http://www.popeater.com/2009/08/24/documents-propofol-killed-michael-jackson/
Propofol Killed Michael Jackson; Death Reportedly Ruled a Homicide
Monday 24 August
Lethal doses of the powerful anesthetic propofol caused the death of Michael Jackson, according to newly unsealed legal documents. Jackson's doctor Conrad Murray said the King of Pop Jackson was suffering from insomnia, and that he had been giving Jackson 50 milligrams of propofol nightly.
Also, an Associated Press source says the Los Angeles County coroner has ruled Jackson's death a homicide.
The Jackson family released a statement Monday afternoon commending the authorities on their hard work. "The Jackson family has full confidence in the legal process, and commends the ongoing efforts of the L.A. County Coroner, the L.A. District Attorney and the L.A. Police Department," the statement said. "The family looks forward to the day that justice can be served."
Murray, who has been at the center of the investigation into Jackson's death, says he dropped the dosage because he feared Jackson was forming an addiction.
He then gave Jackson 25 milligrams of propofol mixed with other sedatives. On June 25, Murray says he gave Jackson valium, lorazepam, midazolam and other drugs. When Jackson still wasn't able to sleep, Murray gave him 25 milligrams of Propofol after Jackson demanded it.
According to the unsealed documents, Murray told police that Jackson was medicated when he left to make phone calls to family members, but was not breathing upon his return. He performed CPR on Jackson, who was rushed to UCLA Medical Center where he was declared dead.
An Associated Press law enforcement claims the death has already been ruled a homicide, reporting the coroner determined a fatal combination of drugs was given to Jackson, causing his death. The AP reports that Murray is already the target of a manslaughter investigation by the LAPD.
According to TMZ, Murray reported Jackson wasn't breathing at around 11 AM, but a 911 call wasn't made until 12:21. Murray made 3 separate calls from 11:18 to 12:05 according to the documents. Murray also refused to sign the death certificate at the UCLA Medical Center, TMZ is reporting.
Authorities said they could find no evidence that Murray ordered or obtained the drugs under his medical license or DEA tracking number. Police did spot at least eight bottles of propofol in the house along with other prescription drugs prescribed to Jackson by Dr. Murray, Dr. Arnold Klein and Dr. Allan Metzger.
Other drugs confiscated in the search of Jackson's house include Clonazepam, Lorazepam, Lorazepam, Tamsulosin, Temazepam, Tizanidine, Trazodone and Valium.
The investigation of Murray's involvement has focused on whether he was negligent in giving Jackson the drug to Jackson outside a hospital setting and whether that justifies an involuntary manslaughter charge.
Last week, Murray released a video in which he claimed he "told the truth and I have faith the truth will prevail."
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
The NEW Edge of Sports t-shirts are here!
E of S Nation: First and foremost, I was on NPR's Talk of the Nation speaking on South African runner Caster Semenya. Check the link below.http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112178722
Also: Finally! The NEW Edge of Sports t-shirts are here! Buy now!
http://edgeofsports.com/product/tshirt/index.html
REPRESENT THE EDGE!
BUY YOUR BRAND NEW EDGE OF SPORTS T-SHIRTS! AND SUPPORT PALESTINIAN TRADE UNIONISTS! JUST $20!
Your new Edge of Sports Tees are printed on shirts made from Certified Organic cotton in Arja Textiles, a factory in Bethlehem Palestine, with union labor from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions.
The design and printing was done by a local Washington DC Industrial Workers of the World apparel print shop, all the proceeds from which are going towards opening a worker-owned and operated clothing recycling and used and new bookstore (read more about this project at: http://dcradicalspace.wordpress.com).
And all for just $20! Smalls also come in sage green.
Just buy it through Pay Pal and we will ship it to you post-haste
In struggle and shirts,
Dave Zirin
Terminator Movie Brings J.D. Salinger Out Of Hiding
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/new_terminator_movie_brings_j_dNew Terminator Movie Brings J.D. Salinger Out Of Hiding
June 8, 2009 Issue 45•24
CORNISH, NH — Famed literary giant and notorious recluse J.D. Salinger, who has not published any new work since 1965, came out of hiding Monday to gush about the new film Terminator Salvation, offering the world its first glimpse into his private life since his last interview nearly 30 years ago.
"I believe that a writer's privacy is among his most precious possessions, in that personal information about him distracts readers from what is most important: the work itself," the author of The Catcher In The Rye told reporters outside the Claremont Cinema 6 theater, moments after seeing the film for the third time. "But on the other hand, the new revival of the Terminator franchise is just way too awesome for me to remain quiet any longer. Hello? Time-travel paradoxes? Freaking amazing!"
"How sweet was it when that giant robot hand reached in through the roof and grabbed that old lady?" Salinger added. "Or when those motorcycle terminators detached from its legs and started speeding toward the escaping resistance fighters? Holy crap, was that fucking cool or what?"
Salinger, 90, explained that he first became a fan of the Terminator franchise in 1991, when he saw Terminator 2: Judgment Day and found the character of the young John Connor to be "a striking figure of teenage alienation and disillusionment." His interest in the series continued with his rental of the first Terminator film, which he described as "almost as awesome as the second one," and his Amazon purchase of Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines on Blu-ray.
Salinger, whose fictional works featuring the Glass family are considered some of the most influential contributions to 20th-century American literature, stated that he "liked Terminator 3 okay," but that it was, in his opinion, "nowhere near as cool as the new film." In fact, the latest installment has so far exceeded his expectations that he has reversed nearly half a century of shunning the media.
In an interview granted to The Paris Review, The New York Review Of Books, Time, Newsweek, and Us Weekly, Salinger called Christian Bale "the most badass version of John Connor yet" and described the film's postapocalyptic war with the machines setting as "totally mind-blowing."
"I admit I was worried about it as first," Salinger explained to enthralled reporters. "The decision to go with McG as the new director seemed like a bad mistake—I mean, he made the Charlie's Angels movies for chrissakes—but boy oh boy was I worried for nothing. T4 may well be more awesome than the first three goddamn films combined, if you can believe that."
Added Salinger, "Those hydrobots are scary as shit."
He then invited reporters into his remote New Hampshire compound to discuss the movie in more detail.
"Come in, come in, sit down, there's plenty of space," an exuberant Salinger told reporters, gesturing around his sitting room, which was filled with movie posters, comic books, and other Terminator collectibles, including a life-sized statue of the T-800 Model terminator as portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. "What a frigging inspired choice to cast Bryce Dallas Howard. She made so much more sense in that part than Claire Danes."
Although the sole film made from Salinger's work, My Foolish Heart, based on his short story "Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut," was considered by Salinger to be such a bastardization of his prose that he never agreed to another adaptation, he now states that "if McG wants to do any of my stuff—'A Perfect Day For Bananafish'; Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters; hell, all of Nine Stories—he has my complete permission. Anything. Anything he wants."
When asked what he thought of today's novelists, and whether he had plans to publish any new work, Salinger replied that he loved it when the helicopter crashes and John Connor gets grabbed by that terminator that's only half a torso, and then he blows it away with the mounted machine gun.
"But by far the best part is when they reveal the T-800 for the first time and it looks just like a young Schwarzenegger," said Salinger, his voice reaching a fever pitch. "I was like, 'Holy shit.' I guess they must've used CGI or something to get that face just right. But what a moment! I practically lost it, if you want to know the truth."
Besides setting the literary community abuzz, Salinger's decision to come out of seclusion has allowed scholars access to his massive archive of unpublished work for the first time. So far, critics have examined three never-before-seen novels, eight novellas, and more than two dozen short stories—all of which appear to be Terminator fan fiction.
"But make no mistake," said Salinger expert Professor Duane Hartworth of nearby Dartmouth College, "this is without a doubt the most personal and affecting body of Terminator fan fiction ever discovered."
Salinger had only one negative comment for interviewers: He condemned the TV spin-off series The Sarah Connor Chronicles, saying that people who like that show are "a bunch of goddamn phonies."
This is Your Brain on Neurotechnology
http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/neuro/your-brain-neurotechnologyThis is Your Brain on Neurotechnology
An Interview with Zack Lynch, author of The Neuro Revolution
Written By: Surfdaddy Orca
August 18, 2009
Zack Lynch is author of The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World (St. Martin's Press, July 2009). Neurotechnology is the emerging science of brain imaging and other new tools for both understanding and influencing our brains.
This well-received and well-written book was conceived as a work of popular science “to broaden the conversation” on what Lynch characterizes as the coming neurosociety. Lynch looks at how neurotechnology will impact the financial markets, law enforcement, politics, advertising and marketing, artistic expression, warfare, and even the nature of human spirituality.
The book has received accolades in the mainstream press (including Jane Pauly, at NBC) and from tech figures like Vint Cerf at Google.
Lynch is the founder and executive director of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization (NIO) and co-founder of NeuroInsights. He serves on the advisory boards of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies, Science Progress, and SocialText, a social software company.
He earned an M.A in economic geography, and a double B.S. in evolutionary biology and environmental science with high honors from UCLA. His master's thesis examined how the Internet transforms communications and commerce.
You can follow Zack on Twitter at @neurorev
h+: You characterize the Neuro Revolution as the next revolution after the agricultural, industrial, and information revolutions. Others have characterized the Nanotechnology Revolution (for example, the ability to assemble goods at the molecular level) as such a paradigm-shattering period. Do you see a relationship between these two upcoming “revolutions?”
ZACK LYNCH: Nanotechnology is an enabling technology that will fundamentally drive progress in the neurotech sector. What makes this fundamentally unique, and why the neurotechnology revolution is so profoundly important, is that we are directing our informational and nano technologies at an entirely new domain of human progress: tools for the human mind.
We've spent human history -- the past several thousand years as I said in the book -- developing tools to improve our physical world. Now we are focused on developing tools that will take our wisdom, knowledge, and capital to develop tools that will improve our inner domain. Nanotechnology will be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of drugs, devices, diagnostics, and brain imaging technologies.
h+: You describe a number of emerging neurotechnologies in your book, fMRI being somewhat the granddaddy of the Neuro Revolution. Where should the smart investor be watching for the next fMRI?
ZL: Physics and biochemistry labs. The latest trend in imaging is combined systems –- fMRI and a whole host of other imaging technologies. One of the issues with fMRI is that it's not very good at temporal resolution. What we're trying to do is marry multiple types of imaging technologies to get more refined spatial and temporal resolution in our imaging systems. GE, Philips, and Siemens are developing these combined systems.
h+: Neurotechnology seems like it's an emerging market.
ZL: It's actually a relatively mature market if you consider first generation neurotechnologies. Last year, companies involved in neurotechnology generated about 140 billion dollars in revenue. This includes drugs, medical and neurological devices, and diagnostics for neurological diseases, psychiatric illness, and nervous system injuries. One of the hallmark characteristics of each technological revolution is that when a technology is developed for one purpose -- let's say for the purpose of creating treatments for brain or nervous system illnesses -- you then begin to see it in a wide variety of different endeavors far beyond it's original intended use.
Imagine a 65-year-old programmer living in San Francisco competing with a 25-year-old in Mumbai. Neither one knows whether the other is using cognitive-enabling drugs.
Who would have thought 10 years ago that we would be using imaging technologies to improve the effectiveness of marketing and advertising? Who would have thought that we would be on the cusp of developing truth detection technologies? Who would have thought that these technologies would be used to understand and perhaps help traders improve their profitability?
What we're seeing across law enforcement, the arts, marketing, entertainment, and warfare is what is means to be human. These technologies are penetrating a wide variety of different endeavors across human society. That -- in and of itself -- highlights the fact that we are witnessing the very early stages of a Neuro Revolution.
h+: Supercomputers are now faster at leveraging trading positions than humans (this is creating a quite a controversy on Wall Street). What role do you see for human neurofinance and neuroeconomics in the financial markets as artificial intelligence continues to gain more sophistication?
ZL: The technology of each previous revolution is required for the succeeding revolution. We couldn't have had the industrial revolution without the agricultural revolution, because we wouldn't have had the specialization of labor that was required for humans to have the wealth and time to be able to develop industrial technologies. We couldn't have had information technologies prior to industrial technology. In the same way, we couldn't have had neurotechnology without the development of information technology – and without its continued development. These are enabling technologies that will continue to develop, and that will support the evolution of more sophisticated neurotechnologies.
If we're talking about specific technologies that will be available to financial traders, one will be neurosoftware applications that will help retrain the brain of financial traders to reduce the human tendency to overestimate. That will require a quite sophisticated understanding of the human neurobiology of decision making. That -- in and of itself --will require computational models that are just beginning to be worked out.
h+: So you envision that humans will still be in the loop as decision makers rather than supercomputers making sophisticated trading decisions?
Right. When things like trading become completely automated over time it's because they're based on models. However, the models don't capture all the elements of our world. And part of what drives financial markets -- which is what I try to get across in the chapter "Finance with Feelings" – is human emotions.
So theoretically, if you have a financial market where there are no human actors, then computers will be making the decisions. In reality, however, human emotions will sway the market. We need to figure out how to work with those emotions to understand how they actually influence the financial markets, and then leverage them. Emotions are very sophisticated computational algorithms that have been developed through hundreds of millions of years of evolution. They allow us to cut through a tremendous amount of information and give us instantaneous feedback on what we should be doing.
h+: You compare the Neuro Revolution to Copernicus's heliocentric notion of the universe as a game changer that will "bring about new ideas of human spirituality that will forever reshape our understanding of humanity's role and place in the universe." This is akin to what Darwin did in the 19th Century with his theory of evolution. What roadblocks do you see to the societal acceptance of the science of something so fundamental as religious belief?
ZL: In the chapter on neurotheology, I try to tackle the question "Where is God?"
Copernicus's heliocentric notion of the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution transformed how humans look at themselves in the cosmos, as well as here on Earth. I believe that advances in brain imaging technology, in addition to neurostimulation technology, can potentially help reveal a new neurospiritual tradition in the coming decades.
Now, will this come without protest? No. Will this be readily adopted? No. But given the history of how breakthrough technologies have changed our perceptions of our place in the universe, I believe that using neurotechnology and diving deeper into the human brain, we will come to understand the neurobiology of spiritual experiences. This isn't to say that God exists within our brains. I'm not saying one way or another, because I don't know. But given history, I'm putting the odds from my perspective that we're going to trip over and discover something that will yet again change how we look at ourselves and our place in the universe.
Through neurotechnology we can possibly accelerate peoples' senses of themselves and their relationship to their higher being.
h+: Sex drove the development of both the videotape markets and the Internet as a commercial entity. Your book only has one specific mention of sex, and yet the application of neuroscience and neurotechnology has great potential to enhance human sexuality. What role do you envision that sex will play in the evolution and marketing of the Neuro Revolution?
