Is Wikileaks under serious online attack lately?

At 2:06 PM EST, this was posted on Wikileaks' Twitter account: "Please bittorrent Wikileaks Insurance release 2012-02-22 (65GB) wlstorage.net/torrent/wikile…

A comment below it from a French Twitter member ("m4de") states: "torrent file is offline..."

The link is code, computer language. Have fun.

 02-23-2012 Addendum: I've been told that the link now contains the 65GB file without a key. What did I download within the first six hours the above Twitter post (w. link) was up? This must be a backup archive. There doesn't seem to be any definitive answer here. The main site's been under cyberattack for some time. 65 GB sounds like everything from the Wikileaks site, the State Dept. cable inclusive.

DC Madam book update

We're in the home stretch here folks. The cover design is nearly in place with back cover copy and design close to completion. This has been a long road. I'm certain that the book will never be quite to my satisfaction. If there are future editions count on them being revised extensively with additional materials from the case/event. Making a book has been more direct than I assumed it would be, but the effort is extraordinary in meeting some reasonable level of quality and internal consistency, and on all fronts. This comes down to page formatting, playing serif off of sans serif fonts, revising, editing, design, ISBN registration, spell-checking, everything. Writing a book was nagging at me ever since I graduated from college along with the desire to chronicle an historic event. Be careful what you wish for. I don't see a release of any later than April. Buckle-up. This is going to be quite a ride, even for participants in the event.

Google: WTF?

I noticed recently that Blogger (a Google company) has removed literally all images from this blog. What's incredible is that many of the are my own photos, so this was done indiscriminately. Will I be taken offline? It wouldn't surprise me the way things have been going regarding online speech. I'm going to contact Blogger and give them an ear or an eyeful. What a crock of shit! What assholes! First it was the Jaenelle Antas images, now all images. Non sequitur. Is this some byproduct of the "intellectual property" insanity going on in Congress now? Perhaps.

Down to the last updates on the DC Madam book...

Work is about done: the final touches to the index--yes, index--have been expedited, it's finished and makes the book searchable. I don't understand why more non-fiction texts omit this feature. Perhaps the authors don't want anyone being able to fact check them easily? Yes, it requires some very detailed and time consuming work, no question, but it should go without saying that not to have one undermines the credibility of the work, the research, and if there is any, the analysis within it.

On proofing, revision and suffering: this has been a learning experience in every aspect. The book is an account. It's not going to be perfect. Yet, enough effort has been expended to make it something approaching a very polished text and it will be an easy reading experience for the curious. This is a work on true crime, an historical event the author was a party to, and it contains the author's take and analysis. It makes no claims at being the last word on the DC Madam event which was a branch of the "Hookergate" scandal, of that I'm adamant about. I am hardly alone in this assertion.

The amount of effort involved can never be justified economically. Even were this book to make well over $100,000 USD, it would only begin to pay for the time, resources and actual labor involved. This has always been about servicing the historical record and setting things straight from the point of view of the author. The assertions are my own and it's my right to publish on them, primary materials inclusive. I've interacted and analyzed the data for five years now. I know it better than almost anyone else, and I have access to materials that individuals like Alex Jones never had, never will, not merely the public record. This has been a kind of a labor of love, my love of the truth, however painful it may be to express it.

No one will ever know the pain this project brought to my life, it has been an ordeal. I haven't experienced overt harassment, albeit there has been some online incidents that weren't accidental or my paranoia--that's now legal, what was once necessary to hide, the harassment of dissidents in the United States. None of it has been significant or impaired this text or its writing. In fact, it's only added to the richness of it and confirmed many of my own hunches, going so far as to prove them outright. Draft after draft has come, and in the interim, I have to assume that government contractors within the text have come around to cause problems. Occasionally, they've succeeded, but in the end all they did was expose themselves and their methodology.

There has never been and will never be a book like this one. I wish that was comforting, but it's not. Take the DC Madam narrative as a kind of a "canary in the coalmine," an indicator of where we're heading as a nation. From my conclusions, the future doesn't look bright at all. The only prognosis I can in fact see as hopeful is collapse of the current system. As my account makes plain, we're looking an awful lot like the former Soviet Union these days, and not in the sense that those on the far right are constantly contending. You can learn a lot from a microcosmic event like the DC Madam saga. The macrocosm, the bigger picture, becomes apparent in the details that form an overall mosaic. 

