MIDDLE CLASS COLLEGE PEOPLE DEMANDING WE CARE ABOUT THEIR FEELINGS, OR PREFERENCES, OR WHATEVER OFFENDS THEM, BUT THEY DON’T CARE IF US POOR PEOPLE LIVE OR DIE. WELL, COME TO THINK OF IT, THEY PROBABLY GOT A PRECIOUS PREFERENCE FOR THAT, TOO! SHAKE OFF THAT WHOLE SCRIPT THAT MIDDLE CLASS, AND RICH, AND SUPER RICH “SCIENTIFIC” DAVOS PEOPLE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN POOR PEOPLE. THERE IS NOTHING “SACRED” ABOUT CAPITAL HILL, NANCY PELOSI OR HER DESK, OR VACATION PLANS, OR PRIVATE JETS, OR INSIDE TRADING, DEEP POCKETED LOBBYISTS, OR ENDLESS WARS PROVOCATIONS. “CRITICAL THINKERS” ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE AFRAID OF IDEAS. OR FREE SPEECH, OR FREE ASSEMBLY, OR A FREE PRESS.
Please watch and share this entire video. It is really great and with very powerful messages from and to the Australian Government. Thankyou Lorese and Co. for organising the event “Converge on Canberra” to Free Julian Assange aand the team at Consortium News for the great Youtube video.
“At a rally before the Parliament building in Canberra on Thursday, Australian politicians decried the British and U.S. governments’ persecution of Australian journalist Julian Assange, the imprisoned publisher of WikiLeaks, and demanded that he be released.
“Watching them so brazenly re-define how they have always used “recession,” and then Paul Krugman adding it doesn’t matter if we’re in one or not (it doesn’t matter for him), all to protect the Biden WH, is a new level of audacity no matter how low your opinion of them already is.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“If someone criticizing the most dangerous agendas of the most powerful and destructive government on earth looks like Russian propaganda or Chinese propaganda to you, it’s because you yourself have been brainwashed by propaganda.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Democrats won’t fight for M4A, Green New Deal, free public higher ed, ending student debt, $15/hr or diplomacy over militarism. They just fight the candidates who do. Tell ’em where to go.” (-Jill Stein)
“Who supports Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan? GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy Former GOP House Leader Newt Gingrich. Former Trump CIA Director/Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, also a neocon, There is only one party in the United States: The War Party.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“But, this fight has shown us how much the system is rigged against us. Even though Dems have control of Congress & the White House, fossil fuel companies still hold the pen on writing climate policy.” (-SUNRISE MOVEMENT ON TWITTER)
“Folks, U.S. officials don’t live in the same world with the rest of us. That is why their policies are failing & are doomed to fail going forward as they are now agitating the Chinese. This makes them an existential threat to all of us. In a logic that is consistent & predictable, U.S. authorities are now moving to openly criminalize political speech & association. With the FBI raid of Uhuru movement yesterday Black radicals are now in the cross-hairs of this effort. Never let any representative of any Western govt twist up their mouth to declare solidarity with Dr. King. The West has exposed itself in ways that can never be reversed. As predicted, Black radicals are targeted again for not falling in line with U.S. imperial agenda on Ukraine. The FBI raided headquarters of African Peoples’ Socialist Party in two cities. The allegations? It seems spreading Russian “misinformation.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“BREAKING: Nancy Pelosi has said Medicare for All is a dead policy and she won’t support it. When pressed, Pelosi clarified that the American people won’t need healthcare once she is done sparking a two-front nuclear war with Russia and China.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Imperialist bipartisanship. For democrats if you don’t support war on Russia, you are Russia agent. We are not surprised because both parties are committed to doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance” as U.S. national security strategy.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“MARION, Illinois — Daniel Hale, dressed in a khaki uniform, his hair cut short and sporting a long, neatly groomed brown beard, is seated behind a plexiglass screen, speaking into a telephone receiver at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois. I hold a receiver on the other side of the plexiglass and listen as he describes his journey from working for the National Security Agency and the Joint Special Operations Task Force at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to becoming federal prisoner 26069-07.
Hale, a 34-year-old former Air Force signals intelligence analyst, is serving a 45 month prison sentence, following his conviction under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified documents about the U.S. military’s drone assassination program and its high civilian death toll. The documents are believed to be the source material for “The Drone Papers” published by The Intercept,on October 15, 2015.
These documents revealed that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations drone airstrikes killed more than 200 people — of which only 35 were the intended targets. According to the documents, over one five-month period of the operation, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. The civilian dead, usually innocent bystanders, were routinely classified as “enemies killed in action.”
When those who expose the crimes of the state are criminalized and sent to prison, tyranny is inevitable.” (–Chris Hedges)
“The white left can sit this out believing there might be credibility to these allegations. But as always, we (the Africans) are first & will suffer the most, but unless you completely surrender they will be coming for you. Now is not the time for cowards.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“It’s a continuation of the infringement of free speech and free association as seen most recently with the tech industry crackdown on political speech that is in opposition to the USA government war propaganda. Plus there are plenty articles on FBI targeting of domestic activists.” (-False Prophet-o1 on Twitter)
“To recognize the system is rigged, while confining yourself to the 2 parties of the system, makes continuing betrayal inevitable. Frederick Douglas’ wisdom is as true today as ever. “Power concedes nothing without a demand…” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
VANITY FAIR IS GATES RESET PROPAGANDA
Man, I used to love Vanity Fair magazine because I thought Christopher Hitchens was an absolutely crucial writer even though I disagreed with him about war, torture, and atheism. Now my favorite Vanity Fair writer was Dominick Dunne, who someone I really respect by the name of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. despises, they fell out over a Kennedy cousin who was accused of stalking and killing a neighbor and I kinda recognize why both of them saw the story through the lens they did. Dunne was a celebutante red carpet groupie partyboy, until some evil motherfucker killed his daughter, and then, he became a crime journalist. I grew up reading Dunne and consider him an influence, actually. I knew VF was over, was just ruined, when they started white washing the crimes of the Bush admin and trying to glamourize creepy abuser billionaires. I believe Robert F. Kennedy knows more about the government and media and capitalism and deep state corruption than you and I do, and I sincerely think the corporate programmed shitlib idea, that books and whistle blowers should be kidnapped, buried, burned, banned or censored, or that dissident jornalists or whistle blowers should be feared, is completely rightwing Hitlerian. You should not talk about any book unless you have read it. Having said that, I really loved DD. His documentary “After The Party” is extremely entertaining.
THERE IS NO FREE SPEECH OR BILL OF RIGHTS ANYMORE. THAT’S JUST SOME BULLSHIT THEY TELL THE GOT-MINES THAT KEEP TRAINS RUNNIN’ ON TIME AND SPY ON YOUR PHONECALLS. MURKKKA IS RULED BY SECRET SOCIETIES AND THE SECRET POLICE
Listen to This Article: “War with Iran” (substack.com)
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Imaginary War – Consortium News
GUTTER GOSPEL: GENERAL LABOR INTERVIEWS JOHN DISSED
Songwriter, singer/guitarist, JFK researcher, revolutionary rabble rouser, human rights activist, insurrectionist podcaster, incendiary truth teller, deep state researcher, radical whistle blower and notable right-on freedom fighter, the courageous composer, essayist, and all around rebel rocker, JOHN DISSED is a powerful provocateur and genuine rocknroll motherfucker whose albums don’t receive enough attention and airplay, because moral courage is in such tragically short supply in this country and many of his ideas are off script, forbidden in the mainstream. He’s a real smart guy so I asked him to answer some interview questions. I encourage you to check out his music and podcasts. If you just wanna hear the reassuring view of Whoppi Goldberg, or Amy Goodman reading her Rockefeller funded Pentagon, neo-con talking points in a kindly ex hippie tone, you know where to find ’em. NAMASTE!
GENERAL LABOR: I guess I just don’t know very much about your background. Where are you from originally, what was it like when you were growing up, how were you first exposed to cool music?
