A few nice highest selling novel images I found: Ray Bradbury – The Martian Chronicles … Sci-Fi Scribes on Ray Bradbury: ‘Storyteller, Showman and Alchemist’ (Jun 6th 2012, 22:59) …item 2.. Ray Bradbury dies at 91 (June 06, 2012) …
Image by marsmet521 With books like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury made a lasting mark on pop culture by taking readers to strange new worlds. And talk about changing the future: His fantastic, mind-expanding tales also shaped the storytelling of a generation of scribes who came after him.
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. …….***** All images are copyrighted by their respective authors …….
. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …..item 1)… Anymes Anymes … anymesanymes.koolcentre.in … Underwire … Taking the Pulse of Pop Culture Sci-Fi Scribes on Ray Bradbury: ‘Storyteller, Showman and Alchemist’ Jun 6th 2012, 22:59 anymesanymes.koolcentre.in/2012/06/underwire-sci-fi-scrib… Ray Bradbury in a previously unpublished photo from 1966. Photo: Ralph Nelson With books like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury made a lasting mark on pop culture by taking readers to strange new worlds. And talk about changing the future: His fantastic, mind-expanding tales also shaped the storytelling of a generation of scribes who came after him. All of us who were fans of Bradbury mourn his loss, but perhaps none so much as his colleagues in the field of science fiction and fantasy, many of whom saw him and his work as a guiding light, and took a life-long dose of inspiration from him. As word of Bradbury’s death spread Wednesday, Wired contacted some of the greatest authors in sci-fi and fantasy to hear how the legend influenced their own work. Ray Bradbury, 1920 – 2012: • How Ray Bradbury Brought the West to Science Fiction • Ray Bradbury on Sci-Fi, God and Robots: The Late Author’s Biggest Ideas • Remembering Ray Bradbury: A Roundup of Tributes and Memorable Clips —–Ursula K. Le Guin, author of A Wizard of Earthsea My mother and I read and loved The Martian Chronicles in the early ’50s, when it was new. It was newer than new, because there’d never been anything quite like it, nor has there been since. SF is so often a control freak’s genre, and Ray Bradbury was never under control — his own or anybody else’s. He took risks in his writing that could send him over into incoherence and sentimentality or take him straight to beauty, which is always new and always rare. And then with Fahrenheit 451 he gave us the rarest thing of all: a genuine, inescapable Myth for Our Time. His was a courageous heart and a generous soul. May his memory be blessed.
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—–Joe Hill, author of 20th Century Ghosts (and recipient of a Ray Bradbury fellowship) Think about what a shock it must’ve been the first time moviegoers saw a picture with sound; the first time those giants on the screen opened their mouths and sang. That kind of describes the shock I felt when I first discovered the stories of Ray Bradbury. Everything I read before that was a silent movie. Bradbury provided a vast library of melodies, shouts and sound effects to jolt my timid 11-year-old imagination into full wakefulness and attention. His dreadful merry-go-rounds spun to the vertiginous shriek of the Wurlitzer; his trees whispered bleak secrets in the brisk October breezes; his rockets scaled the skies in a chorus of grinding roars; his children ran through libraries, refusing to be shushed. Maybe that’s all too lyrical. Here it is, more simply: I didn’t know, until Bradbury, that a book could make you feel so much. To this day, I cannot think about certain subjects without using Bradbury as a reference point — subjects like Halloween and circuses and sea monsters and the word “wonder” in both noun and verb form. I met him in San Diego a few years ago. He was being pushed along in a wheelchair, surrounded by people who were in glory to see him, and hear his voice. We were at Comic-Con, marooned among booths selling ray guns and comic books and maps of Martian worlds. Every third person who walked by wore a cape. “All this,” I said, pointing around us, “is your fault.” I had to shout to be heard. His hearing wasn’t good. He laughed — it was one hell of a laugh — and nodded and said, “You know, some of it probably is.” He was pleased to be found guilty of inspiring a whole country to imagine more, better, louder, crazier. I got to put a kiss on his shaggy white hair. He didn’t seem to mind. Then he was pushed away, at the head of a parade of giddy, euphoric followers. Hey: He led that parade most of his life. I was goddamn glad to be part of it. Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is beloved by sci-fi fans. —–Daniel H. Wilson, author of Robopocalypse Bradbury honed his craft for a long time. By the time I was a kid, the used bookstore that I hit up with my dad every weekend was full of Bradbury’s dog-eared masterpieces. His short stories were spread like pearls throughout countless dense anthologies. I never thought of these stories as science fiction. Instead, Bradbury’s name reminded me of fireflies on a hot Oklahoma night, or the cold wind that would fall through dead leaves as we ran through the neighborhood on Halloween. Somehow, he captured the feeling of being a child — the new raw mystery lurking in the seams of what soon becomes the pedestrian background scenery of our lives. As a child, I recognized and dismissed this remarkable authenticity. The way he wrote was simply the way I felt.
