Words of Wisdom from Bill Burr

"That's not a family photo. That's an environmental disaster and you framed it."

Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

NOTE: Paul Krassner, for those of you who aren't familiar with him, is the former editor of The Realist and an original member of the "Yippies." He has allowed me to post this excerpt from his book, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut, which chronicles his creative activism and the establishment's (especially the FBI's) reaction to it.

Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut is available only at Paul's homepage, where you can watch a 20-minute video of him reading from the book at the Winnipeg Comedy Festival and purchase copies of the Disney Memorial Orgy poster.

Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut is also available as an e-book from Amazon Kindle.

Howard Rasmussen was not his real name. Actually, he was an FBI agent working in their New York office. One day in October 1968, he was reading Life magazine. He saw those photos of me – playing basketball in my loft, lying on the floor of an airport – accompanying a rather complimentary profile. Then he sat down at his typewriter, creatively trying to choose every word so carefully that it would reek of credibility, as he composed the following letter to the editor of Life on plain stationery:

Sirs:

Your recent issue (October 4th), which devoted three pages to the aggrandizement of underground editor (?) Paul Krassner, was too, too much. You must be hard up for material. Am I asking the impossible by requesting that Krassner and his ilk be left in the sewers where they belong? That a national magazine of your fine reputation (till now that is) would waste time and effort on the cuckoo editor of an unimportant, smutty little rag is incomprehensible to me. Gentlemen, you must be aware that The Realist is nothing more than blatant obscenity. Your feature editor would do well to read a few back issues of The Realist. Try the article in 1963 [sic] following the assassination of President Kennedy, which describes disgusting necrophilism on the part of LBJ. To classify Krassner as some sort of “social rebel” is far too cute. He's a nut, a raving, unconfined nut. As for any possible intellectual rewards to be gleaned from The Realist – much better prose may be found on lavatory walls. If this article is a portent of things to come in Life, count me out, gentlemen, count me out.

Howard Rasmussen

Brooklyn College

School of General Studies

Before he could be permitted to mail the letter to Life, he was required to send a copy of it to FBI headquarters in Washington, along with this memorandum:

The 10/4/68 issue of Life magazine contained a three page feature on Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist and self-styled “hippie.” Krassner is carried on the RI of the NYO.

Bureau authority is requested to send the following letter to the editors of Life on an anonymous basis. It is noted that the Life article was favorable to Krassner.

Howard Rasmussen was merely doing his job, writing that poison pen letter, but is that how taxpayers' money was supposed to be spent? I had broken no law. The return memo – approved by J. Edgar Hoover's top two assistants, Kartha DeLoach and William Sullivan – was addressed to Mr. Floyd and Mr. Shackelford at the New York office, and stated:

Authority is granted to send a letter, signed with a fictitious name, to the editors of Life magazine. Furnish the Bureau the results of your action.

NOTE: Krassner is the Editor of The Realist and is one of the moving forces behind the Youth International Party, commonly known as the Yippies. Krassner is a spokesman for the New Left. Life magazine recently ran an article favorable to him. New York's proposed letter takes issue with the publishing of this article and points out that the The Realist is obscene and that Krassner is a nut. This letter could, if printed by Life, call attention to the unsavory character of Krassner.

Life magazine never published Howard Rasmussen's letter to the editor. However, they did publish this letter:

Regarding your article on that filthy-mouthed, dope-taking, pinko-anarchist, Pope-baiting Yippie-lover: cancel my subscription immediately!

Paul Krassner

The Realist

There were Howard Rasmussens all over the place. One FBI memo tried to smear Tom Hayden with the worst possible label they could invoke – FBI informer. The FBI distributed a caricature depicting Black Panther leader Huey Newton “as a homosexual,” and ran a fake “Pick the Fag” contest, referring to Dave McReynolds as “Chief White Fag of the lily-white War Resisters League” and “the usual Queer Cats – like Sweet Dave Dellinger and Fruity Rennie Davis.” They always took pains to “Insure mailing material utilized and paper on which leaflet is prepared cannot be traced to the Bureau.” In that context, “Bureau authority was received for New York to prepare and mail anonymously a letter regarding [an individual's] sexual liaison with his step-daughter (Age 13) to educational authorities in New Jersey” where he was a teacher.

