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You say that you are my judge, I don't know if you are [or not]; but take care not to judge wrongly, lest you place yourself in great danger; and [I] notify you of this, so that if our Lord punishes you for it, I will have done my duty in telling
you. What colour goes with smoke? Comparisons are odious. I'm armed with more than complete steel,— Come live with me, and be my love; There is nothing that is meritorious but virtue and friendship, and indeed, friendship itself is but a part of virtue. Do let me die in peace. |
Joan of Arc, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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It clearly follows that to make men moral it is necessary to make their social environment moral. And that can be done in only one way; by assuring the triumph of justice, that is, the complete liberty of everyone in the most perfect equality for all. Inequality of conditions and rights, and the resulting lack of liberty for all, is the great collective iniquity begetting all individual iniquities.
Mikhail Bakunin, Russian anarchist theorist, born on May 30, 1814
I am a free man only so far as I recognise the humanity and liberty of all men around me. In respecting their humanity, I respect my own.
Mikhail Bakunin
... if instinct alone sufficed to liberate peoples, they would long since have freed themselves. These instincts did not prevent them from accepting... all the religious, political, and economic absurdities of which they have been the eternal victims. They are ineffectual because they lack two things ... organisation and knowledge.
Mikhail Bakunin
I shall continue to be an impossible person so long as those who are possible remain possible.
Mikhail Bakunin
The desire for destruction is, at the same time, a creative desire too.
Mikhail Bakunin; The Reaction in Germany, 1842
God being master, man is the slave.
Mikhail Bakunin; God and the State
If you pull a sapling out of the ground, cut off all the leaves, and branches and make it into a club, you cannot expect to plant it back in the ground and have it grow into a beautiful tree.
Mikhail Bakunin; to Karl Marx
There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic words, so convenient and yet so terrible:
"… for reasons of state".
Mikhail Bakunin; Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism
The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind both in theory and practice. He who desires to worship God must harbour no childish illusions about the matter but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
Mikhail Bakunin; ibid
All religions, with their gods, demigods, prophets, messiahs and saints, are the product of the fancy and credulity of men who have not yet reached the full development and complete personality of their intellectual powers.
Mikhail Bakunin; God and the State (1874), quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to
Doubt, edited by James A Haught
The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
Mikhail Bakunin; ibid
God, or rather the fiction of God, is thus the sanction and the intellectual and moral cause of all the slavery on earth, and the liberty of men will not be complete, unless it will have completely annihilated the inauspicious fiction of a heavenly master.
Mikhail Bakunin; ibid
When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.
Mikhail Bakunin
The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such.
Mikhail Bakunin
The trouble lies not in any particular form of government, but in ... the very existence of government itself.
Mikhail Bakunin
"What queer people you are!" said the mother to the Ukrainian one day.
"All are your comrades – the Armenians and the Jews and the
Austrians. You speak about all as of your friends; you grieve for
all, and you rejoice for all!"
"For all, mother dear, for all! The world is ours! The world is
for the workers! For us there is no nation, no race. For us there
are only comrades and foe ..."
Maxim Gorky, arrested for his writings on May 30, 1901; Mother
Armando Valladares,
one of Che Guevara
and Fidel Castro's thousands of victims,
born on May 30, 1937 Source
I have been expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers so that I shall starve. No one publishes my poetry or my translations anymore, which was my daily bread. The first payments from my editor have been confiscated by order of the authorities.
Boris Pasternak, Nobel prize-winning author who died on May 30, 1960, possibly starved to death by the refusal of the USSR to allow him to work
Am I a gangster or murderer?
Of what crime do I stand condemned?
I made the whole world weep at the beauty of my land.
Boris Pasternak; in Viro, Roberti, Moscow:
Under the Skin, Geoffrey
Bles, London, 1961, pp. 212 - 216
The aim of art is self-discharge
And not the clap-trap of success.
It's shameless to be looming large
For merits which are but a guess.
Boris Pasternak
Good-bye … why am I haemorrhaging?
Boris Pasternak, last words
War should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity's agenda for the future.
Pope John Paul
II, in a speech in Coventry, UK, May 30, 1982
May
30 is
the 150th
day of the year in the Gregorian
Calendar (151st
in leap years), with 215
days remaining.
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Feast day of St Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc; Jehanne la Pucelle)
Joan of Arc, also called the Maid of Orléans, is a national heroine of France and saint of the Catholic Church. During the Hundred Years' War she led the French against the English and was ultimately captured and executed.
This is the traditional date in 1431
of her death at the stake, but there is
evidence to show Joan of
Arc was alive, married with children as late as 1436 at Mentz
and 1439 at Orleans. The marriage contract between Robert d'Armoise, Knight, and
Jeanne d'Arc, la Pulcelle d'Orleans, has been discovered.
