I NEVER LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOMB (Part 2)

This is Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov. Fifty years ago he may have saved the world. (Thanks to Jim Buck on Facebook for the story.)

“On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Millile Crisis, a group of eleven US Navy Detsroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph trapped the diesel-powered nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot class B-59 submarine near Cuba and started dropping practice depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification. There had been no contact from Moscow for a number of days and, although the submarine's crew had earlier been picking up US civilian radio broadcasts, once B-59 began attempting to hide from its US navy pursuers, it was too deep to monitor any radio traffic, so those on board did not know if war had broken out.. The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigonevitch Savitsky, believing that a war might already have started, wanted to launch a nuclear-tipped torpedo. Three officers on board the submarine – Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semonovitch Maslennikov, and the scond-in-command Arkhipov – were authorized to launch the torpedo if agreeing unanimously in favor of doing so. An argument broke out among the three, in which only Arkhipov was against the launch. Although Arkhipov was only second-in-command of submarine B-59, he was actually Commander of the flotilla of submarines including B-4, B-36, and B-130 and of equal rank to Captain Savitsky. Arkhipov eventually persuaded Savitsky to surface the submarine and await orders from Moscow. This presumably averted the nuclear war that would have ensued had the torpedo been fired.“ (Click here for more)

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The secret word is October

HE SAVED THE WORLD FOR THESE BASTARDS

NOBODY HERE BUT US CHICKENS

Back in the days of the underground press this Gilbert Shelton cartoon was a great favourite of the sorely missed Edward Barker who would lustily bellow the tune when drunk. Which was often.

Click here for the song

OR DUCKS

WITH PALS LIKE THAT WHO COULD TOUCH YOU?

GRATUITOUS COMRADE ENGINEER

YES, NEIGHBORS, A NEW WORK OF FICTION IS ABOUT TO BE UNLEASHED

And this is a teaser excerpt…

“This was some fucking party, a wang-dang-doodle crew of grotesques and pony girls, kicking, cutting, drinking and drugging, copulating in corners loosed with martinets, manacles, and devices, generally raising a reasonless and increasingly riotous ruckus. Living lawyers squired dead-eyed models who had long since adopted the habit of eating human flesh and other varieties of voidoid meat. Skin sagged from bones and the shapes of faces were reducing themselves to ectoplasm with a kind of sliding motion. Cocaine, heroin, crystal amphetamine, elevated barbiturates, large mammal tranquilizers, and other ingestible powders figured almost as strongly as alcohol, rolled opium, and black tablets of belladonna at the tables. Dwarves in military dress blues, bearing medals and strange insignia, looked on with over-sized Beefeater Martinis in their stubby fists, while lizard men from the frightened cities of the hollow earth, doing passable—if scaly— impersonations of Joan Crawford, tangoed with Italian baby wiseguys in black fascisti shirts. A Krishna pimp paraded with a swaying, finger-cymbal string of five of his stable. He offered up the perfumed delights of slit-sari, honey-skinned, undulating Hindu whores, heavy with gold and silver, with oiled and ample overfed thighs swathed in silk, yab-yum dots on foreheads, and their yoni red, ringed, rouged, and pouting. Gilded boys in spandex and tans so mahogany they could only end in melanoma, performed queer tribal dances, with roots in the Hitchhike and the Batman.”

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The secret word is Purchase

I NEVER LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOMB

Exactly half a century ago, on this and for the next dozen days, we kids got up each morning with no guarantee that we would live to see evening. We might quite easily be vaporised or worse in a nuclear holocaust. The Cuba Missile Crisis was playing out off the coast of Florida. Jack Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were engaging in what was then known as brinkmanship. World War III was so on the cards. And I really resented it. I monumentally resented it. I was a teenager. I was listening to Gene and Eddie and Elvis and Miles. I was in my very first band. I was learning about whiskey. I was learning about women. I wanted some marijuana. I wanted some pills. I did not want my life gratuitously snuffed out before I’d tasted any of it. It wasn’t fair and I hated it. Fuck you J. Robert Oppenheimer I cried. Thankfully the rest was history.     

