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Culex posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_attack In the comic strip Bloom County, Bill the Cat joined the Rajneesh cult and Opus went to go get him out of it. For decades, I assumed that Breathed just made up the name as a vaguely Indian-sounding cult. One strip, and some photos and details about the cult Longer set of strips from that story line benito has a new favorite as of 23:06 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 23:03
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I've always been creeped out by drugs like Midazolam. It and a few other drugs induce anterograde amnesia. Let's say you're in a car accident. Your leg is horribly broken and the medic can't anesthetize you. He can give you one of these drugs, set the bone causing tremendous pain, and in ten minutes you'll have forgotten everything. That might be a good thing, but if you were a drunk driver who killed a kid in your wreck, would it help you reform to erase that moment from your life? Different scenario: Cop beats the crap out of you to get a confession to a crime you didn't commit. He administers the medication so you forget who he is, or even that you confessed under duress. As you're rotting away in jail, you have no idea why you are there. Use of these drugs is a big medical ethics question. "We need to inject scorpion venom into you because it's the only thing that will save you. But we'll give you a shot that will erase the memory forever." Ok... "I accidentally chopped your dick off during a mole removal, but you'll wake up in the shower holding a razor so it looks like you did it yourself."
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Jun 10, 2014 03:40
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Jack Gladney posted:It's sometimes used as a sedative too, so who knows how many malpractice suits have been averted simply because the memory vanishes. Still, if the anesthetist hosed up and I woke up in the middle of surgery, I'd sure want to forget that. The other way to put it is: who knows how many life-destroying traumas have been erased? I hear you, and if I woke up in the middle of a necessary leg amputation I'd probably scream for the "forget it" drug. It's more an issue of consent and liability that creeps me out. The kind of situation where you wake up at a murder scene and you're the one holding the knife and have no memory of the past half hour while there's a fresh corpse at your feet. When I've heard commentary from medics and police the statement is usually, "Ah, we don't want him to remember this, it's gonna hurt." Big difference between something that numbs the pain and something that erases the experience.
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Jun 10, 2014 04:08
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Rev. Bleech_ posted:The thing that bugs me most about those kind of wrecks? Often no effort is made to clean up the pavement. An intersection near my parents' house was smeared with some poor motorcyclists' dried blood for over a year after he was wiped out by some idiot running the stop sign. When I was a kid I flipped off my bicycle and cracked my skull on the sidewalk. There was a blood stain on the cement for a long time. Content: Charles Bonnet Syndrome. If you have vision loss, you can start hallucinating things that aren't there. Particularly people. Small, creepy people in costumes who constantly make eye contact. From the drat Interesting article: quote:A significant percentage of patients also describe floating, disembodied faces that squirm into their field of vision at random times. These often have wide, unblinking eyes; prominent teeth; and features reminiscent of a stone gargoyle.
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Jun 14, 2014 15:10
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a kitten posted:All the things in this thread where your brain just stops working correctly unnerve the living hell out of me. Actually, the scary part of Charles Bonnet Syndrome is that the part of your brain that fills in gaps in your optical processing is working overtime. Not enough data to do the normal filling in for your natural blind spots? Let's just add in some creepy little people and random teapots and stuff. Even in your day to day normal life, your brain is doing Lucas re-edits of the original Star Wars trilogy 24/7.
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Jun 14, 2014 23:55
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Jonathan Yeah! posted:Is this how the Jackalope legend formed? There are a lot of Germanic names for taxidermy jackalopes, with Wolpertinger probably the most common and like the jackalope, inspired by the horrid fungus. A variant name is Poontinger, which I learned when I had the following wine for the first time: Dr. Peter Poontinger Medium Dry Riesling. It presents something of a marketing challenge in the US.
