#tbt that time two brothers bought their own planes, learnt to fly them and disguised them as soviet planes so they wouldn’t be questioned and then flew into east germany to rescue their third brother from a park and recorded the entire operation and got away with it
no but legit this is one of my favourite stories from the 20th century it just sums up human ingenuity and how walls just don’t fucking work when people will do anything to cross them
the first brother and a friend paddled over the Elbe on inflatable mattresses in the middle of the night to escape the east. they got picked up by a Wessi police officer, who said something like “bit cold for swimming, ey boys?” and the brother says “not when you’re trying to leave the East.” because all East Germans were automatically citizens of the West too, they were taken into town and established themselves there.
the second brother scoped out a particularly dark stretch of the wall. He escaped over it to the west by getting into a high building and shooting an arrow with a steel cable attached over to another building in the west. He then ziplined over. In response to his escape, the Stasi and the Wall designers built another guard tower in the middle of the stretch so no one else could pull the same stunt.
the two brothers met up and heard that their who was still in East Germany also wanted out. So, they learnt to fly planes and disguised them as soviet planes. This was so, if the border guards saw them, they wouldn’t fire on them – they’d have to ring up the Kremlin and ascertain whether they were actual soviet planes on an organised fly-by. they flew into East Germany at dawn (recording it all on camera because you’ve got to do it for the vine even before vine exists), landed in a park where their brother was hiding in the bushes, loaded him onto one of the planes and flew out of East Germany, laughing all the way.
other great moments include – the guy who broke out of the GDR by driving a very low-slung sportscar under a barrier, the family who built two hot air balloons with their bare hands, the guy who managed to windsurf out of East Germany, the man who stole a tank (my hero), the people who removed the petrol tanks from cars so people could squeeze into the gap where the tank should have been, and of course, one of the most famous photos of the 20th century, with Eastern border guard, conrad schumann noping the fuck out of there when he was meant to be on duty guarding the wall when it was under construction in 1961
ok but my favorite defector stories involve engineers, because engineers are insane
Eugeniusz Pieniazek, aircraft designer who decided to escape communist Poland by building an airplane in his living room, and lowering it out the window
Bernd Boettger, an engineer, escaped East Germany by riding a fucking torpedo across the sea
and even when these assholes screwed up they didn’t tend to stay in jail, cause communist regimes just couldn’t afford to keep locking up their engineers. engineers are special kinds of nutjobs
I have been watching this unfold for months through twitter, listservs, and other places. Here is a way to support the people whose land is going to be fucked over by the wall. It’s not just butterflies, it’s also Native American people
😪 can confirm bulldozers were parked on the property earlier this week. Remember, this portion of the wall was already funded last year, but the feds have repeatedly violated the rights of private landowners by tresspassing and destroying vegetation even *before* they obtained legal routes to do so.
I have heard this portion of the wall was funded only because the GOP presented it as “levy wall reinforcements” designed to safeguard land from the effects of flooding. In reality, it will magnify effects of flooding, massively worsen erosion, devastate the area, and every non-flying, non-swimming animal south of the wall will drown the next time the river floods.
For those unfamiliar with Texas and our relationship with our rivers: they flood. They flood regularly. They flood massively. When it rains in Texas, the downpour is torrential, if you don’t have an umbrella, you may as well have walked fully clothed into a shower. Every river and stream with a low road crossing is accompaniedby a flood gauge, some go up to 6 feet, some go higher, and some have been completely submerged.
We get these kinds of floods several times a year. Even in Austin, there are several days a year I have to work from home because parts of the major highways are underwater. All of this rain goes into the streams, which go into the creeks, which ultimately go into one (or more) of the rivers. They all flood. They all flood regularly. You can count on it. That’s why we have things like levies.
If this wall is built, the next time the Rio Grande floods in Mission, the loss of wildlife will be catastrophic. I saw so many cute javelina cleaning up under the bird feeders. Every single one will drown.
Guys, I can’t.
These aren’t pigs. They’re their own thing. They live in packs of 50 or so and this was my first time ever seeing them and it breaks my heart thinking every single one will be dead the next time the valley gets a hard rain.
I’m planning to write up my post(s) from the trip I made last week after tomorrow night. This month is horrible.
The National Butterfly Center
in Mission, Texas is the most diverse butterfly sanctuary in the U.S.
Some 200 species of butterflies find a home there each year, including
the Mexican bluewing, the black swallowtail and the increasingly
imperiled monarch. And, as soon as February, almost 70 percent of it could be lost to President Donald Trump’s border wall, The Guardian reported Thursday…
