fact
In pre-20th century European culture, red hair was commonly identified as the distinguishing negative Jewish trait. During the Spanish Inquisition, all those with red hair were identified as Jewish; and writers from Shakespeare to Dickens would identify Jewish characters by giving them red hair.
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There are certain countries in the world that a majority of people would say they would love to visit – Italy, France, England, China, Ireland, Australia…
My list actually goes on and on, because there’s hardly anywhere I wouldn’t like to go if I had the chance!
Some (or all) of these beloved countries have dark histories and lesser-known facts, though, so before you visit, here are 16 things you might like to know.
During ww2 japan used living POW’s for bayonet practice.
The Japanese were worse than the nazis in some ways. The difference is Germany knows their dark history and paid for it.
Japan swept it all under the rug and never paid for or owned up to their war crimes.
In Egypt , sexual harassment is like the air , everywhere. Something every woman must live with.
I don’t know if it’s the same now, but I travelled around Egypt for a few weeks in the late nineties when I was in my early twenties. I had a couple of rather forceful attempts against me (as a man). I learnt to be quite careful using a public toilet.
Here in Colombia we have enough material to have a dedicated post, but for mentioning one….
In 1928, a banana company workers ceased their production and got in protests. They wanted better work conditions because They worked a lot for the crap of payment they got.
The government’s response was send the national army to shoot a place where between 2000 and 4000 people were sleeping or relaxing. Officially 13 people died, but the people there told that number was faked and the death counter was a lot higher
New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the OECD.
New Zealand also has some of the highest rates of bullying (in school and in the workplace). Everyone talks about how nice Kiwis are… but in addition to the ‘macho’ culture (and maybe along with it) there is this big, dark, ugly underbelly of wide spread bullying.
I can imagine that this very much contributes to high suicide rates.
Mongolia wiped nearly 11% of the ENTIRE world population off the face of the planet.
The largest acts of mass killing/genocide in human history.
It literally changed our carbon footprint by an estimated 700 million tonnes of carbon in the atmosphere during the 13th century.
The Dutch once ate their prime minister.
When Johan de Witt – the ‘Grand Pensionary’ (in effect, prime minister) of the Dutch Republic – was killed along with his brother in 1672, there are accounts of some among the mob taking parts of the bodies and eating them.
New Zealand: high rates of child abuse, hidden poverty and a housing crisis on the brink (not enough housing and what there is is extremely expensive to both rent and buy and rapidly rising at a ridiculous rate. It’s also not particularly high quality).
On Toronto’s beaches up to the mid 1950s, it was common to see signs that read “No Dogs or Jews Allowed.”
During WWII, the Swiss National Bank accepted large quantities of gold from the German Reichsbank.
It was payment for Swiss export shipments(weapons, ammunition..).
A large part of this Reichsbank gold had either been looted by the German occupying forces from the stocks of the occupied countries (Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.), or it came from the victims of the Nazi persecution of the Jews [Holocaust].
Canada had a cult leader named Roch Thériault of Ant Hill Kids who did some VERY VERY disturbing things to his followers and the children.
Also the podcast “Cults” had an episode on them but they even left out the worse things they did.
Canada is the biggest producer of asbestos in the world, although using the product is banned in the country.
“In 2009, about 9% of the world’s asbestos production was mined in Canada. In late 2011, Canada’s remaining two asbestos mines, both located in Quebec, halted operations. In September 2012, the Quebec government halted asbestos mining.”
France had concentration camps… in 1936 for Spanish immigrants who fled the Civil War.
They also had concentration camps in Algeria in the 1960’s, and a weird bit of bureaucracy where they didn’t call them camps.
Norway used to suppressed the natives from up north, by separating them from their parents and forcing norwegian culture upon them.
Learning norwegian and how to live like a norwegian.
Bhutan forcibly expelled Hindus in order to create its “happy” paradise.
Yes.. Uncle was working for UN during the whole Bhutanese Refugee situation in Nepal. He said they were kicked out by the country. There is a large Bhutanese refugee community in Baltimore.
From the 1700s up to 1996, Ireland was home to “Magdalene Laundries,” basically labor camps run by the Catholic Church for “Fallen Women” who had sex outside of marriage (a lot of time the women were SA survivors who’d been molested/impregnated by priests or male relatives)
If you’ve ever looked at a country like Liechtenstein on a map and wondered how a country that small can maintain a flourishing economy the answer is that they’re one of the largest offshore banking sites in the world.
Most people only think of the Cayman Islands when it comes to offshore banking but the Cayman Islands aren’t even close to being the only place where rich people stash their money to avoid paying taxes on it. Most of the places that do it are territories and not countries (the Cook Islands, Anguila, Jersey and Guernsey are a few other big offshore banking sites) but Liechtenstein has made it the core of their economy.
I had no idea!
Do you know any other weird facts about these countries that might give people pause?
Share the with us in the comments.
The post Dark Facts About Countries That Most People Love appeared first on UberFacts.
After the crazy year all of us just lived through, I’m really hoping that humanity and society are only headed in an upward trajectory, but I guess you never really know, right?
And that’s why this conversation will be interesting because it’s kind of hard to imagine any of us being nostalgic for a whole lot of anything from right now…
So, what will people be nostalgic for four decades from now?
Here’s what folks on AskReddit had to say.
“Physical media so you don’t have to micropay for every movie you feel like watching.
