File this one under yet another failure of supposed elites who turn out to know very little about the subjects they’re “professional experts” in.

St. Louis Police Claim It’s Their ‘First Amendment’ Rights Not To Protect Football Players Who Supported Protestors

Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt

Tue, Dec 2nd 2014 9:33am

It’s been pretty obvious that law enforcement in the St. Louis area has a rather tenuous grasp on the concept of the First Amendment. Obviously, they’ve done a fairly terrible job recognizing the right to “peaceably assemble” for quite some time, even having a court declare its “5 second rule” approach unconstitutional. They’ve also ignored the freedom of the press by repeatedly arresting journalists. And, remember, the local prosecutor has claimed that it was really all those people speaking out on social media who were to blame.

But it appears that the misunderstanding of the First Amendment has been taken to new, and even more ridiculous levels, following a brief show of support for the protestors by some players for the St. Louis Rams (the local NFL football franchise for you non-sportsball people). The Rams’ wide receivers decided to all put their hands up — the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture — in support of Michael Brown and the protestors. It’s a small, but meaningful gesture, showing they supported the protestors. And it shouldn’t have been taken as anything more than that.

Instead, the St. Louis County police decided to respond… by suggesting that, because of this, the police would no longer protect the Rams.

…

As many have noted, this certainly sounds like Roorda saying that it’s the police’s “First Amendment” rights to look the other way should any threats come to the team or the stadium.

Of course, that’s not how the First Amendment actually works. It’s quite the opposite. As Sally Jenkins at the Washington Post points out, the reality is exactly the opposite. The First Amendment protects the public from government officials (including the police) from taking actions based on expression of members of the public. If anything, Roorda’s implied threat violates the First Amendment, suggesting that the government will punish people for their expression.

…

Of course, the First Amendment now also protects the press digging into Jeff Roorda’s own background and reporting what they find. Like the time he was reprimanded for trying “to ‘cover’ for another police officer filing a report that contained false statements.” Or how he’s against body cameras because they “sometimes don’t reflect exactly what happened” and saying that “cameras have been bad for law enforcement” because “it causes second guessing by the courts and the media.” Roorda has also defended an officer who a surveillance video showed was assaulting a handcuffed suspect, claiming the officer was “only defending himself” and saying he was doing “as he’s trained to do.”

In fact, we actually wrote about that last story and posted the video.

As we noted at the time, Roorda then lied about what’s in the video. Roorda claimed that the officer was crouched down and the suspect started moving forward at him. But the video shows no such thing. Roorda further claimed that such videos should only be used when it helps the police view of things.

Meanwhile, the St. Louis County Police still seem to think that their First Amendment rights include pretending that the Rams apologized to them when they did not.

Laying Pipe

What did you think I meant?

Smoking is bad for you

The real news, Stephen’s rare 2 part interview with Jon Stewart, and this week’s guests below.

Perhaps you were thinking about the one between Green Bay (Yay!) and the Patsies (Boo, Hiss) that’s supposed to be a Super Bowl preview.

Please, first of all that season hasn’t ended yet and secondly you should know by now that for the most part only the weirdest and most obscure sports are worthy of my ephemeral photons, if there were a Curling Channel I’d be all over it.

No, today is the Grey Cup, the Championship of the Canadian Throwball League and the time of the Grand National Drunk.

Like Lord Stanley’s Cup, Earl Grey’s (and yes, he’s famous for other things besides a Tea blend) has the names of all the Championship Teams and Players engraved on an ever expanding base and is treated with same shameless disregard (broken several times, stolen twice, and salvaged from a fire) that Canadians customarily treat their sports trophies with (I told you it’s National Drunk Day, how about a beer, eh?).

Actually, Canadian and U.S. Throwball have a common origin and as you may not suspect, Canadians were the innovators.

The Canadian Football League and the Grey Cup – a beginner’s guide

David Lengel, The Guardian

Friday 28 November 2014 09.48 EST

The sport played today evolved from a hybrid of rugby and soccer. In fact, both the American and Canadian versions of the game can trace their roots back to an 1874 series between Cambridge’s Harvard University and McGill University of Montréal. By then, the Canadians were picking up the ball and running with it while the Americans were mostly using their feet. It seems that Harvard were quite taken with McGill’s playing style and began to adapt their own version of the sport – from that moment on the two codes continued to evolve on separate paths.

