its all good, he himself posted it on here somewhere a while back anyway

have you ever had the misfortune of meeting montreal metro cops? theyre not exactly reknowned for their compassion and understanding, but more their ability to cause severe bodily harm with no visible traces....

price at the door......addy?

Lesson 2: Myths and Legends of Soviet Russia;

Censorship and Workcamps

Censorship

Stalin was not just Russia leader (or dictator), Stalin was Russia’s Father. Stalin is also a product of his times. He was a strong leader when Russia needed him most; he was not the greatest battle strategist, but Stalin is what unified the country in order to survive the Great Patriotic War. Without Stalin, Russia today might only be those lands located in Siberia. This does not excuse his war crimes, but that is a different topic. Stalin was a harsh Father to his people, but no matter how cold the History Channel paints this one man, they can never capture the pride the Russia people had in Stalin at the time. He held before the Russian people the Grail of the times and I think there are very few wars in the history of modern times when the citizens of a country were so unified and sacrificing in battle and war times.

Russia came too close to losing herself in that war. Dissidence could not be afforded at that time. But Russian censorship was a funny thing. It was not as all encompassing as we were lead to believe. And actually it was the neighbor or co-worker who was the greatest censor in the life of an average person. Governmental censorship seemed to change like the wind. Not many works or topics were banned for the entire history of Soviet Russia. A painting could be banned and in five years it could be the toast of the town, and then banned again, and the cycle continued. Not all works or authors that were critical of the Soviet state were completely banned either. Mikhail A. Bulgakov was a struggling playwright, whose plays never made it past the censors. In frustration Bulgakov wrote a personal letter to Stalin, explaining that all he wanted was to be a good citizen. Stalin gave Bulgakov a position at a theater as the house playwright and Bulgakov wrote many critically acclaimed plays during that time, some satirical and some historical, but not everyone was complementing the Soviet state. This is not to say, artists and writers were not punished (exiled, sent to work camps, put under house arrest, or just plain murdered) by the state for their dissent.

But I am trying to show that censorship was not cut and dry in the Soviet State. Even Stalin, once beloved and adored, was banned eventually. I feel the government had very little to do with censorship. Instead, I feel that it was the public opinion and communistic academic critics who played the largest part in decided what was to be banned and was to be allowed. After the horrors of the Great Patriotic were sufficiently put to rest and Stalin good and dead, the public saw fit to destroy the Stalin cult and anything that had to with Stalin (this was in the 1960’s). Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd, statues were dismantled and destroyed (in Volgograd they dumped Stalin in the river!), and pictures burned.

Work Camps

This is a very difficult subject to explain. During the Great Patriotic war, if you were not fighting, then you were in a work camp. The populations of Russia after WWII was, at the most 50% of the population that Russia had before the war. Work camps are similar to concentration camps, except that a prisoner was worked to death, instead of gassed. The common criminal was not immediately sent to a work camp. These camps were reserved mainly for felonies and treason. Treason was a matter taken very seriously. If you were not Russian by ethnicity you were a suspect for treason. Entire ethnic populations, such as the Tuva and the Kalmykians, were relocated to work camps during the WWII era.

When those horrors were over, Russians forgot. There are many statistics for the number of people killed and/or imprisoned during this time, but the range is so great between them that is almost not worth mentioned any numbers at all.

how are you gonna do this? with permission from the STM?

Iran and the sober-minded left
Mon. 01 May 2006
The Washington Times

TODAY'S EDITORIAL

As the possibility of military action against Iran is being considered, the reactions of politicians and opinion-makers range from mature and thoughtful (increasingly from some on the left) to the surreal and foolish.

In the latter category is European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who said over the weekened that no one was even considering military action over Tehran's refusal to halt uranium enrichment. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has stridently denounced the idea. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar advocates direct U.S.-Iranian talks to resolve the nuclear dispute, and expresses optimism that the two governments will find significant areas of agreement. On Saturday, the official Iranian news agency IRNA reported that Germany's Green Party supports Iran's right to "peaceful" use of nuclear energy and favors direct negotiations between the United States and Iran. The fact that Iran has shown no serious interest in negotiating does not appear to have affected the thinking of ideologues who believe that there is a negotiated solution to virtually every political problem.