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Bradbury was not about the shiny gadgets provided to me by the more technically oriented minds of Clarke and Asimov. Instead, it was the emotion and atmosphere of his writing that sank into my psyche and eventually began to resonate. The sweet, haunting futility of our robotic creations after we are gone in “There Will Come Soft Rains.” Or the sick, ash-mouthed dread that pervades “The Scythe.” As an adult, I came to appreciate Bradbury for holding onto the feel of childhood long after mine had faded. And if I’ve taken anything away from his work, it’s that writing should not be about the gadgets, especially not science fiction. —–Jonathan Maberry, author of Rot & Ruin I met Bradbury when I was 14; it was amazing. He took so much time to talk with me and offer advice about writing. That Christmas he gave me a signed copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes. That copy is put away safe, but I buy a new copy every year and read it on Halloween. Bradbury is one of a small group of writers whose books will be read forever. —–Mort Castle, co-editor of Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury For me, the first Bradbury hit came when I was 13 or so and that was Something Wicked This Way Comes, showing me poetic language was not something removed from life and story, something that had to be interpreted according to rules established by a high school teacher and Cliff Note Coercion. Not long thereafter came the short stories: “I See You Never,” with its perfect depiction of regret and inevitability that any Zennist would understand — even without being called a Zennist — and “There Will Come Soft Rains,” because, hey, this baby boomer grew up waiting for the A blast. But perhaps most significant for me as a writer, well … here is the afterword to “Light,” my story in Shadow Show: I was fourteen or fifteen, reading like the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil set loose at the Olde Country Book Buffet, and couldn’t help noting that too many artists and writers died young and often not well. Then Ray Bradbury came along on this glutton’s word menu and showed me with his “Forever and the Earth” that no, Thomas Wolfe did not have to stay dead — not when we needed him. Years later when the story of Marilyn Monroe seized me — she was “the saddest woman in the world,” said her short-term husband Arthur Miller — I set out to give her something a little better than what foolish choices, DNA tics and the Wheel of Cosmic Fortune handed her. This is my third Marilyn story. There will likely be more in the future. Perhaps one day I’ll get it completely right. But for now, I’ll borrow Mr. Stan Laurel’s derby and tip it to his very good friend and advocate Mr. Ray Douglas Bradbury: He showed me the way. —–Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
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Ray Bradbury had some of the world’s best nightmares and I’m eternally grateful to him for sharing them with us. He did a lot of other things, too — showed us that dreams of the future are compatible with nostalgia for youth, taught us the poetry of rocketry, and gave us many smiles — but it’s the nightmares I value most. Some of them came with the carnival, some lurked in the sea. One of them was just about being locked in a closet. “I don’t try to describe the future,” said Ray Bradbury. “I try to prevent it.” For me, that one comment defined an entire style of science fiction, an approach that will always be valid as long as we have a future. I’m glad to live in a world where people learned from Bradbury’s nightmares. —–Robin Hobb, author of The Farseer Trilogy The work of Ray Bradbury that resonated with me the most was Dandelion Wine. The imagery he wrought in that tale comes back to me in the blink of an eye, even though it has been years since I’ve read it. The new hi-top sneakers, the sound of the push mower, the smells of the cooking…. It’s a door to a world that I cherish. My other favorite is The Martian Chronicles. Each of those stories is like a carefully cut gem, shining in its own individual way, but when they are combined in the one book, they form a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Most inspiring to me was that Bradbury’s writing spans such a broad spectrum. It defies the limits of genre and “literature” to become something that annihilates all boundaries. His books and stories are simply the Bradbury works. Don’t try to fence them in; it’s just as hopeless to exclude them from any classification. Fahrenheit 451 was probably Bradbury’s most well-known novel. —–Elizabeth Bear, author of Range of Ghosts My first conscious memory of reading a Bradbury story is not, as it was for so many, Fahrenheit 451. Instead, it was “All Summer in a Day,” a story of life on Venus and the cruelty of children that must have been assigned to us in a grade-school reader. I’ve written about that story, and I remember being impressed by how thoroughly this grownup understood and could demonstrate the casual cruelty of children and the way they’ll gang up on any kid who seems different, who doesn’t fit in. It remains my favorite Bradbury to this day, although rereading it as an adult what I see in it is the craftsmanship, the terrible pellucid language, the way Bradbury takes a tiny domestic dilemma set on a fantastical Venus and forges it into a commentary on human nature and the eternal tension between science and superstition. We hammerers-out of sweeping epics could learn a few tricks from Bradbury’s detail work, his precision.
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But I’m pretty sure I’d read Bradbury before then — I grew up in an SF-reading household, being a second-generation fan on either side of the family. I was encouraged to read things far beyond my putative grade level, and I know we had paperback copies of The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles. I can’t remember ever having not read them. Bradbury’s work is part of the Zeitgeist. And that is the thing that strikes me most about Bradbury. More than any other science fiction writer — by his craft, his humaneness, his skill — he’s permeated the world we live in with his vision. Like Shakespeare, Bradbury is quoted by people who have never read his work. Ray Bradbury was very good at his job. —–Kim Stanley Robinson, author of 2312 I felt a bond with Ray Bradbury, because we were both born in Waukegan, Illinois, then were moved by our parents to Southern California when we were children. I feel that we both ended up as science fiction writers partly because of this childhood history; southern California has been a science fictional place for a very long time. Bradbury was one of the first break-out stars from the science fiction community into mainstream American culture, and this was no coincidence but because of his open and welcoming style, and the way his science fiction always focused on the human side of things, adding strong emotions to what had previously been perhaps drier or simpler. He was a great ambassador to the world for science fiction, and was beloved in the science fiction community as well. He was a truly inspirational figure to many, because of his positive nature and his boundless enthusiasm for reading, which he conveyed so well, and for life in general. His fiction always reminds us that no matter what strange future we move into, human emotions will stay central to our story. His best stories and books will be a permanent part of American literature. We were lucky to have him and I’m sorry he’s gone. —–David Morrell, author of Creepers Ray Bradbury is a permanent monument in my imagination. I can’t think of another writer who wrote so many fascinating, evocative, meaningful novels. To me, he was a triple master. He not only created stories that extended the boundaries of what I imagined was possible, but he also gave them a hypnotic atmosphere that gripped me as much as his plots. And they were about something. They had meaning and texture and importance. Some writers can do one or two. But not all three. If Bradbury had written only one book, Fahrenheit 451, he would have been a permanent part of our culture. But he wrote so many other wonders. I felt honored to contribute a story to an upcoming anthology, Shadow Show, in celebration of his work. But of course, in celebrating him, no one could equal him. Now the man from the October country has regrettably returned home. The short story collection A Medicine for Melancholy contains Bradbury’s short story ‘Dark
