“Bernie Sanders defending NATO and claiming to not “pay attention” to Ukraine is an unforgiveable example of how there is no “left” in the U.S. two-party system.
It’s one War Party with two wings.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Bernie Sanders position on Ukraine war is as immoral as the rest of the pathetic right-wing democrat party that he is a part of.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“They don’t just control the opposition, they control the opposition to the opposition. Figured out that neither party serves you? Well guess what, friend? You’re in luck! There happens to be a totally organic populist revolution happening on whichever side of the aisle you’re on!” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege, it will always be at the expense of truth and justice.” (-Chris Hedges)
“We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power” (-Chris Hedges)
Round up all your friends and horns and hoopla and hoola hoops, colorful banners and funny hats! You know back in college when you liked R.E.M., and Tracey Chapman, you used to tell yourself how if you were alive in the sixties, you’d be marching with King and Malcolm, or campaigning for the Kennedys, if not the radical Yippie, Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation power to the people left, well? You might need to hit the mirror, Jack. Did something change? Remember when John and Yoko brought the Panthers and Ralph Nader on tv and you agreed with everything they said? In the words of one of the last good punk bands, Electric Frankenstein, the Time Is Now. Two seconds to decide. I fully get why our Australian bretheren scoff at the idea of Brother Kramer calling himself and his professional punk hotshots the MC5, but the message man is the thing, that song is timeless, bigger than any of them, Wayne sez we are all the MC5….so, right now it’s time to, KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS!
“No one is more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they’re free.” (-Goethe)
“Pat Tillman called the Iraq War “fucking illegal,” got shot to death by his own men, and then had his death covered up by the U.S. military.” (-Mike Gravel)
“The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.” (-Chris Hedges)
Man, my electricity went out when I was typing this, so I gotta try and remember what I said the first time cause not all of it saved. All the glitter kids are super stoked about the latest fab collab between the legendary Hiroshi Nakagome, “The Johnny Thunders Of Japan” and the World Famous Mister Ratboy best known for his work with MOTORCYCLE BOY, Hollywood’s coolest band who were “Kicked Out Of Hollywood” for hating the Sunset Strip, and the sexier, darker, more brooding and Velvet Underground influenced PILLBOX that beat from the heart of Alphabet CIty. Ratboy also released a series of memorable records with his more eccelctic group, SOUR JAZZ and an excellent solo album before relocating to Japan. Chris Barry the very charming Pillbox frontman returned to Canada and created an outstanding record called “Let It Throb” with his band, Throbbing Purple, I think Lou paris moved back to Cleveland, and Francois still knocks around on the Sunset Strip in his swanky leopard print and probably still has the best hair in L.A.
“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success,” defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” (-Chris Hedges)
I DON’T SPEAK COMMERCIALS
Man I ended up talking with a boomer I know who reads those corporate celebrity magazines, so she’s telling me like, how popular and with it Kamala “KKKOP” Harris and (Neo)Kanye “Batshit” West are with the young people of the streets, and I’m kinda just like half smiling, trying to imagine where and what young people might even remotely care about either of them, at all. At all. Like, “who”? This is just media juggernaut celebrity magazine fiction. I mean, Ye had those ridiculous $500 cream colored shoes all the white people coffeetable magazines promoted some years back, and I know he married that idle heiress with all the elective surgeries and seems to have been driven bonkers by that family and whatever kook cult they belong to, but young people are probably all into some new shit me and that boomer have never heard of. She still thinks of Amy Pohler and Whoopi Goldberg as edgy, radical comediennes. She thinks “Hamilton” is woke hip-hop. I’m not sure there’s even such a thing, ya know. I’m so old now I can still remember when “woke” meant being conscious of the lies, falsehoods, fabrications and phony fictions the empire manufactured to hustle up support for their endless Dick Cheney proxy wars agenda, and the divide the working class and mass incarcerate people of color for capitalist shareholder profits. Woke meant you did not fall for patriotic, racist whitewash, history revisionism, or stupid advertising slogans, or bullshit copaganda, or believe in the corporate media bullshit of the day, or subscribe to all those long debunked archaic cold war divide n conquer narratives, or follow along with any of the evil empire’s oppressor nonsense, now, the fake as fuck corporate media keeps trying to convince these boomers and some Gen X role playing nerds that woke means endless wars and kill the poor, but maybe with a Buddha statue at your rainbow flagged airbandb and a “TRUST THE SCIENCE” sticker and a Ukraine flag on your BLM Tesla, with maybe a cameo appearance from Bob The Drag Queen. I instantly loved Bob the Drag Queen way back in the day, but the capitalist war machine is still the capitalist war machine, with or without some feelgood bumper stickers, or zaney but lovable cynically cast backup dancers. It’s a dead dull Saturday in a nowhere dead end place, and my family is sick and I’m taking heavy doses of Vitamin C trying to not catch whatever they have, but it might be unavoidable. I’m restless and pissedoff and just hate sitting around. Worked on the garden, expecting some seeds in the mail today or Monday. Bitchy. Wanna Rock. Nowhere Calling to the Faraway Clowns. Oh yeah, that same boomer also wanted to tell me about some Republikkkan that got caught lying (GASP!) but somehow they never heard about any of Gropey Joe’s FIFTY YEAR LONG MADCAP WELL DOCUMENTED, EASILY PROVEN, INDISPUTABLE, ENTIRE CAREER OF LIES. Woke means never trusting the bullshittery on tv.
I was saying Donald Trump sucked, all the way back in the eighties, where’s my donut? Ya know what I mean? All the fraudsquad superstars and Lyn Cheney were required to do was say “ORANGE MAN BAD” and they all got to be overnight shitlib celebrities. What the fuck is that? I gotta say it on Twitter or something? “ORANGE MAN BAD”. There I said it again, now I shouldn’t I be receiving like some kinda special credit card approval in the mail, or job offers in the supposedly popular media, or some kinda discount buffet at the tiki lounge or somethin’? Drink tickets at the Tuesday night gentrification bar? Free hats from the expensive boutique? That’s all the shitlib superstars of the fradsquad and Lyn Cheney the torture and fracking lady have done, some empty, meaningless justice tweeting about “ORANGE MAN BAD”. Most of that was just to make new laws against public protest, to criminalize anyone who contests the fix is in election results, and superfund the racist gestapo cops even after four long years of protests against superfunding racist gestapo cops. Some representation we got, huh? I guess redundant disappointment AOC has started tweeting “IRAN ALSO BAD”. I’ll always remember her crocodile tears over CHILDREN IN CAGES while Trump was in office. Once Biden was in, they put some peppy wall paper on the walls, did a photo op with border kids reading Elmo or some shit and changed the name of the CHILD CAGES to “overflow facilities”, quadrupled the population there, and AOC never mentioned it again. Even when Obama or Biden actually out incarcerate their Republikkkan pals, rightwing media still screams about all the immigrants coming here for our good jobs and healthcare benefits. Does any of this make any sense at all? Good jobs with healthcare benefits? I guess they just mean AOC and her anti protest, pro censorship friends. Politics are fake. All these awful greedy awful people hate the poor. One of my friend’s wives who sadly, tragically, unexpectedly died was a real genius level super extraordinary talented artist, she was sucha brilliantly gifted artist that excessively rich honcho hipsters would even pay her big bucks to paint campy pop art for their ridiculous showoff mansions. Her mom and aunt were old school women’s rights activists who wanted to see a female president in their lifetime, but even she had to admit that this cold war witch, Hillary Clinton, cashing big checks from the bonesawing despot Saudi pharoahs for her so-called foundation, rigging the primaries against Sanders, smearing him as sexist, and the blaming “RUSSIA!” for the next however many years when she lost the election unexpectedly to Trump, and promoting fracking which fucks up all the water supply everywhere, and cackling like an unhinged lunatic over her delight in killing Gaddafi for her central banking friends was terrifyingly outta the realm of acceptablility, no matter what body she has, or what pro nouns make her feel most seen. The ruling class hate our guts and are never, never going to advocate for us, or protect us, or do our will. They work for billionaires, Gropey Joe even said that straightup to a worker in Michigan which is why nobody on the real left believes he won on Super Tuesday without some Mayo Pete affiliated software goosing, aside from the fact that he had no base and never campaigned except with his wife while wearing a mask from his basement, the one time he did hit the campaign trail he bellowed at a union man who challenged his Corn Pop nonsense: “I don’t work for you!”
“It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.” (-Chris Hedges)
“It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance ; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt.” (-Chris Hedges)
“One of America’s most vocal and steadfast advocates for supporting Joe Biden’s war policies in Ukraine. He voted to send $40 billion to Raytheon and CIA “for Ukraine,” and when asked if the US should send F-16 *fighter jets*, he seems not just ready but eager to send much more” (-Glenn Greenwald on sadly soldout pro war Sanders)
“We are living in the most expensive and dangerous timeline and Dems just keep telling you deal with it. They don’t even answer questions anymore, you’re just smeared as “pro Russia.” What a sick bunch. What are we doing?” (-Thia Ballerina)
““China, China, China.” “Russia, Russia, Russia.” Anything to distract us from the fact that our greatest enemy is our own government.” (-Jory Micah)
“Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jail and prisons, however, they can each generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year” (-Chris Hedges)
“Once you know someone is a compulsive liar, you’re not going to fall for their lies anymore. That’s how manipulation works: it’s only effective when you don’t know it’s happening. So our job is to wake people up to the fact that it is happening, and how precisely it is happening. Journalism will never have any meaningful impact on society as long as those in power can manipulate how that journalism is received by the public. This means that the real fight is in crippling their ability to do this by expanding public awareness of those manipulations. Investigative journalists do good and important work, but they’re only a small piece of the equation when it comes to circulating information and waking up the public to effect meaningful societal changes. The bigger part of the fight is in fighting the propaganda machine. The fight is no longer just getting information out there, it’s now also about making sure people see it and understand it correctly. There’s already enough publicly available information out there to incite revolution; only reason it doesn’t is because of imperial spinmeisters. The silver lining in this cloud is that fighting the imperial propaganda machine is something all ordinary people can do in their spare time. We can all circulate inconvenient facts, debunk and discredit the imperial spin machine, and help further degrade public trust in the MSM.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“No, there are no “UN troops” taking over Chile right now and rounding people up for bird flu. IDK why so many are asking me about this, but don’t trust a Canadian living in Canada to tell you what is going on in Chile.
Fearmongering BS doesn’t just come from MSM you know.” (-Whitney Webb)
A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom.” (-Chris Hedges)
“Dear Fellow Americans Our Gov’t lied us into the Iraq War and killed a million people, they just lied to us for 20 years about what was really happening in Afghanistan If you let them make you believe Putin went into Ukraine for no reason and Ukraine is winning you’re just dumb.
No matter what political label Americans gives themselves it appears that almost all of us still believe in American Exceptionalism.
Many Americans had and some still have WWII vets in their families Do they know that our Gov’t is now arming Nazis instead of fighting them?
The reason why the U.S. and NATO have been unable to destroy Russia with sanctions like they thought is because almost the entire Global South knows that the West are the liars and remembers what the West has done to their countries.
The U.S. couldn’t beat the Taliban, NATO can’t beat Russia so the next logical step is to try to start a war with China.
Agree with Russia going into Ukraine or not, Putin and Russia are the ones telling the truth about why the war started and the U.S. and the West are playing us for suckers again.
Americans don’t care about invasions when the US is doing the invading. It is the U.S. and NATO that has totally failed in what they promised.
They didn’t turn the ruble to rubble, they haven’t forced Russia out of Ukraine, taken back Crimea, forced out Putin, isolated Russia, or sent Russia back to the Stone Age. But they took $100 billion from us. When the U.S. and Europe says the world is with them, it’s because they truly believe that they are all that matters and what the other 85% of people in other countries think doesn’t really mean anything.” (-Black In The Empire)
“Political parties are a problem. A voter could agree with a policy and still vote against the candidate promoting the policy because they’re not in the same party as them. Parties keep us divided. As a result, we don’t focus on the elites using all of us.” (-Sabby Sabs)
“Every time Joe brag tweets about his booming economy he’s erasing ppl that are struggling, suffering, hungry, homeless, poor, without medicine, hurting and living paycheck to paycheck. I’m sorry, but he doesn’t give 1 solitary fk about you and it shows.” (-Thia Ballerina)
Man I had some mediocre dreams last night concerning old shit from the high school years, drumkits and arguing with people about recording costs. Stuck in the past. Woke up and checked my old mostly obsolete email cause I’d received some unexpected correspondance from distant quarters there and man the propaganada machine bullshit is RELENTLESS. Somehow during my misguided Bernie daze, when I wrongly thought he had the character, backbone, and integrity to stand up and fight the corrupt DNC and Hillary Clinton and the Military-Surveillance-Pharamaceutical-Media-Incarceration Monopolies, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer and Blackrock, I got on these bullshit DNC, gullible shitlib echo chamber mailing lists, so now I am being flooded with all this STAND WITH IRAN WOMEN and LGBT RIGHTS IN IRAN spam, deceptively manufacturing consent for war. Crassly manipulative wag the dog war piggery. Everytime the empire wants to target another country for um, “Liberation”, they start with the feminist angle, trot out AOC to demand the bombs be deployed on some foreign culture the deep state has determined is not woke and sensitive enough. They did the same shit with Afghanistan, then Syria. Destroyed Libya and laughed about it. If you think women and gay people have more freedom and better quality of lives after USA, USA goes in and flattens all their buildings and infrastructure and rough men come to town with big guns and kick everybody’s door down and shoot the males and do what they do in war to the women and children they are invading, you are an imperialist, white superemacist, or naieve. Women and gay people are not better off in Afganistan or Libya, just because their male family members have been slaughted and tortured and some rich ladies in Amurkkka got more billions donated to their “foundations”. Haiti does not want or need no white women who work for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin overthrowing their governments or helping to steal their natural resources for Davos billionaire profits. I see how they do it though-they whip up the identity politics Nato left, make them think it’s all for the kittens and the oppressed. If the empire could never be bothered to fix fucking FLINT MICHIGAN, how the fuck do you college people imagine they give a rat’s ass about “women’s rights” in Afghanistan? The fraud squad warpigs make me sick. What fakes, what liars, how can they sleep at night? Like babies, rolling in the money, I guess. Those grossout ladies on “The View” really have dumbed the KKKaryns down,.
Rainbow flags on tanks killin’ more poor brown people for oil is not okey dokey, or wokey wokey. Fix Flint. And if you don’t care about the poor people of East Palestine being poisoned by your big media programming mushroom cloud Blackrock buddies just you know cidentally becuse they supposedly just had no choice but to burn all those toxic chemicals there in the farmlands,where they wanna mine for Cobalt, while Bill Gates buys up all the remaining farmland everywhere, stop pretending you love marginalized peoples in foreign countries you know nothing about Sal the Agorist on Twitter: “https://t.co/KhfSj4mlOO” / Twitter
FROM PALESTINE TO EAST PALESTINE THE RICH ARE WAGING WARS ON THE POOR
You know I understand people are punished 24/7 with fear programming and fabricated bullshit hysteria about the boogeymen coming to steal their special privileges or whatever, which is the main reason the consumerist hypnospell see no evil motherfuckers just dutifully repeat what the spin doctor tv millionaires say until doomsday, which is here for a lot of us, but man, I will never really get the whole sham about how all the goosestepin’ gotmines still believe that talking about Obama and Beyonce all day makes them NOT RACISTtm, ESPECIALLY while they steadfastly ignore all the white supremacist wars of aggression, the mass incarceration of black people, and kkkops killing about six people a day in this country, the majority of them people of color, but somehow the tv still convinces them that applauding the soldout fraudsquad or Cailtin Jenner some more somehow means they aren’t absolutely batshit complicit with the HONKY DEATH MACHINE, that’s just slapped some feelgood bumper stickers on the back of their tanks. “COEXIST”, my ass. You mean coexist with other rich white people, mostly. And maybe some token models. A few. “I feel so seen”, the shitlibs all say. What about all the poor people whose lives are being destroyed by your bullshit diversity idol’s donor class bosses and forever prez?
