Paracultural Calendar for April 16

[Mark Thibodeau]

On this day in the year 73 AD, the Jewish fortress of Masada falls to the
Romans after several months of siege... or not. The only thing we really
know for sure about this legendary siege and the site on which it is
located is that the remains found there - which were given a state funeral
with full military honors by the Israeli government in 1982 - mostly
consisted of (ahem) pig bones.

***

On this day in 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman accidentally ingests a
small amount of the chemical byproduct known as LSD-25 while working at the
Sandoz pharmaceutical research laboratory, thereby discovering its
psychoactive properties. Since then, it's been a long strange trip through
Nazi/CIA mind-control experiments, the offices of National Review Magazine,
and really bad "jam" music.

***

Despite the fact that George Orwell had used the term Cold War to describe
the simmering tensions between Western and Soviet bloc nations on two
previous occasions, popular convention has it that the financier,
presidential advisor and One World Government proponent Bernard Baruch
coined the term on this day in 1947, in a speech given in South Carolina.
Google "The Baruch Plan" for some startling and revelatory reading.

***

On this day in 2007, the deadliest killing spree in modern American history
takes place at Virginia Tech, when an apocalyptically awkward South Korean
student by the name of Seung-Hui Cho -- or was it someone else? -- guns
down 32 and injures another 23 before turning the gun on himself. The fact
that his sister works for McNeil/Veritas, a company with deep ties to the
American intelligence apparatus, is of no interest whatsoever. And the fact
that he went to high school with another "deranged lone nut-job" assassin (
http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=636) is just one of those crazy coincidences
that so often pop up in events of this nature.
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