Here’s Noam Chomsky with a more objective view…

“About one-third of the total force was in the air, according to General David Burchinal, director of plans on the Air Staff at Air Force Headquarters.  The Strategic Air Command (SAC), technically in charge, appears to have had little control.  And according to Clawson’s account, the civilian National Command Authority was kept in the dark by SAC, which means that the ExComm “deciders” pondering the fate of the world knew even less.  General Burchinal’s oral history is no less hair-raising, and reveals even greater contempt for the civilian command.  According to him, Russian capitulation was never in doubt.  The CD operations were designed to make it crystal clear to the Russians that they were hardly even competing in the military confrontation, and could quickly have been destroyed. From the ExComm records, Stern concludes that, on October 26th, President Kennedy was “leaning towards military action to eliminate the missiles” in Cuba, to be followed by invasion, according to Pentagon plans.  It was evident then that the act might have led to terminal war, a conclusion fortified by much later revelations that tactical nuclear weapons had been deployed and that Russian forces were far greater than U.S. intelligence had reported.” Clickhere for more

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JUST LOOKING FOR A CAUSE

Click here for the Crystals

GRATUITOUS BLONDE

SUNDAY BREAKFAST

As I was eating my eggs and toast while looking at the Gmail, the following came in from HCB. It’s a quote from Gershon Legman’s 1967 book The Fake Revolt reproduced on the Arouse Your Passion website. G. Legman was an old school bohemian who liked sex, but hated hippies, rock & roll, feminism, and gays – but may well have been gay himself. I’d forgotten all about him and it was nice to be reminded of the insults of yesteryear.

“The New Revolt nowadays consists therefore of a bunch of inarticulate long-haired adolescents, without leadership and without a program, trying to mouth prepared goon-bait such as "existential" and "psychedelic," being shoved on them by psychological pushers that nobody can arrest. If that's your kids and you don't like it, just be thankful they aren't members of the same Fake Revolt one layer down: the motorcycle fags and hoodlums who peddle their bodies to homosexuals in public toilets for money to buy Nazi insignia, but who are scared of girls unless there are enough other hoodlums present to gang-bang them or pull out their front teeth with pliers and throw them to their death from apartment-house roofs. The dirty girls available for this type of work do not require description - either before or after. They are somebody's daughters too, and were also brought up on the "media," and hassled into frothing in their panties publicly over well-publicized pelvic crooners and other pop-culch offal. If you haven't a little LSD dropout in your home, just wander up and down your local Freak-Out Bar area, not forgetting a side-trip to the "S.& M." (sado-masochistic) or "Sadie-Maisie" homosexual bars, such as those on New York's fashionable East Side, for the meaner types of homosexual gangsters - also on motorcycles - and businessmen-delinquents on their off hours, soft-shod rich boys, and art-director types, who like to show what a super-cultured Elite they really are, by chewing dirty socks and beating each other to death.” 

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The secret word is Smile

MARILYN SEZ...

“They also claimed I was stupid.”

I WAS ELVIS’ SEX COACH

This is Tura Santana. She also came via HCB this morning. She was best known for her role as "Varla" in  Russ Meyer's 1965 classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! But she also claims to have been Elvis Presley’s sex coach.

“When we first started out, he was kinda like ‘wham, bam, thank you, ma’am,’ until I showed him what to do. Eventually he became much more sophisticated.” Does that mean Elvis became a good lover? “Yes, it was worth the effort,” Tura says, closing her eyes. Elvis was becoming more passionately adept, but there was one very important amorous pleasure he had yet to experience. “Four or five nights later I showed him how to give head.” Tura grins. “He hadn’t done it yet.” Tura instructed Elvis in one of life’s finest sensual arts. “When a man wants to give you pleasure, that’s what makes the difference—‘Honey, not so hard there, just nibble, and when you find that little man, nudge him. Several times. But try to do it gently at first . . . then a little harder . . . when you’ve got him nice and hard, then you start to suck . . .’

THE FROZDICK FAMILY

Kilgore Frozdick liked to feel safe.

HOW MANY DAYS IS IT TO DECEMBER 21ST?