And one thing I like is that they are really sword fighting as it was done back then, not the movie BS with the big movements.
It was a close quarter (as in bad-breath distance) fight and it was the king of the battlefield until people figured out how to kill them at a distance. It ended up being a combination of old and new technology that brought the end of the knighthood: Long spears and arquebuses.
The Battle of Pavia in 24 February 1525 is considered to be the beginning of the end for the Knights and the coming of age of firearms in the battlefield. The French faced a combined army of Spanish, Germans and Italians and got massacred.
But I tend to be wee skeptical when they tell me that somehow 2,011 subjects of the Crown “accidentally” hung themselves. There might be an epidemic of unregistered nooses all over Great Britain.
And as far as I know schizophrenia may lead to behavior that causes death but not the sickness on itself does not kills people.
For those of you who don’t have the time or desire to read the entire paper, I’ve listed some of its highlights (along with my commentary) below. Let’s dig in…
I confess that I have not read the paper yet as life has gotten in the way. But go ahead and give this article a read as Mr. Ellifritz makes very good points.
No idea where this happened, but illustrative nevertheless.
Playing bumper cars in a busy highway? They both had very close calls with other traffic but they are so invested in their own egos that simply did not care. Both had multiple chances to disengage and take other lanes or simply lay back, but their ego forbade clear thinking.
And it is true. Dennis v. United States was a case where leaders of the Communist Party of the USA were tried and convicted for advocating the violent overthrow of the US government and for the violation of several points of the Smith Act. They appealed and the case went all the way to SCOTUS who approved.
But, now we fast forward to 1957 with Yates v. United States which the Supreme Court hobbled Dennis v. United Sates by deciding that the First Amendment protected radical and reactionary speech, unless it posed a “clear and present danger.” The final nail in that particular insurrectionist coffin came with Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) in which SCOTUS re-affirmed Yates and went on some more by stating that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is directed to inciting, and is likely to incite, imminent lawless action.
I am guessing that somebody in CSGV went to class with that inspired Constitutional Professor at 1600 Pennsylvania Av.?
Police say a woman who lives in the home found her husband dead in the garage.
His hands and feet were tied and the body had been decapitated.
Tulsa police told KRMG news, the death was due to suicide
In my younger, less illustrated days I would have called flag on the play on this one. But believe it or not, decapitations are not uncommon in hangings.
Years ago I read the book Until You Are Dead: The Book of Executions in America (which somehow is MIA from my library, that should tel you something about accumulation) and found out that hanging is actually very delicate “science.” The idea is to break the neck as in severing the spinal cord so the death is instantaneous, but unless you know the exact combination of rope, coils, weight and a couple of other factors, the executioner would either suffocate the individual (Usually not enough wait and that resulted in having to actually pull the guy down by his legs to accelerate the process) or if the weight was too much (adding sandbags to the feet was normal) the rope would cut through the neck and decapitate the condemned man. This is not a “clean” decapitation as one would think done by a very sharp blade but a rather gruesome tearing of the flesh and separation of bones.
Notorious outlaw Thomas Edward “Black Jack” Ketchum had the misfortune of being decapitated at his hanging. The favorite story is that the person selected to be the executioner was not experienced and got his knowledge by third hand. Even though the gallows was built right and according to the specifications required by the height and weight of Black Jack Ketchum when arrested, the executioner failed to take into account that in the time Ketchum was in the shade, he gained a lot of weight and all calculations were now off.
On April 26, 1901 at 1:13 pm Ketchum was executed with less than perfect results:
