A reminder that May 1 is the International Worker’s Day and early American labor rights protesters initiated it. It’s an American tradition – not a Communist tradition. And it’s a pagan tradition from the dawn of time.

I hope you all had a great May Day. As I post this it’s still May 1 from the CDT zone westward. For those who saw the original post, you can just skip it or get refreshed. For those who haven’t seen it, it has some interesting background on the history of the day.

Herewith, a recycled essay:

May 1.

A lot of Americans have apparently been brainwashed during their formative years. Especially the crowd over at the site that shall not be named. The vast majority associate the first day of the month of May as a Soviet Communist celebration day. Then again a sizable number of Uhmericans think Saddam Hussein was complicit in the 9/11 atrocities. Oh, and the wiretapping started after 9/11 and not like late February or early March of 2001.

May first was a holiday before there was a May. It’s a cross-quarter day. That means it falls about halfway between a solstice and an equinox. Back before keyboards, laser mice and high-speed internet connections people used to notice these things. The only thing that emitted light, besides fire, was in the sky. You can check out the sky anytime. Just click here. Cool, huh? And you didn’t have to let go of your mouse to do it.

So back in the days of stone knives and bearskins, and I’m not talking about the Star Trek episode where Spock and McCoy have to build a time-machine thingie with 1930s tech, or even the dark ages of eight bit processors, RAM limits of 65536 bytes and machine code, I’m talking real stone and real bear. Hell, sabre-tooth tiger and wooly mammoth times. Back when chipped flint was high-tech. In the time of neo-pagans (not to be confused with the neopaganists of today).

Together with the solstices and equinoxes (Yule, Ostara, Midsummer, and Mabon), these form the eight solar holidays in the neopagan wheel of the year. They are often celebrated on the evening before the listed date, since traditionally the new day was considered to begin at sunset rather than at midnight.

Festival name Date Sun’s Position

Samhain 1 Nov (alt. 5-10 Nov)

Imbolc 2 Feb (alt. 2-7 Feb)

Beltane 1 May (alt. 4-10 May)

Lughnasadh 1 Aug (alt. 3-10 Aug)

There are Christian and secular holidays that correspond roughly with each of these four, and some argue that historically they originated as adaptations of the pagan holidays, although the matter is not agreed upon. The corresponding holidays are:

   * St.Brigids Day (1 Feb), Groundhog Day (2 Feb), and Candlemas (2 or 15 Feb)

   * Walpurgis Night (30 Apr) and May Day (1 May)

   * Lammas (1 Aug)

   * Halloween (31 Oct), All Saints (1 Nov), and All Souls’ Day (2 Nov)

Groundhog Day is celebrated in North America. It is said that if a groundhog comes out of his hole on 2 February and sees his shadow (that is, if the weather is good), there will be six more weeks of winter. February 2nd marks the end of the short days of winter. Because average temperatures lag behind day length by several weeks, it is (hopefully) the beginning of the end of winter cold.

It’s been Groundhog Day in Iraq for five seven years now. But who’s counting?

UPDATE: we’ve been lobbing explosives into Afghanistan since Clinton’s time. The definition of insanity is repeating the same act and expecting a different result. Our MIC PWOT is insane – but it keeps their funding flowing while we lose our jobs and homes.

It’s 2010 now and nothing has really changed that much, has it? I hope you enjoyed this May Day. It’s a day for Working Class Heroes.

There’s more:

Bill Moyers ended last Friday’s hour with an impassioned plea to Barry Obama. Health care is not an option. It is a requirement. Bill suggested going witha an idea that Josh over at TPM put forward: Offer Medicare to evryone under 65. You’d have to pay for it. It wouldn’t be impossible to figure out a subsidy schedule for those who couldn’t afford to pay. Every American understands Medicare. The problem is most Americans are too dumb to understand that Medicare is government health care. And it works.

It’s almost too simple, too obvious and too effective to implement.

1-202-456-1111. That’d be the WH switchboard. Call it.

Call your rep at their district offices and their DC offices. You can google them. Same goes for your senators – or senator in my case; Teddy’s passed through the veil.

Fax them. The paper industry will love you for that one.