When the DVDs and Blu-Rays are no longer in the stores, there will be no reason for streaming services to charge a flat rate.”
“So many of the amazing movies made in the 2000s.
Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, many of the Cristopher Nolan movies.
I’m convinced these newer classics will be enjoyed for decades to come.”
“Paper and metal currency.
Virtual money, wire transfers, alternative finance models, blockchain money will be a norm I anticipate.
It is coming faster than we think.”
“The golden days before covid-25 when you just had to wear a mask instead of a full Hazmat suit.”
“Contemporary weather patterns and jet streams.
Lack of maa migration and climate change refugees.
Clean beaches.
Peace in India.”
“Driving.
Cars will be 100% automated and it will be illegal to drive your own car on roadways unless you have a special license, because it will be so dangerous.”
There will be amusement parks where you can drive a car all by yourself.
“Privacy.
Nothing would be private. No one would be able to run away, go rogue. You’ll be traced everywhere by cameras, by sensors, by people.
Enjoy privacy while it lasts.”
“Breathable air.
Swimmable water.
Polar bears and whales.”
“Corporations will look back fondly on the days when they do whatever with little to no consequences, besides financial
Targeted advertisements and content is in it’s infancy now, 20 years from now it will be a grown up. Picture Minority Report, where ads are calling your name as you walk down the street.”
“The days when we could go to huge concerts and walk around without masks.”
“I honestly fell it’ll be V8 vehicles.
I’m not talking about those crazy luxurious ones, but as a German car lover I noticed many of those V8 Benz, BMW, Audi swap out for V6 turbos.
Cars like E92, next gen C63, 2016 and prior RS5.”
“Learning how to drive.
I saw an ad for a self-driving car service that worked kinda like Uber, from what I can tell.
Eventually everyone’s gonna have self-driving cars and learning to do it yourself will probably the present-day equivalent of learning to ride a horse-drawn carriage.”
“Cashiers.
They were already slowly being replaced by self checkouts, and now covid has put a rush on it.”
“Large animals. Rhinos, elephants, orangutans, giraffes.
I have little faith that we won’t destroy the world. Looking at the old onesies from our kids pajamas that we packed in a box showing safari animals will become as extinct as dinosaurs.
But more painful.”
Have you thought about what you might be nostalgic for 40 years from now?
If so, please fill us in in the comments.
We’d love to hear from you!
The post What Will People Be Nostalgic for in 40 Years? Here’s What People Had to Say. appeared first on UberFacts.
There are examples throughout history of people who guessed, knew, or figured something out a long time before anyone.
And in general, they were usually written off as huge kooks.
Most of us have trouble believing in what we can’t see, and it turns out that we’re also a bit mean to the people who don’t – but these 15 people stuck to their guns, no matter who called them nuts.
But it was all good in the end, when they were proved to be right.
Sinead O’Connor
Younger Redditors might not know who she is but she was a singer/songwriter from Ireland who was a staple in the Alternative Music scene during the late 80s and early to mid 90s who had some cross-over hits.
Anyway, at the height of her popularity she was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live after canceling an earlier scheduled spot in protest against the guest host which was some dumba$s standup comic from the 80s called Andrew Dice Clay (As Scott Thompson described him: “it’s as if someone took your grandmother, the one who can’t speak English, and taught her to swear phonetically, gave her a special on HBO and made her a star”).
During her performance she sang an acapella version of Bob Marley’s “War” changing the lyrics to make it about child sexual abuse instead of racism. At the end of the performance she shouted something like “Fight the real enemy” and ripped up a picture of the pope.
In the following weeks people lost their shit and on the next episode of Saturday Night Live they had at least 3 sketches that tore her apart. A few years later the Catholics S^x Abuse Scandal broke internationally.
The ex-husband of my ex-girlfriend . Turns out he wasn’t the crazy one after all. He kept trying to tell me and if I would have listened from the beginning I could have saved 4 years of my life.
About ten years ago there was this stoner who always hung around the shop that I played Magic at. One day, he told me that he didn’t trust Jared from Subway. I said that there was nothing to worry about and that the only thing that Jared did was eat sandwiches. He said that there was something really sinister about Jared, and that he could tell just by looking at him.
Courtney Love and her quip about Weinstein.
It’s still wild to me that people will villainize someone while knowing damn well they are speaking the truth.
That one journalist Gary Webb that uncovered the truth that the CIA aided and abetted Nicaraguan contra rebels in funneling cocaine into inner city communities.
And then he was blackballed and later killed himself.
There is actually a book about Gary Webb, his investigation, and the aftermath called Kill the Messenger by Nick Schou.
The classic example, of course, is Cassandra; in Greek mythology she was cursed to know the future, but for no one to believe her when she told them.
My mom. Turns out being Emo was really just a phase.
Johnny Rotten said in an interview that he knew Jimmy Savile was into all kinds of “seediness”.
People dismissed it as typical Johnny Rotten anti establishment talk (for which he is famous).
As it turned out, he was right.
The people who said the government was spying on its citizens.
The people who discovered prions.
All the other biologists thought they were crazy to suggest one protein could be an infectious agent.
Nope those biologists were wrong and Nobel prizes were awarded.
Corey Feldman.
Dude went on national TV to tell everyone that there was a network of sexual abusers in Hollywood, and that he himself had been abused, and people LAUGHED AT HIM and shunned him.
