Gatewood Galbraith to run again

This just in, from Independent Political Report:

On July 4, Gatewood Galbraith filed paperwork to begin raising money in his fifth run for governor of Kentucky. Galbraith, a lawyer who has focused primarily on marijuana legalization, ran as a Democrat in 1991, 1995, and 2007, and as the Reform Party nominee in 1999, when he won 15 percent of the vote in a four-way race. He has also run for Congress and other state offices. In his 2011 gubernatorial bid, Galbraith will run as an independent, with political consultant Dea Riley as his running mate.

Actually, it's not true at all that he's "focused primarily on marijuana legalization" - that was only a key point in his early campaigns. Gatewood's taken a much broader approach in years since, championing greater freedom and civil liberties in all ways. I recommend his book The Last Free Man in America, which also just happens to be the title of Gatewood's portrait I painted for him, and which we unveiled at his book-signing event at Summit Plaza in December 2004.


From Wikipedia:

In his book and speeches Galbraith goes into detail on what he calls “Synthetic Subversion”. This theory seeks to explain when, how and why America, specifically Kentucky, moved from an agricultural agrarian society into an industrial synthetic society, during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration and the “New Deal” era. Up until then America and Kentucky relied on agriculture for everything to fuel the economy. But during the Great Depression Roosevelt moved America towards a more industrial (synthetic) society out of necessity or according to Galbraith his alliance with “Corporations seeking to gain more money.”

Cylindrical UFO at Louisville Airport

Roger Marsh of Examiner.com is covering recent MUFON reports in his latest column:

Reports of UFOs over Louisville International Airport on June 24 may include multiple sightings from various employees, according to witness testimony from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) database.

A package handler at the airport first heard a report over his radio about 10:30 a.m. that there was a UFO over the North South runway. The man did not see anything at that time, but at 1:55 p.m., he saw a reflection in the sky from the south end of the runway.

“As this object came closer," the witness stated, "I could make out it was rotating and was a cylinder, then was a diamond shape.”

He said the object moved in a straight line over the runway at a slow and steady speed at a point just under the cloud cover, approximately 1,500 feet. The object stopped at the end of the ramp and hovered for 30 to 45 seconds, then moved up into the clouds and disappeared.

Guitars and Graves

Middletown, KY:



Georgetown, KY:



Louisville, KY:





Middletown, KY:




Morgantown, KY:



(Read more about Arnold Shultz here.)

Arnold Shultz

Around the turn of the last century, there was a man named Arnold Shultz who wandered the Kentucky countrysides doing odd jobs and working in the occasional coal mine, but primarily living the true rounder/hobo/traveling songster lifestyle. This is itself is enough to earn Arnold Shultz a place of great respect in my heart, but the fact of the matter is, Shultz had a powerful effect on music history and should be recognized by any student of rural blues and country.

Muhlenberg County has always been regarded as the birthplace of a certain jaunty thumbpicking guitar style, better known as "Travis-style picking", after Merle Travis, who popularized it along with Chet Atkins. But Travis didn't invent the technique, nor did locals Mose Rager nor Ike Everly (whose children would later find fame as The Everly Brothers). The source for this peculiar style was none other than our Arnold Shultz, at least according to some historians.

But Shultz's influence didn't stop there. Bill Monroe himself regarded him as a mentor, and openly admitted his stylistic debt.

This all came at a time when black music and white music were cross-pollinating each other and creating bold new material, before terms like "blues" and "bluegrass" were firmly pinned down. Kentucky's fertile musical soil played a crucial role in this merger, as documented on CD by Yazoo Records on The Music of Kentucky Volume 1 and Volume 2, the Kentucky Mountain Music box set, and the Before the Blues series.

According to a great article about Shultz by Kathy and Don Thomason on bgdailynews.com, "Shultz died on April 14, 1931, officially of heart disease but in the regional lore he either died of “bad” whiskey or poison administered by jealous white musicians." He was buried in Morgantown in Boone County.

Atheism, Kentucky Style

A pro-atheist summer camp for kids called Camp Quest has been in the news lately, largely because of the involvement of Richard Dawkins.

Camp Quest is the brainchild of Kentucky attorney Edwin Kagin, who also hosts an internet radio show called Answers in Atheism and a blog called Blasphemous Blogging. Mr. Kagin is apparently one of the organized Atheist movement's leading proponents, and he does so from his law office in Union, KY.

I tried to read the voluminous body of writings on his blog, but couldn't even begin to wade through it. I find long philosophical diatribes against religion to be every bit as dull and pointless as long philosophical diatribes for religion. Maybe more so, in fact, since religious rants can often be quite bizarre and colorful in their fanciful idiosyncracy. Atheist treatises, however, leave me cold, even when dealing with potentially juicy topics. Here's a sample:

Moralists have declared war on reason. With aborted fetuses emblazoned on their shields and chastity belts secured, the armies of God, like ancient pestilence, are marching to stop forbidden sex and to ensure all products of ill advised copulation be born. The births proclaim the truth that the only reason sex is lawful at all is to make God's babies.

