See full version: Inside The Sudden Death Of Janis Joplin, The Soulful Voice Of The Hippie Generation
According to Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi, the missing evidence had been removed from the scene by one of Joplin’s friends — and returned when they realized that her drug use would show in the toxicology report anyway. here
For concert promoter and friend Bill Graham, Joplin’s self-destruction was in part caused by this new-found fame. “She had a tremendous amount of assurance when she got it all together onstage, but offstage, privately, she seemed to be very frightened, very timid and naive about a lot of things,” he said. “I don’t think [she] ever knew how to handle success. I think it created problems for Janis.” here
Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images A recreation of Janis Joplin’s death. [links]
She met Caserta while browsing through her hippie clothing store in the Haight-Ashbury district in 1965. They became fast friends with matching vices. more
Wikimedia Commons Joplin was purportedly shy offstage but came into her own during performances.
If elected, MeRA25 wants to leverage Greece’s position to force change, by hook or by crook. And Varoufakis is the obvious—or rather, the only—man for this job. Without being bound by someone else’s agenda (or sense of decorum), he can nuclearize his training as a game theorist and his experience working with the European establishment to go back and make good on the types of threats Syriza never carried through. This would involve enacting its democratically chosen domestic agenda, even against the wishes of the Eurogroup; halting repayment to the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the other bodies set up to bail out ailing states; turning to Varoufakis’s alternate banking proposal should the country run out of money; and all the while, accepting the possibility of expulsion from the EU. MeRA25 reminds us that after 10 years of crisis and decades of bad leadership, Greece has nothing left to lose. In that, Varoufakis has found a certain freedom. 29
This isn’t to say that his books are beach reads, exactly. (I would know—I read Adults in the Room on a beach.) The subjects he covers range from Eurobonds to Bretton Woods and back to the European Central Bank; they are intricate and often dull, even when he livens them up with backroom gossip and references to Greek drama (his interlocutors, he notes, are characters straight out of Sophocles or Shakespeare: “neither good nor bad…overtaken by the unintended consequences of their conception of what they ought to do”). Still, Varoufakis patiently diagnoses problems in the system, then suggests a great many solutions. He lays out his proposed solution to his country’s debt crisis—essentially an innovative debt swap that pegs how much Greece should repay and at what rate to its GDP and rate of growth—so clearly and convincingly that it’s hard to argue with (unless, of course, you’re a Eurocrat who had actually been arguing with him). Why shouldn’t repayment be linked to recovery? It’s a perfectly logical solution. 20 here
That was when his lack of political experience started to show. Over the five months that followed, his meetings followed a depressing pattern: A sanguine Varoufakis would enter the negotiations, with a mandate from his people to reject the austerity measures that were causing a crisis back home. He would hit it off with seemingly sympathetic European ministers who, in private, would appear to be on his side. He’d spend all night coming up with an ingenious financial workaround to placate even the most hawkish austerity-mongers, thinking sincerely that he was getting somewhere. Then he’d wake up to discover that he had been stabbed in the back by much of the rest of Europe. 12 more
The idea of a unified Europe didn’t always elicit the current mixture of exasperation, boredom, and rage, in politicians and ordinary people alike. In fact, there was a time when the European Union seemed like a great initiative, especially on a continent ravaged first by two hot wars, then broken in half by a cold one. A permanent peace between neighboring nations founded on a common market and sealed with freedom of movement for all might have required bureaucratic impositions, but it also functioned as an insurance policy. Besides, there was something for everyone in this new idea of Europe. Students, through Erasmus programs, learned new languages and made friends in foreign countries. Blue-collar workers could go abroad for better jobs. Manufacturers could import and export goods with no fees and less paperwork. Children of the European elite found positions in Strasbourg and Brussels. Billionaires no longer had to worry about the power of their country’s home currency while vacationing in Courchevel or Monaco. 1
Varoufakis had no love for his country’s creditors, but he saw the EU favoring the bottom lines of international banks over the welfare of the Greek people. He was also practical, and keen to “shower [the EU] with moderation” and prove it wrong about the Greeks being undisciplined and lazy. So he assembled an international team of supporters, including American economists Jeffrey Sachs and James Galbraith, former treasury secretary Larry Summers (aka “the Prince of Darkness”), and Deutsche Bank’s Thomas Mayer, along with some financiers from Lazard, the asset-management and advisory firm, to demonstrate to Brussels that he was willing to negotiate on its terms. 11
Greece was not the only country to rebel against these conditions. Nationalist politicians throughout the continent began to speak of Europe not as one people, but as a hodgepodge of countries bound by pesky supranational rules. Brexit put this notion to a referendum: Why help faceless Europeans when there are Brits down the street who need help too? And why bother with the entire supranational enterprise anyway? Nor are Brexiteers the only ones asking these questions. Many on the left—from Greece’s Syriza to Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise—also had grown uncomfortable with the idea and especially the economic institutions of “Europe.” 3
Beach’s Saturday morning talks on AA’s 12-step recovery program on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda routinely drew hundreds.
“The steps are a little hard for a lot of people to grasp,” said Marty T., 68, who lives in Cabin John, Md. “He just simplified them and made people want to work [through] them. He saved lives that way.”
People traveled from places such as Australia, Iceland and Sweden to attend retreats where Beach spoke. AA members said people living in isolated places, who can’t get to AA meetings, stay sober by listening to recordings of Beach’s talks. here
You may have heard this one, but I find that it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of it every once in a while. First let me tell you the story, and then we can talk about it.
adapted from The Star Thrower, by Loren Eiseley (1907 – 1977) [links]
Once upon a time, there was an old man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach every morning before he began his work. Early one morning, he was walking along the shore after a big storm had passed and found the vast beach littered with starfish as far as the eye could see, stretching in both directions.