Monday, December 20, 2010

Highjack Nation: Politics '10

This has been the year of the highjack. Not foreign terrorists - thinking enemies of the US realize they needn't devastate 'their' folk in other lands just to have our lives and resources wasted by wars modeled on the Vietnam 'conflict' ('our' of course here meaning the majority of US citizens, not the globalist plutocrats who make incalulably great worldly profits), yet without the naive fear-faith in the Domino Theory or the misguided (deals with the devil; Moloch-sacrifices) agendae of promoting prosperity and full employment, paying for the Great Society, and making disciplined (or dead) men out of 'matriarchially raised' delinquents. If you really hate the real US, what could give you more glee than beholding it bleeding with exquisite but inexorable slowness, the osmotic haemorrhage at the borders and the transfusion of our strength to the new Free Trade/New Liberalism/NAFTA plutocrats of foreign slave labor sweatshops and industrialized farms and forests. Peruse these examples:


 Click here: "highjacked the Tea Party" - Forestle

 
 
You get the idea.  Try some searches yourself. 
 
The elected Teeps are galloping for pork for their own troughs; they've already wallowed in 'special interest' and freelance lobbyist lucre to get elected.  Rand Paul has traded Daddy's old antiwar libertarianism for loopy AquaBuddha gun-thuggery (Ms Palin's also handy with a truncheon).  Michelle Bachman is a crankup-tape robo-zombie... there's Mouse-Brain Girl, and so many more.
 
So much more from Bam, too.  What a record!  I'm waiting for him to twist the rails on the DADT repeal somehow, just to be consistent in taking his election platform sworn principles and turning them into the mail-order cures used by Wile E. Coyote.  HOPE?  Bye-bye.  Here comes the anvil and the express train!   
 
 



You get the idea. Try search variations. Happy happy! ~>gag<~

Saturday, December 4, 2010

1890-2010 in Film (0-End Years)

Okay, here is the short reference form for what I did last year. 2010 doesn't seem to compare to previous anniversary years, however, the awesomeness factor of years before 1950 rests most greatly in the BIRTHS section. Maybe the future (gulp! Such as it may be - and it seems a particularly bad time to be bringing tender innocents into this Thunder of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and I Don't Mean the Movies world) will be far kinder than it seems we can reasonably expect just now, and those who take their first breath in 2010 will twinkle as bright as their screen forebears of the nought-end years!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1890_in_film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_in_film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1910_in_film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_in_film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1930_in_film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1930_in_film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940_in_film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950_in_film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_in_film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_in_film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_in_film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_in_film seems like just a few years ago to me!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_in_film

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_in_film

Condemning Helen Thomas

Click here: Wayne State University Scraps Helen Thomas Award After Remarks About 'Zionists'


http://www.aolnews.com/discuss/wayne-state-university-scraps-helen-thomas-award-after-remarks-about-zionists/19746449#gcpDiscussPageUrlAnchor=&gcpCommentsWidget%5Bp%5D=2&gcpCommentsWidget%5Bs%5D=new

Helen Thomas is as Semitic as any Israeli. 'Semite' derives from Old Testament usage: See Genesis 10 and 1 Chronicles 1. It is given as one of the 3 post-diluvian root races of mankind, the others being 'Japhetic' and 'Hamitic'. What we think of as physical markers of 'race' nowadays NEVER properly applied to this, though there have been ages of ignorant and maliciously agendaed misapplications to that notion. These very Biblical accounts show that these 'races' mixed from prehistoric times. These racial terms became applied, with ironically UNscientific promiscuity, by 'linguistic scientists' to language groups, which much further tangled and perverted 'scientific' study of race (at the same time that the money was all on conquest and colonialism). 'Japhetic' had been used for 'Euroid' and 'Mongoloid' racial types and thus didn't work for languages; pseudochristian racists took the linguistic term 'Aryan' (originally Caspian nomads of a warlike bent who GOT AROUND and even left us with the names 'Iran' and 'Erin'), a.k.a. 'Indo-European', ditched the mahogany-skinned Indics from the equation, and worked on a mythology of Nordic Vedic primordial superfolk that Hitler combined with 'population control' and turned into monstrous bloody 'scientific' doctrine...

...With results so horrific - and within living memory - that one dares not posit (for instance) that the principles of social control delineated in 'the Protocols' (no matter how strongly and eloquently the same may argue that they were FALSELY attributed to a 'Jewish Conspiracy') have actually been effected, or that there is no difference in criticizing (a) Zionism (b) the State of Israel (c) any individual Jews, Jewish sodalities, or even any politicians, preachers, etc., friendly to anything that might be considered 'Jewish interests'... Without the one who so dares to speak risking (EVEN IF THE DARER IS JEWISH) of being 'anti-Jewish' or the term that is ridiculous when applied to speakers of the Semitic tongue Arabic, or from the 'racial' heritage of the ancient lands most associated with the 'Children of Shem' (the Near East), 'anti-Semitic'.

This problem of intelligent discourse on matters vital to the World goes far beyond PC wrangling on 'is it all right to say the N word or the Q work or the C word if it's about your own group?' Any rational and fair-minded person can see that, if there is a bad ol' Milton Friedman there's a courageous Naomi Klein, and for every war-profiteering financier with a Jewish name there have been innumerable Jewish philanthropists and innocent scapegoat-victims of every level of bigotry.

Jews, like Italians, can justly claim an extra - even DOMINANT - measure, among humanity, of being excellent in all things. They have excelled in good things, but also, some of them, in evil things as well. For all they have rendered to the World, Italians, Chinese, Arabs, British, Indians, Americans, etc., have been both properly praised and censured. This is JUST. Whether 'Caesar's wives' in history or the Turkish government in the present day, the idea that something must be 'beyond reproach' turned into a euphemism for 'above the law' only works to put the worst things that might be attributed to some in the protected group into such a spotlight (whether from righteously indignant revelators or from maliciously self-righteous hypocrites) that all the good from the protected is shrivelled and covered in shade. One can hardly even say how successful (those separate entities) Jews and Israel have been, without a question of having said it as resentfully as Arab-American Thomas. This morbid excess of protection has woefully fed the filthy virus of hatred resurging against Jews and Israel and their friends today.

For Goodness's sake, let us all just try to be FAIR.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Reason behind the Wikileak?

Cherchez la 'Deep Throat'!  Such fuss over the latest big Wikileak (valid if it actually endangers innocent and well-meaning folk a la the Valerie Plame outing) - otherwise, give us a break.  Shades of Mike Wallace's weekly shocked, shocked-I-say indignation-fits on the old 60 Minutes.  Who, with a passing familiarity of history, Machiavelli, or even adventure novels and screen-stuff, would really find occasion to make O-mouths on what has always been not-for-publication realpolitik-as-usual?

Don't really believe Julian Assange, Aussie hacker-king with Eurotrash affect to match his name, got all that stuff on his own, didja?  Don't think he'd really get away with what he does with nothing more than a couple of highly-doubtful Scandy-candy adult-molestation charges, doya?

Somebody(s) on the inside of keeping secrets had to have arranged it all.  If traitors - you could turn around the Starship Enterprise in that hole in security and sail it to Oz decked in Christmas lights... Or, it was INTENTIONAL by allegedly-our-side:

This article may be The Reason Why:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/11/29/frum.wikileaks.iran/index.html  a.k.a
Click here: WikiLeaks builds case against Iran - CNN.com by David Frum.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

The Final Arbiters

We're given learned-sounding decision-quotes for the news media and history venues... Now I wonder if the black-robes have those ghosted for them by their flacks.  Read this for a revelation of the pertanence, maturity, and selfless sense of honor and duty practiced by the present archons of SCOTUS, the folks who brought you assurance, in the name of the Constitution of the United States, that corporations are persons and that, essentially, they are more important than, y'know, old-fashioned flesh-& heartbeat persons when it comes to representing the 'public interest' to force sales for public domaining.  A transcript of how they really speak and operate, and example of their level of intelligent inquiry:
http://www.joystiq.com/2010/11/03/schwarzenegger-vs-ema-the-recap/?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-n%7Cdl4%7Csec1_lnk2%7C182026  

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

RE-ELECT WILL ROGERS!

Have we ever had this many obviously-crazies up for major seats with such a big chance of winning them, before?
National 'Mid-Term Election Day', All Saints But Not on Your Ballot Day, 2010

No nuttier than actually electing current whack-jobs for your rulers today is electing dead guys, so:  The lates ~ great jester and his honorable 'Jr' (also WP Adair, his namesake):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Penn_Adair_Rogers

snips (but read the whole article & some of its links:


'He wrote frequently for the mass-circulation upscale magazine Saturday Evening Post, where Rogers advised Americans to embrace the frontier values of neighborliness and democracy on the domestic front while remaining clear of foreign entanglements.

Presidential campaign, 1928:

Rogers thought all campaigning was bunk. To prove the point he mounted a mock campaign in 1928 for the presidency. His only vehicle was the pages of Life, a weekly humor magazine. Rogers ran as the "bunkless candidate" of the Anti-Bunk Party. His only campaign promise was that, if elected, he would resign. Every week, from Memorial Day through Election Day, Rogers caricatured the farcical humors of grave campaign politics. On election day he declared victory and resigned.

What does the farmer need? Obvious: "He needs a punch in the jaw if he believes that either of the parties cares a damn about him after the election" (August 23).

