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This is part 2 of a two part series of The Day's Dumpster Fire's Iran Contra Affair. If you are just joining us, it is highly recommended that you listen to part 1 which can be found HERE. Part 1 will give some background as to why Iran and Nicaragua were such hot topics back in the 70s and 80s as well as the predicament the newly elected president, Ronald Reagan, was in at the time:

• On one hand, the Cold War was still very much a thing in the 70s and 80s and America was still worried about communism spreading like a contagion into America's hemisphere and ultimately corrupted hundreds of millions of democracy leaning people. The communists saw an opportunity to spread into Nicaragua, which was too close for America's comfort. The only solution to the problem was to support a group of militants known as the Contras. The only issue is that congress passed an amendment that absolutely forbade the White House from helping the Contras because it could start another Vietnam War. To get a sense of how much of a hot mess that war was for America, check out episodes 41 and 42 HERE.
• On the other hand, Iran was backing a terrorist organization called Hezbollah who were taking hostages, many of them American. During Reagans campaign, he criticized Jimmy Carter's handling of the hostage situation and vowed that he would NEVER negotiate with terrorists.

In today's episode, Ed is going to expand on how Reagan and some of his closest advisors put together a plan that could not only free the hostages held by Hezbollah but also get some badly needed support going for the Contras in Nicaragua.

Ed is going to cover the following ideas of this crazy dumpster fire:

• Who were Robert MacFarlane, Oliver North, and John Poindexter. What were their backgrounds, and how did they get involved with Reagan's plan to free the hostages. What was the strategy, how well did it work, and how did it fly out of control.
• Then we're going to look at Marine Eugene Hasenfus who survived a plane crash in Nicaragua and simultaneously blowing the lid clean off the Iran-Contra cover-up. Hasenfus's plane got shot down like any other plane of the time period, but what was so different about it was that it was full of AK-47 bullets, AK-47 spare parts, and a bunch of other stuff that served no purpose other than to support the Contras, especially since the plane was flying towards a Contra held hold out. Needless to say, the media, including Nicaragua, had a lot of questions to ask.
• Lastly, even with the cover-up no longer covering anything up, how did Reagan walk away from the entire ordeal for the most part unscathed? How did he weather the storm of political turmoil with what seemed like ease and grace. He did such a good job handling the issue, instead of being impeached, he won the next election!

This episode flies off the rails at the very beginning and it's a fascinating view of presidential powers, checks and balances, and just exactly can the president get away with. And what happens to those who are not necessarily shielded by the president's aura of protection. Be sure to get comfortable with this one! It's going to make you feel good that you never got caught selling anti-tank missiles to an Iranian arms dealer so that you can negotiate with terrorists and make some extra cash to give to some anti-communist movement in Central America that you're forbidden to do.

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If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!

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Our President, Donald Trump has joined a long list of presidents in the 20th and 21st centuries who have embroiled America in the Middle East in yet another conflict. We here at The Day's Dumpster Fire don't like to take sides in terms of political parties, the Middle East has proven itself to do the exact same thing. It doesn't matter which president is in office, democrat or republican, the Middle East and America have been involved with one another for decades for one reason or another with no end in sight.

Kara and Ed would often get questions from their students as to why the Middle East is such a confusing conflict and all they could say is that "Well, it's complicated." And you know what, nothing has changed all that much year after year other than things continue to get more and more confusing, complicated, and worse yet for America, polarizing. The best way we can describe the situation over there is that the Middle East is a combination of multiple different jigsaw puzzles that need to be assembled but with no pictures on the boxes as a frame of reference...

... Oh, and all the pieces are in a dumpster that just so happens to be on fire...

In today's episode, Ed doesn't tackle any of the laundry list of issues in the Middle East dating back to the time after WWII. Instead, Ed has put together a few of the puzzle pieces that involve a part of the puzzle contributing to some of the issues today.

Today's episode is about The Iran Contra Affair or Scandal. In Part 1 Ed is giving us some background on:

• A brief overview of what the Iran Contra Affair was about and what sort of questions the whole kerfuffle brought about in American politics.
• What role did communism and the Cold War served in shaping American foreign affairs.
• What in the world was going on in Nicaragua and who the Contras were and what they stood for.
• What was going on with Iran and Iraq going to war in the 1980s and how the Soviet Union was playing a part.
• A quick overview of Hezbollah and the hostages they were taking with the backing of Iran.
• And lastly, what was President Ronald Reagan doing to handle Nicaragua (which his hands were tied to do anything because of congress not wanting another Vietnam War) and Iran (in which his hands were tied due to a campaign promise of never negotiating with terrorists

Be sure to tune into Part 2 when it comes out because it's going to conclude the whole ordeal and exactly how the Reagan administration got themselves in one of the wildest scandals in American history aside from Watergate.

