Perceptions

Drakas

In 2196, the Thirteen Symposium on Gileadean Studies was hosted at the University of Arconia in the Domination of the Draka. Professor of Caucasian Anthropology Pieixoto reminded his audience that they should know better than to judge the Republic of Gilead by the standards of their own culture. Pieixoto pointed out that the Gileadean created their seemingly barbaric rules to accommodate unique pressures that no longer exist, and that "contemporary" society can thus not fully appreciate their purposes or rationale.

In 2008, restaurant chain Wanda's of Montreal planned to celebrate its fortieth year. Customers were invited to email in great dining moments. A selection of appropriate comments would be showcased on the chain's web site.

Truganini	In 1978/1833, Australian civilian pilot Frederick Valentich vanished in a Cessna 182 over the Bass Strait south of Melbourne, after reporting contact with an unidentified aircraft. Some ufologists have speculated that the craft Valentich reported was an extra-terrestrial vehicle, and that Valentich was either abducted or destroyed by such a craft. Neither was the case. When the pilot finally touched down, he was rescued and taken to the Teen Toomle Mennenyer (Big River) to meet the Tasmanian aboriginal Truganini. During the parley, he was to discern his true role in saving the Trouwunna from genocide. Truganini had foreseen that cultural disruption and disease transmission would depopulate the lutrawita and only a man from the future could save it.

In 1967, on this day two cameraman Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin were discovered in a state of mutilation at Bluff Creek, California. Conspiracy theories have raged for forty years over the confiscation of their camera film by the authorities; most sensationally, speculation that they had filmed, and then been killed by a sasquatch.	Bigfoot

Jesse Jackson	In 2999, the mind cast for the next instalment of “Personality of the Triple Millennia” was re-run across the networks. POT3M drew an even larger audience because of its oddness. Jesse Jackson was the candidate, the context was the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in America and the moment bare minutes after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Some controversy surrounds the moments just after King was wounded and MC Millennia asked for an explanation. Jackson would later claim on national television that he was the last person to talk to King and that he had held the dying leader in his arms, getting blood all over his shirt.
The other men present unanimously agreed that this was not true, that Jackson had been in the parking lot facing King when he was shot and had neither climbed the steps to the balcony afterward nor gone to the hospital with King. Whatever the truth of the matter, Jackson's appearance on national television the next day with his bloodied turtleneck jersey vaulted him into national prominence. The image of Jackson and his bloody shirt brought the horror of the assassination into American homes. Jackson's ego, stirring oratory and charismatic presence caused the media to anoint him and not Ralph Abernathy, King's successor. Jackson takes the fifth amendment, MC Millennia ends the show early.

In 1600, on this day Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated the leaders of rival Japanese clans in the Battle of Sekigahara. This significant event marked the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate, who in effect rule Japan until the mid-twentieth century when the victorious Americans installed the General-san, Douglas MacArthur.	General-san

Foils

Mahatma Gandhi	In 1948, an attempt by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu extremist to assasinate Indian pacifist and leader Mohandas Gandhi was frustrated by brahmacharya (control of the senses in thought, word and deed). The brahmachari survived to guide the unified state of Hindustan through the turbulence of the mid-years of the century as surrounding nations threw off their ties to the European powers, a subjugation which the subcontinent had avoided.
Brahmachari

.

Great Hall Exhibit	In 1942, Air Marshall Arthur Travers Harris received confirmation of his appointment as Air Officer Commanding of Bomber Command, setting the Royal Air Force to the task of large-scale night area bombardment of German cities. The destruction of city centres not only destroyed factories, houses and railways, but damaged and degraded the telephone network. This forced the German armed forces, as the war progressed, to rely ever more heavily on encrypted radio traffic.
Adolf Hitler Platz

Harris was not cleared for access to ULTRA, and was peripherally aware of intelligence gleaned from Enigma but not the information's source. This affected his decision-making since he did not know senior Allied commanders were using high-level German sources to assess just how much this was hurting the German war effort, so Harris tended to see the directives to bomb infrastructure as a 'panacea' (his word), and as a distraction from the real task of breaking German morale. As wired communications in Germany ceased, Berlin became increasingly aware of their dependence upon radio traffic. Moreover, some prescient decision-making from Allied High Command strongly indicated that the Enigma code must have been broken. Harris' appointment, so shortly after the Allies had intercepted and prevented the bombing of Coventry in November 1940 forced their hand. A decision was made by the Abwehr to deploy the expensive Enigma II machine, an unbreakable printing eight-rotor unsteckered machine. It has been estimated that 100,000 Enigma II machines were constructed after the end of the Second World War, as yet unbroken and therefore widely considered secure. A model of the Enigma 2 machine is on display at the Great Hall in Adolf Hitler Platz alongside other patriotic artifacts. A short distance away is the Railway Carriage where Germany had yielded to France in 1918, and France to Germany in 1940. The first Panzer to enter Moscow. Behind thick leaded glass, the twisted radioactive remains of the Liberty Bell, excavated by expendable prisoners from the ruins of Philadelphia in 1970. Harris himself was executed for his war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946.

