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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*
Blogger.com has a few recommended blogs this week. Committee to Protect Bloggers looks like a great idea, and I dips me lid to the people who got it together. I've put their Atom feed on my beaut Sharpreader.
Things I Hate About My Flatmate is funny, and real. Radio Free Nepal is a must-read. All Things Dunkin' Donuts is ... well, it's so embarrassing it makes you want to take an iron bar to the Blogger.com clown who wasted space with it when there is so much excellent and important blogging out there. Out here. Out everywhere.
Tourism is one of the creepiest things that the relatively rich do to the abjectly poor. Here's another angle on it:
"Singapore, Dubai, Chennai and Mumbai, and there’s one at Munich International Airport, all places that are stopovers for a new species of sick person, the international patient. That’s the technical term for medical tourists. Sick people are taking a ticket out of the UK, US and Canada to avoid long waiting lists and the high costs of surgery. There’s a cheaper deal elsewhere.
"This new globalised medical business is spawning new words; there’s medicities, for example, and silver economy.
"Dubai has a health care city, and one of the new hospital corporations of Asia have a slogan that doesn’t beat about the bush:
"... first world service at third world cost." Full documentary, audio & transcript
It's handy to know where you can report spam and fraudulent emails, such as an EBay phishing spam I got this morning. SpamLinks provides international addresses. I can't vouch for how up-to-date it is, but it seems pretty good.
When I typed out “Internet origins, wikipedia” into Google on Feb 22 (1.25pm Malaysian time), this is what I saw:
Power corrupts. Power failure corrupts absolutely. We're currently recovering servers from a power failure in our colocation facility. This means backing up 170gb of database on several servers and running recovery. Back soon...
Where's my Wikipedia?
That page should have added that “Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely. Information denial is the future wave!”
I needn’t quite need Wikipedia to know the origins of the Internet. To put a long story short, it started off as the defense project ARPANET which later included key US academia, some of whom may have stories to share, “if they prefer to.”
This was an excellent military tool, one that could allegedly withstand the devastations of a future nuclear attack. Then came the Internet and the world wide web, a liberating medium for anyone, anywhere with a PC, modem and phone line.
Nothing is given away for free, especially when it involves “liberty”. Those who designed this liberating medium knew that any machine, any vaccine, any electronically-contrived tool has a function creep.
If you need to effectuate global hegemony, what better and cheaper way than to string up peoples and nations electronically? People would benefit tremendously, and so would an age-old plan called Novus Ordo Seclorum - "A new order of the ages" The date of origin: 1782. I had to pull up a greenback to check up those Latin words as Wikipedia, that quick portal for double-checking facts, including spelling, was again showing the above message, for a different search.
The Internet was under attack.
All the symbols I saw on that dollar bill, and its exegesis belong to the Masonic religion. I couldn’t find a single Christian symbol in this supposedly Christian, evangelistic country. And how does freemasonry paint Christianity, Judaism and Islam? Biblical figures like Yahweh was the Midianite God of “storms and wars,” who was “fearful” of Moses who in fact was a “death dealing fanatic” and Jesus was the product of a “magical mating” between “Yahweh and Mary.” [1] The quotes, and there are plenty, are taken from a work of speculative delusions at its deranged best, written in a dream world of hallucinatory scholarship. It was, in essence, an attack on all three monotheistic faiths, something carried out with brutal force in Iraq and to a lesser extent, in multiple realms everywhere. Novus Ordo Seclorum can be best accomplished when pseudo-Christianity is used to fight Judaism and Islam, and later incite a three-cornered fight between all three.
Does this have anything to do with the Internet? Look at the Eye on that Great Seal. It cannot be “All Seeing” unless all people can be seen and heard. And the Internet is the best choice, among a growing menu of electronic, panoptic tools.
From a liberating medium, it has gone on to be the perfect surveillance and control mechanism. Your emails and chats (personal) can be monitored, your online purchases (finances) logged, and your psychological profile noted. This hydra is going berserk.