“The media propagates a message that corporations want, and there’s a belittling and mocking of the poor and celebration of wealth. A kind of cutthroat, rapacious capitalism is celebrated on reality television shows where you betray and manipulate and push aside your competitors for fleeting fame and money. These are sick values, but they’re disseminated through corporate media in almost every program you watch.” (-Chris Hedges)
Oh, the alcoholic afternoons When we sat in your rooms They meant more to me than any Than any living thing on earth It had more worth Than any Living thing on earth, on earth, on earth
Vivid and in your prime You will leave me behind You will leave me behind
(-The Smiths)
HAWKWIND, MIND DUST MUSIC RECORD STORE, MY PURPLE APARTMENT & THE YELLOW HOUSE
One of my lifetime’s dearest friends died a couple Christmases ago, our dearly beloved old brother D.A., his stagename was Billy Ray Bogart, and his band was called The Hot Rod Gang, man, I still wrote him postcards like I had since I was a kid. He worked at this old hippie record store in the middle of nowhere-I met him when I was I dunno, 12 or 13 and he taught me all about all those sixties “Nuggets” style garage bands, the blues, so much. From Iggy and The Doors to John Lee Hooker and Love and Blue Cheer. When his parents died, he moved in with me to my purple apartment, I was about eighteen. You could still get good acid back then usually from his guitar teacher friend, ya know, and we would drink beer and whiskey and trip on acid and it was so much fun. You ever see one of those comicbooks, “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers”? That’s what that dude was like, just a lovely, lovely sweet, shy, smart, hippie, space traveler. My time on earth has become a lot lonelier since he split. We used to watch old wretling videos he collected on VHS and get high and listen it Hawkwind, baby. Good times. I wish I could go back and see that little apartment we shared but it burntdown. All the places I used to live are vanishing. They even painted over the Gringo mural on St. Mark’s Place. What the fuck is wrong with people? Nothing’s sacred to the dollar worshippers. These greedhead scumbags call themselves developers but they are more like destroyers. History erasers.
Not that much I’m all that interested in owning, I’m not really all that much of a materialist or collector, but I do still really, really, really wanna copy of that THEE HYPNOTICS boxset and I’d also love to see that movie about them.
Paradise Lost was what we all called my old yellow farmhouse on the edge of town that was pretty much ground zero for the punk rock in my era in that state. Lotta people are still trying to repeat what we had conjured there. It was a magical time and we were foolish and naieve for maybe kinda thinking it would never end.
Ain’t it weird how that’s what we all called my old bandhouse-they tore it down after it sat empty for years and years cause the landlords wanted like some farout high rent and the place was completely deteriorated like thirty years ago. First they turned it into a nail salon, a tanning bed place, a cell phone store, and then it became home to a group called, “Teens For Christ”, which always makes me smile. Lotta the people who used to hangout there are dead, now. Some of the others are like these straight capitalist businessmen. It blows my freakin’ mind. I’m still the outsider lunatic fringe! Silver machine, baby! Headlines say Olivia Newton John is dead-I had that poster of her from Grease on my bedroom wall as a kid. In the third grade for Halloween I had a little girlfriend who was Sandy and I was Elvis.
Black people need some peace. White people need some peace. And we are going to have to fight. We’re going to have to struggle. We’re going to have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace, because the people that we’re asking for peace, they are a bunch of megalomaniac warmongers, and they don’t even understand what peace means. Fred Hampton
During the furor over Nancy Pelosi’s incendiary Taiwan visit last week, I was watching an appearance by Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp on the show Rising which brought up the under-discussed point that US officials going to Taipei is actually a continuation of a trend that had already been happening under the Trump administration.
DeCamp pointed out that China began regularly flying planes into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone after Trump administration officials made similar visits to Pelosi’s.
“That started happening regularly after August 2020 when President Trump sent Alex Azar to Taiwan,” DeCamp said. “He was his health secretary. He was the highest-level cabinet official to visit Taiwan since 1979. The following month, in September 2020, they sent Keith Krach. He was the undersecretary for economics in the State Department, and he was the highest-level State Department official to visit Taiwan since 1979. So these are unprecedented steps, and since then we’ve seen more Chinese military activity in the region.”
Later in the interview Rising’s Briahna Joy Gray asked DeCamp if these escalations against China from the Trump administration into the Biden administration were a “kind of blob foreign policy decision that is not partisan.” DeCamp explained how in 2018 the US military began officially transitioning from emphasis on “counter-terrorism” in the Middle East toward “great power competition” with China and Russia, with the ultimate target being China.
“If you look at all the really hawkish think tanks in Washington that are funded by the arms industry, it’s all about this so-called great power competition,” DeCamp said. “Russia right now seems to be the more imminent issue I guess, but China seems to be in the long run. And we’ve seen this from just about every government agency — the Pentagon, the FBI, the State Department, the CIA — say that China is the long-term so-called threat. And we’ve seen Biden say this, and this is kind of the name of the game in Washington right now.”
In the lead-up to Pelosi’s visit, Moon of Alabama spotlighted this strange phenomenon where US foreign policy moves along the same trajectory regardless of political party or election results with a collection of recent articles that have all raised this subject independently. This one from Naked Capitalism stands out the most right now:
National leaders never have complete freedom to act; even autocrats have constituencies or power blocs they have to appease. In the US, it has become clear that the President has limited degrees of freedom on foreign policy matters; the military/intel interests call the shots. Mind you, there are factions so a President can push the needle to a degree; that’s why, for instance, Obama was able to check Clinton’s plans to escalate in Syria. But the flip side is that Presidents who want to improve relations with pet enemies get nowhere. In the Oliver Stone interviews, Putin recounts how he had productive discussions with Bush and they agreed on concrete de-escalation measures. Follow ups were unanswered. Eventually Putin got a written bafflespeak climbdown. That and other examples led Putin to conclude that US presidents are hostage to bureaucratic and commercial interests.
Biden is a visibly very weak president. And it appears that that has enabled the neocons to have an even bigger say over foreign policy than usual.
One assumes Xi has to understand that. Yet the Chinese readout has Xi starting from lofty first principles to contend that the US and China, as leading world powers, have a duty to promote peace, global development, and prosperity. From that, Xi reasons that seeing China as a strategic rival is “misperceiving” US-China relations and misleading the world community.
Who is Xi talking to when he goes on like that? It certainly is not to Biden.
An example of the aforementioned comments by Putin was when Oliver Stone asked him, “You’ve gone through four U.S. presidents: Clinton, Bush, Obama and now Trump. What changes?”
“Almost nothing. Your bureaucracy is very strong and it is that bureaucracy that rules the world,” Putin replied.
It’s that “bureaucracy” that is responsible for the fact that the US-centralized empire continues to move in the same way along the same trajectory regardless of political parties and election results.
Nobody elects that bureaucracy. You can’t even see most of it behind the veils of government and corporate secrecy. You can study it your whole life and at best you’ll come away with a list of opaque government agencies, longtime military and intelligence operatives, plutocrats, corporations, banks, war profiteers, think tanks, lobbying firms and NGOs with ties to different nations and governments around the world, but exactly who is responsible for what specific decisions behind each specific move of the empire will remain shrouded in mystery to you. It’s just a jumble of names and words with no useful application.
Westerners are fond of crowing about the freedom they have to criticize their president or prime minister in whatever way they want, saying that if you tried to criticize the leadership of one of the foreign regimes we are all trained to hate you would be thrown in jail for it.
And depending on the nation that may be true, but is it really “freedom” to be able to criticize an elected official who is nothing more than a figurehead? Sure, you can criticize the president all you want. You can stick googly eyes on a sock and criticize that all you want, too; it will make the same amount of difference. At least people who live under more overtly authoritarian governments know who rules over them and who’s calling the shots. In that sense, they have more freedom than us.
As an Australian I know live in a member state of the US-centralized empire which is functionally just a US military base with kangaroos, but I can’t see who’s making the actual decisions about how the empire will act, how capitalism will move, and whether my children will be conscripted into the military to fight some idiotic war with China provoked over Taiwan or the Solomon Islands. If I were Chinese I would know exactly who is ultimately responsible for making the important decisions about economics and foreign policy in my country, but as an Australian I don’t get to know those things.
The truth is westerners live in a giant empire loosely centralized around the United States whose operations they have literally no influence over, whose operators they’re not even get to know, and whose mechanisms are entirely hidden. If you call that freedom, I call you a fool.
We can see that the empire moves the same way on important matters regardless of who we elect by simple naked-eye observation of the empire’s behaviors from year to year. We can also see it in the fact that the official leader of the most powerful government on earth is obviously suffering from some kind of dementia and is clearly not the one calling the shots.
All this makes me wonder: at what point will foreign leaders begin demanding to speak to those who are calling the shots? At what point do Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping begin saying, “No, we’re not doing another fake phone call with America’s fake government. Put me in touch with the actual people who are responsible for the issues I am concerned about. Who is making the actual decisions on these specific matters? Let me talk to them. I demand to speak to your real government.” (-Cait Johnstone)
“I fought for liberty and was deprived of all liberty. I fought for freedom of speech and was deprived of all speech. I fought for the truth and became the subject of a thousand lies.” (- Julian Assange)
“Julian Assange shouldn’t be the subject of a grand jury hearing, he should be given a medal. He’s contributing to democracy.”
(-Noam Chomsky)
“It is impossible to correct abuses unless we know they are going on.” (-Julian Assange)
“The thing that struck me when I saw Kamala Harris’s tweet and her statement expressing this outrage about Brittney Griner, first of all, let me say, I don’t think anybody anywhere in the world should be imprisoned for marijuana possession. Period. Full stop. When you look at Kamala Harris’ statement on Twitter, she is expressing this outrage about Brittney Griner. My question for her and the Biden administration is, where is your outrage for your fellow Americans who are sitting in prison today here in the United States of America because of minor marijuana violations? How come you are not fighting as hard for them to be returned home and reunited with their families as you are for Brittney Griner?” And to me, the message to the American people through their actions is loud and clear. It is that if you are rich and powerful or famous, then you will get special treatment from this administration. If you are not, we don’t care about you, and we’re going to let you sit there and rot in jail.” (-Tulsi Gabbard)
“After George W, Obama, Trump and now Zelensky can play president, I guess AOC could also. But the Sanders campaigns demonstrated that liberal/radical democrats don’t have the stomach to fight for power inside that party so she will never get close to the presidency.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“DEMOCRATS ARE LYING TO THE PUBLIC: 1) The economy’s NOT booming. GDP has declined for 2 quarters—which means it’s in a recession. 2) Biden’s “climate” bill expands fossil fuels & drilling on public lands. 3) More people have been locked up for marijuana under Biden than Trump.” (-Ryan Knight)
Chris Hedges explains: Liberals don’t address institutional racism. All those interlocking systems to keep them poor, poor. https://youtu.be/q1PEQGg-mT0
Sabby Sabs interviews whistle blower journalist KIM IVERSON:
I am the people, I’m not the pig. You got to make a distinction. And the people are going to have to attack the pigs. The people are going to have to stand up against the pigs. That’s what the Panthers is doing, that’s what the Panthers are doing all over the world. Fred Hampton
DIVINYLS FOREVER
I can’t believe Chrissy is no longer here, besides Vanity, she was my fave woman of the 80’s. I first discovered the Divinyls at SOUNDS record store on saint Mark’s Place as a runaway teenager way back in 84 or 85. She was the ultimate bombshell and all her troubled songs about being a misfit and a rebel spoke directly to my young heart. Ever since discovering them, ya know, her guitarist Mark has been the template for what I was always searching for in a sideman. I thought he had great style, sound, really inimitable, unique riffs, perfect hair, all the fab moves. Nobody has great bands like this anymore cause pig-media banned real rocknroll and replaced it with toxic-pop garbage. And the propertarians shamelessly jackedup rents so high muttering about “market value” and calling the kkkops everytime they spot a suspected poorer person in their zipcode-all without ever raising wages for workers so nobody can afford an apartment, let alone a rehearsal studio. In my town a couple of get rich developers moved in with big talk about how they’re gonna rebrand the place as a Brooklyn like hipster haven for “California tech-money” and five boomer rich people love that kinda talk and told city hall some changes needed to be made to the desert southwest unconforming cowboy tradition of whacky cactus and rock gardens and cow skulls and horseshoes nailed to every wall, and now code enforcers are flying drones over people’s fences and confiscating poor people’s old R.V.’s and rundown cars-EVEN FROM PRIVATE PROPERTY. partisan media stupid middle people are such short sighted asskissers that everytime the establishment rolls out another bullshit law killing our freedoms and civil liberties, while attacking the poor, they always jump up and down and applaud. “Thanks for getting rid of the eyesores!”, they all shriek, never comprehending that whenever you allow The Man to fuck over “the lesser thans” and “the others”, their NEXT TARGET will be YOU. Like all those shitlib assholes were so happy when Alex Jones and RFK got censored, now it is THE ENTIRE LEFT being purged from all platforms. And HELL NO, “Kamala!” and Pelosi ARE NOT THE LEFT! This culture war bullshit cover story works like a charm though. All the Breitbart rightwingers keep saying Biden is a radical leftist and a Marxist socialist while he keeps arresting people for reefer, mass incarcerating black people for reefer, starting wars, and taking away more rights. All the shitlibs only care about banning guns, abortion, and protecting their own privileged lifestyles to even wanna KNOW what the soldout Democrats are really doing while blaming everything on Trump, or “RUSSIA!” Nothing on tv is real anymore, it’s all corporate police state/forever war propaganda designed to benefit the super rich.
Man do I ever miss Stiv and Joe, ya know they even got Rollins helping promote wars and shit. Pretenders n Duran wavin’ flags for proxy war in Ukraine. The Divinyls are perfect to me. They wrote REAL SONGS, they had REAL HEART, they got REAL style, they played REAL ROCKNROLL. No one can ever replave Achrissy Amphlett or Stiv Bators-certainly not some muppet model paycheck cashers. My fave groups as a gutter urchin in Manhattan were the Lords, Inxs, Fleshtones, Billy Idol, and the Divinyls. That aint changed. These other motherfuckers who been reconditioned into thinking that rocknroll has somethin’ to do with Owning The Most Stuff, asskissing conformity, slavishly puking and repuking the past, or sucking up to rich people, I can’t help them. As a wise kid named Useless Bastard once said, “Fuck Those People”. Anybody else notice how deep state and secret society controlled Hollywood keeps making these movies vilifying, or at best, lampooning people like Fred Hampton, Abbie Hoffman, Che and Fidel? Why do you suppose that is? Cause Nixon and Hoover were the GOOD GUYS? Dick Cheney? Get outta here! The evil billionaires and secret societies are running shit, jacking up the costs of living, waging their imperialist wars while the people on tv are just a puppet show.
