March, 2011
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March 1, 2011 Today’s morbid fact is a bit of philosophical musing by Colin Wilson in his (actually not very good) book The Mammoth Book of True Crime. I found it interesting and thought you might as well? Today’s Hair-Raising Yet Truly Morbid Fact! T.S. Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America (1910) contains a hair-raising account of “The Outrages Committed by the Sioux Indians” between 1852 and 1862, with details of rapes and mutilations that would have convinced any reader that the Sioux deserved mass extermination. Nowadays, civilized opinion has swung the other way; it was the white men who were the criminals; the Indian was only trying to defend his own right to live. Yet when we read Duke’s account today, we are less concerned with the rights and wrongs than with the unreducible human tragedy: The hero of the day was an 11-year-old boy named Martin Eastlick, who carried his 15-month-old brother Johnny on his back for 50 miles, but he died shortly afterwards from exposure, over-exertion and lack of nourishment. Mr. Eastlick had been killed and Mrs. Eastlick was lying helpless on the ground from a bullet wound. Her two little boys named Freddie and Frank, aged five and seven respectively, were with her. Two squaws saw them, and catching the children they beat them to death with bludgeons before the helpless mother’s eyes. Many other children were only beaten until they were left helpless and then left to die from hunger and exposure. Thirty-eight Indians were tried and executed for the massacres. They would have argued that it was unfair to treat the massacre as a ‘crime’, since they were at war with the white man, and the white man had treated Indian women and children just as brutally. In retrospect we can see that it makes no difference whether it was called an act of war or a crime, for they are synonymous. The only logical course, it seems, is to recognize that murder is always unjustified, whether it is a criminal act or an act of war. Culled from: The Mammoth Book Of True Crime by Colin Wilson So, do you agree with Colin? Is murder always unjustified? |
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March 2, 2011 Today’s Awful Yet Truly Morbid Fact! In England in 1812, records show that enlisted men were flogged for the smallest offences, and for the graver ones often flogged to death, the number of lashes being awarded by court martial. One eyewitness described how he had seen ‘men suffer five hundred and even seven hundred strokes before being taken down, the blood running down into their shoes, their backs flayed like raw, red, chopped-sausage meat’. He continued: Some bore this awful punishment without flinching, for two or three hundred lashes, chewing a musket ball or a bit of leather to stifle or prevent their cries of agony. After two hundred lashes they did not seem to feel the same torture. Sometimes the head dropped over to one side but the lashing went on, the surgeon in attendance examining the patient from time to time to see what more he could bear. I DID see, with horror, one prisoner take seven hundred before being taken down, this sentence being carried out before the whole brigade. Culled from: The Book Of Execution |
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March 3, 2011 Today’s State-Of-The-Art Yet Truly Morbid Fact! Built on the banks of the Hudson River in Westchester County, New York in 1825, Sing Sing Prison already had become internationally famous by 1831. Much of the institution’s early success was due to brutal slavery, which helped make it profitable for a short time. By the late 19th century hundreds of convicts had perished, with causes of death ranging from consumption to starvation, suicide, and physical abuse, including water torture in the infamous shower bath, a non-electric and, usually, nonfatal precursor of the electric chair. Legal executions at Sing Sing did not begin until 1891, using the new method of electrocution that recently had been tested at Sing Sing and first was used at another New York prison, Auburn, in 1890. During the first four decades of executions at Sing Sing, the death house consisted of a section of the prison that was appropriated as the Condemned Cells. But a rash of daring escapes, including the violent breakout of condemned murderer Oreste Shillitoni, who killed a prison guard and serious wounded another before he was quickly recaptured and executed in 1916, prompted the construction of a special state-of-the-art prison within a prison: the Sing Sing Death House. Culled from: Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House |
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March 4, 2011 Today’s Unaborted Yet Truly Morbid Fact! When suspicion of abortion or fornication lay in her background, then an accused witch in 17th century New England stood little chance of survival. When brought to trial in New England, Alice Lake utterly denied that she had practiced witchcraft but confessed that as a single woman she had sinned, become pregnant, and tried to abort the fetus. Although she failed, “yet she was a murderer in the sight of God [and herself] for her endeavors.” This admission of attempted abortion was sufficient to condemn her of witchcraft, and Alice was executed in 1648, leaving four small children. Culled from: Witchcraze You know, I really wish that this fact sounded like a horrific bygone of a dark and ignorant age of humanity… but it seems that you can take some people out of the Dark Ages, but you can’t take the Dark Ages out of some people. |
