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Best of the Web: Quality of Life: French smokers abandon bars, clubs and restaurants for private parties

Adam Sage
The Times
Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:02 UTC


Image
©Unknown
Private smoking parties have flourished since the public ban came into force

Smokers in France are uniting to beat a ban on lighting up in public by organising open-house parties where they can puff on their Gauloises until the early hours.

The parties, held in flats and houses but also in clandestine clubs, often draw dozens of people for a drink, a chat, a dance and a cigarette. Some are paying, others are free, but all welcome the smokers who are deserting bars, bistrots and night clubs.

The movement has flourished since the introduction of a smoking ban in all public places on January 1, and has been compared to the speakeasies that secretly served alcohol during the Prohibition in the US in the 1920s. Internet networks have sprung up to link the partygoers and inform them of planned festivities.
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People

Best of the Web: Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation, Part VII

Dave McGowan
Center for an Informed America
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:03 UTC


The Trip
©Unknown
Occult imagery from the film The Trip.

"As all halfway-decent managers in the rock era have done, [Jim] Dickson worked on seducing the in-crowd and creating a buzz around [The Byrds] ... The timing was perfect ... LA's baby-boomers were mobile, getting around, looking for action. And now they were joined by the hip elite of Hollywood itself, from Sal Mineo and Peter Fonda to junkie comic Lenny Bruce."
Barney Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun

As important as the Freaks were to building an audience for the new Laurel Canyon bands, there was another group that played a key role as well: Hollywood's so-called "Young Turks." Like the Freaks, the Turks became an immediate and constant presence on the newly emerging Sunset Strip scene. And as with the Freaks, their presence on the Strip was heavily promoted by the media. Locals and tourists alike knew where to go to gawk at the Freaks and, as an added bonus, quite possibly rub shoulders with the likes of Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper and Warren Beatty, along with their female counterparts like Jane Fonda, Nancy Sinatra and Sharon Tate.

Many of these young and glamorous Hollywood stars forged very close bonds with the Laurel Canyon musicians. Some of them, including Peter Fonda, found homes in the canyon so that they could live, work and party among the rock stars (and, in their free time, pass around John Phillips' wife to just about every swinging dick in the canyon, including Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty, Roman Polanski, and Gene Clark of The Byrds). Some of them never left; Jack Nicholson to this day lives in a spacious estate just off the portion of Mulholland Drive that lies between Laurel Canyon and Coldwater Canyon. Not far west of Nicholson's property (which now includes the neighboring estate formerly owned by Marlon Brando) sits the longtime home of Warren Beatty.

Comment: Continue to part VIII

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Alarm Clock

Best of the Web: Bush is a Psychopath

grantlawnm
thisisby.us
Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:52 UTC


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Bush is a Psychopath I

What Does that Tell Us About Us?

It is true that many of our leaders and CEOs could be labeled as psychopaths or having many psychopathic tendencies. Bush does seem to be one of those psychopaths.

Psychology as we know is not an exact science. But the hard sciences don't seem to be so exact anymore. As we study quantum physics we see matter not behaving in exact ways as we used to believe from a Newtonian perspective. The Quantum world also points to consciousness interacting with matter in ways that would never have been expected.

I worked in a mental health facility and had to diagnose with the DSM, it can be helpful, but it always seemed a bit of a mislead. Many patients would have several diagnosis from different therapists. Some of the diagnosis seemed close to the mark and then others seemed off. I really didn't like having to label people (put them into a box that didn't fully describe them) but it is mainly done for insurance and government reimbursement. As school counselor, I try not to label in my head any of the children that I work with. After awhile they flower, and if I were to label them initially and treat them as a disease or a problem then I am sure the results would be somewhat different.
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Black Cat

Best of the Web: Friday the 13th not so unlucky


news.com.au
Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:11 UTC
UNLUCKY for some? Dutch statisticians have established that Friday 13th, a date regarded in many countries as inauspicious, is actually safer than an average Friday.

Stuffed Black Cat
©Stuffed Ark
Forget about evil black cats, here's a Soft & Cuddly plush stuffed Black Cat! Just what you need for good luck on Friday the 13th!
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Vader

Best of the Web: "A Legacy of Greatness": the Morality of a Psychopath

Stephen Saperstein Frug
Attempts Blog
Wed, 28 May 2008 11:45 UTC


bush legacy
©Unknown

Andrew Sullivan, writing about McClellan's new book is most taken with the fact that McClellan claims that Bush intentionally ignored the WMD evidence, saying "if the president intentionally ignored data refuting the existence of Saddam's WMDs, he should be impeached."

