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The Blogmanac: "On This Day" ... and much more
Think universally. Act terrestrially.
For in a hard-working society, it is rare and even subversive to celebrate too much, to revel and keep on reveling: to stop whatever you're doing and rave, pray, throw things, go into trances, jump over bonfires, drape yourself in flowers, stay up all night, and scoop the froth from the sea.
Anneli Rufus*
I'N'I -- INVESTIGATING THE 'NEW' IMPERIALISM -- From William Bowles
A Damn Fine Mess By William Bowles 27/05/04
Desperate times demand desperate measures and dumping Ahmed Chalabi is just one of them. Just as important is making sure the media gets its story together as well, hence the New York Times dumps Chalabi as well but forgets to come clean on its reporter Judith Miller and CIA asset whose cosy relationship with Chalabi and others in the Bush adminstration, made all the lies possible. But is it all too little, too late?
"Any forces that would impose their will on other nations will certainly face defeat." -- General Vo Nguyen Giap, on the anniversary of the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. May 7, 1954 is also the 50th anniversary of the defeat of French colonial forces at the epic siege of Dien Bien Phu.
Things are starting to buzz at ::Aha!:: Synchronicity Central, with nearly 150 members now getting into logging their coincidences, premonitions and other spooky things. Plus a growing stream of traffic from visitors.
I've changed the layout a bit and added a paranormal psychology newsfeed that's better than the feed I had before. Plus a small bookshop on associated subjects. Check 'em out.
May 28, 1961 Amnesty International was founded, by English lawyer Peter Benenson, Irish Nobel Laureate Seán MacBride (chairman from 1961 to 1975) and others, with an article, 'The Forgotten Prisoners', in the London Observer and the Paris Le Monde.
Amnesty International is a worldwide campaigning movement that works to promote all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards. In particular, Amnesty International campaigns to free all prisoners of conscience; ensure fair and prompt trials for political prisoners; abolish the death penalty, torture and other cruel treatment of prisoners; end political killings and "disappearances"; and oppose human rights abuses by opposition groups.
This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date when you're there.
*Ø* Blogmanac | Labor quizzes Govt over knowledge of Iraqi abuse
Australia: "With revelations today that the Federal Government was alerted to allegations of prisoner abuse in Iraq earlier than it's said, the Federal Opposition is demanding new answers about who knew what and when.
"A report in today's Fairfax press says an Australian military officer in Baghdad was aware of allegations last October, and passed on the details to the Government in his regular reports.
"The Government has said it was not aware of the reports of prisoner abuse until this year.
"The Opposition says the Government must explain the apparent contradiction ...
" ... the Democrat's leader Andrew Bartlett is highly suspicious.
"ANDREW BARTLETT: The Federal Government all the way along with the prisoner abuse scandal has tried to wash its hands of any responsibility, even moral responsibility, let alone legal responsibility.
"They've tried to pretend that we're not an occupying power, they've tried to pretend that we've never arrested anybody, so it wouldn't be surprising at all if there were Australians in Baghdad aware of this, that the Federal Government would have ignored any information they would have got.
"If the report's true, then it shows the depths of disregard that our Government has got for basic rights ..." Source: The World Today
* Ø * Ø * Ø *
US Iraq commander urges Australia to stay "A senior US commander in Iraq is urging Australian troops to remain in the country, despite predicting that the security situation will worsen ...
"Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt says Australian forces should remain, despite a car bomb explosion near the Australian diplomatic mission in Baghdad earlier this week." Source: ABC (Oz) News
*Ø* Blogmanac | Aussie police to gain access to stored messages
By ZDNet Australia Staff
"Australian Attorney General Philip Ruddock has introduced amendments to federal parliament that would ease police access in the country to stored voice mails, e-mails and text messages.
"Ruddock said the Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment (Stored Communications) Bill would allow police to gain access to stored communications without a telecommunications interception warrant, as well as allowing access under 'other forms of lawful authority such as a search warrant' ...
"The bill is designed as a temporary solution while Ruddock's department conducts a more full investigation of interception laws." Source: CNET News
[Ruddock is the politican whose main claim to fame has been the incarceration of hundreds of refugees in concentration camp-like conditions, both on the continent and offshore.]
