Schumacher, Falling Down, and Coronavirus

Was the Novel Coronavirus forecast long before it appeared?

Joel T. Schumacher (born August 29, 1939) was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer who was active from the 1970s to the 2010s, and died June 22, 2020, at age 80, from cancer.

Schumacher: German and Jewish (Ashkenazic): occupational name for a shoemaker, from Middle High German schuoch "shoe"; German Schuh + an agent derivative of machen "to make." Similar surnames: Schacher, Schleicher, Schuhmacher, Schirmacher, Schomaker, Schlachter.

Schumacher directs The Lost Boys.

Of the many films with which Schumacher was involved, he got high praise especially for St. Elmo's Fire (1985), The Lost Boys (1987), and Falling Down (1993). 

Schumacher is shown on the set of the 2004 musical drama The Phantom of the Opera. Was it his Eyes Wide Shut?

Schumacher's clear and overt dance with "twilight language" came in The Number 23 (2007).

***

 

But it is in Falling Down, filmed in 1992, throughout the Los Angeles area, where we scratch our heads.

"Corona" signs are shown going every which way.

Even the toilet paper is given a prominent cameo.

Cleaning liquids and toilet paper in Falling Down.

Joel Schumacher, here wearing different Hawaiian shirts, is directing Michael Douglas in Falling Down. (See more on Aloha or Hawaiian shirts, here.)

 

***

Falling Down was released on February 26, 1993. 

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, carried out on February 26, 1993, when a truck bomb detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 1,336 lb (606 kg) urea nitrate–hydrogen gas enhanced device was intended to send the North Tower (Tower 1) crashing into the South Tower (Tower 2), bringing both towers down and killing thousands of people. It failed to do so, but killed six people and injured over one thousand.

The goal of the WTC attack, once again, was to have both the towers "fall down."

The date is also the second anniversary of the Americans defeating the Iraqi forces and driving them from Kuwait on February 26, 1991.

***

"Predictive Programming from the movie Falling Down. Corona going in every direction, toilet paper, all of it. Movie released on 2/26/93, date of first WTC bombing. Towers literally fell down 3119 days later (444th prime). 222 months from 9/11/01 to Pandemic date of 3/11/20." ~ Credit Prophecy_106 on Twitter, April 7, 2020.

"Coronavirus & Mamba death same year. Kobe buried in Corona Del Mar." ~ The Tale of Onora, May 14, 2020.

See the Hamm's bear in the right side of this photo from Falling Down? Robert DesJarlait, an artist and writer, is from the Red Lake Ojibwe Nation in northern Minnesota. He created the Hamm’s Beer bear. He also drew the Land O'Lakes Native American maiden, "Mia."

***

The director was interviewed about Falling Down for MIT's The Tech. Arts Editor Chris Roberge wrote, in part, on February 9, 1993:

Schumacher has very strong feelings about the mood of America today and how this mood attracted him to the project. "I felt that there was a critical mass building in culture of anger and rage. In the last 12 years it was swept under the carpet while all of the problems kept getting worse and worse. Unlike in the 60s when most creative people were expressing their feelings, outside of African-American filmmakers and rappers and street art, I didn't see much going on. I wanted to be in people's faces about what was going on. In some ways I think that it's worse now than when we started making the film," he said.

"Local news seems to be filled with these types of crimes. This sort of crime is on the rise in the country. Just last week there were two in D.C. and one in Memphis. I tried to put a face and a soul to these six o'clock news stories. This is the guy whose neighbors you see saying, `I don't understand. He was very nice.' " However, the two people who knew Michael Douglas' character the best -- his mother and his ex-wife -- say something quite different. Both of them thought that he was a somewhat frightening man with a propensity towards violence even before he begins his tragic trek across Los Angeles. Still, Schumacher insists, "I thought that he has an Everyman quality. I didn't want him to be a lunatic."