The good news, however, is that a growing number of people on the sober-minded political left appear to grasp the reality of the situation: that the crux of the problem is not the Bush administration, which has for nearly three years largely deferred to Europe's unsuccessful diplomatic efforts on Iran. The problem is the behavior of the Iranian government.

Speaking last month at a conference in Kazakhstan, for example, Richard Holbrooke -- a former United States ambassador to the United Nations in the Clinton administration, a diplomatic veteran of the Carter administration and an advisor to Sen. John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign -- said bluntly: "The U.S. is upset at Russia's stance on Iran. I believe Moscow should support Washington against Tehran." Mr. Holbrooke urged his hosts in Kazakhstan to try to persuade Russia and China to help Washington tighten the noose against the Iranian regime, and praised Kazakhstan for relinquishing its nuclear arsenal more than a decade ago. "If Kazakhstan set such a fine example, Iran wants to go to the other way," he lamented.

David Ignatius, a columnist for The Washington Post, is another moderate liberal who appears to have concluded that it is unrealistic to expect the likes of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, to peacefully give up their quest for atomic weapons. "The United States and its allies talk as if it will be possible to stop the Iranian nuclear program short of war, through a combination of sanctions and diplomatic negotiations," Mr. Ignatius writes. "But the Iranians push ahead, seemingly oblivious, and the ruling mullahs act comtemptuous of the West's threats and blandishments."

Moreover, according to Mr. Ignatius, "Iran's implacability may have been the most important lesson of the three years of 'negotiations' over its nuclear program conducted by three European nations, France, Britain and Germany." In the end, a French official said, it really wasn't a negotiation at all: The EU nations talked, Iran responded, but didn't even bother to offer any counterproposals. Mr. Ahmadinejad also dismissed the concept of U.S.-Iranian talks over Iraq, saying that Coalition forces should simply leave. A large part of the reason why negotiations with Tehran bog down is the very nature of Islamism, reasons Mr. Ignatius: "For a theocratic regime that claims a mandate from God, the very idea of compromise is anathema. Great issues of war and peace will be resolved by God's will, not by human negotiators. Better to lose than to bargain with the devil."

Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for Britain's Guardian newspaper, was strongly opposed to the war that deposed Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein. But according to Mr. Freedland, the combination of Iranian threats to destroy Israel, Mr. Ahmadinejad's messianic talk of a hidden imam and Iran's support for terrorism make the current Iranian regime a much more serious threat to peace than Saddam was. "Iran is led by a man who cannot let a week go by without issuing an annihilationist threat to one of his neighbors," Mr. Freedland writes. "Put it together and it forms an alarming picture: a state galloping towards a nuclear bomb, led by a messianist bent on destroying a nearby nation."

Kenneth Pollack, a Brookings Institution scholar, handled Persian Gulf-related issues for the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. His service in the administration made him very skeptical of the idea of working out some kind of "grand bargain" between Washington and Tehran -- the core of the Clinton administration's efforts to reach an accomodation with the Iranian government. The problem, Mr. Pollack says, is that the Iranians demand in essence that the United States government afford the Iranian government "respect" by never criticizing it for terrorism, torture, persecution of dissidents -- anything. In essence, Tehran is demanding better treatment than we afford our closest allies, a standard that makes compromise impossible.

In short, there are thoughtful people on the political left who understand reality: that it is difficult verging on impossible to negotiate with the people who run Iran today.

----

We may have to bomb Iran
Sun. 30 Apr 2006
The Sunday Times

Opinion

Rod Liddle

Natanz seems an agreeable little town, perched nearly 5,000ft up in the majestic mountains of central Iran, full of dusty relics of Alexander the Great and black-clad peasants scurrying hither and thither. It is a shame, then, that we may soon be obliged to bomb it to smithereens. An even bigger shame, though, if we don’t.

