Month: April 2013

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The World’s Most Handsome Man?

What are we to make of this silly story of this poet being expelled from Saudi Arabia recently because “he’s too handsome?”

This story passed through the English press like a wild fire yesterday, and probably also overtook the entire Saudi media as well. Well, turns out the dude in question is also a model and actor, so maybe you can chalk the entire episode up to a publicity stunt. Or maybe there’s another explanation. Like maybe this nutty story was actually manufactured to divert attention away from something else?

When Abdul Alharbi was taken into police custody at the scene of the Boston Bombing and immediately identified as the prime suspect, some strange events apparently took place, including an emergency meeting between President Obama and the Saudi ambassador, although we were quickly assured that meeting had nothing to do with the sudden reversal of Alharbi from “suspect” to “victim,” and his rapid transportation back to the safety of Saudi Arabia, where he would have been the biggest person in the news upon arrival, except for that handsome man, who conveniently took all the spotlights on himself. Maybe I am barking up the wrong tree, but there are so many issues swirling around Boston that just don’t figure.

First of all, if you escape the scene of a crime in Boston and blend into the scenery, and are ready to make your getaway, the very last thing you’d do is shoot a Boston police officer in the back of the head, execution style. The Boston police force is one of the most tight-knit communities on earth and they take care of their own. Nobody executes a Boston policeman, unless of course, they want the full fury of that entire force coming down on them with great precision and speed, and, of course, that’s exactly what happened next. We were told initially these brothers were armed to the teeth, yet now discover they had but one revolver between the two of them. Nothing makes sense about this crime, and the only possible hypothesis I can find is they were under hypnotic control and instructed to kill that police officer so they’d be quickly located and suicide-d by the Boston police force.

And the most suspicious thing about Alharbi (left)? You can’t ask the State Department any questions about him for reasons of National Security. And that probably gives you only two choices: Alharbi was a double agent planted into the cell the brothers belonged to, or Alharbi was actively working to support the brothers. Alharbi, obviously, was way more important than the brothers, who are probably patsies to be discarded who thought they were super spies working for any number of possible intelligence agencies or jihad fronts.

What really happened when the Soviet Union broke up? Because I was led to believe that just as the CIA and Saudi’s funded the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, they moved quickly into the Russian states with Muslim populations and began recruiting jihadists. Apparently, the two countries are working together to spread the radical Sunni Salafist Wahhabism in order to provide the dialectical opposition they need to advance their global agendas. So a lot of radical mosques suddenly popped up in Chechnya.

Isn’t is a bit strange that the dialectic inside the Muslim world, this endless war between the Sunni and Shite never really seems to produce terrorists from Iran or Iraq interested in fomenting violence against America? In fact, the only source of such violence seems to emanate from Osama bin Laden’s home country, Saudi Arabia. Which is why I find it odd that the Saudi links to 9/11 were covered up and ignored, just like what’s happening right now to the Saudi link to the Boston Bombing.

And honestly, aside from the eyeliner, I don’t see much difference in the looks between these two dudes, so maybe we can ask Saudi Arabia to send Alharbi back here for questioning so he won’t tempt the females there with his smouldering good looks?

I just think the “wag the dog” movies have reached a new level since 9/11, and they already have a brilliant op going that blames the Boston bombing on stoners and conspiracy theorists. You can get smoke and mirrors to work any better than that.

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New Children’s Prayer

 

A lot of the best magic starts with the kids. A good example would be the children’s poem, “Hush-a-bye Baby,” which was a coded message for an uprising against King James I, who was suspected of smuggling a new born baby into his palace so he could pawn it off as his newly birthed offspring (when, in fact, he could bear no fruit). “The cradle will fall” was a reference to this child not being recognized as being of proper royal blood.

When I was a kid, we were taught a very strange poem to say every night before bed. In my usual fashion of improvisational ritual theater, I’ve changed the words a bit in order to place them more in line with my understanding of the vibrations that run through all things.

I encourage parents to introduce this prayer to their kids as a means of dealing with some of the terror being manufactured today.

