February 2005 - cypherpunks-legacy

William Rivers Pitt | HST and the Proverbial 'Live Boy'
by R.A. Hettinga 24 Feb '05

24 Feb '05

<http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/printer_022105Z.shtml> The Proverbial 'Live Boy' By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t | Perspective Monday 22 February 2005 "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy." - Edwin W. Edwards [Author Hunter S. Thompson raises his arms to exhort the crowd of supporters gathered on the west steps of the Colorado State Capitol on Monday, May 15, 2001, during a rally for Lisl Auman, who is serving a life sentence in a Colorado prison for her part in the slaying of a Denver Police Department officer in November 1997. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of journalism in books like 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,' fatally shot himself Sunday, February 20, 2005, at his Aspen-area home, his son said. He was 67. (Photo: David Zalubowski / AP)] In the same month the planet gets to know the 'journalist' James/Jeff Guckert/Gannon, Hunter S. Thompson decides to make The Big Bit-Spit and eject from the planet. This could be sacrilege, and I hope his family will forgive me, but there is something wretchedly fitting in the confluence. Hunter was a drunk and a drug-sucker. He would go to cover an event and slather himself with LSD. He went to the '72 GOP convention as a wild-eyed liberal and elbowed his way into the activist bullpen, grabbing a sign reading 'Garbage Men Demand Equal Pay' before charging the floor with the Nixon-shouters to howl "Four More Years!" at John Chancellor. He wanted to write about motorcycle gangs, so he went out and joined the worst of them, and got his ass stomped in. And wrote about it. Hunter Thompson is the reason I write politics. Period. He was the most honest man in the business. Everyone else had and has an angle, a reputation, or a source to protect. Hunter stripped it down to the raw throbbing nerve and let it fly. How is this for prose: "How many more of these goddam elections are we going to have to write off as lame but 'regrettably necessary' holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me at the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 - and as far as I can tell, we've gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same." Or this: "It is a nervous thing to consider: Not just four more years of Nixon, but Nixon's last four years in politics - completely unshackled, for the first time in his life, from any need to worry about who might or might not vote for him the next time around. If he wins in November, he will finally be free to do whatever he wants...or maybe 'wants' is too strong a word for right now. It conjures up images of Papa Doc, Batista, Somoza; jails full of bewildered 'political prisoners' and the constant cold-sweat fear of jackboots suddenly kicking your door off its hinges at four A.M." Or this: "The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy - then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight - assuming it was straight in the first place." That's the stuff. Rip it down, Bubba, and let the fur fly. For the record, the aforementioned is from 'Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972,' possibly the most purely excellent book on politics to be found anywhere. Amusing, then, that Hunter decides to cash his check in the same week we learn about James or Jeff Gannon or Guckert or whatever. What would Thompson have made of this feeble wretch? Of a man who reports on the White House with a fake name? Who was so clearly the go-to guy for McClellan or Bush when the questions got too hot? Who copied and pasted his 'news reports' from boilerplate GOP press releases? Who somehow got within 20 feet of the President of the United States using a false name while peddling his wares online as a male prostitute for $200 an hour? Hunter once wrote in 'The Great Shark Hunt' about walking in on two Secret Service agents sharing a joint back and forth in a hotel room. Maybe that's how Gannon/Guckert/Whoever got within pistol range of the leader of the free world. No other explanation seems to satisfy. It comes down to this. The Bush crew has been caught in bed with the proverbial 'live boy.' Someone in that White House either eased Gannon/Guckert/Whoever through the 'hard pass' application process, which requires a thorough background check, or else smoothed the way for him to get day pass after day pass after day pass. Some complain that Gannon/Guckert/Whoever is being victimized for his political views. This misses the point. Someone let a working, advertising whore into the White House, and then was stupid enough to let him walk around alive and free after he blew his own cover. That's the point. My hero died tonight. He was a flawed man, a maniac, in so many ways the antithesis of what a journalist is supposed to be. Worst of all, he told the truth. There is now one less warrior on this planet filled with Guckert clones, drones who get fed shit and regurgitate it wholesale for the masses because that is what we are trained to eat. Rest in peace, Hunter. Thank you for everything. We're going to deal with this Gannon/Guckert/Whoever person, and then move down the line and deal with the rest of the whores. You died on the eve of the birth of a new journalism, populist in nature, beholden to the truth and thanking the Google gods every step of the way. I wish you had stuck around to see it, but I'll tell you all about it when we meet at that clearing at the end of the path. Until then... ) Copyright 2005 by TruthOut.org -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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SHA-1 results available
by Jack Lloyd 23 Feb '05

23 Feb '05

http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~yiqun/shanote.pdf No real details, just collisions for 80 round SHA-0 (which I just confirmed) and 58 round SHA-1 (which I haven't bothered with), plus the now famous work factor estimate of 2^69 for full SHA-1. As usual, "Technical details will be provided in a forthcoming paper." I'm not holding my breath. -Jack

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Re: I'll show you mine if you show me, er, mine
by hal＠finney.org 23 Feb '05