Natanz is where the Iranians are carrying out their hectic uranium enrichment programme — something they were politely requested to stop doing by the International Atomic Energy Agency one month ago. The deadline for them to pack up their thousands of centrifuges passed on Friday — but they are still beavering away and have expressed a marked reluctance to take the slightest notice of the international community.

There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that their intention is to produce nuclear weapons; a handful every year, perhaps. The Natanz facility is partially underground, a fact that provoked the IAEA inspectors to note, rather drily, that this was “inconsistent” with the Iranian claims that the plant was solely for the purpose of manufacturing mildly enriched uranium for benignly commercial purposes.

Equally anomalous to this defence is the fact that those same inspectors found particles of extremely enriched uranium at Natanz, the sort of stuff you need to make atomic bombs. Presented with this evidence, the Iranians shuffled their feet a little, looked at the ground and then announced that maybe they hadn’t washed the equipment thoroughly when they bought it from the Pakistanis and consequently there was still the odd bit of weapons-grade material kicking around, sorry about that, you know how it is, can’t get the help, etc.

You can believe them if you wish. It would be a kinder, happier world if we were all able to trust one another. But my suspicion is that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, who has expressed a desire to see Israel wiped from the face of the world, may soon have the wherewithal. A suspicion supported with physical evidence and a statement of malevolent intent. What more evidence do you need? An awful lot more, as far as the international community is concerned. Paralysis has descended since the invasion of Iraq and it afflicts not just the United Nations and the European Union but western public opinion, too. So ill-judged and catastrophic was the Anglo-US adventure against Saddam Hussein that it has warped our ability to think rationally about what to do with Iran. Opposition to pre-emptive military action against Iran will be deafening.

The war against Iraq was predicated upon two misconceptions — first of all that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. He did not. His hopeless army possessed scarcely any weapons at all. But even allowing for hindsight, the term “weapons of mass destruction” in Saddam’s case referred only to chemical and biological weapons — which, although thoroughly nasty, are a politically inspired misnomer. It is nukes that inflict genuine mass destruction and there was never a suggestion that Saddam had any of those.

The difference with any action against Iran is stark: hard evidence of genuine WMD in preparation; hard, stated evidence of intent. And a clearly defined, containable and comparatively attainable military objective — knocking out that enrichment site at Natanz.

I have debated this issue with numerous British politicians, from Tony Benn on the left to Steven Norris on the right, and the result is always the same. “We must negotiate with the Iranians,” they all say, a mantra, a form of whistling in the dark.

Well, of course we must first negotiate. Of course we must, later, bring whatever pressure we can to bear from supra-national organisations such as the UN. We should beg, bully, plead and cajole the medieval Ahmadinejad. We should offer economic incentives. When these do not work, we should impose sanctions. We should bar the Iranian team from the World Cup and refuse them entry to the Eurovision song contest — that’ll teach ’em. But what on earth do we do when all that fails, as it looks as though it will? Faced with that probability, there is just silence from the politicians: the question is never answered.

Never mind such niceties as verifying Iran’s nuclear aims: there is still a large tranche of the western world that believes with bovine obduracy that because we and the Americans and the French and the Israelis have nukes, why shouldn’t poor old Third World Iran? Fair play to the burka boys, don’t you think? The answer is simple and yet — in some quarters — quite unsayable: because it is Iran.

There is a final irony: the war against Iraq may have been at least partially responsible for the election next door of a primitive fundamentalist from the Dark Ages. So, too, the commitment within the country to continue enriching uranium, regardless of how unhappy it might make the imperialistic western powers.

One way or another we will need to get to grips with Natanz quite soon. I may not want to live in a world with nuclear weapons — but I really don’t want to live in a world where Iran has nuclear weapons.

TIMBUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRN

Lesson 1: Myths and Legends of Soviet Russia

Breadlines

We equate breadlines with a failing Soviet system, but this was not the way it was for the majority of Soviet history. The breadline was a form of social welfare during periods of economic depression. In these times, citizens received tickets, which guaranteed they would get the necessities of living, which the State provided free. Food and goods like: sugar, butter, meat, eggs and soap were provided by the State. The breadlines we Americans picture in our heads were the breadlines of the WWII (in Russia, they call this war the Great Patriotic War) and post-war years. This was an extreme time, but this was not the way Soviet Russia always was.