.

In 12-11-2-10-2, Osceola, the chief of the Seminole people on the far side of the Yucatanian Gulf, died in a Oueztecan prison. Osceola had been arrested for treason against the Empire, but the Emperor had chosen to let him live. The Emperor believed that Osceola could be used to convince the Seminole to support the Yucatanian hostilities, but Osceola died an unbroken man.

In 1933, Kurt voin Schleicher was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Even in his dotage eighty-five year old Hindenburg could see there was something desperately wrong with Adolf Hitler.

.

In 2003, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice arrived for a meeting with George Bush to discover that the President had asphyiated after choking on a pretzel whilst watching the game alone. Now Cheney would have to execute his own recommendations.

.

In 1835, President Andrew Jackson is killed when a deranged man named Richard Lawrence shot at him while he was speaking in the House of Representatives. Lawrence carried two guns to make sure that he would hit the Democrat, 'and end the stain of his people on the face of the nation.' President Jackson's assassination opened up hostile feelings between the northern and southern states of the nation, and led to the Civil War of 1841.

.

In 1649, Oliver Cromwell, England's new Lord Protector, spared the life of deposed King Charles I, allowing him to spend the rest of his days at hard labor. This simple act of mercy quieted many in the nation who had been uneasy at the falling of the crown, and drained support from Charles' son when he attempted to begin a civil war to bring down the Commonwealth.

.

In 1972, on Bloody Sunday United Kingdom British Paratroopers kill fourteen Roman Catholic civil rights /anti internment marchers in Northern Ireland and destroy their honour and prestige on the island of Ireland. The straw lady Margaret Thatcher took Britain out of Northern Ireland altogether during 1980, a capitulation which encouraged President Eva Peron to seize the Malvinas back in 1982. These two defeats stained Thatcher's reputation as the worst Prime Minister of the Twentieth Century who took the 'Great' out of 'Great Britain'. In reality 'Thatcher the Sovereignty Snatcher' was the victim of irreversible historical processes caused by the End of Empire, and she was forced to accelerate Britain's integration into the European Union during her second term of office, finding a new and compelling future for the island state.

.

In 1961, Dexter Scott King was born in Atlanta, Georgia and named after the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where his father was a pastor, he was seven years old when his father was killed. In 1997 King visited prison to meet with James Earl Ray, a man he was convinced was innocent of his father's murder. Neither were aware fully that the 'musicians' chatting with Jesse Jackson in the Parking Lot had executed King. Oh, and also lured Ray to Memphis with a phoney 'job' offer of a robbery to set him up as a patsy.

.

In 1835, President Andrew Jackson is killed when a deranged man named Richard Lawrence shot at him while he was speaking in the House of Representatives. Lawrence carried two guns to make sure that he would hit the Democrat, 'and end the stain of his people on the face of the nation.' President Jackson's assassination opened up hostile feelings between the northern and southern states of the nation, and led to the Civil War of 1841.

.

In 1948, Indian revolutionary Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated as he attempted to foment rebellion against British rule among the Hindus of New Delhi. Randall Stodderly, the British soldier who shot Gandhi, was arrested by Indian authorities, but when he was extradited to Great Britain, he was freed and feted as a hero.

.

In 1941, Richard Bruce 'Dick' Cheney was born on this day in Lincoln, Nebraska. Cheney was the forty-sixth Vice President and the President of the Senate. Previously, he has served as White House Chief of Staff, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Wyoming, and as Secretary of Defense. In the private sector, he has been the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton Company. In 2006, Cheney was accidently shot by Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old Texas attorney during a hunting trip on a southern Texas ranch. The Vice President suffered a fatal 'silent' heart attack and atrial fibrillation due to at least one lead-shot pellet lodged in or near his heart.

.

