novalis

dear mr. orange to talk about what "crime is" on a board discussing a crime may in your estimation be "completely irrelevant". please be assured that i am not trying to pressure you into discussing it. you might just pass it up, as all of us pass up some things on this thread which don't interest us and comment on others. as to deciding whether some message, or its form, is on or off topic, the forum has already provided us with a moderator. novalis ps it is "mr", not "ms". (don't let the beard fool you.)

mr orange, thanks for your reply. my concern was not specific legislation ("anti-trust" or other), but with the term "criminal" which i thought worth reflecting on since this thread is about a crime. in this regard darrow's principle point remains valid :the every day crime in which millions -- today billions-- are "stolen" by those who run the communities that imprison the less successful thieves. so as not to take up too much of the board's space on issues that go too far afield from the thread, regarding your specific concern, anti-trust legislation, let me refer you to the "wikipedia" article on "sherman anti trust". one quotation from the article: "What has changed since the Burger court transitioned to the Rehnquist court and with the Roberts court, is that courts are are unwilling to expand per se illegality to encompass new forms of conduct, even if they are allegedly tantamount to price fixing." novalis

naturally in any discussion many terms have to be used in a general way: one can't focus on everything at once. and of course this board is concerned with a particular case and a particular person. but on the general term "criminal", please consider the following excerpt from a speech that clarence darrow delivered to those held in the cook county jail in 1902. novalis the full text can be found at: http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/darrow.htm "Most of you probably have nothing against me, and most of you would treat me the same as any other person would; probably better than some of the people on the outside would treat me, because you think I believe in you and they know I do not believe in them. While you would not have the least thing against me in the world you might pick my pockets. I do not think all of you would, but I think some of you would.[…] And still I know this, that when I get outside pretty nearly everybody picks my pocket. There may be some of you who would hold up a man on the street, if you did not happen to have something else to do, and needed the money; but when I want to light my house or my office the gas company holds me up. They charge me one dollar for something that is worth twenty-five cents, and still all these people are good people; they are pillars of society and support the churches, and they are respectable. When I ride on the street cars, I am held up — I pay five cents for a ride that is worth two and a half cents, simply because a body of men have bribed the city council and the legislature, so that all the rest of us have to pay tribute to them. If I do not wish to fall into the clutches of the gas trust and choose to burn oil instead of gas, then good Mr. Rockefeller holds me up, and he uses a certain portion of his money to build universities and support churches which are engaged in telling us how to be good."

dear ckret, i do take your message in the spirit it was sent. but as to your advice to go back to bed; where i am it is the middle of the afternoon. novalis

dear mr ckret: you write: "Cooper knew what was going to happen because hijackings were on the news every month back then. Anyone who watched the news knew how these things played out. It took very little planning to hijack a plane in the late 60 early 70's, you just did like you saw reported on the news and you could expect the same outcome. " i have given this some thought (and slept over it which sometimes helps). i think you underestimate cooper. none of us on this board would undertake a hijacking and a jump based on tv coverage of these things. think about it: an "average human" being would not risk his freedom and his life without investigating the matter. i wonder if you don't have too low an opinion of "criminals" in general? in any case, it is my experience, that the sounder procedure in any contest or fight is to assume that the opponent is no more stupid than i am. (you remember the colts and joe namath.) no, let's assume dan, criminal though he was, was as intelligent as the gentlemen (and ladies) posting on this board, and produce our hypotheses based on this assumption. thanks novalis

dear mr. ckret, are you telling me that once television was really full of information? how times have changed; now its mostly dis-information. thank you. novalis

i agree with the tendency of your remarks. everything up to the jump, where he was in sight or contact with those trying to apprehend or shoot him, shows a man who is pretty much in command. it is a risky business that he has undertaken, but having gone into it there is evidence that the man is prudent. then comes the jump, and the minutes leading up to it. this is a time when no one saw dan cooper. and in this second part of the story some peple believe that we have a man who didn't know what he was doing? i don't buy that any more than you do. i also agree with your view about the visit to the wc. nothing but dan cooper telling the crew that he would be in the wc "for awhile" can account for the crew having that piece of information. (even if a light goes on somewhere the light can hardly know that it will be burning "for awhile".) due to some of dan cooper's behaviour during the hijacking i wonder if he had a police background, or airlines background, that allowed him to predict with reasonable certainty that the plane would not be stormed at the first stop?

