The call to drive out the Bush Regime

"Your government, on the basis of outrageous lies, is waging a murderous and utterly illegitimate war in Iraq, with other countries in their sights.

"Your government is openly torturing people, and justifying it.

"Your government puts people in jail on the merest suspicion, refusing them lawyers, and either holding them indefinitely or deporting them in the dead of night ..."
worldcantwait.net/ -- Action on November 2

Tagged: bush+regime, bush, torture, activism, progressive, peace, iraq, war

Origins and folklore of Halloween

Originally a pagan festival called Samhain (pronounced sow-wen), the name of November 1 was Christianised by the tenth century abbot of Cluny, St Odile, to All Saints’ (or All Hallows’) Day, hence Halloween, the evening before ...

Today in the Book of Days has a huge amount of background information on Halloween.

Tagged: halloween, celtic, folklore, celts, customs, english, british, lore

Australia's 19th-Century world's fairs

Pretty amazing. In Wikipedia's List of world's fairs I count Australia no fewer than 25 times before 1900. (In fact, of the first ten major world's fairs, two were held in Australia.)

All the more remarkable when one considers that even by 1900 the country was populated by only about 4 million mostly poor people. (Well, Australia is reputed to have had in 1901 the world's second-highest standard of living after the USA, but the plain fact is that one in four children under five died, in Sydney's suburbs, and one in five in the inner city where the hospitals were more accessible.)

Also consider that it took quite a few weeks to sail here from the Northern Hemisphere; and that the towns and cities were separated by hundreds or thousands of miles connected by slow trains (in some cases), or by stage coaches travelling mostly on rough bush tracks masquerading as roads. Some of the places the international exhibitions were held in, I would find it difficult to get to even today. For example, Coolgardie: it would take me about five or six days and hundreds of dollars in petrol to drive there -- imagine driving from Paris to Afghanistan.

Melbourne's exhibition in 1888 had two million visitors and ran for six months. Zounds! That amazes me, because there's no way I could go if they had one today, because of the huge distance and the expense -- and in the 1880s this country had stopped being Britain's convict settlement only a generation before.

King O'Malley

Speaking of such things, this week I've been reading a biography of the very remarkable King O'Malley (1858 - 1953). He was an extremely flamboyant and individualistic American who came to Australia in the 1880s and showed up at the 1888 Melbourne Exhibition wearing a lavender suit and a 10-gallon hat.

He had made lots of money through salesmanship and probably embezzlement in the Wild West of the USA, and wanted a political career. To get into Parliament he lied that he was born in Canada (and thus a British subject, the only ones eligible), but get into Parliament he did, and became one of Australia's most important politicians at Federation in 1901, and for years after. In many ways, he might be called the father of the Commonwealth Bank, and of Canberra, Australia's capital city, and much more besides. Amazingly, he and I are coeval -- he was still alive when I was born. Many of his ideas were very far-sighted, and even though he was a great eccentric, he was a true visionary -- and a pacifist.

Tagged: trivia, australia, history

Train of consciousness, 2

Now, as I said two days ago, it intrigued me that someone in 2005 should be talking about something as new when it seems old, though still valid, to me. We were talking about "Decoupling Use and Ownership" as far back as the early 1970s, though we used different terms for it. When I say "we", I refer to myself and my associates -- my mob and me. I'm referring to an affinity group that came to be known, and almost universally derided over the past three or four decades, as "hippies".

In some cases, that which is apparently trendy and innovative to talk about today was anathema way back when; things like rationalising the ownership of domestic goods, for example -- the decoupling thing.

And that's what got me thinking. What other concepts, I asked myself, were "we" discussing and promoting 20, 30, more than 30 years ago, and being laughed at for, that are now buzzwords or commonplace things accepted by many? What are some other things we hippies struggled to express to a non-receptive society, which are now being preached back at us as New Discoveries, sometimes by the very people who condemned or ignored us back then? That's where my train of consciousness left the platform a couple of days ago, and has been chootling along, intermittently, ever since ...

More soon.

Garry McDonald aka Norman Gunston

1949 Garry McDonald, Australian comedian and actor ... best known for his outrageous haemophiliac character Norman Gunston ...

Norman Gunston had many strings to his comedic bow, but in particular he made his mark with his zany 'ambush' interviews ... Norman’s victims included Muhammad Ali (who good-humouredly threatened to pulverize him), Paul McCartney (“Mr McCartney, where’s Yoko?”), Michael Caine, Diana Dors, the Bee Gees, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elliott Gould, Charlton Heston, Mick Jagger, James Garner, Lee Marvin, Burt Reynolds, Phil Silvers, Elke Sommer, Glenda Jackson, John Stonehouse, Rudolf Nureyev, Frank Zappa and Malcolm Muggeridge.

Perhaps Norman's most well known interview was with Keith Moon at Charlton stadium in 1976. Moon famously ended his brief encounter with Norman by tipping vodka over his head. Norman asked Warren Beatty whether Carly Simon did indeed write the song ‘The Impossible Dream’ about him. Norman told Gene Simmons, of KISS, that at 7 inches, his wasn’t the longest tongue. Gunston told Boy George that the only other place he’d ever heard of anyone being called ‘Boy’ was in Tarzan films. Sally Struthers from All in the Family famously looked like she would die of laughter ...

Iroquois Feast of the Dead

A Native American festival akin to All Soul’s Day (November 2) of the Christian tradition. Traditionally held every 12 years in honour of departed loved ones, the dead are reinterred and revered, with a huge grave dug and lined with beaver skins ...

Rummy and Tamiflu

Nora from that excellent blog Extra!Extra! sent me these two juicy titbits about the connection between Rumsfeld and the company that makes Tamiflu, the drug of choice for governments beating the avian flu drum.

Tagged: rumsfeld, corporations, tamiflu, avian+flu, influenza, pandemic

Train of consciousness, 1

I heard on the radio yesterday something that set in train a stream of consciousness that I will now try to describe. To those helpful friends who will object that a stream can hardly be "in train", I plead a personal delight in the mixed metaphor. That's a lie, of course.

An apparent expert in design referred on the radio to "decoupling use and ownership". In fact, from my listening, I believe it is now a principle of some importance to modern design intellectuals, so it should probably be capitalized in a manner fitting such precepts: 'Decoupling Use and Ownership'. If the intellectuals reading don't like my capitalization, I'm confident the Germans and schizophrenics will.

This expression intrigued me and I was soon to learn that it means, more or less, 'sharing'. He was suggesting that consumers "decouple use and ownership" with such things as lawnmowers, because, I suppose, nobody really needs a lawnmower all to themselves. I agree. Let's face it, it's a lot of money to pay for something you use for an hour a week or a month, and it gets rusty just sitting in the garage. It's obviously a folly, like having a washing machine owned and used by just one person, or a suburban block with forty houses and forty washing machines, with people going to shitful jobs to get the money to pay for them. Yes, obviously a sign of the foolishness (and cupidity) of the Western condition. I digress.

Decoupling Use and Ownership
The expert seemed very excited about it, as though it were a new concept. When I heard him, my stream of consciousness started flowing -- or training. Whatever. Let's call it my 'train of consciousness', will that do?

More tomorrow, gods willing.

Mars at Halloween

"On Oct. 31st, the planet Mars is making its closest approach to Earth for the next 13 years. (13 years? Cross your fingers.) Technically speaking, the moment of closest approach occurs on Oct. 30th, a day before Halloween, but the difference in distance between the 30th and the 31st is too slight to matter.

"Trick or Treaters will notice Mars rising in the east at sunset: sky map. It looks like a pumpkin-colored star, so intense that people in brightly-lit cities can see it. Some say it's blood red, but maybe that's just Halloween talking.

"Mars will soar almost overhead at midnight (as seen from North America) and stay "up" all night long. Halloween 2005 is truly the night of Mars."
NASA

Folklore of Halloween, in the Book of Days

Tagged: halloween, space, folklore, samhain

Dedication of the Statue of Liberty

1886 The 49 m-tall statue of ‘Liberty Enlightening the World’ was dedicated in New York Harbor by President Grover Cleveland. She was created by French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. It has been said that the face is that of his mother.

The original idea of the Statue of Liberty was not received well by either the US federal nor New York state governments. However, due to a campaign stated by publisher Joseph Pulitzer, funds were raised for the American half of the bill in only five months.

In Roman mythology, Liberty is Libertas, the goddess of freedom. Originally a deity of personal freedom, she evolved to become the goddess of the commonwealth. Her temples were found on the Aventine Hill and the Forum. She was depicted on many Roman coins as a female figure wearing a pileus (a felt cap, worn by slaves when they were set free), a wreath of laurels and a spear .

Libertas was presented in 1884 as a gift from the French Grand Orient Temple Masons to the Freemasons of America in celebration of the centenary of the first Masonic Republic, as much as a gift from France to America. The cornerstone of the statue has an inscription that records that it was laid in a Masonic ceremony. It is believed that Bartholdi conceived the original statue as an effigy of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and only later converted it to a ‘Statue of Liberty’ for New York Harbor when it was rejected for the Suez Canal ...