Talking about his goals for the tone and mood of the film, Schumacher says, "First and foremost, I have to make some sort of entertainment. I don't like movies that are soapboxes. I felt that the movie was a good story with a western type formula." But isn't it dangerous to make the film too entertaining, inviting the audience to strongly identify with an obvious sociopath? "I feel that he acts out a fantasy behavior. I think that audiences will be hard pressed not to identify with him. I think that people are conflicted. That's the purpose of the film. I think that it would be nice to do this, but we can't. We should be more like the Robert Duvall character."

As a final note, I asked Schumacher what criticisms he intended specifically for America, which he singles out often in the movie through shots of U.S. flags and characters who run army surplus stores, are Marine Corp veterans, or are defense workers. At first he replied that this was nothing more than a minor theme he introduced into the background, but then he added, "I think we are a violent culture and there's a thin line between what's considered acceptable violence and what's considered unacceptable violence. The Rodney King incident certainly shows all of that. I suppose that when you put on a uniform it's alright." This is a very interesting point, but one that is never dealt with to any large degree in the film. There is a substantial line between what's considered acceptable violence and what Douglas does in this movie. There is an equally great distinction between Falling Down and what should be considered a truly good movie.

***

On February 10, 2015, at 5:15 p.m., Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha were killed in their home in Finley Forest Condominiums on Summerwalk Circle in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States.

The victims.

Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, a former car parts salesman, allegedly shot dead the three Muslim university students at point blank range, in their heads, before turning himself into police. Hicks had moved to Chapel Hill in 2005 from Bethalto, Illinois. His motive, allegedly, was not because he is anti-Muslim, but because he was angry because of an ongoing parking space dispute. However, additional information from his first wife notes that Hicks was obsessed with watching "incessantly" the 1993 film Falling Down starring Michael Douglas, about a divorced engineer ("I helped build missiles. I helped protect this country. You should be rewarded for that. But instead they give it to the plastic surgeons.") who loses his job and embarks on a shooting rampage across Los Angeles.

April 19th Again: Nova Scotia's Mass Shooting

The high school photograph of Nova Scotia's mass shooter.

Is this another "incel" incident?

For several years I have written of this time of year as a "red zone of danger." I even mentioned the temporal syndrome associated with late April's infamous events in The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines.

During the morning of April 19, 2020, I tweeted a message about recalling today as a date with multiple anniversaries of note: the original Patriots Day of the Revolutionary War due to the battles at Concord and Lexington. The events of Waco and the Oklahoma City Bombing on this date.

I posted images of the Boym Design's two "Buildings of Disaster" for Waco and OKC's Murrah Building.

I have pointed to my extensive listing of violence and deaths tied to this last half of several Aprils in past blog postings, including "The Most Dangerous Time of Year," from 2018, and "The Red Zone of April: A Dangerous Time."

In that piece, I review these events for

April 19:

1775 – Battles of Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, the first battles of the American Revolutionary War. This is the actual anniversary of the battles, even though the observance has become a date tied to the third Monday in April.
1897 – First running of the Boston Marathon, with marathons named after the Greek Battle of Marathon.
1993 – The 51-day FBI siege of the Branch Davidian building outside Waco, Texas, USA, ends when a fire breaks out. Eighty-one people die.
1993 – South Dakota governor George Mickelson and seven others are killed when a state-owned aircraft crashes in Iowa.
1995 – Oklahoma City bombing: The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, USA, is bombed, killing 168.
1995 – Richard Wayne Snell, a convicted murderer, member of the white supremacist group The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), is executed in Arkansas. Snell was involved in filming the planes that landed at the restricted airport in Mena, Arkansas, believed by many conspiracy theorists to be used in a CIA-sanctioned cover-up to smuggle drugs into America. Snell had been accused of plotting to bomb the Murrah Building in the 1980s. Snell reportedly watched televised reports of the Oklahoma City bombing on the day of his execution and nodded in approval.
2013 – Boston Marathon bombings suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev is killed in a shootout with police. His brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is captured while hiding in a boat inside a backyard in Watertown, Massachusetts.


