Grateful Dead

So a Bruins fan takes his frustration out on a Leaf fan after the Bruins lose game 2 at the Garden, by sucker punching him and knocking him unconscious and then running away. Apparently this was unprovoked. Bruins fans have a rep for being tough and nasty to the visiting fans that go there. Especially Leaf fans! But this is fkn pathetic and pisses me off. Boston Strong?? Gimmie a break.

As a bruins fan I just want to say not all of us are like that. Every game I have been to a fight breaks out in the stands, I just don't get it. Not to say I haven't yelled out some choice words to the opposing team, but this fan would never do more than that. I am sending out healing vibes to the hurt leafs fan.

I realize not all Bruins fans are like that. it just makes me sick that something like that happened. After all it's not like we beat the Bruins all the time is it? (Not that it would be an excuse). As for that idiot who held up a TorontoStrong sign at Game #3 at the ACC well....that was absolutely classless also. I think the playoffs bring out the best and worst in everybody. GO LEAFS GO!!!!!

"I went to see a fight and a hockey game broke out." :) Even for the fans testosterone + (beer) + losing/winning = predictable I've been to two St. Louis Cards baseball games and both times there have been fans in full-blown fist fights, usually around the 5th inning, just after enough time and beer. Always guys too. Never saw the women being stupid. It is pathetic behavior, indeed. Government approved, all-american family fun :)

About the violence in hockey and football and to a lesser extent baseball. Bunch of overpaid bitches if you ask me. Except for most of the Canadian brawlers in hockey. It just seems they like continuing a tradition of throwing a few half-hearted punches to preserve their honor, at best. The bench-clearing brawls are the worst. Nice to see you around again, Noonie.

And he defeats Steven Colbert's sister, who was the democrat running against him. This is the guy who ran away to Argentina to cheat on his wife when he was governor of that state, without telling anybody! There is no intelligent life (that votes) left in South Carolina. Of course, they still are fighting the civil war. Though I'm trying hard to not comment on the news, I just couldn't let this one pass.

So true. I never gave the Leafs much of a chance to win this series. Now that the Leafs are down to Bruins 3 to 1 in games i"d say they are pretty much screwed. The leafs will learn from this. Hockey is a game of cycles and i'm certain they will be a powerhouse team in a couple of years......It's been a long fkn time.

Up 4-1 in the last 10 mins of game 7 and they blow it. OT is about to start....back later.

i hate to love the leafs.

Holly shit what a comeback, I didn't think they were going to take it. When i saw them pull tuukka with 2 minuutes left i thought why bother. Tell you honestly i thought the Leafs pretty much dominated the game, it took that extra man advantage to get the last two to tie it up. Now on to the next round against the Rangers.Sorry PonchoBill there is allways next season.

That's the motto of every Leaf fan. I nearly fkn cried. I'm still in shock I think. For a team that dominated the better half of that series that was a epic collapse and a brutal way to lose. I'd rather they lost 8-0. Anyways.....it's over. I'll take the positives out of that series and hope for the best next season My wife and son are big Penguins fans so I think i'll jump on board with them. But really....I don't give a shit anymore.

In an administration that has been remarkably free of sleeze, the current three scandals embroiling Obama didn't have to happen and are a measure of bureaucratic stupidity: 1) IRS going after conservatives 2) AG's Office getting phone taps on 500 AP reporters 3) Benghazi (primarily motivated to be a preemptive strike against Billary in 2016 by conservatives) If you want to add Obama's lack of resolve in backing moderates fighting el-Assad in Syria starting at least a year ago and now revving up to be a major problem with the probable use of chemical weapons it would be a fair criticism. Barak Obama has been a good and noble president and he has been defeated by perverse rules in the Senate requiring a super-majority to get anything done. It is a shame that he will piss away the rest of his administration dealing with these issues when there are so many more important things to be done. Hey, if you back the guy majorly like me then you have to admit when there are problems.