Kara and Ed have put together some other episodes that correlate to this episode and the next one that you will find interesting:

The Vietnam War- great two-parter where Kara really explores America's involvement in Vietnam, the spread of communism after WWII, and the fears America had of "catching communism" as though it was a disease.

Support the show

Hey before you go!

If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!

You can also send them a text message by clicking on the link at the top.

Be sure to head on over to www.thedaysdumpsterfire.com for the ever growing library of historical dumpster fires.

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Today's episode addresses a scenario that you have probably seen a few times or been a part of: you get invited to a party that you've always wanted to go to. You're beyond excited and you can't wait to dress up and have the time of your life. However, for one reason or another, you are unable to attend the party or worse yet, you're uninvited and you don't know why. Naturally, of course you're heartbroken. During the night while everyone in the world except you have been invited to this wicked party, you're at home, adrift in your sea of resentment.

That resentment can last days if not weeks and it feels like it's unshakable. Like why Karma punished you like this... until someone comes up to you who was at the party and starts the conversation with, "Hey did you hear what happened at the party last night?" When you get all the "deets" to find out that the party was a huge, colossal failure, replete with people being burned to death and what not, you're suddenly thanking Karma for blessing you by making you miss the party.

Today's episode features the valiant return of Kara, back from a fresh stint of vacation and she put out a banger of an episode for you. Imagine you're job in the 1300s was to put together a party for the king of France who is already a mass of mental health issues and is so bad, he is considered insane for the day. Access to mental health back then consisted of large volumes of alcohol and someone from the church telling you to suck it up and deal with it...

Since your job is to make this party an event fit for a king and something no one could forget, you decide to pull all the stops and go big or go home. Your idea is to make a bunch of men (king included) get sewn into these outfits, made of flammable material, covered in a flammable tree resin, then smothered in flammable fibers so that the bunch of men (king included) look like harry wild men running around the ballroom.

Mind you this is the 1300s, torches and candles were the only forms of light... What could possibly go wrong?

So be grateful as you listen to this episode 1. You or your ancestors never got invited to this event and 2. You or your ancestors were never put in charge of making the party "memorable."

Sometimes, it's good to not be the most popular or the most reliable!

If you like this episode, check out The Day's Dumpster Fire for the ever-growing library of history going horribly awry for humanity.

Be sure to check out these episodes that are similarly themed:

Henry's Wive's Demise Fire - Episode 19

Firing Fireworks Fire - Episode 26

Botched Funerals - Episode 58

Support the show

Hey before you go!

If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!

You can also send them a text message by clicking on the link at the top.

Be sure to head on over to www.thedaysdumpsterfire.com for the ever growing library of historical dumpster fires.

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Ed's by himself today so he's got the entire episode for himself to do as he pleases. Kara is on vacation and that means Ed can do whatever type of episode he wants so what could possibly go wrong?

As a result of Kara being vacation, Ed decided to do and episode themed off nothing else done before in The Day's Dumpster Fire history. and episode dedicated to one of the worst train accidents in American history.

What was supposed to be a normal July 9, 1918, early morning train ride for folks coming in from Memphis TN to Nashville and folks coming out of Nashville TN heading to Memphis, two trains collided just a little way outside of Nashville on a blind turn called "Dutchman's Curve." This collision marked the worst train collision in US history and took the lives of over 101 men, women, and children. Furthermore, about 80% of the people who died that day were African Americans who were trying to head to a munitions factory for work.

In this episode, Ed will nerd out on some cool facts about how steam engines work and why they dominated the mass transit system of the 1800s and early 1900s. He will also dig into the litany of safety issues that resulted in the disfigurement of many railroad workers if they didn't end up dying doing their jobs. Next Ed will describe the geography of where the collision took place as well as the two trains involved. He'll explain how the accident took place, who or what was at fault and what Ed thinks is the real culprit behind this terrible accident.

It's not what you think! So, you better sit down and listen. You might just learn some math along the way.

Of course, if you disagree with Ed's theories or want to add your own be sure to email Kara and Ed at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com come.

Check out the website and send a text if you want. This is not your typical dumpster fire, and it invites the community to chip in their theories.

If you're interested in this episode, check out these!

The Transatlantic Telegraph

The Hindenburg

Support the show

Hey before you go!

If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!

You can also send them a text message by clicking on the link at the top.

Be sure to head on over to www.thedaysdumpsterfire.com for the ever growing library of historical dumpster fires.

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We here at the Day's Dumpster Fire felt that The Bat Bomb of WWII Fire Part 1 episode was so iconic and a breath of fresh air given the stresses of modern day living, Ed and Kara hammered through the recording and editing of Part 2 early so that you wouldn't have to wait tow weeks for the conclusion. Even though it would be worth the wait, Part 2 of The Bat Bomb of WWII should be released sooner than later!

In this episode, Ed and Kara discuss the establishing, engineering, testing, and subsequent conclusions of Dr. Lytle Adams' brain child, the bat bomb or better known in the top secret circles: Project X-Ray.

If the Manhattan Project consisted of elite top tier scientists and engineers headed up by one of the greatest minds of 20th century, Project X-ray was the exact opposite. Comprised of a team of only two scientists, a hotel manager, a body builder, a pilot turned movie star, two random brothers with nothing else to do in the 1940s, a lobster fisherman, and two high school students, the idea of a bat bomb burning down cities in Japan would have been better reflected in a television comedy series.

Ed will show how Project X-Ray was put together, how the bats were selected, how little napalm bombs were attached to them, how they were stuffed into a glorified toilet paper tube after being flash frozen and then dropped out of a B-25 bomber outside Los Angeles and the conclusion that were derived from such a test.

Furthermore, Ed will look at how those conclusions were put together to make a second bomb but with actual destructive capabilities!

World War II was a scary, intense, and involved time in American history, but it was also a time where any idea could be entertained. Some ideas were hugely successful and changed the trajectory of human history, and others... well... simply went up in smoke. Not to spoil anything, but we'll let you decided where Dr. Adams' bat bomb sat in terms of historical influence.

Support the show

Hey before you go!

If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!

You can also send them a text message by clicking on the link at the top.

Be sure to head on over to www.thedaysdumpsterfire.com for the ever growing library of historical dumpster fires.

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In today's episode, Ed decided to go down a different kind of dumpster fire. Instead of a large volume of people being killed or injured or thousands of people losing their retirements due to sketchy accounting practices. The Bat Bomb of WWII is a testament to the creativity of the human mind in times of extreme need and how not all ideas are going to be good.

While vacationing in Carlsbad, New Mexico to watch bats, dentist / eccentric inventor, Dr. Lytle S. Adams, heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 that sent America into World War II. The first half of 1942 didn't go well for America when fighting the Japanese Empire for a multitude of reasons, but Dr. Adams thought of using bats to wreak havoc on the Japanese Empire's homeland of... well... Japan...

In this episode, you're going to be regaled with founding, setup, testing, and conclusions from one of the most "bat brained" ideas of WWII. Dr. Adams selected an elite crew of scientists and contributors to put together a bomb that when dropped, would dispense over 1,000 bats all carrying a little incendiary capsule of napalm. The idea was that the bats would disperse over Japan, find dark attics and other nooks and crannies so that the napalm charge would go off and set fire to the building.

The plan was so well thought out and so perfect, that if implemented correctly, it could rival that of another type of weapon being researched in Los Alamos at the same exact time as the Bat Bomb just out side Los Angeles... the nuclear bomb!

This is all assuming that Adams and his team could make this Bat Bomb idea actually work and not burn the entire program to the ground in the process.

Oh wait! This is going to be two parter episode, but you won't have to wait two weeks for Ed to get the episode out containing the thrilling conclusion. If all goes according to plan, part 2 will be out a few days after this episode airs... What could possibly go wrong?

Some other episodes that you might find interesting based on the time period and / or mentioned in the Bat Bomb episode:

Oppie's Demo Core Fire

The Dust Bowl

Prohibition (Episodes 59-62)

The Great Depression (Episodes 65-68)

Be sure to check out the Day's Dumpster Fire website for detailed show notes, images, Kara's drawings, as well as an ever growing library of humanity's most fantastic failures!

Support the show

Hey before you go!

If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!

You can also send them a text message by clicking on the link at the top.

Be sure to head on over to www.thedaysdumpsterfire.com for the ever growing library of historical dumpster fires.

Check us out on the ol Instagrams!
https://www.instagram.com/thedaysdumpsterfire/

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In today's episode, Ed takes us down memory lane to one of the biggest business fraud cases of the 20th century.

Enron was a company that was the product of two major gas businesses that merged together with a vision to change how the world viewed work culture and how to make money with wild result.

For much of much of the 90s, Enron was the future of corporate mentality and high morale among employees with tons of opportunity and even more prospects of striking it rich in the world of negotiating deals between natural gas sellers and buyers. As the years went by, Enron continuously dropped earnings reports that showed nothing but success, year over year growth, and a cash flow that would never end. As a result, Enron got rich, its executives got rich, investors got even richer, banks were happy to lend Enron money, and its employees were excited in what they sold.

There was one catch though...

...No one knew exactly how Enron was making any money! And that was done by design.

As you'll see in this episode, Enron's CEO Ken Lay, and his two conspirators Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow, quickly turned an honest company of limited (but honest and stable) growth to a company on a meteoric trajectory unlike anything else in American history. However, it was done by bending the rules, flagrant fraud, hiding figures, and implicating CPA firms in piles of shredded documents.

All of us have made some financial blunders in our time, but few in humanity have successfully railroaded a billion dollar publicly traded company into the ground quick like Lay, Skilling, and Fastow did. In a few short months in 2001, These three men went from millionaires to Federally convicted felons. We may be stressing over a missed credit car payment, but at least we didn't cost the life savings, retirements, and careers of over 100,000 men and women who were oblivious to all the craziness that was taking place on the 50th floor of Enron's corporate headquarters in Houston, Texas.

For pictures and show notes, check out The Day's Dumpster Fire website

Some other episodes Kara and Ed have put together that follows a similar "corporate greed and fraud" theme where business leaders prioritized money over literally EVERYTHING ELSE:

Therac-25

Boston Molasses Flood

I Love the Smell of Lead

Thalidomide

Outro Music Credit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdNYSTbPuL0&list=PLfP6i5T0-DkKlAN_qDvZ3nJwsdKRmrxI_&index=

Support the show

Hey before you go!

If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!

You can also send them a text message by clicking on the link at the top.

Be sure to head on over to www.thedaysdumpsterfire.com for the ever growing library of historical dumpster fires.

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https://www.instagram.com/thedaysdumpsterfire/

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Ed is back for another "recent" historical dumpster fire in which a chemical that manufactures a chemical necessary for nylon production explodes in the largest non-WWII explosion in British history. They Nypro Flixborough chemical facility was built in the late 60's to be a sleek, state of the art facility that turned an extremely flammable substance called cyclohexane and turn it into caprolactam. Caprolactam is one of the key ingredients to making nylon which is a ubiquitous substance found everywhere in the modern era. Without nylon, everything from clothing to car parts to kitchen utensils and even surgical implants would be impossible.

On paper and in the minds of the workers and their families, the Flixborough facility was the wave of the future and offered a means of a modern livelihood... until one of the massive reaction tanks that turns 20 tons of cyclohexane into caprolactam develops a crack and could potentially result in an explosion that could destroy the entire complex.

In this case, the dumpster fire isn't the crack, or what managers refused to do that often results in dumpster fires, but it's what the managers DID do that caused so many problems... or one big one!

Take a listen and hop on over to the Day's Dumpster Fire website for show notes, sources, and pictures of what happened to this facility and how it affected an entire community in the English countryside.

Some other episodes that were mentioned in this episode that you might find interesting are:

Nuclear Power Plants

Victorian Bread Making

The Boston Molasses Flood

Byford Dolphin Incident

The Deepwater Horizon Incident

All of the above episodes have something common with the Flixborough Chemical Fire. Send Ed and Kara an email at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com when you notice the connection or what they all have in common? In other words, what often gets in the way of safety, sound practices, engineered solutions, and quotas in manufacturing that turns into a dumpster fire or contents for this podcast?

Support the show

Hey before you go!

If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!

You can also send them a text message by clicking on the link at the top.

Be sure to head on over to www.thedaysdumpsterfire.com for the ever growing library of historical dumpster fires.

Check us out on the ol Instagrams!
https://www.instagram.com/thedaysdumpsterfire/