ZL: (pause) Isn't it sort of obvious? (laughter) It's not necessarily a major driving force, but sex is an extraordinarily important component of human behavior – if not the fundamental component along with eating – and neurotechnologies will be developed (and they are being developed) to treat people that can't fully appreciate and experience sex. These same technologies will be used by others to improve their sexual experiences. And this doesn't just include drugs, it includes neurostimulation devices.
h+: You describe both oxytocin (important to human bonding) and dopamine as "emoticeuticals" that will likely have a big impact on a future neurosociety. Will these become FDA-regulated drugs like the antidepressants of today?
ZL: The FDA is already involved. But the reality is that we live in a highly complex, global economy. If an individual group or a company can develop safe and effective neurotechnology outside the United States, and it then becomes popular and it's used and creates a competitive advantage for an individual or a company or an entire country, then those technologies will seep back into other countries where perhaps they haven't been legalized.
h+ You also mention the example of Adderall and Ritalin as cognitive performance-enabling drugs that are being used at the universities. Such drugs, and others like them, have the potential to make students more and more competitive. Do you think that such drugs and upcoming related technology, if used at the national level, could result in something like a neurotechnology arms race?
ZL: Like any new set of tools, the set of emerging neurotechnology tools can be used for both good and bad purposes. Today there are college students, Wall Street financiers, software programmers, and even poker players who are using cognitive-enabling drugs to improve their competitive performance.
There is a whole host of ethical, legal, and societal issues with taking drugs generally developed to treat an illness and then using them to help normal humans. There are issues of safety. There are issues of fairness. There are issues of health. And there are issues of coercion. And the reality is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. For example, there are over 100 compounds in clinical development right now focused on treating some form of memory loss. And we expect a small handful of these over the next decade to improve memory in normal humans. So you can imagine the inherent coercive force that will emerge as those treatments become developed. Imagine a 65-year-old programmer living in San Francisco and she's competing with a 25-year-old in Mumbai, India. Neither one knows whether the other is using one of these cognitive-enabling drugs.
And it's not just drugs; there are neurodevices in development that will be able to improve memory and speed learning. What we're going to see is what I call "neuro competition." This is the next form of competition that individuals and businesses and nations will adapt to gain competitive advantage –- except this will be a neuro advantage. Just as companies today compete for a competitive advantage in information technology –- whether it's the latest social software, the latest IT backbone, the latest servers, or the latest customer relationship management systems –- they will use neurotechnologies to improve their competitive positioning.
The new neurotechnologies will come in multiple forms. They will come not just as drugs to improve one's competitive performance, or emotional performance, or physical stamina, but they will also come in emotion-sensing technologies... and one of the really hard questions moving forward is: where does this all go? This was a major reason for writing the book -- to begin to spark a broad public dialog around the societal implications of where this technology might go, and how might we begin to have a conversation around what regulatory options that we might want to start discussing.
h+: Do you see a resurgence of research into substances like LSD as part of the Neuro Revolution?
ZL: There will be continued research into psychoactive substances, although probably not here in the United States. We've got to take into consideration the fact that neuroscientific research is just beginning to emerge in a relatively strong fashion in other countries. It's very sophisticated science –- it's the cutting edge of science. So, while the U.S. and Europe have been leading this basic research in previous decades, emerging companies are coming up from developing nations like China, India, and Brazil where they are starting to develop their own relatively strong neuroscience programs.
h+: You close the book with the idea that a "perception shift" will result from the widespread adoption and application of neurotechnology. What exactly is the role for your Neurotechnology Industry Organization (NIO) in making this come about? And putting on your futurist hat, how quickly do you see this shift occurring?
ZL: NIO is specifically focused -- at this point in history -- on accelerating the development of treatments for the two billion people worldwide that currently suffer from a neurological disease, psychiatric illness, or nervous system injury. We're trying to drive this forward by working with the U.S. Congress on a national neurotechnology initiative. This will be a new billion dollar Federal R&D program aimed at accelerating transitional neuroscience. A bill was introduced into Congress in March of this year. It would supply 40 million dollars to fund research into the ethical, legal, and societal implications of advancing neuroscience.
And when does the perception shift happen? Most likely the 2030s.
How Is America Going To End?
Thanks to Disinfo.com for the following...
http://www.slate.com/id/2223962/
How Is America Going To End?
The world's leading futurologists have four theories.
By Josh Levin
Posted Monday, Aug. 3, 2009
The Global Business Network answers the same question for all its corporate and government clients: What happens next? GBN handles a lot of different whats, and even the occasional what-in-the-hell. In 2003, the group's chairman, Peter Schwartz, and his colleague Doug Randall whipped up a not-so-rosy, 22-page report on "abrupt climate change" for the Department of Defense ("The United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries"). Last year, the municipality of Amsterdam asked the firm to help figure out how it might deal with immigration. GBN has also loaned out its brainpower to Hollywood, advising Minority Report director Steven Spielberg on whether Congress and the Constitution would still exist in 2054. (The answer: yes, with a few buts.)
GBN, which since 2000 has been a part of the management-consulting firm the Monitor Group, specializes in scenario based forecasting. Professional futurologists have long used complex computer models to prognosticate, say, what the Middle East will look like in 2050. The Global Business Network comes up with stories. Schwartz, the group's lead philosopher, argues that "scenario planning"—coming up with a broad array of yarns, "good and bad, expected and surprising"—brings rigor to the inevitably imprecise art of forecasting. "It is critical to push people's imagination out to the very edges of believability to see the full range of the possible," Schwartz and Randall explain in the book Blindside. The best way to reach the outer limits of the imagination, they believe, is to tell a good tale.
Today, I've asked the world's leading provider of futuristic consulting to help me think about America's downfall. I'm at a conference table in the group's San Francisco office with six forecasters, including GBN founders Schwartz, Napier Collyns, and Stewart Brand. Our mission: plot scenarios by which the United States could end in the next 100 years. GBN's head of marketing and communications, Nancy Murphy, suggested the time limit. "Beyond 100 years it gets so science fiction-y," she explains.
Before my meeting, I collect some pointers from Schwartz's foundational scenario-planning text, 1991's The Art of the Long View. He suggests that wannabe futurists inhale science and tech news, embrace fringe cultures (though Schwartz admits that his chats with UFO aficionados "offered no insight about the future"), and look for social trends in nascent cultural phenomena such as gangsta rap and America's Funniest Home Videos. (Forgive him: The book was written 20 years ago.) The big picture: If you want to glimpse the future, seek out remarkable people and open your mind to loony-sounding ideas.
I also learn from Schwartz's book that the sensible futurist prefaces everything by saying "This is not a prediction of the future" — the professional forecaster is not an oracle. That said, Schwartz has made his share of good calls. When Schwartz was the head of scenario planning for Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1980s, his team told the company's higher-ups to watch out for an unknown Soviet pol named Gorbachev. If Gorby were to assume a leadership position, Schwartz said, it would be a strong indication that the USSR would open to the West and oil and natural gas prices would drop. When the price plunge came, Shell execs—having anticipated this eventuality—swooped in and bought oil reserves at a discounted rate.
This morning, in a conference room full of fellow forecasters, Schwartz happily plays the emcee for the end of America. He speaks more quickly and authoritatively than anyone else, and he's the one patrolling the line between what's crazy enough to destroy the United States and what's just plain crazy. His first idea: racial warfare. By 2050, whites will no longer be a majority in the United States and Hispanics will make up an estimated 29 percent of the population. "Most violence is committed by males 18 to 35," Schwartz explains. "Now picture a very large, low-employed Hispanic population of males not too pleased with their lot or their ability to control a white-dominated world. … That population then becomes violent and disruptive. And now you get into racial and identity politics—it's all those illegal immigrants we let across the border." Add in a flailing economy, mega-droughts in the Southwest, and the "Colombianization" of Mexico and you've got The Road Warrior crossed with an unusually rabid episode of Lou Dobbs Tonight.
This is just the beginning. For nearly three hours, we run through America-killers that range from the believable to the science fiction-y: rising sea levels, a collapse of entitlement programs, an attack by a foreign power on American soil, a pandemic 10 times worse than the 1918 flu, global domination by a space-faring nation that uses geo-engineering to "turn off" climate change, and the emergence of a transnational class of biologically enhanced supermen and women ("They're all about 6-2—and that's the girls," Schwartz says) who identify more with one another than with any particular nation.
Despite the fun of imagining America succumbing to the Super Friends, Schwartz believes the most likely scenario for the next 100 years is "that the city of Washington will still be a capital of a nation-state on this continent." America has abundant natural resources, relatively low population density, and—with oceans on both coasts—a built-in security system. The collapse of a country with those inherent advantages sometime in the next century would require a low-probability series of events. But low probability isn't no probability. Schwartz ends our exercise by sketching out the possibilities in a two-by-two box.
Most scenario-planning sessions end with the world stuffed inside a grid. The "scenario matrix" is a means of transforming everything we've learned into a range of credible stories—four futures that are as different as you can possibly make them, covering the broadest range of possible outcomes. Joel Garreau, a longtime Washington Post writer and editor who regularly works with GBN, explains that the scenario matrix is a framework for thinking logically about an illogical subject—a way to minimize the "oogabooga" that's inherent in futurism. When he was contemplating whether to buy a generator in the run-up to Y2K, for example, Garreau drew a matrix of four possible post-Y2K worlds. The generator, he found, would come in handy in only one of his four futures; he didn't buy it.
Ultimately, the American collapse probably won't occur in the next century. If it does, though, it might take one of these four forms. Without any further oogabooga, here's Peter Schwartz's matrix for the end of America:
Collapse: In this scenario, the country has devolved after a series of catastrophes: unchecked climate change, a pandemic, nuclear war—the stuff that Jared Diamond books and disaster movies are made of. A catastrophe that breeds internal division, Schwartz argues, is more likely to eradicate America than any kind of external threat. A country is like a family, he theorizes. If you feel threatened from the outside, you band together—rather than tear the United States apart, 9/11 galvanized us against a common enemy. The laggard response to Hurricane Katrina, on the other hand, meant that our own government became the common enemy. A long, uninterrupted series of nationwide Katrinas—and a concomitant series of bungled federal responses—is the recipe for collapse.
Schwartz submits that government incompetence might not be enough to trigger America's implosion. After all, we could always just vote out the bozos who let us down. What we need to destroy the country, he argues, is Zimbabwe-sized corruption: a succession of executives who pilfer the national treasury and refuse to hold free elections. In that case, the country could fall apart as our national creeds of freedom, democracy, and openness are gradually abandoned.
Friendly breakup: In future No. 2, the country dissolves peacefully because the overhead of running a large nation becomes unmanageable. Schwartz likens this to the breakup of the Soviet Union, a case where the cost of holding the country together proved too great and the advantages too small.
While Igor Panarin—the Russian who forecasts America's demise for 2010—would certainly agree with that idea, making parallels with the USSR seems a bit dubious. Unlike the Eastern bloc, the United States isn't an agglomeration of states with strong ethnic identities. It was foreseeable that a socialist republic like Lithuania, which had its own long-standing culture and language, might someday become an independent nation. In modern America, where English predominates and a highly mobile population flits from place to place, is it possible that some state or region could develop enough distinctiveness to split from the union? GBN's Michael Costigan suggests that self-segregation could lead to an amicable parting of the ways. If Democrats migrate to Democratic cities and Republicans cluster in GOP strongholds, we could reach a point where the redder-than-red states and the bluer-than-blue states decide to go it on their own. Hey, it's the future—it could happen!
Global governance: In our third future, the national government declines in importance relative to the world community. Barack Obama's recent brief in defense of American exceptionalism is just one indicator among many that the United States is nowhere near willing to cede its position as the greatest of the world's great powers. But Slate contributor Robert Wright argues in his book Nonzero that humankind must come together to head off the challenges of the "non-zero-sum," globalized world: climate change, biological weapons, pandemics. While Wright tells me that "you wouldn't need something so centralized" as a souped-up United Nations, he believes that if in the next 100 years "America's identity has not dissolved into some sort of larger body of global governance, then chaos will reign."
Global conquest: The final scenario and the grimmest of all: a figure described variously as a "global Napoleon," "a much more empowered Hitler," and "a super-Mao" conquers America and the rest of the world via brute force. This idea, which Schwartz classifies as the least likely of the four, leads us to debate whether it's harder to subjugate the world than it used to be—Schwartz believes it is, as there are "more people with military competence spread across the world." That's followed by a discussion of the best method to exercise dominion over the globe. "I think the way you conquer the world these days is from space," he says. "You can put weapons up there and shut down the world."
A real GBN client would use this scenario matrix to initiate a change in behavior—a shift in corporate strategy perhaps, or a call for new public policy. For me, the end-of-America scenarios are the stopping point. I'm trying to foresee our pathways to societal upheaval, not prevent it from happening.
Futurologists are generally fairly sanguine about man's ability to save himself, even if they do delight in thinking up dystopias. Jamais Cascio, a former GBN employee who now consults for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Institute for the Future, is a connoisseur of disaster scenarios—worlds torn asunder by ocean acidification and nanoscale weapons—that you weren't aware you should be terrified of. For IFTF's Ten-Year Forecast spring retreat—attended by corporations like Kraft, Procter & Gamble, Nokia, and Wells Fargo—Cascio went beyond the program's usual decadelong timeframe to write up three 50-year forecasts, each laying out a distinct vision of the next half-century. One of the timelines, the "Long Crisis," begins with "global storming," a run of catastrophic weather events around the world. By 2023, the United States has defaulted on its debts to China. Eventually, in the aftermath of Global Famine II, the U.S. breaks into eight pieces. On the plus side, African biohackers find a cure for AIDS in 2026. Yippee! (You can read Cascio's whole "Long Crisis" scenario here.)
Cascio insists that the "Long Crisis" isn't merely a scary story. Rather, his goal is to goad policymakers into dealing with the century's biggest challenges: climate change, Sino-American relations, the global food supply. "What futurists and scenario planners provide is a wind tunnel of sorts," Cascio says. "The scenarios we construct allow organizations to test their strategies, to test their decisions, to say, If we follow Course X, what kinds of outcomes might we expect as the world around us changes?"
For more of Cascio's thoughts on futurology—why it doesn't matter that every detail he comes up with will be wrong, his belief that the United States could break apart in the next 50 years, and how America and China might forge a partnership to fight off an asteroid strike—watch the video below.
