From a 1986 exchange between Bob Dylan and a Mister Jones:

Mister Jones: I was looking through your lyrics. There aren't very many political songs in there.

Bob Dylan: I don't know which of my songs was ever political.

MJ: "Masters Of War" is.

BD: I don't know if even "Masters of War" is a political song. Politics of what? If there is such a thing as politics, what is it politics of? Is it spiritual politics? Automotive politics? Governmental politics? What kind of politics? Where does this word come from, politics? Is this a Greek word, or what? What does it actually mean? Everybody uses it all the time. I don't know what the fuck it means. Left, right, rebel. Some people are rebels. Let's see. Afghanistan are rebels, but they're OK. Nicaragua's got rebels and they're OK. Their rebels are all right. But in El Salvador the rebels are the bad guys. If you listen to that stuff you go crazy. You don't even know who you are any more.

MJ: We all have our favorite rebels I guess.

BD: Yeah! That must be it!

MJ: Who do you admire?

BD: Who is there to admire now? Some world leader? Who? I could probably think of many people actually that I admire. There's a guy who works in a gas station in LA—old guy. I truly admire that guy.

MJ: What's he done?

BD: What's he done? He helped me fix my carburetor once.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHY0YxdswyY]

So some 72 hours or so ago I don't think I had ever even heard of "microbeads." Now I have to know that eight trillion of the things are flowing into US waterways every day; they are tiny, they are plastic, they are immortal, and, once turned loose, they can't be stopped.

[A] team of researchers says the best way to protect water quality and wildlife is an outright ban on the common use of plastic microbeads.

The tiny pellets are used in everyday cosmetic and cleaning products and end up being flushed down drains. Since they’re not captured by wastewater treatment plants, they end up in the environment, either directly in the water or in the sludge from sewage treatment facilities that’s then spread on land.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dug-G9xVdVs]

"We're facing a plastics crisis and don’t even know it," said Stephanie Green, co-author of the report.

"Part of this problem can now start with brushing your teeth in the morning," she said. "Contaminants like these microbeads are not something our wastewater treatment plants were built to handle, and the overall amount of contamination is huge. The microbeads are very durable."

Why is there plastic? Doesn't it come from petroleum, or from natural gas, which is sort of the farts of petroleum? Wasn't the planet supposed to be out of that malarkey by now? Humans having happily moved on to Sane and Sensible alternatives? But no. They just keep sucking it up out of the ground. Here; there; everywhere. There seems no end to it. Coming up and out, to transform everybody, all over the earth, into a Beverly Hillbilly.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD22a4APsCg]

When I was a very young journalist I traveled one bitterly cold night out to some farmer's field where Science Men intended to create an earthquake.

There had recently rumbled through the area a pretty impressive earth-shaker, and according to the Science Men, there was No Reason for this. They had detected no fault lines, or any other such earthquake-indicator. So they decided to make their own earthquake, so they could Study it, and then maybe they would Know.

I knew why there had been the earthquake. Because the humans had just finished backing up a shit-ton of water against a new dam. The earth just wasn't used to such a weight, there. So, it groaned. But the Science Men didn't want to listen to this (though, many years later, this was indeed accepted as The Reason). Oh no. They preferred to go bomb a field.

So they drilled a big cylindrical hole hundreds of feet deep in the farmer's field, and then heaved some sort of explosives down there. Then they fitted a cap of some kind over the hole. The cap was supposed to contain the explosion within the drilled tube; thereby, the Big Boom would create an earthquake. The Science Men had Measuring Machines which, when the earthquake arrived, would Tell them Something.

Like a good young journalist, I arrived an hour before the bombs were due to go off. Only to become an ice mummy, as mysterious things kept going Wrong. It was like those old-time Apollo countdowns that started, and stopped, and started, and stopped, endlessly, in an eternal loop, until finally somebody important got impatient, said "fuck it," and pushed the button, and then the rocket blew up on the pad.

Just like then, the bombing in the farmer's field, it was delayed and delayed. Everyone became grumpy—it was the middle of the night, too cold to be anywhere near outside—everyone, that is, but the farmer. He was in the highest of spirits. For he had been Paid for allowing a hole to be drilled in his farm, and he was Proud to be doing something for Science. Also, he had what seemed to be a bottomless supply of whiskey. With which he dosed himself liberally, and often. He offered to share, and eventually pretty much everyone—even some of the Science Men—partook of his libations. It helped numb the cold. But did nothing to ease the eerie feeling that a form of unhealthy unsanity had been unloosed, what with these people standing around a field, in the wee hours of an icicle night, waiting for some lab-heads to set off an earthquake.

Finally the subterranean bombs were at last detonated. And the experiment proved—immediately—a massive failure. The cap was blown right off, and with such force that it disappeared deep into the night; no one had any idea where it had landed, or even if it had succeeded in going into orbit. The farmer was left with a deep gaping hole in his land, and the Machines of the Science Men did not have Measurements.