April 20:

1889 – Adolf Hitler, Austrian-German soldier and politician, Chancellor of Germany (d. 1945) is born
1939 – Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday is celebrated as a national holiday in Nazi Germany.
1945 – World War II: Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler makes his last trip to the surface to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth.
1961 – Failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of US-backed Cuban exiles against Cuba.
1971 – According to Steven Hager, editor of High Times, he found the term 420 originated at San Rafael High School in 1971, among the Waldos. They would meet every day after school at 4:20 p.m. to smoke marijuana at the Louis Pasteur statue. One of the Waldos notes, "We did discover we could talk about getting high in front of our parents without them knowing by using the phrase 420." By extension now, April 20 ("4/20" in U.S. dating shorthand) has evolved into a counterculture holiday, where people gather to celebrate and consume cannabis.
1978 – Korean Air Lines Flight 902 is shot down by the Soviet Union.
1999 – Columbine High School massacre: Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, killed 13 people and injured 21 others before dying by suicide at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado.
2007 – Johnson Space Center shooting: William Phillips with a handgun barricades himself in NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas before killing a male hostage and himself.
2015 – A substitute teacher was killed at the Joan Fuster School in the La Sager neighborhood of Barcelona, Spain, by a 13-year-old student with a crossbow and machete. Four other people were injured.


Now on April 19, 2020

Therefore, today, Sunday, April 19, 2020, we should not be surprised to learn that a mass shooting has occurred.

From Saturday through Sunday, for 12 hours, a gunman drove across the northern part of the province of Nova Scotia shooting people dead. Canadian police, as of Sunday night, said at least 16 people were dead, plus the gunman too. On Monday morning, during the COVID19 government news conference, the prime minister said a total of 19 people had died.

One of the dead was a police officer and another was injured. The dead officer has been identified as Heidi Stevenson, a mother of two and a 23-year-old veteran of the force.

The victims identified so far, besides RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson, a 23-year member of the national police force, and a mother of two, are Debert Elementary school teacher Lisa McCully; care assistant Kristen Beaton; and Heather O’Brien, a nurse from Truro. Additionally, two correctional officers and two neighbors of the gunman, were all killed in their homes.

Altogether, including the shooter, twenty-three (23) people died in the shooting.

The gunman was named as 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman, who died after shooting people in several locations across the province. He was described as white male, bald, 6'2" - 6'3" with green eyes.

The shooting reportedly began in the small Atlantic coastal town of Portapique, about 130km north (80 miles) of Halifax, the provincial capital. It ended Sunday, April 19, at a gas station in Enfield. Online records show Wortman ran a denture clinic in the city of Dartmouth, across the water from Halifax.

One local resident said she had come across two burning police vehicles while out driving on Sunday morning. One man said he saw at least three separate fires.

“There was one officer we could see on scene and then all of a sudden, he went running toward one of the burning vehicles,” Darcy Sack told the CBC.

“We heard gunshots,” she said, adding that one police officer looked to have been injured.Authorities said Wortman was driving what appeared to be a police car and was wearing a uniform but later reported he was at the wheel of a Chevrolet sports utility vehicle that had been modified to resemble a white RCMP vehicle – “one that he has basically made himself,” said Brian Sauvé, president of the National Police Federation. Police have said the suspect was not an employee or officer with the RCMP.

There was on difference between Wortman's car and the official RCMP vehicles: the car #. The suspect's car is 28B11, behind rear passenger window.

“In excess of 10 people have been killed,” RCMP Chief Superintendent Chris Leather said, before later revising the total to “at least 13.” “We believe it to be one person who is responsible for all the killings and that he alone moved across the northern part of the province and committed what appears to be several homicides.”

Please note, in high school, Wortman said his "future may include being an RCMP officer."

Name game: "Wortman" = a grower or seller of vegetables or of medicinal herbs and spices.

+++

RCMP's fallen Heidi Stevenson is to be remembered on Friday, April 24, 2020.

April 20, 2020

What will Monday, April 20th begat?

In 2015, Mother Jones mentioned the high number of "copycats" associated with Columbine. In The Copycat Effect, I tracked over 400 in the month after the April 20, 1999 Columbine shooting.