As weak as their beginnings have been, I think the Occupy Wall Street crowd in NYC have shown us part of the way out. We have a new context without all the past effectiveness of red-baiting. Along with the Occupy movement we have an opening to renew the growth of labor unions. Americans seem to thrive best when their backs are up against the wall. Let the Dead Bury the Dead will speak to all of this, the dark political moment we're in right now, poised for disaster as the irrelevant 2012 elections come, then pass. The DC Madam narrative unfolded publicly right before the 2006 midterms. The GOP appointed prosecution team worked overtime to limit the damage to Republican incumbents when they moved on Deborah Jeane Palfrey. The charges were always political, let's be frank for a change. Expect nothing but brutal frankness in my account of a political travesty that played out before our eyes. The reality-bending machine known as the mainstream media worked overtime to make sure we couldn't see what was right in front of our faces: solid evidence of widespread influence peddling in Washington D.C. with all three branches of government involved in papering over it, defending it, preserving it.

On media inquiries: I expect this book to be ignored all across the media landscape, in nearly all mediums. Why? It's not digestible, it cannot be explained away and absorbed. It stands factually in defiance of the assertions of "conventional wisdom," the standard lines, the empty memes, the safe talk mistake for actual discourse in American life.

I will speak with independent media. You will not be allowed to service your own agendas. I will not expend resources or effort in this endeavor besides my time. The rest is up to you if you want a story or content emanating from me as a subject and a source. Rest assured that I know when someone's serious and when they're pulling my leg or out of their depth. You'll be dealt with accordingly and kicked to the curb. I will not communicate with right wing media without very definite conditions. All that written, I don't expect to be approached by almost anyone. I have in the past, perhaps there will be follow-up, but I am not concerned about this in the end other than getting the primary information within the text out to the public.As a student of history I always wanted to one day be a chronicler to a major event. Be careful what you wish for.

I will not do a speaking tour. Who am I? I'm not known to the public which ends that question before it's put out there. What I do expect is a certain level of interest, but of the level I cannot predict, it's impossible to. There is no literary agent. There is no big house publisher. There is me and CreateSpace and the book. One of my hopes is that it will be seen online by university library acquisitions across the United States and made a part of those collections for the historical record. I never thought that I'd finally write a book, but there it is, I have. I never in my wildest imagination thought it would be on this subject matter. Some of this was experienced reluctantly, but once you open a door...you know. Wish us all luck. We're going to need it in the intervening years before the big event.

Addendum: There has been talk coming from some quarters requesting signed copies of the text. This would be costly to the author. In that case, if there is enough demand, I'll attempt to make this possible. However, there will be an additional charge as this will require having copies printed, shipped to me, then the recipient, and so on, more cost involved. If the demand is there I'll make some signed copies available.

The book will be trade paper, no illustrations, no photographs. It clocks in at 505 pages at this point including blank pages, the title page, the preface and the index. At this point I don't expect the price to exceed $27.95 USD.The book is 99% finished. For those interested in the scandal it won't disappoint and could well be the first accessible, free-standing work on the subject. This isn't a book filled with legalese. It's present, but explained, and doesn't dominate the text. It tells a narrative, a story, from the perspective of a participant. It's not the last word, but it does reach some conclusions that the author feels will endure.

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I never filed an appeal and kiss my ass.

The Last War Crime

Ask Viacom why they won't take advertising from the filmmakers and Google why they pulled the waterboarding scene from Youtube:

http://www.lastwarcrime.com/

 

Virginia Hoge and Topix

I've been informed by Virginia that she's being harassed by right wing trolls on Topix. She's written some very good research and observations on the NSA's infiltration of social networks and commenting services such as a Topix, but them in particular.With the release of the Wikileaks "spyfiles" this is all but proven now, we know that the American intelligence establishment and their contractors are running an information war on commenting threads and social networks like Facebook. These sites and services are too willing to hand over private information to the national security state to the point that we need to ask who some of them really are.