JOHN DISSED: I grew up in Riverside County, CA in a remote valley that we then called Menifee, but the area didn’t really have a name, I guess. Our address was Sun City, which is a little retirement town five miles away. The elementary school was called Menifee Union Elementary School, where I went to kindergarten. Then my parents moved just outside the district (to a shithole called Quail Valley) and I was bussed to Perris for 1st – 4th grade, which was more diverse, where I was exposed to poor kids of many backgrounds. I remember my friend Ghan from Vietnam taught me how to count to ten in Vietnamese, which I can still do. We moved back to Menifee where I started 5th grade and that’s where I met my friend Rick who turned me onto KISS, Aerosmith, Badco, Zeppelin, etc. From then on, I was obsessed with music. He was in fourth grade and had an older brother who played drums in a band called The Kind and would hang out with those guys on weekends and report back to me and my brother, and bring back tons of riffs like Ziggy Stardust, Breakdown, and Best Friend’s Girl. I wanted to be like Ace and play lead guitar, but my dad made me learn classical, which I am now grateful for. Even then I thought it was cool to play classical because Rick played piano. I used to sit next to him on the piano bench while he practiced Beethoven before we went out to his garage to listen to records and ride our bikes in circles and talk for hours. We did a lot of that. It was the country, we’d set up jumps and crank up a boombox and just take turns jumping with our bikes. We used to love to run and jump off the sides of freshly bulldozed roads on hills. You could just fly off the side of the road like you were jumping off a cliff and land in the soft dirt. We’d do that for hours too. We had an old trampoline set up in the middle of some high brush and we would jump on that thing until it got dark. There were tons of rocks to climb and horse trails to ride our bikes on. Through it all, there was always music playing. My parents didn’t have a TV so I would go to the library and check out books every week during the summer. So, when I wasn’t playing guitar or riding bikes I was reading.
GENERAL LABOR: I was really charmed by that article you wrote about Randy Rhoades. When I was at rightwing baptist school in deep Appalachia-they really, really, really feared Ozzy, but my first 3 rebellious teen guitarists from my earliest basement bands, Harlot and Teenage Devil Dolls, were all super Randy Rhoades influenced. I don’t know if they’d admit that now.
JOHN DISSED: Thank you. I didn’t admit it much either, but after many years of thinking my friend Rick was dead from a motorcycle accident, he contacted me, and we started texting about Randy and sending each other links to videos and interviews that would have blown our teenage minds. Randy was the closest thing I had to a hero as a kid. It went far beyond just the music: He had Shaun Cassidy/Mick Ronson looks, and fame, but all he wanted to do was play guitar. He was one of us. He was obsessed with learning and practicing and improving. You can hear clinics and lesson tapes students made, he was a guitar nerd through and through. He loved to teach. He was a man of the people. He was on tour with Ozzy, but he’d do clinics where he’d teach kids all his licks. They would just shout out songs and he’d say, “oh I just do it like this, it’s really simple” and play it for them. He wanted to quit rock ‘n’ roll and get a master’s degree in classical guitar. He was my inspiration to get my master’s in classical guitar, although I never admitted it to anyone until I wrote that Substack article. His death was a dark time for us because we were absolutely obsessed with him at that time. It still angers me when I think about it. He was like a rock ‘n’ roll angel. There aren’t many of those in the world. He inspired me to always strive to be a good person and treat people well. Rick and I started a guitar podcast called Strummertime and we are hoping to record an episode on the Blizzard of Ozz album soon.
GENERAL LABOR: How did you meet Anthony and have you ever met Jimmy Dore? Don’t you guys go to see him sometimes?
JOHN DISSED: I was doing a podcast, playing independent rock ‘n’ roll. My favorite band was Cyanide Pills, and I read a cool review of their first album. I liked the politics in the review, so I looked for more by the writer, and I stumbled upon an interview with Anthony of Slow Motorcade. It was at a time when I was discovering JFK truth and was getting close to my idea of a concept album on the topic, so his blending of deep politics with rock/glam/punk was extremely attractive. I contacted Anthony and started to play his stuff on my show. We’re both in L.A. so one day he suggested we hang out. We went to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch with Donovan Leitch at the Roxy and have been friends ever since.
Anthony turned me on to Jimmy. He had mentioned him a lot, but I didn’t check him out much. I had given up on all my progressive heroes. They all sold out or lost their minds. I missed all the 2016 Bernie fun. I liked that some of my friends were getting activated, but I just didn’t believe he was the real deal, or that the real deal would be allowed to do anything real. But that didn’t stop me from sending him money. When Hillary lost, I was relieved, but depressed over Trump. I talked to Anthony about it that night and he said “you’ve gotta listen to Jimmy Dore, the revolution starts NOW.” So, I did, and was instantly hooked. I remember tweeting at Abby Martin that I loved when she laughed at the MSM, and that we needed to mock them harder and more often. Jimmy was the answer to that prayer. I did meet him the first time I saw him live, in Burbank. It was March of 2017. I didn’t miss very many live shows after that. We all went to about one per month until the Covid lockdowns. Jimmy Dore has sort of replaced Henry Rollins for me. Henry’s interview at the end of One from None was hugely influential in my life. Talking about the machine and unplugging from it. But he’s now an unapologetic Russiagating Democrat. I don’t trust him at all. I have lots of theories about him that I don’t like to talk about because they scare me. I do think he means well, and his influence runs deep within me, but I can’t listen to him talk anymore. I used to travel to see Henry’s spoken word shows. I went to San Diego, Santa Barbara, Bakersfield. I wouldn’t do that for anyone else. Maybe Jimmy. I met Henry once and he was super cool. I mean no disrespect.
I met Jimmy another time in Burbank, and once in Hollywood. He’s always cool. I have a photo of him laughing as we’re talking, and I think that says a lot about him. He’s a comedian who isn’t so insecure that he can’t laugh at a civilian’s non-professional attempts at humor. He can relax and hang out. The last time I met him with my girlfriend, he was making fun of my phone and showing us his new iPhone with three cameras he got to use for the show. I love the guy, he’s brave. He’s got what JFK had. He’s not afraid of death. He’s had near death experiences, he lives in pain, he actually lost height when his spine collapsed due to a bone disease. JFK had back pain too, severe. He wore a brace. His favorite poem was called “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”. I worry about Jimmy, I hope that he lives a long, long life. He could stop now and retire. He’s done his part and we should all be grateful for his amazing art. I think he will go down in history as one of our great prophets. Julian Assange as well.
GENERAL LABOR: what do you do for work and what do you do for recreation?
JOHN DISSED: I worked as a vault monkey at a shitty postproduction facility out of college. It was my first full time job, and I was treated like shit. They fired me for a mistake they couldn’t prove and tried to take my unemployment. I won the case and after the unemployment ran out, I got this job working for the company who made the software we used in the vault. It was like a different world working there. Not perfect, but it was like night and day compared to that hell hole. That company that fired me is the only company who was so awful to our support team that we cut them off. It made me happy to know they were stuck using an old buggy version forever, or forced to re-invest in something else. I still work for the same company.
For recreation I read, listen to podcasts, music, watch political and Bitcoin videos, movies, and documentaries. Go to live shows when I can. Movies. Jimmy does his live shows now at a theater eight minutes away from where I live. It’s mostly standup these days so I don’t go too much. He did a game show recently which we caught live, that was amazing. The greatest night out ever was a Progressive Comedy Tour show with Graham, Ron, Steph and Jimmy all doing standup. One of the few perks about L.A. That team is broken up now, it’s sad. Fuckin’ Covid.
GENERAL LABOR: When did you become interested in modern history and establishment propaganda? When did you first realize the US government was controlling the monopoly-media and lying to us?
JOHN DISSED: I don’t know what made me not trust the media first. It might be the few times I was mentioned. I played in a classical guitar master class that got press, and I was the only person in the class who didn’t get ripped to shreds, and the L.A. Times made it seem like I got some praise, but then told a lie that I was asked to play the piece again, implying that I was then admonished like the rest of the students, which I wasn’t. That really pissed me off, because it wasn’t true. I nailed my piece and the guy told me I was brilliant. Then the school paper mis-quoted me about that same class which was embarrassing. I played a concert at a Jr. College and their school paper called me a genius. The journalism student who wrote it was very sweet, it wasn’t a big deal. But then the guitar professor from that school panned my classical record in the leading classical guitar periodical and spelled my name wrong. I didn’t even send it to him, or the magazine. He just found it and did that. I feel like the dude was just pissed about the “genius” comment, but of course I can’t prove it. So that taught me a lot. It never surprised me when they lied about anything because they blatantly lied about me for no reason. They have the power to destroy, and they can’t resist it. They went after Sinead, which broke my heart. So even before I was political, I hated mainstream thought, I hated the mob mentality. It was always cruel, stupid and dishonest. Mediocre. I could tell my college political science professor was completely full of shit, and I knew nothing about anything at that time.
