"Inside was a note ordering them to stuff two freezer bags with money and deposit them in a grit box—a kind of bin filled with sand for de-icing roads—in Britz, a section of Berlin...At 11:07 P.M., though no one had come to the box, the motion detector squealed. When the officers opened the box, they found a gaping hole that fell deep into the sewers below. Funke had built an exact replica of a city grit box and placed it over a manhole cover, then opened the cover to retrieve the package."
Reading the article, I can't help thinking what a different era it's from. The guy extorted money from department stores with bombs for years, engaged in all kinds of Pink Panther shenanigans, and when he was finally caught he got 9 years, a work release, and the career in cartooning he'd always wanted. Nowadays in the US he'd probably be shot dead within a month, or barring that end up locked away for life. There's very little sense of proportionality left in the justice system these days for those who wrong the rich.
Here is one recent one who wasn't doing it for profit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_serial_bombings he wasn't killed by the police (directly) and he killed some people. The story of Dagobert wouldn't be as amusing if people died, but he did hurt people and caused psychological harm. Real people worked in those stores and other stores like them. The legal system has very little to do with justice, but I have no sympathy for someone placing explosives and hurting people, no matter the remorse.
It's hard to compare the serial bombings in your link to the Dagoberto ones. The Austin ones all seem to be attempted murders, not extortion of large companies. I suppose that could mean the Austin bomber should actually be more likely to be killed by police. But, another big difference is that the Austin bomber wasn't humiliating the police the way Dagobert was.
Hard to speculate how it would go down, but I doubt the police would blast down a high profile suspect. The higher your profile, the more professional and high ranking your adversaries are going to be.
The real goals are to satisfy the belief systems of those who subscribe to “fire and brimstone”, where criminals are sinners who must be punished. It’s (sometimes) less religious in nature these days but the undercurrent has always been in the US since pre-colonial times.
The fire and brimstone crowd did not initially lock people away for extended periods of time. They whipped people, publicly shamed them, executed them, etc. The "penitentiary" was explicitly a reformist idea that people could be improved by education instead of punishment. Instead of whipping and executing criminals, we would put them in an institution of "penitence" -- quiet reflection leading to appreciation of the wrongness of one's actions and the need to act in harmony with the benefit of others and society as a whole. This enlightened, benevolent approach would stress mutual benefit rather than punishment, even if it wasn't pleasant to lose one's freedom temporarily.
After a while we lost our optimism about the penitentiary concept and decided that being locked up was just a pointless ordeal, which made it popular with people who believe the goals of criminal sentencing should be punishment, deterrence, and keeping dangerous people separated from society, and less popular with those who favor a benevolent approach.
Penalties in Japan and China are often worse despite no tradition of fire and brimstone. Feels like you’re just taking your own personal biases and stretching them to explain complex phenomena.
Neither incarcerates anywhere near as large a proportion of their population. The US jails 631 per 100,000 compared to 121 in China and 38 in Japan.
There are certainly other factors, like the presence of a large group of “othered” people with less opportunity, but there is no doubt a vengeance streak running through the American conversation on criminal punishment.
> According to official ballot materials promoting the original Three Strikes law, the sentencing scheme was intended to “keep murderers, rapists, and child molesters behind bars, where they belong.” However, today, more than half of inmates sentenced under the law are serving sentences for nonviolent crimes.
Americans commit crime at vastly higher rates than Japanese, so it makes sense that the number of Americans in jail is higher. Or is there some ideal number of people in jail we should be aiming for, regardless of crime?
The US has the highest rate of incarceration globally, with about 21% of prisoners in 2015 despite having only 4.4% of world population. 639 per 100k is a pretty high rate. The 2nd ranked OECD country for incarceration rate, Turkey, has 335 per 100k.
Despite the high incarceration rate, the US is ranked third in the OECD for homicide, fourth in rape, eighth in robbery, sixteenth in assault, thirteenth in burglary and tenth in vehicle theft in the OECD. The US generally also jails people longer than most other countries; the ratio of people in prison to people who get convicted per year is much higher than in other countries, and those weren't the first "tough-on-crime" laws by any means.
And so for the highest imprisonment rate in the world, amongst the OECD the United States is still amongst the top half of the 32 OECD countries for every category of violent crime. It's not like these are short-term effects either, we've been jailing people under three-strikes for a generation going on two. It's pretty clear evidence that a high rate of imprisonment is not actually reducing crime.
It is closer to old testament style punishment in a country that pretends to be largely christian. Do they even know about that Jesus guy and the books written about him (new testament)?
The amount of corruption, sheriffs getting to pocket the money for prison food, judges getting kickbacks for convictions, guaranteed prison quotas, exceptions from slavery laws, etc. don't help either.
It's way past Old Testament, and closer to the scary stories Israelites were told about what their neighboring nations are doing. Laws given/described in Old Testament were harsh, but there was a sense of proportionality in them.