Tagged: statue+of+liberty, trivia, history, usa, nyc, esoteric, masons, freemasonry

Top 10 Dumb Things Bush Said in 2004

Thanks Baz 'Blame me, I voted Bush' le Tuff for this one:

#10: "I want you to know. Karyn is with us. A West Texas girl, just like me." -Nashville, Tenn., May 27, 2004

"The illiteracy level of our children
are appalling"

#9: "Then you wake up at the high school level and find out that the illiteracy level of our children are appalling." -Washington, D.C., Jan. 23, 2004

#8: "Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat." -Washington, D.C., Sept. 17, 2004

#7: "I want to thank the astronauts who are with us, the courageous spacial entrepreneurs who set such a wonderful example for the young of our country." -Washington, D.C. Jan. 14, 2004

#6: "We will make sure our troops have all that is necessary to complete their missions. That's why I went to the Congress last September and proposed fundamental - supplemental funding, which is money for armor and body parts and ammunition and fuel." -Erie, Pa., Sept. 4, 2004

#5: "After standing on the stage, after the debates, I made it very plain, we will not have an all-volunteer army. And yet, this week - we will have an all-volunteer army!" -Daytona Beach, Fla., Oct. 16, 2004

#4: "Tribal sovereignty means that; it's sovereign. I mean, you're a - you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity. And therefore the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities." -Washington, D.C., Aug. 6, 2004

#3: "I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft." -second presidential debate, St. Louis, Mo., Oct. 8, 2004

#2: "Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country." -Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004

#1: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." -Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

TorrentSpy

Tagged: bush, shrub, dubya, bushism, bushisms, humor, humour, joke, funny

elitematt.com is a tagboard spammer

I've removed about eight spams from my tagger from elitematt.com this week. Each one with a different comment, and each time they change their IP address. Of course, I remove them quickly but I apologise for when they are there, with fake comments like "Eminem got shot last night".

If you look at the bastard's traffic counter (All website referrers) you can see how much of their traffic comes from tagboards. How do these people sleep?

Al Gore decries media power

"The decision that was then being considered by the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate turned out to be a fateful one. A few days ago, the former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William Odom, said,

"'The invasion of Iraq, I believe, will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history ' ..."

Al Gore decries media power, in the Yellow Pages

Tagged: media, propaganda, democracy, iraq, war, peace, disinformation

No, Your Rights

You have the right to not remain silent

You have the right to not question, decide, remember, observe, create, nor otherwise consider yourself a free individual

You have the right to work long hours for less than fair pay, without holidays and sick leave, and subject to arbitrary dismissal without appeal

You have the right to remain in debit for life, and to engage in conspicuous over-consumption

You have the right to be kept alive and force-fed, but not to euthanasia

You have the right to remain indoors, stupefied in front of the TV, except on Sundays

You have the right to eat irradiated genetically-modified inorganic foods that are fat free, low cholesterol, high in carbohydrate sugar salt preservative and behavior modifying drugs

You have the right to be gouged by oil companies, insurance companies, supermarkets, privatized monopolies, taxation, and dentists

You have the right to second rate, high cost, and impersonal medical care from poorly trained doctors and overworked, tired nurses

You have the right to be scared by your government, and abused by public servants and their cut-outs

You have the right to believe this is not a quasi-police state, run by unprincipled authoritarians who can't tell the difference between an activist and a terrorist

You have the right to be watched, followed, and tracked, overheard, profiled, identified, classified, correlated, and suspected

You have the right to indefinite detention, to inadequate counsel, to declared guilty by media leaks and defamation, and to secret trials requiring you prove your innocence without being told the accusations

You have the right to be deported at your own expense, despite being a citizen, crippled, young, or mentally ill

You have the right to bank accounts that cost you money, while the executives are paid well to devise ways of outsourcing the staff

You have the right to be arbitrarily denied welfare, child care, health care, or work assistance

You have the right to the total absence of privacy, to always carry your ID, and to surrender your DNA and biometrics with complete trust

You have the right to be searched, insulted, manhandled, confined, menaced and rejected by overzealous security guards on every train, airport, and entrance, and at every event, gig, show, movie, birthday party or cake stall that you might even think of enjoying yourself at

You have the right to be poorly governed by a parliament that is dominated by extremists, segregated from the electors, unaccountable and undemocratic

You have the right to vote for liars, bible thumping red necks, charlatans, bigots, failed lawyers, and other upstanding self-interested cheats

You have the right to be lied to, persuaded, misled, misinformed, and kept ignorant by a media that is complacent, biased, contrived, and for sale to the most ruthless and wealthy

You have the right to be socially engineered, dog-whistled, pork barreled, demographically data mined, lumped with the lowest common denominator, and ignored

You have the right to become a statistic, a frangible entity defined by your patterns of expenditure

You have the right to be waited on by asylum-seekers who are temporarily welcome, provided they keep their children away from the water

You have the right to inform on your colleagues and friends; to ridicule the defenseless; and to blame, accuse, and libel without foundation

You have the right to have opinions conforming to those the officially mandated mainstream gives you, and to express them when it allows you

You have the right to attend, read, watch, and listen to commercially viable, advertising saturated, highly censored, warning stickered, sexist, unchallenging entertainment, approved by politicians, accountants, churchmen, and self-appointed eminences

You have the right to have your homes and your community destroyed at the whim and design of property developers

You have the right to a fundamentalist fee-paying education, to be fitted for the most menial and casual of jobs

You have the right to respect authority, to worship celebrities and sports stars, to disparage artists and despise intellectuals, to harbor racism and foster intolerance, and to deny that global warming is real

You have the right to be criminalised for smoking, but not for drinking; to be stigmatized for drug addiction, but not for gambling

You have the right to a small, heterosexual, god fearing, law abiding, car owning, fashionably dressed, tax paying family

You will attend places of instruction, worship, labour, diversion, and correction without deviation from the designated routes

You have the right to exploit the environment, pollute, degrade, and occupy without compassion for animals and other humans, and without respect for the indigenous

You will sleep, eat, work, play, fornicate, exercise, consume, barrack, and commute in the prescribed manner only

You have the right to not protest, demonstrate, or organize, and to be labeled and detained as an extremist if you do

You have the right to conduct yourself according to the edicts of the cartel that owns the government today

You have the right to be compliant customers of globalised corporations, who have neither responsibility, nor ethics, or constraints on their ability to make a profit

You have the right to be bombed, invaded, gassed, shot at, interrogated, shocked, interned, beaten, subjected to indignity, threatened, hooded and deprived, to encourage you to become a more co-operative and patriotic citizen

You have the right to be abandoned in time of crisis and need; to be sacrificed; to be forgotten, mocked, and overlooked

You have the right to endure fake terrorism, real war crimes, notional liberties, and military injustice

You have the right to be protected by expensive taxpayer-funded government advertising, and fridge magnets, while the police guard the property of the rich

You have the right to the arbitrary denial of civil rights as a refugee in your own modern 1950s styled free-market penal colony

You have the right to a future the same as yesterday, without evolution, relativism, feminism, socialism, post-anything-ism, or enlightenment to trouble your mind, or to interrupt the holidays of your superiors

You have the right to forget that you ever had rights, or that you will ever need them again.

- Andy Lonsdale, © 2005

JA Andrews, forgotten Australian radical intellectual

1865 JA Andrews (John Arthur Andrews; Jack Andrews; d. 1903), Australian anarchist writer and pamphleteer, probably the most important of the group which came together in the Melbourne Anarchist Club. Henry Lawson knew him (c. 1892) when Andrews was 27 and campaigning in Sydney (for which he ended up in Parramatta Gaol).

Australian historian Bob James has researched and written on Andrews and tells us that during 1889 much of Andrews's writing was published in Bob Winspear’s The Radical. He couldn't afford a metal type printing press, but managed to publish The Anarchist (1891) and various tracts on a home-made contraption made from a tobacco tin, using a wooden font carved for the purpose. He was associated with Joe Schellenberg and the Smithfield communist anarchists while in Sydney from late-1890, helping to establish the Communist-Anarchist Group of Central Cumberland operations centre there. His writings were highly philosophical (he was probably the most intellectual of the anarchists, indeed of the labour movement at the time), but he was also a hard-working activist. Some of what we know about the Active Service Brigade was written by him in Tocsin in 1900. He spent time in prison for his activities, round 1894-5, for sedition and other crimes such as not having a correct imprint on his magazine. After his early death from tuberculosis he was compared to Tolstoi, Kropotkin, Thoreau and Verlaine, among others.

William Lane’s brother Ernie described him, in Dawn to Dusk, in these words: “... Clothed in an overcoat to cover his sometimes shirtless body and tattered clothes, Andrews would proceed to the Domain. Tying a large pole with a small black flag attached to an over- head tree he would deliver a two or three hours' exposition of philosophic anarchy to the proverbial ... two men and a dog ... Andrews obviously spoke right over the heads of the crowd ...”

Bertram Stevens said Andrews “was as gentle as a grub and looked like Christ”.

Tagged: australia, radical, anarchism, labor, history

Australia, bird migration, and H5N1

In the past two months, three million migratory birds have arrived in Australia. Migratory birds are the most likely way that bird flu will reach Australia's shores, writes Michael Richardson.

"As public health anxieties about a global influenza epidemic rise after confirmation that a deadly form of avian flu has reached Europe from Asia, a troubling question is being asked: how has the virus spread relatively quickly over such long distances? Is Australia at risk from the long march of contagious disease? ...

"The UN agencies monitoring bird flu outbreaks say more research is needed to solve the puzzle of how the virus is spread and how it changes into forms deadly to humans as well as birds. Meanwhile, it recommends that wild and farmed birds should not mix.

"The risk that deadly avian flu will be imported into Australia by migratory birds seems low. The biggest risk is the one that faces the world as a whole: if the H5N1 virus changes into a strain that can spread easily from person to person and has a high infection and death rate, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to stop. The consequences of a pandemic could be catastrophic."
The Age

Tagged: avian+flu, australia, bird, birds, bird+migration, migratory+birds, h5n1, flu, influenza, pandemic

Movie director Zemeckis has a thing for this date

1985 In the movie Back To The Future, all of the 'present' events occur on this date in 1985.

In the movie Death Becomes Her, Helen first drinks the immortality potion on October 26, 1985. Like Back To The Future, this movie was directed by Robert Zemeckis.

Tagged: calendar, trivia, movie, movies, film, flims, hollywood

Vale Rosa Parks, 92

In Australia, too, I grew up with the name of Rosa Parks as an examplar of quiet heroism, the dignity of civil disobedience, and the power of what can be done by one person, even one who has no apparent influence. No, it wasn't a name taught me by my school, my church or my government, but cream rises -- as this fine woman proved.