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They Were, And Golden-Eyed.’ —–Greg Bear, author of Darwin’s Radio Ray Bradbury is, for many reasons, the most influential writer in my life. Throughout our long friendship, Ray supplied not only his terrific stories but a grand model of what a writer could be, should be, and yet rarely is: brilliant and charming and accessible, willing to tolerate and to teach, happy to inspire but also to be inspired, happy to share and even re-live a youngster’s awkward joy at discovery. We first met in 1967 and immediately began a lifelong correspondence. My friends and I attended so many Bradbury lectures and events in Southern California that he would spot our grinning faces in the audience and tell us, with a wag of his beefy finger, “I’m not changing a word just because you’ve heard it already!” Throughout my high school years, my classmates and friends were happy to inform our English teachers that we had the straight scoop on one of Ray’s stories, direct from the man himself. I wonder if they actually believed us! In 1969, Ray took three of us and my Grandmother, who drove (Ray did not drive and we had neither car nor license), out to lunch in Beverly Hills – hamburgers and shakes at Frascati. There, he told us about eating his first steak in Mexico. He was in his mid-twenties, very poor – and from that cross-border odyssey, neither entirely happy nor sane, came so many stories, including “The Life Work of Juan Diaz,” where he tried to exorcize the horror of descending into the catacombs of Guanajuato. He concluded our memorable meal by telling us, “When you’re rich, you can take me out to lunch!” And so we did – but before we were rich. In 1970, we invited Ray to be our guest at the first Comic-Con in San Diego, and the fact that he agreed (along with Jack Kirby and a select group of other luminaries) made all of us, the fledgling committee, believe we were creating something real and glorious. He attended every single Comic-Con until just a couple of years ago, when his health would no longer permit it, and drew huge crowds for his talks and interviews. From the beginning, Ray enthusiastically supported my artwork and writing. As I sold more stories, and finally bundled them into collections, I would deliver freshly printed books to him and he would cry out, “Wonderful! Wonderful!” and encourage me to do more. He never treated me as anything other than a colleague – and for us, he was always that amazing, miraculous kid we got to hang out with. You know, the kid who told his readers they could send him letters care of Life magazine, or spin stories of hanging out with Walt Disney, or of having Ray Harryhausen as the best man at his wedding. Ray expressed his admiration for Nikos Kazantzakis and his “The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises.” Later, I relayed Ray’s enthusiasm for Kazantzakis to the translator, Kimon Friar, and helped them exchange addresses. When Ray produced his own play of “Leviathan 99? at the old MGM studios in LA, I posted fliers at my college, went to LA, met him after the performance – and commiserated when it folded a week later, leaving him tens of thousands of dollars in the hole. I still have a few of those fliers – and his letter announcing he was back to another round of lectures to pay it all off. He dearly loved theater, and to this day, his plays are performed in Los Angeles and around the world.
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It was my privilege to arrange for the Science Fiction Writers of America to present Ray with his Grand Master Nebula in 1989. Nowhere near full payback. “Ray was storyteller, showman and alchemist — a master who remixed his own life and made it the stuff of legend.” So I spent a lot of fine times with the man. But behind it all was the genuine love I have for Ray’s fiction. To this day, I can’t begin a Bradbury story without feeling his immediate presence, his amazing ability to make me nostalgic for a place I’ve never been, or recognize an emotion or a connection I may not have experienced. Ray was storyteller, showman and alchemist — a master who remixed his own life and made it the stuff of legend, the core within much of the myth of The Twilight Zone and modern American fantasy in general. For our last visit, just a couple of months ago, my wife and I drove out to the Bradbury family home in the Cheviot Hills of Los Angeles, as we had so many times before. Ray was bedridden, but sitting up, receiving visitors, cheerful, as always, it seems now – and we spent a good hour talking about movies, about work, about new books and writing. As always. I noticed a hefty volume of the collected Buck Rogers newspaper strips, left on the floor by staff or family or previous visitors, and held it for Ray to see — “You did the intro for this, Ray!” “I did?” “Here’s your name. A great intro.” “Read it to me!” Ray could no longer read much, and friends would come by to read to him… But I’m drifting again into that awkward tense. This story has to end. And so here’s my ending, and it’s all true: I read aloud to Ray his own words, the story of his first love for science fiction, the wonder and joy of discovering Buck Rogers at age 10. One of his literary sons sits by his bedside, reading that fine introduction, and then lifts up, brings close to his pale, difficult eyes, the first page of 1920s-era strips, and Ray is suddenly 10 years old, he’s Ray Douglas Bradbury, starting all over, and he beams and cries, “Wonderful! Wonderful! It’s all still wonderful!” And it is. —–R. A. Salvatore, author of Charon’s Claw The beauty of Ray Bradbury is that you can’t classify him as a science-fiction writer or a fantasy writer or any other (insert genre here) writer. Leave out the qualifier, please, unless that adjective is “brilliant.” So brilliant that he could subtly terrify a reader with softly apocalyptic views of the future, or stun a reader with shocking twists (“The Small Assassin,” a truly devilish short story). Few other writers of the last century could stand beside him; when he showed up at San Diego for Comic-Con a few years ago, his name was whispered with somber reverence throughout the hall. So now he is gone, and the world is diminished. But we still have his work, so much of it, and so good is that work that you can read each piece over and over again and come away with different and profound insights each time. Rest well, Mr. Bradbury. You’re already missed.