23 Feb '05

Markus Jakobsson is a really smart guy who's done some cool stuff, so I think this is probably better than it sounds in the article. His web site is http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/markus/ but I don't see any papers there that sound like what the article describes. I tried to reverse engineer the protocol from the article, and the results are below. But first let me put this into context. The security property seems to be that you send something to the server, and it sends you back something that proves that it knows your password. But neither a passive eavesdropper nor a MITM can learn anything about your password from observing or influencing the exchange. The best an attacker can do is to try to brute force your password by guessing it repeatedly and trying each guess out at the server. And this can be easily prevented by having the server refuse to answer more than a few bad password attempts. Note that this is different from simple PK based authentication, because the secret is human memorizable. And it's different from, say, having the server respond with a keyed hash of your passphrase, because an eavesdropper could then do an offline brute force search. The key feature is that the only attack is online brute forcing. There are already a lot of protocols in the literature which do this, often performing key agreement at the same time. The original one and most famous was SPEKE. There is a long list of such protocols at http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1363/passwdPK/submissions.html. I don't know what properties this new protocol has that the old ones don't. Maybe it does have some and I am missing the point. Or there might be some patent issues that it is trying to work around. Anyway, here's my attempt at mimicking the protocol, based on the description of envelopes and carbon paper. You have a password, and so does the site you will login to. (Or, maybe the site has a salted hash of your password; you could use that instead.) You set up a homomorphic encryption system. This is one where you can send an encrypted value to someone else, and he can do certain operations on the encrypted value, like multiplying it by a constant. In this case I think we only need to encrypt the value 1, and let the other guy multiply by his constant, which makes it simpler. I think ElGamal could work: you encrypt 1 as (g^k, y^k), where you'd make up a key y = g^x on the spot. You send this to the other guy who picks a random power j and raises both elements to that power, then multiplies the 2nd one by c: (g^(k*j), y^(k*j) * c), and sends it back to you. This is now a valid ElGamal encryption of c. But an observer can't tell what c is. For a first cut at this protocol, you take each bit of the password (or salted hash) and create two encryptions of m = 1. It would look like this: E(1) E(1) E(1) E(1) E(1) ... E(1) E(1) E(1) E(1) E(1) ... You send all these to the server. The server knows your password (or salted hash) and, for each pair of encrypted values, multiplies the one corresponding to password bit b_i by some constant c_i. The other one of the pair, corresponding to !b_i, it multiplies by a random r_i. The server sets it up so that the sum of all the c_i is zero. Then it sends all of them back to you. If your passphrase started 01101... it would be: E(c_1) E(r_2) E(r_3) E(c_4) E(r_5) ... E(r_1) E(c_2) E(c_3) E(r_4) E(c_5) ... Now, you decrypt just the ones corresponding to the bits b_i and add up the decrypted plaintexts, giving you sum of c_i. If the result is zero, you know the server knew your password (or salted hash). Actually this is not quite right, because the article says that you are not supposed to be able to decrypt both ciphertext values in the pair that corresponds to a password bit. Otherwise an imposter might be able to figure out your passphrase by doing one interaction with the server, then finding an element from each pair such that they all sum to zero. This is kind of knapsacky and it might not be that hard, I'm not sure. So I think what you could do is to send a valid ElGamal encryption of 1, and a bogus value which is not an ElGamal encryption of anything. But the remote party wants to be sure that you can't decrypt them both. One way to achieve this is to arrange that the first members of each pair, g^k in the good encryption, multiply to some fixed value F for which the discrete log is not known. Maybe it's the hash of "I don't know if this will work." You can't know the DL of that hash, so you can't find two g^k values which multiply to that hash. That means that if you have a pair of ElGamal ciphertexts which have this property, only one is a real, valid ElGamal ciphertext and so only one is decryptable (I think!). So you would send, in the example above: (g^k0, y^k0) (F/g^k1, junk) (F/g^k2, junk) (g^k3, y^k3) ... (F/g^k0, junk) (g^k1, y^k1) (g^k2, y^k2) (F/g^k3, junk) ... When the server did its multiplications as above you'd still get the correct encryptions of c_i, but the other pair would be junk and you wouldn't learn the r_i values: E(c_1) junk junk E(c_4) junk ... junk E(c_2) E(c_3) junk E(c_5) ... Now you can still decrypt it and verify your password. But for someone who is impersonating you and doesn't know your password, they're going to get a mix of c_i and r_i values that won't add up to zero, and that won't give them any clue about what the real password is, other than that they guessed wrong. I'm not 100% sure this will work, that the attacker can't create a bogus pair (F/g^k, junk) which will allow him to determine what value the server multiplied by. At a minimum I see that if junk = F/g^k then it will be obvious what the constant was, so the server would have to check for that. This is why it's good to have provable security! This way of doing things would also be quite inefficient; there are two ElGamal encryptions going back and forth (typically 2048 bits each) for every bit of your password. I'll bet the actual paper has a much more clever scheme which improves the efficiency and has a nice proof of security. I'm looking forward to seeing it. Hal Finney