This was a statewide resource management program during the times when the economy was depressed or in crisis. The “breadlines” were only in the WWII and post war era. In the most recent economic depression, during the 1980’s, bread was quite plentiful. Breadlines are not solely to be equated with starving people. Just as here, you don’t have to be starving to be on welfare. In the times when the “breadlines” were in place the state was providing the basic requirement of food to all citizens. It was only during the war era that people received a scant minimum of food required by the human body to live.

My husband grew up during peristrioka (in the 1980’s) and during the last “breadline” era. He tells me that what made the main fault of the ticket system was that the delivery of the food was never consistent, citizens never knew when the next shipment of a particular kind of food would come. So, citizens were allowed to buy as much of a product as they wanted at one time so they could save food for the next few months. It was not unusual to buy a supply of meat for the next three months. To do this you just needed to save three months worth of tickets, so if the meat took a long time to come to the shop you just saved your tickets up and bought it in bulk. Despite this fault, he cannot remember a time when his family (who are average working class people) did not have food.

bo

because they serve as pacifiers for the public at large while at the same time filling government coffers.

PLUR dude, come on!

SING IT!!!!!!!!

or save her ass when she makes some big fuck up, and make sure she knows it was you.

or start leaving bevelled straws around her work area, and maybe sprinkle a little pepper or something around her phone and keyboard so she appears to have the "sniffles". then you buy say a 20 or a 40 bag of blow, and a kilo bag of icing sugar and mix it with the blow. you now have a kilo of shitty-ass blow as far as the cops will be concerned. hide that in her car and dime her out.

hey scotty what was that about not posting if you dont have any useful info to contribute?

allright:

[ www.iranfocus.com ]
[ cnn.com ]
[ news.yahoo.com ]
[ www.irna.com ]
[ www.usatoday.com ]
[ english.aljazeera.net ]
[ dailytimes.com ]
[ www.arabicnews.com ]

there's a few. you want me to read them for you too?

why dont you close your ravewave window for 3 seconds and go find one yourself.

because theres a billion webpages with a billion articles talking about this shit 24 hours a day so i'm not gonna waste my time explaining it to some loud mouth bitch like yourself. NEEEEXT. idiot

do you watch/read the news at all?

just a thought, but could be possible that the bromine ion doesnt even make it to the brain, and instead gets metabolized in your guts somehow....

holy shit murdock, you are KILLING it in this thread, killing it!!!

ummmmmmmmmmm keeping iran out of iraq is a good thing, not a bad thing.

AAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! that IS funny!!

you throwing them away over this is gayer than you having them in the 1st place!!


i HATE doing these things here but i will anyways: happy birthday dickbrain. for the record you brought this upon you

"mescaline is non-toxic"

this is inaccurate. anything can be toxic in a large enough dose.

2 good definitions of the word that relate this concept are:

-Toxic means able to cause harmful health effects. Toxicity is the ability of a substance to cause harmful health effects. Descriptions of toxicity (eg low, moderate, severe, etc.) depend on the amount needed to cause an effect or the severity of the effect.

-This is the adjective applied to any substance able to cause injury to living organisms as a result of physicochemical interaction. See toxicity.

-poisonous, everything, including water and oxygen is toxic in sufficiently high doses.


so there you have it. a much better way to describe mescaline would be to say that it has a relatively low toxicity compared to 2CB.

from wikipedia:

Not much information is known about the toxicity of 2C-B. Because 2C-B lacks an alpha-methyl group it is not considered an amphetamine such as MDMA, MDA, or methamphetamine. 2C-B does not seem to deplete the brain of serotonin, and this suggests that it may not share the neurotoxic mechanisms of many amphetamines.

There are no known deaths caused by 2C-B, despite widespread use and relatively large overdoses (see the PIHKAL entry linked to on the bottom of this page), suggesting that the acute physical danger is relatively small. However, few (if any) proper studies have been conducted on its safety, physically or psychologically.