After
she was captured, she was willing to recant in the face of the terrible
punishment awaiting her, and her enemies were prepared to give her life
imprisonment on bread and water. However, some of them put men's armour in her
cell, and she was naturally tempted to put it on and gain the courage that it
imparted to her. Her enemies caught her and said she was an unrepentant heretic,
and no pardon could be granted to her, so she was burnt in the marketplace at Rouen.
Her real name was Darc, not d'Arc, so she has no association with a village named Arc. Born at Domremi, a small village on the river Meuse, 1410 (some sources say January 6, 1412, which is where we have her in the Book of Days), she was the youngest child of peasants Jacques and Isabell Darc. Domremi lay in the territory of the Duke of Bar, a staunch supporter of the dauphin Charles VII, near the border with territory of Duke of Lorraine, who was an adherent of the Duke of Burgundy and the English party. The archangel Michael came to her in a vision and told her that she was destined to be the saviour of the French, as well as introducing her to her two saintly guides, Catherine and Margaret.
Two French historians, Pierre de Sermoise and Emile Grillot de Givry have both suggested that there is evidence to say that she was not executed. Another "witch" was substituted, wearing a hood. Five years later Joan apparently married Robert des Armoises and lived as wife and mother for another 18 years. Or. so it is said.
Told at her trial she ignored "the duties natural to a
woman", it's also said that Jeanne responded, "There are enough women to do the work of which you speak".
Gallery (lots of pix, slow as a wet week to download) Joan of Arc in WWI More More More
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Highly recommended:  Transgender Warriors  Joan of Arc  Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia
 Kings, Queens, Bones and Bastards
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 The Case Against Wal-Mart
By Robert Fisk
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 Word Origins  Cutting Your Car Use  Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths
Photo of the day
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 Feast
day of Frigg, Norse goddess
In Norse mythology, Frigg, Frige, Fricka, Frigga (shown here spinning clouds), one of the foremost goddesses of Norse mythology, was the mother goddess and the wife of Odin or Odr. Considered queen of the Aesir, and goddess of the sky, the goddess of motherhood, fertility, love, household management, and domestic arts. Indeed strong parallels exist between Frigg and Freya of whom she may be a different aspect. She has the power of prophecy although she does not tell what she knows, and is the only one other than Odin who is permitted to sit on his high seat Hlidskjalf and look out over the universe. She also participates in the Wild Hunt (Asgardreid) along with her husband. Frigg's children are Baldr, Hod and Wecta; her stepchildren are Hermod, Heimdall, Tyr, Vidar, Vali, and Skjoldr. Thor is either her brother or a stepson. Frigg's compainion is Eir, the gods' doctor and goddess of healing. Frigg's attendants are Hlin (a goddess of protection), Gna (a messenger goddess), and Fulla (a fertility goddess). It is unclear whether Frigg's companions and attendants are simply different aspects of Frigg herself. (c.f. avatar.) According to the poem Lokasenna Frigg is the daughter of Fjorgyn (masculine version of 'Earth,' c.f. feminine version of 'Earth,' Thor's mother), her mother is not identified in the stories that have survived. Frigg is the highest goddess of the Aesir, while Freya is the highest goddess of the Vanir. Many arguments have been made both for and against the idea that Frigg and Freya are really the same goddess, avatars of one another. 7 Some arguments are based on linguistic analysis, others on the fact that Freya wasn't known in southern Germany, only in the north, and in some places the two goddesses were considered to be the same, while in others they were considered to be different. There are clearly many similarities between the two: both had flying cloaks of falcon feathers and engaged in shape-shifting, Frigg was married to Odin while Freya was married to Odr, both had special necklaces, both had a personification of the Earth as a parent, both were called upon for assistance in childbirth, etc. On the other hand, they sometimes appear at the same time in the same text. There is also an argument that Frigg and Freya are part of a triad of goddesses (together with either Hnoss or Idun) associated with the different ages of womankind. The areas of influence of Frigg and Freya don't quite match up with the areas of influence often seen in other goddess triads. This may may mean that the argument isn't a good one, or it may tell us something interesting about northern European culture as compared to Celtic and southern European culture. Finally, there is an argument is that Frigg and Freya are similar goddesses from different pantheons who were first conflated into each other and then later seen as separate goddesses again. (See also Wikipedia entry for Frige.) This is consistent with the theological treatment of some Greek, Roman, and Egyptian deities in the late classical period. Sources: Wikipedia, Pantheon.org et al Deities of many cultures in the Book of Days
Festival of the goddess Diana, Roman Empire (May 26 - 31, 17 BCE) Feast day of St Anastasius XV Feast day of St Felix, pope and martyr Feast day of St Ferdinand