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Re: Code name "Killer Rabbit": New Sub Can Tap Undersea Cables
by Tyler Durden 23 Feb '05

23 Feb '05

No! Undersea? Do you take a copy of EVERYTHING and send it back? That might have been more feasible in the old days, but when a single fiber can run 64 wavelength optically amplified 10 Gig traffic, I really really doubt it. Or at least, this would require an undertaking large enough that I doubt they could hide it. If they select some traffic then we have to ask, how do they select the traffic? Even there the mind boggles thinking about the kinds of gear necessary. I suspect it's a combination of all sorts of stuff...remember too that all that traffic has to land somewhere, so theoretically they can access a good deal of it terrestrially. What you might see, therefore, is a sheath coming out of, say Iran, is tapped for fibers that proceed on to other unfriendly nations, and a copy of the traffic pulled back to some nearby land-based station in a friendly country (so that lots of amplifiers aren't needed). I'd bet you do see the occasional Variola suitcase, though, requiring a sub visit once in a while. But I bet they avoid this kind of thing as much as possible, given the traffic volumes. -TD >From: Matt Crawford <crawdad(a)fnal.gov> >To: crypto <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com> >CC: osint(a)yahoogroups.com, cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net >Subject: Re: Code name "Killer Rabbit": New Sub Can Tap Undersea Cables >Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 12:33:56 -0600 > >On Feb 18, 2005, at 19:47, R.A. Hettinga wrote: >>"It does continue to be something of a puzzle as to how they get this >>stuff >>back to home base," said John Pike, a military expert at >>GlobalSecurity.org. > >I should think that in many cases, they can simply lease a fiber in the >same cable. What could be simpler?

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As Gonzo in Life as in His Work
by R.A. Hettinga 23 Feb '05

23 Feb '05

<http://www.opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html?id=110006325> OpinionJournal - LEISURE & ARTS As Gonzo in Life as in His Work Hunter S. Thompson died as he lived. BY TOM WOLFE Tuesday, February 22, 2005 12:01 a.m. Hunter S. Thompson was one of those rare writers who come as advertised. The Addams-family eyebrows in Stephen King's book jacket photos combined with the heeby-jeeby horrors of his stories always made me think of Dracula. When I finally met Mr. King, he was in Miami playing, along with Amy Tan, in a jook-house band called the Remainders. He was Sunshine itself, a laugh and a half, the very picture of innocent fun, a Count Dracula who in real life was Peter Pan. Carl Hiaasen, the genius who has written such zany antic novels as "Striptease," "Sick Puppy," and "Skinny Dip" is in person as intelligent, thoughtful, sober, courteous, even courtly, a Southern gentleman as you could ask for (and I ask for them all the time and never find them). But the gonzo--Hunter's coinage--madness of Hunter Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (1971) and his Rolling Stone classics such as "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" (1970) was what you got in the flesh too. You didn't have lunch or dinner with Hunter Thompson. You attended an event at mealtime. I had never met Hunter when the book that established him as a literary figure, "The Hell's Angels, a Strange and Terrible Saga," was published in 1967. It was brilliant investigative journalism of the hazardous sort, written in a style and a voice no one had ever seen or heard before. The book revealed that he had been present at a party for the Hell's Angels given by Ken Kesey and his hippie--at the time the term was not "hippie' but "acid-head"--commune, the Merry Pranksters. The party would be a key scene in a book I was writing, (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). I cold-called Hunter in California, and he generously gave me not only his recollections but also the audiotapes he had recorded at that first famous alliance of the hippies and "outlaw" motorcycle gangs, a strange and terrible saga in itself, culminating in the Rolling Stones band hiring the Angels as security guards for a concert in Altamont, Calif., and the "security guards" beating a spectator to death with pool cues. By way of a thank you for his help, I invited Hunter to lunch the next time he was in New York. It was one bright spring day in 1969. He proved to be one of those tall, rawboned, rangy young men with alarmingly bright eyes, who more than any other sort of human, in my experience, are prone to manic explosions. Hunter didn't so much have a conversation with you as speak in explosive salvos of words on a related subject. We were walking along West 46th Street toward a restaurant, The Brazilian Coffee House, when we passed Goldberg Marine Supply. Hunter stopped, ducked into the store and emerged holding a tiny brown paper bag. A sixth sense, probably activated by the alarming eyes and the six-inch rise and fall of his Adam's apple, told me not to ask what was inside. In the restaurant he kept it on top of the table as we ate. Finally, the fool in me became so curious, he had to go and ask, "What's in the bag, Hunter?" "I've got something in there that would clear out this restaurant in 20 seconds," said Hunter. He began opening the bag. His eyes had rheostated up to 300 watts. "No, never mind," I said. "I believe you! Show me later!" >From the bag he produced what looked like a small travel-size can of shaving foam, uncapped the top and pressed down on it. There ensued the most violently brain-piercing sound I had ever heard. It didn't clear out The Brazilian Coffee House. It froze it. The place became so quiet, you could hear an old-fashioned timer clock ticking in the kitchen. Chunks of churasco gaucho remained impaled on forks in mid-air. A bartender mixing a sidecar became a statue holding a shaker with both hands just below his chin. Hunter was slipping the little can back into the paper bag. It was a marine distress signaling device, audible for 20 miles over water. The next time I saw Hunter was in June of 1976 at the Aspen Design Conference in Aspen, Colo. By now Hunter had bought a large farm near Aspen where he seemed to raise mainly vicious dogs and deadly weapons, such as the .357 magnum. He publicized them constantly as a warning to those, Hell's Angels presumably, who had been sending him death threats. I invited him to dinner at a swell restaurant in Aspen and a performance at the Big Tent, where the conference was held. My soon-to-be wife, Sheila, and I gave the waitress our dinner orders. Hunter ordered two banana daiquiris and two banana splits. Once he had finished them off, he summoned the waitress, looped his forefinger in the air and said, "Do it again." Without a moment's hesitation he downed his third and fourth banana daiquiris and his third and fourth banana splits, and departed with a glass of Wild Turkey bourbon in his hand. When we reached the tent, the flap-keepers refused to let him enter with the whiskey. A loud argument broke out. I whispered to Hunter. "Just give me the glass and I'll hold under my jacket and give it back to you inside." That didn't interest him in the slightest. What I failed to realize was that it was not about getting into the tent or drinking whiskey. It was the grand finale of an event, a happening aimed at turning the conventional order of things upside down. By and by we were all ejected from the premises, and Hunter couldn't have been happier. The curtain came down for the evening. In Hunter's scheme of things, there were curtains .. . and there were curtains. In the summer of 1988 I happened to be at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland one afternoon when an agitated but otherwise dignified, silver-haired old Scotsman came up to me and said, "I understand you're a friend of the American writer Hunter Thompson." I said yes. "By God--your Mr. Thompson is supposed to deliver a lecture at the Festival this evening--and I've just received a telephone call from him saying he's in Kennedy Airport and has run into an old friend. What's wrong with this man? He's run into an old friend? There's no possible way he can get here by this evening!" "Sir," I said, "when you book Hunter Thompson for a lecture, you have to realize it's not actually going to be a lecture. It's an event--and I'm afraid you've just had yours." Hunter's life, like his work, was one long barbaric yawp, to use Whitman's term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all conventional proprieties that began in the 1960s. In that enterprise Hunter was something entirely new, something unique in our literary history. When I included an excerpt from "The Hell's Angels" in a 1973 anthology called "The New Journalism," he said he wasn't part of anybody's group. He wrote "gonzo." He was sui generis. And that he was. Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization. No one categorization covers this new form unless it is Hunter Thompson's own word, gonzo. If so, in the 19th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's greatest comic writer in the English language. Mr. Wolfe's latest book is "I Am Charlotte Simmons" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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On the road to truth and madness
by R.A. Hettinga 23 Feb '05