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Jun 16, 2014 22:35
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As long as we're talking about smells, I've got some personal experience with anosmia or the loss of the sense of smell. I was cleaning out a sink with bleach and got a huge whiff of it, and then poof! For three days I couldn't smell anything. Think about your day. Your house smells a certain way, you maybe sniff a shirt to see if it's clean, enjoy a cup of coffee, go outside and smell the wet grass, get in your car which has its own scent, and get to the office with its own aromas of carpet cleaner and dry-erase pens. And when you go home, it's all in reverse. Now imagine experiencing none of that, and all of your food tastes like paste. It's kind of like when you break your non-dominant arm, you don't realize how much of a pain in the rear end it is to do things like button your shirt or work a zipper. And anosmia can be deadly since you can't smell a gas leak or smoke or tell if food is rotten. Fortunately it was just temporary for me, but people that have the permanent version have major problems with depression, and there's not really established technology or even low-tech things like braille or sign language to help out those afflicted.
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Jul 4, 2014 01:55
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I think there's a disconnect happening in the conversation about Dahmer. Feeling bad for him or feeling sympathy doesn't negate the sick poo poo that he did. It's rather the idea that he was a human being--not an alien or a comic supervillain or a demon from hell, just a Homo sapiens that did some horrible stuff that has happened many times in history. Hitler isn't scary because he was an aberration, he's terrifying because he's a failed artist who got involved in politics during an economic depression and got the power to do horrible things. Speaking of which, in the west we don't often hear about the Indian Emperor Ashoka, who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people through conquest, then converted to Buddhism, and continued with the killing for different reasons: Ashoka (304-232 BCE) is said to have ordered killings of 18,000 Jains after someone drew a picture of Buddha bowing at the feet of Mahavira. And he built his own sort of concentration camp to torture people to death. It was called Ashoka's Hell, and... quote:In the narrative of Ashokavadana, Ashoka asked Girika to disguise the torture chamber as a beautiful and "enticing" palace full of amenities such as exclusive baths and to decorate it with flowers, fruit trees and many ornaments. The palatial torture chamber was artfully designed to make people long to just look at it, and even attract them to enter, and was referred to as the "beautiful gaol". Strangely, I only know about this guy because a really good friend in high school was named after him.
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Jul 31, 2014 17:42
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Herv posted:Pigs are the least 'domesticated' of the farm animals IIRC. As much as feral pigs are a problem, they are also delicious. When they're out there getting exercise and eating acorns and blackberries, the meat is awesome. You can always add a little conventional pork fat if you're making sausage.
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Aug 3, 2014 18:05
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Speaking of dams... ISIS is in control of the Mosul Dam in Iraq and if they blow it up, Baghdad gets 15 feet of water. Half a million dead. The dam isn't even in the best shape to begin with, but being occupied by fanatics who don't give a... drat doesn't help.
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Aug 8, 2014 03:21
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I don't think I've seen this mentioned here, but from 1894 to 1999 the leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana was the home for every mainland American who was diagnosed with leprosy. (There was a similar colony in Hawai'i but that was more specifically established for an outbreak in the islands.) Leprosy in Louisiana Basically if you had leprosy, the law stated that you had to be transported to this facility, you lost your right to vote, were encouraged to take on a new identity, and were probably stuck there for the rest of your life. All of your mail had to be baked in an oven. The facility was not cruel and in fact did a lot to help people, but it was a really weird response to a disease that's not particularly contagious but has a lot of social stigma going back for millennia. You could, for instance, get a pass to leave the facility but could not use public transit. It's weird to imagine that, as of 15 years ago, you could still be forced into something like the Witness Protection Program for catching a rare disease.
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Aug 26, 2014 21:09
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Slanderer posted:It makes more sense in historical context---it was known to be communicable, but not how (although, I think it was believed to be way more contagious then it actually is). And even once the cause was discovered, it wasn't really treatable until we had penicillin. So, yeah, lepers got segregated because people were scared of getting horribly disfigured too. There were a lot of social causes for this as well, with lepers being a target of general fear and worse. But in the end, I can't really blame people for being terrified of getting a horribly-disfiguring and incurable disease. A lot of people lived in the colonies willingly too, due to the lack of stigma about their disease and disfigurement. Depends on what you mean by historical. 1894, yes, 1999, no. Also, the whole thing about changing your identity and not being allowed to vote? Is that even Constitutional?