Speaking of college, I need to credit the CSUN conductor David Aks who taught classes in History of Symphony Orchestra and History of Chamber Music. He turned us on to Shostakovich, and he told us about the composer’s memoir, Testimony, that was published after his death in the ‘70s. That book taught me about authoritarianism and its relationship to art. It’s basically the story of the composer’s lifelong mission responding to the cruel Soviet leadership (mostly Stalin) in his music without getting himself killed. He wrote music that the people understood, snubbing the leader while giving the people an excuse to cry. They were afraid to show emotion. They had to whisper under blankets, due the power of Stalin’s surveillance. One poet friend he writes about wrote a poem, gave it to his wife to read, then tore up the paper it was written on and buried it in the forest. Many of his friends were shot. He himself almost didn’t make it. His music was publicly condemned more than once. I always told myself if I ever felt that such corruption was happening in the U.S. that I’d dedicate myself to writing music to fight it. It took me years before I started to see it. Shostakovich is a true hero to the people, and a prime example of how art can save us. The documentary Shostakovich and Stalin tells a lot of the story.
I think the Anita Hill trial disturbed me, but the 2000 election was my first real lesson in corruption. Before that, I really didn’t pay attention to anything political. Then Afghanistan. My brother turned me on to Chomsky, who said that the Taliban offered to give up OBL if we provided proof of his involvement in 9/11. We responded that we didn’t need to do that and bombed them anyway. Then Iraq. I remember Rollins did an hour of war propaganda on KFI to get us pumped up for the Iraq War. I listened to it parked along the 101 in my car. That’s how big of a Rollins fan I was. I heard he was going to be on the radio, I didn’t have a radio, so I found a nice spot near the beach to park and listen. And he talked about why we needed to take out Saddam. On KFI, which was the same station that had Rush Limbaugh on. It didn’t really hit me then, but wow. Anyway, Iraq was a deeper level of awareness. I remember Saddam was making offers to do what they wanted before we invaded. We were like, nope, it’s too late, you are going to die.
I watched Bush steal the 2004 election in OH. I had no doubt. They practically announced Kerry the winner, then it flipped. I saw a website flip. (I think it was Slate.) It was a Kerry announcement, not official, but I remember he was getting off a plane, smiling and waving, then I refreshed, and it was “Bush Wins!”. That same week there was a Ukraine election thing that the media was talking about. I wrote to Right, Left and Center asking why they talked about the Ukraine election, but not the U.S. election anomalies. The producer wrote me back and said they don’t report the news, they just comment on headlines, and the Bush/Kerry debacle wasn’t in the headlines. I replied that headlines should also include the independent blogosphere, which was talking about it a lot, and she wrote back that it’s too bad I don’t consider indie media to be the media. She just switched to my argument, nonsensically. I think THAT was when I realized everything was a lie.
I heard former CIA officer, Ray McGovern talking to Brad Friedman one night on my commute home from work, and this was after Obama had just won. I had supported Edwards. He doesn’t get enough credit for being the first to not take corporate money that I know of. In comparison, Obama was like an MLK impersonator to me. But I did support him, although I voted for Dennis Kucinich. McGovern said that he thought Obama and his CIA head Leon Panetta were “afraid of the CIA”. That blew my mind. I also heard Brad interview Sibel Edmonds. I became obsessed with her Boiling Frogs podcast. I heard Russ Baker on there and read his book. At that point I was awakened to a whole new level of corruption and on my way to writing songs about it.
GENERAL LABOR: How were you affected by Oliver Stone’s endeavor to shake out the truth about the Kennedy assassination?
JOHN DISSED: I saw JFK when it came out and it was over my head. It felt like a bunch of theories all bunched together. It is confusing, the whole Garrison trial. But years later I read Russ’s book, and then a ton of others, and watched the movie again and I absolutely love it. I can watch it over and over. Kevin Costner’s performance brings me to tears every time. And Stone’s new doc is amazing. I think I’ve watched it three times. The four-hour version is on iTunes. I bought it and downloaded it. I wish I could get my friends to watch it. That’s why I made my album, to try to turn people on to this story. It’s so deep. It’s so relevant. All the answers we need are there. Not even Jimmy Dore will read about it. He said on his show “I am not going to read a book about JFK”. He’s supporting a third party that isn’t serious. I know because I’ve talked to them. They don’t get it. If we go that route, it’ll be just another decade wasted, ending in heartbreak. The guy I talked to was completely triggered by the fact that I mentioned that Sibel noticed some vague funding language on their website. She leans to the right, so he tried to dismiss her (and my) concerns. The guy ended up talking to one of his superiors about it though and got back to me that the language is there if, for example, one of their supporters wins the lottery and wants to make a large donation. They also leave themselves open to foundation money, which is how the intelligence agencies launder money and support many organizations “under the table”. They are naive. They think that the controlling of the politicians is being done at the party level. That every progressive Democrat is merely a “career climber”. I don’t know where they find evidence of that being the case. Elites in Davos have admitted that they control foreign governments with metadata. How does that mean that our own politicians are exempt? How can you not see that AOC is completely controlled? We can see examples of Obama being controlled. They leaked his itinerary. They let those uninvited visitors crash the state dinner. These are huge on-purpose breaches of security. Obama had to replace the head of his Secret Service. Russ Baker traced the state dinner breach to Robert Gates’ office. Those were clearly warnings. As Russ says, we ignore deep politics at our own peril. Jimmy refusing to read the JFK story is disappointing. I wish I could have a beer with the dude and talk to him. But then again, he goes far enough. Too much truth in his hands could be dangerous. Let someone else bring that message. I have a new song called Wasted Martyrs. It’s not fair to expect someone to give everything of themselves for this. We should all learn and do our part. Be the media. Look at Assange who sacrificed himself for us. And only a tiny percentage of us even care. JFK/RFK/MLK/X and so many other martyred themselves, and we don’t even know the truth about their sacrifices. We don’t teach it to our kids. We just think some insane “lone nuts” targeted them for their egos. I think Jimmy gets it, it’s just too dark and he needs some hope. But that People’s Party needs to toughen up. My bass player, Junior (who I do the Discontented Podcast with) says we need a #ForceTheVote party. The candidates need to be like soldiers. They don’t even need to win, they just need to tell the truth, the deepest and darkest truths about the grip that’s on our country and what we are really up against. We need an army of soldier-candidates flooding local politics and on up. The JFK community doesn’t get it either. They are all Trump deranged. A lost cause. They can’t even apply the information they’ve gathered to modern politics. We need to take their work and do good with it. They don’t know how.
GENERAL LABOR: What was your involvement with Occupy Wall Street? Weren’t you telling me that big tech was already spying and censoring back then? why do so few seem concerned that the NSA monitors and records their every communication-is that not the exact definition of orwellian dystopia? Then, they removed all the payphones, ya know? TSA gropes your Granny, how come the woke pinkhat shitlibs are okeydokey with being fondled for freedom fries?
JOHN DISSED: I followed OWS closely. What you’re referring to is the fact that my brother and I noticed that if we used certain terms in an email, that Yahoo would block the email. Right at the beginning of the movement. It was either OWS or Occupy Wall Street, or something. We tested it, it was eery. But I didn’t have direct involvement. I tried to get someone from the ground in NYC to talk to for my podcast at the time, but they put me in touch with some dude who was going on Fox News. He didn’t want to talk to me. I should look him up, I’m sure he’s now working for the Democratic Party. He blew me off of course. But I was down with Occupy. It showed me the power of a leaderless movement. There was a plan to assassinate their leadership with snipers. We know because the FBI document was released. The FBI knew and didn’t warn them. What saved them was that there were no leaders to assassinate. Anarchy in the USA.
