In the name of scientific advancement, clinical education and fiscal expediency, the bodies of the destitute in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have been routinely collected from hospital beds, nursing homes and homeless encampments and used for training or research without their consent — and often without the approval of any survivors, an NBC News investigation found.
…
Last year, NBC News revealed in its “Lost Rites” investigation that coroners and medical examiners in Mississippi and nationally had repeatedly failed to notify families of their loved ones’ deaths before burying them in pauper’s graveyards. That investigation led reporters to North Texas, where officials had come to view the unclaimed dead not as a costly burden, but as a free resource.
Before its sudden shuttering last week, the Health Science Center’s body business flourished.
On paper, the arrangements with Dallas and Tarrant counties offered a pragmatic solution to an expensive problem: Local medical examiners and coroners nationwide bear the considerable costs of burying or cremating tens of thousands of unclaimed bodies each year. Disproportionately Black, male, mentally ill and homeless, these are individuals whose family members often cannot be easily reached, or whose relatives cannot or will not pay for cremation or burial.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center used some of these bodies to teach medical students. Others, like Honey’s, were parceled out to for-profit medical training and technology companies — including industry giants like Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific and Medtronic — that rely on human remains to develop products and teach doctors how to use them. The Health Science Center advertised the bodies as being of “the highest quality found anywhere in the U.S.”
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A half-century ago, it was common for U.S. medical schools to use unclaimed bodies, and doing so remains legal in most of the country, including Texas. Many programs have halted the practice in recent years, though, and some states, including Hawaii, Minnesota and Vermont, have flatly prohibited it — part of an evolution of medical ethics that has called on anatomists to treat human specimens with the same dignity shown to living patients.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center charged in the opposite direction.
Through public records requests, NBC News obtained thousands of pages of government records and data documenting the acquisition, dissection and distribution of unclaimed bodies by the center over a five-year period.
An analysis of the material reveals repeated failures by death investigators in Dallas and Tarrant counties — and by the center — to contact family members who were reachable before declaring a body unclaimed. Reporters examined dozens of cases and identified 12 in which families learned weeks, months or years later that a relative had been provided to the medical school, leaving many survivors angry and traumatized.
Five of those families found out what happened from NBC News. Reporters used public records databases, ancestry websites and social media searches to locate and reach them within just a few days, even though county and center officials said they had been unable to find any survivors.
In one case, a man learned of his stepmother’s death and transfer to the center after a real estate agent called about selling her house. In another, Dallas County marked a man’s body as unclaimed and gave it to the Health Science Center, even as his loved ones filed a missing person report and actively searched for him.
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“What they’re doing is uncomfortably close to grave-robbing,” [Bioethicist Eli Shupe] said.
Shupe was alluding to the dark history, long before voluntary body-donation programs, when U.S. medical schools turned to “resurrectionists,” or “body snatchers,” who dug up the graves of poor and formerly enslaved people. To curb this ghastly 19th-century practice, states adopted laws giving schools authority to use unclaimed bodies for student training and experiments.
Many of those laws remain on the books, but the medical community has largely moved beyond them. Last year, the American Association for Anatomy released guidelines for human body donation stating that “programs should not accept unclaimed or unidentified individuals into their programs as a matter of justice.”
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After publishing a newspaper essay criticizing the practice, she brought her concerns directly to the Tarrant County Commissioners Court at a meeting last year, asking officials to consider the message being sent to marginalized residents and people of color.
“How does it look,” she said, “when a Black body is dissected with nobody’s permission at all, simply because they died poor?”
It is absolutely equivalent to grave robbing. As bad as grave robbing. Just without the "middleman" bit of burying them first, because they want to dodge the expense, that's the point.
It's especially disgusting because these people would overwhelmingly have been disadvantaged in terms of getting health care while they were alive. To then be used as a teaching aid and have the very effects of that lack of care turned into an educational opportunity for a profession that, itself, is rife with discrimination against the poor, POC, the unhoused, the unhealthy, the disabled, the mentally ill, those with substance use problems, perpetuating the cycle that might have failed the person in the first place and contributed to their demise.... Yeah. Also, a lot of people are victims of medical abuse and probably would be upset, like me, at the idea of this happening to them. I'm already a walking crime scene, ffs, don't make that worse.