----

so apparently there is not much info out there concerning toxicity of 2cb, and thats not surprising considering its a relatively new drug (only 1st synthesized in 1974).
"2C-B does not seem to deplete the brain of serotonin, and this suggests that it may not share the neurotoxic mechanisms of many amphetamines."
this doesnt necessarily mean that there are NO neurotoxic mechanisms.......
clearly more research has to be done on this substance.
there are some scientific reports posted on erowid in the 2cb vault, but i havent had time to look at them. they may provide further info...

hahahah its not poker carlos.....

wow. this is probably the most insightful comment i have ever seen on this board with regards to the whole separation issue. congrats!

that is funny on so many levels

good!!

i second that motion. all in favour say aye:

40$= FREE BOOZE

last call for DJ Assault
pre-sale only
contact steve 618 1818 tek@level4productions.com or rhys 271 7115 rotoloco@hotmail.com

DJ Assault Friday March 31st w/ Sarcastic, Rhys Taylor and Melon. this is a private party to ensure admittance you must contact steve or rhys in advance. presale only. open bar. $40. a birthday party for steve lalla and sami chaudry w/ booty shakin' contest & live visuals....

maybe its just me but i wouldnt assume ANYTHING is under control, especially if the UN is involved...
here's a report that came out last week before the election, and it describes the pre-election situation in belarus.
from what info is available, it seems like lukashenko is your classic soviet dictator. the belarusian secret police is even still called the KGB.
my opinion is belarus's citizens should be able to demonstrate their discontent with their govt in a civil & peaceful manner, and not be terrorized by
the KGB for doing it.
anyways here's the pre-election article from last week:

Tensions loom ahead of Belarus vote
STEVE GUTTERMAN Associated Press, MINSK, Belarus -

