Alan Wilson didn't show up at the airport.

September 2, 1970. Los Angeles. Canned Heat was flying out for their European tour that evening.

Their lead singer and harmonica player was missing.

His bandmates weren't worried. Alan was always late. Disorganized. Spaced out. He'd catch a later flight, like he always did.

They got on the plane and left.

The next morning, friends went looking for him.

They found him in his sleeping bag on the hillside behind drummer Bob Hite's house in Topanga Canyon.

He had slept out there many times. He loved the trees.

This time he wasn't waking up.

He was 27 years old.

The cause of death was barbiturate overdose. Officially ruled accidental — there were unused pills still on his body. He left no note.

But Alan Wilson had been deeply depressed for years. He had tried to kill himself before. He had been in a psychiatric hospital.

His drummer Fito de la Parra believed Alan had killed himself.

Either way, the man called "Blind Owl" — the genius who'd written Canned Heat's biggest hits, sung at Woodstock, and recorded with John Lee Hooker — was gone.

Two weeks later, Jimi Hendrix died. Three weeks after that, Janis Joplin.

Hendrix and Joplin became legends.

Nobody remembered Alan Wilson.

Here's how he got there.

July 4, 1943. Arlington, Massachusetts. Alan Christie Wilson was born.

Highly intelligent. Painfully shy. Severely nearsighted.

He was bullied through every grade of school. Couldn't make friends. Couldn't talk to girls.

He found music instead. By his teens he was obsessed with Delta blues. Robert Johnson. Son House. Charlie Patton.

He moved to Cambridge in his late teens. Started playing harmonica and slide guitar in coffee houses.

In 1965, the bluesman Son House came out of retirement to record his comeback album. He'd been off the road so long he'd forgotten how to play his own songs.

The producers brought in a 21-year-old white kid from Cambridge to teach Son House back to himself.

That kid was Alan Wilson.

Alan played him his own old recordings. Showed him the fingerings. By the time the sessions ended, Son House could play his classics again.

Alan also played guitar and harmonica on two tracks of the album.

It was an extraordinary thing for a 21-year-old to do.

Later that year, the guitarist John Fahey took Alan with him to Los Angeles. Alan forgot his glasses on the trip. Fahey started calling him "Blind Al," then "Blind Owl" — for his round face and scholarly intensity.

The nickname stuck.

In Los Angeles, Alan met Bob "The Bear" Hite — a 300-pound record collector who claimed to own 15,000 blues 78s.

They couldn't have been more different. Hite was loud, extroverted, gigantic. Alan was tiny, quiet, blind without his glasses.

But they loved the same records.

They formed Canned Heat in 1965.

By 1967 they were on stage at the Monterey Pop Festival. By 1968 they had a Billboard hit: "On the Road Again." Alan sang it. Alan played the harmonica solo.

In 1969, they had another hit. "Going Up the Country." Alan wrote it. Alan sang it.

That August, they played Woodstock. "Going Up the Country" became the unofficial theme song of the festival. Every kid who saw the documentary heard Alan's high, lonely voice over the opening credits.

500,000 people. The biggest concert in American history.

Alan mostly hid behind the amps.

He hated touring. He hated crowds. He hated planes.

He told friends he wanted to quit the band.

In 1970, Canned Heat got to record with John Lee Hooker — Alan's lifelong hero. The album was called Hooker 'N' Heat.

Hooker was a notoriously difficult musician to follow. He played his own time. Most guitarists couldn't keep up with him.

Alan locked in with him instantly.

Hooker said on tape: "You musta been listenin' to my records all your life."

He later called Alan "the greatest harmonica player ever."

That was Alan's last recording.

His depression got worse. He sought out therapy. Spent time in a psychiatric hospital. Was prescribed antidepressants but also took barbiturates from the street to sleep.

He told friends he had no one. No girlfriend. No real family contact. Just the band and his blues records and the trees.

He loved the trees most of all.

He founded a conservation group called Music Mountain. Wanted to use the band's money to save the California redwoods.

In the liner notes of Future Blues, he wrote: "The redwoods of California are the tallest living things on Earth, nearly the oldest, and among the most beautiful to boot."

A few weeks later, he was dead in a sleeping bag.

Here's what makes this story matter.

1970 was the year rock and roll lost its prophets.

September 3: Alan Wilson. Age 27. Barbiturates.

September 18: Jimi Hendrix. Age 27. Barbiturates.

October 4: Janis Joplin. Age 27. Heroin.

The "27 Club" got built that autumn.

Hendrix and Joplin became immortals. Movies. Posters. Statues. Streets.

Alan Wilson got his name on a few Canned Heat reissues.

