At Christie’s Books and Manuscripts Sale 12260, 16 June 2016, in New York, Neal Cassaday’s 40-page Lost Letter to Jack Kerouac, Lot 146, Estimated price: $400,000 — $600,000.
Considered ‘lost’ for 66 years, Neal Cassady’s visionary ‘Joan Anderson letter’ is a foundational document of the Beat era and the inspiration for Kerouac’s literary revolutions, beginning with On the Road.
Neal Cassady’s long-lost letter to Jack Kerouac, dated 17 December 1950, has permeated virtually every conversation about the Beat era. Referenced not only by Kerouac but by Allen Ginsberg, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Herbert Hunke, and a host of their contemporaries, Cassady’s fluid, incantatory, and deeply revealing prose influenced the entire generation of Beat writers.
The letter was written on a three-day Benzedrine high, Cassady later confessed. It contained, by Kerouac’s first calculation, at least 13,000 words and ran to 40 pages, offering a compelling, unaffected and discursive account of Cassady’s frenetic love life in 1946, particularly with Joan Anderson (whom he visited in a hospital after a failed suicide), and ‘Cherry Mary’, recounting an acrobatic escape through a bathroom window when they were surprised by Mary’s aunt. The uninhibited, non-literary narrative pointed the way to the free, truthful style to which Kerouac aspired.
STG-44, aka Sturmgewehr 44, the world’s first assault weapon.
The US backed Free Syrian Army [FSA] allegedly uncovered a stockpile of 5,000 STG-44s in 2012. A video released at the time had WWII militaria collectors everywhere wishing the weapons could be accessed and imported.
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So, how did 5000 of those historic pieces get to Syria? Probably from Africa.
JWH1975 explains that first the Russians captured them.
When WWII ended in 1945, the Soviet army retained and stored every StG-44 it found. By best estimate, in 1948 there were about 102,000 StG-44s in Soviet custody. As the SKS and AK-47 were already entering Soviet use, the captured StG-44s were not issued to Soviet units but rather made available for transfer abroad, with Czechoslovakia being the first and main recipient, followed by East Germany. Hungary also received a small (about 4,000) batch, and Yugoslavia also received some prior to it’s split with the east bloc. These joined StG-44s captured by the Yugoslavs themselves. Finally the Soviets transferred a few to North Vietnam; these in turn were joined by more transferred from Czechoslovakia and East Germany (which themselves had come from the USSR) as those two countries phased the type out.
Lots of them ended up in Africa, dispatched by Russia, and its satellite proxies Czechoslovakia and East Germany, to Soviet-sponsored insurgent groups in Algeria and Somalia, with others also sold to the governments of Egypt and Libya.
ANN ALTHOUSE POSES THE QUESTION OF THE AGE: “Did Donald Trump make that happen or did he just sit back coolly and let it happen or — if such a thing is possible — is this not even about Donald Trump?â€
Ann Althouse was actually referring to Megyn Kelly losing negotiating power with Fox News due to her performance interviewing Donald Trump, but when I first read it, I thought she was referring to the mania for Trump that swept over “Reagan democrats” and Low-Information Voter Republicans.
hyvinglavin64 identifies Trump as Dio ( of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure): “An absurd cartoon. Loves gold. Seemingly impossible to defeat. Certain people of indeterminate irony will claim they “did nothing wrong.” (One notable difference: Dio, having built himself up from poverty rather than getting million dollar loans from dad, is actually the more cunning businessman).”
David Harsanyi throws up his hands at watching voters in Republican primaries choosing Donald Trump as the conservative candidate in opposition to RINOs like Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, and Paul Ryan. We have to stop this kind of thing from happening again. We need some way to screen drunks and crazies out of the voting booth.
Never have so many people with so little knowledge made so many consequential decisions for the rest of us.
A person need only survey the inanity of the ongoing presidential race to comprehend that the most pressing problem facing the nation isn’t Big Business, Big Labor, Big Media or even Big Money in politics.
It’s you, the American voter. And by weeding out millions of irresponsible voters who can’t be bothered to learn the rudimentary workings of the Constitution, or their preferred candidate’s proposals or even their history, we may be able to mitigate the recklessness of the electorate.
No, we shouldn’t erect physical barriers to ballot access. Let’s purchase more voting machines, hire additional poll workers, streamline the registration process, mail out more ballots for seniors and produce more “Rock the Vote†ads imploring apathetic millennials to embrace their civic duty.