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Aug 26, 2014 23:53
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Slanderer posted:Apparently it was made legal by the Senate in 1917. Curtailing voting rights used to be more common, and those were restored in 1946 or 1947. The last compulsory admission was in like 1960. You can read up on it if you like, it's just extremely dull: Kudos for excellent fact checking! I've heard a lot of conflicting accounts of this facility over the years. Still kinda creepy in parts...
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Aug 27, 2014 00:34
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Kimmalah posted:Almost 200,000 years or so. Not to say people have always looked exactly the same as they do now - like early on, skeletal features would be more robust and a mix of modern/archaic (like big brows, but a rounded braincase, not so prognathic, etc.) But anatomically modern humans haven't changed too drastically all things considered. And at least some of the more recent differences like height could be traced to environmental stuff like better nutrition, medical care and not having to so as much hard physical labor day to day. As recently as 40,000 years ago you had Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo floresiensis (the "hobbit" people) co-existing on earth with us modern humans. Homo erectus was still around 140,000 years ago. And then there's the mysterious Red Deer Cave people of China who were still around 14,000 years ago. Debate continues on how much interaction (and interbreeding) occurred between modern humans and these different humans, but they definitely would have looked a lot different. To go back to the original comment: quote:Until you go 100s of thousands of years into the past people all sort of look the same. Now here comes an anthropologist to tell me just how wrong I am. It really depends on how you define people.
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Sep 11, 2014 20:24
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Tollund Man has a rope around his neck, and most of the other bog bodies bear marks of strangulation/throat-cutting/&c but no defense wounds, so yeah. It's not just that they're bodies in the bog, it's that they're murdered (and in some cases apparently ritually murdered, with special diets and haircuts and so on) bodies in the bog. I remember when the National Geographic article came out with the bog people and featured this photo of the Tollund Man. I was already having nightmares from the pictures, but part of the text mentioned that the contents of one of the victim's stomach prominently featured burned bread. And as I sat there at Sunday dinner, with Mom having burned another batch of rolls... If I died right then, would that be my legacy if I were somehow dug up centuries later? "Here lies a boy, his last meal was dried out pork chops and burned dinner rolls. Perhaps there was a ritual significance." Nat Geo used to inspire a lot of curiosity/fear, including crazy things like kids in Siberia getting an ultraviolet bath to stimulate Vitamin D production. More nightmare fuel! 
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Sep 12, 2014 17:05
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Speaking of mummies... I'm reminded of the mellified man:quote:Li [Shizhen]: According to 陶九成 [Tao Jiucheng] in the 輟耕錄 [Chuogenglu "Record after retiring from plowing"], it says in Arabia there are men 70 to 80 years old who are willing to give their bodies to save others. The subject does not eat food, he only bathes and partakes of honey. After a month he only excretes honey (the urine and feces are entirely honey) and death follows. His fellow men place him in a stone coffin full of honey in which he macerates. The date is put upon the coffin giving the year and month. After a hundred years the seals are removed. A confection is formed which is used for the treatment of broken and wounded limbs. A small amount taken internally will immediately cure the complaint. It is scarce in Arabia where it is called mellified man. Most likely a myth, but pretty freaking bizarre. I'm also wondering if folks just did this with a pig and a barrel of honey for a few months and passed it off as a true mellified man. Related: Lamas preserved in salt, sitting in the lotus position: 
benito has a new favorite as of 17:50 on Sep 12, 2014 |
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Sep 12, 2014 17:43
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It's creepy how many of these preserved bog bodies appear to have been strangled. Like Yde Girl from about 2,000 years ago. 