23 Feb '05

<http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=1O4IK4JJKT1JRQFIQMFSN…> The Telegraph On the road to truth and madness (Filed: 22/02/2005) The opening of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive " And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?" Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Fwd: Meeting Announcement
by naziluft forlot 22 Feb '05

22 Feb '05

Note: forwarded message attached. Find local movie times and trailers on Yahoo! Movies. http://au.movies.yahoo.com Received: from [65.192.186.2] by web90002.mail.scd.yahoo.com via HTTP; Tue, 22 Feb 2005 13:14:47 NZDT Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 13:14:47 +1300 (NZDT) From: naziluft forlot <nazforlot(a)yahoo.co.nz> Subject: Meeting Announcement X-Approval-Subject: BOUNCE cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net: Non-member submission from [naziluft forlot <nazforlot(a)yahoo.co.nz>] To: cypherpunks(a)al-qaeda.net, owner-cypherpunks-moderated(a)minder.net MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Length: 897 652-SEA FEEBDAEDFEEBDAEDFEEBDAEDFEEBDAEDFEEBDAEDFEEBDAEDFEEBDAEDFEEBDAED b7 a9 1d 72 59 e8 a7 19 9b 67 d3 85 a5 9e 01 6e 34 66 87 9a 9e 6a 1f d8 be 04 99 b5 da d1 e9 74 b4 8d 7a d2 43 9d 34 a6 e1 51 a8 86 b2 e2 56 2a 6b 39 fe 2b 68 e2 d5 85 36 e1 ff 9a ad 99 5d d4 40 f9 b8 5d b7 e4 45 d7 d6 f5 22 55 fb 84 c5 9f fc 66 79 28 57 4d e6 99 d5 c7 82 bb ae 6a 8d bf da 4a 1f 36 7f c0 09 9b 59 71 2e 0a 8b 1c 88 07 99 70 a8 a0 4d b0 8d a3 2e 14 3b 11 3c 35 94 37 9a 37 a1 f5 c9 08 fd 0c d4 fc 36 e6 74 7a 25 13 1e bd 03 d1 36 79 61 c1 87 24 7e 2e 99 9e 1e 72 a9 e7 d6 3a 81 0f 1d 89 10 2c 45 f0 31 0c 81 0a 2d 6d fa 92 30 3f e2 52 f9 82 2e 62 53 f9 df c6 be ce 43 06 47 37 ff 31 86 1d 88 9b 8e 10 3d cc Find local movie times and trailers on Yahoo! Movies. http://au.movies.yahoo.com

