Unintentionally funny look at the recent Beverly Hills Tea Party gathering hosted by a really ditzy blonde lady:
Ann-Marie Murrell proves that not all Californians are liberal kooks as she covers the recent Beverly Hills Tea Party Rally.
I think Ann-Marie proves a lot of things in this video… Things she never intended to prove!
I met Pat Boone on a shoot once and the impression he left on me was that he’s a bit of a dimwit. His conversation was completely insipid and I just kept nodding and saying noncommittal things like “Yep, I hear ya, Pat!” and shit like that. Affable guy, but basically just… a fucking idiot.
What sources of information does he utilize beside WorldNetDaily, I wonder?
“Basketball Jones” was a song/routine/character from Cheech and Chong’s 1973 Los Cochinos (“The Pigs”) record. The original album cover had a secret compartment where you could see how they smuggled pot, sandwiched in their car door. I bought this LP at a garage sale when I was about ten and just starting to get into comedy albums. I only half understood the idea of “drugs” at the time, I’m pretty sure, so I can’t imagine a Cheech and Chong album made much sense to me at that age. But I loved the routine “Basketball Jones” by Tyrone Shoelaces & Rap Brown Jr. H.S.” and would go around singing the musical part of it like ten-year-olds do.
The song is about teenager Tyrone (as in “tie your own”) Shoelaces and his love of basketball sung in a falsetto voice by Cheech Marin. It’s catchy as hell, but small wonder, dig the backing band: George Harrison, Klaus Voorman, Carole King, Nicky Hopkins, Tom Scott, Billy Preston, Darlene Love, Ronnie Spector and Michelle Phillips. The animation is by Paul Gruwell and was made in 1974.
This cartoon has also made some impressive Hollywood cameos over the years, in Robert Altman’s California Split, Hal Ashby’s Being There and in the 70s underground comedy Tunnel Vision. It was also parodied in a 2011 episode of The Simpsons (”A Midsummer’s Nice Dream”).
This is a guest editorial from Dangerous Minds reader Em, expanding on some pointed commentary he’s made elsewhere on this blog. Em—who’ll keep his last name to himself, thank you very much—works in the financial industry:
During the 2008 economic crash I was employed by a large British multinational bank and, as a result, watched from abroad as the economy of my home country collapsed. Now that I’m employed by a big US multinational here in the Citi of New York, my opinion about what happened hasn’t really changed. Unfortunately, until the recent Occupy Wall Street protests, it looked as if the right was going to successfully rewrite the story of what caused the US financial collapse by knitting together their usual mishmash of half-baked economic nonsense while the so-called ‘left’ (ie, anyone who didn’t buy into the rapidly solidifying narrative) sat on the sidelines, apparently unable to counter these idiotic and demonstrably false notions. You know the theories: Rich people create jobs, Unions kill competitiveness, and the financial collapse was caused not by too little government intervention, but too much, through the quasi-private Fed. In other words, all the things that seemed directly opposite to what the real causes were (and continue to be) of the US’s fiscal woes.
The reality, of course, is just the opposite of what’s often said, and all you really need to do is take a quick look at the facts.
Put simply, the problem with our current economic situation in the US is that the middle class was effectively de-capitalized starting in the late 1970s and in particular starting with the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
This matters because it’s not the wealthy that create jobs, it’s the middle class. A fact: 65% of all job creation in the US occurs in companies with 50 employees or less. This is clearly not the realm of the ultra-rich, who have no real desire to create another large company. In fact, the idea that cutting the personal taxes of, for instance, the CEO of my company would create more jobs is laughable. Would he use his own money to hire additional employees? The idea just doesn’t make any sense. No, jobs are created by the middle class as they try to become wealthy, but only if the middle class is sufficiently equipped with capital, education, free time and other basics.
One accidental byproduct of the labor movement of the early 20th century was a strong middle class that had access to education and other basic services. More importantly, with Union wages, they now had some excess capital which they bet on countless small opportunities they saw in every sector of the economy. As those businesses developed, they gave rise to the unprecedented economic growth and prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s and, of course, plenty of jobs. A particularly timely example in fact can be seen in the story of Steve Jobs, who came from working class parents and started Apple computers in a garage. All of the jobs created by Jobs at Apple computer were therefore a result of second-generation working class prosperity and capital, combined with a solid education system. That’s the American story, not “give billionaires more money and they’ll make more jobs”.
