Quote:Pilecki would stay in the underground army and fight in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, he was later interned in prisoner of war camps, and after liberation in 1945 was assigned to the II Corps of the Polish Army in Italy, where he turned in his report about Auschwitz to the British.

For Pilecki, Auschwitz was the symbol of the Polish struggle for existence. He himself could never go back to a normal civilian life after his experience. He maintained contact with the underground resistance – now against the Soviet Union – after the war, and indeed returned to Poland in late 1945 to report on the Soviet occupation.

He lived and worked undercover, but on May 8, 1947 the Ministry of Public Security captured him. He was tortured and dragged before a kangaroo court and accused of many things, including espionage and planning an armed uprising. The sentence was death. On May 25, 1948, in the Mokotow Prison in Warsaw, Witold Pilecki was executed. His final resting place is unknown. In 1990, Pilecki – and others from that show trial – were rehabilitated and today, he is celebrated, and for good reason, as a Polish patriot and hero.

The Story of Extraordinary Polish soldier, Inmate 4859

Quote:West Country Yap:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjTIFkWJctY

West Country Yap is a short film consisting of snippets of conversation and anecdotes from five elderly gentlemen of south west England. A particular point of interest is the regional dialect - Somerset and mid Devon - which is changing and diluting with younger generations. The strong dialect is a result of growing up in an age where mobility was limited, and travel out of the region or community was unnecessary. Now, with cars and transport taken for granted we are able to move around the country at will, and as a result, regional populations are slowly becoming homogenised and regional accents gradually being lost to a bygone era. Certain words, peculiar to the region, are heard less and less among younger inhabitants, and gradually the rich dialects of the West Country will disappear over the coming decades. It is my hope to record many speakers of the genuine dialects before this generation passes on, and before all that is left is a modern diluted version.

Note: The traveller, John Treagood, is not a native of the west country, but hails from Kent. He travels around the south west and has been included for his interesting take on life and the fact that he is a rare character.

Footnote: 
Sad to report that the two gentlemen in the first segment, Bill and Marcus, both passed away within two days of each other. Marcus died on Sunday March 4, 2018, and Bill apparently left us on the previous Friday. More of them from my archive when time permits.

R.I.P. Bill and Marcus.

Further footnote: I recently heard that another of my subjects, Peter Isaacs, passed away around May 9, 2018, at the age of 93.

March 21, 2019:
Sad to learn today that another gentleman from my West Country Yap film has passed away.

Paul Isaac, whose brother Peter died last May, died on Tuesday March 19, 2019, at the tender age of 93.

All have now left us, except for John Treagood, the gentlemen of the road - as far as I know. So glad I met these wonderful gents and captured their dialects on video. Truly, an era is passing.

February 9, 2020:
John Treagood passed away on the evening of Feb 9, 2020. All the subjects of this film have now left us.

Quote:‘This was a really fast computer used by scientific institutions, including NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In the 1960s, the IBM System/360 series, particularly the Model 91, set a new standard for computer architecture, influencing the design of modern computing systems. It’s because of machines like this we can send astronauts to the moon. It was also one of the first beasts to get connected to the ARPANET, the proto-internet. These things are rare – only six of these operator’s maintenance panels are known to exist – and the fact that this one comes to life through the use of emulation makes it really quite special. This particular machine comes from Princeton University, where it supported astrophysics research. More recently, it appeared in the movie Tomorrowland, starring George Clooney.’

AN IBM SYSTEM 360 MODEL 91 CONTROL CONSOLE

Quote:Two soldiers killed during Operation Market Garden laid to rest after DNA identification

Two British soldiers who were killed 80 years ago during the Battle of Arnhem have finally been laid to rest with full military honours.

Private Henry Moon and Lieutenant Dermod Green Anderson died fighting in Operation Market Garden, the major airborne offensive aimed at securing strategically important crossings in the Netherlands.

They were buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery, which is the final resting place of more than 1,700 Second World War service personnel.

Quote:Charles Wendell Colson (October 16, 1931 – April 21, 2012), generally referred to as Chuck Colson, was an American attorney and political advisor who served as Special Counsel to President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1970. Once known as President Nixon's "hatchet man", Colson gained notoriety at the height of the Watergate scandal, for being named as one of the Watergate Seven and also for pleading guilty to obstruction of justice for attempting to defame Pentagon Papers defendant Daniel Ellsberg. In 1974, Colson served seven months in the federal Maxwell Prison in Alabama, as the first member of the Nixon administration to be incarcerated for Watergate-related charges.

Colson received 15 honorary doctorates and in 1993 was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, the world's largest annual award (over US$1 million) in the field of religion, given to a person who "has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension". He donated the prize to further the work of Prison Fellowship, as he did all his speaking fees and royalties. In 2008, he was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President George W. Bush.