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—–Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians Bradbury is one of the few writers who can crush you – casually – with just a title. Something Wicked This Way Comes — I had nightmares about it before I even read it, just seeing its spine on the shelf of my grade-school library was enough. “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed.” “The Day It Rained Forever.” “The Million Year Picnic.” (My adolescence was ruled – as was every nerd’s adolescence in the Boston area – by the comic shop of that name in Cambridge, Massachusetts.) Even before you read them those titles open up spaces inside you, where strange things can start happening. And that’s before the show even starts. Bradbury was the writer who broke me out of the child’s understanding of science fiction – which is, more or less: I’m getting information about the future! – and made me understand that I was getting information on another axis, from a different dimension entirely, not ahead but underneath. It is not true that you can breathe the air on Mars, the way they do in The Martian Chronicles; I understand that now. What is true, however, is that there are aliens living in our unconscious, and we meet them every day, we can’t escape them, whatever planet we’re on. Because they are us. Bradbury was not a soul-mate for me. His home planet was the American Midwest, which to a kid growing up in Massachusetts was as weird a place as Mars. He was also tougher than me: he wrote horror, and I was a wuss. As a child I wasn’t ready to face those dark places that Bradbury moved through apparently fearlessly and with impunity. (Like the air on Mars, he found the atmosphere there perfectly breathable.) They freaked me out too much. I was like those astronauts at the end of “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed”: I couldn’t accept what was right in front of me. But as I get older and I slowly learn to accept those truths, and I remember and think, yes, Bradbury was right. He warned me about this a long time ago. I should have seen it coming. The Martians were the colonists, all along. -–-
Other prominent authors posted lengthier articles elsewhere on the web Wednesday, including Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book), John Scalzi (Redshirts), Carrie Vaughn (the Kitty Norville series) and David Brin (The Uplift series). . . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …..item 2)…. Los Angeles Times … articles.latimes.com/2012 … (Page 3 of 4) Ray Bradbury dies at 91; author lifted fantasy to literary heights Ray Bradbury’s more than 27 novels and 600 short stories helped give stylistic heft to fantasy and science fiction. In ‘The Martian Chronicles’ and other works, the L.A.-based Bradbury mixed small-town familiarity with otherworldly settings.
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June 06, 2012|By Lynell George, Special to the Los Angeles Times articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/06/local/la-me-ray-bradbury… Bradbury married Marguerite McClure in 1947, the same year he published his first collection of short stories — "Dark Carnival" (Arkham House) — a series of vignettes that revisited his childhood hauntings. His first big break came in 1950, when Doubleday collected some new and previously published Martian stories in a volume titled "The Martian Chronicles." A progression of pieces that were at once adventures and allegories taking on such freighted issues as censorship, racism and technology, the book established him as an author of particular insight and note. And a rave review from novelist Christopher Isherwood in Tomorrow magazine helped Bradbury step over the threshold from genre writer to mainstream visionary. "The Martian Chronicles" incorporated themes that Bradbury would continue to revisit for the rest of his life. "Lost love. Love interrupted by the vicissitudes of time and space. Human condition in the large perspective and definition of what is human," said Benford. "He saw … the problems that the new technologies presented — from robots to the super-intelligent house to the time machine — that called into question our comfy definitions of human." Bradbury’s follow-up bestseller, 1953?s "Fahrenheit 451," was based on two earlier short stories and written in the basement of the UCLA library, where he fed the typewriter 10 cents every half-hour. "You’d type like hell," he often recalled. "I spent .80 and in nine days I had ‘Fahrenheit 451.’ " Books like "Fahrenheit 451," in which interactive TV spans three walls, and "The Illustrated Man" — the 1951 collection in which "The Veldt" appeared — not only became bestsellers and ultimately films but cautionary tales that became part of the American vernacular. "The whole problem in ‘Fahrenheit’ centers around the debate whether technology will destroy us," said George Slusser, curator emeritus of the J. Lloyd Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Utopia at UC Riverside. "But there will always be a spirit that keeps things alive. In the case of ‘Fahrenheit,’ even though this totalitarian government is destroying the books, the people have memorized them. There are people who love the written word. That is true in most of his stories. He has deep faith in human culture." Besides books and short stories, Bradbury wrote poetry, plays, teleplays, even songs. In 1956, he was tapped by John Huston to write the screenplay for "Moby Dick." In 1966, the French auteur director Francois Truffaut brought "Fahrenheit 451" to the screen. And in 1969 "The Illustrated Man" became a film starring Rod Steiger. Bradbury’s profile soared. But as he garnered respect in the mainstream, he lost some standing among science fiction purists. In these circles, Bradbury was often criticized for being "anti-science." Instead of
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celebrating scientific breakthroughs, he was reserved, even cautious. Bradbury had very strong opinions about what the future had become. In the drive to make their lives smart and efficient, humans, he feared, had lost touch with their souls. "We’ve got to dumb America up again," he said. Over the years he amassed a mantel full of honors. Among them: the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2000), the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award (1998), the Nebula Award (1988), the Science Fiction Hall of Fame (1970), O. Henry Memorial Award (1947-48) and a special distinguished-career citation from the Pulitzer Prize board in 2007, which was "an enormous nod of respect from the mainstream media," Lou Anders, editorial director of the science fiction and fantasy imprint PYR, told the New York Times. Bradbury helped plan the Spaceship Earth at Disney’s Epcot Center in Orlando, Fla., as well as projects at Euro Disney in France. He was a creative consultant on architect Jerde’s projects, helping to design several Southern California shopping malls including the Glendale Galleria, Horton Plaza in San Diego and the Westside Pavilion in Los Angeles. Even in his later years, Bradbury kept up his 1,000-words-a-day writing schedule, working on an electric typewriter even when technology had passed it by. "Why do I need a computer … all a computer is is a typewriter." Though he didn’t drive, Bradbury could often be spotted out and about Los Angeles. A familiar figure with a wind-blown mane of white hair and heavy black-framed glasses, he’d browse the stacks of libraries and bookstores, his bicycle leaning against a store front or pole just outside. A stroke in late 1999 slowed him but didn’t stop him.