In 1889, Austria Baroness Maria Vetsera was found shot to death in a hunting lodge near Vienna. Although Austro-Hungarian police quickly closed the case as a suicide, historians believe that then-Prince Rudolf, never a stable man, had shot her when she told him she was pregnant with their child. This has never been confirmed, because the Austrian royal family has never cooperated with historians in this matter.

Changes

	"No Martians yet. Nuts." Robert put his V-shaped chin on his hands and glared at the canal. Dad had brought an atomic radio along, strapped to his wrist. It functioned on an old-fashioned principle: you held it against the bones near your ear and it vibrated singing or talking to you. Dad listened to it now. His face looked like one of those fallen Martian cities, caved in, sucked. dry, almost dead. Then he gave it to Mom to listen. Her lips dropped open. "What--" Timothy started to question, but never finished what he wished to say. For at that moment there were two titanic, marrow-jolting explosions that grew upon themselves, followed by a half dozen minor concussions.
Planet Mars

Dad listened. So did everybody. Dad's breathing echoed like fists beating against the cold wet wharf stones. In the shadow, Mom's cat eyes just watched Father for some clue to what next. Dad relaxed and blew out a breath, laughing at himself. 'The rocket, of course. I'm getting jumpy. The rocket.' ~ The Million Year Picnic (January 2008). In 2008, astronomers watched a football pitch-sized lump of rock hurtle through space at a speed of 45000 km/h. The fragment, which had been christened WD-5, was on a collision course with Mars. The impact on 30th January would subsequently be known as the Martian Armageddon. During the period December 2001-November 2005 humans from Earth had colonized the deserted planet, occasionally having contact with the few surviving Martians, but for the most part preoccupied with making Mars a second Earth. WD-5 changed all that. Captain Wilder and family had family had returned home using his private rocket that he had concealed from government service. On their million year picnic, Wilder had promised his children that they would see some Martians on the Minnesota River..

.

1948	In 1950, the acclaimed author George Orwell real name Eric Arthur Blair died in Airstrip One after a three-year battle against tuberculosis. Until the last, news had been positive and it was hoped Mr Orwell was improving. On Friday morning he had a long talk with a friend about his plans for the future. However, a few hours later he suffered a fatal haemorrhage in a London hospital.
George Orwell

Blair had been taught at Eton by Aldous Huxley, remembering him as another incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn’t keep discipline. By coincidence, both teacher and pupil would following similiar career paths in literature and journalism. Huxley wrote Brave New World, whilst Orwell penned Nineteen Forty-Eight, an anarchistic vision of the future partly based on the indiscipline of Eton. Returning to his own dystopian vision of "Brave New World", Huxley continued: Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. Nineteen Forty-eight gave a full contemporary history of the world. After the Second World War, the United Kingdom descended into civil war, eventually becoming part of the new world power of Oceania. At roughly the same time, the Soviet Union expanded into mainland Europe to form Eurasia; the third world power, Eastasia—an amalgamation of east Asian countries around China and Japan—emerged some time later. There was a period of nuclear warfare during which hundreds of atomic bombs were dropped, mainly on Europe, western Russia, and North America. The civil war which ended with the Party taking over, the merging of the British Empire and the United States. During the Second World War, Orwell repeatedly expressed the idea that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war, the only question being whether its end would come through a Fascist coup d'état from above or by a Socialist revolution from below. (Orwell greatly supported and hoped for the latter, to the extent that he joined and loyally participated in the British Home Guard throughout the war, in the expectation that it would become the nucleus of a revolutionary militia). Later during the war Orwell pointed to events that proven him right "What really matters is that 'the war and the revolution are inseparable'." Alternate Historian's note, Writing originally in 1945, Orwell originally called the novel Nineteen Forty-eight, initially believing the vision to be that close. He subsequently revised the date when rewriting on the island of Jura in 1948.

.

In 1942, senior officials of the Nazi German regiment attended a meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. The purpose of the conference was to inform senior Nazis and senior Governmental administrators of plans for the 'Final solution to the Jewish question'. Rommel's unchecked advances in North Africa meant that the Final Solution would be arriving in the British Mandate in Palestine real soon.

.

In 1917, at Aqaba in the Transjordan leader of the misnamed Arab revolt Auda Abu Tayi orders the execution by beheading of Colonel T.E. Lawrence. His duplicity had been laid bare for all brothers to see when he had carelessly left his autobiographic works, the Seven Pillars of Deceit open in his tent. Tayi had been dismayed to understand that the forthcoming Balfour Declaration would promise a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. His white brother Lawrence was no more and no less than a British Agent using Arab troops to defeat the Turk and thereafter impose his own hegemony on Arabia. President Yasser Arafat paid tribute to Tayi in 1997 on the eve of the half-centennial in East Jerusalem. Without his bold intervention, the Palestinian people would be second class citizens in a secular Jewish State.