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An Apology to Elephants

Lily Tomlin has produced a most amazing documentary. Only 40 minutes in length, I guarantee anyone who watches this film will have a hard time ever attending a circus again. I don’t think I ever went to a circus that displayed elephants, but I’m sure never going to even think about paying to see such a spectacle as long as I live.

Elephants are some of the most sensitive creatures on earth: huge telepathic engines for emotion and love vibrations. Their deep attachment to each other is well-known and when a lover, child or friend of an elephant dies, it’s not unusual for that animal to go into mourning for six months. Looking at an elephant in mourning, you get a real sense of how that vibration shuts down all their chakra centers.

What they don’t tell you is that getting elephants to do stupid tricks is a complicated process. First the animal’s parents and adult tribe are usually all assassinated in front of the children in Africa. That’s done to harvest ivory and meat. Then the elephant kids are rounded up and shipped overseas to a circus or zoo. Once the toddlers arrive at a circus, they have to be “tamed,” which involves six men. First, they put ropes on every leg and pull the baby elephant off its feet while one man holds the trunk and another sticks a bullhook into the animal’s anus. The bullhook is a steel torture device designed to stab or hook the animal’s most sensitive parts, usually a tender spot right about the eye. Baby elephants are beaten and tortured until they lose their spirit. At that point, they’re ready to learn tricks, like standing on their hind legs, a completely unnatural position for an elephant.

Interestingly enough, elephants posses great powers that have never been put to use. Had an orphan elephant been showered with love and adapted willingly to living around people, keep in mind he or she is much more sensitive to smell compared with a bloodhound. And probably more intelligent too. Imagine if that elephant had been honored and treated with respect and dignity, instead of being beaten into submission? Almost all are suffering from PTSD, and you can see that in their unnatural head-rocking behaviors. Instead of being treated like a slave, what if that elephant had just been treated like another person, with feelings, emotions and some basic rights? Elephants may lead the way to ending the worldwide abuse of all animals who are denied all dignity in their existence, pumped up on pills and standing in their own feces for most of their short lives before being harvested for human consumption. You know, animals emit telepathic vibes just like we do, so imagine the signals emanating from those animal factories.

Thankfully, people are starting to wake up to this atrocity, and thank you Lily Tomlin for bringing this to our attention. A couple in California created an elephant sanctuary so old elephants no longer of use to the circuses can come and try to get some healing in their final years. One of the most moving parts of the documentary concerns two baby elephants who were separated after coming to the states, both tortured for years, and much later in life, they reunite at this sanctuary. The deep emotion these creatures feel for each other despite being separated for decades was obvious. In fact, elephants spend a lot of time touching each other, rubbing against each other. If they could hug they would since they are obviously sharing compassionate energies on a regular basis.

So check out this amazing documentary while it’s on HBO. It will make you sad, but it’s something that might actually help turn the tide and help stop the abuse. And never, ever, buy anything made of ivory again.

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Alex Jones and Salon: The dialectics of discrediting conspiracy theory

A big dance went down between Alex Jones and Salon over the Boston Marathon Bombing. Salon had already bestowed the title “King of Conspiracy Theory” on Jones earlier and began blogging about him daily, thus increasing his fame, even though Jones is an obvious crackpot demagogue and in no way a real, organic citizen researcher like myself.

Any sensible person rejected Jones after he doctored a pair of Family Guy clips to make it appear the Boston Bombing was predicted by the TV show, a blunder that will forever discredit him. See, Jones likes to push the theory all violence in America is being orchestrated by the Illuminati to mind control us. And when the Colorado shooting happened, that was supposedly a mind control project. Same with Sandy Hook. Never mind the lack of any evidence in this regard, Jones and his ilk just mine coincidences and rumors to bolster phony cases. See, a Batman movie once mentioned the words “Sandy Hook,” so that means they plan these events decades in advance and place evidence of their plots into the movies and TV so when the crimes happen, it subconsciously controls our mind. It’s hard to even figure out what point they are trying to make with these ridiculous theories, other than manufacturing paranoia.