I think the sequestration will leave a blemish on his record as well. I got a call from my delegates here in MD regarding the cuts in military spending, and I told them to stick it where the sun doesn't shine. There are more important infrastructures in America than weapons of mass destruction, and I ain't talkin' 'bout no terrorists neither. Speaking of the Obama administration, did you read the latest issue of 'Rolling Stone'? There's a really good interview with Joe Biden in there I think you might like. And I agree with you wholeheartedly that we have to admit when there are problems with the team we backed with our vote, moreso than those who didn't

Thanks for the tip on the Biden article. Will see if I can give it a read today ot tomorrow.

This was a good article that addressed one of the concerns I mentioned - Syria. We get it -- No rush to judgement because of Bush's rush to war in Iraq. The other good thing in the article was Biden speaking of the Chinese killing the planet with coal-fired plants. I've been pushing that point around here for over four years. Biden was short on specifics on how to motivate the Chinese to more expensive alternate fuels. The truth is that in Asia life is cheap and people dieing due to pollution is a secondary consideration to a revolution against the Communist Party for not delivering the economic goods. The gist of the article seems to be to lend Biden some weight when it comes to his relationship with Obama and Biden being the natural successor to a vastly popular president. The problem I see is that Biden is a whitebread kind of guy that is not going to "pull the underclass out of their apartments" to vote. Make no mistake, without a huge turnout of households with small combined incomes the Democrats have very little chance to retake the White House. If Hillary runs in 2016 it once again energizes the base of the party to do something never done before -- elect a woman for president. She doesn't excite me at all but I think she would do as a president and if being a woman is the way in for a Democrat for another 8 years then I'm all for it. By the way Parkas, thanks for mentioning the sequester and it's effect on the military not being high priority. The Pentagon, along with their buddies at Raytheon, General Dynamics and Grumman (among others) know very well which weapons programs can be cut without the least bit of damage to our military preparedness. The days of profligate spending on redundant weapons systems is over! Bottom line though is that Biden is a good guy. He wouldn't be a bad president.

Y'know, the more I think about how the Republicans want to treat Benghazi like the next Watergate, the Democrats really hold the ultimate trump card. If the one side wants Obama to stand trial for Benghazi, the other should have Bush and Cheney stand trial for 9/11. Because, as we now know, the Bush Administration knew of the threat prior to the attack, but they chose to ignore it. It's still up in the air as to whether or not the Obama Administration knew enough about the Benghazi attack to effectively prevent what happened. Just a thought.

Life truly is not a dress rehearsal...

The recent building collapse in Dacca, Bangladesh that killed over 800 housed many factories making clothes for many popular retailers The fashion industry has tilted toward cheap, wear once garments that are often made in such sweat shops. People don't want cheap fashion to the point of making working conditions unsafe and wages just above starvation. The relentless maw of capitalism gnashes endlessly for profit. The average consumer doesn't want to hurt other human beings so they can get a seven dollar blouse. We don't have a say in the way we are marketed to, except if we vote not to buy from inhuman bastards who sit as CEOs, CFOs and Board members collecting obscene salaries.

Anna, have you seen the recent online video where the guy goes around handing out Abercrombie & Fitch clothes to the homeless? I believe it was in response to a recent corporate statement where the company stated they only wanted their clothes worn by skinny, beautiful people and not fat slobs, or something along those lines. The link to the video escapes me at present, but I'm sure you can find it with a quick Google search. It reminds me of similar statements made by the soulless bastards running Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, etc. And on a similar note, I'm so sick and fed up with the need to look our absolute best when out in public. Seriously, just because Kanye wears shoes that match his pants that match his belt that match his shirt that matches his watch that matches his sunglasses that match his hat is DOES NOT MEAN that we need to do it too! If the youth of the 21st century cared as much about social and political issues as they do their hair and their clothes, those of us here on Dead.net and other such socially-concious sites wouldn't have to complain so much about how badly the world sucks.

Lose your step fallout of grace... I'm anti-fashion though I like to wear good quality, comfortable clothes and shoes. There was one socially responsible company that set up some kind of fund to help the workers in Bangladesh. It wouldn't be fair not to mention them -- wish I could remember the name. There are companies out there whose sole job is to review factory and wage and environmental conditions and they all seem to be like the bond rating agencies. Give them enough money and they'll certify anything!

