BSO: Timothy and Charles

Leary and Manson

I'm still working my way through Robert Greenfield's biography of Timothy Leary, the Springfield native who ended up in prison with insane cultist Charles Manson. Indeed, as this little excerpt shows, Folsom prison was a long way from Indian Orchard.

Unable to see one another, prisoners in 4-A communicated by talking through the air shafts. It was not long before Tim heard a voice in the darkness. "This is the bottom of the pit. Nobody gets out of here. It is bliss here." The voice added, "I have been watching your fall, Timothy. LSD is like the invention of the wheel, gunpowder and the Chinese." Tim realized that his next-door neighbor was Charlie Manson....

"I knew you'd end up here," Manson told Tim. "I've been wanting to talk to you for years. Our lives would never have crossed outside. But now we have plenty of time. We were all your students, you know. You had everyone looking up to you. You could have led people anywhere you wanted. When I got out of jail in 1965, there were millions of kids cut loose from the old lies just waiting to be told what to do." His voice taking on a slight edge of complaint, Manson added, "And you didn't tell them what to do. That's what I could never figure out. You showed everyone how to create a new head but you never gave them the new head. Why didn't you? I've wanted to ask you that for years."

"That was the point," Tim replied. "I didn't want to impose my realities. The idea is that everybody takes responsibility for his nervous system, creates his own reality. Anything else is brainwashing."

"That was your mistake," said Manson. "No one wants responsibility."

When they talked again the next morning after breakfast, Manson had more questions. He wanted to know what Tim called the moment of truth when you took acid and your entire body dissolved into nothing but vibrations, space and time fused, and it all became just pure energy. Bouncing the question right back at him, Tim asked Manson what he found there. "Nothing," Manson said. "Like death must be. Isn't that what you found?"

Having fielded this question many times before, Tim told Manosn this was a trip someone else had laid on him. "It's the moment when you are free from biochemical imprints," he said. "You can take off from there and go anywhere you want. You should have looked for the energy fusion called love."

"It's all death," Manson insisted.

"It's all love," Tim responded.

"I hang on to death," Manson said.

"I live by life," Tim replied.

Good Question.

Advocates of government control want you to believe that the serious shortcomings of our medical and insurance system are failures of the free market. But that's impossible because our market is not free. Each state operates a cozy medical and insurance cartel that restricts competition through licensing and keeps prices higher than they would be in a genuine free market. But the planners won't talk about that. After all, if government is the problem in the first place, how can they justify a government takeover?

- John Stossel

Free Speech

Here's a video montage by S.P. Sullivan of last night's controversial UMass symposium discussing a leftist terrorist group that was responsible for a string of bombings in the Boston area in the 1970's.

S.P. Sullivan on Vimeo.

Many local law enforcement personnel protested outside the event because the group's activities were responsible for the death of a police officer. That murder was despicable, but I still defend the right of the leftist professors behind the event to put it on. My only complaint is that in the past when non-leftist speakers were being protested on campus, these same lefties who are now suddenly champions of free speech were deafening in their silence.

Amherst Owl Plus

Amherst photographer John Elder Robison took these photos of an owl visiting his backyard.

Me in Raos last night.