When it comes to movies that depict real-life David vs. Goliath struggles of plain rural folks against ruthless parastatal corporations that destroy their hometown under a cloak of deceit, you really can't beat the Academy…
Posts published in September 2013
This week’s US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on "Conflicts between State and Federal Marijuana Laws" will get infinitely more media attention than the July 12, 1937 hearing at which a subcommittee of the Senate Finance…
About 160,000 people in the Sacramento area are uninsured even though they could be signed up for the state’s low-income healthcare plan, Medi-Cal. Instead, they are paying bills from their own pockets, or incurring costs…
Greetings one and all. If you are sitting comfortably then I shall begin. Belated “Happy September Birthdays” to these Valley folks: Gloria Abbott, Neil Darling, and Mattie Winkleman. Onward to the Fair. I’m sure I…
“The Wall” in Washington, DC. is a sacred place to Vietnam veterans. Built with private funds and spearheaded by ex-enlisted man Jan Scruggs, it represents all that has come to be known as the Vietnam…
While many writers take to print and electronic media to pooh-pooh Burning Man with pronouncements about false values and carbon footprints and financing I personally question whether they have ever actually attended the event.
No keyboard player of this or any other age has been more wide-ranging than Keith Jarrett. His contributions to jazz extend from the endlessly astonishing treatment of standards to expansive and spontaneous explorations of the…
Let me get this straight. The United States government blithely oversees the killing and maiming of women and children and unarmed civilians with missiles fired from drones and helicopters and jets and battleships, invades other countries in the service of multinational corporations and uses artillery shells made with so-called depleted uranium spreading cancerous dust wherever they explode, and incarcerates and tortures people without charge for years and decades, but that same government says we have a moral obligation to bomb Syria and kill untold numbers of Syrians because the Syrian government has killed people using weaponry we don’t like them using, though we did nothing in response to the Syrian government killing tens of thousands of people over the last two years using weapons we do approve of?
We’re fortunate to live here in a place called Big Valley in the northeast corner of California on the Lassen/Modoc County line that has so far managed to avoid overpopulation and overdevelopment and the resultant hyper lifestyle that gives sad valid relevance to the contemporary epithet Californicated.