Mass Casualty Quotes

Weapons of Mass Destruction: Radioactive, Biological, or Chemical weapons capable of causing mass casualties and great destruction. I wonder why humans aren't on the list?

Am I awake or dreaming? It doesn’t matter anymore. When I close my eyes I dream of death and war. When I open my eyes I see death and war.

I don’t have to worry about what I’ll do on any given day because I already know—I work. All decisions are made for me. The only thing I have to worry about is the possibility of dying.

Every addiction story wants a villain. But America has never been able to decide whether addicts are victims or criminals, whether addiction is an illness or a crime. So we relieve the pressure of cognitive dissonance with various provisions of psychic labor - some addicts got pitied, others get blamed - that keep overlapping and evolving to suit our purposes: Alcoholics are tortured geniuses. Drug addicts are deviant zombies. Male drunks are thrilling. Female drunks are bad moms. White addicts get their suffering witnessed. Addicts of color get punished. Celebrity addicts get posh rehab with equine therapy. Poor addicts get hard time. Someone carrying crack gets five years in prison, while someone driving drunk gets a night in jail, even though drunk driving kills more people every year than cocaine. In her seminal account of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, legal scholar Michelle Alexander points out that many of these biases tell a much larger story about 'who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not.' They aren't incidental discrepancies - between black and white addicts, drinkers and drug users - but casualties of our need to vilify some people under the guise of protecting others.

You are going to war! It is no longer a question of if you are going to go, but a question of when. Look around! In a few years, or even a few months, several of you will be dead. Some of you will be severely wounded or so badly mutilated that your own mother can’t stand the sight of you. And for the real unlucky ones, you will come home so emotionally disfigured that you wish you had died over there.

There are things we feel for certain people, and only they make us feel those things. This was one of those. More than a climax. Deeper than love. Indescribable. It drained me.

In their early briefings, Clarke’s office described bin Laden as an “existential” threat to the United States, meaning that the danger he posed went beyond the dozens or hundreds of casualties al Qaeda might inflict in serial bombing attacks. Bin Laden and his followers sought mass American fatalities and would use weapons of mass destruction in American cities if they could, Clarke and officers at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center firmly believed.

Other nights I lie in bed and think about everything and anything, and the only thing I can feel is nothing. I think about the war and I feel nothing. I think about life and death, mine and everyone else’s, and I feel nothing. I think about myself and I don’t care if I live or die. On these nights, mortars go off and I won’t get out of bed. I’ll lie in bed as the bombs go off. I tell myself it doesn’t matter if I live or die, nothing matters—I like it when I feel nothing.

The CIA prepared a briefing paper on July 10 for senior Bush administration officials: “Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that [bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.”24

Soon I’ll no longer have to worry about death; now it’s life I have to worry about. It’s now time for me to be a man, and it’s the scariest thing I’ll ever do. It really scares me. It really scares me that I won’t have what it takes. That’s a scary thought.

My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds. I cannot marry all of them, or bear them all as children, or care for them all as I would my parents in illness or old age. Are not the here, the now, the individual and her relationships the casualties of modern life? The present is passed over in the race for the future, the here is neglected in favor of the there, and the individual is dwarfed by the enormity of the mass. America, which as the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future. It may be our special function to emphasize again these neglected realities, not as a retreat from greater responsibilities, but as a first real step toward a deeper understanding and solution of them. When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.

The 1994 Crime Bill, sponsored by Democratic senator Joe Biden, went even further, calling for more juveniles to be tried as adults, the building of more prisons, an end to the Pell Grants that had allowed inmates to earn college degrees while in prison, a “three strikes” provision mandating a life sentence upon conviction for a third federal crime, and a provision making gang membership a crime in and of itself. When Bill Clinton signed the measure into law, he ensured that the pattern of mass incarceration started by his predecessors would continue well past the end of his presidency.

Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers

Sometimes I go into the hospital and have to do surgery just as the sleeping pills begin to kick in. I spend the rest of the night pinching myself and throwing cold water on my face. At night I tell myself it’s not worth it. I tell myself I hate the Army and wish I’d never joined. I curse the war on both sides, American and Iraqi. I wish everyone would just...die...so that I could go home.

In April 1865, the United States was faced with a discomfiting reality: It had seen 2 percent of its population destroyed because a section of its citizenry would countenance anything to protect, and expand, the right to own other people. The mass bloodletting shocked the senses. At the war’s start, Senator James Chesnut Jr. of South Carolina, believing that casualties would be minimal, claimed he would drink all the blood shed in the coming disturbance. Five years later, 750,000 Americans were dead. But the fact that such carnage had been wreaked for a cause that Ulysses S. Grant called “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse” invited the damnation of history.