Jones doctored two Family Guy episodes and then presented this as evidence of an Illuminati mind control experiment. This is just the sort of sophomoric drivel Mark Passio pushes, completely devoid of any real research, just the art of connecting dots that don’t connect and then scaring people with the Illuminati boogeyman.

So why would any sensible person even talk to Alex Jones after he pulled that stunt? Of course two of the biggest “whistleblowers” in America talk to Jones all the time: Wayne Madsen and Sibol Edmonds, both former members of the national security state whom I wanted to believe were reliable sources of info, but considering their strong connection to Jones (a manufactured lightning rod, just as Wikileaks and Snowden are manufactured lightning rods), I feel I can’t fully trust them.

I’d assume the National Security State is setting up a dialectic with Salon on one side and Jones on the other, as if those two paradigms are our only options. Of course, I always assumed Salon was a CIA op.

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Was Sinatra a Sometime Stoner?

Handsome Johnny.

Paul Anka’s new tell-all book My Way finally arrived. I was hoping this memoir might shed some light on the Sicilian men-of-honor society since Anka was the youngest member of Sinatra’s Las Vegas ratpack who ruled Vegas throughout the sixties and seventies. The book does not disappoint. In fact, the foreword includes a few paragraphs on Johnny Roselli, who was running Las Vegas for the Chicago family when Anka arrived there as a teenager. Anka says “Handsome Johnny” was working for Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky, but far as I know, he started out doing hits for the Chicago outfit and may have even been the trigger man for the St. Valentine’s day massacre which permanently rearranged the power structure in Chicago.

I have a strange connection to Roselli as he frequently came to my hometown to visit one of his favorite mistresses, the owner of the local newspaper, where I worked on the weekends while in high school, hanging up the UPI and AP tapes that were used to automatically set type. Initially, Roselli was moved out to Hollywood, but after Bugsy Siegal invented Las Vegas, he soon shifted his base of operations there. Anka says Casino is probably the closest movie to the truth about Vegas, but even in that movie the violence is exaggerated for theatrical effect. Roselli and his friends were actually the best-dressed, most well-mannered people in Vegas, and any problems that arose for them were usually dealt with very quietly and behind the scenes.

In fact, the rat pack may have picked up some of its style from Roselli and his pals because they always dressed to the nines. It was Roselli who got Marilyn Monroe her first movie deal, by the way, which is why she owed the Chicago family big time, and why she had affairs with Sam Giancana, Roselli’s boss.

There are many revelations in this book, but one of the biggest is Sinatra actually liked smoking pot on occasion? Anka doesn’t make a big deal out of it, just mentions it in passing one time, but obviously many if not most of the professional musicians in the 30’s and 40’s were vipers at one point. We always heard Sinatra didn’t care for illegal drugs, but, in fact, that may not have been true when it came to marijuana. The rat pack spent a lot of time in the steam rooms, sweating out the booze they were drinking, but marijuana would also have provided some much needed hangover relief.

Of course, Sammy Davis was the weirdest member of that group. At the invitation of the creepy Lt. Col. Michael Aquino, Sammy received an honorary membership in Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Sammy was a freak at heart and loved having threesomes with a dude and a lady while imbibing enormous amounts of cocaine and watching porn. Sammy supposedly had the biggest porn collection in Hollywood. Sinatra tried to pull Sammy out of that scene when it was obvious Sammy was losing it.

According to Anka, the scene in Casino when they are bundling up the skim in the backroom is not entirely correct. All the cash was put into official wooden boxes and reported except the hundred dollar bills. The hundreds were divided between the families who’d invested in Vegas, and suitcases of hundred dollar bills were constantly being shipped back east.

I’m sure Anka knows more than he is revealing, but even so, the book is filled with revelations and I hope this gets turned into a movie soon. Anka comes across as a very smart dude who was there at the beginning of rock and roll. In fact, he was working with Buddy Holly when Holly died and Anka correctly identifies Holly as the most important influence on the British invasion, the man who almost single-handedly created the singer/songwriter/guitar player role model that swept through the culture a few years later. Chuck Berry was very influential too, but Chuck was an older dude, already in his 30s when the rock tidal wave crashed on the beach. In a way, Holly’s death and Berry’s incarceration opened the doors for the British invasion to walk though as they left such a tremendous void.