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The Dark Star
by R.A. Hettinga 22 Feb '05

22 Feb '05

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42719-2005Feb21?language=printer> The Washington Post washingtonpost.com The Dark Star Gloom May Have Stalked Hunter S. Thompson, but His Writing Was a Beacon By Henry Allen Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, February 22, 2005; Page C01 From Hunter S. Thompson's "Songs of the Doomed -- More Notes on the Death of the American Dream": "It has been raining a lot recently. Quick thunderstorms and flash floods . . . lightning at night and fear in the afternoon. People are worried about electricity. "Nobody feels safe. Fires burst out on dry hillsides, raging out of control, while dope fiends dance in the rancid smoke and animals gnaw each other. Foreigners are everywhere, carrying pistols and bags of money. There are rumors about murder and treachery and women with no pulse. Crime is rampant and even children are losing their will to live. "The phones go dead and power lines collapse, whole families plunged into darkness with no warning at all. People who used to be in charge walk around wall-eyed, with their hair standing straight up on end, looking like they work for Don King, and babbling distractedly about their hearts humming like stun guns and trying to leap out of their bodies like animals trapped in bags." He wrote this in Washington, in 1989. As his first wife, Sandy, once said: "Hunter tends to make things worse than they are sometimes." Thompson, at 67, was the gonzo journalist who shot himself in the head with a handgun on Sunday. He was also what you get when you combine Murphy's Law and some hillbilly Calvinist preaching the doctrine of innate depravity. He believed every man had it in him to do wrong. He also believed that if something could go wrong it would. We were all doomed, to use one of his favorite words. Hence the birth of gonzo journalism, a term he picked up from a fan letter, and one that applied only to him. He was the prose laureate of the Age of Paranoia, which began, let's say, with the election of Richard Nixon in the middle of the counterculture's nonstop mental fire drill brought on by psychedelic drugs. Then he took it further, as he took most things: "There's no such thing as paranoia," he said. "The truth is, your worst fears always come true." This was the fundamental joke that served as the fulcrum and lever of all his writing, starting with "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved." He attained "full-bore" torque, or maybe "king-hell" torque, to use his phrasing, with "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -- A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream," followed by "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72," which George McGovern's political director, Frank Mankiewicz, called "the most accurate and least factual" account of the election. Other Thompson titles: "Generation of Swine," "Songs of the Doomed" and a short piece called "Hit Him Again, Jack, He's Crazy." You get the idea. He was from Louisville, a former juvenile delinquent and "hard case," as he liked to say: a big tense guy, 6 feet 3 with tight skin, wary eyes, short hair and a hectic way of moving, as if he were trying and failing to approximate the condition of normal. He wore aviator sunglasses and smoked with a cigarette holder. He looked like a combination of puzzled and threatening. He liked Dobermans and guns and liked to "get loaded on mescaline and fire my .44 magnum out into the dark -- that long blue flame." He spoke in bursts of words that later in his life became so unintelligible that a documentary about him provided subtitles. He had a sharp eye for the right people and he hung out with them. He had charisma. Being around him gave you the charmed but unsettled feeling of having joined an entourage. He took a lot of drugs and drank a lot of Wild Turkey. Louisa Davidson, who knew Thompson in Colorado for 30 years, said he was a Southern gentleman with moments of genius, but "he was a prisoner and slave to his addictions." He could be polite, when he wasn't picking an occasional fight, but there was nothing mellow or laid-back about him. Thompson on the '72 candidates: Being around Edmund Muskie "was something like being locked in a rolling box car with a vicious 200-pound water rat." Nixon "speaks for the werewolf in us." And Hubert Humphrey, the saint of long-ago liberalism: "There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you've followed him around for a while." Strange that he became a hero to a generation known for its long-haired, "gettin' it all together," feminist, free-sex pacifists. Thompson wanted to break it all apart, and he rarely mentioned women or sex in his writing. In 1971, at the beginning of his big-time fame, he'd already written the obit for the '60s, a time when "you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning." But by then, "with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." People will forgive almost anything of writers who can astonish them and make them laugh. None of them can