E-mail them and be sure to ask for a response.

If you have extra time then bombard the hold-outs not in your state or district. Google a business in their district and use that address and “Ima Madzhell”. We need a firestorm to cdounteract the August mind share the wingnuts got with their town halls and death panels.

Today is the first work day after the last big summer weekend. The elected people and the K St things will all be back in DC.

The real battle begins today. This is the only chance you will ever get in your lifetime for universal health care. It’s now or never and it begins today.

I’ve finally getting some late season head-way on my organic garden. I was pretty much out of it from the end of April to the beginning of July with pneumonia. Add in underlying lifelong asthma and it really slows you down. Today’s the 25th and I’ve had a full eighteen days in a row of health. It feels good.

The increased garden work has allowed me time to follow up on some blatant fraud being committed on me, Jordan Hospital (Plymouth, MA) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Boston). United Health Care is committing clear and open fraud in refusing to honor their contract with the hospitals and me and my wife’s employer (our health care insurance source).

A big H/T to D Wreck for the post a few days ago on UHC, the Heritage Foundation, the Lewin Group Study and Ingenix. I had no idea how incestuous the corruption circle can be. I’ve been on the phone to my congressman’s office four times this week wrt the Universal health Care bill. The following is a letter to William Delahunt (D-MA) with some short stories of my plight (only a very small part of it wrt UHC) and some observations from past managerial experience a IBM/Lotus and a look at the opportuinty cost to our national productivity and GDP that is lost to time spet dealing with these intentional fraud artists who claim to be honest corporations offering reasonable health care coverage at competitive prices.

The lies and corruption are beyond comprehension. The letter follows after the jump. Feel free to cut and paste from it, forward it or cross-post it. It is Now or NEVER. I hope you are all doing what you can this week before the bozos go home for vacation. Also, track down any pubic appearances they make in August and be sure to show up and let them know just how you feel. Call their local offices and ask for some face time. Remember, they work for you. They are the paid help. You are the boss. Don’t let them intimidate you.

Change harder! Yell louder! Get right up in their faces! Make it happen! Do not wait for someone else to do this for you! Get off your butts!

Reminder more or less that May 1 is the International Worker’s Day and early American labor rights protesters initiated it. It’s an American tradition – not a Communist tradition. And it’s a pagan tradition from the dawn of time.

I hope you all had a great May Day. As I post this it’s still May 1 from the CDT zone westward. For those who saw the original post, you can just skip it or get refreshed. For those who haven’t seen it, it has some interesting background on the history of the day.

Herewith, a recycled essay:

May 1.

A lot of Americans have apparently been brainwashed during their formative years. Especially the crowd over at the site that shall not be named. The vast majority associate the first day of the month of May as a Soviet Communist celebration day. Then again a sizable number of Uhmericans think Saddam Hussein was complicit in the 9/11 atrocities. Oh, and the wiretapping started after 9/11 and not like late February or early March of 2001.

May first was a holiday before there was a May. It’s a cross-quarter day. That means it falls about halfway between a solstice and an equinox. Back before keyboards, laser mice and high-speed internet connections people used to notice these things. The only thing that emitted light, besides fire, was in the sky. You can check out the sky anytime. Just click here. Cool, huh? And you didn’t have to let go of your mouse to do it.

So back in the days of stone knives and bearskins, and I’m not talking about the Star Trek episode where Spock and McCoy have to build a time-machine thingie with 1930s tech, or even the dark ages of eight bit processors, RAM limits of 65536 bytes and machine code, I’m talking real stone and real bear. Hell, sabre-tooth tiger and wooly mammoth times. Back when chipped flint was high-tech. In the time of neo-pagans (not to be confused with the neopaganists of today).

Together with the solstices and equinoxes (Yule, Ostara, Midsummer, and Mabon), these form the eight solar holidays in the neopagan wheel of the year. They are often celebrated on the evening before the listed date, since traditionally the new day was considered to begin at sunset rather than at midnight.

Festival name Date Sun’s Position

Samhain 1 Nov (alt. 5-10 Nov) ? 15° ?

Imbolc 2 Feb (alt. 2-7 Feb) ? 15° ?