So what happened to our economy? What caused the fiscal collapse? Simply put, the financial collapse of 2008 was the result of a long-term assault on the working class, particularly in the form of Union Wages. Starting with Ronald Reagan and his sacking of the striking Air Traffic controllers, the US began a long, steady assault on Union power and wages in the US. For instance, in 1983 US Union membership was at around 20%, whereas today it is merely half that. Globalization hasn’t helped, as workers were repeatedly told that their high union wages were causing their jobs to be sent overseas. As a result, through the 90s and into the first decade of the 20th century, the working class had been in effect de-capitalized and prevented from investing in all of those opportunities that working people have always seen out of the corner of their eye, as they shoveled coal, or wired up office buildings, or sold home heating. And because all of those businesses were never started, they therefore never grew into larger businesses thus generating all of those jobs that the businesses of previous generations had created.
Of course, there have been ‘drugs’ administered that allowed us to ignore what was really happening and the vast gaping wound that was developing: One of these drugs was ultra-cheap capital, and as the wealthy (who were already wealthy and didn’t need to create new businesses) looked for places to put their money, Wall Street obligingly created special derivative securities that allowed, theoretically, the true risk to be tamed and (they claimed) packaged, so that the wealthy could invest in the housing market, this latter of course spurred on by the cheap money the Fed was throwing out limousine windows on The Street.
Were it not for the housing bubble, we might have noticed that the economy had been hollowed out and shipped largely overseas. We therefore convinced ourselves that everything was going fine, and that ‘laissez faire’ capitalism was continuing to deliver the goods. This was, of course a lie: This was by no means laissez faire and those most particularly hoodwinked by the shell-game economy thought that the Fed was to blame.
Of course, the Fed was sort of to blame, but the fact was that the Fed was really just overextended, using its special powers to cover the deepening hole in the economy.
You could, of course, argue that all of this was inevitable: With China and the BRIC countries coming on line and driving the cost of manufacturing down to practically nothing, the Unions had to give up their gains or else jobs would have departed the US even more quickly.
That, of course, is also bullshit. An interesting fact: The two European countries with plenty of extra cash, Germany and Sweden, are also the two most unionized countries in the western world. What? Yes: Germany in particular is practically pwnd by its auto worker unions, and the result is a stable and prosperous economy, with plenty of cash left over even after absorbing the economic basket case of East Germany (remember them?). Meanwhile, Mercedez and BMW continue to clobber Detroit, so the problem clearly isn’t too much union power in the US: It’s too little.
Come to think of it, why is it that unionized workers in the US have had to compete with third-world wage slaves working in dangerous factories that belch hideous levels of pollution into the rapidly heating skies? Of course, a truly protectionist trade policy would make US goods uncompetitive and keep us beholden to US factory bosses. But a carefully deployed trade policy that protects US union gains by making the playing field level, that’s what is necessary. In other words, there should be significant tariffs on goods coming into the US that are made in countries that do not have real pollution controls in place, or that subject their workers to inhumane or dangerous working conditions.
So that’s it: The US sold out the middle class in order to benefit a group of extremely wealthy individuals who aren’t equipped to efficiently utilize such high concentrations of capital. The right argues that this is good for business and results in jobs, but the reason this clearly does not work is because the right’s economic theories are based on a revisionist history in which the US unions never existed. The unions did exist in the US, and for a time they were reasonably (though not overly) powerful, and to that same extent we enjoyed a few generations of prosperity that will never return unless we examine the facts carefully and divest ourselves of all of the pseudo-economic theories of the right.
About the author: Em was a founding member (with John Cale and others) of the New York punk band Doppler Effect in the early 1980s. After living in China in the late 80s, Em worked in the physics and electrical engineering space until 2002, at which time he moved into the financial world. In July of 2010, Em returned to the US after living in London for several years. He is a member of the UMOUR art/event collective. He blogs at The Magic Lantern, his"litterbox of the soul.”
