All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian spiritual teacher, born on May 22, 1895 Freedom from the Known

Oh yeah? Says who?


Krishnamurti didn't walk on water
Not far from my previous home in Sydney, at Balmoral (a harbour beach suburb), in 1924 the local Theosophical Society commenced construction of a grand marble edifice, the 'Star Amphitheatre'. Its purpose was to provide a vantage point to witness a grand event: J Krishnamurti, who many Theosophists believed to be the second incarnation of Christ, was expected to walk on the water through Sydney Harbour Heads.

When the Indian mystic and teacher did arrive, in 1926, it has been said, he did indeed walk on the water, but it was on the deck of a ship when he did so. Krishnamurti had long since given up the messianic claims that had been made for him, since his boyhood, by Theosophical Society leaders CW Leadbeater and Annie Besant.

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While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free!
American leftist activist, Eugene V Debs, who was imprisoned on this day in 1895

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Bear Waking Day, Norway
Said to be the day that bears wake from hibernation and leave the den.

Feast Day of St Rita
Patron saint of the unhappily married.

Feast day of Ragnar Lodbrok
He was a Viking leader captured by the Northumbrians (England), tortured, and put in a pit full of venomous snakes.


1957 A ten-megaton hydrogen bomb accidentally fell from a bomber in an uninhabited area near Albuquerque (USA) owned by the University of New Mexico. Non-nuclear explosives detonated, blasting a crater approximately 4 metres (approx. 12 feet) deep and 8 metres (approx. 25 feet) across.

Its huge nuclear charge miraculously did not detonate, narrowly averting horror for New Mexico. The bomb was hundreds of times more powerful than the one that had levelled Hiroshima. No one was injured, but radiation was detected in the crater. Source

1989 Danie du Toit, a South African businessman, gave a club speech warning that one never knows when death might strike, so one must live for the moment. Several minutes later he choked to death on a peppermint.