Arielman's Comments (172)

“I recall the Canadian press, investigating the source of hard drugs in North America, in the "Golden Triangle" in Southeast Asia, implicated people inside the US military, carried on flights by the US Air Force, and received an award for the report. In the Gulf War they also reported the strange occurrence of US ordnance next to one of the burning oil wells set afire in that conflict.

More recently, 1/4 million "ecstasy" pills were intercepted on a US National Air Guard cargo carrier at the Stewart Airport, near Newburgh, NY which recently started commercial flights to Florida, once to be the "fourth" area jetport, connected with high-speed rail, proposed by then Governor Rockefeller to take some of the air traffic form above nearby New York City. Then Senator Hillary Clinton, reviewing the Revolutionary War re-enactors there, reminded the press of the then officers plot, thwarted by General Washington, to make him a king of America. Perhaps why history repeated is often a tragedy?”

“The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object. Thomas Jefferson”

“Some of the banks, such as the Long Island Savings Bank, were owned by the Spanish government, or multiple owners, it was reported. If a candidate gets $1+ from the local savings bank, how can we determine whether it represents our people or a foreign program to get certain policies, i.e., return of Gibraltar, enacted or to be taken up in the US Congress or the United Nations, not part of our heritage which elected officials are supposed to protect in the limited time we grant them in their term. Permitted as corporate entities which can contribute as much as they can, is counterproductive, i.e., the theft of elected time of service, in New York applied as "criminal tampering" might be considered a felony, much like tapping a public"service" utility, limiting the enabling of the "will of the people".”

“I read Carl G. Jung stated he was related by marriage to the German poet Goethe. It's stated he had analyzed Herman Hesse, besides a poet and Nobel Prize winning author, a prolific painter I see online. When my father passed on there was a "synchronitic" obituary, a nephew of Carl Jung, who held three patents, in engineering, where he worked it stated, in improving the Third World from Long Island, NY. I used to try to read and understand Carl Jung's volumes, in the former sanatorium turned community college overlooking the Great South Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, Suffolk Community College, in Selden, NY. They were going to need a bigger boat than the "J. Alfred Prufrock" to study the marine environment. Selden is named after a judge who was a "character witness" at the trial of American feminist Susan B. Anthony, tried for dressing as a man to vote in Upstae New York before women were given the right in 1920. What a Great Liberation!”

“The problem with singling this guy out, or even "sex offenders" is that it creates a complacency, that ignores that child-abuse is a "silent" problem, and that it is going on, and one might even suggest the "victims" later create victims. I knew a child-abuse caseworker in that county and there were problems not just by individuals but in institutions that are often unimpeachable, so to speak, and difficult to investigate. Another friend was made an example of, his father a lawyer, over a setup buy-and-bust years ago of two marijuana cigarettes and a camera he didn't know was stolen, that got him five years in Attica State. Maybe this 100 year old has rehabilitated, after all these years without good guidance programs, just incarceration with the rest of the general prison population. I'd take him to his parole officer.”

“I recall my friend telling me, she had been at Shea when the Beatles "invaded" Shea, a folk singer, she had a license to croon in Boston, standing in St. James, NY she told me, as a friend of Woody Guthrie's widow, who lived in a small apartment in the Dakota, that Mrs. Guthrie had heard the terrible shots that were fired at the Lennons. She had been trying to convince the Guthries to get Woody's unpublished material out in a collection people could see. Well amazing grace, the technology we have now is much better than old "wire recording", literally by the Lomaxes. I wonder if you read this have you seen the John Lennon Museum in Japan? It's a marvel, first of its kind. They spent three years before his death there. Bing or Google it you might be surprised.

Too bad "How I Won the War" was never tinted right for the original effect, the film he was in. He might have thought of being in a few others.”