Cascio clearly believes that humanity has the ingenuity and the smarts to beat back threats to its continued existence. He doesn't, however, assume that the persistence of the United States is necessarily the most-desirable outcome. It's possible America will collapse as we try desperately to save it—or perhaps the country will shrivel up and go away when its time has come and gone. "It's not necessarily how America will survive," Cascio says, "but how do the values we hold dear … survive even if some of the institutions don't?"
You've seen what the professional forecasters think. Now we want your thoughts on America's demise. With our "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" tool, you can pick the scenarios you think are most likely to terminate the United States and compare your selections with those made by the rest of the Slate audience. At the end of the week, I'll file a report on the most popular choices and investigate what clues your favorite scenarios give us about the American psyche.
http://www.slate.com/id/2223962/
How Is America Going To End?
The world's leading futurologists have four theories.
By Josh Levin
Posted Monday, Aug. 3, 2009
The Global Business Network answers the same question for all its corporate and government clients: What happens next? GBN handles a lot of different whats, and even the occasional what-in-the-hell. In 2003, the group's chairman, Peter Schwartz, and his colleague Doug Randall whipped up a not-so-rosy, 22-page report on "abrupt climate change" for the Department of Defense ("The United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries"). Last year, the municipality of Amsterdam asked the firm to help figure out how it might deal with immigration. GBN has also loaned out its brainpower to Hollywood, advising Minority Report director Steven Spielberg on whether Congress and the Constitution would still exist in 2054. (The answer: yes, with a few buts.)
GBN, which since 2000 has been a part of the management-consulting firm the Monitor Group, specializes in scenario based forecasting. Professional futurologists have long used complex computer models to prognosticate, say, what the Middle East will look like in 2050. The Global Business Network comes up with stories. Schwartz, the group's lead philosopher, argues that "scenario planning"—coming up with a broad array of yarns, "good and bad, expected and surprising"—brings rigor to the inevitably imprecise art of forecasting. "It is critical to push people's imagination out to the very edges of believability to see the full range of the possible," Schwartz and Randall explain in the book Blindside. The best way to reach the outer limits of the imagination, they believe, is to tell a good tale.
Today, I've asked the world's leading provider of futuristic consulting to help me think about America's downfall. I'm at a conference table in the group's San Francisco office with six forecasters, including GBN founders Schwartz, Napier Collyns, and Stewart Brand. Our mission: plot scenarios by which the United States could end in the next 100 years. GBN's head of marketing and communications, Nancy Murphy, suggested the time limit. "Beyond 100 years it gets so science fiction-y," she explains.
Before my meeting, I collect some pointers from Schwartz's foundational scenario-planning text, 1991's The Art of the Long View. He suggests that wannabe futurists inhale science and tech news, embrace fringe cultures (though Schwartz admits that his chats with UFO aficionados "offered no insight about the future"), and look for social trends in nascent cultural phenomena such as gangsta rap and America's Funniest Home Videos. (Forgive him: The book was written 20 years ago.) The big picture: If you want to glimpse the future, seek out remarkable people and open your mind to loony-sounding ideas.
I also learn from Schwartz's book that the sensible futurist prefaces everything by saying "This is not a prediction of the future" — the professional forecaster is not an oracle. That said, Schwartz has made his share of good calls. When Schwartz was the head of scenario planning for Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1980s, his team told the company's higher-ups to watch out for an unknown Soviet pol named Gorbachev. If Gorby were to assume a leadership position, Schwartz said, it would be a strong indication that the USSR would open to the West and oil and natural gas prices would drop. When the price plunge came, Shell execs—having anticipated this eventuality—swooped in and bought oil reserves at a discounted rate.
This morning, in a conference room full of fellow forecasters, Schwartz happily plays the emcee for the end of America. He speaks more quickly and authoritatively than anyone else, and he's the one patrolling the line between what's crazy enough to destroy the United States and what's just plain crazy. His first idea: racial warfare. By 2050, whites will no longer be a majority in the United States and Hispanics will make up an estimated 29 percent of the population. "Most violence is committed by males 18 to 35," Schwartz explains. "Now picture a very large, low-employed Hispanic population of males not too pleased with their lot or their ability to control a white-dominated world. … That population then becomes violent and disruptive. And now you get into racial and identity politics—it's all those illegal immigrants we let across the border." Add in a flailing economy, mega-droughts in the Southwest, and the "Colombianization" of Mexico and you've got The Road Warrior crossed with an unusually rabid episode of Lou Dobbs Tonight.
This is just the beginning. For nearly three hours, we run through America-killers that range from the believable to the science fiction-y: rising sea levels, a collapse of entitlement programs, an attack by a foreign power on American soil, a pandemic 10 times worse than the 1918 flu, global domination by a space-faring nation that uses geo-engineering to "turn off" climate change, and the emergence of a transnational class of biologically enhanced supermen and women ("They're all about 6-2—and that's the girls," Schwartz says) who identify more with one another than with any particular nation.
Despite the fun of imagining America succumbing to the Super Friends, Schwartz believes the most likely scenario for the next 100 years is "that the city of Washington will still be a capital of a nation-state on this continent." America has abundant natural resources, relatively low population density, and—with oceans on both coasts—a built-in security system. The collapse of a country with those inherent advantages sometime in the next century would require a low-probability series of events. But low probability isn't no probability. Schwartz ends our exercise by sketching out the possibilities in a two-by-two box.
Most scenario-planning sessions end with the world stuffed inside a grid. The "scenario matrix" is a means of transforming everything we've learned into a range of credible stories—four futures that are as different as you can possibly make them, covering the broadest range of possible outcomes. Joel Garreau, a longtime Washington Post writer and editor who regularly works with GBN, explains that the scenario matrix is a framework for thinking logically about an illogical subject—a way to minimize the "oogabooga" that's inherent in futurism. When he was contemplating whether to buy a generator in the run-up to Y2K, for example, Garreau drew a matrix of four possible post-Y2K worlds. The generator, he found, would come in handy in only one of his four futures; he didn't buy it.
Ultimately, the American collapse probably won't occur in the next century. If it does, though, it might take one of these four forms. Without any further oogabooga, here's Peter Schwartz's matrix for the end of America:
Collapse: In this scenario, the country has devolved after a series of catastrophes: unchecked climate change, a pandemic, nuclear war—the stuff that Jared Diamond books and disaster movies are made of. A catastrophe that breeds internal division, Schwartz argues, is more likely to eradicate America than any kind of external threat. A country is like a family, he theorizes. If you feel threatened from the outside, you band together—rather than tear the United States apart, 9/11 galvanized us against a common enemy. The laggard response to Hurricane Katrina, on the other hand, meant that our own government became the common enemy. A long, uninterrupted series of nationwide Katrinas—and a concomitant series of bungled federal responses—is the recipe for collapse.
Schwartz submits that government incompetence might not be enough to trigger America's implosion. After all, we could always just vote out the bozos who let us down. What we need to destroy the country, he argues, is Zimbabwe-sized corruption: a succession of executives who pilfer the national treasury and refuse to hold free elections. In that case, the country could fall apart as our national creeds of freedom, democracy, and openness are gradually abandoned.
Friendly breakup: In future No. 2, the country dissolves peacefully because the overhead of running a large nation becomes unmanageable. Schwartz likens this to the breakup of the Soviet Union, a case where the cost of holding the country together proved too great and the advantages too small.
While Igor Panarin—the Russian who forecasts America's demise for 2010—would certainly agree with that idea, making parallels with the USSR seems a bit dubious. Unlike the Eastern bloc, the United States isn't an agglomeration of states with strong ethnic identities. It was foreseeable that a socialist republic like Lithuania, which had its own long-standing culture and language, might someday become an independent nation. In modern America, where English predominates and a highly mobile population flits from place to place, is it possible that some state or region could develop enough distinctiveness to split from the union? GBN's Michael Costigan suggests that self-segregation could lead to an amicable parting of the ways. If Democrats migrate to Democratic cities and Republicans cluster in GOP strongholds, we could reach a point where the redder-than-red states and the bluer-than-blue states decide to go it on their own. Hey, it's the future—it could happen!
Global governance: In our third future, the national government declines in importance relative to the world community. Barack Obama's recent brief in defense of American exceptionalism is just one indicator among many that the United States is nowhere near willing to cede its position as the greatest of the world's great powers. But Slate contributor Robert Wright argues in his book Nonzero that humankind must come together to head off the challenges of the "non-zero-sum," globalized world: climate change, biological weapons, pandemics. While Wright tells me that "you wouldn't need something so centralized" as a souped-up United Nations, he believes that if in the next 100 years "America's identity has not dissolved into some sort of larger body of global governance, then chaos will reign."
Global conquest: The final scenario and the grimmest of all: a figure described variously as a "global Napoleon," "a much more empowered Hitler," and "a super-Mao" conquers America and the rest of the world via brute force. This idea, which Schwartz classifies as the least likely of the four, leads us to debate whether it's harder to subjugate the world than it used to be—Schwartz believes it is, as there are "more people with military competence spread across the world." That's followed by a discussion of the best method to exercise dominion over the globe. "I think the way you conquer the world these days is from space," he says. "You can put weapons up there and shut down the world."
A real GBN client would use this scenario matrix to initiate a change in behavior—a shift in corporate strategy perhaps, or a call for new public policy. For me, the end-of-America scenarios are the stopping point. I'm trying to foresee our pathways to societal upheaval, not prevent it from happening.
Futurologists are generally fairly sanguine about man's ability to save himself, even if they do delight in thinking up dystopias. Jamais Cascio, a former GBN employee who now consults for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Institute for the Future, is a connoisseur of disaster scenarios—worlds torn asunder by ocean acidification and nanoscale weapons—that you weren't aware you should be terrified of. For IFTF's Ten-Year Forecast spring retreat—attended by corporations like Kraft, Procter & Gamble, Nokia, and Wells Fargo—Cascio went beyond the program's usual decadelong timeframe to write up three 50-year forecasts, each laying out a distinct vision of the next half-century. One of the timelines, the "Long Crisis," begins with "global storming," a run of catastrophic weather events around the world. By 2023, the United States has defaulted on its debts to China. Eventually, in the aftermath of Global Famine II, the U.S. breaks into eight pieces. On the plus side, African biohackers find a cure for AIDS in 2026. Yippee! (You can read Cascio's whole "Long Crisis" scenario here.)
Cascio insists that the "Long Crisis" isn't merely a scary story. Rather, his goal is to goad policymakers into dealing with the century's biggest challenges: climate change, Sino-American relations, the global food supply. "What futurists and scenario planners provide is a wind tunnel of sorts," Cascio says. "The scenarios we construct allow organizations to test their strategies, to test their decisions, to say, If we follow Course X, what kinds of outcomes might we expect as the world around us changes?"
For more of Cascio's thoughts on futurology—why it doesn't matter that every detail he comes up with will be wrong, his belief that the United States could break apart in the next 50 years, and how America and China might forge a partnership to fight off an asteroid strike—watch the video below.
Cascio clearly believes that humanity has the ingenuity and the smarts to beat back threats to its continued existence. He doesn't, however, assume that the persistence of the United States is necessarily the most-desirable outcome. It's possible America will collapse as we try desperately to save it—or perhaps the country will shrivel up and go away when its time has come and gone. "It's not necessarily how America will survive," Cascio says, "but how do the values we hold dear … survive even if some of the institutions don't?"
You've seen what the professional forecasters think. Now we want your thoughts on America's demise. With our "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" tool, you can pick the scenarios you think are most likely to terminate the United States and compare your selections with those made by the rest of the Slate audience. At the end of the week, I'll file a report on the most popular choices and investigate what clues your favorite scenarios give us about the American psyche.
Inside The LC: Part XIV
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr106.html
Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation
Part XIV
March 17, 2009
Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in hell
Could break that Satan’s spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died
- Don McLean, American Pie
(... continued from Part XIII )
Once ensconced in the hills above Los Angeles, Gram Parsons and his band began recording what would prove to be their only album, Safe at Home, which some pop music historians regard as the first country-rock album, but others regard as a straight country album performed by guys who look like they should be playing in a rock band. Whatever the case, by the time the album was released, in 1968, Gram had disbanded the International Submarine Band and unofficially joined the Byrds, replacing the recently departed David Crosby, who had determined that there wasn’t quite room in the band for both he and his ego.
Parsons’ time with the Byrds was rather brief, just four to five months, after which he was replaced by virtuoso guitarist Clarence White, who had been part of the Cambridge folk scene. Despite his brief tenure, Parsons is credited with having a major influence on the album that the band produced during that period, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which is also regarded by some music aficionados as the first true country-rock album.
Soon after leaving the Byrds, Parsons ran into Richie Furay, who was casting about for a new band after the breakup of Laurel Canyon’s own Buffalo Springfield. Gram and Furay considered working together but quickly realized that they wanted to go in different musical directions, so Furay went to work putting Poco together while Parsons assembled the Flying Burrito Brothers. By 1969, Gram’s new band had taken shape, with Gram supplying lead vocals and guitar, Chris Hillman also on guitar, Chris Etheridge on bass, and “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow on pedal steel guitar. With various other local musicians sitting in, the band recorded and released The Gilded Palace of Sin, which is probably also regarded by some as the first true country-rock album. Byrd Michael Clarke would later join the band, as would soon-to-be-Eagle Bernie Leadon.
Also in 1969, late in the year, 23-year-old Gram hooked up with 16-year-old Gretchen Burrell. His new love interest was the daughter of high-profile news anchor Larry Burrell, who was very well-connected in Hollywood. Before long, Gretchen had moved into Parsons’ place at the notorious Chateau Marmont Hotel, with her parents’ blessings – because most wealthy parents, I would think, want their teenage daughter living in a debauched rock star’s drug den. Another guest at the hotel at that same time, incidentally, was Rod Stewart (at whose home, readers of Programmed to Kill will recall, one of the victims of the so-called Sunset Strip Killers would later be last seen).
At the tail end of 1969, Parsons and his fellow Burrito Brothers had the dubious distinction of playing as one of the opening acts at the Rolling Stones’ infamous free show at Altamont. Gram had become a very close confidant of the Stones, particularly Keith Richards, and he would later be credited with being the inspiration for the country flavor evident on the Stones’ Let it Bleed album.
Parsons had first met up with the Stones when they were in Los Angeles in the summer of 1968 to mix their Beggar’s Banquet album. Also hooking up with the Stones around that same time was Phil Kaufman, a recently-released prison buddy of Charlie Manson. Kaufman initially lived with the Manson Family after being released in March of 1968, and he thereafter remained what Kaufman himself described as a “sympathetic cousin” to Charlie. He also went to work as the Rolling Stones’ road manager for their 1968 American tour, which is the type of job apparently best filled by ex-convict friends of Charles Manson.
