“Everybody knows I’ve only got one song and it’s much too slow and it’s much too long…” (-Rowland S. Howard)
IF YOU’RE ALONE AND YOU GOT THE FEAR
“Be an adult and engage your critical thinking. Does a madman who goes around invading countries solely because he’s evil and hates freedom sound like a real-life human being to you? Or does it sound made up? Like something you’d see in a Hollywood movie? Like something that was concocted by people responsible for controlling the dominant narratives of our society and funneled into your mind using media?
Marvel supervillains have more depth and complexity than the one-dimensional characters the imperial spin machine concocts to represent its official enemies. Thanos was a more believable character with more understandable and nuanced motivations than the propaganda machine’s fictional representation of Putin. That representation has been overlaid on top of the actual government official who you might not necessarily agree with, but can definitely understand and engage in diplomacy and negotiation.
People who believe the empire’s narratives about its official enemies have fewer critical thinking skills than your average Marvel movie viewer. Think. Be a grown up and think. Someone’s benefitting from the aggressively promulgated narrative that peace is impossible and war is the only solution. And that someone isn’t you.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
PLEASANT STREET
Man, me and my two guitar players met some big haired record store chick and ended up emptying many bottles of wine and spirits with her, playing acoustic guitars and singing in this grand old, Dagwood & Blondie, fifties style, rent controlled, second floor, Central Square kitchen with the big picture windows and red metal table and Rolling Stones posters and fabulous echo. She had a marvelous record collection from working at Newbury Comics and taught us about the Immortal Souls, Waterboys, Jacobites and Snatches Of Pink. We’d stay up all night talking about merry pranksters, yippies and beat poets and Bob Dylan lyrics. I was finding so much inspiration and starting to get more serious about songwriting: “There was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air”. It was one of those golden hours that could not last, every autumn, my thoughts drift back to that place and the people who used to drink with us and bang on tambourines and sing along. A famous cartoonist/sax player/country music singer named Bob Starker got me into the Jim Carroll Band during a memorable blizzard one winter. Some college girls named Hope and Ashlieng started hipping me to more modern hip hop culture. A girl named Melissa who married the sax player taught me about indie film and underground cinema. It was good, I did not know how blessed we were. That place stayed real cold in the winter. but it was big as hell, and filled with laughs when we made music and it’s a melancholy feeling when you can’t go back home cause everybody’s supposedly grown up now and scattered off to different parts of the world with their careers and bigfish in the mallpond status thing and and spouses and kids and properties and personal agendas. I guess that is what the dreams are for, revisiting all the magical places. Those of us who’d grown up on like, The Pretenders,Lou Reed,Stiv Bators, and Patti Smith were never gonna be that impressed with Evan Dando, Dickie Barrett, Greg Duuli or Taylor Swift…God bless Mike Scott!
YOU ARE NOT IN THE MIDDLE SCHOOL BLEACHERS, ROOTING FOR THE HOMETEAM AGAINST THE CROSSTOWN RIVAL CATHOLIC SCHOOL, SO YOU HAVE TO CARE ABOUT MORE THAN A FLAG, OR UNIFORM, OR GENDER, OR POLITICAL PARTY.
“NATO has blamed the attack on Nord Stream pipelines on “some unknown actor.” This actor was not named but NATO threatened a military response against this “some unknown actor.” (-Lowkey Online)
“Two administrations ago the US had a president who mocked the idea that Russia was a primary rival and said Ukraine was a core interest to Russia but not the US. After four years of intelligence agency-driven narratives marrying Russia to Trump, liberals are now braying for WW3. Before 2016 Dems saw those who spent energy freaking out about Russia as weird, archaic cold warriors. Now they see anyone who doesn’t want war with Russia as a secret agent of the Kremlin. All because they were trained that Russia = Trump and fighting Russia = fighting Trump. Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.” (Caitlin Johnstone)
“Since taking over from Trump, Biden has drastically ramped up ICE detention by 45%, increasing the number of migrants in cages from 14,195 to 25,776. Yet the issue has virtually disappeared from mainstream discourse…”
(-Holding Biden Accountable Twitter page)
“Four regions in Ukraine voting to join Russia is called “annexation” but the U.S. militarily occupying one-third of Syria and stealing 80 percent of its oil is called “democracy.” This is American exceptionalism on steroids.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Asked about Nordstream, Biden waited until the end of a presser to offer a half hearted non-denial denial You’d think there’s be more bluster and outrage over one of the worst acts of industrial sabotage and environmental disasters in recent memory.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Western journalists are completely free to express their opinions. Unless they are the wrong opinions. If you haven’t heard, @kthalps
was fired from The Hill this week for expressing the same view as the UN, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Watch here and support her work!” (-Alan macLeod)
“Rayan Suleiman, 7, died today after being chased by Israeli soldiers. Following his death, the home of his family was raided by the occupation forces.” (-Lowkey Online)
“The bad news: I was censored and fired by The Hill over defending Rashida Tlaib & labeling Israeli apartheid “apartheid.” The good news: I shot the censored video with an actually independent media outlet (see below)” (-Katie Halper)
“People think they’re really smart when they say “censorship is only done by the government.” Nobody intellectually serious or honest believes that. It’s unconstitutional when it’s the government. It’s still censorship when it’s not the government.” (-Katie Halper)
“I saw the war machine against Russia start with Snowden. Then they got people to think that Wikileaks = Russia. Hillary pushed anti Russia on everyone that disagreed with her.” (-Kazza Frazza)
“As Noam Chomsky has been pointing out repeatedly, the political/media class have been continually indoctrinating the public with the completely false narrative that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked”. Every time the war comes up the imperial spinmeisters utter that slogan, in much the same way Michael Jackson had a quota for how often MTV hosts were obligated to refer to him as “The King of Pop Michael Jackson” when his name was mentioned.
But what does it mean if the war is “unprovoked”? It means Putin didn’t invade Ukraine because of anything the western empire was doing, so it couldn’t have been prevented by the western empire behaving less aggressively on Russia’s borders. It means Putin necessarily invaded because he is some kind of evil lunatic who loves to commit war crimes, or a megalomaniacal tyrant who wants to conquer the world because he hates freedom and democracy. Which means he will keep attacking and invading other countries unless he can be stopped. Which means the only answer to the Putin problem is more war.
This is why empire apologists get angry at those who advocate the only sane and rational position toward nuclear brinkmanship by calling for de-escalation and detente. It’s because they’ve been aggressively indoctrinated into the belief that war is the only answer.
The moronic narrative that the invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” poses a massive obstacle to peace, because if Putin is just attacking and invading countries solely because he’s crazy and evil it means detente is impossible and he won’t stop until he’s decisively crushed. If it’s accepted that the US empire has played no role in provoking Putin’s actions, that means there’s nothing the empire could do to make continued Russian aggression less likely apart from regime change, or at least severely crippling and punishing Russia militarily.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Resistance to radical evil is the pinnacle of human existence.“ (-Chris Hedges)
HELLO DISASTER
were a perfect band that became the rough blueprint for the more pop side of what me and my friends were trying to do, tell stories about shit that mattered with a little melody and a lotta sneer.
“at least I’m not another parody in style or not…”
SHITLIBS ARE FAKE AS FUCK. IDENTITY POLITRICKS IS JUST EMPTY TWEETING FEELGOODIST TOKENISM.
This here column won’t be seen until ya know, Christmas, probably, at the earliest, cause I got a backlog of seven or eight columns archived and it is the first day of October as I write this. If the corrupt powers that be have not blown up the planet by then, we oughta be crowded into a little house nestled way back in the trees by then. I just keep trying to retreat deeper away from this vicious ratrace world where all the middle class people battle for middle school popularity well into their middle and even old age. I don’t think anybody really ever grows up, least not the people who adapted all those affectations of adulthood, the cars and keys and big screen tvs. Evil behind the scenes forces continue to censor all truth telling whistle blower journalists while teachers(!!!) who should know better, and safespace feelings fraud squad programmed college people stupidly repeat shit about how it aint censorship if Gates and Zuck and the CIA and the IDF and Aipac or an industry captured regulatory agency, does it. Anyone unwilling to stick to preferred Davos/Pentagon/Nato/WEF script is branded by these tedious shitlibs as “commies”, or “conspiracy theorists” or “Trump voters” or “anti semitic” or “anti vaxxers” or “cysborn heteronormative pass privileged”, or “tankkies” or whatever. It’s the “educated” classes who most often resort to playground namecalling because the truth does not support their preferred Thank Obama “see no evil”, privileged positions. The think tank/ spook media whores are trying to escalate wars rather than engage in thoughtful diplomacy. Hillary and the Cheneys and Kyrsten Synema and Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Podesta and Pelosi are dangerous. NOT just the white haired, elderly dinosaur Southern, Republikkkan males who take big checks from coal companies or pipeline builders or big pharma or surveillance tech. ALL the pro war politicians who think everyone must die who does not obey the empire, and some who do obey, too. Stop making excuses for election rigging warpigs and police state billionaire, class warriors.
Sunshiny Saturday in my deadend desert ghost town-about five lots down, developers have commenced building yet another new house for some winter months part timer from outta state. Up on the hill to my right, a third Dollar Store is being constructed. You know you live in a deadend ghost town when they only ever build more fucking dollar stores. I spoke to a surprisingly upbeat and cheerful veteran in one of those motorized wheelchairs this morning, and an eccentric dude who works at one of the tourist trap, overpriced stores on the main drag, who was complaining about immigrants at the border coming in to do farm labor. Some RV outta towners are walking around smiling about the bright weather in their big sunhats and shorts, locals are overwhelmingly poor and freakishly hostile about the inflation and the outta town fly by night developers who seem to be making the new rules here and controlling these dumb winebox people on the city hall. I had three cups of coffee and now I’m crashing a little bit, dread my afternoon obligations of the day. I have to interact with more humans later on and anticipate some of them doing their seemingly obligatory moodswinging drama queen theatrics, because they can. You know how people with money all love to hijack any moment, break commitments, cancel or postpone appointments, carry on about their conditions? I’m gonna have to deal with that kinda thing, try to fake a smile through it, and then, probably will have to move some heavy appliances. Now between you and me, what I’d rather be doing on one of the last indian summer beautiful days we’re gonna see for a long time probably would be convening in the garage with some fellow leather clad bandanna wearing rockers and making a loud ruckus that’s a throwback to another time. Where I live now, if I say, “The Stooges”, they’re all thinking, “n’yuk, n’yuk, n’yuk, why I oughta…!”
Last night I dreamt I’d found my band and even woke up with a few lines for a song. Sometimes, it seems like that day just aint gonna come. I got some stamps and still send postcards to my estranged loved one’s other relatives so at least they know I never stopped looking for ’em, waiting for ’em, keepin’ my faithful vigil, praying for their safe return. My life is a whole lotta waiting around on other people. Hurry up and wait some more, the fucking waiting room. take a number and grow some cobwebs, “stare at each other, wait til we die”. That’s the tension between the rich and the poor, when the rich want to move shit, make shit happens, they just pay for it to happen, make a call, pay somebody off, snap their fingers just like that. Like Samantha on “Bewitched”. That’s why some dumb rich Ashlee Simpson/Harry Styles model motherfucker jumpin’ up n down aint art, it’s just access. Why you think that show’s called “Access Hollywood”? It’s like a fraternity hazing, the casting couch aint the half of it. They use their monopoly juggernaut to ram these Taylor Swift rich kids into our consciousness, mostly against our will and better judgement, then, they pay Spin magazine and Rob Sheffield to talk about their fifty greatest songs later on, like any of these lapdancer robots have even five good songs, say it enough and some idiot morons will believe it. Rich people want you to listen to them recite their false narratives, they like it better when you’re off the clock. They can’t have friendships because of their superiority complex delusions of grandeur, so they only have minions, assistants, salaried suckers who have to pretend to agree with their mirror mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all bullshit. It’s crazy getting involved with them, believe me, don’t do it if you can avoid it-hold out, find another way. Their over confidence astounds me, how they tell each other, “everything will come to you”. They say it’s all their lifetimes of accrued good karma, and artsy designer redecorating vision. Megachurch prosperity gospel. In my hometown church they are all about the soldiers, cause one in three families got people in the military, so wave the flags and fill the gold plate and they’ll pray for the imperialist invaders killing families overseas and plundering their oil, lithium, and opium. The peachy cheeked Kendoll church goin’ boys draw big fifty thousand dollar a year salaries to be youth group praise leaders at these rightwing evangelical churches preaching the capitalist prosperity gospel, the gospel of nepotism and money, military and Murkkka, they marry off these underaged little blonde haired goldilocks girls, put ’em in big white McMansions, closets overstuffed with Gucci bags and little white dresses and say it’s all for Jesus. Oh man, it’s tough to take, listening to all that shit. Ya know that Hanoi Rocks line, “And Susie, I just can’t listen tonight…” Whoo! I gotta go interact with people and move some major appliances today, definitely not my idea of a good time. People have become so disingenuous in this culture, it’s hard for me to bear it and nod along, none of them even seem to believe their own media induced scripted garbage, they just been programmed with this superstition that some privilege is gonna trickle down on them if they mindlessly repeat the slogan of the day some more. I used to try to be nice and diplomatic with the coffee shop owners and rent gouging liberal know it alls, middle class tv watchers, but they wore me down with their stubborn, willful, devoted blindness. Now I just stay as far away from them as often as I possibly can. There is no negotiating with plagiarists and gentrification brunchers. All they care about is their selfie, their tiktok, their vanity brand, and their mimosa. Launching their monochromatic home accessory collection, and competing with the meanspirited sisters for the inheritance. I can’t be around that shit. In Eugene, Oregon, activists would tell the shitlib politicians about the way their gestapo cops were abusing the homeless people and they would respond with some bullshit story about how they remember having to share a bathroom at the dorm when they were in college in the sixties, so they know how it feels to be homeless, shit like that. The Mayor used to moan about people sitting around and not doing anything-that’s EXACTLY what she and her colleagues drew big salaries for doing-just rubber stamping anything the unelected city manager and diabolical hotel owners and sports tourist college told them to do. Same exact shit where I live now, but on a much smaller scale.
Before fake progressive controlled opposition empty suit brand remodel Obama ushered in the whole fake identity politics sensitivity studies woke bullshit, people mobilized against wars. They all knew wars were based on lies-even the boomers who are the biggest Ukraine flagwavers nowadays still remembered John Lennon, “Fortunate Son” and “Born On The Fourth Of July”. Now anti war movies do not get made. The war profiteering autocrat billionaires own all the media and weaponized it for propaganda purposes. They coup whoever they want to and tell you to your face they want to depopulate the so called third world. Mostly they just hoodwink everybody with narrative control and puppet celebrities. How else you think they could get so many dumbfuck know nothings to recite their evil bullshit new world order eating bugs and worshipping Hillary, Gates and Fauchi scripts?
“Let me guess. They will conclude that Russia did it.” (-Margaret Kimberly)
“Democrats are actually weaponizing upcoming midterms as a referendum between continuing the U.S./EU/NATO proxy war in Ukraine (democrats) & those who are questioning and/or opposing the war ( some forces in republican party). This why I say democrats are primary threats to peace.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“NATO is an instrument of imperialism. By applying to NATO, Zelensky is proving that he was nothing but a puppet willing to risk nuclear winter over a proxy war that is harming Ukraine and Europe more than it’s helping.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Do not start WWIII & risk nuclear war by supporting #Ukraine‘s application to join #NATO. Slam on the breaks before the world breaks apart. Call for a ceasefire & a negotiated peace now.” (-Marcy Winograd)
“House passes stopgap funding bill, including another $12b for Ukraine but stripping funding for health emergencies. Warfare not healthcare?!?! #peaceinukraine” (-Medea Benajmin)
“Cuba, struck hard by Hurricane Ian, fights to recover. But @POTUS
continues with the illegal US blockade, the sanctions & the addition of Cuba to the US state sponsor of terrorism list. Those of you who live in the United States CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES and say #ByeByeBlocade.” (-Vijay Prashad)
“Its a disgraceful thing. Biden seems more right wing than Trump on some issues. How can a blockade of Cuba be progressive?” (-Phillip David Dexter)
“Dear The Daily Show, sorry Trevor Noah is leaving. I’m ready to take over. Just know you’ll have to be fine with me: – Calling Israel an apartheid state – Pointing out the US has killed 6 million people since 2001 – Pointing out the US is the largest prison state in the world.” (-Lee Camp)
“Yes, Trevor Noah is no longer at the Daily Show but did you know that the U.S. has passed another $12 billion for Ukraine while Flint, Jackson, Chicago, and dozens of cities still don’t have clean drinking water?” (-Danny Haiphong)
I had to leave my family of origin at a young age and while I’d always return to my original hometown in Kentucky to see my old fashioned grandparents at Christmas, I could never have become one of those 4-H cattle showing, golf playing, Kentucky Wildcats basketball watching automobile salesman like all my cousins, that just was not my bag, at all-my mother married a dude and moved to a really horrible town in Ohio where I was targeted and harassed all my life by boojie baseball cap wearing shorthaired suburbans, so I had to relocate-I had many good adventures. One of my dad’s friends, Uncle Eric put me up in an old apartment on 11th Street and 2nd Ave. in Lower Manhattan and started teaching me about jazz and Lenny Bruce and shit. I met some chicks named Lisa and Minkie and lived with them for awhile on Rivington Street-they were teaching me about Edie Sedgwick, Jean Genet, David Bowie, and William Burroughs and introducing me to people like Nick Zedd and Ena Kostabi and John Spacely. I had a badass pad back in the midwest when I was 18 that felt like a home and family with my bandmates and their girlfriends and rowdy all night drinking buddy band of brothers for awhile. Then, like I said, it was glorious for a couple years in Cambridge, Ma, me and my main man were still trying to find a drummer for a permanent band, but we got distracted by various hard partying girlfriends and it never panned out. Now that guy is on the road again and that’s a hard life if you ask me, being a ramblin’ man who never settles down, his home is the highway, but I’m glad he’s out there, keeping the gypsy road alive. You know what Willie Nelson says: “the life I love is making music with my friends.”
I used to be, now I’m not what you see, Lord, I try…
Shitlibs cheered when Twitter and other fascistic deep state affiliated techlords started censoring offensive speechifier Trump, but now, they have also all come for every anti war, pro worker voice on the left. Every real civil rights organization, human rights group, research study-scientific method-facts based scientist, every free speech whistle blower advocate supporting Assange or Daniel Hale, they are all getting silenced, too. I know you’re mostly and mainly mad that Trump said grab their pussy when he was bragging to Billy Bush years ago. Biden is on camera in countless videos grabbing people inappropriately, many underaged. If you hashtag “believe women”, you gotta believe Tara Reade and alla Bill Clinton’s accusers, too. Trump always sucks up to kkkops because he recognizes they are the ones who stand between oligarchs such as himself and Cheneys and Bloomberg and Pelosi and the pitchforks of the working class. Biden and the squad superfund the same racist kkkops they do their meaningless tweeting about. What I’m trying to tell you, again and again, is there is not that much difference between the political parties anymore. Mostly just marketing hoaxes and superficial skin deep stunt-casting. I aint mad at Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) for telling the truth about inhumane, ballsout apartheid thuggery. History will show that mass murder and kisnapping and poisoning second class citizen’s water and sanctions and torture and burning down houses and shooting kids and stealing land arent okey-dokey, cute or cuddly, jes cause the “specials” are the ones doing it. That’s how the establishment turned the former left into shitlibs-by convincing them at the university that they are the special ones, the anointed, the cuddly folks who deserrve more special privileges, but it’s just some Sneetch ass bullshit. Stars upon ours. Starbellied sneetches. When trends change, the specials will be lasering the tattoo off to stay on trend, ya know? My wife reminds me how I am a sentimental fool for certain people from my past who operate in my own tiny personal life, as sheepdogs, like Bernie and the squad. They always talk me into going back around the herd, the popular kid clique, the oppressor gentrification pigs, and I always get burned, everytime I do. I love some folks who love their popularity so they kinda always make me think it’s gonna be okay this time, we’re just all gonna have some friendly mimosas, but then they put me around the sadists and the bullies, the pay to play posers and showbiz sharks and it goes bad again. Stay away from joiners and belongers, asskissers and wannabe insiders. The in crowd are always gonna love their special parking places and cushy jobs and backstage passes and music festival vacations more than they will ever love some errant dropout black sheep,rebel diehards, no matter how far they go back together. Even if it’s the motherfucker they modeled themselves after, who taught ’em half of what they play act they know, they love their privileges more. I’m persona non gratis with lotsa motherfuckers… except when they wanna have some sexy hardknocks cred, or peddle some vicarious streetwise, been around survivor image. Mostly they all love to pose like streetgangs in combat boots and skull tattoos, but in real life, they’re all about safespaces, cowering, never offending the powerful, and sticking to official narratives. Not punk at all. They believe in nothing and brag about it, they stand for nothing but their own special privilege. They don’t give a fuck about the little people, the outsiders, the lesser thans, and never will. Dead Kennedys who’d be cancelled nowadays by these sniveling shitlibs said it perfectly: “Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death”. Their own convenience, play acting like they did something extra fancy or high brow or hard working to earn all their piles of property, prestige, and privilege. AS IF you and me couldn’t do all that and more outta bed with a hangover standing on our head all day long, while chewing gum and telling jokes.
Am I well aware that summa my former street kid ex friends have assimilated and joined the system and swan around with the fat fratboys who wear the gold jewelry and cologne and throw the rich bassplayer’s money around on cocaine and studio time? Yeah, I know. That’s the worst part about social media-all your sold-out ex amigos are right there with the dickheads and the grunge era douchebags.
“Zelensky is a puppet of the NATO. Ukraine is its pawn. NATO has declared that it won’t stop its suicidal proxy war until Russia is in ruin and the world at the brink of nuclear war. The age of Western imperial decline is also the age of madness.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“The US oil and gas industry intentionally releases fossil methane into the atmosphere through their normal operations at a rate of approximately 1 Nordstream-sabotage every two and a half weeks.” (-Ketan Joshi)
Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, and Alice Walker React to the Assange Extradition Sign Off: “It is a sad day for western democracy.” http://ow.ly/hBbF50JAenU
This record changed my standard of what a song could and maybe should be. People say my lyrics are “too long”, ya know, but they said the same shit to Patti Smith and Rowland S. Howard, Nick Cave, and Jim Carroll. Jim Carroll showed me that pop songs did not have to be stupidly repetitious and banal, Jim Carroll was a divebar, hobo jungle, Stanton Street oil drum campfire, true story tellin’ man just like me. Jim Carroll showed me how to do it. Jim Carroll set me free. I met an artist named Corazon at Rounder/Ryko who played this record when I visited her once. She was really somethin’, sang for a band called Sugar Bitch. I have felt a real love for her.
It’s too late There’s no one left that I even wanna imitate You see, you just don’t know I’m here to give you my heart, and you want some fashion show
But it ain’t no contribution To rely on the institution To validate your chosen art
And to sanction your boredom and let you play out your part
Things got weird for people like me in the nineties-ya know all those preppie fuckers we left the midwest to get away from had infiltrated the underground music scene with their parent’s money for drugs and high school bully popularity clique bullshit, all of ’em imitating fucking Kurt Cobain and Mark Lanegan, but poorly. Musicians in my age group, a lot of ’em quit music, hopped on trends, or just no longer understood or remembered the kind of subversive poetry that had the power to really make people want to come alive and live more fully.
Mine and the late great Tony Coiro’s (RIP) mutual associate, Brother and Comrade Michael Volgare, who I may have met at a Gunfire Dance show, used to hangout with Jim Carroll, they’d go have breakfast together and talk about old movies. That’s pretty sweet. I never met Jim Carroll in real life but his music set my imagination alight, I could always identify strongly with everything he was singing about. I also wrote her name in vain.
Way, way back like 21 years ago or something, when I first met my longtime companion, I would get her to read my song lyrics aloud to me so I could hear how they flowed and I would read Jim Carroll and Leonard Cohen lyrics to her, now we are older and busier and everything is a tough hustle, we don’t get as much time together for shit like poetry and paintings.
Like I said, I used to live on the Lower east Side, pre gentrification, hadda lotta wild adventures, the stories I could tell, it is crazy, being me…. Jim Carroll “City Drops Into The Night” – YouTu
STOP BEING FOOLED BY GENDER-DEMOCRATS WHO OFFER YOU NOTHING BUT A TOKEN PANTS SUIT AND ENDLESS WARS. RICH FASCIST WARPIGS STILL SUCK, NO MATTER HOW THEY SELF IDENTIFY.
CODEPINK – Women for PeaceCODEPINK is a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism, support peace and human rights initiatives, and redirect our tax dollars into healthcare, education, green jobs and other life-affirming programs.www.codepink.org
“52.3% of Puerto Ricans live in poverty. Blackouts were constant after the US privatized the electrical grid. Today, 2 weeks after a hurricane, more than 250,000 people still have no electricity. This is the daily violence of US colonialism. The only real solution is independence.” (-Ben Norton)
“Parts of the so called ‘Left’ hate comedian podcasters more than the crooks they say they are fighting against but keep voting for in the Democratic Party.” (-Black In The Empire)
EIGHTIES
The way the boomers carried The Beatles and the Kennedys in their hearts, I mean prior to 9/11-Obama-Fauchi, that’s how I feel about the eighties. I wanna go back to the Martha Quinn-1999-Rebel Yell-She’s So Unusual era, like the Cult sang on their masterpiece perfect album, “Love”, “All my beautiful friends have all gone away”…I tried to reach out to some of my my old pals and former cronies, but they’ve sadly all joined the adult world, gone over to the dark side of the force, become these blind slaves to the consensus, pleasing the inlaws, all about the Benjamins and keeping up with the Kardashians, reciting official narratives, fitting in at the sports bar. They are all afraid of being cancelled on Twitter. Many of my lifetime’s once favorite people are so invested in the system and in protecting their own personal privileges, they willingly goose step towards total fucking fascism, and therefore obviously have to avoid people like me-it’s pretty heartbreaking. I’m still all like, ROSE TATTOO! MC5, Ralph Nader, Malcolm X and Abbie Hoffman, motherfuckers. If the Good Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise, me and my most immediate family will be easin’ on down the road sometime soon to another nearby dead end desert ghost town. I got a lotta worries. Estranged loved ones, propagandized loved ones, people with health problems, and loved ones suffering from mental illness. It’s been a wild ride. I am tired. I wrote a lot of songs you should have heard by now, but they gave you like, Taylor Swift, instead. I still love all the Glitter People.
BANANARAMA
My kid’s show “Cobra Kai” rebooted “Cruel Summer” but slowed it way down and man did it ever take me back. So yeah, I read “SMASH HITS” religiously at 12 and 14 and loved it all. Duran, Prince, INXS, Blow Monkeys, Wham, Belouise Some, ABC, Scritti Politti, King-you name it-all that fey and twee kinda androgynous fake reggae and new wave shit. Paul Young? Love ‘im. Culture Club, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, English Beat, General Public, Eddie Grant, Madness, Strawberry Switchblade, Fun Boy Three, Tears For Fears, Anrde Cymone, Roxy Music-anything like that. Where I lived, there were only about three even semi pseudo cool girls. Two of ’em, actually named Lisa and Michelle, Madonna wannabes with all the silver bracelets and bangles and bleached hair and rosaries and black lace and a very impressive Siouxsie and the Banshees t shirt from the Big City, dismissed me curtly one time when I meekly approached them at the lunch table poring over their pinups of various new wave idols with funny haircuts like A-Ha, with a Valley Girl voiced, “Oh Gawd, you are like, SO QUEER!” So when I met a real cool chick through an absurd series of unlikely events who was also into post punk, new wave, art, and crazy fashion, I was naturally en thralled. We both liked U2 and the Police and Bowie and the Furs which was all edgy and semi taboo where we came from back then. I was so head over heels in love with her that other girls just became pale shadows of her. Even famous blondes like Aimee Mann or Bananarama. They all just reminded me of her-every Rick Springfield B-Side. Every Prince song. Ya know? All I did for years was listen to The Smiths and OMD and Jesus & Mary Chain and Duran and dream of her. We were both smart and arty and her dad had died and I had never known my own dad, both of us were misunderstood or rejected by our stupid peers, and both of us had friction with a series of step figures. I really loved her so much, I ended up kinda seeing her in everything for a real long time. Her mother had vetoed me instantly though, so it was all too brief. She did make me feel a lot more confident about myself though when I was a real shy weirdo kid. My next girlfriend after her was 25 and I was 15, beautiful, glamourous, queen of the after hours scene in the Lower East Side-a filmmaker. I came to know many marvelously exceptional and wonderful talented women who I learned everything I know from, but it all started with her. I can say she discovered me. She was totally my teenage Venus. I might have written a song about her. Or two.
In the last big bogus election cycle, all your Amazon Shopping shitlib friends, who bought into the window dressing of the fraudsquad told us they were going to push Biden to the left, but instead, they all went Full Pelosi, completely dropped the idea of universal healthcare or free education, and pushed the gentrified shitlibs to the police state, pro war, hardcore imperialist right. People who used to be antiwar and anti racist have become satiated with some high visibility token females, some slogans, and an “I Voted Today” sticker. College educated folks are so baffled by media that all they talk about now is Blaming Trump, enforcing gender pro nouns, and unconditionally worshipping the blue no matter who diversity squad tweeting about Trump, that shit is supposed to replace all radical action and organizing and any authentic leftish principle. U2 started off as like, anti war Martin Luther King Jr. emissaries and ended up as richman stooges for the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates and Bush/Cheney. Middleclassers care more about Obama fanclub membership than embodying or protecting any traditional liberal value. All they did is wring their hands for years blaming Trump for building a wall that Biden continues construction on. Blaming Trump for all the immigrant children human trafficked and seperated from their parents in for profit border gulags that Biden has quadrupled the population of. Blaming Trump for big giveaways to billionaires and perpetuating bogus Bush wars that Biden expands. Blaming Trump for groping young women when Biden does the same. Chastising Trump’s kids for being corrupt and inept flunkies but looking the other way when it comes to Hunter and his Azov battalion friends in the Ukraine. Shitlibs support every rightwing policy s’long as they trot out a token model to co sign it. makes it ALLL just apple pie okeydokey-drones, domestic spying, torture—they celebrate mass murder and endless war now like it’s some kinda transfriendly feminist victory, when Dems are in office doinbg all the same exact rightwing shit, they just make excuses, look the other way, don’t wanna know. Can we just talk about much they love the person in the pink dress from Hamilton and Kamala and the Obamas some more, how they got their fourth monkeypox booster for the babies in the Ukraine? Media is powerful. It’s all gone. There is nothing left of the left. Just me, Jimmy Dore and Caitlin and Nader screaming in the wind. Media is so powerful it has trained people who describe themselves as liberals and progressives to admire the Cheneys, W Bush, Big Pharma, billionaires, idle heiresses, lady torturers, Ukraine nazis, Cait Jenner, royals, the CIA, kkkops, etc. All conversations about income inequality, class, Flint water, and Citizen’s United Ruling corruption are deflected by these puppets by changing the topic to gender. Everytime. Phony Balonies-muppet show.
“The Democrats tried to subvert democracy and kick Green party candidate @MatthewPHoh
off the ballot in the North Carolina Senate race, but they failed. Thank you Matthew for taking on the corrupt duopoly and giving the people a real choice on election day.” (-Ryan Knight)
“At precisely the same time Leonard Peltier was complaining about the cruelty of Covid lockdowns in his prison in early 2022, large segments of the organized US left were calling for placing the entire US population under an inhumane Covid lockdown.” (-Max Blumenthal)
❖”The president of the United States has once again committed the US military to direct hot war with China in the event of an attack on Taiwan, a commitment that was once again walked back by his White House handlers.In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Biden was asked point-blank by CBS News’ Scott Pelley if US forces would defend Taiwan from an attack by the mainland.”Yes, if in fact there was an unprecedented attack,” Biden said.”After our interview a White House official told us US policy has not changed,” Pelly narrates after the comment. “Officially, the U.S. will not say whether American forces would defend Taiwan. But the commander-in-chief had a view of his own.””So unlike Ukraine, to be clear, sir, US Forces, US men and women would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion?” Pelley asked.”Yes,” Biden replied.This is by my count the fourth time the US president has made such remarks in transgression of his government’s standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” on this issue only to have them walked back by administration staff.This past May Biden said “yes” when asked by the press if the US would defend Taiwan militarily in the event of a Chinese invasion, adding, “That’s the commitment we made.” A White House official later stated that the president’s comments did not reflect a change in US policy.At a CNN forum in October of last year Biden responded in the affirmative when asked by an audience member if the US would intervene to defend Taiwan, and said “Yes, we have a commitment” when asked to clarify if he meant intervening against an attack from China. Again, the White House quickly clarified that “there is no change in our policy.”In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in August of last year Biden implied that the US would defend Taiwan as it would a NATO ally, saying that the US has “kept every commitment… same with Taiwan” when asked if China might be emboldened to attack the island by the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Again a senior administration official told the press, “Our policy with regard to Taiwan has not changed.”(It is worth noting at this time that Biden’s repeated assertion that the US has a “commitment” to defend Taiwan militarily is objectively false; that hasn’t been the case for over 40 years.)I’ve listed these statements in reverse chronological order, and you can see they get more vague the earlier they are. Now you’ve got the president clearly and explicitly saying that he will send US troops to kill and be killed in a direct hot war with China to defend Taiwan.The White House says official US policy hasn’t changed on Taiwan, but it doesn’t matter. Biden’s made clear this is his policy, and whether he would follow through or not, that’s the message that’s been conveyed to China. This isn’t dementia, it’s deliberate. https://t.co/Lg5ZpTqieF— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) September 19, 2022I don’t know why the US president keeps verbally committing his armed forces to a third world war against a nuclear-armed nation only to have it walked back over and over again by the administration he’s supposed to be in charge of. Is this just some neurological glitch in an aging brain which promoted war and militarism throughout its entire time in office? Is it some weird new tactic in “strategic ambiguity” to have different parts of the administration saying completely different things in totally unambiguous ways? Is Biden just a crazy warmonger? I don’t know. But what I do know is that all this chaos and confusion is happening at the worst possible time.As Brett Wilkins explains for Common Dreams, a new bill from the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee threatens to bring the world much closer to a horrific war due to the way it would upend existing US policy on China with its recognition of Taiwan as a major “non-NATO ally” as part of a commitment to send billions of dollars worth of weapons to the island. Fears of what this could unleash upon our world have caused even fairly reliable empire facilitators like Ed Markey to vote against the bill, which Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning says would “greatly shake the political foundation of China-US relations and cause extremely serious consequences to China-US relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”This is just one of the ways that tensions with China are being ramped up with astonishing speed over Taiwan, among them also the normalization of sending an increasingly high number of US officials to Taipei in steadily rising contempt for Washington’s One China policy which has kept the peace along this flashpoint for decades.This Taiwan situation is getting uglier and uglier, much faster than many expected, and the president of the the world’s mightiest war machine is either two stupid, too bloodthirsty, too careless or too demented to navigate this situation with the sensitivity it deserves. Things never should have been allowed to get this far, and the US empire is showing us every indication that it intends to take things much, much further.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)Propaganda Warps Our Very Humanity: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix – Caitlin Johnstone
❖”The president of the United States has once again committed the US military to direct hot war with China in the event of an attack on Taiwan, a commitment that was once again walked back by his White House handlers.In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Biden was asked point-blank by CBS News’ Scott Pelley if US forces would defend Taiwan from an attack by the mainland.”Yes, if in fact there was an unprecedented attack,” Biden said.”After our interview a White House official told us US policy has not changed,” Pelly narrates after the comment. “Officially, the U.S. will not say whether American forces would defend Taiwan. But the commander-in-chief had a view of his own.””So unlike Ukraine, to be clear, sir, US Forces, US men and women would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion?” Pelley asked.”Yes,” Biden replied.This is by my count the fourth time the US president has made such remarks in transgression of his government’s standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” on this issue only to have them walked back by administration staff.This past May Biden said “yes” when asked by the press if the US would defend Taiwan militarily in the event of a Chinese invasion, adding, “That’s the commitment we made.” A White House official later stated that the president’s comments did not reflect a change in US policy.At a CNN forum in October of last year Biden responded in the affirmative when asked by an audience member if the US would intervene to defend Taiwan, and said “Yes, we have a commitment” when asked to clarify if he meant intervening against an attack from China. Again, the White House quickly clarified that “there is no change in our policy.”In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in August of last year Biden implied that the US would defend Taiwan as it would a NATO ally, saying that the US has “kept every commitment… same with Taiwan” when asked if China might be emboldened to attack the island by the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Again a senior administration official told the press, “Our policy with regard to Taiwan has not changed.”(It is worth noting at this time that Biden’s repeated assertion that the US has a “commitment” to defend Taiwan militarily is objectively false; that hasn’t been the case for over 40 years.)I’ve listed these statements in reverse chronological order, and you can see they get more vague the earlier they are. Now you’ve got the president clearly and explicitly saying that he will send US troops to kill and be killed in a direct hot war with China to defend Taiwan.The White House says official US policy hasn’t changed on Taiwan, but it doesn’t matter. Biden’s made clear this is his policy, and whether he would follow through or not, that’s the message that’s been conveyed to China. This isn’t dementia, it’s deliberate. https://t.co/Lg5ZpTqieF— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) September 19, 2022I don’t know why the US president keeps verbally committing his armed forces to a third world war against a nuclear-armed nation only to have it walked back over and over again by the administration he’s supposed to be in charge of. Is this just some neurological glitch in an aging brain which promoted war and militarism throughout its entire time in office? Is it some weird new tactic in “strategic ambiguity” to have different parts of the administration saying completely different things in totally unambiguous ways? Is Biden just a crazy warmonger? I don’t know. But what I do know is that all this chaos and confusion is happening at the worst possible time.As Brett Wilkins explains for Common Dreams, a new bill from the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee threatens to bring the world much closer to a horrific war due to the way it would upend existing US policy on China with its recognition of Taiwan as a major “non-NATO ally” as part of a commitment to send billions of dollars worth of weapons to the island. Fears of what this could unleash upon our world have caused even fairly reliable empire facilitators like Ed Markey to vote against the bill, which Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning says would “greatly shake the political foundation of China-US relations and cause extremely serious consequences to China-US relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”This is just one of the ways that tensions with China are being ramped up with astonishing speed over Taiwan, among them also the normalization of sending an increasingly high number of US officials to Taipei in steadily rising contempt for Washington’s One China policy which has kept the peace along this flashpoint for decades.This Taiwan situation is getting uglier and uglier, much faster than many expected, and the president of the the world’s mightiest war machine is either two stupid, too bloodthirsty, too careless or too demented to navigate this situation with the sensitivity it deserves. Things never should have been allowed to get this far, and the US empire is showing us every indication that it intends to take things much, much further.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)Propaganda Warps Our Very Humanity: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix – Caitlin Johnstone Propaganda Warps Our Very Humanity: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix – Caitlin JohnstoneThere’s so much more to propaganda than just manufacturing consent for governments and wars. It trains us what to value. What to think a successful human being looks like.caitlinjohnstone.comProposal: Just Run All Western News Media Directly Out Of CIA Headquarters – Caitlin Johnstone
“The Soviet Union lost more than 27 million people fighting Nazism. China lost more than 20 million people fighting Japanese fascism. The world owes both an immeasurable debt.” (-Danny Haiphong)
I dunno if I was 13 or 14 when I first fell in love, I only know it was magical, musical, mythical, mystical, had a real life heightened reality, full blast fairytale quality, and my strange and embarrassing life had taken on this new and wide awake intensity, all the music we were listening to in those initial spark holy moments stayed with me all these years. Even if that first love was too good to be true, or I just fucked it up, or whatever happened, the songs remain in my heart. I never got over anything.
Be careful what you dream of It may come up and surprise you I can’t confess, my life’s a mess I’ve come to idolise you You liken it to walking on hot coals I’ll keep my boots on Wisen up and fly straight There’s a shape on the horizon
In a hollow horse I’ll steal my way Inside your guarded heart So selfishly the needs I harbour When we are apart My past strung out behind me Contradiction and disaster I’m in search of charity A union I could master
We’ll be as we are When all the fools Who doubt us fade away Fortune deep and wide Intimidated, restless in the wait
Things I chose to value I no longer have a use for I ridicule myself for all the things Those symbols stood for When vanity has played a part In every leader’s downfall Wait to storm the gates, what’s left Undone to hang around for
We’ll be as we are When all the fools Who doubt us fade away Fortune deep and wide Intimidated, restless in the wait
We’ll be as we are When all the fools Who doubt us fade away Fortune deep and wide Intimidated, restless in the wait
REV. PAUL S. CUNNINGHAM VIDEO!
“And the poor stay poor and the rich get rich and the cops get paid to look away as the 1% rules america. Spreading the Disease, everybody needs, but one one wants to see, the way society keeps spreading the disease.” (1988 – Queensryche ~ Spreading the Disease)
“If you talk about the problem of crime in the United States and fail to prioritize the financial and war crimes of the one percent, congratulations you are either a victim of or willing participant in copaganda.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Mexico just honored Julian with the keys to the city & invited his family. Russian artist Jorit painted a mural of Julian in Moscow. Meanwhile the UK approved Julian’s extradition to the US where he faces 175 yrs for the crime of journalism. Who’s the dangerous country here?” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“People ignore politics because they perceive (correctly) that neither of their country’s two mainstream political factions cares about them, and because they perceive (incorrectly) that those two mainstream political factions are the only possible framework for political action. A tremendous amount of perception management has gone in to getting people to buy into the absurd delusion that status quo politics can be used to change the status quo. People stop ignoring politics when they learn there’s a whole meaningful reality underneath that delusion.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“There isn’t Democracy in any country, worldwide. The US overthrew them all.” (-Estebon Martinez)
Host of the Sabby Sabs podcast,
@SabbySabs2, gives discusses how progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has fallen in line with corporate Democrats, and that this could hurt her in the future.
Obviously, as an outlaw singer writer lyricist performer, one of my biggest influences was Patti Smith. I remember being a dumb new wave kid and an older friend trying to turn me onto her but the Patti Smith Group were too garagey for my Duran Duran and synthpop sensibilities, back then, I was not ready for her, yet, but by the time she caught me, she REALLY got me, I was a deeply moved devotee. One of my last bands sadly fractured before we really got to accomplish what we were capable of, my dudes abandoned the promising project to hookup with other people who were much better funded than I was and it was real heartbreaking at the time, I felt really wounded about it. We had been invited to perform at some very prestigious events and two big name artists even suggested we go on tour with them as their opening act. I was planning on opening our NYC debut show with a cover version of “Privilege Set Me Free” which I always resonated with for very self evident reasons if you listen to the words. I’m not a fucking sceretary. I can still rock like fuck.
I sincerely like “When You Close Your Eyes” and “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me”. I like all kinds of stuff the record collector/hipster snob/record store types all cringe over for being too sappy or mainstream or overproduced. I like everything from Howard Jones, Dexy’s,Nik Kershaw and Thompson Twins to the Lep’s first three albums, Night Ranger and 38 Special, who one of my former drinking buddies hilariously used to call, “The Beatles Of The South”. My buddy Matt Thorne has a music snob group online called Desert island Dickheads with people like Elliot Easton in it and they memorably all went nuts for weeks on end because I casually referred to 38 Special as power pop, arguing that some of their songs were as catchy as Rick Springfield or the Shoes, or most any skinny tie band. I’m not being at all ironic when I say I dig the heartfelt sentiment of Night Ranger’s corny teen anthems. My old songwriter friend, Max O’Donnal from Ill-starred, Streetcar Named Disaster, and Bang Bang Satellite agrees: “Those first 3 Night Ranger records are beautiful. Camaraderie, big choruses, long hair, denim & the girl next door. They’re the 80’s teenage boy version of Norman Rockwell. “
Listening to this old Vai interview remembering when the older flyover country punksters had all these rules about what punks were allowed to like-supposedly, it was forbidden to enjoy the busier, flashy guitarists like Steve Vai, Steve Stevens or Eddie Van Halen. A stray hardcore kid we knew used to bleat on and on about how I shouldn’t be “allowed” to have the long hair and makeup-we were supposed to only ever have short hair like the military, cause The Clash did, and just limit our listening habits to Thunders and Jones or some shit. The Black Flag/Circle Jerks/Suicidal Tendencies gang-like factions. You remember them, right? They were just like their sports moms-fascists. I was not born to obey conformists with many pairs of imported boots. Idiots-all those tedious fucking Minor Threat/Fugazi/DC hardcore people. I’d go to Ft. Wayne on the weekends and the aggressive males there were even worse-emboldened by their numbers-half of them were in those junior ROTC military school programs, some were neo fucking nazis, and the rest were like drunken macho, English Punk wannabes with the foot tall mohawks, talking in Clockwork Orange dialog in fake British accents, wanting to slamdance, rough house, male bond like fratboys, or just straightup outright Sid Vicious clones. They all had all these rules, which were not for me. The girls were much cooler-goths, crusties, do your own thing anarchists. Me, too, sisters. I was always a rocker, even in the punk days, not apologizing. Of course the big muscled hometown Transmarao driving suburban shredders who liked Journey and Judas Priest all called me Devo or Boy George or Joey Ramone. I always had bruises from them punching me in the hallways or locker room. I was being held hostage at the Oneida Baptist Institute in darkest Appalachia when the US FEST happened in California and Strummer and Roth famously sniped back n forth at the press conference and Dave accused them of putting iced tea in their Jack Daniels bottles-I was always like part Clash, part Van Halen. Still am, really! Then, Guns N Roses hit the mainstream like five years later, and eventually, after all the hesher mullets got used to them wearing blue eyeshadow, a couple years after that, around the time of “Paradise City”, the bandwagon chasers were all insisting I should be able to do that high pitched AXL screech, that my vocal style was not metal enough. I can’t hit the Queensryche/Iron Maiden highs-no way. More like the Mary Chain or Bators vocal range. That’s always been the great comedy of my life-too punk for metal, too metal for punk. A patriarchal privileged cys born, culture appropriating colonizer male in the oh so gentrified, navel studies collegetowns, a gutter trash pinko commie queer fag Antifa race traitor in the Midwest. I remember being real excited by “RIP” magazine in the “Appetite For Destruction” era cause they covered all those new sleaze bands coming out of Hollywood and NYC like Junkyard and Rock City Angels, Circus Of Power, and The Throbs: it was all about breaking down those barriers between punk and metal. Like me and my friends and Hanoi Rocks and later Guns N Roses and the Four Horsemen and Danzig. My own crew were part “Thrasher” magazine skaterat headbangers, a skinhead, an older 70’s scuzzpunk, a jock, and a new romantic. I had to replace about half those guys with an AC/DC barnstorming hellraiser and some Go Betweens/Replacements fan, richass pop geeks from Walden fucking Pond, and a goth-folkie telemarketing warlock, when our shithot romeo guitar hero split the scene for med school. My life has been a weird and frequently sad as fuck misadventure. I can’t believe we never even got to make a fucking record. It just kills me. I mean, I try listening to summa my ex associates’ cds and they are generally hard to sit all the way through, there’s just very little content there-just feels like rich people throwing their money around- so I guess I’m glad I don’t have boxes full of mediocre unsold cd’s someone paid for so I can be pretend famous, but man we had SONGS! Catchy fucking memorable songs, so it’s an injustice that all these people who don’t even LIKE me or my main songwriting amigo, have been able to record way way more versions of OUR SONGS in the studio than we have. That’s crazy, but it’s all just because of money-they got it and we don’t. It’s so fuckedup. So I’ve always known my friendly reminder wakeup call, prayer for peace, S.O.S. message in a bottle rants and columns are infinitely more powerful when accompanied by a heavy backbeat and the Bang A Gong riff, but the rest of the kids got swept up by the warpig juggernaut or ratrace V.I.P. room beauty contest Botox bullshit, so here we are.
If I coulda told those eighties kids that in the future rocknroll of any real rebellious kind would be removed from the airwaves, replaced with corny, say nothing, athletic post-grunge or soft porn pop-rap, and that they would all be cool with every fucking rightwing Reagan policy s’long as the fraud squad have empty lip service to gay pride and black lives mattering, that they’d have self proclaimed educated, liberal people cheering for wars and baying for more kkkops and laws against protests on the capital, PLUS the government would be spying on all their electronic communications and wiretapping everybody’s phonecalls and removing all the pay phones so if you were ever in trouble, you had to have a cellphone, and that they would roll out some phony pinup celebrities like Obama and AOC that would make everybody feel all warm and fuzzy and okeydokey with endless wars, drone mass murdering, kidnapped journalists, warehouses full of separated families near the border, and torture camps, they never would have believed me. That the only “movement” allowed by the mimosa slurping gatekeeping middleclassers was the pink triangle-rainbow flag-save the whales, virtue signaling bumper sticker bullshit, that changes nothing. Man, I always wanted Roth to reunite with the “And Smile” band and write more music! “Eat ‘Em & Smile” was Damn Good rocknroll, “Skyscraper” had some good parts, too. “I bet if you asked them our heroes would say “Hey, we’re already gone.”
(We want modern thrills) Yeah, we want modern thrills (We want rock and roll that kills) Tell me, who we gonna get high over if we can’t get high together (We want modern thrills) (We want rock and roll that kills) Tell me, who gonna die over if we can’t die together
PEZ DISPENSERS AND MAD MAGAZINES DEPARTMENT
This makes me think of my long lost brothers in arms. The Records – “Starry Eyes” – video Dailymotion What happened to those guys, it’s like invasion of the body snatchers, mass hypnosis, pod people, fluoride or some shit, Straight up “Twilight Zone” cable zombified, they’ve all lost their minds. Imitation Songs!
“When I was a kid all I wanted to be Was the meanest dude on the meanest machine Now I’m going to wrong way on a one-way street I never fit this society” (-MM)
“I think that the horrific crimes committed by U.S. settler-colonialsim is responsible for the denialism & split in consciousness that requires them to dehumanize their adversaries while pretending the U.S. walks with the Gods. We see this now with the Russians & Chinese.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Azov don’t like having to pretend they aren’t Nazis and many of them won’t, but some realize they have to if they want to guarantee continuing to get our Gov’t to keep stealing Americans money to fund this US proxy war.” (-Black In The Empire)
“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)
“Telesur reporter, Alejandro Kirk, was hit with a fragment of a projectile in the center of Donetsk after Ukraine attacked a civilian-filled area. He is now hospitalized.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
I was reading the Debbie Harry autobiography and thinking to myself I would not want to be involved with the artist/illustrator, H.R. Giger, personally, though I’m a lifelong Blondie fan and apparently, Chris Stein is an occultist. Having said that, you know it was batshit crazy bonkers when the Establishment brought the hammer down on Jello Biafra for including a poster with their record that was supposedly a metaphor for consumer culture called “Penis Landscape”. While Jello almost singlehandedly took on the Capitalist Hierarchy, his bandmates decided he was too activist oriented or exerted too much control over his “Alternative Tentacles” record label or was too full of himself or whatever. Same shit always happened to me. They replaced him with a former child actor who continued trading on the brandname singing songs Jello wrote. In the 80’s, even kids who did not specifically self identify as hardcores, every punk, all of us, had Dead Kennedys albums and thought what they were saying was righteous as fuck. It was the PMRC/Top Gun/Reagan era. That was before the government think tanks infiltrated the College Left with their p.c. woke horseshit, before ignorant asshole, evil poser, boneheads crippled Jello, absurdly accusing him of selling out at the Gilman Street Collective Clubhouse. It’s a really sad mystery to me how so many of my former friends and colleagues and once seemingly radical progressives have been so media bamboozled and browbeaten by fear since 9/11, that they’ve all become these conservative, hut-two goosestepping, television believers. Russiagate, Muslim hating, official narrative spewing, Obama Thanking, pro war, police state apologist, billionaire worshippers, making excuses for AOC and Biden and the corrupt DNC rigging primaries and doing all that rightwing shit. It’s sad as fuck, and there’s not really much of an underground punk press in Murkkka anymore. Everybody’s been trained by college to buy into empty slogans and identity tokenism and superficial gesturing while obediently preserving the evil corporatist status quo. Phil fucking Donahue and John Denver were more radical than the faux wokes we got now. The righteous liberal position was, dig this, suckers: fucking ANTI CENSORSHIP, PRO FREE SPEECH. You sacrificed every single anti-war and pro free speech, leftist value for meaningless gender celebrity worship and a rainbow flag, and all outta sheer TDS. So what? Trump’s a bad man. So are all your “Classy” shitlib centerfolds. You don’t okeydoke laws against protest and mass surveillance and censorship cause you like some fucking personality. I lost all faith in you fuckers. Blueblood crunchy granolas like Michael Stipe and Natalie Merchant seem like antifa black block street fightin molotov rebels compared to all my former friends. It’s so sad how everybody fell for that fucking bullshit false flag Dick Cheney propaganda. It’s gotten worse and worse, ever since. I know motherfuckin ex punks who believe that Bill Gates is their loving philanthropic, super scientific savior for social justice. It’s a crazy time to be alive. Where are the Dead Kennedys when you need ’em? Infiltrated or assassinated, killed dead by the government Cointelpro disruption programs. One by one by one. From Lenny Bruce to Phil Ochs, From Fred Hampton to Paul Wellstone. From John Lennon to Michael Hastings. Fuckin’ sad. Ya even gotta wonder about Angela Davis now. A few years ago, Peter Crowley sent me a link to Jello talking about going on one of those special trips to Israel and kinda promoting or excusing or justifying Netanyahu shit. That was a bit sad. Saw Rollins do some big Boo-yah Hoorah pro war standup special, too. What happens to motherfuckers? Ya think they get threatened? Like some men in black show up and say they gotta spew the script or else? What happened to Bernie Sanders? Ya know? Bill Hicks dead. Stiv Bators dead. Joe Strummer dead. John Trudell dead. Seth Rich murdered. Assange in captivity. Dave Chappelle, cancelled for not wanting to be in movies while wearing a dress. Not transfriendly woke enough. That’s like the Only Cause allowed by shitlibs. Pro Nouns and mandatory men in dresses. All else gets you deplatformed, demonetized, you can’t say the things Dead Kennedys or Tupac Shakur used to say anymore. Here’s more Foo Fighters and Miley Cyrus, instead. WTF? People I grew up with don’t even organize protests against these bullshit forever wars.
“Don’t be fooled by the illusion of democracy in the U.S. A country where 3 billionaires are hoarding more wealth than half of the population is NOT democratic. The U.S. is a capitalist oligarchy where the rich get richer by exploiting workers & depriving people of basic rights.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Before NAFO, there was retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s “Defeat Disinfo,” which used AI to identify critics of Covid restrictions and boost attacks on them through a network of 3.4 million influencers, even paying them to advance chosen counter-narratives” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Were you “traumatized” by US “failures” in Afghanistan & Iraq? Luckily, retired US diplomat Daniel Fried of the Atlantic Council has a path to healing: the Ukraine proxy war. For “traumatized” warmongers like Fried, Ukraine “is a situation where an actual success is possible.” (-Aaron Mate’)
“Black Alliance For Peace will not fight for the rich. We understand our interests as an oppressed people & class & will not be moved by appeals to national chauvinism meant to galvanize working class to support wars of choice by the colonial/capitalist oligarchy. help us fight: Donate — The Black Alliance for Peace” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Biden’s proposed $813,000,000,000 military budget could: End homelessness in the US 40x. End world hunger 20x. End poverty in the US 2.5x. The U.S. is the real threat to humanity.” (-Danny Haiphong)
I AM THE PAST, THE PISSED, WHAT’S LEFT OF THE LEFT. FUCK YOUR BULLSHIT MAKEOVERS. NO THANKS. I’LL PROBABLY ALWAYS BE LIKE THIS. NOT SORRY.
I been in love with Chrissie since I was about nine. She influences all my songwriting. Just listen to the words of “Revolution” and then try to live like that. Thanks.
“Shitlibs once again melting down because Noam Chomsky is 100% right about Ukraine war propaganda and the hypocrisy of the west” (-Revolutionary Blackout Network)
“…the FBI once again interfered in a presidential election by bolstering the fabricated notion that Hunter Biden’s laptop was possibly ‘Russian disinformation,’ thereby justifying unprecedented censorship of reporting about it.” (-Aaron Mate’)https://mate.substack.com/p/in-fbi-vs-tr
CORPORATE DEEPSTATE FUCKERS FUCKIN WITH THE ALGORITHIMS
I guess I been Writing too much since getting locked outta Falsebook by Zuck and his Langley spook cronies, but I suppose I just feel a bit powerless about all the bad corruption and wars and shit I see goin’ down and the most I can probably do is gently shake summa my former associates from their big pharama numb hypnoslumbers, even that much is a long shot, but as Lennon sang, “we’re all doin’ what we can…” My old lady might help me put one of those Substack things together but for now, I just wanna say thanks to all our friends and fellow glamrarchists for giving me a mic and a soapbox, here. I feel like it’s just us damaged dropout malcontents and aging androgynes against the fatcat fascists and evil billionaires and all their baffled tv watching slaves.
Hey man I can’t believe I’m sayin’ this, but much like Ajamu Baraka, the social media monopolists have not only censored, Facebook jailed, and finally, locked me outta their platform for being Anti-war, but where I used to get hundreds of “likes” on every fuckin’ post, gradually, over the past couple years, it looks like I only get one or two likes or reposts. I get that the fix is in, but do me a solid, as the kids say, and if you agree with anything I got to say here, “like” and repost and subscribe just in case any of it might work, so my webzine homies can know you value my rebellious ravings on some level. Thank You Friends.
TROUBLE BOYS
I guess it was my sixteenth birthday, when my arty downtown high school girlfriend brought these two hardcore/goth mohawked punks over to meet me. Some asshole local stoner heavy metal guys had crashed my no alcohol attic party and stomped loudly down the step dad’s stairs kicking or knocking heirloom Christmas decorations down the steps and disappearing an old bass amp on their way out, so my stepdad threw me out again, and I was happy to be free of him. I started hanging out with the mohawked guys who had a crappy goth band. I say crappy, cause that’s how I felt about it back then, but now, I see how creative and innovative they were with such limited technology. They were doing like a Ministry/Skinny Puppy thing on a no budget, D.I.Y. level and we would convene nightly in the older guitarist’s nasty rodent infested, loudly clanging furnace basement studio apartment nightly and he’d play us old seventies imported punk vinyl and we’d drink beer. I was already on my second make believe bullshit garage band with the metalhead guitar players and we could never find drummers where we lived cause we were not into Bon Jovi or even Led Zeppelin. I got along with a pothead drummer who went to the Catholic school and we used to walk home together, but he was friends with some real sadistic heavy metal goons, and burnt somebody’s house down and got away with it, and was afraid to be seen with me by the metalheads, so I never really trusted the kid, and looking back, I’m glad I chose to stay away from him. The older mohawk was really fascinated with Charles Manson so all his artwork always had like a visual reference to say, Barker Ranch, or something. I had grown up loving the Doors so I had always felt a calling to the desert, and now I live in the ghost town South West, I get to see stuff like a skunk just chilling with my outdoor feral cat friends on the side of our disintegrating trailer this morning. Some pimp named Red was said to have burnt down the guitarist’s low income housing apartment, but I had become good friends with the mohawk kids. One went to the downtown high school with me and my arty girlfriend but was given a wider berth for dresscode violations than me because he was honor roll and his mom sold real estate. He grew up and got into real estate. I’m still violating the dress codes.
Being an empty pocketed pauper with many responsibilities, it is seldom that I am able to indulge in some selfish purchase like a book or hat or something, but I’m aware of those Alvin Gibbs books-I know they’re out there, and the “Trouble Boys” book about The Replacements, and yeah, of course, I am kindof coveting those tomes. I often say that as a crazy kid, it was Dramarama and The Replacements who gave false hope to me and my gang of underage beer drinking record store clerks and alcoholic janitors that if we composed a diverse oeuvre of songs we might also be discovered and recorded and able to make a living performing shows, making record albums, and selling black skull t shirts from the back of our scuzzy black van-that was the popular mythology, anyway, pre Nirvana. There was a whole network of basement show and bandhouse venues, college radio stations, and medium sized magazines about underground music like CMJ and Alternative Press and Flipside and Maximum Rocknroll. Soul Asylum and the Goo Goo Dolls were two other examples of Replacements inspired garage rockers who broke into the mainstream. I loved the whole Replacements story because it was so easy for us to identify with all those characters-they were so much like my lot. I had an older guitar player who was living like a crusty punk, not bathing very often, kinda being a little antisicial and self destructive, who drank alot, but I knew he had real potential and artistic ability that bled out when he played guitar. I remember the first time hearing he had learned the Brian James solo from “I Never Believed” rather than just letting our other kid, the flash “Young Wayne Kramer” learn the part.
When half my band fled the Midwest and got convenience store jobs on the East coast, we met a kid named Jake who was a writer. In the words of the Great And Terrible Heavy Metal Impresario, Sleazegrinder, “he’s an even better writer than US!” Jake never officially joined the band but my lead guitar hero taught him how to play bass and he joined a more popular local band, but contributed many lengthy screeds to my subversive fanzines back in the day, before joining the nine to five world in later years. He shared my love of The Clash, The Replacements, and Hunter S. Thompson, we’d stay up all night long talking about resistance subcultures and him and his gutter punk girlfriend Theis would sing background vocals for me and my dueling guitarists in their big Park Drive bachelor pad. Summa the songs we wrote back then have been covered by other people. Even after those guys were on their way into proper adulthood, me and the crazy rhythm guitar player were still stubbornly trying to get discovered with our heartfelt garage punk Songs About Drinking! I kept trying to encourage the lost lads back into our broken dream, but they were already gone for good. The Replacements pissed all the Adult World people off at “Saturday Night Live” and on some Tom Petty tour. They drank. So many of their songs spoke so deeply to my generation, ya know even the squares who followed the prescribed path to cubicles and cable and purchasing Glade Air Fresheners and Dyson vacuum cleaners from Target on Sunday loved shit like “Unsatisfied” and “Answering Machine”. I’ve seen Joan Jett bring everybody at the county fair together-from the pink haired LGBT kids to the old bikers singing, “Androgynous”, which everybody now thinks she wrote. Of course I relate to Bob Stinson, many of my closest friends were tortured clowns and soulful guitarslingers. I was not as wild about the stuff they did without Bob Stinson, though all the tunes Paul wrote about band breakups and shit like say, “When It Began” and “Happy Town” and “Rocknroll Ghost” all got tattooed on my heart n soul.
I could always identify with The Replacements, until Paul started phoning in stuff like a professional pandering power balladeer. I liked all his early insecure romantic shit better than his overconfident actress wooing stardom shit. Me and a guy named Brett Milano, I think he was some bigfish Boston Rock critic, were both actually pogo jumping for joy in the front row, when we saw Westerberg with Dave Minehan from the Neighborhoods covering “Daydream Believer” at a tightly packed sweaty show in Central Square. By the time all those Professional Replacements Imitators came along-you know, like half the bands in “Big Takeover” magazine and EVERY band in “No Depression”, I was becoming increasingly cynical about the value of showbiz and celebrity and even the songwriting itself cause it was all becoming so rat race-y. People I grew up with just wanted to become “popular” and ride that fucking awful, loathsome, fuckedup alternative hoax grunge train no matter where it went-they’d join generic bands with dudes who had nothing to say. Whoever had access to pay to play “popularity”, post Nirvana, all the bands became so contrived and formulaic and insincere and eventually, every band was consolidated into just the fucking Foo Fighters, all that was left of rocknroll on the airwaves was Foo Fighters-the ultimate triumph of goober mediocrity. An emo kid band came out and called themselves Plain White T Shirts. They did a really overtly precious tribute to Westerberg and company, not only were all the middle class college people in the ya’allternative public radio world imitating Westerberg like those Wilco and Uncle Tupelo dudes, but now all these horrible fucking suburbanite emo kids were, too. I made friends with a crazy alcoholic bartender we’ll call A2-he’s dead now, but he used to wear this leather cowboy hat I gave him that made him look like a real pirate, and he had a dart team called the Whiskey Dicks, was something of a pool shark-he was the biggest Replacements fan I ever met, he’d always give me quarters for the jukebox and want me to play “Here Comes A Regular” at the little old man, dirty, dark divebar where we were both artists in residence for a couple of years, in our mid to late twenties. Like 25-27. I sure have missed that guy and most of our common friends who have also long since passed. I say my youth ended in ’95 when my high school friend overdosed like two weeks before he was set to graduate from a prestigious college way out in Seattle, but the next two years after that, I spent it with about seven or eight hard drinking, hard living, extremely soulful, kind, misunderstood, and extremely talented people at a disreputable hoodlum bar in the Midwest, all of us were kindof haunted and traumatized, embittered and broken hearted but making each other laugh through the tears and even dance in the streets. One by one, they all disappeared from this world but I still write songs about all of them that nobody ever hears. My wife told me the one I wrote a couple weeks ago was not as good as the stuff I used to write about ’em. I guess I never got over it. Any of it. And yeah I used to be better than I am now. Don’t you know who I think I used to be?
WHAT KINDOF EVIL CORPORATE OVERLORDS WOULD INTENTIONALLY ASSASSINATE THE REBEL SPIRIT OF REAL ROCKNROLL
Sorry Slaves, dude in the tall hat and the dress and rhinestone slippers who never holds any of his big cult child abusers accountable and lives in a city of gold is not more important than any truth teller with soul. One thing I always loved about Sinead is how she always insisted we can all sing undermining the whole Simon Cowell proper pitch Olympics. I kinda objected when she eviscerated Aerosmith for goin ‘down in the elevator but free passed Eazy E and Ice Cube, but now I am old, I see where she was coming from. Sinead got me into Public Enemy actually. Kristofferson was one of my favorite lyricists so when he came out onstage to defend her when Dylan failed to, made me like him even more. In the years since they killed Tupac, ya know all we’ve had are these dumb model robots like “Marky” Mark Wahlberg and Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber and Harry Styles and Miley Cyrus who they pummel into superfame with their bullshit mockingbird media first, and then pay Rolling Stone and Spin wankers to artistically legitimize later. I think they all suck so bad. Man I miss real artists with soul power like Tupac and Sinead an awful lot. I said it before, Fuck Dr. Phil and all assholes like him.
Man, I miss my old teacher-mentor-filmmaker-girlfriend, Lisa, sometimes. Don’t even know if she is alive or dead, she took me in off the street and protected me and I’m still sorry about the shit I did wrong under her watch. The Lower East Side was still a magical world back then.
HIPSTERS SUCK!
We had such a good staff at Tower Records-the mgt. were even decent. I don’t think I could befriend loss prevention people nowadays, but back then, Sam, Mike, Dave and Tim were all goodfella close pals of mine. Old dude Jim M. was a manager, Thom was the indie/import guy. Michael Dow, Noah from New Orleans, Chris who did his big college paper on the NY Dolls. Danielle who used to do my reg shift so I could sneak out the side door to Charlie’s Cheeseburgers. Mark O’Connor, Barrie and Dermot from Ireland. A chick named Erica who bleached my hair Warhol white in my wannabe Jeffrey Lee Pierce phase and sang the fuck outta Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” with a townie band uptown.
A real cool teacher from Missouri got me into Dramarama who were the best band besides The Replacements in the era we grew up in. My bands were way more glam than Replacements or Dramarama, like we were equally as in to Hanoi Rocks and Generation X as we were these song oriented bands, we wanted to put on a big blinding backlit Rock Show as well as write so many sad slow songs about drinking in small towns, but yeah it was hard to find an audience because we were too sincere and sentimental for the Guns N Roses mobs and too silvery trousered and pink winklepickered for the college peeps. The lady who booked the Middle East at the time, I don’t think she ever even listened to out tape because we had long black hair she wrote us off as headbangers. I met John Easdale at the Coconut Teaszer when his side project The Bentback Tulips were playing. He was so, so cool. I loved all his lyrics and the highest compliment I ever got from somebody besides Bebe Buell or Phoebe Legere was the underground music journalist who compared one of my shortlived dead end crash and burn bands to Dramarama. When Clem Burke was in the band they probably became the best band in the world and I am glad they are still around.
SCUM LIVES ON
When Billionaires And The Government Work Together To Control InformationFacebook restricted visibility of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 election after receiving counsel from the FBI, according to Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.“So we took a different path than Twitter,” Zuckerberg said during a Thursday appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. “Basically the background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”Zuckerberg said a decision was made to restrict that information on Facebook’s multibillion-user platform. He said that unlike Twitter, which banned the sharing of the article entirely, Facebook opted for the somewhat subtler option of censorship by algorithm.”The distribution on Facebook was decreased,” he said, adding when pressed by Rogan that the decreased visibility of the article happened to a “meaningful” extent.As we’ve discussed previously, censorship by algorithm is becoming the preferred censorship method on large Silicon Valley platforms because it can be done to far more people with far less objection than outright de-platforming and bans.BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for 7 days based on a general request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation. pic.twitter.com/llTA7IqGa1— Minds (@minds) August 25, 2022In addition to being censored across social media platforms, the Hunter Biden laptop story was first ignored and dismissed by the mainstream news media, then spun as a Russian disinfo operation. Those media outlets eventually came around to admitting that the leaked emails were probably authentic, and Hunter Biden tacitly authenticated them himself when he acknowledged that the information “could” have come from his laptop. Nothing that came from that laptop was anywhere near as scandalous as the unified front presented by the news media and Silicon Valley in reducing the political impact of an October surprise before a presidential election.And now we know that the reason the world’s largest social media platform censored that particular story was because they were cautioned by the FBI against allowing such information to circulate. How many of those other institutions suppressed that news story because they were told to by the FBI or other government agencies? How often are US government agencies involving themselves in the act of censorship? What other information is being suppressed in this or similar ways? What other information will be suppressed in the future?Because of the veils of government and corporate secrecy which obscure our view of the behaviors of power, we don’t get to have answers to these questions. All we get to have is what oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg choose to tell us, in whatever way and to whatever extent they choose to tell us about them.But even what we’ve been told is pretty ugly. A government agency and a social media platform of unprecedented influence teaming up together to silence impactful political speech is censorship by any sane definition. Mainstream liberals can come up with all kinds of arguments for why the continuallyexpanding justifications for online censorship are fine and normal and not really censorship, but are they able to maintain those justifications when government agencies are actively involved? Is it really better when political speech is being censored by a collaboration of government operatives and billionaires than censored directly by the government alone?ThreadTwitter is hiring a TON of FBI agents. Searching employment websites, it is clear Twitter has been extensively recruiting from the FBI, employing a dozen former feds.My new @mintpressnews investigation explores why and what this means for us.https://t.co/15hZwFz8X8— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) June 21, 2022Alan MacLeod has been putting out a number of reports with Mintpress News documenting the way many veterans from the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have been recruited to work for tech companies like Google/YouTube, Facebook/Meta, and Twitter. The intimacy with which these government and corporate entities are working together is growing closer and closer, and they’re making less and less effort to conceal it.In a power structure without clear boundaries separating corporations from the government, corporate censorship is state censorship. The mightiest power structure on earth is growing more and more brazen and shameless about this reality.You know you are living in an oligarchy when Mark Zuckerberg has more political influence over your country than any elected official. Democracy is an illusion. Those who live under the US empire are a propagandized and politically impotent population who only think they are free because they’ve been given the illusion of freedom, and less and less effort is being made to sustain that illusion.We are ruled by unelected sociopaths who have no wisdom, no compassion, and no intention of ever relinquishing their rule. This will continue unless and until enough of us wake up to what’s going on to stop them.