From 2010: http://open.salon.com/blog/virginia888/2011/11/15/is_topix_giving_out_users_personal_data_to_the_nsa

Some recent reflections on former DC Madam civil attorney Montgomery Blair Sibley

I've been torn about this man for some time. I don't believe him to be dishonest. Perhaps referring to him as "eccentric" or even "off-the-hook" is accurate, but I never experienced any dishonest or dishonorable acts at his hand. His representation of Obama accuser and homosexual hustler and con artist Larry Sinclair wasn't to my liking, but then, I think I understand what that was about (more on that one day). His attempts to reopen the DC Madam case for a retrial was appropriate as well as brave, it was what gentlemen do under such deplorable circumstances and Sibley is a unique kind of an aristocrat to put it mildly.

Maybe he's Don Quixote, maybe his behavior has been peculiar. Maybe his fixation on his Scottish heritage is archaic. Yes, his behavior has sometimes been peculiar.

However: He was zealous in the defense of Deborah Jeane Palfrey. His constitutionally-based suits against the Supreme Court were principled. His love for his son is clearly genuine, sincere. His humanism is apparent. He has been a threat to established power that's corrupt as well as sadistic and has inflicted itself on the American public via the power of the state. He's not getting rich from charging windmills and I suspect that he's not even remotely how he's been portrayed in the mainstream press, notably by the Washington Post. Indeed, he's drawn to the spotlight like a moth and his being driven from the legal profession could have had merit to it, but that wasn't valid based on his actions in the DC Madam case, albeit that it was probably the main reason for it in the end.

His recent attempts at co-founding a medical marijuana growing space in the nation's capital has my moral support. Other actions by him do not, but what do I know about all of them? What does the press? They don't appear to know very much in any detail. Yes, he "wore a kilt" (traditional, no underwear and he also plays the bagpipes) at his appearance with Larry Sinclair to the National Press Club when his "client" was supposed to present his evidence that he'd snorted coke and had sex with the future presidential candidate in a limousine in Chicago over a decade ago. Sinclair had no evidence. Yet, I cannot come to any conclusions about the man. He's part of our history, for better or worse, and he's terrifically complicated to the extent that he defies one. What would his ancestors like Hiram Sibely be like now? Probably a lot like him, and I leave it at that. He's an anachronism. There are far worse things to be these days.

DC Madam book update

Things are wrapping up: Work is about to commence on a cover design as well as a stand alone website or the book, separate from this blog. At this point, the book is clocking in at 504 pages+ an  index and a table of contents. The length is based primarily on the fact that it's packed with primary information related to and from the case from correspondence, the public record, court documents, and more, much more. This is a view into the case that--other than in Montgomery Blair Sibley's Why Just Her--no one has ever seen. I was in a privileged position to experience, view and analyze information that few outside of the defense have ever seen let alone heard of.

The primary data isn't so much as explosive as my own own take, my analysis of it. While these are my opinions, they're the opinions of someone intimately involved in the case, therefore, this is a historical accounting as well as opinion and analysis. There will never be a book quite like it, rest assured, and it might just stand as a clear-eyed testament to this troubled era in ways that many of the observers of the case at the time never quite grasped, hindsight being everything of course. You would never want to experience what I and others did. While he's been quite reviled in relation to the case, I can only imagine the hell that counselor Sibley experienced. I was fortunate not to get too close and still got my wings singed.

 
The prosecution of Deborah Jeane Palfrey was a nightmare case if there ever was one. It was without any legal precedent in American jurisprudence. No one can recall anything like it ever happening, and I doubt there will ever be one quite like it ever again, power nailed that lid shut as thoroughly as possible. Incredible forces were marshaled to shut her down, to prevent more exposure of influence peddling related to defense/intelligence contracting by members of Congress, the executive branch, and yes, even the judiciary who enabled them. As this book should make clear, we're in a lot of trouble as a nation with no hope of actual reform. I believe we're headed in the same direction as the Soviet Union. Perhaps after that there can be a real chance at rebuilding American democracy. That's at least my hope. As it stands, under the current order, there can be no reform and we will continue to push towards the brink of what could be major catastrophe.

Ironically, only government can fix these things. This wasn't just a story about a sex scandal, it was about institutionalized corruption by officeholders who are in fact criminals. The media lied, and lied, and lied, and fulfilled their usual role of protecting power from public scrutiny. Small wonder no one wants to pay to be lied to anymore. More than a few institutions will be put under scrutiny in this account. The picture's not a pretty one and the myth of democracy is revealed as just that. It's one thing to assume, it's another to have your worst fears and cynicism confirmed. Expect a spring release.

