Attractive nuisance, 2011

It is the most gaudy, spectacular tribute to the consumer religion holiday frenzy -- the Lightmare on Suburban Streets, popularized on the tacky xmas tour circuit:

Read into it what you will, it draws a mad crowd. Carloads of gawkers, foot-trolling, slack-jawed pre-adolescents and goofy teen-aged date-bait honeys in tow by their over-sexed boyfriends.

The best of the season, and the loss of our collective minds is the reason!

Evergreen Cemetery, revisited

Hey boys and girls, there's been a lot of work done at Evergreen Cemetery lately, especially in the main part where Maggie Walker and her kin are buried. The workers bit themselves off a huge chunk of work this time, and they ripped back the undergrowth right down to the naked earth.

For the most part, it was an admirable job. In only a few places did over-zealousness with task at hand show up in the guise of hacked tombstones, but considering the work is all gratis by volunteers and civic-minded companies, have at it!

Here are some photos from Saturday, Nov. 27. It's not readily apparent, but the cemetery's grounds begin almost from the entrance gate on Evergreen Rd., and extend past the Walker family site to where the road loops around again. It's a huge grounds, and most of it lies in a formidable tangle of weeds that is as-yet unraveled.

The entrance to The Four Cemeteries at Evergreen

Newspaper publisher John Mitchell, Jr. statue in tribute to his mother, Rebecca Mitchell

Mostly included for the view of the surrounding grounds it gives...

I was really taken by the carving on this piece...

It's an incredible change from just a couple of months ago....

Still waiting for the cleanup to extend to the Thompson plot...

Under decades of being concealed by the undergrowth, some of this fine work can again be seen...

Sadly, a lot of the ironwork is ruined; it's commendable that some remains...

Again, it looks great!

Here's the Walker family site, with Maggie Walker's grave at left...

I have no idea what kind of defoliant is used, but it does the job -- even on that awful ivy!

The Mitchell statue again, with a bit of artificial light thrown up for effect...

These photos begin the series of shots taken further up the road from Evergreen's gated entrance...

Where there is no surviving family to maintain the grave sites, they become overgrown quickly.

At their worst, they become completely consumed...

This is part of a cluster of graves that's unkempt, and nearly impossible to reach behind fallen trees...

It's a shame that people such as this, so appreciated for their life's work, have be lost to time...

This site was a particular surprise. Fortunately, someone has watched over it...

I tore away the ivy to expose this stone, which lay concealed under a lump of green.

C'mon, people. Can't we do better than this? It's not a fucking dump!

The pepper-spraying Grinch at Wal-Mart

Isn't it funny how the popular press takes a story like the one about the Wal-Mart shopper who grew indignant while waiting in line, and blasted her fellow shoppers with pepper spray, and slowly morphs it into something altogether different?

Woman pepper-sprayed adults, kids at Wal-Mart sale, police say - latimes.com: "Authorities are searching for a woman accused of pepper-spraying other shoppers Thursday night at the Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch so that she could grab more discounted merchandise.

Twenty customers, including children, were hurt in the 10:10 p.m. incident, officials said. Shoppers complained of minor skin and eye irritation and sore throats.

"This was customer-versus-customer 'shopping rage,'" said Los Angeles Police Lt. Abel Parga."

Early reports put the number of victims at closer to a half-dozen, and had the woman reacting to others who were jumping the line while she waited patiently.

Nowhere in the original telling of the story did the woman lash out aggressively against other shoppers, but after several hours of re-telling, the tale has progressed into a Hollywood-style motif of 'shopping rage' at the mall.

America is intoxicated with its own mythos of social disintegration in conflict with its wholesome pursuit of holiday beneficence and generosity. Society unravels at ever-quickening speed, while mobs of shoppers grope the products they desire in a frenzy of patriotic consumerism.

Just look at all the myopic zombies our family and neighbors have become during the happiest time of the year, because it's a long, long way back from consumer hell to the reality of life lived on the precipice of debt peonage.

Drama over "super committee" is a cruel joke

That the political process is paralyzed by partisanship, brought on by the corruption of the political process by money, is a well-established fact. Now that the chickens have come home to roost, we're being treated to this kind of palaver that chalks it up to congressional gridlock, when in fact the system is completely corrupted:

New drama over U.S. taxes and spending looms | Reuters: "WASHINGTON, Nov 20 (Reuters) - The "super committee" may be effectively dead but brinkmanship in Congress over taxes and spending will only escalate as the impending expiration of several provisions threatens to undermine the U.S. economy.

If Congress does not extend them by the end of the year, workers will see less money in their paychecks, nearly 2 million jobless people will lose the benefits that help them make ends meet, and Medicare patients may have a harder time getting in to see the doctor. Countless businesses will see their tax bills rise.

Analysts have warned that this effective tax increase, which would kick in on Jan. 1, could push the economy back into recession even as it struggles to recover from the last one."

Anyone who claims the economy is an any way, shape or form in recovery mode is either an abject liar or so self-deluded as to be psychotic. The economy has been sinking for the working person for a generation, at least, and the decline has accelerated in the past few years -- as the elites and their scams have finally tanked the very system they built.

There will be no recovery, and there is no fix, with the current cast of characters in their accustomed places. There's no way we can put our fiscal house in order while the inmates are still running the asylum, as they are now.

Take the lie about the payroll tax, and how ending the "holiday" on withholding will appear like a "tax increase" -- this is nothing but a carefully crafted strategy to bankrupt the social security trust fund, in order to end the program and turn the money over to the dogs from hell on Wall Street. It has nothing to do with reviving the economy, and everything to do with gutting the moribund social safety net as it currently still exists.