The great Ron English has pulled a fantastic Situationist-inspired cereal box détourné prank by placing comically altered boxes on the shelves of a Ralph’s in Venice Beach, CA.
If you find one of the boxes and contact him at his website, he’ll sign it for you.
Happy Crowleymas everyone. On today’s date, October 12th in 1875, the British occultist, poet, mountain climber, artist and eccentric was born. “The Great Beast 666,” as he liked to think of himself, was voted the “seventy-third greatest Briton of all time” in a 2002 BBC poll along with Johnny Rotten, J.R.R. Tolkien and Julie Andrews.
And here’s a timely item: The 1920s site of Crowley’s “Abbey of Thelema” in Cefalù, Italy is for sale. This dump can be yours for a mere 850,000 euros!
You can see a photo gallery from the real estate listing here.
Below, a goofy episode of Scariest Places on Earth that focuses on The Abbey of Thelema. There are some pretty hilarious moments if you can wade through the boring parts. I noticed that they’ve got edits from an obscure, early Psychic TV video intercut here whenever they want to indicate evil or malevolence. What’s with the voice over???
Part II is here. After the jump, a closer look at the Abbey of Thelema’s ruins.
Matter of Heart: The Extraordinary Journey of C.G. Jung is a fascinating 1986 documentary that explores Jung’s life through interviews with the man himself and reminiscences from his colleagues, friend and students, some of whom were analyzed by Jung.
This is a fine introduction to Jung’s concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Written by Suzanne Wagner and directed by Mark Whitney.
Seattle Superhero Phoenix Jones (no relationship to Basketball Jones) was arrested this past weekend after trying to break up a fight using his super powers: a can of pepper spray. (Jones is not affiliated with the NYPD).
The caped crusader denies allegations of assault saying he was just doing the right thing and fulfilling his role as a crime fighter.
Here’s Jones defending himself yesterday on Seattle TV.
About halfway through The Freedom Trap, author Desmond Bagley reveals his hand towards his sources. It comes around page one hundred, when the central character Owen Stannard is briefed by his boss, Mackintosh:
‘What do you know about the British prison system?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I’ll let you have a copy of the Mountbatten Report,’ he said. ‘You’ll find it fascinating reading. But I’ll give you the gist of it now. Lord Mountbatten found that the British prisons are full of holes as a Swiss cheese. Do you know how many escapes there are each year?’
‘No. There was something about it in the papers a couple of years ago, but I didn’t read it too closely.’
‘More than five hundred. If it’s any less than that they think they’ve had a good year. Of course, most of the escapees are picked up quite soon, but a small percentage get clean away - and that small percentage is rising. It’s a troublesome situation.’
I’d picked up a copy because of its cover, who doesn’t? Maybe the French? As once, most of their covers were all the same - that’s equality for you. The cover had Paul Newman, as Stannard, with suit and tie, gun in hand, and it left a fluid memory of John Huston’s rather fine film version, The Mackintosh Man.
Bagley’s story mixes a little bit of fact with a lot of page-turning fiction. It’s a tale of double agents, the British Secret Service and the Scarperers, a fictional organization that helps long-term prisoners escape gaol - all for the right money. Back to our opening scene. Mackintosh now makes it clear he isn’t interested in the “‘murderers or rapists, homicidal maniacs or ordinary small time thieves’” that escape from gaol, his focus is State Security, and how to stop double agents, like the real-life George Blake, turning up in Moscow, “‘where he chirped his head off.’”
‘For the first time in years someone has come up with a brand new crime. Crime is just like any other business - it’s conducted only for profit - and someone has figured a way to make profit out of getting people out of prison…
...an organization was set up, dedicated to springing long-term prisoners who could pay enough, and you be surprised how many of those there are. And once such an organization gets going, like any other business it tends to expand, and whoever is running it has gone looking for custom - and he doesn’t care where the money comes from, either.’
‘The Russians?’
‘Who else?’ said Mackintosh sourly.
It was the Cold War and the Russians were still off the Christmas card list. The way Bagley tells it, the Red Menace was everywhere. In the Freedom Trap, the Reds actively liberating double agents like Slade - as the character Stannard explains when he meets Slade in prison:
It was about this time that I first met Slade. He was a new boy inside for the first offence and he’d got forty-two years, but I don’t believe the First Offenders Act covers espionage. I had heard about him before, of course: the news broadcasts had been full of the Slade Trial. Since most of the juicy bits had been told in camera no one really knew what Slade had been up to, but from all accounts he was the biggest catch since Blake.