Tension loomed over a presidential election Sunday in Belarus despite a near certain victory for hard-line incumbent Alexander Lukashenko, the latest leader on Russia's periphery to face a potentially explosive confrontation with opponents desperate for change.
After the revolutions that have swept three former Soviet republics following disputed elections, opposition suspicions of fraud could make Belarus the fourth to be convulsed by protests and the threat of a forceful state response.
Underlying the election is an atmosphere of Cold War confrontation pitting Belarus and Russia against the West, which is seen by Lukashenko's government and its backers in Moscow as a chief culprit in the political upheaval in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.
Lukashenko has accused Western countries of plotting a repeat here. While Russia's relations with Belarus are sometimes strained, the Kremlin is wary of losing its only ally between its western border and NATO countries, and has signaled approval of a Lukashenko victory.
The United States, meanwhile, has forged close ties with the beleaguered opposition and made no secret of its disdain for the ruler of what the Bush administration calls an outpost of tyranny in Europe. It has condemned the campaign as "seriously flawed and tainted."
While Lukashenko is a dictator to his opponents and foreign critics, muzzling the media and stifling dissent during 12 years of authoritarian rule, many Belarusians cherish the leader who likes to be known as "Batka" - Father.
Even independent polls suggest he could win outright with a majority of the vote, avoiding a run-off. Lukashenko, who pushed through a referendum scrapping term limits and has hinted he plans to stay in office indefinitely, portrays himself as indispensable.
"What can you do? You will elect me," he told a crowd last fall.
Polling stations opened with a recording of the national anthem Sunday. At one school near central Minsk, voters trickled in slowly as a wet overnight snow gave way to an overcast, chilly day.
Supporters see Lukashenko, 51, as having brought stability after the uncertainties and suffering that followed the 1991 Soviet collapse. While the landlocked nation, about as big and flat as Kansas, is far from prosperous, the economy is growing and salaries are rising.
"He has been a successful leader, so let him stay in power - at least until he gets old," said Vitaly Musel, 27, a university administrator in the southeastern city of Mozyr.
Critics say the economic successes are unsustainable, based largely on cheap Russian energy and heavy-handed state intervention reminiscent of the communist era, when he was a collective farm manager.
The Soviet past is strongly palpable in Belarus. The government makes five-year plans, the main state newspaper has "Soviet" in its title and the state security service is officially called the KGB.
Since his first election in 1994, Lukashenko has silenced foes and maintained his grip on power through votes dismissed as illegitimate by the opposition and Western governments. Four opponents disappeared in 1999-2000.
"People are scared," said Zhanna, 40, a Mozyr teacher who declined to give her last name for fear of retribution. Interviewed at a rally for the main opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich, she said she didn't trust Lukashenko and wanted him out.
In Minsk, the quiet atmosphere on the broad, clean avenues could be shattered Sunday. After a campaign marred by arrests of opposition activists and blatantly biased media coverage, Milinkevich has called on Belarusians to protest peacefully. The government has banned election day rallies, setting the stage for a showdown.
Fearing the kind of protests that helped bring opposition leaders to power in other ex-Soviet republics, the state has mounted a campaign of threats and allegations aimed to frighten people off the streets Sunday.
On Thursday, the KGB chief accused the opposition of plotting to seize power with foreign help by detonating bombs and sowing chaos on election day, and warned that protesters could be charged with terrorism.
Subscribers to the country's biggest cell phone service provider received text messages on the eve of the vote warning that "provocateurs are planning bloodshed" Sunday evening at Oktyabrskaya Square in central Minsk, where protesters are expected to try to gather.
Milinkevich dismissed the messages and the claims of a coup plot as part of a government scare strategy aimed to discredit opponents and justify the potential use of force against protesters.
He urged supporters to be wary of provocations and suggested protesters would not try to force their way onto the square.
"We will come out with flowers, we will come out peacefully, without any violence," Milinkevich told several hundred supporters Saturday outside a movie theater, part of a final push in a campaign he acknowledges he won't win.
Ignored or attacked by state media, his rallies often banned or disrupted, the 58-year-old former physicist says he is out to show the country that change is possible - and imperative.
"We have defeated the apathy, but it is hard for us to conquer the fear," he said last week.
Milinkevich said more than 300 opposition supporters have been detained ahead of the election, some jailed until after election day. Authorities have seized the print runs of independent newspapers and barred at least a dozen European election observers from the country.
On Saturday, police with machine guns ordered the evacuation of a building housing offices of an opposition party, and Associated Press photographers saw several people driven away in a police car. A member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observer mission accompanied them to monitor their treatment.
The authorities have sought to whip up anti-Western sentiment, with state-run media airing reports accusing the United States of sending tents meant for a protest camp like the one in Kiev during Ukraine's Orange Revolution. The KGB also sought to link Americans with an alleged takeover plot involving terrorist training in Georgia.
State media have fed voters a steady diet of Lukashenko, from an election address Friday in which he warned that foreigners seeking to destabilize Belarus would have their necks broken "like a duckling's" to a pop performance hailing "Batka" as "strict but fair" and "cooler than all the rest."
Also running are Alexander Kozulin, an opposition candidate who was beaten up by security agents earlier this month, and Sergei Gaidukevich, widely viewed as a Lukashenko loyalist meant to legitimize the election.
---
Associated Press writer Maria Danilova contributed to this report.

oh sharon that was your white bike chained up out front....it's nice. but seriously, dont leave it out front of our place like that or something bad's gonna happen to it before long; either vandalism or theft...

so cavemen ate cheese and ice-cream? or you're just a hypocrite?

first of all, i never said people should drink thujone. in fact they shouldnt drink thujone, its a dangerous substance and is known to cause seizures and convulsions. but people are gonna do what they wanna do. i said "if a thujone based beverage is what youre looking for". secondly if you use wormwood to make your absinthe, then youre going to have thujone in your product, even in very small amounts. third, absinthe doesnt even have these so-called psychedelic effects. thats a myth created from romantic associations with dead writers and artists. the fact is if youre drinking something with an alcohol content of 45% to 90%, youre probably going to be hallucinating and seeing green fairies anyways.

everybody wants to make a buck. there is a shop downtown on st-denis street called La Bottine Aux Herbes that sells, in bulk, all the herbs you need to make your own absinthe. all the info is available free, online, from multiple sources.
and if a thujone-containing beverage is all youre concerned with then distillation is wholly unecessary, and if you dont know the intricacies of distillation, which is as much science as it is art, then you WILL bring across less than desirable substances in the distillate.
absinthe has been around long before people knew how to distill.