If this is the only hope we have in the face of financial Armageddon, then face it, we're already fuckin' toast.

The stupid committee was always about causing a fiscal trainwreck that would lead to the type of austerity favored by the IMF and the voracious, heartless bastards that run the banks. They claim that this system is nothing but a giveaway for lazy people who don't want to contribute, when it's people who've worked all their lives and are being cut off at the knees who're getting the ax, while the elites don't feel any obligation to the lower classes -- none whatsoever.

As long as you have a system that generates obscene amounts of wealth, but only distributes them to the top of the pyramid, you have the ingredients for a wholesale social revolution. That is the the real train wreck that this society has to contend with, and hiding out in one's gated community will provide little if any refuge when blood runs in the streets.

Still, the oligarchy seems to be willing to risk it.

Israel: time running out to shut up

Patience is running short in the war-mongering campaign by Israel to spark up a war between the US and Iran, so they're cranking up the volume and revving up the horseshit:

Israel: time running out to stop a nuclear Iran | Reuters: "(Reuters) - Iran is less than a year away from being unstoppable in its goal of producing a nuclear weapon, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in an interview with CNN released on Saturday.

In an advance transcript of an interview to air on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" program on Sunday, Barak said Israel was focused on the prospect of a nuclear Iran and what "should and could be done about it on time.""

It's isn't time that's running out, but our patience with Israel in its constant beating of the war drums against potential rivals -- read, any country in the region that won't permit the Israelis to roll 'em at will.

We've seen the same nonsense too many times, and if anyone needed a more convincing example that Iraq of how these false allegations can be ginned up into a shootin' war, then they ain't paying attention.

The Israelis are liars and blusterers. They want to eliminate their adversaries, and they've bought the US congress through AIPAC in order to get the job done. It doesn't matter how preposterous and ill-advised the case for war is, they have the votes to pass any legislation they want, no questions asked (except, how soon? or how much?).

Let your elected representatives know that you're against funding Israel's wars against its neighbors. Either they fight 'em with their own troops -- and their own money -- or they find a way to come to terms with their neighbors. No more of this, my way or the highway style of negotiations.

Of course, this is a joke. We know how this is going to turn out, Obama or Rick Perry or Mitt Romney -- they've all talked themselves into a box on this one.

Hope you guys like the idea of $10-a-gallon gasoline, because that's what the war on Iran promises to bring your dumb asses. So pay attention!

Are you sick of your life?

Just in case you're terminally bored and there's no hope of any relief, you can tune in to a 30-year-old, played-out story of no intrigue involving a beautiful movie star:

Yacht captain blames Robert Wagner for Natalie Wood's death [Updated] - latimes.com: "A yacht captain claimed Friday that he lied to investigators about Natalie Wood's mysterious death 30 years ago and that he blames the actress' husband at the time, Robert Wagner, for her drowning in the ocean off Southern California.

The former captain of the boat alleged on the "Today" show Friday that Wood's husband, actor Robert Wagner, was responsible for her death.

Dennis Davern said he is now urging homicide investigators to look into Wood's death."

The billionaire media hucksters like Murdoch and Zuckerman, and the others in the CIA's pocket who don't have the same name recognition, feast on this dreary type of fascination with long-dead celebrities. It's the perfect antidote to the real, perplexing issues that bedevil society, and would have led to blood in the streets unless the tensions were skillfully defused by propaganda and mindless distractions.

The Natalie Wood story was big in the supermarket tabloids, as she and her husband were up there with Liz and Dick in the Inquirer and other similar topical venues of sleaze and cornpone schlock.

So it's hardly surprising, really, to see the fascination with these people take another run around the course -- just for old times sake. Even the LAPD is playing along, since it's a good break from the OWS police brutality story.

Never have so many been so deluded by such meaningless drivel.

Climate change deniers in the crosshairs

If FOX news could get away with it, they'd be suggesting that the OWS people are somehow carrying out a vendetta against climate-change deniers by unleashing these extreme weather events on the good people of the US southland:

The Associated Press: 6 dead as storms, possible tornadoes hit Southeast: "ROCK HILL, S.C. (AP) — At least six people have been killed and dozens more injured as a storm system that spawned several possible tornadoes moved across the Southeast.
Suspected tornadoes were reported Wednesday in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina. Dozens of homes and buildings were damaged and thousands of people were without power as trees and power lines were downed.
In South Carolina, three people were killed and five injured when a likely tornado swept through a rural community near Rock Hill, about 20 miles south of Charlotte, N.C. In north Georgia, a man was killed when a tree fell on his sport utility vehicle. Authorities also said an adult and child were killed in central North Carolina."

No matter how bad it gets, the profit-seeking exploiters of nature will never be tagged with responsibility for the damage their predatory kind of capitalism creates. Instead, it'll be imputed to greedy scientists in search of federal grant money -- never mind that guys like the Koch brothers spend billions of dollars funding a propaganda machine to create that and other convenient fictions to misdirect attention from their activities.

Here in the southland, you have a lot of bible-thumping, rock-ribbed Republicans who are reliable voters for the emissaries of their own destruction. They're so gullible that the guys who savage the environment get a pass, and instead it's "god" who wills these terrible events in some inscrutable way.

That's how someone like Rick Perry can be taken seriously when he announces that he'll pray for the divine to intervene and grant his supplicants mercy. And exactly like the clown who said the rapture was imminent, and when proven wrong simply said he'd gotten the date wrong, the true believers think that it doesn't matter what happens here on earth, since they'll all be in heaven when things get really bad anyway.