Only if you don't have a weak ticker

Thanks, Almaniac-since-1832 Kayla in California for this virtual pumpkin carving game. She always sends the good stuff.

Alfred E Neuman's grandpa

So this is where Alfred E Neuman came from.

Australia, USA, the FTA & Mad Cow Disease

AMERICA: Knock, Knock

AUSTRALIA: Who’s there?

AMERICA: AMERICA. We want to sell some beef.

AUSTRALIA: But we’re Australia. We don’t have BSE – Mad Cow disease -- and we don’t buy beef from Mad Cow-affected countries.

AMERICA: But you signed the Australia - US FTA.

AUSTRALIA: So?

AMERICA: Well there’s a side-letter in the FTA that commits you to following OIE guidelines on trade with Mad Cow-affected countries. They say it’s OK to import our beef.

AUSTRALIA: But they’re only guidelines – not law. You reject OIE guidelines when they don’t suit you. America doesn’t import beef from Brazil even though the OIE says it’s OK.

AMERICA: Yes, but you signed the FTA. It’s a legally binding document. It commits you to following OIE guidelines. It also says you’ll respect American quarantine rules and regulations. So you have to import our beef.

AUSTRALIA: But why should we respect your Mad Cow quarantine standards? Your standards are so unsound!

AMERICA: Go easy! We’ve only had two reported cases of Mad Cow in America It’s hardly an epidemic.

AUSTRALIA: Well you’ve only found two cases of Mad Cow – but your testing regime is seriously flawed. You only test 0.1% of slaughtered cattle for Mad Cow. Europe tests 25%, France 50% and Japan 100% of all eligible cattle destined for human consumption. If you only test 0.1%, how do we know Mad Cow isn’t more widespread than you claim?

AMERICA: Well we do good science. We only test those most likely to have Mad Cow – dead and downer cattle – cattle too sick to walk – and some cattle over 30 months. That’s what makes our testing regime so sound.

AUSTRALIA: Your argument is as flawed as your testing regime! Your testing regime is voluntary and takes place at the slaughter house. American farmers are naturally scared that one of their downer cattle might be diagnosed with Mad Cow because it would mean having to destroy their entire herd. So instead of taking their downers to slaughter for testing, US farmers have an incentive to shoot shovel and shut up.

AMERICA: Well we still sample test cattle older than 30 months.

AUSTRALIA: But again your approach is not grounded in the most recent science. It says cattle as young as 22 months can carry Mad Cow. So you may still be feeding cattle with Mad Cow to humans.

AMERICA: Well your agricultural minister accepts our view and our science that says you have far less to fear from Mad Cow than you used to. He’s your Minister. Why don’t you have faith in him?

AUSTRALIA: Faith is what we have in our beef industry -- because of our own rigorous standards. And the science we trust is not sponsored by the US government or its industry. It’s true we have less to fear from Mad Cow in Australia – but only while we continue to ban imports from Mad Cow countries. But why does America care about access to our small beef market anyway? Why are you targeting us?

AMERICA: Well to be honest, it’s not really about you. It’s about Japan and Korea. They’re big markets, but like you they ban our beef. If Australia accepts our testing system, it will set a precedent – a clean green country lowering its standards to accept beef from a Mad Cow-infected country. If you import from us, they will have to do likewise.

AUSTRALIA: So you want to help erode our unique clean and green status and steal our international market share?

Read on at Perspective

Linda Weiss
School of Economics and Political Science
University of Sydney
Elizabeth Thurbon
School of Politics and International Relations
University of New South Wales

Publications:
How to Kill a Country: Australia's Devastating Trade Deal With the United States
Author: Linda Weiss, Elizabeth Thurbon and John Mathews
Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Tagged: bse, mad+cow+disease, usa, fta, australia, trade, neo-colonialism

Dutch Schultz's last words

I know what I am doing here with my collection of papers, for crying out loud. It isn’t worth a nickle to two guys like you or me, but to a collector it is worth a fortune; it is priceless. I am going to turn it over to ... Turn your back to me please, Henry. I am so sick now. The police are getting many complaints. Look out. Yey, Jack; hello, Jack. Jack, mamma. I want that G-note. Look out, for Jimmie Valentine, for he is an old pal of mine. Come on, Jim, come on, Jimmie; oh, thanks. OK. OK. I am all through; I can’t do another thing. Hymie, won’t you do what I ask you this once? Look out! Mamma, mamma! Look out for her. You can’t beat him. Police, Mamma! Helen, mother, please take me out. Come on, Rosie. OK. Hymes would not do it; not him. I will settle ... the indictment. Come on, Max, open the soap duckets. Frankie, please come here. Open that door, Dumpey’s door. It is so much, Abe, that ... with the brewery. Come on. Hey, Jimmie! The Chimney Sweeps. Talk to the Sword. Shut up, you got a big mouth! please come help me up, Henny. Max come over here ... French Canadian bean soup ... I want to pay, let them leave me alone ...


1935 The death of American gangster Arthur Flegenheimer aka Dutch Schultz (b. 1902). What did he say?

Dutch Schultz was a New York City-area gangster of the 1920s and '30s. Born into a Jewish family in the Bronx, he made his fortune in bootlegging illegal alcohol and in the numbers racket in Harlem.

He was shot to death on the night of October 23, 1935, in the men's toilet of his hideaway, a Newark diner called The Palace Chophouse, by Charles Workman (aka 'Charlie the Bug'), Emmanuel Weiss, and a third, unidentified man known to this day only by his alias "Piggy'.

Schultz's famous last words, influenced by a high fever and large quantities of morphine, were a delirious stream of consciousness babble. They were taken down by a police stenographer, and have since been used in literature by a number of writers, most notably William S Burroughs (The Last Words of Dutch Schultz), Robert Anton Wilson and EL Doctorow (Billy Bathgate) ...

Tagged: gangsters, mysteries

Lies Judith Miller told us

"In the last few months all manner of gas has been expended on the Valerie Plame case.

"Did Karl Rove and Scooter Libby out Plame as a CIA officer to punish her husband Joseph Wilson IV? Who else in the White House knew of or condoned this crime? And is there some kind of medal we can bestow on Judith Miller, who suffered prison to protect her First Amendment rights?

"Yes it makes for good drama, but in a perverse way the Plame case obscures the larger story. The media understandably finds it more interesting to ferret out the specific crimes of a Karl Rove than to reflect on the larger, more profound crime: how we were misled into invading Iraq. First, the Bush administration created a catalogue of lies and misinformation in order to justify invasion. Second, some prominent members of the national media parroted those lies.

"And no one squawked louder than the New York Times’ Miller. As a former CIA analyst told Salon’s James C. Moore: 'The White House had a perfect deal with Miller. [U.S.-funded Iraqi dissident Ahmed] Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the information they need to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated by some insider she always describes as a "senior administration official."' ..."
In These Times

Tagged: plame, judith+miller, usa, iraq, disinformation, wmd, war, peace

Knitted Semtex factory

"Myra was so proud to eventually see a permanent home for her knitted model of the Dunlop Semtex Factory, and what would be a more fitting home for this craft masterpiece than the former Semtex Factory ground where it once stood. It is situated near the restaurant of the store [ASDA/Walmart] where everyone can admire it."
Source

My Welsh mate Bouglaf writes: "Come to Brynmawr and see the knitted Semtex factory, a unique product of the community spirit. This picture cannot do it justice -- it is about five feet long."

(This must-see makes me feel like BoingBoing.)

Secret poll: Iraqis support attacks on UK troops

Secret poll: Iraqis support attacks on UK troops

Tagged: iraq, war, peace, uk, usa, occupation, terrorism, military, army, bush, blair

Las golondrinas: the swallows of Capistrano depart

Swallows traditionally leave today from Goya, Corrientes province, Argentina, and return to Capistrano Mission, California, USA on or around St Joseph’s Day (March 19) each year, greeted by large numbers of locals and visitors from all over the world. It is one of the planet’s best-known equinox (or near-equinox) events.

Tagged: capistrano, bird, swallow, migration, argentina, golondrinas

USA conspired on Iraq and UN: WMD inspection chief

Scott Ritter on the Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein

"The CIA knew, since 1992, that significant aspects of the Iraqi weapons programs had been completely eliminated, but this was never about disarmament"

"We speak with Scott Ritter, the chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998 about his new book: 'Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein.' It details how the CIA manipulated and sabotaged the work of UN departments to achieve the foreign policy agenda of the United States in the Middle East. [includes partial transcript]

"In a major article in The New York Times this weekend, reporter Judith Miller admitted she was wrong when she wrote several of the key articles that claimed Iraq had an extensive weapons of mass destruction program ahead of the 2003 invasion. Miller wrote, 'W.M.D. -- I got it totally wrong. The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong.' Today we are joined by someone who was not wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq:

Scott Ritter. He was the United Nations" top weapons inspector in Iraq at UNSCOM between 1991 and 1998. Before working at the UN he served as an officer in the US marines and as a ballistic missile adviser to General Schwarzkopf in the first Gulf war.

Scott Ritter has just published a new book titled 'Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein.' The book details how the CIA manipulated and sabotaged the work of UN departments to achieve the foreign policy agenda of the United States in the Middle East. ..."

Read on at Democracy Now

Listen to Segment :: Download Show mp3 :: Watch 128k stream :: Watch 256k stream :: Read Transcript :: Printer-friendly version :: Purchase Video/CD

I dips me lid to Jim at pagans4peace

Tagged: scott+ritter, wmd, activism, wmds, unscom, usa, disinformation, propaganda, bush, cia, iraq, war, peace

The Divine Sarah Berhnardt

1844 Sarah Bernhardt (d. March 26, 1923), French stage actress, 'The Divine Sarah'.

She was the eldest surviving illegitimate daughter of Judith van Hard, a Dutch Jewish courtesan known as ‘Youle’. Born in Paris as Henriette Rosine Bernard, after a successful acting career in France she came to London in 1876 where she quickly established herself as the leading actress of the day.