Can voters be fooled? Darn tootin': "Of all the bunk handed out during a campaign the biggest one of all is to try and compliment the knowledge of the voter" (September 21).

What about a candidate's image? Ballyhoo: "I hope there is some sane people who will appreciate dignity and not showmanship in their choice for the presidency" (October 5).

What of ugly campaign rumors? Don't worry: "The things they whisper aren't as bad as what they say out loud" (October 12).[20]

"The average citizen knows only too well that it makes no difference to him which side wins. He realizes that the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey have come to resemble each other so closely that it is practically impossible to tell them apart; both of them make the same braying noise, and neither of them ever says anything. The only perceptible difference is that the elephant is somewhat the larger of the two.[28]

"Every guy just looks in his own pocket and then votes. And the funny part of it is that it's the last year of an administration that counts. [A president] can have three bad ones and then wind up with everybody having money in the fourth, and the incumbent will win so far he needn't even stay up to hear the returns. Conditions win elections, not speeches.[29]

"One sure certainty about our Memorial Days is that as fast as the ranks from one war thin out, the ranks from another take their place. Prominent men may run out of Decoration Day speeches, but the world never runs out of wars. People talk peace, but men give up their life's work to war.[30]

"Everything is changing. People are taking the comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke."

"Our foreign policy is an open book - a checkbook."

"The income tax has made more liars out of Americans than golf."[31]

"If stupidity got us in this mess, why can't it get us out?"

"Everybody says this here thing we're involved in ain't a real war. Congress says it ain't a war. The President says it ain't a war. 'Course the guys over here getting shot at say it's the best damned imitation they ever saw."

"A senator got up today in Congress and called his fellow senators sons of wild jackasses. Now, if you think the senators were hot, imagine how the jackasses must feel."

Friday, October 22, 2010

Pitfalling My Way Through Un-PC Ravine...

I tried to add/reply to  my own post ('China Holds Mortgage -' down a ways), but that didn't work, and it went here as a post, so I might as well just leave it.

I don't really want to be a bigot, but these questions and feelings just occur.  As Sr Aloysius cried, 'I doubt! I DOUBT!!'  Woe is we.

'...and, yes, I know that there are many races / subracial types, in the morphological / physical / genetic sense...'  Unlike current Tea Party Repub Senate candidate Sharron 'BS & Backtracking' Angle, who's presently trying to spin her way out of challenging the propriety of a Hispanic interest group in her audience, because a lot of them looked Asian to her.  We are so schizoid, so multifariously whack on the subject of RACE.  How can we make any progress when the word itself, and all that pertains to it, is so individually understood (in the sense of being pertinently different in concept to how the same is understood by others, especially if those others aren't just tunnel-visioned 'truthiness' raging bigots)?  It doesn't help for airy idealists to try to wish it away, or for one bunch of scientist to say that DNA scientists prove it's an illusion while others (calling Prof. Gates and his TV show -among others!) use DNA markers to 'prove' you're this or that much of some 'race' because you had ancestors who sometime clustered and bred on one of three continents... Even though all those continents have always, in human history and prehistory, have each had folk of the full span of human coloration and morphology...Which is one way we mean 'race', while (especially outside the present English-speaking world), the word has like been used to mean 'ethnicity as national/tribal affiliation and culture'.  We all just don't know what we really mean by 'race'.

I wonder if this is true:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_aboriginals
'Reports from American envoys and others suggest that Taiwanese aboriginals under Qing rule were treated extremely harshly. Presbyterian missionary George Leslie Mackay in From far Formosa (1896) reported that "if a savage is killed inland, the heart is eaten, flesh taken off in strips, and bones boiled to a jelly and preserved as a specific for malarial fever" (Mackay 1896:276). American consul James W. Davidson described in The Island of Formosa (1903) how the Han Chinese in Taiwan ate and traded in their aboriginal victims' flesh (Davidson 1903:255), a practice also mentioned by Owen Rutter in Through Formosa (1923), whose account bears some similarities to Davidson's (Rutter 1923:224–225). Sangren, in History and Magical Power in a Chinese Community (1987) mentions Davidson's account, adding that elderly Ta-ch'i informants had corroborated his claims (Sangren 1987:223).'
Soooooooooooooo un-PC of me (and the above 'Yellow Peril' era quotes may be abominable false witness for political agendae) but it does seem that what (used to?) be called 'the Mongoloid Race' has tended to slip a little more easily into exigent or inimical cannibalism than the other so-called 'races'.  If this is so, I wonder if it might be because 'race scientists' have said the characteristic 'Mongoloid' morphology originated as adjustments to arctic conditions:  Which until recent times = a long season of STARVATION.  (We know that the tall, pale, hairy, beaky-nosed 'Euroids' of Scandinavia and Russia went Androphagi in the same circumstances) This might well also relate to the comparative lack of food taboos had by Mongoloid people, particularly the frequent cultural readiness to eat dogs, cats, and primates, which other races tend to think of as 'family member' species.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Too Many Obits: Gallery 2010 as All Souls Approaches


Started this blog attentive of obituary salutes and trying to stay away from whining and snarling and politics~ have failed bigtime at both... But here's a link to a picture gallery of some famous deceased in this year so far.  A few perhaps would have been 'better to have had millstones attached to their necks and been drowned in the depths of the sea' than to have caused the harm they did, but most of them, ahhhhh... You were a part of our lives; a good and willing exchange of life and energy.  Your ghosts, and so very many other friendly phantoms, ever welcome in the spacious tabernacles of our tattered hearts:  Take another piece of our hearts with you to those everlasting green pastures of blissful peace!!!
http://www.aolnews.com/entertainment/article/barbara-billingsley-beaver-cleavers-tv-mom-dies/19677013

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Scariest Movie in America

"Crumbling of America" "History Channel" - Forestle search = about 3,490.

http://us.forestle.org/en/search.php?q="Crumbling%20of%20America"%20"History%20Channel"

This documentary is the most truly horrifying movie in America. Combine the mega-disasters of Katrina-Rita, firestorms across the world in recent years, the BP spill and the toll of our Middle Eastern wars, and that still would be relatively trivial compared to the only-a-matter-of-time global catastrophe, hydra-headed threat to our CRUMBLING INFRASTRUCTURE.

For at least the last 40 years, presidential candidates have been promising 'elect me and I'll fix the infrastructure' (while 'creating jobs for Americans', 'getting free of [foreign-at-least] fossil fuel dependency', stopping pollution, etc.), and blowing it all to the wind in favor of war, 'wars' over tax-break favoritism, and endless campaigning once they're actually in office. We citizens, en masse, show our concern by hanging on every detail of meta-addicted plutocrat poptarts' latest court-plea fashion statements--

And let the TRILLIONS of dollars, billions of tons of materials, and armies of manpower we need to fix it get devoured in foreign lands and in outrageous wanton waste here at home.

It would not be good enough to to really be righteous if we put our hideous, awesomely vulnerable power grid (poles, skeletal 'towers', etc., ever more cable-webworking out the sky and necessitating the mangling or eradication of our life-giving urban forest) underground (with all manner of security protocols actually employing competent loyal natural American citizens), and dredge out dams below depths that make them such downstream flood hazards, while using the soil and rock removed to (with more advanced construction engineering, free-energy onsite electrical safety/warning devices, etc.,) raise levees, thicken fill-dam walls, fill sinkholes, berm erosion, restore islands, and such, but it would be immeasurably better than what we have been doing - or not doing, unless you consider IGNORING LIKELY APOCALYPTIC DANGERS an 'activity'.

Friday, September 17, 2010

ABATEMENT: local; long-needed

(Quickies:)

EPA proposes $69.2 million plan to contain 4.2-mile-long contaminated underground water plume from Whittier to Norwalk
http://www.whittierdailynews.com/news/ci_15966083?source=rss

also~

Number of illegal immigrants in U.S. now declining
http://www.whittierdailynews.com/news/ci_15965391
Had to happen eventually.  Took all the jobs left in the US - the rest were outsourced (often by the same frequently FOREIGN-on-US-soil / formerly American businesses who hired - or even brought them in and doubled their lawscoffing by keeping them in various kinds of illegal and immoral thralldom), and now, like their anchor-babies who grow up with other native-born Americans, have the career choices of (1.)  Killer Cannon-Fodder for Endless War.  (2.) Crime.  ...Bridging these two, of course, are the few (but still utterly too many), the (satanically) proud executive and demagogue lackeys of the insatiable bloodsuckers who exploit it all.

...Not for me to judge, but I can't help thinking that the tubes sticking out of Dick Cheney's chest are uh, }}ahem! {{  KARMA's piquant way of saying, 'Now more like Vladimir Harkonnen than ever!!'

'Appalling' Surveillance of Peaceful Demonstrators

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/pennsylvania-governor-ed-rendell-appalled-at-states-tracking-of-peaceful-activists/19634948?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-n%7Cdl1%7Csec3_lnk3%7C171105

And even this neo-totalitarian effort at 'homeland security' is OUTSOURCED; the name of the agency is 'Institute of Terrorism Research and Response'.  Forestle Search it, whydoncha.  Here's the 'nonprofit' ={{{koff - yeahright -koff}}}= link on it:
http://www.terrorresponse.org

You, too, can be suspect with a dossier 'n' stuff, and have secret warnings sent out about you.  Go ahead and protest anything! ANYthing!