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Fact Du Jour For March 6, 2011 Case study of a 21-year-old necrophile who worked as a morgue attendant: He violated scores of female corpses in the two years that he was working at the morgue, by practicing various perversions on them, ranging in age from infants to elderly women. He usually began by sucking their breasts and copulating his mouth to their privates, after which acts he would become so excited that he would crawl upon their bodies, and with superhuman effort he would perform the act of coitus. On one occasion he was so impressed with the corpse of a young girl fifteen years of age that when alone with her the first night after her death, he drank some of her blood. This made him so sexually excited that he put a rubber tube up into the urethra, and with his mouth sucked the urine from her bladder. On this occasion he felt more and more of an urge to go further and felt that if he could only devour her – eat her up – even chew part of her body, it would give him great satisfaction. He was unable to resist this desire, and turning the body upon its face, he bit into the flesh of the buttocks near the rectum. He then crawled upon the cadaver and performed an act of sodomy on the corpse. (The man was tried and found guilty, and was sent to a hospital for the criminal insane.) Culled from: The Sexual Criminal by J. Paul De River |
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Fact Du Jour For March 7, 2011 Today’s Penitent Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Designed in 1821 by Philadelphia architect John Haviland, Eastern State Penitentiary was born from the fusion of Quaker social conscience with the Enlightenment’s faith in reason. Its innovative form arose from humanitarian concern for the treatment of prisoners and from philosophical speculation about the cause and cure of crime. Traditionally, prisons were squalid places, where people were thrown together in common rooms, often regardless of sex, age or the severity of their offenses. They were places of disorder and social neglect. By contrast, “penitentiaries” like Eastern State were places of discipline. They were built on the theory that criminals are psychological slobs, people who failed to acquire discipline early in life. Within the penitentiary’s controlled environment criminals would reform themselves through penance – hence the name. The Pennsyvlania Plan, as solitary confinement was called, took the theory a step further: Criminals would acquire discipline more readily if they were isolated from other undisciplined souls. Instead of constant surveillance, Eastern State relied on the power of the invisible. On arriving at the prison, prisoners were hooded before being led to their cells, to prevent them from seeing where they were going. Each cell measured 8 by 12 feet and was equipped with a flush toilet and running water. A walled yard outside the cell permitted solitary exercise. An 1831 report explained: “No prisoner is seen by another, after he enters the wall. When the years of his confinement have passed, his old associates in crime will be scattered over the earth, or in the grave… and the prisoner can go forth into a new and industrious life, where his previous deeds are unknown.” The roots of the Pennsyvlania Plan lay in monastic architecture and in the solitary life of Carthusian monks. Inmates at Eastern State were provided with Bibles and were expected to work at weaving and other crafts. They received regular visits from members of the Philadelphia Prison Society, the Quaker organization that had championed the creation of Eastern State. It is as if, by emulating a monastic structure, the prison could convert a criminal calling into a religious one, sinners into saints. But to Charles Dickens, who visited the prison in 1842, the system was infernal, precisely because of its reliance on the unseen. Prisoners were invisible to the world as well as to one another, and their punishment left no visible scars. Society did not have to witness the consequences of confining people here. Dickens thought public flogging preferable to this “slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain.” Culled from: Hope Abandoned What do you suppose it says about me that I think this type of prison sounds infinitely preferable to modern prisons, where you actually have to interact with other people. Incidentally, I visited this marvelous treasure back in 2001 and wrote a travelogue on it. I can’t wait to go back again one of these days… I highly recommend you add it to your morbid bucket list immediately! |
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Fact Du Jour For March 8, 2011 The three young workers sank into a funnel of corn that pulled them down like quicksand toward the bottom of the giant grain bin. Wyatt Whitebread, 14, started screaming as the kernels moved past his chest, up his chin and over his head within a matter of seconds. “We’re going to die,” moaned Alejandro “Alex” Pacas, 19, who had jumped into the sinkhole to try to pull Whitebread out. “Hold on,” responded Will Piper, 20, who had rushed to the boy’s aid on the other side. “Help is coming soon.” But rescue came too late for Pacas and Whitebread, who perished that sweltering day in July in Mount Carroll, Ill., inspiring renewed concern by regulators over grain bin accidents — a little-known, perilous workplace hazard in farm country, including some parts of collar counties surrounding Chicago. Last year, 51 men and boys were engulfed by grains stored in towering metal structures that dot