*Ø* Blogmanac | Human rights climate 'worst in 50 years'
The Guardian, May 26 "Amnesty International today claimed that governments and armed groups such as al-Qaida were putting human rights and international humanitarian law under the greatest pressure for more than 50 years.
"From long-running conflicts in countries such as Chechnya and Sudan to the Madrid train bombings, it said global insecurity was combining with increasing human rights violations by powerful governments to create a world of 'mistrust, fear and division'.
"The 2004 annual report documents human rights abuses in 155 countries including execution, detention without judicial process, hostage taking and 'disappearances' by state agents.
"It condemns attacks by al-Qaida and others as 'sometimes amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity' but says principles of international law that could prevent such attacks were being undermined and marginalised by powerful countries such as the US.
"'Governments are losing their moral compass, sacrificing the global values of human rights in a blind pursuit of security. This failure of leadership is a dangerous concession to armed groups,' said Irene Khan, the secretary general of Amnesty International.
"'The global security agenda promoted by the US administration is bankrupt of vision and bereft of principle. Violating human rights at home, turning a blind eye to abuses abroad and using pre-emptive military force where and when it chooses has damaged justice and freedom, and made the world a more dangerous place.'"
"More than two thirds (67.6 per cent) of the 840m emails scanned by filtering firm MessageLabs last month was identified as spam." Source via Scripting News
*Ø* Blogmanac | Abu boo-boo: President tortures the name of shame
"Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Two rehearsals for his prime-time speech were not enough to keep George Bush from mangling the name of the prison outside Baghdad that has brought shame to the US mission in Iraq.
"During the half-hour televised address, the President mispronounced Abu Ghraib each of the three times he mentioned it, while announcing plans to tear down the infamous jail.
"The prison, the scene of torture under Saddam Hussein and the US military, has a name that English speakers usually pronounce as 'abu-grabe'.
"But Mr Bush, long known for verbal and grammatical lapses, stumbled on the first try, calling it 'abugah-rayp'. The second version came out 'abu-garon', and the third attempt sounded like 'abu-garah'.
"White House aides said Mr Bush had practised his speech twice before boarding his helicopter to deliver the address.
*Ø* Blogmanac | Afghanistan, the war the world forgot
25 May, Independent.co.uk:
'We've got to make sure this time that we do it properly' Tony Blair, 5 April, 2002
'It's a basket case. It's a forgotten country' Eric Illsley, Labour member of Foreign Affairs Select Committee, yesterday
"Three years after the overthrow of the Taliban and George Bush's declaration of victory in the first conflict in the war on terror, Afghanistan is a nation on the edge of anarchy.
"A devastating indictment of the Allies' failure to help reconstruct the country in the wake of the 2001 conflict is to be delivered in a parliamentary report.
"The Independent has learnt that an all-party group of MPs from the Foreign Affairs Committee has returned from a visit to the country shocked and alarmed by what they witnessed. They warn that urgent action must be taken to save Afghanistan from plunging further into chaos because of Western neglect.
"As President Bush and Tony Blair unveil their plans today for the future of Iraq through the draft of a new United Nations resolution, the MPs warn that the mistakes of Afghanistan could be repeated with similar tragic consequences in Iraq ..."
I don't want to alarm anyone who still thinks that life and liberty are safe because of Western intelligence agencies, but if you click on this actual logo from The Firm you'll see what "intelligence" means in the USA administration. No, it's not a joke, it's the actual website, if you check the URL. There really are people like that in power.
Now, everyone's talking about G Mail and we know about "1000 megabytes of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message". And we know that the G-oogle men's head suits have been seen lunching with the Terrorism Busters' head suits, although now that's hard to find on the G-Men site.
This new email service, owned by the company that owns this blog and half the Internet, brags that it places ads in the email according to the sweet nothings you whisper in your lover's ear. How do we really feel about that?
"Gmail does include relevant text ads on the right side of the page. The matching of ads to content is a completely automated process performed by computers. No humans read your email to target the ads, and no email content or other personally identifiable information is ever provided to advertisers." That's fine, but it's not the advertisers most of us are concerned about. It's the lunch partners.
All this will have the Echelon suits laffing, for sure. Not to mention 'Who Ya Gonna Call'. Remember, one gigabyte times six billion people is an awful lot of permanent data. Thank god these blokes are intelligent and Nice, not Evil, as any Middle Eastern patriot will affirm.