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
--"Think Different", Apple Computers Advertisement
Sydney, Australia: "It appeared overnight, but no one knows where it came from. It's 60 metres long and 30 metres wide, but no one knows what it means.
"The image of a man, a dollar note, a wave and a tombstone appeared on Reg Bartley Oval in Rushcutters Bay about four weeks ago, residents say. And it has been puzzling them since. 'It must have been done in the middle of the night because I noticed it first thing in the morning,' said a resident, James Potts." Source: Sydney Morning Herald
By Linda Weiss and co-authored by Elizabeth Thurbon and John Mathews
"Thanks to the manipulation of debate surrounding the trade agreement with the US, which came into effect on January 1st, few Australians realise the enormity of the changes that are being demanded of us under the deal – and just how destructive they will be. We are not referring to the poor market access that Australian business and exports received (damaging enough in itself). We are talking about the dismantling and replacement of Australian institutions with something foreign, which will work against our economic prosperity and to the advantage of the foreign power.
"These institutions include:
• Our rigorous Quarantine procedures that safeguard agricultural producers from devastating exotic pests and diseases and give Australians a competitive advantage in world markets; • Our PBS that protects the health system against soaring prescription costs and makes medicines affordable for all Australians • Our IP laws that encourage local innovators in IT and biotech, for example, without extravagant protection of monopolies; • Our system of government purchasing programs that support an Australian IT industry, in particular, and return tax dollars to Australian residents.
"The most important changes target these very arrangements that secure our competitive advantage in world markets, preserve our economic security, and safeguard social wellbeing.
"The evidence – for anyone willing to consider it – is compelling. As we show in our new book, How to Kill a Country, all of these institutional arrangements, and more, are placed under peril by the FTA.
"Take the case of agriculture. Once we allow our core ‘clean and green’ label for our agricultural exports to be compromised by lowering our Quarantine standards to accommodate imports from disease-prone areas — as occurred throughout 2004 in dress rehearsal for the FTA’s entry into force—then this distinctive advantage is lost forever; it cannot be retrieved. This is a loss of national competitiveness ..." Source: Perspective
Linda Weiss is Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney’s School of Economics & Political Science; Elizabeth Thurbon is a Lecturer at UNSW’s School of Politics and International Relations; John Mathews is Professor of Strategic Management at Macquarie Graduate School of Management.
"Jane Alsop (18) was in her home on Bearhind Lane in the district of Bow, when she heard a wrapping on the door. Answering the door, a black cloaked man exclaimed 'I'm a policeman. For Gods sake, bring me a light, for we have caught Spring-heeled Jack in the lane' ..."
This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with many more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date (or your birthday) when you're there.
Police look at a defaced poster of U.S. President George W. Bush, while environmental activists protest against Essso's [sic] alleged lobbying of the U.S. President to refuse to abide by the Kyoto Protocol. With the pact on climate change set to take effect, the Bush administration still rejects it as too costly for the US economy and based on questionable scientific hypotheses.
First, a potted history of Aussie politics in the past four months. In October, the Howard Liberal Government was returned with an increased majority. Despite its name, the Liberal Party is the major conservative party, and the main progressive party opposing it is the Labor Party.
At the October 9 election, Labor was led by the moderately progressive but rather unimpressive Mark Latham, who got terrible press and failed badly, to be replaced by Kim Beazley, who is right-wing Labor and so fond of military matters he is known as 'Bomber' Beazley. He seems to like nothing more than a photo-op sitting atop a tank, and is probably a childhood war afficionado and military hobbyist who never grew up.
John Howard is very right-wing even for a Lib. One of his core promises to the Australian voters last year was that Australia would not increase by hundreds, though it might by tens, troops in Iraq.
Today, Howard announced that Australia would be sending 450 more troops to Iraq, hugely increasing our role there. Not only that, but these will be combat troops as opposed to the previous main roles of Aussie soldiers in non-combat positions. The Australians will take on the roles previously held by the Dutch, who have sensibly decided to get the hell out. Howard was asked by the PMs of both Japan and the UK if he would send Aussies in -- because neither Tokyo nor London can take much more political flak over Iraq from their own voters. Thanks to the Australian Labor Party's complete stuff-up of recent political events, Howard has such a huge electoral majority in both Reps and Senate, he doesn't care. We look forward to many more such unilateral, reactionary decisions from 'Little Johnny'.