GENERAL LABOR: Don’t you agree this whole Capital Hill shitshow is just a big staged psy op to incriminate activist groups and outlaw protest and get shitlibs to support superfunding the police state and do you think they are preparing Lyn Cheney to run for future office as a Democrat?
JOHN DISSED: I wrote a thing about Jan 6 a few days after it happened, and I still believe now what I wrote then. It was like what we did to the Soviets in Afghanistan, or the Russians in Ukraine. The protestors were lured into the Capitol. We stole an election, seems to me. I have no proof, but Biden was not a popular candidate, just like Hillary wasn’t. Then we made it a crime to talk about it, even though we talked about Trump/Putin stealing 2016 for four years straight with no evidence. Then on the day the election was to be certified, we let protestors into the Capitol and branded them as terrorists. Provocateurs even pushed them forward from what I’ve read from witnesses. The proceedings were stopped, taking away the Republicans’ opportunity to contest the election. I watched Barbara Boxer contest 2004, which was a historic event completely blacked out by the media, including Right, Left and Center. Yes, Jan 6 opened up a new era of “domestic terrorism” that can be easily tied to former constitutional attorney Obama’s 2012 infinite detention that allows U.S. citizens to be disappeared indefinitely. Chris Hedges sued Obama over this, and SCOTUS refused to even hear the case. Same thing they pulled with Sibel Edmonds’ case, which would have revealed 9/11 truths.
I will not be surprised if Tim Kaine and Lyn Cheney run together because the Dems now love Bush/Cheney. Why not? They had the same policies as Obama. But watch for a pivot to the GOP. They can’t have too many years straight of Dem control before it becomes obvious that they are never going to do anything for the people with their power. It’s just a “shitshow” as you say. That’s how we don’t stop believin’. It’s time to make the Democrats the villains again. The Republicans have a great opportunity with Joe’s obvious dementia, these vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and inflation. I also think it’s an opportunity for a real third party fighting medical tyranny. If those people can get together with the #Med4All people, we could really get something done. As more U.S. Americans realize they’ve been poisoned and lied to, that movement will grow. Scary times.
GENERAL LABOR: What do you think is going to happen now with so many of our fellow citizens being so willingly blind with the whole partisan pingpong shuck n jive? How can we ever get these corrupt corporate tyrants off the thrones and their rotating villain puppets and pinups out of office when the secret police can hack the votes and the media keeps everyone in such a heavily censored and propagandized hypnospell?
JOHN DISSED: It’s dismal. We just need to keep talking to each other. I can talk to conservatives easily. We bond over hating the Democrats and then I try to warn them of the lies they are being told about open borders and things like that. I don’t know about the border, but I do know that Obama wasn’t called the Deporter in Chief for nothing. And I watched Biden tell a Mexican-American to vote for Trump when he expressed concerns. I wish Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson would tell the whole truth. I wish someone with some facts would debate them and pin them down on the party propaganda. The conversations always get a bit wacky.
Did you see Megan Kelly interview RFK Jr.? That was fucking beautiful. His book is a must-read. I think it’s the Achilles Heel. The vulnerability spot in the Death Star. I think the Alec Baldwin thing was a warning to RFK not to put out his book. He had just recently done an interview with Alec, and they are known to be friends.
GENERAL LABOR: So we are kindof already in world war 3 with Nato expanding on Russia’s frontporch and our government and media manufacturing consent for wars with China and Iran, why is there no significant peace movement anymore? I mean i know it has something to do with Obama and the Squad and middle class people just staying in some kinda regressed celebrity Teenbeat fan culture. Why don’t people care that our government mass murders so many people in these shameful wars based on lies, resulting in so many veteran suicides?
JOHN DISSED: I sure don’t have the answer to that, but I do know that we love war. We love authoritarianism. I read a book about Skull and Bones and one of the main agendas of that organization is to get us to worship the State. It’s deeply embedded in our culture. That’s why even the left only considers options like Communism. What attracts me to Bitcoin is the idea of making the state irrelevant. I think there is a chance that it will fix everything, just by being perfect money. It would happen slowly over time, probably not in our lifetime. But it gives me some hope.
When Iraq happened my friend had a friend who had to go, and he talked to me about it. He went on a long rant about how his friend had to go and die in this war based on lies. It was a beautiful rant and I have to say that it moved me deeply. I really relate to David Swanson. But I send his stuff to friends, and he offends them. They must feel triggered because war fever is so embedded in their psyches.
We took war off the TV. We made it illegal to show the coffins coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. I volunteered a couple times at Arlington West where every weekend they put out a cross for every dead soldier killed in those wars on the beach in Santa Monica. (They’ve since moved it.) I remember a lady walking up to me and asking what the crosses were for. I told her and she asked, “What war”? If we showed Obama’s double-taps on weddings and funerals, and what we put our own kids through when we put “boots on the ground”, we’d have an anti-war movement like we did in the ’60s when we had Vietnam on TV. I mean, we don’t have a draft which is also part of the problem, so it may not be just like the 60s. Instead, we just get Joy and Whoopie talking about how brave the troops are fighting for democracy, what should we expect?
Jimmy Dore talked about how The View is called “the” view because it’s “the view”. All the ladies have the same stupid opinion, and it’s handed to them by the powers that be. They are giving us “the view’ every morning. It was just a joke in passing but it hit home for me. That’s what our media and education system do. They give us “the view” with tiny deviations here and there.
The propaganda is so thick. People on the pseudo left think they are doing their part by hating Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan. #ForceTheVote revealed a lot to us about what many thought was the actual left, and so does this vaccine mandate thing. I knew long ago that most progressives are full of shit. The JFK community is full of shit. People are just in it for their egos. They won’t talk to me. They hate anyone trying to do anything. They want to shine. They hate Jimmy for his success and the adoration he gets from his viewers. He’s the Howard Stern of progressive independent media. His success comes from having the intelligence to see the truth and the balls to tell it. He’s interesting, too. That’s just a gift he has, a lot like Howard. He’s not afraid to be hated. He’s stared deep into the abyss and he’s not afraid. These motherfuckers are lightweights. I’ve dealt with a few of them. The last thing on their minds are kids dying from our bombs or the Trump/Biden vaccine. They are careerists, and some of course are paid to lie. The truth is in smaller media. Substack. Read those comments, those people are the brightest bulbs in the world. Just everyday people who are reading, paying attention, connecting dots. It makes me proud. Those of us learning this stuff need to talk to our friends, spread the truths we learn and teach each other. Learn from each other.
Howard Stern used to talk about a doctor named John Sarno. He learned how to heal pain with the mind. I read his book and I healed some excruciating back pain in a single night. The pain is caused by the brain creating mild oxygen deprivation in muscles to create a diversion from repressed anger, stress or emotional pain. The cure is to tell your brain that you know what it’s doing, and that it’s just creating more problems. So, the pain goes away. Understanding the problem fixes the problem. Howard healed his OCD in one night using Sarno’s technique. We need to understand our world, who the real enemies are. Teach each other. Learn from each other. And the problems will melt away. So, talk to your family, friends, neighbors and co-workers, and be patient. Guide them toward the truth. It’s all you can really do, and I do believe we are well on our way to reaching the level of understanding necessary to create change.
Whitney Webb, my favorite journalist, is now featured on a Hulu documentary about Victoria’s Secret and Jeffery Epstein. This was deep stuff a couple years ago. Now it’s in the mainstream. Everyone knows about the Great Reset. That was conspiracy theory just recently. I think this is remarkably hopeful.
GENERAL LABOR: How about Vanguard and Gates and Blackrock buying up all the farmland and rental properties-how are poor people going to stay housed and fed?
JOHN DISSED: Terrifying. I think the homeless problem is a direct reflection of our lack of morality in this country. Even more than the wars. It’s right in our neighborhoods. Think about all the virtue signaling about Trump and trans rights while at the same time the woke culture says never a word about the fact that there are people sleeping under every bridge in every U.S. city. This stuff falls into the same category as the mandates. Progressives aren’t particularly concerned. And I must say that the mandate people aren’t concerned with the homeless problem either. Not from a perspective of compassion anyway. I just read this morning a Robert Malone article where he printed a quote from someone saying that one reason CA is bad is that people were “free” to be homeless. Like it’s just a bunch of hippies partying in the streets for fun. I love that guy but he’s so misled in some ways it scares me. And he’s going to support Republicans, and they could achieve power and betray him and the medical freedom movement just like Obama betrayed the progressives. Another wasted opportunity for change.
