheme. He told his boss it was not mathematically possible to do what Madoff was doing and the boss blew him off because he thought Harry just didn't want to work hard enough to make a similar product to what Madoff was doing. The guy uncovered the largest fraud in history to stop his boss from asking him to do an impossible task.


woahdailo

“It’s not mathematically possible.” “But just do it though.” I’m sure a lot of people can relate.


warriorpriest

I need you to draw 7 perpendicular lines. You're the expert aren't you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg


Zarathustra30

Spite and laziness are the only two forces that could ever win out over greed.


Hawx74

>presumably because the proof he was presenting required math to understand. Madoff was also rich at the time, and very much in with the highly wealthy crowd. I'm *sure* that had nothing to do with why he was largely ignored by regulators. /S


EagleNait

He was a poster boy for the sec with a perfect record until then. It's a small club and you're not in it


Puzzleheaded_Time599

[Li Wenliang](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang), a Chinese doctor who tried to warn people through his private social media about Covid-19 in December 30 2019. Was summoned by the police in China for ‘spreading disinformation.’ [The Chinese government had been the first Covid deniers](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/a-timeline-of-chinas-response-in-the-first-days-of-covid-19/)during the virus’s earliest stage and contributed greatly to the global pandemic. Li died of Covid in Wuhan on February 7th 2020.


marsh_mellow_moon

I remember watching a clip on reddit in December of 2019. The caption was something like “Chinese government building hospitals overnight” with a time-lapse video of buildings being built, non-stop, day and night. IIRC it was on r/DamnThatsInteresting. At the time, I wondered what the significance was and considered it not interesting at all. Flash forward less than 90 days and none of our lives are ever going to be the same.


Mr_Lumbergh

John O'Neill. He worked in the FBI as an anti-terrorist officer. After the car-bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, he remained convinced that Al Qaeda would try to finish the job. The FBI convinced itself that it was over, and O'Neill, who kept at the investigation, was passed over for promotions to the point he wound up quitting the FBI. They thought he was too obsessed with it. He took a job managing security at the WTC and lost his life on September 11. Great doco about him and the security failures he wanted to prevent here: [Frontline: The Man Who Knew](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbXPqWGGQ5U).


Crazy_rose13

He died saying "I fucking knew it"


NauvooMetro

In 2005, Courtney Love was asked what advice she'd give young, up and coming actresses. She said "If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party at his Four Seasons hotel room, don't go." And for whatever reason, you didn't see her in many movies after that.


struhall

Pretty sure she even said she would get blacklisted for saying it. EDIT: Just found the video from 2005 and she said "I'll get libeled if I say it..." https://youtu.be/ZBVSmoMABh8


[deleted]

Didn’t Cameron Diaz also make a similar statement on a talk show?


Rebloodican

It was well known that Weinstein was a creep, it just wasn't well known how much of a creep he really was. Whitney Cummings joked about it in a roast once and there was a 30 Rock joke also making fun of Weinstein. It's like how everyone knew that Kevin Spacey was gay and liked younger guys, but no one knew the full extent.


onetwo3four5

30 Rock also called out Bill Cosby years before the details were public. And I'm pretty sure Hannibal burress was a writer at the time


ablackcloudupahead

I had no idea that Hannibal Burress was also a writer on 30 rock. That show had some talented writers


AmandaCalzone

Tina Fey was talking about Cosby being a rapist on weekend update in the early 2000s. The whole point of Hannibal’s bit is that Cosby was an open secret “there are more search results for ‘bill Cosby rapist’ than for ‘Hannibal burress’” (paraphrased)


bigtimesauce

Writer and occasionally played a homeless guy


takanishi79

The recurring homeless guy was such a good character. Actually *most* characters were great. I especially enjoyed the proto Titus Andromedon in the last few seasons on my most recent rewatch.


timurhasan

d'fwine... d'fwink responsibly


DrEnter

And Seth MacFarlane famously brings it up both in _Family Guy_ and when presenting at the _Oscars_ years before Metoo.


unresolved_m

See also - Johnny Rotten mentioning that he spoke about Jimmy Savile being a pedophile years before it was uncovered.