The Canadians created a unique version of the game they called rugby football, and it actually wasn’t until 1960 that the term “rugby” was dropped entirely.

As The Guardian article goes on to point out, there are some minor rule differences that have a major impact on the way the game is played-

CFL

• 150-yard long field including 20-yard endzones
• 65 yards wide
• 12-a-side
• Three downs
• 20 seconds between plays
• A one-point play called a “single” or a “rouge”
• The clock stops after every play inside three minutes
• All kicks are live, no fair catches but the returner gets a five-yard buffer
• Linemen are separated by a full yard at the line of scrimmage

NFL

• 120-yard long field
• 53.3 yards wide
• 11-a-side
• Four downs
• 40 seconds between plays
• No one-point plays (except PATs)
• Two minute warning
• Fair catches can be called for on kicks
• Receivers may move before the snap parallel to the line of scrimmage
• Linemen are separated only by the line of scrimmage

To the casual viewer, it may seem like the games resemble each other closely, but the CFL version is much faster. Consider this – with a shorter play clock teams have just half the amount time to get a play off. With much more real estate to cover on a CFL field, linemen need to be much quicker on their feet while chasing offenses that feature more option play and wide receivers who get a running head start.

I’ll note that the lack of Downs and the longer and wider playing area place a premium on the passing game.  It’s two Downs and Punt.

Oh, and about that single point play-

• The defense/receiving team are unable to return a punt or a missed field goal out of the endzone.
• The defense/receiving team allow a punt or a missed field goal to roll out of the endzone and out of bounds.

It’s not uncommon to have games that resemble Pitcher’s duels in Baseball where the Kicking Game dominates as advancing the ball is quite difficult.

Playing for the Cup today are the Calgary Stampeders (official site) who are the 7 and a half point favorites and the Hamilton Tiger-Cats (official site).  They both have young and inexperienced Quarterbacks and athletic Defenses.  The Stampeders are favored because the’ve shown more consistency over the season while allowing some upsets.  The Tiger-Cats have a less imposing record but have played very well recently.

I’m rooting for the Stampeders because they have a nicer looking website without that ugly Tim Horton’s ad.

Coverage starts on ESPN2 @ 6 pm with Kickoff @ 6:30.

1991, 23 years ago.

Interestingly enough many of the location shots were filmed in Seymour and Georgetown.  Both businesses are now defunct.

Радул

Antonín Dvořák was a composer of the late Romantic model meaning fiercely nationalist, overtly emotional, and deriving his melodies and themes from folk music roots.  Wagner poisoned at least a generation of musicians.

Rather than directly echo any particular song or dance Dvořák sought to capture the rhythms and harmonies of his sources and while most of his work is, as you might imagine, influenced by his Bohemian and Moravian roots, he also sought inspiration from other Slavic cultures in Serbia, Poland, and the Ukraine.

Something that’s not widely realized is his influence on United States Art Music.  He arrived in New York in 1892 and stayed there until 1895.  In addition to composing several works, notably the String Quartet in F (the “American”), the “New World Symphony“, and the Cello Concerto in B minor, he wrote extensively on the  need to create a United States “national” music style which he felt should be based in the traditions of Native and African American folk music.  He was particularly impressed by spirituals.

My selection for today debuted in Birmingham (Dvořák was enormously popular in Britain as opposed to Austria-Hungary where he was widely viewed as subversive) about a year before his move to 327 East 17th Street.  The building no longer stands, having been demolished to make way for a Beth Israel Medical Center residence for people with AIDS over the objections of Czech President Václav Havel.

I love long holiday weekends, they’re the perfect time for people to dump shit on you without anyone much noticing.

In its continuing campaign of convincing us that Google == Evil (that’s how you write an equation test folks, anything else is just an assignment of value) YouTube is once again ignoring the not inconsiderable universe of people who use e-bay and decided to only provide <iframe> embed codes for their videos.

Unfortunately this is also a problem for us.

Only lofty Admins like me (and make no mistake, I’m about as lofty as you get here so don’t fuck with me if you know what’s good for you) can directly embed <iframes> and while you may in an egalitarian way say-

ek, why not just make everyone an Admin?

