"Aboard the USS Burrfish (SS312) near Peleliu in the Pacific Ocean, part of a UDT special mission group of volunteers that conducted the only UDT submarine launched operation during World War II. (L-R) Leonard Barnhill, John MacMahon, LT M.R. Massy, Bill Moore and Warren Christensen, John MacMahon (pictured) and Robert Black and CPO Howard Roeder (not pictured) were captured by the Japanese the night after this photograph was taken and killed while in captivity.
The Museum flies its flags at half-staff today to honor these men."
Civil war
Following the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, and fighting between Serbs and Croats in Croatia, a civil war erupted in the new Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Bosnia had a mixed population of Muslims, Serbs and Croats. In 1992, the Bosnian Serbs attacked their neighbours, seizing large tracts of land which they then ‘ethnically cleansed’ of non-Serbs.
Ethnic cleansing
As the war went on, the Croats and Muslims also carried out ethnic cleansing. An estimated 2 million people were driven from their homes.
Which is why
British soldiers first deployed to Bosnia in 1992 .. have remained there on peacekeeping duties ever since.
"In 1787, when Beethoven was 17 years of age he left Bonn on six months' leave of absence from the court orchestra, and arrived in Vienna a month later. Armed with a letter of introduction from Max Franz, whom Mozart knew, he gained entry into Mozart's home and was ushered into the music room to meet his great idol.
Mozart was in no mood to receive him. His health was plaguing him – his untimely death at the age of 35 was less than five years away – and he did not relish having to stop work to listen to a child prodigy from somewhere hundreds of miles away.
"Play something," he told Beethoven. Beethoven played the opening of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor. "Not that," said Mozart. "Anybody can play that. Play something of your own." So Beethoven did.
When the young man had finished, Mozart walked into the adjoining room where his wife Constanze was entertaining friends.
"Stanzi, Stanzi," he said, pointing back into the music room, "Watch out for that boy. One day he will give the world something to talk about."
He agreed to take Beethoven on as a pupil, but when Beethoven returned to his lodgings there was an urgent letter from his father telling him to return to Bonn by the next stage – his mother was seriously ill with consumption and doctors feared for her life.
Beethoven had no choice but to leave. Less than two weeks after arriving in Vienna for what promised to be a trip that would change his life, he left for Bonn without ever achieving his ambition of taking lessons with Mozart.
By the time he returned to Vienna in November 1792, Mozart was dead."
(Sep 6, 2024 05:45 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] Beethoven had no choice but to leave. Less than two weeks after arriving in Vienna for what promised to be a trip that would change his life, he left for Bonn without ever achieving his ambition of taking lessons with Mozart.
By the time he returned to Vienna in November 1792, Mozart was dead."
Just as well. Beethoven probably would have been so indoctrinated with Mozart's style and theory approach to composing music that it would have crimped his own potential novelty. Equivalent to a Mozart chatGPT just cranking out new stuff that Mozart might have written if he was still around.
"Samuel Cartwright was a physician practicing in the American South, who, in 1851, delivered a report to the Medical Association of Louisiana titled “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race.” Unsurprisingly, there was wild speculation contained within the report, notably his “discovery” of two conditions: drapetomania and dysaesthesia aethiopica.
Drapetomania, Cartwright claimed, was a sort of madness that affected black slaves, causing them to flee. He attributed this to slave owners treating their slaves as equals or by being overly harsh:
If the white man attempts to oppose the Deity’s will, by trying to make the negro anything else than “the submissive knee-bender” (which the Almighty declared he should be) … or if he abuses the power which God has given him over his fellow-man, by being cruel to him … the negro will run away.
Cartwright’s cure was to treat slaves as though they were children — meaning as lesser-than and occasionally subject to corporal punishment. For truly unresolvable cases, Cartwright had a horrifyingly straightforward cure: Cut off their big toes.
Dysaesthesia aethiopica, according to Cartwright, was a mental illness that caused slaves to be lazy. Cartwright claimed this illness was somehow connected to the skin, believing that the lesions he saw on lazy slaves were a manifestation of the illness. The cure for this illness was whipping. But of course, if a slave was seen as being lazy, he’d be more likely to be whipped, and if he were whipped more often, he’d probably develop some lesions. For the slave owners who followed Cartwright’s logic, this ensured a perverse cycle of whippings."---- https://bigthink.com/health/strangest-sc...-theories/
"The basis for smallpox vaccination began in 1796 when the English doctor Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had gotten cowpox were protected from smallpox. Jenner also knew about variolation and guessed that exposure to cowpox could be used to protect against smallpox. To test his theory, Dr. Jenner took material from a cowpox sore on milkmaid Sarah Nelmes’ hand and inoculated it into the arm of James Phipps, the 8-year-old son of Jenner’s gardener. Months later, Jenner exposed Phipps several times to variola virus, but Phipps never developed smallpox. More experiments followed, and, in 1801, Jenner published his treatise “On the Origin of the Vaccine Inoculation.” In this work, he summarized his discoveries and expressed hope that “the annihilation of the smallpox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice.”
Vaccination became widely accepted and gradually replaced the practice of variolation. At some point in the 1800s, the virus used to make the smallpox vaccine changed from cowpox to vaccinia virus."--- https://www.cdc.gov/smallpox/history/history.html
"Daniel Defoe drew on the real story of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk (1676-1721) to write Robinson Crusoe. Selkirk was marooned as a punishment by a captain of a buccaneer ship on Más a Tierra island (now Robinson Crusoe island) in the Juan Fernández archipelago on the Chilean coast."
"John Ernst Worrell Keely was, in his own words, “the greatest humbug of the nineteenth century.” The perpetrator of a long-running and remarkably elaborate pseudoscientific scam, Keely convinced numerous men and women to invest in his Keely Motor Company, an enterprise dedicated to developing practical ways of harnessing an “etheric” force he claimed to have discovered. Over the course of his career, the charlatan-scientist built more than 2,000 machines and gave several headline-grabbing demonstrations in and around Philadelphia using the energy of what he called the “interatomic ether” to shoot bullets, saw wood, and lift weights. After Keely’s death in 1898, his workshop was taken apart and his deception revealed: The machines were powered not by any mysterious, new force, but by simple compressed air routed through the building via hidden ductwork. Despite this revelation, debates between Keely’s supporters (mostly his investors) and detractors continued."--- https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2010/mayj...ce-machine
Aug 15, 2024 08:34 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 15, 2024 08:36 PM by Magical Realist.)
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