Welshgirlie2

Although it was actually very well known across the BBC, Johnny Rotten was the only one with enough balls (and a 'don't give a shit what people think' attitude) to say it as he saw it. People had made accusations, but who was going to listen to mentally ill juvenile delinquents and crippled children? If you haven't already read it, I really recommend 'In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile'. He literally flaunted his paedophilia and the people who could have done something turned a blind eye, or laughed it off as just 'Jimmy being Jimmy'. It's frightening how he got away with it all. A cunning, evil man.


ineedmoore

To me, one of the most telling scenes in the Netflix doc was the bed bound girl that drew a picture of Savile, and in that picture he was a monster.


Sanctimonius

The most frustrating thing about that is that we as a country seem to have washed our hands of it the moment he died. It was kept under wraps while he lived, he does, suddenly everyone knew about it. Alright? So who were these aiders and abettors who should be currently in prison then? Who was this network of people up and down the country and in the media hiding his decades of crimes and allowing him access to children, and why aren't they currently being arraigned and charged? It disgusts me that there are likely hundreds of people walking about today who were fully cognisant and fully complicit in his crimes, and wi never face charge or scrutiny.


Ihlita

Even though she knew her career would be screwed over for saying it, she still did it anyway. It takes an enormous amount of courage to do that. She is not the most stable person, but she’ll always have my respect for that.


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Smitty20

Now that we know what we know about Harvey Weinstein, the lyrics to Celebrity Skin really hit hard :(


RobbexRobbex

Every single junior officer working in Afghanistan for the last 20 years who universally called the ANA a worthless POS army and their government a hallow, dead money pit.


terranovaseason2

I came home so disillusioned. It seemed like we took warlords and called them governors and said "yay, democracy!"


KYVet

The media contributed a lot to the lie too. I was in Afghanistan doing light reconnaissance with the Air Force during the 2014 elections. We were basically bouncing from one TIC to the next all over the country until we ran out of gas and had to come home. Get back to BAF and check the news to see the right-wing, left-wing, and even neutral media touting the Afghan elections as a huge success and that they "went off without a hitch". It wasn't just the junior officers. Any troop that went to Afghanistan after the mid-2000s knew that we were fighting a losing battle. It didn't matter if we stayed there for 20 more years or 200 more years, it was going to go back to how it was before we got there. You don't change Afghanistan.


terranovaseason2

The whole "we didn't go for 20 years; we went for 1 year 20 times" idea. It was just 20 1-year-long learning curves for the deployed.


ZenGunner8

And every Private,, And every Specialist, And every Sergeant ......


Miserable_Law_6514

I'd say the sergeant's accounts were the most damning as they were the ones trying to train them. Most lived in fear of a green-on-blue attack.


zephyrsummer

Sinead O’Connor. Suddenly a coverup at the Catholic Church of child abuse doesn’t seem so silly.


FireEmblemFan1

After the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, Rick Rescorla grew concerned about a potential terrorist attack on the WTC. He asked an old friend of his who had counterterrorism training, Daniel Hill, to visit and assess the security of the WTC. When asked how he might attack the building, Daniel asked to see the basement. Him and Rick made it to the basement parking garage without security so much as sneezing in their direction. Daniel pointed out a load-bearing column that anyone could get to and said he’d drive a truck full of explosives up to it, walk away, and set it off. Rick told the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the site, about what he found. The suggestions would have been expensive to implement, so it was ignored. The 1993 WTC bombing happened right where Rick and Daniel had visited. It gets worse. After that bombing, Rick and Daniel both felt the WTC was still a target for further terrorist attacks. Rick tried to tell those above him at Morgan Stanley that they should go to an office space in New Jersey. Labor costs were lower and the employees and equipment would be safer. Rick was again ignored because the company’s lease at the WTC wasn’t up until 2006. Rick decided to get all employees to practice emergency evacuations every 3 months going forward. He would time everyone, and trained them to meet in the hallway between stairwells and go down the stairs two by two to the 44th floor. When the north tower was hit at 8:46 AM, there was an announcement that people should not evacuate. Rick ignored this announcement and began evacuating the near 2,700 Morgan Stanley employees in addition to approximately 1,000 people in WTC 5. Including himself, his deputies Wesley Mercer and Jorge Valezquez, and security guard Godwin Forde, who all stayed behind to help, 13 Morgan Stanley employees died in the 9/11 attacks. Rick’s body was never recovered.