To anyone reading this in the early seventies it may have seemed like non-fiction - as it came almost a decade after notorious double-agent, George Blake had been sentenced to forty-two years in jail, and who, only 5 years later, had managed to escape from Wormwood Scrubs Prison, in 1966. Then, it was commonly believed Blake had been helped by an organization, just like Bagley’s fictional “Scarperers”, paid for by the K.G.B., and run by a petty criminal, Sean Bourke.
It wasn’t just fiction writers who believed this was what happened, respected journalist E. H. Cookridge stated in his 1970 biography, George Blake Double Agent that the K.G.B. had financed Blake’s escape, claiming the cost for such an operation was “mere chickenfeed”, and Blake was far too important a spy for the Russians to lose.
This was all fine on paper, but in reality both Bagley and Cookridge were wrong, as Blake’s escape from prison was the work of amateurs and more reminiscent of Carry On Spying than Funeral in Berlin.
George Blake was born George Behar in the Netherlands in 1922. During the Second World War he worked as part of the Dutch Resistance against the invading German army. Blake was so successful he was soon on the Gestapo’s most wanted list. His keenness verged on the fanatical, something which would become more apparent as Blake grew older. His experience with the Resistance highlighted his seemingly natural talent for subterfuge. Arrested by the Germans, Blake just managed to escape, following his family out of Holland to England.
In Britain, Behar was at first frustrated by the long immigration process required to ensure no sneaky German agents were hidden amongst the influx of refugees. To fit in with his adopted country, Behar changed his name to the anglicized Blake, and applied for work in the Navy, his intention was to become a spy, and return to Holland. It didn’t quite happen that way, as his superiors were more than a little suspicious of Blake’s methods which were straight out of the fictional Richard Hannay, and anticipated the fantasy of James Bond and even Matt Helm. It’s worth considering whether Ian Fleming ever met Blake during the war years and if he had, did Blake fuel the writer’s imagination?
After the war, Blake became fully fledged spy, working undercover as part of the diplomatic service. This was when his B-movie imagination kicked-in - writing in invisible ink, arranging bizarre pick-ups for worthless information and running a team of spies.
In 1950, Blake found himself under a different invading army when he was posted to Seoul, Korea. He was captured by insurgents form the North and held prisoner. The North Koreans had no sympathy for prisoners of war, and Blake and his fellow POWs were treated barbarically and forced on a long death march from city to bombed city. Cookridge described part of it thus:
The death march went on for many days. Occasionally there were overnight stops in villages. Usually the civilian internees were packed into one room which had no windows and was covered with vermin and excrement….
...Those who fell by the side of the road, watching mutely as the column passed them by…“We heard many shots…the dying were pushed into the ditch.”
They were repeatedly moved village to village, until they reached their destination, Chung-Kang-Djin. On arrival, the POWs made a rough estimate of the casualties - a least one hundred had died or been shot during the march, just over a quarter of their number. But this was only the start, as they were handed over to the Chinese military, who began a process of brainwashing techniques on the beleaguered inmates.
Blake has since claimed he was never brain-washed, claiming he turned to Soviet Communism because of the horrors witnessed during the Korean War. Whatever the truth, the attempts at brainwashing were later confirmed by his fellow POWs.
After negotiations for a cease-fire, Blake returned home a hero to Britain. Ironically, it wasn’t long before he offered his services to the KGB, and so began his 9-year career as a dastardly double-agent.
Working for the British Secret Service, Blake was transferred to Berlin where he set-up and ran his own spy ring for the K.G.B. Blake’s love of cloak and dagger defined his time in Berlin. He was responsible for the exposure and deaths of an estimated 400 agents - something else he later denied, though his K.G.B. bosses have since confirmed this number as correct. Blake verged on the fanatical with his work, having no compunction in hiring spies to work for him, then exposing them as traitors, as Cookridge explains:
I have a long list of agents Blake had betrayed between 1955 and 1959, but in deference to the regulations of the Official Secrets Act, I shall mention only a few, whose names became known through “show trials” in East Germany.