We lost one hell of a musician yesterday. Ray Manzarek, as many of you probably know, was the keyboardist for the Doors, and he lost his long battle with bile duct cancer yesterday afternoon. When I was still in elementary school, my brother introduced me to many of the most legendary bands/artists on the planet--Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Doors, etc.--and the Doors have remained among my all-time favorite bands ever since. Few artists have been able to make such an impact on the music world in such a short period of time. The Doors are truly legendary. R.I.P., Ray. Break on through to the other side, and tell Jim we still miss him. And we miss you, too.

2013 may go down as a year of infamy for those attempting to scale the world's highest peak in Nepal. A total of seven people have already died this early in the season, including three sherpas, one of whom was blazing the trail as a "Khumbu Icefall Doctor". This is way too many deaths this early in the season. All this after a joint military Indo-Nepalese expedition cleared the trash at base camp a few days ago. Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world and each year lines of up to 200 people can be seen single file going up the mountain in darkness before dawn. The average cost for summiting Everest is somewhere north of $50k. The average life of a climber on Everest and Nepali peasant is unimaginable unless you've been there.

Where the wind comes sweeping down the plains.

It was over a mile wide and traveled 17 miles on the ground. 24 dead including 9 children in an elementary school. This was one for the record books or a sign of things to come in the global warming arena. Positive vibes to anybody or animal still alive in the wreckage.

ASSOCIATED PRESS 8:10 pm 5/22/13 "ORLANDO: A man being questioned in the Boston Marathon bombing case was shot to death at his home by an FBI agent Wednesday after turning violent, officials said. The agent and two Massachusetts State Police troopers were interviewing 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev, a mixed martial arts fighter, at his townhouse early Wednesday in Orlando. In a statement, the FBI said the agent acted on an imminent threat and opened fire. The agent was taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening. Khusn Taramiv, who described himself as a friend of Todashev, told Orlando TV station WESH that Todashev had known one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, from mixed martial arts fighting. Public records also show Todashev lived in Watertown, Mass., just outside Boston, last year."

President Obama will give a defining speech today at the National Defense Academy in which he will outline his policy on prosecution of terrorism as well as plans for Guantanamo Bay. Both of these topics are very interesting and may well set policy for the US for the next ten years. Of the 166 prisoners at Guantanamo, most on hunger strike and being force-fed, 59 of them are Yemenis that could be repatriated to Yemen. The policy on drone strikes may very well determine if the US involves itself in future ground wars when UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) may do just as well. Hopefully this will be a defining moment for a sea-course change in American policy or at least a long-term normalizing of the rules of engagement for the many agencies tasked with command and control of drones. One thing is for sure, America needs to sort this out, especially the policy on drones overflying American airspace...

In his first major speech on counterterrorism of his second term, President Obama on Thursday opened a new phase in the nation’s long struggle with terrorism by announcing that he is restricting the use of unmanned drone strikes, which have been at the heart of his national security strategy. Highlights: 1) Tracing the Rise and Decline of Drone Strikes President Obama inherited the drone program, the number of strikes drastically increased in his first term. 2) Polls Show Strong Public Support for Drone Strikes There is strong public support for drone strikes against suspected terrorists outside the United States 3) More Militants Killed Than Captured In his speech, President Obama spoke of a “strong preference” for capturing militants rather than killing them. 4) Concern Over Drone Strikes and Response in Arab World Parts of President Obama’s speech suggest an evolution not only in how the administration views the drone program but also in how the United States views events in the Arab world. 5) The Role of the C.I.A. in Targeted Killings President Obama spoke of using “remotely piloted aircraft referred to as drones.” He made no mention of the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency is running the bulk of the drone program. 6) Obama Addresses Kill-Versus-Capture Policy The president said that the United States does not order drone strikes when it has the ability to capture terrorists. 7) Obama Keeps the Door Open to a Drone Court The United States government has been debating the idea of setting up a court to oversee targeted killings, something akin to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees eavesdropping on American soil. 8) The Debate Over the Use of Force Authorization There is fierce debate about whether Congress should renew the Authorization for Use of Military Force law that was passed in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks. 9) Obama to Lift Moratorium on Detainee Transfers The most significant part of President Obama’s remarks about Guantánamo Bay was his announcement that he is lifting the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen. 10) What Next for Drone Program? Now that the speech is over, one of the big outstanding questions is just how transparent the Obama administration will be about drone strikes in the future.

