Rick Pettit

🎾❤️👍Sex work decrim👍 Pro-choice👍Ka’u❤️🚫TERFs/SWERFS 🚫MAGA🚫NSFW - he/him - ENFJ

[Rick Pettit @Section322RowX]

Sex Work Decrim👍
Cannabis Decrim👍
LGBTQ+ community👍
Ka’u, Vermont, 🎾, animals, cigars & women who smoke them❤️
TERFs & SWERFs🖕🚫
Trump & MAGA🖕🚫
Racists, misogynists, Nazis, Zionists, Christian nationalists🖕🚫
Genocide enablers🤦🏼‍♂️🖕
ICE🪦

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

On the afternoon of March 14, 2026, at exactly 5:42 p.m., Shigeaki Mori died in a hospital in Hiroshima, Japan. He was eighty-eight years old. To most people, he was known as a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. But the work that would define his life began decades after he survived the blast. For nearly forty years, working quietly on evenings and weekends, he devoted himself to a single mission: identifying twelve American prisoners of war who had been killed in Hiroshima by their own country's atomic bomb.

Neither the United States government nor the Japanese government had completed that task. More than seventy years after the bombing, the families of those twelve men still did not know exactly where their sons, brothers, and loved ones had died. Officially, they were listed as missing in action, presumed dead. The details had never been fully explained.

Shigeaki Mori changed that.

He was born on March 29, 1937, in Hiroshima. On the morning of August 6, 1945, he was only eight years old. He was standing on a bridge crossing one of the city's rivers when the atomic bomb, known as Little Boy, exploded high above Hiroshima. The hypocenter was roughly two and a half kilometers away.

The blast hurled him from the bridge and into the river below.

When he climbed out of the water, the city he knew was disappearing around him. Years later, he recalled seeing a badly injured woman stumble toward him, asking where she could find a hospital. There were no hospitals left to find. There was no help to offer. He was a frightened child standing in the middle of a catastrophe beyond comprehension.

He ran.

By the end of that year, an estimated 140,000 people had died from the immediate effects of the bombing and the radiation that followed. Mori survived.

Life moved forward. He attended university, graduated from Chuo University, and entered the workforce. He worked ordinary jobs, first at a brokerage firm and later for a piano manufacturer. For most of his adult life, he was not a professional historian, researcher, or academic. He was simply a man with a full-time job.

Then, sometime in the mid-1970s, a local researcher showed him a document discovered in a Japanese government archive.

The document listed twelve American airmen.

Their aircraft had been shot down over Japan in the final weeks of the war. They had been captured and transferred to Hiroshima, where they were held at the Chugoku Military Police Headquarters. The building stood only a few hundred meters from where the atomic bomb would explode.

When Little Boy detonated on August 6, 1945, all twelve men were killed.

Mori was stunned.

The more he investigated, the more troubling the story became. The families of those men had never been told what had happened. They had received the standard wartime notices informing them that their loved ones were missing in action and presumed dead. But they had not been told where the men were being held. They had not been told how they died. And they had certainly never been told that the bomb which killed them had been dropped by their own nation.

For many people, the discovery might have remained an interesting historical footnote.

For Mori, it became a life's work.

He began collecting records from both sides of the Pacific. He examined Japanese military police documents, prisoner records, transfer reports, and eyewitness accounts. He searched through American military archives, missing-person reports, squadron records, and combat documentation. The work required navigating two languages, two bureaucracies, and countless gaps in the historical record.

He did it all while maintaining his regular employment.

Night after night. Weekend after weekend.

Years became decades.

Slowly, the puzzle came together.

One by one, he identified the men. He reconstructed their final journeys. He learned when they had been captured, where they had been taken, and how they had ended up in Hiroshima. He gathered personal information about their lives and military service. Then he began reaching out to surviving relatives.

His letters arrived in homes across the United States.

For some families, more than seventy years had passed since the war. Generations had grown up without knowing the truth. Then, unexpectedly, a letter from a Japanese man arrived, explaining what had happened to a father, uncle, or brother whose fate had remained uncertain for decades.

Mori was often writing in imperfect English. The language barriers were real. But the message was clear.

Your loved one has not been forgotten.

In 2008, he published his findings in a book titled The Secret of the American POWs Killed by the Atomic Bomb. The work received widespread recognition and earned the prestigious Kikuchi Kan Prize, one of Japan's major cultural honors. Eventually, the book was translated into English, bringing the story to a wider audience.

