Suicide

We resign from our jobs, we divorce our husband/wife because we think the status-quo is not something we want to put up with. Suicide is nothing but a resignation from life or an event where we divorce our life. The reason is the same - that the status-quo is unacceptable. And just as we move to a different job, different relationship, we move to a different "life" when we commit suicide. While no one frowns upon resignations, while Catholics and other religious people frown upon divorce, a whole lot more people including the legal apparatus frown upon suicide. An exception was in the case of Sati - a practice that used to exist a 100 years back among recently widowed Hindu women in India.

A close cousin of suicide is euthanasia which is legally allowed, I think, in Switzerland and in few other places but not in India.

Another cousin is the old Tamil practice is "vadakkiruthal" - when a person decided to "resign" he would sit facing the north (= vadakku) and starve to death in a peaceful manner, perhaps taking time to chat with friends and family during his resignation process which could last a few weeks. This is explained in an earlier post.

I am reminded of an incident where a man, a distant acquaintance, encouraged his wife to commit suicide. This, of course, is closer to murder than to suicide. I wonder whether the husband, the instigator, was more weird. Or his wife who acquiesced.

So long as the decision to commit suicide is taken by a person in his right mind - it is no different from a will written by a man. It's his right. Can we deny a man the  right to decide when to "resign" from his life?

Additional reading:
http://www.intropsych.com/ch10_development/suicide.html

Interesting Flight Routes

Couple of days back I was tracking flight routes and I took pictures of some interesting routes. All pictures were taken from flighradar24 app. And up is North in all photos.

Picture above shows route from SF to Dubai. See how the flight goes north of Greenland. This is a polar route. There are more polar routes shown later.

This picture (above) is that of Dubai to Washington DC. About 9 hours into the flight and 4 more hours to go. The flight is shown in red color in the top right of the picture flying over Greenland.

The picture above shows Dubai to Washington (or is it New York) route - note that the place was flying over Greenland at the time the picture was shot. And this is NOT a polar route - at no point in the route is the latitude above 67degrees.

See this picture above. The plane is flying from the east cost in USA to a place in Eastern Asia (Beijing / Taipei / Seoul / Hong Kong). And the route is way above Alaska (Alaska is in the center of the picture). This is a polar route.

Shown above is another polar route from NY to Seoul.

Route above is from Toronto to Hong Kong. Is it a polar route?

Shown above is the 3D picture as though taken from the plane - some place near Pennsylvania.

Shown above the LA to Moscow route. Is is polar?

Shown above is NY to a place near China (Taipei?) - flying east.

Shown above is NY to Seoul (I think it is Seoul) - flying west. Flying north of Alaska. Polar route. Another such route (shown below) from Eastern Asia to East Coast of North America.

This is an interesting picture showing 3 flights about to enter Greenland which are from NY/Toronto to East Asia (near China). How do I know this? Because I had gone through the flight details before I took the picture. The two planes going North/Northwest at the top of the picture are going from NY/Toronto to eastern Asia but taking the western route over international date line.

The pictures above and below show two interesting polar routes. Both planes are so close to each other. One is from San Francisco to Dubai going East and the one below is from New York to Seoul going West. The pictures were taken at the same time. Surprisingly both are Airbus A380-861.

Shown above is one of the few intercontinental flights that start and terminate in the southern hemisphere. Santiago (Chile) to Auckland (New Zealand). Because of the scarcity of such flights I doubt whether there are any polar routes in the southern hemisphere (say, Chile to Australia or Argentina to South Africa flying over Antarctica).

For some reason, part of the route from Santiago to where the plane is in South Pacific is not displayed. The boarding and destination airports are shown with a blue pin, though, as usual. 

This flight is going from Delhi to Vancouver (polar route). This site was used to combine two pictures: https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/combine-two-images-into-one.php

Here, below, are 2 flight routes juxtaposed. One is from Doha, Qatar to LAX, going by the polar route over Greenland while the route on the right is from Dubai to SFO going by the polar route easterly over Alaska. Incidentally both the flights, at the time I was watching, were both North of Russia and were about turn "left" and "right", respectively.