anymore. In his early '70s heyday, which was the last time that writers could still be heroes -- he was among the very last of them, along with Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe, all of them outrageous in style and subject, the final heirs of J.P. Donleavy, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger and Terry Southern, who all taught us the irreverence that Thompson made even more hilarious by taking it into the craziness that comes with sticking the big toe of your brain in the socket of "high-powered blotter acid," and "uppers, downers, screamers, laughers." He was a particular hero to journalists, whose terrible secret is that beneath all the globe-hopping and news anchor fame, they are merely clerks and voyeurs. Thompson, despite his rants about the onanistic squalor of journalism, had the bearing of an adventurer striding out to the very edges of madness and menace. He had much rep for walking the walk, which he did, but mostly he talked the talk. In fact, he'd never done very much in his life except write about it, which he did with clarity, hilarity and big-train momentum. He was a master stylist -- he once typed out the entire "Great Gatsby" as an exercise. He also created a pyrotechnic public persona called Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. How much more can we ask? He'd done a little jail time as a kid in Louisville. He joined the Air Force, which let him out two years early after a prescient commanding officer said that in Thompson's military newspaper work his "flair for invention and imagination" and his "disregard for military dress and authority . . . seem to rub off on the other airmen." He worked for small papers, wrote from South America for a now-gone Dow Jones weekly called the National Observer, drove a taxi in San Francisco while working on a novel, got in fistfights, ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colo., got pulled over for drunk driving, beat a drug bust at his home in Woody Creek, near Aspen -- small-time stuff. Rolling Stone sent him to cover the fall of Vietnam -- where he could find no end of real fear and loathing -- but he split for Laos and failed to file a story worth mentioning. In 2000, he slightly wounded his assistant while trying to shoot a bear on his property. And yet readers worshiped him as a man of profound experience, to the point of playing what you might call "the Hunter Thompson game." The point of the game is to create mortal fear out of nothing more than, say, the sun flashing in a window. First man: You see that glint? Second man: Like binoculars? First man: Try 12-power Unertl glass on a Remington .308. Second man: Your first wife's boyfriend? First man: But he's a cop. Second man: Exactly. Our heads? In four seconds? Vapor, baby. This is the sort of conversation that boys have in treehouses, to scare themselves for the fun of it. Thompson's writing had the venerable American quality of boys' literature, in the manner of Hemingway, Jack London and Mark Twain. And of: old-fashioned sports writing, with its flamboyance and moralities, and the good but long-forgotten men's magazines such as True or Argosy, which honored the courage, luck and jocularity of the lone cowboys lurking in American men. Lately, with his best writing behind him, the gonzo just a collection of occasional gestures, he'd been writing a sports column for ESPN's Web site. We're left wondering what happened. He once said: "I hate to advocate weird chemicals, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone . . . but they've always worked for me." Until maybe he got wondering about the ultimate high being a 1,500-feet-per-second implantation in the neurological system. Or the paranoia got to him -- in paranoia you are your own worst enemy, and that's a tightening circle that nobody can escape, except, say, by suicide. Or it was pain and depression brought on by reported back surgery, a broken leg and a hip replacement. Or he was playing out the last moves of the Hemingway game -- the paranoid, shock-treated Hemingway who ended up with his doctor one day, crying because he said that he couldn't write anymore, he just couldn't write. Or America has finally become what he said it was, with lie-awake fears of suitcase nukes, jails full of secret uncharged prisoners with no legal recourse, and quiet applause for the recreational torture of Arabs in Iraq. Or people have stopped reading, and there are no more literary heroes. Or maybe he just killed himself, like a number of other people on any given day. He lived on his terms, he died on his own terms. Except he wasn't like a number of people -- he left us his prose, his genius persona, and his insights into the dark side of America, insights that could change your life after the laughing stopped. You would like to think that beneath the forbidding scowl of post-9/11 America, and despite the dark side, that a lot of people understand that Hunter S. Thompson was a great American. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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A night in the life of Hunter
by R.A. Hettinga 22 Feb '05

