Sun Valley is not really a city. It is the anus of Los Angeles. Literally. It’s where the sewage plant is. And the garbage dump. It’s in a trench below the Hollywood Hills, where the smog settles into a kind of puke-yellow soup.
Greg Palast, left, at 11 years old, and Steve Paddock in elementary school in 1964. (Photos courtesy of Greg Palast)
The Las Vegas Shooter, Two Years Later
SNIPPET:
By Greg Palast — Why Steve Paddock killed dozens of innocent Las Vegas revelers two years ago isn’t as much of a mystery when you consider his roots.
Paddock. Palast. We sat next to each other at Fernangeles Elementary School, and later at Poly High in Sun Valley, Calif.
Steve was a chess prodigy and a math whiz.
He finally got to use his extraordinary gift to do complex ballistics calculations that allowed him to murder 58 people in Las Vegas in just minutes from a distant hotel window. That was two years ago this week.
Steve should have gone to MIT, to Stanford. He didn’t. For that, he needed Advanced Placement calculus.
If you went to “Bevvie”—Beverly Hills High—you could take AP calculus. Or AP French. We didn’t have AP calculus. We didn’t have AP French. We weren’t Placed, and we didn’t Advance.
According to a state investigation led by Tom Hayden, our high school was situated on top of a toxic dump site. No surprise there.
In Sun Valley, Steve and I were required to take classes called “electrical shop” and “metal shop” so we would be trained to man the drill presses at the local General Motors plant. Or do tool-and-dye cutting to make refrigerator handles at GM, where they assembled Frigidaire refrigerators and Chevys.
And we were required to take drafting. Drafting, as in “blueprint drawing.” We sat at those drafting tables with our triangular rulers and No. 2 pencils so we could get jobs at Lockheed Martin Corp. as draftsmen and draw blueprints for fighter jets.
But we weren’t going to fly the fighter jets. Somewhere at Phillips Academy Andover, a dumbbell named Bush with an oil well for a daddy was going to go to Yale and then fly our fighter jets over Texas. We weren’t going to go to Yale. We were going to go to Vietnam. Then, when we came back, if we still had two hands, we were supposed to go to GM or Lockheed.
And any pretty girl at our high school could always make decent money in Sun Valley, then the
po rn film capital of America.
Those were the choices we were given. As long as they lasted: After NAFTA, GM shut down and shifted to Mexico.
Full article: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-las-vegas-shooter-two-years-later/