Quote:Writers and artists can achieve more: they can CONQUER FALSEHOOD! In the struggle with falsehood art always did win and it always does win! Openly, irrefutably for everyone! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art.
And no sooner will falsehood be dispersed than the nakedness of violence will be revealed in all its ugliness — and violence, decrepit, will fall.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Nobel lecture (1970)

Quote:In the 17th century, English travelers, merchants, and physicians were first introduced to cannabis, particularly in the form of bhang, an intoxicating edible which had been getting Indians high for millennia. Benjamin Breen charts the course of the drug from the streets of Machilipatnam to the scientific circles of London.

Not long after he arrived in Machilipatnam, Thomas Bowrey began to wonder what it was that the people of Machilipatnam were smoking.

The bustling port city on India’s Coromandel Coast felt fantastical to the young East India Company merchant. During the first days of his visit in 1673, Bowrey marveled at wonders like “Venomous Serpents [which] danced” to the tune of “a Musicianer, or rather Magician”, and “all Sortes of fine Callicoes . . . curiously flowred”.1 Above all, Bowrey was most fascinated by the effects of an unfamiliar drug. The Muslim merchant community in the city was, as Bowrey put it, “averse [to] . . . any Stronge [alcoholic] drinke”. Yet, he noted, “they find means to besott themselves Enough with Bangha and Gangah”, i.e. cannabis. Gangah, though “more pleasant”, was imported from Sumatra (and as such was “Sold at five times the price”), whereas Bangha, “theire Soe admirable herbe”, was locally grown. The word Bangha came to be more commonly transliterated as bhang, and nowadays generally refers specifically to an edible preparation (usually a drink). It is not clear whether Bowrey uses the word with such a specific meaning in mind but either way it is this liquid form, “the most pleasant way of takeinge it”, which he opts to experiment with, as opposed to smoking it, which he describes (with perhaps some trepidation) as a “a very speedy way to be besotted”.

...
Even if these religious biases were overcome, a final challenge was in store for a drug like cannabis. How to prove, conclusively, that it had any value as either a medicine or as a recreational high? Assessing the “occult causes” of a drug’s virtues came to be a signature goal of the Royal Society and of early modern natural philosophy as a whole. It was a goal buoyed by Iberian-mediated links to pharmacological knowledge in the colonies. But it was also one that depended on the erasure of these links. The sorts of witnesses that the Royal Society deemed trustworthy, after all, tended to be elite, Protestant, and British. Too strong a reliance on figures like Petro Loveyro, or Bowrey’s unnamed bodyguard, was epistemologically unacceptable. On both a cultural and a chemical level, British scientists sought to “purify” pharmaceuticals of their Iberian Catholic, indigenous, tropical, or colonial roots.

(04-21-2024, 12:30 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: Today is National Look Alike Day! The Chinese military is full of weapons that look a lot like systems developed by other nations, namely the USA. The Shenyang J-31 is an attempt to copy the Lockheed Martin F-35.

(04-21-2024, 01:30 AM)Bally002 Wrote:

(04-21-2024, 12:30 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: Today is National Look Alike Day! The Chinese military is full of weapons that look a lot like systems developed by other nations, namely the USA. The Shenyang J-31 is an attempt to copy the Lockheed Martin F-35.

You can copy the aircraft and weapons but you can't copy the battle trained aviators and operators on the ground.

Love me some Blondie,

Thanks

Bally)

Quote:China's state broadcaster CCTV is under fire after Internet users noticed striking similarities between news footage of a Chinese J-10 fighter destroying another jet with a missile and a scene from the movie "Top Gun."

China's state broadcaster CCTV is under fire after Internet users noticed striking similarities between news footage of a Chinese J-10 fighter destroying another jet with a missile and a scene from the movie "Top Gun."

Quote:Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist



“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.

Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live.

Quote:    “The piece itself is kind of ugly, but so was the deed.”

    --Dr. Glenn Van Warrebey assessing Robert A. Lewis’s mushroom cloud sculpture, 1983[1]


    “He was an entertainer and would always want people’s attention.”

    --Dieter Rosellen assessing the late Glenn Van Warrebey, 2010[2]

INTRODUCTION

Decades ago, Dieter Rosellen dubbed an unusual piece of art acquired by his best friend as “The ‘Shroom.” He still refers to the white Italian marble mushroom cloud sculpture by that nickname.[3] The artist’s more formal (and thought provoking) title for the work is etched into its base: ‘God’s Wind’ at Hiroshima?[4] The sculptor, Robert Lewis—the co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb in warfare—died in 1983 and Rosellen’s pal, author and psychologist Glenn Van Warrebey, passed away twenty-one years later.[5] The ‘Shroom survives both of them.