Anka and Bobby Darin were the two most talented dudes in their class, the last to come from the Brill Building, and it’s obvious Anka thinks Darin lost all dignity by joining the counterculture late in life. I disagree in that songs Darin wrote during this period were among his best and make great counterculture anthems today, especially Simple Song of Freedom. So I don’t think Darin lost his dignity, quite the contrary, I think he had a spiritual awakening, but like Ricky Nelson found out at Madison Square Garden, sometimes your audience thinks they’re in charge of your paradigm and they don’t want you to change, or at least they don’t follow you down that road.

I didn’t realize Anka was Lebanese, probably because his family is Christian, but he was Adnan Khashoggi’s favorite performer and there’s a lot of praise for that gun runner and Octopus bagman and very little on his criminal behaviors, but then the same goes for the Sicilian men-of-honor. Anka also goes into detail on the famous fight between Steve Wynn and Donald Trump.

But some of his most interesting revelations occur when Howard Hughes arrives in Vegas with the intent of buying up the state. Hughes did buy several casinos before he was mysteriously disappeared, but the men-of-honor? They were left in place. Hughes needed people to run his casinos, and they were simply the best people for that particular job.

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Remembering Richie Havens

I hitchhiked to the first Woodstock festival in 1969 with only a few dollars in my pocket. When I arrived at the site, I actually went to the ticket window and bought one ticket, to the Saturday night performance because the Grateful Dead were my favorite band at the time, and the Merry Pranksters were my biggest role models. The Prankster bus (Further) and most of the Pranksters were at the event, although the Chief, Ken Kesey, was hiding in Mexico at the time, avoiding arrest on a minor marijuana charge because he was afraid they were going to throw the book at him for being a counterculture leader. After all, Tim Leary had gotten ten years for two seeds in Texas.

The event was so much more massive than expected. They were trying to erect a fence around the site while I was buying that $7 ticket with most of the money I had on me. You could buy all three days for $18, but I didn’t have that much money on me. A few hours later, promoter Michael Lang took Prankster Ken Babbs’ advice and tore down the fence and declared Woodstock a free concert. I should have that ticket stashed somewhere in my vast archives but haven’t seen it in years.

They had the sound system ready to go long before any of the major acts showed up. A band called Sweetwater was supposed to open the show, an LA version of Jefferson Airplane that nobody ever heard of. But Sweetwater was stuck in traffic and could not reach the site. After that, helicopters were used to bring in the bands. Finally, after a long wait, Richie Havens was sent out to warm up the crowd with only an acoustic guitar, but that warmup lasted for hours as they told Richie just to keep vamping. Richie had been a doo wop and gospel singer from Brooklyn who’d moved to Greenwich Village and become a hippie. After 2 and half hours Richie had played out every song he knew, and still, no other act was ready to play. So Richie performed that most famous example of Improvisational Ritual Theater: he made up a song on the spot and called it “Freedom.” Because after all, freedom was what the counterculture was all about. And that became one of the most memorable moments of Woodstock.

As we contemplate the epidemic of violence in our culture, brought on by the perfect storm of pills for everyone, guns for everyone, and graphic violence pornography for everyone, one wonders if another generation will ever emerge honoring non-violence, like mine did in the 1960s.

Richie died last night of a heart attack in his home in Jersey City. His spirit is a good place to be.

 

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The Saudi Connection to the Boston Marathon Bombing

Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi

Wasn’t it strange that Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi was picked up immediately after the Boston Marathon and his residence searched while the media (NY Post) told us he was the lead suspect in the case? Then, suddenly, the pair from Chechen executes a Boston policeman, followed by a wild shoot-out with police, while behind the scenes, Skull & Bones Patriarch John Kerry and then President Obama hold emergency meetings with the Saudis, the result of which is to have Abdul immediately moved from “suspect” to “victim” and hastily deported out of the country back to Saudi Arabia, free from prying eyes and anxious questions and any legal actions.