And then it came out that pretty much everything he was saying was true.
Me. About my (now disowned) cousin.
He kept stealing things from me which my family felt was no big deal. But it escalated. It went from stealing candy, to my things, to cash, and after that I asked them how much longer they would support him and call me “selfish” for “not sharing”. The line was finally crossed when he stole our grandmothers credit cards and her car.
She finally wrote him off.
This was AFTER he had stolen all of her jewelry, including the last present (anniversary ring) my grandfather was ever to give her.
Oh, but he tried to say that our family kicked him out because he’s gay. No. None of us cared about that, it was because he’s a thief.
His “friends” have bailed him out of jail and then dropped him when he steals from them.
But he claims the world is “just unfair” to him.
Now he tells his pity story and milks the “my family disowned me because I’m gay” to everyone he begs from. I learned this when he tried to do it to one of my friends.
The people who were tortured as a part of MK Ultra.
Imagine trying to convince the people around you that the government is trying to make you crazy with mind control, only years later to find out that not only was it true, but you wouldn’t get compensation for it. And you were subject to illegal human experimentation.
Jose Canseco. He revealed that a bunch of baseball players (Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, etc) were doing steroids.
No one believed him for years, until everyone else got caught doing steroids.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee was the only congressperson out of 535 members who voted no on the Authorized Use of Military Force Act after the 9/11 attacks (there were also 12 present/not voting recorded). In her words,
“It was a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the September 11 events—anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation’s long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit. In granting these overly broad powers, the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration. I could not support such a grant of war-making authority to the president; I believe it would put more innocent lives at risk. The president has the constitutional authority to protect the nation from further attack, and he has mobilized the armed forces to do just that. The Congress should have waited for the facts to be presented and then acted with fuller knowledge of the consequences of our action.”
For her vote she received death threats, a damaged political career, she was called insane, a traitor, and a communist. And she was 100% right.
Humanity sure would be a lot better off if we had listened to some of these folks early on, don’t you think?
What’s your favorite example of this phenomenon? Drop some knowledge on us in the comments!
The post These People All Turned Out to Be Right, NOT CRAZY appeared first on UberFacts.
I’ve always thought it was pretty interesting how car companies got their names – and Jerry Seinfeld’s bit on how car models are named is downright hilarious.
Some names are obvious – like Ford, for example, which is named after their founder – while others are a bit more elusive.
If this sort of semi-obscure knowledge is your thing, below are the origin stories behind the names of 11 popular car companies.
Image Credit: Dougw/English Wikipedia
Machinists and brothers, John and Horace Dodge ran a Michigan bicycle company in the 1890s.
They sold that business and began creating transmissions for Oldsmobile in 1902, then a year later, added Ford to their list of clients.
In 1913 they left those lucrative positions to start working on their own car designs, and the rest is obviously history.
Image Credit: Public Domain
Lexus is actually a Toyota brand, and when the company’s ad agency was looking for a name for the luxury division, they decided on Alexis.
It’s evolved into Lexus, and thank goodness – they would have had to compete with Alexa down the road.
Image Credit: Public Domain
Austrian entrepreneur Emil Jellinek had a secret love of racing cars. He drove Daimler cars in races all over Europe, typically using an alias when getting behind the wheel – Mercedes was his daughter’s name.
Three years in, Jellinek agreed to order more than 30 cars from Daimler to continue his passion, but made the condition that they be called Mercedes.
They agreed, and luxury brand was born.
Image Credit: Public Domain
In 1926, Sakichi Toyoda founded Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, a company that made looms and not cars at all.
It was Toyoda’s son, Kiichiro, who started a separate motors division in 1933, and they quickly took off.
In 1936, during a competition designed to get the company a new logo, the winner was a design that included 3 Japanese characters that made up the Toyoda name.
The family gave it some thought, and decided that not only was “Toyota” stronger overall, the fact that it only required 8 brush strokes instead of 9 was considered lucky in their culture.
Image Credit: Public Domain
Volvo is Latin for “I roll,” and was conceived by Swedish ball bearing company SKF in 1915.
Because of the first World War, though, they didn’t start making cars until 1926.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
This is a tad unsavory, because the company was founded in 1937, during the rise of that unfortunate time.
It translates to “The People’s Car Company,” a reflection of the push to encourage German nationalism.
Image Credit: John Lloyd
Henry Leland, a New Yorker, founded the Cadillac Car Company in 1902, and the moniker is a nod to the history of automobiles itself.
Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, was the French explorer who founded Detroit in the early 18th century.
Image Credit: baku13
Like Ford, Honda bears the name of its founder, Soichiro Honda.
He was a mechanic who, in 1946, started Honda Motor Co. Ltd because he wanted to build small motorcycles.
He had a slow start but he didn’t give up, and by the 1960s owned one of the world’s largest bike companies.
In 1963 the made their first automobile, a Honda T360 pickup.
Image Credit: David Wright
Saab is an abbreviation of “Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolag,” which is quite a mouthful for anyone who isn’t Swedish (and maybe people who are).
It means “Swedish Airplane, Limited,” and obviously, the originally manufactured aircraft.
They produced their first automobiles in the 1940s.
Image Credit: Public Domain
David Dunbar Buick was a Scottish immigrant who got his start manufacturing enameled cast-iron bathtubs. He began toying with engines instead in the 1890s, and founded the Buick Manufacturing Company in 1902.
