...people who found out what's what created our world. People who respected reality and investigated its properties. People who didn't lie or make up shit. Those people are called scientists.

The dreamers of the 14th century were busy dreaming of heaven and how to get there. Which included such quaint notions as not taking baths. That's what dreamers did back then.

Also our freedoms are at least as important as our material possessions and powers. And our freedoms come from people who decried abuse, not from people who engaged in it.

That is the question. We don't seem to have anyone these days in the media or in government or in academia or the legal professions or in business or even in the arts who is outstanding, at least not as compared to earlier generations.

Where are our Einsteins, Twains, Picassos, Chaplins? Where are our Roosevelts and Lincolns and Martin Luther Kings Jr? Where our Menckens, Roykos, Hunter S. Thompsons? the last interesting Americans seem to have been Bob Dylan and Muhammad Ali and they are in their late 60s or 70s now. Nobody seems to have followed them.

Our media elites have collapsed at every challenge for the last 30 years, from the utterly stupid Satanic ritual child abuse scares of the 80s to the phoney Clinton scandals to the Iraq war. During the same time frame, our business elites have imported our jobs and industries overseas so that wages and opportunities have declined for ordinary people. Our government elites have crammed our prisons full of prisoners and engaged in a long series of pointless showboat wars from Grenada to Panama to Iraq. Our intellectual elites speak either absurd French philosophical bunkum or absurd libertarian economic nonsense. Our leftwing politicians are pathetic lamers, and our conservatives keep verging on fascism. Our medical care is ruinously expensive, our arts suck, and our roads are cracking up from hideously overweight SUVs. What elites have been doing anything right, lately?

I'm not against elites, I just wish we had some that were any good. It seems to me that as a nation we've basically decided to become the punk generation and just like stoned punkers banging away on guitars their garages, we no longer believe in talent or admire accomplishment.

...and if there's any runty little child in the world who doesn't clap for Tinkerbell, she dies.

I wish this was a joke, but I don't think it is. Peter Pan is really and truly the president of the US--and Caption Hook is his veep.

The only place we'll ever 'win' in Iraq is in Neverland.

And I thought it was complete horseshit back then. But it was kind of cool to read while stoned. So I remember those days too. And there were hippies in every small town in America for a long time after 1971. It wasn't just some San Francisco thing--it went all across the country and in some ways it never really went away.

For all the talk of love and magic, there was a decidedly selfish streak to the hippies, as very well seen in this story. And they were quite brainless as well, so many were fully primed to be exploited--also as well seen in this story. This is a story of exploiting people in name of spirituality, and that's a pretty gross thing.

The problem with the hippies is that they were thoughtless. They did what they felt like doing and they thought things would just turn out OK. They thought with their hearts, not with their brains. And Bush is just the same way today. He's running the Iraq war on no other basis than what makes him feel good. He thinks with his heart, not his brain. And the country is also like that; we think with our hearts, not with our brains. Unfortunately, our hearts are stupid, as hearts always are. Hearts can never be smart because hearts are always selfish.

The hippies were just a little more advanced in their selfishness and thoughtlessness than the rest of society at the time. Now we've caught up and we're a perfectly stupid, selfish country splashing in a hot tub, oblivous to the house falling down around us. We're not thinking of the future, we're not taking care of our kids. We're just consuming things, getting wasted, and jumping fences and invading other people's countries. When other people don't like how we behave, we whine about it. That's hippie behavior all the way through.

...is why nobody gives a shit about the hippies anymore. This is a tale of abuse and greed and heartlessness, not of magic.

How can anyone just live a life of lies/self deception like that is just beyond me.

...that in 30 years the political historians will come along and say Bush was worse than we thought. In fact, I almost feel certain of it. If anybody can do it, Bush can.