Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Address to joint session of the US Congress on December 8

The American mass murderer named Richard Benjamin Speck was born on December 6, 1941 in Kirkwood, Illinois the seventh of eight children. He was from a broken home whereby his beloved father died when he was six and his stepfather abused him unmercifully.

He died on December 5, 1991 in Joliet at age 49 after getting over on the criminal justice system for most of his life. He is known for killing eight female nursing students in a Chicago town house in 1966. He went largely unpunished dying of lifestyle disease instead of the electrocution he so richly deserved.

Prior to his life sentence incarceration he was arrested numerous times for things like check fraud, murder, rape, and yet he was set loose upon the earth beyond all of that to commit more acts of murder and mayhem.

He was sentenced to death in the electric chair. Then the libtard Supreme Court declared capital punishment unconstitutional in 1972. This commuted his sentence to eight consecutive terms of 50 to 150 years.

He was denied parole a number of times and died of a heart attack at age 49 after a life of homosexual debauchery and drugs in prison — some of which was filmed at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois and shown on broadcast television under the auspices of journalist Bill Kurtis.

It makes me wonder just how someone like this may slip through the cracks and actually enjoy his incarceration while those families who remain of his victims receive nothing in the way of justice. If anyone is truly in Hell as punishment for misdeeds in life it is surely this man.

Burn in hell.
 

Gloria Davy, Patricia Matusek, Nina Jo Schmale, Pamela Wilkening, Suzanne Farris, Mary Ann Jordan, Merlita Gargullo, and Valentina Pasion were murdered by Richard Speck with a knife.

When the AIDS epidemic began I was working in the medical field. I migrated from the Emergency Room to a wholistic clinic on the West coast where indeed, those ravages were much more evident and the procedures and requirements of work increasingly stringent.

One of those ideas batted around which stayed with me over the years was the notion that the epidemic had struck down a disproportionately large number from the arts community. In LA this was much more of a tragedy because a lot of persons living there worked in the arts ... as well as frequenting bath houses and engaging in anonymous unprotected sex.

Thus began the impetus of Day Without Art in 1989 under the auspices of one Robert Atkins who was a writer and art critic as well as three curators named Gary Garrels, Thomas Sokolowski, and William Olander. It is observed each December 1 which appropriately coincides with World AIDS Day.

The day is one of remembrance and mourning with closed places of business, dimmed lights, shrouded works of art and posters about AIDS, screening of documentary films, and memorials to those lost from 'the plague'.

I used to joke and laugh about the AIDS epidemic. Then I found myself thrust within it at witnessed it's victims first hand. It is less a humorous idea these days and more a sad notion in my mind.

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