III, first king of Castille and Leon in Union Feast day of St Gabinus Feast day of St Gamo Feast day of St Hubert of Bretigny Feast day of St Isaac Feast day of St James Bertoni Feast day of St Joseph Marello Feast day of St Lawrence Richardson Feast day of St Luke Kirby Feast day of St Madelgisilus Feast day of St Maguil, recluse in Picardy Feast day of St Walstan, farm labourer at Taverham in Norfolk, devoted to God Feast day of St William Filby Corn and Flag
Dances, New Mexico Chanté-messes
(sung masses in the Roman Catholic Churches), Martinique dances,
Bamboches, Voudon
(Voodoo) Source Corn and Flag Dances, New Mexico
Around this time of year, Pentecost/Whitsunday On the dating of items in the Almanac In 2004, in the Western Christian calendar, today was Pentecost, known also as Whitsunday, originally called White Sunday – one of the great seasons for baptism when the candidates wore white garments, hence the name. The period around Whitsunday is known as Whitsuntide, the suffix -tide being Old English for 'time'. Whitsunday is the seventh Sunday after Easter, to commemorate the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. European folklore is rich in the traditions of Whitsuntide. In England, it is the traditional date of the Cotswold Games ... Read more at the Whitsuntide article at the Scriptorium
National Reconciliation Week, Australia (May 27 - Jun 3) Memorial Day, USA (originally – currently last Monday in May)Memorial Day is a United States federal holiday that is observed on the last Monday of May. It was formerly known as Decoration Day. This holiday commemorates US men and women who have died in military service to their country. The History and Origin of Memorial Day in Waterloo, New York Ratu
Sir Lala Sukuna Day, Fiji (last Monday in
May) National Potato Day, Peru
Indian
Arrival Day,
Trinidad and Tobago
On which day of the week were you born? Find out here 1672
Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia
(June 9 [May
30, Old Style], 1672 - February 8, [January 28, Old Style], 1725),
first
Emperor of the Russian Empire (1721 - 1725).
Tsar Peter, a man who was two metres tall, had a
program of Westernising Russia. Because beards were unfashionable in
Europe but not in Russia at that time, Peter levied a tax on beards.
However, not all his subjects complied, on his order bearded men
were then forcibly shaved with a blunt razor, or had their whiskers
removed one at a time with a pair of pincers. Once, Peter even
personally cut off the beards of his noblemen. Men also had to wear
Western dress and were encouraged to take up smoking and coffee
drinking.
Bakunin timeline More at Wikipedia 1846 Peter Carl
Fabergé (d. September 24,
1920), Russian goldsmith/jeweller
to royalty, who created the famous precious Easter eggs that bear
his name 1896 Howard Hawks (d. 1977), American film director, screenwriter and producer whose works gained considerable stature first among French film cultists, then among American critics. He directed Viva Villa!; To Have and Have Not (co-scripted by William Faulkner); The Big Sleep (also co-scripted by Faulkner); Rio Bravo. Hawks was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1975. 1899 Irving Thalberg (d. 1936), producer1901 Cornelia Otis Skinner (d. 1979), Broadway producer, writer, director, actress 1902 Stepin Fetchit (d. 1985), dancer, actor 1907 Elly Beinhorn, German pilot, the second woman to fly from Europe to Australia 1908 Mel Blanc (born Mervin Jerome Blank; d. July 10, 1989), American vocal artist who provided the voices for all Warner Bros cartoon characters, such as Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester Pussycat, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Tasmanian Devil, Pepe LePew, Marvin the Martian and Yosemite Sam. The versatile Blanc also voiced dozens of Hanna-Barbera characters, starting in 1960 with Barney Rubble of The Flintstones. His autobiography, That's Not All, Folks! was published in 1988. Since Blanc's death, his son Noel has taken up some of his father's mantle. Despite his most famous character's
connection to them, he was allergic to carrots as they tended to
affect his vocal cords. Thus he often did the eating sounds last in
a recording session and had the sound technicians edit them in the
soundtrack as needed. The epitaph on headstone at his burial site in Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood reads, "That's All Folks!" 1909 Benny Goodman (d. 1986), clarinetist, bandleader 1920 Franklin Schaffner (d. 1989), film director 1922 Hal Clement, science fiction writer 1926 Christine Jorgensen (d. 1989), transsexual 1927 Clint Walker, American actor (TV series: Cheyenne) 1928 Pro
Hart (Kevin Charles Hart), MBE
(d. March
28, 2006, Australian artist 1934 Aleksei Leonov, cosmonaut and first person to walk in space 1936 Keir Dullea, actor 1937 Armando Valladares, political prisoner and prisoner of conscience in Cuba. Valladares was jailed in 1960, at age 23, when the new regime under Fidel Castro and Che Guevara cracked down on dissidents. He was imprisoned for refusing to place a placard on his desk at work stating that he supported Communism. He spent 22 years in prison, including years of solitary confinement. 1939 Michael J Pollard, American actor 1953 Colm Meaney, Irish actor (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine) 1972 Trey Parker, animator, comedian (South Park)
Phew!! Have a rest before the big This day in history section
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Varies Full Moon Day Varies Friday the 13th Varies Hindu holidays Varies Buddha Purnima Varies Memorial Day (USA) Varies Dragon Boat Festival (China) Varies Pentecost
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