In late summer of 1969, following the probable murder of Brian Jones in July, the Stones were back in LA to complete their Let It Bleed album and prepare for yet another tour. According to Ben Fong-Torres, writing in Hickory Wind, “Mick and Keith stayed at Stephen Stills’s [sic] house near Laurel Canyon … Before Stills, the house had been occupied by Peter Tork of the Monkees.” (For the record, other reports hold that the Peter Tork house was in, not near, Laurel Canyon.)
The Angels part the crowd at Altamont
On December 6, 1969, temporary Laurel Canyon residents Mick and Keith, along with permanent Laurel Canyon residents Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and the Flying Burrito Brothers, all gathered at a desolate speedway known as Altamont to stage a free concert. By the time it was over, four people were dead and another 850 concert-goers were injured to varying degrees, mostly by members of the Hell’s Angels swinging leaded pool cues.
The Angels had, of course, been hired by the Stones to ostensibly provide security. That decision is almost universally cast as an innocent mistake on the part of the band, though such a claim is difficult to believe. It was certainly no secret that the reactionary motorcycle clubs, formed by former military men, were openly hostile to hippies and anti-war activists; as early as 1965, they had brutally attacked peaceful anti-war demonstrators while police, who had courteously allowed the Angels to pass through their line, looked on. It was also known that the Angels were heavily involved in trafficking meth, a drug that was widely blamed for the ugliness that had descended over the Haight.
Perhaps less well known was that more than a few of those biker gangs had uncomfortably close ties to Charlie Manson, particularly a club known as the Straight Satans, one of whose members, Danny DeCarlo, watched over the Family’s arsenal of weapons. At least one of the performers taking the stage at Altamont, curiously enough, also had close ties to the motorcycle clubs; as was revealed in his autobiography, Crosby “had friends in every Bay Area chapter of the Hells Angels.”
The death that the concert at Altamont will always be remembered for, of course, is that of Meredith Hunter, the young man who was stabbed to death by members of the Hell’s Angels right in front of the stage while the band (in this case, the Rolling Stones) played on. The song they were playing, contrary to most accounts of the incident, was Sympathy for the Devil, as was initially reported in Rolling Stone magazine based on the accounts of several reporters on the scene and a review of the unedited film stock.
Most accounts claim that Hunter was killed while the band performed Under My Thumb. All such claims are based on the mainstream snuff film Gimme Shelter, in which the killing was deliberately presented out of sequence. In the absence of any alternative filmic versions of Hunter’s death, the Maysles brothers’ film became the default official orthodoxy. Of course, someone went to great lengths to insure that there would be only one available version of events; as Rolling Stone also reported, shortly after the concert, “One weird Altamont story has to do with a young Berkeley filmmaker who claims to have gotten 8MM footage of the killing. He got home from the affair Saturday and began telling his friends about his amazing film. His house was knocked over the next night, completely rifled. The thief took only his film, nothing else.”
Contrary to the impression created by Gimme Shelter, Hunter was killed not long into the Stones’ set. But as the film’s editor, Charlotte Zwerin, explained to Salon some thirty years later, the climax of the movie always has to come at the end: “We’re talking about the structure of a film. And what kind of concert film are you going to be able to have after somebody has been murdered in front of the stage? Hanging around for another hour would have been really wrong in terms of the film.” What wasn’t wrong, apparently, was deliberately altering the sequence of events in what was ostensibly a documentary film.
One of the young cameramen working for the Maysles brothers that day, curiously enough, was a guy by the name of George Lucas (it is unclear whether it was Lucas who captured the conveniently unobstructed footage of the murder.) Not long after, Lucas began a meteoric rise to the very top of the Hollywood food chain. Also present that day, and featured in the film gyrating atop a raised platform near the stage, was the King of the Freaks himself, Vito Paulekas.
Many of the accounts of the tragedy at Altamont include the demonstrably false claim that Hunter can unmistakably be seen drawing a gun just before being jumped and killed by the Angels (some accounts even have Hunter firing the alleged gun). The relevant frames from the film are included here for your review. What can certainly be fairly clearly seen is the large knife being brought down into Hunter’s back. But a gun being brandished by Mr. Hunter? If you can see one, then you either have far better eyes than I, or a far more active imagination. Or both.
The Angel who was charged with the murder and then ultimately acquitted, Alan David Passaro, was found floating facedown in a reservoir in March of 1985 with $10,000 in his pocket. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, Passaro’s acquittal was not based on the jury having been convinced that Hunter had drawn a gun, but rather on the fact that the knife wounds that killed Hunter were apparently upstrokes, which meant that they were not the wounds inflicted on-camera by Passaro. He and/or someone else continued to stab Hunter after he was down, and it was those wounds, which the cameras didn’t clearly record, that killed him.
About one year after Altamont, otherwise obscure singer/songwriter Don McLean penned the lyrics to what was destined to become one of the most iconic songs in the annals of popular music: American Pie. Those lyrics are essentially a chronological recitation of various tragedies that shaped the world of popular music. Not long after a reference to the August 1969 Manson murders and their connection to the Laurel Canyon music scene (Helter Skelter in a summer swelter, The birds flew off with a fallout shelter, Eight miles high and falling fast), and just before a reference to the October 1970 death of Janis Joplin (I met a girl who sang the blues, And I asked her for some happy news, but she just smiled and turned away, I went down to the sacred store, Where I’d heard the music years before, but the man there said the music wouldn’t play), can be found a verse, reproduced at the top of this post, in which McLean characterizes the death of Hunter as a ritualized murder.
I, of course, would never make such a wild and reckless claim.
As was the custom with big events in the mid to late-1960s, particularly in the northern California area, Altamont was drenched in acid. And as was also the custom at that time, that acid was provided free-of-charge by Mr. Augustus Owsley Stanley III, also known as The Bear. At the so-called “Human Be-In” staged in January of 1967, for example, Owsley had kindly distributed 10,000 tabs of potent LSD. For the Monterey Pop Festival just five months later, he had cooked up and distributed 14,000 tabs. For Altamont, he did likewise.
The 1960s were, you see – and you can look this up if you don’t believe me – the era of brotherly love. So if someone happened to have, say, a cache of acid with a street value of $20,000-$30,000 (a considerable amount of money in the 1960s), he was naturally expected to hand it out for free to thousands of random strangers. Of course, probably the only person who routinely had such vast stockpiles of LSD was the premier acid chemist of the hippie era, Augustus Owsley Stanley.
No one – not Ken Kesey, not Richard “Babawhateverthefuckhecalledhimself” Alpert, not even Timothy Leary – did more to ‘turn on’ the youth of the 1960s than Owsley. Leary and his cohorts may have captured the national media spotlight and created public awareness, but it was Owsley who flooded the streets of San Francisco and elsewhere with consistently high quality, inexpensive, readily available acid. By most accounts, he was never in it for the money and he routinely gave away more of his product than he sold. What then was his motive? According to Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, writing in Acid Dreams, “Owsley cultivated an image as a wizard-alchemist whose intentions with LSD were priestly and magical.”
To be sure, Owsley is revered by many as something of an icon of the 1960s counterculture – a man motivated by nothing more than an altruistic desire to ‘turn on’ the world. But then again, the trio listed in the preceding paragraph are revered by many as well, so you’ll excuse me if I’m a bit hesitant to embrace Owsley as some sort of anti-hero – especially given his rather provocative background and family history.
The Angels appear to be quite pleased with the murder of Hunter 
Jagger at Altamont
After his stint in the Air Force, Owsley set up camp in the Los Angeles area, ostensibly to study ballet. During that same time, he also worked at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was undoubtedly the primary reason for his move to LA. In 1963, Owsley moved once again, this time to Berkeley, California, which just happened to be ground-zero of the budding anti-war movement. He may or may not have briefly attended UC Berkeley, which is where he allegedly cribbed the recipe for LSD from the university library.
Owsley soon began cooking up both Methedrine and LSD in a makeshift bathroom lab near the campus of the university. On February 21, 1965, that lab was raided by state narcotics agents who seized all his lab equipment and charged Stanley with operating a meth lab. As Barry Miles recounted in Hippie, “Berkeley was awash with speed and Owsley was responsible for much of it.” Nevertheless, Owsley walked away from the raid unscathed, and, with the help of his attorney, who happened to be the vice-mayor of Berkeley, he even successfully sued to have all his lab equipment returned. He quickly put that equipment to work producing some 4,000,000 tabs of nearly pure LSD in the mid-1960s.
Also in February of 1965, Owsley and his frequent sidekicks, the Grateful Dead, moved down to the Watts area of Los Angeles, of all places, to ostensibly conduct ‘acid tests.’ The group rented a house that was conveniently located right next door to a brothel, curiously paralleling the modus operandi of various intelligence operatives who were (or had been) involved in conducting their own ‘acid tests.’ The band departed the communal dwelling in April 1965, just a few months before Watts exploded in violence that left thirty-four corpses littering the streets.
Owsley had been with the Dead from the band’s earliest days, as both a financial backer and as their sound engineer. He is credited with numerous electronic innovations that changed the way that live rock music was presented to the masses – and likely not in a good way, given that his work as a sound technician undoubtedly drew heavily upon his military training.
In 1967, Owsley unleashed on the Haight a particularly nasty hallucinogen known as STP. Developed by the friendly folks at Dow Chemical, STP had been tested extensively at the Edgewood Arsenal as a possible biowarfare agent before being distributed to hippies as a recreational drug. Owsley reportedly obtained the recipe from Alexander Shulgin, a former Harvard man who developed a keen interest in psychopharmacology while serving in the U.S. Navy. Shulgin worked for many years as a senior research chemist at Dow, and later worked very closely with the DEA.
In 1970, Owsley began serving time after a conviction on drug charges. That time was served, appropriately enough, at Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution, the very same prison that had, just a few years earlier, housed both Charlie Manson and Phil Kaufman. A few years later, it would also be home to both Timothy Leary and his alleged (but not actual) nemesis, G. Gordon Liddy. After his release, Owsley continued to work as a sound technician, eventually graduating to a new medium: television.
After that rather lengthy digression, we return now to our regularly scheduled program: the Gram Parsons saga. Along with Mick and the boys, Gram made a hasty exit from the chaos at Altamont via the Stones’ private helicopter. The next year, his Flying Burrito Brothers released their second album, Burrito Deluxe, which was produced by Jim Dickson, the man who played such a pivotal role in shaping Laurel Canyon’s first band, the Byrds. By June, Parsons had been booted out of the band, reportedly due to chronic alcohol and drug abuse. He quickly signed with A&M Records and was partnered with our old friend Terry Melcher.
Gram became a regular visitor to Melcher’s Benedict Canyon home, where the self-destructive pair worked on songs together, with Gram on guitar and Melcher on piano. John Phillips became a close associate of Parsons at this time as well. Meanwhile, sister Avis had been institutionalized back in New Orleans. She had gotten pregnant, after which Bob Parsons had moved quickly to have her committed and to have her marriage annulled. Little Avis reached out repeatedly to big brother Gram for help, but got none.
In late October of 1970, Gram went to A&M and signed out the master tapes of ten songs that he had recorded with Melcher; those tapes were never seen or heard again, as seems to happen from time-to-time with recordings made with Melcher. During roughly that same period of time, Parsons was busted with a briefcase full of prescription drugs. As would be expected, however, the charges were quietly dropped and Gram walked away unscathed.
There are many who claim, by the way, that the musicians under examination in this series were relentlessly persecuted by agents of the state, ostensibly to silence their voices of protest. But if that is true, then why is it that on more than one occasion when the state seems to have had solid evidence of crimes that could bring prison time, no action was taken? Our old friend David Crosby, for example, has candidly acknowledged that “the DEA could have popped me for interstate transport of dope or dealing lots of times and never did …” And John Phillips, busted for wholesale trafficking of pharmaceuticals, was, by his own account, “looking at forty-five years and got thirty days.” He began serving his sentence on April 20, appropriately enough, and served just twenty-four days – in a minimum security prison that offered “residents” such activities as “basketball, aerobics, softball, tennis, archery, and golf,” and that featured a “delicious kosher kitchen, an elaborate salad bar, and a tasty brunch on Sundays.”
Sorry, but we seem to have drifted off course once again. I’ll try to stay focused on the Gram Parsons story for the rest of this post.
In 1971, Gram married Gretchen Burrell. The lavish affair was held, curiously enough, at the New Orleans home of step-dad Bob Parsons, a fact that has left Gram’s chroniclers somewhat puzzled. Bob Parsons was, after all, the man who had – at least in the eyes of many family members – terrorized and institutionalized Gram’s younger sister, carried on a scandalous affair with the family’s babysitter, murdered Gram’s mother and subsequently married that babysitter, and repeatedly looted the family coffers. And yet it was Bob Parsons, of all people, whom Gram trusted to host his wedding, suggesting a bond between the two that would seem to defy conventional explanations.
That same year, Gram spent some time in France, hanging out once again with the Rolling Stones. The following year, he was signed to Reprise Records by Mo Ostin and he and Gretchen moved back into the Chateau Marmont, where Gram and Emmylou Harris began working on the songs that would make up his first solo album. Emmylou, as Fong-Torres notes, had been raised on “various military bases around Virginia,” so she quickly fit right in with the Laurel Canyon crowd.
In 1973, with his first solo album, entitled simply GP, due for release, “Gram and Gretchen finally moved out of the Chateau Marmont and found a cozy brown wood-shingled house on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, which wound its way north from Hollywood through the stars’ favorite canyon.” Working once again with Emmylou, Gram began working on tracks for what would be his posthumously-released second solo album, Grievous Angel.
As July of 1973 rolled around, a series of tragedies befell Parsons and the people around him. In July of the previous year, Gram’s friend Brandon DeWilde – who had introduced Gram to Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson, resulting in Gram’s involvement in The Trip – had been killed in a traffic accident. A year later, on July 15, 1973, Gram’s friend and fellow musician, Clarence White, was hit by a car and killed. According to Fong-Torres, “Around the same time that Clarence White was killed, Sid Kaiser, a familiar face in the Los Angeles rock scene, a close friend of Gram’s and, not so incidentally, a source of high-quality drugs, died of a heart attack.” Just after those two deaths, “In late July 1973 … [Gram’s] house in Laurel Canyon burned down.”
Other sources, for the record, have placed that house in Topanga Canyon rather than Laurel Canyon. Whatever the case, Gram was home when the house caught fire and was briefly hospitalized for smoke inhalation. Having lost their home and all their possessions, Gram and Gretchen “moved into Gretchen’s father’s spacious home on Mulholland Drive in Laurel Canyon.” Because the Burrells, naturally enough, also lived in everyone’s favorite canyon.