“Maybe too many of the federal contracts, a competitor upriver hired by the Confederacy built a "powder mill" 30 miles outside Atlanta, Georgia, from brochures from the Crystal Palace exhibition in London, which burned down. Some historians think the Civil War to have been shortened by a year if General Sherman had found it.
It might have been a little "tit for tat" the foundry workers were from England who were given other identities, i.e., teacher, maid, etc. since they had a law against leaving the country with the knowledge learned in the production of weapons of mass destruction. There was also signed "industrial indenture" there as a surviving document attests, some of the last in the civilized world of indentures. I think Michigan Technological University in their five years or more of fieldwork in the West Point Foundry core has shown that to be true. Reported the first "labor action" in a Federal facility perhaps it was under different circumstances not "private enterprise" in the civil war, became a federal facility.
From 1989-1992 I was in the archeology, EPA, Marathon Battery National Priority Superfund Site, below the former "Bridge Shop" of the Chicago Bridge and Steel Co., burned down in 1912, we recovered a R.P. Parrot "gun platform" on grillage was the prototype or actually "Swamp Angel" used in the incendiary bombardment of Charleston, South Carolina in 1863. The cannon exploded and was obtained by the citizens of Trenton, NJ where it still is.”

“Bowling is probably as old as New York (New Amsterdam) and was played down on "Bowling Green" now a park. It was once I recall outlawed as "10 pins" so it was then played with only 9 and the prohibition revoked. Another story is that thunder heard around the Hudson Valley is the Knickerbockers bowling. More likely the early cannon "proofing" at what became the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, NY which had its offices in Manhattan. Congress authorized its creation shorty after the nation's founding, to be one of its foundries producing cannons for the new US Navy, which later was "born" on the Great Lakes in the War of 1812, particularly at Sackets Harbor, NY on Lake Ontario.”

“Glad I read his autobiography rather than an upcoming biography! It's true I used to commute through there and recently did again for awhile (testing for a buried AME Zion churchyard in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn) its a real dangerous area, the redesigning of the approach to the Willis Ave. Bridge going on and all.”

“To add to bowling alley locations I have two. Germania Hall, on the Bowery, where during the Haymarket Riots in Chicago, I think, and people peaceably in NYC assembled in various halls, this one recently torn down and was where Kate Mullaney, of Troy, NY, sitting next to Susan B. Anthony was the first women elected to union management, is listed in a city history as a single lane bowling alley. Unfortunately the history of it as a predominately Upstate National Guard unit, perhaps descended from the Revolutionary War and post-war protection of the early government, the first federal assembly in NYC, later known as "Steuben Rifles" may have been overlooked, perhaps for its use in the "draft riots" in the Civil War, one its officer's tried in courts martial. The later guard unit up the street became the Seventh Ave Armory, the only privately built one.

The other bowling alley is in the Wave Hill complex in Riverdale in the Bronx, two Hudson River estates joined, one where Samuel Clemens, Arturo Toscanini, and others lived, lastly the British Embassy compound in the early 1960s. I mapped an inventory of trees in the botanical center and performance place today. The lower level of the "promenade" has an entrance to a single lane bowling alley, said the archaeologist then working in Riverdale Park on the proposed impacts to remove invading species of plants that were severely altering the ecology of the park on the Hudson River.”

“In some ways I think a comparison to Ralph Nader, too and Nelson Mandela. Mr. Nader has run for President, the oldest American citizen to do so and may run against Senator Lieberman in his own state, Connecticut, where he has a proposed "tort law" museum. Over the years he's inspired and formed "Public Citizen" and the various Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG) one I worked for out of St. James, NY one summer around 1982 canvassing for subscriptions to "Public Citizen" based in Texas on Long Island on "water issues". Pete Seegar and another gave us a concert at the end of it in the old Riverhead Theater, out where once migrant farmers were fought for and today "regulated", today more likely flown in from Puerto Rico, than "hoodwinked" out of the South. Issues of "race" aside, the American public needs better leadership, as did South Africa.”

“The "kicker" to the story is that then President Bush fired the head of the US Army because he sat of the board of Enron, without any "due process" or barely any public interest.”