According to the theocratic understanding of biology of the anti-choice movement, at the moment the sperm penetrates the egg, the mythical "soul" is placed in the zygote, presumably whether it is in a uterus or a petri dish. That which God has infused with soul may not be removed by the mere mortal choice of not wanting a baby. This notion of a soul inhabiting a collection of cells that may, barring accident, abortion, or whatever, become a child is rather new in mythological thought and bears analysis.

As I'm so fond of saying: anyone who wants to know that knows it already. I already hold these truths to be self-evident, having already sorted all this stuff out for myself by the age of 18. Are religious zealots annoying? Of course they are. Are anti-religious zealots equally annoying? I say yes, most assuredly, yes.

I wish Kagin well, though, and he seems to be doing just fine. According to his website, he has a new book called Baubles of Blasphemy, "as seen on ABC's Good Morning America", and has many debates available on YouTube for your perusal, just in case the subject of God's existence hasn't already been utterly talked to death to your satisfaction.

Me, I think worshipping nothing is a drag, man, a king-sized drag. Me, I worship lots of stuff, from Ernest T. Bass to Hydrothermal Vents to Fudge Stripe cookies to Sgt. Fury comics, and all with a laserbeam pinpoint fervor and intensity that could only be classified as religious in nature.

Here Lies Juanita

Like the blank grave in Cave Hill or the mysterious Vold J.M.U., this grave for "Juanita" is a bit lacking in data. Usually a gravestone with only a first name on it is located in a family plot around a central stone that indicates the shared surname. Not so here. There's no context and no clue from any of the surrounding gravestones about who Juanita was, nor why she lacks a last name.

You can find the enigmatic Juanita in the ever-troubled Eastern Cemetery.

John Kehne's 2012 Site

Last night WHAS Channel 11 ran a piece about 2012 which focused heavily on a website called december212012.com. The site's a virtual one-stop shop for 2012-obsessives, and just happens to be run out of Brooks, KY by a fellow named John Kehne.

So what's the whole 2012 thing about? Well, see, the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar stops abruptly at December 2012, which has been variously regarded as meaning that armageddon will ensue, that our entire universe will end, that time as we know it will cease to exist, that a new enlightened spiritual era of global consciousness will be ushered in, that the Earth will collide with a rogue planet named Nibiru, that the Earth will undergo a pole shift because of galactic alignment with the Dark Rift, or maybe all of the above. Or maybe not.

Or maybe Terence McKenna was right.

Globe Grave

The planetary grave of educator Francis J. Ockerman in Lexington Cemetery. According to this site, her name lives on via the Frances J. Ockerman International Book Endowment, which has donated hundreds of thousands - maybe millions - of books to libraries and schools around the world.

Kentucky "Anthrax" Letters Contained Artificial Sweetener

Posted today on Global Security Newswire:

A powder found in threatening letters that reached a number of federal sites in Kentucky on Monday -- including the offices of four U.S. congressmen -- appears to have been artificial sweetener, the Lexington Herald Leader reported (see GSN, July 7).

U.S. Representatives Brett Guthrie, John Yarmuth, Geoff Davis, and Ed Whitfield received envelopes containing a powdery substance along with letters claiming the material was anthrax. Similar letters arrived at three federal courthouses in the state.

A courthouse and post office in Pikeville County were shut down for several hours, and several people underwent medical checks after coming into contact with the white material. The federal courthouse clerks' office and a U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau office in London also received suspicious envelopes, causing the temporary closing of the courthouse.

Authorities believe an inmate at Kentucky's Big Sandy federal prison mailed between 25 and 50 threatening letters, lacing them them with a popular sweetener rather than anthrax, according to U.S. Marshal Mike Klein.

It was not immediately known whether the same person sent all the letters that turned up this week (Estep/Hjalmarson, Lexington Herald-Leader, July 7).

Questionable Potatoes

As Sting (the singer, not the wrestler) once said, I'm like a canary in a coalmine. Sensitive soul that I am, I can detect one part per zillion of certain bad substances in our food and our air.

I can instantly tell when I've been dosed with toxic death-sludge like Nutrasweet and Splenda, even when those around me report no ill effects (because they've consumed so much of it they're in a permanent adaptive state). I also can sense when there's pesticide recently sprayed in a place even when it can't be smelled, and usually have to excuse myself and get outta Dodge when I encounter such poisons.