Chinese hold Mortgage on USA; Swoop Up American Forclosures

Among many articles:
http://www.topix.com/forum/business/real-estate/T6EAMFCET6HKSJKJ3  (Focusses mostly on the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles County - as well it might, regarding  private home purchases - but it's all over, including many big famous businesses, rural properties, etc.).

I have nothing against people who are racially Chinese - indeed, the Han seem to produce more exquisite beauty and brilliant brains than most of the rest of us (and, yes, I kow that there are many races / subracial types, in the morphological / physical / genetic sense, in China), and there are innumerable honorably admirable things about Chinese culture (is it the OLDEST of all?)... But there are pervasive traditional aspects of it so coldly ruthless and insularly arrogant that I dread them more than the violence and wantonness of the Western and African world, the Sharia extremists and dhimmi-jihadists of the Islamic world, or fulfillment of the reconquistadores de Aztlan's  most aggressive dreams.  It may be irrational, bigoted, paranoid.......But nothing says LOST to me more than Chinese takeover.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Insane Transmission Tower Lines

http://www.whittierdailynews.com/news/ci_16008367?source=rss

Edison's new power scheme is an abomination. It recalls T. Edison's ruthless thievishness and relish to electrocute man and beast for monopolistic profit.


Nothing is more vulnerable to terrorist efficacy or natural disaster than our exposed power grid. It has also been proven that illness and deformity increase in areas near electrical transmission towers. God only knows what damage is done to body, mind and spirit as trees are butchered or forbidden so that we may be ever more trapped under the cross-hung webwork of wire!

If we really cared about a safe, employed America, we would stop feeding all we have to war profiteers and other government contract bloodsuckers, and start a grand project to PUT POWERLINES AND GOODS TRANSPORTATION UNDERGROUND; WELL-GUARDED.

And~ What power might be generated if even ONE transmission tower was hung full of louvered-reel generators and photoelectric cells?

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Nature-Lovers Flee Discovery Center Pork Proj

Posted in Relief from the Concrete by Friends of the Whittier Narrows Natural Area
http://naturalareafriends.blogspot.com/

Last community-based environmental organization walks away from Discovery Center project


And then there were none.

The last community-based environmental organization on the booster committee for the troubled San Gabriel River Discovery Center water museum project voted in July to remove itself from the committee.

The exit of the local chapter of the California Native Plant Society is the latest page in an exodus from the project. In past years, the Discovery Center Authority claimed to have nearly 30 members on the committee. Today the list is down to seven.

The project booster committee is now made up almost exclusively of government agencies and water districts, a fact which reveals the project for what it is: unsustainable pork-barrel spending at a time when the taxpayer and ratepayer can no longer bear it.

The $22 million taxpayer-funded water museum and meeting hall -- deemed "incompatible" with the Whittier Narrows Significant Ecological Area by the county's own habitat experts -- is being pushed by a group of government agencies and water districts. Now, their booster committee consists almost exclusively of other government agencies and water districts.

Remaining members include the watershed council, an interest group dominated by agencies, water districts and utility companies; and another government agency whose chairman supports expanded oil drilling in the nearby Whittier Hills even though the agency was established to protect habitat and wildlife there.

Organizations that have decided to walk away because of their opposition to the project or their concerns about its goals, impacts and viability include the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society and the Whittier Narrows Nature Center Associates. Volunteer members of these and other organizations are deeply committed to community, conservation and education -- and they reject the destruction of wildlife habitat and public lands for a building intended primarily as a meeting hall for government officials and water execs.

But the authority seems to be little concerned that the local community, the habitat experts and the conservationists have all rejected the project. With a handful of its fellow agencies still on the booster club, the authority can claim a kind of support. But that support reveals the project for what it is: unsustainable pork-barrel spending at a time when the taxpayer and ratepayer can no longer bear it.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Glenn Beck, Demagodgue

Glenn Beck appears to be rolling along that familiar road of Mistaking Himself for God.  This is dismaying, but not surprising.

I don't think that he and St. Sarah Save Us and their 'truthiness' blinkered minions exalting WAR and the nobility of sending American children off to be killa kannon fodda (because the plutocracy leaves them few other employment choices, Because Lazy American Natives Just Won't DOOOOOOOOO the Jobs Imported and Overseas Foreigners Will Do, doncha know) are exactly the Abomination of Desolation in the Holy of Holies, standing where Martin Luther King stood before the idol of bloody Lincoln, but the hordes of pseudo-Christians lapping up their poison 'tea' ought to look in their Bibles and note that the Antichrist was first called 'the god of (military) Forces!!  

Michael Jackson's Kids: WRONG SCHOOL

The late KOP's two older children, formerly homeschooled and (until their father's arena public-funeral) hyper-sheltered, are now going to a campus school for the first time, at the exquisitely vulnerable age of beginning-teen.  Where?  (Showing that elite and expensive by no means has to mean protective) THE BUCKLEY SCHOOL of Sherman Oaks, California.  The Buckley School's greatest claim to fame:  Turning out ENTITLISTA COKE WHORES.  Maybe A&E will pay their fee, an Investment in the Future of exploiting the screwed-up lives of celebrity offspring in splattery 'reality' TV.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

'LAST COMBAT TROOPS' (?) withdrawing, they say...

What should be a colossal hooray and halleluJah remains fizzly in that we're LEAVING troops there in the same character and operational stance as we first entered in Vietnam.  Arrgh. WE'LL SEE.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Water bond reveals swine in museum's clothing

naturalareafan excellently reported in blessed blog Relief from the Concrete:~:~:~:~:~


The yearlong debate surrounding the $11 billion water bond shined a bright light on what government officials like to call "water education facilities" -- a category that includes the proposed San Gabriel River Discovery Center.

What did that light reveal? That such projects are little more than government pork.

Democratic legislators, Republican legislators, political observers -- people from across the spectrum pointed out that these projects are the superfluous, costly ingredients intended to do nothing more than sweeten the deal to build political support for legislation.

But don't take my word for it:

The Los Angeles Times, Aug. 10, 2010:

"Sen. Lois Wolk (D-Davis) criticized the bond for including money for economic development projects, a water taxi service at Lake Tahoe and the construction of water education centers, saying that spending is not directly related to improving water quality.

"'It is fiscally irresponsible,' Wolk said. 'We need to repeal it, revise it and refocus it on the true needs of California.'"

The Los Angeles Times, Aug. 18, 2009:

"The bond proposal includes funding for bike paths, museums, visitor centers, tree planting, economic development and the purchase of property from land speculators and oil companies -- all in the districts of lawmakers whose key votes helped it pass the Legislature.

"'It's unfortunate that so many pet projects were put in that it has just created a Christmas tree out of this bond, and most of them don't produce one drop of water,' said Sen. Jeff Denham (R-Atwater), who voted against the measure when it cleared the Legislature this month."

The Los Angeles Times' George Skelton, Aug. 19, 2009:

"No matter how clever and careful the writer, on occasion a work should be ripped up and retooled. That also goes for writers of legislation.

"A prime example: Sacramento's new state water bond proposal. Granted, this bloated $11.1-billion bond is laced with humor: A waterworks package that provides borrowed money -- at twice the ticket price, counting interest -- for building bike trails, buying open space and developing 'watershed education centers.'

"OK, it is not funny," Skelton writes. "It's politics. It's pork."

Skelton's right: It's not funny.

And the proposed Discovery Center is so not-funny -- government officials ignoring the will of the people, attempting to build a project that destroys what it supposedly is intended to interpret, lashing the taxpayer to a project that promises to waste tens of millions of dollars -- that you have to laugh to keep from crying.

To my mind, one of the least funny aspects is that while the county, the state and the two water districts behind the project are raising taxes and water rates, all while slashing budgets and services for things people actually need and use, the Discovery Center Authority would have us believe that a water museum and meeting hall is something other than the multimillion-dollar government boondoggle it so obviously is.

It's not funny. It's just sad.

Tea Party SCHIZ

Here's a post EPStolarion sent as commentary to an article on the growing prevalence of 'Tea Party' enthusiasts accusing each other of 'misrepresenting the brand.  She makes the under-commented-upon point that the Tea Party - and indeed, other parties - don't really have a coherent brand, dispite being 'branded' by their enemies! :~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~

It's not at all surprising that the Tea Party is now being stirred by open accusations of imposters, dissemblers and hollow opportunists. It has always been thus with every political party, from the 'leading lights' on down.


This has been more obvious from the start with the Tea Party than with most other American political movements, recalling the wildly disparate swellings against draconian rule (made by ruthless controllers) of rather simple-minded monarchs in 1790s France and WWI Russia.

Of course, all attempts at e pluribus unum make strange bedfellows, but the oil and water of the Tea Party seems to be, on one side: Conspiracy theorists who loathe all ruling elites, wars, warmongers, financiers, demagogues and Globalists; utterly and equally distrust 'our Two Parties' as fused fingers of an international Establishment / World Corporate State,,, And all politicians! On the other side are those who all too often seem as given to pseudo-epiphanies of 'truthiness', Sarahdolatry and zombie dittoheadedness toward proselytizers of Chaneyesque Military-Industrial hive-being orthodoxy as the Party's mockers caricaturize them.

Yet both elements may be 'Fortress America', or separatist-ish, or of antique tradition, or other things which make them bond, without being inclined to militancy, plots, bigotry, or any other Handmaid's Tale-like dread vision of their attackers.