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Sep 13, 2014 03:10
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Jean Thurel lived from 1698 to 1807 and spent 90 years of his life serving as a French soldier under everyone from Louis XV to Napoleon I.
benito has a new favorite as of 01:23 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 01:20
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bulletsponge13 posted:I kinda hope he was the old french version of the shammers of today- look good while brass is around, sham about when there is work to be done, and avoid anything that looks hard...then talk poo poo about how everyone is pussies. It's also possible that he just got locked into a certain system and couldn't imagine life outside of it, like the old guy in the Shawshank Redemption. A buddy of mine was in the Army with a guy they called "The Machine". He had zero personal ambition and was happiest when every minute of his day was dictated to him. This guy hated leave because he didn't know what to do, and was the kind of guy who would get ordered to mop a warehouse and somebody would find him 18 hours later because nobody told him to stop.
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Sep 25, 2014 23:18
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outlier posted:There's an article I read recently about Gage, which of course I can't find now. The premise was that while Gage was grievously injured, the conventional narrative of his personality being utterly changed by the accident was overblown. He held down several jobs afterwards and travelled to South America. The "change" may have been little more than natural reactions of a man who had been horribly maimed and still had severe physical effects from the accident. The article was in Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...be_patient.html
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Oct 2, 2014 22:00
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Open casket funerals... When I was 14, my Scoutmaster died. He'd been running the troop for 50 years and was well respected in the community, very active in his church, and people came to his funeral from all over the country, so it was a pretty large service. I got to stand honor guard next to the open end of his casket for a solid hour. For the first fifteen minutes I just tried to avoid it, for the next thirty it was really weird but I had to keep my poo poo together to not break in front of grieving friends and family members, and finally for the last fifteen I was kind of OK with it. I had a couple of friends commit suicide in high school, both of those were open casket and very disturbing. Then in college I was an anthropology major and one of my professors was a forensic pathologist, so I spent a semester around bodies and parts of bodies in various stages of decay. Gruesome slide shows right before lunch. I'm pretty desensitized to the sight of corpses at this point. Sounds like I should have turned into Dexter, but I work in quality assurance and write about wine.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:03
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Pondex posted:Haha, "Ice-nine". Is Vonnegut that well known among physicists? It's problematic because ice IX is a real (and boring) thing, one of the fifteen phases of solid water.
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Oct 29, 2014 17:11
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Mississippi has always been an interesting place for the criminal justice system. For years Dr. Steven Hayne conducted 80-90 percent of the criminal autopsies in the state, between 1500-2000 per year while holding other jobs. Prosecutors loved him because he'd basically make up crap to convict whoever they wanted. Why did he do so many? He didn't have a salary, he was paid by the body:quote:“It’s a racket,” says Sanders, the former Columbus police chief. “Most states pay a [state] medical examiner $100,000, maybe $200,000 per year. Do the math. Fifteen hundred autopsies per year at $500 to $1,500 a pop. Hayne’s making millions.…Prosecutors love him because he’ll testify to whatever they need him to. Meanwhile, the state legislature saves money by not having to fund a full-time state medical examiner, office, and staff.” Here's one of his tricks with a colleague: quote:Jimmie Duncan was convicted for the 1993 murder of Haley Oliveaux of West Monroe, Louisiana based primarily on the testimony of Hayne and Michael West, a bite mark examiner and at the time coroner of Forrest County, Mississippi.[9] Duncan had admitted to leaving Oliveaux in a bathtub unattended, and was initially charged with negligent homicide. Hayne examined Oliveaux and claimed to have found bite marks on her face that had not been seen by any of the other medical professionals who had previously examined her body, such as EMTs and hospital personnel. After this, a mold was taken of Duncan's teeth for use in bite mark analysis by Michael West. In performing this analysis, West repeatedly pressed the mold into the cheek of Oliveaux' corpse, creating bite marks which had not previously existed. This was recorded on videotape which surfaced in 2008. Michael Bowers, deputy medical examiner for Ventura County, California commented with regard to the bite marks that "Dr. West created them. It was intentional. He's creating artificial abrasions in that video, and he's tampering with the evidence. It's criminal, regardless of what excuse he may come up with about his methods." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hayne http://reason.com/archives/2007/10/08/csi-mississippi/ It would take a lifetime to figure out how much bad evidence he provided over his career.