“So I think perhaps when the OMB sued for the "energy meeting" with VP Chaney in the early days of the first Bush term, and then President Bush says they can't have that, without perhaps even knowing what was discussed, the "great decider" did us a dis-service. What if they decided, and to support Mr. Baldwin's assertion, the first former President Bush was a "wildcat driller" after WWII, they basically "don't need no stinking maps" or research, just "drill baby drill" to set up Enron as the fall guy. I was working after 9/11 (during anthrax) at Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, and elsewhere on Federal land, Picatinney Arsenal, NJ, West Point Academy, and in the flooded Bridgewater, NJ solution, digging archeology test holes in the Parade Field behind the headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers, that they had lost like $17 million in fuel oil at Fort Hamilton, Enron had been their supplier, and had to come up with the funds to cover their energy production. The archeology by the way was to prove or disprove that the previous archeology tests had actually found anything other than fill, nearby also the Robert E. Lee house, who lived there and was a former Commandant of the West Point Academy President Obama spoke at tonight to the Nation. The "Nation" publication has a wonderful open letter to the President that apparently the "dude does not abide by".”

“I think it's Pravda, that's reporting the cost to US taxpayers for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to be a quadrillion or 1000 trillion dollars, which we seem to think we can afford. What we should afford is election reform. A 20 multiple choice test questions for citizens from the US, asked who elects the President? The correct answer is the Electoral College, answer the people and you would have been marked wrong. That system allows, as I understand it, for one persons vote in one state of 50 to swing the Electoral College over to one of the parties. Interestingly, the President and Vice President in the early days of the republic could and were from different parties, a "coalition" of sorts until changed, but the Electoral College remained unchanged. The state of Maine is changing that, adjusting Electoral College votes to reflect the popular numbers actually voted by its citizens as best possible. Let's hope "as Maine goes so goes the Nation" up to the States of the Union how they are counted and used under the US Constitution.

Happy Thanksgiving! Did you know the Declaration of Independence was probably signed with ink made from pokeberries fermented in a pumpkin?”

“Mr. Green left out the very important counsel AG Gonzales gave former President Bush at his "call to duty" day, i.e. jury duty in Texas, in regards to a case involving a woman, employed as a stripper. As questions were asked the AG consulted with President Bush to what his response should be. I have no further info on "sitting" US Presidents called for jury duty while in office (judge Lance Ito was called up during the so-called "OJ Simpson" trial, married to Peggy York, highest ranking female in the LA Police Dept. I just learned). Interesting set of laws in the US, no due process, then defined after years as "do process". Nearby Gitmo is Cape Maisi, where America's "last slaver" a former luxury yacht "Wanderer" sank in a storm in 1871. The world might think those there held by the US, its "slaves" to political expediency.”

“Yet, there is a photo published in the Westchester, NY paper a few years ago of Sigmund Freud coming off an airplane to visit a doctor friend with a film camera in his hand, and that he enjoyed the gratification perhaps of making his own small films. Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, is also the developer and publisher of Idrisi, a fore-runner and premier developer of GIS and image analysis, often when I recall using it in EPA required archaeology studies, in use in the Third World, i.e., designing flood-relief centers in Bangladesh for example, with its early Trelaine digitizer map making and satellite imagery analysis software. I thought perhaps later Swiss doctor Carl G. Jung received one too there, but I might be confusing the hilarious reading I once heard of the fiction "Ragtime" where they are both traveling in NYC and Dr. Freud is embarrassed to have to find a bathroom at the back of a delicatessen.”

“Pretty woman. Reminds me of that episode on "Tales From the Crypt" her Mom was in. I once worked for her aunt Margaux's boyfriend who ran Wetsons, competing at the time with the only other "hamburger joint" in town, McDonald's. We had fresh potatoes for fries, well in Lake Grove, NY anyway, skinned in a water driven tower. Maybe today they'd be Idahos instead of Long Island taters.”