In 1969, the FBI's previous attempt to assassinate my character escalated to a slightly more literal approach. This was not included in my own Co-Intel-Pro (counter-intelligence program) files but, rather, discovered elsewhere by Sam Leff. At the Chicago convention, he had erased the line between anthropologist and activist. Later, as a Yippie archivist, he investigated a separate FBI project calculated to cause rifts between the black and Jewish communities. He found this: Julius Lester had allowed a black teacher to read an anti-Semitic poem on his program over WBAI in order to showcase an artistic expression of the outrage behind that point of view. As a result, the station was picketed. The FBI reprinted the poem on a flyer with the photo of a picketer holding a placard reading Do Not Use Jews for Scapegoats. This leaflet was “aimed at individuals of Jewish background active in the New Left and who, until recently, gave open sympathy to Lester's revolutionary ideas.” Then the FBI produced a WANTED poster featuring a large swastika. In the four square spaces of the swastika were photos of Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Mark Rudd of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), and myself. Underneath the swastika was this copy:

LAMPSHADES! LAMPSHADES! LAMPSHADES!

New York radio station WBAI recently featured programs under the tutelage of black revolutionary Julius Lester of the Guardian and Leslie R. Campbell, sometime teacher at JHS 271, from which it appeared that the only solution to Negro problems in America would be the elimination of the Jews. May we suggest the following order of elimination? (After all, we've been this way before.)

*All Jews connected with the Establishment.

*All Jews connected with Jews connected with the Establishment.

*All Jews connected with those immediately above.

*All Jews except those in the Movement.

*All Jews in the Movement except those who dye their skins black.

*All Jews (Look out, Jerry, Abbie, Mark and Paul!)

Once again, this flyer was approved by the FBI director's top aides:

Authority is granted to prepare and distribute on an anonymous basis to selected individuals and organizations in the New Left the leaflet submitted. . . . Assure that all necessary precautions are taken to protect the Bureau as the source of these leaflets.

NOTE: NY advised that Julius Lester, a revolutionary Negro writer for the Guardian, had recently featured one Leslie Campbell, a teacher at a Brooklyn high school, during one of his regular broadcasts over radio station WBAI. During the broadcast, Campbell read a poem which contained anti-Semitic statements. This and other broadcasts by Lester have resulted in organized picketing at WBAI and much comment in the press. NY suggested a leaflet be prepared captioned: “Wanted: by Julius Lester” and containing pictures of several New Left leaders who are Jewish. This leaflet would refer to this broadcast and suggests facetiously the elimination of these leaders. Station WBAI is an ultra-liberal organization which has attacked the Bureau, as well as other Government agencies in the past. NY's proposal would lend fire to this controversy surrounding WBAI and also create further ill feeling between the New Left and the black nationalist movement as Lester is a spokesman of this latter group.

And, of course, if some overly militant black had obtained that flyer and “eliminated” one of those “New Left leaders who are Jewish,” the FBI's bureaucratic ass would be covered: “We said it was a facetious suggestion, didn't we?”

Oh, yes, one other thing. It turned out that J. Edgar Hoover himself was a raving, unconfined nut.

Oil Well that Ends Well

Robert Newman's History of Oil

As shown on Ch4 and repeated several times on More4, available at IndyBay on the web and many other places, now on Google video (not great video quality) Robert's stand-up act examines the history of the last 100 years or so but putting oil center-stage. Brilliant!

The Return of Despair.

When Bush won re-election in 2004, I did serious research into moving to Canada. They have a point system for immigration, and I came up a few points short, according to my calculation. Today, I feel about a million times more despondent than I did then. Any Canadian, Australian or New Zealand women out there who would like to marry an American malcontent who's really a nice guy beneath the gruff exterior? I'm good at cooking, chopping firewood and cunnilingus.

Jet Fuel?

It's a Beautiful World

Devo-Beautiful World
Uploaded by adiis. - Watch more music videos, in HD!

Proud Member of the "Professional Left"

My New Favorite Blog

http://diehipster.wordpress.com/

The Sensible Liberal's Guide to Sensible Liberalism in the Age of Obama

God, I fucking hate people.