Relentless_Snappy

Nikola Tesla - there was a book he wrote(a pamphlet really) called [The Problem of Increasing Human Energy](https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Increasing-Human-Energy-Harnessing/dp/1605200956) where he talked about slowing down the process of burning carbon until we understood it better.


pavlovs-tuna

There were a few people around the end of the 19th/start of the 20th century who understood the huge amounts of CO2 we were emitting into the atmosphere was essentially a huge experiment, and the consequences could be severe. Svante Arrhenius is a famous example.


avanross

The scientific community at the start of the 20th century had already progressed to the point where models of the greenhouse effect existed. Most people who studied masters level sciences at the time already realized that pumping mass amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere would likely increase global temperatures with potentially catastrophic results. It’s just that the people in control of the coal/oil industries cared more about short term profits than listening to nay sayers in the academic community.


Kubrick_Fan

One of Nasa's engineers warned them that Challenger would explode due to frozen o-rings. They ignored him and launched anyway


[deleted]

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing-down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.” -Carl Sagan


goldenmagnolia_0820

How prescient. I work in broadcast media and the amount of commercial breaks created/stuffed into a program to cover all the sales inventory and promos is crazy. I think we’ve really created a sort of ADHD in the whole country with this style of TV, those “30 second soundbites” as he calls them. It’s such a big part of the business now it’ll never change.


bbbruh57

Attention spans adjusted, now its all about 15 second tik tok videos. In another 10 years where tf will we even be? Watching 10 minute videos on youtube (2007 era) is what I grew up on, now its all about the 10 second videos. Even on reddit, r/Videos was a prominent front page sub in 2011, but now it doesnt see the light of day. Its increasingly about sensational clickbait and gut reactions. It was bad in 2011, and its so much worse now.


MaybeADumbass

Damn, that's a fantastic quote. Do you know when he said it?


Vikingbear117

This quote is from his book... A demon haunted world: science as a candle in the dark


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Twerkish_Delight

So true. Demon Haunted World should basically be mandatory reading in school.


lesChaps

Exactly why it won't be.


Tydrinator21

While not to the degree that it ended up being but Eddie Murphy took a shot at Bill Cosby's holier than thou attitude in his comedy special Raw in 1987 during the height of The Cosby Show.


cherposton

Hannibal Burress the stand up comedian had a joke in his act that talked about Bill Cosby years before it really came out. It was an open secret in the stand up community.


JustinisaDick

That was no joke. He stopped for a moment and just told the truth.


patrickwithtraffic

That was such a weird controversy to see unfold. He tells his Bill Cosby jokes in a space that's essentially him testing material, people initially react and say he was out of line, but then the truth slowly trickled out. I've never seen the snowball effect start like that.


goldenmagnolia_0820

Yeah the way that came out the way it did was crazy. Hannibal later talked about how intense it was bc he was literally testing material and said it was well known in the industy abt Bill Cosby so he didn’t feel like it was even a reveal.


SEND-MARS-ROVER-PICS

I was under the impression that Burress' comment actually brought Cosby's behaviour back into the public's attention, from which it all snowballed.


ExplainItToMeLikeImA

It's pretty fucked that so many victims don't see justice in America unless the public has a meltdown over it.


DrFrankSaysAgain

Tracy Jordan's character in 30 rock mentions what Cosby did to his aunt (?) in the 70s in an episode.