Those in the Tea Party now might more logically drift into other or new parties better suited to their differences, but, for the time being, their growing power is not just (disgruntled swarms of heritage-minded Americans) pouring into it to swim in the cup of wrath, but by HAVING VALID POINTS hardly expressed elsewhere!

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Goodbye, American Citizens

 Here's a super article from Michael Lind at Salon.com :

http://www.salon.com/news/us_economy/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/07/27/american_people_obsolete

Are the American people obsolete?



The richest few don't need the rest of us as markets, soldiers or police anymore. Maybe we should all emigrate

Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes.


In every industrial democracy since the end of World War II, there has been a social contract between the few and the many. In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority.

In North America and Europe, the economic elite agreed to this bargain because they needed ordinary people as consumers and soldiers. Without mass consumption, the factories in which the rich invested would grind to a halt. Without universal conscription in the world wars, and selective conscription during the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies might have failed to defeat totalitarian empires that would have created a world order hostile to a market economy.

Globalization has eliminated the first reason for the rich to continue supporting this bargain at the nation-state level, while the privatization of the military threatens the other rationale.

The offshoring of industrial production means that many American investors and corporate managers no longer need an American workforce in order to prosper. They can enjoy their stream of profits from factories in China while shutting down factories in the U.S. And if Chinese workers have the impertinence to demand higher wages, American corporations can find low-wage labor in other countries.

What about markets? Many U.S. multinationals that have transferred production to other countries continue to depend on an American mass market. But that, too, may be changing. American consumers are tapped out, and as long as they are paying down their debts from the bubble years, private household demand for goods and services will grow slowly at best in the United States. In the long run, the fastest-growing consumer markets, like the fastest-growing labor markets, may be found in China, India and other developing countries.


This, too, marks a dramatic change. As bad as they were, the robber barons depended on the continental U.S. market for their incomes. The financier J.P. Morgan was not so much an international banker as a kind of industrial capitalist, organizing American industrial corporations that depended on predominantly domestic markets. He didn't make most of his money from investing in other countries.

In contrast, many of the highest-paid individuals on Wall Street have grown rich through activities that have little or no connection with the American economy. They can flourish even if the U.S. declines, as long as they can tap into growth in other regions of the world.

Thanks to deindustrialization, which is caused both by productivity growth and by corporate offshoring, the overwhelming majority of Americans now work in the non-traded domestic service sector. The jobs that have the greatest growth in numbers are concentrated in sectors like medical care and childcare.

Even here, the rich have options other than hiring American citizens. Wealthy liberals and wealthy conservatives agree on one thing: the need for more unskilled immigration to the U.S. This is hardly surprising, as the rich are far more dependent on immigrant servants than middle-class and working-class Americans are.

The late Patricia Buckley, the socialite wife of the late William F. Buckley Jr., once told me, "One simply can't live in Manhattan without at least three servants -- a cook and at least two maids." She had a British cook and Spanish-speaking maids. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently revealed the plutocratic perspective on immigration when he defended illegal immigration by asking, "Who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?"

The point is that, just as much of America's elite is willing to shut down every factory in the country if it is possible to open cheaper factories in countries like China, so much of the American ruling class would prefer not to hire their fellow Americans, even for jobs done on American soil, if less expensive and more deferential foreign nationals with fewer legal rights can be imported. Small wonder that proposals for "guest worker" programs are so popular in the U.S. establishment. Foreign "guest workers" laboring on American soil like H1Bs and H2Bs -- those with non-immigrant visas allowing technical or non-agriculture seasonal workers to be employed in the U.S. -- are latter-day coolies who do not have the right to vote.

If much of America's investor class no longer needs Americans either as workers or consumers, elite Americans might still depend on ordinary Americans to protect them, by serving in the military or police forces. Increasingly, however, America's professional army is being supplemented by contractors -- that is, mercenaries. And the elite press periodically publishes proposals to sell citizenship to foreigners who serve as soldiers in an American Foreign Legion. It is probably only a matter of time before some earnest pundit proposes to replace American police officers with foreign guest-worker mercenaries as well.

Offshoring and immigration, then, are severing the link between the fate of most Americans and the fate of the American rich. A member of the elite can make money from factories in China that sell to consumers in India, while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country. With a foreign workforce for the corporations policed by brutal autocracies and non-voting immigrant servants in the U.S., the only thing missing is a non-voting immigrant mercenary army, whose legions can be deployed in foreign wars without creating grieving parents, widows and children who vote in American elections.

If the American rich increasingly do not depend for their wealth on American workers and American consumers or for their safety on American soldiers or police officers, then it is hardly surprising that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people. The rich don't need the rest anymore.

To be sure, wealthy humanitarians might take pity on their economically obsolescent fellow citizens. But they no longer have any personal economic incentive to do so. Besides, philanthropists may be inclined to devote most of their charity to the desperate and destitute of other countries rather than to their fellow Americans.

If most Americans are no longer needed by the American rich, then perhaps the United States should consider a policy adopted by the aristocracies and oligarchies of many countries with surplus populations in the past: the promotion of emigration. The rich might consent to a one-time tax to bribe middle-class and working-class Americans into departing the U.S. for other lands, and bribing foreign countries to accept them, in order to be alleviated from a high tax burden in the long run.

Where would a few hundred million ex-Americans go? The answer is obvious: to the emerging markets where the work and investment are found. That will show all those American union members who complain that their jobs have been outsourced to China. Let them move to China themselves and compete, instead of complaining!

Needless to say, the Chinese and Indians might resist the idea of an influx of vast numbers of downwardly mobile North American workers. But like American capitalists, Chinese and Indian capitalists might learn that ethnic diversity impedes unionization, while the mass immigration of North Americans to East and South Asia would keep wages in those regions competitively low for another few decades at least.

Once emptied of superfluous citizens, the U.S. could become a kind of giant Aspen for the small population of the super-rich and their non-voting immigrant retainers. Many environmentalists might approve of the depopulation of North America, because sprawling suburbs would soon be reclaimed by the wilderness. And deficit hawks would be pleased as well. The middle-class masses dependent on Social Security and Medicare would have departed the country, leaving only the self-sufficient rich and foreign guest workers without any benefits, other than the charity of their employers.

Of course there are alternative options, which would not require the departure of most Americans from America for new lives on distant shores. One would be a new social contract, in which the American people, through representatives whom they actually control, would ordain that American corporations are chartered to create jobs in the U.S. for American workers, and if that does not interest their shareholders and managers then they can do without legal privileges granted by the sovereign people, like limited liability.

The American people also could put a stop to any thought of an American Foreign Legion and declare, through their representatives, that a nation of citizen-workers will be protected by citizen-soldiers, whether professionals or, in emergencies, conscripts. The American people, in other words, could insist that the United States will be a democratic republican nation-state, not a post-national rentier oligarchy.

But restoring democratic nationalism in the U.S. would inconvenience America's affluent minority. So instead of making trouble, maybe most Americans should just find a new continent to call home.

