JUNE 26 / Lottery
WHAT IS BASIC
for us
What drives us
What need
separates
us Greed
or something more
than that
WHAT
1243 – Mongols defeat the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Köse Dağ.
1409 – Western Schism: The Roman Catholic Church is led into a double schism as Petros Philargos is crowned Pope Alexander V after the Council of Pisa, joining Pope Gregory XII in Rome and Pope Benedict XIII in Avignon.
1541 – Francisco Pizarro is assassinated in Lima by the son of his former companion and later antagonist, Diego de Almagro the younger.
1740 – A combined force of Spanish, free blacks and allied Indians defeat a British garrison at the Siege of Fort Mose near St. Augustine during the War of Jenkins' Ear.
1924 – The American occupation of the Dominican Republic ends after eight years.
1948 – Cold War: The first supply flights are made in response to the Berlin Blockade.
1948 – Shirley Jackson's short story “The Lottery” is published in The New Yorker magazine.
1963 – Cold War: U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, underlining the support of the United States West Germany shortly after Soviet-supported East Germany erected the Berlin Wall.
1974 – The Universal Product Code is scanned for the first time to sell a package of Wrigley's chewing gum at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio.
1975 – Two FBI agents and a member of the American Indian Movement are killed in a shootout on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota; Leonard Peltier is later convicted of the murders in a controversial trial.
1977 – Elvis Presley held his final concert in Indianapolis, Indiana at Market Square Arena.
1997 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the Communications Decency Act violates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
1997 – J. K. Rowling publishes the first of her Harry Potter novel series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in United Kingdom.
2003 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Lawrence v. Texas that sex-based sodomy laws are unconstitutional.
2013 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5–4, that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and in violation of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
2015 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5–4, that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marriage under the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
2024 – Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, returns to Australia after pleading guilty to one charge of espionage in a Saipan court and subsequently being released by the United States Department of Justice.
2025 - Gaza not yet officially named the World’s Largest Outdoor Prison. Israeli settlers kill three Palestinians in the West Bank. Trump has called for Israel to "pardon" Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial for alleged corruption, or drop the case altogether.
2025- Longest-serving person on Mississippi’s death row executed. Richard Gerald Jordan, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder whose final appeals were denied without comment by the US Supreme Court, was sentenced to death in 1976 for killing and kidnapping Edwina Marter. He died by lethal injection at the Mississippi state penitentiary in Parchman with the ghost of Mose Allison singing The Parchman Farm Blues. Parchman Prison was modeled on a Southern slave plantation in shape and intent. A story: Levon Brooks spent 15 years in Parchman Prison but was exonerated by The Innocence Project. Check out The Innocence Files, a Netflix documentary.
2025 - US Supreme Court okays de-funding of Planned Parenthood
BORN
1892 – Pearl S. Buck, American novelist, essayist, short story writer Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1973).
1903 – Big Bill Broonzy, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1958).
1908 – Salvador Allende, Chilean physician and politician, 29th President of Chile (d. 1973).
1913 – Aimé Césaire, French poet, author, and politician (d. 2008).
1931 – Colin Wilson, English philosopher and author (d. 2013).
1952 – Olive Morris, Jamaican-English civil rights activist (d. 1979)
DIED
1793 – Gilbert White, English ornithologist and ecologist (b. 1720).
1798 – James Dickey, Irish revolutionary (b. 1776) [Not the poet named James DICKey].
1856 – Max Stirner, German philosopher and author (b. 1806).
1938 – James Weldon Johnson, American poet, lawyer and politician (b. 1871).
1939 – Ford Madox Ford, English novelist, poet, and critic (b. 1873).
2003 – Strom Thurmond, American general, lawyer, and politician, 103rd Governor of South Carolina (b. 1902).