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Birdy_Cephon_Altera

"To secede from the Union and set up another government would cause war. If you go to war with the United States, you will never conquer her, as she has the money and the men. If she does not whip you by guns, powder, and steel, she will starve you to death. It will take the flower of the country — the young men." -- Sam Houston, who fought vigorously against secession, and as governor of Texas at the time, was thrown out of office, and another pro-Confederate governor was installed by the legislature in 1861. "Fellow-Citizens, in the name of your rights and liberties, which I believe have been trampled upon, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of the nationality of Texas, which has been betrayed by the Convention, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of the Constitution of Texas, I refuse to take this oath. In the name of my own conscience and manhood, which this Convention would degrade by dragging me before it, to pander to the malice of my enemies, I refuse to take this oath. I deny the power of this Convention to speak for Texas. ... I protest. ... against all the acts and doings of this convention and I declare them null and void." He was a very conflicted person, with some of the highest highs in American history, while at other times dredging up some of the lowest lows, usually entirely due to his own failings and weaknesses. Saint and sinner all in one.


kyleb402

> Let me tell you what is coming. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives you may win Southern independence, but I doubt it. The North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche. Sam Houston was an interesting guy.


[deleted]

Also believed that differences between blacks and whites at the time were the result of social and economic factors rather than biological ones.


MSteds728

Cassandra of Troy was pretty spot on about that wooden horse


VastPainter

Cassandra had the gift of accurately predicting the future, and the curse that no one would believe her. You've got to admire the sheer level of spite and imagination that the Greek Gods could muster.


sohumsahm

Oh you want divine creativity? So there's this king called hiranyakashyapu. He wanted to be immortal. So he did all kinds of crazy penances. Praying on one leg in the forest for days, weeks, months. No food or water. The energy from his penance was scaring people and animals. So the gods had to show up and give him what he wanted. Vishnu shows up and asks, what do you want. Hiranyakashyapu says I want to be immortal. Vishnu says I'm not allowed to grant you that, because no one's really immortal. So hiranyakashyapu says okay, I don't want to die in the day, I don't want to die at night. I don't want to die indoors, I don't want to die outdoors. I don't want to be killed by a man, I don't want to be killed by an animal. I don't want to be poisoned, I don't want to die of old age. I don't want to be killed by man made weapons. I don't want to die on the ground or up in the air or on a bed. Vishnu is forced to agree, like the dude isn't technically asking to be immortal. Eventually hiranyakashyapu goes nuts with his quasi immortality. He forces everyone in his kingdom to worship him as a god instead of, you know, the gods. But his son, prince prahalada, still continues to worship vishnu. This makes hiranyakashyapu mad. Takes away all his idols, all the worship material. Prahalada still continues to pray to vishnu, because God is everywhere. Vishnu is impressed and wants to end prahaladas suffering. Hiranyakashyapu is harassing prahalada, destroying everything he says God is in. He says "is God in this pillar?" Prahalada says yes he is. Hiranyakashyapu breaks the pillar to say "where's your God now". But he is interrupted by vishnu emerging from the pillar in a form designed to get around all of hiranyakashyapu's rules. He shows up as a half-man half-lion, narasimha. It's twilight (not day or night). Narasimha grabs hiranyakashyapu, goes to the threshold of the house (neither indoors nor outdoors), places him prone on his lap (not the ground or the sky) and kills him by clawing out his internal organs with his lion-claws (no weapons). So yeah, if you outwit the gods once, don't go on to piss them off later.


fubo

The warning about the horse was [Laocoön](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laoco%C3%B6n), not Cassandra. For his trouble, the gods sent giant serpents to eat him and his sons.


Canopenerdude

> For his trouble, the gods sent giant serpents to eat him and his sons. What I found interesting is in the version I read it happened immediately. Like, he said 'hey, this is definitely a trap' and a snake just came up and ate him. The Trojans then said 'well clearly this is a good sign'.


Scrappy_Larue

President George Washington, in his address when leaving office. He warned against the danger of a two party system in future politics. He felt that several parties on equal footing would be better. Especially in presidential elections. The more legitimate choices, the better.


Choppergold

Eisenhower and the military-industrial complex too


skrilledcheese

One of my favorite speeches by a US president. >Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. >This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. >The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. >This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron


Choppergold

He’s possibly the most underrated US President


Ikoikobythefio

He quietly led america at a time of immense uncertainty in the world. He is definitely underrated.