This marks a historic change in the relationship between capital and labor in the U.S. The robber barons of the late 19th century generally lived near the American working class and could be threatened by strikes and frightened by the prospect of revolution. But rioting Chinese workers are not going to burn down New York City or march on the Hamptons.

~~~~~~~

And see this:
http://thedustininmansociety.org/no_more_deaths/no_more_deaths.html
Which has a long hyperlinked list of persons of all races and very many national /ethnic backgrounds who have been killed by illegal aliens in the USA.  As they say: 'Note: We are aware of many more deaths caused by illegal aliens in our nation, but have only listed the names for which we can provide a news story that mentions the immigration status of the individual charged.' And: 'We remind the reader that illegal immigration is a crime, as it is to employ, encourage or assist an illegal alien. Read USC Title 8, section 1324 for more information.' ('USC' = 'United States Code'.  Go to the Dustin Inman Society page linked above, and there will be a link to that code section via Cornell Law.)  The page also has other pertinent information and other links, such as:  www.ImmigrationsHumanCost.org/text/crimevictims.html 




 




Monday, August 2, 2010

DON'T GIVE UP THE PET!!!!!!!

Here is a heartbreaking story of frustration and danger for goodhearted innocents in the face of 'DOGged' bureaucratic perversity and stupidity:
http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/articles/savingbuddyspcadog.htm

Today, in wantonly deceptive euphemism, what was once called 'the pound' (as a place of empoundment - this in itself is a euphemism, as in fact it means jail/prison/killing station, with the pathetic but unhelpful nuance that those interned are innocent of crime by human standards, and are often both totally inoffensive and themselves the victims of crime [or what ought to be crime; yea, to some of us, crimes that should bring the death penalty upon the cruel perpetrators]), is now called a 'shelter'.  You get your licences there, and it's the first place to call if your animal - tagged, tatooed, chipped, or give 'em a discription & pray for the best - goes missing.  ...Or your weirdo neighbor's Burmese python, chimp, aquatic monster, or Baskerville hound is loose, or Something Looks Rabid, or something really BIG, like a horse/bear/deer/cow/cougar is wild in the streets, or there's a real emergency that a 'LOW kill shelter', the Fish & Wildlife Service, the zoo, or something better can't take care of in time (though the pound may just call, or have you call, the police, who tend to handle such things with very little patience and a strong tendency for  an ironclad Final Solution).

Woeful to have to accede to the fact that PETA 'shelters' may be the 'killingest' of them all, and that PETA higher-ups seem largely to be anti-pet: The phrase 'animal rights' has been largely perverted and co-opted by hidden-agenda, black-prop cranks who say domestic animals are all slaves - and of course, our favorite carnivores, along with us naughty non-vegans, eat other domestic animals, and maybe even kill rats and snakes and cucarachas who are, by the standards of those self-proclaimed liberators, 'purer' and more 'natural' even if they're Dangerous Invasive (dare we still say?!? =ahem=) Aliens, on account of being 'wild'. 

Next, articles like that linked above, unfortunately and historically, have hardly been unique.  Shows like Animal Cops, rightly memorializing the heroic efforts of the best of the SPCA and Humane Societies, give the impression that all such shelters may be so trusted.  Not so.  Whatever it is, check it out as carefully as you can.

And MOST OF ALL, study to be a good caretaker of an animal before you take charge of one, and don't give up on them!!!       

Saturday, June 26, 2010

'Public' 'Protection' - Privileged Profiteering: Oil in Whittier & more

Adding to my previously expressed suspicions on the safety of the natural environment in 'public' (as meaning, government) ownership, I recently saw brochures in the Whittier Public Library and signs on homeowners' property protesting a city council plan to open protected land in the Whittier Hills (the city's part of the Puente Hills, and, apparently, at least underground, some unincorporated county land usually called or thought of as 'Whittier') to drilling for petroleum by Matrix Oil Corporation. It has been suggested that no competitive bidding was involved. La junta hopes the city's cut - numbers such as 30% royalty and/or one fifth of the day's barrel-load take have been mentioned - would end its financial crisis. But the turnover of the hills to the protection of the city was particularly that there should be no new oil exploration.


Here's where you can get further info:

http://www.whittierhillsoilwatch.org/

http://us.forestle.org/en/search.php?q="drilling%20for%20oil"%20Whittier%20Matrix ~of which these are especially good:

http://www.whittierdailynews.com/ci_8553946  ~Whittier Ponders Drilling for Oil (Whittier Daily News)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124096173407165939.html  ~The Derrick Next Door: Suburb Explores a Crude Solution to Its Budget Woes (Wall Street Journal)

http://www.topix.com/business/oil-gas

I also went deeper in studying the very curious history of gummint protecting humans and other creatures in the Channel Islands of California (see earlier LAND GRAB post, especially the Santa Rosa Island links), and strongly suggest you go to and then to the articles on the individual islands. (God bless you, messrs Wrigley and Stanton!)~

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Islands_of_California

And then, there's this local nasanasty, from the same roots that once told us about Tang being better for you than orange juice or other natural stuff, and that the Peaceful Atom / nuclear fission and Better Things Through Chemistry were the salvation of the world!

 Searching "complaints about Downey" (Forestle about 55 pages) wondering if I cold find anyone else complaining about the way they lock of the river bikepaths, and suspicious things on their side of those paths, n'stuff, got to these:  "Downey Flu" - Forestle about 252.  Especially:

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/02/business/fi-ct-downey2
=coff coff!!=

Sunday, June 20, 2010

(Wishful) Withering of the Overclass

http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9608/public.html

The first section, "Farewell to the Overclass" obviously (since it was written in 1996) was among the better motivated flowers of intellectual wishful thinking, still worthwhile as a combination of hope-nostalgia and hope for the future.  Ah well!

Monday, June 14, 2010

Rim of the Valley: Wildlife Corridor or Land-Grab?

Consider these elements:
1. ( From http://www.whittierdailynews.com/)
Forest Service to start study of massive Southern California open space protection plan


By Dan Abendschein, Staff Writer      Posted: 06/04/2010 08:27:07 PM PDT

PASADENA - U.S. Forest Service officials announced Friday the beginning of a five-year study of an open space that stretches from the Santa Monica range to the San Gabriel Mountains.

The Rim of the Valley Corridor includes private and public land from the Santa Monica Mountains, Santa Susanna Mountains, San Gabriel Mountains, Verdugo Mountains and San Rafael Hills.

The Forest Service wants to bring the lands under federal protection and would study the possibilities of trail development, land acquisition and preservation of wildlife corridors that connect different sections of open space in the area.

Failure to preserve the lands will have negative consequences for local wildlife, as well as for outdoor recreation, said Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, whose legislation has led to the study.

"These are incredible wild areas that are loosely connected corridors that allow for wildlife to pass through," Schiff said Friday at the Eaton Canyon Nature Center. "If the areas become disconnected we lose those corridors."

The study will start in August with a series of public meetings meant to help define the scope and ambition of the project.

Improving the trail system, recreational opportunities and protecting wildlife habitat are some of the major topics that will be discussed in developing the plan.

The study will cost $500,000 and will be finished in 2014, at which time it will be presented to Congress with recommendations.

Though the plan could result in a new national recreation area or other Forest Service protections, it will not likely mean a new national park in L.A.'s backyard, said Jody Noiron, forest supervisor for Angeles National Forest.

It will mean that the Forest Service will be looking to acquire lands from private owners who currently hold title.

But the Forest Service will not use eminent domain to take land from property owners, Schiff said.

"Whenever you are dealing with the Forest Service some people will always say it is a land grab," Schiff said. "This is not a land grab ... we only want to deal with willing sellers."

Among those who are labeling it a land grab is the Washington state-based American Land Rights Association.

Chuck Cushman, a spokesman for the group who grew up in Southern California, said members will be participating in the public process, opposing development of the plan.

He said that he is not convinced the Forest Service will stick to its promise to avoid eminent domain. Additionally, he said, there are other people with interests in the area who could be threatened by the plan.

"There are a whole bunch of people with cabins in the area, who lease the land but don't own it," Cushman said. "There are people with mineral rights ... if the park service takes over the area all those people are at risk."

dan.abendschein@sgvn.com

Read more: Forest Service to start study of massive Southern California open space protection plan - Whittier Daily News http://www.whittierdailynews.com/news/ci_15231347?source=rss#ixzz0q021sTq2