Postscript: All of the important DC Madam entries from this blog have been extracted and archived. There have been some alarming clusters of activity around the blog and I'd neglected to create copies of some of them. This is no longer the case, and I suspect that some of them faced potential removal in the current political climate. Future editions of the upcoming text could possibly include a DVD-r containing them as well as other primary materials not included in the text from the case.

"Why America is Failing" (I didn't generate this)

A.J. Weberman on Ron Paul

Ed.--This is a pretty good set of personal observations by a Jewish activist on Ron Paul and the people he surrounds himself with. I too stumbled upon Spotlight (a defunct anti-Semitic/right wing extremist paper), speaking for myself in the early 90s, and agree with his conclusion: Ron Paul is an authoritarian fascist and a race baiter, a demagogue, a liar. Paul is a sad reminder of the failings of American Populism just over a century ago too, the fixation on the gold standard-and-all...as well as the baggage of anti-Semitism.

Make no mistake: This man, and more specifically, the people who are his base, are an incredibly dangerous political phenomenon on the American landscape. Worst of all are his Christian Identity connections. His son Rand (named after Ayn Rand) has been put on the SPLC's watch list not long ago, and for good reason. These people are scarier than you think. The scariest part is that there are numbskulls on the left (really arch-conservative flakes) who are being swayed by him out of desperation and a desire for expediency, for immediate change. Yeah, we'd get change alright--an even greater acceleration of the move towards corporate tyranny and a more openly racialist state.

"Ron Paul - The Most Dangerous Nazi in America": http://www.slideshare.net/AJWeberman/ron-paul-the-most-dangerous-nazi-in-america?from=new_upload_email

Postscript: Again, I don't agree with all of Weberman's contentions, historical or otherwise, but the raw data is there. I do agree that Paul is a demagogue, a Christian Identity freak and a corporatist, a bad populist.

Alex Jones Featured Prominently in Upcoming DC Madam Account

There are no words to describe this scummy dirtbag and his audience, you'd have to grab some from other languages. I wasn't aware of it until last year, but Jones did a radio interview with Deborah Jeane Palfrey (aka "the DC Madam") in the spring of 2008, not long before her trial. It was her final interview with him for his moronic syndicated radio show. It's up on Youtube, check it out some time. If you want a good example of someone asking leading questions, look no further, Jones lets his ass hang out in the wind in it.

Worst of all: If you know most of the context of the case and how it played out, you can hear the ambulance chaser concocting his own conspiracy theory before her death. Suffice it to say this gets more elaboration in the text, but Jones is busted here, it's one more example of what a disgusting exploiter and a demagogue he truly is. His audience are way beyond sick and would make good redneck extras in Twain's Huckleberry Finn. I used to think this bastard and his ilk were lowly, but this one tops my worst assumptions about this asshole, this liar, this degenerate, who routinely abuses the First Amendment. He should in fact be taken off of the air for his alarmist comments as well as his pandering to what are very violent, extremist elements in American life.

Filmmaker Richard Linklater should be ashamed for putting this turd in not one, but two of his feature films, both animated. President Lincoln was in fact wrong to fight southern secession after all...

Jaenell Antas and Censorship

Naziland--This very stupid young woman had her photos (posted at one time by her on Stormfront, also her MySpace page) removed from this blog not long ago, perhaps the last six months. That's pretty ridiculous considering she's been putting them out there--you don't keep title when you do that without some statement of intellectual ownership. Whether it was her or Google, I don't know, but it's even money the Nazi, Holocaust denying bitch whined to them about it.

So much for Google's supposed stance on censorship over the impending intellectual property protection bills (SOPA is one) is hypocritical in this light, the use of the photos was academic, they were up for years before being pulled, and Antas lost title to them the moment she posted them without any declaration of ownership--doesn't matter.

Hit the related labels below for a rundown of the story. Yes, some of the links in those posts are dead. Some of us have a habit of rewriting history. Others, like me, have a habit of documenting it for posterity so that the lies don't hold. What a flake...