At the same time, let’s also remember that checking a box for the candidate whose campaign ads you like best is one of the most overrated obligations of the self-governed. If you have no clue what the hell is going on, you also have a civic duty to avoid subjecting the rest of us to your ignorance.
Unfortunately, we can’t trust you.
Now, if voting is a consecrated rite of democracy, as liberals often argue, surely society can have certain minimal expectations for those participating. And if citizenship itself is as hallowed as Republicans argue, then surely the prospective voter can be asked to know just as much as the prospective citizen. Let’s give voters a test. The citizenship civics test will do just fine.
The Webley Mk V [Correction: Mark VI -thanks to Hammond Aikes] of 2nd Lieutenant J.R.R. Tolkien.
According to the Imperial War Museum,
Tolkien was an Oxford University student in 1914 but was commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers soon after taking his degree in 1915. He joined the 11th Battalion of his regiment in France in June 1916, shortly before the Battle of the Somme. During the battle Tolkien served as the battalion signals officer. In late October 1916 he contracted trench fever and was sent back to England in early November. He spent most of the rest of the war convalescing. It was at this time that he began to write early versions of his Middle Earth stories. Debate continues regarding the extent to which Tolkien’s war experiences influenced his literary work.
James Lewis, at American Thinker, speculates that Obama’s own childhood traumatic experience is responsible for his Bathroom Edict.
At age ten, the child Barry Soetoro was sent by his biological mother from Jakarta, Indonesia to Hawaii, where his grandparents apparently handed him over to the care of a person of known and questionable character, his “mentor,” Frank Marshall Davis. There is no known legal basis for this double transfer of parental responsibility. The mother and her husband remained in Indonesia so that legally, the child was abandoned by his legal parents. This is child neglect.
As far as is known, Frank Marshall Davis never legally adopted the ten-year-old child. Any family welfare worker would have raised serious questions about the legality and safety of Frank Marshall Davis becoming the sole adoptive parent. Davis was a hard-core Communist at the time, a party member. The Soviet Union, then under Nikita Khruschev and soon Leonid Brezhnev, posed a nuclear threat to the Western world. The Cold War was at its height. Davis was an obsessively enraged anti-white, anti-American individual, as shown in his newsletters and personal accounts. Davis wrote at least one pornographic pseudo-autobiography under the name Ben Green. He was an obsessive race-hater.
On the face of it, Barry’s mother, his grandparents, and Mr. Davis were guilty at least of child neglect. Psychologically, children who are passed around like this are often traumatically affected. Abandonment at a vulnerable age is said to inflict an emotional “wound” that may turn into narcissistic overcompensation. To make up for crushing feelings of personal rejection, a child may take refuge in grandiose and self-glorifying fantasies. Children who feel abandoned may seek sexualized relationships with adults to ensure that they will never be abandoned again.
Davis shows strong features of oppositional-defiant disorder, a compulsive need to break the boundaries of socially accepted behavior. For example, he allegedly took naked photos of Obama’s mother, dedicated his life to the Communist Party at a time when it was viewed as a threat to national survival, wrote passages involving pedophilia, and expressed his rage in racial terms. Davis mixed his obsessive racial anger with sexual provocation and revolutionary politics. He was not a fantasy revolutionary. He really hated those he considered enemies.
As an adult, Barack Obama shows many of the same psychological features. Other father figures in Obama’s life are also enraged, racially charged, and emotionally obsessive. Jeremiah Wright is an obvious example, but he is not the only one.
The important point is that the young Barry Soetoro lived with father figures who were consumed with racial hatred. When he briefly encountered his biological father in person and read his socialist writings, he was ready to idealize the image of Obama Sr. In fact, Obama Sr. joined the post-revolutionary regime of Jyomo Kenyatta, was soon expelled, apparently became alcoholic, and died under suspicious circumstances after two nearly identical car accidents.
All this should be irrelevant, but it is not – certainly not when the president of the United States issues decrees to our school systems that directly affect the psychological development of children.
The author doesn’t spell it out, but I expect he is referring slightly obliquely to the “Bathhouse Barry,” Obama-is-Gay theory, and blaming Obama’s covert sexual identity and partisan loyalty to LBGT causes on childhood molestation by the communist poet Frank Marshall Davis.