Did you hear what Obama said about why he betrayed the progressives? This comes from Ray McGovern too: Obama was having dinner with some of his progressive activist friends, and they asked why he betrayed their agenda, and he said something to the effect of “don’t you know what happened to Dr. King?” But I digress…
GENERAL LABOR: Please tell me something about each of your records.
JOHN DISSED: My first record worth mentioning is only available from me at live shows, but I am posting a lyric video from one song soon, so it’s sort of being revived a bit in my tiny world. It’s called The Shooter EP, and it has two political songs on it. At the time, I had an opportunity to work with a producer and I had three songs lying around, so I used them. The fact that they don’t go together was problematic. I realized I wished I had done three political songs. From that point on, I’ve stuck to politics. It just feels right. Caterpillar is inspired by two cases where Israeli military murdered U.S. activists. They were Rachel Corrie and a teenager named Furkan Doğan, who was aboard the second Freedom Flotilla and shot five times, once in the face, and once at point blank range. The other is a tribute to Sibel Edmonds, who changed my life with her book and podcasts.
Next came Red Flag in 2012. That was basically my response to the Bush years and the beginning of Obama. Songs about empire, war, rendition, and austerity. I have a song on there about the 9/11 jumpers inspired by Chris Hedges. No one ever talks about them, so I wrote a song. Red Flag is a full album, with a band, produced by me. Steve Postell taught me how when we made the Shooter EP. And my friend Tom had befriended one of our heroes, Mixerman, and actually was living with him working on a script. Mixerman had done an online journal about being hired to produce a mainstream rock record in 2002 or so, and it was amazing. My friend and I were hooked on the story. He was a controversial figure on the audio message boards, but I could tell from much of what he said in his diary that he had original ideas and was a master at his craft. I asked Tom to ask Mixerman if he’d mix my record, and he said yes. That was a lucky break for me, meeting Mixerman. It’s super fun to work with him. The album is a bit more Stonesy than what I’m doing now.
Lastly is American University, which is my JFK concept album. It took me five years. No researcher would ever endorse it, because I read a ton of books and all the researchers hate each other. You have to just take it all in and make your own conclusions. I do have original ideas, but it’s all based on research, and I know that a lot can never be proven. I have no idea how the album comes off, but I feel like it’s a primer, and if you go to my website, you can see the list of books that informed the songs. Lyrically inspired by Slow Motorcade, Stiv Bators and The Wanderers, Queensryche‘s Operation Mindcrime, and probably Pink Floyd a bit. Musically, KISS, UFO, Ramones, AC/DC, Nirvana. I think the story is a modern romantic Shakespearean tragedy, and everyone should learn about it. Also mixed by Mixerman.
I think independent music is important, which is why I started a podcast playing independent rock ‘n’ roll 13 years ago. It didn’t catch on. People get that journalism needs to be independent. But for some reason they think rock ‘n’ roll needs to be corporate funded. Jimmy Dore was just ranting about this the other day, about how rock ‘n’ roll isn’t rock ‘n’ roll because of everyone selling out to the woke agenda. Yeah, but so does CNN, dude. Corporate rock was dead when it became corporate. We don’t need them to make great sounding records anymore. So why even bring it up?
My next album is all about the control of our culture. I’ve learned a lot in the past few years. Nothing you see is what you think it is. This is all a show. Manufactured reality. What was so great about the rockers Jimmy thinks are rebels? They sang about their dicks and all the underage groupies they fucked. About how they fell in love with groupies who broke their hearts. About life on the road. Partying. Maybe early Dylan and Lennon. We can see what happened to Lennon. And it’s pretty obvious Dylan backed off after the JFK assassination. It was cool seeing he paid attention though. Murder Most Foul was kind of gratifying to me, it gave me a sense of validation after the total rejection of American University.
I have a new band with an incredible Cuban-American rhythm section and I’m super excited about this next album.
GENERAL LABOR: where can people hear your podcasts and buy your merch?
JOHN DISSED: I don’t have merch but I do have podcasts and music and a few videos. You can get to everything from johndissed.com. I’m on twitter but I’m trying to get kicked off so I can start building something new on a platform that doesn’t censor. The only good thing about twitter is that you can fuck with the woke people. If we move to other platforms, we’ll just be preaching to the choir and that’s not necessarily what we need to be doing.
Thanks for asking, and for featuring me. Your work is always great and meeting you and Anthony has inspired me to no end. I don’t know if there’s anyone else out there like us, but I’m mostly grateful to having learned about Stiv from you guys. I loved The Lords in college but had no idea about Stiv’s politics and lyrics. He was a soldier for the truth, and so are you and so is Anthony. Thank you for everything you do and for your support and friendship.
David Swanson – War Is A Crime
“US is speculating that Russia killed Ukrainian POWs & then staged a scene to frame Ukraine. When similar allegations are lodged against insurgents in Syria — except with overwhelming evidence (see OPCW leaks) — that gets dismissed as “atrocity denial” &”conspiracy theories.” Also worth nothing that the allegation that Russia, not Ukraine, bombed a Russian prison of high-value Ukrainian Azov Nazi POWs is great timing for the current bipartisan push to label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism.” (-Aaron Mate’)
“Fascist Fox News host shows the Neo-McCarthyite tactics of the authoritarian US regime: If you don’t support war with China, you’re going to be labeled a secret Chinese agent” (-Benjamin Norton)
“I’ve had a hard time writing of late and didn’t know why. Then I was reminded of the one year anniversary of Glen Ford’s death and put and two together. Glen Ford was an irreplaceable revolutionary journalist. And I miss him greatly.” (Danny Haiphong)
“Wow. Jersey City Councilwoman Amy DeGise allegedly ran over an UberEats deliverer with her car and then took off. She was not made to take a breathalyzer or drug test. She is refusing to resign.” (-Zellie)
“So how did these corporations get so powerful & how do we fight back? 1) They consolidated their power to the point where most industries are now controlled by a handful of monopolies. 2) They bought off our politicians & both capitalist parties to rig the laws in their favor.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Democracy Now is where you can watch a hippy read MSNBC transcripts.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“12 years to the day since the publication of Afghan War Diaries, here is Julian Assange speaking in 2011: “The goal is an endless war, not a successful war” #FreeAssangeNOW” (-Wikileaks)
“No Australian citizen should face over a century in jail for the crime of telling the truth” Senator
#FreeAssangeBig protest for Assange being censored by Youtube today but tell me how we live in a free democracy and have representation again. You booj pig sons a bitches.
Price Gouging at the Pump Results in 235% Profit Jump for Big Oil: Analysis (commondreams.org)
Since it’s probably just you and me here, I’m gonna be honest and tell ya, man, I think it’s pretty fuckin’ depressing, the way this world is goin’. A handful of sociopaths, billionaires, secret societiy douchelords at the top-people like that king of Saudi Arabia and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos-those kinda dudes are fuckin’ robbin’ all us poor people of any kinda quality of life, keep starting wars for resources and control of everything and everyone, and that batshit Klaus Schwab and Henry Kissinger devil’s chessboard bullshit. Meanwhile, what few people still have any surplus or influence in this society just keep goose stepping in lockstep formation behind these tech monopoly fascists, endlessly repeating their advertising buzzword mantras, don’t even ask no questions no more. I’m thankful for comedian Lee Camp, and comedian Jimmy Dore, and antiwar activist David Swanson, and heroic and courageous Doctor JILL STEIN, cause most of my former peers who are all so proud and confident of how “educated” they are have never even fucking hard of motherfucking Black Rock, ya know? All they know is what Whoopie Goldberg and Rachel Maddow tell ’em. Ya know that dude John McAfee had a whole tattoo on his arm that said, “whacked”? He was one of the many who have made public comments when they said they were not suicidal and if they were found suicided, it was a hit. How often does that shit happen? Michael Hastings told people he was working on a big story and was concerned somebody was following him and messing with his car. When his car lost contol and burst into flames incinerating the Rolling Stone journalist who had embarrassed Hillary and several high ranking generals, many knew it was a hit. The Young Turks even did shows about it, but that was before they took big millions from an HRC megadonor and started reading the official script from the teleprompter. WIKILEAKS Vault 7 proved the deep state have tech to kill people who drive newer cars by remote control-they just threw the book at the guy who leaked that story. Same with Daniel Hale. College people always dismiss Sibel Edminds, Colleen Rowley, Ray McGovern, Naomi Wolf and Col. Ann Wright as “conspiracy theorists”, but seem themselves and like, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher as “critical thinkers”. Anybody who strays from preferred rich people and deep state narratives is automatically branded some heretic or crackpot by the Microsoft robots. I’m just nobody, but for the record, If anything happens to me you know it’s some bullshit. I’m still trying to do shit. Make records, reconvene with lost loved ones, stir some people to conscious action for peace and human rights. You dig? Don’t believe the HONKY DEATH MACHINE!