Here's a link to her MySpace page where they're still posted: http://www.myspace.com/jaenellesings

The first article, coming from a tip out of Portland, Oregon: http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2009/07/jaenelle-antas-stormfront-phots-nifty.html

PS: Wikileaks was releasing hacked emails from UK Holocaust revisionist David Irving at the time. Interesting serendipity.

A'murkan Exceptamatism™!

Truly, A'murka is exceptional! So exceptional I had to coin a new word today: Exceptionihilism™. Reread A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and you'll see that this was apprised long ago. We're exceptional alright. Exceptionally dangerous to all life on the planet. We need to thank our business community and our edumacational systum.

Lily in Solitude...

A message to Facebook contacts

My account was disabled today thanks to a number of factors, some of them backstabbing Libertarians who have a problem with freedom of speech. Contrary to being for "liberty," these little men (ever notice women are too smart for that shit?) have no tolerance for someone disagreeing with them and bruising their titanic egos, exposing their delusions of adequacy. The last time I got booted was over the Jaenelle Antas story (see label below) and her connection to a chair of the Libertarian Party of Indiana--the most successful Libertarian group in the 2010 elections at a whopping 2%--and Holocaust denier David Irving. For posting a link to the article, giving them a heads up, I was reported and removed. Does that sound like they have any respect for freedom of the press there? Never mind that: my page was literally inundated for many months after reestablishing a new profile under a different name, hacking, dirty trick, you name it, they tried it.

Many of them got wind that I was back on Facebook and came at me like the slack-jawed (mooks--look it up) zombies that I always thought they were. Ever notice many of them work in the IT world and at Radio Shack? I don't play nice with hateful idiots and I'm sure that these wimps were reporting me left and right (there is no center in America, face it) because I wasn't going to humor them like their friends and family who have to. The irony is that while I've been vociferous in my criticisms of both American Libertarians and Ron Paul on Facebook, I have never reported any of these people who hide in the shadows. What they don't get is that I accomplished what I wanted to on there on many, many counts. It doesn't matter. I'm just one person, certainly, but there's little doubt in my mind that I got people thinking about these vermin and the threat that they pose to democracy in the United States. They're the legendary people waiting in the wings for their time, they're a bigger problem than you think.

Anyway: I have had my life disrupted thanks to dirty tricks on Facebook by nameless, faceless people. God only knows who they are, but this is a relief to put it mildly, I wanted out long before this occurrence. This is a blessing in disguise to put it mildly. To all of my Facebook contacts, you can reach me either here (my email address can be found on my profile page here) or via my Twitter account. There will also be a stand alone website coming before long for the DC Madam book.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/MJanovic

The Devil and Bob Dylan, by A.J. Weberman (review)

WEBERMAN: And here I am a Dylanologist.

DYLAN: A Dylanologist pig man.

WEBERMAN: In a certain position, in a certain position where I can do a number on a cat who’s become a pig man who’s become a fucking sell out ‘ya dig? Like that’s the way it goes man. You write all these songs some jerk is gonna fucking believe them man and he’s gonna get pissed off when finds out you didn’t believe ‘em or don’t believe them anymore.

DYLAN: I believe ‘em. …

--The Dylan/Weberman tapes, January 1971.

As more than a few observers have noted over the decades, to be a Bob Dylan fan is to hate writer/Yippie activist/researcher/chronicler A.J. Weberman. No one likes the bearer of bad news which is human folly. In the nearly four decades that I’ve been aware of the pioneering sing-songwriter there hasn’t been one moment that the cult surrounding the folk singer didn’t seem detached from reality, unhinged from the facts, even after numerous admissions by their icon of his fallibility never mind what the detractors have unearthed over the years. When did I first notice cracks in the edifice? It was in the early 1980s when I saw D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary on Dylan, Don’t Look Back (1969) which painted a portrait of a pompous, arrogant nihilist who didn’t appear to believe in anything but money and fame, a real asshole.

Dylan shot a hole through the Elvis print that Andy Warhol gave to him and gave it away thoughtlessly during that period. This guy was a real creep, yet so many idiots I knew loved this prick ignoring what was obvious. Others took note though early on, one of them was in the film, John Lennon, who needs no introduction.

