Politics: The electoral college will be replaced by a system where voters will choose the polling firm they trust the most. Barack Obama will be re-elected because his vice-presidential running mate Joe Biden will be replaced by Hillary Clinton, thereby gaining the women's vote. Failed Republican campaigners will all take...

November 18th marks the 33rd anniversary of the Jonestown massacre.

Jim Jones, founder of the 8,000-member People's Temple in San Francisco, once asked Margo St. James, founder of the prostitutes' rights group, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), how he could obtain political power.

She answered, sardonically, "Arrange for...

Dear President Obama,

It seems that the theme emanating from the White House is "Eat, Pray, Be Disappointed." And yet, whenever I do feel disappointed, I always realize that the alternative was John McCain, with Sarah Palin just one Halloween "Boo!" away from the presidency, and then I always feel...

The LA Times has been publishing articles about the files on Ruben Salazar's death being kept secret. Here's an excerpt from my autobiography:

No wonder Mae Brussell was so excited. The attempted burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., in June 1972 had suddenly...

Tuli Kupferberg is better off dead.

My friend and counter-cultural icon had been suffering from a couple of strokes, hospitals, breathing tubes, feeding tubes, anemia, infections, blindness, catheter, hearing aids, wheelchairs, psychosis, memory loss, diapers, constipation, anti-depressants, sleeping pills, fatigue and a chronically bed-ridden life that seemed to be no...

The volcano in Iceland was considered an Act of God.

Smoke from the volcano caused countless flights to be canceled.

The Rolling Stone correspondent was stuck in Paris.

Embedded there, he hung around with talkative drinkers.

They revealed stuff while forgetting it was being told to a reporter.

He wrote...

Re my blog, "Kent State Anniversary Blues," from Laurel Krause: just noticed the link for the Kent State Truth Tribunal is WRONG, we have a wonderful new website...the CORRECT link is: http://TruthTribunal.org

In my book, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs: From Toad Slime to Ecstasy, Freddy Berthoff described his mescaline trip at a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert in the summer of 1970 when he was 15. "Earlier that spring," he wrote, "the helmeted, rifle-toting National Guard came up over the...

Perhaps Toyota should borrow a slogan from McDonald's: "You deserve a brake today."

Finally, a minimalist summation of American culture excerpted from the Los Angeles Times' article on Conan O'Brien: "...the Masturbating Bear [will] remain the intellectual property of NBC."

In the summer of 1977 I got a magazine assignment to cover the trial of Roman Polanski. My daughter Holly was then thirteen—the same age as the girl Polanski was accused of seducing (I didn't know yet it was actually rape)—and Holly had decided to come to Santa Monica with...

This is a minor response to Chez Pazienza--the Guitar Hero with feet of claymation--and his post, "What a Long, Strange, Thoroughly Obnoxious Trip It's Been," a delusionally subjective, condescending blog, filled with hostile generalizations and a million exaggerations.

These days--despite the wingnuts media binge and the major disappointments of...

Four decades ago, along with 499,999 others on a countercultural pilgrimage, I was headed for the Woodstock Festival of Music & Love. I was wearing my yellow leather fringe jacket for the first time. In one of the pockets there was a nice little stash of LSD. If you happen...

Charles Manson was never a hippie. His real family included con artists, pimps, drug dealers, thieves, muggers, rapists and murderers. He had known only power relationships in an army of control junkies. Manson was America's Frankenstein monster, a logical product of the prison system -- racist, paranoid, violent -- even...

This month, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a member of the Charles Manson family, is scheduled to be released on parole from a federal prison in Texas after serving 34 years behind bars for the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford in 1975. Squeaky did not participate in the Tate/LaBianca killings, which...

This satiric interview was originally published in High Times Magazine.

Q. What've you learned from this whole nuclear bong explosion?

A. I learned how fast you can go from being an international hero to being a reference in a joke on a late night talk show. I heard Jay Leno...

A friend of mine received an e-mail from Global Associated News, complete with a professional-looking logo of the globe. Their "Breaking News" was about the death of Jeff Goldblum. She forwarded it on to others, including a reporter. Later, when she learned that it was an untrue report, she felt...

I neglected to mention in my previous post that a January 2005 press release issued by the No Name-Calling Week Coalition stated: "Results from 2004 bullying surveys in schools indicated that students reported a significant decrease in the amount of bullying and harassment in school after taking part in the...

Arnold Schwarzennegger announced his candidacy for governor on the Tonight Show. John Edwards announced his candidacy for president on The Daily Show. And now Sarah Palin has in effect announced her candidacy for president in 2012 by denouncing Late Show host David Letterman for a joke about her daughter--the wrong,...

Whereas President Barack Obama ordered that Stephen Colbert be given a military shaved head on his visit to Iraq, the Treasury Department ordered that President Thomas Jefferson's image on the nickel be given a haircut.

You'll notice that he's gone from a left-side profile in 2004 to facing right in...