The route below is from Delhi to SFO flying eastwards over Alaska. This is the first time I am seeing such a route.

This route is close to the South Pole: from Santiago to Sydney. Three pictures were merged.

Polar map:

These are images from the net.

This flight from Singapore to JFK takes 17 hours - the longest I have come across. It flies across the Pacific.

This is a LATAM airline flight from Santiago to Sydney. I have included both the Google Earth route and flightradar24 routes (the latter has 3 parts merged).

This is the Lufthansa flight from Tokyo to Frankfurt. Instead of flying west over Russia, because of the war the flight has taken the polar route, it's flying over Alaska and then down east of Greenland to Germany.

Adolf Eichmann, Simon Wiesenthal, Josef Mengele, Christian Wirth

Quotes, reproduced without permission, from a book by Alan Levy: "Nazi Hunter: The Wiesenthal File" (Protagonist is Simon Wiesenthal) - the quotes are about Adolf Eichmann, unless otherwise mentioned.

"At the time, Eichmann impressed his superiors only with his diligence in doing whatever was asked of him. Though one of his colleagues described him as a most colorless creature - the typical subordinate: pedantic, punctilious [and] devoid of any thorough knowledge."

"It was here [Palais Rothschild in Austria] that he [Eichmann] discovered his two true talents: he could organize ruthlessly and he could negotiate from a position of strength, real or illusory."

"'Anger got the better off me' Eichmann recalled in 1960. 'I lost my control, which very seldom happened. I don't know what got into me. I let myself go and slapped him in the face. It wasn't the kind of also that hurt, I'm sure of that. I haven't got that much muscle. But I never concealed that incident. Later on, when I was a commandant, I spoke of it in in the presence of my subordinate officers AND Dr. Lowenherz - and begged his pardon. I did that deliberately... because on the department I ran layer, I did not tolerate physical violence. That was why I apologized in uniform and in the presence of my staff.' Nothing is more important to a desk murderer than clean hands."

How feminine... [my comment]

"One of the Eichmann family's good friends, who had not been a Nazi, simply refused to believe the accusations against 'that oafish lackluster Adolf who never spoke up and often seemed to get stupidly stuck on one idea'. Wiesenthal said later 'The man didn't realize how well he'd characterized Eichmann - how right he was and how wrong'."

"Eichmann could have been a communist taking orders from Stalin or a Mafioso from his godfather. In every dictatorship, the appeal to such people is the same: 'Let the Führer think for you'."

Eichmann was a J (as in MBTI). Germans are (or were) largely J's. Is it possible that normal people can become murderers if their duties involved murder? is there a potential criminal lurking in SJ's? I had earlier thought that J's, especially TJ's were not capable of dastardly acts. I wonder... Was Eichmann T or an F?

I would assume Eichmann had a strong Mars and a strong Saturn (indicated by J) and poor Venus (an inability to decide what's good for him - no independent goals or vision). Looking at his horoscope (taking date of birth data from Wiki), his Mars and Saturn are both strong. Mercury is debilitated but in its own constellation. Surprisingly though, so is his Venus and Moon. Now, how come his Venus is strong? :( 

While he was found guilty and hanged to death in Israel, I can't help but wonder... Was he guilty? He did his job (exterminating Jews) as a duty. Just as the two soldiers in the Tom Cruise movie A Few Good Men were found to be guilty of conduct unbecoming a Marine and dishonorably discharged for having only executed a Code Red (=kill) ordered by the Camp Commander. The senior of the two soldiers explains at the end of the movie to the junior person as to why they were dishonorably discharged: Marines were supposed to protect the weak. Carrying out orders to kill the weak was wrong. Hmmm. Difficult to integrate duty and morality when the two are out of sync.

Another person the book describes is Josef Mengele, the Angel Of Death in Auschwitz, formally the chief medical officer of the extermination camp. Quotes from the book about him:

"He was a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Munich who had studied Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, but embraced the racist rubbish of Alfred Rosenburg, Hitler's philosopher."

"In front of the Auschwitz crematorium he was once heard to say 'Here the Jews enter through the door and leave through the chimney.'"

His remark seems more like that of a tourist guide who extols someone else's virtue. (I doubt whether he designed the crematorium. - That the statement is in extremely poor taste is not worth mentioning.)