While his designs were fantastic, he had a timeliness issue that made it hard to earn customers. He always needed new investors, and made a bad call that resulted in his losing his company to William C. Durant, the founder of General Motors.
Buick was handed a pink slip at $100,000, and when he died in 1929, he was broke.
Image Credit: Public Domain
Don’t worry, though, because William Durant eventually got his. At least for awhile.
In 1910, his own creditors forced him out of his management role at GM, so he teamed up with Swiss race car driver Louis Chevrolet to found Chevrolet in 1911.
Durant earned enough to take back control of GM, and then in 1918, he acquired Chevy, too. Louis Chevrolet ended up back at Chevy, working as a consultant in his own company.
Some people have all the luck.
Well, color me surprised! I feel so much smarter now, how about you?
Which one of these surprised you the most? Tell us in the comments!
The post Learn About How 11 Famous Car Companies Got Their Names appeared first on UberFacts.
I can attest to the fact that the truth is definitely stranger than fiction. There are some things that have happened in human history that, even if an author could dream them up, no one would ever buy.
Some of them, as these 14 events prove, are completely dark, showing the absolute depravity of humans, corporations, governments, or all of the above – and these are niche enough that even the most avid of history buffs will probably learn a little something!
The Cambodian Genocide. You could have been killed just for wearing glasses, therefore being an intellectual (at least this was the Khmer Rouge logic). The prisoners were tortured so badly that they tried to commit suicide in every possible way, even by using some spoons.
The executions used to be like this: the prisoners were put on a straight line and to the second prisoner was given an object like a shovel or a hammer which he had to use to kill the prisoner in front of him. Then, the same object was given to the third prisoners and the cycle would repeat until there was nobody alive except for the last prisoner on the line, who was then killed by the guards.
Since many medics were killed or sent to work as farmers, the local regime used child medics to conduct experiments on the prisoners: they used teenagers with no knowledge of western medicine to experiment on people without anesthesia. For example, they opened one person’s chest just to see his heart beating. Imho, this s**t is even worse than Unit 731.
The massacre of kalavrita. It is a village is Greece. The Germans entered it and rounded up all the male villagers in a field. They then shot them all with machine guns. After that they got the children and women and put them in the church.
When everyone was inside, they locked the doors and set fire to the church. Around 20 minutes into the burning, a German soldier couldn’t take it anymore and opened the doors. Around half of the people escaped the fire but the rest perished.
The German soldier was shot for this, and if you go to kalavrita today his name is on the memorial. No one was punished for this apart from the leader of the division, who I was told by my grandmother that he died in a gulag. But everyone else got away with it. It is sad that no one knows about this, as things like this happened all over Greece and Russia and Poland.
I only know about this because my Great grandmother was one who escaped in the church. This massacre was in retaliation for the villagers supporting the local resistance force, which had recently killed about 10 nazis.
Madame LaLaurie
Slave owner who tortured her slaves in horrifying ways. Evil sh%t.
“Khuk Khi Kai,” or the “Chicken Poop Prison” in Thailand. Used by French forces to hold political prisoners (rebellious Thai people) in the Chanthaburi region.
The long-standing impacts of this much-feared torture are still felt in the region today – there’s a Thai saying for those who buck authority that roughly translates to “Be careful not to get caught in a chicken poop prison.” I learned about this prison from my parents who learned about it from theirs.
How it worked, was there was a small, 2-story prison. Bottom floor houses the prisoners, and the top floor is basically a huge chicken coop.
The grated floor/ceiling ensures that the chicken poop falls onto the prisoners below.
Apparently, even though the “maximum sentence” in Khuk Khi Kai was around a week, it was one of the most feared punishments there was.
The January 1945 sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. It was a German ship carrying fleeing Germans from the Eastern Front to the West through the Baltic Sea. It was sunk by the Soviet Navy shorty after setting sail.
The total death toll is unknown but estimated at over 9000 since there were so many stowaways. It is the worst maritime disaster ever, several times more than the Titanic.
It didn’t get nearly the press because they were the enemy so who cares, and the Nazi media certainly didn’t report it because they’re at the waning days of a war they’re badly losing so the last thing they need is more hits to their already sinking morale.
Margaret Beaufort – mother of Henry VII (father of Henry VIII
She was married off at age 12 to Edmund (25) who was desperate to get her pregnant as quickly as he could. It was not unusual for members of the aristocracy to marry young. It was slightly more unusual, because of the risk to both mother and child, for them to get pregnant before the age of 14.
Edmund died of plague while Margaret was pregnant, she was widowed and alone and pregnant during war. The birth was a very difficult one and would scar her forever. For a time they believed that she and her unborn child would perish. Not only was she very young but she was also slight of stature and undeveloped for her age so it’s a wonder she even survived childbirth.
It was so difficult for her that she never became pregnant again over the rest of her years, despite remarrying two more times. It is widely believed that she was physically damaged during the childbirth and was unable to conceive again, but it’s also possible she was too traumatized to ever put herself in that situation again.
Either way, Margaret devoted herself to her son, calling him “my dearest and only desired joy in this world.”
Mother and Baby homes here in Ireland. Most Irish people will know about this, but most people from other countries don’t.
Basically, mother and baby homes (or laundries) were places run by nuns where women would be sent if they got pregnant before marriage, and would do all the laundry from people who sent their dirty clothes to the homes until they gave birth.
