“The government says it needs secrecy in order to win wars and protect freedom. History says the government needs secrecy in order to start wars and restrict freedom.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
““Julian Assange committed Empire’s fatal sin. He exposed its crimes, its machinery of death, its moral depravity.”(- Chris Hedges)
The US leads the world in prisoners, healthcare debt, war, and obesity. China leads the world in high-tech, education, high-speed rail, poverty alleviation, and optimism for the future. If you despise China, then your anger is in the wrong place.” (-Danny Haiphong)
THIS ONE’S DEDICATED TO THE COURAGEOUS PEOPLE OF REBEL FRANCE!
“So many emerging technologies would be cause for celebration if our rulers weren’t evil. In a healthy society we’d be celebrating the fact that automation and AI giving us more and more abundance and free time; instead we’re terrified of police robots and technocratic dystopia.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“When I was young I was the nicest guy I knew I thought I was the chosen one But time went by and I found out a thing or two My shine wore off as time wore on I thought that I was living out the perfect life But in the lonely hours when the truth begins to bite I thought about the times when I turned my back and stalled I ain’t no nice guy after all…”
I was never “Very Metal”. I’m new wave-totally differnt head, man. I never liked the thrash bands, speed metal, black metal, much of that shit. Never liked Iron Maiden with all the screechy high wailing opera vocals and songs about hobbits and knighthood. I still don’t like Metallica and I tried to get through several of their new videos the other day, just not my thing. I love Van Halen, the Misfits, and Motorhead, but I just consider all them rocknroll, ya know? When we were young malt liquor drunken hooldlum kids in black leather jackets, the coolest thing that ever happened was when Motorhead appeared unexpectedly on “The Young Ones”. Twenty years later, I lived in Kancel Kulture Karens safespace feelings studies world capital Honkytopia for a few years against my will and better judgement due to family obligations, and I scoffed at these Safespace Karens who’d call themselves community organizers and call the kkkops on poor people for smoking cigarettes outdoors in the alley behind the Wow Hall nightclub. Shitlibs idea of activism is snitching on poor people, same faction would try to tell me I should unpack all my privilege, while I was walkin’ around with no car, no credit card, no money, no college, these people owned bakerys and bookstores and rental properties and lived to lecture poor people about how we should not like Dave Chappelle or Motorhead. They thought they could cancel Motorhead for being “problematic”. I started avoiding middle class college people, they were fuckedup. Their whole religion was based on two word descriptions of people’s bodies, I was dismissed as a cys born privileged white male oppressor whenever I was participating in marches for the houseless or volunteering to help feed hungry people, it was batshit programming. All I had goin’ for me was the key to my girlfriend’s apartment, no cellphone, no safety net, no career opportunities, no safespaces-the local entertainment weekly said I could not even contribute record reviews without a journalism degree from the Nike sports college. I never knew how rightwing shitlibs had all become-they mighta flown a rainbox flag or put a Black Lives Matter bumper sticker on their Teslas, but they were all about steam rolling over the poorest people. They supported City Council and hotel owners who hired professional thugs to push all the poor out of the downtown gentrication district, so crass, so evil, they openly called it “The Exclusion Zone”. The gender college identicist shitlibs upheld no real leftist value, not free speech, not human rights, not unions, no love for poor people, all they care about is their own privilege, money, power. They detested protestors and whined and whined when somebody did something without a politeness permission permit from the classist old bats of city hall. They hated poor people. They all hassled the homeless, spewed hateful rhetoric they learned from their superiors about how the homeless people all deserved to be punished and degraded for their “lifestyle choices”, it was fucking awful. Landlordly navel-studies people just suck so bad, when my kids turned 18, I got out of that college town, pinkat brunching hipster hell, and I still see straight through all their virtue signaling booj fauxliberalism, still love me some Motorhead. I’d always planned on someday revisiting my old Sunset Strip stompin’ grounds and making