On the planet, it also has laws to ban the sale of nudity depicted in magazines as it may be offensive to the clerks selling them. Whats next? Chocolate milk? Integration with the plain, non-fat and vanilla is a must! Political correctness at all costs!

Freedom isn't free... Be sure to thank all those who serve, from the potato-peelers to the drone controllers. The blunt sword of the armed forces swings where it is aimed. If you don't like the result, blame the one who is aiming, not the one taking orders.

Not sure how many of you out there caught the news yesterday, but a CSX train derailed and caught fire yesterday after apparently colliding with a trash truck. A huge column of smoke followed by an explosion shut down an entire zip code north of Baltimore and actually caused a hazmat team to evacuate the area for a while. Fortunately, thanks to early warnings, regular updates due to the continued news coverage, and the general public actually paying attention, major and massive traffic delays were avoided, and (as far as I know) no one lost their life. And to top it all off, this took place only a few miles north of my house. Sometimes it's cool that the area around where you live makes the national news, but not for something like this. I'm just glad nothing catastrophic happened.

There have been a lot of train derailments lately? It's not that they seem weird or anything, just the law of averages. Oh, and living near a major rail junction as I do, I can say there is lot of train traffic out there, the economy is picking up...

I did notice that now that you mention it, Anna rXia. An odd coincidence for sure, but also a sign of a growing economy. You know what they say: you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs (though I'm not sure how directly that applies here)!

If you forgot Sgt. Bales, he is the vet who lost it and snuck over the wire twice in one night in a forward operating base in Afghanistan and slaughtered 16 Afghans -- mostly women and children. At the time I thought sure this was a black op. hatched out of Ft. Lewis-McChord to end the war. It happened mere weeks before Obama met with Karzai in Afghanistan to agree on the draw-down of US troops by the end of 2014. I figured Bales might do 3 years and then quietly be let out on a psych. charge. Today it was announced that the evidence was so overwhelmingly against him he would probably cop a plea for life if one is offered. War is hell. Imagine if we had concentrated on Afghanistan at first and got OBL at Tora-Borra? No massive casualties, no ticking PTSD time bombs, no extra billions spent? I think Jeb's mother is right, we've had enough Bushs in the White House already!

They are collecting masses of data through all types of communication. The Utah Data Center was the original prototype platform for collection which I wrote about here about a year ago. The concept, as they outline it, seems innocent enough -- they match possible suspects of interest to IP addresses and phone numbers and then see what addresses and names that leads them to. But does anybody really believe that is the extent to which they will limit themselves? The system is rife for political abuse... just look at the current scandal at the IRS. Is the protection of the state and it's citizenry that of a higher magnitude than the freedom and privacy of those citizens? It is the price we pay for our bloated economic hegemony that allows us our vastly inflated lifestyle. This end justifies this means?

Many of the quatrains of Nostradamus come to mind as the petty tyrant of Syria is now proven by the French to have used weapons of mass destruction and the Russians have made good on their pledge to help their proxy with state-of-the-art anti-aircraft weapons to make sure the war does not turn on an air blockade by NATO and other allies (of Syrian air domination) of the rebels. The avowed terrorist organization Hezbollah of Lebanon is now fighting on behalf of Syria and drawing Israel into the war. Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have been destabilized with massive refugee camps. Turkey so much so that civil war is emerging from many factors. It should be pointed out the destabilization spreads even further -- from Iran & Iraq to Egypt. In the middle of this Bermuda Triangle of misery is the Armageddon Valley. It is hard to say why Iran, Iraq, Russia, China and a few radical elements within Lebanon would stand in the way of a very aggressive response by NATO, an unmistakeable response that would swiftly turn the tide in this battle and forcefully strengthen the democratic forces fighting the Assad regime. I am disappointed in Obama's timid foreign policy in this matter and, frankly, Kerry's statements on the matter are scaring the hell out of me! Diplomats speak of mistakes in Bosnia and Rwanda and what they would now do differently when millions of people are in danger of being slaughtered. This situation is far worse, orders of magnitude worse.