The cult of Hitler's birthday and Columbine travel forth into the future.

Pandemic Mass Shooting: Russia

Anton Franchikov, 31, pictured with his wife who is a doctor, shot dead five people in a village in Ryazan, about 120 miles southeast of Moscow.

On Thursday, April 4, 2020, at Yelatma, Ryazan Oblast, Russia, Anton Franchikov shot dead 5 people.

A Russian medic opened fire on his balcony after neighbors made "too much noise" under coronavirus isolation, police say. Anton Franchikov, 31, killed five people after tensions rose between himself and residents of his apartment block during the second week of lockdown. He shot three people on the street outside his home in Yelatma, a settlement in Ryazan region with population of 3,100, before running downstairs to shoot two others as they sought to hide in their apartment. He has been detained by police while his wife, a GP [General Physican] based at a local hospital, is also being questioned by the Russian Investigation Committee. Source.

Local administration head Grigory Danilov said,

This was a conflict between neighbors which developed into a shooting. They exchanged words and he ended up picking up a rifle. The second week of quarantine plays badly on people’s psychology. People miss having communication.

Camel-Related Coronavirus Hit Indiana in 2014: Lessons for 2020

A disease that jumped from camels to humans landed in the USA in 2014. The first American case of MERS-CoV was reported in Indiana, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Friday, May 2, 2014.

But where in Indiana? In what town did this new illness appear?

Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), also known as camel flu, is a viral respiratory infection caused by the MERS-coronavirus (MERS-CoV).
The initial original source, bats, is one familiar to students of COVID-19. But camels might be a surprise.

MERS-CoV is a betacoronavirus derived from bats. Camels have been shown to have antibodies to MERS-CoV but the exact source of infection in camels has not been identified. Camels are believed to be involved in its spread to humans but it is unclear how. Spread between humans typically requires close contact with an infected person.
As of 2020 there is no specific vaccine or treatment for the disease; a number of antiviral medications were being studied. The World Health Organization recommends that those who come in contact with camels wash their hands frequently and do not touch sick camels and that camel-based food products be appropriately cooked. Treatments that help with the symptoms may be given to those infected.
About 36% of those who are diagnosed with the disease die from it. Source.

A strain of MERS-CoV known as HCoV-EMC/2012 found in the first infected person in London in 2012 was found to have a 100% match to Egyptian tomb bats. A large outbreak occurred in South Korea in 2015. In January 2016, a larger outbreak of MERS among camels in Kenya was reported. As of February 5, 2016 more than 500 camels were said to have died of the disease. On February 12, 2016, the disease was reported to be MERS. As of February 12, 2016, there were no known human cases. Antibodies though were found in healthy humans in Kenya according to one study.

Further 2020 Update on American cases:

The Indiana patient traveled from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to London on April 24, [2014] and then to Chicago by air. He took a bus to the Highland, Ind. area and went to Community Hospital in Munster, Ind. after falling ill. He was kept in isolation until he recovered. Source.

A second patient who also traveled from Saudi Arabia was reported in Orlando, Florida on 12 May 2014. Source.

No one has died of MERS-CoV in the United States.

MERS-CoV, short for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, is a type of coronavirus.

Since the first documented cases in spring 2012, MERS sickened at least 339 people in Saudi Arabia alone and killed nearly a third of them, according to the country's Ministry of Health. 

Mers was the health scare to make headlines in 2014, as modern international travel increased the speed in which viral diseases can spread across vast distances.

A Malaysian man from Johor who developed respiratory complications after returning from Mecca died on April 13, 2014, became the first person from Asia to die from the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers) coronavirus.

As of April 16, 2014, the World Health Organisation has recorded 238 cases of the disease and 92 deaths globally.

On April 26, 2014, the Ministry of Health of Egypt reported the first laboratory-confirmed case of infection with Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in the country.