Anti-War Voices Warn Against ‘Insanely Provocative’ Pelosi Visit to Taiwan (commondreams.org)
The Shadow Bank That Owns The World (mintpressnews.com)
Jill Stein: “I am the only candidate that is not controlled by predatory banks” BBC News – YouTube
“The David Lee Roth track is fire, I’m so glad Dramarama is still churning. Dave’s new tune or new to me at least is a strangely reminiscent of some of your more recent Musings. The Dramarama is, well, Dramarama, took me back to better times in the basement on Pleasant Street.” (-Nasty Bastard)
METHQUEENS, PITBULL ATTACKS, DEAD TOWN WITH NO PAWN SHOP…
I do my best to avoid all the drug crazies-you can usually see ’em coming-or hear ’em, cause they all seem to have car stereos that are more valuable than the cars. I can usually spot ’em walking from a couple blocks away. They all seem to have that desperate forward leaning druggy gait if they’re on the speed, or the slow zombie lumbering “Thriller” dance like walk, if they’re on the other shit that’s out there nowadays, I dunno that much about it, but you can feel the whiteboy jailbird predator vibes rolling off all these cars with two bald males in the front seat, driving in slow circles. It is a tough hustle trying to get money in a dead end desert ghost town in the middle of an intense heat wave and hardcore recession with all the capitalist price gouging, post Covid. People are getting more desperate down there by the dollar store which is like the main drug hub where people panhandle. Low income housing neighborhood with all the shifty people in the ghettofied park. I was out there looking for something to generate revenue myself this morning. Looking for something to resell online, doing the hard hustle, trying to turn a nickel into a dollar today, but things aint nothing like they used to be. I never seen so many “Sorry We’re Closed” signs anywhere, and all the people I used to know just act like this shit is acceptable, the new normal, cause tv says, ‘blah blah blah…Moneypox…blah blah blah Bitcoin…blah blah blah billions for Ukraine…blah blah blah blame Russia and let’s also have war with Iran and China…Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, trump, Trump, Trump, blah blah blah, own nothing and be happy…blah blah blah, diversity and science.” I felt almost bad for the missing teeth meth lady who came outta one of the alleys and complimented my kid’s drenched in dad sweat $7 from Wal-Mart KISS t shirt. I thought that was suspicious, naturally, she asked me if I had a couple dollars to give away so she could get a pack of smokes, well, the hard fact is a pack of smokes is at least ten bucks now, and if I had ten bucks, I’d be trying to find a way to turn it into fifty, so I could buy a birthday present for a loved one. Right now, I gotta worry about this upcoming electric fucking bill that’s gonna be a mean motherfucker. Can you imagine being one of those fake bumper sticker shitlibs, self described academics, ex punks, celebrity class entertainers, “woke journalists”, teachers, boomers ee no evil tv believers, or media broadcasters who refused to stand up for Julian Assange? People are too cowardly to even say they are anti-war nowadays, because the tv programming is so powerful, they are afraid their peers in the cubicles will get mad at ’em for not reposting the Ukraine flag today and demanding more billions to warp speed some Monkeypox boosters to all those poor war babies on the frontlines in the Ukraine. Oh man, it is HOT here in the desert, had a hard time sleeping here last night, kept waking up hot. Most mornings, my body moves itself almost instinctively outta this dumb chair and away from the corporate propagandizing hypnoscreens and puts me outdoors on the mountain trail to listen to a symphony of birds and get some sunshine and fresh air, but when it’s this hot with the swamp cooler running indoors, it’s too hot for a walk. I’m sick of sunburn-my kid comes up and hugs me and ooh ya don’t want nobody squeezing your sunburnt flesh. I’m trying desperately, nervously, prayerfully, to sell some rare mint condition collector object online cause a family member’s birthday is coming right up and the electricity bill with the cold air running all the time, is gonna be a hardship for my family. Biden’s inflation, which is really just the Wall Street Walton family gouging us poors some more, because they can, makes it real hard to pay for anything but the most basic essentials. We used to get about three or four times more groceries for what we’ve been paying since Nato launched the provocation with Russia, requiring them to gift this celebrity magazine coverboy showboat Zelensky with another 80 billion for weapons every few days that will all end up on the black market, they just want permanent wars over there, to Balkanize the Russian territory and bleed alla Russia’s, and next stop, China’s resources, for their big imperialist new world order Gates Reset plans. Anybody who opposes full spectrum dominance and endless wars and nonstop billionaire surveillance techlord and secret police censorship is being branded a commie or Russian sympathizer by this bigass overfunded bureaucratic juggernaut bipartisan war machine. No politicians have stood up and said maybe we can negotiate a peace settlement because none of their significant donors, the private contractor proxy armies and weapon manufacturers, big pharma, and big oil, want peace. That’s how you know they are not real liberals or progressives, they are just corporate shills and popularity puppets. Stop worrying about your teen magazine favorite politician’s feelings and start worrying about the future of the planet.
I’m seeing cockroaches and scary hairy spiders around my place, it is summertime in the desert, but I am not a big fan of bugs. I’m outta drinking water again. We used to buy these three dollar generic 12 packs of carbonated water that went up to $6 under Covid but they quit selling them and the dickhead grocer acted personally offended when I inquired about them ever returning to the shelf. “It’s the price of aluminum because of Putin! And supply chain issues! I don’t know! I can’t get them, anymore!” Dumb people buy in to any media script so the social engineers and spooks on social media really don’t even have to try that hard anymore. Murkkkan tv obeyers are happy to thrust the blame for Murkkka’s oligarch’s criminal enterprises, money laundering and merciless greedhead behaviors on any random foreigner. Putin, Gaddafi, Bin ladin, it’s all Hussein to them. Just don’t say THE SQUAD SHOULD BE FIGHTING FOR POOR PEOPLE, that’ll piss off some motherfuckin’ Amazon ordering Netflix watchers. All the booj mimosa sippers stay behind their big walls and only come out behind the wheels of their gigantic gas guzzling, tank like big vehicles, ya know? These MSNBC watchers they all insist the town’s just getting so HIP and TRENDY. They think it’s “gentrifying” and they are all gonna “GET RICH OVERNIGHT!” with their maxed out already investment property, but truthfully, the place died when they did the shutdowns and it aint gonna make no big comebacks just cause there’s four rich people saying it over and over, how it’s gonna be a “tourist destination”. Those ten airbandb owners are fuckin’ dreaming, just kidding themselves. Five fake business owners on the strip are only even open maybe, what, twelve hours a week? Even if some real creepy mansion builder can successfully sic city hall and their entire code enforcement apparatus and police force on a couple of hoarder old man cowboys for having too much junk in their yard, that don’t mean anymore rich people from outta state, that oft dreamt about, “Big California Tech Money” will ever ever wanna congregate in the crazy 106 degree heat and get followed around by Breaking Bad Slim Shadies with broken out back windshields. Nope, the place is dead as hell, it’s ghettofying more everyday, as all the loony drug people keep coming over the hill from the crime ridden nearby town to look for customers, suckers, weaker people to shakedown or extort from, old folks to potentially rob, any kinda easy prey. I’ve lived in bad places all my life and just in the past couple of weeks, I’m seeing and feeling the escalating tension out there. When the locals start kinda getting real animal like. Everybody’s hunting. Not just hurting, but HUNTING, with an “n”. I feel it especially at dusk. Freaks come out at night, hut hut hut. It’s hot outside and my wife got me a sonic gizmo that promises to deter leashless dogs, thusfar I’m seeing mixed results from it. Nothing deters mentally ill old geezers in the middle of these manic meltdowns. Mental illness is sad to behold, especially when all middle class folks have been tv trained to believe there are some kind of still existing social safety nets. All NPR listeners seem to yap on about the imaginary “services” they imagine all us unsightly poors are enjoying. Fox watchers and obnoxious Ann Coulter types still moan about those $600 checks some people got and refer to creepy Crimebill Gropey Joe the bankster servant as a (cough, cough, snort guffaw) “radical leftist” cause their fake ass culture wars fictions. AS IF he aint been voting with the Republikkkans for fifty years, mass incarcerating seven times the immigrants Trumop was at the border and superfunding cops, starting wars, and appointing rightwing judges. Come ON, man. Sometimes, I wanna shake ’em but they will never wake up until the hard times evictions, layoffs, sudden deaths or extreme health problems affect them personally. Or MAYBE if it happens to someone they love, but even then, they tend to just parrot catch phrases from television commercials. Ask your doctor if sudden death is right for you. Some side effects may include…
BEWARE OF DARKNESS
In my book, the self titled Concrete Blonde record is one of the most perfect albums I ever heard. I love every song on it. They were so good. Everything I want from a band, poetry, punk, and soul. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. I’m 52 and still trying to put together my own band like that. Johnette is so talented, compassionate, heartfelt, I always vibed with her songs. I don’t know what she’s like anymore, fame kinda seems to have it’s way with people but I will always be grateful for her musical contributions that enhanced my travels and experience here. I think she may have dropped out of the ratrace and moved to the desert to be a happy hermit like me.