Well, it’s not just that I’m an authoritarian asshole but there are plenty of buttons you can push that screw things up and the reason I know that is because I’ve pushed them.

Now we are in communications with our software providers, the kind, patient, and understanding people at Soapblox to correct this condition but in the mean time I’d like to thank BobbyK for finding a temporary fix-

Cut and paste the first thing you see when you go to YouTube and hit Embed just as you would to post to Facebook, in this case-

http://youtu.be/OMOVFvcNfvE

into the Generator.  Now delete that part which always says-

http://youtu.be/

and push the Generate! button.  You’ll come out with a piece of crap that looks like this-

<object width=”475″ height=”381″><param value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/OMOVFvcNfvE&showsearch=0&rel=0&fs=1&autoplay=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″ name=”movie” /><param value=”window” name=”wmode” /><param value=”true” name=”allowFullScreen” /><embed width=”475″ height=”381″ wmode=”window” allowfullscreen=”true” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/OMOVFvcNfvE&showsearch=0&fs=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″></embed></object><br /><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMOVFvcNfvE” target=”_blank”>View on YouTube</a>

Which will pretty much work fine if you cut and paste it as is OR you can be a little fussier like me and strip away all the non-essential garbage (everything that’s not between <embed> and </embed>) and end up with something like this.

<embed width=”475″ height=”381″ wmode=”window” allowfullscreen=”true” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/OMOVFvcNfvE&showsearch=0&fs=1&rel=0&autoplay=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D18″></embed>

QED

Eventually I’ll get around to posting it as a permanent link under Menu, but you might want to bookmark it now anyway.

In case you hadn’t noticed, oil prices are way, way down and after yesterday’s OPEC meeting they’re unlikely to rise any time soon.

Why is this and what does it mean?

Like most things economic it’s largely demand driven.  Japan is in recession (again), Europe teetering on the edge of deflation, China no longer on an expansionist binge, and as for US?  Well, the U.S. has the same crappy .01% economy we’ve had for the last 7 years.

At the same time recoverable reserves have expanded through fracking and other techniques to the point where the U.S. is once again the #1 Oil exporter in the world.

Can I get a chorus of Proud to Be or at least a U.S.A., U.S.A. chant for that?

Pfft.  It won’t last.  Either demand will rise or we’ll spiral into an economic black hole.  And should demand and consumption rise we’ll be killing off 50% of the population through climate change and demand will go down anyway.  This is why Tar Sand development is as dead as the Dodo, they had a window to make obscene amounts of money that is now permanently closed.

But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.

John Maynard Keynes- A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923)

So, let’s take a look at the the short term, Qui Bono?

It’s clearly the House of Saud who are driving these developments and their extraction costs are around $5 – $15 a barrel.  This is why they are price makers, they can produce enough to fill most of the demand and as long as they are getting more in return they are making a ton of money they don’t have to share too widely.

Other traditional producers, like Venezuela and especially Iran, have larger and more restive populations and thus benefit from a price point that maximizes their income, something the Saudis aren’t concerned about.  It’s not far fetched to speculate that the current oil glut has been orchestrated specifically to disadvantage Shia Muslims (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon) in what can easily be argued is open Jihad by militant Wahabi Sunnis that the ignorant West (that would be the Empire of the United States and our coalition of the coerced and cowardly) is only too happy to support in return for a little liquid black gold to keep our inebriated Military Industrial Complex well lubricated.

Not that they like us, they hate us almost as much as the Shia… almost.  And low oil prices also mitigate against costly extraction technologies (North Sea and Arctic Drilling, Deep Sea Drilling, Fracking, Tar Sands) by making them unprofitable.  Likewise the longer term threat of cheap renewable power via Solar, Wind, Tidal, and Hydro-electric.

So we’re not only whores, we’re cheap whores, practically sluts giving it away for nothing (regular readers will know that I have no objection to a healthy and active sexual life, sex work, or promiscuity).

The benefit of fossil fuel is that its reliability and low volume to energy ratio make it uniquely suited to military applications.  Is it any wonder then that access to it is the number one priority of Empire?

It also illustrates the power of monopoly pricing, not just in extracting the maximum revenue, but in destroying the economic viability of competitive rivals

I’m among those who have fond memories of Mario and thought at the time he should be President, or at least a Supreme Court Justice.  His son has led me to question my judgement.

Andrew Cuomo has, almost single handedly, kept the New York State Republican Party alive because he doesn’t believe in liberal ideas and finds it easier to have a convenient excuse to disguise his naked conservatism.  He has, without fail, sabotaged the campaigns of State legislators of his own nominal party in order to promote the “deal makers” and “compromisers” to stifle any truly populist initiatives, especially any that might offend the delicate sensibilities of the Bankster “Master of the Universe” Thieves and Con Men.

Content to coast on the store of goodwill built up by his father, he basks in the the rumors that he’s on the short list of Presidendial prospectives.  If he ever got close to the nomination it would be a shame and a travesty.

First of all he’s an incompetent finger pointing weasel-

Gov. Andrew Cuomo shamefully blames lack of preparation for Buffalo snow on the National Weather Service

Joanna Rothkopf, Salon

Monday, Nov 24, 2014 09:20 AM EST

On Saturday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo felt he had to comment on the massive lake effect snowstorm that buried Western New York and Buffalo under up to 7 feet of snow last week. People were surely wondering: Why had there been so many deaths? Why was the region seemingly unprepared to deal with such extreme conditions?

Cuomo, in an attempt to appease the state’s residents, blamed it on the National Weather Service. “No one had an idea that it was gonna be that much snow that fast,” he said in a press conference on Saturday. “Snow coming down at the rate of about five inches an hour. No one had an idea. The weather service was off. By the way, I said this in my State of the State last year, we’re putting in our own weather detection system.”

In fact, the National Weather Service had warned of the possibility of an extreme storm.

…

One of the most dangerous impulses of politicians is their willingness to dive head-first into scientific issues, professing authority in areas where they quite simply have none. For the most part, politicians and pundits look to science only when it is a suitable scapegoat on which to place blame for failed policy, rather than as the most accurate barometer we have of what is to come.

Don Paul, chief meteorologist at the CBS affiliate in Buffalo-

Governor Cuomo’s attempt to scapegoat the National Weather Service for an inaccurate forecast in advance is not only completely in error–the NWS did an outstanding job–but is a disservice to the public and to the hard-working staff of this federal agency. No forecast of such an historical disaster is going to be absolutely perfect, but no one who lives here can say this event was not well forecast in advance, or that the warning headlines of its impact to come were not well explained in advance…his statement is disinformation, purposeful or ill-informed.

Secondly, he revels in his science denialism as thoroughly as any card carrying tea-bagger-

New York Governor Cuomo: ‘I Don’t Want To Get Into A Political Debate’ About Climate Change

by Emily Atkin, Think Progress

Posted on November 25, 2014 at 9:34 am

According to a Capital New York report, the politically savvy governor has historically refused to talk about the scientific link between extreme weather events and climate change, citing a desire to avoid contentious debate. He most recently did this on Sunday, when asked about the climate connection to Buffalo’s massive lake-effect snowstorm, and the worry of flooding because of rising temperatures.

“I don’t want to get into a political debate at this time about climate change causes, et cetera,” Cuomo reportedly said. “Forget the causes. Is it global warming? Is it reliance on fossil fuels? Forget the causes. What is inarguable is the result.”

The issue with these comments – and arguably all modern political rhetoric about climate change – is that the debate over extreme weather and global warming is not inherently political. It is scientific. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international body that provides comprehensive updates on climate science, says that man-made warming increases the severity of heat waves, wildfires, and heavy precipitation events. Some scientists have even tied Buffalo’s massive snowstorm to climate change, citing the increased moisture held in the atmosphere as a result of warming temperatures.

Instead of acknowledging this, however, Cuomo’s position is that it doesn’t matter whether climate change is causing extreme events. And it’s not the first time he’s made the claim. In a 2012 op-ed for the Daily News, where he pledged increase storm preparation measures in the face of Superstorm Sandy.

“Debating why does not lead to solutions – it leads to gridlock,” Cuomo said at the time. “The denial and deliberation from extremists on both sides about the causes of climate change are distracting us from addressing its inarguable effects.”

The issue with that stance, however, is that it focuses solely on adaptation to extreme weather events, and does not acknowledge the need to reduce carbon emissions to reduce the likelihood of those extreme events happening in the first place. That’s bad, considering the latest IPCC report says the effects of climate change – including extreme weather – could be irreversible if decisive actions aren’t taken to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. And those impacts will only get worse as future carbon emissions rise.