Beltane 1 May (alt. 4-10 May) ? 15° ?

Lughnasadh 1 Aug (alt. 3-10 Aug) ? 15° ?

There are Christian and secular holidays that correspond roughly with each of these four, and some argue that historically they originated as adaptations of the pagan holidays, although the matter is not agreed upon. The corresponding holidays are:

   * St.Brigids Day (1 Feb), Groundhog Day (2 Feb), and Candlemas (2 or 15 Feb)

   * Walpurgis Night (30 Apr) and May Day (1 May)

   * Lammas (1 Aug)

   * Halloween (31 Oct), All Saints (1 Nov), and All Souls’ Day (2 Nov)

Groundhog Day is celebrated in North America. It is said that if a groundhog comes out of his hole on 2 February and sees his shadow (that is, if the weather is good), there will be six more weeks of winter. February 2nd marks the end of the short days of winter. Because average temperatures lag behind day length by several weeks, it is (hopefully) the beginning of the end of winter cold.

It’s been Groundhog Day in Iraq for five seven years now. But who’s counting?

UPDATE: we’ve been lobbing explosives into Afghanistan since Clinton’s time. The definition of insanity is repeating the same act and expecting a different result. Our MIC PWOT is insane – but it keeps their funding flowing while we lose our jobs and homes.

It’s 2010 now and nothing has really changed that much, has it? I hope you enjoyed this May Day. It’s a day for Working Class Heroes.

There’s more:

All roads lead to the Rome Statute.

From Wiki:

Following years of negotiations aimed at establishing a permanent international tribunal to punish individuals who commit genocide and other serious international crimes, the United Nations General Assembly convened a five-week diplomatic conference in Rome in June 1998 “to finalize and adopt a convention on the establishment of an international criminal court”.[7][8] On July 17, 1998, the Rome Statute was adopted by a vote of 120 to 7, with 21 countries abstaining.[5] The seven countries that voted against the treaty were Iraq, Israel, Libya, the People’s Republic of China, Qatar, the United States, and Yemen.[5]

Article 126 of the statute provided that it would enter into force shortly after the number of states that had ratified it reached sixty.[3] This happened on April 11, 2002, when ten countries ratified the statute at the same time at a special ceremony held at the United Nations headquarters in New York.[9] The treaty entered into force on July 1, 2002;[9] the ICC can only prosecute crimes committed on or after that date.[10]

McClatchy has a great article that is pretty much a must-read summary of the consensus of where we are now on the subject of “War Crimes“.

Emboldened by a Democratic win of the White House, civil libertarians and human rights groups want the incoming Obama administration to investigate whether the Bush administration committed war crimes. They don’t just want low-level CIA interrogators, either. They want President George W. Bush on down.

There’s a little problem here, though.

Without wider support, the campaign to haul top administration officials before an American court is likely to stall.

In the end, Bush administration critics might have more success by digging out the truth about what happened and who was responsible, rather than assigning criminal liability, and letting the court of public opinion issue the verdicts, many say.

I strongly recommend reading the entire McClatchy article. I posted recently on the subject of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I don’t like the Reconciliation part any more than anyone else does. Pat Leahy (D – VT) predicts that there will be no criminal punishments. He’s almost certainly right. Dick Cheney has just admitted his guilt to the entire world and nothing – absolutely nothing – is being done about it. And nothing will be done about it.

There is, however, one possibility: the United States of America joins the International Criminal Court.

Are we up to it? Are we willing to join the ICC and allow any potential war criminals in our population to be tried openly and fairly on the world stage? Bust ourselves and turn ourselves in and plead for mercy? I doubt it. But it would be nice.

Our biggest obstacle to making this happen is mentioned in the McClatchy article:

Also left unanswered is whether any top congressional Democrats consented directly or indirectly to the most controversial interrogation practices after the administration disclosed them in closed-door briefings.

I think one of them said something like “impeachment is off the table” after the 2006 elections. More and better. Right. Check the dates. Scrutinize the time-lines.

Our leaders don’t lead. They follow. Sometimes they need to get shoved out front. We may have a different one now. We’ll see. Joining the ICC would be an emphatic statement that the truth will be known.

Satya.