During childbirth they would be provided with no real medical procedure, anaesthesia etc, and the nuns would often verbally abuse them during the process for being so sinful as to have sex before marriage.
When the baby was born, the umbilical cord was cut and that was the last contact the mother would have with the baby. Ever.
The nuns would only ever rarely let the baby live, and if they did it would be abused by the nuns it’s whole childhood for being the product of sin. But, most of the babies didn’t survive, and you would think, maybe, they would be killed humanely. Nope. Dropped into a septic tank.
They’ve all been shut down now obviously, but they ran until the late 70s I believe. During excavations they would find the remains of around 300 newborn babies for each home.
I apologize if any of this is a little inaccurate, I will gladly correct myself if I’ve gotten something wrong.
Use of the “Judas Cradle” for torture:
The Judas Cradle was a pyramid-shaped seat set up high where the victim would be seated on the pinnacle, while tied.
The pyramid point would penetrate the victim’s anus or vagina and the sheer weight and movement of the person would slowly help it penetrate more.
The torturer would sometimes add weight to the victim’s legs, rock them, or add oil to the pyramid to increase the pain and quicken death.
The Children’s Blizzard. It occurred in January 1888 on an unseasonably warm day. The weather was nice and many school-kids were tricked into not wearing coats or jackets to school, some only in short sleeves.
While the kids were in class, the weather outside changed dramatically from warm and sunny at noon to dark and heavy like a thunderstorm, with heavy winds and visibility at 3 steps by 3 pm.
Children left school to go home and do their chores (this was in Minnesota) and were expected to milk the cows and do whatever else was involved in the family farm. But they got lost in the darkness and snow and the wind and many froze to death in their town, just yards from houses or other sources of refuge.
235 people, mostly children died.
Magdalene asylums, also known as Magdalene laundries.
Places of “reform” for women that didn’t fit the idea of a good upstanding citizen. The most well known ones were in Ireland. The women and girls were abused and mistreated by asylum staff, most of whom were nuns.
Mass graves, selling these women’s children to people in other countries, blocking any parental rights… There’s apparently at least one movie coming out, a lot of stories about it, and so many people sharing stories from their mothers and grandmothers.
Human “experimentation” by Japanese Unit 731 during WWII, committed primarily against innocent Chinese civilians. Nothing I’ve ever heard of in my life, including in fiction, is darker than the horrors committed for years by Unit 731, a military biological and chemical weapons research division of the Japanese Imperial military.
There’s not enough room in a Reddit post to list half of it, but here’s a taste: Dissections of living babies, pregnant women, etc. without anesthesia (also known as a vivisection) usually after they had been deliberately exposed and left to suffer from horrible diseases, chemical and biological weapons, and so on. Freezing limbs off of victims. Horror-movie sadistic surgeries involving cutting off limbs and attaching them to the wrong sides of a victim, or removing organs and connecting the tubes back together without the organs to see what would happen, such as running the esophagus straight to the intestines with no stomach in between.
Not to mention the fact that the victims were routinely raped and tortured for the sake of rape and torture, without even the flimsy excuse of “science” being conducted.
And we’re talking about thousands upon thousands of victims, usually hapless Chinese civilians, political prisoners, POWs, and the homeless, over the course of years in huge facilities with thousands of staff committing these atrocities.
The icing on the cake? General MacArthur and the rest of the US government found out about it when they captured Japan — and they granted Unit 731 immunity for their war crimes so long as they share their findings with America and ONLY America. Many of the former Unit 731 members even went on to have very successful and profitable futures in Japan after the war.
Highland clearances.
Thousands of Scots were forcibly evicted from their homes, many were forcibly exported to Canada, the US or Australia, many who refused were massacred with whole villages of women & children r*ped, many died of starvation on the forced marches or from famine, all so they could farm sheep.
You know Jameson Whiskey?
Well a long time ago in like the 19th one of their family Heirs fed a little girl to cannibals.
Like legit went and bought a little girl in the Congo as a slave and brought her up to a cannibal tribe because he wanted to see them.
Sick f*ck drew pictures of it and s**t as it was happening.
Of course for years the family tried to bury the fact, and the stories and such. Discredit the witnesses. But the crazy bastard was happy to document the whole thing, his only rebuttal incase it reflected badly on him was that “he wanted to see if they would do it”
And his accounts matched up with the evidence witnesses had provided.
I wrote my undergraduate history thesis on human zoos at the 1893 and 1904 world’s fairs. Even people who are vaguely aware this was a thing may not remember that the US government specifically sponsored the “anthropology” department in 1904. It was organized so that fairgoers walked up a hill, and the people on display “evolved” from the most ape-like to the most civilized.
At the bottom of that hill were Pygmies from the Belgian Congo, at least one of whom had been “saved” from the infamous Force Publique when they sold him to a fair recruiter. After the fair, that recruiter took him “home” (to a village that had already been burned by the Belgians.) He begged the recruiter not to leave him there, so the recruiter took him to NYC and gave him to the American Museum of Natural History, who loaned him to the Bronx Zoo, which put him on display in the ape house. His name was Ota Benga, and he got out of the zoo after African-American church groups protested. He tried to build a life in America for over 10 years before he shot himself in 1916.
Farther up that hill were Ainu people from Japan, and a large contingent of Filipinos (the US had recently taken the Philippines as a colony). A few months after the fair closed, one of the Ainu wrote to someone they’d met in St. Louis to report that they’d made it home safely, and explain how they were spending all the money they’d made in tips on new livestock.