He began dictating his work over the phone to one of his daughters, who helped to transcribe and edit. In 2007 he began pulling rare or unfinished pieces from his archives. "Now and Forever," a collection of "Leviathan ’99" and "Somewhere a Band Is Playing," was published in 2007 and "We’ll Always Have Paris Stories" in 2009. . . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . . America Today …item 2.. A Key Economic Lesson (1.2.13 @ 6:07AM) …item 4.. Tallahassee Used Bookstore Owner Arrested — Hart called the charges “hurtful.” (7:33 PM, Jan 09, 2013) …
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Image by marsmet531 In Brave New World, a prophetic novel published in 1932, prior to Stalin’s purges and before Hitler came to power in Germany, Huxley described a tyrannical future where totally controlled and dehumanized slaves would “love their servitude.” . ………*****All images are copyrighted by their respective authors ……… .
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …..item 1)…. The Culture of Entitlement and Dependency … www.briantracy.com … Brian Tracy’s VIEW ON THE NEWS … . ………………….. img code photo … America Today www.briantracy.com/view/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Americ… ………………….. . Current Events | October 24th, 2012 | www.briantracy.com/view/current-events/the-culture-of-ent… We have reached the turning point in America today. You can have one of two world views
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about Americans and America. You can either believe that Americans are a proud, free, self-responsible, self-reliant, creative and a pragmatic people, possessed of optimism and confidence in an ever unfolding and abundant future, or you can take the other world view. You can believe that Americans are weak, dependent, not capable of accepting responsibility for themselves, not capable of making their own choices in any areas, including virtually everything that they eat, drink and consume, and that they must be put under the control of those who are superior to them, elected politicians and the bureaucrats in charge of the thousands of government departments. These are the choices. You are either proud, free and self-reliant, or you are weak, dependent and incapable of providing for yourself. These are the two world views represented by the two political parties. You can pick the one which best represents your world view and vote for the candidates of that party. But whatever you vote for, you know what you are going to get in advance. After spending fifty years of studying psychology and human nature, I have concluded that people are neither good nor bad. They are merely expedient. Human nature simply says that people seek the fastest and easiest way to get the things that they want right now, with little concern for the long-term consequences of their actions. This has always been true, and is the driving motivator of virtually all of human behavior. If you boil all economic activity down into a simple word, it would be “improvement.” Every person acts to improve their life, work, family, health or finances in some way, in whatever way they possibly can. And because people value their time and leisure, they seek the easiest way to get the things they want. Because people are impatient, they seek the fastest way to get the things they want, as well. And because people are motivated toward immediate gratification, they take very little concern for the long term future or for the consequences of their actions. Most people are more concerned about the immediate pleasures that they will enjoy rather than the long-term consequences of what they do, or what they ought to do. People are neither good nor bad. They are merely expedient. This explains most of what is going on in American society, and throughout the world today. As they say; if you throw money in the street, do not be surprised if people bend over and pick it up. If you offer people free money, or money with very few strings attached, a certain number of people will reach for that money. And afterwards, more and more people will reach for that money until it can become a feeding frenzy, with everyone trying to get more and more money the fastest and easiest way possible with the least amount of effort, and little or no concern for the long-term consequences of their behavior. — America’s History of Entitlement This is a very simple and concise explanation of the entitlement and dependency culture that has developed in America, and throughout the western world, especially Europe. From the 1950’s onward, America enjoyed a burst of prosperity that had never been seen before in human history. With high tax rates and growing wealth and prosperity, government began taking in enormous tax revenues that they quickly developed an irresistible urge to spend
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in all directions and on all possible projects. By the mid-50’s, the entire interstate highway system was developed and under construction, building thousands of miles of big new roads and highways criss-crossing the entire country. Then in 1965-66, the politicians in Washington concluded that with so much potential wealth, poverty could be eliminated completely, and a new age of mankind with wealth and prosperity for all, whether or not anyone worked for it or deserved it, could be ushered in by government regulations and legislation. Thus began the “War on Poverty” and the massive growth of the entitlement state. The entitlement state was based on offering people money which they had not earned and which they did not deserve. By the 1960s, virtually every ethnic American group, including the African Americans from the south, were moving upward and onward, into the middle class, getting their own homes and cars, and putting their children into better and better schools. Crime rates were declining, illegitimate births were declining, rates of welfare and dependency were declining, and more and more new jobs absorbed virtually all the members of the work force who wanted to work. And then came the curse of the entitlement state. Governments began offering people money for not working. Tens of thousands of people went to work for the government with the sole job of going out and finding people and convincing them to take a government handout rather than working. Meanwhile, the politicians discovered that they could buy people’s votes with their own money. They could tax people with one hand, and give them free money with the other hand, and get them to vote for them in the next election. As James Buchanan, the noble prize winning economist concluded, you can tell how a politician will vote by simply looking at the issues that are most popular in his constituency in the weeks prior to the election. Therefore, politicians have no morals, values or principles aside from re-election, and they will do or say whatever it takes to get back into office one more time. Elections then became like auctions, with politicians trying to beat their competitor by offering more and more free money, to ever greater constituencies. Soon, national politics, and then statewide and local politics, began a gradual race to the bottom. How much free money could you offer how many people to get elected one more time? — Stages of Civilization As it happens, throughout the history of mankind, every civilization goes through several phases. It starts as a frontier society, and then becomes an agrarian society, then industrial, and then it grows in wealth and affluence and becomes an entrepreneurial society. It then becomes an industrial and then a service society, and then, it develops so much wealth that politicians think that they have enough to give to prospective voters without hurting the overall economy. The society then becomes an entitlement and welfare economy. Just as ancient Rome was the wealthiest entrepreneurial economy in the world, with the most powerful armies on earth at that time, it eventually devolved into a dependency and a welfare state, more focused on “bread and circuses,” and free money and entertainment, and eventually Rome had