This is the story of the sculpture’s evolution: From its birth in the tortured imagination of an atomic veteran to its current state—an unsettling curiosity that has to be seen to be believed. It is also a tale of the intersecting lives of the man who created it and the man who exploited it.

Quote:North Korea on Monday conducted a firing drill of short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs), with state media Korean Central News Agency reporting that it was a firing of “super-large multiple rocket units” simulating a nuclear counterattack and marking the first use of its Haekbangashoe nuclear weapon combined management system.

The purpose of the North Korean drill, which was overseen by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was “to demonstrate the reliability, superiority, might and diverse means of the DPRK’s nuclear force and to strengthen the nuclear force both in quality and quantity as a clear warning signal to the enemies,” said KCNA.

North Korea Launches Ballistic Missiles in Nuclear Command and Control Test

Quote:She was born in 1946 in Hove, West Sussex and attended Brighton and Hove High School. When she was 16 she entered a competition in the London Evening Standard and won a trip to Hollywood to take part in the spy thriller The Candy Web (1963), directed by William Castle [of Rosemary's Baby fame]. She played a diplomat's daughter at a boarding school, who with her fellow pupils becomes involved in a story of international intrigue.

While the film was not especially well received, the early exposure to Hollywood brought her a number of minor roles in film and television throughout the mid-1960s, including an uncredited role as a radio operator in the spy film The Liquidator (1965), directed by Jack Cardiff, two episodes of The Saint and the 1967 Bond spoof Casino Royale. Bastedo also modelled for Shell posters, but on condition that the images were not displayed in Britain. It was as a result of this modelling assignment that she was fortuitously discovered by the director Cyril Frankel, who saw her picture while on holiday in Austria.

The Champions was conceived during the Cold War amid a fascination with the world of spies and shadowy underground organisations, already popularised in programmes such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Thunderbirds and the James Bond franchise. Bastedo played the super-intelligent and glamorous agent Sharron Macready, starring alongside Stuart Damon as Craig Stirling and William Gaunt as Richard Barrett, on the team of Nemesis, an international spy organisation based in Geneva.

Quote:Among her more famous admirers were David Frost, Omar Sharif and Steve McQueen; though she entered briefly into relationships with the Frost and Sharif she was distinctly less impressed with McQueen, whom, she recalled, propositioned her with the line: “My wife doesn’t understand me.”

The daughter of a Canadian businessman, Alexandra Bastedo was born in East Sussex on March 9 1946 and grew up in Brighton, where her childhood ambition was to become a vet. At 16, however, she entered a “teenage diplomat” competition organised by London Evening News, beating 4, 000 finalists to a role in a comedy thriller, 13 Frightened Girls! (1963) Despite subsequent offers from Hollywood agents – and interest from Alfred Hitchcock – she returned home to finish her education, before the contracts with Shell and ITV intervened to preclude her university career.

(04-25-2024, 02:46 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: PalaeoRogue dinner tonight...

Menu for the 1874 Anniversary Dinner of the UK Palaeontographical Society. Featuring "Sheeps' Brains à la Numa", "Consommé of Trout à la Buckland" (served with "Thick Kangaroo Tail"), "Saddle (Croupe) of Wild Boar à la Danoise,
pickled in Beer", and "Gateau Palæontrographie"....

(04-25-2024, 07:51 AM)BIAD Wrote:

(04-25-2024, 02:46 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: PalaeoRogue dinner tonight...

Menu for the 1874 Anniversary Dinner of the UK Palaeontographical Society. Featuring "Sheeps' Brains à la Numa", "Consommé of Trout à la Buckland" (served with "Thick Kangaroo Tail"), "Saddle (Croupe) of Wild Boar à la Danoise,
pickled in Beer", and "Gateau Palæontrographie"....

It reminds me of 'The Freshman'!

Quote:Abel Lefranc, in his "L'origine d'Ariel," reports having found Shakespeare's very figure in a book written for magicians of the highest order, the Steganographia of Trithemius. This work, according to Lefranc, names the seven angels who control the seven planets of astrology and, subordinate to these angels, twenty-one "spiritus subjecti per quos nunciantur arcana." The idea that magic works through the controlling of spirits who direct natural phenomena (in the cabala, angels who animate both celestial and earthly elements) is in Renaissance occultism a commonplace. But Lefranc emphasizes the fact that in that order of spirits which is said by Trithemius to serve the magician ("per quos intentionis nostrae operamur effectum") appears a spirit called Ariel, one of the three placed under Zachariel, governor of Jupiter; and he goes so far as to suggest that the Steganographia is the direct source for Shakespeare's character.