Continuing up the hill, there were also Native American people, including Geronimo, who was still being held as a “prisoner of war” by the US army (some 20 years after the Indian Wars were over.) In his memoirs, Geronimo writes about the soldiers taking him on the Ferris Wheel in order to make fun of him, and how he reclaimed the moment by teasing them right back.
Another Indian resident at the fair irked the fair governors by spending her tip money on a baby carriage for her kid. They thought it would be more “authentic” to carry him around on a board, but she liked the labor-saving carriage. She won that argument.
At the top of the hill was a “model Indian School,” of residential school infamy. The teenagers on display there were “proof” of how savages could be civilized into almost-white-passing specimens. The girls’ basketball team from that school competed against other teams that traveled to the fair and the girls were, in effect, world champions. When the fair was over they all got sent back to reservations or shipped off to “good Christian families” (who wanted free labor).
I try to remember these stories because it helps me think about the humanity of the people on display, and always remember not to tolerate systems that could – can – dehumanize people to that degree.
I know I learned a few things, and I am aghast at people, y’all.
If you know a story that would fit onto this list, share it with us in the comments!
The post History Buffs Might Have Even Missed These 14 Dark Moments appeared first on UberFacts.
Most cities have at least a few creepy urban legends.
And thankfully people from all over the world can come to Reddit and share theirs for all the online world to read.
The following 12 people have heard some s**t, and now you can read it!
Let’s take a look!
“In Wichita, there is a bridge, Theorosa’s bridge. There are a few versions of the story, but most of them tell that there once was a woman who had an illegitimate baby, and she threw the baby off the bridge into the water to be rid of it.
Full of grief and regret, she then jumps in after the baby and drowns herself. Supposedly, if you go to the bridge and yell loudly that your are Theorosa’s child or that you have her child, she will appear and drown you in the river.”
“We have the Watchers. The story (that I have heard) is that their daughter was kidnapped and murdered decades ago and the family completely snapped. They boarded up their windows and installed CCTV stuff and now they watch not just their yard but their whole street 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If they think someone is suspicious they will run out of the house with a weapon and attack.
The Watchers are completely legit, it’s pretty much a rite of passage in my area and they DO come running out after you. I’ve done it twice, both times in a car, and once they came out running with a bat and another time they came out with a knife. No idea what really compels them, especially since this has (supposedly) been going on since the 70s or 80s, but it’s real.
It isn’t a rural area, either- it’s just a house on a normal California street. I know their (new) next door neighbors, too. Nobody knows what their deal is.”
“Shades of Death Road is actually located about five minutes outside of my town. A lot of people get really into it and insist that they see ghost on the side of the road.
I remember my teacher telling me it was a really old road and people used to hide behind the trees on the side of the road and murderer them and have an old fashion GTA. There is also a lake next to the road called Ghost Lake. I love that road and lake. I’ve taken many beautiful drives down that road and have hiked and explored around the lake.
The lake at night can give out a weird vibe, though.”
“In my hometown there is a legend that one of our high schools is haunted by a girl who committed suicide in the school.
There were reports of green like ooze dripping from the ceiling and the hallway supposedly covered in fog everyday. The hallway has been closed on the fourth floor that has been closed off for decades. Some hear a girl sobbing near the hallway, some see her waving at them from the balcony, even some see a girl jump off of the balcony and see her vanish before she hits the ground.”
“There’s a church in a suburb town of Dallas with no real windows, and if you go there at night, there’s always at least 1 car, sometimes 2 parked in the entrance and really spooky choir music audible. The doors are all metal, and the 10″ish square windows in the doors have that shatter-proof wire mesh in them. Keep in mind that this church is not in a terribly bad area. Not great, but not bad.
Rumor is that a woman walked into a nearby convenience store covered in blood, and said that they tried to sacrifice her. No idea if it’s true, but I used to live near the church, and I can confirm the car(s), spooky music, and overbuilt door bits of the story.
Might actually try to go by there after dark and get a video or something. Anyone interested?”
“Where I am from, there is a man known as the Green Man.
He was a normal person who endured a traumatizing accident in his youth. Basically, a freak accident melted his face clean off, and the the locals called this person ‘Charlie No-Face.’
Eventually he died, but legend has it he still haunts a trail by the railroads, which is where he would do his night time walks, away from people that would be too afraid of him during the day.”
“I used to live near Statesboro Georgia for a time, and while my own home town didn’t have its own creepy urban legend, there was a legend about the old abandoned slaughter house on the aptly named ‘Slaughter house Road.’
The slaughter house had been built sometime originally in the 20’s, and worked through the mid 40’s before a fire ran through the place, killing a number of the employees. The legend was that the fire had been started by the owner when he found out that his young bride to be wanted to break off the marriage in favor of her childhood sweetheart. Among the dead reported were the woman, and the presumed sweetheart. The owner himself effectively vanished off the face of the earth after the fire, making the case technically (he’d be long dead now) still open.
The building has long stood abandoned, with no power, phone, nor access to the very top most floor. Yet this hasn’t prevented phone calls to 911 cropping up from there, as well as strange sightings of a woman walking aimlessly along the top floor where the offices were.”
“The little girl in the white dress.