On July 28, 1891, she began her season at Her Majesty's Theatre, Sydney, Australia. Seats sold for up to 2 pounds each, and she stayed on the second floor of the Australia Hotel with a menagerie.

In 1892 she asked Oscar Wilde to write her a play, which resulted in Salomé. However, the Lord Chamberlain had the play banned ...

Tagged: sarah+bernhardt, theatre, theater, cinema, movie, history, actress, actresses, france

Col. Larry Wilkerson on "Washington cabal"

"If you haven't yet heard it or read the newspaper reports on it, take the hour and fifteen minutes necessary and listen to Colonel Larry Wilkerson on Iraq and U.S. national security policy. Wilkerson was Colin Powell's chief of staff. While you won't agree with everything he has to say, you will find much of what he has to say of great interest. When you listen, it's pretty clear why Wilkerson did not make General. He doesn't pull many punches and even some of the ones he pulls will jar. He is obviously a career soldier who cares dearly about the U.S. and the U.S. army. The presentation was made at the New American Foundation and is available on their website."
Lid dip to Chris Keeley

Lawrence Wilkerson Transcript (PDF)

Tagged: bush, washington, military, cia, iraq, wmd, policy, politics

Situation in Kashmir "worse than tsunami"

"A second 'Berlin Airlift' by NATO is needed to prevent massive loss of life in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Pakistan's northern mountains, Jan Egeland, the United Nations' emergency relief co-ordinator said yesterday.

"Mr Egeland said the relief operation was turning into the toughest the world has known.

"'We have never had this kind of logistical nightmare ever. We thought the tsunami was bad -- this is worse,' said Mr Egeland at a news conference in Geneva.

"'We need a second Berlin airbridge, and if they could do that at the end of the 1940s, set up in no time a lifeline to millions of people, we should be able to do that in 2005.'"
Scotsman

Earthquake aid: Action links

Tagged: pakistan, earthquake, aid, tsunami

Trafalgar: "Kiss me, Hardy"

1805 Napoleonic Wars: Battle of Trafalgar – The British fleet led by Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson defeated a combined French and Spanish (under Admiral Villeneuve) off the coast of Spain.

Nelson lost his life on the deck of his flagship Victory, mortally wounded by a sniper from the French ship Redoutable. A bullet entered his shoulder, pierced his lung, and came to rest at the base of his spine. Famous even while alive, after his death Nelson was lionized like almost no other military figure in British history ...

Famous last words?
There is no definitive account of Nelson’s last words, although many books say that he said “Kiss me, Hardy”, or else “Kismet [fate] Hardy”. Both versions are speculative and there’s no primary record of anyone present at his death reporting either of them.

However, the artist, Arthur Devis spent three weeks aboard the Victory, making sketches and talking to men present at Nelson's death in order to create an authentic image of the actual scene on the afternoon of October 21, 1805.

According to Devis’s informants, Nelson said: “Take care of my dear Lady Hamilton, Hardy, take care of poor Lady Hamilton.” He paused then said – very faintly – “Kiss me, Hardy.”

Hardy knelt and kissed his admiral on the cheek. Nelson then whispered, “Now I am satisfied. Thank God I have done my duty.” Hardy rose, paused silently, then knelt again and kissed Nelson’s forehead.

Tagged: trafalgar, english+history, british+history, french+history, naval, history

Guantanamo Action Center

"If you're not convinced our new Supreme Court Chief Justice will stand up for human rights, you're right. But thank goodness for the Center for Constitutional Rights, who have been standing up for social justice for four decades. There mission is: 'to guarantee the rights of those with the fewest protections and least access to legal resources. ' They've launcheda new campaign called the Guantanamo Action Center, which will tell you more than your stomach may be able to stand about what's going on at Guantanamo. But they don't just tell you what's wrong, they give you ideas for how to change it."
AlterNet

Tagged: guantanamo, activism, usa, human+rights, torture, civil+rights, humanitarian

Run, run, run the bastards over!

1966 US President Lyndon Johnson visited Australia for talks on Vietnam, cheered on by right-wing Prime Minister Harold Holt who famously said "All the way with LBJ".

While riding with corrupt New South Wales Premier Robin Askin through the streets of Sydney, surrounded by Vietnam protesters, Johnson was probably either horrified or amused as Askin (also famously) told their driver, “Run the bastards over”.

The comment led to much derision, and a protest song (to the tune of American peace activist Julia Ward Howe’s famous ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’), often sung at rallies thereafter:

In 1966, our friend and ally LBJ
came out to Sydney town from his great land of USA.
Some students chose to demonstrate by lying in his way
but my comment lingers on.
Run, run, run the bastards over!
Run, run, run the bastards over!

Tagged: australia, usa, peace, war, military, activism, politics

Preventing embarrassing information becoming public

"Guidelines issued by the Australian government's Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet advise public servants on how to avoid personal notebook comments being disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act.

"'As some comments included in notebooks may have the potential to cause embarrassment or could be misinterpreted if taken out of context, you should transcribe the information that needs to be recorded into a file note, record of conversation or minute, and ensure it is placed on the appropriate departmental file. You can then destroy the original notes,' the guideline says. In 2002 a Senate Committee of Inquiry investigating fabricated claims against a group of refugees perpetuated by a government taskforce complained that a failure to keep proper records rendered 'the activities of the Taskforce largely inaccessible to subsequent scrutiny'.
Australian Financial Review, October 19, 2005 (sub req'd) "
PR Watch

Tagged: australia, liberty, civil+rights, privacy, refugees, disinformation

Disappointment for the Southcottians

1814 Today is the day that self-proclaimed English prophetess, Joanna Southcott (1750 - 1814), fixed as the date that she would give birth to a son (the Shiloh of Genesis xlix, 10) who would be a great spiritual leader, in fact, the new Messiah.

Southcott, originally an English Methodist, represented herself as a spiritual leader and prophetess, gathering a côterie of followers. She said she was the “woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” (Revelation xii, 1). There was no religious leader more discussed in 19th-century Britain than Southcott ...

Tagged: millennialism, southcott, religion, messiah, cults

Horn Fair, Charlton, near London

The Horn Fair was held for three days annually from St Luke's Day and was named after the custom of carrying horns and wearing them.

A foreign traveller in 1598 wrote that there was at Ratcliffe, nearby, a long pole with ram's horns upon it, representing “wilful and contented cuckolds”. The horned man, or Green Man, was a representation of the ancient horned god Herne (who derived from the Celtic horned god Cernunnos), and it is interesting to note that the fair, now held at Hornfair Park, was formerly held at Cuckold’s Point, East London ...

Tagged: england, english+folklore, folklore, gods, deities, fairs, festivals, holidays, markets, pagan

The making of the Henry Lawson songs album

"In May 2005, one of the most intriguing groups of Australian musicians in years gathered at Sing-Sing Studios in melbourne, Australia.

"Members of three legendary Australian bands, the Dingoes, Redgum and Goanna -- along with a number of other Australian music industry legends -- recorded an album of songs drawn from the poems of Henry Lawson, Australia's foremost poet and writer ..."
The making of Lawson, the album

The Vagabond Crew
Michael Atkinson, Shannon Bourne, Paul Cartwright, Michael Harris, Rob Hirst, Marcia Howard, Shane Howard, Toby Lang, Mal Logan, Louise McCarthy, Hugh McDonald, Russell Morris, Alan Pigram, Steven Pigram, Mike Rudd, John Schumann, Broderick Smith, Chris Stockley, Kerryn Tolhurst and Mick Wordley.

Who was Henry Lawson? (in the Book of Days) :: Who was Louisa Lawson?

Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson (in Wilson's Almanac)

Tagged: henry+lawson, australia, music, literature, poetry, bush+poetry, australian+music, australian+literature

Pakistan earthquake death toll at 54,000

"Pakistani officials have increased their estimated death toll from last week's earthquake to more than 54,000.

"Poor weather conditions could drive that number even higher, as some of the two million left homeless by the disaster struggle to survive."
CTV

How can I help?

Disaster relief: don't stop now
Earthquake's death toll rises
Pakistan raises earthquake death estimates
Pakistan Earthquake Relief Still at the Lifesaving Stage
Quake Efforts in Pakistan: Hampered by Gusty Rain, Chopper Crash

2005 Kashmir earthquake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Track new stories about pakistan earthquake donate – create an email alert :: RSS

Tagged: pakistan, earthquake, aid, donate, donations, relief, humanitarian

Altruists International: Working for love not money

"We are an optimistic, positive community with members from both the under- and the over-developed world. We are united by our commitment that a money-centred struggle for personal gain is no way to make the world a better place. We try to ignore money but put people at the heart of what we do, concentrating on what will be of real benefit to others."
Altruists International -- check it out.

Lid dip to my mate Deborah Garriott at Sandinshoes Software

Tagged: altruism, ethics, ethical+investment

Muybridge beats the rap

1874 California, USA: During a social event, British photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge took out a pistol and to the horror of the assembled guests, shot and killed his wife’s lover. (One version says that Muybridge shot Major Larkyns at the latter’s door.)

Muybridge was found guilty of the crime, but a conviction was not recorded, becoming the last person in California to escape a sentence for murder, except by reason of insanity. Despite “getting away with murder”, Muybridge was disgraced in San Francisco and he soon left on a trip to Panama and Central America.

On December 11, 1877, Muybridge proved that when a horse runs, every foot is off the ground simultaneously at one point every stride. This he did by fixing up separate cameras that were set off by trip wires as the horse passed. The projector he invented to show these ‘films’ (as we now know them), he called the Zoopraxiscope.