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Nov 20, 2014 23:24
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New Leaf posted:My wife sent me this one- a French soldier during the late 1700's who eat anything and everything he possibly could without gaining weight. He apparently had an absolutely insatiable appetite and even ate live animals. At the bottom of that link is the story of a Polish soldier (Charles Domery) serving in the French army with the same condition, to the point where he sometimes was in too much of a hurry to strangle cats before eating them and when a fellow soldier's leg got shot off, he started snacking on it. Both stories have so many things in common including time and place that they sound like urban legends with some of that British/French hostility (no offense to the original poster). I can only imagine that if someone like this were found today he'd instantly be given his own show on Food Network. "Tarrare eats 170 dead rats and then sits down to consume an entire Thanksgiving feast for ten prepared by Paula Deen. Later, Guy Fieri prepares him twelve pounds of BBQ bologna sushi rolls. Tune in at 7:30 eastern!"
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Dec 2, 2014 23:51
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EZipperelli posted:Re: Non-stop eating Even though the link is broken (fix that!) I grew up with someone with Prader-Willi Syndrome. He could literally eat until he burst but everybody had to make sure that his food intake was restricted. At home, the family had locks on the cupboards and refrigerator. I've lost touch with him but last I heard he was in a special program and had outlived the usual 16-year prognosis by more than a decade. He was a dear friend and I hope he is OK.
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Dec 3, 2014 04:55
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This is unnerving in a different sort of way. Think about how much cell phone technology has advanced in just the past 20 years. So many advances, they keep getting smaller and more complex, if you lose one it's annoying but not the end of your life... For two million years, <i>Homo erectus</i> had the hand axe. That was the highest technology we could muster as hominids. For two million years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_axe
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Dec 14, 2014 21:37
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Solice Kirsk posted:Well most of our advancements have happened pretty damned quickly. Just 150 years ago there was no good way too move electricity, no planes, no cars, no xrays, terrible medicine, terrible surgery, no cheap refrigeration, and (possibly the worst) no Barqs root beer. As far as human history is concerned the last 200 years have been a whirlwind of scientific and medical advancements, much of which would seem like magic to people just a few decades in the past. True, but we had a lot of advancements in math, language, writing, engineering, construction, etc., over the past six thousand years, with incremental progress and some backsliding at times. I'm just amazed that we are able to advance so rapidly versus our hominid ancestors.
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Dec 15, 2014 00:40
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Phobophilia posted:Source the article, because it sounds like pile of nonsense. According to the wiki article and its source, the earth receives 174 petawatts of power from the sun. In other words, 174 petajoules every second. Human civilization consumes 18 terawatts of power, in other words, 15 terajoules per second. 1 petawatt is 1000 terawatts. The energy blasted from the sun onto the earth vastly outstrips what we burn from fossil fuels, and the downside of that is not the direct heating, but the indirect heating from the planet retaining more heat from the sun. The fun part is, how do you get off the planet with solar power?
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Dec 15, 2014 02:02
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MightyJoe36 posted:It wasn't scary or unnerving, but it was a little weird after the last general election when I realized that for the first time in my life, I'm older than the President. I was born in 1976, which doesn't make me old per se, but dating women born in the 80s is always kind of odd. You can't just make a reference to Mary Lou Retton or Reagan getting shot without sounding like grandpa. I learned how to type on a manual typewriter and can still replace a ribbon on an electric IBM Selectric with my eyes closed. The first computers I used ran off cassette tapes. My great-grandparents were still of the horse-and-buggy era here in the rural mid-south but lived to see the moon landing. Anxious to see what we standing apes can accomplish in the next few decades.
