FBI spying on Antiwar.com

In the Sixties I was very involved in the peace movement, and more and more people in the peace movement started telling me and telling one another that we were infiltrated by government agents.  And after a while, I decided it was true, and we just had to learn to live with it.  There wasn't much we could do about it. No sense in getting hysterical about it.  But it turned out that we were - that was the "call and tell" program.  Then when the war ended, I got involved in the Timothy Leary defense fund, which was raising money to fight Leary's case and get him out of prison.  Everybody in the Leary defense fund eventually suspected everybody else of working for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and we were all suspected of being government agents, we all suspected one another.  People would come around and tell me, "John is a government agent," and the next day John would come around and tell me Jim was a government agent.  I've been living in that kind of environment since the late sixties.  I just got used to it.

                                                                           -- Robert Anton Wilson

While there is an ever-present danger that any given libertarian will launch yet another blog or social media account or think tank, libertarians generally are not associated with terrorism or violent activity. I suppose that someday there will be a bombing carried out by the Murray Rothbard  Liberation Front or the Robert Nozick Revolutionary Brigade,  but fortunately, it hasn't happened yet.

But yesterday, the same day that I put up a blog posting about a video featuring Robert Anton Wilson and Karl Hess, in which Wilson talks about being spied on while part of the peace movement in Chicago (in  terms similar to the interview citation referenced above), I read that Antiwar.com, the libertarian peace site, has sued the FBI in an attempt to learn more about the FBI's surveillance of the website and its editors. Apparently the government has nothing better to do than monitor an opinion website. (I've linked to Antiwar.com at this blog for a long time.)

The best article I've read about the lawsuit is this one by Kelley Vlahos published by Antiwar.com.

New RAW audio and video

The other day, I covered an appearance at an Ohio library of best selling historical novelist Tracy Chevalier. During the question and answer session, she did something marvelous. Every time someone asked a question, she repeated it aloud so that everyone could hear it  and know what she was answering.

I wish Robert Anton Wilson had learned to do this, because it would make the discovery of two new videos (also available as MP3 audio downloads) even better -- some of the answers would be better if I could hear what the original question was.

Still,  this is pretty good: A joint appearance with Karl Hess (about two and half hours) and a solo performance (about an hour and a half ). Both videos were made at the Libertarian Party's 1987 nominating convention and are made available on Libertarianism.org. It works pretty well as MP3 files (the only way I had time to take them in -- I have a long commute) but you'll have to watch at least the first part of the Wilson-Hess video to figure out why you keep hearing those mysterious cigarette lighter noises.

This videos are useful for learning what Wilson called himself in 1987 (instead of "libertarian"), for  learning what women want and for finding out who Wilson named as the "greatest man who ever lived" (not the person I was expecting.)

Oz checks in again in 'Masks' discussion

If you missed it, Oz Fritz has posted two more comments in Part 10 of the Masks of the Illuminati discussion (hat tip, Gary Acord for prompting Oz and pointing it out to me.)

Which prompts me to point out that it's never too late to participate and post new comments in the Masks of the Illuminati or Quantum Psychology discussions. I plan to re-read Quantum Psychology later this year and post more comments.

From the "Rancid Honeytrap FAQ"

Here is a bit I liked from a document called the "Rancid Honeytrap FAQ"


If You’re Not a Libertarian, How Come You are Always Defending Them?

As I’ve said elsewhere, I do not rule out any tactical alliance. At the moment, it seems that people identifying themselves as libertarians are among the most genuinely principled in opposition to police brutality, the security state, mass incarceration and the Wars on Drugs and Terror. Those are all issues of huge importance and I don’t think an effective politics can rule out a tactical alliance with any faction that is principled on these points, regardless of what else this faction might stand for.

Furthermore, I believe that anti-libertarian fear-mongering is increasingly being deployed as a stratagem of liberals and other statist lefts, in an effort to immunize the Democratic Party from any genuinely leveraged opposition from anti-imperialists and civil libertarians. In other words, the primary aim of stigmatizing libertarians is the fortification of state violence, as well as fortification of the primacy of the state itself. Its leading proponents are careerist idiots acting in the worst possible faith.  Hence I reject it with the most extreme contempt. 

The fellow who wrote that is a "bilious, sex-obsessed, herbivorous, queer semi-anarchist" and I follow him on Twitter.


This guy obviously is not my clone (I'm not always bilious or sex-obsessed, I'm only part time herbivorous, I'm not queer and I identify as a moderate libertarian who supports a guaranteed income) but I'm totally behind his priorities, and I think most people with a clear political vision (Jesse Walker, Cory Doctorow, etc.) are too. That's why I include peace and civil liberties links under "Resources" and "Sangha."

Various links

Audiobook of J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World (free download at Ubuweb).

 RAW predicts Bitcoin (from the new Reddit group).

Wonkblog article on universal basic income, a proposal endorsed by RAW, Milton Friedman and other heretics (via Dan Clore at Robert Anton Wilson Fans on Facebook).

A Building Road on Room 237.

Will robots take all the jobs? (From Boing Boing, another issue RAW wrote about, Cory's take is close to RAW's.)

An interesting RAW interview

John Higgs recently journeyed from Brighton to London (on the M23 highway, naturally), met up with actress Prunella Gee and returned home with a 1970s interview with Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. He offered on Twitter to scan it and share it with readers of this blog.

As it turns out, there was no need. The wonderful Robert Anton Wilson fans Web site has the interview. It's a good look at RAW's thinking during the 1970s (he explains what "Osiris is a black god" means). The only disappointment is that Shea kind of disappears for much of the interview. I would have liked more of him, too.

Prunella Gee is a lovely blonde British actress with a long list of credits, but RAW fans will remember her as the actress who portrayed Eris and Mavis in the British stage production of Illuminatus! (She was formerly married to Ken Campbell and they had a daughter, Daisy Eris.) I believe she is now retired from stage, screen and British TV and is a counselor in London.

More on the new Leary bio

The new Timothy Leary bio by R.U. Sirius I mentioned earlier (which as I said has quite a bit about Robert Anton Wilson) is drawing good notices. I09 calls it "The first great biography of Timothy Leary," which seems like a slight stretch, as I rather like the JMR Higgs bio. Nick Gillespie has endorsed it over at Reason.  Higgs himself endorsed it on Twitter and said it looks really good. Free download of ebook is here.