rural landscapes, and 26 died — the highest number on record, according to a report issued last month by Purdue University. Illinois led the nation with 10 accidents and five deaths. In less than 10 seconds, a man who steps into flowing corn can sink up to his chest, becoming immobilized, said Robert Aherin, agriculture safety leader in the department of agricultural engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Within another 10 seconds, he’ll be completely submerged and unable to breathe, essentially drowned in corn. Accidents can occur when someone enters a bin to break up clumps that form when grains are moist and have started decomposing. The day before the accident, two other teens joined the crew: Chris Lawton, 15, and Alex Pacas. Pacas was Piper’s best friend, the oldest of seven siblings, the kind of person who “thought of everyone but himself,” Piper said. Sometime after 9 a.m. July 28, Piper said, a Haasbach manager decided to open two additional holes in the floor of a 500,000-bushel grain bin to accelerate the flow of corn; only one hole had been open previously. (Think of a round bathtub with three drains, all open.) At the time, the bin was about one-third full, Piper recalled. He and Pacas were working on one side of the bin with a shovel and pickax while Whitebread and Lawton were on the other side. With machinery running to help pull out the corn, “we were attacking different clumps, wading in corn all over the place,” Piper said. At some point the four climbed a ladder to the top of the bin to get some fresh air and came back down. What happened next isn’t entirely clear to Piper. Suddenly, he saw Whitebread riding a pile of moving corn nearby in a sitting position, something the young workers did occasionally to help the grain flow. By the time he stood up, Whitebread was knee-deep in the sinkhole. Right away, Piper said, he and Pacas rushed to either side and tried to pull the boy out. Then, all three started sinking together while Lawton climbed a ladder inside the bin to go get help. Whitebread was the first to go under, Piper said. The facility’s manager, Piper said, turned off the grain-moving machines, but the corn was still unstable and began to swallow up Pacas and Piper, who had an advantage over his friend because he was taller. “He prayed for us to get out alive, he prayed for his family, for his siblings, then he said, ‘All I ever wanted to do was watch my brothers graduate high school,’” Piper remembered, describing Pacas’ last moments. Then, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, Pacas asked Piper to hold his hand as corn climbed above his head. It took more than 300 rescuers from the surrounding area another six hours to remove Piper from the grain bin while draining the structure of corn. Culled from: Chicago Tribune |
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Fact Du Jour For March 10, 2011 The Inquisition Palace in Mexico City has torture chambers with windows that are slightly higher than an average man’s height. This design was quite deliberate, considering that this palace was specially built to the be the seat of the Inquisition in the Americas. From the patio, situated in front of the torture chamber, the victims waiting to have a change of dress before interrogation (they were supposed to wear specific garments called San Benito robes, which in Mexico were green in color and bore pictures of devils), could hear the screams of the victims of torture just a few feet away, without seeing them. The torture chamber, in fact, was situated between the patio where the people awaiting judgment sat, and the room where the trial was carried out. The entrance to the torture chamber was conical in shape and allowed those who entered a complete vision on all instruments. The torture chamber was constructed in such a way that, while the victim was under torture, the figure of the judge or the executioner appeared to be gigantic, due to a special visual effect. Culled from: Torture – Inquisision – Death Penalty Okay, so now I’m obsessed with San Benito robes! I think I have a new Halloween costume idea… |
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Fact Du Jour For March 14, 2011 Excerpt from the case study of a 30-year-old white male who engaged in “auto-sadism”: At the present time, his fixation has been removed from nails and hammers, and now he has a knife fetish, the knives growing larger on each occasion. When he was arrested he carried a spring knife with a five inch blade. He states that, in order to gratify himself sexually, he must have one or two drinks, then he sneaks out to a desolate spot in the country, preferably in a cow pasture or a river bed, and wallows about in the dirt and filth with his clothes off, mutilating himself about the body. On both thighs there are many scars, some old and some of recent date. His orgies sometimes last all night long, until finally he has an ejaculation, and he returns home in a very filthy, worn out condition. Culled from: The Sexual Criminal |
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Fact Du Jour For March 15, 2011
Lindow Man was certainly sacrificed as part of a ritual. Who can say if he was a criminal who suffered the ultimate penalty or if he volunteered? A trace of poisonous mistletoe found in the dead man’s stomach indicates that, before his violent ordeal began, he was subjected to the formalities of a last meal which was in some manner garnished with the plant. Mistletoe was frequently used by Druids for religious purposes. Culled from: History Of Punishment & Torture You can visit Lindow Man at the British Museum in London. |
