Peace Flag

One voice Day unites all countries of the world with the reading of the Universal Peace Covenant on July 26th at 6 p.m. UT each year. Uh huh. You betcha.  An Entry at Checkiday.com takes you to a fuller explanation and understanding here:

http://www.peacedome.org/UniversalPeaceCovenant/1stpgCovenant.html, which in turn links to the actual Peace Covenant itself, all 577 words of it, here:  http://www.peacedome.org/UniversalPeaceCovenant/UPCinLanguages/UPC_Engli...

Isn't that thrilling, and such a glorious undertaking?  The Universal Peace Covenant is beautiful and profound in its own way, and sets forth assorted things we can do, recognize and remember to attempt or help bring peace about, changes we can make and more.  Yet, as a covenant, it falls short because those who recite it nowhere so much as say, let alone pledge and swear to do the one thing which will assure peace, an oath I personally  took some 55 years ago or more - I will not wage war except to repel an invasion or overthrow a tyrant at home.  In short:

A sincere universal affirmation of that would, in fact, bring peace,  I know this is heresy and goes against the grain here in the USA, where war is one of our major industries, one of our major exports and one of our major employers.  Such ideas and assertions have been called treasonous throughout the nation's history and still are and probably wwill be for the forseeable future.  All the same, no matter how good the pay might be, everybody should, at least once a day consider why.

The Birth of the Feebs ( and the ACLU): Seemingly desirous of his own small empire, Napoleon's great nephew, US Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte created his own special police force, the Office of the Chief Examiner, by fiat and then on this day in 1908 ordered that it be immediately staffed.  In time it came to be renamed the Federal Bureau of Instigation Investigation.  Whatever it's official mandate may eventually have become, it seems to have pretty much immediately set about persecuting unionists, anarchists, socialists, immigrants, and other undesirables.  By 1919, infamous arch criminal Jedgar Hoover was in charge and gleefully going after anybody arguably to the left of Benito Mussolini.  The Palmer raids and the practices and procedures of Jedgar's gang were so antithetical to civil rights that the ACLU was formed in response.   To quote Da Wiki: (( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids))

 

On May 28, 1920, the nascent American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was founded in response to the raids,[27] published its Report Upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice,[28] which carefully documented unlawful activities in arresting suspected radicals, illegal entrapment by agents provocateur, and unlawful incommunicado detention. Such prominent lawyers and law professors as Felix Frankfurter, Roscoe Pound and Ernst Freund signed it. Harvard Professor Zechariah Chafee criticized the raids and attempts at deportations and the lack of legal process in his 1920 volume Freedom of Speech. He wrote: "That a Quaker should employ prison and exile to counteract evil-thinking is one of the saddest ironies of our time."[29] The Rules Committee gave Palmer a hearing in June, where he attacked Post and other critics whose "tender solicitude for social revolution and perverted sympathy for the criminal anarchists...set at large among the people the very public enemies whom it was the desire and intention of the Congress to be rid of." The press saw the dispute as evidence of the Wilson administration's ineffectiveness and division as it approached its final months.

In June 1920, a decision by Massachusetts District Court Judge George W. Anderson ordered the discharge of 17 arrested aliens and denounced the Department of Justice's actions. He wrote that "a mob is a mob, whether made up of Government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals and loafers and the vicious classes." His decision effectively prevented any renewal of the raids,

But it was too late, the institutional culture had been permanently created and those practices continued with an ever widening group of target classes as well as some new offences such as using bullshit "expert testimony" of fake "experts" in assorted pseudo-sciences to get convictions and thus make it look like they were accomplishing things.  They got castigated again for Cointelpro, which they swore they terminated, but really never did.  Sure, there is probably no longer an official program called cointelpro but they continue to criminally hack, track, eavesdrop on, lie about and build dossiers on all the old targets as well as some new fictitious terrors and threats such as so called "Black Identity Extremists"  and the violent “loosely organized hybrid gang” known as the Juggalos.  (Fun Fact: Juggalo make up renders facial rec technology useless .)   ;-)

On this day in 1945 the USS Indianapolis delivered components and enriched uranium for the Little Boy A-bomb to Tinian for assembly
  I will let Mr. Oppenheimer speak to this matter:

Having the utterly lawless Feebs trying to enforce an extra-legal narrow twisted mindset and ideology upon the US populace turned out to be such a wonderful idea that on this day in 1947, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 creating the CIA to terrorize the rest of the world without the pretense of being an arm of the law.  The act also created the DoD, USAF, JCS, and NSC.  Thanks, Harry, I feel so secure knowing that our lawless assassins patrol the globe looking for wrong thinking.

On this day in history:

1775 – The office that would later become the US Post Office was established by the Second Continental Congress. Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania took office as Postmaster General.

1822 – José de San Martín arrived in Guayaquil, Ecuador, to meet with Simón Bolívar.

1847 – Liberia declared its independence.

1882 – Richard Wagner's Parsifal premiered.

1887 – The Unua Libro, founding the Esperanto movement was published.
1890 – The Revolución del Parque took place in Argentina, forcing President Miguel Ángel Juárez Celman's resignation.

1891 – France annexed Tahiti.
1908 – US AG Charles Joseph Bonaparte issued an order to immediately staff the Office of the Chief Examiner (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation).