Adolescence is hard for everybody-even my friends who were rich or large or good lookin’ TOTALLY struggled and not just cause their friend wore a lot of makeup and sequins. I had a very dear, dear, benevolent friend who died like four years ago, her name was Jan S. Last person in the world you’d think I’d get along with, or have a lifelong, intimate camaraderie with. She was a country club, show off, fur coat, diamond ring mom to my dangerous gangster friend. She was into status and titles and property and conspicuous consumption, but her deep and abiding, unconditional love for her crazy son humanized her and her love for her crazy son humanized me, in her eyes. These brainwashed, spoilt shit fuckin P.C. wokey-wokeest-pro-nounest-I’m Every woman Lil Oprahs can talk about safe spaces all day long, but man, I’ll tell ya, I was hated and hunted as a kid, and this one, bourgeoise country club foxy lady TOLLERATED me and a couple of mine and her kid’s other friends, even though we were all fuckedup and sad and weird, and she fed us freely and let us stay upstairs in his room, making mix tapes, and calling girls on the phone, and mixing heavy metal with rap and new wave on cassettes way before Ton fuckin Loc or Kid Rock or whoever. I miss her, she was a good lady, had some soul, raised my brotha’s black daughter as her own. And that was not an easy thing to accept in uptight racist White Suburbia. I guess I’m thinkin’ about all this today, because she provided one of my lifetime’s only real tollerant havens, and cause summa my extended family members and my very own mightily cherished kids are struggling to fit into this society and even at 52, I am, too. The people at the top want us all to think it’s our fault, or blame each other, but, no, my brothers and sisters and friends of the revolution, I am here to tell you again today, it is the sociopathic abusers at the top and their lyin’ ass gaslighting pimped out no soul fuckin media that’s doing it to all of us. Listen to your own conscience, your own gut instinct—trust that, not the amount of “likes” you get or anything to do with fucking Bullshit Pig-Media.
YOUR HEROES FOR GHOSTS
This is gonna be a little bit backdated by the time it “goes to press” because I’ve got about 4 prior columns in line to post, but a lotta shit is goin’ on in the crazy world and there is so much censorship on all platforms in the USA, USA, nobody even knows anything about what’s happening unless they really dig for it online. Lotta people even think their kindly deep state protectors and big-pharma investors and surveillance-tech billionaires are just buying up all the media and silencing all dissident voices for their own good, for the health and protection of the general public, and the public good, and the Gates Reset. These same liars might have lied about everything else for all these years, but NOW, THIS TIME, they’re telling us the truth, according to gullible wisful thinking blue no matter whos, the secretive billionaires are supposedly trustworthy because they are Democrats and philanthropists and woke scientific and because they love us! These same apologists try to make sense of like Taylor Swift and Kanye West and Harry Styles and Dave Grohl and shit. Man, I’ll never know how so many people can even stand all the say-nothing copycat clones and tribute bands or mediocrity imitations who just constantly regurgitate and rehash the past. I remember when the Fox tv people kept saying, “Shut Up & Sing” to the Dixie Chicks, now rebranded as The Chicks after she spoke out against Bush/Cheney and their lies for wars and dismantling of the Fourth Amendment. I even experienced first hand entire barrooms of motherfuckers who kept telling me to not be political, while applauding the local Elvis imitators who just basically did covers and copied some famous legends whole act again and again like fucking Saturday night karaoke, that was just never my thing at all. At all, at all, they all suck, mean nothing, waste everybody’s time throwing their mother’s money around, trying to buy fame and females. Not my thing at all. Growing up in the shithole Midwest I had to hear Pink Floyd‘s “Money” all day on classic rock FM until I came to hate it, but Pink Floyd‘s “The Wall”, along with The Doors debut, “Strange Days”, “Waiting For The Sun”, “Soft Parade”, “Morrison Hotel”, and “L.A. Woman”, oh yeah and “Absolutely Live” and “Alive, She Cried”, and of course, THE STOOGES debut, “Fun House” and “Raw Power” really shaped who I was to become way, way before I ever heard of The Clash or Wanderers or The Alarm or Lords Of The New Church. I think Roger Waters is one of the only dinosaur rockers who still stand for anything besides tacky millionaires doing more money gouging, big stadium, victory lap, ripoff concerts ala Guns N Roses, Springsteen, and The Stones. I salute ROGER WATERS for his courage and bravery and artistry and songwriting. I frequently think about Stiv and Strummer and Bill Hicks and Hunter and Baldwin and Malcolm and all those people who came before us, and how horrified they’d be, if they were here today, and could see how their former fans and collaborators are such eager beaver, official narrative, make a bucks and willing puppets for corporate rulers, warpigs, and known liars. Radicals and whistle blowers, truth tellers and poets and comedians get blacklisted, cancelled, banned, incarcerated, deplatformed/demonetized or straight up just outright assassinated ala Seth Rich and Michael Hastings, Berta Caceres and Dr. David Kelly and Paul Wellstone and Gary Webb, and probably JFK Jr., and Sandra Bland, while pig-media hypes and celebrates all the no talent say-nothings and fake muzak puppets and trust funded playtime costume bands. Big love to Roger Waters, each one teach one, let every performance and tv appearance, every rock column, every song that ever squeaks in despite the ruling class efforts to shut it down, be a truth telling FREEDOM SCHOOL! All the time, everyday, keep broadcasting. We aint no match for the Big machine, but we can all do a little something-say your thing, pant your garden, share your seeds. The billionaires who are buying up all the farmlands aint your friendly friends. As Texas Terri used to say, “never shut up!” FREE ASSANGE!
I believe I’m going to die doing the things I was born to do. I believe I’m going to die high off the people. I believe I’m going to die a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletarian struggle. Fred Hampton
Sunday in the desert. Bored stiff. Dread Wal Mart. Inflation is killin’ us.
Met these folks at a bar in Detroit called Lilli’s, they were exactly as you might have imagined-standoffish, dead cool, very haughty and eccentric, as one pal said, “like Warhol celebrities”, Hiawatha was way more approachable and down to earth. I was good friends with a couple of their collaborators-Mark Gilder, my shortlived Detroit based glam gang’s bassplayer and wildboy all night fun hog extraordinaire who also briefly played bass in their band and Bootsy X, the fabulous Mutants drummer who sadly passed a few years ago. Bootsy was originally in line to play drums for me, he was real gung ho about it actually and I’m still a bit salty it didn’t go down like that, he was also a real extroverted speedy personality king and loud laughs raconteur. He shared my love of Zodiac Mindwarp and Betty Davis, he had known everybody in rocknroll from Lester Bangs to Dark Carnival, obviously, he was a blast to be around, so many amazing stories-what a wild life he had. I miss ‘im, we had so much fun together.
WE NEED MORE OF THIS. NOT JUST THE GUITAR SOLOS, NEITHER! AUDIBLE LYRICS THAT COUNT!
HEY SHIT-LIB
I never liked anything about Donald J. Trump, but when the establishment and deep state pig-media start trotting out demonic forces like Dick Cheney and Lyn Cheney and pretending that they are some kind of virtuous defenders of the Constitution or election integrity or truth or civil liberties or some shit, ya gotta wonder what’s up. They are known election fixers who eviscerated the Bill Of Rights and Genevea Conventions, brought in torture and kidnapping, burn pits, and lied this country into a dozen wars based on fabrications and false flags continued under Obama/Biden. They are not some heroic figures for not liking Trump. They are some evil motherfuckers. I thought you knew.
“BILLS ARE NAMED TO DECEIVE YOU: The “Climate Bill” expands fossil fuels & is a giveaway to Big Oil companies. The “Cares Act” had little care for the people & lots of care for billionaires. The “Affordable Care Act” is unaffordable & was a giveaway to Big Insurance companies.” (-Ryan Knight)
“$60B for Ukraine. $90M for PeIosi to fly to Taiwan. $44M for Dems to fund Rep primaries. There’s plenty of money, it’s just not for you.” (Thia Ballerina)
“The War on Drugs (a war on our own people) was created to destroy Black communities & activist communities. Former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman admitted it in the 1990s.” (-Lee Camp)
We might not be back. I might be in jail. I might be anywhere. But when I leave, you’ll remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary. And you’re going to have to keep on saying that. You’re going to have to say that I am a proletariat; I am the people. Fred Hampton
Loved this one girl you probably never met, but if you did, you never could forget. It was way back in the eighties. Her sister made her cassette tapes from college, turned us on to all kinds of obscure music that was otherwise unavailable to us, from R.E.M. to the Dream Syndicate. Ya know, “I always thought we’d still be friends, someday”, like the O.M.D. song goes, but it don’t always work out just like our teenage dreams. Back then, she was the only one I knew who shared my love for the new music, the new wave and post punk, our first conversation was about The Psychedelic Furs. We would spend our time listening to music like The Smiths and Depeche Mode and U2 and Tears For Fears and Fra Lippo Lippi and talking about the lyrics, we were both really into Michael Hutchence and thought he was not just a brilliant frontman but also a wonderful poet. I don’t know why all the good music seems to come from Australia-Rowland, The Beasts. I used to think I’d visit Australia someday, but that was back when I imagined I’d have money from recording and performing all these wild rocknroll songs we wrote. Stupidly, nobody bothered to record us. Some nights, I just listen to old INXS and Duran Duran for hours, remembering all the fun we had, our little circle of friends, my bassplayer back then was the small town’s celebrity heart throb new wave DJ at the downtown preppie bar and he was famous for looking like Michael Hutchence, he’s dead, too, now, I’m having a rough time with all the loss, the grief is kindof here to stay now, I suppose. God bless us everyone. I love Michael Hutchence. And all those people I told you about.
NEW WAVE-TOTALLY DIFFERENT HEAD, MAN
We say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx and Lenin and Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung, and anybody else who ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that a revolution is a class struggle. Fred Hampton
JUST SAY NO TO GATES RESET! THOSE BILLIONAIES ARE NOT KINDLY PHILANTHROPISTS!
The CIA, MI6, Geheime Dienst, and KGB are the biggest drugs dealers on the planet! That’s how they fund their black ops. We thank them very much for the counter culture and congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs! Keep the faith and keep fighting!” (-Elizabeth McDowell-Forsyth)
People have to be armed to have power, you see. Fred Hampton
BROTHERS & SISTERS & FRIENDS OF THE REVOLUTION, KEEP FIGHTING! IT’S UP TO US!
Sad we lost Glen Ford last year, he was one of the most important voices of our time and I think you should read his book, “The Black Agenda”.
You can always tell how important narrative control is by watching the way people react when their control of the narrative is jeopardized.
Empire apologists are raging at Amnesty International for pausing its aggressive facilitation of western imperialism to issue one brief criticism of the way Ukrainian forces have been endangering civilian lives with their warfare tactics against the Russian military.
Amnesty is far from the first to highlight this extensively documented issue; that Ukrainian forces have been deliberately positioning themselves in civilian populations without taking proper measures to protect noncombatants is a concern that has been voiced repeatedly since the war began and reported on by both mainstream western news outlets and the United Nations.
Incredible seeing Amnesty attacked for documenting what every minimally independent observer has from the start. See e.g. Washington Post, March 28 on “Ukraine’s strategy of placing heavy military equipment and other fortifications in civilian zones.” https://t.co/vu3v3UCdIqhttps://t.co/v0qy2ehVLV
A common criticism circulating among the outrage is that Amnesty is facilitating Russian propaganda, has been influenced by Russian propaganda, or has itself become an instrument of Russian propaganda.
The head of Amnesty International’s Ukrainian branch resigned as a result of the report, saying that “the organization created material that sounded like support for Russian narratives” and that in an effort to protect civilians, “this study became a tool of Russian propaganda.”
“It is a shame that the organization like Amnesty is participating in this disinformation and propaganda campaign,” tweeted Zelensky advisor Mykhailo Podolyak.
“Amnesty International can go to hell for this garbage,” tweeted Human Rights Foundation Chairman Garry Kasparov. “Or go to Ukraine, which Putin’s war is trying to turn into hell. As with their actions on Navalny, it reeks of Russian influence turning Kremlin propaganda into Amnesty statements.”
“The organization gives a huge assist to Russian propaganda,” tweeted Oleksiy Sorokin, chief operating officer of the NATO propaganda outlet Kyiv Independent.
“Shameful victim-blaming. Russia invaded Ukraine and is committing unspeakable war crimes there. Please do not amplify Russian lies,” tweeted Paul Massaro of the US government’s Helsinki Commission.
Pathetic. Amnesty International can go to hell for this garbage. Or go to Ukraine, which Putin’s war is trying to turn into hell. As with their actions on Navalny, it reeks of Russian influence turning Kremlin propaganda into Amnesty statements. https://t.co/KOC0S0NJOt
The underlying premise behind these complaints, of course, is that it is Amnesty International’s job to help Ukraine win a propaganda campaign against Russia. Which is odd, because Amnesty’s reporting on the war has actually been overwhelmingly biased in favor of Ukraine this entire time.
“Anger directed at Amnesty is surprising given that it is the first critical piece the group has written on Ukraine since the war began,” reports Unherd. “Over the last six months, Amnesty has published 40 articles on Ukraine, nearly all of which condemn Russia’s invasion, with only one exception — its latest — that could be conceivably described as critical of Ukraine.”
Even the Amnesty report currently sparking all the outrage contains repeated condemnations of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, citing “indiscriminate attacks by Russian forces” and “war crimes” Amnesty has found Russia guilty of committing, as well as decrying the use of “inherently indiscriminate weapons, including internationally banned cluster munitions.”
But even ninety-nine percent loyalty to the official line is not enough for imperial spinmeisters and the empire’s useful idiots. Anything short of 100 percent compliance counts as Russian propaganda.
Zelensky now implies that Amnesty International has now fallen under the spell of Kremlin propaganda for pointing out the obvious that Western press would not report & that is Ukrainian forces have been using civilians as shields.
But that’s precisely the notion that has been drummed into western consciousness with ever-increasing fervor since 2016: that any dissent about US foreign policy is Russian propaganda. Don’t support western interventionism in Syria? You’re spouting Russian propaganda. Worried about nuclear war? Russian propaganda. Don’t think the fight for US unipolar domination is worth all this dangerous brinkmanship? Russian propaganda. Don’t like the idea of an expensive proxy war with no exit strategy whose economic fallout is making life harder and harder for more and more people all around the world? Russian propaganda.
I myself am accused of being a peddler of Russian propaganda many times per day, and have been for years. This despite my hardly ever consuming Russian media, never receiving a penny from Russia, and never having worked for the Russian government or any other government at any time. Russian media have at times chosen of their own initiative to amplify my work since I have a standing invitation for anyone to do so, but I’m literally just an Australian woman writing her opinions online with her American husband. I only qualify as “Russian propaganda” because I disagree with US foreign policy.
Ask anyone who says a criticism of the western empire’s Ukraine policy is “Russian propaganda” to name a critic of western Ukraine policy who they don’t consider a Russian propagandist. They won’t be able to. For them, disagreeing with one’s government about Ukraine is itself Russian propaganda.
For empire apologists the measure of what constitutes “Russian propaganda” about Ukraine has nothing to do with whether or not what’s being said is true or valid; it’s literally just a question of obedience to one’s government about the decisions it’s been making with regard to that nation.
So the @amnesty basically accused Ukraine of endangering civilians by continuing to resist Russian advances.
The organization gives a huge assist to Russian propaganda.
If the measure of whether something qualifies as propaganda is defined entirely by whether it agrees with one’s government, then that measure is itself propaganda.
That’s exactly what’s happening with criticism of the west’s interventionism in Ukraine. Something doesn’t have to come from Russia to be considered Russian propaganda, and its source doesn’t need to have any connection to the Russian government. It doesn’t even have to be false. All it needs to be is disobedient.