~~~~~~~
I am ALL FOR wildlife corridors (and pedestrian corridors! -for the feetsies of wildlife, humans, domestic animals under human & humane responsible control, and gently used, quiet, non-polluting small wheels), and as 'GREEN' as anybody...Which, history has shown, can be a lot more green than guvmint enviro-honchos [such as the abominable Let It Burn, no-reservoirs, erosion-loving, crack-brained worshippers of fire and death, and those who have infiltrated the system only for the sake of getting payola and power-fixes by exercising 'Public Domain' which is almost always in the interest of the Military-Industrial Complex, porkbarrel contractees and pol-buddy developers, not the real general PUBLIC - let alone non-voting, non-taxpaying, non-workerbee Nature's Children], so let' give a note to the opponents, who are, for the most part, Not Cheneyesque At All:
~~~~~~~
http://www.landrights.org/OCS/CARA.cushman_testimony.99_6.htm

(Looking up a particularly shameful steal I remenbered, by example):

http://us.forestle.org/en/search.php?q="Santa%20Rosa%20Island"%20"land%20grab"

A big YES for genuine wildlife corridors, a big NO to totalitarian Trojan Horse ways of having them!



Monday, May 31, 2010

USE Arundo

My friend Lindenfir, who has even more trouble with his TypePad blog than I have with this one (& that's sayin' sompin!), wrote the following to the California Invasive Plant Council,
http://www.cal-ipc.org/ and copied to me.

Good ideas as usual, and applicable far beyond California:

Just read your article on Arundo donax/Giant Cane, then read up on the species elsewhere. I am dismayed and alarmed by MONSANTO and the idea of introducing foreign species (not counting Angora goats, as long as they're competently herded) to "take care of" Arundo or any other invasive. Monsanto is about as benign to our world as staphlococcus, and the history of trying to combat one noxious invasive by introducing its predator has generally been one of disaster.

Since Giant Cane has so many uses, including as a biomass fuel source and probably for pulp, fiberboard, wood polymer product material. bamboo-like flooring and panelling, etc., and since trying to rip it out can destroy habitat and cause erosion, IT SHOULD BE HARVESTED.

Imagine boats and land vehicles equipped with cutters that could "give a buzz cut" to stands. The canes, sans seed-heads, could even be left fallen (some perhaps staked or palisaded) in crushing heaps over the stumps, and this serve as a base for an overlay of soil that might be planted with native willow, alder, ash, maple, sycamore, walnut, elder, lodgepole pine, dogwood, etc., and smaller fare like native rushes, berries, oxalis and ferns, Jussiaea, Duckweed, wild grape, etc. This sort of method might also work in cases of some other alien invasives, like Tamarisk. I'd bet that, given this sort of chance, willow and wild grape could give a really good fight against the bully invaders! In damp places with North-facing canyon walls or other protection from sun and wind, good-sized native (or even not quite, like the magnificent Ahuehuete) Taxiodiaceae might even be planted.

I also wonder about things like harvesting water hyacinths, ivy, and kudzu for biomass (they have other little-exploited values, as well), and whether "beheading" milk thistle and dropping native seed - or even commercial grain - into their wet, hollow stems could serve as a moist "nursery" for those seeds to put forth roots and take over.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

General Butler's WAR IS A RACKET

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket   (go to this link for Wikipedia's in-line hyperlinks & more).   ~snips:


War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired U.S. Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of only 19 people to be twice awarded the Medal of Honor, in which Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests have commercially benefited from warfare.

It contains this key summary:

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

In another often cited quote from the book Butler says:

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." *

See also:

Arms industry

Military-industrial complex

Perpetual war

Free online text:  http://www.warisaracket.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
 
Curiously, I came to these things after reading overwraught scorn against overwraught allegations at:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2010/05/26/smedley-butler-rides-again/  huh!
 
*p.s. By way of folk of these sort, the PBS documentary on last night, The Legend of Pancho Barnes, suggested that Barnes and other 'Powderpuff Derby aviatrixes' believed they may have sabotaged by oilman Erle Halliburton.
http://panchobarnesfilm.com/film/index.php ; more cool stuff at:
http://panchobarnesfilm.com/film/links.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Halliburton

Monday, May 24, 2010

Don't Go Where They're Out To Get You!

Today's news has featured Americans beguiled and beleagured by drug-gang rule in Mexico and Jamaica, and 'DETAINED' in Yemen and Iran.  Three chums, two guys and a girl, imprisoned in Iran tried to hike across the Iran-Iraq border a couple of years ago and were imprisoned on suspicion of espionage.  You can blame Iran for a lot, but I can't see blaming them for this.  At least they were giving these kids credit for some kind of mental sanity.  The trio did not claim to be on a humanitarian or archaeological mission, nooooooooooo, they were hiking.  Because there are no good hiking places in North or South America, Europe or the Antipodes?  Because they were already living in Syria?  Now we find that two of the three want to get married and the other boy will act as best man.  Awwwww..........$#!  They want to get out and 'start a family' .  What would this world be if all those who had more dollars than sense - or just, the awesomely STUPID - were 'spayed or neutered'???          

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Carlsbad's Trails

I got onto this after seeing the delightful Huell Howser* (that invaluable resource and California's Golden Guy) piece, recently, on The Leo Carrillo Ranch State Historic Park - not to be confused with Leo Carrillo State Park in Malibu.  I'm old enough to remember Leo Carrillo as an actor and generally beloved celebrity, but hadn't known till now much of anything of the great deeds and accomplishments of Mr. Carrillo himself, or of his vast mingled pedigree of California pioneer aristocrats.  For some Carrillo & family info, try:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Carrillo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Californios

http://www.sfgenealogy.com/spanish/index.htm

~But here's the link that will take you to a page giving out Carlsbad's admirable efforts and venues for nature-strollers and such:
http://www.carlsbadca.gov/services/departments/parksandrec/trails/Pages/default.aspx

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huell_Howser

Enjoy!

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Deranged Maps - SG Bikeway

(And you thought Thomas Bros. were bad!)

I sent this to http://www.labikepaths.com/ :


You might want to warn folks that the Google map for the Mid San Gabriel River Bikeway ('Gateway Cities') area is seriously deranged.

The area around Santa Fe Springs includes a quite fictional 'Little Lake City' (more than a century ago, before the devastation brought by the explosive discovery of OIL at once was a garden spot and spa that had been sacred to the native Tongva, there was a 'Little Lake' miles to the SSE of this imaginary city, and various things, some of them on the long-drained lake bed, remain named after it: Lake Center Middle School on Clarkman Avenue between Jersey and Pioneer will give you an idea); this is what actually should be called West Whittier (unincorporated LACO area; old locals called it 'Whittier Downs') / Los Nietos (a section of SFS; old people called the riverbank part of it Cantaranas='singing frogs'). Nor is there another 'Los Nietos' around the intersection of Whittier and Beach boulevards. ...Nor an alternate world portal 'Norwalk La Mirada' northwest of Lakewood, nor an alternate Lynwood above the real Monrovia! Sheeeeesh...

Completely unaccountable are the names 'Evergeen' for the (popularly known as:) 'Five Points'- intersection of Washington Boulevard, Santa Fe Springs Road, Whittier Boulevard, La Cuarta Street and Pickering Avenue under the old Union Pacific Railroad bridge (now part of the Whittier Greenway Trail*), and 'Isantacogna' 'bout where Lincoln and Durfee Avenues met up with San Gabriel and Rosemead Boulevards - this notoriously haunted spot being Whittier Narrows and the site of the original SG Mission. Maybe da ghosties made up something with Latin words tricked to ersatz resemblance with Shoshonean placenames!

'La Habra' (nobody says 'La Habra City'), 'South Pasadena' 'Monrovia' and 'Mountain View' exist and thrive in Southern California, but far from those places listed on the map.

*Of good intentions but poor planning: Running along a section of defunct UPRR track, its western end, in shameful absurdity, does not extend across Pioneer and the 605 Freeway to the SGR Bikeway (FYI, the section of Pioneer here is cut off from other portions; stay on the river or Norwalk Boulevard if you want to go north or south without wretched double-backing). There is no decent or legal access at any portion of the former tracks except at on-the-flat intersections. The ramp on the east side of the bridge over Norwalk Blvd. is an idiotic waste of money: You have to go down El Rancho Drive nearly to Palm Park to reach the bottom of the ramp...Where you no longer need it, especially - and I speak as an elderly pedestrian crippled by many things, stumping along with a cane - if you wanted to go west (as I last checked, no legal access west of Norwalk Blvd). in which case would mean doubling back! There is no legal access anywhere about the 5 Points bridge... Which of course means much unsanctioned embankment-scaling and fence-hopping by otherwise law-abiding frustrated pedestrians, or even those who more dangerously struggle with wheels. The Greenway Trail is thus nearly useless to those who might want to access most thoroughfares and adjacent destinations along it. It runs from Pioneer west of Danby in the NW to the crossing of the Southern Pacific RR tracks between Gunn and Mills in the SE.

I dread to think how many other mistaken elsewheres may be presented on Google Maps!

Nice of them to have those park listed in the Puente Hills - however, at this time, some of them are just trails restricting bikes, doggies and wandering offtrail. 'Sycamore Park' is actually 'Sycamore Canyon Trail' and the entrance is very easy to miss: On Workman Mill (an extension of Norwalk Blvd. between Whittier Narrows / the 605 and the W end of the Puente Hills; conjunctive to Puente Avenue) between Strong Avenue and Rose Hills Memorial Park Gate 17. The vast cemetery is a triumph of pre-EPA contouring and irrigating of formerly very rugged, 'quaked and eroded hills. Sycamore Canyon Trail gives you, among other interesting things, a View to the Past (far from pristine: Whether we're talking about the mini oil refinery near the head of the trail -don't take the righthand trail toward it; you'll have to go back - or nasty invasive milk thistle, or the more-dollars-than-sense ricos whose big houses hang from the cliffs) exemplified by a peek at the Rose Hills Sign from its otherwise hidden aspect at the edge of a precipitous cliff.

There's a switchback path-let up the southern side of the canyon to Hellman (yeah, I know -snark- right next to the cemetery where 'Bank of Hell' grave-offering notes sometimes take the breeze, and to [the 'Net-originated 'old legends' of creepy stuff along the] Skyline Drive Fire Road... But it's a pioneer's name; some will remember the ice-cream-truck-style vending of delicious fresh Hellman's Bakery goods 'to your door') Wilderness Park. This trail is not for wheels or those unprepared for a longish steep slippery climb with poison oak 'n' scratchy stuff. Not for rainy or hot weather times.

Hikers should always dress protectively, including gloves and brimmed hat, have stick and water, lite quasi-med / first aid-y things & small tools - a 'multi-pliers', for instance - (carried so your hands are free); things like shades, gum. pens, etc., are also good. Cell phones if you have 'em, but don't rely on them in steep canyons! Paths in these trail-lands are often extremely deceptive, and trails badly marked if at all. You may end up having to slow-slide down hundreds of feet of hill on your be-hind. REALLY. A chair-cushion- sized disk of cardboard or some such thing might be a knapsack/bag item, bizarre as it seems!

~~~~~~~~

Something really need to be done to make the west side of the SGR Bikeway 'through' and accessible from the bridge crossings. Downey is especially rotten about this (and crosswalks are 'waaaay off. I wonder if their ever-locked access gates are legal? Foot access to streamsides used to be one of those English Common Law derived RIGHTS.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

SYMBOLISM LINKS - Art, Occult, Conspiracy, etc.

Wow, WIKICOMPANY presents itself as an all-about-businesses specializing alternative to Wikipedia, but look at what I found:  http://wikicompany.org/wiki/911:Occult_symbolism.  It also has further pages like
http://wikicompany.org/wiki/911:Occult_symbolism_II,  http://wikicompany.org/wiki/911:Occult_symbolism_III
and so  forth - apparently these pages are the same as the Parts I-XVII links found on each page. The '911' titles suggest a relatively narrow scope; this is misleading.  What is presented is, rather, an illustrated dictionary of symbols with a conspiracy-theorists' commentary.  This material is fascinating for thinkers of all sorts, even if you don't buy the slant/spin, and a great resource for artists, especially graphic designers.  Homeschooling parents should review the material and provide ongoing guidance to children so that they can learn to separate actual factoids from opinion and agendae, and come to understand that symbolism may be used as an extremely powerful motivating force -often subconsciously - but that symbols and symbolism cannot be corralled, contained and controlled within individual minds or the 'mass psyche'. Anyhow...  This stuff is worthy of bookmarking, filing, etc.  Give it a look!  I'm going to be exploring...    