Tagged: photography, muybridge, murder, law, legal

The Cardiff Giant

1869 The Cardiff Giant, one of the most famous American hoaxes, was discovered, in New York state by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C 'Stub' Newell in Cardiff ...

It drew such crowds that showman PT Barnum (1810 - 1891) offered $60,000 for a three-month lease of it ...

The resurrection of Henry Lawson

John Schumann has released an album of Henry Lawson's songs set to music.

We have a lot -- a real lot -- of Henry Lawson-related items in the Book of Days. Click if you would like to read up on Australia's most famous writer, Henry Lawson, his remarkable mother Louisa Lawson ('Mother of Australian Women's Suffrage') and the many fascinating people they came in contact with.

Tagged: australia, literature, henry+lawson, louisa+lawson, suffragettes, bush+poetry

G8 does nothing as Malawi famine unfolds

By Mzimasi Makiniki, Malawian activist

"Before the recent famine in Niger there was a long period when there were increasingly strong appeals for aid, but nothing happened. We have now reached that time in Malawi — and people have already begun to die.

"Perhaps four million people are facing starvation in Malawi, and there are millions of others at risk in Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique and Namibia.

"G8 cannot give a day’s military spending to save
12 million people on the edge of starvation"

"Remember all the hype around the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, where it was said that the world leaders would “make poverty history”?

"Now these great powers cannot give a day’s military spending to save 12 million people on the edge of starvation in southern Africa.

"At the beginning of this week the United Nations World Food Programme said it remained £100 million short of the £225 million it estimates it needs to feed those affected.

"Some children have already died from eating poisonous roots, which they had been forced to scavenge after food ran out ..."
Socialist Worker Online

Poor response to Malawi's growing hunger
Malawi churches declare food crisis a national disaster
Swaziland's AIDS orphans battle drought, hunger

Track new stories about the Malawi famine – create an email alert, or add a custom section to your Google News homepage. RSS "malawi famine".

More ways we can help

Tagged: malawi, famine, hunger, g8, southern+africa

UN official accuses US of starving civilians

"A United Nations human rights investigator has accused US and British forces in Iraq of breaching international law by depriving civilians of food and water in besieged cities as they try to flush out militants.

"The US military denied the charge and said that while supplies were sometimes disrupted by combat, food was never deliberately withheld."
ABC News

Tagged: war, peace, usa, un, united+nations, hunger, starvation, military, army

Politician defies Aussie Govt over anti-terror bill

Politician defies Aussie Govt over anti-terror bill

Tagged: australia, human+rights, civil+rights, liberty, disinformation, terrorism, police+state

Virgil: larger than life

70 BCE Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro; d. September 21, 19 BCE), Latin poet (Eclogues; The Aeneid) who was a real man who became like a deity. To the medieval mind he was a necromancer rather than a poet.

Many fables were told about this Roman poet whose persona grew to mythological proportions by the time of the Middle Ages.

His birth was announced by an earthquake in Rome, and he grew to be skilled in the magical arts, or so it is said. Virgil made a lamp that lit every street in Rome; he was said to have founded the city of Naples upon eggs, as a magical charm for protection. On one of Naples's gateways he erected two statues: one had a happy face, the other a deformed and miserable one. If one was to enter the town near the happy statue, that person would prosper; if near the sad statue, the person would have a contrary fate. On another gate he erected a statue of a fly, the presence of which kept out flies from Naples for eight years ...

Tagged: virgil, latin, poetry, medieval, folklore

Ida Pfeiffer's world travels

1797 Ida Pfeiffer (d. October 28, 1858), Viennese-born world traveller and author (A Visit to Iceland and the Scandinavian North; A Woman’s Journey Around the World) who wrote 13 books from her seven journeys around the world, visiting such countries as Egypt, Iraq, Brazil, Iceland, Tahiti, China, Madagascar and India.

On her travels, Pfeiffer collected insects and reptiles; these and other "souvenirs" she sold back in Vienna, with which to finance further journeys. Her best-sellers were translated into seven languages and showed a dry humour.

On one of her journeys, the remarkable adventuress was attacked by cannibals, fending them off alone with an umbrella. Both she and an aggressor were wounded in the incident and after this experience she decided to carry a double pistol. She kept the broken- off handle of the umbrella as a trophy.When she was in Madagascar, in May 1857 when the island was embroiled in political turmoil, Pfeiffer became unwittingly involved in the troubles ...

Tagged: history, women's+history

The persecution of the Knights Templar

1307 On a Friday the thirteenth, Philip IV of France (Philip the Fair; 1268 - 1314) ordered the arrest of all 2,000 Knights Templar in France. He owed them a large sum of money, and also was no doubt troubled by the rise of the Templars as a great European banking house.

Philip confiscated their property and accused them of heresy, witchcraft, being in league with the devil, homosexual acts, the worship of heads and/or a mystery known as Baphomet. Many were burnt and tortured, and many confessed. [See also March 15, 1314, death of Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay.] The Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem and of Rhodes and of Malta, seeing the fate of the Templars, were also convinced to give up banking at this time ...

Tagged: templars, knights+templar, medieval, history

UFO Maps

UFO Maps, a nifty use of Google Maps. Try August 1860.

Did Khrushchev bang his shoe at the UN?

1960 Cold War: Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on a table at a General Assembly of the United Nations meeting, in anger at a point, made Lorenzo Sumulong, the Filipino delegate, about Soviet Union policies regarding Eastern Europe.

Sumulong asked ‘Mr K’ how he could protest Western capitalist imperialism while the Soviet Union was at the same time rapidly assimilating Eastern Europe. Khrushchev became enraged and informed Sumulong that he was, “a jerk, a stooge and a lackey of imperialism,” then removed one of his shoes and banged it on his table. Or, so it is said, but it is doubted by some ...

Tagged: trivia, soviet+union, ussr, communism, united+nations, cold+war

Yahoo! Podcasts beta now online

"It was just time before one of the search giants cashed in on the immense popularity of the iPod's podcasts, the audio programs that are broadcast over these Apple-made devices. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, Yahoo Inc has announced a podcast service site that lets users in finding, organizing and rating podcasts.

"The tool, which is currently in beta lets users search among the thousands of podcasts currently available online and choose the one best suited to them. The site would also have reviews of various podcasts in order to help users to find what they want, exactly how they want it."
EarthTimes

Yahoo! Podcasts


And here's the current playlist from the Wilson's Almanac Podcast Page (constantly refreshing):

Adam Curry: Daily Source Code
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001014/categories/dailySourceCode/rss.xml

ITC: All Programs
http://www.itconversations.com/rss/recentWithEnclosures.php

AlterNet.org: Podcasts
http://www.alternet.org/module/feed/rss/multimedia/podcast/

Audio Activism
http://www.audioactivism.org/wp-rss2.php

GreenWorldOnline
http://feeds.feedburner.com/greenworldonline

Earthwatch Radio
http://ewradio.org/podcast/current/

A World of Possibilities
http://feeds.feedburner.com/aworldofpossibilities

A View from the Religious Left
http://www.uuccpf.org/rss.xml

Mother Jones Radio
http://www.motherjones.com/radio/rss.xml

The Spirit of Things
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/spirit.xml

Background Briefing
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/bbing.xml

Living on Earth: Sound Journalism for the Whole Planet
http://www.loe.org/podcast.rss

Late Night Live
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/lnl.xml

triple j's Hack Highlights
http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/podcast/podcast.xml

IndieFeed: Alt/Modern Rock
http://feeds.feedburner.com/IndiefeedAlt/modernRock

Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/podcast.xml

A Moment of Yoga
http://horoscope.libsyn.com/rss

The Chris Pirillo Show
http://www.thechrispirilloshow.com/subscriptions/content.xml

Greenpeace
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/assets/binaries/podcast-rss.xml

MondoGlobo Network
http://mondoglobo.net/?feed=rss2

theWatt Weekly Podcast
http://www.thewatt.com/podcast.rss

bioneers.org podcast blog Bioneers Podcasts
http://www.bioneers.org/podcast/bioneerspodcasts.xml

Ethical Investing csmonitor.com
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ethicalinvesting

Spiritual Spice
http://www.spiritualspice.com/rss

The World Today
http://www.abc.net.au/news/subscribe/twtrss.xml

All in the Mind
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/mind.xml

Correspondents Report
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/correspond.xml

The Media Report
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/mediarpt.xml

The Science Show
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/science.xml

Ockham's Razor
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/ockham.xml

Asia Pacific Podcast
http://www.abc.net.au/ra/podcast/asiapac/asiapac.xml

From Our Own Correspondent
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/radio4/fromourowncorrespondent/rss.xml

Documentary Archive
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/worldservice/documentaryarchive/rss.xml

Go Digital
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/worldservice/godigital/rss.xml

Sounds Sustainable
http://www.besustainable.com/sounds/podcast.php

Comedy 365
http://pepperstock.libsyn.com/rss

Simulacrum
http://www.listentothestars.co.uk/simulacrum_podcast.xml

Inside Europe: The European Radio Weekly
http://rss.dw-world.de/xml/podcast_inside-europe

Living Planet
http://rss.dw-world.de/xml/podcast_living-planet

EarthNews Radio
http://www.enn.com/news/podcast/earthnews.xml

Web Essentials 2005
http://we05.com/podcast/rss.cfm

Radio For Peace International
http://www.rfpi.org/podcast.xml

Traprock Peace Center
http://www.traprockpeace.org/wordpress/wp-rss2.php?category_name=podcasts

Notes From The Underground
http://feeds.feedburner.com/notesunderground

ChinesePod.com
http://www.chinesepod.com/podcast.php

NPR: All Songs Considered
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510019

Ebert & Roeper
http://tvplex.go.com/buenavista/ebertandroeper/rss-podcast.xml

Roocast - Australian Music Podcasts
http://www.roocast.com/feeds/roocast.xml


Tagged: yahoo, podcast, podcasts, podcasting

Fifth Marx Brother found

Meriwether Clark: Was it suicide?

