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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*
A cut-down version of an old article of mine, 'Kroakin' Rosie and the King of Karaoke' is published in the January '05 edition of Karaoke Scoop Ezine (requires free registration).
If you, too have ever been seriously humiliated by being forced by friends into singing in public, you might enjoy it. The full piece is found in the Articles Index at the Scriptorium.
OK, America, here's a challenge from your Aussie cousins. Australia has just pledged one billion dollars to tsunami relief in SE Asia, and more than $100 has been donated privately. Australia has one-seventeenth the population of the USA, whose government has, in response to foreign and domestic outrage, upped its offer to $450 million. Less than half the salary of the CEO of any US corporation such as Disney.
Now, even though US and Australian money will all end up being tied aid (ie, Western corporations will get the contracts, impose the rules, and superimpose inappropriate modes of agriculture and industry, etc), the money is urgently needed in the short term for people without food, water and shelter. So, how about it, Messrs Bush, Rumsfeld and Bowell? We'd all love to see the US match Australia with a pledge of $17 billion, which is the cost of two months illegal occupation of Iraq alone.
Now, Mr President, I know you're gonna say, "Hell, SE Asia is in the Aussies' region, not ours". Hey, that didn't seem to matter with Vietnam! Come on, Dubya, put your money where your mouth is ... you know, "The greatest country on earth" and all that jazz. People are people, even the tinted Mooslim ones.
"An earthquake that killed 31,000 people in the Iranian city of Bam exactly a year before the tsunamis brought $1.3 billion in promises of which only $22 million became reality." Source: Annan wants tsunami aid pledges honoured
Tiger Force was a commando unit of the United States Army, 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), which fought in Vietnam, from May to November of 1967; as part of the Vietnam War.
The unit, consisting of 45 paratroopers, has since been accused of committing various warcrimes, including indiscriminate attack, mutilation, and torture. Some reports by former members of this unit state that the soldiers wore necklaces composed of human ears.
The Toledo Blade newspaper broke the story on Tiger Force: Read their online report.
Since the Blade story, the Army has re-opened the investigation, but has not been forthcoming with any additional information. The most recent status update was received by The Toledo Blade reporters on May 11, 2004, when Lt. Col. Pamela Hart stated she had been too busy responding to prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers in Iraq to check on the status of the Tiger Force case.
I'm pleased to announce a sister blog to the Blogmanac. The Sandy Beach Almanac (http://sandybeachalmanac.blogspot.com/) is where I am logging daily observations of Nature and life from my cabin on Sandy Beach, on the South Pacific coast of Australia. Here are two snippets:
1) Yellow Mondays, blazing blue Sunday ... The cicadas make themselves known on these hot days, as well, and they're quite loud from the casuarina trees immediately behind the sand. Australia has about 220 of the 2,000-plus species of the world's large Cicadidae family.
Over generations, Australian children have bestowed names on some of the species. The most common and thus best known is the Green Grocer (Cyclochila australasiae). The Floury Baker (Abricta curvicosta) and the Black Prince (Psaltoda plaga) are less common – the latter especially so and their scarcity might help explain the dubious folklore of children that you can sell them to pharmacists for a tidy sum, and their wings will be ground up and used in important medicines. It might be that during the Gold Rush days of the 1850s, Chinese herbalists really did grind up Black Prince wings for their elixirs ...
2) One thousand, two hundred and eighty-five ... one of my paces is almost precisely four of my hand spans. As Nature would have it, my hand span is near as dammit to 25 centimetres, providing a handy metric rule. So my step is one metre and Sandy Beach I reckon to be 1.285 kilometres in length, at least around the arc of the delicious waterline that lapped around my ankles ...
Of course, I might have lost count and messed up the calculation. There were at least four moments along my surveying route that interrupted my concentration.
First of these was a remarkably proportioned, young, bikini-clad woman leading two small black dogs on a leash at some distance from me. I won't pretend it was the dogs that distracted me, although I don't like to see dogs on the beach, and it is against council regulations. I did find her easier to forgive than some others I've seen. I might have lost count then and as I pondered the grim reality that if she were 19, as I guessed, she was closer in age to my granddaughter than my daughter, and that God is quite uncaring in the apportionment of libido and age ...
As with the Blogmanac, there is a subscription box at Sandy Beach Almanac so interested readers can follow the cycles of the seasons with me as they turn. I look forward to seeing you there.
Outrageous proposals, coming from the administration of 4% of the world's population, a government that happens to have the military and financial clout to make such things happen. Illegal, disgraceful, and hypocritical in the extreme for a gang that preaches "democracy" and "our way of life" to other countries and cultures. I can only hope that the judiciary in the US, not to mention the peoples of the world, will not tolerate the ideas quoted below.
Long-Term Plan Sought For Terror Suspects
Washington Post, January 2:
"Administration officials are preparing long-range plans for indefinitely imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn over to courts in the United States or other countries, according to intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials.
"The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts. The outcome of the review, which also involves the State Department, would also affect those expected to be captured in the course of future counterterrorism operations." [My emphasis - N]
A little over a week ago I heard a fast-breaking radio bulletin: "There has been an 8.5 Richter earthquake just off the west coast of Aceh and it is believed 150 people have been killed by the resulting tsunami".
"More like 150,000," I muttered. (When you live alone for long enough you start to mutter to yourself.) Now, I'm just a shmendrick and I live in the boondocks of Australia and I have a little bedside clock radio someone gave me for Christmas. Not this Christmas, but one about 20 years ago. The clock doesn't work and neither do most of the buttons.
On the other hand, guys like Colin Powell, Dubya and the rest of the US cabal, who are certainly no shmendricks, have next to their beds an array of things called NASA, the CIA, the NOAA and, of course, our friends at Echelon. The cabal has satellites that can literally read any car licence plate and the headlines on a newspaper carried by anyone outdoors in any part of the world.
By the time this shmendrick in Sandy Beach took a wild guess about the enormity of the Indian Ocean crisis, these guys and their space age technology already had thousands of films and photos, a careful selection of which we have all now seen in the media. They had films and photos that showed the froth on the waves and the bodies and probably the terrified looks on their faces.
Some days later, the US administration, via Mr Powell (the 'dove' in the White House who oversaw the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the first Gulf Invasion) announced the generous ofer of $15 million in tsunami relief. About half the price of a luxury yacht.
Under pressure of an international torrent of outrage, and a NY Times editorial entitled 'Are We Stingy? Yes.', Powell hastily increased it to $35 million, about half the cost of Dubya's inauguration party. It might be seen as generous, as the US government still needs to spend $8.3 billion per month ($270 million a day) in Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein, who is a very bad man and has Weapons of Mass Destruction as their satellites showed. And couldn't be captured any cheaper.
What a windfall the Asia crisis is for Amerika! Across 11 countries in South and South-East Asia, the US and its corporations now have with a stroke of a miserly pen what they couldn't win after years of Vietnam and the deaths of 2 million Vietnamese. They can just stroll into Sumatra, Sri Lanka or any damn place they please, and put their own price tags on the merchandise. "Hmm, nice beach. How much do you want for that? And that rainforest over there ... is that real teak? Would you take $50 an acre? Say, what about a nice little resort over on that island. We could put in a McDonald's next to a Levi's sweatshop."
Santa must have decided that the rest of the world got it completely wrong: the US was nice, not naughty in 2004.
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A cut-down version of an old article of mine, 'Kroakin' Rosie and the King of Karaoke' is published in the January '05 edition of 
I'm pleased to announce a sister blog to the Blogmanac. The Sandy Beach Almanac (