*Ø* Blogmanac | Arctic meltdown signals global catastrophe
"Global warming is hitting the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet in what may be a portent of wider, catastrophic changes, the chairman of an eight-nation study said today.
"Inuit hunters are falling more frequently through the thinning ice with habitats for plants and animals also disrupted. The icy Hudson Bay in Canada could be uninhabitable for polar bears within just 20 years ..." Source: The Age
1870 Captain Thunderbolt (Frederick Ward), the notorious Australian bushranger, was allegedly shot dead by Constable AB Walker.
Thunderbolt had been the scourge of inns and mail coaches around Bourke and Uralla, New South Wales, and had done at least 80 robberies netting him £20,000. Many of these ill-gotten gains, however, were in the form of cheques and half notes, pretty useless to a highwayman out in the Armidale tablelands wilderness.
A number of years ago I sometimes used to stay on Cockatoo Island, in Sydney Harbour. The house I stayed in had once been the mansion of the governor of the notorious Cockatoo Island Prison that existed during the convict days of Australia – like a mini-Alcatraz or Robbin Island. In the old sandstone prison yard I have seen the iron rings on the walls, with which prisoners were restrained as they were scourged with the cat o’ nine tails, a leather whip sometimes made more fearsome by the addition of small pieces of sharp lead at the end of nine knotted thongs. Cockatoo has only recently been opened to public tours so visitors can get a feel for what a terrible living tomb it was.
Fred Ward was the only prisoner ever to escape from the hell of that place, which he did by covering his head with a box and swimming a kilometre or so to land. Some say that he was shot dead on May 25, 1870, but a respectable theory has it that Thunderbolt lived a long life and died in a boarding house in the 1920s; the boarding house was, I believe, in Stanmore, possibly within a few blocks of where I was born.
Ward family members have long asserted that it was not Fred at all who was shot, but his brother William (known as 'Harry'), and word has it that there was a tall, veiled 'woman' with a masculine gait at the funeral, but no one ever saw 'her' face. Was Fred having a larrikin lark at his own interment? ... (Read on)
This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date when you're there.
"London (Reuters) - Homer's ancient Greek poem 'The Iliad,' the basis for Hollywood blockbuster 'Troy,' has been compressed for a new generation too lazy to see the film let alone read the 24-book epic that runs to over 15,000 lines.
"The first five books of the centuries-old tale, set in the final year of the Trojan War -- which began when Trojan Paris snatched Helen (the face that launched a thousand ships) from Greece -- are now available in the language people use when sending instant messages, Microsoft said on Monday.
Funny Dylan Birthday boy Bob Dylan is known more for his genius with words and tunes, and for deadpan (once, asked by a journalist how many children he had, he said "Some") than as a comedian.
However, he also has a fondness for silly wisecracks and is known among fans as a real joker at gigs. Sometimes he’s corny, but his cornball jokes are loved by the audience. Here are a few of his quips, and if you have any more, I'm collecting them:
At one gig, Dylan apologized, saying that "I almost didn't make it tonight ... had a flat tire. There was a fork in the road."
February 13, 1999, in Normal, Illinois (Illinois State University campus): "They said I'd never make it to Normal."
At a concert’s end he said he had to "get a hammer and hit the sack".
"Nice to be here. One of my early girlfriends was from Milwaukee. She was an artist. She gave me the brush-off."
"My ex-wife left me again. She's a tennis player. Love means nothing to her."
"This is a love song. We love to play it."
"David swallowed a roll of film today. We’ll see what develops."
"Tony was here once before. He got a bicycle for his wife. Tony said it was a pretty good trade."
"Larry hurt his foot today, we had to call a toe truck."
San Francisco, Oct. 13, 2001: Dylan introduced David Kemper as "one of the few drummers around better than no drummer at all".
Veteran guitarist Sexton, he proclaimed, is "the meanest man in the band. When we played the Middle East, Charlie killed the Dead Sea."
"You might be wondering what's written on [David Kemper’s] shoes; those are foot notes." ...
*Ø* Blogmanac | White plastic chair, white plastic chair, white ...
That white plastic chair in my garden sure gets around
Last seen in Buffalo, USA
This guy Marc Perkel (his site is mentioned in Nora's post below, 'Berg Video - Smoking Gun?') has the Berg/white chair stuff on one page in his site and draws some interesting/crazy/funny comments.
