Posted by Alexander Jerri
This day in rancid, ugly, horrible, putrid, rotten history...
On this day in 1903 – [112 years ago] – a specially chartered passenger train was carrying the Purdue University Boilermakers, along with hundreds of fans, to a football game against their rivals at Indiana University. Just as the fast-moving train rounded a curve near Indianapolis, a coal train engineer, who was unaware of the Purdue train’s approach due to a railroad signaling error, backed his own train onto the main line. By the time the engineers of the two trains saw each other, it was too late. The railroad collision killed eighteen people -- including fourteen Purdue football players riding in their train’s lead car, which was smashed to pieces.
On this day in 1984 – [31 years ago today] – Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was shot and killed by two of her own Sikh bodyguards in the garden area of her official residence. The killing was widely viewed as an act of revenge, since four months earlier she had ordered Indian troops to enter the holiest shrine of the Sikh religion, the Golden Temple at Amritsar, to remove armed separatist rebels who had taken refuge there. Indira Gandhi had been heavily criticized for that military operation, which cost hundreds of lives, and had been accused of pursuing it for political reasons. But her assassination sparked a backlash among her supporters which led to even more violence, as riots broke out in the streets of New Delhi and other Indian cities, ultimately resulting in the massacre of an estimated three thousand Sikhs.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Listen live from 9AM - 1PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM or stream at www.thisishell.com
9:10 - Anthropologist Flagg Miller examines al-Qaeda's psychology via Osama bin Laden's cassette collection.
Flagg is author of The Audacious Ascetic: What the Bin Laden Tapes Reveal About Al-Qa'ida from Oxford University Press.
10:05 - Live from Mumbai, Valérie Bergeron reports on repression in Egypt and the first days of the Knife Intifada.
Valérie is in the middle of a trip across the Middle East and Asia.
10:35 - Antidote Zine's Ed Sutton explores the effects of refugees and right-wingers on direct democracy in Switzerland.
Ed will be doing the reporting himself, but Antidote has been transcribing and publishing stories on Switzerland and the refugee crisis all year.
11:05 - Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing finds a matsutake mushroom growing beyond endstage capitalism.
Anna is author of The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins from Princeton University Press
12:05 - Sociologist Margee Kerr explores the science and psychology behind fear itself.
Margee's new book is Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear from PublicAffairs Books.
12:45 - Jeff Dorchen turns off his phone and focuses just long enough to write about distraction.
OK now he just wrote me on Facebook, he must be done writing his new Moment of Truth.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
After a football-induced hiatus, This is Hell! is back with a one hour show. Listen 9AM - 10AM US Central. Four hours next week!
9:05AM - Civil rights attorney Flint Taylor challenges police torture and state secrecy at Chicago's Homan Square.
Flint's law firm, the People's Law Office, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of Chicago and six Chicago police officers.
9:30AM - Writer Sarah Kendzior explores the ties and tensions between Ferguson's Jewish and Palestinian activists.
Sarah wrote The Jewish and Palestinian Activists of the Ferguson Movement for Medium.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Atention citizens of Grand Rapids and West Michigan:
This is Hell! Monday nights at 11PM Eastern on Public Reality Radio!
Starting tonight, This is Hell! will be airing Monday nights at 11PM Eastern on WPRR Public Reality Radio. We're sending them a one hour version of the show each week (the first hit is always free) with the reminder that there's four hours of interview Hell each week at www.thisishell.com
If you know a radical / lefty with a radio in Grand Rapids or West Michigan, let em know that we're coming to their town / subdivision / squat. And if you want to hear This is Hell! in your community, get in touch with us and we'll bug that station together.
Posted by Alexander Jerri
This day in rancid, ugly, horrible, putrid, rotten history...
On this day in 1780 – [235 years ago] – an enormous hurricane swept through the Caribbean with winds of up to two hundred miles per hour, devastating colonial towns and sinking scores of British and French ships. The storm later zigagged northeast, up the Eastern Seaboard, wreaking havoc as far as Newfoundland and Bermuda, and killing more than twenty thousand people. It remains the deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record, worse even then Hurricane Mitch of 1998.
On this day in 1871 – [144 years ago] – the Great Chicago Fire burned itself out after having raged through the city center for three days. It killed some three hundred people, destroyed a third of the city’s real estate, and left more than one hundred thousand people homeless. To this day, the fire’s original cause remains unknown, despite many theories advanced by historians. The popular myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over the lantern was debunked long ago. One of the more sketchy but intriguing conjectures is that the fire in Chicago -- along with others occurring on the same day in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and in Holland, Michigan -- may have been ignited by red-hot meteorite fragments fallen through earth’s atmosphere from an exploding comet.
On this day in 1957 – [58 years ago] – the world’s first major nuclear accident occurred when a fire broke out at the Windscale facility in Cumbria on the northwest coast of England, releasing streams of airborne radioactive particles across the UK and Europe. Operators worked frantically all night and into the following day before finding a way to extinguish the reactor’s burning uranium cores. Once they did so, they were able to seal the reactor tank -- which remains sealed today, with fifteen tons of uranium fuel still inside. The Windscale reactor is now being decommissioned, a process expected to be complete in the year 2038.
On this day in 1973 – [42 years ago] – Spiro T. Agnew, vice president of the United States under President Richard Nixon, was forced to resign from office as a condition of a plea deal on an income tax evasion charge. Agnew had also been charged by a federal district attorney with extortion, conspiracy, and accepting more than one hundred thousand dollars in bribes while holding political office. His resignation came amid... read more