The media is spinning the PRISM story (after Ed Snowden, PRISM whistle-blower, claims asylum in Hong Kong). PRISM is the program by which the intelligence agencies spy on foreign entities. The spin is that everybody in America supports this so why even talk about it, other than build momentum to literally hang Snowden as a traitor. Even Feinstein wants his ass on a platter and she is the most liberal Democrat sitting on the Senate Intelligence Committee. The FISA Court is the entity to which these intelligence agencies must go to get permission to target. There is only a government appointed lawyer to represent the public's interest so it is basically a rubber stamp. This process was brought about by the Patriot Act, which was renewed last December. I remember when the ACLU used to make noise about this kind of stuff and I believe there are more than 14 Americans who oppose an omnipotent intelligence apparatus that can learn anything about anybody at any time for any purpose. This system is rife for abuse. The telling fact is that just a few US Senators know something about these programs and when the entire Senate is tomorrow being briefed on these programs they won't be able to comprehend because they are clueless. And so are we. But a 29 year-old sub-contractor to the NSA isn't.

This story is so surreal for me. Not because Ed Snowden is the Julian Assange of the NSA but because he went to prom with my wife. Like, a bajillion years ago. It's a small world after all...!

As Jerry would have said: Too strange, man -- too strange!

the DEA, who's droning this site for thc, lsd, duty-free mexican vanilla, dryer lint and various other sundries, is now going to contact the FBI who will then contact the CIA who will then counter-contact themselves, thereby secretly triggering a super secretive email to the NSA who will then secretively fire up their super secret Cray supercomputers to find out everything 'bout ya except your IQ and sperm count. Then they'll come knockin' and want to know all about.........prom! Trouble Ahead, mahn!!!! Don't open the door!! (Of course, at the speed that each of these agencies communicate, this chain of events should take around 5 yrs to come to fruition.....so be expecting some company around the summer of 2018. :))

The White House has a website that requires 25k signatures for them to consider an idea or project or law or whatever. 20k have already signed the petition to pardon NSA whistle-blower Ed Snowden. Meanwhile Snowden has left Hong Kong for parts unknown where is expected to release more sensitive information. Right or wrong, good or bad, Ed Snowden has brass balls and he is my Alpha Dog of 2013 (declared with half the year yet to go!) ~ Run Rudolph, Run! ~ (Because if that pardon doesn't come, you'll be running the rest of your life Ed)

...They don't want to know my sperm count? T_T

Is collecting digital information from EVERYBODY. I don't know about the mid and big-sized cities where you live, but in the ones near me everybody is walking around glued to their smart phones and not speaking to one another. For a rube like me from a rural area it feels like being a stranger in a strange land. These poor people are giving up their social skills and ignoring beauty and miracles all around them and the government is gleefully shadowing and vacuuming up every digital crumb, including a map of where you've been all day and storing it in a mega-zeta-byte facility in Utah. Turn off your smartphone unless you need the damn thing! You're giving up your freedom for it, not to mention losing your humanity for it. Ask yourself, how far away are you from becoming a cyborg (and I don't mean owing to health conditions)? Most people are running from reality and a very few are seeking to merge with it. I'm starting to feel like Keenau Reeves in The Matrix.