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declined, fell apart, and disappeared as a society. The challenge with giving voters free money is that there is never enough. If you offer them free money to vote for you this time, at the next election, they say, “What are you going to do for me now?” Free money is like a narcotic. When you first take it, it has a certain effect. But after a while you must have more and more free money to get the same amount of pleasure. This is why people who get free money from government are never satisfied. They are never grateful. All they want is more and more free money, and they will become angry if they don’t get it, and quickly vote for someone else who promises to give it to them. However, government has no money of its own. The only money that government has is money that it taxes out of the pockets of working men and women. Even government jobs create little or no wealth. Government studies show that it takes between three and ten people in the government sector to do the same amount of work as one person in the private sector. And in order to buy public sector unionized votes, politicians have increased the salaries, benefits and pensions of unionized public sector workers to the point where they are paid an average of ,000 a year, when the average American earns ,000 a year. Not only that, but hundreds of thousands of government servants can retire in their 50s on full pensions, based on their last year of work, with full benefits for themselves and their families for the rest of their lives, which may be 20 or 25 years. As a result, America is now bankrupt. It owes trillions of dollars worth of pensions and benefits to government unionized workers that can never be repaid without bankrupting the cities, states and eventually the federal government who has promised all this money. — Face the Facts So what is the solution? The solution is first of all to face the facts. It is to be honest and look at the situation as it truly is. Second, we need to begin to make changes at the margins that raise the retirement age for government service, lower the pensions for them, raise the age of retirement for people in the private sector, and puts them on 401k plans where their retirement income is tied to the health of the economy as a whole. I bet you didn’t know that virtually all politicians have golden parachute retirement plans that are completely separate from what happens to the government or the economy, complete with cost of living increases and fabulous medical benefits for the rest of their lives, and their family’s lives. Politicians have set themselves up so that no matter what happens to the economy they will be living the fat life after they leave government. This gives them no incentive at all to limit entitlements and welfare while they are in office, because when the chickens come home to roost, it will have no effect on their own personal income. You have a choice. You can vote for the continued growth of government, and the continued growth of the entitlement and welfare state, which always and inevitably leads to national impoverishment and bankruptcy, or you can vote for freedom, opportunity and economic growth accompanied by limited government, lower taxes, and diminished regulations.
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You can go on one of two paths, upward toward the light or down toward the darkness. You can go upward toward national prosperity, hope and opportunity, or downward toward national entitlement, welfare, and dependency on ever-growing government with ever higher taxes and ever worse regulations.
The choice is up to you. . . . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …..item 2)…. The American Spectator … spectator.org …A FURTHER PERSPECTIVE A Key Economic Lesson By RALPH R. REILAND on 1.2.13 @ 6:07AM Good intentions and bad results in the never ending war on poverty. spectator.org/archives/2013/01/02/a-key-economic-lesson “If there is any lesson in the history of ideas, it is that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences,” stated Thomas Sowell, economist at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Similarly, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman warned of the mixture of good intentions and big government. “Concentrated power,” he cautioned, “is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.” French writer Albert Camus (1913-1960) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. “The evil that is in the world,” he asserted, “almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.” Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), British essayist and novelist, stated it more boldly: “Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.” In Brave New World, a prophetic novel published in 1932, prior to Stalin’s purges and before Hitler came to power in Germany, Huxley described a tyrannical future where totally controlled and dehumanized slaves would “love their servitude.” In the forthcoming society envisioned by Huxley, a technologically proficient and well-intentioned government replaced self-reliance and individual freedom with security, dependence, safety, and drug-induced happiness — plus an abundance of carnal pleasures, commanded by the state’s “everyone belongs to everyone else” decree. What’s required for the establishment of this Brave New World is putting the state up front in all matters and assigning individuals to the back burner. What’s essential for implementation is for
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man to be precast, molded, and enslaved to the program. Launched in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the “unconditional war on poverty in America,” now in its 49th year, might arguably be the most expensive and longest running example of Thomas Sowell’s warning that “good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences.” From 1964 until now, the federal, local and state governments have spent trillion in the War on Poverty — trillion by the federal government and trillion by state and local governments. In “The American Welfare State: How We Spend Nearly Trillion a Year Fighting Poverty — and Fail,” Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the Cato Institute, reports that the 2012 poverty rate “has risen to 15.1 percent of Americans, the highest level in nearly a decade.” In 2012, “the federal government will spend more than 8 billion on at least 126 different programs to fight poverty,” in addition to “welfare spending by state and local governments which adds 4 billion to that figure,” writes Tanner. On a per capita basis, this roughly trillion a year in welfare spending “amounts to ,610 for every poor person in America, or ,830 per poor family of three,” explains Tanner. In contrast, the Census Bureau reports that the median household income in the United States dropped to ,054 in 2011, the latest figure available, down 8 percent from 2007, the year before the recession began. “Welfare spending increased significantly under President George W. Bush and has exploded under President Barack Obama,” states Tanner. “In fact, since President Obama took office, federal welfare spending has increased by 41 percent, more than 3 billion per year. Despite this government largess, more than 46 million Americans continue to live in poverty.” Bottom line, “the poverty rate is perilously close to where we began more than 40 years ago,” after trillion in spending, Tanner reports. “Clearly, we are doing something wrong.” ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise and an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh. . . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …..item 3a)…. youtube video … A .Copland – "Fanfare for the Common Man" … 3:48 minutes www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVDOeUah9x4
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Uploaded on Jul 31, 2011 RSO-Vienna, D.R.Davies; Salzburg Festival 2001, Timps: Gerald Fromme; Gerhard Windbacher Category Music
License Standard YouTube License . . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …..item 3b)…. youtube video … Fanfare for the Common Man – Emerson, Lake & Palmer (Olympic Stadium … 9:49 minutes www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK92hdp6u18 Uploaded on Jan 29, 2012 IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: The music, video and images remain copyright of their respective owners and are strictly used here on YouTube for educational reasons as well as for the artists’ promotional purposes only! Therefore, if you own copyright over any part of these materials and do not wish to see it here, please contact me directly (rather than immediately referring to YouTube) and I will remove it as soon as possible! Thanks, in advance, for your understanding! From "Works Volume One- 1977" (at the Olympic Stadium Montreal) - Keith Emerson: Yamaha GX1 polyphonic synthesizer - Greg Lake: 8-string bass - Carl Palmer: percussion, drums "Fanfare for the Common Man" is a 20th-century American classical music work by American composer Aaron Copland. The piece was written in 1942 for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under conductor Eugene Goossens. It was inspired in part by a famous speech made earlier in the same year where vice president Henry A. Wallace proclaimed the dawning of the "Century of the Common Man". Several cover versions have been made and fragments of work has appeared in many subsequent US and British cultural productions, such as in the musical scores of movies. Copland’s fanfare was used in 1977 by British rock band Emerson, Lake & Palmer on the album Works Volume 1. The track became one of the band’s biggest hits when an edited version was released as a single that year. It peaked at No. 2 in the UK. Keith Emerson had
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long been an admirer of Copland’s American style, previously using Copland’s Hoedown on the band’s Trilogy album in 1972. In a BBC Radio interview, Copland relayed his reaction to the piece: "Interviewer: Just before I left London, I heard a piece of music of yours, Fanfare for the Common Man, which had been taken by a rock group Emerson, Lake & Palmer. How do you feel about that? Copland: Well, (laughs) of course it’s very flattering to have one’s music adopted by so popular a group, and so good a group as Emerson, Lake & Palmer. A lot depends on what they do with what they take, and naturally since I have a copyright on such material, they’re not able to take it without my permission; so that in each case, where I have given my permission, there was something that attracted me about the version that they perform, which made me think I’d like to allow them to release it. Of course, I always prefer my own version best, but (laughs) what they do is really around the piece, you might say, rather than a literal transposition of the piece, and they’re a gifted group. In that particular case, I allowed it to go by because when they first play it, they play it fairly straight and when they end the piece, they play it very straight. What they do in the middle, I’m not sure exactly how they connect that with my music but (laughs) they do it someway, I suppose. But the fact that at the beginning and the end it really is the Fanfare for the Common Man gave me the feeling I ought to allow them to do it as they pleased. Interviewer: I know your original work is just over three minutes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer have managed to turn it into a nine minute work. Copland: (Laughs) Exactly, well, it’s those six minutes in the middle…(laughs)" www.emersonlakepalmer.com/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerson,_Lake_%26_Palmer pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerson,_Lake_%26_Palmer The song is placed here for listening enjoyment only. Please respect and support the music artists by buying their commercial DVD’s and/or CD’s. Copyright belongs to its respective owners! Category Entertainment
License Standard YouTube License . . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… . …..item 4)…. Tallahassee Used Bookstore Owner Arrested … WCTV News … www.wctv.tv/home
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Posted: Wed 1:05 PM, Jan 09, 2013 … Reporter: Department of Revenue, Julie Montanaro Email Updated: Wed 7:33 PM, Jan 09, 2013 … www.wctv.tv/home/headlines/Used-Bookstore-Owner-Arrested-… January 9, 2013 by Julie Montanaro The owner of one of Tallahassee’s most popular used book stores is accused of failing to pay thousands of dollars in sales tax. The owner of the Paperback Rack was arrested this week and accused of theft of state funds. A Department of Revenue spokeswoman says Lisa Wyartt-Hart failed to pay more than 5-thousand dollars in sales tax dating back to 2010. . ………………………. img code photo … Lisa Wyartt-Hart media.graytvinc.com/images/300*225/Lisa+Wyartt-Hart.jpg ………………………. . Hart called the charges "hurtful." She admits to owing the state money, but says her business has been struggling to stay afloat for the past few years. "I don’t know why they use the word ‘stealing.’ We are struggling. The last three years have been really, really tough," Wyartt-Hart said. "If I had it," she said, "it would be paid." The Paperback Rack has been in business for more than 25 years. Department of Revenue Release: Leon County Bookstore Owner Arrested Lisa M. Wyartt-Hart, the owner of the Paperback Rack, a used bookstore located in Tallahassee, Florida, has been arrested on charges that she stole more than ,000 in sales tax she collected from customers, but failed to send in to the state, the Florida Department of Revenue announced today. Ms. Wyartt-Hart, 45, who also lives in Tallahassee, was arrested by the Leon County Sheriff’s Office January 8, 2013 on felony and misdemeanor charges relating to theft of state funds, failure to file six consecutive return and refusal to file and pay taxes due. If convicted, she faces up to 5 years in prison and up to ,000 in fines, as well as possible payment of penalty and investigative costs. Paperback Rack is located at 1005 N. Monroe Street in Tallahassee.