Evil or an Idiot?

I must say I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that when a politician or a media personality acts in ways that are contrary to the expressed wishes of their constituents or audience, they’re not idiots.

This song is called Alice’s Restaurant, and it’s about Alice, and the restaurant, but Alice’s Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant; that’s just the name of the song, and that’s why I call the song Alice’s Restaurant.

Now, it all started two Thanksgivings ago, was on – two years ago on Thanksgiving, when my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the restaurant. But Alice doesn’t live in the restaurant, she lives in the church nearby the restaurant, in the bell tower, with her husband Ray and Fasha the dog. And living in the bell tower like that, they got a lot of room downstairs where the pews used to be in. Having all that room, seeing as how they took out all the pews, they decided that they didn’t have to take out their garbage for a long time.

We got up there, we found all the garbage in there, and we decided it’d be a friendly gesture for us to take the garbage down to the city dump. So we took the half a ton of garbage, put it in the back of a red VW microbus, took shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed on toward the city dump.

Well, we got there and there was a big sign and a chain across across the dump saying, “Closed on Thanksgiving.” And we had never heard of a dump closed on Thanksgiving before, and with tears in our eyes we drove off into the sunset looking for another place to put the garbage.

We didn’t find one. Until we came to a side road, and off the side of the side road there was another fifteen foot cliff and at the bottom of the cliff there was another pile of garbage. And we decided that one big pile was better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we decided to throw ours down.

That’s what we did, and drove back to the church, had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat, went to sleep and didn’t get up until the next morning, when we got a phone call from Officer Obie.

He said, “Kid,we found your name on an envelope at the bottom of a half a ton of garbage, and just wanted to know if you had any information about it.” And I said, “Yes, sir, Officer Obie, I cannot tell a lie, I put that envelope under that garbage.”

After speaking to Obie for about forty-five minutes on the telephone we finally arrived at the truth of the matter and said that we had to go down and pick up the garbage, and also had to go down and speak to him at the police officer’s station. So we got in the red VW microbus with the shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed on toward the police officer’s station.

Now friends, there was only one or two things that Obie coulda done at the police station, and the first was he could have given us a medal for being so brave and honest on the telephone, which wasn’t very likely, and we didn’t expect it, and the other thing was he could have bawled us out and told us never to be see driving garbage around the vicinity again, which is what we expected, but when we got to the police officer’s station there was a third possibility that we hadn’t even counted upon, and we was both immediately arrested. Handcuffed. And I said “Obie, I don’t think I can pick up the garbage with these handcuffs on.” He said, “Shut up, kid. Get in the back of the patrol car.” And that’s what we did, sat in the back of the patrol car and drove to the quote Scene of the Crime unquote.

I want tell you about the town of Stockbridge, Massachusets, where this happened here,they got three stop signs, two police officers, and one police car, but when we got to the Scene of the Crime there was five police officers and three police cars, being the biggest crime of the last fifty years, and everybody wanted to get in the newspaper story about it. And they was using up all kinds of cop equipment that they had hanging around the police officer’s station. They was taking plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smelling prints, and they took twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us. Took pictures of the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that’s not to mention the aerial photography.

After the ordeal, we went back to the jail. Obie said he was going to put us in the cell. Said, “Kid, I’m going to put you in the cell, I want your wallet and your belt.” And I said, “Obie, I can understand you wanting my wallet so I don’t have any money to spend in the cell, but what do you want my belt for?” And he said, “Kid, we don’t want any hangings.” I said, “Obie, did you think I was going to hang myself for littering?” Obie said he was making sure, and friends Obie was, cause he took out the toilet seat so I couldn’t hit myself over the head and drown, and he took out the toilet paper so I couldn’t bend the bars roll out the – roll the toilet paper out the window, slide down the roll and have an escape.

Obie was making sure, and it was about four or five hours later that Alice (remember Alice? It’s a song about Alice) Alice came by and with a few nasty words to Obie on the side, bailed us out of jail, and we went back to the church, had a another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat,and didn’t get up until the next morning, when we all had to go to court.