Saturday, April 24, 2010

http://us.forestle.org/en/search.php?q=%22illegal+immigrants%22+biometric+Antichrist&meta=normal
 '...of about 1,430...' - and counting! Promoted by Senate-erdz Chuck Schumer (D.-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R.-S.C.). Is this more likely to separate the sheep from the goats or swirl the pot with strange bedfellows?

Restoring Oglalla and other watersheds

http://www.aolnews.com/earth-day/article/time-water-running-out-for-ogallala-americas-biggest-aquifer/19446923?icid=mainhtmlws-main-ndl1link2http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aolnews.com%2Fearth-day%2Farticle%2Ftime-water-running-out-for-ogallala-americas-biggest-aquifer%2F19446923


a.k.a "Time, Water Running Out for Ogallala, America's Biggest Aquifer"


At least since Jimmy Carter, we've had prezzies and other high hoo-haws, even (uhhhh, the advertising departments? of) globocrat fossil fuels companies saying we needed to go green, clean, naturally renewable, conserving and locally produced. They're all for it when they're running for / entering / leaving office, or trying to obfuscate what they're really up to, which is, of course, continuing to ruin things by neglect and aggression.

I've said the following for decades. I don't expect it to happen, I expect dooooooooom and disaster and damnation (no, not Eternal Punishment from the infinite moloch deluded blastphemers mistake for Jesus the Savior and Reconciler of ALL, but the predictable consequences of doing BAD...Which so often seem to hit the relatively innocent first...but I believe will finally catch up to the perps, even if it's when the roll is called up yonder and we are all then given to understand our own and everyone else's lives, deeds, circumstances, wishes, inclinations and effects. What envy of the humble, then!)...Because what I propose runs drastically counter to (at least some elements of the varied and vying material and manipulative profits of) present institutions of power, whether 'establishment' or 'revolutionary'.  But IMAGINE:

If we acted like fossil fuel and nuclear power would just be impossible in a very short time from now, and rejected the usual satanic stratagems of war & crime - wiping out, invading/leach-colonizing, stealing from, enslaving, etc., and put our efforts and resources into free, clean energy, including the mighty stuff that's hardly considered now, like tidal power (Dude! the biggest hydro dams in the World --and what we need are series of small dams which support life and safety, instead of getting in the way of them!-- are nothin' compared to the potential of the Sea of Cortez!), the wonderful discoveries of George Washington Carver, and the now-wasted (from teapots to trains to trash, and beyond!) unfathomable quantity of heat and energy produced by stuff all over the place in what is now considered energy and resource use.

And the nations of the World decide to TAKE CARE OF THEIR OWN, AT HOME. GROW OUR OWN, MAKE OUR OWN, EMPLOY OUR OWN. Imagine if WARBUX went to helping migrating and outsourcing horde-nations have viable economies of their own. Imagine if the Arab World, aided by Israel and Uncle Sugar, had INSTEAD directed the energy and resources given over to war-mentality and had given a GREENED and beautifully infrastructured Sinai to the Palestinians!

And now, to get really un-PC: (Painless as possible) sterilizing and de-lusting criminals (including really sunk drug addicts), and especially those who behave criminally toward children, as well as those with deeply cruel congenital deformities and diseases, or those definitely and permanently unable to care for children, is not Nazi (unless it's done, as Margaret Sanger and other pretenders-to-Science who inspired Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. proposed in the name of 'eugenics', but loaded with criteria from their own totalitarian bigotries), it's a rational response to a rolling pandemic disaster on children.  Sterilizing and (and/or de-lusting ought to be provided free of charge to any adult who wants such things... Also for their pets, and for ferals/strays.

We need to make employee wages and hours and job security so that, once again (speaking of the past ideal-but-often-real), there can be family members who are not directly paid by wage-employers who are considered as of equal value to the family and larger society, as homemakers. Any/if any sexual relationship or other gender issue should be aside from this, and the homemaker should have rights regarding personal finances and possessions that would keep him or her from slavelike dependency.

We need to have the option of freedom from media assaults and from sheer noise. We have horribly acquiesced to being stripped truly meaningful privacy and First Amendment rights while knuckling under to blastings of torture-porn and gangsta wallowings from ambient electronics, as well as the nonverbal torments of power tools and machinery. It is outrageous dissembly to pretend that we can simply leave the presence of such things any more. To do so would require living deep underground in a protected rural area or some at-least-equally-imprisoning equivalent.  It is that which assaults which should be contained!

And (in the absence of the will of foreigners to stay in their own countries), think of the native employment we would have if we in the U.S., or many other nations afflicted with haemorrhages and embolisms of immigrants, built multi-use, clean-power-making and clean-power using sea- and other-water reclamation canals, reservoir-lakes, and other barriers along the borders, with permanent guard, maintenance and countless other jobs that would bloom with the same. Pipelines facilitating such excavated wetlands could also bring fresh water (cleaning out holding places when necessary) to the very many dry lakes of the U.S. Intermountain West and Northern Mexico, as well as refilling the natural cisterns of dry aquifers and such things as exhausted mines and petroleum and natural gas strata.

A 'socialist' New Deal project, huh? Do you like your taxes going to war profiteers and baleouts for 'Too Big to Fails' ='socialism' for the insatiables who keep devouring you - more?



Sunday, April 4, 2010

The End of the World as we knew it

http://thisistheendoftheworldasweknowit.com/  Is a darlin' (for a dark view) website.  Short snarky schrift to the Planetary Cataclysms From Beyond Oh My Gorshk the Mayan Calendar Ends bemusement.  It gets real with what Big Changes & Mighty Mindforks are already in the works to SCROOOOOOGE us, oh yeah.

Holy Holy Week!! (2010) Look at the Earthquakes!

The Ring of Fire (and the mountains of the Mediterranean) rockin' this Holy Week.  Just felt a slight but prolonged (for an earthquake) sensation, like that of slowly rolling to a stop in a luxury car with 'soft' suspension, from the 6.9 quake centered in Delta, Baja California del Norte.  Pray for them!  6.9 is vastly bigger than our  4.4 Pico Rivera quake (the Burrow is within walking distance of the Pico shaker epicenter).
But look at what Wikipedia has for this year's Passiontide ~ see Matthew 27: 50-54 and 28: 1-8 ~ :

A magnitude 5.0 earthquake struck west of Kohlu on 1 April. [18]



The British Virgin Islands was struck by a number of small earthqaukes from 2.8 to 3.4 magnitude earthquakes and was felt in Road Town,Tortola and Anegada on 1 April. [19]


A magnitude 4.0 earthquake was felt in Chignik just 105 mils west of the epicenter on 1 April.


The french side of the Pyrenees was struck by a magnitude 4.4 earthquake on the Western Pyrenean Fault Zone on 1 April.


A magnitude 4.3 earthquake was felt in the city of corum just north of the epicenter on April 2. [20]


A 5.2 magnitude earthquake struck the Mariana Islands on 2 April. [21]


A magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck south off the islands of Fiji on 2 April. [22]


A magnitude 4.4 earthquake struck the centre of Costa Rica on 2 April. [23]


A magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck the Barat Daya Islands in Indonesia on 2 April. [24]


A magnitude 5.2 earthquake struck the city of Maule in Chile on 2 April. [25]


A magnitude 4.2 earthquake struck Sicily in Italy on 2 April. [26]


A magnitude 4.6 earthquake struck between Glogow and Polkowce in Poland on April 3. [27]


The Ryukyu Islands was struck by a magnitude 5.1 earthquake on April 3. [28]


The Kermadec Islands was struck by a magnitude 5.3 earthquake on April 3. [29]


The Mentawai Islands struck by a magnitude 4.2 earthquake on April 3.


The Cayman Islands was struck by a magnitude 4.2 earthquake on April 4. [30]


The Kuril Islands was struck by a magnitude 4.8 earthquake on April 4.


A magnitude 4.1 earthquake 115 miles offshore of Oaxaca on April 4.


Guam was struck by a magnitude 4.4 earthquake on April 4


The Solomon Islands was struck by a magnitude 4.8 earthquake on April 4.


Tarapacá Region was struck by a magnitude 4.8 earthquake on April 4.


A magnitude 4.8 earthquake struck the city of Datong on April 4.


A magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck the islands of Fiji on April 4.


A magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck the town of Delta in Baja California just hours after a magnitude 4.1 earthquake near Oaxaca on April 4.


A magnitude 4.1 earthquake struck the Cobb Mountain on April 4. 

Cobb Mountain is in Lake County, California, which is named after the geologically particularly ancient Clear Lake.  It's north of Sta. Rosa and east of Ukiah and Point Arena.  I'm guessing these last (Please, God, let them be the last!) two temblors are San Andreas offshoots. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_earthquakes 

The experts opine that 'big earthquake years' are really only a matter of significant shakers locating where there are lots of people to experience it with danage to their stuff.  Maaaaaaaybe.  But I wonder if there are bigger-than-we-figger forces, like cosmic conjunctions of magnetism and centrifugal force as our solar system voyages on its circuit 'round the Galaxy (or sumpin). 