Gram wouldn’t live in the Burrell estate long though; on September 19, 1973, Ingram Cecil Connor III died in a nondescript room at the Joshua Tree Inn. His death is usually attributed to a drug overdose, but toxicology reports suggest otherwise. Parsons’ death received minimal press coverage, partly because, as fate would have it, singer/songwriter Jim Croce went down in a blaze of glory the very next day, on September 20, 1973. But though the media had moved on, the Gram Parsons story wasn’t quite over yet.
Parsons had been a regular visitor to Joshua Tree National Park, where one of his favorite pastimes was said to be ingesting hallucinogenic drugs and then searching for UFOs. Sometimes he would take friends, such as Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, along with him to help with the search. I’m no expert, to be sure, but it seems to me that if your goal is to succeed in spotting UFOs, then the dropping-acid strategy is probably a pretty good approach. But again, that’s not really my area of expertise.
In September of 1973, Gram was accompanied to Joshua Tree by his personal assistant, Michael Martin, Martin’s girlfriend, Dale McElroy, and Parson’s former high school sweetheart, Margaret Fisher. As the story goes, the group soon ran out of pot and quickly dispatched Martin back to LA to pick up a fresh supply. He was, therefore, officially not there at the time of Gram’s death, though why he hadn’t returned has never been explained, especially given that his job was, specifically, to keep an eye on Gram and monitor his drug intake.
How Gram Parsons died is anyone’s guess. There are as many versions of the event as there were witnesses to it. Actually, that’s not quite true – there are more versions than there were witnesses, because some of those witnesses have told more than one story. Officially, Parsons died of an overdose, but forensic testing revealed no morphine or barbiturates in his blood. Morphine showed up in his liver and urine, but as experts have noted, those toxicology results indicate chronic, but not recent, use.
Police seem to have had little interest in getting at the truth and made no apparent effort to reconcile the various conflicting accounts. Details of the incident – such as how long Gram had been left alone, whether he was still alive when discovered, who made that discovery, etc. – were wildly inconsistent in the accounts of Fisher, McElroy, and Frank and Alan Barbary (the Inn’s owner and his son, who were also witnesses, and whose accounts conflicted both with each other and with the girls’ accounts).
At the hospital, police spoke briefly with the two girls and then released them. Within two hours, Phil Kaufman was on the scene to pick up Fisher and McElroy. Bypassing the police and the hospital, Kaufman went directly to the Inn, which the girls had returned to, and quickly hustled them straight back to LA. Police never spoke to either of the women again, despite the conflicting accounts and the open question of what exactly it was that killed Gram.
On the autumnal equinox of 1973, Kaufman and Martin, driving a dilapidated hearse provided by McElroy, arrived at LAX to claim the body of Gram Parsons. Apparently no one, including the police officer who was nearby, found it at all unusual that two drunken, disheveled men in an obviously out-of-service hearse (it had no license plates and several broken windows) had arrived without any paperwork to claim the body of a deceased celebrity. In fact, according to Kaufman’s dubious account, the cop even helped the pair load the casket into the hearse – and then looked the other way when Martin slammed the hearse into a wall on the way out of the hangar.
Kaufman and Martin then drove the body back out to Joshua Tree, doused it with gasoline and set it ablaze. Local police initially speculated that the cremation was “ritualistic,” which indeed it was, but such reports were, and continue to be, scoffed at.
On September 26, LAPD detectives, led by anchorman Larry Burrell, came knocking on Kaufman’s door with warrants to serve. Bizarrely enough, director Arthur Penn was there with a full crew shooting scenes for the film Night Moves with star Gene Hackman (because when you’re a friend of Charlie Manson’s, it would appear, everyone in Hollywood wants to hang out with you). While the crew continued working, Kaufman was taken in, but he was back just a few hours later. In the end, he and Martin were fined $300 each plus reimbursement for the cost of the coffin.
In January 1974, four months after his death, Grievous Angel was released to critical acclaim and public indifference. Later that year, Gram’s adoptive father, Bob Parsons, died as well, reportedly of alcohol-related illness. He had apparently been making moves aimed at gaining control of the deceased musician’s estate. In keeping with family tradition, Bob failed to make it to the age of fifty (Gram’s real dad, Coon Dog, had died at forty-one, his mother at forty-two, and Gram at just twenty-six).
By sheer coincidence, no doubt, the deaths of Gram and Bob Parsons were followed by the bankruptcy of much of the Snively family business, which also occurred in 1974. Around that same time, Little Avis gave birth to daughter Flora. Sixteen years later, both were killed in a boating accident in Virginia. Avis had made it all the way to age forty.
Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation
Part XIV
March 17, 2009
Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in hell
Could break that Satan’s spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died
- Don McLean, American Pie
(... continued from Part XIII )
Once ensconced in the hills above Los Angeles, Gram Parsons and his band began recording what would prove to be their only album, Safe at Home, which some pop music historians regard as the first country-rock album, but others regard as a straight country album performed by guys who look like they should be playing in a rock band. Whatever the case, by the time the album was released, in 1968, Gram had disbanded the International Submarine Band and unofficially joined the Byrds, replacing the recently departed David Crosby, who had determined that there wasn’t quite room in the band for both he and his ego.
Parsons’ time with the Byrds was rather brief, just four to five months, after which he was replaced by virtuoso guitarist Clarence White, who had been part of the Cambridge folk scene. Despite his brief tenure, Parsons is credited with having a major influence on the album that the band produced during that period, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which is also regarded by some music aficionados as the first true country-rock album.
Soon after leaving the Byrds, Parsons ran into Richie Furay, who was casting about for a new band after the breakup of Laurel Canyon’s own Buffalo Springfield. Gram and Furay considered working together but quickly realized that they wanted to go in different musical directions, so Furay went to work putting Poco together while Parsons assembled the Flying Burrito Brothers. By 1969, Gram’s new band had taken shape, with Gram supplying lead vocals and guitar, Chris Hillman also on guitar, Chris Etheridge on bass, and “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow on pedal steel guitar. With various other local musicians sitting in, the band recorded and released The Gilded Palace of Sin, which is probably also regarded by some as the first true country-rock album. Byrd Michael Clarke would later join the band, as would soon-to-be-Eagle Bernie Leadon.
Also in 1969, late in the year, 23-year-old Gram hooked up with 16-year-old Gretchen Burrell. His new love interest was the daughter of high-profile news anchor Larry Burrell, who was very well-connected in Hollywood. Before long, Gretchen had moved into Parsons’ place at the notorious Chateau Marmont Hotel, with her parents’ blessings – because most wealthy parents, I would think, want their teenage daughter living in a debauched rock star’s drug den. Another guest at the hotel at that same time, incidentally, was Rod Stewart (at whose home, readers of Programmed to Kill will recall, one of the victims of the so-called Sunset Strip Killers would later be last seen).
At the tail end of 1969, Parsons and his fellow Burrito Brothers had the dubious distinction of playing as one of the opening acts at the Rolling Stones’ infamous free show at Altamont. Gram had become a very close confidant of the Stones, particularly Keith Richards, and he would later be credited with being the inspiration for the country flavor evident on the Stones’ Let it Bleed album.
Parsons had first met up with the Stones when they were in Los Angeles in the summer of 1968 to mix their Beggar’s Banquet album. Also hooking up with the Stones around that same time was Phil Kaufman, a recently-released prison buddy of Charlie Manson. Kaufman initially lived with the Manson Family after being released in March of 1968, and he thereafter remained what Kaufman himself described as a “sympathetic cousin” to Charlie. He also went to work as the Rolling Stones’ road manager for their 1968 American tour, which is the type of job apparently best filled by ex-convict friends of Charles Manson.
In late summer of 1969, following the probable murder of Brian Jones in July, the Stones were back in LA to complete their Let It Bleed album and prepare for yet another tour. According to Ben Fong-Torres, writing in Hickory Wind, “Mick and Keith stayed at Stephen Stills’s [sic] house near Laurel Canyon … Before Stills, the house had been occupied by Peter Tork of the Monkees.” (For the record, other reports hold that the Peter Tork house was in, not near, Laurel Canyon.)
The Angels part the crowd at AltamontOn December 6, 1969, temporary Laurel Canyon residents Mick and Keith, along with permanent Laurel Canyon residents Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and the Flying Burrito Brothers, all gathered at a desolate speedway known as Altamont to stage a free concert. By the time it was over, four people were dead and another 850 concert-goers were injured to varying degrees, mostly by members of the Hell’s Angels swinging leaded pool cues.
The Angels had, of course, been hired by the Stones to ostensibly provide security. That decision is almost universally cast as an innocent mistake on the part of the band, though such a claim is difficult to believe. It was certainly no secret that the reactionary motorcycle clubs, formed by former military men, were openly hostile to hippies and anti-war activists; as early as 1965, they had brutally attacked peaceful anti-war demonstrators while police, who had courteously allowed the Angels to pass through their line, looked on. It was also known that the Angels were heavily involved in trafficking meth, a drug that was widely blamed for the ugliness that had descended over the Haight.
Perhaps less well known was that more than a few of those biker gangs had uncomfortably close ties to Charlie Manson, particularly a club known as the Straight Satans, one of whose members, Danny DeCarlo, watched over the Family’s arsenal of weapons. At least one of the performers taking the stage at Altamont, curiously enough, also had close ties to the motorcycle clubs; as was revealed in his autobiography, Crosby “had friends in every Bay Area chapter of the Hells Angels.”
The death that the concert at Altamont will always be remembered for, of course, is that of Meredith Hunter, the young man who was stabbed to death by members of the Hell’s Angels right in front of the stage while the band (in this case, the Rolling Stones) played on. The song they were playing, contrary to most accounts of the incident, was Sympathy for the Devil, as was initially reported in Rolling Stone magazine based on the accounts of several reporters on the scene and a review of the unedited film stock.
Most accounts claim that Hunter was killed while the band performed Under My Thumb. All such claims are based on the mainstream snuff film Gimme Shelter, in which the killing was deliberately presented out of sequence. In the absence of any alternative filmic versions of Hunter’s death, the Maysles brothers’ film became the default official orthodoxy. Of course, someone went to great lengths to insure that there would be only one available version of events; as Rolling Stone also reported, shortly after the concert, “One weird Altamont story has to do with a young Berkeley filmmaker who claims to have gotten 8MM footage of the killing. He got home from the affair Saturday and began telling his friends about his amazing film. His house was knocked over the next night, completely rifled. The thief took only his film, nothing else.”
Contrary to the impression created by Gimme Shelter, Hunter was killed not long into the Stones’ set. But as the film’s editor, Charlotte Zwerin, explained to Salon some thirty years later, the climax of the movie always has to come at the end: “We’re talking about the structure of a film. And what kind of concert film are you going to be able to have after somebody has been murdered in front of the stage? Hanging around for another hour would have been really wrong in terms of the film.” What wasn’t wrong, apparently, was deliberately altering the sequence of events in what was ostensibly a documentary film.
One of the young cameramen working for the Maysles brothers that day, curiously enough, was a guy by the name of George Lucas (it is unclear whether it was Lucas who captured the conveniently unobstructed footage of the murder.) Not long after, Lucas began a meteoric rise to the very top of the Hollywood food chain. Also present that day, and featured in the film gyrating atop a raised platform near the stage, was the King of the Freaks himself, Vito Paulekas.
Many of the accounts of the tragedy at Altamont include the demonstrably false claim that Hunter can unmistakably be seen drawing a gun just before being jumped and killed by the Angels (some accounts even have Hunter firing the alleged gun). The relevant frames from the film are included here for your review. What can certainly be fairly clearly seen is the large knife being brought down into Hunter’s back. But a gun being brandished by Mr. Hunter? If you can see one, then you either have far better eyes than I, or a far more active imagination. Or both.
The Angel who was charged with the murder and then ultimately acquitted, Alan David Passaro, was found floating facedown in a reservoir in March of 1985 with $10,000 in his pocket. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, Passaro’s acquittal was not based on the jury having been convinced that Hunter had drawn a gun, but rather on the fact that the knife wounds that killed Hunter were apparently upstrokes, which meant that they were not the wounds inflicted on-camera by Passaro. He and/or someone else continued to stab Hunter after he was down, and it was those wounds, which the cameras didn’t clearly record, that killed him.
About one year after Altamont, otherwise obscure singer/songwriter Don McLean penned the lyrics to what was destined to become one of the most iconic songs in the annals of popular music: American Pie. Those lyrics are essentially a chronological recitation of various tragedies that shaped the world of popular music. Not long after a reference to the August 1969 Manson murders and their connection to the Laurel Canyon music scene (Helter Skelter in a summer swelter, The birds flew off with a fallout shelter, Eight miles high and falling fast), and just before a reference to the October 1970 death of Janis Joplin (I met a girl who sang the blues, And I asked her for some happy news, but she just smiled and turned away, I went down to the sacred store, Where I’d heard the music years before, but the man there said the music wouldn’t play), can be found a verse, reproduced at the top of this post, in which McLean characterizes the death of Hunter as a ritualized murder.
I, of course, would never make such a wild and reckless claim.
As was the custom with big events in the mid to late-1960s, particularly in the northern California area, Altamont was drenched in acid. And as was also the custom at that time, that acid was provided free-of-charge by Mr. Augustus Owsley Stanley III, also known as The Bear. At the so-called “Human Be-In” staged in January of 1967, for example, Owsley had kindly distributed 10,000 tabs of potent LSD. For the Monterey Pop Festival just five months later, he had cooked up and distributed 14,000 tabs. For Altamont, he did likewise.
The 1960s were, you see – and you can look this up if you don’t believe me – the era of brotherly love. So if someone happened to have, say, a cache of acid with a street value of $20,000-$30,000 (a considerable amount of money in the 1960s), he was naturally expected to hand it out for free to thousands of random strangers. Of course, probably the only person who routinely had such vast stockpiles of LSD was the premier acid chemist of the hippie era, Augustus Owsley Stanley.
No one – not Ken Kesey, not Richard “Babawhateverthefuckhecalledhimself” Alpert, not even Timothy Leary – did more to ‘turn on’ the youth of the 1960s than Owsley. Leary and his cohorts may have captured the national media spotlight and created public awareness, but it was Owsley who flooded the streets of San Francisco and elsewhere with consistently high quality, inexpensive, readily available acid. By most accounts, he was never in it for the money and he routinely gave away more of his product than he sold. What then was his motive? According to Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, writing in Acid Dreams, “Owsley cultivated an image as a wizard-alchemist whose intentions with LSD were priestly and magical.”