Canned Heat is one of the few bands in history that played both Monterey and Woodstock — the two biggest counterculture concerts ever held. They were on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Their music is still in commercials. "Going Up the Country" gets used every time a movie wants to summon the 1960s.

Most people who hear it don't know who sang it.

Alan Wilson's body was cremated. His ashes were scattered among the redwoods he had tried to save.

His Music Mountain fund didn't survive long after him.

The redwoods are still being logged.

Alan Wilson. Singer. Songwriter. Harmonica genius. Found in a sleeping bag at 27.

His crime? Being too sad to keep going on the road.

His legacy? The song the world plays every time it wants to remember the 1960s — and a name almost no one remembers.

#AlanWilson #BlindOwl #CannedHeat #27Club #ForgottenStories

~Forgotten Stories

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 BREAKING: Trump's racist goons pulled the Uruguay World Cup team off their bus and deployed SNIFFER DOGS in a deeply racist show of profiling!

The Trump administration’s cruel border obsession is turning the American World Cup matches into an international embarrassment. Upon arrival in the States, the Uruguay national team – twice World Cup winners – was pulled over on the side of the road for a humiliating canine search of their luggage before they even arrived at their hotel.

In another incident, Iraq striker Aymen Hussein was detained for nearly seven hours at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, while a member of the Iraqi team’s photography staff was denied entry entirely.

Fans from across the world weren’t having it:

“Imagine training your whole life to represent your country at the World Cup, only to have your first touch in America be a sniffer dog checking your luggage on the roadside,” one post read.

Many pointed out the obviously racist pattern of teams from Latin America and Africa facing far more aggressive scrutiny than others. “What a coincidence that the fixation on registering and checking is always with American countries from Mexico southward or from Africa,” one blogger wrote.

Another referred to the United States as “A country that should never again host a World Cup. If you only like people from your own country, then don’t organize an event that should be open to the world.”

Oh snap, we were afraid something like this might happen. Stephen Miller and his horde of goons have no use for soccer, so let’s make a point, right?

They have already denied entry to fans, journalists, and soccer federation officials from Haiti, Iran, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast, all World Cup-qualifying nations that fall under the State Department’s 39-nation travel ban (the players and coaches got carve-outs).

They want to showcase Trump’s “America First” obsession to the whole world. They want to project to the MAGA masses that their hatred toward Black and brown people as well as Muslims are bigger than sports – watch us treat their elite athletes and symbols of their national pride like criminals. Aren’t we badasses?

Hosting the World Cup is a global honor, which provides a setting to celebrate global unity and amity through sports.

Instead, under Trump, that’s all discarded as woke. In its place is more of its petty cruelty and self-sabotage on the world stage.

"What has the United States become?" the more than five billion people watching across the world are asking themselves.

Think of people, say, crowding around a communal village TV in rural West Africa to get a snippet of the real America on the screen in addition to the football, and seeing and hearing about stuff like this.

What disappointment they must feel when they see America, which has always been the symbol and hope that a better life exists and awaits out there, now behaving like a bunch of merciless thugs.

Shameful. Embarrassing. Humiliating.

     (What? Trump is a Liar? 38, 000 thousand confirmed lies in one term. Who knew?)

WE ARE ENTITLED TO KNOW THE REAL STORY!!

Tucker Carlson dropped a bombshell Thursday, claiming that Dan Bongino — while still serving as FBI Deputy Director — admitted to him that Donald Trump himself ordered the investigation into the 2024 Butler assassination attempt to be SHUT DOWN!

 

Carlson said that after pressing Bongino about Thomas Crooks’ online presence, Bongino “became hysterical” on the phone. “He was clearly terrified,” Carlson said. After a long series of calls and texts, Bongino allegedly told him: “Take it up with Trump. He’s the one who shut down the investigation.” 

Carlson made the explosive claim during an appearance on Mario Nawfal’s podcast, stating flatly: “I know that Trump shut down the investigation into Butler. That is a fact. Dan Bongino told me that when he worked at the FBI.”

 

Let that sink in. The man who claimed the left was trying to assassinate him may have personally buried the investigation into his own near-murder.

 

Bongino fired back Friday, calling Carlson’s accusations “seriously one of the most delusional things” he’d ever heard, and sharing purported text messages to dispute the account. He also called Carlson a “nepo baby” on X.

 

So either Tucker Carlson is lying about a sitting FBI official confessing to a cover-up — or Dan Bongino is lying about what he told Tucker Carlson. Either way, two of the right wing’s most prominent voices are now accusing each other of being liars about the most serious domestic security incident in years.

 

The truth is in the texts, Tucker says. Release them.

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One man found $2 billion. The President of the United States destroyed him for it. And lost.