ELECTRIC GYPSY
One of the last concerts I saw was L.A. Guns about 13 years ago. Tracii Guns was not in the band-just Riley and Lewis and various blackhaired sidemen. They were good. Phil was sortof borrowing heavily from the Zodiac Mindwarp bag of tricks. I liked Faster Pussycat as a kid, not as much as I liked the Joneses but I liked em when it was the original lineup or semi original couple of lineups. I never understood how guys as famous as Mark Michaels and Zowie Ackerman can just disappear off the face of the earth like Richie James Edwards, no body, no death certificate, just nothing? So yeah I’m seein’ all the same footage from the current metal tours online as everybody else. makes me feel better about my own old man singing/dancing/stamina and energy level. In a certain mood, I can listen to Cinderella‘s “Gypsy Road” over and over, but after about oh, maybe five songs, all these screechy metal guy voices start wearing on my nerves, honestly. I used to be like on nodding terms with him back in NYC and my friend Ratboy knew him and we’d pass him sometimes in his velvet newboy cap, but really I only properly met and conversed with Danny Nordahl once and we got along like a house on fire. He was even helping to hide me out from nazi skinheads at the NY Loose and Rev. Horton Heat show my ole pal Katie’s brother took me to. He’s a fantastic person, in my book. I’ve fallen into the drums a time or two myself. God bless him! I love that dude!
‘Nightclubbing’ doc: Wild sex and drugs at Max’s Kansas City (nypost.com)
ELITES RULE BY BLACKMAIL, PROPAGANDA, DIRTY TRICKS AND ASSSASSINATION
Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case (unlimitedhangout.com)
Big Pharma Flooding Airwaves With Disinformation to Kill Drug Price Reform (commondreams.org)
WHERE DO YOU DANCE?
If you know me, you know that growing up in the 80’s a lot of my only friends were early rap enthusiasts. Yep, we just called it rap, back then, but my homies had the two turntables and the shelves of 12 inch records-some were “mixologists”, some were MC’s, my buddy Wuzzy had a breakdance troupe-the Jammasterz! They used to let me carry the boombox and big piece of cardboard around, but I turned out a punk.
Black Agenda Report https://blackagendareport.com
GENDER IS NOT CHARACTER & STOP WORSHIPPING BAD RICH PEOPLE
Hillary Clinton on Gaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died” | We Are Change
Gina Haspel Watched the Waterboarding at CIA ‘Black Site’ – Antiwar.com Blog
Torture at Gina Haspel’s Thailand ‘Black Site’ – The Atlantic
Liz Cheney’s smug, self-satisfied con job: Don’t fall for it | Salon.com
Taylor Swift Reportedly Has The Most CO2 Flight Emissions (uproxx.com)
GLEN GREENWALD ON BIG TECH MONOPOLY/DEEP STATE CENSORSHIP
A federal district court in California on Friday denied Google’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit alleging that the Silicon Valley giant is violating federal antitrust laws by preventing fair competition against its YouTube video platform. The lawsuit against the search engine giant, which has owned YouTube since its 2006 purchase for $1.65 billion, was brought in early 2021 by Rumble, the free speech competitor to YouTube. Its central claim is that Google’s abuse of its monopolistic stranglehold on search engines to destroy all competitors to its various other platforms is illegal under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which makes it unlawful to “monopolize, or attempt to monopolize…any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations.”
It is rare for antitrust suits against the four Big Tech corporate giants (Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon) to avoid early motions to dismiss. Friday’s decision against Google ensures that the suit now proceeds to the discovery stage, where Rumble will have the right to obtain from Google a broad and sweeping range of information about its practices, including internal documents on Google’s algorithmic manipulation of its search engine and the onerous requirements it imposes on companies dependent upon its infrastructure to all but force customers to use YouTube.
Founded in 2013, Rumble began experiencing explosive growth in the run-up to the 2020 election. Americans were encountering escalating and aggressive Big Tech censorship of political content as the election approached. Conservative politicians, followed by a wide range of heterodox voices on the right and left, began migrating by the millions away from Google’s YouTube to Rumble, which has promised and thus provided far more permissive free speech rights. That was at the time when Google and other Big Tech platforms — at the urging of the Democratic-controlled Congress, began aggressively increasing its censorship of political video content on YouTube on the grounds of “disinformation” and “hate speech.”
The explosive user growth which Rumble enjoyed in 2020 has continued to rapidly increase, as Big Tech generally, and Google specifically, clamped down further on dissident views in the name of the COVID pandemic, and now even more so with respect to the US/NATO role in the war in Ukraine. More and more prominent politicians, journalists and commentators, along with smaller content creators, have either been banned by YouTube or left on their own accord to join Rumble as Google’s crackdown on free speech intensifies. The ability to speak more freely on Rumble regarding the most contentious political debates has become one of the key drivers of the exodus of users — both those with large public platforms and ordinary citizens alike — from YouTube to Rumble.
During the COVID pandemic, Rumble allowed far greater questioning of the claims and policies of U.S. health policy official Dr. Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization — regarding the virus’s origins, the efficacy of masks, and the justifiability of vaccine mandates — than Big Tech platforms permitted. For the first year of the pandemic, Big Tech users who questioned or rejected the official story that COVID-19 was zoonotic rather than due to a lab leak in Wuhan were silenced or banned: a censorship policy that was reversed only when the Biden administration itself admitted that it did not know the answer to that question and would officially investigate it.
Similarly, Americans who were stifled or outright barred by Big Tech from citing pre-election revelations about Joe Biden from the archive of his son obtained by The New York Post found a place, on Rumble, where they could openly reference and discuss them. And Rumble has aggressively resisted pressure campaigns from the U.S. government and corporate media outlets and outright legal bans enacted by the EU requiring all platforms to cease allowing “pro-Russian” news outlets such as RT and Sputnik to be heard.
Rumble’s user growth, driven overwhelmingly by growing anger toward Big Tech censorship and de-platforming, has continued to swell this year. As Investor Place’s Ian Cooper wrote in April, “its user base hit a new record of 41 million monthly active users in the first quarter of 2022. That is 22% growth quarter-over-quarter.” Moreover, “Rumble is setting user engagement records. In the first quarter of 2022, Rumble users watched about 10.5 billion minutes per month.”