Also, this? If I wanted to donate my body for education or research (I don't and my paperwork reflects this) this would make me reluctant because even though I might be willing, I wouldn't want to have anything to do with a place that does this, even if I were dead. I literally would not be caught dead supporting them.
And while *I* know how the organ donation process works for transplants and am not worried about coming to harm because I am a donor (please please learn about it and become a donor, please), a lot of people don't trust the process and are misinformed, and you can't tell me this sort of shit is not going to affect those fears. It's the same sort of callousness.
It also gives HUGE motive for those same companies to lobby *against* social assistance programs.
If it's more expensive to ethically source voluntarily donated remains than it is to buy a congressman who can shut down mental health access and homeless shelters so they can scoop up society's most vulnerable as they fall by the wayside, I don't think we'd be surprised to see things go that way.
Protectibe the sanctity of human bodies isn't *just* a matter of practicality and efficiency. It's also a foundational step in ensuring the sanctity of the *living*.
Perhaps they ought not to have eaten the dragon. There had been people objecting to it at the time. Surely such meat was poisonous. Perhaps it was even an affront, an insult to some intangible order of nature they ought to honour.
But the city was starving, the siege had gone on too long, and the king's troops were still a week's march away. The scorched earth would be fertile again in time, but right now it was barren. Right now there were mouths to feed. So they changed their crossbows for butcher knives and got to work.
None of the royal commanders asked any questions that could not be answered. After all, their aid had come shamefully late. The dragon's horned skull made a noble gift, a fitting tribute from a triumphant city to its humbled king. Who would have thought to question them?
And none of the townsfolk spoke up, when the first golden-eyed babes were born. Children who grew up barefoot and fearless, clambering over the city's patched and rebuilt roofs like they had no notion of falling, with a strange glitter to their skin when the sunlight hit it just so. No one breathed a word about dragons.
Because soon enough there were deft, young hands taking loaves straight out of the oven, heedlessly lifting iron from the forge, plunging into boiling laundry water. And some of them more wondrous still, wild, warm-skinned youths, with inexplicable knowledge and peculiar remedies.
A blessing, their families said proudly. A blessing after so much hardship. Which it was, in its way. This city would never fear dragon fire again.
We write to inform you that renowned journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul and cameraman Ramy El-Rifi of Al-Jazeera were murdered just a few hours ago by the occupation. They were going out to document the scene of another bombing attack, when they were deliberately targeted by the occupation. Footage provided by journalist Osama Al-Ashi in the immediate aftermath of the attack shows that Ismail and Ramy were murdered with targeted precision weaponry, meaning the occupation watched them, waited for them, and executed them in cold blood (warning: graphic footage).
Ismail and Ramy have been documenting the genocide at immense personal cost since the 7th of October 2023. They were previously kidnapped and tortured by the occupation, but survived and continued to remain in north Gaza and document crimes against humanity. They have had many narrow escapes, and today, the occupation was finally successful in its illegal goal of assassinating these prominent journalists.
When western journalists hand-wave their suppression of the IOF’s atrocities in Gaza by claiming no journalists are “allowed” in to report, remember these men. Remind them of these men. These men who lost friends and loved ones, who suffered immensely, and yet chose to remain and continue documenting the genocide against their people. They join the ranks of more than 150 Gazan journalists who were murdered by the occupation to hide its crimes and retaliate for speaking the truth.
حسبنا الله و نعم الوكيل
أنا لله و أنا اليه رجعون
God suffices us and he is the best disposer of affairs. We belong to God and to Him we shall return.
Keep fighting for Gaza. Don’t stop talking about north Gaza.
Summary: it’s been weeks since Gotham City flooded, and Alfred has returned to Wayne Tower to continue recovering from his injuries. One morning over breakfast, Bruce opens up to Alfred about his feelings after nearly losing the man who raised him for 20 years.
Content: emotional hurt/comfort through the roof, with some mild suicide ideation. This is Battinson canon-compliant, taking place only a few weeks after the end of the movie.
Word count: 1,487
Check the reblogs for a link to read on AO3!
Authors notes at the end.