Apparently a father went crazy in the 1950s and tied up & blindfolded his young daughter that was wearing a white dress. He placed her on train tracks and she was decapitated.
There are sightings to this day of a young girl standing right next to the tracks where the roadway is. They always say that it looks like a real human until she turns around and her eyes are completely black with bloody tears running down her face. Then, poof, she’s gone.
Thats how the sightings always go too. Nobody ever sees her from the front first…it’s always from the back, she turns around, people see the face, are horrified, then they see a mist where the ‘girl’ was and she disappears.”
“From rural Alabama…we had the story of Old Man Taylor. Tl;dr Old Man Taylor’s house caught on fire during a Sunday night poker game, everyone ran out, someone went back in for Taylor, saw his head had been cut off or something like that.
Legend is that the wrong man was convicted, so you can see Old Man Taylor’s eyes watching where his house used to be for the actual killer to come back.”
“Randomly, the amount of suicides in my home town will spike from absolutely zero to about 6 or 7 a year. We can go for 20 or so years without a single suicide, then all of a sudden many people take their lives over the course of 12 months.
I first heard about it when my mother was explaining what happened to some of the people she mentioned by name but I had never met. Two of them happened to take their own lives in the same year, as did 4 other people. They are normally in their early or mid twenties, have pretty normal lives, and usually aren’t connected much in anyway, so it’s not like these are suicide packs.
It’s creepy as hell because this is a small rural town in the highlands of Scotland. The population never really goes over 1,500 people. Most of these people also took their lives in a local forest by hanging themselves.”
“I live in Princeton right now but I’m from a suburb of Seattle but I always say I’m from Seattle because people don’t know where federal way/Tacoma/auburn/Renton is.
So the story goes that if you go Federal Way, on foot or bike at night, and then to Tacoma (doesn’t matter exactly where) you’ll began to notice little things start to get weird. Usually you’ll feel as if you’re just stuck in the same 500ft stretch of land that just repeats over and over again forever. Then paranoia and the last thing would be some things chasing you on foot, shadow figures.
I thought it was stupid when I heard it in the 7th grade until I tried it, except in a car years later. I noticed a few shadowy figures out of the corner of my eye looking at me, at that point I peeled out and drove to my girlfriends in downtown Seattle and said some bullshit about wanting to see her.
Would never try it again. I had an intense paranoia that I couldn’t get rid of. Like night terrors that I felt for days at a time.”
“I live in Southern California, and about half an hour east of the cities in the foothills. It’s very rural with lots of steep rocky hills and dry brush.
The blue people are a cult that live in the deep foothills. They never come out during the day, so their skin is super pale and tinted blue. They will leave a person laying on the rd out in the rural areas, and when a car stops to help them, they’ll surround the car and the person and the vehicle are never seen again.
I once got lost with very little gas out in the foothills at night and this story freaked me out so much I had to keep convincing myself it was just a story.”
Wait… the BLUE PEOPLE?!? What in the actual f**k?
Okay, I’m not sleeping tonight. Thanks Reddit!!!
Which of these really freaked you out? Let us know in the comments!
The post Creepy Urban Legends You Should Read With the Lights On appeared first on UberFacts.
So, let’s have some real talk… this one hit me right in the feels because I am very much a 90s kid and I remember ALL of these.
Remember Blockbuster? Remember Nokia phones? Remember ALL THE GREAT THINGS!?!
Here are fifteen things you unwittingly did for the last time and never even thought twice about.
I legit still miss those Nokias.
Image Credit: Buzzfeed
The only time I watched the news as a kid.
Image Credit: Buzzfeed
Man… we actually had to be in front of the TV at a certain time!
Image Credit: Buzzfeed
This was oddly satisfying.
Image Credit: Buzzfeed
You gotta make sure ya got your tunes!
Image Credit: Buzzfeed
Pour one out for our physical media…
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I mean… this is going to happen to anybody… so I consider this emotional blackmail!
Image Credit: Buzzfeed
You all doing okay?
Image Credit: Buzzfeed
I am so gutted by this.
Image Credit: Buzzfeed
I remember the day these left and it was a bad day.
Image Credit: Buzzfeed
Do people even have these anymore?
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Ahhhh…. the memories…
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I REALLY miss this.
Image Credit: Buzzfeed
My grandmother still does this, though, so…
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Did you all really think this was gonna last? Borrowing? HAHAHAHAHA… you f**king people…
Image Credit: Buzzfeed
How many of these did you do back in the day? Oh, all of them? Of course you did!
Share some bit of nostalgia in the comments. We love to read that stuff.
Thanks, fam!
The post Things That 1990’s Kids Remember Doing at One Point and Never Again appeared first on UberFacts.
There’s a good chance your family has some kind of tradition when it comes to the movies you watch during the holidays. It might be children’s classics, like Charlie Brown or How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
It might be modern favorites like Christmas Vacation or A Christmas Story, or maybe you just love marathoning every Hallmark Christmas movie they can throw at you in the span of two months.
If you’re like my family, you enjoy mixing in an oldie or two, like White Christmas, Holiday Inn, Meet Me in St. Louis, and yes, It’s a Wonderful Life.
Image Credit: Republic Pictures
The story of George Bailey’s descent into despair and subsequent triumph over the certainty that everyone would be better off without him has become a tradition for many, and I don’t know about you, but that heartwarming ending gets me every single time.