Frankly, the fact that Bush did this is old news; and impeachment is the least of the appropriate responses -- a war crimes trial would be called for. (I sort of thought Sullivan was farther along than this, actually.)
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Eye 1

Best of the Web: Leaders With No Conscience

Rand Clifford
OpEd News
Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:26 UTC
As Osama bin Laden lay dying, December of 2001, might he have imagined that seven years later he would be on bogeyman life-support, still officially issuing messages as ruling poster boy for America's mindless, force-fed terror obsession? The hammerlock on thoughts of Americans by psychopathic leadership still depends on the fairytale power of Osama to help fuel the pathological War On Terror - could he have foreseen this, Americans being so propagandized as to let the lifeblood of their nation drip through their fingers, for lies? Whatever Osama knew he'd accomplished surely pales in light of what he has done since dying; if he had any inkling of this he must have died smiling.

With characteristic deception our pathocracy implies that Osama has somehow gotten vital dialysis treatments all these years at his hideout in never-never (mind) land.

Definition: pathocracy (n). A system of government created by a small pathological minority that takes control over a society of normal people (from Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes, by Andrew Lobaczewski).
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Take 2

Best of the Web: Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation, Parts V & VI

Dave McGowan
The Center for an Informed America
Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:47 UTC


Mondo 18
©Unknown

Part V
June 6, 2008

"Call them freaks, the underground, the counter-culture, flower children or hippies - they are all loose labels for the youth culture of the 60s ..."
Barry Miles, author of Hippie
"This is how I remember my life. Other folks may not have the same memories, even though we might have shared some of the same experiences."
So begins David Crosby's autobiography, Long Time Gone (co-written by Carl Gottlieb). As it turns out, quite a few other folks seem to remember some people in Crosby's life who are all but ignored in the lengthy book. The names are casually dropped only once, and not by Crosby but rather in a quote from manager Jim Dickson in which he describes the scene at the Sunset Strip clubs when The Byrds played: "We had them all. We had Jack Nicholson dancing, we had Peter Fonda dancing with Odetta, we had Vito and his Freakers."

Following that brief mention by Dickson, Gottlieb briefly explains to readers that, "Vito and his Freakers were an acid-drenched extended family of brain-damaged cohabitants." And that, in an incredibly self-indulgent 489-page tome, is the only mention you will find of "Vito and his Freakers" - despite the fact that, by just about all other accounts, the group dismissed as "brain-damaged cohabitants" played a key role in the early success of Crosby's band. And the early success of Arthur Lee's band. And the early success of Frank Zappa's band. And the early success of Jim Morrison's band. But especially in the early success of David Crosby's band.

Comment: Continue to part VII

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Heart - Black

Best of the Web: Authoritarianism and Psychopathy

Delany Dean, JD, PhD
DelanyDean.com
Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:39 UTC
Authoritarianism
© Unknown
I recently re-discovered the blog called Orcinus, and within it a series of articles by Sara Robinson about authoritarianism. She begins the series (click here) with a summary and review of John Dean's book, Conservatives Without Conscience. I was very much intrigued by this re-discovery, for several reasons. First, I did not realize that John Dean (who was made (in)famous by Watergate, and who is not a relative of mine, so far as I know), wrote about authoritarianism; second, I have not read anything within the academic literature about authoritarianism (see Dr. Robert Altemeyer) for years, probably not since I was in grad school; and, third, I am struck, again, by the very significant overlap between the construct of authoritarianism and the construct of psychopathy (which is an area in which I am quite interested in, click here).
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Vader

Best of the Web: And the winner is ... the Israel lobby

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:12 UTC


AIPAC rules America
©Unknown

They're all here - and they're all ready to party. The three United States presidential candidates - John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Madam House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most US senators and virtually half of the US Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. And a host of Jewish and non-Jewish political and academic heavy-hitters among the 7,000 participants.

Such star power wattage, a Washington version of the Oscars, is the stock in trade of AIPAC - the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the crucial player in what is generally known as the Israel lobby and which holds its annual Policy Conference this week in Washington at which most of the heavyweights will deliver lectures.
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People

Best of the Web: Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation: Part 4

Dave McGowan
Center for an Informed America
Tue, 20 May 2008 13:05 UTC


Image
©Unknown
The bridge of the USS Bon Homme Richard, January 1964. Just months later, the guy on the right would guide his ship into the Tonkin Gulf, and the young man on the left would begin a remarkable transformation into a brooding rock god. The Bon Homme Richard, by the way, was launched on April 29, 1944, under the sponsorship of Catherine McCain, the grandmother of a certain presidential contender.

Until around 1913, Laurel Canyon remained an undeveloped (and unincorporated) slice of LA - a pristine wilderness area rich in native flora and fauna. That all began to change when Charles Spencer Mann and his partners began buying up land along what would become Laurel Canyon Boulevard, as well as up Lookout Mountain. A narrow road leading up to the crest of Lookout Mountain was carved out, and upon that crest was constructed a lavish 70-room inn with sweeping views of the city below and the Pacific Ocean beyond. The Lookout Inn featured a large ballroom, riding stables, tennis courts and a golf course, among other amenities. But the inn, alas, would only stand for a decade; in 1923, it burned down, as tends to happen rather frequently in Laurel Canyon.

Comment: Continue to parts V & VI

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