Browsing: Crime

A Brief History On January 4, 2013, the Philippines were the scene of mass shooting carnage when a 41 year old man went on a rampage that left 20 people and a dog shot, with 7 of those people dying of their wounds and sadly, also the dog.  The locale of the shootings was Kawit, a city of over 83,000 people on the shores of Manila Bay on the island of Luzon. Digging Deeper As we have pointed out on several occasions, mass shootings are not a strictly American occurrence, as such tragedies happen in other countries as well as…

A Brief History On December 28, 1999, Western actor/action hero Clayton Moore died.  If you are not familiar with this star of the small and large screen, he played The Lone Ranger from 1949 to 1957 on television and starred in 2 related big screen movies about the same character.  Even if you never saw the Clayton Moore versions of the Lone Ranger,  you are probably familiar with “The William Tell Overture” by Rossini, the theme music played for Moore’s Lone Ranger character.  In the Covid-19 plagued year of 2020, we have lost another host of notable people, both to…

A Brief History On November 30, 1718, while manning a front line trench in a battle in Norway, the King of Sweden, Charles XII, was killed by either a musket ball or a grape shot ball right through his head.  Despite the horrific wound, he immediately grasped his head at the entrance wound with his left hand, leaving his glove soaked in blood.  Not only are we not sure if the fatal shot came from a musket or a cannon, but we are also left with various conspiracy theories that the King may have been accidentally or purposely shot by…

A Brief History On November 23, 2009, the Philippines were the scene of a travesty of failed democracy when in the town of Ampatuan in Maguindanao province on Mindanao, 58 people were slaughtered while on their way to formally file for a candidate for governor, including the wife and two sisters of the candidate.  In late October of 2020, as this article is being written, the United States Presidential and General elections looming for November 3, 2020, seem to hold an almost certain level of distrust, dissatisfaction, and even potential violence in an election predicted to be plagued by accusations…

A Brief History Today, as the United States and the rest of the world continues to be ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic, we look back to a previous pandemic of enormously greater proportions, the infamous Black Death of Bubonic Plague that ravaged much of the world in the 14th Century.  Panicked populations, desperate for answers and solutions to the deadly plague, took to blaming Europe’s Jewish population as the cause of the calamity, a scapegoating of Jews common throughout history.  The pervasive theme of blaming various catastrophes on Jews made the scapegoating of the Black Death an almost foregone conclusion! …