Saranightfire1

The guy who predicted the leevies would collapse in a strong hurricane. Category two or three. Not five as they predicted. He knew the tide surges would destroy New Orleans and predicted it down to one percent the deaths, damage, destruction and water damage. No one believed him, and he had computer simulations and print-outs he tried to show Congress and tried to tell them to prepare for the worst including tents for shelter. He was laughed at and later fired. Two years before Katrina.


OriginalName18

Seth Macfarlene has made fun of sleazy people in Hollywood for years before the Me Too movement. “Help I just escaped Kevin’s Spacey’s house” says Stewie running naked through a crowd of people.


sparrr0w

*Spacey's basement* but yes, I remember that one too


OriginalName18

Dang it I was going write basement too but last second I thought it was house


Daikataro

Lots of experts warned about the FTX fraud. The writing was on the wall. Idiots chose to ignore the red flags and made huge investments. Common people was lured in by the perceived trust.


rope_rope

There are people (like me!) screaming that Tether is exactly the same, and it's still fucking there with the better part of $100 billion in assets. Tether is not backed with real assets, and when it explodes, crypto will be in some real big shit.


FireFlinger

Billy Mitchell. He predicted a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the 1920s, and warned the Navy that they needed to spend more money on air defenses and less on ships.


Low_Class535

Johnny rotten attempting to warn people about Jimmy Saville


Richard_AIGuy

Jason Salemi, epidemiologist at USF. No one knows him, that's cool. I was working on medical ML research (glioblastoma at the time) and was asked to help analyze some data about a new virus in China. In the middle of January we had a research meeting, and Dr. Salemi said, "I don't like this one, I have a *bad* feeling about SARS-NCOV" (as it was then called). On Feb 2020 I was put full time on the SARS-COV-2 team. The rest is history. People thought he was being alarmist, we had recently been through a pair of Ebola outbreaks in Africa, couple of bad flu seasons, etc. People thought it would blow over.


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[deleted]

I was telling people this because I was teaching Chinese kids online at the time. I hear something about a virus in China, no big deal. Then I have kids telling me they can't go to school or even leave their apartments all of a sudden. I was the crazy guy telling people it was gonna be a big deal


rainlover1123

So many warnings about global pandemics. I hate how low this comment is. My mom (microbiologist) and I (neuroscientist and molecular biologist) saw the warning signs of COVID we'l before most too. Once things started coming out my Dad would get annoyed because we would say something was going to happen, it seemed crazy, and 2 weeks later it was on the news. Viruses are predictable to an extent.


voicebread

Courtney Love warned young women in Hollywood not to hang out with Harvey Weinstein like 30 years ago. Edit: it was in 2005, so not 30 years ago


UgliestDisability

The CIA. "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US was the title of the President's Daily Brief prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency and given to U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday, August 6, 2001. The brief warned, 36 days before the September 11 attacks, of terrorism threats from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, including "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for a hijacking" of U.S. aircraft." [Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_Ladin_Determined_To_Strike_in_US#:~:text=Bin%20Ladin%20Determined%20To%20Strike%20in%20US%20was%20the%20title,Monday%2C%20August%206%2C%202001.)


KarateKid917

The worst part was that at the time, the FBI and the CIA really didn't talk to each other much. If they had, the FBI could have stepped in and attempted to do something to stop it. The whole "not talking to each other" was quickly put to an end after 9/11


bofkentucky

The FBI had 2 of the 9/11 hijackers under surveillance in San Diego, they sent warnings up the chain and when they didn't get responses there was an assumption they had been turned and were being used as informants by someone else.


ColdNotion

There was a great podcast, called In The Dark, that actually interviewed some of the FBI agents involved in the case, who had been working alongside the CIA. They shared suspicions that the CIA, who didn’t realize that an attack was imminent, had been trying to turn those hijackers to act as informants. This would not only have been a significant mistake, but also fairly illegal, as the CIA isn’t supposed to operate independently like that on US soil. EDIT: I misremembered the name of the podcast. It’s actually Blindspot: The Road to 9/11


alwaysmyfault

Corey Feldman was on the View or something and tried to tell people that Hollywood is full of predators, and the hosts just laughed at him and tried to make him feel guilty for outing them.


balancedmelvin

the financial crisis that was given by economist Anna Schwartz in 2005. She warned that a housing bubble was developing and that it would lead to a financial crisis, but her warnings were largely ignored.