We saw this illustrated this past June when The Guardian published a NATO-backed claim that journalist Aaron Maté was “the most prolific spreader of disinformation” among a “Russia-backed network of Syria conspiracy theorists,” despite being incapable of citing a single false thing in Maté’s Syria reporting, and despite The Guardian having to hastily edit out their “Russia-backed” claim.
We also saw this illustrated this past June in a University of Calgary briefing paper on “disinformation” about the war in Ukraine which warns about “five primary narratives” being circulated online:
1. Implying NATO expansionism legitimizes the Russian invasion
2. Portraying NATO as an aggressive alliance using Ukraine as a proxy against Russia
3. Promoting a general mistrust in institutions and elites
4. Suggesting that Ukraine is a fascist state or has extensive fascist influences
5. Promoting a specific mistrust of Canada’s Liberal government, and especially of Prime Minister Trudeau
There are arguments of varying strengths to be made for every one of those points, but more importantly it is self-evident that all of them are matters of opinion and none of them meet any sane definition of “disinformation”. They also can’t in and of themselves rightly be called either “Russian” or “propaganda”.
“We are moving into a situation where dissent from officially sanctioned opinion can be pathologized & criminalised. Pressures for increasing censorship of dissenting opinion are becoming normalised.” Academics should be resisting this, not assisting it.https://t.co/R1tRb34D6W
Russian propaganda certainly exists, and the Russian government certainly has a vested interest in influencing western thought in its strategic favor to whatever extent it is capable. But its capability is very, very limited, especially compared to the exponentially greater influence that western institutions have over our minds.
Russia has a few trolls and some media outlets that were barely viewed by westerners even before they were banned; the US-centralized empire has the billionaire media, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the education system. Comparing the two is like comparing a candle to the sun, and the sun ain’t Russia. But that’s the one whose influence over our minds we’re meant to worry about.
In reality we are swimming in propaganda that is favorable to the US empire our entire lives; it’s so ubiquitous that people don’t even notice it. Claiming your support for US foreign policy on an issue has nothing to do with being propagandized is like someone who was raised in the Westboro Baptist Church claiming it was pure coincidence that he happens to agree with the church on the sinfulness of homosexuality. It pervades our minds and shapes our society, but they want us all freaking out about the virtually nonexistent problem of “Russian propaganda”.
This is a thought-killing dynamic, and it is a major problem. It is not good that propaganda is shoved into our minds manufacturing consent for dangerous escalations between the world’s two greatest nuclear powers while anyone who opposes any part of it is dismissed as a Russian propagandist or a useful idiot of the Kremlin.
Ten Times Empire Managers Showed Us That They Want To Control Our Thoughts
The single most under-appreciated aspect of our society is the fact that immensely powerful people are continuously working to manipulate the thoughts we think about our world.https://t.co/s9gIfQGb39
We should be using our minds more at this critical juncture, but these dynamics put in place by imperial narrative managers have instead got us using them a lot less.
Old joke:
A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and get to talking. The Russian says he works for the Kremlin and he’s on his way to go learn American propaganda techniques.
“What American propaganda techniques?” asks the American.
“Exactly,” the Russian replies.
The Times has published an article titled “Lady Gaga embodies everything China fears,” subtitled “The singer’s uncompromising individuality makes her a serious threat to the mass imposition of cultural conformity through censorship,” and its contents are exactly as horrifyingly idiotic as you would imagine.
Here are the first three paragraphs of the article by Ben Macintyre, because if I had to read them then so do you:
A woman looking like an extra-terrestrial praying mantis upholstered in red leather strode on to the stage at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, jets of flame shot 100ft into the air, 50,000 outrageously costumed fans screamed, and I understood why China is so terrified of Lady Gaga.
For there is nothing so wildly individualistic, so defiant of convention, so unwilling to be regimented and controlled as Lady Gaga in full voice, an erotic, exotic ubercelebrity who also contrives to be the girl next door, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta from New York City.
Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Ball last week was the first UK performance in seven years by this raw meat-wearing, bisexual feminist who sings of liberty, drugs, addiction, mental health and the absolute right to self-expression because she, and everyone else, is Born This Way. Simultaneously channelling Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana, she is both an extreme fashion freak and defiantly ordinary, which is why she is one of the most powerful pop stars in history and, from the point of view of Beijing’s Communist leadership, a serious threat.
Macintyre goes on to explain that Lady Gaga was banned from China in 2016 for meeting with the Dalai Lama (who just between us is known to have collected a massive paycheck from the CIA for decades), which makes her a serious threat whose bold defiance and bisexual feminist individualism give Xi Jinping screaming night terrors.
“Lady Gaga poses a threat less for her political views, her visit to the Dalai Lama, and her support for LGBTQ rights than through her determination to be, and encourage others to be, entirely different,” Macintyre concludes. “Do What U Want, she sings, and Beijing trembles.”
I seriously cannot believe this article was published. Like, anywhere. I would have been surprised to see it picked up by even the most obscure clickbait blog in the seediest backwaters of the internet, much less by a prominent 237 year-old British newspaper.
But from where I sit right now, the funniest thing about it is the way the article portrays the western world as this bastion of free thought and individuality. Just that one fact alone eclipses the absurdity of the fact that the article’s author thinks the perfect symbol of this freedom is Lady Gaga strutting around in a meat dress.
I mean, just the fact that we are ingesting anti-China propaganda to facilitate the long-term strategic agendas of the US-centralized empire while reading in the Murdoch press about how free and unique we are compared to the Chinese shows you how bizarre this claim is.
In an authoritarian regime, you do what the powerful want you to do. In a Free Democracy, you do what you like, and it’s only by pure coincidence that what you like just so happens to always align perfectly with what the powerful want you to do.
The more you understand about the brainwashing effects of domestic propaganda in the west, the more adorable it is when you see westerners talking about themselves as free-thinking individualists living in a free society in contrast with the citizens of nations like China. A civilization whose inhabitants are continuously indoctrinated with power-serving belief systems from childhood until their dying breath is not individualist, is not free, and is not thinking. Its inhabitants only think this is so, and they think this is so because they’ve been programmed to.
Freedom of thought and freedom of speech only exist on the fringes of western society, in such small numbers that they make no difference. The mainstream population whose numbers could be used to effect revolutionary change are herded into political factions which are designed to prop up status quo power at every turn and corresponding media echo chambers which keep them from providing any meaningful resistance to the machine.
As a whole we are marching in perfect accordance with the will of our masters: voting how they like, thinking how they like, speaking how they like, working how they like, shopping how they like, and living how they like. It is only the power-serving narratives put in our minds by our education systems and our media which tell us we are free. And it is only those power-serving narratives which have trained us to look down our noses at people in nations like China. (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“I don’t understand how people can recognize the rot, and not reject the bipartisan system enabling it.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“It’s pretty cool that most cities are becoming unlivable, billionaires got 700% wealthier during a global plague, the planet is literally cooking, and major political institutions are basically hardwired to neutralize leaders and movements who actually want to fix it.” (-Luke Savage)
“The US government has taken your student debt forgiveness, your healthcare money, your public school funding & sent it in the form of weapons to Ukraine. Billions of dollars. Now those weapons are ending up sold on the black market to terrorists.” (-Lee Camp)
“It is absolutely insane how many Americans worship the politicians and billionaires who are fucking us all over. You are not supposed to worship these greedy psychopaths. You are supposed to make them fear the people. That is the only way anything will ever change.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Y’all liberals can see the Democrats filling their coffers campaigning on the very rights you’ve lost *under their watch*. What makes you think Democrats have *any incentive at all* to actually protect your rights when it’s so lucrative for them not to?” (-Blue Check Beth)
I DON’T MISS FACEBOOK, FUCK THOSE FASCIST FUCKS! ALL THEY DID IS CENSOR US AND SELL OUR BIDNESS TO THE MAN! YES, IT IS CENSORSHIP, AND NO THEY AIN’T REALLY PRIVATE-THEY ARE THE MERGER OF CORPORATION & STATE! THEY EVEN FB JAILED ME FOR POSTING THAT MUSSOLINI QUOTE!
The whole sham, the whole shit show is designed to make some gullible middle management, clip-on tie, khaki clad, trains on time secretarial motherfuckers think that their complicity, lockstep obedience, conspicuous silence and sucking up to the bad guys is gonna somehow get ’em some extra special V.I.P. only badge, with deluxe privileges and a nicer parking spot outside of the tumor factory or torture gulag. Tuesdays are Ladies Night with special drink discounts at the bioterror weapons lab for feminist freedom.
Of course I always understood I’d eventually be lockedout of Fascist Book for my anti-war shit posting. How they supposed to manufacture consensus for always more Forever-War bombings and their NWO Gates Reset, if the loudmouth peasants keep cross talking and sharing off-script factual information with one another? I am shocked and awed by how savvy they’ve become with marketing and advertising strategies. Everytime they wanna conduct another regime change war or coup, the military industrial complex and it’s mockingbird big 5 media always insist now that it is for Wokeness, Feminism, Trans-Rights, and Science! Everytime they wanna superfund the domestic police state, they just trot AOC out on her red carpet to insist she was insulted or lied about or traumatized or offended by impolite sexists, again. So the racist cops are gonna need more weapons and surveillance tools to protect AOC from sexists! I remember Laura Bush on Oprah Winfrey’s show, telling all our former mother in laws and ex wives and their sisters that the reason Amurkkka had to occupy Afghanistan for all those years was not to slow bleed Russian resources, or plunder their minerals, and opium, but it was all for (drum roll…….) FEMINISM and Muslim women’s rights! Cause everybody knows women oppressed under the Taliban will become alot more liberal and educated as soon as Murkkkan soldiers invade and cut off their son’s fingers for trophies and bomb the nation back to the stone age. So isn’t that comforting to know? It wasn’t just that some Muslim boogeyman trained by our own secret police was supposedly hiding there, after masterminding the Pentagon accounting room being destroyed by a plane with no wingspan, passengers, or luggage, coincidentally the day after Rumsfeld gave a speech about missing trillions, but USA! USA! had to kill all those people for….FEMALE MUSLIM LITERACY. cause the Empire CARES! The woke, trans-friendly, trustworthy scientific, vibrant and diverse, black lives, feminist freedom fries empire is teaching women how to read by liberating them, ya know–with drones. This kinda grotesquely fake narrative is increasingly being met with collective incredulity and wariness which is why all the spooks are controlling Twitter and Facebook. Like Cait Johnstone says, though, all these General Dynamics bulletproof stormtrooper robots are gonna be used against us in the next few years. But it’s for Science! And your own protection! Jane Goodall and Greta Thunberg said so at the World Economic Forum! So it must be true. Unless you hate teenage girl power climate warriors and kindly old ladies who want to protect the monkeys!
Man, my old pal Brian got a song placed on the “Stranger Things” soundtrack, which means Winona Ryder has probably heard his music. How cool is that?
WORK WILL NOT SET YOU FREE
Shit havers never like to talk that much about how they got their shit, the whole capitalist meritocracy pose is tedious as fuck, though, cause all of us who been around and seen some things, we all know that 95% of the wealth in this world is inherited or married into, and the rare and exceptional people who make it big with their unusual talent or good looks, sometimes they get killed by the establishment after generating profits for them and somebody decides they’re worth more dead, so shady attorneys can take control of their publishing and merchandising. I never worshipped the rich, always saw ’em as a criminal class of abusers and predators. Secret police have infiltrated and terrorized or exterminated every human rights activist, social justice movement leaders, or truth telling whistle blowers of the last sixty years, so when big media are all of a sudden hyping some outta proportion rap about how the system has decided this special interest group or that niche marketing pie chart demographic is gonna start receiving some all of a sudden special sensitivity treatment or protections from the good ole boy honky establishment, I always figure they making some money from it somehow, or manufacturing controlled opposition. The empire does not love you and did not develop a conscience just because they recognized your particular brand of special virtue. People who get privilege like to believe they earned it with their own uniqueness, karma, hard work, or special talents. They at the top, cause they so, special. Noblesse Oblige, if it ever existed in real life, ‘been dead for years now-these evil bloodsucking people just hire publicists to SAY they got some fake charity, or rescued a kitten from a tree or whatever. Gave money to the Innocence Project. Fake arrested at the pink hat astro turf protest for puppies rights. That kinda shit. Photo ops and empty staged, blue screen, p.r. smokescreens.
Beauty is an advantage in some ways, but it’s ephemeral as hell and I’ve seen many gorgeous people whose youthful physical beauty faded just go crazy over it-suicides and shit. Even murders. The prettiest girl in my girlfriend’s hometown highschool got stalker killed by her psycho obsessive boyfriend and his family who were friends with the cops got the cops to help feed her dead body to the lions. You know you can’t make this shit up. Other real breathtakingly gorgeous people got so cozy trading on their looks for easy jobs and shit, they failed to cultivate their other talents. I knew girls with artistic ability, actresses, songwriters, all those things, but they got comfortable and let it all slide. Why work hard on your paintings if everybody wants to give you pills afterhours and tell you how talented and pretty you are some more? Many hoped to marry into wealth and then got used to being used and settled for free drinks forever at somebody’s kid’s sports bar, or being a town bimbo, or whatever. So in that sense, beauty is a disadvantage, it attracts disingenuous predators and makes one a target. It seems to me like at some point, it would be hard to have any idea about what’s going on in the world, if everywhere you go, people are flattering, promoting, gifting, or free passing you for your beauty. One of my ex girlfriend’s sister was like in a crazy delusional bubble cause everywhere she went, she got upgraded, everything’s for free, she trusted all the worst people, probably still does. We all have our cross to bear, I suppose. Hers is like convertibles and compliments, massages, and alimony and plane tickets everywhere. I got famous female friends who are soughtafter beauties and mistakenly always think their Matt Sorum supergroup side project N.A. celebrity book signing author former rockstar buddies and producer suitors and shit are gonna discover or celebrate me, cause they so nice to THEM. It’s a crazy world. Fame people guard their turf. It’s a whole different trip for a gutter punk.
You ever have motherfuckers damn you with faint praise, like say you are a clever phrase chiseler or wordsmith, or “knows how to dress”? That’s how people who paid for a certain level of prestige on a bought platform assert their status as shit havers. They can’t be admitting you got any talent or formidable ability as a singer or frontman with an ability to connect to people and look ’em in the eye and transfer a whole vibe to lift a room, cause that would threaten their whole bullshit story about how you are just uneducated and lazy or drank too much, or whatever, always some bullshit about how you are undeserving of some shit, that you are preposterously less than them, “You just haven’t earned it yet, baby”.
HERE AND GONE
Really, what it’s all about, is mere access. It’s all class based. Some poor people can not afford to pay somebody $100 an hour to record their music. If I get my music recorded, it changes shit cause it’s hard for money having motherfuckers to control some false narrative among the haves on the hill being so extra talented if my work is ever preserved. So that’s what I really got get back to focusing on. Archiving the songs. Difference between me and the money having motherfuckers is they still cover shit I wrote when I was eighteen, and I got a lot better than that shit. Or the shit I done when I was 25-29. Some people liked the idea of me being found dead in a room somewhere so they can falsely claim they wrote all my shit and more than five people might pretend believe them. People who had girlfriends pay for them to have pay to play fame, or parents who superfund all their fucking ridiculous videos and shit don’t want me behind some microphone. I can still get down. It’s been fuckedup seeing so many bullshit mediocrity fakes on every billboard, while so, so many of my soulful and genius brothers and sisters died young and been forgotten by the mad herd in their rush to winner’s circle, finishing line, look at me, ma, in-law assimilation. My Pal Adam was a heart of gold comedian soulman street punk, funniest, most loving, affectionate, tragic, hilariously self destructive rockstar brother confidante mirror reflection you could ever meet. I wrote two or three books he’s a central character in. Midwesterners hated and feared the brother, went outta their way to expel him from bars, ban him from trendy places, hiss gossip about the dear sweetheart, he spooked the trendy hipsters. After I left town, he got tattoo shop popular. Like a mascot of the middle class, as tattoos came into the mainstream, he came to be embraced by the mainstream and I think he was happy about that. I loved him so much, I could not begrudge him that. Prior to the tattoo thing he was an outrageous punkrock impresario and member of several unforgivably, scandalously offensively named bands, including one of my own. That character was everything any legend was ever made of and more. Too spontaneous and lovable and sensitive and beautiful to live. A Real Rocknroll Motherfucker. I can feel him in my heart and with me even now. What’s up baby? AY! He used to get shitfaced and yell at me from across the divebar: “I’m IN YOUR BAND! I’M IN YOUR BAND!” Our bartender, a lively and boisterous son of Hunter S. Thompson named A-2, he and I had this shtick about roll call where we’d convene our divebar social club and read the minutes from our last meeting and name off all our friends, who’d all vanished in a rapid procession of sad and lonely deaths. Now HE’s gone, too. (RIP) A-2!
Even when my smart and talented friend King Corey from the famous hiphop pioneers DEE MOE FRESH CREW, was dying of lung cancer, he still felt obliged to take a job working at Bob Evans, ya know with the timeclock and the dirty mop and the polyester uniform and rude hick customers for minimum wage, that’s how strong the hicktown programming was where I came from. Even on his deathbed, he’s trying to get approval from his loveless fellow programmed workers by laboring for not even enough money to rent a one bedroom. He collapsed on the job and had to be ambulanced to an emergency room. His ex still did not come back to him, you dig? If somebody don’t love you, no amount of hairnet and floorscrubbing and wearing the wet bloody aprons is gonna change that, at all, ever, ever. Some rich motherfucker is having an open bar party paid for by his parents to celebrate his getting outta jail while you pick chicken upstairs for minimum wage in the rat infested kitchen. Which one of you is the popularity seeking female gonna leave with? Have some dignity, don’t make a fool of yourself, like I did. Walk away and never look back again. Some motherfuckers don’t love you, that’s just how it is. My friend, Austin, a lovely kid, funny, sweet, also stayed in that horrible town where it was always either fast food, factory, crackdealer or jail. He died of stab wounds during a domestic violence episode. My friend Kevin died of stab wounds, when some outta town drug dealers killed him, Jamaicans from Detroit according to one story. My friend Bobby H. died in a motorcycle wreck. Anthony got murdered with a gun in front of many witnesses but the killer only did like 30 days cause his drug dealer connections to corrupt politicians. Jen and Tracey killed themselves. Marc went to jail for murdering his wife’s boyfriend. Mitch o.d.’d when we were 25 on the verge of graduating from a prestigious engineering school in Seattle, nobody ever believed in me as much as he did, he was my Catholic school friend and first wouldbe rocknroll manager, he invested in my bands, and was actively making plans to REALLY invest a whole lot more, get us to that next platform where our songs could be heard and evaluated based on their actual merit-we’d just seen him and made plans to reconvene after his graduation, but poof! He was gone just like that. His friend Tracey brought me his leather jacket on a plane from Seattle. I don’t think he really wanted to be an engineer, that was all to please his mother. His mother told me he had left behind some intimate journals addressed to me, but his brother, a mainstream wannabe popular guy decided that since I dressed in black and wore makeup and shit, I must be somehow to blame for his brother’s overdose with rich helicopter owning millionaire drug people on the other side of the country. Everybody grieves in their own way, in these smalltown catholic school cliques and sportsbar popularity culture, blaming the symbolic others is always a big part of ALL their rituals. Preppie sportos blame the outsiders and punks. Democrats blame Republicans, Republicans blame Democrats. No one can blame the Rich, ’cause they have all been trained to “identify” as rich, to “self identify” with millionaires on the tv. If you aint born rich and famous, you must be a slave to the rich and famous, or what other value could your life possibly ever have, and how can you ever, ever, ever be worthy of any kind of love? “Is he on the clock or off the clock”? I used to get up at 5 in the morning, walk a mile in the dark, ride for an hour in the back of a truck with non English speaking paint crews who’d meet up in the parking lot of Sherwin Williams and work all day painting McMansions, come home ruined, exhausted, destroyed my knees for nothing-all for a rich, beautiful starlet chick who broke up with me anyway. Dumb midwestern males like me were taught we could “earn” love. That you needed alot of money, ya know, to buy a girl. That is a dastardly lie. That aint love, that’s bartering. Walk away and never look back . One of my former bandmates, K.M., abruptly met some speed freak chick and quit the group to wing off with her and some well connected math metal drummer who had like cheap access to fancy recording studios and smack and rose to imminent fame by riding the famous yokel band’s coattails which is why I never liked him, he just seemed like such a suckup in the pocket of the well to do status quo, well, they went out West with a couple other midwest transplants, really made a splash, seemed to be two steps from the move, recorded, played out, opened for shit tons of famous hipster bands, got written about glowingly in all the magazines and entertainment weeklies, one of our old originals has long since been recorded by famous people in NYC, my old bandmate became a popular vocalist doing a not entirely unfamiliar version of something I mighta seen before, but he’d become semi pseudo underground famous in San Francisco and L.A., but died, of drugs and brandy one night. Fun loving, Presley-charismatic, charming like a rattlesnake motherfucker. Beautiful, funny, alcoholic, drunk driving hillbilly kid from my homestate of Kentucky. People still write me letters asking me about him.
Back in my New Romantic/Rocky Horror daze, a couple of my best friends and former wouldbe sometimes bandmates were just so good looking, they ended up staying too busy to really make that much art-my original keyboardist, Jaysin B. loved to sing and play and dance and pose, he was instrumental in me meeting my other original punk and scrappy new wave cohorts and getting our early bands started, but he got slowly suckedin to the Dutiful Midwestern Workin’ Man Trap. Ended up killing himself cause no man’s ever a manly enough provider once they assimilate you to that whole worker bee circuit of assembly line, speed, come down weed, back to work speed, come down weed, DUI bust, thirty days in jail, that whole gauntlet, pinballing between church on time and Dr. Phil Hallelujah Sobriety Societies and GET BACK TO WORK, SLAVE! Sad he’s gone. My superstar DJ bassplayer was the King of the Midwest In the 80’s, only Ronald Koal might have enjoyed more money for nothing and your chicks for free, regional celebrity than that guy. When he lost his looks, it adversely impacted him, same as my former keyboard player. He’d always been the best looking blue eyed teen beat pinup star where we grew up. Women just threw themselves at him-one of my male bosses, where we all worked, did too! I think he got depressed when he no longer looked like Michael Hutchence, turned to drink, spent all his time in bars with preppie conservatives and businessmen golfers from our hometown highschool. They got him into the factory life, also. He died last year. I have my suspicions, but nobody really told me how or why he died. I’m still not over it, in our teens and into our late thirties, we were tight as hell, ya know, one of my whole lifetime’s dearest brothers, and I’ve known many cities filled with people, he was somebody special. Bobby. “Died Suddenly”. A girl I deeply loved named JP, but whom I was very foolishly, not nearly as devoted to as I shoulda been, cause I was in my mid to late 20’s, and still involved with some other stormy diva it took forever to escape, she worried she was losing her looks, too, I mean, she was still a bright, vivid vision that almost all men were instantly spellbound by, but she’d been a model in her youth and she was not twenty anymore, though she was a sensitive, soulful, sweet, good hearted heroine. A honky tonk hippie, hard drinkin’ good time girl bartender, she could throw dumb drunken apemen outta the bar, cut it up with the best of the town gutter poets, she was one of the real wildflower Good Ones, ya know? I messed up letting her date those dumb oversized Tarzan grunge dudes with the goatees and Lollapalooza tattoos and the “cruelty based sense of humor” and access to hard drugs, she killed herself on the same day and same age that her mom had. I never knew how haunted our poor girl really was, I miss her. Wrote summa my best songs about her. People should hear ’em, she had a real magical quality. She was a big star in a nowhere place. We all were. Now, so many of the Also-Rans married up or inherited houses and shit, you see ’em joining these high visibility tribute bands, playing covers, kinda corny, halfassed imitator acts, but leaving behind 1000 mediocre cds in unsold boxes in the basements but at least I guess they got some low level namebrand recognition and maybe five dork fanboys each. Like I said, summa my favorite people already been here and gone and even my scrapbooks of pictures they were all in got stolen during some midnight eviction moves a couple decades ago. I still wake up thinking about ’em. Man, I dunno, free drinks popularity can be a real distraction. Some of my most talented friends like Mark and Robert who I considered real badass full fledged geniuses did not leave behind the body of work I expected them to, cause they got sidetracked by lifestyles, or needy women, and doing research studies to pay the rent at the Y and dying young as a result. I know you been programmed to worship the pharmaceutical industry but fuckedup side effects are real. You’ll find out.
My friend Paul had almost zero commercial success whereas every bloated ego fratboy poser dick who ever covered one of his songs struts around like he’s Jay Z-Diddy-Kanye-Prince, just endlessly bragging about his famous grunge friends or 25 years ago mainstream tv appearances. Paul’s songs changed the lives of everybody who really got to soak in them. I think he was easily as good as Alex Chilton, Paul Westerberg and Lou Reed. I used to call on him whenever a woman was breaking my heart-they don’t let a woman kill you in the Tower Of Song. He’d always say to me, “are you doing the work, boy?” reminding me to write, and not just hammer myself to death with the liquor and drugs. Urging me to put it in the songs, he made me a better songwriter, for sure. “You been reading your Burroughs?” Paul was always telling me to read the Beats, but I think Herbert Huncke mighta been his favorite. He was like my priest. I know some other people felt that way, too. We might be few and far between, but the people he really touched, are permanently altered by his grace and friendship and genius, he was a lovely motherfucker, no matter what his stupid detractors might say. Jealous dogs. My brother, Dave A., who worked for thirty five years at the same record store, taking buses for minimum wage, going home and drinking malt liquor and listening to the old blues records and doing it again, his life really was like a blues song, man. He’s gone, too. A local dude sold his lp’s off for the widow, I did not even get one, kinda an extra heartbreak, man I love that guy, everyday he is in my head and in my heart. I had memorial buttons of him made and put ’em on all my hats and jackets. He’s who got me into the Stooges, Doors, and Stones when I was about 12. He had a rockabilly band that used to open for my group.
It’s gotten so weird ya know, how all the good ones really are gone. I dream about them all. Famous actor I knew as a teenager in NYC, also named Mark, died from Covid. Nice man-even when he was busy dating McDonna, I could call him up and bore him with all my angsty teen Smash Hits magazine bullshit. Everybody’s leaving. It’s been hard. My aunt, my grandparents, it’s just relentless. I had a perfect prettyboy drummer but he became a fucking cop. You can’t make this shit up. Aint that a shame?
“180 Democrats and 149 Republicans just came together to pass an $840 billion war budget for 2023, which is the biggest in history. If you haven’t figured out that both parties exist to preserve our decrepit capitalist and imperialist system then you’re not paying attention.” (-Ryan Knight)
“The most obscene defense bill in history passed and earmarks made a triumphant return, but there was little outcry, thanks to a progressive rebrand of the war machine: The Great American Military Rebrand (substack.com) ” (-Matt Taibbi)
You probably won’t see too many links to anything I ever write on Falsebook because of how the secret police control the algorithms and they lockedup my previously shadow banned account for antiwar posts and links to Jacobin magazine, Mint Press, Real News, Convo Couch, Gray Zone, Unlimited Hangout, Last American Vagabond, Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, Abby Martin, Dr. Cornel West, Jeremy Scahill, Ray McGovren and Col. Ann Wright, Scott Ritter, John Kirakou, Project Censored, Code Pink, Wikileaks, Consortium News, Antiwar.com, David Swanson, Cindy Sheehan, Black Agenda Report, Last American Vagabond, Activist Post, etc. Assange called it the world’s most abusive spy machine.
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” William Casey, CIA Director 1981
“NEVER PUT ANYONE IN A CHOKEHOLD. THAT’S WHAT THE PIG DOES”. (-IAN ASTBURY)
HYPNOSPELL
“An unconscious human is one driven compulsively by deep-seated mental habits they don’t really see and can’t do much to control, so they’ll often find themselves engaged in unwholesome behavior patterns like addiction, unkindness, greed and neurosis, and making the same mistakes over and over for reasons they don’t quite understand.
A conscious human is one who doesn’t have unseen conditioning pulling the strings from behind the scenes in their subconscious mind, because they have done their work and drawn their inner demons into the light of consciousness where they can be healed. They are therefore able to move through life deliberately and in the interest of what’s best, rather than compulsively and in a way that spreads trauma to others.
A conscious humanity would mean that this way of functioning blossoms throughout the entire species.
Doesn’t it kind of look like that might be what’s happening? Like all the chaos and confusion of these strange times could simply be the birth pangs of a species whose relationship with consciousness is about to take a dramatic pivot? The increasingly shrill mass media narratives rapidly approaching white noise saturation? The increasingly widespread awareness that our society’s rules are made up and we can change them whenever we want? The mysterious increase in incidents of spiritual awakening as reported by teachers of enlightenment? Just how goddamn weird everything’s been getting these last few years?
I think it’s possible. I think it’s possible we are moving as a species toward an adaptation that will enable us to survive in a situation which is very different from the one we first emerged in, as every species eventually does if it doesn’t go extinct. If this is indeed what is happening, it stands to reason that it will be an adaptation that prevents us from wiping ourselves out via ecocide or nuclear war, and that a collective movement into consciousness is what that adaptation will look like.
A conscious species would be able to work in cooperation with its ecosystem, rather than compulsively consuming it due to primitive impulses to obtain and dominate and egoic impulses to be rich and have more. A conscious species would be able to convert civilization from competition-based models into collaboration-based models, where rather than trying to climb over each other to get ahead we all work together to make sure everyone has what they need to live. A conscious species would no longer see the sense in dividing itself up into separate competing nation-states which brandish armageddon weapons at each other out of fear and greed.
The more I learn about humanity, and the more I learn about myself, the more possible such a world appears to be. Sure the world’s a chaotic and distressing mess right now, but so is childbirth. However bad things get for us, as long as we’re still alive our problems are nothing that can’t be fixed with a collective movement into consciousness.
Anyway. That’s my pet theory right now. And the cool thing about my theory is that if you like it too, you don’t have to wait for it to come true. You can start becoming more conscious on your own right now and leading the charge for the rest of us. Investigate your true nature, heal your wounds, be responsible with your actions, and begin working to coax all your endarkened bits into the light.
And then hopefully the rest will follow. If they don’t, worst-case scenario is you wind up a lot more happy and functional than you otherwise would have been, because you brought so much more consciousness to your inner processes and your habits of perception and cognition.
This is where the real adventure is at, in my opinion. This is where the rubber meets the road.
I will meet you there.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
JUST GOT BACK FROM THE BEST CATHOUSE IN TOWN
George Michael and Duran Duran were big faves of mine growing up and I been reading articles about how Princess Diana naturally loved those bands, too.
I went into detox back in the day, I dunno, I’d been drinking too much during a stupidly public breakup I did learn a lot from. Mostly, I think I just needed to retreat from all the voyeuristic local opinion havers who were rooting for my infinitely more popular faux moviestar richboy replacement. I just really needed a break, to get off the street. While I was in there meeting some beautiful girls and making friends with old dealers who knew rockstars and racked up federal charges, smoking too much, but enjoying the valium and mashed potatoes and naps, Princess Diana, who’d been dating a rich and famous billionaire Muslim and looking for protection from the crown and m16, kinda like Jackie O was able to find fleeing the USA deep state via Onassis, the mainstream tv story had it that the paparazzi just got carried away and chased her chauffer driven car into a tunnel where her car accidentally just crashed. People less trustful of official government narratives concerning royals and billionaires, particularly ones who seem to have almost certainly birthed two children by two different men, embarrassing Windsor, she knew too much, wronged the pompous blueblood bloodlines, and coincidentally according to many coincidence theorists just whoopsy daisy happened to die tragically young, Elton did that awful song forever. Coincidentally her now long grown sons, who look entirely different from one another are no longer friends, coincidentally, and the one said to have been sired by the redhaired jockey, has left the royal family, just coincidentally. Around the same time, a guy we’ll call PJ, a sketchy dude who’d saved my life once was hanging out a car window, drunk, maybe high on crack, being wild and rowdy on his way home from seeing Hoodoo Wagon, our poet friend’s blues band somewhere in deep suburbia, when he fell out on the freeway and the people in the car saw his feet come off and his body splatter on the highway, driver faced homicide charges, the whole carload of witnesses were terribly traumatized by seeing our friend splattered all over the road, they all delved ever deeper into dope to help ’em cope. I also mourned, as I had gotten to know him over many long nights of card playing and hard partying while he anguished over losing access to his daughters who he loved. I lived with that guy for awhile-he had a bad reputation among the straights but we all did, we were the outsiders, but he was always right on to me. Righteous. A Diamond G. A Goodfella.
A different rich drugdealer who was court ordered into rehab with me, came back from a three hour pass with a bunch of booze and drugs and shared ’em with me, so at that point, I kinda thought, well, I might as well split and I set off an alarm by going awol or whatever leaving out the side door against medical advice. I walked up the impossibly hot hill to my street musician friend’s third floor walkup dangerous ghetto dwelling and he started telling me all these wild stories about all the stuff that happened while I was in detox at the Cathouse, what they called the ghetto rehab I had been in. I liked summa the people I met there-Miss Betty, Capable Jesse. I think they’re all dead now. I learned some important stuff in that coocoo’s nest: “take what you need and leave the rest”. Also, “if nobody told you they love you today….love yourself”. I’m still workin’ on that one. The dude who fell out the car window had the same first name as me, so while I’d been gone from the public eye for quite some time, some people who’d heard about the death of the regular from the notorious hoodlum bar we were both semi-permanent residents at, dying, some people thought they were talking about me. I ran into a former co worker who looked like he’d seen a ghost and the poor boy had actually spent time mourning me. I’m still here, like what? 23 years later, knocks wood. (RIP) PJ
When I was a teenager, from ages like, 13 or 14 til at least 19 or 20, I loved an arty, beautiful, brainy, playful and wonderful new wave chick from the other side of the tracks and George Michael always makes me think of her.
“If the International Criminal Court was a real court, Blair will have already been convicted & serving time on the same tier with George W & Obama.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Democrats never deliver on their promises (even when they have a majority) because delivering for the people was never their objective in the first place. The DNC is a corporation whose sole function is to co-opt & destroy social movements that challenge the capitalist oligarchy.” (-Ryan Knight)
“We’re fighting back against the corrupt Democratic Party establishment’s coordinated campaign to deny our rightfully earned place on the ballot. If you want to stand with us and fight for real democracy, here’s how you can help! https://matthewhohforsenate.org/fightback/” (-Matthew Hoh For Senate)
“The land of the free” is just another capitalist lie. We are not free. We are owned and controlled by a handful of giant corporations and greedy billionaires who work in tandem with the capitalist state [the U.S. government] to exploit the people and planet for profit.” (-Ryan Knight)
WOKEWASHING FOREVER WARS….GENTRIFICATION BRUNCHERS ONLY IN REAL SOLIDARITY WITH OTHER RICH MOTHERFUCKERS
“Callin’ it your job, ole hoss, sure don’t make it right, but if you want me to, I’ll say a prayer for your soul tonight…” (-John Cougar)
These chain of command types, who come in big gang, power tripping, gratuitous overkill vulgar displays of overpowering force, the four cars fulla cops in bulletproof vests, the ten or so hillbillies in the white trucks and gigantic earth movers, and the bureaucratic rich women on the phones in their shiny new oversized Arnold Schwarzenegger like black vehicles, code enforcement paychecks and fancy government title havers, are some ugly sons a bitches who you wouldn’t want fucking waking up your sleeping family or tearing up your street, or bulldozing YOUR neighbor’s yard, just cause some corrupt local millionaires wanna remake and remodel the town, but if you are a middle class property owner, or genteel classed college educated capitalist, you probably think it’s all just golly gee willikers downright just okeydokey and fair is fair and by the textbook acceptable as long as they don’t say some kinda weekly updated “bad speech”. Or have a different diet, or like some comedian you were told is “objectionable”, all that matters to bipartisan haves is short term protecting their own professional class image, and eager-beaver reputation as go alongs, BUT if you are a member of a class that’s being pushed around with active violence and physical and legal intimidation and non stop class persecution, you would not find it oh so charming and progressive, that some fuckin’ token females are involved, with the push around, believe me. So what, big deal, there’s always been Uncle Tom tokens and high visibility status quo exploitation of brazen tokenism. Wrong is still wrong. The powers that be, scumbag billionaires and millionaires, have somehow rebranded their relentless nonstop worldwide war on the poor as somehow green, or LGBT friendly woke, or scientific, which is obviously nonsense. The shitlib booj people are all-in, though, for always more okey-dokey blame a boogeyman forever war bombings and inflated “defense budgets” and shady proxy war military contractors and total bullshit psy ops and black ops as long as media calls it “for democracy”–the usual, same ole same ole drones, plundering, mass murder and colonialism. Everyday booj safespace people wanna add more forbidden words to their naughty, naughty cancel culture list. Hey man, if you don’t wanna be called a groomer, don’t be creepy around kids, stop trying to help normalize the elite’s gross and inappropriate sexualization of children. Don’t like being called a Karen, you think that’s a mean ole hatespeech smear, well, imagine how poor people who you keep calling the cops on, for no reason, feel. Ya’all privileged people gotta cease with the fuckin double standards, and make-believe, SO & SO FIRST, protected class bullshit. The TV is not a gawd. (I know, I know). Gawdess. The TV is not a gawdess. Why would city hall dispatch 25 some city employees, sub-contractors, and police officers to spend 4 hours in the unforgiving hot sun, just removing some rock garden debris and old wood off a hill, next to a targeted geezers property? Because they can? I dunno, he musta pissed some insider off, there are cluttered properties on every street in this poor old town, but this guys’s gettin’ the business, and apparently the secretive developers think his property’s an eyesore and he’d built some rock steps up their embankment. Drunk on power bureaucrats are the worst. They defy all logic and they’re whole thing is punishing poor people. The way judges throw the book at poor people, that’s how voters should treat politicians, not all this worshipping and making excuses for ’em. I’ll tell ya, not just Obama, but Bernie and the Squad are all big betrayer, two faced, bullshit, lyin’ ass disappointments if you ask me. I was fooled by that bullshit AOC marketing. Bartender, working class, gonna make a ruckous, remember? But she did not force a vote on healthcare, she did not fight the real fight against the jet-set on behalf of us real life actual bartenders, and working class, she sat down when Pelosi told her to, makes excuses like all the rest, points her finger at Trump some more. Phony baloney, time wasting justice tweeters are meaningless controlled opposition.
REMEMBER THE LESSONS OF GANGSTA RAP AND THE GRUNGE/ALTERNATIVE HOAX?
Whenever I see old friends living out their Ultimate Cheers Fantasy where everybody knows their name and they’re always glad you came, ya know, it reminds me of all the times when I thought I’d also Arrived At Last. Every waitress waits for her chance to be discovered and even the ones who try to take the shortcuts to overnight celebrity, supermodel fame and fortune, on some level, gotta know deep down, that it’s a slippery slope, a devil’s bargain. The Smiths sang, “Fickle fame plays tricks on the brain” and I know that’s true, baby! Like all those Playboy chicks who write their me, too victim, tell all best sellers nowadays, when they were standing in line with hundreds of other topless g-stringed hopefuls and going though the bunny school orientations and creepy photographer groomer cult hazings and having to sleep with Hugh’s brother and told by the old secretaries they were gonna have to follow strict initiation rules and have curfews and sign non disclosure agreements and all that shit, weren’t they hip on some level that they weren’t really Marilyn Monroe? Even Marilyn found herself facedown on a dirty white bearskinned rug with a fat awful casting couch scumbag. More than twice. There is little in the way of authenticity, sincerity, redemption or real love in showbiz circles, it’s just horrible old men preying on young and desirable kid’s energy, creativity, vanity, a game of three card monte with the old shadow from the crossroads. My main man had his hour for magic, when he got to be smalltown famous and lord supreme over a white trash bar where he made the rules and got the girls and took all the glory, but ya know, what goes up must come down, those glory days really do zoom by in the blink of a young girl’s eye, leaving you with nothing. I think that’s what Sly was talkin’ bout when he said “Everybody’s A Star”. In a greedy, got mine, superstar celebrity V.I.P. culture, everybody thinks they are the one who deserves it, earned it, already paid their dues, it’s “because I’m WORTH IT!” Nobody thinks they just get to stay at the hotel with the creepy dayjob man ordering food service, and doing good drugs finally, for the weekend and then, they’ll have to return to their lowly stripper pole in Kentucky. A long long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, maybe somewhere on the East Coast, I knew a chick once who was smart and talented and she got alot of small pond overnight attention and celebrity and fanfare and TMZ tabloid paparazzi local Lindsey Lohan/Paris Hilton/Britney Spears special pass free drinks red carpet treatment, but if you watch how the cards all really fell, the vampire haves on the hill cut her off from her real friends, undermined her support systems, kept her away from her family of origin, exploited her ideas, sabotaged her art, used and abused her, filled her up with cupcakes and false praise, left her broken at a bar, fattened up, spat out, haggard. They Anna Nicole Smithed her! They can kill ya with Jagerbombs and on the house, insincere flattery bacon cheese potatos skins, too. One blearyeyed, brokenhearted morning, I came down to the dirty boulevard after sleeping over at a sadistic abuser dude’s photographer girlfriend’s house, she had pulled me up off the barroom floor the night before but gotten mad at me when I asked her if I could borrow some clean pants. I ran into a barefooted, shaven headed, beautiful Bambi eyed girl, ya know she had been taken home the night before and dumped off on the boulevard, our eyes met, she told me I was beautiful, we both recently shaved our heads as some kinda ridiculously misguided protest and were surprised to see someone else had also independently done that exact same thing, when we saw each other. I’m sure I was goin’ for a Richie Manic look but probably looked more like one of those crazy eyed Manson girls, now, I’d found a twin in Spacey Tracey! (RIP) She’s dead and gone now, killed herself in jail. She was a good chick but had been raised in a cult, had a mental illness, stole a car from my friend once, also robbed a bank. Some old man would pick her up from the bar, fill her head with big promises and ditch her in the morning. Happens everyday, they got a formula, a whole textbook for use and abuse and dangling false hope. Big Pimpin’, they call it. They find a runaway kid at the bus station and buy her some Denny’s. Ya gotta be careful with fame seeking and the ever promised illusions of arrival and belonging, highschool popularity, all too often, it’s fool’s gold. Just a handfull of pills and some fratboys and their groomer moms helping ’em, when they’re doing their dirty work. Nothing but a sign over a side door that says “V.I.P. ENTRANCE” and the local gentry rich as fuck junkie crackhead kids want you to wear this used thong for the night. You know how the Revolution only got like one or two lines a piece in “Purple Rain”? I’ve started to notice how everybody is Prince in their own Starring Role and people like me, we somehow gradually became, ya know, Bobby Z, one line sayers, background characters, distant echoes from a half forgotten rock dream, left in the dust, forgotten but not gone….But they kept the songs. Like Prince with Brown Mark’s “KISS”, actually.
Man, in the 90’s, Corporate Amurkkka made a billion by exploiting the Gangsta Rap movement, a buncha young rappers posed and flexed in front of their record executive’s mansions, flossing around like Diamond Jim, buying gold chains and quoting Scarface, Hootchie girls in the short shorts in their vice president’s hot tubs, rental cars. Most of ’em, the good ones usually, ended up dead after the record industry made money off ’em. Still happens thoday, these overnight face tattooed rappers all make their occult video and have a season of drugs and partying before they find ’em dead at 21. The list is long. A few convert to secret societies, capitalist hierarchies, are used to promote a diverse face of Corporate Honky Empire. Black Lives Matter slogan became a big money maker for two to three years, cover of every expensive coffeetable magazine and white pople media hook, two or three grifters at the top of a fake organization got overnight rich, live in mansions, but 100 real grass roots actual legit community organizers we all recall from iconic photos during the Baltimore and Ferguson uprisings ended up dead. Prince wrote a song called “Baltimore” and went on BET talking about Bill Gates geoengineering, had just finally got his publishing back under his own control, was supposedly found dead with his clothes on inside out, in an elevator at Paisley Park and no doctors or bodyguards were really held accountable like when Michael Jackson died, they just cremated Prince, made the estranged sister into a showboat for a couple weeks, tied his fortune up in lawsuits for awhile, then, whoever controls the estate now, started selling highpriced merchandise, flung open the doors of Paisley for high priced tours and concert goers were served alcohol, and they did these sorta bogus tributes to Prince with jive ass industry caricatures who are in no way heirs to his legacy, though I would have loved to have seen the Revolution play with Dez and Andre. The lawyers who own the estate were even giving Morris Duff about using the name THE TIME again. I love Morris, but was not into his Santa song, and the Rhino reissue that came out without the Time’s consultation shoulda been a big ta-do with photos and extra tracks, a live dvd and liner notes and shit.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO WATCH DYNASTY
You know I been thinkin’ alot about old Clash and Public Enemy songs, cause back then, those guys were really sayin’ somethin’, PRINCE (“When Will We Get Paid”, “Mister Man”, “Money Don’t Matter 2night”) and Michael (“They Don’t Care About Us”) were saying stuff, too. What do we got now? Buncha manufactured artificial hip-hop co-opted fakeass capitalist technopop bullshit, just a buncha fakes on puppet strings. Brothers and Sisters And Friends Of The Revolution, you gotta get extra attentive when The man starts telling you that you are the Bright Young Thing, Next Week’s Model, ya know? Since when have Black Lives Mattered to the racist kkkops or rich people running the show? They killed even MORE black folks since the George Floyd uprisings and all those sellout fraud squad celebrities send billions for guns to destabilize regions or start wars with Russia-China-Iran-Yemen-Palestine. Make laws against protest. I just don’t believe the media-whores or techlord secret police censors, red capet partisan celebrities, or anybody on television “represents” me, you, or our interests. Even the Gender Industry, after a lifetime of getting beaten in the streets, a lifetime of smear the queer, and countless horrible queer bashings, suddenly, EVERY macho hetero celebrity is in a dress and all the kids on Tik Tok are being peer pressured from the tower to be gender fluid this or somethin’ somethin’ that? Makes no sense to me, the corporate push for everybody to be on high alert extra extra pro noun fixated and in a dress. Like Chuck D. said, you “Can’t Truss It”. Why, after generations of churning out G.I. Joe armies of musclebound don’t ask/don’t tell arrow straight conformists have they suddenly switched the factory settings to making everybody into Gay Beachouse Malibu Kendolls? The social engineers do not love poor people, we know that much is true, and beyond a shadow of a doubt, so I fret for all my allies in every slice of the piechart, when they are suddenly invited to the head of the class and told that from now on they will be the teacher’s special privileges pets. I just don’t buy it, smells fishy to me. Gender is not an identity, my character is my identity, not my genitals or preferred sexual positions or partners parts, but yeah, I know, it’s become a gigantic INDUSTRY. Who are the major stockholders, moneymakers, qui bono? I remember the corporations just over saturating us with that garbage corporate punk in the nineties, they used it to kill off the real rebel underground. All the tiny radio stations, punk zines, college bars got Over Grunged and forcefed all that awful Blink 182 and Offspring and Green Day product until nobody wanted to ever hear anything like it again. They killed the real punks and gave you Avril Lavigne and Machinegun Kelly and Class Act. No thanks, ya know? You gotta think twice or fifty times before going mainstream, it’s a big mousetrap. The Capitalists just eat human beings and exploit rebellious subcultures, turn it all into advertisements for war and fascism. I loved RuPaul since early Wigstock and the Love Shack, but every show on Netflix or Hulu is suddenly drag obsessed? I dunno, man. can’t truss it. When there’s a sudden and unprecedented mandate to wear makeup and a dress, when it becomes compulsory, you ask questions. I would not WANT to sit with the jacks and fratboys at the lunchroom table, ya know what I’m sayin’? Don’t fall for it. Black comedians been complaining about it for years, how they can not get movie roles except as black men in a dress. What’s up with that? What happened at the end of the Alternative marketing hoax? Rich sado-preppies took over all the collegetown bar scenes and killed off live music. Turned it into gentrified cocaine crowd, Amurkkkan Psycho Urban Outfitters hipster posturing, backstab circle jerks and “me, first” rat race, ha ha we own all the shit culture. Some rich private school boys imitated Oasis poorly for a year. Kathleen Hannah married a Beastie Boy, they became mega rich for owning hip-hop and spinning off dumb white boyshit like Eminatti and richboy Beck. Kathleen always promoting imperialist war witch, Hillary Clinton. Just based on the new cult religion of Gender. Are you kidding me? Sonic Youth got rich, Courtney Love made a billion, and now we got Dave Grohl on every radio station, on every stage, by court order, forever. Makes me wonder. To me, Foo Fighters always felt like Mariah Carey, I know the Big Machine sez they’re “REALLY POPULAR”TM but they say that about GROPEY JOE and WAR WITH RUSSIA, and fourth booster for the Monkeypox making you sexy and popular forever, too.
One big problem in seeing real life, on the ground, actual reality, versus the big bamboozle manufactured tv, fear based, divisive, unreality, is how the PARTISAN PROGRAMMING and corporate media preferred tv channel-identifying, has become so powerful and effective, that you never can have a peaceful encounter or brief conversation with a Democrat, ever, without them going into a big tv narrative, official sounding, authoritarian rap about how Trump is Hitler, or Putin is Hitler, everybody’s apparently, a nazi, except, of course, the white nationalist Azov Battalion in the Ukraine…or the kkkops all those middle class Karens call to push poor people outta view and neatly, without ever acknowledging ANY complicity on the part of their blue no matter who Democrat enablers, who basically co sign every bad thing the Republicans do, that adversely affects the poor-ya know? The rank n file Rachel Maddow Russiagate Dems can not even hear anything about how Biden, Hillary or Obama are directly first hand responsible for wars or warrantless mass surveillance of fracking, or that AOC and the Squad helped fund the police and the overthrow of other countries everyday, they just don’t want to know, all they care about is blaming some Republican patriarchal figurehead, “uneducated” voter, or foreign, external boogeyman scapegoat. www.opensecrets.org I just have to walk away, kick the dust off my winklepickers, and not even try to communicate with them, they really have become like impossible to reach-their whole social justice thing was just a big front, a parade float, a hollow sham. A bumper sticker on a Tesla. They care about their own position/property/prestige or political party, their precious preferred millionaire grifter celebrities, and do nothing red carpet tweeters, but millions of people being displaced by the bankers, murdered by cops, or military, or proxy mercenary armies? People going broke from Wall Street greedy ripoffs and rent gouging? They do not give a rat’s ass, they can just blame somebody, Putin, McConell, Bin Ladin, whoever-“The Parliamentarian”, the bucks stops nowhere, so that’s why we on THE REAL LEFT say there is no real difference between Republicans who hate the poor, and Democrats who pretend to not hate the poor, but then always vote to help fund the Republican’s police state, military expansionism, Nato overthrows and the mass incarceration and mass warrantless techlord secret surveillance of the Murkkkan slave class. ‘Long as they get to keep their private pension, mimosa, and VIP backstage pass, ya know? I can’t even fathom any atrocity the shitlibs would stand up and fight for, or really legit stand in opposition to, s’long as they get to keep their red velvet ropes, scraps of privilege, and special V.I.P. class protections. And some bogus justifications were drummed up by marketing people and sold to them in soothing NPR dayspa tones. All they gotta do is tell ’em that defending Gitmo torture culture will make them sexy, scientific, genderfluid, and most importantly, POPULAR!
Right now as I type this on a Wednesday morning, ’bout nine o ‘clock, four cop vehicles plus two or three code enforcement vehicles, plus city trucks, plus big machine bulldozers have all descended on my dead end street to earth move hermit neighbor’s eccentric rock garden and found object collections off the city property so called easement, to make way for creepy developer to build a big road to a new cul de sac the city hopes will attract some as yet unseen out of state people who want to reside across the street from the stinky waste disposal treatment center among a smattering of elderly loners and embittered, “don’t tread on me” hermits in disintegrating trailer homes, and small brick n mortar houses owned by snowbirds who are only here two months a year. It is an overwhelming show of force and it’s hard not to have contempt for the yuppie rich people, city lawyers, tourist gouging hipster coffeeshop and fake art gallery owners and second hand ripoff boutiques and stepford wives of city hall who gave the big okeydokey to all this negative destruction in the name of one dubious investor’s profits. My neighbors are all outside moving found objects and garden rock stuff from yard to yard, around in circles with wheel barrels, but I’m not doing that with them. I gotta teenager with autism I’m trying to protect from the confrontation seekers. It’s already in the high nineties and it aint gonna make a difference if we’re out there getting beaten, the man has decided the home owners on this street and their preferences are not as significant as the shady developer’s who is obviously in bed with some shadowy kahuna. I don’t wanna be involved with these show of force cops-one of ’em ya see around town, is always spoiling for a fight, she’s got that machismo provocateur swagger. You know the way a hateful redneck looks at a gay person? That’s her same energy. You should see how furious she gets about having to wait in line, like everybody else at the dollar store. She’s got that occupying army marine type of gun ho aggression just rollin’ off her. Can’t wait to nightstick or taser somebody for freedom or feminism or WHATEVER IT IS THAT MOTIVATES PEOPLE TO WANNA BECOME UNIFORMED THUGS FOR CAPITALISM, THAT “I’LL SHOW YOU” CHIP ON THEIR SHOULDER THING. Half the time they are on the job, they don’t even know what’s going on. They’re just sent to “protect” the agendas of the rich from the poor, or even just less rich. Guardians Of Property. Brutes, bullies, gangbangers, cops n robbers, military enforcers, rent a cops, even though they’re all seemingly former abused children, I never liked ’em. Bullies and goose-stepper not-sees have always sucked.
Even still, right behind the armed aggressors are the etiquette oriented, always offended, cancel culture P.C., winebox Karens and smiley faced indie-martyr owner-operators downtown. Yuppies, lawyers, gentrification coffeehouse owners, moneymakers in solidarity with banks and developers are behind this big invasion. I’m laying low, they already don’t like the looks of me. They’d love to handcuff somebody, I’ll let the entitled, booj property owners deal with the city government clampdown. Rich college people like to pivot from every topic and change the discussion to talk more about my pale hue and penis having privilege or “heteronormative pass privilege”, but I am first and foremost predominantly perceived by most as a poor person, and that is how the always more powerful forces of capitalist hierarchy gentrification class preference people treat me. As someone to be stomped on, removed, exterminated, silenced and censored so the posh people on the legal white people reefer and big pharma happy pills who are all loving the removal of the poor from entire communities and profiteering from the overpriced hotels and airbandb’s and mass evil landlord evictions and prison profiteering and war machine investments don’t have to see my objectionable presence or hear my offensive anti imperialist ideologies. All that intimidation cause the rich wanna get the poor to leave town and apparently a grouchy hermit complained about some politician’s daughter’s barky FIVE DOGS. A big part of being a middle class shitlib is believing your middleclass shitlib dog’s feelings are more important than some lower class neighbors human rights.
The class police in my town, are all working for some McMansion builder who is coincidentally a repeat registered sex offender, who is remaking our humble neighborhood in his McMansion building sex offender image, he’s gonna put like 100 new houses across the swamp trail which means 200 cars and probably dogs and kids, and it’s very creepy,..how the cops and city hall are all in bed with this guy and his agenda of pushing the poor and old people off the street, cops with low i.q.’s and forearms like Popeye can be really menacing in groups. Packs of enforcers ready to inflict violence on any low rent hippies or hermit trailer dwellers who ask too many questions, or stand in their front yards watching the big machines, or who might be accused of signing some petition that might somehow interfere with the business of clearing the street for “progress and development”. The suckup gentrifiers on the main strip would not like this kindof intimidation being deployed towards themselves, or their elite loved ones-the goon squad giving us the stink eye, but they secretly self-identify as rich people, so they cheerfully look the other way, when it happens to some elderly eccentrics and low wage earners, “over there”. They tell themselves us unsightly poors deserve the push out, we got it comin’, the being bulldozed out of our neighborhood business-they all agree we shoulda gone to college and married up, then, we would deserve some kinda rights that only belong to Specials and a couple pet preferred minority group tokens. They do not have any compassion toward “THE OTHERS”. The yuppies are so baffled by Obama, “The Squad”TM, Capital Hill maga tantrum HYSTERIA, relentless next New Plague wave update Pfizer advertisements, NWO Forever-War Propaganda, and Netflix identity politics trickery, they foolishly PRESUME that all blue collar folks are “Trump Voters”, and therefore, deserve no quarter or mercy, or human rights. See-they’re the SMART, EDUCATED ONES(!!?) with the Tibetan prayer flags and OM mosaics and correct lexicon and obedience signals. The pro war feminist, Hillary Voters. In their middle class bubbles, the police men (and much more always most importantly) police women(!!!) are their SpecialsTM friends and protectors. I kinda get it. Ya see ’em leaning against their vehicles and talking on their cellphones and initially, they seem almost normal, human being like, but then, when they start to assertively move in as a pack, and kinda loom threateningly over the elderly property owners, or give the hostile staredown to us no real rights having, coffee sipping neighbors who should (theoretically) have a legal right to be outside, but don’t in real life, without risking harm or arrest to ourselves or vulnerable family members cause we aint got no Saul To Call, they all look like hulks or great apes. I have some kinda begrudging sympathy for the devils, they are all blue collar enforcers, from dumbfuck backgrounds of multi-generational abuse, probably can’t help it, don’t know better, but the smugly smirking, diabolical predator class gentrifiers over on Main Street and Broadway, I got a lot of resentment towards them…Those fakes and frauds, elitists and college manners shitlibs are only out for themselves, they stand for nothing but their own privilege, these new age selfish and greedy airbandb divorcee make a bucks, cause they decorate their tourist trap businesses with all the affectations of arty hipster bohemia-John Lennon psychedelic posters and reggae flags and shit while all 100% behind the creepy developers and in bed with the Mr. Burns shadowy financier forces that own the dimwitted winebox ladies of just for show city hall. They line these women up behind some table and make it look like the soccer moms are in charge, but nothing they do ever benefits the everyday people, the poor families from this side of the tracks–they are just teleprompter reciters, puppets, models of the honky old Mister-Man establishment, same as it ever was, and here come the armed goons and bulldozers. Only now in the bullshit fiction age of the BIG WOKEWASH some of the bruisers identify as female or blue no matter who Democrats, so that’s supposed to make some low information, gender identifying, college grad tv watcher feel better. Whatever, man. Sometimes THE MAN is just a collaborating WHOA-Man. People who just want a license to do violence and take up arms against the poor to please the rich are just gangsters for capitalism, him/her/they/them/anybody. I wanna ask my trans friends who’ve endured lifetimes of abuse, from the very same exact intolerant military culture and permanently entrenched corporate elite, why they think they are suddenly so obligatory en vogue among the oppressor classes. My theory is “vibrant and diverse” is just pie chart pinkwash/whitewash/wokewash/greenwash/gentrification real estate code for “have money”. You can self identify as whatever you want and own tiny increments of privilege, as long as you have money. The gougers and brunchers downtown all got rainbow flags and pink triangles out front like they are liberal and progressive, but they wanna get rid of the poor. I think it’s fuckin’ crazy. Ya know Malcolm X talked about the race hustlers, I think now they just market-weaponize everything, we got gender hustlers, still wolves. Capitalism even co-opted hippie movement’s paisley shirts and headbands, bellbottoms and acid as an advertising sales pitch in the sixties, don’t get too excited with the fake wokeness cults, they just use and abuse subcultures for evil marketing purposes. They don’t really love any of us.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene captures perfectly the question of our times- what if only the rude untutored characters express sane beliefs, and all the well schooled and well behaved people latch onto abusive, deranged insanity?”
(-Spotted Toad on twitter)
“Friendly reminder that the prospect of revolution will become far more remote once there are bulletproof AI-guided robot armies who will fire upon locals without a moment’s hesitation. Revolution has a pretty definitive use-by date.”
(-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Look at what these criminals are preparing for you. Don’t think this is just about “foreign” wars. The rulers are more concerned about domestic opposition as it becomes clear capitalism is untenable & has to be replaced.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Double boosted Biden announced he has Covid one day after announcing he has cancer.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“American weapons of war kill far more people overseas than they do domestically, and those killings are done in wars of aggression for power and profit which are sold to the public with lies and propaganda. Every AR-15 mass shooting you get a bunch of Democrats falling all over themselves to say those weapons should only ever be used on impoverished foreigners. That unique brand of psychopathy that can posture and preen as a compassionate voice of sanity before the voting public, turn around and help gun down everyone in the Global South for crude oil and Raytheon profit margins, and then go to bed and not lose a wink’s sleep over it” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
Our civilization is built upon lies and obfuscation to such an extent that advocating for transparency and the democratization of information can be a complete political position, all by itself.
Rather than claiming to know what’s best for society (whether we should move left or right, whether we should espouse this model or that model), it is perfectly legitimate to simply support giving humanity the information tools necessary to know the truth about what’s happening so that they can collectively determine for themselves what direction to take.
This would mean supporting the end of the mass-scale manipulations and obfuscations used by the powerful to influence the way the public thinks, acts and votes, and it would mean giving them the democratic infrastructure to steer their civilization in response to the true information they’ve got access to.
It would mean supporting the end of government secrecy and advocating transparency for any institution with any degree of power over the people. The more power and influence they have, the more transparency should be required of them, whether they be governmental, corporate, or financial institutions.
It would mean supporting the democratization of information and the end of mass media propaganda. It would mean breaking up institutions which have too much information-sharing ability and giving more information-sharing ability to those who don’t have enough. Rather than a few plutocrats influencing the public, the public influences the public. The public can collectively uplift individual voices and ideas that they like, but no voice is given an unfair advantage in whether or not that will happen.
