PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR APRIL 9

"Read Free or DIE!!!" The first ever tax-supported public library opens its doors in Peterborough, New Hampshire on this day in 1833.

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On this day in 1860, a French fellow by the name of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville makes the oldest known recording of an audible human voice - his own, singing Au Clair de la Lune, very slowly - on a machine of his own devising, which he christened the Phonautograph Machine! You can listen to this brief but creepy echo from the far, distant past here, on the machine's Wikipedia page.

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On this day in 1865, after four years of bloody combat that left 600,000 dead, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. This effectively ends the American Civil War. Today, many revisionists try to argue that the Civil War wasn't about slavery - either the practice at it had evolved in the South, or its expansion into the newly developing Western states. Anybody who tries to argue this point is either pathetically ignorant of history or a bald-faced liar, and anything they have to say about any topic can therefore be dismissed as a-historical balderdash and/or right-wing propaganda.

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On this day in 1992, a U.S. federal court finds former Panamanian dictator and notorious, CIA asset, and Bush Crime Family crony Manuel Noriega guilty of drug and racketeering charges. Sentenced to 30 years in prison, Noriega was ultimately extradited to France in 2010, where he was tried for money laundering, and then back home to Panama in 2011, where he was tried over the murder of a domestic political challenger, and where he remains behind bars to this day.

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On this day in 2003, the world first learns that Patient Zero in the SARS pandemic just happened to fly on seven different planes to six different international locations in the span of six fucking days just two weeks earlier. He flew from Hong Kong to Munich on March 30, then flew to Barcelona where, according to authorities, he began developing symptoms. Undaunted, he hopped another plane to Frankfurt, then switched off and flew to London (same day, different plane). The day after that, he flew to Munich, then headed back to Frankfurt, again on a different plane. Eventually, he made his way back to Hong Kong, where he checked into a hospital and was confirmed to have SARS. Regarding these suspiciously ostentatious travel habits, authorities said: "He travels a lot." In other words: "Move along, nothing to see here."

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On this day in the year 2003, after the application of a little "Shock and Awe" by the "Coalition of the Willing", the city of Baghdad falls to advancing American forces. In the center of the city, a statue of Saddam Hussein is pulled down in what the mainstream media described as regular, everyday Iraqis turning on symbols of their former leader. In fact, that's still the way Wikipedia portrays those events. In reality, however, even the Pentagon was forced to admit that the whole thing was a stage-managed psychological operation. Oh well, it might have been a Big Lie, but at least it ended the war!

I'm kidding, of course. Because even though Preznit Dubya and all the bought-and-paid-for whores in the right-wing military/industrial/media propaganda complex declared victory, in reality, the war in Iraq had barely just begun. Ten years, six thousand dead Americans, a hundred times that many dead Iraqis and over a TRILLION wasted dollars later, the only undeniable truth about the war in Iraq. is that it was a wasteful, Satanic enterprise built upon a foundation of propaganda, forgery, and lies. There was no valid ethical, moral or legal justification for it, no matter how "easy" the task might have seemed back in the early days of what would ultimately turn out to be a completely Pyrrhic victory.