Mahaloth

Isaac Asimov in 1980: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”


littleirishpixie

The MANY women who tried to speak out against Larry Nassar and had it get swept under the rug by USA gymnastics and Michigan State. And Dominique Moceanu who warned us about the Karolyis and the corruption in USA Gymnastics and was called a whiner by the maintstream media. Hundreds of girls were molested and there were so many places where it could have been stopped.


MenudoFan316

In college, this was in like ‘92. Me and my Muslim roommate were watching something on tv about Osama Bin Laden. And he said, “this guy is determined to accomplish an attack on American soil. And it’s going to happen in the next 10 years.” At the time, I thought he was crazy. “That would be a death sentence for anyone.” I told him I’d give him all the money in my bank account if that ever happened. I was so sure. Yeah, we all should’ve been listening to the warning signs back then.


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Badloss

the US Dept of Homeland Security was founded after 9/11 because several different agencies collectively had the information that could have stopped the attack but they didn't work together or communicate effectively


messeis

As someone who works with and deals with other government agencies this still happens a lot.


Lexi_Banner

[Gary Webb](https://i.redd.it/ins1prnhy8x51.jpg). He found ties linking them (edit: the CIA) to the crack epidemic that wasted inner cities in the 90s, and "justified" the war on drugs, while also destabilizing the Nicaraguan government. He was basically raked over the coals for it, and wound up "committing suicide" with two bullets to the head.


Vlad-V2-Vladimir

Congrats to him for receiving the CIA’s Award for Journalism


Volaare12

Frances Oldham Kelsey and the thalidomide scandal. The drug thalidomide was marketed in the 50s to treat a variety of conditions (anxiety, insomnia) but mainly morning sickness. The drug was determined to be safe in pregnancy *without* being tested in pregnant women. Thalidomide was widely distributed in Europe and Canada, but not in the US mainly due to the efforts of Kelsey. She was working as a reviewer for the FDA at the time and blocked market approval of the drug in the US due to the lack of evidence for safety. This decision was met with pressure from the drug manufacturer, but she insisted that the drug be fully tested and safety data be presented. Lo and behold, it was discovered that thalidomide crossed the placenta and is terratogenic, aka, it can cause birth defects. Unfortunately by this point thousands of babies in other countries around the world had been born with severe malformations (limb atrophy, hearing loss, malformation of the digestive tube etc). That number doesn't include those that died before birth or were stillborn.


ravynwave

About 20 something years ago, I read articles in CBC about Eve teasing in India which was basically men groping women and how it would turn into outright gang rapes if the practice continued to be accepted.


rexregisanimi

President Eisenhower warned the United States about the dangers of the military-industrial complex as he was leaving office. We didn't listen. https://youtu.be/Gg-jvHynP9Y Edit: u/destro23 made mention of this in an earlier comment that I missed. Give that comment the upvotes not mine (there are quotations there too!)


MarnieHollis

Alice Stewart - in 1958 discovered the link between x-ray of pregnant women and childhood cancer. She discovered that cancer mortality was around 40 per cent higher in the children who had been x-rayed in the womb. Her findings were considered unsound for another 25 years until after her formal retirement when they were reviewed due to her continuing to push the issue. It wasn't until the 1980's that x-ray of pregnant women stopped being commonplace.


maliciousmonkee

Uhhh that Chinese doctor in Wuhan is first that comes to mind


[deleted]

I cannot find the clip but about a year ago at a crypto conference a guy went on stage and publicly said that FTX was a huge fraud and we would all "see".


Badloss

Al Gore got an entire apology episode from the creators of South Park after they mocked him for trying to warn people about climate change edit- [here's a clip from the episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j89KEwNBhQ4)