Good that the US government thinks that all people are at least theoretically equal when it comes to them being blown up in illegal drone attacks.

Hilary Mantel ruffles royal feathers.

My comment from last night to a small article about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong(c.1330-c.1400):

The irony is that nobody really won the long and bloody contest to rule China that had began with the rebellion of the secret Taoist  revolutionary societies in 184.

By 281, all the original three dynasties - Wei(221-264), Wu(222-280) and Shu Han(223-263) - were gone. In 263 Wei conquered Shu Han, but in 264 the Wei dynasty itself was overthrown in a place coup and replaced by the Western Jin(265-316) which conquered Wu in 280 and briefly united China.

In 291 a new civil war began - The War of the Eight Princes - which lasted until 306 and weakened the Western Jin, which experienced then attacks by partly sinicized semi-nomadic tribes which captured and killed two teenage emperors in 311 and 316.

Jin dynasty withdrew to the south, becoming the Eastern Jin(317-419) and the north of China was fragmented to numerous competing dynasties for over a hundred years until the Tuoba-led Northern Wei(386-534) united northern China by the 440s.

The unification of northern and southern China would come only with the brief Sui dynasty(581-618) from the north, which conquered the southern Chen(557-589) dynasty in 589. After a natural disaster and failed attempts to conquer Korea Sui itself started to fall in 616 and from among its ruins rose the Tang dynasty(618-907), which had asserted control by the mid-620s, defeating its competitors.

The silence around Samer Issawi, Ayman Sharawna & their comrades on hunger strike is slowly breaking, but they are close to death. Media is starting to publish small news items, often distorted by the Zionist propaganda in the "West" and politicians have become "concerned".

Of human rights organisations, Amnesty finally had collected enough courage to make an appeal on 12th day of this month.

This night the Zionists kidnapped Samer's brother from the family home, one more attempt to pressure him through his family. They have destroyed the home of one brother, cut water to family home, arrested one brother and sister, who is now under house arrest.

A solidarity tent for Samer has been destroyed 24 times by the Zionists.

New discovery from Teotihuacan's Pyramid of the Sun.

Nature on the Russian mini-Tunguska event.

A good day for meteor (and hopefully meteorite) studies.

Conserving the Diamond Sutra, world's oldest printed book, which was made in 868 and found in the Mogao grottoes at Dunhuang:

Text for the song Hungry by Doctor Jazz, which tells of the record breaking hunger striker Samer Issawi's desperate struggle for freedom against the Apartheid regime, which has imprisoned him without charges:

You'd think you'd read about me in the New York Times
Almost two hundred days without any bite
While I'm withering away in my prison cell
All you read about is the game of buy and sell

in Wall Street - they don't know the way I resist
If they knew, they'd be shocked at the way I insist
Freedom and human rights are on my list
I want to live, breath, move - hell, I wanna exist

If I had an army I'd set it up to defend
Our villages our towns till the very end
But I'm cut off from the world, so there's no supplies
They call resistance terrorism but u know these are lies

If my eyes are blindfolded, my body in chains
Tucked away behind bars the only thing that remains
Is to refuse to be fed from a racist thief's den
To refuse to be treated like a sheep in their pen

I am hungry
For freedom and rights
I am hungry
That's the way that I fight

I am hungry
A prisoner on a hunger strike
Never charged
Never tried
By that damned Fourth Reich

-

Let them say what they say bout my people
If there's one thing we ain't it is sheeple
Why would we give up on our land and allow its theft
Because greed is their creed, there'll be nothing left

We want Justice, how is that too much to ask
You wont touch this, cuz ur not up to the task
Go ahead and lie, and call our enemy 'civilized'
it won't matter no more when Victory strikes

I am hungry
For freedom and rights
I am hungry
That's the way that I fight

I am hungry
A prisoner on a hunger strike
Never charged
Never tried
By that damned Fourth Reich

-

While you're out there in your homes counting dollars and pennies
I've got a question to you when ur done stacking ur twenties
Can u spare a few minutes for a man like yours truly
Whose only crime is that he won't bow to a bully

I'm not asking u to break me out, cuz I'm alright
Can spend a hundred more years putting up this fight
All I want you to do, is speak out for the truth
Don't support a racist state that is vile and uncouth

A song for political prisoner and hunger striker Samer Issawi, who has been 198 days on hunger strike in the Apartheid regime's prison:

© 2013 Doc Jazz Author: Doc Jazz

2000 year old ruins of 35 small pyramids found in Sudan.

Have you heard of record breaking hunger striker and political prisoner Samer Issawi?

6 % of red dwarf stars could have an Earth-sized planet in their habitable zone based on a statistical analysis of data from the Kepler space telescope. This would mean 4.5 billion possibly habitable planets around red dwarf stars alone.

One of my web comments about Richard III from today:

One argument which can be made against claims that the later portrayal of Richard III was just Tudor propaganda is that there never was any attempt by Yorkist pretenders and relatives living abroad to create and cultivate a cult of a martyred good king around Richard III.

In fact, there appears to have been basically no attempts at all to counter the Tudor portrayal of him, which should make us question whether the Tudor portrayal really was so far away from how he was seen by people neutral or even supportive to the Yorkist cause.

When his own designated heir and nephew, the earl of Lincoln, made his move to regain the throne for York in 1487, the earl used Lambert Simnel in an effort to use the memory of Edward IV against Henry VII, instead of trying to appear as an avenger of Richard III.

Richard III's sister, the dowager duchess of Burgundy, safe on the continent and living in a declining but still celebrated centre of artistic patronage, would have had ample resources to draw in an effort to shape his brother's memory after 1485, but no effort was made.

More examples could be easily given, but the fact is that when a lot of people could have stood up for Richard III after 1485, many out of the reach of Henry VII, none did beyond some recorded laments about his fate by the burghers of York.

This, I think, shows that Richard III was viewed at best with indifference by people hostile to the Lancaster and Tudor dynasties and that although propagandistic in nature, the Tudor portrayal of him had a core which was more or less in accordance with the public view of him.

King Richard III(1452-1483-1485) of England is missing no longer. The remains of the third and last king of the York dynasty(1461-1470, 1471-1485) are now confirmed to have been found, with new details revealed of his death on the battlefield of Bosworth.

Last of my grandparents' siblings was buried two days ago. He, a paternal uncle of my dearly beloved, late mother, would have turned 90 during the summer. His father, my great-grandfather, was born in the 1870s (nobody seems to know exactly when anymore) and he was - of which I am very proud - a Red Guard during our civil war in 1918. Several of my great-uncle's half-siblings and one of his siblings, my grandfather's twin brother, died over ninety years ago, in a very different world.

Anselm Hollo(1934-2013) died 29th of January. I have to say I didn't rank him very highly as a poet, I saw him as a rather average talent. Naturally his success, as limited as it was if you think higher visibility, made him if not honestly admired in Finland, then at least it was felt that he should be admired because he had "made it" abroad.

At least 36 dead and 105 wounded in a suicide attack against a police station in Kirkuk, Iraq.