1809 Along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, USA, at an inn called Grinder’s Stand, the death by gunshot of Meriwether Lewis (b. 1774), 35, leader (with William Clark) of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. He was shot to death under mysterious circumstances at a tavern about 70 miles from Nashville, Tennessee en route to Washington.

The question of whether his death was from suicide (as is widely believed) or murder (as contended by his family) has never been settled ...

Tagged: trivia, lewis+and+clark, america, usa, history, american+history

My school wasn't like this, but then again we did bugger all

Very modest they are at St Peter's College in Adelaide, Australia.

Robin Warren, who this week was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for discovering (with Barry Marshall of Western Australia) the Helicobacter pylori bacterium and the fact that it, and not stress, is the cause of gastric ulcers, is not mentioned on the News and Events page of his old high school.

There is a mention of the chess team, however, and an unforgettable evening of drama -- hats off to them:

"History was made last Thursday night, 22 September. In an intense struggle lasting three hours, the Saint Peter's chess Intercol team defeated PAC 10 – 0. The score line in no way reflected how desperate the play was at times, with the final match being decided in the last few seconds of the allotted time. The team of J. Obst, P. Thiyagarajah, A. Utturkar, A. Khoo, N. Chia, P. Tan, N. Kwok, R. Pedler, M. Chan and D. Gai were supported by two reserves, T. Trenerry and C. Ho, and provided the small audience with an unforgettable evening of drama."

Jolly good!

Nor do they mention that other old boys of the school include two other Nobel laureates, William Lawrence Bragg (Physics, 1915) and Howard Florey, the pharmacologist (Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1945 for his role in the extraction of penicillin). Another boy from St Peter's, which is not a selective high school by the way, is Andy Thomas, the Australian astronaut with NASA and Mission Specialist for the STS-114 Space Shuttle Discovery . The school's 40 Rhodes Scholars should probably get a mention as well.

Not like this at Normo
If my alma mater, Normanhurst Boys' High, had just one of such calibre there would be a banner across Pennant Hills Road, but sadly the best we ever did was a bloke who was all over pages 1, 2 and 3 of the Daily Telegraph for a very big heroin importation bust. Still, it was a pretty sophisticated racket for its day, and the guy did manage to pay off a two-storey house in suburban Carlingford.

The best thing that ever happened in science at Normo was when one of the taller boys dressed himself in a hat and overalls and, wandering the science block from lab to lab with cigarette dangling from mouth, told all the teachers he was from the gas company and that the building had to be evacuated, which I suppose about 100 or 150 of us did in a very orderly fashion, much to the credit of our school's brilliant teaching staff.

Speaking of "the City of Churches" and gays floating in the Torrens River, Associate Professor Mike Tyler's team from the University of Adelaide won the 2005 Ig Nobel biology prize for its work on frog smells. Definitely something in the water.

It's all on our Podcast Page today, from the ABC Science Show for October 8, with some interesting background and interviews.

Tagged: science, education, nobel, australia, adelaide

Yahoo! News ad doesn't quite fit

A rather unfortunate ad placement on Yahoo! News.

The story reads: "Guatemalan officials said they would abandon communities buried by landslides and declare them mass graveyards".

Click to enlarge.

Tagged: hurricane+stan, flood, mexico, guatemala, yahoo, advertising

Ida Craddock turns on the gas

1902 USA: Activist Ida Craddock (‘Sexual Mystic and Martyr for Freedom’; b. August 1, 1857) slashed her wrists and turned on the gas, killing herself rather than returning to court for sentencing. She had been found guilty of obscenity; the judge said her sex education pamphlet ‘The Wedding Night’ was too obscene to show to the jury, when in fact its real crime was its misinformation, particularly in its ‘spiritual’ sexual advice to men ...

Do they have any oil in Pakistan?

That's what my friend asked me when I said that there were so far 18,000 earthquake dead reported in Pakistan alone and that the USA is donating the price of a yacht (a hundred grand; source BBC News).

As I write, the cost of the war in Iraq ticker in the sidebar of this blog says that the USA has so far spent a few bucks short of $200 billion.

Tagged: war, peace, usa, earthquake, pakistan, military

Oxfam launches Asian Earthquake appeal

"In response to the Asian Earthquake Oxfam has today launched an emergency appeal to get help to the people affected.

"Hundreds of thousands of people will be affected by this earthquake and will need help urgently. The death toll won’t become clear for days but what is clear is that if we don’t get help to those people quickly the death toll will grow.

"Urgent needs are for tents, blankets, medical kits, food aid and water for those affected."
Oxfam

Donate online
Google news earthquake donations :: RSS

More than 18,000 dead in devastating South Asia quake

More at Daily Planet News

Tagged: earthquake, donations, oxfam

John Lennon Day

Suspicious behaviour on the tube

Arrested, handcuffed, his home searched, his phones and computers confiscated, his girlfriend questioned. The reason? The cops don't need one any more. Welcome to the new "anti-terrorism" regimes of Bush, Bliar and Howard. How did we let this happen?
Guardian

Ad corps' fake blogging: dumb, unethical, creepy

Take five and follow the link trail on this story, especially Tom Coates's blog, 'cause the tale is a beauty. Two of the Big Transnational Nasties of Advertising -- Young & Rubicam and J Walter Thompson -- are to be found slithering around in this one:

"Fake blogs—a form of viral marketing in which PR or advertising agencies attempt to generate interest in their client's product by creating a fictional character on the internet—are drawing criticism from real bloggers. The Cohn & Wolfe PR firm had to apologize recently after 'using a fictional character to leave a series of thinly veiled advertisements on blogs and other websites. A number of websites were hit last week with messages from Barry Scott,' a fictional spokesman for a British household cleaning product. British blogger Tom Coates was especially outraged and called it 'a new low for marketers' after he wrote an emotional account of his relationship with his father, and then received comment spam from 'Barry Scott' disguised as condolences. Coates replied: 'My view was that any right-thinking person would view trying to market your product on such a post as revolting, corrupt, cynical, disgusting, sick and dishonourable.' According to some PR people, however, fake blogging is a good idea."
PRWatch

Tagged: advertising, pr, fake+blog, fake+blogs, fake+blogging, viral+marketing, public+relations, media

Bush White House declares torture vital to US security policy

Bush White House declares torture vital to US security policy

Feast day of St Keyne

St Keyne spent her life performing good deeds in the West Country, where she is remembered by the sacred well bearing her name, near Liskeard, Cornwall.

Keyne liked to reside in a wood at the place now known as Keynsham. The chief of the country warned her of the venomous snakes that were prevalent in that forest, but St Keyne answered that she would pray and thus rid the country of serpents. Indeed, they were turned into the coils of stone that we know today as the ammonite fossils that are frequently found in the lias rock of that district.

Folklore records a quaint tradition associated with St Keyne’s Well. Legend has it that the first spouse to drink from its waters will have the upper hand in the marriage ...

Tagged: cornwall, uk, folklore, history, saint, saints, sacred+wells, sacred+springs

Latest news on "Climate change" and "pandemic"

Especially since NASA earlier this year said that global warming is beyond reasonable doubt, and since this week scientists announced that they have cracked the code of the 1918 influenza pandemic, I feel it has become quite essential to stay reasonably informed on these topics.

The AIDS epidemic in Africa, too, is so vast and terrible that I feel that knowledge and awareness are important.

So I've added two big new news pages, each with 100 headlines, that pop up from Daily Planet News, viz:

Climate Change News (popup) :: Pandemic News (popup)

Another new feed at DPN is Le Monde Diplomatique (France's great newspaper in a monthly roundup in English). DPN now has more than 150 newsfeeds all on the one page, and some of those feeds themselves draw on dozens or hundreds of sources, so DPN is BIG, but all on one page. (The usual online news sources only give you one -- their own.) I keep DPN open and minimized -- it refreshes itself every 15 minutes so a few times a day I can drop in for the latest world headlines from many sources.

Tagged: pandemic, avian+flu, influenza, aids, africa, spanish+flu, climate+change, global+warming, environment

Dylan Thomas audio: 11 volumes in free MP3

"Salon has got the entire, eleven-volume set of Dylan Thomas recordings from Caedmon as free MP3 downloads. Subscribers get 'em by clicking, others will have to watch a brief ad."

Link, and lid dip to BoingBoing

A peculiar president

I'm reading Gavin Souter's 1968 book, A Peculiar People, which is about William Lane and New Australia -- the brave but flawed attempt by about 600 Australian working class people to set up an agrarian communist society in Paraguay in the 1890s.

Even in late-19th century Australia it was seen as dangerous if a leader claimed to be receiving instructions from a deity. Some of Lane's most fervent supporters abandoned the project when Lane started crediting God with some of his actions.

James Murdoch, a classics scholar, arrived at New Australia in early 1894 intending to become the commune's school principal. When he met Lane, who told him that he was consulting God about the affairs of New Australia, Murdoch immediately decided he had to return to Japan. He later wrote, "When the leader professed to be ordering his movements and policy by the instructions of a supernatural being, New Australia was no longer any place for James Murdoch". (Murdoch went on to write a three-volume History of Japan and hold the chairs of English Literature at the University of Tokyo and Oriental Studies at the University of Sydney.)

Perhaps more than any one thing, it was the religiosity and fanaticism which Lane developed after he had founded the community that freaked out his followers, even his lieutenants, with resignations en masse eventually leading to the ruin of the project.

Now, 11 decades later we learn that Dubya gets his orders from an imaginary friend who apparently tells him to slaughter scores of thousands of innocent men women and children in a foreign land most of his subjects can't even find on a map. How long can this last in modern America before someone or some movement stops him?

Theocracy Watch on Bush

Is Bush Crazy?

Tagged: bush, god, religion, fundamentalism, christianity, mental+health, iraq, war, progressive

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night ...

