Summer of Love -40 years on....

The San Francisco Chronicle is doing an interesting retrospective look at the Summer of LOVE, 40 years afterwards. I found the individual interviews in the sidebar particulary of value.
Here is a small sample, of what Grace Slick had to say:

"I was with Jefferson Airplane, newly. We were in a period -- I think not only me but a whole bunch of people -- of hope. Meaning what we had in mind we actually sort of envisioned happening within a fairly short period of time because we were very young and naïve. We forgot that the human being is a new species, one of the newest on the planet, and that our fear system, which is basically Cro-Magnon, is not in sync with this big brain. We thought enough information could change people's mind. If they sat around and considered it and weighed it, they'd see what was going on was probably not appropriate. And it's the same thing as anybody trying to do that today. Thinking that if you sending more troops into Iraq, the Middle East is going to change. They have been fighting for five thousands years over the same thing and they're going to continue to do that whether we're there or not."

"We don't have a democracy right now. It's a monarchy. There's nothing about it that's a democracy. So we're in worse shape now than we were and the stuff we were trying to change in the '60s. Look at it. Look at it from every standpoint and we're in worse shape now with the possible exception of black people making headway. And God bless 'em, it's about f--king time.

Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert. Those are the guys I look at who are telling me pretty much the truth. And they throw humor into it which makes it much more interesting to listen to."

Then Mountain Girl says this:

"I see remnants of that movement everywhere. It's sort of like the nuts in Ben and Jerry's ice cream; it's so thoroughly mixed in, we sort of expect it. The nice thing is that eccentricity is no longer so foreign. We've embraced diversity in a lot of ways in this country. I do think it's done us a tremendous service. It's also institutionalized a lot of the thinking that was beginning to emerge in the summer of Love; non-violence, peace movement, Buddhist leaning, sort of catch phrase stuff. All of that stuff has just become part of our common, everyday diet. I'm very happy for that. I feel like I get understood better.

I think that a lot of it is about having given ourselves permission to be weird. We gave ourselves permission. We also gave other people permission to be weird. Try to think outside of the box of convention. I think that's been terribly useful. As far as the drug culture is concerned, I think that's been terribly useful as well in promoting inventiveness in the arts. " - - Carolyn Garcia (Mountain Girl)

One can follow the link to get to the whole series of articles. As the Doormouse said," Feed your Head".

Ron Paul on Iran as a threat

Recently on 'Tucker', Ron Paul had this to say about Iran as a threat to the US:

"CARLSON: You—about Iran, you said last night, no candidate here is willing to remove, as you just said, the preemptive nuclear strike option against a country that has done no harm to us directly and is no threat to our national security, Iran.
But there is evidence actually that Iran funded the bombings of the barracks in Beirut in 1983 that killed all those U.S. Marines. And they do fund terrorism. And it‘s not like Iraq circa 2002. We know that Iran has funded terror. They are not a threat at all to us?

PAUL: Not really. I—sure, what I was thinking in my mind there when I said that was they are not a threat to our national security. This idea that they are on the verge of having a weapon and we have to put anti-ballistic missiles up in Europe because the Iranians might attack us, I mean, that‘s a bit of a stretch.

You know, they are not capable of it. They don‘t have an air force. They don‘t have a real military. They have essentially no navy. For them to be a threat—and you say, well, they‘ve said nasty things against Israel. Israel could wipe Iran off the face of the Earth with few nuclear weapons in no time.
And the Iranians are not going to attack. I mean, they talk belligerently, but so did Khrushchev. I mean, they talked about burying us, and yet we stood up to the Soviets. They had 40,000 nuclear weapons.
So this idea that we have to be so bold and so intimidating and looking for another war or to spread the current war—I mean, we have enough problems on our hands and yet here we are threatening to spread the war into Iran. I think it‘s very, very dangerous and doesn‘t make any sense to me. "

Some common sense from Ron Paul. Meanwhile in an article over at CounterPunch, Cheney, Israel and Iran, Gary Leupp looks at how Dick Cheney, is working hard to get us into a war with Iran:

"There is a race currently underway between different flanks of the administration to determine the future course of US-Iran policy," writes Washington insider Steven C. Clemons on his Washington Note blog. "On one flank are the diplomats, and on the other is Vice President Cheney's team and acolytes -- who populate quite a wide swath throughout the American national security bureaucracy." This is "worrisome" because the "person in the Bush administration who most wants a hot conflict with Iran is Vice President Cheney."

Clemons cites a Cheney aide as indicating "that Cheney himself is frustrated with President Bush and believes, much like Richard Perle, that Bush is making a disastrous mistake" by supporting the diplomatic approach to Iran apparently favored by the State Department. So Cheney plans to deploy an "end run strategy" around the president (who's more swayed at present by Condi Rice's "realists" than Cheney's neocons) if his flank doesn't prevail and Bush resists the demand of the neocons and the AIPAC lobby for a bloody showdown.

"The thinking on Cheney's team is to collude with Israel, nudging Israel at some key moment in the ongoing standoff between Iran's nuclear activities and international frustration over this to mount a small-scale conventional strike against Natanz using cruise missiles This strategy could be expected to trigger a sufficient Iranian counter-strike against US forces in the Gulf
as to compel Bush to forgo the diplomatic track that the administration realists are advocating and engage in another war."

Scary stuff.