“Last month, over review of the NYC Landmarks Commmission, there was assisted the excavation of six (6) 5'x5'x9'+ units on a street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn as part of the ongoing construction of a large pressure sewer (force main) there that I crewed on. They were concerned that there may have been a burial ground below 27th Avenue that was once an AME Zion church (African Methodist Episcopal, "Zion" to separate it, i.e., New York City rather than Philadelphia, PA). Lots of coal ash/trash from around the time they made Rikers Island, land-filled by 1903, it still, with a Queens causeway, in the Bronx jurisdiction from where the ferries left, but no evidence of burials and lots of evidence of a former marsh in south Brooklyn where Mr. Benson made his town.”

“July and August 2000 I worked the Cooper Square Urban Renewal project, once proposed to tear down 25 blocks of NYC's Lower East Side. I co-authored research of the lots and histories in the Bowery, Manhattan, NY, i.e., parts of three blocks, two former cemeteries, some with standing structures, one housing Kate Millet, noted feminist, next-door to “Germania Hall” where Kate Mullaney, of Troy, NY, sitting with American feminist, Susan B. Anthony was elected to a union, a first.

A Quaker cemetery on Houston St. was moved to Old Westbury and on "Coney Island Road" now Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Outside our study, is a "Negroe Cemetery" on one map a few blocks south of Houston. Another lot on Bowery had been the "satellite" cemetrery of a Methodist church, located where today a former courthouse houses Anthology Film Archives. In construction of the courthouse (2nd Ave, 2nd St.) they discovered a burial, which required a special session of the NY legislature, determined it Dept. of Education's purview. Those proceedings were lost in a State Library fire, so only the results are known, and perhaps a precedent set, in need of further research as to how the legislature determined that result.

There are two Marble Vault cemeteries nearby, first nondenominational ones in the city in the former historic theater district. The Methodist cemetery was moved to Long Island, straddling Queens/Brooklyn it avoided the legislature which forbid any larger than 250 acres in any one county.”

“Before working there, I worked in the summer of 1999 in the City Hall Park human remains found in construction and “restoration” designs for fixing the park, most thought in the "first Almshouse” cemetery, in the former Commons. I worked excavating around a two stacked burial found in the test unit dug in the planned location of a water-fountain, hopefully the fountain was moved, not far from the statue of Horace Greeley, who may also sit on some.

In the fall of 1999 I helped with The Old Soldiers Cemetery, West Farms, Bronx, NY, monitoring excavation for a new fence, bones recovered sent to Smithsonian for analysis. Street cutting and neighborhood development isolated former churchyard. Four wars (to WWI) of veterans are buried there. The stones were stood against each other their location awaiting some map, displaced by road and city planning (an aqueduct runs near it under land next to the west side of the Bronx River at 180th St. there, the church building removed to the north, where across the street is the Bronx Zoo. Also said to be one of the earliest city landmarks considered.

Quakers and Shakers never had headstones in their burials, here in New York and from my experience in Ohio, at the Watervliet Shaker community now a research park. Perhaps some of these stones were also stacked up either standing or leaning or laying flat and broken.”

“I worked on the archaeology of this cemetery in June, 2000 with Celia Bergoffen, PhD, RPA for the Queens Historical Society. The family house was on a crossroads and was commandeered by the British Army. They were tried after the American Revolution and found innocent of collaboration. The info gathering and reporting allowed the British Army to win the "Battle of Long Island" against General George Washington.

The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission requested and reviewed a then previous research report on it. We excavated a controlled archaeology unit in front of the standing headstones. The theory was that work in the WPA period had "reconstructed" or landscaped it, then next to a Japanese-American run garden supply business. Each of the stones turned out to have been broken, i.e., usually they project 2 feet into the ground, they appeared in profile to have been broken, and there were no "pit outlines" that would have suggested a human interment.

I suggested "remote sensing" ground-penetrating radar. It would be able to describe better the street-to-street lot and thereby perhaps find where the burials had actually been before the headstones were apparently "mowed down".

At the same time I recall, the NY Times, published a story that the "Night Before Christmas" might have had been prose "lifted" from an Upstate paper who included a similar story in their request for the subscribers to pay their bills and to remember the carriers of it that brought it to them.”