Jazz is an original American musical art form originating around the early 1920s in New Orleans, rooted in Western music technique and theory, and is marked by the profound cultural contributions of African Americans. It is characterized by blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms, and improvisation. Jazz has been described as "America's Classical Music", and started in saloons throughout the nation.

Jazz has roots in the combination of Western and African music traditions, including spirituals, blues and ragtime, stemming ultimately from West Africa, western Sahel, and New England's religious hymns and hillbilly music, as well as in European military band music. After originating in African American communities near the beginning of the 20th century, jazz gained international popularity by the 1920s. Since then, jazz has had a pervasive influence on other musical styles worldwide. Even today, various jazz styles continue to evolve.

The word jazz itself is rooted in American slang, probably of sexual origin, although various alternative derivations have been suggested. According to University of Southern California film professor Todd Boyd, the term was originally slang for sexual intercourse as its earliest musicians found employment in New Orleans brothel parlors, with the word deriving from the term 'jass'. The term "jass" was rude sexual slang, related either to the term "jism" or to the jasmine perfume popular among urban prostitutes. Lacking an attentive audience, the musicians began to play for each other and their performances achieved esthetic complexity not evident in ragtime. At the root of jazz is the blues, the folk music of former enslaved Africans in the U.S. South and their descendants, heavily influenced by West African cultural and musical traditions, that evolved as black musicians migrated to the cities.

With Prohibition, the constitutional amendment that forbade the sale of alcoholic beverages, the legal saloons and cabarets were closed; but in their place hundreds of speakeasies appeared, where patrons drank and musicians entertained. The presence of dance venues and the subsequent increased demand for accomplished musicians meant more artists were able to support themselves by playing professionally. As a result, the numbers of professional musicians increased, and jazz—like all the popular music of the 1920s—adopted the 4/4 beat of dance music.

A speakeasy was an establishment that was used for selling and drinking alcoholic beverages during the period of U.S. history known as Prohibition, when selling or buying alcohol was illegal. The term comes from a patron's manner of ordering alcohol — a bartender would tell a patron to be quiet and 'speak easy.'

The origin of the word predates Prohibition by at least 30 years. Samuel Hudson, a newspaperman in the late 19th century, said he heard the term used in Pittsburgh in the 1880s by an old Irish woman who sold liquor without a license. She told her clients to "speak easy" if they wanted to buy some. The Cassell Dictionary of Slang lists the word as coming into usage around 1890. The term spake-aisy was used even a century before this, where it referred to smugglers' hideouts.

Speakeasies were formed in the 1920's as a means to get around the everyday hassle of law enforcement watching for people to violate the 18th Amendment. As a result of Prohibition, the speakeasy was an established institution. When legitimate saloons closed as a result of the new law, underground palaces would spring up to meet the demand for alcohol. These speakeasies were one of the many ways that people during the 1920's and early 1930's obtained illegal alcohol. By the middle of the decade there were thought to be 100,000 speakeasies in New York City alone. Patrons often said you could get a glass of liquor at any building on 52nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in New York City--if you knew where the speakeasies were and if you had the password to get in. Federal agents also reported that this area was one of the "wettest" in the country. (Crime and Punishments166)

Speakeasies became more popular and numerous as the Prohibition years progressed, as well as more commonly operated by those with connections to organized crime. While police and United States Federal Government agents would raid such establishments and arrest the owners and patrons, the business of running speakeasies was so lucrative that such establishments continued to flourish throughout the nation. In major cities, speakeasies could often be elaborate, offering food, live bands, and floor shows. Police were notoriously bribed by speakeasy operators to either leave them alone or at least give them advance notice of any planned raid.

Another slang term similar to a speakeasy is "blind pig".

Some discreet venues called smoke-easies have popped up in states such as New York, California, and Massachusetts where smoking tobacco in bars and clubs is prohibited.