JUNE 26
My friend Lorry Swain used to tell me, show me, that The New York Times is the voice of the ruling class. That used to upset me since it seemed to me then that the real voice was The Wall Street Journal. I read Noam Chomsky and understood what Lorry meant. Because of the need for investors to have correct economic data, the Journal was a much better source of factual information. Basically, ignore the hate filled editorial pages and read the articles to better understand the workings of capitalism. And the Times? It wasn’t just Judith Miller’s lies about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”. It wasn’t just its “fair and balanced” editorial page. It’s the neo-liberal elitist perspective on everything, from fashion to book reviews. Here is a small but telling example. An employee at Marsh supermarket in Troy Ohio scanned groceries using a UPC (Universal Product Code), scanned for the first time on June 26, 1974. The New York Times front page headline in February 1992 reported that when George (H.) Bush used a market scanner they ran this: “Bush Encounters the Supermarket, Amazed”, making him look ridiculous for being out of touch with the average American and implying that he certainly never did his own shopping. It was all a myth, and the Times never acknowledged how their story was false. Purposely false. Bush knew what scanners were. He was “amazed” at the technological changes in the new scanners. Just more misdirection from The New York Times. Salvador Allende, Chilean physician and politician, 29th President of Chile was one of many democratically elected foreign leaders who the US undermined or removed from office, dead or alive. Quiz. Name at least one more. Today Chile attempts to stop the US dumping its “last season’s fashion discards”: “Chile’s government has taken a decisive step towards addressing the environmental crisis which has beset the Atacama Desert”. A different kind of American desert was helped along by racist Senators and their enablers. Strom Thurmond was perhaps the greatest racist Senator of modern times. Perhaps or Most Likely? Maybe his good friend Joe Biden can answer. Biden claimed that he “literally” convinced Thurmond to vote in favor of the Civil Rights Act. The Associated Press found that Biden statement to be a lie, but there are so many others that they probably gave up calling him on it. The New York Times didn’t run a headline on that one. Biden was all about compromise, and each compromise moved the US Government further to the political Right. To compromise with Thurmond and Jesse Helms, Biden made an amendment that “effectively separated students by race whether or not they used busing”. Thurmond and Helms co-sponsored the amendment. No amends were given by Biden to Julian Assange who founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and was finally released from prison. Sometimes his prison was Ecuador’s embassy where he sought asylum. But a prison is still a prison if it denies your freedom. Assange was accused of sexual assault, but the real assault was that Assange upset the US was revealing through WikiLeaks Chelsea Manning’s video “Collateral Murder” that showed “a US military Apache helicopter as it blasted to pieces [journalists] Namir, 22, and Saeed, 40, and nine other men, while seriously wounding two children”. As he always did, Joe Biden did his two-face shuffle: he said he would grant Assange “time served” but later said he would extradite Assange. He did not use Hillary Clinton’s language that Assange should “answer for what he has done”. Biden had trouble with language, especially when trying to disguise the truth. Of course Hillary would never answer for what she had done, but that’s another story. [Hint: as Secretary of State she refused to call for the return of the democratically elected Manuel Zelaya (Honduras) who had been ousted in a military coup.] The Democrats in general wanted nothing to do with Assange’s “case” but at least one Progressive, James McGovern, and one Libertarian, Thomas Massie, (my rep when I lived in Kentucky) opposed Biden, writing that “Put simply, there is a long-standing and well-grounded concern that section 793 [of the Espionage Act], which criminalizes the obtaining, retaining, or disclosing of sensitive information, could be used against journalists and news organizations engaged in their normal activities, particularly those who cover national security topics.” The Espionage act? Obama used the Espionage Act to put a record number of reporters' sources in jail. Big Bill Broonzy may have been an influence on Ray Charles and Beyonce. Broonzy is best known as a great blues singer. And he deserves that. But he also deserves credit for breaking down the color barriers imposed on categories of American music. Long before fusion or cross-over, there was Broonzy singing country music and blues and just about every other type of music, making “Country” not the exclusive province of White Southerners. Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds of Country and Western Music is one of the most awarded albums for Country, R&B, and Pop with songs latter covered by several country artists. Talent sometimes breaks prison boundaries. Broonzy did that helping along Charles and Beyonce. Plus Big Bill Broonzy performed the best of all versions of Stackalee (accompanied by the greats, Memphis Slim (piano) and Sonny Boy Williamson (harmonica).
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
—William Blake, from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”