Am I being oversensitive? Maybe, maybe not. As a painter, I breathe enough toxins as it is, on my own volition, and my liberal use of European-style snuff (the kind you actually sniff) and the hyper-fermented Brazilian elixir known as Cachaca guarantees I'll never be anyone's poster child for straight-edge. But at least let me choose my own methods of cellular deterioration, and not ingest poisons against my will, hidden in consumer products in ways they never used to be.

Blah blabbity blah, Jeff, get to the point. Okay. I picked up this here bag of potatoes at the Kroger in Middletown, KY. I was astounded that it was only a buck-fifty, and yet it had some crazy-huge spuds in it, one of which was the size of a shoe, kid you not. Should have taken a photo of that before I baked it up.

After eating said megaspud, both myself and a friend who ate the other half began experiencing not-so-subtle nervous-system disruption and wooziness, and later that evening, insomnia. When sleep finally came, it was filled with crazy fever dreams, the same kind I had when I ate some of those famous and now-banned taco shells made with genetically modified corn (also a Kroger item, interestingly). It was a bad trip, friends.

I tried to track down the source of these spuds, but the packaging doesn't even have a freakin' brand name. The bag just says "Potatoes". It does say the taters were "Packed for W&W Co., Whiting, WI", but "packed for" doesn't really tell you anything about the source of the actual product. And a Google search for this mysterious W&W Company brought up nil, zippo, goose egg.


I cut one of the smallest ones in half and noted that unlike "real" potatoes, these stay fresh looking indefinitely. Potatoes are supposed to be like apples - the flesh inside starts turning brown with oxidation soon after you cut it open - but the first photo of the cut spud above was taken 6 hours after cutting, and the one below was taken the next day. Some slight shrinkage was noted the next day, and some fine white drying of the potato juice occuring around the edge, but that's about it. These russets should have been dark brown and dessicated by now.

Nitrogen gas and sulfating agents are often used to promote tatery freshness, but it seems there's more than just that at work here. Ugh.

Anyway, there's my Kentucky consumer alert for the day, for those of you who would rather not eat potentially genetically modified space-age Monsanto frankenfoods. I don't know that these potatoes are such, but they act like such, and so I'm swearing them off.

Hostage Standoff in Bluegrass Industrial Park

Yesterday, a crazed gunman took over Lyndon Millworks, a woodworking factory in Jeffersontown's Bluegrass Industrial Park, and held one man hostage at gunpoint.

WLKY was reporting rumors that it had something to do with the gunman's spouse or significant other, but details were sketchy. Cherchez la femme.

According to the Courier-Journal:

At 3:36 a.m. Tuesday, the gunman inside Lyndon Millworks in the Bluegrass Industrial Park ended contact with Louisville Metro Police who had been in communication with him since the incident began around 3:30 p.m. Monday, according to Maj. Chris McIntire of the Jeffersontown Police Department.

A short time later, SWAT team members who had been stationed outside the business heard at least one shot, then saw the hostage come out unharmed, McIntire said. McIntire said he had no reason to believe that officers fired their weapons during the incident.

The gunman, who was not an employee and had no relationship to the hostage, was taken to University Hospital with life-threatening injuries. The names of the the hostage, who is the owner of the business, and the gunman have not been released.

"The hostage just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time," McIntire said.

Watching WLKY's live coverage, I was surprised to see a police van clearly labeled "Hostage Negotiating Team". How often does that vehicle get hauled out in Louisville??

John A. Keel, R.I.P.

I just found out that John A. Keel, best known to the masses as the guy behind the whole Mothman mythos, left this mortal coil on July 3rd and has moved on to his next level of research. Shine on, you crazy synthetic cubic zirconia.

Wikipedia quotes Keel as saying he is not a ufologist, then goes on to call him a ufologist. Typical. But they do give some good background on his pre-Mothman doings:

John Keel's first published story was in a magician's magazine at the age of 12. He later moved to Greenwich Village and wrote for various magazines. His first published book was Jadoo in 1957 that was serialised in a men's adventure magazine. The book is his account of his travels to India to investigate the alleged activities of fakirs and holy men who perform the Indian rope trick and who survive being buried alive.

Influenced by writers such as Charles Fort, Ivan Sanderson, and Aimé Michel, in early 1966, John Keel commenced a full-time investigation of UFOs and paranormal phenomena. Over a four-year period, Keel interviewed thousands of people in over twenty U.S. states. More than 2,000 books were reviewed in the course of this investigation, in addition to thousands of magazines, newsletters, and newspapers. Keel also subscribed to several newspaper-clipping services, which often generated up to 150 clippings for a single day during the 1966 and 1967 UFO "wave". Keel wrote for several magazines including Saga with one 1967 article, UFO Agents of Terror, referring to the Men in Black.