1918 – Emmy Noether's paper, which became known as Noether's theorem was presented at Göttingen, Germany, from which conservation laws were deduced for symmetries of angular momentum, linear momentum, and energy.

1944 – The Red Army entered Lviv, Ukraine, capturing it from the Nazis.

1945 – The Potsdam Declaration was signed in Potsdam, Germany.

1945 – The USS Indianapolis arrived at Tinian with components and enriched uranium for the Little Boy A-bomb.

1947 – President Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 

1948 – President Truman signed Executive Order 9981, desegregating the US military

1953 – Fidel Castro led an unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks, beginning the Cuban Revolution.

1956 – Following the World Bank's refusal to fund building the Aswan Dam, Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal

1957 – Guatemalan  dictator Carlos Castillo Armas was assassinated.

1963 – Syncom 2 was launched from Cape Canaveral

1963 – The OECD voted to admit Japan.

1968 – South Vietnamese opposition leader Truong Ðình Dzu got five years hard labor for advocating the formation of a coalition government as a way to move toward an end to the war. Uh yeah, smooth move.

1971 – Launch of Apollo 15 on the first Apollo "J-Mission", and first use of a Lunar Roving Vehicle.

1977 – The National Assembly of Quebec imposed the use of French as the official language of the provincial government.

1989 – A federal grand jury indicted Robert T. Morris, Jr. for releasing the Morris worm

1990 – The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was signed by Bush the Elder
 

2016 – Hillary Clinton became the first female nominee for President of the US (by one of the official "major parties"

2016 – Solar Impulse 2 became the first solar-powered aircraft to circumnavigate the globe

Born this day in:

We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. 

~~   George Bernard Shaw

1502 – Christian Egenolff, printer
1711 – Lorenz Christoph Mizler, physician, mathematician, and historian
1782 – John Field, pianist and composer
1791 – Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, pianist, composer, and conductor
1796 – George Catlin, painter, author, and traveler
1819 – Justin Holland, guitarist and educator
1855 – Ferdinand Tönnies, sociologist and philosopher
1856 – George Bernard Shaw, playwright and critic
1874 – Serge Koussevitzky, bassist, composer, and conductor
1875 – Carl Jung, psychiatrist and psychotherapist
1875 – Ernesta Di Capua, botanist and explorer
1875 – Antonio Machado, poet and academic
1893 – George Grosz, painter and illustrator
1894 – Aldous Huxley,  novelist and philosopher
1897 – Paul Gallico, journalist and author
1904 – Edwin Albert Link,  industrialist, inventor, and entrepreneur
1914 – Erskine Hawkins, trumpet player and bandleader
1922 – Jim Foglesong, record producer
1925 – Joseph Engelberger, physicist and engineer
1938 – Bobby Hebb, singer and songwriter
1940 – Dobie Gray, singer, songwriter, and producer
1941 – Brenton Wood,  singer, songwriter, and keyboard player
1943 – Mick Jagger, singer, songwriter, producer, and actor
1945 – Betty Davis, singer and songwriter
1948 – Luboš Andršt, guitarist and songwriter
1949 – Roger Taylor, singer, songwriter, drummer, and producer
1953 – Robert Phillips, guitarist
1958 – Angela Hewitt, pianist
1961 – Gary Cherone, singer and songwriter
1961 – Andy Connell, keyboard player and songwriter
1965 – Jim Lindberg, singer and guitarist
1974 – Iron & Wine, singer and songwriter
1980 – Dave Baksh, singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1985 – Audrey De Montigny, singer and songwriter

Died this day in:

Five great enemies of peace inhabit with us — avarice, ambition, envy, anger and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.

Custom does often reason overrule.

~~     John Wilmot

1533 – Atahualpa, Inca emperor abducted and murdered by Francisco Pizarro 
1680 – John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, poet and courtier
1684 – Elena Cornaro Piscopia, mathematician and philosopher
1899 – Ulises Heureaux, assassinated President of the Dominican Republic
1934 – Winsor McCay, cartoonist, animator, producer, and screenwriter
1941 – Henri Lebesgue, mathematician and academic
1957 – Carlos Castillo Armas, assassinated dictator of Guatemala
1971 – Diane Arbus, photographer and academic
1984 – George Gallup, mathematician and statistician
1992 – Mary Wells, singer and songwriter
1995 – Laurindo Almeida, guitarist and composer
2000 – John Tukey, mathematician and academic
2011 – Joe Arroyo, singer, songwriter, and composer
2011 – Margaret Olley, painter and philanthropist
2012 – Don Bagley, bassist and composer
2013 – Harley Flanders, mathematician and academic
2015 – Ann Rule, cop and author of books about crimes and criminals

Holidays, Holy Days, Festivals, Feast Days, Days of Recognition, and such:

Day of National Significance (Barbados)
Day of the National Rebellion (Cuba)
Esperanto Day
Independence Day (Liberia)
Independence Day (Maldives)
One Voice Day
National Bagelfest Day

Music goes here, iirc, well, With apologies

Proto-Post Office

Bagelfest Day

Karl Jung

Moncada Barracks Attack

National Security Act 

Joe Arroyo

Erskine Hawkins

Mick Jagger

Laurindo Almeida

Roger Taylor

Mary Wells

Don Bagley

Ok, it's an open thread, so it's up to you folks now. So what's on your mind?