Weberman was no stranger to either man having spent considerable time getting Lennon’s ear as well into Dylan’s garbage, speaking with him on the phone and so on. His foray into “garbology” of the latter apparently began in the fall of 1970 (he has the pictures and the trash to prove it). Weberman and Dylan had many friends in common at the time as he recounts in the new text. In the case of Dylan, there was physical contact when the folk singer rode up on a bicycle behind the then young writer and punched him in the back of the head, yelling at him to keep out of his garbage. The Yippie had pushed it too far after bringing literally hundreds of protesters of the DLF to the front door of his Greenwich Village apartment on Dylan’s birthday demanding he get involved in the politics of the day. As his account goes, he took his licks feeling that he’d earned them. Fair enough. Some of this sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Indeed, Weberman cites literary history going back to the French novelists and poets of the 19^th century, drawing a parallel that’s spot-on. The Yippies have often been called “proto-punks” (or, as the saying went, “A Yippie is a Hippie who got beaten by the cops.”). Looking at Weberman’s actions directed at Bob Dylan it’s hard to argue against it. This is cultural history at its best and the author has made a good contribution to chronicling a lost time in American countercultural history. Dylan’s trash became grist for his mill, say what you want. His fallen idol also earned his licks. You really don’t want to sell a mythology of being a social rebel, a progressive when you’re not willing to live up to, when you only do it for money, something he admitted he was doing to folksinger Joan Baez in the sixties.

Sometimes people like Mr. Weberman—or Baez--will come after you with everything they’ve got once the scales have fallen from their eyes. Hell hath no fury. Dylan is a lie, a Shibboleth for lost people, an ingenuine creature in a false reality in a construct of democracy within an oligarchy, a sick, twisted version of the American dream that’s been copied ad infinitum. This is the horrible truth at the heart of the Dylan myth: Rather than being a genuine radical as Woody Guthrie had been, he was literally the opposite while contending that he was like some kind of dustbowl minstrel, a fabrication.

Ultimately, this was never about money for the author, it was another quest for the truth on his part (with some exceptions that go into the personal). While I and many may not agree with all of his analysis of Dylan’s lyrics his central contentions are rock solid: Bob Dylan has been a fraud the entire span of his career and his fans are delusional people who have projected their wishes onto him. That’s a religion, not unlike Christianity, that Judaic faith created by Jews and appropriated by Anglo-Saxons and other groupings, then perverted as the messages got into the wrong hands. Would you know it, somehow, Weberman was able to obtain mimeographed copies (there had been under 100 copies made, a small run for a select few) of Dylan’s awful unpublished experimental novel, Tarantula which he’d written in 1965-66. Rather than being a sycophantic biographer like so many others, Weberman has taken the path towards uncovering the truth, or his version of it, which has been found to be surprisingly accurate over the intervening years.

In May of 2011, for example, the tapes of the late, sycophantic music critic Robert Shelton which were rummaged through after his death in 1995 yielded the final word on his heroin addiction. This suppressed passage was found in them: "I kicked a heroin habit in New York City. …I got very, very strung out for a while, I mean really, very strung out. And I kicked the habit. I had about a $25-a-day habit and I kicked it." This was recorded by Shelton in March 1966 at a tour stopover in Denver. His biography of Dylan, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, is silent on the subject. The music critic was one of the very first to notice the talent of Dylan in 1961. He promptly wrote a review of a performance in the Village and the singer-songwriter was just as quickly signed to a record contract with Colombia. The rest is false history written by liars.

In August 1962, the “schmuck” would sign with Albert Grossman to manage his career becoming one more willing victim of that deceased criminal. Grossman would become infamous as a con artist who ripped-off his talent roster but also for taking out a life insurance policy on Janis Joplin after he’d found she was injecting heroin. According to writer Ellis Amburn’s biography on the singer, Pearl, he’d told her and the rest of Big Brother & the Holding Company upon signing them in 1967 that he wouldn’t tolerate intravenous drug use. Where did he get that notion from? Because of Dylan? Weberman was the first to contend that Dylan was using heroin and has paid the price for telling this truth ever since 1971. Now he’s been proven correct. I believe that Grossman and Shelton constitute Weberman’s “Devil” in his text in an allegorical sense. This is a story about Jewish identity as well as one about the failure of the baby boomer generation to grasp their place in the world, in history, resorting to fraudulent lifestyles and voting accordingly. Many of these fools—too many of them American WASPs, banal reincarnations of conformist lynch mobs--will continue to ignore the truth about Dylan and America to the grave and to our collective peril. Weberman’s ability to grasp all of this underscores a powerful intellect that has yet to be even remotely appreciated, however rough the delivery might be, however painful. The truth is the truth that fools run away from. The Crowd delights in lies.

