Thoughts On Steve Jobs, Capitalism, Cybernetics & Old Reactionary Bankers
By LIONEL ROLFE
I’ve never been a fan of capitalism, but Steve Jobs made that a difficult position to uphold.
Jobs created one of this country’s biggest and most successful corporations by actually producing things good and real. More, the products were good because Jobs imbued those products with his own peculiar vision of things. That alone makes his corporation an exception to the general rule of America’s big business today.
Mind you, it might not seem so, but Jobs did not create this new age being wrought by computers. Norbert Wiener, whose best known book was “God and Golem” published in 1964, invented the term cybernetics in the early 1940s. Cybernetics has all to do with machines and man and then machines making machines. The upshot was that computers would give every person extraordinary new labor power and thus transform the world. Read more
AN INSIDIOUS PACK OF SCOUNDRELS
By LIONEL ROLFE
The insidious pack of scoundrels running for President on the Republican side make it difficult for me to figure out if I should shit or go blind in the event Obama were defeated by one of them.
On the one hand, it’s clear that the smartest among them is John Huntsman. He’s not an obvious scoundrel like a Perry or a Bachmann. He is intelligent, and for that reason I hope he is not the candidate. He’s the only one who would have a chance of successfully going head to head with Obama. Hopefully he won’t be the Republican candidate, I guess, but then I get the chills. I used to think that Ronald Reagan was a man who could never be elected president. I was wrong. Read more
A Sinister Priest Tries Concealing A Boarding School Massacre
Older Than America
By PHYL VAN AMMERS
Boryanabooks Film Critic
The Echo Park Film Center showed supernatural thriller Older than America, which should be seen for its portrayal of brutality purportedly suffered by Fond du Lac Indian children in Minnesota in the 1900s.
The plot rests on a plot by a sinister Catholic priest to conceal the deaths of children in a boarding school for Indians during in an earthquake in 1955. There is no record on Internet of an earthquake in the Cloquet area of any significant magnitude.
A rebellious child – Irene — sees a secret burial in the forest and insists on telling what she saw when she is a young mother. The evil priest wants to protect the Church from accusations of child abuse and rape, so he convinces the woman’s sister Apple to authorize electric shock therapy and heavy medication. Irene remains institutionalized for most of the rest of her life. Read more
Trying to Fix L.A.’s Animal Death Row
How is our new head of Animal Services doing in her effort to stop the killing?
By Leslie Evans
Brenda Barnette
Brenda Barnette was sworn in as head of the Los Angeles Animal Services Department in August 2010. She had a long history of efforts to halt, or at least slow down, the mass government killing of lost and abandoned pets. Most recently she had been CEO of the Seattle Humane Society, where in 2009 they found homes for 6,091 animals and raised the save rate from 77 to 92 percent. Barnette at her swearing in said she would try to match the Seattle numbers in Los Angeles within five years. Before Seattle she had run the Tony La Russa Animal Rescue Foundation and been Development Director of the San Francisco SPCA.
Ominously, Barnette was the sixth General Manager in ten years to try to reform the dysfunctional Animal Services Department. By the end of her first year it was already apparent that the various and sundry partisan interests didn’t mean to give her much of a honeymoon before starting to look for candidate number seven. Read more
People’s Capitalism Is Dead!
By LIONEL ROLFE
With two of the three leading Republican candidates for president threatening to set up a new Christian theocracy, this next election may be our last. We know that it will be brutal, the Republicans will use every cheap bullying lie and tactic that they can, and we’ll end up with America’s first fascist state if they prevail.
It’s obvious that the Republicans were so anxious to get rid of the nation’s first black president, they decided to go for tanking the economy before the next election. In another day and age, when Republicans took seriously their own claims of patriotism, they would not have committed such treason. For treason it is. They decided to throw away the term “loyal” from “loyal opposition.” Read more
Readers: Our Site Was Hacked
Boryanabooks readers: Our site was badly hacked a few weeks back: 49,000 spams and corruption of part of our operating system. We have wiped the old site and made a clean install. We are in the process of restoring our backlist of commentary. Our catalog of Ebooks and other publications is back up now, along with the whole of Honey’s column, “Notes from Above Ground,” from the beginning, and all the chapters of Phyl M. Noir’s serial novel Edendale. We are working on restoring earlier articles, and are ready to stay with you into the future. Because of the extreme hack, which came in through hackers’ attempts to plant spam in the site disguised as comments, we regretfully have had to turn off all comments from readers.
The Sierra God Machine
Photographer Susan McRae captured Ari as an old man standing in reverie in front of the Mansion House where the Sierra God Machine Was Born.
By Lionel Rolfe
Ari began his journalism career in the early sixties by writing for the communist
People’s World. By the end of that decade, he had done a lot of knocking around small town weeklies and dailies. It was in the late in that decade when he was called into the office of the publisher of the Inglewood Daily News and fired because his connection with the People’s World had resulted in his name appearing in an Un-American Activities Committee report.
In a dreary suburban L.A. area town of dirty white and faded pink stucco apartments and
fifties tract homes and a downtown long before gone to seed, the Daily News did not have enough of an economic base to survive much longer. But it continued to exist in Ari’s
mind, because he never forgot when the publisher fired him because the California
Newspaper Publishers Association had found the reference listing him as a subversive. Read more
A Reunion At Mt. Lowe
I’m the stout fellow with the hat and beard on the left.
By LIONEL ROLFE
Some time ago I wrote an article in which I mentioned that my parents sent me away to a military school in Altadena when I was perhaps 13 years old and it was probably 1955. This fellow wrote me and asked me if I was talking about Mt. Lowe Military Academy. He introduced himself as Chris Andrada, president of the school’s alumni association. Would I like to come a reunion? Read more
A Romanian Novelist
By Leslie Evans
Eugen Uricaru (left) with Leslie Evans
We sit quietly under the arbor in my backyard. “You are familiar with the Cathars, of course,” he says. “Yes,” I reply, “French offshoots of the Bulgarian Bogomils, who renounced the material world and its god.” This esoteric discussion had been prompted by my giving him a copy of my memoir, Outsider’s Reverie , in which he had reached the chapter recounting my youthful fascination with the ancient Gnostics, otherworldly progenitors of the medieval sects of which we were speaking. He seems interested and intrigued, to have found an unexpected commonality. Read more
Who Was The Real Columbo?
By LIONEL ROLFE
The death of Peter Falk at 83, the actor whose most famous role was a rumpled, eccentric Los Angeles police detective named “Lt. Columbo,” brought to mind the real story of who Columbo was.
For many who hung out in newspaper circles back in the early’60s and’70s in Los Angeles, London and Paris, they knew a profoundly eccentric and brilliant rimrat named Gene Vier. Vier worked as a copy editor at the Los Angeles Times for years, the Los Angeles Daily News, as well as the New York Times Paris edition and the Guardian in Great Britain. 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.