They will tell you whatever you want to hear, except for the reality of how they voted. They'll have a reason why "the senator backed your position but all his amendments were shot down". Most of the time young staffers are reading from scripts. It is so obvious. This is especially true for written responses. It makes them look like complete idiots but most people don't care. They don't even know they are being hoodwinked. They really believe that the Senator backs their opinion and blithely vote for that same person again in the next election. Senators do many other things for their constituents besides legislate. They help with all manner of bureaucratic drivel having to do with the Federal Government from war veteran claims to appointments to the military academies and everything in between. But then they go so far as to say "Our office deals with many matters pertaining to the Federal government and your relationship to it. Please don't ask us to intervene in anything having to do with the matters of the state (we all reside in)." In other words, go deal with another nightmare bureaucracy at the state capital. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont recently got burned badly when people in town hall meetings started to vote against power producing windmills for various reasons. He rushed out a statement saying it was "very important that Vermonters support wind power generation stations to pave the way for more production of that same kind and legislation he was backing had to have the support of his home state. Many, many Vermonters responded to him in kind -- "Sorry Bernie, you have nothing to do with the state of Vermont. You just stay down there in Washington and help us with the Federal matters and we'll take care of ourselves, thank you very much." (Ouch! Burn!) All of the preceding was to say that I called Senator Pat Leahy's office in Burlington yesterday (Senator Leahy is the only Senator Deadhead in Congress and big on civil liberties). I asked that if prosecution of Ed Snowden is forthcoming from the Feds for him to ask Obama to pardon Snowden. The young staffer said that, yes indeed, many people were messaging Leahy's office with the same sentiment. I got the very distinct impression that if I had said "We need to hang Snowden as a traitor and make an example of him the staffer would have replied in the same vein -- Yes indeed, many people were messaging the Senator with that same sentiment and he supported the immediate funding of building a gallows for that very purpose. We live in a Republic, not a democracy. The Electoral College elects the president, though those 535 people are supposed to vote the public's will on the first ballot. All subsequent ballots are their prerogative. We put all our trust in these people to create legislation of the nature that the majority of us support. But when it comes to legislating funds for Federal programs like Prism or sweeping orders to tap all cell phones from the FISA Court, unless they sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee and are of the few select on that committee who receive regular briefings on the subject, they don't have a clue what is going or what they are voting for. By now we know that that the Patriot Act passed in the aftermath of 9/11 was anything but patriotic. It was more like the Tyranny Act pre-written by some committee that meets every year at Davos to decide what amount of freedom the serfs really have. I was disappointed to learn that Senator Deadhead (Leahy of VT), who originally sponsored sunset amendments for that Act, last December voted in favor of renewing the Patriot Act (and all his amendments were shot down). Well, I said to the young staffer from Leahy's office, it seems like the Senator has considerably weakened on his stances in favor of civil liberties. "Yes indeed!" he replied enthusiastically, forgetting momentarily which side of the argument I was on... Senator Deadhead's head is dead and the remaining appendages work with less and less grey matter every day. It's no wonder Jerry always said (paraphrasing) Politics is their bag man, not ours. Let them play their games. But, uhh, Jer? The stakes in the game are getting a lot higher these days.

Anna, I think the majority of America has absolutely no idea what their Senators--much less their Congress(wo)men--do or what power they have. After the last twelve years, they appear to be under the assumption that all decisions lie in the lap of the President. The Senators and Congress(wo)men merely comment as to whether or not they like the ideas. I want to smash my head through a stack of bricks whenever I hear people complaining about the state of the nation and blaming it all on Obama when he's just one part of the trifecta. Chances are it's their other elected officials that are to blame, but they're too stupid to make the connection. I mean, what happened to the generation who actually paid attention to what was happening in this country? The bra-burners and the proud hippies who stood out in the streets to fight for the rights of others? This country has become a Shakespearean comedy; those who pounded their chests and said, "I will not become a sheep like my parents' generation!" have gone and done just that.

Well, Parkas, you might want to consider that there is quite a debate around these parts (dead.net) as to what hippy deadheads stand for, politics wise. Jerry Garcia was definitely of the opinion that, as I paraphrased, electoral politics was THEIR game and that we (deadhead hippies) should have nothing to do with it. So, in Jerry's time, the deadheads were pretty apolitical. But, as I have pointed out many times to many people, the Grateful Dead played many benefit gigs over the years that supported very radical, even revolutionary causes. The Black Panthers, the White Panthers and AIM (the American Indian Movement) are the three revolutionary ones that come to mind but there were many, many others such as the Pacific Alliance that supported the total ban of nuclear power, especially at Diablo Canyon. In 12/12/81 there was the Dance for Disarmament with Joan Baez that I attended at San Mateo. There was a slew more. Like all good hippies they supported what was radical and hip at the time. They didn't support candidates for office though (and neither did I) for as long as Jerry was around. Only in 2008 did Bob & Phil get behind Obama and there was a lot of chatter from old hippies saying this wasn't kosher, Grateful Dead-wise. More folks said they were entitled to do as they pleased, though it was dissonant to see Bob & Phil playing Obama's Inaugural Ball in tuxedoes. But I would say you are correct in that there were a lot of hippies out there who composed the anti-war movement and such who weren't deadheads. The Grateful Dead didn't have a monopoly on hippie-dom. Lomg hairs were often times the organizers. I should know. I was one of them for a long time (no time-cards, no rubles!). There are a lot of people out there who went and cut their hair and changed their politics and made compromises as marriages and kids and inheritances and responsibilities came down the pike. I live in a place where a lot of counter-culture types moved to from Boston and Philly and NYC and points south and west. They moved back to the land and started communes and tried to do the self-sufficient thing. The best of these became artisans in some way and survived the breakup of communal idealism to live with their values intact. You really do have to have your act together in a big way to get off the grid, recycle, compost and live to scale while still involving with political activism. If it was easy a lot more people would be doing it. But, alas, it's not easy so when you find those juicy people who have kept it together all these years salute them! They are winning the nonviolent revolution every day - imho...