Ernest Fitzgerald. Air Force analyst. 1968. He found the Pentagon hiding a $2 billion overrun from Congress. He told the truth under oath. Nixon fired him personally. He lost his house. His wife went to work to feed the kids. He fought 13 years. He sued a sitting president. And the laws he forced into existence protect every federal whistleblower in America today.

Start in Birmingham, Alabama. 1926. Poor family. His dad made steel. Depression kid. Learned it young — tell the truth, work hard, don't cheat.

Navy in World War II. Fixed electronics. Came home. Engineering degree, University of Alabama, 1951. Learned exactly how the Pentagon spends money and how contractors bill it. Got dangerously good at it.

1965. The Air Force hires him. Age 39. Senior civilian. His whole job is finding waste.

1966. They put him on the C-5A Galaxy. Biggest military cargo plane ever built. Lockheed's contract. Around $3 billion. Ernest starts checking the numbers.

Something is wrong. The real costs are way higher than the contract. Not a little. Billions over. And the Pentagon is hiding it. From Congress. From everyone.

The overrun hits $2 billion. Massive in 1968. The Pentagon knew. Lockheed knew. Both lying to keep the program alive. Ernest saw the real books. He couldn't unsee them.

November 1968. He's scheduled to testify. His bosses get to him first. Don't mention the overruns. Say the program is fine. Protect the Air Force.

He had a choice. Lie and keep his career. Tell the truth and lose everything.

November 13, 1968. Under oath. He says it. The C-5A is $2 billion over. The Pentagon hid it. On the record. National news. The room goes silent — a Pentagon official just told Congress it had been lied to.

Then comes the part that should make your blood run cold.

January 1969. Nixon takes office. He sees Ernest's file. He takes it personally. He tells his chief of staff Haldeman: get rid of Fitzgerald. The White House tapes caught it. The President of the United States, on tape, ordering one honest analyst destroyed.

November 1969. Fired. They claimed budget cuts. Everyone knew the real reason. Nobody would say it.

Ernest had nothing. Three kids. A mortgage. No income. He lost the house. His wife Nell went to work. The savings were gone. The retirement was gone. Defense companies wouldn't touch him. Blacklisted everywhere. A marked man.

He didn't quit.

He filed. He said the firing was illegal revenge for testifying. He demanded his job back. He didn't know it would take 13 years.

1973. A commission ruled the firing was wrong. The Pentagon brought him back — to an empty desk. Following the rules. Still punishing him.

1974. Nixon resigned. Watergate. It didn't help Ernest. The same officials were still there. Still wanted him gone.

So he did something nobody had ever done. He sued the President. Personally. He said presidential revenge against a whistleblower violated the Constitution. One Alabama engineer. Against the entire United States government. Unlimited Pentagon lawyers on one side. His small legal team on the other.

The case climbed for years. District court. Appeals. More appeals. And in 1981, the Supreme Court took it.

June 24, 1982. Nixon v. Fitzgerald. 5–4. The Court ruled a president has immunity for official acts. Ernest could not collect a dollar from Nixon. On paper, he lost.

But read the opinion. It laid the whole thing bare. Nixon ordered the firing. The retaliation happened. Ernest was wronged. The Supreme Court of the United States said so, in writing, forever.

And the same day — the part that changed everything — the Court decided a second case. Harlow v. Fitzgerald. 8–1. It ruled that other federal officials do NOT get full immunity. They can be sued. That single ruling is the shield protecting federal whistleblowers right now, today.

Then the final turn. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 — passed partly because of him — had built a new board. In 1982, that board ruled the firing illegal. Full reinstatement. Full back pay. Full benefits. Thirteen years after Nixon tried to erase him, Ernest Fitzgerald walked back into the Pentagon with real authority — and kept hunting waste until he retired. Never touched again. Protected by the laws he won.

Here's why this isn't history.

The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 exists because of his fight. The Office of Special Counsel exists because of his fight. The Government Accountability Project exists because of his fight. Every single person who has ever exposed fraud inside the U.S. government and lived to keep their job is standing on Ernest Fitzgerald's shoulders.

The Pentagon still wastes billions. Lockheed became Lockheed Martin — the biggest defense contractor on Earth. The C-5A still flies. But the next time someone inside your government finds the truth and refuses to bury it, there's a law that says they get to survive.

One man, fired by a president, built that protection out of 13 years of his own ruin.

That's not a man who lost at the Supreme Court. That's a man who beat a president and never knew how to quit.

A sitting president ordered him erased, on tape, and almost got away with it.

Pass it on and you finish what they couldn't bury — the proof one honest man beat the most powerful office on earth.

#ErnestFitzgerald #Whistleblower #PentagonWaste #TruthWins

~Weird But True

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BREAKING: A shocking new Guardian investigation discovers that Trump and Hegseth murdered EIGHT CHILDREN and four adults, including a pregnant woman, in an airstrike on a school and homes in Somalia…and NEVER told the public!