22 Feb '05

<http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=1O4IK4JJKT1JRQFIQMFSN…> The Telegraph A night in the life of Hunter (Filed: 22/02/2005) The day Hunter S Thompson introduced Hugh Davies to Wild Turkey bourbon, guns and his Rocky Mountain wilderness We started drinking Wild Turkey at noon. The Woody Creek Tavern had only just opened and Hunter S Thompson swung round on his usual stool at the bar, just across from the pool table he had tried to blow up the week before. "Hey Dude, what's up?" he said in a voice matured by a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse. He spoke in a stop-start, throaty rasp, occasionally missing out words in sentences. At times, it was hard to understand him. We had first met years before when he was a sports reporter in Washington DC. We kept in touch through his riotous years as the Mad Doctor of Gonzo Journalism, author of Kerouac-like screeds such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Rolling Stone's most individual writer. His reputation for being difficult rarely spilled over to his relations with the media because he loved drinking with reporters. This time, we met as he was being sued for allegedly groping a former porn queen, Gail Palmer, in a hot tub at his home, Owl Farm, up Buttermilk Mountain near Aspen, Colorado. He was alleged to have snarled to the woman's companion: "Get her out of here, or I'll blow her head off." This I could have believed as his love for bourbon, cocaine and mind-numbing pharmaceuticals was only matched by his addiction to munitions. I noticed that the barman, ordinarily used to the mad doctor's eccentric behaviour, was keeping his distance, pouring large measures of whisky into his shot glass and then retreating swiftly to the other end of the bar. Hunter said he'd upset the proprietor by testing a detonator and explosives on a table leg, scattering cues and pool balls, and smoking out the bar. As usual, his voice was on fast-forward, as he sped past the incident to rant on about "the generation of swine" now running Aspen, where he had lived since the 1960s. As I was trying to elicit details about the porn queen's visit, Hunter raced on, confessing that he had opened fire late at night on the house of a multi-millionaire neighbour, Floyd Watkins, because he didn't like his attitude. There had been some altercation over Hunter's environmental concerns. Watkins said the mad doctor's brain was "fried with drugs". Hunter called him "crazy". The mad doctor jabbed a Dunhill into his cigarette holder and plucked two Mexican peppers from a bowl on the bar. Handing me one he said: "Try this. It helps when you're as mad as hell." He lumped Watkins, who kept three tigers in a cage at the gate of his home as well as swans on a man-made lake, with the Hollywood figures who had second homes in Aspen, worth millions of dollars. "The greed-heads are taking over," he said. He recalled his early years in Aspen when he arrived with Jack Nicholson, Bob Rafelson of Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces fame, Glen Frey and Don Henley of The Eagles and Jimmy Buffett, to "cool out" in the Rockies. "Now, it's all networking, corporate money and day-glo fur," he said. "It's fat cat money - and I hate the swine." As he spoke, his best friend, Bob Braudis, dropped into the bar to say hello. Bob, the sheriff of Aspen, was almost Hunter's literary equal. As he sipped beer, he quoted Homer from his days as a student at Harvard. Hunter said: "Bob and I go back 20 years. He's had to arrest me more than once." The sheriff, I later learned, periodically rounded up friends to help the mad doctor clean up his house. At 6pm, Hunter said it was time to go. He ordered up a last Wild Turkey and, clutching it in one hand with his other on the wheel of his Chrysler pick-up, we went up the mountain road. Owl Farm, covering 127 acres, was at the top of a bluff. The entrance was hung with steel models of vultures and three gargoyles. Inside, on a desk, was his old Apple Power Book computer. Hanging over it was a rubber bust of Richard Nixon wearing a scout hat. I got him to talk about the porn queen. "Ungrateful swine, the lot of them," he muttered, unravelling a parcel. Inside was a *44 Magnum. "Come into the garden," he said. We went out into the gloom. There were two targets. He said: "Look, I'll try for the target with the Mickey Mouse face. I'll imagine it's Michael Eisner, the Disney chief. You try and hit the old television set." He loaded the gun and handed it to me. It was so heavy that I needed both hands to steady the barrel. I missed. Hunter, despite a day on the bourbon, blew the target away. Once again, as he once wrote, the Lord of the Karma enjoying an activity he said was "better than sex". -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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Hunter S Thompson
by R.A. Hettinga 22 Feb '05