As this report shows, Bomber gave a half-arsed response. If you heard him in the media you would note from his voice that his opposition to Howard's outrageous decision was not at all passionate, in contrast to Sen. Bob Brown of the Greens Party.
Goddess of Love and Battle from the region of Mesopotamia (Greek for 'between the rivers', ie, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers), the area now known as Iraq, and from Assyria. Ishtar is the counterpart of the Phoenician Astarte.
Her name is said the be associated with the word 'Easter', because of her associations, like Easter, with springtime and fertility. The meaning of the name is not known, though it is possible that the underlying stem is the same as that of Assur, which would thus make her the ‘leading one’ or ‘chief’. She was known as Inanna in Sumerian mythology ...
This is just a snippet of today's stories. Read all about today in folklore, historical oddities, inspiration and alternatives, with many more links, at the Wilson's Almanac Book of Days, every day. Click today's date (or your birthday) when you're there.
How The US Murdered a City Fallujah: The Truth at Last
Doctor Salam Ismael took aid to Fallujah last month. This is a report of his visit.
02/17/05 - - IT WAS the smell that first hit me, a smell that is difficult to describe, and one that will never leave me. It was the smell of death. Hundreds of corpses were decomposing in the houses, gardens and streets of Fallujah. Bodies were rotting where they had fallen-bodies of men, women and children, many half-eaten by wild dogs.
A wave of hate had wiped out two-thirds of the town, destroying houses and mosques, schools and clinics. This was the terrible and frightening power of the US military assault.
The accounts I heard over the next few days will live with me forever. You may think you know what happened in Fallujah. But the truth is worse than you could possibly have imagined.
This amateur video was shot on the first day of one of the biggest festivals in the Muslim year. But instead of buying new clothes for their children and visiting family and friends, the men of Falluja are digging graves.
"Richard Smalley, a Rice University professor who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1996, is calling on the United States to mount a multibillion-dollar campaign to fund research into alternative energy or else face the consequences.
"'It may be a greater challenge for us than the Cold War ... to make it possible for 10 billion people to live the lifestyle you are used to in a way that doesn't cause unacceptable impacts on the environment,' he told an audience of scientists at the International Electron Devices Meeting taking place in San Francisco this week. 'There is no escaping the problem. The consequences will be terrorism, pestilence, famine.' " Source: CNET News.com via GhostChild
This one's a real bookmarker: Adherents.com for information about religions. Quite a goldmine. I also often refer to ReligiousTolerance.org which is different but also very good. Thanks, London Almaniac Sylvia for sending the former.
Turtles All the Way Down is my new blog about ... about ... well, hard to explain unless you're an Australian and familiar with the frustratin' ways of Auntie ABC. Enjoy.
"WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 - The comptroller general has issued a blanket warning that reminds federal agencies they may not produce newscasts promoting administration policies without clearly stating that the government itself is the source.
"Twice in the last two years, agencies of the federal government have been caught distributing prepackaged television programs that used paid spokesmen acting as newscasters and, in violation of federal law, failed to disclose the administration's role in developing and financing them.
"And those were not isolated incidents, David M. Walker, the comptroller general, said in a letter dated Thursday that put all agency heads on notice about the practice.
"In fact, it has become increasingly common for federal agencies to adopt the public relations tactic of producing 'video news releases' that look indistinguishable from authentic newscasts and, as ready-made and cost-free reports, are sometimes picked up by local news programs. It is illegal for the government to produce or distribute such publicity material domestically without disclosing its own role." Source: New York Times [Ta Baz 'Bob Woodward' le Tuff.]
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When I typed out “Internet origins, wikipedia” into Google on Feb 22 (1.25pm Malaysian time), this is what I saw: 
Day of Ishtar, Babylonia
New blog: Turtles All the Way Down