W. Niederhut

Fascinating. I continue to learn something new every day on this forum. I never knew that Denver's legendary rock promoter, Barry Fey, had briefly opened a Family Dog rock venue here in Denver, with Chet Helms, back in 1967, and that the Grateful Dead, and other S.F. bands, had performed there in '67. Unfortunately, I was too young to know what was happening over there on Evans Avenue at the time. I once had an interesting phone conversation with the late Barry Fey, many years later, but that's another story. In any case, it's interesting to hear these first hand stories from our California Boomers-- Joe, David, Cliff, and Kirk.

It's not that complicated, Ben. Hate speech and inciting violence against the citizenry or against government officials is not acceptable. That's precisely why Dorsey and Twitter were correct when they banned Trump from Twitter after he incited the violent January 6th attack on the U.S. Congress. And Trump is, certainly, a stochastic terrorist. Go back and study the incisive Vox commentary by the professor from American University that I posted on that subject recently. It can't be said any more clearly. You have been in denial of Trump's history of inciting violence-- including J6-- as long as we have been discussing these issues.

Which is more or less what happened with Boehner's Tea Party House after 2010. As David Brooks observed in July of 2011, the Tea Party was incapable of governing the country. They even turned down Obama's "Mother of All No Brainers" debt ceiling deal in 2011, leading to a downgrade in the U.S. credit rating.

Yes, and I think that's Ginsburg in the prayer shawl.

Ben, Should hate speech be allowed? How about speech that incites violence against the citizenry or government officials? Incitement of violence against minority groups? How about libel? How about deleterious false advertising? As for your concerns about wages, what has been the Republican Party position on support for labor unions during the past 40 years?

So, Ben, since wages have been stagnant while the marginal increase in wealth in the U.S. has all gone to the top 1% since the Reagan revolution-- as Thomas Piketty has shown-- should we all simply vote for 'Phants and stop worrying about the de-funding of Social Security and Medicare? Should we stop worrying about Big Oil-funded GOP climate change denial, the pro-corporate Koch/GOP SCOTUS, and Citizens United? Is that your argument? 🤥

Cliff, 1) Was this the Newport Folk Festival Dylan set where Pete Seeger cut the electrical cord with an axe? 2) Meanwhile, apropos of interesting posts by our resident Californios, I discovered this afternoon that Wikipedia has a fairly well written chapter on the Counterculture of the 60s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture_of_the_1960s#cite_note-Lattin-143 3) Is the Jim Derogatis book, Turn on Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock, worth reading? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0634055488/ref=ox_sc_act_title_5?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1

Yes, Ben, the military industrial complex is a HUGE problem. We all know it. But you're ignoring all of the other major partisan policy differences that I enumerated--on climate change, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, tax policy, gun control, women's rights, LGBT rights, etc.

I'll defer to Cliff and Kirk when it comes to the details of Bay Area counter-culture history. Geez, Kirk has even conversed with Ken Kesey! But let me toss this out there. I've read a lot of the Beat literature over the years-- Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Rexroth, et.al.-- and I always had the impression that the counter-culture originated in the Beat generation. Ginsburg even talked openly about "passing the (Beat) torch" to Bob Dylan. So, the Bay Area Beat poetry scene was, obviously, an early epi-center of the counter-culture-- especially after the CIA introduced LSD into the area, at Stanford and Haight Asbury. But it seems like another important epi-center of the counter-culture was the folk scene in Greenwich Village, where Dylan first came to national prominence, along with a lot of other folksters from NYC and New England (e.g., Newport Folk Festival) -- Pete Seeger, Ginsburg, Van Ronk, Simon & Garfunkel, et.al. Simon & Garfunkel were performing at Folk City in the Village as early as '62, if I recall correctly. Some of my closest friends and fellow musicians in college (at Brown) were the last of the New York/New England folksters in the 70s. Then punk and the New Wave music (Talking Heads, et.al.) took over in the late 70s. And Sidney Gottlieb also set up a CIA/MK-Ultra LSD "research" brothel in Greenwich Village at the same time he established the first CIA LSD brothel on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.

Ben still doesn't get it. Yes, the 5-4 GOP Citizens United ruling has completely corrupted U.S. politics, but that doesn't mean there are no significant policy differences between Donks and Phants on issues like tax policy, healthcare, gun control, women's rights, LGBT rights, and climate change mitigation. Here's one major example. The GOP is the party of climate change denial.

Fred Wertheimer said, at the time, that Citizens United essentially wiped out a century of campaign finance reforms in the U.S. It opened the floodgates to unregulated plutocratic influence over U.S. elections through dark money funded advertising. And, contrary to Ben's false equivalence trope, Big Oil has heavily funded the Republican Party for years, effectively preventing legislation to promote clean energy and mitigate climate change. The same thing can be said about the NRA and gun control legislation.