Dejected, the Science Men announced they were going home, and would send somebody out in a few days to plug up the hole. The farmer, formerly so sunny, now went mad with rage. He demanded the hole be sealed at once. Otherwise, he raved, his cows would stumble into the hole, in the fall they would break their legs, he wouldn't be able to get them out, they would all die, he would then go bankrupt, and he would be forced to go live on the docks of some city as a wharf rat.

He was making me nervous, with his roaring, and I wanted to light a cigarette, but I was afraid it would ignite the booze-cloud enveloping the farmer, and in the explosion we would all be Wounded.

At some point around this time, somebody—maybe the farmer, maybe me—suggested it had all been a Plot. That the Science Men had never been about making and measuring an earthquake at all. Instead, they were about drilling the big hole deliberately so the farmer's cows would fall into it. The dead cows would then be covered and compressed. Until, in the fullness of time, they devolved into petroleum. Or petroleum's farts, natural gas. Just as the dinosaurs and algae had. This particular team of Science Men, it was but one of hundreds of such teams, even then fanning out across the nation, with their balderdash and lies about earthquake-creation, when really they intended to suck mass quantities of farmer-cows into their numberless holes, there to become petroleum, so that Americans could continue to drive their cars, and the American government could continue to crank its tanks.

The thing was a complete fiasco, but it was fun to write about. A lot of people thought I made most of it up, but mostly I didn't.

A lot of people also think LAist makes up the stuff in "Overheard In LA." But I don't think so. It is too perfect. It is too exactly what people in Los Angeles say. So, even if it's invented, it's True.

"Overheard In LA" appears every now and again and records what Angelinos claim to have overheard other Angelinos saying. For your morning amusement, here are some recent overheard southland emissions.

"Meatballs really freak me out. I don't like sculpted meat."

"I'm on a Disney show, but I'm really more of a dramatic, classical actress."

"Where did you find your dog psychic?"
"Oh, he was recommended by my other dog's acupuncturist."

"You know the really skinny one who's had a lot of work done? She calls her dog 'Pimp Daddy'? Well her dog goes to the dog academy I'm trying to get my dog into."

"You know my yoga teacher who looks like Johnny Depp? He also does fire dancing."

"My friend is super-spiritual. She's had four UFO sightings."

"I was going to try LSD, but I had Bible study the next day."

"I want to do the rest of this year right. Fuck bitches, get money, and secure my faith in God."

"I've already got Uber for kids: it's called my ex-husband."

"He's a narcissist. And here's how I know—he's a musician."

"I don't think the pyramids are so great. If they were how come they're not replicated in today's architecture."

"The world is not more messed up than it was 20 years ago. Florida is just more visible."

"Jesus, how hard is it to rent a midget in L.A."

The "ist" people also offer sites dedicated to similarly doomed metropoli: Shanghai, New York, London, Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, Washington DC. There used to be one covering Austin, but it is no longer available. Presumably because that city no longer exists.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef0s38kCAEo]

I saw a headline this week that read "Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl Planned For Weeks To Abandon Post."

And what's supposed to be wrong with that? That simply indicates that he grew a brain.

G.I Gurdjieff, when asked during WWI what soldiers might do if they were to become "awake," replied: "They would throw down their guns and go home to their familes."

That is what Bergdahl endeavored to do. He should be honored. Not tried. And all soldiers, the world over, should follow his example. Follow him into the light.

In 1973, while the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci was interviewing Mohammed Riza Pahlavi, shah of Iran, the following exchange took place:

Oriana Fallaci: If I were an Iranian instead of an Italian, and lived here and thought as I do and wrote as I do, I mean if I were to criticize you, would you throw me in jail?

Mohammed Riza Pahlavi: Probably. If what you thought and wrote went counter to our laws, you'd be put on trial.

OF: Really? And sentenced too?

MRF: I think so. Naturally.

Today we have Atena Farghadani, who responded to a proposed law that would restrict access to birth control, with a drawing depicting members of the Iranian government as monkeys and goats. For this she was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison. She, and her attorney, now face further charges, of "indecent conduct" and "illegitimate sexual relationship short of adultery." This is based on the fact that the two were observed shaking hands.

The humans seem to have invented a new sport. I have no idea what it's about, but here's what it looks like.

Whatever it is, it certainly looks safer than handegg*, and so I am in favor of it replacing that mayhem, and at once.

(*Handegg is a term—I believe created by the French through the English—that more properly refers to the sport that in the United States is known as "football." Elsewhere in the world, "football" is what people in the US know as "soccer." That sport overseen internationally by Seep Bladder, whom everyone in a tube was totally exercised over some months back, but who now has been pretty much totally forgotten. Anyway, the creators of the "handegg" moniker observed, quite rightly, that the "ball," in American "football," is not shaped like a "ball" at all, but more resembles an egg. Furthermore, while the foot is indeed employed in American "football," for "kickoffs," "punts," "field goals," and "extra points," these events occur relatively rarely; most often, the egg is passed from hand to hand, either directly, or through the air. I have been won over by the Logic and Wisdom of these people, and therefore, throughout the remainder of this piece, US "football" shall be referred to exclusively as handegg.)