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Dec 15, 2014 20:54
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I've been in a lot of different caves in several different states. For the most part they are enjoyable hikes underground. Serious spelunkers go through tunnels called meat grinders because you're pushing your body through a tube of jagged rock in hopes of reaching a separate cavern. If you get stuck or if water drains into the tunnel, you are royally screwed. If anyone is claustrophobic, imagine being underground in a rock tunnel that is barely the width of your shoulders and you have to inch along with your knees and elbows.
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Dec 16, 2014 01:01
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shock.wav posted:This is an actual recurring nightmare of mine. I don't know how anyone can willfully put themselves through something like this. What is really crazy is that a lot of cave deaths like this happened before electric flashlights and other technology. From my own cave exploring going through tiny passages... I still have nightmares in which I get stuck somewhere and can't get out. I'm talking about waking up at 4 a.m. in a panic remembering the experience of an Arkansas or Missouri cave and having to go for a walk just to feel the experience of being in open air. I'm pretty sure this caver has been posted here: Floyd Collins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd_Collins
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Dec 16, 2014 03:21
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New topic! Not wiki and only mildly unnerving, but it has nothing to do with wrestling mats. Twinspeak! How twins will form their own secret language during early childhood. The Bryan brothers consider it an important part of their doubles tennis strategy: http://nautil.us/issue/6/secret-codes/the-secret-language-of-tennis-champions A lot of the examples sound like bad English but the underlying grammatical structure that occurs across multiple languages with twinspeak is intriguing. Somewhat related: in the 70s and 80s, students of a school for the deaf in Nicaragua independently and without direction created their own language. We get a lot of scary stories about people like Genie who grow up in isolation and never form any real language skills, but get a few Homo sapiens together and they'll figure something out, especially as babies or very young children: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
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Dec 19, 2014 02:21
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The Japanese death penalty is also sort of weird. The prisoner doesn't know the day of execution until that morning, nobody outside of the prison finds out until afterwards, and it is done via hanging. Regardless of what you think about about capital punishment, it's crazy to tell some guy he might be killed tomorrow or a few years from now but that he'll never know until that day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Japan
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Dec 19, 2014 19:06
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I've always been fascinated by the Sea Peoples, a collective name for nine different groups that terrorized the Mediterranean back 3,500-3,200 years ago. Nobody knows much about them and there's not a lot in the historical record despite how much we know from the Egyptians and Greeks of the same era. We don't even know that much about their boats or how they were able to settle Sicily and other islands. There are lots of different hypotheses about who exactly the Sea Peoples were. And to make it more interesting, whoever they were, they may have been responsible for the Late Bronze Age Collapse, a period of "dark ages", the collapse of a bunch of kingdoms and civilizations 3,200 years ago. We do know that they seriously pissed off the pharaohs: quote:Merneptah states that he defeated the invasion, killing 6,000 soldiers and taking 9,000 prisoners. To be sure of the numbers, among other things, he took the penises of all uncircumcised enemy dead and the hands of all the circumcised... Even after that, they came back to attack Ramses III at the Battle of the Delta :
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Jan 15, 2015 01:20
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AdjectiveNoun posted:I don't know how eerie it is. Large scale migrations with a military element have been a thing for ages, the Sea Peoples are just one of the earliest recorded examples we have. Look at the Germanic migrations into the Roman Empire; the migrations of Iranian and Turkic peoples into Northern India or Turkic peoples through Persia and into the Middle East as a whole, or the people we know as Aztecs originating from somewhere in the Southwestern USA and migrating into the Valley of Mexico. (Or heck, the colonization of the Americas by various Europeans and the Russian Far East by Russians) I posted it as weirdness because so much of the history of western civilization revolves around things that happened around the edges of the Mediterranean over the past four thousand years, yet you never hear anything about the Sea Peoples. And again, given the loads of how much we know about other groups in the same area at the same time, it's strange that we know so little about them. Speaking of early folks with boats, it's amazing that Madagascar is so close to the cradle of various hominids over the past several million years but was only settled by humans 2,500 years ago--who came from Indonesia.
