Hunter Thomas and the Meaning of Life

There are two death anniversaries now.  February 21^st 1965 is the fiftieth anniversary of Malcolm X’s birthday.  Malcolm blames the Nation of Islam for firebombing his home when he and his little children sleeping in it.  They were trying to kill him.  They played the “By Any Means” speech from July of 1964.  Malcolm was already using the term “Afro-American”.   Then they played “The Ballot and the Bullet” speech from “About a year before he died” meaning earlier.  In this speech he says Black people have been made fools out of by not only Whites, but also by the Martin Luther King march on Washington.  The other death anniversary is today February 20^th of 2005 when Hunter Thompson took his own life blowing his brains out.  He left a suicide note to his wife.  He was 67.   He was a long time journalist for the Rolling Stone and was kind of a modern day Ernest Hemingway.  He believed in being where the action was.  He was raised in Louisville KY, and unable to finish high school, but joined the Air Force and apparently got an early honorable discharge (?) because he held an outside job.  In the early sixties he traveled to other countries like to the Caribean and Brazil.  They he hitchhiked his way around America for a few months but in mid 1964 he got a job in Big Sur, but I believe he got fired from that.  Eventually he wound up in San Francisco and began investigating the Hell’s Angels.  But he crossed them by getting information about their group and not giving them any royalties.  It’s the Steve Jobs super pig sidrone.  So they beat him up for it.  He later write a whole book about the “Hell’s Angels” in 1967.   He didn’t respect the hippy culture when he returned to Height – Ashberry again in the summer of 1967.   He says they represented neither the “Beat Generation” nor the “New Left” but just was out to get as many drugs as they could lay their hands on.  I’ve always regarded certain aspects of the Hippy movement as self obsessed, with that “The me generation” thing.  Then he wrote “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and then wrote a book on the 1972 Presidential campaign.   This man despised Nixon something fierce.  But at some point in the late 1970’s he was considered rather passé by his peers.  But he lived on of course.  By 2001 he was already 64 or something.  This is where Thom Hartman commented upon him today.  I had the initial impression the guy was a lot more “current” than he was.  I must say that after you die you’ll face your toughest critics because you won’t be around to stick up for your own views, and people will no longer fear “saying something to hurt your feelings”.  And you’ve got to wonder what your whole life amounted to in the long time scheme of things.

This whole listing of wars of the United States is a little strange.  Two of the most pernicious wars nobody ever heard of.  Texas and Indian wars and “US Forces Invade Mexico” long after the Mexican war.   We do have the “Banana war”.   But basically the era of the least conflicts the United States was in was the decade or more before World War II.  On Hardball they were telegraphing US intent to try and take back the town Mozel from ISIS.  Mozel sounds a little Jewish like Mozeltoff or something.  At any rate, the United States plans to escalate the current war.  So it's early 1965 and Viet Nam all over again.

Thom Hartman says that butane or other “ane” petroleum product- - can be made to burn hotter than it normally would by force feeding the flame oxygen.  The trouble with this there is with the buildings on 9 – 11 there was n giant apperatus like a blow torch force-feeding the fire what amounts to a hurricane of oxygen.  Besides the black smoke shows that these flames were actually starved of oxygen and would eventually burn more slowly.  But whoever was behind the demolitions of 9 – 11 figured an hour was as long as an average American would wait to “see something happen” and still have it believable.  Hartman says “It’s highly unlikely these explosions were intensionally set because someone would see them setting it”.  He ignores all the reports of workers telling various people “this area is off limits now” or things are being “retro-fitted” or something.   Clearly people who have seem deliberate demolitions of buildings, know this scene looks just like one of those scenes.  Hartman ignores the enormous speeds which projectiles were thrown through the air at.  He also ignores the presence of “thermite” and the fact that parts of this wreckage were glowing red hot for three months.   You have to have a bias against believing this happened, in order to disregard all the facts pointing to that it did.

The Dow Jones Industrials just closed at an all time high of 18,140.   OK this is an accomplishment.  It’s five weeks after I issued my “sell” signal.  I said at the time I thought it was better to be premature rather than be too late.  If the market had continued going down you would have lost a considerable amount of profit by now.  My goal was to lock in as much of that profit as you could so it’s safe.  But in the process you’ve missed out on some gains.

This “Polar vortex” is a misnomer in this sense.  We are supposed to have a tightly confined “vortex” low pressure in the Arctic regions.  Although in Sci Fi movies the term "vortex" is used to describe some "other kind of mystery space".  I thought the generic definition was "the center of a rotation".  If you are a Deist Ecologist as I fancy myself you believe "God" made earth's climate the way it was for a reason, with the cold regions pushed to the far north.  But of course the jet stream is weaker and gapes downward into the heartland of the United States because ironically it is not as cold as usual.  Don’t tell that to the people in Nashville.  None of the snow in Boston has melted but only piles up continually.  This whole “Polar Express” is still continuing this weekend.

This next story would have been our lead paragraph in blogger if I could verify it.  There was news on KNX radio that the nine month long Longshorman strike on the West Coast is now over and that an agreement had been reached.  People on the Union side are happy with the package that is being presented for agreement.  As you know it was impacting business in a major way and it was about to get worse whether it’s sprockets or items in a department store- - when the pipeline gets clogged up nothing gets done.   In the past I’ve had a whole problem with strikes in general wondering why strike breakers aren’t hired the next day to end the thing.  The way I see it it all comes down to an adults “Inherent right to make a contract”.  But apparently some kind of law says you can’t do that.  However when you Google the story you don’t get a lot of confirmation and the story was not included in the headline articles.

Thom Hartman flagged my attention yesterday with both the 9 - 11 reference and particularly in regard to Hunter Thomas.  This individual may constitute a part of the "Howard Richards" myth or loore.  It's the whole living on the edge bating your opponents and taking chances thing, and getting yourself killed at an early age.  The guy himself physically viewed himself as in Hemingway's legacy, and was interested with the details of his life.  The best I can do with my pathetic life is be an admirer or someone else like that Soliari guy was with Wolfgong Mozart in the movie.  So I idolize people like John Lennon, Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan - - regardless of whether the three of them idolize each other.  Of course I'm also Me, and do things in my own way and put my own spin on things.  But as long time readers may or may not go- - - if we go back, back, into the remote past of June 2005 I make reference to a birth of a boy that took place, who was prophesied to be the man Isaac Newton prophesied would "break the bonds of gravity".   To my way of doing this would be the Romulan cloaking device.  This prophesied person would be 56 already by the time he piloted his first Star Ship with this new anti gravity device.  I'm not even sure of the date of birth.  I think it's mid June but it might be early July of 2005.  The last time I ever saw him was around age eight, and he was wearing a Batman costume.  He'll be ten in a few months.  I'd like to get the Federation to come out and say whether it's the incarnation of Hunter Thomas, the individual described in the above paragraph.