In 1955 Hans Joachim Koch, a then 43-year-old radio operator, was arrested when emptying a “dead letter box” in Pankow Park, which Blake had arranged and of which he had given the information to the K.G.B….
At about the same time Johann Baumgart, an official of the East German railways, who had produced twenty-five remarkable reports about railway transports, was given away by Blake and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment….
Ewald Jantke, a former Luftwaffe radio operator, and Arno Gugel, son of a Gestapo official, who with a young woman called Ursula Lehmann had formed a successful “cell” in East Germany, were betrayed when Jankte became too cocky and joined the East German People’s Police…
Blake was instrumental in “burning” an outpost established in Dresden, which kept in contact with the secret service in West Berlin by exchanging stamps for collectors…marked with microdots…
The list goes on, but you get the idea, it was all fun and games straight from a John Le Carre. It beggars belief how he wasn’t uncovered, or even suspected as a double-agent sooner, until you appreciate nearly the whole of the British Secret Service was a private members’ club for Soviet double agents, most famously the Cambridge Five (Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross) and most controversially, the suggestion Director General of MI5, Roger Hollis was also working for the K.G.B.
Blake had a good run, destroying most of MI6’s operations in eastern Europe, seeding double agents, and notoriously revealing the tunnel the Allies had built under the Berlin Wall. But all things must pass, and in 1961, the game was up, Blake was arrested sent to trial, parts of which were held in camera for security reasons. He pleaded guilty to the five counts against him, and expected to receive a sentence of 14 years imprisonment. However, Lord Parker of Waddington imposed a sentence of 14 years imprisonment on each of the 5 counts:
“Those in respect of counts one, two and three will be consecutive, and those in respect of counts four and five will be concurrent, making a total of forty-two tears; imprisonment.”
Forty-two years, it was “the longest prison sentence ever imposed in modern British history…” And herein lies the tale of his escape.
Blake wasn’t set free by the machinations of the K.G.B., but by passionate amateurs, who disagreed with Blake’s harsh sentencing.
When he was in Wormwood Scrubs, Blake came in to contact with Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, two men imprisoned for their non-violent protest against USAF Weatherfield, a British airbase used by the American Air Force during the Cold War.
Randle was a conscientious objector, and a member of the Aldermaston March Committee which organised the first Aldermaston March against British nuclear weapons, in Easter 1958. Pottle was a founder member of the Committee of 100, an anti-nuclear direct action group which broke away from Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Their outrage at the “vicious” sentence imposed on Blake saw Pottle and Randle team up, once they were released from prison, with another ex-con Séan Bourke, in a bold plan to set Blake free.
Prior to his escape, the police and prison authorities received numerous warnings that Blake would make a bid for freedom. Security was tightened but it was to no avail, as the BBC reported on October 22 1966:
One of Britain’s most notorious double-agents, George Blake, has escaped from prison in London after a daring break-out believed to have been masterminded by the Soviet Union.
Wardens at Wormwood Scrubs prison last saw him at the evening roll call, at 1730 GMT.
An hour-and-a-half later, his cell was discovered to be empty.
After a short search, the escape route was found. Bars in a window at the end of a landing had been sawn away and a rope ladder hung down inside the prison wall.
Sean Bourke had prepared a ladder made from nylon thread and knitting needles. As in Bagley’s book, the ladder was thrown over a perimeter wall, where Slade/Blake climbed over to an awaiting vehicle. Unlike the novel, Blake wasn’t liberated to Ireland and a well staffed safe house, but was moved apartment to apartment, bed-sit to bed-sit by Bourke, Pottle and Randle, never staying anywhere long enough to attract police attention.
Eventually, in a farcical denouement, Blake was driven by Randle, in a Commer Dormobile from London to Berlin, and then through to East Germany. Through the crucial parts of the journey, Blake remained hidden under the bench seat, with Randle’s children sitting comfortably on top. The incident made fools of the security and secret services, but revealed the ability of committed individuals to change history.