David, Most of what I know about Jim Morrison, aside from listening to the Doors for years, comes from watching Oliver Stone's movie, The Doors. I read that Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger didn't like the movie, but I thought it was terrific. As you probably know, Morrison was depicted in the film as a kind of psychedelic mushroom-eating Dionysian poet/prophet who ultimately visits Andy Warhol in Manhattan, and is given the gift of a golden telephone. Warhol says, "I'm told that this telephone can be used to call God, but, honestly, I don't know what I would say to Him, so I thought YOU should have it." 🤥

And Jim Morrison's father was completely clueless about his son's rock 'n roll career, and life. I watched an interview once where Admiral Morrison said that he initially thought that his son abandoning a film career to sing in a rock band was ridiculous, and he didn't realize that the Lizard King had become wildly successful until he saw the Doors perform on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Yes, and it was a 5-4 vote by the conservative Republican majority on the SCOTUS. Yet Ben continues to tirelessly push his false narrative that there is no significant difference between Donks and Phants. Also, I read somewhere recently that dark money accounted for 85% of Senate GOP campaign funding in 2022. The Koch brothers bought GOP control of the Senate in 2014-- a disaster that prevailed until January of 2021. Mitch McConnell has always been the Koch's head Senate bell boy.

It looks like they're calling the Senate squeaker in Wisconsin for RoJo the Clown. Words fail. Hard to believe that this shamelessly corrupt idiot could get re-elected to the U.S. Senate. But anything's possible in an era when even a guy like Herschel Walker could garner half of a state's Senate votes.

Mathew, May I suggest an entree for your dinner this evening celebrating the 2022 Red Wave? It goes well with a cheap chianti... 🤥

Ron, Funny you mentioned Johnny Rivers. In his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan mentioned that the Fugs song, C.I.A. Man, would have been a good Side B on a Secret Agent Man 45 rpm.

The MAGAts have been endlessly repeating memes and tropes about Biden's alleged senility ever since Mango Mussolini began calling Biden "Sleepy Joe" back in 2019. Yet, Biden has delivered a series of articulate, thoughtful speeches since 2020, (Acceptance, Inaugural, State of the Union, etc.) in addition to trouncing Trump in their 2020 debates. Of course, we all lose brain cells as we age, and Biden is no spring chicken, but these same MAGAts seem to be unaware of Trump's stroke a few years ago -- after which he began to noticeably slur his words and drag his right leg. It was around the time that Trump had obvious difficulty walking down that ramp at West Point. But, as always, Trump aggressively projected his own defects on to his adversary-- in the same way that the MAGAts have repeatedly accused the adversary of Ghislaine Maxwell's Orange Friend of being a pedophile.

Addendum: Hedges initial comments about corporate plutocracy are correct, but he's dead wrong about alleged policy equivalence between the two parties. This is the same false equivalence argument that Ben has re-posted endlessly. Hedges' false equivalence claims are debunked by the facts of U.S. legislative history.

Chris Hedges makes a number of blatantly inaccurate assertions in this article, especially his claims about allegedly similar Republican and Democratic policy positions on healthcare policy. Let's not forget that the Republicons repeatedly sought to sabotage and overturn the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion, and passed major funding cuts for Medicaid in December of 2017. They are also planning to force cuts in funding for Social Security and Medicare in 2023 if they regain control of the House. My response to Chris Hedges is, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

Shocking stuff, really. Jagger and the Stones should have sued the U.S. government, although only a handful of people knew the MK-Ultra details at the time, including Richard Helms. The CIA MK-Ultra guys were awfully cavalier about their use of unwitting civilian guinea pigs-- including mental health patients, hippies, and even non-rockabilly rock stars, etc. Notice that they never gave acid to performers like Elvis and Pat Boone.

John, I don't have any data on the subject, but I'm not aware of any violence in the U.S. toward people who refused to wear masks or get vaccinated during the height of the COVID pandemic. But I am aware of many news stories and firsthand reports of people getting angry and violent about being told to wear masks in public settings. There has also been a strong correlation between anti-mask/anti-vax sentiment, higher COVID death rates, and Trumpism in the U.S. Trump, unfortunately, fostered resistance to basic public health measures during the pandemic, even hosting deadly super spreader campaign rallies in 2020.

Interesting. Kinzer writes about Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and Grateful Dead song writer Robert Hunter taking LSD at Stanford, as I recall. I once listened to an interview of Jerry Garcia where Garcia talked about trying LSD at Kesey's electric kool-aid acid parties in the Bay Area during the formative days of the Dead. He said LSD gave him a sense of "infinite creative possibilities." Kinzer also described Sidney Gottlieb's frequent, avid use of LSD, and the way that the drug became quite popular in academic and celebrity circles. Cary Grant, reportedly, experienced it as a life-altering antidepressant.

Tusko the Elephant and Jolly West are mentioned at the end of Poisoner-in-Chief. Frank Olson's life and death are also covered in detail. I didn't realize from watching Errol Morris's documentary, Wormwood, that Frank Olson had traveled with Gottlieb to visit some of the sites in Europe where Gottlieb's MK-Ultra experiments (and murders) were conducted.