"Pedaling blithely along, the doctor in his early thirties seemed seemed immune to the dirt, dust and grease of the misery around him - none of which was [was, not were!!] permitted to smudge his attire...He might be humming or whistling a melody - maybe Mozart, sometimes Wagner, but invariably with perfect pitch, for there was much that was musical about this man..."

"He liked cryptic dialogues  in which he understood the subtle nuances, but the other person didn't. "

Was he an N (iNtuitive as in MBTI)? This guy prided himself on his work while Eichmann did his work conscientiously and ably. How come both have strong Venus? It is worth noting that Mengele had strong Mars and Venus and a debilitated Saturn. Is weakness of Saturn more important than the strength of Venus in this case? Incidentally, Saturn and Rahu are in the 8th from Moon which point to a different conclusion about his marriage.

"Of the millions he met in the eternal chill before the chimneys of Birkenau (Auschwitz), Dr Mengele reserved a special welcome for those who had not been created in "God's image", for they were laboratory animals for his diabolical pseudo-scientific experiments."

This man was different from Eichmann. He was more akin to Hitler.

"In the Auschwitz memoir appropriately titled Anus Mundi, Polish survivor, Wieslaw Kielar characterizes the anthropologist Dr Mengele, who was also camp doctor as 'an exceedingly elegant and good looking SS officer who, thanks to his attractive appearance and his good manners, conveyed the expression of a gentle and cultured man who had nothing to do with selection, phenol and Zyklon-B. What he was like in reality was something we were to learn soon enough.'"

"As a matter of fact, Dr Josef Mengele was no evil mastermind, no ancient dybbuk, no devil incarnate but a dumb intellectual, a dilettante, a dabbler who used human beings as his guinea pigs. Though better educated and endowed, he was as much a loser in life as Eichmann or Stangl, a bungler whose failures bred failures, aborted starts and abrupt ends that, almost without design, carved a trail of blunders and false clues leading only to Simon Wiesenthal's greatest postwar disappointment. Even Mengele's drowning in three or four feet of water - which cost the world and Wiesenthal a chance to confront him in court - was banal and stumbling, as befits the man's mediocrity."

I am not able to agree with the opinion expressed in the para above. 

"There [in the camp] he came into his own - found expression for his talents, so that what had been potential became actual. Intelligent but hardly an intellectual giant, Mengele found expression and recognition in Auschwitz beyond his talent. The all important Auschwitz dimension was added to ... create a uniquely intense version of the Auschwitz self as the physician-killer-researcher.... In Auschwitz, Mengele was 'the right man at the right place at the right time.' His energies no less than his ambition were galvanized by this Auschwitz synchronization of all his faculties."

"[As per Dr Martina Puzina, a University of Lemburg anthropologist] 'He [Mengele] believed you could create a new super race as though you were breeding horses. He thought it was possible to gain absolute control over a whole race. Man is so infinitely complex that that kind of strict control over such a vast population could never exist. He was a racist and a Nazi. He was ambitious up to the point of being completely inhuman. He was mad about genetic engineering.... In the end he would have killed his own mother if it would have helped him.'"

"If gypsies were his fetish, twins were his forte. 'Scientists,' Mengele once gloated 'have always been able to study twins after they have been born together. But only in the Third Reich can Science examine twins who died together.' Sometimes he would even dissect them while still alive."

It is usually thought that psychopaths or criminals who are "unfeeling" are of Thinking (as in MBTI) type because Feelers would be empathetic. Mengele is an example to disprove that notion perhaps. Being "F" is not sufficient for a person to be decent. Just as being J, as I realized, is not sufficient for a person to be decent.

"A letter of recommendation from the SS garrison commander at Auschwitz: Dr Mengele has been here since 30 May 1943. Dr Mengele has an open, honorable firm character. He is absolutely trustworthy, upright and direct. His mental and bodily hygiene is outstanding. His appearance indicates no weakness of character, no inclinations or addictions. His intellectual and physical predispositions can be designated as excellent. In his function as camp physician at Concentration Camp at Auschwitz, he applied his knowledge practically and theoretically while fighting grave epidemics. He seized every every opportunity, even under difficult circumstances, to improve both his theoretical and practical knowledge. He uses his spare time to search for further opportunities and unused anthropological materials."