Blake became a hero in Soviet Russia, but his actions seemed pointless after Perestroika. In 1990, he published his autobiography No Other Choice, and claimed his time spent in Moscow had been the happiest of his life. Sean Bourke dined out on the escape story for years, becoming the focus for media attention, and, of course, Simon Gray famously turned the relationship between Blake and Bourke in prison into his play Cell Mates- the production Stephen Fry ran out on, in 1995.
In June 1991, Randle and Pottle were eventually put on trial for their involvement in Blake’s escape, but were found not guilty by a jury, after arguing that, while they in no way condoned Blake’s espionage activities for either side, they were right to help him because the forty-two year sentence he received was inhuman and hypocritical.
Okay, you might have been expecting something else if you followed a text link here, but since you are here, have a listen to this utterly magnificent apocalypso-beatnik free-form freakout from Kim Fowley and TURN IT UP LOUD.
“Baby,
Is America dead?
Are we the brave new world
Or the end instead?
Baby,
Is America dead?”
The epic “Is America Dead?” is as exploratory and totally off onto the furthest reaches of the thinnest branch of the associative free form tree as “When The Music’s Over” and just as true to its vision. Mentally checking his country’s pulse, the song suffers innumerable instrumental breakdowns, ravings, musings, deep truths, jokes, insults, snatches of patriotic hymns and…you name it: it’s all there, up against Kim’s streaming organ chords of flapping freak flag flying. “Is America Dead?” stretches out all the way to Europe and back as Kim ponders, fumbles, moans and freaks out uncontrollably, while the chorus continually asks and prods the song’s title’s question.
Hit play, crank it up loud and enjoy...
Read more: Animal God of the Streets: Kim Fowley (Head Heritage)
Comedian and folkrocker George McKelvey has some fun with his parody of doomsday protest songs and Sonny Bono.
“My Radiation Baby (My Teenage Fallout Queen)” appeared on McKelvey’s album A Crowd of George McKelvey which was released in 1965 and is long out-of-print.
McKelvey was a member of the influential San Francisco improvisational comedy group the Committee.
This groovy Scopitone is from 1964. Its been floating around on Youtube for awhile but this is the best quality version I’ve seen.
Cynical, dark-hearted British playwright Joe Orton and his boyfriend (later murderer) Kenneth Halliwell so hated the books on offer at the Essex Road library in London, that they decided to amuse themselves by creatively defacing book covers. Eventually the pair were caught and did jail time. Now a large selection of their naughty handiwork is on display at the Islington Museum, where 40 of the 72 dustjackets they defaced can be viewed by the public through January of next year.
What would a librarygoer in 1960 think in picking up The Collected Plays of Emlyn Williams and finding they were about to read plays called Knickers Must Fall and Fucked by Monty?
They also altered the blurbs for the books in a less than tasteful fashion. Dorothy L Sayers’s Gaudy Nights, for example, was the writer “at her most awe inspiring. At her most queer, and needless to say, at her most crude!”
Readers of another of her Lord Peter Wimsey books, Clouds of Witness, are advised to read behind closed doors “and have a good shit while you are reading!”
The pair would sneak the book back on to a shelf and then wait for someone to pick it up so they could watch the reaction.
You can see more of the defaced book jackets here.
The results of the recall elections of the WI state reps might have been mixed, but that was then and this is now. Just a few months later, the political headwinds have shifted suddenly. I don’t think things look too promising for the continuing political career of Scott Walker. It’s time to make it hot for this bastard.
Organizers in Wisconsin will have 60 days to collect 540,208 signatures as they announce plans to kick off an effort to recall Governor Scott Walker, the man whose extreme levels of union-busting intransigence led to hundres of thousands of protesters descending on the capital, in a standoff that riveted the nation and led to a resurgence of pro-labor activism. One group, United Wisconsin already has over 200,000 promised recall signatures through its organizing efforts.
On the Ed Show last night, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Mike Tate explained why, after deliberation, the party along with groups of activists forged during the protests had decided to go forward with this action, feeling that they couldn’t wait any longer to try to recall Walker. Video of their conversation is embedded below.
If the drive is successful, elections could potentially be held in Spring 2012. Find out official information here. (It’s a testament to the popularity behind the recall that there are quite a few unofficial recall Walker sites flooding the web already!)