Okay, so I'm at the Blue Line station on my way home from work. I need to add money to my stored value card or else I won't have enough to get to work tomorrow. But the machine doesn't take credit cards, so I have to get $20 out of the nearby ripoff ATM, which is located inside a tiny convenience store inside the station. If I hurry, I can make it to my bus before it pulls away from the station. Unfortunately, this stupid, fat she-beast who just bought a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos is standing right in front of the ATM, and she won't move until the clerk gives her a bag. The clerk is already helping the next customer, so the stupid fat she-beast has to wait for the bag that she doesn't even fucking need but that she thinks the clerk owes her because she just bought a 99-cent bag of Doritos. Of course, she won't move her fat motherfucking ass so I can gain access to the ATM; I have my card out & she looks right fucking at me, so I know she knows what I'm trying to do, but she still won't move until the clerk gives her the plastic fucking bag that she so richly deserves. Finally, the clerk finishes helping the other customer and asks the stupid fat she-beast what she wants even though he already knows what she wants.

"You didn't give me no bag," she explains, her words dripping with injury.

The clerk glances at me, recognizing my building rage, chuckles, and laboriously pulls a plastic bag from the hanger and carefully spreads it open for her to deposit her precious motherfucking Nacho Cheese Doritos. Finally, the obese food tube waddles off allowing me, at long last, to access the ATM, which, despite the fact that it's charging me two dollars and fifty cents to access my own money, takes for fucking ever. After chirping and grinding and wheezing for an eternity, it finally spits out my measely twenty. I snatch it and dash to the stored value card vending machine. But by this time, there is a line of people waiting to put money on THEIR stored value cards. The line is long, in part because the other vending machine is out of order (naturally), and in part because two motherfucking thirds of my fellow countrymen have not yet figured out how to operate these things. They are hell on wheels when it comes to texting their post-literate friends, but when it comes to reading pictograms on a vending machine rivaling a PlaySkool infant's toy in simplicity, they turn into stone cold imbeciles.

Anyway, by some miracle, I am able to add the twenty dollars to my stored value card and make it to my bus moments before it leaves the station. And guess who I see on the bus. Come on, guess. That's right! The very same fat, cretinous whore who wouldn't get the motherfuck out of my way until she got the plastic motherfucking bag for her stupid goddamn fucking Doritos, which she doesn't fucking need anyway. And guess what I see on the floor of the bus beneath her idiotic hooves. Go ahead, guess. That's right! The plastic fucking bag that she wouldn't move until she got because it was owed to her.

This meat puppet, this disgusting, worthless food tube is exactly why people go postal. She will go through her entire pointless life consuming and consuming and consuming while producing nothing of value until she dies and begins decomposing, which can't happen soon enough. Every bite of food that has sustained her, every stitch of clothing that has kept her warm, every brick, piece of lumber, slab of concrete, tile, shingle, rug that has sheltered her, every tidbit of knowledge her teachers tried in vain to ram through her thick skull, every gallon of gas that has moved her carcass around, every satellite that has been launched and every megabyte of bandwidth that has been used so she can text her backward, half-witted motherfucking friends has gone one hundred percent to waste. She is a monumental drag on civilization, and, unfortunately, there are millions just like her. They waddle around prattling on and on about god knows what, consuming every idea and resource like matter down a black hole and leaving nothing in their wake but a trail of discarded wrappers and stains and crumbs. God it's great to be American. Thanks for listening (and by listening, I mean reading.) I'll be here all week.

Happy Memorial Day

Conservative Victory

"We shouldn't burn books, but at least they should be filed correctly."
photo by Gary Smith

Song I Wish I'd Written

Flagpole Sitta

I had visions I was in them

I was looking into the mirror

To see a little bit clearer

The rottenness and evil in me

Fingertips have memories

Mine can't forget the curves of your body

And when i feel a bit naughty

I run it up the flagpole and see

Who salutes (But no one ever does)

I'm not sick but I'm not well

and I'm so hot, cause I'm in hell!

Been around the world and found

That only stupid people are breeding

The cretins cloning and feeding

And I don't even own a TV

Put me in the hospital for nerves

And then they had to commit me

You told them all i was crazy

They cut off my legs now i'm an amputee (God damn you)

I'm not sick but I'm not well

And I'm so hot cause I'm in hell

I'm not sick but I'm not well

And it's a sin to live so well

I wanna publish zines

And rage against machines

I wanna pierce my tongue

It doesn't hurt it feels fine

The trivial sublime

I'd like to turn off time

To kill my mind

Kill my mind, mind

Paranoia paranoia

Everybody's coming to get me

Just say you never met me

I'm runnin' underground with the moles (Digging holes)

Hear the voices in my head

I swear to God it sounds like they're snoring!

But if you're bored then you're boring

The agony and the irony are killing me

I'm not sick but I'm not well

and I'm so hot cause I'm in hell

I'm not sick but I'm not well

and it's a sin to live this well

One, two, three, four

Go ahead, kids. Touch it.