For starters, of the four so-called weapons of mass destruction, three are far less massively destructive than good old-fashioned explosives.272 Radiological or “dirty” bombs, which are conventional explosives wrapped in radioactive material (obtained, for example, from medical waste), would yield only minor and short-lived elevations of radiation, comparable to moving to a city at a higher altitude. Chemical weapons, unless they are released in an enclosed space like a subway (where they would still not do as much damage as conventional explosives), dissipate quickly, drift in the wind, and are broken down by sunlight. (Recall that poison gas was responsible for a tiny fraction of the casualties in World War I.) Biological weapons capable of causing epidemics would be prohibitively expensive to develop and deploy, as well as dangerous to the typically bungling amateur labs that would develop them.

After the massacre, the worst domestic terrorist attack since 9/11, General George Casey, army chief of staff, bleated that a “greater tragedy” than the mass murder and maiming would be “if our diversity becomes a casualty.” The administration fraudulently labeled the killings of U.S. troops who were about to deploy to a war zone as “workplace violence,” not international terrorism—a finding that denied Purple Hearts to the soldiers killed and wounded in the attack.

The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the 'conventional' bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb.

The trick of switching words’ meanings is one of the oldest in the book. Just think of “freedom” and “democracy” … Ultimately, it’s a problem of shortsightedness. An addiction to what’s next. People become so obsessed with the future, they make it up. Fabricate the “news.” Invent their own “analysis.” We’ve been doing that for years. It seems only natural that eventually we’d move on to manufacturing words.… But Synchronic didn’t invent accelerated obsolescence. As a nation we’ve been practicing mass production since before World War II. We believed wastefulness would morph, by magic, into wealth. That if we created enough disposable products, it would help fire consumerism. And it did, for a while. But here’s a dirty secret: resources are finite. Waste enough, and eventually it’s all used up. Language, too. You can’t just coin a word, use it once, and toss it out. But language is just the latest casualty. We always think there’s more of everything, even as we deplete it. Not just petroleum or gold, glacial ice or water, bandwidth. Now even our thoughts and memories are disposable.

He was putting together the day’s list, as usual—because, despite another mass-casualty disaster, New Yorkers kept stubbornly dying of regular things.

This magnificent city that I only knew from photographs had been devastated. The infamous submarine bunkers had been bombed, and the bunkers that survived were later dynamited. I could understand this, but why civilian houses had also been leveled and set afire by incendiary bombs was beyond me. Each British Lancaster bomber delivered up to 8,000 pounds of bomb loads each night, with as many as 1,000 bombers over the target on a given night. During these raids, this great port city was set alight like a Roman candle! American B-17 and B 24 bombers also came during the daytime. Operation Gomorrah was conducted day and night causing a howling noise as the Feuersturm firestorm sucked the air out of the city to feed itself. With surface temperatures reaching 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, asphalt streets actually melted, leaving people trapped in the black molten gunk. Winds of 150 miles per hour fanned flames that reached an altitude of over 15,000 feet! I lost an aunt, who was a beautiful young woman in her twenties, along with her husband and baby. Her older sister also perished in the flames. They all now lie buried in a mass gravesite, which I visited in the Ohlsdorf Cemetery. The stories I heard from people who could still talk about them, without totally choking up, were unbelievable. It was said that over 50 miles of street frontage were set ablaze and totally reduced to ashes during the raids, and another 133 miles were severely damaged. An estimated 1,500 people were killed on the first night of the raids and many more were wounded. Those who survived were suddenly homeless and without possessions. The total casualties were estimated at approximately 45,000 people. At the end of it, Hitler refused to come to the city and sent Hermann Göring instead! This was never forgotten or forgiven by das volk, the people. What is it with us? Why do we as human beings have to experience war after war? It seems that we never learn and so perhaps we will have to witness even worse in the future.

In previous campaigns, only the bodies of officers were returned for burial. The rank and file casualties of Waterloo and the Crimea had been interred in mass graves. It was not until the American Civil and Franco-Prussian wars that the concept of military cemeteries for all participants developed.

We are sorely in need of a national reckoning with the soul of our country. We have sold our soul to the belief that the First Amendment covers all forms of hate-speech and fear-mongering that lead to real world tragedies and that the Second Amendment gives every red-blooded American the divine right to acquire military-style weapons that make mass casualties like these commonplace.

Wounded men were being dragged along the deck and down the hatchways to where the horrors of the cockpit awaited them. As Hornblower looked he saw a powder boy flung across the deck, dissolved into a red inhuman mass as a twenty-​four pounder ball hit him. “Ha-​h'm,” said Hornblower, but the sound was drowned in the roar of the quarterdeck carronade beside him.

Ironically, the last aircraft carrier to sink as a result of the Battle of Midway was an American one. By the early afternoon on June 6, there was some optimism about the prospect of saving the Yorktown, as salvage crews had put out the fires and stabilised the vessel using pumps. The Yorktown was also surrounded by 6 protective destroyers as an escort. However, these destroyers failed to detect the Japanese submarine I-168, which crept to within easy torpedo range. In the middle of the afternoon on June 6, the submarine fired four torpedoes, two of which punched through the Yorktown’s hull, causing more extensive flooding. The third hit the destroyer Hammann, sinking the destroyer within three minutes and causing mass casualties. The fourth torpedo missed, and the I168 was chased off by the remaining American destroyers.