Take care not to romanticize the Old Testament or its laws. Plenty of genocide and wives-of-jealous-husbands-must-drink-dusty-water misogyny in there.
IME the excuses made for it and cherry picking from it have only reinforced bad habits. Stuff like appeal to authority, survivorship bias, and trusting intuition over data.
But if he tried to pull the same tricks today, thanks to omnipresent CCTV he would be caught much faster.
On the other hand, if he did the cash drops with Bitcoin instead, it would be much harder to catch him -- but there wouldn't be any Gyro Gearloose devices, so we'd never heard about it either.
Surveillance cameras, especially overlooking public spaces, aren’t that common in Germany. Probably more common than they were thirty years ago but also not a constant presence.
Any kind of private person or company cannot install cameras looking into public spaces at all (and yes, that includes Ring doorbells that can see the street or even just part of the sidewalk). While many of those illegal uses might fly under the radar the general ban of those uses also means that they are relatively rare and not something just anyone would do.
Public institutions can install cameras seeing public spaces but they are limited by law (there needs to be a valid obvious reason for the camera to be there and the use needs to be proportionate), so blanket complete coverage of public spaces is just not happening (yeah, public institutions can probably find a bullshit excuse for any place but the culture these laws create mean that cameras are just used a lot less). Cameras in general are where you would expect them to be (e.g. around high profile government buildings), not in some random street somewhere.
> On the other hand, if he did the cash drops with Bitcoin instead, ...
Actually, the most recent episode of "Aktenzeichen XY ... ungelöst"[0] (a German TV show that is basically the same as "Crimewatch" or "America's Most Wanted", but predating both of them) mentioned such a case [1].
Some guy in Berlin sent bombs via mail back in 2017/2018 and demanded a ransom paid in Bitcoin. They didn't explain the details, but apparently police did trace a transaction to that wallet back to some Bitcoin vending machine and got a nice picture from there.
> This stuff really was straight out of a cartoon:
> ...
> ...motion detector squealed. When the officers opened the box, they found a gaping hole...
That line immediately had me thinking of the movie "Speed", but funny enough, this story actually pre-dates the movie by roughly 2 years. But it does make me wonder if they had the same source of inspiration.
I was thinking of that exact sequence in Speed as I read the article. I guess instead of a frustrated artist, Dennis Hopper's character was a frustrated ex-cop, so it kind of fits.
> The German translator of the comics made the Disney characters more complex: Dagobert speaks in grandiose language; his nephew Donald Duck often quotes the poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller.
It's a shame they didn't mention the name of the translator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs - her creativity, together with the popularity of the comics has left a lasting impression on the German language. She basically invented a new grammatical form, named "Erikativ" in her honor.
Thank you for mentioning this bit about Erikativ; I was just talking to somebody the other day about (linguistic) morphology so these ideas are fresh in my mind, and German is my best non-English language, so reading all the examples of Erikativ is invigorating and reminds me of how much I used to enjoy consuming written German.
I love reading classic Carl Barks comics in Erika Fuchs's translations, but one should acknowledge that her very liberal variations did not always improve on the original text, but also resulted in some unnecessary obsfuscation. Still, her writing and editorial work made comics culturally acceptable in post-Nazi Germany and she really had an extreme impact on popular culture.
Translations straying from the source material to make it more popular with German speaking audiences were very popular in dubbed movies and TV shows, too. I was kind of dismayed to learn that Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill aren't all that funny in the original Italian. This might be kind of interesting to non-German readers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_humour#Humorous_dubbing
Translating humor often requires a license with the source material that isn’t present in adventure or technical translations - a perfect example would be Asterix and Obelix, where so many of the names are puns that have to be translated- do you preserve the literal meaning and lose the joke or do you preserve the joke and lose the literal meaning?
Sure, but Fuchs sometimes went to far. Nothing in the original should have triggered her to make Donald and Daisy cousins, who were dating after all. Relocating Duckburg, California, to Entenhausen, somewhere in Germany, also made things pretty awkward. I remember a picture of a map showing some kind of grand tour around towns spread over the entire continental USA. In Fuch's translation this turned into a few villages around some local hill in her neighborhood... You need to change quite a lot to cover up such a decision, but it will never be very convincing. :)
Those are notable issues (though if you take Barks as canon Duckburg is intentionally in Calisota - basically Northern California but fictionalized; and it could make sense to try to 'localize that' for an audience elsewhere; especially when they're just "comics" - Don Rosa's detailed Life and Times would likely garner more respect) - but also note that if you step outside the Barks canon the stories get varied and wild, and are inconsistent amongst themselves. It's one of the surprising things about Don Rosa's work - not that he wrote it but that he COULD write it; Barks was internally consistent without apparently trying.
Lots of these things are caused by the Disney "rules" at the time - no human characters for example (everyone "human" is technically a dog), and there may have been additional rules about "real places" - though enough adventures involved GOING to real cities and locations.
Depending on which story you started with I could easily see the misunderstanding - the "three nephews" refer to Donald as "Uncle Donald" and to Daisy as "Aunt Daisy" at times - but if Donald and Daisy aren't married the way to make that work is to make them cousins. And then you get a second story to translate where it's clear they're dating, and you are now kind of stuck.
I had the pleasure of meeting him during a a rare inside seminar of the Berliner Unterwelten, where he did a tour of the train track used by his one rail battery car gadget for one of the failed attempts and had a beer with him afterward.
He told lots of stories from his exploits which were truly brilliant and funny among others, a remote operated submarine and fake tunnel systems. Also from prison and even some of the social hacking he did in the upper circles inbetween (he was super famous and gave interviews to tabloids at day while still spending time in prison at night).
Turns out he‘s a really nice and humble true nerd with a bad childhood and background.
He‘s a cartoonist now, but eschews the limelight these days and his brain is pretty damaged from paint fumes when he worked as a car painter.
> The state police eventually offered a hundred-thousand-mark reward for information that led to his capture. Astrologers and fortune tellers chimed in, and bored citizens called the phone lines with thousands of tips.
Note to self: next time I’m on the run, post a bunch of fake reward notices so that the investigators get overwhelmed with noise.
"In fact, Funke did build a remote-controlled submarine that could whisk money packages away underwater, to scramble the signals from tracking devices, but he did not end up using it."
> In Germany, Donald Duck comics are extremely popular, outselling even superheroes like Superman.
I remember being shocked a few years ago when I learned that the hero of my childhood, and in my opinion one of the greatest comic book artist of all time (only surpassed by the master himself, Carl Barks, of course), is virtually unknown in the US: Don Rosa [0]. I read an interview once where he confessed that his neighbor doesn't know what he does.
The death of Carl Barks also went largely unnoticed in the US, I think. In Germany, it was prime time national news.
I recently bought the complete Don Rosa Library.[1] This is published in the US and it is really well done, with background information on all the works by Don Rosa himself. This is a good sign as it means that Don Rosa's works are not entirely neglected in the US. But of course (and unfortunately) this doesn't compete in popularity with many inferior comics.
That is somehow the most German thing I've read in a while. It's also really droll to see all these very typically German personalities given the high-middlebrow US magazine nonfiction "a thirty-two-year-old psychologist with blond hair and a steely demeanor" treatment.
I always wonder about relationship dynamics in which a spouse can be completely unaware that their significant other is a wanted criminal actively committing crimes.
Although, I guess by the time they were married, he wasn't actually making any money from his schemes.
Im honestly surprised that there aren't unemployed mech/elec/chem engineers out of a job, making and setting off bombs and demanding to be paid in cryptocurrency.
We're already seeing a digital version of this terrorism with cryptolocking ransomware... And it's always been the most dangerous part of criminality is getting paid. cryptocurrency solves a lot of that problem.
There are latin Disney comics, just like Asterix. Probably more done for general educational purposes than for the Vatican market, but hey, you got to pin the name somewhere (and IIRC, for modern words in Latin the Vatican is often the official source)
Incidentally, the article seems somewhat wrong in attributing the comics that inspired "Dagobert" to the US and Carl Barks. A lot, if not most of these, were Italian originals that got translated into German (pretty well, which at least the article gets right). One could even nitpick the "outselling superheroes", because Phantomias, Donald Duck's alter ego is a thing.
Carl Barks absolutely invented, defined, and developed the character of Scrooge / Dagobert. For decades the _good_ Dagobert stories appearing in "Micky Maus" and the other periodicals on the German market were exclusively from his pen. Later, Don Rosa stepped into his footsteps and at some point in the 1980s or 1990s this second _good_ artist started to appear. He just wasn't ever as productive as Barks, who has left us 6000+ pages of awesome duck stories.
Of course Bark's work seeded a secondary tradition of Italian artists with stories set in some alternative universe Duckburg. They are popular in Germany as well, but generally of lesser importance and historical value.
Not disagreeing, but there are a few other really good (if not great) Duck (and Mouse!) artists in Italy, South America, and other places, including Fabio Celoni, Corrado Mastantuono, and Casty.
"Inside was a note ordering them to stuff two freezer bags with money and deposit them in a grit box—a kind of bin filled with sand for de-icing roads—in Britz, a section of Berlin...At 11:07 P.M., though no one had come to the box, the motion detector squealed. When the officers opened the box, they found a gaping hole that fell deep into the sewers below. Funke had built an exact replica of a city grit box and placed it over a manhole cover, then opened the cover to retrieve the package."
Reading the article, I can't help thinking what a different era it's from. The guy extorted money from department stores with bombs for years, engaged in all kinds of Pink Panther shenanigans, and when he was finally caught he got 9 years, a work release, and the career in cartooning he'd always wanted. Nowadays in the US he'd probably be shot dead within a month, or barring that end up locked away for life. There's very little sense of proportionality left in the justice system these days for those who wrong the rich.