1955 American poet Allen Ginsberg (1926 - 1997) organised a poetry reading at Six Gallery, San Francisco (featuring also Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti) and brought down the house by reading ‘Howl’ publicly for the first time (some sources say October 13).

‘Howl’ is Ginsberg’s most famous work, but the Beat poet did not consider it his best ...

Wilson's Almanac Book of Days hip list :: Test your hipster general knowledge

Tagged: ginsberg, literature, beat+poetry

EU to begin online library project

"Google and Yahoo are already in efforts to provide an internet library project, but now the European Commission has announced similar plans as well. In this case, the EU is likely to be very successful, since any copyright laws which might hamper Google and Yahoo can be changed for the EU's efforts."
TechSpot

Yahoo rivals Google's digital library
Yahoo! plans e-library
UC joins Yahoo to build vast online library
Whose intellectual property is it anyway?
EU to follow Google's lead with online library
UC helps facilitate public access to digital texts
Yahoo Gets Book-Scanning Right...Almost

Tagged: yahoo, google, library, e-library, copyright, open+source, literature

Drummer tells corps: Doors classics "not for rent"

Is this a sign of the times? The Yahoo! News reporter writes this article as though principled behaviour were somehow exceptional, intriguing ... even perhaps kind of screwy:

"Bob Dylan is singing 'The Times They Are A-Changin'' in a television ad for healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente these days, and who could argue? With Led Zeppelin pitching Cadillacs, the Rolling Stones strutting in an Ameriquest Mortgage ad and Paul McCartney warbling for Fidelity Investments, it's clear that the old counterculture heroes of classic rock are now firmly entrenched as the house band of corporate America.

"That only makes the case of John Densmore all the more intriguing ..."

Tagged: rock+music, corporation, corporations, ethics

Bush has a new 9-11 to scare us with

The spectre of pandemic will be Bush's (and Howard's, Bliar's, etc) new 9-11, Rita and Reichstag rolled into one: another excuse for "security" creeping curtailment of civil and human rights.

Tagged: bush, civil+rights, human+rights, security, avian+flu, pandemic

Mad Hatter Day, USA

Inspired by the character of the Mad Hatter as depicted in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Mad Hatter Day (also frequently appearing without spaces, as 'MadHatterDay') is a semi-official holiday created to be a 'second Silly Day', bridging the gap between each occurrence of April Fool's Day.

In the USA, it falls on October 6 each year, due to illustrations where the Hatter's oversized hat is labelled "In this style 10/6"; it is considered an amusing coincidence that this date is almost a half year away from April Fool's Day. However, due to differing systems of dating, in the UK, Australia and many other countries it occurs on June 10 ...

Mad Hatter Day is one of numerous Discordian 'Holydays' [sic; see the Discordian calendar in the Wilson's Almanac Scriptorium].

Tagged: holiday, holidays, discordian, holyday, fiction, literature

The Da Vinci Glow

"When you think of Leonardo Da Vinci, you probably think of the Mona Lisa or 16th-century submarines or, maybe, a certain suspenseful novel. That's old school. From now on, think of the Moon.

"Little-known to most, one of Leonardo's finest works is not a painting or an invention, but rather something from astronomy: He solved the ancient riddle of Earthshine.

"You can see Earthshine whenever there's a crescent Moon on the horizon at sunset. Thursday, Oct. 6, is a good night: sky map. Look between the horns of the crescent for a ghostly image of the full Moon. That's Earthshine.
"For thousands of years, humans marveled at the beauty of this 'ashen glow,' or 'the old Moon in the new Moon's arms.' But what was it? No one knew until the 16th century when Leonardo figured it out.

"In 2005, post-Apollo, the answer must seem obvious. When the sun sets on the Moon, it gets dark--but not completely dark. There's still a source of light in the sky: Earth. Our own planet lights up the lunar night 50 times brighter than a full Moon, producing the ashen glow ..."
NASA

Leonardo da Vinci in the Book of Days

Above: A crescent moon with Earthshine over Yosemite National Park in October 2004. Photo credit: Andy Skinner. See it embiggened.

Tagged: nasa, moon, leonardo, da+vinci, science, lunar, space

Cynthia Fellatio’s Flying Circus

1969 Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuted on BBC One. Some rejected alternative names for the show:

1 2 3 / It’s Them! / Arthur Megapode’s Flying Circus / The Horrible Earnest Megapode / The Panic Show / The Plastic Mac Show / Ow! It’s Colin Plint! / Vaseline Review / Vaseline Parade / The Keen Show / Brian’s Flying Circus / The Year of the Stoat / Cynthia Fellatio’s Flying Circus ...

Tagged: british+comedy, funny, humour, humour, monty+python, uk, edible+pets

Hunger crisis in Malawi

Malawi children starving
The World Food Program has issued a new warning that five million people in Malawi will face starvation unless more food aid is received from the international community.

World Food Program :: Hunger map :: Flash appeals

5 million people in Malawi are likely to need assistance

Malawi Group Say Private Sector Contributing to Food Shortages

"The World Food Programme has been warning of the imminent food crisis threatening southern Africa for the past six months. But even they have been taken by surprise by the emerging scale of the problem ..."
Observer

Ten ways you can help Africa :: Help Africa :: Hunger charities

Famine kills children in Malawi :: Donate online :: Famine Hits Malawi

More

Track new stories about famine – create an email alert or get famine news by RSS

Tagged: famine, malawi, poverty, hunger, aid, africa

Dr Jim Cairns, Australia's hippie Deputy Prime Minister

1914 Dr Jim Cairns (d. October 12, 2003), Australian politician, Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer (1974-5) in Gough Whitlam's Labor Government.

Cairns is best remembered as a leader of the movement against Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, for his affair with Juni Morosi and for his later renunciation of conventional politics. After leaving politics he became a leading light of the counter cultural Down to Earth movement which organised ConFests attended by thousands of Australians interested in alternative lifestyles (see December 12, 1976, Cotter ConFest, in the Book of Days).

In a 1982 defamation case he initiated before the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Cairns denied on oath having had a sexual relationship with Morosi. The jury in that case found that the article in question did contain "an imputation" that Cairns was "improperly involved with his assistant, Junie Morosi, in a romantic or sexual association," but that this statement was not defamatory. Cairns did not receive money for defamation, although Morosi did. In 2002 Cairns admitted that he had had a sexual relationship with Morosi ...

Tagged: australia, peace+movement, progressive, politics, counter+culture, hippie, labor

Nobel for gastric ulcer discovery

This was a pretty big deal because until 1982 absolutely everyone swore by the "fact" that ulcers were caused by stress. How many millions of people were wrongly treated?

"Australians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren won the 2005 Nobel Medicine prize for discovering a bacterium that causes gastritis and stomach ulcers, said the Nobel Assembly of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute on Monday.

"They made the 'remarkable and unexpected discovery' in 1982 that the stomach inflammation known as gastritis and ulceration of the stomach and duodenum known as peptic ulcer disease are caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, the Assembly said."
Reuters

Tagged: australia, medicine, nobel, health

My flickr account

Well, I knew I'd get round to it one day. Finally opened a flickr account to store&show some photos of Sandy Beach and stuff like that. I've had fun putting the first pix in. The link is http://www.flickr.com/photos/pipwilson/

Tagged: flickr, photos, photography, file+sharing, tags, tagging, tag

The mighty pav

1935 Chef Bert Sachse of the Esplanade Hotel, Perth, Western Australia created the pavlova, named after Anna Pavlova (1881 - 1931), the Russian ballerina whose Australian tours in 1926 and '29 had been very popular. The pavlova, a whipped cream-filled meringue dish usually topped generously with passionfruit, strawberries and/or Chinese gooseberries (kiwifruit), is considered the national dessert of Australia ...

Tagged: australia, dessert, cuisine, cooking, recipes

Arctic meltdown just decades away, scientists warn

This satellite im shows the Arctic sea ice spread on September 21, 2005, when it dropped to the lowest extent yet recorded. The yellow outline indicates where the concentration of ice was as of September 21, 1979.
Photo: AFP

Story

Tagged: arctic, global+warming, climate+change, science, environment, meteorology

Care2 not as global as it claims

Care2, which claims 5,308,976 members and proclaims itself "The global network for organizations and people who Care2 make a difference!" is a wonderful online organisation and I support it 100%.

In fact, I have a whole page of the Scriptorium dedicated to Care2 action alerts -- I call it What Can One Person Do?

Care2's activism is important and its issues of focus are extremely important. I also acknowledge the importance of activism in the USA, much of which affects us all.

Having said that, I dispute Care2's claim of globality. It seems to have a blind spot as big as a barn about the world as a whole, and the fact that there are about 190 countries not in North America. While the world reels under rampant globalization, most of it emanating from the USA even though its population is just 4.6% of the world's, perhaps Care2 would care2 examine its own part in this. Or else label itself as American and be frank about it to the citizens of the Internet who it wants to recruit.

Does the Care2 management have any idea how their website looks to people outside North America? Sadly, I doubt they have a clue. I hope their members will take them to task over this. Care2 might even pick up more members -- particularly from those other 190 or so nations -- by having a genuine, clearly global perspective. After all, we're all in this mess together.