What ELSE aren’t they telling us?

Shortly after 9am on 15 November 2025, the town of Jamaame in south Somalia was pummeled with a series of explosions. Missiles, almost certainly fired from American MQ-9 Reaper drones, destroyed a school and several homes.

“All my children were lying on the ground covered in blood. When I tried to tend to them, shells began falling everywhere. Every direction you turned, there were shells and missiles raining everywhere,” said Marian Haji Abdi Guled.

A farmer, Abdullahi Mohamed Abo Sheikh Ali, returned home in shock to find his children murdered. His grandfather recounted to the Guardian how “clothes and books were scattered on the ground, but I couldn’t focus on them. I was in shock, standing before the bodies of my grandchildren. They were ripped to pieces.”

Mohamed is tortured by the memory of having to find the pieces of his torn-apart grandchildren. They were too slippery, he says, and kept sliding from his grasp. “There was no place to grip because they were ripped to pieces.”

“The Americans bombed us,” said Abdullahi. “Children, women and elders were bombed. They spared nothing.”

The strike killed Abullahi's heavily pregnant daughter-in-law Safiyo Hassan Abukar, her ten-year-old daughter Abdifatah, seven-year-old Abdinasir, six-year-old Hussein, and four-year-old Abdurahman.

Mohamed Hassan Abdulle found his home flattened and the mangled bodies of his 26-year-old wife, Farhiyo Hassan Nuur, and daughter, 10-month-old Layla Mohamed Hassan.

He stood beside his destroyed home, the entire neighbourhood ablaze. “I couldn’t even find anyone to help carry the bodies of my wife and daughter,” he says.

Gedow Ibrahim received a call from his wife, terrified about the circling drones. He raced home. His daughters, Maryan, nine, and Farhiyo, seven, were dead.

“I saw the lifeless bodies of my children. One of them had their left arm torn off. The other one had shrapnel in their back, which came out of their chest.”

Mohamed says at least 18 homes were destroyed. The school was reduced to a shell. Guled counted nine strikes in the Burburka neighbourhood alone.

Locals say that the al-Shabaab terror group has no presence in the town, which raises huge questions about why and how this quiet village of livestock herders was selected to be massacred, why the presence of children playing in the street didn’t deter the strikes, or why they kept firing after the first homes were hit.

The Trump administration has refused to comment on anything. When the White House was approached for a response to the Jamaame strikes, the deputy press secretary Anna Kelly asked if the Guardian would also focus on “fraud committed by Somalis in the United States?”

Between these strikes in Somalia and the massacre of sailors in the Caribbean, it is clear that the Trump administration is simply killing for the sake of killing.

This is the consequence of building the world’s most sophisticated murder machine – the people in charge of pressing the buttons won’t always be responsible or empathetic.

Sometimes, they will be murderous, racist psychopaths like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth.

They must be held accountable after all this is over. These crimes are beyond horrific.

 

In April 2025, a federal IT staffer filed a whistleblower report alleging that members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had caused a significant cybersecurity breach at the National Labor Relations Board. Within days, Musk posted about him publicly. The day after that, the whistleblower's brake line was cut. The story resurfaced this month after circulating widely across social media, prompting a fresh wave of public attention more than a year after the original incident.

Dan Berulis, an IT staffer at the NLRB, filed his report on April 14, 2025, alleging that DOGE officials had demanded unrestricted access to internal systems with “essentially unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter data.” He added that within minutes of DOGE personnel creating user accounts, login attempts came from an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia, using the correct usernames and passwords. He noted that many of these attempts came within 15 minutes of engineers opening their accounts.

The attempts failed only because of the NLRB's no-out-of-country login policy. Berulis also told NPR that raising concerns internally resulted in someone physically taping a threatening note to his door that included overhead photos of him walking his dog. NPR, which broke the story, had also corroborated it with internal documents.

On April 19, Musk reposted a claim that Berulis had fabricated his report, captioning it: “Filing a deliberately false whistleblower claim is a serious crime.” The next day, Berulis got into his car and discovered his brakes had failed. He ran into a curb after calling his legal team. A police officer who arrived on the scene noted a cut wire under the hood and photographed it.

Police collected fingerprints, and Berulis provided video of a drone he had observed flying above his house. Police later closed the investigation after being unable to identify a suspect. The identity of whoever cut the brake line has never been determined, and there is no evidence connecting Musk to the incident.

In April 2026, Berulis filed a defamation lawsuit against Musk, alleging he showed “reckless disregard” for whether the accusations against Berulis were accurate. That lawsuit is ongoing.

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