In Search of...Democrats

Finanzeinsturz

George Carlin R.I.P.

Edgy comic George Carlin dies at 71
by Dean Goodman

Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs, dirty words and the demise of humanity, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday. He was 71.
Carlin, who had a history of heart and drug-dependency problems, died at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. PDT (9 p.m. EDT) after being admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains, spokesman Jeff Abraham told Reuters.
Known for his edgy, provocative material developed over 50 years, the bald, bearded Carlin achieved status as an anti-Establishment icon in the 1970s with stand-up bits full of drug references and a routine called "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television." A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of the routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the 1978 case, Federal Communications Commission vs. Pacifica Foundation, the top U.S. court ruled that the words cited in Carlin's routine were indecent, and that the government's broadcast regulator could ban them from being aired at times when children might be listening.
The Grammy-winning Carlin remained an active presence on the comedy circuit. Carlin was scheduled to receive the John F. Kennedy Center's prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in November and his publicist said Carlin performed in Las Vegas this month.
His comedic sensibility revolved around a central theme: humanity is a cursed, doomed species.
"I don't have any beliefs or allegiances. I don't believe in this country, I don't believe in religion, or a god, and I don't believe in all these man-made institutional ideas," he told Reuters in a 2001 interview.
Carlin told Playboy in 2005 that he looked forward to an afterlife where he could watch the decline of civilization on a "heavenly CNN."
"The world is a big theater-in-the round as far as I'm concerned, and I'd love to watch it spin itself into oblivion," he said. "Tune in and watch the human adventure."
AWARDS
Carlin wrote three best-selling books, won four Grammy Awards, recorded 22 comedy albums, headlined 14 HBO television specials, and hosted hundreds of variety shows. One was the first episode of "Saturday Night Live" in 1975, when he was high on cocaine.
Drug addiction plagued him for much of his life, beginning with marijuana experimentation as a teen, graduating to cocaine in the 1970s, and then to prescription painkillers and wine. During the cocaine years, Carlin ignored his finances and ended up owing about $3 million in back taxes. In 2004, he entered a Los Angeles rehab clinic for his alcohol and Vicodin abuse.
George Dennis Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, in New York City, where he was raised with an older brother by their single mother. He fondly recalled that the nuns at his school tolerated his early comedic inclinations.
After a brief, troubled stint in the U.S. Air Force, he started honing his comic act, developing such characters as Al Sleet, a "hippie-dippie weatherman."
Carlin told Playboy that his sensibilities developed in the 1950s, "when comedy stopped being safe ... (and) became about saying no to authority." He cited such influences as Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory and Bob Newhart.
He also dabbled in movies and television, recently voicing a hippie Volkswagen bus named Fillmore in the Pixar cartoon "Cars."
Carlin is survived by his second wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; and brother Patrick. His first wife, Brenda, died of cancer in 1997. News of his death was first reported by the television show "Entertainment Tonight."
(Additional reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Patricia Zengerle)

Thank You Mask Man

It's a Miracle!!!!1!11!!!one!!!

Atheist Sees Image of Big Bang in Piece of Toast
For Immediate Release: Miracle Toast?
(ACPA-London) Excitement is growing in the Northern England town of Huddlesfield following the news that a local man saw an image of the big-bang in a piece of toast. atheist donald chapman, 36, told local newspaper, "the huddlesfield express" that he was sitting down to eat breakfast when an unusual toast pattern caught his eye.
"I was just about to spread the butter when I noticed a fairly typical small hole in the bread surrounded by a burnt black ring. however the direction and splatter patterns of the crumbs as well as the changing shades emanating outwards from this black hole were very clearly similar to the chaotic-dynamic non-linear patterns that one would expect following the big bang". "It's the beginning of the world" he added excitedly.
Ever since news of the discovery made national headlines, local hoteliers have been overwhelmed by an influx of atheists from all over the country who have flocked to Huddlesfield to catch a glimpse of the scientific relic. "I have always been an Atheist and to see my life choices validated on a piece of toast is truly astounding" said one guest at the Huddlesfield arms hotel.
To the surprise of many, the UK national atheist association has asked its members not to pay attention to the story despite its potential to inspire less faith. "Given what the religious believe already, this is an easy sell" said one disgruntled activist who said he was going to Huddlesfield anyway noting that "Seeing is not believing".