Abdul disappeared from the national media and all google searches titled “Saudi Connection to Boston Bombing” led straight into Russia and none into Saudi Arabia, who, as we know, is the real center of funding for Islamic terrorism, perhaps even under the supervision of their British and American compatriots in the MI6 and the CIA and Pentagon. War is really a game played for profit, and most of the crusaders and jihadists don’t even realize it, but they’re actually working for the same banks, just running up billions in profit in guns and drugs.

Meanwhile, that uncle who was interviewed on CBS 60 Minutes and praised in the Washington Post for being so nice and articulate in his hatred for his two loser nephews? According to Daniel Hopsicker today, that dude is an oil millionaire with links to Halliburton and the CIA. Why am I not surprised? Meanwhile, when Abdul was shipped back to Saudi Arabia, he and his father were immediately paraded before the Saudi media and assured everyone they had nothing to do with the bombing. And then the entire media was overwhelmed by a absurd story of three men so handsome they had to be banished.

Shades of the Israeli team caught videotaping the fall of the twin towers, like they knew if was going to happen, and then celebrating their collapse before being picked up by the New Jersey police and quickly deported back to Israel, where they were paraded before the media to assure everyone, “We didn’t have anything to do with 9/11.” Funny how easy that op always works. Nothing to see here people, keep moving along. Look, there goes the most handsome man in the world! Just obsess about him and nothing else for the next week or so, will ya?

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Me & My Meditations

As an infant, I was trained to get on my knees every night by the side of my bed, clasp my palms together with fingers extended upward and say the same prayer every night. Only I always had a queasy feeling about that prayer….”if I should die before I wake.” Why even bring up that concept? Something just didn’t feel right. I mean, don’t you get what you ask for?

Can you imagine if millions of kids went to bed every night in that same position across the world saying: “Now I lay me down for the night, I pray my friends will never fight, a day will come we’ll all live in peace, and all these negative energies will finally cease.”

How long would it take to manifest world peace if we got something like that going in a major way I wonder? I doubt many of the religious institutions will pick up on this idea, however, much less spread it to their congregations.

I was in the 6th or 7th grade when my older brother finally clued me into the fact our Lutheran upbringing was basically a Santa Claus story. I was absolutely furious. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me sooner?” I snarled. I felt like I’d been walking around acting a fool believing some white-haired dude lived in heaven and was watching over me? It shattered not only my religious faith, but also my faith in my parents to tell me the truth, although my mom was real sheepish about the whole fiasco when I confronted her and said she’d only pretended to go along to please my dad’s parents who’d grown up in south-eastern Kansas. They went to their graves believing in that white-haired dude in the clouds.

I didn’t deal much with religion or spirituality for a long time after that and was basically a punk for many years with no moral foundation. It wasn’t until I was sitting on the hill on Yasgur’s Farm that I finally got zapped. Probably Wavy Gravy helped that process since he was the main emcee and what a wonderful job he did.

But the 1970s was a terrible time for my generation, at least those of us that choose to fight against the establishment. We were herded off on a trail to nowhere, and gradually watched our entire scene diminish and fade away. But it didn’t fade away. Around 1990, I went to my first National Rainbow Family Gathering, and plugged back into that spirit I’d felt at Woodstock in 1969.

I went to a lot of gatherings after that and even organized many on my own, only I called mine the World Hemp Expo Extravaganjas (WHEE!). I had started the concept with the clinical “World Hemp Expo,” but Ken Babbs told me it would be a million times better with another “e” on the end so it sounded like fun. The fun vibe was my main trail at the time and always had been. Babbs and Wavy were both Pranksters, although Wavy just dropped in for a brief time before starting his own group, the Hog Farm.