the piligrimage back to the Rainbow to see the big statue of rocknroll Saint Lemmy. Sadly, my songwriter friend went to the Rainbow recently, was met with unaccomodating, obscene ripoffs and bullshit, negative staff hostility-after paying those greedhead motherfuckers $75—that was sad, same shit happened to my other pal, a more famous guitarist, who agreed to guest star with an old L.A. band at the Whiskey, they stop and frisked him and patted him down and had all these heavy handed bouncer assholes giving him the business while he’s there to entertain the people for their inheritance bosses booze profits. Those old rich fuckers who inherited those clubs are spoilt sons a bitches and it’s a shame they don’t have no manners and let their staff be rude to musicians. I used to have fun drinking in the Rainbow parking lot before it became an uptight tourist trap for nepo babies. I can’t stand P.C. nampy pampys who think they have the right to impose their perferences on lesser thans, or rich entitled idle heiress people who pay big hulks to push paying ten dollar pint punters or legendary musicians around. One shamelessly unremorseful gym rat dickhead in L.A. beat up some homeless geezer and all the suckups and asskissers acted like that was just okeydokey cause they all live for free drink tickets or Satuday night V.I.P. lounge headliner status or second hand identify as richass cocaine hipster clubowners more than as street people. I am the opposite. I wish all those gentrification money hoarders and capitalist hierarchy fratboy abusers would fuck right off. I relocated out here to a desolate Pirate Island, but you know there are still scuzzbucket ruthless gimee gimees and relentless McMansion building developers tearing up the scenery and dislocating the wildlife to build more ugly airbandb compound bullshit and lord over their phoney baloney Douchebag Hives everywhere you go. I love the French people who love liberty so much, they push back when the fascist pigs try to fuck them all over with WEF robocop uniformed violence and state abuse. Murkkkans have been programmed to obey the gold necklace overlords in too much cologne and anybody with a smelly costume or pretentios title. I watched that documentary about Chuck Leavall, “The Tree Man” last night and Billy Bob Thorton was correctamundo when he said people should try to be like Chuck Leavall. I’m so sick of Douchebag, USA!
“If you can’t publicly demand the resignations of both Clarence Thomas and Dianne Feinstein, you just might be partisan hack.” (-Prof Zenkus)
“Teixeira, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Daniel Hale, David McBride — they should all be living free and without fear of persecution. And those who persecuted them should be imprisoned.”” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“I have been a social work educator for 15 years. One thing that social workers do is analyze policy. The Joe Biden 1994 Crime Bill stands alone as the single most destructive piece of legislation for black communities across the nation in the past 50 years.” (-Prof Zenkus)
“Gadaffi was excited when Obama won the Presidency thinking that he might have an opportunity to have good relations with America and it would be good for Africa He didn’t realize that it would be under the Black President that he’d be murdered and his country be destroyed” (Black In The Empire)
“Perhaps we’d have an easier time having conversations on difficult topics with friends and neighbors if we hadn’t been diligently trained for two decades to ignore, ridicule, or cancel anyone who puts into question our current spoon-fed reality.” (-Human Bean)
People shouldn’t be punished for revealing the secrets of the government, governments should be punished for keeping secrets from the people.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
WHERE I COME FROM
Everybody’s mom even loves “Hands To Yourself”, it’s one of those songs that make the big old gals get up outta their LaZBoys and do their drunky brickhouse boogie down in the kitchen, ya know? I remember really loving Georgia Sattellites cause to my way of thinkin’, they were just as rocknroll as they could be, just like pure undiluted hillbilly hellraiser rocknroll excellence with a little bit of hayessed yeeehaw Jack Daniels Saturday night bonfire soul, ya know, kinda like Jason & The Scorchers, the Replacements, Rock City Angels, or Tex & The Horseheads, I love all that shit. When it’s almost summer, I naturally start gravitating towards the fun loving rocknroll records. I guess Dan Baird’s no longer in the band which is kindof a shame, but Rick Richards is one of rocknroll’s real gunslingers who was even recruited by Izzy Stradlin for the similarly excellent Juju Hounds.