Although 2015 was certainly an anomaly, the fact remains that in one year France suffered more mass public shooting casualties—killings and injuries—than the U.S. experienced from the beginning of Obama’s presidency until the end of 2015 (532 to 396).

It’s the biggest cowardice of a man to awaken the love of a woman without the intention of loving her back.

He was wooing the girl. I could tell because his lips were moving. She was also grinning and turning a half dozen shades of red. Her nipples were also hard. Yup. They were gonna be fucking by the end of the night.

Truth be told, if Islam and the Sixth Mass Extinction continue on their path unhindered, chances are worlds will collide with high casualty rates...

I’m expecting mass casualties in 2-3 years from everyone who got the mRNA vaccine, so if they vaccinate/exterminate 60-70% of everyone alive today that will take the global population down nicely…which would also collapse the

Mail boxes were a mass casualty event in hurricane Ian.

Another important lesson from the time was that mass self-deception is simply a sedative prescribed by leaders who cannot face reality themselves. And as the Spanish Civil War proved, the first casualty of war is not truth, but its source: the conscience and integrity of the individual.

our data on 133 completed and attempted school mass shootings over the past forty years show that there were no differences in the number of people killed or injured between schools that regularly ran lockdown drills and those that didn’t. The number of casualties in school mass shootings has remained relatively steady over the past forty years, while our attempts at security have become more time-consuming, costly, and elaborate. In fact, evidence suggests that active shooter drills may do more harm than good.

Ukraine war = Evil.

Truth and authenticity are easy casualties before the power of the lens.

War seemed to be a must for every generation. A pageant to fortify the tribal spirit. A columnist plumped for bloodless war through the space race. Henry sympathized with the man, but it could never work. Mere abstraction. People needed casualty lists, territory footage won and lost, bounded sets with strategies and payoff functions, supply and communication routes disrupted or restored, tonnage totals, and deaths, downed planes, and prisoners socked away like a hoard of calculable runs scored. Besides, war was available to everybody, the space race to few: war was a kind of whorehouse for mass release of moonlust. Lunacy: anyway, he sure wasn't inventing it.

The insurrection was meant not as a mass casualty attack, but as a show of force, to prove that a band of white self-proclaimed “patriots” could strike at the heart of democracy. As we untangle the relationships between groups and activists, between lawmakers and police who aided and abetted their cause, and between competing narratives of the event, our only hope of confronting this threat to the idea of America is in better understanding our history.

On January 6, when the insurrectionists constructed a gallows and noose outside of the Capitol, they referred directly to a scene in The Turner Diaries; the entire action referenced a strike on the Capitol in that novel. This indicates that January 6 was not meant as a mass-casualty event but a recruitment and radicalization exercise to draw others into the fold. Certainly this happened immediately after the rally, as white power activists and others on the militant Right reached into the Trump base and QAnon groups in intensified recruitment campaigns.

One of Col. John Boyd’s most important insights we need to make a greater effort to understand is, “Machines don’t fight wars, people do and they use their minds.” How this applies to law enforcement is to understand what technologies, processes, policies and procedures work on the street, one must first understand how people think and act in the uncertainty, fear and chaos of dynamic encounters and what creates friction in decision making as a cop interacts with a suspect bent on getting his way or in a crisis situation such as a multiple car accident with mass casualties, a blizzard, hurricane, tornado, or fire etc.2

victim-resolved incidents result in far fewer fatalities than shooter-resolved incidents. Additionally, police-resolved shootings produce more casualties than victim-resolved shootings.

When that grenade blew me over the cliff, it probably should have killed me, but the only new injury I had sustained was a broken nose, which I got when I hit the deck semiconscious. To be honest, it hurt like hell, along with my back, and I was bleeding all over my gear. However, I had not been seriously shot, as two of my team had. Axe was holding the tribesmen off, leaning calmly on a rock, firing up the hill, the very picture of an elite warrior in combat. No panic, rock steady, firing accurately, conserving his ammunition, missing nothing. I was close to him in a similar stance, and we were both hitting them pretty good. One guy suddenly jumped up from nowhere a little above us, and I shot him dead, about thirty yards range. But we were trapped again. There were still around eighty of these maniacs coming down at us, and that’s a heck of a lot of enemies. I’m not sure what their casualty rate was, because both Mikey and I estimated Sharmak had thrown 140 men minimum into this fight. Whatever, they were still there, and I was not sure how long Danny could keep going. Mikey worked his way alongside me and said with vintage Murphy humor, “Man, this really sucks.” I turned to face him and told him, “We’re gonna fucking die out here — if we’re not careful.” “I know,” he replied. And the battle raged on. The massed, wild gunfire of a very determined enemy against our more accurate, better-trained response, superior concentration, and war-fighting know-how. Once more, hundreds of bullets were ricocheting around our rocky surroundings. And once more, the Taliban went to the grenades, blasting the terrain around us to pieces. Jammed between rocks, we kept firing, but Danny was in all kinds of trouble, and I was afraid he might lose consciousness.