Despite How It Looks Now, Obama Will Be Our Next Lincoln
By LIONEL ROLFE
Ultimately I think that Barak Obama will be considered one of the great presidents. He has the intellectual ability to see what the problems are and what might be done about them. That’s a big start, compared to the last president. There’s a problem, however. The nation is awash in religious fervor and a growing worship of ignorance, not unlike the Middle East and too many other parts of the world. This is not the way to deal with the future. Read more
On The Black Sea Or By The Pacific, People Sing & Dance Their Way Into Delerium
In Varna on the Black Sea, a dance troupe puts on a show of Bulgarian folkdancing. Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