The Obama Administration today announced it has concluded that Syria is using chemical weapons. The next logical step is arming moderates fighting Assad. The following logical steps involve a lot of people being killed... McCain is going to take the karma for this one. How do people, like him, angrily accept responsibility for leading the charge? I guess, for McCain, it's easy after he tells a mother whose child has died of gun violence that there will be no ban on assault weapons - not in His Senate, not on His watch! Brutal, just brutal.

In states where registered Republicans outweigh registered Democrats and Independents, the industrialist group ALEC and LE are sponsoring and supporting laws to force those identified as "deadheads" to giver up their driver's licenses at age 65, despite meeting all other legal criteria. Citing such facts as their former and current self-admitted use of psychotropic drugs; their ticket purchases to any Grateful Dead related events; purchase and trading of Grateful Dead music; past criminal history for use and possession of psychedelic drugs, even within the Native American Church, and trolling for like information on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, ALEC has asserted that there is enough research to prove that "flashbacks" and current use of psychotropic drugs by this category of people creates a risk magnitudes of order higher regarding the incidence of serious road accidents than those who simply use all the current devices available as options in the most expensive latest model of car (including voice activated phone and internet) such as GPS and texting, to name just a few. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is quoted as saying that "It is time to round up all the known and suspected deadheads as menaces to the public safety by their current and past drug use. We don't need to know anything more than how Art Linkletter's daughter died or Leary's last request for 500 super-humans to take off from Earth in a spaceship to star-seed the universe to know what a public safety risk we are facing from this segment of the population now turning 65. If they don't voluntarily give up their privilege to drive it is time to take it from them and lock them up! Although it is expected that the ACLU will take up the deadheads cause there will be little opposition to the laws in red state legislatures or, ultimately, the Supreme Court. These assemblies expect their LE to make wide-ranging requests for information from the Utah Data Center that will lead to arrests using tag-data scanning software programs loaded into LE car computers when Grateful Dead related events come to towns in their states as well as confiscation of vehicles belonging to this class of drivers. An ALEC spokesperson smiled as he said his group could use the funding wisely to expand it's outreach to other areas of drug-induced music. Grateful Dead spokespersons were not immediately available for comment as they were out "clubbing" for the night.

With a speech by Obama to the largely unemployed youth of Ireland and Europe saying "We in America had a different approach to austerity that has not involved so much suffering for the working and middle class. It is laughable. The American view is always short term. If we bail out investment banks and every company "too big to fail" while printing vast quantities of paper money that other countries continue to believe has worth and concentrate that useless paper in the hands of corporate treasuries they will indeed continue to grow jobs as long as the huge pile of surplus cash is spent slowly and wisely enough not to create inflation and bring in reasonable profits, quarter to quarter, as far as the eye can see (and the dollar and bond market remain afloat. Give the money to the rich elites. They know what to do with it. Until they don't. And what we could have done? Well, let's not talk about infrastructure and arts and social programs and health care and the environment. They aren't important. Fracturing and raping the Earth to employ the American working class outweighs all else. Immigration reform? NSA omni-surveillance? Please, don't bother me. I have to check the box to put 10% of my paycheck into a 401k from which I'll draw a .05% profit from, after the tax break and company match. Medicare? A fading memory after Obama gives tax dollars to health care corporations. So listen up 56% of unemplyed youth in Europe, WE'VE got it fright! I mean right! Err - ughh, we see the light!