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Santa Fe Springs? Earthquake ~ March 16, 2010

Hey! The danged (4.4 mag at about 4:04 a.m. PDT) thing seems to have epicentered pretty much here at the Burrow ('bout a block from the crossing of the 605/San Gabriel River Freeway and the 5/Santa Ana Freeway), from the vague and differing fearmonger TV newsies.  They're calling it 'the Pico Rivera Earthquake', while giving specs that suggest it's more in SFS, although the latest sounds like they were about zeroing in on the Rose Hills sign.  For you foreigners, that's a big but not- (unlike the HOLLYWOOD sign) tasteless sign on a high point of the original - now vastly expanded - Rose Hills Cemetery north of Whittier at the western terminus of the Puente Hills, the letters internally lit at night with a rosy glow, easily seen for many miles along the San Gabriel and Rio Hondo rivers region to the sign's south and west.  The LS of the sign can be seen from the bottom of a cliff along the trail in Sycamore Canyon, a shear-off unsuspected by those who have only seen the smooth green cemetery side of the hill; curious about erosion there, and the 'cliff dwellers' along the canyon with their half-stilt million+$ big houses.

At any rate, just a damageless rumble here; not so much as a knick-knack knocked.  Kitties but little disturbed.  No yelling, barking, howling, sqwacking, car alarms, cracks, smells, etc.  When I went out to sniff the gas meter, I was the only one outside.

HALLELUJAH...& mayhap no aftershocks - or, please God! it's not a foreshock of something larger.

An old earthquake hand (though thankful to never having suffered significant harm), I was awakened from my traditional pre-quake, doesn't-occur-at-other-times Huge FN Spaceship Invasion Dream.  I used to be able to predict quakes and even feel little ones as much as 200 miles away.  But it meant being a nervous nelly.  I desensitized by the Grace of God, and now just they're Just Another C&@##y Thing.  Let's try:     
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/   

Monday, March 8, 2010

The GET REAL Oscar obits

Here are a few folks the (otherwise unexpectedly classy) 2010 Academy Awards telecast remenbered, and a bushel they forgot... Although I may have missed some they included.  The camera pulled back at times and one couldn't tell who was onscreen by face or printed name, and the time given each seemed to range between the time it takes to say 'blink' twice, and 'blink' five times.  Fie!  And more shame that it was followed by a long, meaningless sequence of synchronized modern dance, which I think was a sub for presenting nominated music, but I'm not sure, because I stepped out for a while, disgruntled.  Others I asked didn't remember 'the songs' either.  Perhaps they were presented but unmemorable, or other witnesses were stunned into snooze mode by the dance, or distracted by the question, Who-all did they leave out?  I know there was a bunch!  This may provide some answers and compensation:

(Also note my earlier memorial to the great EDWARD WOODWARD.) 

January 13 – Patrick McGoohan, American-born British actor (born 1928)


January 14 – Ricardo Montalbán, Mexican-born American actor (born 1920)

February 6 – James Whitmore, American actor (born 1921)

March 15 – Ron Silver, American actor and political activist (born 1946)

March 18 – Natasha Richardson, English actress (born 1963) (they did get her... )

March 29 – Maurice Jarre, French composer and conductor (born 1924)

April 22 – Ken Annakin, English film director (born 1914)

April 22 – Jack Cardiff, English cinematographer (born 1914)

April 25 – Beatrice Arthur, American actress (born 1922)

May 4 – Dom DeLuise, American actor and comedian (born 1933)

June 3 – David Carradine, American actor (born 1936)  (got)

June 25 – Farrah Fawcett, American actress (born 1947)

June 25 – Michael Jackson, American performer and recording artist (born 1958)  (got)

July 1 – Karl Malden, American actor (born 1912)

August 5 – Budd Schulberg, American screenwriter (born 1914)

August 6 – John Hughes, American film director and writer (born 1950) (got a featured memorial)

September 14 – Patrick Swayze, American actor and dancer (born 1952) (got--?)

October 13 – Al Martino, American singer and actor (born 1927)

October 19 – Joseph Wiseman, Canadian actor (born 1918)

December 3 – Richard Todd, Irish-born British actor (born 1919)

December 9 – Gene Barry, American actor (born 1919)

December 16 – Roy E. Disney, American businessman (born 1930)  (got)

December 17 – Jennifer Jones, American actress (born 1919)  (got)

December 20 – Brittany Murphy, American actress (born 1977)  (got)

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

2010~

January 11 – Éric Rohmer, French film director (born 1920)

January 17 – Erich Segal, American author, screenwriter, and educator (born 1937)

January 22 – Jean Simmons, British actress (born 1929)  (got)

January 27 – Zelda Rubinstein, American actress and human rights activist (born 1933)

February 17 – Kathryn Grayson, American singer (born 1922)  (got)

The above from Wikipedia, years 2009 & 2010 to this date: March 8, 2010 (day after Academy Awards show.  Too many hyperlinks to reconstitute, here or below ).

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Click here: Obituaries - Britmovie - British Film Forum ~Some particularly noticeable to us: Simone Simon. Lionel Jeffries. 'Marie Glory 1905-2009 ...  Apparently this ancient French actress died on January 24 aged 103. ...'

Glad another centenarian, Luise Rainer, is still alive and getting some 'due', since it's come to be 'blink blink' at the Oscars at best!

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Click here: 2009 Legacies: Search Notable Deaths, Featured Obituaries & Editorial Tributes
Legacy.com

(Ken Annakin already noted.)
Archerd, Army
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Army Archerd, whose breezy column for the entertainment trade publication Daily Variety kept tabs on various Hollywood doings for more than a half-century, has died. He was 87. ... Read Obituary for Army Archerd  (got)

Full Profile Guest Book

Arthur, Bea

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Beatrice Arthur, the tall, deep-voiced actress whose razor-sharp delivery of comedy lines made her a TV star in the hit shows "Maude" and "The Golden Girls" and who won a Tony... Read Obituary for Bea Arthur

Blair, Betsy

Academy Award-nominated actress Betsy Blair died on March 13, 2009 at her home in London after a long illness. She was 85. Blair began on Broadway and later starred in several films, including... Read Obituary for Betsy Blair  (got)

Carey, Phil

NEW YORK (AP) - Phil Carey, best known for his role as business tycoon Asa Buchanan in the ABC soap opera "One Life to Live," has died. He was 83. Carey died at his New York City home Friday... Read Obituary for Phil Carey '

(David Carradine already noted)

Chaplin, Sydney

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Sydney Chaplin, second son of Charlie Chaplin and himself a Tony-winning actor who starred on Broadway opposite Judy Holliday in "Bells Are Ringing" and Barbra Streisand in "Funny... Read Obituary for Sydney Chaplin

(Dom deLuise & Roy Disney already noted)

Dunne, Dominick

NEW YORK (AP) - Author Dominick Dunne, who told stories of shocking crimes among the rich and famous through his magazine articles and best-selling novels such as "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles," died... Read Obituary for Dominick Dunne

(Farrah Fawcett already noted)

Foote, Horton

NEW YORK (AP) — Playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, who movingly portrayed the broken dreams of common people in "The Trip to Bountiful," ''Tender Mercies" and his Oscar-winning screen... Read Obituary for Horton Foote

Gelbart, Larry

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Larry Gelbart, the award-winning writer whose sly, sardonic wit helped create such hits as Broadway's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," the films "Tootsie" and "Oh,... Read Obituary for Larry Gelbart  (got)

Gibson, Henry

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Henry Gibson, the veteran comic character actor best known for his role reciting offbeat poetry on "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," died Monday. He was 73. Gibson's son, James,... Read Obituary for Henry Gibson

Gordon, Lucy

PARIS (AP) — French police say British actress Lucy Gordon, who appeared in "Spider-Man 3," was found dead in her Paris apartment after apparently committing suicide. An official with the Paris... Read Obituary for Lucy Gordon

Hingle, Pat

CAROLINA BEACH, N.C. Pat Hingle, a veteran actor whose career included a recurring role as Commissioner Gordon in several Batman movies in the 1990s, has died after battling blood cancer. ... Read Obituary for Pat Hingle

(John Hughes, Michael Jackson, Marice Jarre, Jennifer Jones, Karl Malden, Al Martino, Patrick McGoohan, Ricardo Montalban & Brittany Murphy already noted)

Reed-Amini, Alaina

LOS ANGELES – Alaina Reed-Amini, the Broadway star and TV actress best known for her long-running roles on "Sesame Street" and "227," has died. She was 63. Reed-Amini died Dec. 17 at St. John's... Read Obituary for Alaina Reed-Amini

Richard, Wendy

LONDON (AP) - British actress Wendy Richard, whose four-decade television career included roles as a sexy sitcom shop assistant and a working class matriarch on the soap opera "EastEnders," died... Read Obituary for Wendy Richard

(Natasha Richardson, Budd Schuberg & Ron Silver already noted)

Stang, Arnold

STANG, Arnold Beloved husband, father and grandfather died on December 20th, 2009 of Needham at the age of 91. His career as an actor in film, radio, television and the theater endeared him to a... Read Obituary for Arnold Stang

(Patrick Swayze already noted)

Westlake, Donald

NEW YORK (AP) - Donald Westlake, a prolific author considered one of the most successful and versatile mystery writers in the United States, has died. He was 75. Westlake collapsed from an... Read Obituary for Donald Westlake (Also:)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Westlake - has large bit of Westlake re films.

(James Whitmore already noted).

...

And, perhaps most recently,

Click here: Nan Martin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia .