I don’t get around much, anymore. In my wild, wild youth, I spent several lifetimes fuckin’ around in dark bars and ending up in come crazy places like the Sunset Strip where I met a lotta people with black hair who wanted to be like Guns N Roses and Posion and the Crue and purple haired Zeroes. I remember most of those metal years black haired guys being kinda dumb and untalented and 100% incapable of writing a song to save their lives, but I did like that guy from Queeny Blast Pop, probably cause when we met he was soft spoken and polite actually, reminded me a bit of myself onstage. He continues to be pretty good as far as I’m concerned and I’m always lookin’ for some new rocknroll being made with some energy, a little style, a little heart. Not bad if you ask me. At least as good as ya know, say, Stars From Mars or Plastic Tears. I saw Lesli’s guys live opening for L.A. Guns about I dunno, twelve or thirteen years ago and they were still good, wild onstage, couple catchy tunes, brought out all the old leather jacket wearers. People at that show kept asking me if I was Phil Lewis. Other old people probably recall me absolutely slaying all the hairspray metal dudes in my more punk leaning fanzines during the assembly line spandex Headbanger’s Ball Days, but lately, I’ve been kinda sentimental for even the cheesier overproduced deedle deedle metal bands I used to kinda disdain. I can appreciate a little “One More Reason” or “Electric Gypsy”, now. Like when I was a kid, I did not really listen to much Ozzy or Twisted Sister. I was very new wave, like totally immersed in synth pop and death rock, now I don’t mind me some heavy metal. Especially ’round the bonfire at night. The problem with my desert southwest border radio classic rock station is it’ll play some Van Halen, George Thororoughgood, ZZTop and Billy idol, but then they play like, Yes. And I still say no to Yes. In the deadend ghost town here, aint nothin’ happenin’ at all in the way of music, ya know the only musicians are like outta towners who play at the tourist trap-I saw a death rock guy in all the pentegrams and upside down crosses on his battle vest yesterday and knew he was not from here. We saw a nazi couple about a month ago, I hope they aint livin’ here, but it would not surpise me, all the ranchers are super fucking far to the racist extremes rightwing. People behind us have the biggest fucking turkey I’ve ever seen in my life gobble gobbling around their backyard. I don’t fuck with other people’s stuff, but it is a bit hard to not wanna like quietly, open a gate and free the fucker, but where would he go, really? He’d just get eaten by the wolves and coyotes. I think they’re fattening him up for Christmas. Loony old demented Gropey Joe told some badly scripted fuckin’ photo op jokes the other day, but you know this aint no democracy cause he’ll pretend pardon a turkey but not a righteous and heroic human being. Everybody witgh any measure of integrity whatsoever has demanded the Ivy League posh people free Julian Assange and Leonard Peltier, but those tyrannical fuckin’ rich billionaire deep state secrecy people who rule over us don’t give a fuck who we want pardoned. They’re all just like, laughing at us and how most people will believe any crazy crackpot farfetched bullshit they wanna sell ’em from “lone gunman magic bullet” to “found the passport, melted steel, Muslims with boxcutters so buy duct tape”, so long as a Serious PersonTM in a pinstriped pants suit says it on tv.
I love alla Morrissey’s solo stuff, too, but there is something still special about those old Smiths records, ya know? Morrissey got me into Osacr Wilde, as a kid. Not sure how I feel about his new producer, yet. Moz guests on the new Iggy lp, “EVERY LOSER”. The most beautiful new wave girl got me into the Smiths when we were jut thirteen and fourteen, all that post punk and new romantic, goth and new wave stuff especially imprinted deep on my soul, ya know I’m still listening to the eighties music even now in these cold times when it’s impossible to know what’s going on, the powerful forces of Wall Street weapons makers and pill pushers beat us crazy with abusive gaslighting and fear propaganda and pro war, fascist hoopla, you can see it on everybody’s faces-the horror, the trauma, the shutoff utilities notices, and threats of eviction, at our old place we did not have adequate heat, now we got broken water heater problems, I’m in solidarity with everybody who’s in the struggle, all the people with nowhere to go-I got a lot more empathy for the people barely gettin’ by, than I do with all the phony fake hipster shitlib haves, paying to play, hoarding their platforms, buying some kinda make believe illusion of “being popular”, and shithoarding their piles of More Stuff, it’s fuckedup. I don’t even talk to people where I live no more, except for a couple of hardworking retail slaves at the low pay grocery store, cause the insufferable ESP new age landlord hot tob Karens and Fonzie hipster airbabandb owners pushed us out of our old neighborhood and now we are deep into ya know, Rush Limbaugh, love the kkkops, rightwing rancher, insufferable blowhard, talk radio terrain. Navigating pitbull meth head culture on foot aint all roses. Tumultuous territory in troubling times. Divided States Of Amnesia. It’s dangerous out here. Do you remember the bills you have to pay or even yesterday? I’m just a broken record, by now. A whole stack of broken records, really. And a couple of dogeared old books, right? It all started with the Monkees and Prince, Cyndi Lauper, Adam Ant, Nik Kershaw, Dexy’s, Lords, Hanoi and Billy Idol, “ASK” by the Smiths and “Rubber Ring”. Some Nick Cave and Gun Club and Beasts Of Bourbon and here we are.
I’m still trying to find out whatever happened to all those guys from the Indianapolis glam band CHATTERBOX formerly known as Too Cool, who were around in the late eighties that were influenced by Dogs D’Amour, the Quireboys, the Black Crowes and the Faces, the ones with the scarves, who played Arthur Lee covers. Let us know if you know those cats, Stephen Lee Canner (Dirty Sidney Cox), vocals; Garry Wayne Finley (Slim Chance), guitar; Dave d’Eath (bass); Ryan Payne (Poppy Rimdeau), drums, or how to contact ’em. I’d love to interview ’em. They were sorta midwestern glam contemporaries of my ole teenage bands, Vain Damage, the Neons, and Teenage Devil Dolls, and of course, Detroit’s glammest Motor City sons, Trash Brats, in the late eighties.
NEW “WHOLE OF THE LAW” VIDEO DROPS! THE WORLD FAMOUS MISTER RATBOY & HIROSHI THE GOLDEN ARM ARE STAYING GOLDEN!!!
“KILL A PUNK FOR ROCK & ROLL PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARTY PEREZ 1976-2019” (-HoZak Books)
This photographer Marty Perez travelled the old beat highway and college radio music circuit for years and really doies a startlingly effective good job at capturing the restless rocknroll subculture-he’s got it all here, the truck stops and hangovers, sick in the parking lot, the “Dazed & Confuzed” sevnties stoners, the rich kid grunge poser motherfuckers, the old school Batcave rockabillies, From Big Star in their satin baseball jackets to Lazy Cowgirls doing what they do best, writing the songs that make old junkies cry and tearing up some shithole bar.The Clash, the Replacements, Bad Brains, 68 Comeback-I used to drink with one of those guys, the dead one-Jack (RIP), Fastbacks, Aerosmith and Black Oak Arkansa-they’re all hear and sweatty. The pictures of their fans are really what tells about half the story. The kinda real cool photography book that says it all loudly, that you and your loved one can treasure on their coffeetable for the rest of their life. Pretty much everything HoZak does, they do very well. I don’t know the HoZak gang personally, but they keep churning out valuable works by important artists and they sure seem like they know exactly what they’re doing. Reminding me of when Sympathy hit their stride in the nineties before he got White Stripes fad rich and crappedout. These HoZaks are the people who brought you books about Chris Isaak and James Calvin Wilsey, and like, Jeff Drake the rocknroll bankrobber. They’re a music label, too. HOT STUFF! CAN”T GET ENOUGH!
WAS KUCINICH THE LAST ANTI WAR DEMOCRAT? * FOLLOW REAL JOURNALISTS, LIKE ABBY MARTIN & GARLAND NIXON, SY HERSH & WHITNEY WEBB, ALL THE WRITERS DEPLATFORMED BY THE BIG MACHINE! WHAT HAPPEND TO JEREMY SCAHILL & AMY GOODMAN? SHEESH! IT’S SAD-THEY EVEN GOT TO CHOMSKY. YA KNOW? JOE LAURIA AND AARON GOOD BOOKS MAKE GOOD HOLIDAY GIFTS! ABBY MARTIN SELLS PSYCHEDELIC ARTWORK!
“Wow Ron DeSantis was the sole legal oversight officer for the whole Special Ops task force in the Anbar province of Iraq at the height of JSOC’s 2007 killing spree.” (-Seth Harp)
As a homeschooling primary caregiver to a kid with a disability, I got sucked into False-Book there for a couple of years and it was another trap for troubadours, big deadend time suck, and I was getting censored or FB-jailed all the time for antiwar posts all the time, the sillicon valley spy pigs made sure my posts had like a severely limited reach, which is why it has been a real treat that my righteous comrades in the worldwide freedom struggle have provided me with platforms outside of Zuck’s Censorverse. I was being hassled relentlessly by the infowar “fact checkers” for being offscript, actively opposed to the Pentagon’s bullshit Hillary Clinton cold war Russiagate propaganda narratives, until finally, the spooks just locked me out of my account. I only miss a few people from that social media world like Lo Daniels, Scott Bassman, Robert Ott, and Cindy Barnes MacDougal. I’m pretty antisocial nowadays. Tell Dorothy and Scarlet I said hello. And the Humpers. It is a crazy time to be alive, but we don’t really get to pick the hour we are born into. How the fuck did I end up in an era where the so called academics, the self proclaimed critical thinkers, are terrified of reading books, films, and new information and just wanna silence any voice that does not soothe them like their fucking massage “therapist” or NPR radio personality pimping wars, drones and torture in kindly ex hippie tones “for science and feminism”?! It’s a batshit time, everything seems Bizarro world universe, backwards and upside down-and has been like that since what, ’95? You got some big mouthed guitar player shouting down fucking scientists he thinks might threaten his special VIP backstage second hand celebrity status. Barowner celebrities beating up homeless guys and being applauded by their suckup for free drinks entrouge. It aint good, this dark path the techlords are leading all the need a fix, consumerist zombies, and latest thang upgraders, and obedient virtue signaling followers down. No sex in the champagne room, but they don’t get it, they think there’s a special prize for being assholes. Maybe there is. I dunno anymore. I just know everytime I get involved with the popularity sekers and the mad herd slogan repeaters, the collector scum and hipster capitalists, I get burned again and again and again and again. Start to feel like Charlie Brown, and the pigmedia is the teacher voice…”wha wha wha wha wha wha wha wah..” Better off in my garagey make believe world, like Snoopy n Woodstock having their imaginary adventures on his Red Baron flying doghouse. I used to live closer to where I thought the action was, but the closer I looked, the more I realize there really was no action, besides some oversized monkey bouncers in baseball caps and staff shirts punching out punk rockers, yuppies running ripoff record stores, and a buncha gentrifiers pressuring city hall to sick the kkkops on the poor people, and some trendy hustler rich kids fucking showing off their designer wardrobes and playing redundant covers in high dollar fake divebars for lawyers and hedge fund managers, fat actors, and slumming tourists, who just came to get their picture taken with the framed photo of Sid N Nancy or pay twenty bucks for a GG & The Jabbers burger. I aint really seen no real rock action since it was you and me makin’ a crazy racket way back in that derelict ghetto apartment together. I mean can ya really even count those fucking fratboys with the deep cocaine pockets who inherited a recording studio from their rich media pig parents? Their whiteboy Barry White covers or trustarfarian sidekick’s Formulaic Spooky Detective Rock? I mean, c’mon. Yeah they bought an echo machine. So what, they got nuthin’ to say and never did. And all the people on tv are millionaires who get paid their millions to lie to you for their billionaire bosses, and still the people continue to just mindlessly blame the other wing of the war party, or some external boogieman they know almost nothing about-like Assad or Hussein or Maduro or whoever. They think they’re gonna get some special cookie for pretending that another random blue suit mannakin Klaus Schwab sock puppet is the interim prez of Venezuela while the mercenaries and oil gougers keep trying to overthow more socialist democracies to plunder their oil, and you been trained to call that freedom like a ventriloquist dummy, cause your mom likes Pelosi. Or your wife’s mom. Some mean rich lady. Tells you what to think and who to vote for. How you need to get a third job and work harder while she drinks wine from a box and talks on the phone about how you aint good enough. Needs more pills. For science and diversity and Muslim girl’s rights in Afghanistan..”Stay At Home Moms are the hardest working people in the world!” The Oprah audience roars with it’s applause sign standing ovations, and then, there’s a giftbag under the seat, and here comes NY Times bestselling author/diet expert, Fat Doctor Phil to explain why your children need to be locked up if they aren’t already involved in some kinda ROTC program with plans to join the military for college money. This country has been fuckedup for a real long time. Judge Judy says you need a fourth job. TLC don’t want no scrubs.
“You talk about the high cost of living — and you vote to increase the cost of living every time you vote the capitalistic ticket. Are you a working man and in the capitalist’s party? What business have you there?” (-Eugene V. Debs)
“Isn’t it odd that all major media outlets under our “free press” system happen to agree on all social, economic & geopolitical issues?
If the press is “free,” then shouldn’t we see major philosophical differences on fundamental topics — like US military occupation of the planet?” (-Primo Radical)
“For the millionth time:
ANTIFA = Anti-fascist.” (-Peter Daou)
It’s hilarious seeing kids today screaming “NAZI” at everyone while wearing a NASA tee shirt.” (-Esostericbot)
Russia is now demanding that Europe pay for gas in rubles. Europe gets 40% of its gas from Russia. That’s 200-800 million euros per day. Putin is basically saying: you want to play sanctions? Either pay up in rubles or freeze.” (-Richard Medhurst)
“Ukrainians are ready to live without light and heat for two or three years”- Zelensky’s wife Olena says from one of her 4 mansions while her husband hides behind a green screen.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“Capitalism’s answer to ‘What about the poor?’ has always been ‘They should work harder,’ and its answer to ‘What about those who can’t work?’ has always been ‘They should die quickly.’ ” (— CaitlinJohnstone)
“Can’t stop thinking about how Warren Buffett, the owner of BNSF Rail, made more money in 1 day than it would cost to guarantee 15 paid sick days to rail workers. Buffett could avert a rail strike today by giving workers what they need: paid sick days. That’s how you give thanks.” (-Warren Gunnels)
“This app is crawling with freaks who seriously believe that nobody should be allowed to criticize the foreign policy of the most powerful government on earth. Right wingers correctly believe that liberals subscribe to an artificially constructed worldview designed by the powerful in the service of the powerful, but incorrectly believe that they themselves do not.
Common debates:
– Which status quo party is best – Which side of the culture war is correct – How the western empire should act – What capitalism should look like Uncommon debates: – Should status quo politics exist – Should the western empire exist
– Should capitalism exist”
“Our rulers will openly imprison a journalist for telling the truth and then self-righteously pontificate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting journalists.”
“It is cute to see North Americans going to the World Cup to preach about human rights in Qatar, where the US has a massive military base that it kills people from……”
““I believed that by revealing to the world the vital information that was being concealed, I would contribute to freedom and to make the world a better and safer place.”
“I wonder how many journalistic/human rights prizes Julian #Assange has to win before the absolutely outrageous persecution by the #US and #UK comes to an end and he is free. He hasn’t been since 2010.” (-Stefania Maurizi)
“The US literally created Al Qaeda through its proxy war in Afghanistan than allowed it to flourish by destroying the entire region via endless war yet we are supposed to believe that RUSSIA is a state sponsor of terrorism?
SBF is having Thanksgiving dinner in a penthouse with his family. The NYT will interview him next week. Amazon is already planning an eight-part mini series about it with two Marvel directors. … “clown world” doesn’t even begin to describe it.” (-Zack Voell)
“I feel strongly for the Ukrainian people. They have been lied to by corrupt politicians. They are pawns in the geopolitical games of a failing US Empire.
The US Govt doesn’t give a shit about Ukrainians or else they would have prevented this suffering when they had the chance.” (-Kim Dotcom)
“Those in charge of labeling ideas as “disinformation” are the most biased, duplicitous and propagandized people in the world. They do not care about objectivity. Their job is to discredit dissent and try to prevent the masses from realizing our “leaders” are corrupt psychopaths. The woman who was supposed to head up the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board — before embarrassingly being exposed as an unhinged lunatic — is now literally a foreign agent working with a British outfit to censor the American people.” (-Primo Radical)
“Some are finally realizing that this may very well be the last battle for humanity. That the ‘control’ which people tout as the reasoning behind everything, was already had through generations of nudging and prodding so why the sudden rush? There is now a ‘deadline’ it would seem and the question for me is: why?
If anything can be learned from the history of our benevolent ‘rulers’, is that they don’t shoot for single outcomes; multi-layered operations are the ‘norm’ and naivete and ignorance are their greatest weapons.
How unprepared we are for this battle; having been divided and conditioned over generations, to accept the life of serfdom or ‘slavery lite’ as ‘the best system in the world’ and as the only way to ‘live’.” (-by Sylvain Lamoureux)
“Interesting how the AP fired the junior journalist on the fake-news story but not his senior manager who was co-credited as an author of the article. Selective dismissal in order to create a scapegoat, indeed they should have both been sacked on the spot.” (-Uro)
“A society at war with itself with violence at the core of its cultural values. The real problem is that this pathological society is not just a threat to itself but to the world.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“If you want an example of how Americans hard working citizens lose trillions no matter whether the Dems or GOP get to be the face of the Empire, watch how the rulers got us to cheer them stealing billions from us on the proxy war in Ukraine” (-Black In The Empire)
If you grew up in the eighties, you were impacted by all those flicks-“I6 Candles”, “Some Kind Of Wonderful”, “Pretty In Pink”, all the Brat Pack shit, I don’t think it was a Hughes film but I always loved “Weird Science”. My only complaint with his movies is how the takeaway message was always sell out, growing up means marrying the rich dude. Remember the zany record store owner in “Pretty In Pink”, how she conforms for the money? That was always sad to me, and I knew way back then, I was never gonna do that. Somehow I went from being a Duckie character to being an Andie’s Dad tyope character as played by my fave actor, Harry Dean Stanton. His music was also pretty badass if you ask me. They repackaged all the John Hughes s/t tunes into a big Xmas boxset or something, I read about it on one of those Shitlib websites like Salon. He really did have pretty decent taste in music. But I never like when the system weaponzies our music against us. But he nailed it usually-Flesh For Lulu, Jesse Johnson Revue, New Order, the Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen. I wept many a tear to those songs over the decades. The OMD tune still cuts me up. “Someday…”
“I don’t want to hear about the protests in China when the U.S. had MILLIONS of people in the streets protesting police violence and still there hasn’t been an ounce of accountability for the thousands who have been killed by American cops.” (-Danny Haiphong)Man I been listening to a lotta last band that mattered, Mescaleroes lately, now that was about all I listened to in that decade when those records all came out-them and Ian Hunter’s “Rant” and maybe one ofr two by Manic Street Preachers, but less n less so as the years whizzed by. I was going through a real bad time, about twenty some years back, with the ex wife dumping me and taking my kids far, far away but with the kind and caring help of a brainy Boston fanzine publishing goth bombshell, I’d scraped together a shithole apartment in a crack neighborhood the rich trendies were in the process of gentrifying. Cops killed a “suspect” in our alley one night-shot ‘im 8 times and then yelled “drop your weapon”, it was later shown he had no weapon but they told the papers that he was coming at them to steal one of their wepons, but all the bullet holes were in his back, they hit him six times outta 8 shots fired. Me and my couuent girl who was there with me that night remained mighty traumatized by always seeing so much of that everyday kkkop violence so up close and personal like, on toppa the usual nazis and jock dickheads who were forever hounding me and my drunkroll black sheep brethern, we kept testifying to my former associates about all the horrors we’d gone through, but nobody cared really, they all just wanted to be on the WINNING TEAM. They were all prepared to look the other way no matter how many atrocoties were committed by the popular kid status quo, the local gentry, the establishment, the racist kkkops hired by corrupt barowners to push the poor people off the boulevard and outta sight of rich yuppies. The Scenester brunch dummies did not care what kinda stupid human tricks they would be obliged to perform at their Master’s command, they were up for anything, s’long as they got to keep their privilege lifestyles and cushy jobs working for bad people. I split that town for good soon after that but I do remember one real bad day when all my kids and their moms, and my mom and her husband, had all shown up at that shithole apartment in one day for various reasons, but then outta nowhere, my ace buddy Howie who is also sadly dead now, he came to my door unexepectedly. Drove all the way from Chicago to tell me Joe Strummer had died. I was of course devastated. Still am, really. I never really got over any of it. Joe was like my only guy. Only famous cat who mattered to me by then. Okay…Joe, Hunter, Baldwin, and Bill Hicks, we’ll say. This planet is a poorer place without them. ‘Miss Howie, too. Oh, man, it’s a little heartbreaking-all the tantalizingly shiny brand new boss as hell hipster product they love to dangle over our heads on “Record Store Day”. Of course, summa my best friends and I were record store dudes for years and years, until the corporate Alternative muzak sham attracted the suburban shopping mall people into what was formerly an outsider underground, and the big fluorescent lights got added, and all those capitalist nerds and mainstream, Nascar watching, fast food cargo shorts people who got the startup capital from their dead relatives sewed up the bootleg and cool vinyl markets, the squares came in, pushed the outcast bastards out, right? That was fucked up, and of course, I still remember being troubled in those hard times. Irony, they started peddling “irony”. “LOSER” t shirts worn by rich people. What they were saying to us working class dropouts and holdouts and anti hierarchy conscientous objectors is if you aint a richie, you aint shit, you can’t even be a loser, that role was already being monopolized by super rich kid, hipster culture appropriator supreme, Beck. Fuck man, I really started not liking even being around all the middle class grunge people with the shorts and combat boots and big ugly piercings and long green goatees. They’d charge ya three times what the mall wanted for the same shit and act like they were saintly indie martyrs. They’d put cartoons of all these old blues and country addicts on their gentrification logos but complain all day about poor people being unsightly drunks and undesirables. They’d all wanna shake hands with the famous old dudes being popularized by trust funded garage rockers but rip off all us compelte unknowns and broken hearted songwriters having to sell off all our most treasured possessions and autographed books and records and Prince movie teater standees for mere pennies in order to keep our electricty on. When those Jon Spencer rich people were coming in, I was goin’ out. Never liked Sonic Youth or the Beastie Boys that much, let alone their eight zillion college town imitator wannbes. Soundgarden clones were the worst. Now I see all the hoopla hype and fresh merch all over the internet and sometimes I get bitchy if I can’t be part of the acquiring of neat-o Santa wishlist stuff but you know, then I remember, I made my choice. I maybe coulda buttoned my lip and got some flannel and suckedup to the sports bar people and watched the fucking Simpsons and Friends and Portlandia and praised Fred Armisen and Dave Grohl and obeyed The Man and got purple yurt airbandb legal reefer faux woke and stayed in line with all the comic con dorks and “Guitar Hero” players, but I chose a different path, and that long and dusty desert trail brought me to a place without hipster swag on Record Store Day, and no object or collectible has ever made me happy, anyway, but yeah sometimes it’s hard not to covet the never ending assembly line of Seventies Punk Product. I still love all that rocknroll shit. It is how it is. I know the punk aint in the Collection, it’s in the way of life. Punk’s not dead, Joe’s in my head. “I don’t have any message other than don’t forget you’re alive…” I used to give all my books to people, most fequently, either my kids or ex bandmates, hoping they might find a flash on inspiration in the true stories of the old guard, but ya know looking back, it don’t seem like many of ’em even read those books, ya know, they never seemed to carry much of the old ideas with ’em any longer. I reccomend reading “The Ballad Of Joe Strummer” by Chris Salewicz, it’s really good, probably important, even. Joe called him “Sandwich”. Oh, man. My surly teen just konked out on the couch after refusing to take his medicine which means our evening is probably gonna be a rough one. I had a fantastic day with my lady love yesterday and for that I am deeply grateful, those are few n far in between, in these frosty days of obscene inflation, external pressure, fear mongering, proxy wars, non stop stress, and high anxiety. A friend’s spouse reset our water heater so we had hot water on the holiday but now it has stopped working again. As Gilda Radner used to say on SNL, “it’s always somethin’!” The town’s only remotely affordable second hand store closed for four days and none of us know what to do with ourselves.
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.’ (- Joe Strummer)
“After school, in 1970, I got into Central College Of Art in Southampton Row as I wanted to be a cartoonist, and I loved it, but at the back of my head was this need to be a musician.” (- Joe Strummer)
“A society at war with itself with violence at the core of its cultural values. The real problem is that this pathological society is not just a threat to itself but to the world.”
(-Ajamu Baraka)
BABYSHAMBLES
Evad turned me on to this Babyshambles lot. Pretty rad.
“In you I see all colors not just black and white…” (-King)
SHE CAME IN THE SUMMER
ARCADIA OR POWER STATION
I’m living in the 80’s. I hated fuckin’ grunge, what a lotta bullshit that was in the nineties-corporate “Alternative”, nasally bellowing Tarzans with gym memberships pretending to have smack habits for gloom and profit aint my scene, at all. I’m still very into new romantic, post-punk, eighties weirdo art rock and glam, ya know?
As a lovesick jilted teenager mooning forever over some arty new wave chick from the deepest Catholic school honky suburbs with a Tinkerbell heart and a cherry ice cream smile, I tended to be an Arcadia kid, now they seem a little bit daff, maybe like fourth rate warmed over Roxy Music, but believe me when I tell you, brothers and sisters and friends of the revolution, their gypsified, starlit, cinematic, heart on their velvet sleeve new romanticism meant everything to me back then. “Last Chance On The Stairway”, “Like An Angel”, “My Own Way” and “Hold Back The Rain”, too! Me and my old bassist Cowboy Bobby Cloyd saw them in concert so many times, they started recognizing us, and John Taylor was especially kind and generous towards us. I still love Duran Duran.
Of course, most all our dude rocker friends much preferred the loud lads on the tiles storm and bluster of The Power Station whose explosive cover of Bang A Gong was cool as hell and blasting out of every passing Transmaro and stoner van window for about two years or longer on a suckass radio station called 92 Zoo. A shame they were too rich and famous and coked out on the champagne and super models to write more good songs and Palmer split, cause that was a badass band they had for five minutes.
Do you remember that time in your life when every fucking single song made you think of a girl you loved but never married?
BOOTSY X & THE LOVEMASTERS
When one of my old pals from the eighties first tried to get me into this guy, Bootsy X, I just was not vibein’ it, I was not from that particular town and therefore did not subscribe to their fanatical sports patriotism, where you’re supposedly obliged to love everything local. Took me a minute to really get it, but once I got it, I got it. Man, first time I met Bootsy, I thought the dude was a crazy, raving maniac speed freak spilling drinks and doing Honk Kong Fooey moves, talkin’ ’bout James Brown and breakdancing like Turbo and Ozone. Turned out he was one of the most righteous dudes on the planet-offered to let me and my old lady stay at his place when I was homeless post-divorce-he had like nothin’ in the way of middle class bullshit but was willing to roll out a piece of carpet in the corner for a rocknroll amigo. Then, his place burnt down, sadly, lost a buncha rocknroll souvenirs, but soldiered bravely on, like we do. I remember one night when my band friend was playing with one of his other bands outta town and I was briefly staying at his house, me, Bootsy, and their girlfriends went to some bars and you could not keep up with Bootsy, who was like, bang zoom, whoa, wah wazzat? Like, the fastest man alive, high fivin’, ass grabbin’, glad handin’, talkin’ a million miles an hour, drinks galore. I’d been known to have a taste of alcohol every once in awhile to break the ice in those years, but this cat made me look like an old lady, insisting, no, DEMANDING he should play drums in my flash metal punk rock goth gang. The guitar player at the time unfortunately vetoed that idea cause I dunno, musicians are always lookin’ for some kinda technical proficiency, but me, I was always aligning myself with the most rocknroll motherfuckers I could find, not necessarily the ones with the most virtuosity or biggest amps, or like mommy/daddy trustfund budgets, I have always most preferred the crazy motherfuckers with the face tattoos and maybe some problems, like the people with the big hearts and even bigger personalities. We had a wildass bassplayer who was a million laughs, why not also a wildass drummer? Anyways, I think of that guy pretty frequently nowadays, as we became pretty close friends and talked on the phone alot when we were both going through our hard times. He might not be here in the flesh no more, but his legacy remains. RISE IN POWER BOOTSY X! VIVE LE PUSHERMAN OF LOVE!
“Denton’s Jesus reflects American consumerism dunked in fast food sludge and deep fried. The failed American Dream is drowning in Thunderbird and bottom shelf whiskey and desperately searching for some sort of answer. Finding Jesus is a pilgrimage for the lost, the damned, the drugged and drunken outcasts American capitalism devours by the millions.
Denton’s altar of saints shine their flickering lights out into the stygian void. Each poem a votive candle of remembrance and honor. Denton offers up prayers for the disabused, the spit on, the murdered, the holy eaten up by a hungry world spinning towards insatiable darkness.”–A.S. Coomer, author/poet/singer-songwriter
“Thank God and all his angels for saints like Dan Denton who continue to commit their hearts to the page in these assfuck shitsplat days of so much relentless mindless merciless nada. It’s all noise. It’s all nonsense. I watch Janis howl at Monterey Pop for the hundredth or so time and add “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Aneurysm” to another playlist (where did you sleep last night? In Leadbelly’s shadow with nothing in my pocket but a losing lottery ticket) and console myself with collages and books and the occasional trek to the magic shop because I’m still lighting candles and communing with the moon even though we are both so scarred and so tired. Then I read Dan Denton or Charles Bukowski or Kathy Acker and remember that I am not alone. There will always be war (sorry, John and Yoko…a lot of us imagine but it seems there is plenty to kill and die for) and injustice and poverty and busted pay phones and not nearly enough quarters. But sometimes the light breaks through. Thank God and all his angels for Michele McDannold. Love still exists. Here is proof.”–Misti Rainwater-Lites, ebullient poet extraordinaire
“The matriarch of a royal family legacy of slave-trading, imperialism, colonialism, theft, symbol of opulence and mascot for the ruling class is dead the media will now parade the queen’s zombie ass in front of u while telling u that overthrowing capitalism is not what we need.” (-Boots Riley)
“I don’t criticize Democrats cuz I side with Republicans, I criticize Democrats Cuz THEY side with Republicans. Our fight is not Left/Right anymore, it is Us vs.Them. We have 2 corporate party’s that serve Wall St/War Machine/Corporations & crush everyone else.” (-Jimmy Dore)
“The DNC Resolutions Committee just refused to allow a vote on a resolution aimed at banning dark money from the party’s primary process. This follows a long pattern of the Democrats posing as if they are against dark money in our elections while they are being funded by it.” (-Ryan Knight)
“No AC in our classrooms, teacher to student ratio is 40:1, 80% of our students live at or below poverty level. But yeah let’s go ahead and give cops housing subsidies lll…that’ll help us.” (-Nicole Donanian-Blandon)
“Trip wires for WW III are being laid right now. We’re all in the target hairs of war profiteers.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“So you know my story We’ll I’ll tell you a secret Inside I was certain Inside I was crying out for more Now I’m roaming through seats that are empty To find my destination Will you touch my fascination once again? It’s like a memory that will last Like a postcard from the past Yesterday is history It’s there for all the world to see It’s like a memory that will last Like a postcard from the past My future seems wide open And tomorrow’s never broken
“So come on…”
(-Billy Fuckin’ Idol)
“The essence of trauma is loss of contact with yourself, loss of connection to yourself.” (— Dr. Gabor Maté)
“BREAKING: Queen Elizabeth II is dead. Her royalty was built atop the mass graves and pools of blood spilt across the world to enrich the British colonial empire. Queens are not heroes. Queens are colonizers, exploiters, pillagers, and plunderers. That is the true legacy of Queen Elizabeth II.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Everyone who believes in journalism should be on Assange’s side. Julian Assange must be defended because the elites want him locked up.” – Lee Camp Support the film here: https://gofund.me/ebd7821f
WORRIED LIFE BLUES
My hands are all torn up from landscaping, blisters are split open, feet and knees hurt from all the bending-hacking-digging-pulling, got a lot of household chores and adult responsibilities to carry out today. Relatives with medical problems, relatives who disappeared from our lives, bullshit bad electric fuckin’ bills. I peeked into my “sent” folder this morning and see I already have about eight of these fucking glorified social media columns waiting for publication on the online underground rocknroll fanzines I contribute to. Not sure anybody even reads ’em cause the deep state controlled algorithms, or if any young person learns anything from the cool music and indie-media I link to, but I got too much goin’ on to go stand at the stoplight with a sign and get hollered at by Fox watching idiots in big white trucks. I did that shit in Eugene, ruined my nice hat in the rain resulting in snobby librarians profiling me as homeless, and all it accomplished was a buncha elitist fratboy types and rightwing dicks got to cleverly, and oh so originally yell, “get a job!” Also some booj-pig gender worshippers got to lecture me tediously about my cys born heteronormative pass privilege or some shit like that. as a cute way of deflecting from the fact that they gouged everybody’s rent and none of them would hire me to work at their hipster popularity businesses cause my pro nouns weren’t of their preferred variety and they all knew my wife had been fired from the woman’s shelter for not speaking Spanish or being a diversity token-she was “too white” according to the non profit special privilege hustlers. So yeah, we are the wrong kind of non conformists everywhere we go. A fag in the midwest, a redneck oppressor in the gentrified and oh so sweetly genteel vibrant and diverse AOC believin’ red carpet college towns. Now we are being pushed from our deadend street by developers and corrupt city code enforcers and oversized kkkop intimidation squads, to make room for a buncha condos and Mcmansions nobody’s gonna wanna pay a half a million dollars for cause we live across the street from the waste treatment plant that stinks of shit most of the year, but the swells are banking on out of state home buyers not knowing what that building is over there. My selfless and saintly old lady has been doing a lot of intense labor for some rich world travelling artist lady, the daughter of two millionaire professors, and her new dream is relocating our family into one of her many empty unfinished properties in the more dangerous part of town sometime before Christmas cause there’s no furnace in this rickety old trailer that leaks and has plumbing problems and who wants to do another cold winter without sufficient heating in the deadend desert? Meanwhile, thanks to youtube,Tik Tok and pig-media programming, our fifteen year old just wants Gucci status symbols, and the other kids don’t communicate with us at all, anymore-we’re not sure why, something happened they were told not to tell us about, but ultimately, I’m pretty sure it’s mostly cause they were taught by the other side of the family to think of us as overly emotional Beverly Hillbilly paranoid drunken antisocial anarchists. Bad beat poets, crazy hoodlums, outsider uneducateds. The hideously ungentrified “OTHERS!” Poverty might be contagious. They don’t want me hippin’ ’em to too much Slade, T. Rex, Nikki Giovanni, or Noam Chomsky-ya know what I mean? Hurts to be estranged from loved ones. The connected motherfuckers who could’ve helped us succeed, back when we were two steps from the move, sabotaged us instead, ripped us off, wrote us off, mutinied, took delight from our ripple effect hardships, acted like they don’t even KNOW us, now. Declared themselves winners and told their wives it was all cause I was born to lose, and had it comin’. Shoulda gone to college or married up. Then they toast and demand the waitress refreshen their drinks. Fuck the ratrace shit. I aint trying to be in no bruncher mimosa club with those no talent, skinny tie money motherfuckers. I love poor people. I try not to complain, but as we get older, the heavy lifting and blue collar shit work can be a bitch on the body. It aint all glamour. Aint all shiny shoes and booze galore no more.
My old playgrounds, my former stomping grounds, are all lilywhite and creepy Dizneyfied by the rich. Entire zipcodes of name dropping, fifth hand, vicarious living rule followers with big posters of The Damned or The Jam on every wall, big coffeetable books about Basquiat or Blondie, but they are all just TOO posh and polite to consort with lowlife gutter dwelling hobo anarchist traveler gypsy caravan antifa forever people like me and my closest family. They’re all so posh. OH SO POLITE! Pro Noun perfection and gender studies extra credit educated at the Shitlib University. Pure as the driven snow, just so highbrow and puritanical and whitey might polite up in them sky high syringe-phallic ivory towers. Am I the only one who’s sick to death of those phony fuckers-the Scrooge McDuck me, first overstuffed swells in the balcony? I’ll tell you what is scarring to bear-when your own loved ones were trained to hate or fear poor people, but allowed to be in proximity of predator rich people, all because of capitalist hierarchies and rich people family secrets. Holy shit, that stuff is tough. Bad stuff obviously happened to people I love and to this day, nobody even told me the truth about what, or why, or who or what really happened. I always understood Morrissey when he said, the past never dies, not really…”I am the past”. I remain a walking landmark to something other than this bullshit Metaverse programming reset sham, a relic from a more rebellious time, another state of mind, and I’m not trying to follow the trends or make excuses for Bill Gates or Hillary Clinton or any evil showbiz predator classers. I still like Poison Idea outta Portland-they were right about everything, man.
Man, I am sorta repulsed nowadays whenever I see summa that instafame phony monarch beta kitten programmed MK ultra cultist Kanye Kardashian Kult VMA’s/Tiki Tok/showbiz slavery/Lil Nas X/Youngblud/Miley Cyrus occult bullshittery they do on non stop on all the awards shows now. In the punk rock days, people were free to freak freely and do their own thing and be themselves tonight. The B 52’s and Fleshtones were a big fun, all inclusive dance party for all, but that’s a farcry from this nu mandatory gender cult, nobody should have to be or do, or wear anything that does not represent themself. When we blurred gender in the sevnties and eighties it was not because we were being top-down peer-pressure obliged by the sicko in the secret society lording over the kidnapped underage kids at the blackmail temple on the cult island. I feel awful for all the young people who are media hostage to the Masonic Schwab Illuminati Reset dystopia creeps. I’m gonna miss the B-52’s though, they were always about love, freedom, and fun, and individuality. That’s my kinda jam-free to be you and me, not being manipulated by some depraved billionaire Weinstein slave owners or Maxwell groomer handlers. The government you still stupidly believe in has admitted it human traffics and that billionaires from the Mega Group and people like Epstein sex enslave people for blackmail purposes but nobody from the Lolita Express logs seems to ahve been penalized except for Maxwell and Weinstein, Cosby, and Kevin Spacey, but the list of Davos fatcats and politicians who vaca at Epstein islands is lengthy.
Man this society is so sick, it celebrates and rewards known war criminals, racist police state goons, cable tv spooks, torturers like the Cheney family, mass murderers, drone assassins, and even gross rich people who are irrefutably inappropriate around children-like Gropey Joe for instance, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates-all those Epstein Island people, Hillary laughing about having Gaddafi’s corpse bayonetted and dragged through the streets “for feminism”, it’s all objectionable and problematic–not just Trump. What’s weird is how everybody who owns property or went to college is able to overlook all the unforgivable evils of the rich, but never, never, never seem to even briefly stop yakkin’ away about the presumed sins of the poor and working classes. Who was it that said, “work is the curse of the drinking classes?” Joyce? MacGowan? Hell, I’ve always had some yap yap yapping fake puritans and hypocritical haves gossiping from their perpetual barstools about how me or my former bandmates drank too much alcohol, but all these same bullshit squares were all known to be problematic long term boozers and winebox moms and cocaine habit with the haves and the bonghits fratboys, themselves. I aint no puritan or temperance leaguer. I was a ruffly shirted sparrow years before the Captain in those pirate movies. Sometimes a bit sloppy/emotional? Sure. Maybe a wee bit known to slur some words from time to time, or engage in all sorts of crazy clad, new wave club kid, bozo buffoonery and daredevil divebar daffy duckery after midnight on a social occasion? Yeah, hell yeah, we did get known for our all week house parties and dawn’s early light, singalong all night, helpless laughter rabble rousings. We grew up on “Animal House”, “Blue Brothers” and classic Van Halen. WHAT YOU MAY FIND OBJECTIONABLE OR PROBLEMATIC IS NOT THE SAME AS WHAT I FIND OBJECTIONABLE AND PROBLEMATIC-IF YOU ARE ALL GIDDY WITH EXCITEMENT OVER THE METAVERSE OR HARRY STYLES, KATY PERRY OR BEYONCE, WE AINT ON THE SAME PAGE AT ALL. I did love punk rock, heavy metal, new wave and edgy, provocative comedy and gonzo truth tellers. From Mother Jones to Gore Vidal, from Ture Kwame to John Trudell, from Assata Shakur to Whitney Webb, you dig? We weren’t made to fuckin grovel and take little tests and stand in line and follow your dresscodes, not then and not now. We loved Hunter S. Thompson, Paul Mooney, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, and Bill Hicks. It is not our job to make middle class college people who take offense from Joe Rogan interviewing Kennedys, or Chappelle not being Trans enough, or any other gaslighting creepy double standard, identity politricks bullshit artists like Cait Jenner or Kardashian occultist shitlib Hillary voters, feel good about themselves. I find the cancel culture offensive. I find Facebook censoring real science offensive. I am offended by corporate media propagandists. All those Lady Gaga cannibal shows on Netflix offend me. The police state offends me-your bullshit phony baloney drug war offends me. Your middle class P.C. B.S. affectations. Why do booj people think having a piece of paper gives them some kinda cloak of invisibility, like the whole world can’t see them snorting the cocaine whenever they see their sister, or the rich old man gambling all day on the casino boat, or you with the medicine cabinet overflowing with pain pills and a flask in your Batgirl purse, a little nip after brunch, all of ’em always wrestling with their own problems, addictions, afflictions, mental illnesses, compulsive behaviors, or other unseemly, desperate social clawings, while they point their fingers at the poor people? It’s a put on, the whole daytime people sham of ha-ha holier than thou, or having shit free stink, just because they got some nametag with a title on it or a boat or a set of keys. I can’t stand the fuckin’ Tipper Gore crowd and never could. The shitlibs are just humorless Jerry Falwells with pink hair. Bitter and uptight and uncool authoritarian J. Edgar Hoovers or Lindsey Grahams, in a dress. But I repeat myself. I don’t care what you wear, or how you like to get down with other consenting adults, or what you eat or snort or drink or smoke, it’s not my business, but hey, Sniffy, leave those kids alone. And for heaven’s sake tell your kid he don’t gotta wear a dress if he don’t want to!
Last of the last of the wild bandido hobo jungle ghost town frontier kings still seeking: guitar, bass, drums, maybe even synths, for Wild Wild West outlaw cowpunk, torch n twang, gypsy joker jazzpunk, bonfire traveler/trainhoppin’ trail songs, spaghetti western glam, and elderly goth revolution rock band. A bit like Joe…
“On this Labor Day, remember that this is a scam holiday meant to divert the attention of workers in the U.S. from celebrating International Workers Day on May 1st with the rest of the socialist and progressive world” (-Danny Haiphong)
“I am tired of this narrative that Democrats are saving democracy from Republicans because it’s not true. Democrats do not believe in democracy. They are one half of the corporate oligarchy & the far more sinister half as they pose as our ally right before stabbing us in the back.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Secrecy-keeping the people and Congress in the dark-is the cancer eating at the vitals of democracy. What is remarkable about all the official hullabaloo by government officials, who leak plenty themselves, is that there never is any indictment or prosecution of government big wigs who continually suppress facts and knowledge in order to carry out very devastating actions like invading Iraq under false pretenses and covering up corporate contractors abuses. The morbid and corporate-indentured secrecy of government over the years has cost many American lives, sent Americans to illegal wars, bilked consumers of billions of dollars and harmed the safety and economic well-being of workers.” (-Ralph Nader)
“Biden/Nuland and company have used the Ukrainian ultra nationalist’s hatred of Russia to manipulate them into throwing their entire nation into a meat grinder on behalf of an absurd doomed neocon project. Hate is a poison that kills its owner.” (-Garland Nixon)
DNC BACKSTABBERS ONLY CARE ABOUT BILLIONAIRES, MORE WARS, TECHSURVEILLANCE AND PANDEMIC PROFITS!
“If you think the DNC is going to rein in dark money, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. “The 2020 election saw more than $1 B in dark money spending … driven by an explosion of secret donations boosting Democrats” – Open Secrets” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“This represents limitations & contradictions of neoliberal brand of feminist politics. It is vulgar identity politics at its worst. It will have you reject radical black feminist reproductive justice framework for narrow liberal abortion demands & supporting a fascist.” (-Ajamau Baraka)
It’s Labor Day and I got hours of landscaping in the hot sun with the mutant mosquitoes to perform today and I gotta find out if the post office is open before I carry boxes across town.
So I hate being pushed around by the evil forces of gentrification, all the people who inherit surplus properties from their ancestors seem so content to jack up rents and push the working class from view. I’ve always been a power to the people punk rock frontman-singer-songwriter, but the ex bandmates all went solo, or gave up and retired, or joined big budgeted fame hag name brands with legit marquee value, or pay to play karaoke clownish novelty cover bands, so that whole rocknroll adventure’s slowed down to almost a halt in spite of my prolific outpouring of Songs. ‘Worked at record stores, til they got bought up by fucking detestable capitalist, pretentious assholes who only wanna hire younger females who don’t threaten their authority in any way, so now, I’m just like the record store guy online, via my columns and reviews. Always ended up retreating to the hot, wet kitchens cause as a dishwasher, I get the least hassle from “bring us more ice, bread, olive oil, extra straws”/no tip types. I can’t successfully interface with mimosa brunchers, Strokes fans, or Lyn Cheney worshippers, so I’m better off elbows deep in the dish galley, scrubbing away, in the hairnet and wet apron. Nowadays, I keep ending up performing more backs of the poor, blue collar labor for posh people and let me tell ya, I got blisters on my hands and my feet and knees hurt. Tonight, I go back to landscape some impossibly overgrown yard for someone who has many sitting empty houses, so many people around here end up working for the ranchers taking care of properties, farming, gardening, caregiving that’s where the only hustle is. The gulf has gotten so big, you got the oligarchs and lower ranking land barons on one side being insatiable gobblers of all things, and us serfs and peasants being reduced to on call slaves, indentured servants, day workers, movers. They snap and we come running with the toolbelts and plungers and hedgeclippers and weedwhackers. Stupid people have asked me why I always interrupt your regularly scheduled collector scum conversations about how bitchen it is that you own more Johnny Thunders bootlegs from Japan than some kid one third your age does, but he says, he knows somebody from the Biters so take THAT, to amplify the voices of insurgent activist groups and people’s movement organizers? Well, it’s cause the bad guys that run society have infiltrated all the traditional organizations like the ACLU and Amnesty and now, all those orgs act as propagandists for the war machine, all the celebrities, too. Just look at ex progressive, Jon Stewart, praising full fledged nazis at Disneyland to help promote the wars on Russia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, China, etc. Rolling Stone and Spin are both platforms for the big 5 techfascist tyranny agenda as well, all the radicals and leftists have been purged from pig-media and every tech-platform. The fraudsquad sheepdog models won’t even take phonecalls from Ralph Nader or Winona LaDuke anymore. Pig-media wants to pretend the Dems and Republikkans are different but they aren’t really, they just trot the old tried and true wedge issues out every five to ten years to get us slaves babbling about guns and gender rather than uniting against tyrannical megalomaniacal overlords, cashless society microchip maniacs, panopticon surveillance techfascism, and forever wars. Trump still babbles to racist mobs about killing drug dealers to reduce crime which is just his usual red meat to the rightwing base dog whistling-kill the poor black drug dealers, but the real kingpins are all high ranking oligarchs and CIA honkies and governments controlled by Nato and shit and he is well aware of that, he gives fools false hope, of “restoring order”…just like Sanders and company do on the shitlib fake center…”reduce crime”, ha. AS IF the whole oligarchy aint in on the black market drug trade that funds the black ops and homeland psy ops, as well as the forced labor in drugwar private prisons profiteering (*Just See Kamala Harris’ resume) and let us not forget how invested Congress is in Blackrock and Vanguard the Borg like unstoppable Bill Gates billionaire monopolies that own all the Big Pharmaceutical Companies profiting from endless prescription drug racketeering and forced new vaccinations and boosters and new variants and updates and Bird Flu and Mad Cow and Monkeypox, etc. etc. etc. Both parties are fascist, so let’s quit the pretense of there being some kind of lesser evil.
MY FRIEND PAUL K. WAS A LEONARD COHEN OR TOM WAITS LEVEL GENIUS
Sometimes, I’m glad he aint here to have to behold the heartless shitshow all around us but I do miss him an awful lot. Not that many people ever got me like PK did. We were birds of a feather. (RIP)
ALL THOSE TECHFASCIST CREEPS HAVE BEEN PURGING LEFTIST TRUTHTELLERS LIKE OLIVER STONE, ABBY MARTIN, LEE CAMP, AND CHRIS HEDGES FROM SOCIAL MEDIA AND YOUTUBE. AMPLIFY THE DISSIDENT WHISTLE BLOWER JOURNALISTS, INDIE MEDIA, AND WORKING CLASS RESISTANCE!
“It’s pretty disturbing when you have law enforcement working for a private corporation and furthering their agenda.”
Enbridge is still not charged for reckless damage to rivers and aquifers.” (-Honor The Earth)
Check out the Water is Life Official Playlist on Spotify – Sun, Sept 4th Bayfront Park – Duluth, MN The “WATER IS LIFE” festival featuring Ani Difranco, The Indigo Girls, Allison Russell, Dessa, Tia Wood, Keith Secola, Annie Humphrey + MORE
“Julian Assange is slowly dying in a maximum security prison because he told the truth. ” (-Ralph Nader)
“While some Western countries call for peace, the Pentagon has signed a $182-million deal with an American arms manufacturer to produce advanced surface-to-air missile systems for the Ukrainian military IN LATE 2024.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“Our politicians don’t hate each other, they make us hate each other.” (-Black In The Empire)
“When it comes to the Ukraine proxy war, there is zero difference policy-wise between self-identified progressives like Bernie aide @mattduss
and neocons like Lindsay Graham.” (-Aaron Mate’)
“It’s for his #1 hit: High Treason in Syria feat. David Petraeus, Hillary Clinton, John O. Brennan, Robert Ford, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Produced by the CIA, Daily Beast, MI-6, Prince Bandar bin Sultan and Israel’s Likud Party.” (-Scott Horton on Obama Emmy)
“In his “Soul of America” address, Biden cited Michael Luttig as a hero of democracy. Luttig is a right-wing ex-federal judge who resigned because Bush tried Jose Padilla in a civilian court. Luttig wanted civilians detained in military brigs indefinitely. Oh, and Luttig, the defender of democracy and former clerk for Antonin Scalia, went on to work for Boeing.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Democracy? The U.S. is a capitalist dictatorship with a form of governance structured to obfuscate that reality. One essential element of the fight in the U.S. is the fight for democracy which translates into the fight against the dictatorial rule of capital.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“The two factions of the US Capitalist Imperialist Party agree on 95% of issues, such as: -war on China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Cuba, Venezuela -illegal sanctions -support for apartheid Israel -bailing out Wall Street -giving corporations infinite power.” (-Benjamin Norton)
“Obama should be tried for war crimes. But the U.S rewards war criminals with awards, metals & promotions, while claiming everyone else is the problem.” (-Fiorella Isabel on the can’t look back guy who gave billions to Wall Street, covered up Bush crimes, provided cover for Flint poisoning politicians and BP ecocide in the Gulf)
“It’s good the west banned RT, otherwise westerners might consume propaganda.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“I don’t criticize Democrats cuz I side with Republicans, I criticize Democrats Cuz THEY side with Republicans. Our fight is not Left/Right anymore, it is Us vs.Them. We have 2 corporate party’s that serve Wall St/War Machine/Corporations & crush everyone else.” (-Jimmy Dore)
“The white house is owned by the plutocracy and openly calls for censorship while continuing to prosecute Assange. Maybe look up the definition of fascism at some point?” (-Robert Faison)
“If Ukraine is a democracy, why does it have a hit list of critics that it wants to silence?” (-Danny Haiphong)
“If you’re so committed to your narrative that using Ukrainians as cannon fodder is a good thing, I recommend owning it, rather than omitting countervailing facts.” (-Aaron Mate’)
“Approved with no human data, no assurances of safety or efficacy, and no demand from the US public revealed by CDC. The question on the table for fall campaign: are Americans going to succumb or are they going to have enough strength, resolve, backbone to say: “no more” ?” (-Peter McCullough)
went on Fox News to talk about how both parties are corrupt and put corporations and billionaires over everyday people. Telling the truth about the U.S. oligarchy to millions of people is good actually. What’s weird is thinking this is bad.” (-Ryan Kight)
“Democrats: Medicare for All is too expensive! Also Democrats: Let’s give Ukraine $228 million per day in military aid to prolong war with Russia!” (-Danny Haiphong)
“You won’t hear it in mainstream media but people all over Europe are starting to resist the NATO proxy war en masse.” (-Wyatt Reed)
“Jon Stewart sounds like the same intellectually incurious right wingers he made a career off of mocking All these rich celebs are class loyal first and foremost when will people learn? People really think Jon Stewart is progressive because he supports healthcare only for people who served the war machine” (-Revolutionary Blackout Network)
“He did take orders straight from Obama.” (-Margaret Kimberly)
I used to have some bands influenced by the Gun Club, but you know how it goes-a couple guys died, a couple guys still mad somebody ran up their phonebill thirty years ago, or just married up and only socialize with richer people, or became so willfully derelict they can’t be bothered to do anything besides their drug of choice or whatever. It’s sad. I still wanna rock like the motherfuckers. I got it. Watch me. I got it.
GRASS ROOTS MEANS D.I.Y, REJECT FUNDING FROM BOOJ PIGS! ORGANIZE RESISTANCE! STAY INDIE! STAY FREE!
“Palin (R) complained that #RCV allowed Begich’s (R) voters to support Peltola (D) with their 2nd choice votes. But Palin has it backwards. Liberating people to vote for candidate over party is one of the great things about RCV. We need it in every state!” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Not just Czech Republic but many in Europe are pushing back. Hundreds of German citizens protested the delivery of weapons to Ukraine. In Kassel, protestors blocked the entrance to the arms factory of the Rheinmetall corporation. The police used batons & tear gas against them.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“Barbara Ehrenreich a true and kind voice for working poor women. She illuminated the fear and despair the US working woman is subjected to in order to survive.” (-JoAnne Beemon)
“So saddened by the passing of great author/activist Barbara Ehrenreich. Whether focusing on the working poor or the motives behind war, Barbara was witty, biting, moving and deep. We at @CODEPINK
are grateful for her support of the anti-war movement and will miss our dear sister.” (-Medea Benajmin)
“The U.S. used chemical weapons in Korea and Vietnam. The U.S. used chemical weapons in Iraq. The U.S. used chemical weapons in Syria. The U.S. “rules-based international order” is global terrorism, torture, and war.”
(-Danny Haiphong)
“It’s pretty easy to get people to believe lies when you can convince them to only listen to what you say.” (Black In The Empire)
“A crucial policy of the Trump administration remains, and that is Cuba’s presence on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. It is critical to Cuba’s ability to pursue economic, trade and humanitarian activities that it be removed immediately from the list.” (-Col. Ann Wright)
“American propaganda is like a comic book. It’s always framed as absolute evil vs absolute good with no in between and people have been conditioned to think that way for the last 80 years.” (-Agrippa)
“Americans will quickly tell you they don’t trust the media, politicians, and corporations but immediately not only fall in line and believe everything they tell them when it comes to war or something like Covid but attack the people telling them they’re being lied to again.” (-Black In The Empire)
‘That’s Terrifying’: Blackrock, State Street & Vanguard Control the World Dr. Robert Malone: “According to New York Times, Blackrock is going to control, through a board membership and stock ownership, well over 90% of all the corporations in the US within the next three years.”
“China doesn’t have 800+ military bases around the world. Russia doesn’t sanction 39 countries. Neither country is engaged in seven bombing campaigns abroad. That would be the United States, the imperialist hegemon and kingpin of chaos.” (Danny Haiphong)
Capitalism Has No Solution To Ecocide: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative MatrixCaitlin JohnstoneSep 4Listen to a reading of this article:❖”Those who make peaceful revolution impossible get to just stay in power indefinitely and suffer no meaningful consequences of any kind.” ~ John F Kennedy (paraphrased)❖Ecocide will continue as long as ecocide is profitable. No possible iteration of capitalism can address this problem. This, in and of itself, is a sufficiently strong argument that capitalism must be abandoned.No model where human behavior remains driven by profit can address the problem that ecocide will continue as long as ecocide is profitable. That’s why so many capitalism proponents are reduced to simply pretending that ecocide isn’t a problem.Eco-consciousness and anti-capitalism go hand in hand, but the liberals are dominating environmentalist discourse while the commies frequently neglect it. This is a strategic and moral error. This is the strongest argument against capitalism, and it’s one which needs to be made.❖ It can take a while for a principled antiwar leftist to learn that in the big picture they have very little in common with so-called progressives who mostly ignore US imperialism and just want the empire to forgive their student loans. The difference between a leftist who opposes capitalism and empire and your average Bernie Sanders progressive is considerably greater than the difference between your average Bernie Sanders progressive and your average MSNBC Clintonite.None of this means progressives can’t be worked with on points of convergence, it just means they’re ideologically different and it serves no one to pretend otherwise. The same is true of antiwar right-libertarians. Ultimately there’s commonality wherever class interests align.❖ I’m as distrustful as anyone of the new mainstream UFO narratives, but when congress is saying UFOs are a threat that is “expanding exponentially“, it probably deserves attention. I don’t know why they’re saying it, but they’re not saying it for no reason. There’s an agenda here, whether it’s weaponizing space or running cover for new military technology or just securing more money for the military-industrial complex. I’m not willing to commit to any position on what exactly they’re up to, but they’re clearly up to something.Not many people from my sector of the political fringe are looking at this, and I think that’s partly because there’s so much uncertainty and partly because it doesn’t really fit into any of our models for understanding the world. But whatever it is, it’s worthy of at least some attention.❖The more information that comes out about the effectiveness of psychedelics in treating psychological trauma the more outrageously criminal it looks that these medicines have been suppressed for generations while the world was being destroyed by a highly traumatized species.❖We’ve all had the experience of wanting to change something undesirable about our behavior but not being able to. This happens because the forces driving that behavior are not yet conscious. This is what’s happening with the self-destructive behavior of humanity as a whole, too.There’s a misconception in our society that people stop their self-destructive behavior when they apply “willpower”, which is really just empty head noises. Actually people change when there’s an expansion of consciousness. That’s what we’re waiting on with the human species too.That’s ultimately why we’re destroying our planet despite knowing it’s bad for us. We can talk all we want about capitalism, corruption, empire and ecocide, but underneath it all what we’re really looking at is the struggle of a thinking species to become a conscious species.So for me the answer to the “what can we do?” question is usually, expand consciousness. Spread awareness of what’s going on in the world, expand our consciousness of what’s going on in ourselves, anything you can do to bring awareness to previously unconscious important matters.And people are already doing this. That’s all healthy activism generally is: people working to spread awareness of an important issue. That’s also what real journalism is, it’s what real political dissent is, and what authentic spirituality is. It’s all about expanding awareness.Working toward a healthy humanity is essentially the task of strolling through the dark hallways of our collective unconscious and flicking on the lights, one by one. It’s not easy, but the more lights get switched on the more awake people there will be helping us switch on the rest of them.”
TO MY FRIENDS WHO PRETEND-BELIEVE THE USA ELECTIONS ARE REAL AND FAIRLY COUNTED IN SPITE OF DIEBOLD REBRANDED AS PREMIER, THE FIX IS IN.
They’re not, the DNC private services corporation argued bluntly in court they have the right to ignore the platform of the rank and file and backroom cigar chomper install whoever they see fit. For freedom. Ha. All Lies and identity puppets marketing. and notice how foreign policy never changes and even domestic policy is mostly about giving handouts to the rich, superfunding the racist mass incarceration, and giving more weapons of war to vassal states and proxy armies to overthrow sovereign nations, but ganking us with two thousand dollar rents. People on the Breitbart/Bannon/Maga right are still complaining about those stupid checks people got two years ago when Fauchi/Gates closed all the independent businesses so now only Amazon and Wal Mart and Pfizer and Ebay are really making money. I know everybody who is talking about Vanguard and Blackrock and Bill Gates taking over the world one farm, pharma company, regulatory agency or Klaus Schwab Future Leader’s Puppet at a time, or how bogus it is that Congress keeps shoveling more billions every few days for the Ukraine or Israeli governments to buy weapons while moaning about too many guns in the so called homeland police state, letting common people in the USA, USA do without clean water, affordable groceries, or rent, or afforadable insulin, when there are no living wage jobs for anybody who did not inherit big money or go to college, everybody who talks about those things online is being Facebook jailed or having their accounts frozen by deep state narrative managers. Lo Daniels, from Dandelion Salad longtime leftist antiwar blogspot got the same freezeout censorship and shadow bans from tech platforms I did, but all the sniveling thank Obamas cheer for more censorship, anything the oligarchs disapprove of is branded disinformation. The techfascists with their so called algorithms suppress everyone’s likes and make stuff invisible to people’s friends, or followers-even Tulsi Gabbard and Ajamu Baraka have both spoken out against techfascists silencings. It’s a big deal when two or three companies gobble up every fucking industry. Ya’all still clutching your pearls about Qshaman offending Pelosi, Rogan interviewing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on some podcast, or Dave Chappelle not being transfriendly/woke enough and eager to wear dresses in movies.
he Heatmeiser stopped being cool when he started punching journalists and singing that “One In A Million” song and wearing athleisure wear onstage. He got lucky. “White Trash Wins Lotto”. God bless Us everyone. Izzy/Adler. Adler/Izzy. Fuck your rich pricks. I used to distantly know Slash’s dogwalker. Marilyn Manson’s house sitter. Moon. She dated the Pantera bassist Rex, led the revolution off the sidewalks in Eugene.
“Obama won an Emmy but what he really should have won is a trip to the Hague for war crimes.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“The establishment be like, “Be afraid of your neighbor! Don’t you dare think to organize for something better together! You hate each other!” I’m tired of their bullshit divisive games. Be wary of the “progressives” who use CIA tactics and are obsessed with getting people to not work with each other. There is a very blatant op going on imo where people just want you to focus on red/blue tribalist bullshit.” (-Revolutionary Blackout Network)
“The establishment wants us to fight each other. I’m done with people who want to divide the working class” (-Revolutionary Blackout Network)
One of my best and only friends growing up was a black dude named Fred-O. He took a girl named Heather F. to a school dance and the white people were shocked and offended and it was a big scandal. The wrestling coach/history teacher he was trained to “respect” was a racist, and all his fat fuckin’ football friends were, too-he had a clandestine friendship with me, that probably remains to this day. He liked Prince, I liked Prince. His parents had a big collection of old records-Ohio Players, P-Funk, all that. Me, too. WE grew up together. Prince and Michel Jackson. Golf shirts and designer jeans versus parachute pants and checkered Vans. Fred helped win football games for that shitty school, and basketball games, too, and sports are like a religion in White Suburbia. So he was afforded some privileges by the Man.
This is after all occurring as the US enters a steadily escalatingnew cold war against both Russia and China, and we know that during the last cold war the CIA sought to exploit public panic about UFOs as a psychological weapon against the Soviets, and that the CIA has claimed that its newly developed spy planes were responsible for many UFO sightings in the 1950s, and that the US military was working on developing “flying saucer” aircraft during that same time. It also occurs after the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics stated at a 2020 conference that the Air Force has a brand new aircraft prototype, designed using new digital engineering technology, that has “broken a lot of records.”
This new mainstream UFO narrative also has highly suspicious origins, with key players ranging from shady US intelligence cartel operatives like Lue Elizondo and Christopher Mellon, to corrupt senator Harry Reid and his plutocratic campaign donor Robert Bigelow, to Blink-182’s Tom DeLonge, who believes humanity is being tormented by malevolent extraterrestrials who feed off negative human emotions and that the US military is heroically protecting us from their evil agendas. Filmmaker Steven Greenstreet put out a short, well-sourced documentary with The New York Post this past May laying out copious amounts of evidence that the groundwork for the new UFO narrative was built on journalistic malpractice and negligence, obfuscation, omission, and outright lies. The footage we’re being shown of these supposed vehicles to justify this new narrative consist of blurs, flashes and smudges which can all be explained by mundane phenomena.
So in my opinion this isn’t a subject we can just ignore, as weird and uncomfortable as the subject of UFOs might make serious analysts. Whatever the subject, when you’ve got the US government claiming on highly suspect grounds that there’s an exponentially growing threat that urgently needs to be addressed militarily, it’s time to sit up and start paying attention.
Not that I myself have any clear idea of what’s going on here beyond the distinct impression that we are being deceived about something potentially very important. And I don’t get the impression that other people have a very clear picture of what’s going on either.
Some say this is just a scam to get more funding for the Space Force or the military in general. That could very well be, but as far as publicly available information goes we’re not seeing anyone saying anything like “Hey we need $40 billion to address this UFO problem.”
Some say this is part of an agenda to justify getting weapons into space, but I suspect anyone likely to support that agenda would support it with or without the claim that we need to fight ET. And again, there’s the problem that nobody’s saying “Hey we need to get weapons into space because of UFOs.”
Some say this is just a deliberate “distraction” designed to keep people from focusing on more important issues, but the problem there is that (A) the empire doesn’t normally roll out distractions in that way, and (B) the UFO issue isn’t getting much mainstream attention. It’s a peripheral story, dwarfed in comparison to real propaganda initiatives like Ukraine.
Some say there’s a conspiracy to use high-tech weaponry to create a false flag alien invasion and unite humanity under a one world government, but that’s a fairly mainstream idea that’s being pushed on viral Netflix films by knownfraud Steven Greer. I think the world is paranoid enough at this point that few would buy such a psyop even if it were somehow convincingly orchestrated.
Some say this narrative is all a cover for new technology the empire is keeping under wraps, presenting an official position that the US government has nothing to do with the strange vehicles people are seeing in the air as stated in the ODNI’s report on UFOs last year. That would certainly explain the empire’s cockiness in confronting Russia and China simultaneously when public knowledge of its economic and military capabilities would indicate that that’s a bad idea.
It could be as simple as the fact that once it becomes the established orthodoxy in Washington that UFOs are a threat and something needs to be done about them, it’s a safe bet that we’re going to see massive amounts of money moving around to deal with that threat and the emergence of war machinery that can be used in future confrontations with Russia and China. There are any number of creatures lurking in DC who would stand to benefit from that happening, and would stand to benefit from pushing that agenda. It’s possible that contracts have already been signed. It’s possible that finances have already been allocated for it from the war machine’s dark money slush fund, and that all this public talk is just narrative management to preemptively justify that spending when information about it comes out.
Or maybe it’s some mixture of these things, or none of them. I don’t know. I do know that someone’s benefitting from all this. And I know it’s unreasonable to expect the most murderous and tyrannical regime on earth to tell us the truth about UFOs when it would stand nothing to gain by doing so, and we ordinary people should therefore do our best to understand what’s happening for ourselves.
I think it would be good if people on the anti-empire fringes of the spectrum started looking at this thing more and describing what they’re seeing, even though it’s impossible to see everything behind the walls of government opacity. Otherwise the only people looking at it will be UFO enthusiasts who just want “disclosure” at any cost, and the operatives of the empire itself.
“The EPA warned Mississippi in 2020 of “imminent” dangers for people drinking Jackson’s tap water. The 80% Black city has sought repairs since the 1940s. Governor Reeves repeatedly refused requests for funding and the state only approved 6% of requested repair funds last year.
“I will believe that Democrats care about democracy when they stop suing to kick the Green party off the ballot, stop appointing corporate lobbyists to head the DNC, stop interfering in their own primaries, and start passing overdue election reforms like ranked choice voting.”(-Ryan Knight)
“Mikhail Gorbachev was not just a corrupt traitor; he was a criminal with millions of victims After he sold out his country to capitalists, the US imposed neoliberal shock therapy that led to 3.2 MILLION EXCESS DEATHS 18 million children pushed into poverty. Rampant malnutrition.” (-Benjamin Norton)
The latest barbarism of apartheid Israel’s colonial occupation: Foreigners must now notify the Israeli regime if they fall in love with a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank. If they marry, they are required to leave for a 6-month “cooling-off period” (-Benjamin Norton)
JUST YOU AND ME VERSUS JEFF BEZOS AND BILL GATES AND ELON MUSK. THEY GOT THE GOVERNMENT, THE WAR MACHINE, THE WEAPONRY, THE UNIVERSITY CONDITIONING, AND THE PIG-MEDIA…WE GOT SARCASM, SONGS, BLOGS, AND COMMUNITY GARDENS. AND THE MEMORY OF JOE STRUMMER!
“George W. Bush killed one million Iraqis and gets to teach a Master Class. Julian Assange exposed Bush’s war crimes and gets a de facto life sentence in solitary confinement on the way to being extradited to the same US authorities seeking to murder him.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Life without an ideal is spiritual death.” ( ~ Emma Goldman)
“If I were hungry and friendless today, I would rather take my chances with a saloon-keeper than with the average preacher.” ― Eugene V. Debs
“Other than a few principled organizations, the Black liberation movement has almost no allies it can count on. Strengthening our organizations and ability to project independent power is an absolute historical necessity.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Is it even possible to get through to the remaining Democrat loyalists? Biden admin. working to set the stage for nuclear world war, and the lib kids say, “Cool.” (-DH Fabian on Twitter)
“They lied to you about Vietnam. They lied to you about Iraq & Afghanistan. They lied to you about Syria & Libya. They lied to you about Honduras & Bolivia. They lied to you about Assange & Russiagate. So why the hell would you believe what they’re telling you about Ukraine?” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“The US gov has admitted they are often reporting faulty intelligence in Ukraine as if it’s fact. They say they do this because they’re in an information war. Sooo, isn’t it time we all stop believing their false reports?” (-Lee Camp)
“China has cancelled 23 loans for 17 African countries. The U.S. has announced the permanent theft of $7 billion of Afghanistan’s assets. It’s quite clear which country practices imperialism, and which does not.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“When you are not grounded in anywhere, don’t build anything, don’t submit to any organizational discipline & this dangerous & serious movement for many us is only a petit-bourgeois game for you & your neocon friends on social media, you can wildly attack anyone with impunity.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
Yeah I know Bragg and Morrissey don’t get along, but they both impacted my conscience and consciousness as a young punk songwriter kickin’ against the pricks.
Another of my main songwriting influences is the haunted soul, tormented broken blooze and torch and twang, weary Western star, late night cowpunk of Jeffrey Lee.
FUCK GRUNGE
There’s a famous John Steinbeck quote about how if you are in trouble, or are hurts, look for other poor people for help because they are the only ones likely to ever help you, and even that gets dicey in dark times such as these, when us slaves at the bottom have to break our backs doing no joke hardcore heavy lifting and scrubbing and bending, general labor for fuckin’ bullshit electric bills or to put enough gas in the car to go to Wal Mart or to go see a doctor. Martin Luther King Jr. used to talk about the need for a real people’s movement, to unite the working class and poor people. You might as well just stay away from middle class people, because they are all so obsessed with looking upwards, becoming rich and vicariously “identifying” with either Trump, or Biden, or Obama, or Liz fuckin Cheney. Anybody who is getting in bed with the Cheney family is no ally of mine. I oppose mercenary imperialists secret armies and torture and human experimentation and false flag psy ops for wars, so you see, already…we got nothing in common. There are some new progressive parties raising money and integrating some old Green Party ideas but taking the teeth out of ’em, so really what’s the point to any of that? We already have Sanders and the Squad who pretended they were gonna push the Wall Street Dems left but instead, helped push the shitlibs to the right-they are complicit with the Cheney-Bush-Obama-Biden agendas. Which means big banks and billionaires write the laws and they love war and racist kkkops. What I have learned from Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Righteous Struggle of the Water Is Life indigenous water protectors of Standing Rock, is you can not organize an effective people’s struggle/movement if you allow torture apologist/police state copsucker, middle class preservers of the status quo, to senselessly sheepdog you back to the DNC, or allow them to waste your time with official narratives, debate team P.C. identity politics all talk/no action bullshit. You are a fool to ever follow anymore sugar talkin’ pretty faced pants suits who only ever obey the military industrial complex and do whatever their donor class shareholders instruct them to do. If somebody tells you they have come to “lead” your movement, shun those motherfuckers especially if they are big money preachers, or red carpet celebrities, or have Patreon sponsorships where middle class lady landlords give them money to play act as activists while watering down all the truth telling and always discouraging any kindof direct action as frowned upon Antifa tactics or Black Bloc forbidden antics. You can’t be a legit people’s movement activist or poor people’s ally if you are pro war or take big fucking checks from corporations like those phony baloney grifters at the top of the BLM organization who live in mansions now. You gotta stay free, stay street, be proud that you are not one of the rich pig oppressors. Stay with The People, like Eugene Debs and Fred Hampton and Joe Strummer.
“The majority cares little for ideals and integrity. What it craves is display”. (- Emma Goldman)
So yeah I hear that wounded beagle moaner Eddie Vedder released a cover of Joe Strummer‘s immortal “Long Shadow”, and I know that Pearl Jam took the Mescaleros on tour, which must have been marvelously gratifying for Joe and friends. His band were all peak players, he’d started out busking with Tymon Dog, as you probably know. I just never really liked Pearl Jam, at all. “Lemon yellow sun” was really all they had to briefly offer me, a couple stray lines. I liked Cobain’s lyric, “Leonard Cohen afterlife so I can sigh eternally”, but that was about it, and did not dig his friend’s bands much at all. Foo Fighters are terrible. They are still like The Beatles to these sadly programmed Hooters goobers in Ohio and Indiana. Korn, Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters, Kid Rock. That’s most people’s idea of real edgy alternativeness in the fast food shithole towns I came from. Joe’s band were like these amazing all stars, reminded me of Morrissey‘s solo bands, everybody looked boss as hell and carried their own weight and contributed their part! Amazing to me, I still don’t personally know how that’s successfully accomplished, other than you gotta find qualified people and they are rarer and rarer, nowadays, or just wanna play for big name headliners, which I am not. I understand from watching my friends have bands, that you have to first be able to pay for a rehearsal room, if you hope to find competent players willing to sincerely dedicate themselves to rehearsing and recording, rather than just loafing around to meet girls or mooch your frozen burritos and beer or whatever. Somebody let my friend Paul K (RIP) teach his bands his set on a house boat! Anyways, I miss Joe, wish he was still here, can not stand all those moaners who got rich during the grunge hoax who still have never gone away. Let’s listen to Joe sing. “Some dreams are made for children but most grow old with us.” I was never into Rancid or D-Generation. So ya know, for me, punk’s been dead for a real long time. My old friends Howie, Adam, and Mark were true punks but they are all dead and gone. I can’t stand that corporate alternative shite, whatever that is. I’m glad UK Subs are still out there. And The Godfathers! I kinda like Amyl and the Sniffers from Australia. Anybody wanna start a real dangerous, heartfelt rebellious, true punk band with me?
“To stir the masses, to appeal to their higher, better selves, to set them thinking for themselves, and to hold ever before them the ideal of mutual kindness and good will, based upon mutual interests, is to render real service to the cause of humanity.” ― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs
“Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.” (-Emma Goldman)
IF YOU WANNA GET STARTED BY CLEANING THE URINALS, THAT WOULD BE SUPER!
“The greedy, profit-seeking exploiter cannot see beyond the end of his nose. He can see a chance for an “opening”; he is cunning enough to know what graft is and where it is, and how it can be secured, but vision he has none-not the slightest. He knows nothing of the great throbbing world that spreads out in all directions. He has no capacity for literature; no appreciation of art; no soul for beauty. That is the penalty the parasites pay for the violation of the laws of life.” ― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs
I am physically crushed, exhausted on a heating pad, I totally threw my back out but I made some halfway decent money that is all going straight to the electric company for our air conditioning bill. I was endeavoring to explain to an ailing bedridden relative that while television provides an illusion of continuity to boomer aged middle classers and thousands of deep state spooks have been deployed to spy on, censor, or shadow ban off script peasants challenging lies of known liars on social media, we poor people are getting fucking hammered hard out here in the streets. Hometown headlines say rents are doubling and people act like they just found out about this, though I’ve been telling them about it for years. I just have zero credibility in their eyes because I don’t have money, ya know? I’m stressed the fuck out most all the time nowadays, it can’t be good for my health. All this fucking Biden Admin Super Inflation, blamed by controlled media, on all purpose external boogeyman, Putin who has zero to do with what boomer aged middle class landlords and Wal Mart charge us slaves for necessities in the USA, USA; or on all purpose domestic boogeyman Trump supporters who do not trust the word of Dick Cheney’s daughter, all the price gouging has forced me to take any work I can get, which currently means, the hard work of deep cleaning a series of long abandoned houses for relators and potential home buyers, and I’m moaning and bitching involuntarily right now, because I’m physically exhausted, weak, fatigued, filled with dread, self-pity, class resentment, social anxiety and I’m not that adept at eating shit, and it’s thrown off my whole schedule, I’m severely underslept and my cells just wanna repair. You know, when your body just cries, “SLEEP!”
When millionaires get ready to flip some surplus properties they bought on the cheap, they feel compelled to repeatedly inform The Help of their Altruism because they decided to have The Help take some of the old crap left behind in the long empty houses to the Non Profit second hand store rather than the dump. The second hand store people seem bitter with burnt-out, they don’t like accepting donations, hanging clothes, or taking money, but they do seem awful concerned about charging E-bay prices for their second hand shit they got for free, if they are a non profit, why they gouging, at a second hand donation store, where us poor people shop? It’s a mad, mad world. All the booj pigs LOVE to cos-play as “social justice warriors”, kinda like Meadow Soprano, but ya know, there’s no real service, or helpful action, besides like, maybe some tut-tut online language policing, or moaning about Vlad Putin being a sexist manspreader. They act like they’re wannabe activists but they’re really just cops, snitches, informants, Judge Judys. I wish I could get away from gentrification rich people, they’re all such authoritarian assholes. Feels like they follow me from town to town. They like their arty poses and sometimes wanna pat me on the head and squeeze me for ideas they can assimilate into their Personal Brands. Mostly, they want to treat me like The Help, hand me the mop, then tell me how I am mopping incorrectly. Faux-woke booj peeps always, always act like they’re some Concerned Citizens, or some shit, but their causes are only ever: 1) Rich White Women Deserve More Stuff And They’re Doing You A Favor By Charging You Market Value Rent, Vote Blue No Matter Who And Orange Man Bad. 2) Pets. Their Pets Are More Important Than Those Yukky, Lower Class People Outside Who Should Have Gone To College Or Married Wealth. 3) How can we get rid of all these Ikky poor people? Can’t the police make them Go Away? In the sacred name of public health and public safety? “They are making me feel uncomfortable”. They all learned at their prestigious Shitlib University that they have the right as fauxwoke booj pigs to never feel uncomfortable. A couple of them might have a token Trans friend and make themselves their Educated Spokesmodel. Or hire them as personal assistants or “glam squad”. They feel certain they should no longer have to wear masks, but that your kids should. That’s about it, though. Their only cause is really guarding their luxurious lifestyles at any cost. They want you to know how they really, really like the Obamas, Oprah, and how they now suddenly “care” about children in a war zone-the Ukraine one. Lastly, they do love praising the Squad, Mayo Pete, that pink dress singer from “Hamilton”, and All Rich Evil Fucker’s Rich Wives. Example: “Melinda Gates is SO SMART!”, “Doctor Jill is SO educated!” or, “Penny Knight is SO philanthropic!” and my favorite, “Chelle Obama really CHANGED THINGS!”
Liberty will not descend to a people; a people must raise themselves to Liberty. ~ Emma Goldman.
“. . . the press and the pulpit have in every age and every nation been on the side of the exploiting class and the ruling class.” ― Eugene V. Debs
I GET GOOD ADVICE FROM THE ADVERTISING WORLD, TREAT ME NICE PARTY GIRL, COKE ADDS LIFE DEPARTMENT
“As the majority of the wealth in the U.S. gets even more concentrated at the top both capitalist parties are leaning into the culture wars & insisting that the problem is your neighbor to deflect from the fact that the problem has always been our capitalist & imperialist system.” (-Ryan Knight)
“We must not let the democrats confuse people with deceptive marketing ploys like the “inflation reduction act,” that is neither an inflation reduction bill nor a climate bill.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Feed the poor. Fight the power. Rock the f*ck out.” (-Tom Morello)
“Pure cringe The Atlantic Council is NATO’s warmongering think tank, funded by the US govt, EU, weapons industry, fossil fuel corporations Here it implicitly admits its goal is to maintain authoritarian US hegemony across the planet and keep Europe subordinated to US imperialism” (-Benjamin Norton)
“The US police treat American citizens as its regime treats the world. Then, warns you not to film the barbaric behavior. The world is fed up with the regime in Washington” (-Ahmad Noroozi) . https://twitter.com/incontextmedia /status/1561638832524648449
“They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. This is too much, even for a joke. But it is not a subject for levity; it is an exceedingly serious matter.”
“He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the people.” ― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs
“I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands.” ― Eugene V. Debs
“Nearly all the lockdown leftists I know who cheer these demented policies on or pretend this is not happening as they defend the Covidian regime from their social media accounts happen to be childless.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“90% of the media outlets in the United States are owned by 6 corporations so no we don’t have a “free press” in our country. We have a corporately owned press that indoctrinates the masses to obey the decrepit capitalist and imperialist system that we live under.” (-Ryan Knight)
It is organized violence on the top which creates individual violence at the bottom. ~ Emma Goldman.
“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.” ― Eugene Victor Debs
Public school – where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression. ~ Emma Goldman.
“Beware of capitalism’s politicians and preachers! They are the lineal descendants of the hypocrites of old who all down the ages have guarded the flock in the name of patriotism and religion and secured the choicest provender and the snuggest booths for themselves by turning the sheep over to the ravages of the wolves.” ― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs
I used to work at a hipster pizza place that subscribed to Ad Busters magazine and liked the easy to understand “We Are The 99%” message they effectively used to bring attention to the main problem of wealth inequality in this country. White collar criminals and billionaires and corrupt politicians are almost never held accountable. No one who caused the financial crisis was prosecuted, Cheney and the Bush junta were never investigated for rigging that election, 9/11, or lying us into multiple wars, instead, Obama rewarded his bosses and gave ’em all bigass billion dollar bailout paydays and let Goldman Sachs pick his cabinet. His attorney general, Eric Holder who failed to prosecute any shady bakers or mortgage fraud sham merchants went back to work for the big banks. Shitlibs still love him for wearing a suit….while being black. Like that’s some big achievement-remember when Crime Bill Biden was so impressed he met a certain black senator who spoke in complete sentences? Now they let that old Jim Crow teleprompter reading motherfucker lecture people about race, like he is some kinda civil rights advocate. Identity politics is a big fuckin hustle-Malcolm X warned us about these token P.R., empty suited wolves back in 1963, he called ’em bourgeoise hustlers! Glen Ford called them the black misleadership class! Pharmaceutical Lobbyists were appointed to heads of the regulatory agencies that were supposed to regulate pharmaceutical companies. Steadily under Obama, and then again, under Bannon/Trump, industry men took over the agencies that were supposed to regulate them. So now, the fox are guarding the hen house everywhere you look. you know-like when Marvin Bush guarded the Twin Towers and Lucky Silverstein took out all that insurance and those art students spent weeks doing something in the basement and Dick Cheney called off Norad and had the air force doing drills somewhere far away.
Oil men, frackers, big pharma, private mercenary Blackwater proxy armies, tech surveillance scumbags, these 400 Wall Street predator Davos rich guys run it all now. Biden says the 400 people at the top “are not the problem, folks”. I disagree. They are all sociopaths and megalomaniacs. The saudi kings, all these inflated oligarchs with the dick rockets and super yachts and secret plots and bio weapon patent owners. All creeps. Yes, even and especially, your special, glasses wearing science friend, Bill Gates. Industry captured every government agency. Media continued to consolidate. Middleclass people worship Obama as a suave and virtuous GOD! Hedge fund managers and millionaires bought up entire cities and people like Giuliani helped kick out all the working class and poor people in places like Manhattan with ruthless rent gouging and Stop N Frisk Nightstick Robo-Cop Overpolicing. In places like gentrified Eugene, Oregon, if you did not present as sufficiently middle class, you got The Business, the shakedown, the aggressive hospitality, wherever you strolled. I was pedestrian and that made me a suspect. I had a child who ran around the kid’s department at the downtown public library likeall kids do and the pink haired librarians who were sick of homeless people would profile me as insufficiently whatever their preferred kind of person was, and follow me around, like I was doing something wrong, as my son ran merrily around the kid’s department. Especially after my expensive hat got rumpled from attending a protest for the homeless to have restroom access, in the rain. We would get followed home by the butch lady rent a kkkops in the uniforms with the walkie talkies. One time we asked to use a phone to call a taxi and they were needlessly hostile and hateful and again, sicced the rent a kkkops on us for our crime of not being I-Phone owners. “We don’t PROVIDE that SERVICE!” she shrieked at us, from behind the information desk, and when she got loud, here comes the screws. It was a Sunday so buses were running slow and since it was thunder storming I thought a civil and sane human being might not mind assisting us. These were self important title havers. The “ownership society”. “Educated People”! Where I came from, Smalltown Kentucky, we looked out for other people-especially very obviously struggling children with disabilities, in inclement weather. All these kkkops and pissed off lady librarians were Letting Us Know we were not welcome. I wrote letters to the entertainment weekly about these issues but they were never published because you have to have a phone to have a letter printed. How fucked up I that bullshit? If I had a phone, I coulda called my own tax cab, right? I thought it was fuckedup they did away with all public payphones and all the middle class people just shrugged and ignored Edward Snowden when he blew the whistle about the NSA listening to and permanently storing all our conversations. Rightwing Republikkkans would always screech online about how wrong it was when they saw homeless people buying beer with foodstamps, which of course, never happened, and is impossible, just dumb hate nonsense, and these hateful class bigots who claim to be eyewitnesses to the beer buying crime of the century think that foodstamps are still like paper currency, when they have been plastic cards for decades. They also love to claim that they were homeless once but overcame every obstacle with their manly bootstraps and hard work. And of course (drumroll please) the most popular screech from both shit don’t stink they/them shitlibs AND Donald Trump lovin’ upfront racist as hell rightwingers is how homeless people do not DESERVE to have cellphones!!! It really makes these power drunks crazy to see poor people with I Phones, but they never respond when you confront them with how else are poor people supposed to get jobs or apartments, without phone numbers.
Middle class people would rather talk about Beyonce some more and Jay Z and Chelle Obama and Gayle King and Kamala so you will see that they are “Not Racist”TM. I learned attending these gatherings that the most nauseatingly P.C. class snob gender obsessed know it alls in the world all think it is totally okey dokey to ridicule poor people and stereotype the entire low wage earning working class as rednecks, Low information “Trump voters” and “anti-vaxxers” and Russia sympathizing Conspiracy Theorists and dirty commies. Anyone not Facebook Ukraine Flag Posting and cheering for Official Nato/DNC/Gates Reset/deep state agencies must be ignorant “trailer trash”. I resemble that comment! But they go nuts(!!!) if you haven’t learned their Latest New Identity Politics/Gender Lexicon Rulebook Updates For Science And Diversity and AOC’s Feelings. I avoid ’em as much as possible.
Whenever poor people got together to discuss these problems in public spaces, middle class people showed up and changed the subject to Gender, which became a whole field of study and emerging industry, almost a religion unto itself. I was telling some early fellow occupiers about the hardships my family endured when my wife was abruptly fired overnight from the women’s shelter she had become so dedicated to-for not being gay or speaking Spanish or dark hued enough-she was laidoff and liberal guilted into going away quietly-they said they wanted more diverse counselors, so we were at risk of being imminently evicted. We lived in low income housing and the neighbors kept sending kkops to our door whenever our kid was loud, he has Autism. The middle class narrative managers from the college would insist I stop actively advocating about my family’s needs at Occupy gatherings, because they not so helpfully explained, I was a white privileged male. Of course, all this talk was all coming from actual privileged two parent college educated middle class and rich people who had businesses and rental properties and keys and credit cards. I had two leather jackets, a mattress, and some cassette tapes in a box and was hassled by kkkops everyday, while pushing my child around in a baby jogger to the library and art programs in the park. City hall gutted the library and art programs in the park our second year in town and gave big money contracts to some private kkkop goon squads “Downtown Guides” they called themselves, and Wackenhut security professionals, to start strongarming poor people out of what they openly declared the “exclusion zone”, downtown. They were paid big salaries to “guide” us away. Outta sight of the posh people.
I would bicycle to meetings they advertised as Occupy events but again, the middle classers were saying we needed to agree to speak in quiet pleasing voices, and “unpack privilege” and not trouble the nice liberal ladies of city hall with our disruptive and coarse neediness or complaints about police harassment. This was not a LEFT organization or proletarian protest struggle, so much as a hijacked identity politics/intersectionality/pro noun policing classroom. Nimby landlords and gender experts changed the topic to gender oppression, whenever we were talking about being poor, or again at risk of homelessness. They were tone policing. Complaining that the coarse and unsightly houseless community were not woke or liberal enough, and had too many males. No shit, motherfuckers. We saw ’em living in the mud puddles in wet tents down by the railroad tracks. The Namaste culture, college folks with the Buddha statues and new agey feelgood poses did not really want loud disabled kids, or any poor people, living near their gentrification boutiques or hipster reefer clinics-ya know? They were meditation retreat landlord classers, and fine arts majors, in bed with the rightwing fratboys really. It felt like A Purge. The shitlib answer to everything was always just shutup and vote for Hillary Clinton for woke folks intersectionality and safespace feelings. They were all for rainbow diversity so long as you were RICH. RICH gay folks, RICH Muslim folks, RICH black folks, and so on and so forth. Human Rights City, but you had to be rich for your human rights to be honored by the kkkops. Or pinkhaired fauxwoke librarians or Whole Foods loss prevention staff. We got a tattooed tree sitter appointed to city hall and she IMMEDIATELY started reciting bullshit sports tourism official talking points about how homeless people were “travelers” and it was a “lifestyle choice”. Outfuckingrageous, and the Occupy community refused to hold her feet to the fire, even though she was fake as fuck.
One real inspirational grass-roots activist organization emerged called Carry It Forward that was actively addressing the real life needs of homeless men, women, and children in that excessively rich and decadent, classist, navel gazing, gentrified town. It was followed by another organization that started passing out burritos for free to people who were hungry, no matter what their gender or skintone or college level or political party was. I loved those people. Heroic organizers and example setters. I always tell people they are a model for a better future and deserve all our support. Carry It Forward
I did not last long as an active participant in the Occupy Wall Street movement in Eugene, Oregon, because I don’t talk in soothing sing-song tones or wear happy bunny rabbits on my clothes ya know, these opportunistic grifters with pretentious Rainbow Family hippie dippy names all showed up wanting to get shit for free for having participated in a demonstration against wealth inequality, just based on their gender, there was all this non stop banter about so called privilege being babbled on and on about, predominantly by all the plainly oblivious, rich town, college educated property owners with way more privilege than we protestors they came to silence, and almost immediately, the city hall bureaucrats in bed with hotel owners and Nike sports tourism duped local gentrification middle classers into abandoning their initial Occupation, in downtown where it was supposed to be, saying it was inconvenient for Saturday Market vendors. They marched ’em into a woodsy park faraway from the banks and law offices downtown they were supposed to be(!!!) inconveniencing, that was the whole point of the protest. The hard fact was, the gentrified college town was dominated by rightwing pro war sports people, the fratboy tailgaters. The politeness scolding committees and ceramics majors and Democracy Now watching Whole Foods shoppers may have had many shitlib bumper stickers on their electric cars and perpetually claimed to be sensitive animal lovers and woke gender studiers, but they also did not want to see any tents or tarps inhabited by ikky, uneducated poors in the Wayne Morse Free Speech plaza, they frequently Kalled the Kkkops on panhandlers in the Trader Joe parking lot, yukky cigarette smokers flagrantly smoking cigarettes in the alley behind the live music bar, outside the Wow Hall. These were all self obsessed, me first, middle class, Thank Obamas. Way, way, way more concerned with their shitlib hipster image, of flaunting the Tibetan prayer flags and pink triangles and rainbow flags, Amish beards and pink hats, forever emphasizing the trending slogan of the week. “But Fuck Those Ugly Poors, They Are So Shabby & Disgraceful and Shoulda Gone To College!” They are the reason I always dropout, I would never wanna be around such asshole elitists. They are not interested in equality or solidarity-they are into being exclusionary, shit don’t stink, holier than thou, V.I.P.’s. There was one radical local leader named Kristen Carpenter who I admired. She understood our situation and did not hate the poor. Another helpful activist named Alley explained to me what cys born and heteronormative pass privilege were. I had no idea. I’m from Kentucky. I did not go to school for sensitivity feelings studies or Wokey McWokeness. Where I came from, nobody cared about our preferences or triggers or traumas or what we might find offensive. They told us to get over it. Moonshine, Coalmine, or Down the Line. Fuck you, Jack. “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ― Eugene V. Debs
“As long as he owns your tools he owns your job, and if he owns your job he is the master of your fate. You are in no sense a free man. You are subject to his interest and to his will. He decides whether you shall work or not. Therefore, he decides whether you shall live or die. And in that humiliating position any one who tries to persuade you that you are a free man is guilty of insulting your intelligence.” ― Eugene V. Debs, Works of Eugene Victor Debs
“Russiagate conspiracy theory is dying & none too soon. Russiagate was the 1st step to manufacture consent for war w Russia, peddled by the same MIC tools now drumming up #UkraineCrisis. Screw warmongers pushing us to the brink. Pass the mic to the folks who got #Russiagate right!” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Democrats are absolutely fascists too, just consider who’s presided over the highest military budgets & police budgets in our history, along with the crackdown on dissidents & whistleblowers. Fascists purge the ballots of candidates they don’t like, as Dems have done to Greens.” (-Justin In BMore)
This reminds me a whole lot of TEENAGE DEVIL DOLLS playing that Boy’s Club Benefit for the soup kitchen in Springfield Missouri in 1987. We took the skinhead’s girlfriends skinny dipping at the resevoir that night. Tom Morello on Twitter: “Well I have a new favorite band now” / Twitter
They Demolished The Left And Burned The Blueprint: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
The empire’s information war against the left has been so successful that people don’t even know where “the left” is anymore. Most have it confused with things that are tangential like having pink hair and saying your pronouns, or outright right-wing like the Democratic Party.
Convincing everyone that communism is bad and unions work against your interests was just the first step. The next step was to confuse and muddy the waters of the political landscape so much that nobody even remembers where it was the left had been trying to get to — namely fighting and winning the class war that’s being waged upon the working class by the capitalist class, dismantling capitalism and imperialism, and creating a just and equitable society for everyone.
Now if you tell your average westerner to point to “the left”, they’ll point at “woke” hashtags and at political parties that are designed to support and protect the capitalist class. They didn’t just sabotage and destroy the left, they burnt the blueprints for how to rebuild it.
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The true left emphasizes the interests of marginalized communities with the goal of class solidarity. The fake left emphasizes the interests of marginalized communities with the goal of class division. You can sort out which is which by simple naked eye observation over time.
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Friendly reminder that no extremist group in the modern world is killing, oppressing and tyrannizing anywhere near as many people as the so-called moderates of the US-led world order.
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Find someone who loves you the way Americans love criticizing foreign governments that are far less murderous and tyrannical than their own government.
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Whenever I say the US is quantifiably the most murderous and tyrannical regime on earth, I always get a deluge of replies saying “Yeah well I’d rather live there than China!” Like where you live is the only issue that matters, not mass military slaughter. And I think that just says so much.
It genuinely never occurs to them that the people dying from military explosives being dropped on their homes and starving to death from economic sanctions are real human beings whose lives matter. All they can think of is what country they’d rather be using their smartphones in.
The fact that the US happens to export most (though certainly not all) of its murderousness and tyranny overseas does not make it less murderous or tyrannical than the governments the media have trained you to hate. The people it kills and terrorizes are just as human as you.
It says so much about how propaganda-addled that population is that the lives of foreigners don’t even register in their assessments of a government’s murderousness and brutality, skipping instead to the fact that they’re allowed to call the president “Brandon” on social media (which,as we’ve discussed previously, is not even a real measure of freedom anyway).
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Love how it’s almost universally agreed that Biden is knowingly starving people in Afghanistan for no valid reason and it’s still just happening anyway:
Virtually everyone who knows anything about the issue wants Biden to stop starving people in Afghanistan, even people who stand to benefit materially from their starvation. And he still just won’t:
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There’s a night and day difference between someone who wants the US to stop bullying and dominating the world and someone who wants the US to stop bullying and dominating some parts of the world so it can focus on bullying and dominating China. They’re really nothing alike.
Faux populists on the right oppose some aspects of the US war machine, but they support other aspects and don’t oppose the empire itself. Faux populists on the so-called left provide little or no resistance to the empire, they just want the empire to give them healthcare.
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Wealth is meaningless if everyone is wealthy. Power is meaningless if everyone has power. The kings of our day have a vested interest in keeping everyone poor and powerless, because if everyone is king, then no one is king.
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Imagine wanting to be a cop as a kid, wanting to grow up and get into the police academy so you can fight crime and bad guys, and then you get to the police force and you find out the whole job is writing tickets and destroying homeless encampments.
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Question mainstream politics and they’ll tell you to support the lesser evil. Question capitalism and they’ll say it’s better than any other system. Question the empire and they’ll say it’s better the US rules us than risk anyone else. It’s all lesser evilism, in support of evil.
Every time you point to the dysfunctional nature of our systems you’re told “Well it has to be that because otherwise it would be something far worse!” Oh yeah? Anyone benefiting from your believing that? Any powerful people pouring energy into mainstreaming that idea, perchance?
It’s like the abuser who says “Go on, leave! No one will ever love you like I do. You’ll fail and you’ll come crawling back!” And the victim stays out of fear of what’s on the other side of the unknowns inherent in that blind leap. But at some point you’ve got nothing to lose.(-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.” ― Eugene V. Debs
“U.S. politics under the duopoly is not about helping the people or planet. It’s about controlling the people and planet. And they control us by dividing us. They split the people into two teams (red vs. blue) while they are on the same team and serve the same corporate interests.” (-Ryan Knight)
Where I live now, some local complained to someone charging top dollar for a used weed whacker online, that he could get a new one for that same price, opining he will in all likelihood only be able to get like half of that price, to which the seller responded, “then it can sit in my garage until I die”. Ha. Too typical, all these old bastards have a dozen weed whackers. Entire arsenals of weed whackers. Weedwacking Hoarders of a Greedhead Nation. “Greed Is Good” they taught us. Bill Gates is the Decider Of All Things. He is Very Rich. A Saintly Super Savior Scientist Who Knows What’s Best Because His P.R. Companies Say He is Cuddy & Nerdy Philanthropic. Mass Hypnosis. Now, after selling all that shit from sweat shop laboring kids in China to all these consumerist boomers with the quadruple wide barn like garages full of RV’s and car collections, some corrupt little cabal in a desert ghost town’s passing ordinances insisting the code enforcement agency can spy over people’s fences via a private drone company, determine who owns “too many things” and declare one’s collections a “health risk” and come confiscate your belongings if deemed an “eyesore” by the town real estate titan or builder of overnight McMansions.
You know I always loved that Billy Idol song, “Catch My Fall”. Somebody told me it was based on “When You Were Mine” by Prince. “Trusted and broken my own word”.
I’m breaking my own main rule again, which is, “avoid any involvement with rich people”. Anytime I’ve ever, ever, ever so foolishly gotten involved or entangled with rich people, it costs me bigtime, I lose, they end up taking way more than just a pound of flesh, but here I am again, laboring for an egomaniac on a “spiritual enlightenment” moodswing powertrip, fucks up my whole week. Hopefully, I won’t get hurt. I’m depressed, beaten down, and my old lady does not want me to smoke or drink over it. I dunno, man. I’m sick of it all. All my muscles are sore from heavy lifting two days in a row, supposed to go houseclean an abandoned house full of spiders that’s been collecting dust for decades for get rich quick resell, but same boss lady that requires one pull weeds from the roots rather than weed whack, she does not want us to get the cheap flooring wet. Plus she is coming to stand over-supervise. How I got wrangled into this, I’ll never know. Some kinda punishment. Working for control freak, spare houses, art garden redecorating/remodelling millionaire heiresses is just Not my bag, at all, man. Desperate times for the desert dwelling, elderly goth, bad luck dishwasher. Somedays, when the kid wakes you up at the crack of dawn and you’re still sore from the days before, you just aint got it in ya to be bossed around some more by some insanely vain and inhumane rich person. That’s how I ended up spending most of my life washing dishes. If you get lucky sometimes you can just stand in the back, and stay busy and people will mostly leave you the fuck alone. Some asshole waitresses might splash you while uncaringly dumping their stacks of plates on the dish counter but when you finally mop up at the end of the night, there hopefully aint nobody round still keepin’ you hostage there off the clock with their Bullshit Narratives. Telling you how bad you suck and how great they are for having rich fucking parents. I can’t stand these nauseatingly self important rich motherfuckers. They always got a story bout how they got their castle with their karma by being so extra fancy artsy fartsy and Special. I’d stay outside on the stoop with the brown bag Unspecials, but of course, the Gentrification Police drove them all outta downtown years and years ago. The Corner Gang are all dead now, besides, like, maybe two guys who became big disappointment, boring sellout suckups to power. But I get it-that’s how they’re able to keep drinkin’ free now that they closed down the old dives, they hadda start kissin’ up to the sports goons. I hate this whole game, man, it hurts. Humiliating, degrading, hurts my pride, hell on the soul. Like Gore Vidal noted, it aint enough for these people to win, they got really dig their heel in the back of your neck and take more delight and glee forever about how bad you lost. If they can really hurt you bad enough, strip you of dignity, take away everything you ever loved, drive you outta town and away from their precious princeling in the ivory tower Turf they will still be gloating triumphantly about it on their narcissistic fame podcasts from their big white mama mansions, 25 years later. That’s their Main High, harming others. Rich people get so used to buying things, eating well, traveling, doing all the best drugs, seeing concerts, visiting museums, and bathing in all that fucking self importance champagne, that they end up needing to fuck with other people’s lives just for fun. That’s like their sport-meddling with the little people’s destinies. Driving wedges between people, casting some out, hiring others, sexually harassing all. That’s how we ended up with Jamie Dimon and Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein and Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab and the Cheneys and Clintons and Trumps and Gina Haspel. The people who rule over us are not caring nurturers or sensitive philanthropists, fretting about the well being of the delicate spotted owls.
They lie to us all our lives about what soldiers do, about what cops do, about what journalists do, about what presidents do.
They lie to us all our lives about how laws are made, about how kings are made, about how culture is made, about how norms are made.
They lie to us all our lives about what our minds are for, about what our hearts are for, about what our neighbors are for, about what foreigners are for.
The world is confusing and they make it more confusing, on purpose, because they thrive in confusion, and now we watch as the world turns to ashes carried on the back of confusion made by news men and corporate creatures who eat ashes.
And we stumble in confusion, eyes darting behind lenses made of confusion, trying to understand with minds made of confusion, trying to feel our way through with hearts shackled by confusion. Searching for an angel egg we know is there but can’t seem to find because who turned out the goddamn lights? And why can’t I figure out which way is up? And oop off we go chasing distractions again for the next news cycle the next election cycle the next spin cycle the next amnesia cycle.
They lie to us all our lives, and then when we catch them in a lie they just say, Oh, the person who gave you that information is bad, or, Oh, that came from Russian hackers, or, We made a mistake but we don’t do that anymore, or, Don’t be a conspiracy theorist, or, Hey! Look over there! or, We already knew that, it’s no big deal.
And then everyone forgets, and the confusion churns on.
But the angel egg is there in our mind’s eye, in our heart of hearts, haunting our dreams, calling us home, the embryo holding our original eyes for whenever we are ready to claim them.
They lie to us all our lives about what our country is, about what our government is, about what money is, about what nature is.
They lie to us all our lives about where the answers are, about where our friends are, about where our enemies are, about where our claws are.
They lie to us all our lives, and they make the world confusing, and beneath that confusion we are watching them with our original eyes, with our primal eyes, with our natural eyes, with our uncivilized eyes.
Watching them, like lions watching a gazelle, and waiting, with primordial patience, until it is time to make our move.
(-Caitlin Johnstone)
WHEN THEY SILENCE AND CENSOR AND SLANDER AND SMEAR THE COLLEGE PROFESSORS FOR TEACHING ABOUT WHAT PROPAGANDA IS:
BROTHERS AND SISTERS AND FRIENDS OF THE REVOLUTION, REMEMBER TO HELP YOUR NEIGHBOR WHENEVER YOU CAN, SET AN EXAMPLE, PASS ALONG THE VEGGIES AND HEIRLOOM SEEDS. BOYCOTT PIG MEDIA! DISOBEY EVIL BILLIONAIRES! THINK OF EACH OTHER AND NOT JUST YOUR OWN SELFISH SELFIE SELVES! STAY WILD! STAY FREE! GOOD NIGHT & GOOD LUCK!
“There isn’t a duopoly—only a corporate party and that’s it.” (-Nina Turner)
“Chomsky says: in his long life, he has never seen censorship in the West like that which has been imposed in the name of the war in Ukraine. Again, regardless of your views on this war, nobody should favor a closed system of propaganda.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.” (-James Baldwin)
“It’s 2022 and people still believe this nonsense about NATO being a defensive organizations and America giving a damn about Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights.” (-Black In The Empire)
“And I hear punks talk of anarchy I hear hobo’s on the railroad, I hear mutterings on the chaingang cause those are the men who built the roads, and if you put it all together, you didn’t even once relent you cast a long shadow and that is your testament…” (-Joe Strummer)
“You may vote and debate freely on any issue which does not affect the functioning of the empire. When it comes to how money, weapons and resources move around the world, however, you suddenly find that your votes don’t matter and your position has no mainstream representation. They’ll let you argue until you’re blue in the face over whether or not you can have an abortion or whether minorities should have civil rights; they’ll even let you vote on it. But things like military expansionism and neoliberal globalization and deregulation are off limits.
The empire relies on false political dichotomies like Democrats vs Republicans to keep everyone fighting over issues which don’t affect the functioning of the empire so the machine can trudge onward uninterrupted by the local riff raff. That is the entire job of those parties.
The mainstream media exist to keep everyone spellbound by those false dichotomies on the level of discourse and debate. They manufacture culture wars which split the populace in half over an issue which doesn’t affect the empire, then continually feed into that debate.
The Bernie/AOC/TYT “populist left” and the Trump/Tucker Carlson “populist right” factions are there to lure parts of the population who get a little too curious about the raw mechanisms of empire back into the political false dichotomy so they stop asking unauthorized questions.
The entire political/media class exists for this purpose: not to help people, not to fight for civil rights, not to create a well-informed populace so that democracy can function, but to keep the grubby little mitts of the unwashed masses far away from the true levers of power. That’s their whole entire function.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“The national Democratic Party is not a party — it’s a fundraising email.” (-David Sirota)
“The CIA called China the biggest threat to the US in 2021. Today, the FBI claimed China is a “threat” to the US economy. Last time I checked, the CIA and FBI, not China, has overthrown more than 50 foreign governments and terrorized domestic social movements for generations.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“The U.S. Supreme Court has now eviscerated the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to tackle the climate crisis.
But instead of seizing this moment to radically reform the court and advance an aggressive climate action agenda, too many Democrats — and their enablers in the corporate media — are acting as if the court’s rolling judicial coup is inevitable and unstoppable.
I joined The Intercept to help shine a spotlight on injustices others take for granted and thereby expand the horizons of political possibility. And that’s why I’m so proud of how — as others have studiously avoided challenging the Supreme Court’s legitimacy — The Intercept’s journalism exposes how corporate greed and right-wing extremism have conspired to enable these outrageous power grabs.
“While elements of the corrupt latte-left in the U.S. & Western Europe collaborate with the rulers to undermine Cuba, The Black Alliance for Peace will never abandon the people of Cuba and their project.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
John McCain is posthumously awarded a Medal of Honor after spending the twilight of his life blessing the Nazis and jihadists serving as imperial foot soldiers. His hallowed words still echo today: “I hate the go*ks. I will hate them as long as I live.” https://consortiumnews.com/2018/08/27/the-other-side-of-john-mccain/… (-Max Blumenthal)
RIP … Nazareth founding Guitarist Manny Charlton
It’s no secret I love old Nazareth and sorry to hear their founding member passed at EIGHTY. Time keeps FLYING by. Everytime I see a photo of Ole Diamond Dave lookin’ even longer in the tooth than me and my longtime rollin’ buddies, I’m shocked, cause in my mind, ya know, we’re still wild and free and young and vital and totally capable of rockin’ this town inside out. Black leather sons a bitches never say die. Roth leaked another song that he probably recorded with John 5 and Brett Tuggle (RIP) called “Pointing At The Moon”, it’s real good in my humble opinion. I like Dave’s mellow stuff. My friend’s three legged dog Angus died. (RIP) Very sad days, indeed, everything is just zoomin’ by like fifties home movies projected on some wall. I’m overwhelmed by it all. The beautiful, sacred, holy, and gorgeous stuff keeps disappearing, while every day, more food warehouses are mysteriously burning down and kkkops kill people because they can.
RULING CLASS
These Private Jet Riding Sun Valley Hunger Games Oligarchs aint having all these secret meetings to talk about making the world a better or healthier or more prosperous and egalitarian place for us serfs, I can assure you of that. In spite of all their greenwash, pinkwash, woke and scientific diversity marketing, these evil robber baron shitheels are like science fiction villains, but totally for real and with access to unprecedented technology and surveillance tools, now they wanna start pushing for cashless society and yes, those chips they been talkin’ about forever. Don’t believe me, research World Economic Forum Agenda, yourself. Klaus Schwab Creeps are infiltrating every government. They finally took down their Georgia Guidestones after some forty odd years, the United Nations is said to have translated the surveillance tech dystopian manifesto into countless archaic languages as it is a ritualistic tradition of the secretive occult elites to warn their gullible victims ahead of time. Mainstream headlines said things like, “some conspiracy theorists believe the monument to be satanic”. People programmed at Shitlib U or Big 5 mockingbird propaganda do tend to blindly and obediently trust these authoritarian overlords who they believe are woke and scientific philanthropists and some even look forward to seeing more of their NWO Klaus Schwab rollouts. Not everyone is in favor of a one world government, social ratings, robot armies, special privileges for stormtroopers, mass depopulation, wars with Russia-China-Iran, permanenet lockdowns in the Global South, bigger and bigger monopolies like Vanguard and Blackrock gobbling up every institution and buying every resource, owning nothing, or any of that other shit the eager cult lords are so giddy about in their sinister WEF speeches you can see online. FREE THOUGHT PROJECT opines: “It’s a chilling reminder that in the American police state, ‘we the people’ are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”
This is how unarmed Americans keep dying at the hands of militarized police.
Under the guise of qualified immunity, there have been no consequences for police who destroyed a private home by bombarding it with tear gas grenades during a SWAT team raid gone awry, or for the cop who mistakenly shot a 10-year-old boy after aiming for and missing the non-threatening family dog, or for the arresting officer who sicced a police dog on a suspect who had already surrendered.
Qualified immunity is how the police state stays in power.”
REMEMBER WHEN SHITLIBS BLAMED RALPH NADER FOR REPUBLIKKAN SUPREME COURT SELECTION COUP?
Man, it’s one of those mornings when I’m missing all my good friends and family members who I used to call in surly, anxious, monotonous moods like this, who’ve already gone on to whatever comes after this dreadfully uncertain tyrannical bullshit. Been watching the old eighties videos on Vevo-everything from Animotion to New Edition. It takes me back. Of course, I still naturally wonder whatever became of my pals from detention school-Patti “Rolling Stones” Hamilin, “Damn N Shit” Marty, Gary, Alice, Kenny, who used to live across the street from Meat City and worked with me as a dishwasher at the Black Angus steak house where the crazy cheap owners recycled french fries and salads offa tables, White Mike, Farmer Jodie, and even Fat Diane, who liked Rick Springfield, but snitched on our whole classroom for math book cheating…We were onery kids from troubled backgrounds but gradually came together, which is what the working class of this society is gonna have to do if there is to be any hope of genuinely resisting the totalitarian Davos billionaires who’ve already bought the government, media, pharmaceutical industry, weapons manufacturing, farmland, food distribution infrastructure, and regulatory agencies. If you were somehow stubbornly blind enough to just dismiss and ignore the DNC leaks that got poor Seth Rich (RIP) killed, you probably do a fair share of elementary school back n forth namecalling when someone on social media suggests elections are rigged. According to tv obeyers, it is just outrageous when that “other” party’s supporters insist their preferred servant of the rich, pro police state, fascist old white man in a blue suit was somehow robbed of his rightful place on the faux-throne, but Hillary and Rachel harped on and on and on, all day long, for YEARS, that Putin’s troll armies and Facebook ads had supposedly flipped the election for Orange Man Bad. When Orange Man Bad’s supporters could similarly not believe longtime mediocrity, nothing will change, laughing stock Gropey Joe won, without even really bothering to campaign, that just OUTRAGES the shit-libs, there is just NO WAY to hack a USA USA All Amukkkan patriotic and woke election…EXCEPT of course, if that dastardly ORANGE MAN BAD was somehow in cahoots with that dirty, diabolical, super-duper villain, VLAD PUTIN! I dunno man, the blind partisan shit seems like an impossible to crack hypocritical hypnospell. I still think it’s like wrestling-the Heel Vs. The Face, and now, from backstage, here comes hard chargin’…Lyn Cheney (D) with a metal chair over the head, and now it’s….SCARY….QSHAMAN(!!!) entering the ring. Nancy Pelosi with a SARCASTIC CLAP and now…a TORN PIECE OF PAPER! (GASP!) AOC tweets, “ORANGE MAN BAD”, again…AND THE CROWD GOES WIIILLLLD! Ric Flair is even coming outta retirement. Bring back Jesse Ventura! You know the kangaroo court let those politicians who were complicit in covering up the crime of poisoning Flint’s water off? Was there ever any doubt? Rich people are never held accountable for white collar crimes in this country, it’s all about generating revenue by busting poor people for petty drug charges and shit. I remember the simple message of Occupy Wall Street being the One Percent were predators waging war on the rest of us and should be held accountable and that billionaire bankers and Wall Street servants were not to be trusted. College people were promptly dispatched to take control of the narrative. First, they lectured us endlessly on etiquette, then suggested we relocate away from the downtown business district where the law firms and banks we were supposed to be occupying were located, then, they said we can never inconvenience the gentrification landlords or “independent businesses” at Saturday Market. Then, they changed the topic to individual trauma stories and then it was all about pinkhat women’s marches objecting to bawdy Trump speech and getting Hillary elected. I’d ride my bicycle three miles into town mistakenly believing we were gonna feed the houseless community, and it would be one girl with a bullhorn talking about her personal trauma and how she should get free rent, babysitting, landscaping, reefer, wine, and a trip to the big city for wokeness. What? What? Huh? What? I was coming to help distribute grilled cheese and soup to poor people. Identity politricks was rolled out by college professors anytime there was danger of people uniting to help the poor, they collegeys pivoted the discussion to gender. Or gender privilege. I wasn’t there to be scolded, I came to assist the houseless community. What the fuck. You can not organize with the bourgeoises college people, they change the whole agenda, hijack your movement, protect their banking and lawyer and silver making farmer’s market landlord pals. It becomes a complaining divorcee gripe session winebox thing. Sheesh. Thankfully, a couple of very savvy and righton ladies stayed focused on the needs of the houseless community and organized a grass roots resistance the grifters and navel studies coattail riders were unable to derail. I saw first hand though, how university narrative managers are deployed to divide and control real people’s movements, as not to inconvenience the rich. They carve everybody up into separate factions, put us in boxes, try to tell us who we are, and label us as sub categories. The straightup exclude working class allies and actually tell blue collar white males to not speak. Like we’re the privileged landlord Dick Cheney oppressors. First the label and insult us, then they attempt to silence us, then they demand we vote for their corrupt do nothing Democrats again. No thanks. So the moral of that story, what I learned is you gotta work with other poor people, not fauxwoke identity politricks college campus safespace script memorizers. If you wanna make any successful moves against the entrenched powers that be. These booj hustlers are all about protecting their own power and Nimby property values. I try not to get involved with middle class landlords, college educated property owners, and people who self identify as holier than thou, enlightened high brows, or sacred cows. Once i finally located the advocated for the homeless community and not just the Me Show getmines, I was able to help serve the community who needed assistance. Immigrants with barriers from getting jobs, people who needed ID or SS cards to receive assistance, teens fleeing abuse, moms struggling after unexpected job losses, evictions, divorces, family deaths. There was a loud couple of assholes trying to make the Occupy Wall Street movement into a same ole same ole divisive red versus blue old paradigm, interrupting the discussion to make it about their own personal vanity trip and middle class entitlement, but what was even more shocking, were the city hall table sitters who saw nothing wrong with cops stealing houseless people’s tarps and tents, or kicking people awake, or arresting them for the crime of sleeping. These awful people put sharp rocks beneath underpasses, locked the public restrooms, hired thugs to hassle people in the parks and at the library, had uniformed rent a cops following parents around if their kid was loud in the library, they’d have two lady cops following them all the way home with their walkie talkies and nightstick intimidation tactics as they pushed a baby jogger in the rain. All the sports tailgate party fratboy Republikkkans wrote inhumane letters to the paper moaning about the presence of the unsightly poor in their rich and fancy white people paradise-one described houseless veterans shivering in the elements as “rapey hobos”, they’d always, always, almost all insist, get this: “I was once homeless but I…blah blah blah” with the Bill O Reilly bootstraps, victory story that always left out what they inherited or who they married. It was rough business watching both Kall Tha Kops Karens (D) and Redhat Hit ‘Em Harder Maga Copsuckers (R) unite to simultaneously rail against the poorest while instinctively protecting the class patrols and nasty, mean spirited, do nothing shitlibs of city hall and the real brazen, outright ugly city manager who worked for the hotel owners and Nike sports tourism billionaires.
PAY ATTENTION TO THE TAKEAWAY MEDIA MESSAGING
If you think Masked Singer, Drippy Hairdye, Drinky Drunky, Rudy Giuliani (certainly no loonier than First Fortunate Son Hunter Biden) was involved in some kinda dodgy rightwing deception and conspiratorial chicanery with all those Blue Lives Matter outta state Maga kkkops who marched on the Capital, (Qui Bono?) wait til you find out what kinda big conspiracy he helped cover up on 9/11! Shitlbs weren’t mad at Rudy when he Killed The Kool in NY. Strongarmed all the poor people outta their billionaires only V-I-P Zone. Shitlibs weren’t mad when Rudy’s stormtrooper gestapo “STORMED!” the unarmed houseless folks in Tompkins Square Park. Shitlibs weren’t mad when he helped ole Lucky Silverstein and Marvin Bush and Dick Cheney express mail the evidence to China after the Israeli art students hijinks and “pulled” Building #7 kerfuffle that resulted in Gropey Joe’s Patriot Act, TSA-NSA dismantling of the Constitution, Rumsfeld erasing the Geneva Conventions, and Bush-Cheney taking over the world, one regime change, proxy war at a time. Remember when General Wesley Clark spilled the beans on their Big Plans? They’re still at it, just maybe a little behind schedule. Copsucker shitlibs think that Cointelpro is a thing of the past, but why did so many protestors from Baltimore and Ferguson uprisings come to such seemy ends? Sandra Bland (RIP) was under surveillance when she was arrested and suicided and the Classy, Dashing drone prez aint say shit. He also said he was gonna let mercenaries abusing women elders water protectors at Standing Rock “play out”-remember? Him n Gropey Joe REWARDED the townie kkkops who arrested Harvard historian Walter Skip Gates in his Cambridge home with a cheerful, beerful visit to the WHITE house. Remember when Wikileaks Vault #7 data divulged how they killed Michael Hastings (RIP)?
Murkkkan politics are fake as fuck, and have been for a long time-maybe forever. Lion Of The Left, Gore Vidal (RIP) called us, the United States Of Amnesia, ’cause he knew nobody remembered yesterday, or ever paid any attention. Nobody thought it was weird at all that Warren Commission Ford replaced Nixon who was always fretting about “The Bay Of Pigs thing”, worried that the Dulles Brothers and company might turn on him, as well. Then, Redscare Ronnie the original Russiagate Rachel McCarthyist blacklist snitch was given the big chair, in spite of his dementia, he was surrounded with handlers and teleprompters and given mass media credit for ending the cold war with all his jellybean rewarded John Wayne script reading, until of course, a Bush cousin tried to assassinate him. Clinton’s cigar scandal seemed like a real big psy-op distraction, I remember seeing the movie “Primary Colors” that sorta opened my eyes to how a lot of campaign dirty tricks and fixers and operators like Roger Stone and James Carvelle hustle popular opinion to get their empty suits into office, at least before the rise of Bush/Cheney and their sordid Supremes and Diebold hackable voting boxes and Brooks Brother Rioters and hanging chad controversies and continuity of government privatizing of mercenary armies and NSA mass wiretap operations eviscerated the Bill Of Rights. Obama was trotted out to make Murkkkans “feel better” about Bush/Cheney policies, he promised Hope & Change with vaguely uplifting speeches delivered in gospel cadences, but just expanded all their worst policies, forking over big bailouts to rich execs, fracking up the water, allowing corporate gestapo to abuse the water protectors for big oil investors, knocking over more countries for Wall Street gangster profits, provided cover for BP ecocide in the Gulf, the governing conspirators of Flint, and bragged openly about his “Disposition Matrix” and helping Hillary topple Libya. Trump always seemed like a gullible stooge, an oaf, an easily handled egomaniac. Like you know how people always defended Obama, insisting maybe the need to know basis Deep State didn’t really let him in on what they were doing, by surrounding him with an entrouge of flattering admirers and media asskissers all pretending like he did something besides rebrand Dick Cheney policies, keeping him busy with phony peace prizes and golf and basketball and showbiz celebrity receptions? How much less do you think they told W, or Donald J? Or Gropey Joe, who can barely function and only campaigned from his wife’s side, in masks, from their basement? I remember when the backroom cigar chomping duopoly debate corporation would not let Ralph Nader participate, kkkops wouldn’t even let him enter the building-same thing happened with Dr. Jill Stein, they HANDCUFFED her to a chair for 8 hours for trying to attend a debate in this rigged, sham, stage managed, shell of a fake democracy. Where were all those pinkhats when Chertoff and Cheney installed actual groin fondling, porno screening, security theatrical, granny gropers in our airports? Where was the ResistanceTM? The Squad stands for nothing but Orange Man Bad. Empty tweets affect nothing. Performative protest theater.
They changed their own debate rules like five times to try to keep anti-war notable Mike Gravel (RIP) out of the conversation. DNC argued in court they had no obligation to nominate the chosen candidate of the rank n file majority, they rigged two elections against Sanders, using every dirty trick in the book, superdelegates, rightwing billionaire Bloomberg switching parties and spending a billion to run against a tax the rich platform, Bezos and all the corporate lapdog media trashed Sanders night and day, they ran 22 corporate Dems against Bernie, people from the intelligence apparatus and Schwab school, Snake Liz Warren came out and blasted Bernie as a “sexist” even though he was running against Biden who got Clarence Thomas seated on the Supreme Court by attacking Anita Hill and can never seem to keep his hands of women and young people on countless videos, and the Me, Too pinkhats all decided to ignore Tara Reade, but it was Sanders(!!!) who had a populist rap that resonated with The People, never confused old “get off my lawn” Gropey Joe. When they all lined up and endorsed Biden, I knew the fix was in, they got the memo, did not wanna get Paul Wellstoned, so they all went along with the program. USA USA is like one of those old Hollywood cardboard sets, the Gunsmoke saloon that is just a wooden front, nothing behind the stage but spies and assassins. Snickering billionaires operating secret cults. Some overpaid hack media personalities who give middle class people false confidence that everything is running smoothly, and that the trains are running on time. This country operates a bunch of torture gulags, like Gitmo, which Classy, Dashing Obama casually broke his promise to close. Now they pig-media just blames it all on Trump and Putin, or Stein and Sarandon, and tries to whitewash image-rehab war criminals like W, Condoleeza, Hillary and McCain, and I think they’re grooming Lyn Cheney to maybe run for the presidency as a Democrat. Biden and Harris are both klutzy, bungling, boobs, goofs, incompetent, Mayo Pete is a lameduck spy weasel marketing creation. All the hysterical anti-protest Capital Hill media frenzy feels like another Clinton cigar psy-op to me. Distraction Theater. Boogeyman Scapegoating. So I aint got no horsey sauce in this ongoing rat race. I know I don’t get no real vote about how this sick society operates through it’s rich man trickery, secrecey, wars, extortion, torturing, spying, coups and mass media fabrications. I don’t believe in any of them, I think it’s all a big show and that we are really ruled by secretive oligarchs and evil billionaires from the shadows. They don’t really care HOW you identify, s’long as they can keep you feuding and blaming your neighbor and only ever punching down. Rather than fret about how “THE OTHER” party are “THE FASCISTS”, I suspect the best we can do is prepare for the worst and help our neighbors and uplift and educate and organize our own peers, rather than exchange media induced insults with them from a pre programmed script designed to keep us divided. Vanguard owns both Carlson and Maddow. They control both sides of the fake debate. talk about something else, turn the televisions off. Stop applauding One Percent Media Rule and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg Techlord Censorship of all Dissident Voices.
‘Today, the US will spend more than $2,100,000,000 on war, then another $2,100,000,000 the next day, and the next day… While American workers struggle to cover basic needs like healthcare, there’s always money for war.’ (-Assal Rad) “We built the largest and longest protest movement in our nation’s history, focused first and foremost on police violence. How did our government respond? By *increasing* police spending. And how did the cops respond? By killing more of us in 2021 than in the previous 8 years.” (-Awkword on Twitter)
The censorship continues. Facebook is shadowbanning us from almost half a million of our followers and have informed us our page is at risk of being deactivated. Help us fight back against corporate censorship by joining us on Telegram https://t.me/mintpress_news
“Even Amnesty International (which is blatantly biased in favor of Western governments) spoke out in 2015 against the US-backed Ukrainian coup regime’s authoritarian ban on the communist party, calling it a “flagrant violation of freedom of expression” (-Benjamin Norton)
” Alex Berenson and Daniel Kotzin were banned from Twitter for being right too soon. They said the same thing vaccine investor Bill Gates later conceded after increasing his fortune by $30 billion.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Again, these are the same people who not only claim to be combatting disinformation but insist they are so reliably honest and have such superior wisdom they should be trusted to *censor the internet* in its name. Nobody spreads disinformation most casually and destructively.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“Happy Birthday Julian! We won’t stop fighting for your release. May you go home to your family soon.”
(- Chris Hedges)
“If we want more than the 2 parties killing our future thru climate collapse, escalating war & crushing inequality – we have to fight for it by voting 3rd party.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Some states are passing laws saying people can’t sleep or “camp” on state property. This is a wonderful idea – If we make it illegal to be homeless then that will mean unfettered capitalism works great!” (-Lee Camp)
“Democracies” are states which the US has managed to overthrow or install a client regime. “Authoritarian regimes” are countries where the US has not yet been successful in doing so.” (-Alan MacLeod)
MAINSTREAM MONOPOLY PROPAGANDA MEDIA WILL NOT ALLOW CHOMSKY, HEDGES, McGOVERN, ROWLEY, McKINNEY, OR COL. ANN WRIGHT ON THE AIRWAVES
“Japan’s right-wing former PM Shinzo Abe was part of a fascist cult called Nippon Kaigi which seeks to restore the Japanese empire (denying its genocidal crimes in China & Korea), undo the pacifist constitution and end women’s equality and human rights laws” (-Benjamin Norton)
“When many shortages were reported in the old USSR, communism – the system – got blamed. Now that we suffer many shortages, everything other than the system – capitalism – gets blamed. Dont be fooled.” (-Richard D. Wolff)
“It trips me out that Americans are willing to pay taxes to send people to prison but not to send people to college or have health care.” (-Brokeass Stuart)
“These Mercedes Benz princes do not represent any Arabs. They are simply selfish and stooges for America. The people, from Morocco to Bahrain, do not support any of this.” (-Richard Medhurst)
“This appears as madness but it is actually policy so we should not not be surprised. The U.S. openly declared its’ commitment to “full spectrum domination” & a military-first strategy in their public documents. Building an effective Anti-war movement is only way to to stop them.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Find someone who loves you as much as the Washington Post loves demanding we bomb Iran.” (-Alan R. MacLeod)
“First the US nuked Japanese civilians, killing 200,000 in order to prevent Japan from going socialist and becoming an ally of the Soviet Union Then the US rehabilitated fascist war criminals and gangsters, turning Japan into a one-party right-wing regime, which it still is today.” (-Benjamin Norton)
“Beyond Finland & Sweden formally joining NATO, it’s the military posture that’s the real story. There’s 260,000 more combat-ready troops that are going to be brought up to Russia’s borders, increasing the likelihood of war.” – BT Editor Ben Becker WATCH https://youtu.be/tdEquEff1P0
“WAR ON HISTORY: DISMANTLING of memorial to Soviet soldiers who LIBERATED Klaipeda, Lithuania begins in the city. The site remembering those who sacrificed their lives against NAZI Germany will be taken DOWN.
We must face the fact that WWIII has begun, and the EU must face the fact that the US, while against Russia, is not on the EU’s side.” (-Dan Kovalik)
“One of the hardest things to do in rocknroll is walk it like you talk it.” (-Billy Bragg)
“With a government that doesn’t give a damn about them and has passed on the cost of the ruling class war in Ukraine on to the working class, why don’t people in the U.S. rebel?” (-Ajamu Baraka)
RISE
It’s way too hot to be in the garage where the old record player is, a big heat emergency, accompanied by sudden desert thunderstorms that always floods all my rickety old domiciles. I got buckets placed out there in the ancient sun warped wooden garage now, but ya know, it just depends on how heavy the rains are and how long they last. Anyways, I’m jonesin’ to go out, there cause I got real lucky at the usually sucky second hand store the resell plunderers access before us peasants get a chance, the two tourist trap boutiques in town obviously got an inside line, cause no old school boom boxes or records or tapes or cd’s ever make it to the floor. Used to be a steady influx of cowboy shit which I always like-from hats and chaps to bolo ties, cufflinks, boots, to ya know spurs and button down Western shirts and shit, but these greedhead boutique owners struck a deal with the non profits donation store managers, so they buy up everything with potential resell value and then, charge fifty times whatever they paid for it. Hardly seems fair to us low wage scavengers, but about every three or four months, something slips by the eagle eyes of all the ripoff artists and today, I hit the jackpot with a Nick Gilder 45, 3 Shuan Cassidy 45’s, a book about Tombstone and the gunfight at the Okay Corral, a Tina Turner dvd and two Ike and Tina records I can not wait to play next time it’s cool enough to go out there and me and my old lady are able to steal some very rare private time together, when we can work on making music together, and enjoying some crackly old records. I’m pretty lit about finding some desirable stuff I like and can almost afford for a change because it does not happen too often out here in the wind beaten, scorching hot, rain faded, streets flooded, mosquito ridden, no man’s land. That was a bigass haul for me. Everything is a motherfuckin ripoff nowadays, we had to pay over $4 for a disposable motherfucking lighter to light sparklers on the Fourth Of July. They were always Ninety Nine cents before these big monopoly Vanguard/Blackrock power grabs and price gouges under cover of Covid/War On Russia. Biden’s billionaire buddies are having the time of their fuckin’ lives, just mercilessly gouging us impossibly propagandized slaves to death. “Blame Putin”, they say ten thousand times a day. And for me, personally, even the “Blame Trump” bullshit has gotten stale. Beyond stale. Just bullshit excuses at some point. Nobody wakes up THAT early. The rich are all in it together, but use the bullshit media to keep the slaves all divided, arguing about petty madeup shit so we never unite against the common oppressors.
So yesterday, after many, many days of very high stress and escalating desert high nineties heat, I was able to squeeze in a few covert hours of well deserved R & R, watching some Roku Tv ap station called VEVO that plays all the old 80’s MTV videos-Pat Benatar, Berlin, Hall & Oates, Cyndi Lauper, Jodi Watley, the Police, the Motels, John Cougar, Cameo, Duran Duran, Prince, Madness. It was good to slip back there into the long gone past, even just for a little while, and dream. Poor people have been telling middle class people, for a long time, that this ever expanding police state and military industrial surveillance complex is not democratic or woke, that faux-woke politeness culture and creepy Disneyfied identity politricks aint woke, but these middle class people are still so comfortably privileged and consumerist cloistered in their homes with their secondary rental investment properties and never ending streams of Amazon boxes on their purple front porch with the prayer flags and Buddha statues, they are unable to hear anything, except how, of course, More Big Pharma Is Always Good, Anything That Feels Ikky Is Fake News Or Russian Disinformation, Big Tech Censorship and NSA Surveillance Is Good, Big Proxy Regime Change Wars Are Good, and We Just Need More Imperialist KKKops In Khaki Pants-Suits. There is no genuine communicating with people who never leave their houses, that watch television everyday, the mainstream celebrities become their imaginary friends and they will fight you to protect their imaginary friend’s honor. “Don’t say that about KAMALA! She…WEARS A KHAKI PANTS-SUIT! ….FOR FREEDOM!”
I saw how Johnny Carson and David Letterman and Vanna White and Betty White provided continuity and familiarity to my relatives whose spouses had died. You can NOT reach the middle class tv people, they do not wanna know that things are crummy for the poor, outside their luxury, high fenced, hot tubbed, country clubbed, gated communities or skyrises with doormen and shit. They don’t wanna know, they don’t care. They really do seem to think that all their non stop relentless stand in lines obedience and sucking up to power and ignoring real injustices is gonna protect them, or get them some special privilege status in the Great Reset. Grovelers, worshippers of authority. Don’t waste your time involving yourself with these corporate media monopoly programmed Just-Us Got-Mines. They care even less about you and me than their millionaire celebrity class idols do. You can not organize any genuine resistance with these know it all time wasters who just repeat tv slogans like robots all day, I say it’s best to just avoid them entirely, you can not help them, educate them, or collaborate effectively with them, because they just wanna gorge on your energy and steal the monetary value-they do not believe in real collaboration, or equality, or possess any communal or egalitarian vales, you will be unable to ever, ever, ever change their minds, raise their consciousness , or push them left, because they have lifelong investments in their personal identity, the hometeam sports uniform and family of origin tribal myths, they believe in their heart of hearts that the Tv does not lie, Obama kept it classy, and Bill Gates is a Super Savior Scientist For Science From The Future Like Jeff Bezos & Richard Branson & Elon Musk!!! SUPER SMART SPACEMAN WHO WANT TO RESCUE US! FOR PHILANTHOPY! I love Cait Johnstone from Australia-she is a modern day equivalent of like Edward Abbey or Bill Hicks or Mark Twain or Lenny Bruce. She is a real talented writer and her powerful words are beautiful fountains of fiery truth, a dazzling light in the dark-like fireworks, like THE CLASH! A real power to the people, salt of the earth, truth telling social commentator. This one made me laugh: “Very surprised that we weren’t rescued from internet censorship by the man who is a crappy car salesman and also a billionaire and also a womanizer and also an emerald mine heir and also a malignant narcissist, but don’t worry guys he’s still definitely going to save the world.” That’s what I’m saying about the blue no matter who college people, they really have been so conditioned to totally worship all millionaires and billionaires uncritically, they can’t see the trees for the forest, they just echo the commercials. I would feel more sympathy for them if they weren’t so stubbornly self obsessed. Me, me, me, my, my, my. Never a legitimate “us”, unless they’re talking ’bout their family member who has the most money. Can’t wait to inherit some vacation house in Malibu or Ibiza or Dubai or whatever. To the haves on the hill punk is just one more empty commodity they try to own the most shares in. They put up a poster saying we earn more than you. Only thing that ever trickled down from the rulers at the top was greed and powertrip freakery.
: The US government was completely bought for $14.4 Billion The 2 candidates who spend the most (meaning the 2 corporate shills) win the elections 100% of the time A large Princeton study found the US is an oligarchy,…
OH BABY WHAT A PLACE TO BE IN THE SERVICE OF THE BOURGEOISIE
Their only real concerns are protecting their delusions of being popular and shit like that, of owning the Most Stuff. Waiting for more inheritance to prove their moral superiority and virtue to all those lazy and unscientific, lesser thans, who aint so lucky-it;s all about the hoarding and lording over “the others”. Like starbellied sneetches. They consider themselves The Winners. But ALSO, always aggrieved and injured parties, who still do not have Enough Stuff. So hard to get help/nobody wants to work/those dirty ikky POORS are to blame!!! Hometown dude wrote to say he’d been insulted by successful local big fish in small pond retail businessman, for not being as mainstream popular as dude’s trendy hipster own cousin, the popular shtick guy, I reminded him of what he accomplished thirty years ago with primitive home recordings on pre digital equipment and his own whacky, zany humor and imagination. His quirky old cassette tape garage band influenced two or three decades worth of local music makers. I always liked original ground breaking, trail blazing innovator eccentrics more than just the usual come-lately, pudgy suburbans whose families finance their redundantly derivative, glorified cover band, hipster gimmick acts. It gets harder and harder to not just give up on people, and I suppose I already have mostly given up, certainly on the tv believing, wishful thinker status quo preserving, active rat racers. Surely, somewhere out there, there has got to be other remnants of rebel alliance, old punk or anarchist, or gypsy minded droput, kindred spirit resistors, but we seem to be fewer and farther in between. I met an old indigenous rights activist, radical organization veteran elder and was encouraged to see somebody espousing so many of the same ideologies as me, but alas, there aint no women in the desert, it’s just overwhelmingly old man populated, so he could not get past his horny oldman crush on my wife, his tongue was on the floor like some old wolf cartoon, he was stepping on it, just seemingly incapable of holding it together and being respectful enough to our family in order to have any kind of relationship with us-the oldsters just go too ga ga over females in these deadend ghost towns, to even remember there is anything happening, besides being struck dumb by some vah vah voom fantasy mirage. He was just an overgrown old teenager. Made me think of when I was eighteen and could not stop myself from flirting with someone’s girlfriend back then, even though I shoulda known and done much better by then. I guess in some ways, I am a graying teenager too. On a hot day like today, I wish I had somebody to talk to, somebody to rock with, I miss the old fashioned ya know, get down, productive ruckous. Like band practice, ya know? When did singing and drinking in the summertime become such a cancel culture criminal offense? Feels like the fake ass shitlib left was hijacked by like, the Moral Majority or P.M.R.C. anti rock conspiracy! But when it comes to the corruption of the DNC they always all look the other way! Like can you imagine if videos were leaked of Donald Trump Jr. smoking crack, how outraged the fake left would be? But Hunter Biden working for secret labs and oil companies in the Ukraine? Totally okey-dokeyed by every shitlib Karen. It’s a kooky world with the partisan blindness. They all work for the same megadonors, they just wear different colored ties, sometimes.
We got to build new coalitions among the working class, we have to unite with other poor people and not allow ourselves to be diverted or disrupted by squeaky wheel, me first, middle class Karens. My wife says nobody ever grows up and I see it-these smalltown guys back there in the forever competitive midwest are in their sixties now, and one is gloating he’s got more fame and fortune than some forgotten old weirdo basement punk. Even though his fortune and fame are second hand vicarious, being lived through his well financed family member’s paid for corny coverband’s pay to play high visibility. I just aint got the energy for that kinda nonsense no more. High school people still suck. They closed down the malls and the drive in and rollerskate rink, ya know all that’s left in the plantation states are jails, churches, crackhouses, bars and a hospital. Oh, man. So yeah I heard from some people who stayed in the soybean fields and tank factory places and they just got crazier and crazier, bored, churchified superstitious, delusional, adversarial, stalkeresque. Whip themselves into paranoid frenzies. Hunting for witches or commies in the corn. They are the best case scenarios, too. Most of ’em killed themselves, got hooked on crack, or went to jail. Saddening. I know folks who still think there are two very separate political parties in this country, that they are being represented and this is a democracy. It is probably not a coincidence they all got free college and own property.
Rise, like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you: Ye are many—they are few!
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
The video footage coming out of Sri Lanka right now has been the recurring nightmare of every ruler throughout history.
Thousands of protesters outraged by the deteriorating material conditions of the nation’s economic meltdown have stormed the presidential palace of Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and I guarantee you the aerialfootage as they poured into the building en masse has made every government leader and plutocrat a little uncomfortable today.
Video footage of Sri Lankan protesters taking over President’s office in Colombo
Just look at that. Look at all those people flooding in there. That is some truly awe-inspiring power. Imagine how terrifying it would be to find yourself on the receiving end of it.
Every ruler throughout history has spent time envisioning what would happen if a crowd that size decided to storm their base of operation. If their numbers became too great to suppress, or if your forces who would be doing the suppressing joined the ranks of the people instead, the best-case scenario for you is that you’d have already fled the building by that point, as Rajapaksa had the good sense to do shortly before the building was stormed. If enough angry people get their hands on you, it won’t matter if they’re armed with rockets or pistols or their own bare hands; you are in for a violent end.
If you’ve ever wondered why so much energy goes into keeping everyone propagandized in our society, this is why. If you’ve ever wondered why our rulers work so hard to keep us divided against each other, this is why. If you’ve ever wondered why we’re always being instructed to take our grievances to the voting booth even though we learn in election after election that it never changes the things that most desperately need to change, this is why.
Our entire civilization is structured around preventing scenes like the one we’re seeing in Sri Lanka today. Our education systems, our political systems, our media, our online information. Religions that have been around for thousands of years because the powerful endorsed and promulgated them are full of passages extolling the virtues of obedience, poverty, meekness, and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. From the moment we are born our heads are filled with stories about why it’s good and right to consent to the status quo and why it would be wrong to take back what has been stolen from us by a predatory ruling class.
WATCH: Protesters storm presidential palace in Sri Lanka as economic crisis worsens pic.twitter.com/diIVaXx8Cd
This is why we’re always inundated with messaging about the importance of civility and politeness any time people realize that they can simply confront corrupt officials in restaurants or at their homes to push for what they want. The managers of the oligarchic empire which rules over us are terrified that we will one day notice that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that there’s really nothing they could do to stop us if we decided to replace them with a system which benefits ordinary people instead of an elite few.
Things are getting worse and worse because the systems that are in place are designed to exploit and oppress rather than to uplift and help thrive. Those systems will protect their own ability to continue to exploit and oppress until the people use their numbers to replace them with something healthy. The people will never use their numbers to replace abusive systems with something healthy as long as they are successfully propagandized away from doing so.
This is why our political and media institutions act the way they act and why our systems are set up in the way that they are: to keep us from realizing how easy it would be to shrug off the old mechanisms of oppression like a heavy coat on a warm day and build something new that works for all of us.
Things will keep getting worse until we find a way to cut through the propaganda brain fog and rise like lions.(-Caitlyn Johnstone)
“Backslide”! Where has this commitment to human rights been? Yemen, Israel, the U.S. judicial system, Guantanamo, the U.S. healthcare system? Let’s ask Jayland Walker about U.S. human rights – oh sorry we can’t he has 60 bullets in him.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“So, uh, I guess the military poisoned a major Hawaiian water supply, lied about it, and then downplayed the harm. Now a whistleblower seems to have revealed a video of the leak to a local paper. Wow. Locals would be justified in booting the military off the island over this.” (-Edward Snowden)
I know the word fascist/fascism is overused and often misused – but Abe’s political project and beliefs fit the bill, especially when we understand fascism to be a type of imperialism / authoritarianism that is built on specific goals of ethno-supremacy. Steve Bannon loved Shinzo Abe, called him ‘Trump before Trump’. Italian and German fascists also loved Abe and they romanticized Japan under his leadership. Why? Because Abe was a fascist – he was referred to as a “right wing populist” but his views, philosophies were fascist.” (-Sana Saeed)
“If you’re Black and you want to know what the Democrats really think about you, try to escape their Party, watch how some of them treat you and listen to what they call you All those fake smiles, caring and civility goes out the window and you’ll see that they think they own you. Biden saying “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t Black” is how they really think” (-Black In The Empire)
“Maybe moving Joe Biden left will begin after the Democrats lose the House and Senate in 2022.” (-Compton Jay)
“The moral rot of a society could not be clearer when you see a society that shuns the working class & the poor Instead of investing in uplifting people out of poverty…the priority of capitalists is building a strong national security state.” (-Baba Yoga)
“How did this happen? The normalization of warmongering by neoliberals? There is almost no push-back, no counters to why economic competition must lead to war – nothing in the corporate press. Abe was a fascist from a family of war criminals.” (-Ajamu Baraka) Biden to Nominate an Anti-Abortion Lawyer to Become a Federal Judge – Rolling Stone
“Water wars are already coming to America’s suburbs. In some places people have to pay to have water trucked in. This water is often stolen from other locations. As the droughts across the US worsen, these battles will increase & grow.” (-Lee Camp)
“Joe Biden reads from teleprompter “repeat the line” instead of repeating the line. “Say goodnight Gracie.” (Look up the reference if you’re young).” (-Margaret Kimberly Black Agenda Report)
“Elon Musk is a total fraud. This Twitter stunt, like most of what he does, was just for media attention. This failson oligarch only manages to stay afloat thanks to billions of dollars of US government subsidies and his own manufactured media scandals.” (-Benjamin Norton)
“Every time I hear her, I am reminded @AbbyMartin has things to say that will never be spoken on the corpo media nightlies. The very definition of a “dangerous voice.” (-Edward Snowden)
Man, this song’s like a really significant entire chapter of my long gone former life. They say opposites attract, but I’ll never know how, or why this one foxy broad got involved with me, or I got involved with her. I was a pink leather clad, defiant antisocial, outcast glamarchist street kid, into Slade, writing rebel songs, and having boozy singalongs. She was from the ultra mega in crowd, hypnotizingly beautiful to behold, but with introverted, landlordly sensibilities, a propertarian, into money, ownership society, conspicuous consumption, popularity, hierarchy, VIP parking, and from an entirely different class. I remember buying her a double Sam Cooke lp for Valentine’s Day and her really just not digging it, at all. Red flag. Turns out she didn’t really like me, deep down, either. Not really. I’m a pauper, a dishwasher, a minimum wage earning record store guy. A music ranter who won’t take checks to say the Foo Fighters or Kid Rock or Lil Nas X or Kanye are good. I thought she knew. Don’t get involved with rich girls who don’t like Sam Cooke. That’s my only advice.
You’re not “saving democracy” by blindly supporting a party that has rigged its own primaries, kicked the Green Party off ballots, & taken more money from Wall Street in 2020 than the corrupt Republican Party. You’re doing the machine’s bidding and enabling the corporate duopoly. (-Ryan Knight)
“And how do they fool you? Because they pick the leaders they want. And they put those people up there and portray them as being your leaders when, in fact, they’re leaders of nobody.” (– Fred Hampton)
“Whatever The Oppressed do to get The Oppressor off its back…Is Justified.”(-Malcom X)
“I am a revolutionary I am the people I’m not the pig.” (- Fred Hampton)
“TOO POLITICAL”…YA EVER HEAR SELF PROCLAIMED “PUNKS” SAY YOUR LYRICS ARE “TOO POLITICAL”?
I dunno when capitalist hierarchy culture convinced people that “punk” was all about acquiring a big collection of products, or “being popular” with the trendies or sports idiots, but man, I LEARNED stuff from The Clash, and even CRASS, growing up. I dunno how the global one world government transhumanist Davos billionaires captured the universities and regulatory agencies, but most of the media was consolidated under their umbrella in 1996 via Colin Powell’s son and Clinton’s Telecommunications Act. Then, they permanently banned over 900 anti-war songs after Uncle Dick’s 9/11. FREEDOM FRIES FOR EVERYBODY! They just dumbed us down, paid those Spin magazine NYU rich kids to repeat the bullshit about Beck, Kanye, Dave Grohl and the Strokes being godlike geniuses for twenty five years and all the gullible sucksups bought into it. I never had enough drugs to pretend like techno!
“The U.S. really should never be talking about how propagandized people in other countries are. Ever.” (-
Report: Military-Industrial Complex Campaign Checks Help Explain Bloated Pentagon Budget
WASHINGTON –
The military-industrial complex contributed a combined $10.2 million in the 2022 cycle to lawmakers who voted to lavish the military with tens of billions more than either the Pentagon or the White House requested, according to a new Public Citizen report based on campaign finance data collected by OpenSecrets.org.
The report helps explain lawmaker’s eagerness to waste tens of billions more in taxpayer funds on the already bloated military budget. In June, the U.S. House Armed Services Committee voted to increase the Pentagon budget by $37.5 billion over the $813 billion the White House requested, and the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee voted to increase the Pentagon budget by $45 billion.
If the final FY 2023 budget ultimately reaches the amount approved by the Senate committee, defense contractors will have clinched a nearly 450,000% return on their $10 million investment in 2022 campaign and PAC contributions.
Senate committee members who voted to increase the defense budget and received the most from the defense sector over the past six years are:
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member and recipient of $874,876,
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), committee chair and recipient of $822,757, and
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and recipient of $616,152.
House committee members who voted to increase the defense budget and received the most from the defense sector over the past two years include:
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), ranking member and recipient of $404,525,
Rob Wittman (R-Va.), vice ranking member and recipient of $237,799, and
Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), recipient of $150,950
“The military-industrial complex’s campaign spending spree gives war profiteers an outsized influence over Pentagon funding votes,” said Savannah Wooten, People Over Pentagon campaign coordinator for Public Citizen and one of the authors of the report. “It creates a self-fulfilling annual cycle where money from the industry begets money for the industry. Instead of working overtime to secure defense contractor profits, Congress should prioritize the true, urgent human needs of everyday people.”
“The human species is at an adapt-or-perish juncture in its history on this planet; we will either drastically change the way we operate, or we will wipe ourselves out by nuclear war or environmental cataclysm. Because we’ve been brought to this point by our unhealthy relationship with mental narrative, the adaptation we’re being challenged to make would be a collective movement into a healthy relationship with mental narrative.
We’re where we’re at because powerful people have been able to manipulate us into believing mental stories about reality which aren’t based in fact. History is one long unbroken tale of large groups of humans being manipulated by much smaller groups of humans in ways which benefit the smaller groups, and that tale continues to this day. Propaganda and other forms of narrative control are used to manufacture consent for status quo models of governance, economic and monetary systems, and foreign policy which benefit an elite few at the expense of the general population.
And what’s interesting is that underneath all the babbling propaganda stories about what’s happening in our world, humanity is indeed showing signs that we are collectively slipping out of our old relationship with mental narrative. It’s happening in the usual sloppy, awkward, two-steps-forward-one-step-back shamble which has always marked all of human progress, but it’s happening.
It’s happening in the way people are moving away from religion as we collectively discover that those ancient narratives which so long transfixed our ancestors are not necessary or helpful for finding meaning, morality and fulfillment in our lives, and as we collectively notice that doctrines about eternal reward for obedience and eternal damnation for disobedience sound made-up.
It’s happening with the rise of cryptocurrencies as people figure out that money is made up and we can change the rules whenever we want. Money is nothing more than an agreed-upon story that’s only as true as we all continue to pretend it is, a collective narrative that we can collectively rewrite at any time.
It’s happening as people figure out that a romantic relationship doesn’t need to look the way they’ve looked throughout most of our recorded history; that it’s only narrative which says one man and one woman must love and have sex with only each other throughout their lives, or even throughout their relationship. That those rules have only ever been made of empty narrative fluff and can be replaced with an entirely different set of guidelines.
It’s happening as people figure out how much narrative overlays things like gender and sexuality, that there’s nothing inscribed upon the fabric of reality which prescribes our longstanding models of men and women and what their roles are and how their sexualities should express. Rearranging societal narratives that deeply entrenched in our culture is causing a lot of chaos and confusion, and the arguments it’s bringing up are very upsetting for a lot of people, but it’s gradually working itself out as people pick through the narratives and sort out fact from story.
Indeed each issue I’m describing here has brought in its own set of quandaries, challenges, bad faith actors and abuses that had previously been avoided under the old models, but it’s not like the old models have been free of those things either. And as we all discuss, argue, push and pull and muddle our way through these obstacles with each other, we are collectively sinking into the real important insight which underlies all those more superficial areas of contention: that our society is made of narrative, and we can change the rules whenever we want.
We’re still in the early days of this growing insight, but if you look at the conceptual rigidity we had as a society even a few decades ago around our how-it-is stories and our how-it-ought-to-be stories, it’s clear that there’s a real unravelling happening. A relaxation in our collective certainty about how the various components of our civilization are meant to look.
This relaxation and unravelling is the first step in transforming into a healthy society. It’s the first step in the adaptation we’re going to have to collectively make to survive as a species.
But it can’t stop at insights into the fluid nature of narratives around faith, money, gender and relationships. We’re going to have to unlearn the how-it-is and how-it-ought-to-be narratives we have learned about everything over the course of our entire lives.
We’re going to have to learn that we’ve been lied to since we were children about how the world works, how our government works, how our political and economic systems work. We’re going to have to learn that the very building blocks of our culture are mostly just made-up stories from people who want to control us and from long-dead people who wanted to control our ancestors. We’re going to have to learn that all the metrics by which we measure our personal success and failure and the frameworks we use to decide what our lives are about are fictions implanted in our minds by the powerful. We’re going to have to learn that even our most absolutely fundamental ideas about who and what we are have been built on faulty assumptions.
You can’t rewrite a rule if you still believe it’s written in stone. You can’t rewrite a story if you don’t know that you are its author. We can’t rewrite the structure of human civilization if we haven’t yet learned that none of the old rules are real. We can’t collectively withdraw our consent for status quo systems until we collectively understand that our consent is actually required. We can’t bend the spoon until we realize that there is no spoon.
And we are collectively moving toward that realization. We are learning as a collective and as individuals that we don’t have to be what we’ve been told we are, that things don’t have to be how we’ve been told they must be, that all the how-it-is narratives and how-it-should-be narratives we’ve been indoctrinated with are just fairy tales for adults made up by highly confused people whose only qualifications were that they got here before us.
So don’t worry when you see the old rigid boundaries start to blur and wobble. Don’t panic when you see the old stories being met with incredulity. It might look awkward and sloppy right now, but that’s just what it looks like when a thinking species begins moving into a conscious relationship with thought.
(-Caitlin Johnstone)
“NATO expanded its footprint, violatingpromises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden. It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes. It is building a military footprint in Africa and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called “Asia Pacific Four,” to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June. It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021. It has backed Turkey, with NATO’s second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq. Turkish-backed militias are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes – including multiple airstrikes against a refugee camp and chemical weapons use – in northern Iraq. In exchange for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed to expand their domestic terror laws making it easier to crack down on Kurdish and other activists, lift their restrictions on selling arms to Turkey and deny support to the Kurdish-led movement for democratic autonomy in Syria.
It is quite a record for a military alliance that with the collapse of the Soviet Union was rendered obsolete and should have been dismantled. NATO and the militarists had no intention of embracing the “peace dividend,” fostering a world based on diplomacy, a respect of spheres of influence and mutual cooperation. It was determined to stay in business. Its business is war. That meant expanding its war machine far beyond the border of Europe and engaging in ceaseless antagonism toward China and Russia.
NATO sees the future, as detailed in its “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China, and calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict.
“
China has an increasingly global strategic agenda, supported by its economic and military heft,” the NATO 2030 initiative warned. “It has proven its willingness to use force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO’s ability to build collective resilience, safeguard critical infrastructure, address new and emerging technologies such as 5G and protect sensitive sectors of the economy including supply chains. Longer term, China is increasingly likely to project military power globally, including potentially in the Euro-Atlantic area.”
The alliance has spurned the Cold War strategy that made sure Washington was closer to Moscow and Beijing than Moscow and Beijing were to each other. U.S. and NATO antagonism have turned Russia and China into close allies. Russia, rich in natural resources, including energy, minerals and grains, and China, a manufacturing and technological behemoth, are a potent combination. NATO no longer distinguishes between the two, announcing in its most recent mission statement that the “deepening strategic partnership” between Russian and China has resulted in “mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order that run counter to our values and interests.”
On July 6, Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, and Ken McCallum, director general of Britain’s MI5, held a joint news conference in London to announce that China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.” They accused China, like Russia, of interfering in U.S. and U.K. elections. Wray warned the business leaders they addressed that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”
This inflammatory rhetoric presages an ominous future.
One cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The political and social turmoil in the U.S., coupled with its diminishing economic power, has led it to embrace NATO and its war machine as the antidote to its decline.
Washington and its European allies are terrified of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) meant to connect an economic bloc of roughly 70 nations outside U.S. control. The initiative includes the construction of rail lines, roads and gas pipelines that will be integrated with Russia. Beijing is expected to commit $1.3 trillion to the BRI by 2027. China, which is on track to become the world’s largest economy within a decade, has organized the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest trade pact of 15 East Asian and Pacific nations representing 30 percent of global trade. It already accounts for 28.7 percent of the Global Manufacturing Output, nearly double the 16.8 percent of the U.S.
China’s rate of growth last year was an impressive 8.1 percent, although slowing to around 5 percent this year. By contrast, the U.S.’s growth rate in 2021 was 5.7 percent — its highest since 1984 — but is predicted to fall below 1 percent this year, by the New York Federal Reserve.
If China, Russia, Iran, India and other nations free themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network financial institutions use to send and receive information such as money transfer instructions, it will trigger a dramatic decline in the value of the dollar and a financial collapse in the U.S. The huge military expenditures, which have driven the U.S. debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire GDP, will become untenable. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military in 2021, $ 801 billion which amounted to 38 percent of total world expenditure on the military, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. The loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will force the U.S. to slash spending, shutter many of its 800 military bases overseas and cope with the inevitable social and political upheavals triggered by economic collapse. It is darkly ironic that NATO has accelerated this possibility.
Russia, in the eyes of NATO and U.S. strategists, is the appetizer. Its military, NATO hopes, will get bogged down and degraded in Ukraine. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation, the plan goes, will thrust Vladimir Putin from power. A client regime that will do U.S. bidding will be installed in Moscow.
NATO has provided more than $8 billion in military aid to Ukraine, while the US has committed nearly $54 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to the country.
China, however, is the main course. Unable to compete economically, the U.S. and NATO have turned to the blunt instrument of war to cripple their global competitor.
The provocation of China replicates the NATO baiting of Russia.
NATO expansion and the 2014 US-backed coup in Kyiv led Russia to first occupy Crimea, in eastern Ukraine, with its large ethnic Russian population, and then to invade all of Ukraine to thwart the country’s efforts to join NATO.
The same dance of death is being played with China over Taiwan, which China considers part of Chinese territory, and with NATO expansion in the Asia Pacific. China flies warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense zone and the U.S. sends naval ships through the Taiwan Strait which connects the South and East China seas. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May called China the most serious long-term challenge to the international order, citing its claims to Taiwan and efforts to dominate the South China Sea. Taiwan’s president, in a Zelensky-like publicity stunt, recently posed with an anti-tank rocket launcher in a government handout photo.
The conflict in Ukraine has been a bonanza for the arms industry, which, given the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, needed a new conflict. Lockheed Martin’s stock prices are up 12 percent. Northrop Grumman is up 20 percent. The war is being used by NATO to increase its military presence in Eastern and Central Europe. The U.S. is building a permanent military base in Poland. The 40,000-strong NATO reaction force is being expanded to 300,000 troops. Billions of dollars in weapons are pouring into the region.
The conflict with Russia, however, is already backfiring. The ruble has soared to a seven-year high against the dollar. Europe is barreling towards a recession because of rising oil and gas prices and the fear that Russia could terminate supplies completely. The loss of Russian wheat, fertilizer, gas and oil, due to Western sanctions, is creating havoc in world markets and a humanitarian crisis in Africa and the Middle East. Soaring food and energy prices, along with shortages and crippling inflation, bring with them not only deprivation and hunger, but social upheaval and political instability. The climate emergency, the real existential threat, is being ignored to appease the gods of war.
The war makers are frighteningly cavalier about the threat of nuclear war. Putin warned NATO countries that they “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history” if they intervened directly in Ukraine and ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on heightened alert status. The proximity to Russia of U.S. nuclear weapons based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey mean that any nuclear conflict would obliterate much of Europe. Russia and the United States control about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, with around 4,000 warheads each in their military stockpiles, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
President Joe Biden warned that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences,” without spelling out what those consequences would be. This is what U.S. strategists refer to as “deliberate ambiguity.”
The U.S. military, following its fiascos in the Middle East, has shifted its focus from fighting terrorism and asymmetrical warfare to confronting China and Russia. President Barack Obama’s national-security team in 2016 carried out a war game in which Russia invaded a NATO country in the Baltics and used a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon against NATO forces. Obama officials were split about how to respond.
“The National Security Council’s so-called Principals Committee—including Cabinet officers and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—decided that the United States had no choice but to retaliate with nuclear weapons,” Eric Schlosser writes in The Atlantic. “Any other type of response, the committee argued, would show a lack of resolve, damage American credibility, and weaken the NATO alliance. Choosing a suitable nuclear target proved difficult, however. Hitting Russia’s invading force would kill innocent civilians in a NATO country. Striking targets inside Russia might escalate the conflict to an all-out nuclear war. In the end, the NSC Principals Committee recommended a nuclear attack on Belarus—a nation that had played no role whatsoever in the invasion of the NATO ally but had the misfortune of being a Russian ally.”
The Biden administration has formed a Tiger Team of national security officials to run war games on what to do if Russia uses a nuclear weapon, according to The New York Times. The threat of nuclear war is minimized with discussions of “tactical nuclear weapons,” as if less powerful nuclear explosions are somehow more acceptable and won’t lead to the use of bigger bombs.
At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war.
“A simulation devised by experts at Princeton University starts with Moscow firing a nuclear warning shot; NATO responds with a small strike, and the ensuing war yields more than 90 million casualties in its first few hours,” The New York Times reported.
The longer the war in Ukraine continues — and the U.S. and NATO seem determined to funnel billions of dollars of weapons into the conflict for months if not years — the more the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Flirting with Armageddon to profit the arms industry and carry out the futile quest to reclaim U.S. global hegemony is at best extremely reckless and at worst genocidal.(-Chris Hedges)
The US government was completely bought for $14.4 Billion 
Buddi U Chandrasiri 
(@NewsWireLK) 
Veglam 