WEEDS
“People often ask me where I stand politically. It’s not that I disagree with Bush’s economic policy or his foreign policy, it’s that I believe he was a child of Satan sent here to destroy the planet Earth. Little to the left.” ― Bill Hicks
“They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you’re high, you can do everything you normally do just as well — you just realize that it’s not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference.” ― Bill Hicks
People I’ve known in real life have actually told me they now love Lyn fucking Cheney just because she goes on tv and says she dislikes all purpose bad sexist boogeyman Donald J. Trump, like that is some kinda feminist forward leaning position. Still blows my mind how many rich white zipcodes have legalized reefer boutiques just operating out in the open, while other poorer peoples are still in fucking jail or on slippery slope probation or parole for non violent so called drug offenses. I never really liked reefer, personally, but obviously, believe no one ever should have gotten shot by cops in bed, or beaten to death, or mass incarcerated. for smoking a medicinal herb. I’ve been outside trying to cutdown my frontyard desert weeds, post monsoons, before the fanatical gentrification zealot fascist code enforcers show up again in their shiny black, new, tank like vehicles to fine us or whatever. I got blisters on both hands and it feels like I been workin’ on the railroad all the livelong day. I do my work with a very primitive garden tool my ole lady bought at the farmer supply store-we had an actual working and more realistic weed whacker from Wal Mart but it fell apart first time I used it. I know you’re REALLY smart having gone to college. You heard of planned obsolescence. So yeah, my hands hurt, my clothes are wet, I’m ill tempered alot of the time. Arthritis, depression, anxiety, PTSD,bitter about the band stuff, about being banned, but no relief is forthcoming. Burroughs said he had to write his way out of the hole-maybe that’s what I’m trying to do, too, against my better judgement. Man, I miss Bill Hicks, Paul K., Paul Mooney, Tattoo Mark, and Glen Ford. (RIP)
“The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud, and it’s fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, “Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, “Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.” And we … kill those people. “Shut him up! I’ve got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real.” It’s just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.” ― Bill Hicks
MARTIN TRUTHER AND PAUL WELLSTONE AND AARON SCWARTZ AND MICHAEL HASTINGS AND SETH RICH (RIP)
Mainstream media really is a fear factory, aint it?! One of my former Facebook friends was a fearless seventy something lady activist from California who died last year, she was a good soul who’d gardened and demonstrated and organized, she endured much in her lifetime including having her kids taken away from her by a richer former spouse, which is something I know about, and I’ll miss that good lady who would always give me courage, spur me onward, advise me, “fuck fear”, that’s how the sick sociopaths at the top of the ivory towers control us serfs and peasants. With fear. Fear they’re not gonna sign your band, or let you work at the record store, or steal your original work, or not let you ever record your original works, or blacklist you from all begrudgingly even desirable jobs, or offer all your girlfriends high paying easy jobs, or use their rich parent’s money to monopolize the Scene or take away your kids, or dispatch oversized, brainless mooks with dumbfuck Lollapalooza tribal tattoos and cargo shorts to pound you into the sidewalk again, or whatever. I’m not sure if it was Burroughs or Thompson who said that paranoia is just knowing a little about what’s really goin’ on. Bravery is doing the next right thing, in spite of your fear. Imagine being Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who saw his cousin put out that magazine, the title of which is said to have dimed his father’s killer. How frightened would you be, if you’d seen your uncles and cousins and nieces and nephews exterminated by shady powers and secret societies? He knew what happened to Paul Wellstone. Bernie Sanders promised to fight for The People, but apparently received the Dick Cheney memo and got in line and endorsed rightwing corporate police state Gropey Joe. Another Facebook friend, Martin Truther, talked about all this stuff before dying when the cops showed up and assassinated him in his home for failing to pay back taxes. I personally got no space in my life for people who cheerlead for the Cheneys or Pompeo or Clinton or Kissinger or Gates or Zuckerberg or Bezos or Musk or Bloomberg or Obamas or Bush family. I can’t even get past the Benie Sanders betrayals. But yeah, the secret police probably threatened him or his loved ones, and Lockheed Martin is the biggest employer in Vermont. I never believed that it was just another oopsy daisy, whoopsie coincidence when JFK Jr. died in a small plane crash so Hillary got to become senator from NY instead of JFK Jr. There are documentaries about it. Look for ’em. Same way Jackie O sought refuge and safehaven with billionaire super yacht owner from Murkkkan deep state, post hit, so did Princess Di, post jockey’s son Harry, post divorce, ya know?
Your shitlib friends all say the one and only thing that ever threatened Murkkan “democracy” is Trump lovers convening in the rotunda of the Capital insisting that elections were rigged, when Clinton and Wasserman Schutz had already admitted in court(!!!!) the DNC private services corporation fixed the primaries. The Dems argument was they have a right to fix the primaries, because they are a private corporation. Similar argument shitlibs have been taught to repeat ad nauseum is supposedly, how it’s not censorship, if big tech in bed with the soldout government, buries big stories for big pharma, big oil, the deep state, the DNC, or other power grabbing shock doctrine disaster capitalist billionaires. Everytime someone has a big audience and is critical of the USA, they have an accident-from Hugo Chavez to Gaddafi. Fred Hampton and the Kennedys. Bill Hicks to Seath Rich, they always mysteriously die young. Always an oopsy daisy coincidence, say the shitlibs. A random burglary. Pancreatic cancer. Small plane crash, suicide with two bullets to the back of the head. All these scientists, investigative reporters, almost all the people who made films or who wrote books about 9/11—just youtube that shit, Ferguson and Baltimore uprising activists, vault #7 and drone whistle blowers, Dr. David Kelly said that Iraq had no WMD’s, found dead. Shitlibs think Epstein killed himself and the fact that monarch mind controlled Hinkley, a Bush cousin, is free, is just another whacky, zaney, oopsy daisy coincidence. Um-hummm.
“There are so many things going on re 9/11 that just don’t make sense”.
— Senator Paul Wellstone
“I asked him how his week had been. He said, ‘it’s been tough. Vice President Cheney called me in and told me to get on their bandwagon or there would be serious ramifications in Minnesota. ‘And stop sticking your nose into 9/11; there are some rumors going around, but we are going to get to the bottom of this.’ When Paul made this statement, there were about 10 military veterans standing around us, and he spoke to them about 9/11…’There are so many things going on about 9/11 that just don’t make sense…’ Wellstone knew 9/11 was staged. Wellstone was after 9/11.”
–Pat O’Reilly, Wellstone’s close friend.
Although warned by Dick Cheney to “tow the line”, Senator Paul Wellstone questioned the official version of 9/11. For that he paid with his life. What follows are interviews with eyewitnesses, first responders and friends on his fatal “air crash”…
“The Joint Operations Command (JSOC): It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on.”
“Here is my final point…About drugs, about alcohol, about pornography…What business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, or take into my body as long as I do not harm another human being on this planet? And for those who are having a little moral dilemma in your head about how to answer that question, I’ll answer it for you. NONE of your fucking business. Take that to the bank, cash it, and go fucking on a vacation out of my life.” ― Bill Hicks
“Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here’s American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!” ― Bill Hicks\
Even though top US officials admit that US troops are in Syria for “leverage” (a fancier way of Trump’s admission that US is there to steal oil), US outlets never report that. (-Aaron Mate’)
“Some 40% of Black DC public school students 12-17 will be refused education under this policy, which aims to coerce them into taking an injection that does not prevent viral transmission or infection, and which requires constant boosting. Welcome to actual vaccine apartheid”. (-Max Blumenthal Gray Zone)
DC’s NAACP chapter complains, “Mandatory vaccinations may negatively impact attendance, and attendance impacts school funding, resources and students’ academic success.”
“Billionaire Jared Kushner got PPP loans that were forgiven in full—meanwhile small business owners like Jamie, a Philly bar owner, will be paying off his PPP loan of $32,700 for the next 15 years.” (-Staus Coup News)
THE ULTRAS
By the time I made it out to L.A., glam was kinda dead, except for like the Last Call dregs who lived with strippers and played cattle call concerts at the Coconut Teaszer on like Thursday nights. Those Motley Crue babies were all way more into living out some kinda Tommy Lee party lifestyle than they were into songwriting, which was sorta my thing. My old girlfriend Steffani tried to introduce me to some famous locals and gave me phone numbers for people like Kristy Krash Majors who I had not that much in common with but I thank her for endeavoring to help my search for the right group of players. Another cat she hooked me up with was Alistarr from The Ultras who was dead cool and funny and generous and sweet to me. I was surprised by how open and accessible he was because having herd his Bruce Duff produced EP, I had already sortof put him on a pedestal. I felt like he was far and away the best lyricist in the whole glam scene. He had accomplished what I had set out to do, which was to form a larger than life spacedout seventies glam rock band with the showmanship and panache of old Ziggy Stardust and Alice Cooper but also writing vivid and lyrical SONGS! He was one of the only people I took seriously that I met in my hard times year and a half or whatever starving on the Sunset Strip. I was living on this horrible fortified wine they only sell in black neighborhoods called Cisco-the ingredients are classified as a trade secret. That shit makes people crazy. Alistarr was different from all the Aqua Net blackhairs who lived with my ex girlfriend because he was smart and cool and kind.
Most of the metal years people were just kindof fucking dumb. Alice was hip to stuff like, the Only Ones. The rest of ’em never got past Poison, Skid Row and the Crue. I liked all that shit when I was like fourteen and even seventeen, but by the time I made it out to California, I was 22 and kinda past “I Want Action” and “Same Old Situation”.
“Biden just authorized a ~$200 B bandaid for the gaping wound of student debt. But every year the president authorizes ~ $ 1 trillion for the bloated military that impoverishes us at home & endangers humanity the world over. The duopoly has plenty of money, just not for us.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Just one of the ways the US security state manipulates domestic politics behind the veil of democracy. Another example: the high election season Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot manufactured by the FBI.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Nothing to see here, just a billionaire with a monopoly on information was censoring accurate news stories at the behest of the FBI to favor a political party & outcome.” (-Jimmy Dore)
“Epstein was the mastermind of that Ponzi Scheme and, while Hoffenberg went to prison for that and related financial crimes, Epstein instead got involved with Clinton presidential fundraisers.” (-Whitney Webb)
“I don’t care what shitlibs say. Joe Biden is still a terrible president and a servant of oligarchs.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Still in Syria…. Getting rockets shot at us so Centcom can pull in a war budget, defense contractors can get paid & senior brass can have combat commands. And maybe we can bumble our way into a fight w/Iran/Russia/Turkey/Assad. What a scam.” (-Joe Kent for Wa-3)
“New documents show the US & EU plans to plunder Ukraine have been in the works for years. They plan to sell off public infrastructure, destroy worker rights, & secure massive giveaways to billionaires. Much of this has already begun.” (-Lee Camp)
“Ron DeSantis was the lone legal oversight for US Special Ops in Fallujah during the brutal troop surge, tasked with ensuring “fair & humane treatment of detainees and military compliance with law”—he previously had that same job at Guantanamo Bay during the Bush torture program.” (-The Empire Files)
Unless you count, say, Joe Strummer & The Mescaleroes or Hello Disaster, to me, the Last Band that mattered was the Manic Street Preachers. I had a girlfriend who was still in love with me back then who would go to the record store and buy me a stack of English tabloids and music papers, a fiddle of whiskey and a pack of cigarettes and bring it all home to me tied up with a purple ribbon. I read all the early hype from UK critics but was pretty skeptical, was not into the idea that the guy who wrote all the good lyrics could not play guitar, so that was already kinda weird, then the singer had that high Freddy Mercury vocal range but was shouting slogans like that first Clash album, spraypainted clothes, ehh. I was still trying to get my own band together in the Generation X/Hanoi Rocks vein, part glam and part punk, and I had been talking to and working with these guys from deep Massachusetts smalltown suburbia hoping they would become our fulltime rhythm section, but the bassists was a lyricist/songwriter and they were a package deal, so they ended up doing a very Manics influenced band with the shorthair and skinny ties and stuff called Bang Bang Satellite while me and my two faithful longhaired guitar cronies from the Midwest in the scarves and black leather pants continued to stockpile originals and have no reliable drummer for years on end. It was those Bang Bang Satellite guys who got me into the Manics. One of their wives published a cool fanzine called “Machine Gun Etiquette” and that gang collectively made me reassess the Manic Street Preachers. I had bought “New Art Riot” from Newbury Comics but dismissed it as Clash copycats. We had songs of our own I figured were every bit as good as “Suicide Alley'”. “Stay Beautiful” was what won me over, I played those four songs like a million times a day and yeah my old friend, the Famous Rock Critic, is telling the truth when he says I did not keep up with popular music or get into Crystal Pistol or Robin Black & The Intergalactic Rockstars From Mars or Whatever, or Brides Of Destruction or Velvet Revolver. The Last band that Really Mattered to me were the . They wrote about matters of the heart AND social commentary AND fought the empire and the forces of conformity AND wore makeup when they felt like it. They were the People’s Choice, the last real motherfuckers. I love ’em.