The patient was a 27-year-old man who has been living in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for the past four years. The patient had contact with a previously laboratory-confirmed case (his uncle) who died on April 19, and another laboratory-confirmed case (neighbor of his uncle) who is still under treatment in a hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The patient became ill on April 22, returned to Egypt on April 25 and was laboratory-confirmed with MERS-CoV on April 26.

This "Indiana" patient flew to Chicago from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, via London, then took a bus to northwest Indiana. He fell ill on April 27 and was hospitalized the next day. The patient is currently in a stable condition.

On April 29th, new research pinpointed the source of the respiratory-virus outbreak that has killed more than 100 people: Arabian camels. New evidence showed that camels were likely the source of the outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, a viral respiratory illness that led to the deaths of more than 100 people, according to a study published in the journal mBio and the latest Bloomberg news report.

The current range (above) of the dromedary, also called the Arabian camel or the Indian camel (Camelus dromedarius) - pictured directly below and at top.

+++++

The range (above) of Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus) - pictured directly below.

Researchers at the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, King Saud University, and EcoHealth Alliance extracted a live, infectious sample of MERS coronavirus (MERS-CoV) from two camels in Saudi Arabia. They found that this sample matched the virus found in humans on a genetic level.

As the New York Times has pointed, 

The virus is thought to have originated in bats, but it is also widespread in camels. While it has not spread easily between humans, there have been outbreaks within families and in hospitals, where patients have infected paramedics, nurses and doctors.
...
Travelers to the Middle East have been warned to stay away from farm animals, and camels in particular. Camels are raised for meat and milk, for racing, and to haul goods. So-called beauty camels are kept as pets and entered in beauty contests.
Experts suspect that raw camel milk and meat transmit the virus.

As of May 1, 2014, the Mers-CoV has killed 107 people in Saudi Arabia and is a cousin of the Sars virus that erupted in Asia in 2003. Two new cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (Mers-CoV) have been detected in Jordan, the health ministry has said . One was a Saudi man and the other a Jordanian doctor who was treating him.The state news agency, Petra, said this brought to seven the total number of people who were diagnosed in Jordan with the severe respiratory disease since 2012.

As of the end of January 2020, 2519 cases have been reported worldwide, with 866 deaths.

Coronaviruses, in general, have been found in the Rhinolophidae, a family of bats commonly known as horseshoe bats. COVID-19 has been linked to horseshoe bats and pangolins. And a wet market in Wuhan, China.

Pangolins, or scaly anteaters, are mammals of the order Pholidota (from Ancient Greek φολῐ́ς, "horny scale"). The one extant family, Manidae, has three genera: Manis, Phataginus and Smutsia. Manis comprises the four species found in Asia, while Phataginus and Smutsia each include two species living in Sub-Saharan Africa.
***
The working theory of researchers in Guangzhou, China, was that SARS-CoV-2 had originated in bats and, prior to infecting humans, was circulating among pangolins. The illicit Chinese trade of pangolins for use in traditional Chinese medicine was suggested as a vector for human transmission. Researchers recently have implicated the pangolins as intermediate hosts in the ongoing coronavirus pandemic as the discovery of multiple lineages of pangolin coronavirus and their similarity to SARS-CoV-2 suggests that pangolins should be considered as possible hosts in the emergence of novel coronaviruses. However, further study was less conclusive on pangolins as the definitive source of (SARS-CoV-2), namely being the bridge that the virus used to jump from bats to humans, after it emerged that the 99% match did not actually refer to the entire genome, but to a specific site known as the receptor-binding domain (RBD). A whole-genome comparison found that the pangolin and human viruses share only 90.3% of their RNA. Ecologists worried that the early speculation about pangolins being the source may have led to mass slaughters, endangering the animals further, which was similar to what happened to civets during the SARS outbreak. Source.

The Chinese government, after the COVID-19 outbreak in late 2019 and early 2020, initially closed down the wet markets, where live animals were sold for food and slaughtered in front of waiting customers.

By April 2020, the wet markets of Wuhan were open again.

A lesson learned is often not one recalled.

The danger awaits us all in the second wave of infections.