When Abby from Daily Beast interviewed me, I started talking about the people I’ve known and studied under, a list that includes John Cage, Julian Beck, Jasper Grootveld, Ken Kesey, and Wavy Gravy. This is basically the whos-who of Improvisational Ritual Theater, the art form they pioneered and I struggle to keep alive even though most people don’t know it exists and a some people even claim I’m a fraud mouthing a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and have no art at all? Abby had never heard of Wavy Gravy, but I think she did recognize John Cage. Maybe not. Her interview has yet to appear, which makes me think the bosses on high killed her story on 420.

Anyway, after I started going to gatherings, I’d usually be the first one up on peace meditation day, often a Sunday, or in the case of the National, always on July 4th. There’d be silence throughout the camp that morning until noon. I’d be the one who got up before dawn, however, in order to be the first at the peace pole, so I could sit there for hours, burning incense, taking a few hits of pot every hour or so, but focused on one thought, please bring an end to violence and the suffering it creates, and keep that thought until the OM broke out at noon, followed by a big drum circle and dance.

I know both John Lennon and George Harrison approached meditation the same way. When they discovered it, they’d chant for hours until both lost their vocal cords and had to stop.

Does this meditation have any positive effect? Well, it always leaves me feeling cleansed and energized. I’m always very sad to leave the natural world after living in a forest as an environmental monk for a few weeks. And I look and act like a road dog for a few days before I morph back into my Babylon identity.

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The Sexiest Woman Alive?

When dudes my age think “sex appeal” most of us think Marilyn Monroe, easily the sexiest screen goddess Hollywood ever manifested, but as beautiful and sexy as Marilyn was, she wasn’t known as the best person in bed in Hollywood, far from it, in fact. That particular honor actually fell to Angie Dickenson, as revealed in Paul Anka’s stunning new tell-all book, My Way. When Anka asked both Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin who the best lay in town was, neither hesitated for even a second: “Angie.”

I already ordered a copy of Anka’s book and I’m really looking forward to it. It’s obviously creating problems for the Sinatra estate, as they would like to keep some of this gossip out of the press, but apparently Frank pretty much lost it by the end of his life and became a haunted shadow of his former self. While Bobby Darin easily made the paradigm shift in the 1960s, growing long hair and become a peace activist who loved hippies and wrote songs about world peace, Sinatra never found a way to connect with the emerging paradigm and its messages of universal love.

Burt Bacharach and wife.

According to Anka, Sinatra was enamored of his connections with the Sicilian men-of-honor society, although Frank never seemed to realize he was just a pawn really, and not an actual member of the gang. According to Anka, Sinatra tried to get a casino head whacked who wasn’t giving him enough free chips at the gambling table (he was used to getting $50,000 in chips every time he showed up). But then when Howard Hughes started buying up Las Vegas, he didn’t extend those perks to anyone. Sinatra had a hard time during the late 1960s as the world changed all around him while he didn’t. But the Sicilian fathers refused to whack a member of their tribe just because Frank was pissed at him.

I’d sure like to question Anka about whether Sinatra ever mentioned Bobby Fuller, who was about to become the biggest rock star in America when he was died mysteriously. That case has never been solved, but one rumor had it that Sinatra had ordered the hit on Fuller because he’d introduced his daughter Nancy to LSD. If you know anything about Nancy, though, that story seems ridiculous as she was always a goodie two shoes, and certainly never showed any signs of having tripped on anything. At one point I thought I’d actually cracked the case when Bobby’s only child, his son John Novak, told me that his grandfather might have killed Bobby as revenge for impregnating his underage daughter. John was raised in a foster home and his identity as Bobby’s son was not revealed to anyone for decades.

Some people ask me, “Steve, why do you call the mafia ‘the Sicilian men-of-honor society?” Well, I do that for the same reason I call the Lakota by that name, instead of calling them Sioux like most everyone else. I prefer to call tribes and secret societies by the names they use for themselves and not the names put on them by their enemies.

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Gunshots at Marijuana Rally

How sad the Denver rally was marred by violence and instead of a message of peace, the global news is now reporting: “gunshots at marijuana rally.” For me, this is a great tragedy.