It’s a little surprising to learn, then, that audiences originally panned the film so hard that it was considered a complete box office flop – this despite Academy Award magnet Frank Capra at the helm and America’s beloved everyman, James Stewart, in the starring role.
None of that mattered to audiences in 1946, and the flop was so bad that it killed Liberty Films, Capra’s production company.
Image Credit: Republic Pictures
Frank Capra had made a name for himself in the 1930s with hits like It Happened One Night and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He took a break during the war to produce propaganda films for the government, but in 1946 he was ready to jump back into producing films about the thing he loved most – freedom.
Liberty Films was born, and they decided their first film would be an adaptation of a short story titled The Greatest Gift (alternate title: The Man Who Was Never Born).
It was, of course, It’s a Wonderful Life, and with a $2 million budget, it was a huge risk.
The production process was fraught with drama. There were script rewrites, a bloated shooting schedule, and they have trouble keeping crew, all of which meant most of the budget was gone before filming even wrapped.
Image Credit: Republic Pictures
It’s a Wonderful Life released just after The Best Years of Our Lives, and it soon became clear that audiences and critics alike preferred the hard-hitting drama of the latter to the message of hope and the worth of simple values espoused by Capra and Co.
The Best Years of Our Lives won awards, it won the box office, and everyone forgot It’s a Wonderful Life ever existed. Capra sold his Liberty Films to Paramount and he only directed 5 more films in his career (none of which achieved what his pre-war movies did).
In 1974, though, a clerical error resurrected It’s a Wonderful Life from certain death on a dusty shelf.
The woman who owned the film’s copyright forgot to file for a renewal, and the movie entered public domain. Any television station could air the movie as often as they liked without paying a cent – and as you may have realized, networks aren’t shy about roping in viewers with – to quote Mr. Potter – “sentimental hogwash.”
People who were experiencing life after WWII wanted nothing to do with the sweet nostalgia of the film, but it turns out that audiences 30 years later had a strange sort of yearning for those days.
Image Credit: Republic Pictures
The Wall Street Journal spoke with Capra about the film’s revival after it was clear it was going to stick.
“It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.
The film has a life of its own now and I can look at it like I had nothing to do with it.
I’m like a parent whose kid grows up to be president.
I’m proud…but it’s the kid who did the work. I didn’t even think of it as a Christmas story when I first ran across it. I just liked the idea.”
In 1993, the Supreme Court ruled that Republic Pictures, the film’s original copyright owner, could regain ownership of the movie. What that means is that now NBC is the only one who is allowed to show it, and they manage to show some restraint – they typically air it once or twice during the holidays.
So, there you have it. Proof that you really never can predict success, and there are no bad stories – sometimes you just have to wait 30 or so years to find the right audience.
The post This is Why “It’s A Wonderful Life” Flopped at the Box Office, and How It Ended Up a Holiday Classic appeared first on UberFacts.
Do you want to know ALL the info there is out there?
Well, that’s impossible, but today we’ve got 14 crazy facts to wrap your head around.
Let’s take a look!
It took humanity approximately 4 times longer to switch from copper swords to steel swords than it took to switch from steel swords to nuclear bombs.
There are more chickens in America than people on the planet.
To be in the top 1% of Americans in terms of income, you need to rake in about $400,000 a year.
Round it off to $1,000 a day.
The Titanic had two sister ships, the Britannic and the Olympic. There was a woman called Violet Jessop, a nurse and a cruise liner stewardess that worked on all three.
The Olympic crashed into a warship whilst leaving harbor but was able to make it back.
She was on the Titanic as it sank and is referenced in the Titanic film, a stewardess that was told to set an example to the non english speaking passengers as the ship sank. She looked after a baby on lifeboat 16 until being rescued by the Carpathia the next day.
It’s not known what exactly caused the sinking of the Britannic but the lifeboats hit the water too early. As the ship sank, the rear listed up and a number of the lifeboats were sucked into the propellers. Violet had to jump out of the lifeboat she was in and sustained a serious head injury, but survived.
She was on board for all three incidents in the space of 5 years.
She went back to continue to work at sea for another thirty years before retiring in 1950. She died of Heart failure in 71.
If the sun were scaled down to the size of a white blood cell, the Milky Way galaxy would be the size of the continental United States.
The vastness of space is mind boggling.
The US dropped 26,172 bombs [in 2016].
That’s almost 72 per day.
That’s about 3 bombs an hour. Every hour. For the entire year.
In 2017, the US had already dropped more bombs than that by September.
Macaulay Culkin is now older than Catherine O’Hara was when she played his mom in Home Alone.
France was still using the guillotine when the first Star Wars film came out.
Next to the US army, Disney world is the largest buyer and importer of explosives in the USA.
The first electric car was invented at the end of the nineteenth century and it went 65 mph.
China used more concrete in 3 years than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century.
The Moon orbits us from the west to the east, but we see it move across the sky east to west because of the rate of the Earths rotation.
Our observation is like being in a faster car watching a slower car (heading in the same absolute direction) fall further and further behind us.
There are more tigers privately owned in Texas than tigers in the wild.
The US navy has the second largest air force in the world.
Mind blowing, right? Who would have thought that a nurse could be THAT unlucky. Wow!
Have a fact that you’d like to share with us? Do that in the comments!
Thanks, fam!
The post People Share “Let That Sink In” Facts That Are Hard to Believe appeared first on UberFacts.
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