In
1984 a body dating back some 2,000 years was dug up in the peat bogs
of Lindow Moss, near Manchester, England – complete with skin,
hair and fingernails. The body was so well-preserved by the peat that,
at first, police suspected a murder victim had been found. They were
right. Lindow Man, as he was known, was indeed murdered – scientists
could tell by close examination that he was struck on the head several
times with an axe and knocked unconscious. Presumably, this was to prevent
him from suffering. Then a ligature was tied around his neck and twisted
by means of a stick so that the victim was choked. The old-style garrotte
was so effective that it broke his neck. His throat was then cut (although
he was already dead) and the body was cast face down into the bog.|
Morbid
Fact Du Jour For March 16, 2011 The dawn of forensic science as we understand it today took place in ancient China. Documents found in Chinese archives dating back to the 17th century refer to a magistrate who lived a thousand years before in the remote age of the T’ang dynasty. Ti Jen-Chieh is reputed to have used both logic and forensic evidence to help solve a wide range of crimes in the late 7th century AD. Ti used a team of investigators, studied the crime scene, examined physical evidence, and interviewed witnesses and suspects. Though his methods and tools bore little resemblance to their sophisticated modern counterparts, Ti’s attitude to his work and his careful investigation of the evidence would not be out of place today. Culled from: Hidden Evidence I can see the latest spinoff now. CSI: T’ang Dynasty. |
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Fact Du Jour For March 17, 2011 Among the earliest and best-known photographs of war dead in America is Alexander Gardner’s “Home of the Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 1863?. It is not possible to reconstruct the impact this particular image had upon people in the 1860s or even to conjecture about how many people might have seen the picture. But among those who did see the image, there is no written evidence that anyone doubted its veracity. That faith in its verisimilitude no longer exists. William Frassanito has demonstrated that Gardner and his colleagues organized “reality”. He moved the dead soldier and his weapons into a more compositionally pleasing position and used the same body for at least two different photographs. Apparently, Gardner believed the photograph would be more effective if it were composed in this manner. Some have argued that the falsification of photographs during the Civil War was necessary for a greater good: “The photograph readily became the vehicle for moral truth. If expression of this truth required mistitling an image, misinterpreting it, or even interfering physically with what was being photographed to achieve a more effective image, it was entirely justifiable.” Culled from: Secure The Shadow: Death and Photography in America So, what do you think? Is it okay to alter reality to make a more “pleasing” composition… or is Truth more important? |
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Fact Du Jour For March 18, 2011 Police have arrested an Upper Darby, PA man who they say confessed to stoning to death 70-year-old Murray Seidman because he was making “homosexual advances.” In his interview with police this week, John Thomas, 28, cited the Old Testament in explaining the murder. Seidman was found dead in his Lansdown apartment in January. “I stoned Murrary with a rock in a sock,” Thomas told police. The complaint states: “John Thomas stated that he read in the Old Testament that homosexuals should be stoned in certain situations. The answer John Thomas received from his prayers was to put an end to the victim’s life. John Thomas stated that he struck the victim approximately 10 times in the head. After the final blow, John Thomas made sure the victim was dead.” “He is a deeply religious man. Or so he says,” said Lansdowne Police Chief Dan Kortan. Several days later, Thomas, who is the executor and sole beneficiary of Seidman’s will, returned to the apartment and pretended that he had just discovered Seidman’s body. He said he ditched his bloody clothes and the bloody sock in a Dumpster. Delaware County Medical Examiner Fredric Hellman ruled that Seidman had been dead for five to 10 days before Thomas started banging on doors in the apartment hallway Jan. 12. Thomas, who police found sitting in the hallway crying, said, “I’m not going down there again, there is too much blood,” court documents state. Seidman was face down on the living room floor. Thomas, who lives on Sunshine Road in Upper Darby, had no comment as he was led out of the Media courthouse today. Seidman, who previously lived at Elwyn Institute, was a longtime worker in the laundry department at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital, where he was “very popular,” Kortan said. “As far as we are concerned, he was a model citizen,” Kortan said. Culled from: Philly.Com “He was a model citizen.” Yes, a model of citizen for Ancient Mesopotamia, perhaps. 2011 America? Not so much… |
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Fact Du Jour For March 21, 2011 The earliest known reference to forensic entomology is in a 13th century Chinese manuscript entitled The Washing Away of Wrongs. It is a general treatise on forensic science, and it discusses a case in which a peasant was cut down and killed with a scythe. The investigating officer asked the local peasants to stand in a row and place their scythes on the ground before them. It was a hot day, and flies came and settled on one particular scythe, which had traces of blood and other body fluids on it. The officer arrested the owner of the scythe and charged him with murder. Culled