Quote:Another suggestion is that Ariel's name comes from the Bible, Isaiah xxix.
The Geneva Bible (London, I594) uses the term altar in the chapter, but it
adds this prominent gloss:

The Hebrew word Ariel signifieth the Lyon of God and it signifieth the Altar, because your Altar seemed to devour the Sacrifice that was offered to God.

Quote:On the 25 April 1916, one year to the day that Australians troops splashed ashore at the Gallipoli Peninsula, 6434 servicemen paraded through the streets of Brisbane before 50,000 onlookers.

This was the first instance of what would soon become an annual national ritual of observance - Anzac Day.

Anzac Day ritual  (State Library of Queensland)

Quote:ANZAC is an acronym for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, a grouping of several divisions created early in the Great War of 1914–18. In December 1914 the Australian Imperial Force and New Zealand Expeditionary Force, both of which had just arrived in Egypt, were placed under the command of Lieutenant-General William Birdwood. Initially the term Australasian Corps was suggested for the combined force, but Australians and New Zealanders were reluctant to lose their separate identities.

No one knows who came up with the term Anzac. It is likely that Sergeant K.M. Little, a clerk in Birdwood's headquarters, thought of it for use on a rubber stamp: 'ANZAC' was convenient shorthand, and became the telegraph code word for the corps.

The Anzacs first saw action at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. The small cove where the Australian and New Zealand troops landed was quickly dubbed Anzac Cove. Soon the word was being used to describe all the Australian and New Zealand soldiers fighting on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Later it came to mean any Australian or New Zealand soldier.

New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage

Quote:James Bama was an American artist known for his realistic paintings and etchings of Western subjects. Life in Wyoming led to his comment, "Here an artist can trace the beginnings of Western history, see the first buildings, the oldest wagons, saddles and guns, and be up close to the remnants of Indian culture... And you can stand surrounded by nature's wonders."

In an extremely successful twenty-two year career as a commercial artist, he produced book covers, movie posters and illustrations for such notable magazines as Saturday Evening Post, Argosy and Reader's Digest. In 1968, Bama moved to Wyoming to pursue his love for portraying contemporary Western subjects, saying goodbye to his career as an illustrator.

Big Horn Galleries

Quote:Two versions of V. were issued in 1963, one in the U.S. and one in England, because errors that had crept into the first American edition were found and corrected in time for the British edition’s release. Pynchon would be able to get the corrections he had made for the British edition into the American paperback the following year. The fact that the first U.S. edition needed to be corrected was forgotten, and with the exception of those printed by Bantam, the U.S. paperback publisher, all other U.S. editions are reproductions of the uncorrected first American edition. This paper traces the editorial history of V. after its publication, detailing the differences between the corrected and uncorrected editions of the novel.

...

The issue, in any case, should have been settled, indeed had been settled in Britain and in the United States for about twenty years — between 1967 and 1986 — while the corrected Bantam edition was the only U.S. text being reproduced, but the problem resurfaced when Bantam lost the rights to reprint its edition and Lippincott's fiction catalogue was taken over by Harper and Row in the mid-1980s. The text of the first Perennial reprint — which also seems to have been produced using the original Lippincott edition, even though the chapter titles are centered rather than flushed to the left — followed the original American text to the letter and the later reprints continue to do so, with the exception of the introduction of new typos after two resettings, one in 1999 and the other in 2005. Meanwhile, the text that continues to be printed in Britain follows the Cape edition. Consequently, since 1986, the two versions of V. that were issued between 1963 and 1966 have been available to readers, and as in 1963, the corrected, near definitive edition, has only been the British one, a Vintage paperback in its present manifestation, while those in the U.S who have been relying on the Perennial imprints, or the newly released Penguin e-book, have been reading an unauthorized text.

Quote:Sir Victor’s remarks are, admittedly, even harder to believe than the claims of the various UFO cults. If you are not familiar with the massive, welldocumented occult and religious literature, his words may be incomprehensible to you. In essence, he means that the UFO phenomenon is actually a staggering cosmic put-on: a joke perpetrated by invisible entities who have always delighted in frightening, confusing and misleading the human race. The activities of these entities have been carefully recorded throughout history, and we will be leaning heavily on those historical records in this book.