22 Feb '05

<http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=1O4IK4JJKT1JRQFIQMFSN…> The Telegraph Hunter S Thompson (Filed: 22/02/2005) Hunter S Thompson, who shot himself on Sunday, aged 67, was the explosive, funny and frequently shocking self-styled "Mad Doctor of Gonzo Journalism". Where Tom Wolfe and the "orthodox" New Journalists were observers, Dr Thompson (he had a doctorate in Divinity, bought by mail order) cast himself as catalyst and participant, charging into situations with a headful of hallucinogens and a safari jacket weighed down with guns and bottles. His most famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), concerned a trip to Vegas with his 300lb Hawaiian-shirted Samoan attorney, supposedly to cover a motorcycle race and a national drug enforcement convention. But in carrying out the assignment Thompson largely ignored both events and instead focussed on his own antics. The opening paragraph set the tone: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like: 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive... ' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" Later on Thompson remarks: "This is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted." Before becoming national affairs editor of Rolling Stone magazine in 1970 (a title he held until 1999), Thompson had worked as a freelance, writing relatively straight reports on sports and South America, plus an excellent book about the Hell's Angels (1966), some of whom became close friends, until the book appeared and they beat him up. He invented "Gonzo" journalism when he and his favourite colleague, the British cartoonist Ralph Steadman, were sent by Scanlan's Magazine to cover the 1970 Kentucky Derby (held at Thompson's home town of Louisville). Unable to produce a piece, Thompson ripped pages straight out of his notebook, numbering them and sending them to the printer. The technique was fuelled by terrifying quantities of drugs, alcohol and tobacco. He wrote later that Gonzo was "a style of 'reporting' based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism - and the best journalists have always known this". He also admitted his own work was not Gonzo, that it was all a failure because he was unable to write or report his reactions to events literally as they occurred. He said that "the writer must be participant in the the scene while he's writing it", and that such instantaneous effort was beyond him. In the 1960s and early 1970s Thompson was also celebrated for his excoriating political reporting - the writer Nelson Algren called him the finest political reporter in America, whose "hallucinated vision strikes one as having been, after all, the sanest". Thompson's coverage of the McGovern-Nixon election in 1972 resulted in his best book, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (1973), in which he famously characterised the Republican candidate as speaking to "the Werewolf in us, the bully, the predatory shyster". "Jesus! Where will it end?" Thompson mused. "How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?" Nixon's victory effectively brought an end to Thompson's career as a political journalist, although he became a self-confessed "Watergate junkie". While he went on to write several more extraordinary books, including The Great Shark Hunt (1980), he later became more widely known for his own bad behaviour, and as the model for Duke, the dope-addled character in the comic strip Doonesbury. Journalists who visited Thompson at his cabin discovered that it was fatal to try and drink with him. Thompson's biographer E Jean Carroll described his routine: "3pm rise. 3.05 Chivas Regal with the morning papers, Dunhills. 3.45 cocaine. 3.50 another glass of Chivas, Dunhill. 4.15 cocaine. 4.54 cocaine. 5.05 cocaine... 9pm starts snorting cocaine seriously. 10pm drops acid. 11pm Chartreuse, cocaine, grass. 11.30 cocaine, etc, etc... 12.05 to 6am Chartreuse, cocaine, grass, Chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhills, orange juice, gin, continuous pornographic movies. In later years, the biographical note in Thompson's book described him as living as a "freelance country gentleman" and existing "in a profoundly active Balance of Terror with the local police authorities". Hunter Stockton Thompson was born at Louisville, Kentucky, on July 18 1937. His father sold insurance and died when Hunter was 14, an event that propelled the boy, so he recalled, into becoming "an outlaw". Thereafter, his mother became alcoholic and slovenly, while Hunter became a leader of his gang, and was much admired by girls. Aged 18 he was jailed for his part in a robbery, and he took a writing course in prison. On release, he joined the United States Air Force, doing sports writing for a base newspaper in Florida until his commanding officer noted that "his flair for invention and imagination" and "rebellious disregard for military dress and authority seem to rub off on the other airmen". Honourably discharged, Thompson took, and was quickly fired from, a job with the Middletown (New York) Record, then did a traineeship at Time magazine. He worked for a bowling magazine in Puerto Rico and in 1960, at least partly in emulation of Jack Kerouac, drove across country to California. While living at Big Sur, he began work on The Rum Diary, an autobiographical novel based on his beginnings as a journalist in Puerto Rico, which was eventually published in 1998. After investigating the beatnik scene in San Francisco, Thompson spent two years in South America, sending dispatches to the National Observer. Returning to San Francisco, he combined freelance journalism with driving a cab, before being commissioned by Random House to write Hell's Angels. The first reporter to meet with the Hell's Angels on their own turf instead of relying on police information, Thompson rode with them for a year. In 1963, Thompson moved to the Rockies so that he would be free to live by his own anarchic rules - among his stunts were blowing up the pool table in his local bar and driving around drunk with a glass of bourbon in hand. Not surprisingly, he deplored Aspen's subsequent fashionability, the influx of "Day-Glo fur and Manhattan chic". In a bid to "prevent the greedheads from moving in" he ran for sheriff in 1970 on a "freak politics" ticket, promising to turf the streets, rename Aspen Fat City and put dishonest marijuana dealers in the stocks. He lost by 1,533 votes to 1,068. Thereafter he resorted to "direct action", using what he called "firepower demonstrations", such as firing 50 shots from his automatic rifle over the house of an arriviste property developer. In 1990 he was accused of assaulting a former porn film actress who had come to his house to interview him. The woman, Gail Palmer-Slater, accused Thompson of "squeezing and twisting her left breast and threatening to blow her head off" after she refused to join him in his hot tub. Thompson said she was drunk, and was seeking publicity for a new range of sex aids and manuals. A police raid on the house turned up white powder, explosives, a 12-bore shotgun and a.22 calibre machine-gun. Claiming he was a victim of a revitalised police state unleashed by the Bush administration anti-drug hysteria, Thompson suggested a newspaper headline: "Life-style police raid home of crazed Gonzo journalist. Eleven-hour search by six trained investigators yields nothing but crumbs." He promised to enliven the the court case by showing the actress's movies Hot Legs and Prisoner of Paradise at the Aspen Opera House. Not that criminal proceedings interfered with his lifestyle. "The whiskey stores opened at seven, and I didn't have to be in court until ten," he wrote in Songs of the Doomed. The charges were soon dropped, after potential witnesses failed to co-operate with the prosecutors. "We beat them like stupid rats," Thompson declared. "We beat 'em like dogs." Stopping in Aspen to load his car up with beer, he then sped off, firing blanks. Fearful of "growing old and helpless", he admitted in interviews that suicide had occurred to him, saying in 1998 that he planned to fill his house with "cold liquid glass" so it was preserved forever, with him inside, "and people can come and look through the front window". Hunter S Thompson married first, in 1963, Sandra Dawn Conklin. They had a son, Juan, "and seven miscarriages". She left him in 1978. He is survived by his second wife, Anita Beymunk. -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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