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Jan 18, 2015 03:28
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Kanine posted:The Toba Catastrophe theory. Also the supposed genetic bottleneck in humanity that was caused by the entire human population being reduced to just around 10,000 people about 70,000 years ago. Most of the humans (and all of the other hominids in genus Homo) who moved out of Africa perished, which means that for most of Homo sapiens history, the Khoisan people of southern Africa have been the majority of the species even though there are only 100,000 of them today: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141204/ncomms6692/full/ncomms6692.html
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Jan 18, 2015 16:31
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The Aral Sea in 1989 vs. 2014. Formerly the fourth largest lake on the planet.
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Jan 24, 2015 14:32
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Alhazred posted:The Soviet Union was basically every mad scientist's wet dream, if you had a theory that you could grow peas in the winter or that women should gently caress monkeys then Stalin would give you the means to fulfill that dream: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Ivanovich_Ivanov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov Not to mention what they did to dogs. Head transplants, sending Laika to space to die... quote:Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it... We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog. 
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Jan 25, 2015 15:02
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DumbparameciuM posted:So I was thinking I'd do a post on a specific massacre of Indigenous Australians, but I was having trouble finding a wikipedia article for the specific incident I was searching for. The story of Tasmania is pretty crazy. Some folks call The Black War of 1828-1832 a genocide. Others disagree, but seeing as how all of the native Tasmanians were either killed or fled the island and the languages are pretty much dead, I think the name fits. quote:On 1 December 1826, the Tasmanian Colonial Times declared that: "We make no pompous display of Philanthropy. We say this unequivocally SELF DEFENCE IS THE FIRST LAW OF NATURE. THE GOVERNMENT MUST REMOVE THE NATIVES—IF NOT, THEY WILL BE HUNTED DOWN LIKE WILD BEASTS, AND DESTROYED!" – Colonial Times and Tasmanian Advertiser, 1826[18][19] And the attitude toward the successful eradication of the native population, who had been there for 35,000 years: quote:When Truganini died, the Tasmanian Government declared the island’s Aboriginals to be extinct. Its intention was to make everyone understand that the native problem was over, but the government was wrong on both counts. Other aboriginal women born from full-blooded tribal parents outlived her. And what was done to the bodies of the last Tasmanians: quote:In one case, the Royal Society of Tasmania received government permission to exhume the body of Truganini in 1878, within two years of her death, on condition that it was "decently deposited in a secure resting place accessible by special permission to scientific men for scientific purposes." Her skeleton was on display in the Tasmanian Museum until 1947.[39] Another case was the removal of the skull and scrotum — for a tobacco pouch — of William Lanne, known as King Billy, on his death in 1869.
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Mar 8, 2015 14:11
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Not terribly scary, but still a little weird... The Washington Monument. It was constructed between 1848-1885, meaning that the building phase at the time was a third of the history of the United States as a nation. I've walked down it, which is really odd. (At the time, they weren't letting anyone climb up it, which was fine with me. We rode the elevator to the top and then hiked down with a guy from the Army Corps of Engineers as guide.) The top is pretty modern, but as you go down the steps it gets older and older, and you see weird stuff where construction stopped at times (for pesky things like the Civil War) and finally you get to the bottom which looks pretty ancient, yet is still holding everything up. Inside the staircase are commemorative stones embedded in the walls, these sort of plaques made with geological specimens of whichever state, country, or group donated it. The one from a Pope didn't fare well: quote:At that time a memorial stone that was contributed by Pope Pius IX, called the Pope's Stone, was destroyed by members of the anti-Catholic, nativist American Party, better known as the "Know-Nothings", during the early morning hours of March 6, 1854 (a priest replaced it in 1982). They've been added at various phases of construction and repair ever since it started, and some as recent as the 1980s: pdf catalog of stones Unnerving part? since there are no windows except at the top, you kind of feel like you're digging down through 150+ years of history deep into the earth, and then you walk out into modern day DC where it's bright and sunny. benito has a new favorite as of 02:16 on Mar 26, 2015 |
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Mar 26, 2015 01:39
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