Quote:So when authorities realised in 1985 that the whole Macari-Qantas saga was being made into a film, all hell broke lose. Questions were asked in the Senate, and Qantas actively tried to stop the movie being made. They failed, but Network 10, that had invested a quarter of a million dollars into Call me Mr Brown, refused to screen it. It remained unseen until it came out on video in 1990.

You can find it on YouTube, as well as the 1971 Peter Hiscock song A certain Mr Brown, that told the story (“a shocker in your locker”) to the tune of Click go the sheers. But still, it wasn’t the end of it. In 1998, a cold case was reopened into the disappearance of a young Ten-Pound Pom called Billy Day. He had migrated to Australia in 1969, travelled a bit and then disappeared. His last known address was with Peter Macari, who had used his identity in the 1980s to open bank accounts in Britain to safeguard some of the ransom money. A coronial inquest was held, but nothing conclusive came out of it. Macari was not extradited and allowed to continue to live his life in Britain. Billy Day has never been found. It was a nasty end to an otherwise weird and wonderful episode in Australian history.

The bomb on the Qantas flight, and what happened next

Quote:The representative of the Russian Federation, noting that the Council is again involved in “a dirty spectacle prepared by the US and Japan”, said:  “This is a cynical ploy.  We are being tricked.”  Recalling that the ban on placing weapons of mass destruction in outer space is already enshrined in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, he said that Washington, D.C., Tokyo and their allies are “cherry-picking” weapons of mass destruction out of all other weapons, trying to “camouflage their lack of interest” in outer space being free from any kinds of weapons.  The addition of the operative paragraph proposed by the Russian Federation and China does not delete from the draft resolution a call not to develop weapons of mass destruction and not to place them in outer space, he emphasized.

By a vote of 13 in favour to 1 against (Russian Federation), with 1 abstention (China), the Council then rejected the draft resolution, owing to the negative vote cast by a permanent member.

The representative of the Russian Federation said the only reason Washington, D.C., introduced this amendment is to tarnish the Russian Federation.  Addressing the United States’ delegate and highlighting the thrust of the proposed amendment, he asked:  “If the United States is really so much in favour of using outer space for peaceful purposes, why did you vote against our amendment calling for a ban on weapons of any kind being placed in space, not just weapons of mass destruction?”

Russia vetoes UN resolution against nuclear weapons in space

Quote:Chinese Aircraft Carrier Fujian Prepares For First Sea Trial (Updated) (29 April 2024)

Update: Against initial reporting in this article Fujian currently remains stationary in the Yangtze River Delta off her original berth. The rationale for this remains speculative and the beginning of a proper trial therefore is to be confirmed. This article will be updated with further information as it becomes available.

Fujian today, April 29, vacated her moorings at Jiangnan on Changxing Island in the Yangtze River Delta under her own power, as evidenced from social media imagery. The anticipated first sea trial represents a significant milestone on getting China’s first supercarrier equipped with electromagnetic catapults ready for service. The carrier moved out of berth assisted by several tugboats as covered in moving footage circulated on Chinese social media and on “X”, formerly Twitter.

Quote:No one was better at spinning a good yarn than the imaginative Calamity herself. She had no high regard for truth, particularly when she was “tight as a goat” and cadging drinks in frontier saloons.

Calamity was certainly not noted for her beauty. The Black Hills Daily Times once described her as looking like the “result of a cross between the gable end of a fire proof and a Sioux Indian.”

Despite Hollywood’s later attempts to pretty her up, that description was not inaccurate. Calamity was tall for a woman, just under six-foot when wearing her high-heeled boots. Big boned and muscular, with rough, weather beaten skin and dark, stringy, seldom-washed hair, she was masculine in appearance even when wearing a dress.

Calamity is often referred to as Martha Jane Cannary (sometimes spelled Canary) but the middle name is open to question; she didn’t claim it in her so-called autobiography. Men who patronized prostitutes were called johns and trollops referred to as janes, which may explain the Jane portion of her nickname.

Calamity knew she could count on the kind-hearted people of Deadwood to help with the little girl’s education. According to Estelline Bennett, author of Old Deadwood Days, money raised at a benefit held at the Green Front saloon “was enough to have kept that child in St. Martin’s convent until she was ready for Wellesley or Bryn Mawr.”

GIRLS OF THE GULCH (Deadwood magazine)