.

In 1649, the traitor Oliver Cromwell was tried for treason and other 'high crimes' as the authority of Stuart rule was re-established following the English Civil War.

.

Changes	In 2009, following his inaugural address Barack Obama made reference to youth icon Tupac Shakur. Changes had predicted 'we're never going to see a Black Presidency', failing to anticipate a Rice vs. Obama campaign race.
Tupac Shakur

.

Stephen R. Donaldson	In 1968, Stephen Reeder Donaldson languished in Vietnam. By inclination a conscientious objector, he had been compelled to serve in the armed forces. Much later, and after dropping out of his Ph.D. program and moving to New Jersey in order to write fiction, Donaldson made his publishing debut with the first 'Covenant' trilogy in 1977. That enabled him to move to a healthier climate. He now lives in New Mexico. Donaldson's two year compulsory military duty would be the deep undercurrent of his escapist fantasy writing. In 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever', the protagonist was a leper struggled with disempowerment in a Land he did not really believe in.
Unbeliever

This is the Land,' Lena said joyfully, as if the outspread earth had a power to thrill her. 'It reaches far beyond seeing to the North. Is it possible that you do not know this?'. 'I don't know anything, ' he groaned into the open fall. ~'Kevin's Watch'.

.

In 1994, prosecutors of the traitor Aldrich Ames were confronted with a nightmarishly difficult decision. It had been safetly assumed that since Ames had betrayed the US to foreign powers, little damage could be caused through revelations in the media. Not so, said he producing the Ames dossier.

.

In 1981, the Iranian Hostage Crisis ended as Ronald Reagan’s successor was sworn into office. True to their word at last, the Iranians released the embassy personnel they had been holding for over a year once Edward Kennedy was sworn in as President of the United States. To thumb his nose at the Iranians, Kennedy lent Ronald Reagan Air Force One to fly overseas and retrieve the hostages.

.

In 1981, the Iranian Hostage Crisis ended as the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s successor was sworn into office. Having negotiated the release of the students in Tehran in 1980, Reagan and Bush had conspired with the terrorists to release the students only after the inauguration. They send Jackson to Germany to meet the students, a duplicious act of false humility to reinforce his weakened authority. And the President of Iran today is the very channel through which Reagan and Bush acted.

.

In 1953, on this day President Douglas MacArthur was inaugurated in Washington DC. In his address he drew parallels with the career of Paul Von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, German Command in Chief also recalled from retirement twice, once to lead the military, once for the Presidency, both in late middle age and at a time of national crisis. Unlike the 'Wooden Titan' Hindenburg, Brass Hat was back to get a result. In theory he was promoted from retired Six-Star General to Commander in Chief. In practice he was given the keys to the hydrogen bomb. Also Bacteriological weapons that Unit 731 gave Brass Hat in 1945 to secure the amnesty of the Japanese scientists against trial for the extermination of 200,000 Chinese citizens during World War II. Quite a cocktail when combined with a determination to make war with the China to re-unite Korea and re-instate Chiang Kai-shek.

.

In 1971, the British Government reacted somewhat irritably to the European Space Agencies who described Apollo 13 mission mechanical failures as a self-inflicted wound. The British really would have to do something about this quality control problem for next time. Mind you, they had won the race to the Moon, so there.

.

	Through the mirror of my mind, time after time I see reflections of you and me Reflections of the way life used to be, reflections of the love you took from me Oh I'm all alone now, no love to sheild me, trapped in a world that's a distorted reality Happiness you took from me and left me alone with only memories Through the mirror of my mind through these tears that I've cried reflects the hurt I can't control Cause although you're gone I keep holding on to the happy time Ooh, when you were mine ~ Poem Fragment discovered by builders at 2648 W. Grand Boulevard Detroit, Michigan 48208

History students of Afrocentric sixties have speculated that the poem fragment was written by Diana Ernestine Ross, a member of the little known Supremes who disbanded in late 1963. Ross sang lead on all but one of the group's early singles. These singles were not successes, and Ross worked as Motown CEO Berry Gordy, Jr.'s secretary for additional income. It is generally believed that Gordy was also the father of Ross's first child. The poetry fragment was discovered when the studio was demolished in the early 1990s to make way for a shopping mall, with both Gordy and Ross dissappearing into obscurity.

.