To be sure, Owsley is revered by many as something of an icon of the 1960s counterculture – a man motivated by nothing more than an altruistic desire to ‘turn on’ the world. But then again, the trio listed in the preceding paragraph are revered by many as well, so you’ll excuse me if I’m a bit hesitant to embrace Owsley as some sort of anti-hero – especially given his rather provocative background and family history.
The Angels appear to be quite pleased with the murder of HunterAugustus Owsley Stanley III is the son, naturally enough, of Augustus Owsley Stanley II, who served as a military officer during World War II aboard the USS Lexington and thereafter found work in Washington, D.C. as a government attorney. He raised his son primarily in – where else? – Arlington, Virginia. Young Owsley’s grandfather was Augustus Owsley Stanley, who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1903 through 1915, as the Governor of Kentucky from 1915 through 1919, and as a U.S. Senator from 1919 through 1925. Senator Stanley’s father, a minister with the Disciples of Christ, served as a judge advocate with the Confederate Army. His mother was a niece of William Owsley, who also served as a Governor of Kentucky, from 1844 through 1848, and who lent his name to Owsley County, Kentucky.
During Owsley III’s formative years, he attended the prestigious Charlotte Hall Military Academy in Maryland, but was reportedly tossed out in the ninth grade for being intoxicated. Not long after that, at the tender age of fifteen, Owsley voluntarily committed himself to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.. St. Elizabeth’s, it should be noted, had a far more sinister name upon its founding in 1855: the Government Hospital for the Insane. He remained confined there for, uhmm, ‘treatment’ for the next fifteen months. During that time, his mother, in keeping with one of the recurrent themes of this saga, passed away.
Owsley apparently resumed his education following his curious confinement, but he had reportedly dropped out of school by the age of eighteen. Nevertheless, he apparently had no trouble at all gaining acceptance to the University of Virginia, which he attended for a time before enlisting in the U.S. Air Force in 1956, at the age of twenty-one. During his military service, Owsley was an electronics specialist, working in radio intelligence and radar.
During Owsley III’s formative years, he attended the prestigious Charlotte Hall Military Academy in Maryland, but was reportedly tossed out in the ninth grade for being intoxicated. Not long after that, at the tender age of fifteen, Owsley voluntarily committed himself to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C.. St. Elizabeth’s, it should be noted, had a far more sinister name upon its founding in 1855: the Government Hospital for the Insane. He remained confined there for, uhmm, ‘treatment’ for the next fifteen months. During that time, his mother, in keeping with one of the recurrent themes of this saga, passed away.
Owsley apparently resumed his education following his curious confinement, but he had reportedly dropped out of school by the age of eighteen. Nevertheless, he apparently had no trouble at all gaining acceptance to the University of Virginia, which he attended for a time before enlisting in the U.S. Air Force in 1956, at the age of twenty-one. During his military service, Owsley was an electronics specialist, working in radio intelligence and radar.
Jagger at AltamontAfter his stint in the Air Force, Owsley set up camp in the Los Angeles area, ostensibly to study ballet. During that same time, he also worked at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was undoubtedly the primary reason for his move to LA. In 1963, Owsley moved once again, this time to Berkeley, California, which just happened to be ground-zero of the budding anti-war movement. He may or may not have briefly attended UC Berkeley, which is where he allegedly cribbed the recipe for LSD from the university library.
Owsley soon began cooking up both Methedrine and LSD in a makeshift bathroom lab near the campus of the university. On February 21, 1965, that lab was raided by state narcotics agents who seized all his lab equipment and charged Stanley with operating a meth lab. As Barry Miles recounted in Hippie, “Berkeley was awash with speed and Owsley was responsible for much of it.” Nevertheless, Owsley walked away from the raid unscathed, and, with the help of his attorney, who happened to be the vice-mayor of Berkeley, he even successfully sued to have all his lab equipment returned. He quickly put that equipment to work producing some 4,000,000 tabs of nearly pure LSD in the mid-1960s.
Also in February of 1965, Owsley and his frequent sidekicks, the Grateful Dead, moved down to the Watts area of Los Angeles, of all places, to ostensibly conduct ‘acid tests.’ The group rented a house that was conveniently located right next door to a brothel, curiously paralleling the modus operandi of various intelligence operatives who were (or had been) involved in conducting their own ‘acid tests.’ The band departed the communal dwelling in April 1965, just a few months before Watts exploded in violence that left thirty-four corpses littering the streets.
Owsley had been with the Dead from the band’s earliest days, as both a financial backer and as their sound engineer. He is credited with numerous electronic innovations that changed the way that live rock music was presented to the masses – and likely not in a good way, given that his work as a sound technician undoubtedly drew heavily upon his military training.
In 1967, Owsley unleashed on the Haight a particularly nasty hallucinogen known as STP. Developed by the friendly folks at Dow Chemical, STP had been tested extensively at the Edgewood Arsenal as a possible biowarfare agent before being distributed to hippies as a recreational drug. Owsley reportedly obtained the recipe from Alexander Shulgin, a former Harvard man who developed a keen interest in psychopharmacology while serving in the U.S. Navy. Shulgin worked for many years as a senior research chemist at Dow, and later worked very closely with the DEA.
In 1970, Owsley began serving time after a conviction on drug charges. That time was served, appropriately enough, at Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution, the very same prison that had, just a few years earlier, housed both Charlie Manson and Phil Kaufman. A few years later, it would also be home to both Timothy Leary and his alleged (but not actual) nemesis, G. Gordon Liddy. After his release, Owsley continued to work as a sound technician, eventually graduating to a new medium: television.
After that rather lengthy digression, we return now to our regularly scheduled program: the Gram Parsons saga. Along with Mick and the boys, Gram made a hasty exit from the chaos at Altamont via the Stones’ private helicopter. The next year, his Flying Burrito Brothers released their second album, Burrito Deluxe, which was produced by Jim Dickson, the man who played such a pivotal role in shaping Laurel Canyon’s first band, the Byrds. By June, Parsons had been booted out of the band, reportedly due to chronic alcohol and drug abuse. He quickly signed with A&M Records and was partnered with our old friend Terry Melcher.
Gram became a regular visitor to Melcher’s Benedict Canyon home, where the self-destructive pair worked on songs together, with Gram on guitar and Melcher on piano. John Phillips became a close associate of Parsons at this time as well. Meanwhile, sister Avis had been institutionalized back in New Orleans. She had gotten pregnant, after which Bob Parsons had moved quickly to have her committed and to have her marriage annulled. Little Avis reached out repeatedly to big brother Gram for help, but got none.
In late October of 1970, Gram went to A&M and signed out the master tapes of ten songs that he had recorded with Melcher; those tapes were never seen or heard again, as seems to happen from time-to-time with recordings made with Melcher. During roughly that same period of time, Parsons was busted with a briefcase full of prescription drugs. As would be expected, however, the charges were quietly dropped and Gram walked away unscathed.
There are many who claim, by the way, that the musicians under examination in this series were relentlessly persecuted by agents of the state, ostensibly to silence their voices of protest. But if that is true, then why is it that on more than one occasion when the state seems to have had solid evidence of crimes that could bring prison time, no action was taken? Our old friend David Crosby, for example, has candidly acknowledged that “the DEA could have popped me for interstate transport of dope or dealing lots of times and never did …” And John Phillips, busted for wholesale trafficking of pharmaceuticals, was, by his own account, “looking at forty-five years and got thirty days.” He began serving his sentence on April 20, appropriately enough, and served just twenty-four days – in a minimum security prison that offered “residents” such activities as “basketball, aerobics, softball, tennis, archery, and golf,” and that featured a “delicious kosher kitchen, an elaborate salad bar, and a tasty brunch on Sundays.”
Sorry, but we seem to have drifted off course once again. I’ll try to stay focused on the Gram Parsons story for the rest of this post.
In 1971, Gram married Gretchen Burrell. The lavish affair was held, curiously enough, at the New Orleans home of step-dad Bob Parsons, a fact that has left Gram’s chroniclers somewhat puzzled. Bob Parsons was, after all, the man who had – at least in the eyes of many family members – terrorized and institutionalized Gram’s younger sister, carried on a scandalous affair with the family’s babysitter, murdered Gram’s mother and subsequently married that babysitter, and repeatedly looted the family coffers. And yet it was Bob Parsons, of all people, whom Gram trusted to host his wedding, suggesting a bond between the two that would seem to defy conventional explanations.
That same year, Gram spent some time in France, hanging out once again with the Rolling Stones. The following year, he was signed to Reprise Records by Mo Ostin and he and Gretchen moved back into the Chateau Marmont, where Gram and Emmylou Harris began working on the songs that would make up his first solo album. Emmylou, as Fong-Torres notes, had been raised on “various military bases around Virginia,” so she quickly fit right in with the Laurel Canyon crowd.
In 1973, with his first solo album, entitled simply GP, due for release, “Gram and Gretchen finally moved out of the Chateau Marmont and found a cozy brown wood-shingled house on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, which wound its way north from Hollywood through the stars’ favorite canyon.” Working once again with Emmylou, Gram began working on tracks for what would be his posthumously-released second solo album, Grievous Angel.
As July of 1973 rolled around, a series of tragedies befell Parsons and the people around him. In July of the previous year, Gram’s friend Brandon DeWilde – who had introduced Gram to Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson, resulting in Gram’s involvement in The Trip – had been killed in a traffic accident. A year later, on July 15, 1973, Gram’s friend and fellow musician, Clarence White, was hit by a car and killed. According to Fong-Torres, “Around the same time that Clarence White was killed, Sid Kaiser, a familiar face in the Los Angeles rock scene, a close friend of Gram’s and, not so incidentally, a source of high-quality drugs, died of a heart attack.” Just after those two deaths, “In late July 1973 … [Gram’s] house in Laurel Canyon burned down.”
Other sources, for the record, have placed that house in Topanga Canyon rather than Laurel Canyon. Whatever the case, Gram was home when the house caught fire and was briefly hospitalized for smoke inhalation. Having lost their home and all their possessions, Gram and Gretchen “moved into Gretchen’s father’s spacious home on Mulholland Drive in Laurel Canyon.” Because the Burrells, naturally enough, also lived in everyone’s favorite canyon.
Gram wouldn’t live in the Burrell estate long though; on September 19, 1973, Ingram Cecil Connor III died in a nondescript room at the Joshua Tree Inn. His death is usually attributed to a drug overdose, but toxicology reports suggest otherwise. Parsons’ death received minimal press coverage, partly because, as fate would have it, singer/songwriter Jim Croce went down in a blaze of glory the very next day, on September 20, 1973. But though the media had moved on, the Gram Parsons story wasn’t quite over yet.
Parsons had been a regular visitor to Joshua Tree National Park, where one of his favorite pastimes was said to be ingesting hallucinogenic drugs and then searching for UFOs. Sometimes he would take friends, such as Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, along with him to help with the search. I’m no expert, to be sure, but it seems to me that if your goal is to succeed in spotting UFOs, then the dropping-acid strategy is probably a pretty good approach. But again, that’s not really my area of expertise.
In September of 1973, Gram was accompanied to Joshua Tree by his personal assistant, Michael Martin, Martin’s girlfriend, Dale McElroy, and Parson’s former high school sweetheart, Margaret Fisher. As the story goes, the group soon ran out of pot and quickly dispatched Martin back to LA to pick up a fresh supply. He was, therefore, officially not there at the time of Gram’s death, though why he hadn’t returned has never been explained, especially given that his job was, specifically, to keep an eye on Gram and monitor his drug intake.
How Gram Parsons died is anyone’s guess. There are as many versions of the event as there were witnesses to it. Actually, that’s not quite true – there are more versions than there were witnesses, because some of those witnesses have told more than one story. Officially, Parsons died of an overdose, but forensic testing revealed no morphine or barbiturates in his blood. Morphine showed up in his liver and urine, but as experts have noted, those toxicology results indicate chronic, but not recent, use.
Police seem to have had little interest in getting at the truth and made no apparent effort to reconcile the various conflicting accounts. Details of the incident – such as how long Gram had been left alone, whether he was still alive when discovered, who made that discovery, etc. – were wildly inconsistent in the accounts of Fisher, McElroy, and Frank and Alan Barbary (the Inn’s owner and his son, who were also witnesses, and whose accounts conflicted both with each other and with the girls’ accounts).
At the hospital, police spoke briefly with the two girls and then released them. Within two hours, Phil Kaufman was on the scene to pick up Fisher and McElroy. Bypassing the police and the hospital, Kaufman went directly to the Inn, which the girls had returned to, and quickly hustled them straight back to LA. Police never spoke to either of the women again, despite the conflicting accounts and the open question of what exactly it was that killed Gram.
On the autumnal equinox of 1973, Kaufman and Martin, driving a dilapidated hearse provided by McElroy, arrived at LAX to claim the body of Gram Parsons. Apparently no one, including the police officer who was nearby, found it at all unusual that two drunken, disheveled men in an obviously out-of-service hearse (it had no license plates and several broken windows) had arrived without any paperwork to claim the body of a deceased celebrity. In fact, according to Kaufman’s dubious account, the cop even helped the pair load the casket into the hearse – and then looked the other way when Martin slammed the hearse into a wall on the way out of the hangar.
Kaufman and Martin then drove the body back out to Joshua Tree, doused it with gasoline and set it ablaze. Local police initially speculated that the cremation was “ritualistic,” which indeed it was, but such reports were, and continue to be, scoffed at.
On September 26, LAPD detectives, led by anchorman Larry Burrell, came knocking on Kaufman’s door with warrants to serve. Bizarrely enough, director Arthur Penn was there with a full crew shooting scenes for the film Night Moves with star Gene Hackman (because when you’re a friend of Charlie Manson’s, it would appear, everyone in Hollywood wants to hang out with you). While the crew continued working, Kaufman was taken in, but he was back just a few hours later. In the end, he and Martin were fined $300 each plus reimbursement for the cost of the coffin.
In January 1974, four months after his death, Grievous Angel was released to critical acclaim and public indifference. Later that year, Gram’s adoptive father, Bob Parsons, died as well, reportedly of alcohol-related illness. He had apparently been making moves aimed at gaining control of the deceased musician’s estate. In keeping with family tradition, Bob failed to make it to the age of fifty (Gram’s real dad, Coon Dog, had died at forty-one, his mother at forty-two, and Gram at just twenty-six).
By sheer coincidence, no doubt, the deaths of Gram and Bob Parsons were followed by the bankruptcy of much of the Snively family business, which also occurred in 1974. Around that same time, Little Avis gave birth to daughter Flora. Sixteen years later, both were killed in a boating accident in Virginia. Avis had made it all the way to age forty.