"Man, that damned chair gets around. Last week, I saw it on a National Geographic TV program: a monk was sitting on it in a cave in Tibet, where they were restoring 16th century Bhuddist frescoes. Last year, it was on my aunt's front porch in Buffalo."
Someone else reprimands: "I have an assignment for you LEARN HOW TO FACT CHECK, CORRECTALY."
One of his correspondents remarks: "The Federation of American Scientists has pointed to a startling revelation by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that mainstream media have missed: In remarks during a recent press briefing, Rumsfeld suggested that though the controversial Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) no longer exists in name, its programs are still being carried out".
More stuff on those white-skinned Arab terrorists and the poor bastard in the orange jump suit.
On a more serious note, there's a lot more interest in who killed Nick Berg than in who this poor woman is who appears to be being raped by "our brave, fine Americans in uniform". But of course, she isn't American. Hell, she ain't even full white.
Republican and Democrat Congressmen and women who voted to invade a sovereign nation, and that's all of you, how do you sleep?
[May be a bit far-fetched, but in this day and age who knows? - N]
From marc.perkel.com:
"There has been a semi-secret government initiative to add digital signatures to various digital consumer products. Photocopiers and digital cameras store an encrypted signature to identify the unit that made the video. This digitial signature is totally inique to each device and is more unique than a fingerprint.
"Today new pictures were released of prison torture at Abu Ghraib prison. But not just still pictures. Today video was released showing prisoners being tortured by Americans. Aparently Kodak film experts are Kodak Park in Rochester New York have compared the digital watermarks of the turture video and the beheading video and have determined that one of the cameras used in the Nick Berg beheading is THE SAME CAMERA that took the prison torture video."
*Ø* Blogmanac | Abu Ghraib Visits By General Reported In Hearing
Alleged Presence of Sanchez Cited by Lawyer
Washington Post, May 23
"A military lawyer for a soldier charged in the Abu Ghraib abuse case stated that a captain at the prison said the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Iraq was present during some 'interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse,' according to a recording of a military hearing obtained by The Washington Post ...
"'Are you saying that Captain Reese is going to testify that General Sanchez was there and saw this going on?' asked Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor.
"'That's what he told me,' Shuck said. 'I am an officer of the court, sir, and I would not lie. I have got two children at home. I'm not going to risk my career.'"
1498 Girolamo Savonarola (September 21, 1452), Italian religious fanatic, was burnt at the stake for heresy. He was hanged and cooked, in the same place and in the same manner in which he had had others, pagan and Christian, executed for their 'heresies'.
A Dominican preacher of Florence, Savonarola believed he received divine instructions and carried them out. It was said that he had frequent conversations with God, and the devils that infested his convent trembled at his sight ...
Following the overthrow of the Medici in 1494, Savonarola set up a democratic republic, one of its first acts of which was to make sodomy, previously punishable by fine, into a capital offence.
Bonfire of the Vanities In 1497 he ordered the notorious Bonfire of the Vanities, sending boys from door to door collecting items associated with moral 'laxity' – mirrors, cosmetics, 'lewd' pictures, pagan or allegedly pagan books, gaming tables, fine dresses, and the works of 'immoral' poets – and burnt them all in a large pile in the Piazza della Signoria of Florence. Fine Florentine Renaissance artwork was lost in Savanarola’s bonfires, including paintings by Sandro Botticelli ...
His enemies dragged him to prison; the odious Pope Alexander VI had him, his champion, and another monk strangled then burned, in the name of the Prince of Peace.
This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date when you're there.
*Ø* Blogmanac | The Manchurian Candidate . . . Today
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the Manchurian Candidate by Maureen Farrell, Buzzflash.com
"I am writing this from Frederick, Maryland. I've just been filming, for Channel 4, a press conference in which the son of a CIA officer who died in suspicious circumstances presented his evidence that vice-president Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld were, in 1975, when part of the Gerald Ford administration, involved in a cover-up of the events surrounding his father's death. The press conference was due to have been two weeks ago, but when the son, Eric Olson, called the New York Times to invite them, they said, "Whoa! Do you really want to release such complex information to a bunch of journalists who'll probably screw it up? Let us do it properly instead."