Handegg totally has to go now that 87 out of 91 former US handegg players tested positive for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which renders a person even more absent-minded, depressed, and demented than the hybrid farm animal Rick Perry. Handegg has long required its participants to repeatedly bruise and break various vital portions of their bodies; now it is incontrovertible that it additionally asks them to sacrifice their very brains.

Chris Borland, a handegg player for the San Francisco 49ers, earlier this year retired from the gladiator ring after but one year. "I just honestly want to do what's best for my health," he said. "From what I've researched and what I've experienced, I don't think it's worth the risk. For me, it's wanting to be proactive. I'm concerned that if you wait 'til you have symptoms, it's too late. I just thought to myself, 'What am I doing? Is this how I'm going to live my adult life, banging my head?'"

May all the other handegg players follow him. Into the light.

Like handegg, writing songs is hard on the head. Just in a different way.

Last fall Annie Lennox confessed that she really only wrote when she was unhappy—"a lot of musicians are sensitive souls and not always terribly happy and I do tend to swing a little bit like that; misery is a great catalyst for some very strong music but you don't really want to live there 24/7"—and more recently she has said songwriting for her is "in the past tense"; "the song," for her, as the Who once said, "is over."

Meanwhile, Gillian Welch—who has groused that "people would flat-out ask me, 'Don't you have any happy love songs?' Well, as a matter of fact, I don't. I've got songs about orphans and morphine addicts"—recently accepted a Nashville lifetime achievement award, for a life where "I don't start writing until I’m totally miserable."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTYArCrSCcg]

Chrissie Hynde is officially a senior citizen now—she gets shit in the mail from AARP, unsolicited—and she is, sadly, exhibiting the senior moment of publicly grumping about the young'uns who today do what she once did. Yes, she is out there pruding, about young women making music who, to her, are the functional equivalent of "sex workers," in "selling their music by bumping and grinding and wearing their underwear in videos."

Maybe she has forgotten, but I haven't, that, back in her day, Hynde was condemned by no less a Moses than Bob Dylan, who, while deeply enmucked in a swamp of born-againness, bemoaned Hynde's on-stage lack of "modesty."

And Dylan, of course, and particularly back in his Blonde on Blonde androgynous amphetamine period, was denounced as some sort of weirdsmobile sex-unknown freak—spooking the horses, and shocking the children—by the likes of Rudy Vallee . . . who, in his time, was regarded as a shameless Sex Machine—"his screaming female fans went home happy if they had caught sight of his lips through the opening of the emblematic megaphone he often sang through"—who should be Dumped in a Dungeon.

And so it has always gone—beating on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past—all the way back into the mists of prehistory, wherein Confucius furiously thundered against the "licentious" music of Zheng . . . though he himself, once upon a youth, fronted a thrash-metal band in Zou, that nightly lubed up all the boys and girls, boys and girls who did, yearningly, lubriciously, bow down before him.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyuUWOnS9BY]

They say they dug up the last mine in Mozambique this week. I hope it's true.

When Portugal went out of the colonial business in 1975, death-eaters from all over the globe streamed into Mozambique to feed there on a civil war. As the people of Mozambique arrayed themselves into Thanatos alphabet outfits like RENAMO and FRELIMO, nations including Belgium, China, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, East Germany, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Rhodesia, Singapore, South Africa, the UK, the US, the USSR, and Yugoslavia, all fed on the carnage. As an example: not a single mine was produced in Mozambique itself. But all those countries listed above sold, or gave, hundreds of thousands of mines, to that country. A particular favorite was the M-72, from China, devoid of metal except for the firing pin, and thus very difficult to detect. It was estimated that it cost $1500, to clear each one of these $3 mines.

Evolved humans do not want to have mines. For mines are even more cowardly and craven and chickenshit than snipers or drones.

"You don't like mines."

"They're so . . . I can't even find the word for it."

"Perverse."

"Yeah, that's the word. Or mind-fucking. A landmine is just as happy disabling you as killing you. Happier. When you see your pal blow up and come down screaming without a leg, you don't check for tripwires. You rush in and trip more mines and disable more men. You can't outrun it either."

But there are not evolved humans in the governments of China (Eastasia), Russia (Eurasia), and the United States (Oceania). Which is why all three nations refuse to sign the Ottawa Treaty, which would ban the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer (i.e., sales: big money here!) of mines.

Most of the mines in Mozambique were, in the end, cleared by civilian Mozambiquan women. You can read about them here.

I remember when Bob Dylan's Desire album (we had albums then) was released, and many "critics" barked and howled that Dylan had become some sort of deep-dish dullard dilettante, because, according to them, his song "Mozambique" referenced not at all the wars there. Which only proved that these Mister Joneses were as clueless as the winger Mr. Joneses who would later embrace to their bosoms Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA." They didn't get the song. And unlike the original Mister Jones, who was sad and pathetic enough, they no longer even knew something was happening. Here. There. Everywhere.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd4u4bZ928M]