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“Alfred.”
Alfred looked up at the sound of Bruce’s voice. His young charge stood in the doorframe, his oversized t-shirt dwarfing his frame and bringing to mind the days when a child had refused to sleep in anything other than his father’s old clothes.
“Yes, Master Bruce?”
Bruce hesitated for a moment, then slowly came to join Alfred where he sat at the kitchen table. Alfred wordlessly poured Bruce a cup of coffee from the pot that sat waiting, and Bruce took it, his knuckles white as he gripped the mug.
“I…” he began, then paused, a slight crease forming on his forehead.
His shoulders were hunched, and he didn’t quite meet Alfred’s eyes as he spoke. Alfred was used to seeing Bruce clam up in this way, though it had been some time since he had been on the direct receiving end. Something was clearly bothering him; the question was what could it be?
It had been a stressful few weeks following the attack on the sea walls, but Gotham had reached a tentative equilibrium. Bruce still went on patrol most nights, though he also wore the cowl during the day now, helping civilians with transport, first aid, and evacuation.
Alfred himself had been one of the first evacuated from the city, along with the other patients at the hospital, but had come right back home to Wayne tower where he belonged as soon as he was discharged. He’d had to switch from using a cane to using a wheelchair, but his physical therapist said that it may only be a temporary measure. His daily exercises were already having a positive effect, though who knew if he’d ever be able to spar with Bruce again.
Alfred didn’t speak as all this ran through his mind, he merely gave Bruce the space to gather his thoughts. He’d learned a long time ago that there was no forcing anything out of the boy before he was ready, as much as he still found himself trying on hard days.
“I’m sorry, Alfred,” Bruce finally said, and Alfred blinked.
Of all the potential things that could have come out of Bruce’s mouth, that was one he’d not expected.
“Whatever for, Master Bruce?” he asked, and Bruce grimaced, cringing further in on himself.
“These past few years, I’ve been so…focused. Devoted entirely to this cause, this idea that if I just fight hard enough…” he shook his head. “I let vengeance become the only thing that mattered to me. And I didn’t think…I wasn’t allowing myself to think of anything else.”
His grip tightened on the mug of coffee, and Alfred could hear the lump in his throat when he spoke.
“Or anyone else.”
He looked up then, and as their eyes met, Alfred was shocked to see that Bruce’s were glassy with unshed tears.
“I almost lost you, and I couldn’t…I couldn’t bear that,” he whispered.
The words were like a lance through Alfred’s heart, but he forced himself to smile encouragingly.
“You can’t lose me that easily, Master Bruce,” he said, but Bruce shook his head.
“I couldn’t stand the thought of losing you,” he reiterated. “But I wasn’t thinking about how…how every night, for the past two years, I was forcing you to go through the same thing.”
Alfred had taken more than his fair share of punches over his lifetime. In recent years many of them had been from Bruce himself, as the two trained and sparred together. But if you asked him in that exact moment, he’d be hard pressed to recall a time when the wind had been so completely knocked out of him.
“I didn’t care about what happened to me,” Bruce continued, looking down again. His words came out in a rush, as though now that he’d started speaking, he wasn’t able to stop himself. “Not just my name, or my money, or the company, me. And if I’m honest…I think a part of me still doesn’t. I…I’m not sure I know any other way to be.”
“Bruce…” Alfred said, tears of his own welling in his eyes.
“But that kind of thinking wasn’t fair to you,” Bruce continued. “It shouldn’t have taken…all of this, for me to see just how much I must have worried you. And I’m sorry that I let you down.”
“Oh, Bruce,” Alfred said, leaning forward. “I won’t lie and say I haven’t worried…that I haven’t been scared to death some nights that you wouldn’t come home, that they’d find you bleeding in some alley in the morning. But you haven’t let me down. You’ve stood up every single night and fought for what you believe is right, and so many people owe you their lives. How could I be anything but proud of you?”
Bruce didn’t answer, and Alfred knew from experience that meant that he didn’t quite believe him.
“I am proud of you,” he insisted. Then, pretending he hadn’t noticed Bruce’s hitch of breath, added, “And I know your parents would be too.”