Downside to Murdoch's Plan to Control Online News
http://www.fair.org/blog/2009/08/25/the-downside-to-murdochs-plan-to-control-online-news/
The Downside to Murdoch's Plan to Control Online News
08/25/2009
Jim Naureckas
The problem with Rupert Murdoch's proposal to create an online news consortium, in which major publishers would all band together to put their news content behind pay walls (L.A. Times, 8/21/09), is that it's not illegal to discuss news events online. And you don't want to make it illegal to discuss news events online.
And yet, absent a law forbidding such discussions, there's nothing to stop someone from buying subscriptions to the various pay news sites and starting a website (like this one, but more so) in which they write about what they've learned from them--thus offering for free what the Murdoch's news trust would be trying to get people to pay for. You can't copyright facts, and any attempt to change the law to allow publishers to do so would run straight into the shoals of the First Amendment and the concept of democracy itself.
Let's say you could keep the "tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet" (as a Murdoch editor memorably calls them) from passing along the news for free. According to the L.A. Times piece, News Corp points to the Wall Street Journal as a success story with its website's 1 million paying customers, and has encouraged the New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp. and Tribune Co. to follow its lead. Imagine that each of those publishers was as successful, and that the paying readers they attracted did not significantly overlap (both rather unrealistic assumptions, it strikes me)--that would be great news for publishers but something of a disaster for democracy, with the news generated by these leading (and not-so-leading) outlets confined to an elite audience of 5 million--or roughly 1-2 percent of the citizenry.
It's not like we have a particularly well-informed electorate as it is; if Murdoch's plan for an online news cartel is at all successful, though, today's voters may seem like Encyclopedia Brown.
The Downside to Murdoch's Plan to Control Online News
08/25/2009
Jim Naureckas
The problem with Rupert Murdoch's proposal to create an online news consortium, in which major publishers would all band together to put their news content behind pay walls (L.A. Times, 8/21/09), is that it's not illegal to discuss news events online. And you don't want to make it illegal to discuss news events online.
And yet, absent a law forbidding such discussions, there's nothing to stop someone from buying subscriptions to the various pay news sites and starting a website (like this one, but more so) in which they write about what they've learned from them--thus offering for free what the Murdoch's news trust would be trying to get people to pay for. You can't copyright facts, and any attempt to change the law to allow publishers to do so would run straight into the shoals of the First Amendment and the concept of democracy itself.
Let's say you could keep the "tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet" (as a Murdoch editor memorably calls them) from passing along the news for free. According to the L.A. Times piece, News Corp points to the Wall Street Journal as a success story with its website's 1 million paying customers, and has encouraged the New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp. and Tribune Co. to follow its lead. Imagine that each of those publishers was as successful, and that the paying readers they attracted did not significantly overlap (both rather unrealistic assumptions, it strikes me)--that would be great news for publishers but something of a disaster for democracy, with the news generated by these leading (and not-so-leading) outlets confined to an elite audience of 5 million--or roughly 1-2 percent of the citizenry.
It's not like we have a particularly well-informed electorate as it is; if Murdoch's plan for an online news cartel is at all successful, though, today's voters may seem like Encyclopedia Brown.
Health Care Puts Progressives On the Verge
http://www.openleft.com/diary/14778/health-care-puts-progressives-on-the-verge-of-changing-the-power-dynamic
Health Care Puts Progressives On the Verge of Changing the Power Dynamic
David Sirota
Tue Aug 25, 2009
So, here's the deal, folks: Looking at the current state of play on health care through the multicolored lenses I acquired working on Capitol Hill and then working in politics out here in the West, I'd say it's a good bet that the House will pass a health care bill with a solid public option in it, and the Senate will pass a health care bill without a solid public option in it. I'd say it's also a good bet that the major reason - though probably not the only reason - Obama has gone back and forth on the public option is because the administration is solely focused on getting bills - any bills - passed through each chamber and into one conference committee for a final negotiation.
Once that happens, the health care shit hits the legislative fan. We won't have to speculate anymore about whether the president is really committed to the public option, nor will we have to speculate about whether top senators and House members on the conference committee are committed to the public option. At that point, their actions will be far louder than their words.
Obama will be forced to take a position on the public option as he either draws a veto line in the sand, or doesn't - and if he doesn't on the public option, it means he's willing to sell out the public option. Similarly, conference committee lawmakers will either have to vote for a public option, or vote with the insurance industry against it.
A month ago, I would have said that the administration was planning to lay low while two templates got into a conference committee, and then sell out the public option in that committee, believing that ultimately, progressives will vote for a bad health care bill (ie. one sans public option but with a few regulatory goodies) rather than kill it outright. The White House is, after all, packed with staffers like Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina who have made their careers coddling corporate lobbyists - and the president himself is a guy who has often chosen to seek common ground instead of confrontation with moneyed interests when an avenue is available to do that. That's why, for instance, this administration has exhibited two different standards for dealing with progressive and conservative Democrats - it tries to push progressives around while kissing the fat, mostly white and mostly southern asses of the so-called Blue Dogs.
A month ago, all of these forces might have made the "roll the progressives, sell out the public option" strategy a legislatively successful one, even as it would produce a bill that would likely be terrible public policy. I say that because let's be honest: the bloc of congressional progressives who the White House would be hoping to steamroll, while fighting the good fight in the lead up to key votes, has nonetheless capitulated on nearly every single do-or-die final-passage vote in recent memory (and I say that sadly, having served as an aide to Progressive Caucus leader - and dear friend - Bernie Sanders).
However, after the fantastic organizing/whipping/fundraising being done by Firedoglake, OpenLeft and Moveon and after the strong progressive media pressure on radio, TV and in newspapers, I believe the dynamic - and therefore the White House political calculus - could change.
Indeed, all the forces seem to be coming into line: Polls show local Democratic dissatisfaction with easily primary-able Democrats, putting huge pressure on those Democrats to get in line; the Paul Krugmans of the liberal punditocracy, often offering up "on the one hand, on the other hand" dithering at the end of legislative fights, have now come out pretty strong for a public option; mainstream Republican editorial boards like the Denver Post are saying the public option is necessary; the decline in Obama's poll numbers are being fueled by progressive - not conservative - dissatisfaction on health care; fundraising for the public option campaign is intensifying; and the organizing work to support the public option is in full gear.
Taken all together, the aimed at A) forcing House Democrats to pledge to vote against a public-option-free health care bill and B) getting Senate Democrats to state their support of a public option may be making the easier legislative path the one that squeezes the Blue Dog Democrats - not the progressive movement that got Obama elected.
Obviously, the pressure on the House Democrats is the most important. The Senate is basically a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry - the best we're probably going to do is get enough members to say they support the public option, but it's probably too big a lift to hope to get many of them to pledge to vote against an insurance-industry sop, if that's what the final bill ends up being. However, that's less significant because enough House members taking that pledge - and sticking to it, rather than publicly undermining it - creates a veto power all on its own. That is, it creates a Ben Nelson Effect for the progressive movement.
What is the Ben Nelson Effect? Back in 2007 while reporting my book The Uprising, I wrote a post about progressives learning lessons from the Ben Nelsons of the world - about us learning to use the conservadem tactics of threatening to torpedo a bill to further progressive goals. Back then, Moveon and many other progressive groups as well as many congressional progressives refused to play this kind of hardball, and, as The Uprising showed, our nation paid for it in substantial blood and treasure. So I'm absolutely thrilled that it looks like we're finally embracing the kind of tactics that could force legislative change.
And that's the key word - "force." As Glenn Greenwald has said, this isn't about trust in Obama, or loyalty to Democrats or affinity for particular legislators because they happen to be nice people. This, like every political issue, is about raw power - something many of us on this site have been saying for years, something that many progressives in the throes of Democratic Party/Obama sycophancy have refused to consider (and, indeed, many of us who have been talking for years about changing from partisan to movement psychology have been the target of more than a little anger/vitriol/hate from the sycophants).
We will get only what we force both the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress to give us, taking into account exactly how the Congress works. This is, once again, the "Make Him Do It Dynamic" - and right now, that requires us to build the Progressive Block, as Chris Bowers calls it. We must focus laser-like efforts on constructing a group of House members who delivers on a promise to vote against a public-option-free health care bill. If we do that, we will change the power dynamic in the health care debate by forcing the administration to use its power to make the public option a reality in the final bill that is reported out of the conference committee. And even more broadly, it may change the power dynamic on every other issue by finally establishing the progressive majority in the Democratic caucus - and not the corporate whores - as the final "deciders" on other major bill.
These are the stakes, and they are high. While they aren't going to get us all the way to single payer (which I've long said was a huge missed opportunity), they may deliver us a public option that represents genuine progress. It all depends on us. If we can ignore the professional naysayers and power appeasers in the Washington Punditburo (especially the D.C. liberals who keep going back and forth with overwrought handwringing/bedwetting), if we can substitute real pressure for partisan apologism, if we can refrain from making our typical excuses for Democratic politicians, we can actually deliver this Progressive Block and have a real shot to be successful.
And remember, I don't say that very often.
Health Care Puts Progressives On the Verge of Changing the Power Dynamic
David Sirota
Tue Aug 25, 2009
So, here's the deal, folks: Looking at the current state of play on health care through the multicolored lenses I acquired working on Capitol Hill and then working in politics out here in the West, I'd say it's a good bet that the House will pass a health care bill with a solid public option in it, and the Senate will pass a health care bill without a solid public option in it. I'd say it's also a good bet that the major reason - though probably not the only reason - Obama has gone back and forth on the public option is because the administration is solely focused on getting bills - any bills - passed through each chamber and into one conference committee for a final negotiation.
Once that happens, the health care shit hits the legislative fan. We won't have to speculate anymore about whether the president is really committed to the public option, nor will we have to speculate about whether top senators and House members on the conference committee are committed to the public option. At that point, their actions will be far louder than their words.
Obama will be forced to take a position on the public option as he either draws a veto line in the sand, or doesn't - and if he doesn't on the public option, it means he's willing to sell out the public option. Similarly, conference committee lawmakers will either have to vote for a public option, or vote with the insurance industry against it.
A month ago, I would have said that the administration was planning to lay low while two templates got into a conference committee, and then sell out the public option in that committee, believing that ultimately, progressives will vote for a bad health care bill (ie. one sans public option but with a few regulatory goodies) rather than kill it outright. The White House is, after all, packed with staffers like Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina who have made their careers coddling corporate lobbyists - and the president himself is a guy who has often chosen to seek common ground instead of confrontation with moneyed interests when an avenue is available to do that. That's why, for instance, this administration has exhibited two different standards for dealing with progressive and conservative Democrats - it tries to push progressives around while kissing the fat, mostly white and mostly southern asses of the so-called Blue Dogs.
A month ago, all of these forces might have made the "roll the progressives, sell out the public option" strategy a legislatively successful one, even as it would produce a bill that would likely be terrible public policy. I say that because let's be honest: the bloc of congressional progressives who the White House would be hoping to steamroll, while fighting the good fight in the lead up to key votes, has nonetheless capitulated on nearly every single do-or-die final-passage vote in recent memory (and I say that sadly, having served as an aide to Progressive Caucus leader - and dear friend - Bernie Sanders).
However, after the fantastic organizing/whipping/fundraising being done by Firedoglake, OpenLeft and Moveon and after the strong progressive media pressure on radio, TV and in newspapers, I believe the dynamic - and therefore the White House political calculus - could change.
Indeed, all the forces seem to be coming into line: Polls show local Democratic dissatisfaction with easily primary-able Democrats, putting huge pressure on those Democrats to get in line; the Paul Krugmans of the liberal punditocracy, often offering up "on the one hand, on the other hand" dithering at the end of legislative fights, have now come out pretty strong for a public option; mainstream Republican editorial boards like the Denver Post are saying the public option is necessary; the decline in Obama's poll numbers are being fueled by progressive - not conservative - dissatisfaction on health care; fundraising for the public option campaign is intensifying; and the organizing work to support the public option is in full gear.
Taken all together, the aimed at A) forcing House Democrats to pledge to vote against a public-option-free health care bill and B) getting Senate Democrats to state their support of a public option may be making the easier legislative path the one that squeezes the Blue Dog Democrats - not the progressive movement that got Obama elected.
Obviously, the pressure on the House Democrats is the most important. The Senate is basically a wholly owned subsidiary of the insurance industry - the best we're probably going to do is get enough members to say they support the public option, but it's probably too big a lift to hope to get many of them to pledge to vote against an insurance-industry sop, if that's what the final bill ends up being. However, that's less significant because enough House members taking that pledge - and sticking to it, rather than publicly undermining it - creates a veto power all on its own. That is, it creates a Ben Nelson Effect for the progressive movement.
What is the Ben Nelson Effect? Back in 2007 while reporting my book The Uprising, I wrote a post about progressives learning lessons from the Ben Nelsons of the world - about us learning to use the conservadem tactics of threatening to torpedo a bill to further progressive goals. Back then, Moveon and many other progressive groups as well as many congressional progressives refused to play this kind of hardball, and, as The Uprising showed, our nation paid for it in substantial blood and treasure. So I'm absolutely thrilled that it looks like we're finally embracing the kind of tactics that could force legislative change.
And that's the key word - "force." As Glenn Greenwald has said, this isn't about trust in Obama, or loyalty to Democrats or affinity for particular legislators because they happen to be nice people. This, like every political issue, is about raw power - something many of us on this site have been saying for years, something that many progressives in the throes of Democratic Party/Obama sycophancy have refused to consider (and, indeed, many of us who have been talking for years about changing from partisan to movement psychology have been the target of more than a little anger/vitriol/hate from the sycophants).
We will get only what we force both the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress to give us, taking into account exactly how the Congress works. This is, once again, the "Make Him Do It Dynamic" - and right now, that requires us to build the Progressive Block, as Chris Bowers calls it. We must focus laser-like efforts on constructing a group of House members who delivers on a promise to vote against a public-option-free health care bill. If we do that, we will change the power dynamic in the health care debate by forcing the administration to use its power to make the public option a reality in the final bill that is reported out of the conference committee. And even more broadly, it may change the power dynamic on every other issue by finally establishing the progressive majority in the Democratic caucus - and not the corporate whores - as the final "deciders" on other major bill.
These are the stakes, and they are high. While they aren't going to get us all the way to single payer (which I've long said was a huge missed opportunity), they may deliver us a public option that represents genuine progress. It all depends on us. If we can ignore the professional naysayers and power appeasers in the Washington Punditburo (especially the D.C. liberals who keep going back and forth with overwrought handwringing/bedwetting), if we can substitute real pressure for partisan apologism, if we can refrain from making our typical excuses for Democratic politicians, we can actually deliver this Progressive Block and have a real shot to be successful.