from: Forensic
Medicine: Clinical and Pathological Aspects Why don’t they give textbooks such colorful titles anymore? Instead of “The Washing Away Of Wrongs” we now have “Forensic Medicine: Clinical and Pathological Aspects”. I think that’s another sign of the general deterioration of everything interesting in this world. |
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Fact Du Jour For March 22, 2011
Culled from: Gizmodo The full story is available to peruse at NPR, along with a recording of Komarov’s last angry shouts as his spacecraft began to burn up on re-entry. (I think the empty electronic beeps that end the transmission are the creepiest part of the recording.) I’m definitely picking up this book when it’s released! |
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Fact Du Jour For March 23, 2011 On the morning of Monday, July 26, 1830, the Parisian newspaper Moniteur announced that the French king, Charles X, had made some major changes in the country’s government. Contrary to the constitution, he had suspended the liberty of the press, dissolved a newly elected government chamber, and restructured the French election system, giving greatest power to his own ministers. It took awhile for the news to spread through the city, but soon anxious groups of people began to collect on Paris streets. Some began to throw stones through the windows of government offices. By afternoon, the editors of newspapers and journals issued a public statement: “Legal government is interrupted, and that of force has commenced. In the situation in which we are placed, obedience ceases to be a duty…” The next day, police began to seize and smash the journalists’ presses. Violence broke out, and the streets of Paris were quickly filled with angry and unruly mobs. Some 30,000 printing workers and factory laborers who had been dismissed from work swelled the unmanageable crowds. French soldiers took to the streets and tried to keep order, but were enormously outnumbered by the defiant French citizens. By July 29 the soldiers had fled from Paris, and the city was left entirely in the control of its triumphant citizens. Some 2,000 people were wounded in the insurrection and another 1,000 lost their lives. King Charles was forced to flee the country, and when he abdicated, Louis Philippe was proclaimed the new king of France. Culled from: The Pessimist’s Guide To History |
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Fact Du Jour For March 24, 2011 Ever think you’re going to pieces? Saint Catherine of Siena feels your pain. After the holy woman died in 1380, her body became an object of veneration. Pilgrims believed touching her miraculously unrotted flesh could heal illnesses and bring them closer to God, so they flocked to visit the body from all over Europe. Eventually, the Catholic Church laid Catherine to rest – part of her, at least. Before she was buried, one of her followers removed a finger (along with a few teeth and other various and sundry body parts). Meanwhile Pope Urban VI got a similar idea and took her head. Today, both finger and head are on display at San Domenico Church in Siena, Italy. The rest of her is beneath the main altar at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva Church in Rome. Culled
from: Neatorama |
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The
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire – Revisited The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire Near closing time on Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the top floors of the Asch Building in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Within minutes, the quiet spring afternoon erupted into madness, a terrifying moment in time, disrupting forever the lives of young workers. By the time the fire was over, 146 of the 500 employees had died. William G. Shepherd was an eyewitness to the atrocity: As I reached the scene of the fire, a cloud of smoke hung over the building. . . . I looked up to the seventh floor. There was a living picture in each window–four screaming heads of girls waving their arms. ‘Call the firemen,’ they screamed… One girl climbed onto the window sash. Those behind her tried to hold her back. Then she dropped into space. Then came that first thud. I looked up, another girl was climbing onto the window sill; others were crowding behind her. She dropped. I watched her fall, and again the dreadful sound. Two windows away two girls were climbing onto the sill; they were fighting each other and crowding for air. Behind them I saw many screaming heads. They fell almost together, but I heard two distinct thuds. Then the flames burst out through the windows on the floor below them, and curled up into their faces. The firemen… took out a life net and, while they were rushing to the sidewalk with it, two more girls shot down. The firemen held it under them; the bodies broke it; the grotesque simile of a dog jumping through a hoop struck me. Before they could move the net another girl’s body flashed through it. As I looked up I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped a girl to the window sill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were as unresisting as if her were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward–the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head. Thud–dead, thud–dead–together they went into eternity.