These are the first 22 action alerts currently feeding out from Care2. Spot the alerts that don't have a North American focus:

Stop Canada's Cruel and Senseless Seal Hunt!
Tell US Retailers to Leave Ramin in the Forest
Tell Congress to Keep Sewage Out of Our Drinking Water!
Don't Let Frist Eliminate the Filibuster! - update
Tell US Retailers to Leave Ramin in the Forest
Melting glaciers, rising seas: Tell Congress to act now
250,000 Seals Dead in Just 10 Days of Hunting
Pennsylvanians - Pledge to Vote this May 17th - success
SUPPORT A LIVING WAGE FOR U.S. FARM WORKERS
Victory for Farmworkers! Taco Bell Agrees to Increase Wages for Tomato Pickers
Reduce Toxic Waste: Tell the FCC You Want to Keep Your Cell Phone
Help Stop Big Tobacco's Sweetheart Deal!
Help Make Trade Fair for Central America! (story on CAFTA)
Opposition to CAFTA Growing in US and Central America
Justice Department Proposes Remedies in Tobacco Lawsuit: Reactions
Hey Cell Phone Companies - Can You Hear Us Now?
Core American Principles Sacrificed in Largely Unnoticed Law
Stop Bolton Now! Oppose John Bolton's Nomination to UN
Oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment Senate
Begins Debating Bolton's Nomination
Ask President Bush to Make Poverty History – Sign the ONE Declaration
Urgent: Stop the Patriot Act Expansion

Tagged: americocentrism, care2, globalization, activism, progressive

Tlatelolco Massacre: Mexico's Tiananmen Square

1968 A peaceful student demonstration in Mexico City ended in the Tlatelolco Massacre. In October 2003, documents released to the National Security Archive at George Washington University under the USA Freedom of Information Act showed that the massacre was supported by the CIA.

At the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Place of Three Cultures) in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, thousands of students attempted to protest against the army’s occupation of the university (sources vary between 6,000 and 15,000).

The massacre was preceded by months of political unrest in the Mexican capital (see September 21), echoing student demonstrations and riots all over the world during 1968. The Mexican students wanted to exploit the attention focused on Mexico City for the 1968 Olympic Games. President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, however, was determined to stop the demonstrations and, in September, he ordered the army to occupy the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the largest university in Latin America.

In what amounted to an ambush, the army responded with firepower, killing close to 300 (some sources say thousands), wounding many more and arresting several thousand. Some students were tortured, and others disappeared. After nine weeks of student strikes, Mexican military opened fire on the thousands gathered in the plaza for a march on the National Polytech Institute to protest the army occupation of campus ...

Tagged: tlatelolco, activism, massacre, progressive, cia, mexico, human+rights, civil+rights

Ted Turner on the dangers of Big Media

The following excerpts of an article by CNN founder Ted Turner were written a little more than one year ago. However, they are still valid, if not more so, and because each paragraph is in itself a quotable quote, I thought I'd run it today. Note that he refers to General Electric (GE), which not only owns NBC (thus profoundly influencing the thinking and opinions of hundreds of millions of people worldwide) but also happens to be the USA's 14th largest military contractor:

"The media giants now own not only broadcast networks and local stations; they also own the cable companies that pipe in the signals of their competitors and the studios that produce most of the programming. To get a flavor of how consolidated the industry has become, consider this: In 1990, the major broadcast networks -- ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox -- fully or partially owned just 12.5 percent of the new series they aired. By 2000, it was 56.3 percent. Just two years later, it had surged to 77.5 percent …

"The Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans exerts a negative influence on society, because it discourages people who want to climb up the list from giving more money to charity. The Nielsen ratings are dangerous in a similar way--because they scare companies away from good shows that don't produce immediate blockbuster ratings.

"When media companies
dominate their markets,
it undercuts our democracy"

"When media companies dominate their markets, it undercuts our democracy. Justice Hugo Black, in a landmark media-ownership case in 1945, wrote: 'The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public.' …

"These big companies are not antagonistic; they do billions of dollars in business with each other. They don't compete; they cooperate to inhibit competition. You and I have both felt the impact. I felt it in 1981, when CBS, NBC, and ABC all came together to try to keep CNN from covering the White House. You've felt the impact over the past two years, as you saw little news from ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox, or CNN on the FCC's actions. In early 2003, the Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Americans had heard 'nothing at all' about the proposed FCC rule changes …

"But networks have also been compromised when it comes to non-news programs which involve their corporate parent's business interests. General Electric subsidiary NBC Sports raised eyebrows by apologizing to the Chinese government for Bob Costas's reference to China's 'problems with human rights' during a telecast of the Atlanta Olympic Games. China, of course, is a huge market for GE products …

"At this late stage, media companies have grown so large and powerful, and their dominance has become so detrimental to the survival of small, emerging companies, that there remains only one alternative: bust up the big conglomerates."
Ted Turner, ‘My Beef with Big Media: How government protects big media -- and shuts out upstarts like me’, Washington Monthly, July/August, 2004

Who owns CNN? or MSNBC? ABC?
"So ya think we have a "free press" eh? Check out who owns who, and who owns what you think ..."

Top 25 Media Companies’ Campaign Contributions, 1999-2002 (lid dip to Nora)

Tagged: media, corporations, fcc, television, tv, military, disinformation, propaganda

Annular eclipse on Monday to change Ramadan

"On Monday, October 03, an annular1 eclipse of the Sun will be visible from within a narrow corridor which traverses the Iberian Peninsula and stretches across the African continent. A partial eclipse will be seen within the much broader path of the Moon's penumbral shadow, which includes Europe, western Asia, the Middle East, India and most of Africa."
Physorg.com

"The moon sighting of the holy month of Ramadan will not be possible Monday, October 3, due to a partial eclipse of the sun, which means that the beginning of the dawn-to-dusk fasting month will fall Wednesday, October 5, an Arab astronomer has revealed."
Islam Online

Ramadan on Tuesday ?
Health Guidelines for Ramadan

"Al-Qaida is planning to detonate nuclear devices in seven major U.S. cities next month during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. At least, that's what World Net Daily is reporting. Of course, to find out the details of the report WND is only asking for the paltry sum of $99 dollars a year or $9.95 a month."
Al Qaeda Planning Nuclear Holocaust to Celebrate Ramadan

Tagged: astronomy, ramadan, islam, eclipse

Tell network execs to get real!

"TV Execs need a wake up call! Britney Spears' life is not reality. Carefully selected beautiful people romping around on a remote island are not reality. However, unemployment, job insecurity, and skyrocketing health care costs ARE ..."

Take action

Tagged: tv, television, media, anti+television, reality+tv, activism

Thank you, dear reader

This blog is getting lots more visitors, so thank you for all your support. I hope you're enjoying the mix of posts.

I think, too, that our special tagging method is also working. I implemented it on about September 1, and the graph speaks for itself. I'll share it if your blog has a progressive, anti-war position.

Tagged: blog, blogs, blogging, seo

World atheism and agnosticism ranking

Baz 'Witnessing for Fun and Profit' le Tuff sent this one in. Where does your country rank on the atheism/agnosticism scale?

Tagged: agnosticism, religion, christianity, god, atheism, belief, religions

October lore in the Book of Days

The old Dutch name for October was Wynmaand and the Old English was Winmonath (Wine-month, or the time of vintage; the month for treading the wine-vats); also Teomonath (tenth-month) and Winter-fylleth (winter full-moon). In some Saxon calendars, the month was allegorised by the figure of a husbandsman carrying a sack on his shoulders, sowing corn. Sometimes, October is personified as a vineyard worker riding on Scorpio, as in this image that illustrates Spenser's rhyme (Octover 1 in the BoD). In other old calendars, the sport of hawking is represented. In the Domesday Book the vineyards are mentioned often.

The Frankish name, Windurmanoth, means ‘vintage month’. American backwoods calendar: Hunter’s Moon. Ásatrú name: Hunting.

In the French Revolutionary Calendar the month was Vendémiaire (time of vintage, c. September 22 to c. October 21). It is the month for making beer, wine and cider, because of the steady temperature.

In the Goddess calendar, October is sacred to goddess Hathor (October 3 - October 30). October’s flowers are the calendula and cosmos ...

Tagged: october, folklore, trivia, lore, calendar, almanac, mythology

The BRICs, in a series of podcasts

This series of documentaries today on our Podcast Page looks at the BRICs -- Brazil, Russian, India and China -- and asks pertinent questions:

"By 2050, projections indicate that the US will no longer be the world's biggest economy and that Brazil, Russian, India and China will be the future global superpowers. Peter Day asks what this might mean for the rest of the world."

Tagged: bric, bbc, brazil, russia, india, china

Biologists challenge conventional dinosaur theories

"It was once believed that dinosaurs were simply oversized crocodiles, huge lumbering reptiles that took decades to reach full maturity. Over the past decade, work at UC Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology has contributed to the transformation of this perception. Dinosaurs are now thought to have been warm-blooded, active creatures with bird-like structure and growth that outpaces today's mammals."
Daily Californian

Tagged: dinosaur, dinosaurs, palaeontology, paleontology

Scientists end mystery of Maya city

"A decades-long mystery surrounding the rumored existence of a Maya city has reportedly ended with the discovery of the city in the jungles of Guatemala.

"The city is the rumored home of ancient monuments that once flooded the art market, the Dallas Morning Newsreported Wednesday.

"Archaeologists from Southern Methodist University and Yale University have confirmed discovering the city. The find, based on discovery of a limestone panel with more than 140 hieroglyphs, ends what one archaeologist called 'one of the longest and wildest hunts for a Maya city in the history of the discipline.'"
Physorg.com

Tagged: maya, mayan, archeology, archaeology, guatemala

Labour Party Conference ejects 82-year old protester

All he said was one word: "Nonsense!"

No wonder members are leaving the so-called Labour Party in droves, as the Australian Labor Party is also finding:

"My case is not important. But what happened to me when I was ejected from the Labour conference -- simply for a one-word protest during Jack Straw's speech this week -- tells us there is something deeply wrong with the culture of our Government under Tony Blair ... Tony Blair is the worst leader the Labour Party has ever had ... When I was a child living in Germany in the late 1930s, with relatives who died in the concentration camps, things were very frightening. But the policy of the American government today frightens me too. And so does the attitude of the British Government ..."
Independent

I dips me lid to Nora at Extra!Extra!, the blogorrah.

Tagged: progressive, uk, labour, labor, dissident, free+speech, iraq, war