And remember, I don't say that very often.
FeedBack: Blackwater
I read your post of Wayne Maden’s article about Blackwater, which uses first person testimony to characterize the multiple layers of corruption that typify the agency. The article, points out that the organization has generally operated with impunity. I think the following video will fit well in your post:
http://www.newsy.com/videos/blackwater_more_help_than_we_thought
It uses coverage from various news sources to describe the political, constitutional, and international implications of the use of Blackwater for covert ops. The video provides background information about Blackwater to put the political, and legal, concerns surrounding the issue into context.
I think it will compliment your post because it uses expert analysis to examine the implications of using military contractors, which operate without congressional oversight.
Newsy.com videos analyze news coverage of important issues from multiple sources. Its unique method of presenting how different media outlets cover a story gives context to complex global issues.
Rosa Sow
rosa@newsy.com
http://www.newsy.com/videos/blackwater_more_help_than_we_thought
It uses coverage from various news sources to describe the political, constitutional, and international implications of the use of Blackwater for covert ops. The video provides background information about Blackwater to put the political, and legal, concerns surrounding the issue into context.
I think it will compliment your post because it uses expert analysis to examine the implications of using military contractors, which operate without congressional oversight.
Newsy.com videos analyze news coverage of important issues from multiple sources. Its unique method of presenting how different media outlets cover a story gives context to complex global issues.
Rosa Sow
rosa@newsy.com
Obama violating law by not investigating Bush
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/08/24/obama-violating-law-prosecuting-bush-officials/
Congressman: Obama violating law by not investigating Bush officials
John Byrne
August 24, 2009
President Barack Obama will be “violating the law” if his administration declines to investigate Bush officials for their role in torturing detainees, a prominent House Democrat said in a little noticed interview Friday.
The congressman, liberal New York Democrat and Judiciary Committee member Jerrold Nadler, made the comments in an interview with The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein published Friday. His comments come on the heels of a CIA report being released Monday that promises to offer more details into the abuse of prisoners under the Bush Administration’s watch — including the use of “mock executions” and threatening inmates with power drills.
Nadler’s comments also come as The New York Times is reporting that the Justice Department will recommend pursuing abuse cases in court.
“If they follow the law they have no choice,” Nadler told Stein, citing the US role as signatory to the United Nations convention against torture and an anti-torture act passed in 1996.
If the Obama administration doesn’t investigate, the administration “would be violating the law,” Nadler remarked. “They would be not upholding the law; they would be violating it.”
Nadler has recommended the appointment of a special prosecutor. Such an appointment now appears likely.
“With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the C.I.A,” the Times David Johnston penned Monday. “It is politically awkward, too, for Mr. Holder because President Obama has said that he would rather move forward than get bogged down in the issue at the expense of his own agenda.”
The administration “must appoint a special prosecutor,” Nadler said. “But, again, you have no choice because that’s the law.”
“[Holder] was strongly inclined to support a special prosecutor,” he said. “But not for the lawyers who wrote the memos justifying the torture, and not for anybody who acted within the scope of those memos; only for some local level guy who acted beyond the scope of those memos, who waterboarded with too much water or whatever.”
“You must not limit it that way,” he added. “Again it would be against the law to do it because you have got to investigate everybody involved in torture or in a conspiracy to order torture.”
The treatment of detainees — and in particular, the death of detainees at the hands of US forces — was referred to federal prosecutors after a review of the cases in 2004. But after a preliminary Justice Department investigation, the Bush administration declined to prosecute those involved.
“There has never been any public explanation of why the Justice Department decided not to bring charges in nearly two dozen abuse cases known to be referred to a team of federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., and in some instances not even the details of the cases have been made public,” Johnston wrote Monday.
“Former government lawyers said that while some detainees died and others suffered serious abuses, prosecutors decided they would be unlikely to prevail because of problems with mishandled evidence and, in some cases, the inability to locate witnesses or even those said to be the victims,” Johnston added.
Nadler told Stein that he expects any effort to go after CIA employees or contractors will be viewed by Republicans as politically motivated — but that it isn’t a reason to shutter prosecutions.
“If you start prosecuting the Bush people,” Nadler quipped, “you know what is going to be said? What’s going to be said is, this is politically motivated payback for the Clinton impeachment. That is what they are going to say… [But] from a point of view of reestablishing justice in this country, it is essential.”
Congressman: Obama violating law by not investigating Bush officials
John Byrne
August 24, 2009
President Barack Obama will be “violating the law” if his administration declines to investigate Bush officials for their role in torturing detainees, a prominent House Democrat said in a little noticed interview Friday.
The congressman, liberal New York Democrat and Judiciary Committee member Jerrold Nadler, made the comments in an interview with The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein published Friday. His comments come on the heels of a CIA report being released Monday that promises to offer more details into the abuse of prisoners under the Bush Administration’s watch — including the use of “mock executions” and threatening inmates with power drills.
Nadler’s comments also come as The New York Times is reporting that the Justice Department will recommend pursuing abuse cases in court.
“If they follow the law they have no choice,” Nadler told Stein, citing the US role as signatory to the United Nations convention against torture and an anti-torture act passed in 1996.
If the Obama administration doesn’t investigate, the administration “would be violating the law,” Nadler remarked. “They would be not upholding the law; they would be violating it.”
Nadler has recommended the appointment of a special prosecutor. Such an appointment now appears likely.
“With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the C.I.A,” the Times David Johnston penned Monday. “It is politically awkward, too, for Mr. Holder because President Obama has said that he would rather move forward than get bogged down in the issue at the expense of his own agenda.”
The administration “must appoint a special prosecutor,” Nadler said. “But, again, you have no choice because that’s the law.”
“[Holder] was strongly inclined to support a special prosecutor,” he said. “But not for the lawyers who wrote the memos justifying the torture, and not for anybody who acted within the scope of those memos; only for some local level guy who acted beyond the scope of those memos, who waterboarded with too much water or whatever.”
“You must not limit it that way,” he added. “Again it would be against the law to do it because you have got to investigate everybody involved in torture or in a conspiracy to order torture.”
The treatment of detainees — and in particular, the death of detainees at the hands of US forces — was referred to federal prosecutors after a review of the cases in 2004. But after a preliminary Justice Department investigation, the Bush administration declined to prosecute those involved.
“There has never been any public explanation of why the Justice Department decided not to bring charges in nearly two dozen abuse cases known to be referred to a team of federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Va., and in some instances not even the details of the cases have been made public,” Johnston wrote Monday.
“Former government lawyers said that while some detainees died and others suffered serious abuses, prosecutors decided they would be unlikely to prevail because of problems with mishandled evidence and, in some cases, the inability to locate witnesses or even those said to be the victims,” Johnston added.
Nadler told Stein that he expects any effort to go after CIA employees or contractors will be viewed by Republicans as politically motivated — but that it isn’t a reason to shutter prosecutions.
“If you start prosecuting the Bush people,” Nadler quipped, “you know what is going to be said? What’s going to be said is, this is politically motivated payback for the Clinton impeachment. That is what they are going to say… [But] from a point of view of reestablishing justice in this country, it is essential.”
Senator Edward Kennedy dies at age 77
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090826/us_nm/us_kennedySenator Edward Kennedy dies at age 77
Scott Malone
8-26-9
BOSTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, a towering figure in the Democratic Party who took the helm of one of America's most fabled political families after two older brothers were assassinated, died at age 77, his family said.
"Edward M. Kennedy, the husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle we loved so deeply, died late Tuesday night at home in Hyannis Port (Massachusetts)," the Kennedy family said in a statement early on Wednesday.
One of the most influential and longest-serving senators in U.S. history -- a liberal standard-bearer who was also known as a consummate congressional dealmaker -- Kennedy had been battling brain cancer, which was diagnosed in May 2008.
His death marked the twilight of a political dynasty and dealt a blow to Democrats as they seek to answer President Barack Obama's call for an overhaul of the healthcare system.
Kennedy was a longtime advocate of healthcare reform, a signature issue of Obama's presidency. Obama said on Wednesday he was heartbroken to hear of the death of Kennedy, a crucial supporter of his presidential candidacy.
"I valued his wise counsel in the Senate, where, regardless of the swirl of events, he always had time for a new colleague. I cherished his confidence and momentous support in my race for the Presidency. And even as he waged a valiant struggle with a mortal illness, I've profited as President from his encouragement and wisdom," said Obama, who was elected last November and took office in January.
Kennedy had recently urged Massachusetts lawmakers to change state law so the governor, if necessary, could quickly fill a Senate vacancy as the chamber debates the contentious healthcare issue.
Known as "Teddy," he was the brother of President John Kennedy, assassinated in 1963, Senator Robert Kennedy, fatally shot while campaigning for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, and Joe Kennedy, a pilot killed in World War Two.
When he first took the Senate seat previously held by John Kennedy in 1962, he was seen as something of a political lightweight who owed his ascent to his famous name.
Yet during his nearly half century in the chamber, Kennedy became known as one of Washington's most effective senators, crafting legislation by working with lawmakers and presidents of both parties, and finding unlikely allies.
At the same time, he held fast to liberal causes deemed anachronistic by the centrist "New Democrats," and was a lightning rod for conservative ire.
He helped enact measures to protect civil and labor rights, expand healthcare, upgrade schools, increase student aid and contain the spread of nuclear weapons.
"There's a lot to do," Kennedy told Reuters in 2006. "I think most of all it's the injustice that I continue to see and the opportunity to have some impact on it."
After Robert Kennedy's death, Edward was expected to waste little time in vying for the presidency. But in 1969, a young woman drowned after a car Kennedy was driving plunged off a bridge on the Massachusetts resort island of Chappaquiddick after a night of partying.
Kennedy's image took a major hit after it emerged he had failed to report the accident to authorities. He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene and received a suspended sentence.
Kennedy eventually ran for his party's presidential nomination in 1980 but lost to then-President Jimmy Carter.
His presidential ambitions thwarted, Kennedy devoted himself to his Senate career.
A 2009 survey by The Hill, a Capitol Hill publication, found that Senate Republicans believed Kennedy was the chamber's easiest Democrat to work with and most bipartisan.
Republican Senator John McCain called Kennedy "the single most effective member of the Senate if you want to get results."
In January 2008, Kennedy endorsed Obama, who was serving his first term as a senator, for the Democratic presidential nomination. Many saw the endorsement as the passing of the political torch to a new generation. A year to the day before his death, Kennedy made an electrifying speech to the Democratic convention that nominated Obama for president.
'LION' BATTLED ON
Kennedy had been largely sidelined in Congress since becoming ill. The "Lion of the Senate" began to use a cane and often looked tired and drained as he mixed work with treatment.
Yet colleagues and staff said he remained determined to fulfill what he called "the cause of my life," providing health insurance to all Americans. He helped draft legislation to overhaul the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare system.
Kennedy's interest in healthcare dated from his son's bout with cancer in the 1970s. More recently, he cited his own illness as he made a case for reform.
"I've benefited from the best of medicine, but I've also witnessed the frustration and outrage of patients and doctors alike as they face the challenges of a system that shortchanges millions of Americans," he wrote in a May 28, 2009, issue of the Boston Globe.
His charisma as "the last of the Kennedy brothers" was such that draft-Teddy drives were a feature of U.S. presidential election years from 1968 through the 1980s.
But he never fully escaped the cloud of the Chappaquiddick accident. A decades-long argument arose about whether he tried to cover up his involvement by leaving the scene while Mary Jo Kopechne's body remained submerged and whether police helped sweep such questions under the rug. All involved denied any cover-up.
Later crises involving younger Kennedys, notably the 1991 Palm Beach rape trial of his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, caught a bloated and weary-looking Uncle Ted in a media glare. Reports of heavy drinking and womanizing led to a public apology for "the faults in the conduct of my private life."
Kennedy was remarried soon after that to Victoria Reggie, a 38-year-old lawyer with two young children from her first marriage. He poured renewed energy into the Senate, where he would become the third-longest serving senator in history.
Even his Republican foes recognized Kennedy's dedication as he worked to protect civil rights, give federal help to the poor, contain the spread of nuclear weapons, raise the minimum wage, expand health coverage and improve America's schools.
FAMILY STANDARDS
Born on February 22, 1932, Edward Moore Kennedy was the last of four sons and five daughters born to millionaire businessman Joseph Kennedy, who would later be ambassador to Britain, and his wife, Rose.
The Boston Irish family combined the competitive spirit of nouveau riche immigrants with acquired polish and natural charm. The sons were expected to mature into presidential timber and were groomed for that starting with the oldest, Joseph Jr., a bomber pilot who died in World War Two.
"I think about my brothers every day," Kennedy told Reuters. "They set high standards. Sometimes you measure up, sometimes you don't."
Like his brothers, Kennedy was known for his oratory, delivered in a booming voice at rallies, congressional hearings and in the Senate.
He drew praise from liberals, labor and civil rights groups and scorn from conservatives, big business and anti-abortion and pro-gun activists. His image was often used by Republicans in ads as a money-raising tool.
Tragedies dogged Kennedy throughout his life. They included a 1964 plane crash that damaged his spine and left him with persistent pain; bone cancer that cost son Teddy a leg; first wife Joan's battles with alcoholism that contributed to their divorce, and drug problems involving nephews, one of whom died of an overdose. His nephew, John Kennedy Jr., died in July 1999 when his small plane crashed into the ocean near Cape Cod.
In May 2008, Edward Kennedy collapsed at his Cape Cod home and was flown to hospital in Boston, where he was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Brain cancer kills half its victims within a year.
Kennedy's illness kept him from attending the funeral of his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a leading advocate of the mentally disabled, who died on August 11 at the age of 88.
(Additional reporting by Thomas Ferraro in Washington and Patricia Zengerle in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Vote 4 Beast of the Year 2009!
Who is The Konformist Beast of the Year?
To vote for your pick go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/konformist/polls
Or send email to: robalini@aol.com
It's time for the annual pick of The Konformist Beast of the Year.
One nominee was chosen each month from May 2008 to April 2009. Here are the choices:
May 2008: Roger Clemens
June 2008: Robert Gates
July 2008: Barack Obama
August 2008: Hu Jintao
September 2008: Zbigniew Brzezinski
October 2008: The Wall Street $700 Billion Bailout Swindle
November 2008: Sarah Palin
December 2008: Al From
January 2009: Rick Wagoner
February 2009: Bernie Madoff
March 2009: Uwe Boll
April 2009: Rick Santelli
To see profiles on each, go to:
http://www.konformist.com/page4.htm
To vote for your pick go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/konformist/polls
Or send email to: robalini@aol.com
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