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James Earle Breslin (October 17, 1928 – March 19, 2017) was an American journalist and author. Breslin began working for the Long Island Press as a copy boy in the 1940s. After leaving college, he became a columnist. His early columns were attributed to politicians and ordinary people that he chatted with in various watering holes near Queens Borough Hall. Breslin was a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, the Daily News, the New York Journal American, Newsday, The Daily Beast and other venues
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Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy (February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009) was an American democrat politician who served in the United States Senate from Massachusetts for almost 47 years, from 1962 until his death in 2009. Kennedy became a committed champion of women's issues and of gay rights, and established relationships with select Republican senators to block Reagan's actions and preserve and improve the Voting Rights Act, funding for AIDS treatment, and equal funding for women's sports.
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Edmund Gerald "Jerry" Brown Jr. (born April 7, 1938) is an American politician, author and lawyer serving as the 39th and current Governor of California since 2011, previously holding the position from 1975 to 1983. After his Senate defeat in 1982, many considered Brown's political career to be over. He traveled to Japan to study Buddhism. In an interview, he explained, "Since politics is based on illusions, zazen definitely provides new insights for a politician.
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Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor, and liberal political activist. Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, which uses the style and devices of literary fiction in fact-based journalism.
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Christie Ann Hefner (born November 8, 1952) is the former Playboy Enterprises Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, a company created by her father, Hugh Hefner. She stepped down from her position at Playboy on January 30, 2009. She has often worked with the progressive political organization Center for American Progress. Their site describes her as having "long been involved in electing progressive candidates, advancing women, First Amendment issues and advancing treatment for people with HIV/AIDS."
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William Bradford Shockley Jr. (February 13, 1910 – August 12, 1989) was an American physicist and inventor. Shockley was the manager of a research group at Bell Labs that included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. The three scientists were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for "their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect." Late in his life, Shockley became intensely interested in questions of race, human intelligence, and eugenics. Shockley argued that a higher rate of reproduction among the less intelligent was having a dysgenic effect, and that a drop in average intelligence would ultimately lead to a decline in civilization. Shockley’s views were heavily criticized, e.g. by Roger Witherspoon, who compared Shockley's advocacy of a voluntary sterilization program to Nazi experiments on Jews.
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Sir Michael Philip Jagger (born 26 July 1943), known professionally as Mick Jagger, is an English singer-songwriter, musician, composer and actor who gained fame as the lead singer and one of the founder members of the Rolling Stones. Jagger's career has spanned over five decades, and he has been described as "one of the most popular and influential frontmen in the history of rock & roll".His distinctive voice and performances, along with Keith Richards' guitar style have been the trademark of the Rolling Stones throughout the band's career. Jagger gained press notoriety for his admitted drug use and romantic involvements, and was often portrayed as a countercultural figure.
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Abbot Howard Hoffman (November 30, 1936 – April 12, 1989) was an American political and social activist, anarchist, and revolutionary who co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies").
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Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his patrician manner, epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing. As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's principal subject was the history of the United States and its society, especially how the militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer. Vidal thought all men and women are potentially bisexual, so he rejected the adjectives "homosexual" and "heterosexual" when used as nouns, as inherently false terms used to classify and control people in society.
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Paul Krassner (born April 9, 1932) is an American author, journalist, comedian, and the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies.
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Ayatollah Khomeini, was an Iranian Shia Islam religious leader and politician. He was the founder of Iran as an Islamic republic and the leader of its 1979 Iranian Revolution that saw the overthrow of 2,500 years of Persian monarchy and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. Following the revolution, Khomeini became the country's Supreme Leader, a position created in the constitution of the Islamic Republic as the highest-ranking political and religious authority of the nation, which he held until his death. Shortly after assuming power, Khomeini began calling for Islamic revolutions across the Muslim world, endorsing anti-american politics and muslim fundamentalism.
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Margaret Hilda Thatcher (13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013) was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century and the first woman to hold that office. A Soviet journalist dubbed her the Iron Lady, a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.
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References to Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis; he was the first psycho-analyst to attach importance to dreams and analysed them as wish-fulfillments. August Strindberg (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter - His A Dream Play (1902) – with its radical attempt to dramatize the workings of the unconscious by means of an abolition of conventional dramatic time and space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters – was an important precursor to both expressionism and surrealism. Ernst Ingmar Bergman (14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish director, writer, and producer who worked in film, television, theatre and radio. Considered to be among the most accomplished and influential filmmakers of all time. His work mostly deals with death, illness, faith, betrayal, guilt, bleakness and insanity