I am amazed by this recommendation. Was it written by Mengene himself? Could his nature be so skilfully masked and reputation cleaned? Wonderful. A classic case of strong Venus (and Mars) and a weak Saturn.

"Simon Wiesenthal points out that this is a very common paradox: 'From Eichmann and Stangl on down, ninety percent of my 'clients' were - sometimes before the war and certainly after the war - solid family man and women, devoted to their children, loyal to their relatives, hardworking, taxpaying good citizens and good neighbours who did their duty, tended to their gardens and seldom made trouble for anyone. But when they put on under uniform, they became something else: monsters, sadists, torturers, killers, desk murderers. The minute they took off the uniform they became model citizens again."

"'The trouble with Eichmann' writes Hannah Arendt, 'was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.' And Stangl, says Gitta Sereny, had an infinite capacity to manipulate and repress his own moral scruples which, she insists, unquestionably existed."

"'In countries where the church is a controlling or dominating factor,' said the La Vista report, 'the Vatican has brought pressure to bear which has resulted in the foreign missions of those Latin American countries taking an attitude almost favoring the entry into their country of former Nazi and former fascist or other political groups, so long as they are anti-communist.' LA Vista added that 'the justification of the Vatican for its participation in this illegal traffic is simply the propagation of the faith.'"

The Catholics and Muslim institutions are primarily feelers (not thinkers) - power hungry.

"During her stay in Düsseldorf, Theresa Stangl visited her husband several times a week. 'What was strange,' she says 'was that often he would hardly talk to me. He'd sit opposite me at the table... But he'd chat with the guards, not with me. He'd talk to them about their leaves, their outings, places he knew, had been to. It hurt me and sometimes I'd say, ' Don't you want to talk to me?' Of course he didn't. To talk about his work from 1940-43 would have been to confess his infidelity to her values and upset the delicate equilibrium of his relationship with her and his family. She, more than he, had long looked the other way. His way crimes were like a mistress that everybody knows the head of the house has, but to openly acknowledge her existence would disturb the harmony of Sunday dinner. So it is perhaps fitting that the only time Stangl ever acknowledged his guilt, in private or in public, was to another woman, Gotta Sereny on Sunday, 27 June 1971, the day before he died."

"Sereny comes to this conclusion: 'I do not believe that all men are equal, for what we are above all things, is individual and different. But individuality and difference are not only due to the talents we happen to be born with. They depend as much on the extent to which we are allowed to expand in freedom... A moral monster, I believe, is not born, bit is produced by interference with this growth."

"Unlike Eichmann, however, he [John Demjanjuk, Ford Motor Co mechanic], denied everything, including, that he, Ivan Nicolaivich Demjanjuk, born 3 Apr 1920, in Duboimachariwzi in the Ukraine, was the same person as 'the other Ivan', whose name he (and later, others) said was Marchenko. But Demjanjuk performed the ultimate abstraction when he told the  US Marshals escorting him to Israel: 'If I was in Treblinka, then I was just a small cog. There was a war on, and there was no choice but to follow orders. But I was never in Treblinka.'" Wonder how his Venus is...

"'The trouble with Eichmann' writes Hannah Arendt, 'was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.' And Stangl, says Gitta Sereny, had an infinite capacity to manipulate and repress his own moral scruples which, she insists, unquestionably existed."

The book also talks about Raoul Wallenburg, who apparently was a gentile Swede and whose contribution to the Jewish cause is indicated to have been great.

Shown below are recent photos (shot by a friend of mine) of old houses in the southern part of Poland where I understand Jews used to live around 1944 until they escaped or the Gestapo took them away .

Additional reading:

1. Auschwitz extermination camp (Near Krakow)
2. Treblinka extermination camp (North east of Warsaw, Lublin)
3. Riga concentration camp (Latvia)
4. Dachau concentration camp (Southern Germany)
5. http://Calmisc.blogspot.com/2015/04/best-of-world-war-ilse-koch.html
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Wirth