“Seriously, think about it: what could the rulers of western society possibly extract from us that they’re not already getting? There’s no meaningful political opposition, no antiwar movement, no anti-capitalist movement, very little critical thought — they’ve got total control. Everything we do in this dystopia is designed to funnel profit into the coffers of the oligarchs and power into the hands of the imperialists, and all efforts to resist and change these funneling systems have been successfully quashed by mass-scale psychological manipulation.
This totalitarian dystopia looks like freedom because they let us more or less do what we want, while controlling what it is that we want to do using mass-scale manipulation. They further bolster this by creating systems where what we do has little or no meaningful effect. Even if we had actual software in our brains that gave our rulers total and complete control over our minds, they’d have the masses think and behave in more or less the same way they do right now.
The primary weapon of our totalitarian rulers is not surveillance, police robots, digital IDs or CBDCs — their primary weapon is propaganda. The system of mass-scale psychological conditioning they’ve created is unlike anything that has ever existed in history. The ability to detect and suppress an emerging revolution is vastly inferior to the ability to use psychological conditioning to prevent people from even thinking about revolting in the first place. That’s what real power looks like. That’s total control.
This is a dystopia whose inhabitants all move fully in alignment with the will of their rulers, without ever even thinking that they are unfree or should try to become so.
Try to design a more effective totalitarian dystopia than this.
Another band we all jammed to back when we were still driving around in those Indiana and Ohio backroads, sometimes with an open container or twelve, parking for awhile at the resevoir, hangin’ around at the bowling alley, or taking poncey black n white publicity pictures in graveyards for our scarf wearing bedraggled gypsy smalltown glam bands was this group from Nashville called Royal Court Of China-they never quite made it big but we all liked ’em. Kinda reminded me of the Hangmen, really, or hell’s belles- I think they reminded us of ourselves, back when Bobby C., the original bassplayer was still an one of our many iterations of the group. I still like ’em, still miss Bobby, you know how the song goes-I got 6 empty bottles! I had a saxophone player and a rhythm guitarist who loved all this kinda dirty honkytonkin’ loud life affirming white trash rocknroll, a really talented lead player who had shit tons of potential but decided he wanted to purse something more reliable than rotgut basement punknroll-he got sorta steered away from the gang by a series of well to do New Englanders and that other guy had a girlfriend who disapproved of our reckless lifestyle and wanted him to get a haircut and get a real job, and then other guy would always disappear on payday and forget to contrubute anything to the rent, another guy had a mean drunk chick who was always yelling at him or throwing him out in the middle of the night whenever she was not the center of attention, drummers and bassplayers came and went ya know but there were times when that basement sounded like a Tennesee roadhouse and the neighbors would call and let the roommate have it so we’d have to turn down. I still love this kinda burnin’ heart rocknroll, if it’s really in your heart and soul, it never goes away. If you know any longhaired musicians lookin’ for a real wild frontman, send ’em to me!
“You couldn’t design a more effective totalitarian dystopia than the one we’re in right now. One where everyone’s brainwashed by propaganda without even knowing it, where everyone thinks, acts, votes and shops exactly as their rulers want them to, all while thinking they are free. (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“If you run in the corporate controlled Democrat party on a platform of challenging the status quo, see firsthand how the DNC rigs the process for its preferred corporate candidate but still endorse the party afterwards then you were never serious about challenging the status quo.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Propaganda is the real mechanism of control, and that’s what we’re going to have to fight if we’re ever to become free. The only way out of this giant matrix of psychological control is to show people how unfree we are, how they’re being deceived, how much better things could be. Awaken people to the lies, to the real nature of the political, educational and media institutions designed to keep us enslaved, weaken public trust in the propaganda machine, and then we might have the beginnings of the possibility of real change. Until then, we’re locked in.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
Veglam 