Colson served in the United States Marine Corps from 1953 to 1955, reaching the rank of captain. From 1955 to 1956, he was the assistant to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Material).

While in prison, Colson had become increasingly aware of what he saw as injustices done to prisoners and incarcerates and shortcomings in their rehabilitation; he also had the opportunity, during a three-day furlough to attend his father's funeral, to pore over his father's papers and discover the two shared an interest in prison reform. He became convinced that he was being called by God to develop a ministry to prisoners with an emphasis in promoting changes in the justice system.

After his release from prison, Colson founded Prison Fellowship in 1976, which today is "the nation's largest outreach to prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families".

In 2000, Florida Governor Jeb Bush reinstated the rights [of course] which were taken away by Colson's felony conviction, including the right to vote.

On March 31, 2012, Colson underwent surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain after he fell ill while speaking at a Christian worldview conference. CBN erroneously reported on April 18, 2012, that he died with his family at his side but Prison Fellowship later (12:30 am on April 19 and again at 7:02 am) pointed out that he was still alive as of that moment.

On April 21, 2012, Colson died in the hospital "from complications resulting from a brain hemorrhage". [Falls Church, VA]

Wiki

Quote:In the 1990s, the lack of security on the internet and its ability to be used for tracking and surveillance was becoming clear, and in 1995, David Goldschlag, Mike Reed, and Paul Syverson at the U.S. Naval Research Lab (NRL) asked themselves if there was a way to create internet connections that don't reveal who is talking to whom, even to someone monitoring the network. Their answer was to create and deploy the first research designs and prototypes of onion routing.

The goal of onion routing was to have a way to use the internet with as much privacy as possible, and the idea was to route traffic through multiple servers and encrypt it each step of the way. This is still a simple explanation for how Tor works today.

Tor history

Quote:Originally published in instalments in Cosmopolitan, this piece of utopian fiction by William Dean Howells delivers a vision of a "one-class" socialist utopia while at once offering a biting critique of unfettered capitalism. The story centres around a visit to America of Mr Homos, a citizen of a mysterious island called Altruria, which is home to a one-class socialist Christian society, with no monetary system and no concept of the rich and poor. In the course of Mr Homos' visit he is appalled by what he sees occurring in late-19th-century America, a society which he likens to his country's own before "Evolution". He is clearly confused by the class system, continuously embarrassing his hosts — carrying his own luggage, bowing to waitresses, and other such acts — and finds certain activities simply bizarre, for example exercise for its own sake:

Quote:To us, exercise for exercise would appear stupid. The barren expenditure of force that began and ended in itself, and produced nothing, we should — if you will excuse my saying so — look upon as childish, if not insane or immoral.

In Altruria, all people are guaranteed a share of the national product on the condition they work at least three hours a day. In 1894, the year in which Howells' story was published, the fiction attempted to become reality when a Unitarian minister Edward Biron Payne — inspired by the Christian socialist principles espoused by Howells' book — founded "Altruria", a community in Sonoma County, California, which he set up with thirty of his followers. A hotel was started, and orchards provided fruit sold to a shop in Berkeley owned by Job Harriman (who himself set up the commune of Llano del Rio in 1913). Unfortunately, "Altruria" ran into unsurmountable financial troubles and it was abandoned in 1896. Howells would go on though, eventually creating an Altrurian trilogy, with the publication of Letters of an Altrurian Traveller (1904) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907).

Quote:The IBM 405 was IBM's first "Alphabetic Accounting Machine," able to print text as well as numbers. It had more complexity than you might expect from the 1930s, able to generate three levels of subtotals, intermediate totals, and grand totals. It could process up to 150 cards per minute; that's remarkably fast for an electromechanical system, reading and summing more than 2 cards per second. The 405 was IBM's flagship product for many years, with IBM manufacturing 1500 of them per year. Like most IBM machines, the 405 was usually rented rather than purchased; it cost over $1000 a month (equivalent to about $15,000 per month in 2017 dollars). Renting out these machines (and selling the punch cards) was highly profitable for IBM, with the IBM 405 accounting machine called "the most lucrative of all IBM's mechanical glories".

Identifying the "Early IBM Computer" in a Twitter photo

Quote:Marine pilot became God’s man after WW II

by Don Moore

Father Bill Magill of Venice, Fla. was a “Devil Dog.” He flew a Corsair, F-4U fighter, in the Pacific during World War II before he began working for the Lord.

The former Marine aviator and retired Episcopal priest was a member of Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-111. “Devil Dogs” is what they called themselves.  He saw action in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands in the Central Pacific from December 1943 until March 1945.

“Our job was to bomb and strafe everything and keep the Japanese‘s heads down,” said Magill, 85. “The first thing we did was shoot up their planes on the ground and then we would pound the heck out of them with bombs.”