Imperial Narrative Control Has Five Distinct Elements
“The powerful manipulate the dominant narratives of our society in five major ways: propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy, and the war on journalism.”https://t.co/ojJdjAJ11Z
It would mean supporting the end of internet censorship and algorithm manipulation, so the information the public sees is determined not by billionaire megacorporations in Silicon Valley but by what’s in the zeitgeist and what the public finds interesting.
It would mean calling for an end to the war on journalism and opposing the persecution of publishers like Julian Assange and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden for exposing inconvenient truths about the powerful. All efforts to increase transparency for the powerful and share information in the public interest would be praised, not punished.
In my personal opinion it would also mean supporting the legalization of psychedelics, because giving people the tools to gain information about their inner dimensions is as important for helping them understand the direction society should take as giving them the tools to gain information about their external world.
It would mean the complete absence of any authority controlling people’s access to information or ideas in any way. Call it information anarchism, if you like.
Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.
Life in our society is like the movie The Matrix, except instead of AI keeping us asleep in an illusory world, it’s psychopathic oligarchs. And instead of code, it’s narrative.https://t.co/mkk41xhtZK
Information anarchism is just as radical a goal as any other revolutionary ideology, because information control is so important to the continued existence of our status quo systems that it could never be achieved without drastic measures taken by the collective. The difference is that rather than claiming to know whether ideological models like communism or anarcho-capitalism would be better, for example, one only supports giving the people the means to collectively decide for themselves.
The idea of true information anarchy can be as frightening to the ego as the idea of total societal anarchy, because nobody being in control means there’s nobody to stop it from going in a frightening direction. What if ideas I don’t like gain popularity? What if people start thinking wrong thoughts and believing wrong beliefs?
But that’s kind of the appeal, in my opinion. Really taking the brakes off of the way information moves through our world and letting humanity take full unbridaled advantage of the interconnectedness of our brains at this unprecedented juncture in terrestrial history could lead somewhere very bad, but it could also lead somewhere very good. And whatever ends up happening would be because of our own decisions instead of the decisions of a few powerful manipulators.
And right now the latter is what’s happening. We’re on a collision course with extinction via environmental catastrophe or nuclear war, and it’s because of the decisions made by powerful people who are continuously working to control what ideas and information we consume. If information was really freed up, along with our ability to collectively control the direction humanity takes going forward, it’s hard to imagine we’d mess it up any worse than they have.
Ten Times Empire Managers Showed Us That They Want To Control Our Thoughts
The single most under-appreciated aspect of our society is the fact that immensely powerful people are continuously working to manipulate the thoughts we think about our world.https://t.co/s9gIfQGb39
And whatever world we built together will have been by our own informed consent, instead of the manufactured consent of elite manipulators. If we’ve seen it all and we still choose our own destruction, then that will have been our choice. Whatever happens will be humanity showing the universe what it’s really made of. What we really are as a species.
And in my opinion, that’s what real freedom looks like. Giving humanity the tools to go whatever way it wants to go, even if it’s the way of the dinosaur. If you really, truly value freedom, in my opinion that’s the wisest place to take your stand.
Wanting the truth to be known whatever it may be is a standalone ideology, and it’s also a standalone personal philosophy. Wanting the truth to be known not just in the world but in your own life, even if it’s uncomfortable or embarrassing. Wanting unhealthy dynamics in your interpersonal relationships to come into awareness. Wanting your unhealed traumas to come into the light of consciousness where they can be healed. Wanting your delusions to be seen so they can be dispelled by truth. Wanting it all to come out into the light: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
It’s possible for an individual to live an entire life that is guided by truth and by the desire for truth, and I’m fairly certain it’s possible for all of humanity to live that way as well. We can all push for that, if we decide we want it. We can all decide that we’re sick of being lied to, sick of being manipulated, sick of the completely backward status quo of secrecy for the powerful and surveillance for everyone else, and we can use the power of our numbers to force it to change.
And from there we can sort out together what kind of world we want to live in, guided by the light of truth, whether toward harmony or oblivion, come what may.”
“Police in Ohio shot an unarmed man who was fleeing 60 times. US police kill over 1,000 ppl a year. Many countries in Europe for example average under 20 deaths a year (some average 0). The US is uniquely brutal.” (-Lee Camp)
“The tragedy of Uvalde is a microcosm of the US empire. Precious humanity is bleeding out while militarism – at home & abroad – consumes our resources & fails spectacularly in meeting our most dire needs.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Hey Biden, if you are opposed to gun violence why are you sending guns to Ukraine? Look, if you can culturally accommodate the kind of warmongering that has gripped this country you are immersed in normalized violence so stop playing surprised when it blows back. No honest person really believes this is only about the availability of guns? People are not being honest. It is too much to admit the society is sick & produces sick individuals. Anger, alienation & violence is the “American” ethos & how they sell war. I guess they are catching on that the only place Europeans are winning the propaganda war against Russia is in the U.S. & Europe! Everyone not subjected to Western other-worldly propaganda knows sanctions are responsible for energy & food crisis!” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Following a decree by Volodymyr Zelensky, the Communist Party of Ukraine was permanently banned by a Lviv court. As the party’s assets, buildings and funds were forcibly transferred to the state, Zelensky appealed for more weapons to defend democracy.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Mexican President AMLO says he will raise the issue of the prosecution of journalist Julian Assange during his meeting with Joe Biden and campaign to have the Statue of Liberty dismantled if Assange is not freed.” (-Alex Rubeinstein)
“DEMOCRACY: Government is responsive to the people and adheres to a ‘rule of law.’ US GOVERNMENT: Government is responsive to the wealthy and “arbitrarily applies the law” on behalf of political allies.”
(-Garland Nixon)
“A major reason why mass shootings like Highland are happening so frequently is because the United States is at war with itself. And the United States is at war with itself because it is at war with the world.
MAGA: Democrats are agents of CHINA! Democrats: MAGA are agents of RUSSIA! Reality: Democrats and MAGA GOP are agents of CAPITALISTS and their monopolies.
Mexico has offered asylum to Julian Assange. Russia gave asylum to Edward Snowden. The United States hunts whistleblowers and refuses to free political prisoners such as Leonard Peltier until they are on their death bed.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“I save my empathy and love for my fellow working class, marginalized and oppressed communities. The ruling class, the bourgeoisie who fund them and the pigs who protect them get nothing from me. They are what’s standing between us and liberation.” (-MozFrame)
“Most Americans don’t realize that we live in the heart of the cruelest empire on earth because we are kept distracted with a heavy dose of mindless entertainment and fabricated tales of a democracy that has never existed here.” (-Ryan Knight)
“The stock market is a Ponzi scheme used to enrich the few at the expense of everyone else. 80% of stocks are owned by 10% of Americans.” (-Lee Camp)
“This is a day of mourning for the captors of this settler-colonial state. When the U.S. is freed from control of the white-male, colonial/capitalist 1% & finally de-colonized, July 4th will be a day of infamy. Do you not understand why non-European, colonized people historically subjected to the madness of violent white power would find the rehabilitation in the U.S. & Europe of crazed ultranationalist white supremacists & neo-Nazi’s in Ukraine an existential threat?” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Akron Police just released the body camera footage of the killing of Jayland Walker. Jayland was unarmed and running away when police opened fire, firing 90 shots, hitting him 60. The Department of Justice needs to step in to investigate immediately. This is like Cleveland all over again, with the 137 shots fired at Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams. Jayland’s family is urging protestors to remain peaceful. Something has to change.” (-Nina Turner)
“Stranger Things added a dull, lifeless, and unnecessary storyline set in the Soviet Union just so they could get some propaganda slights off against a republic that no longer exists.” (-Jody Roumain)
“If you buy the idea that we need to stop the flow of “misinformation”, you are a sucker of the highest order Who is the biggest spreader of Misinformation? –> Corporate Media = CNN MSNBC FOX NYT Bloomberg WashPo” (-Compton Jay)
“NATO is a legalized terrorist organization led by the empire of lies. U.S Americans must be the first to oppose its existence. Lovely how every U.S beltway politician & propagandist will celebrate July 4th, boasting of the “freedoms” they’ve increasingly robbed their people of, while Julian Assange spends his birthday in prison for exposing their war crimes against the world. The U.S American people are merely victims of their own government. The world, even those their government sanctions, coups & vilifies know this. But it is time to do more than just be complicit. You will have to help get rid of the imperialist predator class more than anyone.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“The ruling class has mastered giving us shit to fight each other about, and ignoring the reasons we should be uniting to fight them.” (-Black In The Empire)
“July 4th is supposedly a celebration of “freedom.” Yet I see no freedom for Julian Assange or Jayland Walker. Yemen and millions more in nations terrorized by U.S. imperialism know nothing of this “freedom” either. The United States is a big lie. July 4th is a celebration of the fact that the United States is the most propagandized and historically illiterate country in the world.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Calling it “defense” spending is propaganda. It’s wage endless wars to enrich the U.S. oligarchy spending.”
(-Ryan Knight)
“The US is the only nation on earth whose entire economy is built on arms manufacturing and security guarantees to tyrannical Gulf states. It’s not just correct to call the US empire a uniquely evil power structure, it’s correct to say it’s impossible for it not to be.
Saudi Arabia’s destruction of Yemen and proxy warfare in Syria are many thousands of times more evil and horrific than the assassination of one Washington Post columnist, but because the empire is built on that kind of bloodshed it gets far less attention.
Biden continuing the unbroken presidential tradition of courting the Saudis is not a betrayal of US values but a very normal expression of them. You either want the complete dismantlement of the US empire or you don’t. If you don’t, quit bitching about how the sausage gets made.
The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Republicans say they will do evil things and then do evil things, while Democrats say they will not do evil things and then do evil things.
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On one hand polls say Americans don’t want Biden to run again, but on the other hand there’s zero chance Democrats put forward a different candidate who’s better than the rotbrained empire mummy.
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Friendly reminder that Russiagate was a psyop which had its origins in the US intelligence cartel, was used to facilitate longstanding agendas of the US intelligence cartel, is the reason liberals are now cheerleading the US proxy war in Ukraine, and that only an idiot would call this a coincidence.
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Anyone who still buys this schtick is a fucking moron:
19 year old “Zaporizhzhia Avenger” took down a Russian Su-25 plane with an Igla (Needle) man-portable-defense-system.
This is his sixth plane, and he also took down a cruise missile.
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) July 17, 2022
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Current proxy warfare tactics in Ukraine have no chance of delivering a swift defeat to Russia. What they do have is a pretty good chance of creating a costly military quagmire for Russia and a 100 percent certainty of creating massive profits for the arms industry.
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The biggest lie the hawks ever sold was that their militaristic policies prevent the problems they actually create. Militarizing against Russia caused this war. The war on terror created terror groups. Continuing the encirclement of China will likely lead to a nasty confrontation there. Etc.
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Working to bring down Moscow and Beijing would be a great way to move toward securing unipolar planetary hegemony while simultaneously unleashing the kind of worldwide economic chaos and desperation that shock doctrine capitalism engineers have heretofore only ever dreamed of.
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At the end of this clip Bolton cites “classified information” as the reason he won’t name the other US coups he’s helped orchestrate, calling to mind when Assange said “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security”:
John Bolton was asked to elaborate on his comment last weekend that he “planned coup d’etats” when in the WH: “This is something some of the snowflakes on the Left really were kind of shocked at, but when you’re looking out for America’s best interests, you do what’s necessary.” pic.twitter.com/7XC7xvRVuR
The most important job of the western media right now is convincing the public that the world’s major powers splitting into two increasingly hostile alliances is probably nothing to worry about.
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Celebrities “getting political” is not a problem in itself. The problem is that most of them don’t start growing their political awareness until they’re already famous, when they’re informing their worldview from inside an elite echo chamber that has a vested interest in preserving the status quo.
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Believing there are good billionaires is even dumber than believing there are good US presidents, and believing there are good mainstream media pundits is even dumber than believing there are good billionaires.
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The Guardian is the nastiest war propaganda rag in the world, and Simon Tisdall is the nastiest war propagandist at The Guardian.
No one ever espouses a mainstream political worldview because they have thoroughly examined all the options and sincerely believe that one’s the best. It’s always because they don’t know other political worldviews exist, or aren’t sufficiently familiar with them, or have been propagandized into believing false things about them, or because they work in a career that is advanced by adhering to mainstream political perspectives.
This is true because mainstream political worldviews do not exist to help people and make good things happen, they exist to facilitate plutocracy and empire. Nobody who deeply investigates their nature and contrasts them with alternatives comes away thinking they’re the best, whether they’re someone with left-wing or right-wing sympathies or anywhere in between.
The only reason mainstream politics are mainstream is because powerful manipulators pour a tremendous amount of wealth and energy into making them mainstream. If there were actually a “marketplace of ideas” on that front, mainstream politics would die.
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The empire still fears the public. If it didn’t it wouldn’t bother rolling out so much propaganda ahead of all its depraved actions — it would just act. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because they’re still afraid of what we’ll do to them if we decide we don’t consent.
Just something I think is worth calling to mind once in a while.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
Covering the Waterfront with Randy Credico – Ray McGovernRecent Posts. Covering the Waterfront with Randy Credico July 15, 2022; The Imaginary War in Ukraine July 14, 2022; Ray McGovern on John Bolton’s Bragging About Coups July 14, 2022; James Clapper Gets a Mulligan at Carnegie July 13, 2022; Blinken Leading the Blind Into the Mideast Desert July 13, 2022raymcgovern.com
A super hip school teacher from Missouri named Phil who was into Husker Du and The Replacements when I first met him turned me on to Public Enemy. I did not get it, at first, cause they were so noisy and shit and being hyped by Spin Magazine which I’ve always been distrustful of. Manic Street Preachers and Sinead kept pushing them, Sinead even shaved their logo onto the side of her head. Now I think they are one of the most important bands that ever came along and I spent a lot of time on social media fighting stupid boomers who wouldn’t shutup about how PUBLIC ENEMY did not belong in that sham Rocknroll Hall Of fame but I think they are way way way more important than Billy Joel, James Taylor, McDonna or a million other mean nothing mediocrity unit shifters.
Most self proclaimed rocknroll people I know never done one thing in their whole lives even like one tenth as rocknroll as FIGHT THE POWER!
RESIST RESIST RESIST RESIST
“No one ever espouses a mainstream political worldview because they thoroughly examined all the options and sincerely believe that one’s the best. It’s always because they aren’t familiar with other worldviews or because they know a mainstream worldview will advance their career. The only reason mainstream politics are mainstream is because a tremendous amount of wealth and energy are poured into MAKING them mainstream by power structures which benefit from them. If there were actually a “marketplace of ideas” on that front mainstream politics would die. This is true because mainstream political worldviews do not exist to help people and make good things happen, they exist to facilitate plutocracy and empire. Nobody who deeply investigates their nature and contrasts them with alternatives comes away thinking they’re the best.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“I’d like to see them all run to the hills.” (-Singer-songwriter, guitarist. Co-host of the ‘Discontented’ and ‘Deep Politics and Rock ‘n’ Roll’ podcasts)
It’s incredible to see Western media suddenly pretend to support “anti-war” journalists. These same outlets spent years viciously demonizing real anti-war journalists who exposed US/NATO wars on Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc., smearing us as “conspiracy theorists” spreading “disinfo” (-Benjamin Norton)
“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)
” (-Jory Micah)
, you do what you like, and it’s only by pure coincidence that what you like just so happens to always align perfectly with what the powerful want you to do.
The US government was completely bought for $14.4 Billion 
Buddi U Chandrasiri 
(@NewsWireLK) 
Veglam 