More importantly, his research forced long-overdue acknowledgment.

For decades, the deaths of the twelve American servicemen had remained largely absent from public discussion. Mori's painstaking documentation changed that. His work contributed to the eventual recognition of all twelve men by the United States government.

The most visible moment came on May 27, 2016.

That day, President Barack Obama became the first sitting American president to visit Hiroshima. Standing at the Peace Memorial Park, Obama spoke about the victims of the bombing. In his remarks, he specifically acknowledged a dozen Americans who had been held prisoner when the bomb exploded.

It was a brief reference.

But it mattered.

Shigeaki Mori was standing there when it happened.

After the speech, Obama greeted survivors and guests. When he reached Mori, he embraced him. Cameras captured the moment. The image traveled around the world.

For many observers, it was simply a photograph.

For Mori, it represented four decades of work finally receiving public recognition.

Two years later, at the age of eighty-one, he traveled to the United States for the first time. He attended memorial ceremonies honoring the twelve airmen whose stories he had uncovered. He spoke at Columbia University. He delivered remarks at the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs. The quiet office worker from Hiroshima had become an international voice for historical truth and reconciliation.

Yet he never described his work in political terms.

He explained it much more simply.

"The research I spent more than forty years on was not about people from the enemy country," he said. "It was about human beings."

That sentence may be the most important part of his story.

The remarkable reality is that the identification of the twelve American prisoners killed in Hiroshima was not completed by a government agency, a military commission, or a university research team. It was completed by one man. A survivor of the atomic bombing. A Japanese citizen. An amateur historian with a full-time job.

He spent decades searching archives that others had overlooked. He connected records that others had never connected. He wrote the letters. He found the families. He told them the truth.

He lived long enough to watch a sitting American president publicly acknowledge those twelve men on Japanese soil.

And when he died in Hiroshima in March 2026, the names of those American servicemen remained preserved in the historical record because he refused to let them disappear.

History remembers the twelve men because Shigeaki Mori made sure someone did

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature.”

— Hubert Reeves

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

In the USA in 1943 they produced a film 'Don't be a Sucker' about fascism.

It perfectly explains Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the entire Right.

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

In Samuel L Jackson's voice "Lets tax these motherfucking trillionaires."

[chiky handler @chiky_handlr]

I love that a Black woman is responsible for this. 😂
Shout out to @RepBeatty for filing the lawsuit to get Trump‘s name removed from the Kennedy Center

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

Juneteenth Celebration idea.
It's an idea.
Ideas are bulletproof.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Ask your buddies. Don't act like you haven't hung out with them for decades.

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

The idea that glyphosate “causes cancer” took off after a hazard classification from in 2015, while regulatory agencies concluded it is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk at real-world exposure levels.

And here we are a decade later, still re-litigating the same selective interpretation.

Such a tiresome waste of time.

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

The UFC press conference was postponed due to rain and lightening. Thank you Jesus. 😂🤣👇

[Canada Hates Trump @AntiTrumpCanada]

They wore red hats for him.
They wore ear bandages for him.
They wore diapers for him.
They wore garbage bags for him.

Now they cheer wars, shrug at high gas prices, call inflation “freedom” and are totally cool with pedophilia.

MAGA are the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet.

[Vanessa shaw @VanessaSha8677]

Happy weekend

[Desiree Alliance @DesireeAlliance]

LOL

[Rick Pettit @Section322RowX]

https://t.co/svpetDtJ0w

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

It’s my birthday! Which means red dresses and car selfies and coconut rum with diet Dr Pepper in your Stanleys on the way to the graduation party!

[LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 @LongTimeHistory]

ICE tackle U.S. citizen—shoot him with taser after already pinned to ground.

4 agents hold the man face down—while 5th agent tazed him in the back.

Another agent points a weapon at a witness.

"Don't point that at me again," man says.

"I don't feel safe," agent yells back. "It's whatever I say—Get back!"

The man detained was a community volunteer with VC Defensa.

Incident occurred in an area open to the public at the Ventura County Government Center in Ventura, California.

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

Your money — whether it’s a 401K, a pension, or a college endowment — is now tied up in Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Guess who will be stuck holding the bag when the rocket crashes?

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

It's not the vaccines themselves that I support..it's the way they stop people dying from horrible diseases

That's the bit I like.