By the time his tour was finished he logged 89 combat missions. The side of his Corsair was covered with yellow bombs, one for each mission.

In February 1944, Magill’s squadron was flying against Japanese targets on the Island of Jaluit in the Gilbert chain. Jabor Town was an open city on the island. They weren’t supposed to attack it.

Their fighter planes were being shot at by enemy soldiers who held Jabor Town. One of the pilots in Magill’s squadron was shot down over the village.

“The skipper told me to fly over, take a look and see if I could spot our downed pilot,” he recalled. “As I flew over, I saw a Japanese soldier in the middle of a street holding a long bamboo pole with the pilot’s head on the end of it. I became the first one in our unit to fire on Jabor Town.”

....

“Does Memorial Day mean anything today to the average American?” the 91-year-old retired minister and fighter pilot was asked.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t. I think in order to be loyal and a patriotic you have to be taught. Today both parents work and they don’t teach their kids anything about patriotism. We have let the school system go to pot. They don’t teach history like we learned history.

“We were taught to put our hand over our heart when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Kids today don’t know what you’re talking about. They know nothing about World War II or World War I were all about.

“Kids today don’t have any real understanding of patriotism so they’re not patriotic. ”I feel sorry for my grandkids, which I have eight, and my great-grandkids, which I have nine. My immediate family has produced nine Marines starting out with me and my oldest son on down to my grandchildren. All are boys and my daughter married a Marine,” he said with a chuckle.

Magill added, “I think the breakdown in our education system started with FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and all the social stuff we’re doing today. I know a Republic is one thing and a Democracy is something else. Republicans stand for the Republic which has a small government. A Democracy is what the Democrats want which is big government where few people have to work.

Quote:the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

Quote:George and his sister Dorothy had assumed custody of Peter before the divorce. They subsequently dispatched him to their mother Laura who presided over a salon of artists and musicians at Vaucresson, near Paris. Abandoning Continental sophistications for sub-continental simplicities, in 1925 she embarked on a pilgrimage to Adyar, the Theosophical community near Madras, India, with Peter in train. His waif-like aura and wafer-thin body proved irresistible, at least in the spiritual sense, for Adyar's twin panjandrums Dr Annie Besant and 'Bishop' Charles Leadbeater. From Dr Besant, Peter had lessons in meditation; 'Bishop' Leadbeater was more noted for his lessons in masturbation. Early in 1926, not unwillingly, the young Finch (without his grandmother) joined a shipload of Theosophists bound for their Australian headquarters in Sydney.

Frederick George Peter Finch (1916–1977) (Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 14, 1996)

Quote:Michaelmas is the bookend to September feasts that celebrate the intersection of theology & the harvest season. The completion of the agricultural year, Michaelmas marked the end of one and beginning of another husbandman’s year1 - the turning point of the farming cycle, as harvest reaches its peak. Rents & debts were paid, new leases taken, positions filled. As an agrarian society prepared their larders & land for a winter of unknowns, they looked to the stories of archangels defeating darkness & dragons to accompany them.

This is the time of year when I feel the autumnal equivalent of “spring cleaning” - a need to take stock, simplify, store, preserve, & refresh for the coming season. I can really see how these ancestors saw the turning of a new year in Michaelmas; we can sense a threshold here if we settle ourselves enough to see it.

To celebrate this angelic harvest feast, a bannock (unleavened quick-bread) hailing from the Scottish Highlands symbolizes the fruit of the field that is (hopefully) so prolific at this time: the Struan Micheil. Baked with a mixture of grains - especially oats, barley, & rye - this cake represents the culmination of the growing season’s abundance.2

Though its ingredients vary, it often included

Quote:    “blackberries, bilberries, cranberries, caraway seeds, and wild honey. It was baked on a fire of oak, rowan, bramble, and other woods considered blessed.”3

Traditionally baked by the eldest daughter of a family, a short prayer accompanied her baking:

Quote:    Progeny and prosperity of family,
    Mystery of Michael, protection of Trinity.4

These cakes were enjoyed by families, and more were baked in memory of departed loved ones and also gifted to the poor.

If you bake a Struan this year, maybe consider baking some extras to memorialize loved ones; if you have a food bank locally, maybe they’d enjoy this bannock as well, or a donation of flour, oats, etc?

According to legend, St. Michael cast Lucifer out of heaven on Michaelmas (originally, this legend was attached to Old Michaelmas – which was on October 10th or 11th5). Lucifer landed in a blackberry bramble, and being so angered by the prickles, he spat on them – so, it became unlucky to pick blackberries after Michaelmas, since they would be spoiled.

Quote:    “On Michaelmas Day, the devil puts his foot on blackberries.”

    Irish proverb

Because of this association, blackberry desserts are a popular tradition for Michaelmas – whether blackberry pie or cobbler, it’s considered the last time of the season to use these late berries.