As discussed on this page and as was reported by The Washington Post, I was one of a group of nine journalists and commentators, along with former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), to make Rumble my primary home for video journalism in mid-2021 based on support for its free speech principles and the need for alternatives to centralized Big Tech repression. Though the purpose of that Post article was to predictably malign Rumble as a cesspool of hate speech and disinformation — relying on and extensively quoting a “disinformation” expert who happens to partner with U.S. and British intelligence agencies and Big Tech platforms such as Google and Facebook — The Post was forced to acknowledge how significant Rumble’s growth has been (and since that August, 2021 Post article, the growth has increased further):
Rumble has grown from 1 million active users last summer to roughly 30 million, said the site’s chief executive Chris Pavlovski, a Canadian tech entrepreneur who worked a brief internship at Microsoft and founded a viral-joke website before launching Rumble in 2013. And its traffic has exploded: According to data shared with The Washington Post by the analytics firm Similarweb, visits in the United Statesto the site grew from about 200,000 in the last week of July 2020 to nearly 19 million last week — a 9,000 percent increase.
Though Rumble’s audience size is still significantly smaller than YouTube’s, the threat posed by Rumble to YouTube is real. Rumble’s imminent merger with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) CF Acquisition Corp. VI will effectively make Rumble a public company and is likely to arm it with far greater capital to compete even more robustly with YouTube.
But the major obstacle to competing with Big Tech giants generally, and Google specifically, is that these companies have acquired such extreme market dominance in so many key areas of the internet that they abuse that power to prevent competition and crush any competitors who pose a challenge. That these four Big Tech giants are classic monopolies in violation of the antitrust law was the emphatic conclusion of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law’s comprehensive 2020 report, a conclusion that now has ample support from leading members of both parties.
The lawsuit brought by Rumble against Google is designed to ensure free and fair competition, so that the public is not effectively forced to use YouTube but can instead fairly choose among Google’s competitors as well. The primary allegation is that Google abuses its power as the dominant search engine and destroys free competition for online video platforms by manipulating its algorithms to prevent YouTube’s competitors, including Rumble, from being found by the public.
Attempts to find Rumble videos through Google searches are purposely thwarted by burying Rumble’s videos and instead redirecting the user to YouTube, the lawsuit alleges. Google’s “chokehold on search is impenetrable, and that chokehold allows it to continue unfairly and unlawfully to self-preference YouTube over its rivals, including Rumble, and to monopolize the online video platform market.” I often am unable to find my own videos using Google’s search engines even when I recall the title of the video more or less perfectly, and have frequently heard the same complaint from viewers.
Further illegal monopolistic acts alleged by the complaint include Google’s manufacturing of its Android phones with a pre-installed YouTube app as the default video setting, and imposing agreements on other Android-based mobile smart device manufacturers to pre-install YouTube, place it in the most prominent position, and prevent users from deleting it. The court summarized the alleged anti-competitive results of Google’s behavior this way (citations omitted):
[Google] “requires Android device manufacturers that want to preinstall certain of Google’s proprietary apps to sign an anti-forking agreement.” [Rumble] alleges that once an Android device manufacturer signs an anti-forking agreement, Google will only provide access to its vital proprietary apps and application program interfaces if the manufacturer agrees: “(1) to take (that is, pre-install) a bundle of other Google apps (such as its YouTube app); (2) to make certain apps undeletable (including its YouTube app); and (3) to give Google the most valuable and important location on the device’s default home screen (including for its YouTube app).”
As another example, [Rumble] asserts that “Google provides share of its search advertising revenue to Android device manufacturers, mobile phone carriers, competing browsers, and Apple; in exchange, Google becomes the preset default general search engine for the most important search access points on a computer or mobile device.” And, by becoming the default general search engine, Google is able to continue its manipulation of video search results using its search engine to self-preference its YouTube platform, making sure that links to videos on the YouTube platform are listed above the fold on the search results page.” [Moreover], Google’s revenue sharing agreements allow it to maintain a monopoly in the general search market and online video platform market).
As a result of the denial of Google’s motion to dismiss the complaint, the lawsuit will now proceed to the discovery stage. After denying Google’s request to dismiss the lawsuit prior to discovery, the judge scheduled a conference at which a discovery plan would be established. This phase of the lawsuit is when one party can obtain a broad range of documents from the other relevant to the claims of the lawsuit.
The antitrust specialist Matt Stoller, Research Director of the American Economic Liberties Project, said about the ruling: “Getting past the motion to dismiss stage is quite meaningful, and depending on what turns up in discovery Google could be in serious trouble.” This ruling should enable Rumble to acquire and utilize extremely revealing documents about how Google exploits its algorithms to manipulate search results on its dominant search engine, as well the burdensome requirements it imposes on other companies dependent on Google’s infrastructure to ensure prominent promotion of YouTube.
Google did not respond to requests for comment on the judicial ruling. Rumble’s statement was naturally celebratory: “We welcome the court’s decision, which is a significant step toward ending Google’s unlawful preferences for YouTube and helping to put creators first. We look forward to starting discovery.”
When Rumble first filed the suit, its founder and CEO, Chris Pavlovski, told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that the company’s data specialists had determined that, with its search engine algorithmic manipulations, “Google has redirected up to 9.3 billion visitors to YouTube instead of to Rumble.” These anti-competitive practices by Google, he argued, destroy the possibility for innovation and competition: “Imagine being a tech entrepreneur trying to build an online video platform. You absolutely do not have a shot. You do not have a chance. You have pre-installed YouTube apps on phones. You have a rigged search engine. You have no ability to compete in this market.”
Lawsuits like these have the ability to unite people across the political spectrum. Stoller, one of the nation’s leading scholars on the question of Big Tech monopolistic dominance, noted that “the case leverages antitrust action by the government pursued under both Trump and Biden. It’s also notable that this ruling came from an Obama-appointed judge. Clearly concentrations of power worry both sides.”
Regardless of whether one is an avid admirer of the modern iteration of capitalism, there is nothing to cheer when a tiny group of corporate giants can corner a market and prevent competition. That is particularly true when — as is obviously the case for Big Tech — the “market” in question is now the primary means by which Americans gather information, politically organize, receive and disseminate news, and question and debate the most consequential political controversies. The political and propagandistic aspects of these anti-competitive practices substantially elevate the public interest in fostering free and fair market competition. To allow a tiny number of tech giants to maintain a stranglehold on the digital public square is self-evidently dangerous, especially as they escalate their censorship regime, due to some combination of their own political interests, the demands of the majority political party in Washington, and the incessant grievances of their own work force.
These dangers are not abstract. Perhaps they were most vividly seen in January, 2021, when Parler — designed as a free speech alternative to Facebook and Twitter — became the most-downloaded app in the country, fueled by anger over the pre-election censorship of the New York Post‘s reporting on Joe Biden’s activities in Ukraine and China as well as the banishment of President Trump by a consortium of Big Tech giants. As soon as Parler rose to the top spot, Democratic politicians such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and censorship activists groups such as Sleeping Giants demanded that Google and Apple immediately remove Parler from their app stores, preventing any further downloading. Other Democratic lawmakers then demanded that Amazon Web Services, the dominant hosting company that had enabled Parler’s website, terminate its agreement with Parler.
Within forty-eight hours, all three Silicon Valley monopolies complied with these demands. Parler instantly went from the most popular app in the country — thanks to the free speech principles it upheld — to utterly crippled if not destroyed. It attempted to come back but never really recovered. That was as brute and stark a display of Big Tech’s ability and willingness to destroy any successful competitors as one might imagine. And in the process, they not only abused their anti-competitive dominance to destroy one of their few successful competitors but also, heeding the demands of Democratic Party politicians, abolished one of the few significant venues on the internet where Americans could gather to freely question and dissent from the orthodoxies and pronouncements of their leaders.
There are other antitrust actions currently pending against the Big Tech giants from both private companies and, increasingly, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). But this suit from Rumble has enormous potential to open competition in the vital video uploading market and, perhaps even more importantly, shed substantial light on the extremely opaque and guarded algorithmic manipulations Google uses to force down the public’s throat the content it wants them to see while hiding that which it does not want them to see.
Telegram: Contact @benjaminnorton
Veglam 