We walked in, sat down, Obie came in with the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, sat down. Man came in said, “All rise.” We all stood up, and Obie stood up with the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures, and the judge walked in sat down with a seeing eye dog, and he sat down. We sat down. Obie looked at the seeing eye dog, and then at the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and looked at the seeing eye dog. And then at the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one and began to cry, ’cause Obie came to the realization that it was a typical case of American blind justice, and there wasn’t nothing he could do about it, and the judge wasn’t going to look at the twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.

And we was fined $50 and had to pick up the garbage in the snow, but thats not what I came to tell you about.

I came to talk about the draft.

They got a building down New York City, it’s called Whitehall Street, where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected. I went down to get my physical examination one day, and I walked in, I sat down, got good and drunk the night before, so I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning. `Cause I wanted to look like the all-American kid from New York City, man I wanted, I wanted to feel like the all-, I wanted to be the all American kid from New York, and I walked in, sat down, I was hung down, brung down, hung up, and all kinds o’ mean nasty ugly things. And I waked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said, “Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604.”

And I went up there, I said, “Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL.” And I started jumpin up and down yelling, “KILL, KILL,” and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumping up and down yelling, “KILL, KILL.” And the seargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, “You’re our boy.”

Didn’t feel too good about it.

Proceeded on down the hall, getting more injections, inspections, detections, neglections and all kinds of stuff that they was doin’ to me at the thing there, and I was there for two hours, three hours, four hours, I was there for a long time going through all kinds of mean nasty ugly things and I was just having a tough time there, and they was inspecting, injecting every single part of me, and they was leaving no part untouched. Proceeded through, and when I finally came to the see the last man, I walked in, walked in sat down after a whole big thing there, and I walked up and said, “What do you want?” He said, “Kid, we only got one question. Have you ever been arrested?”

And I proceeded to tell him the story of the Alice’s Restaurant Massacre, with full orchestration and five part harmony and stuff like that and all the phenomena, and he stopped me right there and said, “Kid, did you ever go to court?”

And I proceeded to tell him the story of the twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one, and he stopped me right there and said, “Kid, I want you to go and sit down on that bench that says Group W …. NOW, kid!!”

And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W’s where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean and ugly and nasty and horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, “Kid, whad’ya get?” I said, “I didn’t get nothing, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage.” He said, “What were you arrested for, kid?” And I said, “Littering.” And they all moved away from me on the bench there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I said, “And creating a nuisance.” And they all came back, shook my hand,and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench. And everything was fine, we was smoking cigarettes and all kinds of things, until the Sergeant came over, had some paper in his hand, held it up and said.

“Kids, this-piece-of-paper’s-got-47-words-37-sentences-58-words-we-wanna-know-details-of-the crime-time-of-the-crime-and-any-other-kind-of-thing- you-gotta-say-pertaining-to-and-about-the-crime-I-want-to-know-arresting-officer’s-name-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say”, and talked for forty-five minutes and nobody understood a word that he said, but we had fun filling out the forms and playing with the pencils on the bench there, and I filled out the massacre with the four part harmony, and wrote it down there, just like it was, and everything was fine and I put down the pencil, and I turned over the piece of paper, and there, there on the other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on the other side, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, read the following words:

(“KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?”)

I went over to the sergeant, said, “Sergeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I’ve rehabilitated myself. I mean, I mean, I mean I’m just, I’m sitting here on the bench, I mean I’m sittinhere on the Group W bench, ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after being a litterbug?”

He looked at me and said, “Kid, we don’t like your kind, and we’re gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington.”

And friends, somewhere in Washington, enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I’m singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if you’re in a situation like that there’s only one thing you can do. Walk into the shrink wherever you are, just walk in and say “Shrink, you can get anything you want at Alice’s restaurant.” And walk out.

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them . And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends, they may think it’s a movement.

And that’s just what it is , the Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar. With feeling.

So we’ll wait for it to come around on the guitar here, and sing it when it does. Here it comes.

That was horrible. If you want to end war and stuff you got to sing loud.

I’ve been singing this song now for twenty-five minutes. I could sing it for another twenty-five minutes. I’m not proud… or tired.

So we’ll wait till it comes around again, and this time with four part harmony and feeling.

We’re just waitin’ for it to come around is what we’re doing.

All right now.

Da da da da da da da dum…

At Alice’s Restaurant!