WHAT IS IT ABOUT ROMNEY THAT IS SO OBJECTIONABLE?
By LIONEL ROLFE
For the last few weeks–ever since that first debate between Obama and Romney–my dislike of Romney has deepened. That first debate forced me to figure out why the man so got on my nerves. He obviously gets on other people’s nerves as well, even including some conservatives, and even other Mormons like Jon Huntsman and Harry Reid.
I’m afraid in that first debate, poor old Barak Obama was having a tough time concealing his disdain for Romney. I’ve heard that Obama is disdainful because Romney is a man without a core, without real beliefs–except for the tenets of his religion, which like most religions has very bizarre beliefs. Read more
The Hunger Ahead
Leslie Evans
The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It . Julian Cribb. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 248 pp.
The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources. Michael T. Klare. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2012. 306 pp.
Back in 1798, Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population . He put forth the simple proposition that, land being finite, the food supply increases only arithmetically, by small percentages, while humans have multiple births that in the next generation have multiple births so that population increases geometrically and will periodically locally, and in the end globally, outrun the food supply. The premise would seem irrefutable, though the date when the ultimate bill comes due is uncertain. On the right, Malthus was rejected on the ground that God would take care of his own. On the left, for two centuries Malthus was dismissed with the argument that there would always be sufficient food if distribution were more equal. We are now in the endgame.
A CITY THAT BECKONS AND SUMMONS THE PAST
Views of Santa Barbara
By Bob Vickrey
As I drove north on Pacific Coast Highway and caught a glimpse of the place where mountains meet the ocean, there suddenly appeared a vista that rekindled old memories and also marked the dramatic passing of time. Read more
Chapter 1: Ishi. The First Chapter Of “Travels Through California Literature”
This is a painting of Ishi on the Oroville jail wall.
Phyl van Ammers
The highways, freeways, streets and back roads of the state lead through California’s literature. Califia is the beginning of the journey for Europeans. The real beginning is the immense literature of the native people.
Around 1500, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo introduced Califia in The Adventures of Esplandián. She ruled black women in her kingdom of California.
Whoopi Goldberg narrated her fictional life in a former attraction in Disney’s California Adventures before that site became the Little Mermaid ride. From there, the trip should head northeast to Riverside County. Read more
Interspecies Friendships
Humans are rapidly exterminating most of the larger animal species on our planet. Here are some photos to remind us what it can be like to share affection with other animals.
Forwarded to us by Kathleen Rosenblatt. NOTE: You can click within each photo to see the next one, or use the arrows at the bottom, but the full screen icon on the right doesn’t work and it doesn’t run as an automatic slide show.
If you have Microsoft PowerPoint or the PowerPoint Viewer and want to see this show full screen (much better!), Click Here
Honey walks in Black Diamond Regional Park
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
The East Bay’s relentless march of urban sprawl — the vast numbers of identical houses with similar lawns now decorated with fake orangey spider webs and fake tombstones, without stores or schools within walking distance, everything a drive somewhere, stoked by the freeway system, financed by taxpayers to enrich developers, climate destroying — is startlingly interrupted by its parks.
The suburban tracts gather at one end up against Mount Diablo State Park. 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.