On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman later went about with tags, which he fastened with wires to the wrists of the dead girls, numbering each with a lead pencil, and I saw him fasten tag no. 54 to the wrist of a girl who wore an engagement ring. A fireman who came downstairs from the building told me that there were at least fifty bodies in the big room on the seventh floor. Another fireman told me that more girls had jumped down an air shaft in the rear of the building. I went back there, into the narrow court, and saw a heap of dead girls… The floods of water from the firemen’s hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood. I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer. Culled
from: The Triangle
Factory Fire Here is my original review of a book chronicling the tragedy. I should re-read it because I might find the second half more interesting these days: The
Triangle Fire |
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Fact Du Jour For March 28, 2011 Today’s Ash-Covered Yet Truly Morbid Fact! On March 9, 1945, as the war in the Pacific entered its climactic phase, American General Curtis LeMay ordered a daring new type of raid on Tokyo. The B-29 bombers would strike at night, flying at 5000 to 8000 feet instead of the usual daylight 30,000-foot altitude. This time the raiders would carry M47 incendiary bombs. At 5:36 p.m. the first of 333 B-29s took off from Guam’s North Field and headed north, followed at 50-second intervals by eleven more. These were pathfinders. They would demarcate the target area and light it up with a gigantic “X” by dropping canisters of magnesium and phosphorous as well as jellied gasoline (the dreaded napalm). Undiscovered on their low sweep over southeast Tokyo, the pathfinders began to discharge their fiery markings at 12:08 a.m. The main force of three wings started to arrive at 12:30 a.m. and dropped two-foot-long napalm sticks at altitudes ranging from 4900 to 9200 feet. Under a stiffening wind, flames fanned out rapidly. Within minutes huge balls of fire torched structure after structure and fueled an incandescent tidal wave carrying temperatures exceeding 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. The turbulence of the firestorm tossed the bombers hundreds of feet into the air, then pulled them downward. Many fliers vomited, first from airsickness, again when the sickly-sweet stench of burning bodies hit them from the ground. Some crews put on oxygen masks. The last of the B-29s escaped to the south at 3:30 a.m. – only 14 planes were lost. On the ground Koyo Ishikawa, a cameraman for the police department, was photographing LeMay’s handiwork. “The very streets were rivers of fire,” he said later. “Everywhere one could see flaming pieces of furniture exploding in the heat, while the people themselves plazed like matchsticks.” Many were incinerated in their wooden shelters. Masao Nomura, a reporter for the newspaper Asahi, described the scene after the raid: “Long lines of ragged, ash-covered people straggled along, dazed and silent, like columns of ants. They had no idea where they were going.” Mrs. Yohie Sekimura, trying to make her way back to her home with her baby on her back, found the bridge across the Sumida River clogged with bodies, the river choked with swollen corpses. Mechanically she walked past bodies of neighbors and could shed no tears. The pool of emergency water at her neighborhood hospital was filled with layers of sprawling bodies. Survivors were scrawling charcoal messages for their missing loved ones on the sidewalk. Her home was in ashes, along with 267,170 others; 15.8 square miles were burned out; 72,489 people died, 130,000 were injured. Culled from: Day One: Before Hiroshima and After Now, that’s terrorism for you! The military’s reason for targeting civilians? Factories, which were considered military targets, had been disbanded and workers had been moved into individual houses so productivity was not impacted by the conventional raids. LeMay grew impatient and decided to take out the civilian workplaces in one fiery fell swoop. Unsurprisingly, many of the pilots who took part in the raids were tortured with guilt afterwards. If ever a people had to pay a severe price for the misguided arrogance of its leaders, it was the civilians of Japan. |
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Fact Du Jour For March 29, 2011
Culled from: Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages |
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Fact Du Jour For March 31, 2011 A Bellaire, Ohio man had to be removed from his home on Washington Street Sunday, March 27, 2011. The 43-year-old man’s skin had become attached to the fabric of the chair after he sat in it for two years Authorities said he was sitting in his own feces and urine and maggots were visible. Police were called in to help transfer the man to the hospital. Authorities said they had to cut a hole in the wall to get the man out of his home. Shockingly, two other able-bodied people lived there—another man, who had a separate bedroom, and the girlfriend of the man who was stuck in the chair. Officials say the girlfriend served food to him, since he never got up. Bellaire Code Enforcer Jim Chase says now the tenants have been given orders to clean it or leave it. One officer said it was the worst thing he ever responded to. And most said the worst part of all was the smell. Ironically the landlord says the man in the chair rented from her before and used to be a vital active person. She says she checked on them periodically but lately he always sat with a blanket over him. She says she had no idea it had come to this. Sunday morning his housemates called officials when he was unresponsive. He later died at the hospital. Culled
from: WTRF.Com So, what do you think? Should the housemates be held liable for enabling this situation? |