Bruce nodded stiffly, wiping surreptitiously at his eyes, which Alfred also pretended not to notice.
“You were right,” Bruce said softly, once he’d composed himself. “About their legacy. I still believe…” he paused, swallowing. “I have to believe that the Batman can work. But it needs to evolve. It has to stand for something other than vengeance. It has to be capable of bringing hope to people, or all I’ve done is become another monster in the dark. If I really want to save Gotham…if I want to change it, I have to be more than the Batman.”
His voice was hesitant, uncertain, something that Alfred hadn’t seen in the boy in a long time. For years, Bruce had been driven by his single-minded determination that he would personally save the city from itself. He’d been pushing so hard for so long, and never once in all that time had he shown any doubt about the fact that he was doing what needed to be done.
Seeing him now, adrift and unmoored from his sense of purpose, it reminded Alfred of that child from so long ago who had looked up at him with wide, tearful eyes and asked “what do I do now?”
Alfred had done his best, provided what little guidance he could while struggling through his own grief, and not a day went by where he didn’t wonder whether he’d done it right, whether he’d made some horrible mistake. “Don’t be sorry, Alfred,” Bruce had told him back at the hospital. Such easy words to say, yet so hard to really, truly hear.
“I have to be more than the Batman,” Bruce repeated. “But I don’t think I can be. Not alone.”
He finally looked up again, and Alfred found himself looking into those familiar eyes, eyes that held both the past and the future in equal measure. Eyes that looked so much like his father’s.
Alfred wordlessly wheeled his chair around the table and took Bruce’s hands in his. Bruce startled at the touch, but Alfred just tightened his grip.
“One thing you never have to worry about, Master Bruce,” he said firmly, “is being alone.”
Bruce’s tears spilled over his cheeks, and Alfred pulled him forward into a tight embrace. Bruce moved hesitantly at first, placing feather-light arms around him, and Alfred snorted quietly.
“I’m not going to shatter, Bruce. I’m well on my way to recovery.”
Finally, Bruce sank fully into the hug, burying his face in Alfred’s shoulder like he’d done when he was a child. He let out a shuddering breath and Alfred squeezed even tighter, trying to convey everything that they’d failed to say with words over the years through the simple touch.
Later, they would clumsily disentangle from the hug, and Bruce would fret over him as they dried their tears. They would discuss the company, the money, the ways that Bruce Wayne could work alongside the Batman to bring change to the city.
Alfred would eventually help him write and practice a speech that announced the new Wayne Foundation, a charitable organization that Bruce would establish to address the misuse of the Renewal Fund and provide real aid to Gotham and its citizens.
And every night, the Batman would return to the streets, and Alfred would have an emergency comms channel on standby that Bruce could use if he found himself in a situation that he wasn’t able to get out of on his own. It would never completely erase Alfred’s worry, nothing could ever do that. But it gave him one more opportunity to protect the boy who had become a man who fought with his every breath to save the city, just as his father had.
All of that would come later.
For now, as the morning light streamed through the arched windows and signaled a new day, Alfred simply held his child, and hoped that would be enough.
————————
Authors Notes: yeah so I rewatched this movie with @mug-of-beans this weekend and have a lot of feelings about this version of Bruce and Alfred’s relationship. I decided to look for fic that featured their dynamic, but then surprise! AO3 was down, so like a normal person, I coped by just writing my own. Honestly, I had a lot of fun, so if you have any other Battinson stuff you’d like my take on, let me know. Thanks for reading!
When you manage a fabric store in a midwest town, you see this played out in real time. Young women coming in during that first year of marriage - when their husbands go to dental college - pert, bubbling with creative plans. Then, four years on, you help them shift to the reality of balancing budget with creativity - and they learn the value of that inexpensive flatfold table that they used to badmouth - to make that 2nd & 3rd baby their own quilts. And they're exhausted. And they're scared. And they are 1000 miles away from family.
And you have your staff play with their kids while you hold them in the tiny restroom as they come completely undone because they just found out that their golden boy husband is having an affair with the someone he's been doing residency with for the past three years.
He confessed that he'd rather be with the other woman but she's of a different faith and it's more important to have kids than to be happy. And no. No he will not grant her a divorce. And he will not stop seeing the other woman - because he's a man. It's his right.