I must try this ruse sometime. It worked on Olson. He postponed the press conference. The New York Times finally called him and said, "We missed Watergate because we thought it was just a small, unimportant break-in." What they seemed to mean was they believed his evidence but they couldn't decide if it was a huge, government-toppling White House cover-up of a murder, or a small, unimportant White House cover-up of a murder, the kind of stuff that doesn't mean much.. . "
In the summer of 2003 (back when President Bush was renouncing the use of torture [New Yorker]) author Douglas Valentine reminded us why blind trust in any government official or agency has historically been a bad idea. "The war on terror, and its ‘homeland security’ counterpart are flip sides of the same coin," he wrote. "They are the same ideology applied to foreign and domestic policy. But like CIA agent Alden Pyle in The Quiet American, their evil intention is wrapped in a complex matrix of transparent lies." [CounterPunch.org]
Coming soon to a theatre near you . . . God willin' and the jack-booted thugs don't rise!
'Fahrenheit 9/11' Ignites Cannes Audiences with Anti-Bush Assault By David Germain Associated Press
As promised, Michael Moore lit a powder keg at the Cannes Film Festival: His incendiary "Fahrenheit 9/11" riled and disturbed audiences with a relentless critique of the Bush administration in the post-Sept. 11 world.
If Moore can get the movie into U.S. theaters this summer as planned, the title "Fahrenheit 9/11" could become a rallying cry in the fall election for voters hoping to see Democratic challenger John Kerry defeat President Bush.
"Will it influence the election? I hope it just influences people to leave the theater and become good citizens," Moore said at a news conference Monday. "I'll leave it to others to decide what kind of impact it's going to have on the election."
The movie reiterates other critics' accusations about the Bush family's financial connections to Saudi oil interests and the family of Osama bin Laden. Moore charges that the White House was asleep at the wheel before the Sept. 11 attacks, then used fear-mongering of future terrorism to muster support for the Iraq war.
Yet Moore - the provocateur behind the Academy Award-winning "Bowling for Columbine," which dissected American gun culture - packages his anti-Bush message in a way that provokes both laughs and gasps.
Those people who believe in such things, rather than being a wimpy fence sitter such as I, will be interested in the fact that the infamous Abu Ghraib photos were mostly taken on November 8, 2003, the day of the "Harmonic Concordance". Despite its name, which indicates some kind of musical dictionary, that was a day (like its spiritual ancestor, the Harmonic Convergence of 1987) supposedly full of high esoteric significance in the history of the world.
"November 8 was the day US guards took most of the infamous photographs: soldiers mugging in front of a pile of naked, hooded Iraqis, prisoners forced to perform or simulate sex acts, a hooded prisoner in a scarecrow-like pose with wires attached to him. Source: Yahoo News
"Peruvian shamans of the Q'ero line (a lineage shared by both the Inca and the Apaches), descendants of those who fled into the high Andes to escape the Spanish conquistadors, have told shaman-psychologist Dr. Alberto Villoldo about the occurrence of an important event in the late fall of 2003. At that time, which they say will mark the end of the current, and final, Pachakuti (a period of cleansing, when everything is turned upside down), it is said that a tear, or hole in the fabric of time will appear, and that those who have prepared for it will be able to walk through it and into their luminous bodies." Source: Crystalinks
At least one source claims that November 8, 2003, was the actual Gregorian date of the 2012 calendar convergence. I wonder what Lynndie would say.
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May 28, 1961 
"Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Two rehearsals for his prime-time speech were not enough to keep George Bush from mangling the name of the prison outside Baghdad that has brought shame to the US mission in Iraq.
1870 Captain Thunderbolt (Frederick Ward), the notorious Australian bushranger, was allegedly shot dead by Constable AB Walker. 
"London (Reuters) - Homer's ancient Greek poem 'The Iliad,' the basis for Hollywood blockbuster 'Troy,' has been compressed for a new generation too lazy to see the film let alone read the 24-book epic that runs to over 15,000 lines. 
Someone else reprimands: "I have an assignment for you LEARN HOW TO FACT CHECK, CORRECTALY."
1498 Girolamo Savonarola (September 21, 1452), Italian religious fanatic, was burnt at the stake for heresy. He was hanged and cooked, in the same place and in the same manner in which he had had others, pagan and Christian, executed for their 'heresies'.
Those people who believe in such things, rather than being a wimpy fence sitter such as I, will be interested in the fact that the infamous Abu Ghraib photos were mostly taken on November 8, 2003, the day of the "