The Devil and Bob Dylan is interspersed with thematically-linked excerpts throughout from Tarantula and the legendary songs. According to Dylan biographer Bob Spitz, Weberman took the substantial proceeds from his bootlegging of the text and formed the “Dylan Liberation Front” in 1971, part of a multi-pronged assault to pressure the singer-songwriter into participating in progressive causes for a change. Considering the times, one can hardly blame him. Considering all of the lies, one can hardly blame him.

What he found in Dylan’s garbage went straight into the East Village Other and various underground publications during that painful transition from the sixties into the seventies, a time when so many illusions of the counterculture were being smashed. The reaction to Weberman’s revelations by 1971 ranged from explosive to utterly dismissive, and this is where some of the crux of the story comes into play: there are those who are capable of seeing the hard facts and those who are believers in the mythology of Dylan as an icon of an era. They buy into the lies on many fronts. The Yippies are also part of that iconography, albeit in a different sense, a far more transparent one. The main difference was in their sincerity proven by their adherence to social activism well into the 21^st century, something the singer-songwriter ditched decades ago…if he ever truly believed in it at all. According to Weberman’s new book, he never did, a conclusion he seems to have reached before the legendary phone call between him and Dylan in January 1971. Legend has it that avante garde composer John Cage provided him with the means to tap and record the conversation. The entire operation to unmask Dylan should be regarded as an artistic work. The Devil and Bob Dylan is likely the bookending of it, the frame--a conclusion. Others were also ahead of the Crowd and were ignored.

By 1970 John Lennon had reached a point of maturity where he roundly rejected Dylan…as well as an addiction to heroin through snorting it, probably the method that his faltering hero had employed. George Harrison also battled this demon throughout the 1970s and Graham Nash was one more casualty. Harrison also snorted heroin. Was it thanks to Dylan’s influence over them? In his song “God,” Lennon roundly rejects Dylan as a weak man, not a man-god that others had made him and the Beatles into. Who would John Lennon, perhaps the most popular sing-songwriter of that era besides Zimmerman himself, have looked up to enough to have been persuaded to try heroin? That’s right, no one. The myth of Bob Dylan was founded on lies. The lies have begun to come crashing down for good. A.J. Weberman was right all along: you’ve been had and you wanted to be, the talent of the artist aside. Now grow up and get a life.

Jewish Republican Eric Cantor sings for his meals

This smarmy fascist asshole was on the CBS investigative program 60 Minutes last night denying before God and everybody that Ronald Reagan never raised taxes when it's well established that he did. Is Cantor hanging out with Holocaust denier David Irving as well? Is he totally insane or just a bad liar? I'll tell you what he and most politicians are: simulacra of human beings, parodies of people. Politicians having sex with prostitutes is one more indicator that these people aren't human, acting out perverse, parallel versions of the lives of normal, well-balanced, ordinary people. The fact is that they're pathological, totally insane, and should be detained and evaluated as to whether they're criminal psychotics by legal and clinical definition.

Republican Eric Cantor needs to reform the Sonderkommando (Jews in the death camps who assisted in the disposal of other inmates for a little more time) so he can join it. Will he shoot himself in the back of the head, then dump his own body into a mass grave? Could be. His Walther P-38 is loaded with a full clip, he's ready for action, ready to lick the hand that overfeeds him with inflated capital. What scum. What an animal. Dirt. Typical behavior of Republicans in every sense. Next week they're going to tell us that the laws of gravity have been rescinded.

On Ron Paul and his Trolls

He's a racist, but in the interest of brevity, ala Seuss, a few lines (no, not drugs):

I will not vote for him in a booth, I will not say he's long in the tooth. I will not say that he is sane, or that he is a weather vane. I say that he is a kook, and that he thinks that blacks are "spooks." He will not win on election day, so there is nothing more to say about this ossified ofay.

And since he's bound to lose, there truly is no more to say.