“We, I think we, were robo-called by former Mayor Koch to vote for Mayor Bloomburg just about 1/2 hour before his debate with Mr. Thompson on Channel 1, the local NYC station, started by the former employees of the last "news massacre" in TV City. After all the other ads for the hospital Ed Koch was in, praising his second chance that the heart surgery brought, I found it clear who he supported for the "second hardest job in America" and "I should know" but he didn't make a point that he had served the city for twelve (12) years himself, before the voted on "term limits". However I found myself in sympathy with the problems of the over 100,000 Hispanic run stores in NYC, and wondered why the law recently up before the City Council, to stop the "under-the-table" cash for leases, was not discussed by either candidate, though that's up to a debate moderator isn't it?”

“I worked archaeology testing nearby in Penns Neck, NJ, part of a proposed Route 1 interchange for Princeton, NJ. The road to Grovers Mills was closed then as the bridge was being replaced. The RCA Sarnoff research center, a co-developer of "successful television" and a General in WWII in charge of "ionospheric" transmissions, i.e., large acreage of wires stretched about tree top level in New Jersey nearby, and on Long Island, NY, (Rocky Point, NY ~4500 acres given to NY state for $1 for parkland), to transmit radio and perhaps images to Europe at night were in place nearby or proposed. I remember the "strange shaped water tower" in Grovers Mills, on a tripod that was apparently shot at with a shotgun after the radio show. I purchased my IBM PCjr internal 300 baud modem nearby after the bridge was finished and the job done. We found one Orient Fishtail projectile point in the gas-line pipe trench in the research center's front yard.

So I think perhaps, the "Martians" chose their landing site carefully that Halloween. Happy landings!”

“As I recall it, having archaeologically "salvaged" the "Swamp Angel" gun platform, used in the first incendiary bombardment of civilians, the "foreign" citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1863, a EPA re-remediation of nickel and cadmium for batteries in NIKE missile defenses once in use around the world, recovered for the US Army Corps of Engineers in a Marathon Battery National Priority Site in part in "Foundry Cove" filled swampland in Cold Spring, NY next to Constitution Island across the Hudson River from the West Point Military Academy, I was shown a device in our exploration of archaeological recording that allowed a TV camera to be raised over the US embassy compound, which were the only pictures often from our operations there in Iraq, narrated however, quite skillfully for children by television journalist, Peter Jennings.

Edwin Newman read a letter at the UN Chapel, back before the invasion of Iraq and the looting of one of Western civilization's most important museums, at a eulogy for a former NBC and lastly CBS news producer, George Murray, who had directed "Huntley and Brinkley" in the early years and went on to win awards in television news. In it he apologized to the reporters "embedded" in Vietnam who were trying to create a report on the common soldiers view, that they had been canceled by "higher ups" it was reported to me, a cousin. Those 9/11 passports found, create a scenario, where "The whole World is watching" (Medium Cool).”

“Back in 2001, after 9/11, I was working on the archaeology survey of West Point Academy, on parts that had to be cleaned up due to damages to large trees by Hurricane Floyd. I had previously worked on the archaeology of the EPA National Priority site across the river in Cold Spring, NY in the 1990s, where the West Point Foundry was located, and cannon founding, proofing and test firing went on at the west side of the river. Anthrax I recall had appeared in the mails, later to have been found to be from the US Army, and a jetliner crashed into Queens, NY bound for the Dominican Republic, killing all on-board. Security at the Point was more thorough than usual and entrances blocked by large vehicles. Listening to the TV in the small motel the crew stayed in nearby, after work in the former Raritan River flooded Bridgewater, NJ and some testing at a Picatinney Arsenal former rocket assembly facility, I was interested in the report that we were going into Afghanistan, according to Japanese news reporting, to clean-up the airfields that the Russians had left behind, in what my Dad called "Russia's Vietnam". Well eight years later I've yet to see a report on airfields other than that the largest one in Asia is being built there according to DW-TV. Some policy huh? Airfields.”