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According to Revenue Department investigators, Ms. Wyartt-Hart collected tax from customers at her bookstore. However, during various periods beginning in 2010, lasting through periods in 2012, she failed to send in to the state all of the sales taxes that were collected or file tax returns as required by law. “It is an honor to serve the vast majority of Florida businesses who comply with State tax requirements,” said Marshall Stranburg, Interim Executive Director, Florida Department of Revenue. “For those that don’t, it is our job to enforce the law and ensure honest businesses are not placed at a competitive disadvantage by those who ignore the law or intentionally collect and steal taxpayer dollars.” If you have information about tax crimes, please call the Florida Department of Revenue Investigations office in Tallahassee at (850)922-2671. Note: Due to the confidential nature of taxpayer records, generally the information found in this release is the only information available from the Department of Revenue concerning this matter. Other information may be available through the arresting agency and the local Clerk of Court. . Comments are posted from viewers like you and do not always reflect the views of this station.
— Ivan Sondel • 11 hours ago I’ve known Lisa Hart for 18 years. There is no way on earth that she is guilty of the things she’s being charged with. Marshall Strandburg has the records that the taxes were not paid. I understand that. But to say she is dishonest, or that she intended to "steal taxpayer dollars" is a gross defamation. The Paperback Rack is the best book shop in Tallahassee and yet it has been on the brink of closing more than once in the past year, but has been saved by heroic measures by Lisa and her wonderful staff. She is the one put at a competitive disadvantage by the likes of Goodwill who receive their stock for free. Lisa has to buy or barter for stock. There are days when the store hardly sells enough to keep the doors open or pay part time staff minimum wages; I’m sure every penny collected at the register right back into the store – just to keep it open. Perhaps my friend made a mistake. It looks that way on the face of it. But there is a great difference in making a mistake, or acting in a way that benefits your employees regardless of self, and being called dishonest and a thief. If an individual fails to make enough salary in a year, they are not required to pay income tax; why doesn’t the same apply to a small business? And we’re talking about such a small sum – ,000 – it’s not like she was going to take that money and flee to Belize. The quote makes my dear friend sound like some nefarious scam artists like Bernie Madoff. Remember folks that between 2008 and 2011, 26 major American corporations paid no net federal income taxes despite bringing in billions in profits – General Electric and Verizon. So let’s put this all into proper perspective. God bless you Lisa – God save The Paperback Rack. . . …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… .
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. Old High Church from Blackfriars Abbey (Greyfriars Cemetery) Inverness Scotland
Image by conner395 Taken from the gateway of the cemetery, looking up Friars Street to the Old High Church atop St Michaels’ Mount In 1233 AD a Dominican Friary was constructed in Inverness. It was located on the edge of the Town Centre, directly opposite St Michael’s Mound, where St Columba of Iona is said to have preached in 565 AD. (There has been a church on that site since Celtic times, where the Old High Church currently stands) The Friary or Abbey (Blackfriars) was disbanded in 1556 at the time of the Reformation, and the building soon fell into disrepair. In 1567 Queen Mary (Mary Queen of Scots, mother of King James VI and I) awarded the lands and church buildings of the Dominicans to the Council and Community of Inverness. In 1653 the Town of Inverness sold the ruinous buildings to Oliver
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Cromwell’s local representative for use in construction of the Citadel at Inverness Harbour (several other large disused church buildings in the area also suffered a similar fate, and what stone remained was later used in the construction of a Castle at Inverness. (It kept getting destroyed!) In 1935 a smart new Telephone Exchange was constructed in Friars Lane, Inverness on the west extremity of the Town Centre proper. It was built of sandstone, and despite its modern look ,the colour of the stone makes it blend in. The land on which is was located was where the Abbey’s School had stood and the Exchange backed on to the Blackfriars graveyard – now confusingly called Greyfriars! This graveyard would have been within the actual abbey building, and nowadays only a sandstone pillar and an effigy of a knight (now mounted on a wall) remain of the actual building. The gravestones still legible all appear to be more recent, mainly 18th century. In the 1970s, as telecommunications became more prolific (but before miniaturisation took full hold) there was a need to extend the Telephone Exchange, but it was not possible due to the ancient graveyard, although other land further down Friars Street was available. A novel solution was adopted, with a "bridge" (an enclosed corridor) at first floor level being used to provide access between the two buildings without disturbing those resting beneath. The history of the Old High Church (including the Blackfriars Abbey): www.oldhighststephens.com/html/old_high_history.html Check Out The Full Indepth Details Here: http://fullmoviedeal.com/nice-highest-selling-novel-photos/
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