Abby from Daily Beast called me on 4/19 and interviewed me for over an hour. She seemed fascinated by my history of spiritual use of cannabis, although I cautioned her there was a pretty intense filter in the national media on any of this info, and if she planned to write about it, be prepared for censorship from on high. She laughed off that idea, but strangely, her story has yet to appear.

The Denver rally began ten years ago, one of the first large mass April 20th events. Now we have so many. In 1990 I discovered an annual ritual was taking place near the top of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. At the time, I was reading about Soma and had decided the story invented by Gordon Wasson that Soma was a mushroom was false, and Soma was actually cannabis, just like it was obvious to me cannabis was manifesting real ceremony and ritual in Marin, headquarters of the hippie counterculture after the Haight was over-run with undercovers, violence, hard drugs and nasty ops. From 1995 until 2003, the center of energy on spreading 420 ceremonies was the Cannabis Cup, especially the Temple Dragon Crew, who were so fanatical about honoring 420 they did it twice every day, at 4:20 PM and 4:20 AM. Having a picture taken at the Quentin hotel lobby under the clock at 4:20 AM was one of the biggest 420 ceremonies around for years before the rest of the world picked up on it.

That’s why I could never understand why Steve Bloom, who actually appears in some of those early 420 photos at the Quentin lobby, tells people High Times, the Cannabis Cup, and me in particular, “had nothing to do with spreading 420?” After having spent 30 years trying to get the spiritual rights issues around cannabis recognized, and then have that entire life’s campaign dismissed by someone who actually saw the thing assembled is saddening. But then Bloom voluntarily quit High Times when I was brought back the third time, just because he couldn’t work under me again. So I understand where the vibes are coming from.

Mike Edison on wikipedia claims I pushed the Waldo’s story and took 420 to “cult-like extremes.” That is really hilarious. Yes, I organized events around 420, and at 4:20 PM, I would sometimes ask the assembled multitudes to form a circle, hold hands, and OM for world peace. That’s a traditional hippie ceremony begun in North America by The Brotherhood of Eternal Love on the West Coast and Allen Ginsberg on the East Coast. I believed holding these ceremonies was proof of spiritual culture and could be used to bring a court case to the Supreme Court, which had always refused to hear the religious rights case on cannabis.

Like I was telling Abby from Daily Beast, I found out about marijuana by reading On the Road, and the key moment in that stream of consciousness is a spiritual moment in Mexico provided by a few hits of marijuana. That book sent my generation looking for marijuana because we wanted to have a spiritual moment like that, especially since all of us had recently lost our religions and needed something real and honest we could plug into.

During this crucial time, when the counterculture was re-discovering the sacrament of peace culture, what happens? A major op is launched by Gordon Wasson to declare the magic mushroom as the key to spirituality. And he heads off down to Mexico to take mushrooms with a shaman and it ends up on the cover of Life magazine. Suddenly, it’s all about mushrooms again. This is obviously the same op Wasson pulled on Soma. Could it be possible that when the Roman empire took control of Christianity, which up until then had been a poor people’s religion based on world peace, and when Constantine put that cross on his army’s shields, he also switched up the sacraments? The poor people got alcohol, while the priests got mushrooms maybe but the cannabis became strictly forbidden because cannabis manifests peace culture, and the Roman empire was never about peace.

After I attended my first Rainbow Gathering and stood in a circle OMing for peace with 15,000 people, my mind was blown and I realized if only we had more ceremonies like this, we might actually get some positive energy going in this direction. So I organized a lot of peace circles for the next 30 years and tried to teach the youth about hippie magic. But I live in New York City, where hippies are not really very popular, and the minute I started manifesting these ceremonies, I was branded “a cult leader” by people that wanted to take my job. Where is my army of zombie robots and why aren’t they carrying me around in a sedan chair feeding me grapes all day? In fact, I never tried to organize a cult or anything close and I have zero dogma to push, only a desire to spread peace energy to help heal all the hate, but of course, this is dangerous, or at least lame and stupid, eh?