TRUE story.
Also - She was NOT THE ONLY ONE to fall to pieces in our store for similar reasons.
I loath the ideology of "tradwives". It is a false doctrine preach by Patriarchy not a divine being.
This is 100% what happened to the host mom I've been au-pairing for. And to many other moms my friends have been au-pairing for.
Married out of college, 4 kids, he spent 15 years building up his career while she took care of the house and the kids. When he was earning $600k a year suddenly he started to pull away - she wasn't as pretty anymore, the kids were loud, the house was a mess... She wasn't good enough anymore. He got himself a flat. He got her me and my precedessors to help with the kids. No, they can't divorce, that would make him pay her money for the kids and he didn't like that. Every once in a while a bill would be unpaid. My weekly checks would bounce. We lived in a $1,5mil house around DC and our gas or water was turned off more than once.
Somehow he was always out of money.
By accident she learned from a friend of a friend that he was actually seeing a young lady lawyer for a few years now. It wasn't her, it wasn't lost interest. He was just a piece of shit.
Thankfully, she had family that took no shit and they stood behind her and borrowed her money for lawyers to force the divorce now that she had proof of him cheating. She's spent tens of thousands to get there while he was resisting every step of the way - because without divorce he wouldn't have to pay her alimony, he could just throw scraps whenever he wanted and still pretend to be a good dad.
She's spent tens of thousands and two years to free herself from this man, and when she could finally go to work (thank fuck she finished college) she was earning $25k a year.
She only managed to get away with the support of her parents and family. Through the au-pair grapevine I've known other families like that. Too many. Lady down the street tried to commit suicide when same happened to her - she was from Taiwan and had no support to get free. And people around scorned her for being "dramatic" - women who held on to their places with their fingertips talked shit about her, because their own husbands would never...! Right?
when you're a Tokyo Ghoul fan, just doing your therapy homework and one of the Distraction techniques causes you to vividly recall Kaneki's torture scenes-
There’s like 3 week old kittens in our backyard that we’re trying to socialize so they can get adopted once they’re old enough and today my brother told me that when he picked one up and put it back down next to its family it just started walking the opposite direction away from the other kittens like little dude thought it was really gonna escape like you can’t even walk properly yet where do you think you’re gonna go
I don’t have any pictures of the kittens but I do have pictures of their older brother who follows me around and sometimes meows at me but runs away if I try to get closer to him
why is privacy so eroded. I get treated like a nutcase if I say no, I don't want strange companies taking pictures of my home and putting them online for maps or whatever. I don't want to be in the background of your tiktok, and I think it's weirder for you to assume I'm okay with it than it is for me to politely ask you to refilm it so my face isn't in the frame. I don't enjoy handing my employer a list of every online account I have and feeling under surveillance when I'm just shit posting or sharing pictures of my cats or garden harvest. I don't want to hear your private calls on speaker on the bus, esp when the person on the line doesn't know you're broadcasting their words to strangers. I don't want an algorithm guessing what will piss me off the most so I spend more time online, engaging with shit I don't want to see or hear out of outrage. I don't want any of this. it's total ass.
One of the best stories I ever read as a child was a fantasy novel by some local dude selling books out of a suitcase on the sidewalk downtown, and I don't remember what it was called or who the author was, and it's so obscure that no matter how many elements I remember, I've never been able to find it through web searches. I only vaguely remember the story - it was a love story, something about a tower on an island and two characters on a quest to discover their forgotten past. They fall in love and at the end the only way to stay together is to allow themselves to forget again, and you realize that they're right where they started, in the exact same tower, and they're doomed to go on this same quest over and over again, never completed, but that also means they'll fall in love over and over again forever. And I remember how that ending blew up my little child brain into a million pieces.
I don't know what happened to the book, and I'll probably never read it again, but if you're somewhere out there and you were once selling fantasy novels from a suitcase on the sidewalk in the suburbs of Chicago, and if you ever felt like your writing never meant anything or went anywhere except a hundred copies you had printed yourself and sold for almost nothing, please know that your story buried itself in my young brain and has probably shaped my worldview in ways even I don't understand.
blakekathryn
amandla
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