you make some interesting points. to the word "knapsack". it is sometimes the case that words reveal a regional origin. that is, what was no longer used, perhaps never used, in one region is the word used in others. i grew up in the northeast and was often surprised when travelling to other parts of the country that rather simple items were termed in a completely different way. (what some places call "soft drinks", "soda" etc--i have forgotten other terms i encountered-- were (god knows why) called "pop" where i grew up. you order a "pop" 1971 in some places and they think you ve been orphaned. perhaps investigating some of dan's "terminology" could shed light on "where he was coming from". (is knapsack, for example, canadian?)

i realize this general profile of suicides has some diagnostic value. i also recall that not too many years ago the profession that was most susceptible to suicides was psychiatry. (probably a lot of left handed guys in the business.) to those who do tend to the suicide notion i would reply: personally i don't see how anyone comes up with the notion of committing suiced in this case. i mean dan went to a hell of a lot of trouble to commit suicide didn't he? couldn't he just have jumped off a high bridge? no. the premise from which people who follow this hypothesis seem to be working, is that dan didn't know what he was doing. i personally see no evidence of that. he knows what the plane is like etc. when it comes to the jump i think it well to recall, what has been said here before: he was alone in the cabin. no one saw what he was wearing or how he had tied the money to his body etc. when he jumped. and of course no one has any information on what he was wearing when he landed. i see no shred of evidence for a person taking all the trouble he did to hijack a plane just to leave the whole success of the venture up to a dangerous jump for which he was in no way -- training, clothing etc. prepared. the man that is revealed to me by the earlier part of the story is prudent; the man who purportedly is found in the second half is not. but remember: the second half is the one in which no one was present to observe him.

thanks. so whuffo means: "why do they do that?" i must confess the question never occured to me. people do what they do. or as g. m. hopkins says: "As king fishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; ... Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: ... Selves - goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came. " i assumed whuffo meant something like: a person who hasn't got a clue. (which is probably also contained in the definition.) thanks again.

to our moderator and to those engaged in the discussion: i wonder if technically our moderator could put all the discussion that has taken place on dan cooper into one thread? it would also be very useful if when some one says, "i discussed this already" he (or she) could refer to the number of the posting. without a number such references are a bit general when one considers, that on this thread alone, there are already almost 50 pages of messages. so my questions: could one thread be made of the several? would those referring to earlier contributions please give the number of the message? one last question. from the context i have an idea of what a "whuffo" is. still i would appreciate a definition. thanks. novalis ps happy birthday sluggo.

re: post 1086 a really interesting find! may not lead anywhere-- time will tell-- but good!

you ask, did he commit a robbery before this. certainly a legitimate question. i tend to think that he had knowledge of airplanes, flight procedures, i.e. was an engineer, had military experience, or law enforcement experience related to flight. i say this because, yes, i think there was a lot of preperation involved in what the man did; the "enviornment" he chose that day was not completely new to him. i tend to think that it was this type of preperation, i.e. experience with the "enviornment", rather than a career in robbery because 1) the amt. of money he asked for seemed to be below what others in the same "industry" were asking for and getting, 2) if it were just for the money, couldn't he have gotten it with less risk by robbing a bank, or something like that? the penalty for plane hijacking was death--if your just in the robbery biz. there are less dangerous ways of getting cash to meet the monthly bills. these are of course conjectures. none of us know. i merely wanted to agree, yes, as i read the man there was "preperation" at several levels: on the jump, and on the hijacking. i wanted to suggest a type of hijacking preperation that might account for his choice, without his having necessarily done a "heist" before.

thanks for your reply. yes we are all working with probabilites; i don't see how it could be otherwise in a matter like this. the fact the man chose a night jump, as you point out, is the type of fact that makes me think he had a pretty good background in what he was doing: perhaps a flight crew member during his military service etc. certainly a man who had done at least one jump. i think there are also indications that he was in a position to, and did do, research on the type of plane he was in. as to riding in the back of the plane. that served his purpose in being able to keep an eye on the others. (irrelevant to cooper but some one asked the question why one might take the back: it has always struck me -- the complete layman -- when i see photos of plane crashes that if any part of the plane is still in one piece, it's almost always the tail section.)

certainly i think the man chose the flight on a day before the holiday because generally they are less full. [is this a fact or does it depend on the holiday? certainly the day before labor day, which i have flown all over the usa east of the miss. has been pretty slow in recent years. (was it in 1971, i don't know.) did cooper investigate the type of plane most likely to be used on that flight? (just what kind of a nut do people think he was? his plan depends on the back stairs. there is no reason to assume that he was less intelligent than any of us: we would look into the matter. why wouldn't he?) if it had turned out that for some reason a different type of plane had been chosen at the last minute, he could have gotten off the plane with the bomb just as easily as he got on with the bomb. he didn't have to show his hand until he felt the conditions he needed were right. (this needn't have been the first time dan tried; just the first time he felt "comfortable" with things.)