Cut your hair in front of businessmen Kill yourself and censor health
Destroy words and ignore their truth Wanna die and have never worked
I feel like falling, feel like falling I feel like falling, feel like falling I feel like falling, feel like falling
I can’t feel no need to care Narcotic of ambition poisoned my air
Wearing hate like they wear money Sucking down vodka, spitting out Perrier, huh
I feel like falling, feel like falling I feel like falling, feel like falling I feel like falling, feel like falling In hate
Oh, the road is beautiful You live stoned in obedience Your vanity kills people, paint your ego in blood Oh, the road is beautiful
The wall is a reason for you to believe Is there too many numbers for us to sleep? The wall is a reason for you to believe Because there are too many numbers, numbers, numbers
Oh, the road is beautiful You live stoned in obedience Your vanity kills people, paint your ego in blood Oh, the road is B.E.U.T.I.F.U.L.B.E.U.T.I.F.U.L Beautiful
(Manic Street Preachers)
GOOD NIGHT & GOOD LUCK, BROTHERS & SISTERS & FRIENDS OF THE REVOLUTION! STAY WILD! STAY FREE!
“The majority of people were always sitting in the stands. When I find people who are willing to go against the grain, who are willing to make tremendous sacrifices to change an unjust situation – that’s what blows my mind out.” (-Abbie Hoffman)
“Necessary reminder: Liz Cheney is not a hero.” (-Nina Turner)
“There is a higher law than the law of government. That’s the law of conscience.” (― Stokely Carmichael)
“Without Trump, liberal media personalities have no way to keep their rapidly dwindling flock sufficiently enraptured and excited — Biden, Kamala and Pete don’t quite do it — so their already miniscule audience is shrinking back to barely-extant pre-Trump levels.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“Rachel Maddow peddled the Russiagate conspiracy for YEARS to boost ratings, helping raise anti-Russia and pro-war sentiments in the general public. That’s not journalism. It’s grifting and warmongering.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Yes, but she told lies at the behest of the Establishment, those lies are NEVER punished, they’re rewarded, like she was with $30 million. It’s the TRUTH that gets you sent to prison, just ask Julian Assange.” (-Jimmy Dore)
“Stop censoring independent journalists for exposing the truth about the security state and its media lackeys” (-Max Blumenthal)
“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.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“As crazy as Bolton is he is not as silly as most liberals & some left forces to agree that whatever that thing was on Jan 6th the one thing it wasn’t was a coup. As he said, he knows what a coup is since the U.S. is the master at organizing them.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“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)”
Unless we all rally together and fight this “Official Narrative”, last word always belongs to the secret police or richest person in the room bullshit, your kids will not even have the right to peacefully gather in public spaces without permission from some sinister techgeek surveillance capitalist in a creepy secret island cult robe. (-General Labor)
“Google and Facebook are trying hard to degrade the internet from its early promise (an unprecedented tool of liberation) into one of the most repressive weapons ruling class power centers ever had. Beyond left/right, Jackson is, above all, an anti-establishment critic. Thus…” (Jackson Hinkle’s censored and deplatformed by Youtube)
“When did people of the U.S. sign-up for war with Russia, China & Iran? Answer: when they elected democrats who represent the military/industrial/complex & energy interests – the most aggressive elements of the capitalist ruling class.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“This proxy war has no exit strategy. There’s no plan to deliver Putin a swift defeat, there’s no diplomatic effort toward peace, there’s only a plan to keep pouring weapons into Ukraine (at immense profit to the military-industrial complex) to create a costly quagmire for Russia.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Joe Biden not only mispronounced slain journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh’s name but refused to complete the meeting request from her family. He then received a medal from Israel for his exemplary contributions, & now he’ll be meeting with the great democratic country of Saudi Arabia.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“The arrogance of U.S. & Western leaders blinds them from seeing how non-white world sees them today. The naked, white supremacist appeals by Zelensky to a “Europeaness,” Biden’s declaration of his commitment to Zionism, confirms essential commitment to white world supremacy. The military/industrial/complex hustle continues as this sector of capital plunders public resources to tune of 840 billion for “defense.” And because the public has no representation in Congress there was no real resistance to this thief. The Biden administration is building off of the Trump initiated “Abraham Accords”with Israel, continues Trump’s dismantling of Iran agreement & aggression against nations in Latin America, forced workers back to work in unsafe conditions – so what is the difference again?” (-Ajamu Baraka)
BIG NEON GLITTERS
“Livin’ in a shack in a one-horse town Trying to get to heaven ‘fore the sun goin’ down Lizard in a bottle, yeah”
I live in the deadend desert where there ain’t nothing to do and it’s 101 degrees everyday and that means it’s like 120 in my garage. This hermit dropout life ain’t for everybody. I will say there are moments where it feels like paradise is now, you know, maybe at sunrise or sunset with the psychedelic pink streaky skies. I miss indian food and news stand access to my favorite print magazine “Vive Le Rock” from the UK, wish I had more record store access to like all those Easy Action reissues and shit. It gets real boring but man, it is still pretty gratifying to have some wide open spaces removed from all the rat race hustle and bustle and no mercy Murkkkan backstab greed and competition war-culture. I think it’s fantastic Ian Astbury is writing about mercy, you don’t see many people in the rocknroll community promoting ideas like love, empathy, solidarity, peace, or mutual aid no more, most of ’em are just trying to “get somewhere”, usually on the backs of the poor. It’s hard to overstate the affect Ian and Billy Duffy had on me and all my friends. I remember all those metalheads wanting to kill me and my small contingent of Indiana goths when we ventured into Detroit in all our black lace and pancake makeup, rosaries, and dried roses braided into my hair when they opened for Metallica! Metallica fans in Detroit, man. Tough crowd!
Southern Death Cult, “LOVE”, that MTV concert at the Ritz were life changers for eighties goth kids like me. The Cult were everything! So ya know, even in our elderly goth years, a new CULT album “UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN” and already underway “WE OWN THE NIGHT” big comeback tour is always a call for celebration! My old amigo, disreputable all night hellion and renowned motorcycle cowboy, NF Bastido he went to see ’em live the other night and was right in the front row and said they were still absolutely dynamite. I guess those love troopin’ geezers have been taking their vitamins cause they still throw down like the good old days. These perpetually high temperatures in the Desert Southwest where it’s always 100 degrees in the shade kinda been sapping my own super powers. Kid wants to have another Nerf war and I’m trying to caffeinate and psych myself up for it. I just wanna take a nap when it’s this scorching outside. “Texas sun makes my back burn.”
GOLDEN RAT
Real guitar-fuelled rock ‘n’ roll for unreal times….There is a lot of buzz and excitement about the GOLDEN RAT, the Japanese based glam punk super group co starring the one and only WORLD FAMOUS MISTER RATBOY of Motorcycle boy, Pillbox, and Sour Jazz and HIROSI THE GOLDEN ARM. Their Pinups-esque cover album is coming out on Australia’s legendary VICIOUS KITTEN underground record label and also features real boss Blue Note style classic sleeve artwork design by Cowboy from Sour Jazz. I’ve heard some tracks from it and it is a real classic. Ratboy and Hiroshi turn in really heartfelt slowburn covers of Brian James‘ “Aint That A Shame”, The Heartbreakers “It’s Not Enough”, Only Ones “Whole Of The Law”, Patti Smith‘s “Dancing Barefoot”, “Some Girls” by the Rolling Stones“and MORE! I remember being a shabby rehearsal space down in the ABC’s way back when and Ratboy reimagining “Play With Fire” as a doomy Smack ballad. He’s always been really imaginative, good at reinventing rocknroll.
He’s obviously just about the best of the best, or certainly right up there with, you know-Jim Jones, Iggy Pop, Steven Leckie, Billy Idol, Tex Perkins, Tyler and Jagger and lovable old Alice. His band are all ace assassins, total professionals, a machine. I still miss Andy and Nasty, there was something magical about Hanoi Rocks, but Mike’s gang are real good. I don’t agree with all their politics but admire their energy and love for the stage. Mike never seems to age.
HAIRMETAL LINEUP CHANGES & WHOEVER OWNS THE NAME
As an underground outcast death rock weirdo I always had some static and friction with the hickass white trash Beavis N Butthead heavymetal guys, the stoners in the bleached denim and Fake Spicoli voices would drive past my house and threaten to burn it down or showup when I was alone at my record store job, in packs of 5 or 7 telling me how I better stay away from this girl or that girl. Me and summa my friends were into you know the old punk and new wave and goth and subversive glam stuff like Bauhaus, Gun Club, Sisters Of Mercy, Stiv Bators and Hanoi Rocks and Dogs D’Amour and Disciples Of Soul, who the stupid Bon Jovi/Ozzy/Metallica dudes had just never heard of. I remember them telling us that Guns N Roses were “F***” at the lunch table that last year I briefly attended high school before the admin illegally forced cosmetology to cut my hair and I never returned. A year later, of course, they were all getting bandannas and going to fuckin Guns N Roses concerts. When I was I dunno 17, or 18, my black leather clad old hellraiser guitarist NF BASTIDO brought a bombshell blonde home on the back of his motorcycle from the preppie downtown dance club where my former bassplayer was the hometown heart throb DJ. She wanted to meet me and we commenced a whirlwind romance until she sorta ditched me for some more famous dudes, but when I hear that old hairmetal band, SKID ROW, I remember our times together fondly, not sure what happened to her, hope she’s still alive. I hope she’s okay, I cared about alot of those misfit midwestern heavy metal kids, as people, even if we could never keep it together. There were some saddening rumors she had a kid and disappeared in Mexico years ago. Ya know an awful lot of us so called bad kids kinda bonded together because we had come from such repressive, abusive, superstitious, military or evangelical religious backgrounds. Same way the phony techlord wokeness religion is being used as a club to beat poorer or “less educated” people with, nowadays. Back then, you had the PMRC Washington Wives and all these specialist grifter behavior modifying anti-rock crusaders going on a fanatical with hunt against any kid in a black t shirt. Now, the NEW AGE techlord wokeness religion seems to actually promote the occult and sexualizing children. I’m personally the farthest thing there is from a square or a conservative, but I do not believe it is acceptable or appropriate for corporate media to promote the occult or sexualize children. The faux-woke ideology is just more divide and conquer identity politics trickery of the rich. Poor people, in Real Life, do not think it’s somehow extra bitchen when they are being droned or evicted by mutigendered democrat-voting women of color, or that their authoritarian fascist captor assassins identify as this or that. Or that or this. Here or there or up or down. I do not like fascism with a chick, I do not like fascism with a dick, I do not like fascism with a hick, I think that Net-Flix shit is sick, etc., etc. I do not like fascism. So anyways, when the Skids were the biggest thing since I dunno Poison or the Crue or whatever, I was just so NOT into them at all, that guy seemed like such an idiot asshole and it made me mad some McGhee Mgt. metal wankers were wearing a LORDS OF THE NEW CHURCH t shirt, like for punk rock street cred. Reminded me of the New Kids On The Block dude wearing Bauhaus. You’d think I’d side with the songwriters against the former pretty boy pinup star, especially since they keep trying to write like these Warrior Soul type rebel anthems, but call it nostalgia, or what you will, gradually, I just started having some mercy and compassion for perpetual nuisance and celebrity feud, tantrum and bottle throwing Sebastian. I mean, I done a lot of stupid foolish, belligerent, asinine, offensive stuff in my wild youth, too. Used to bum me out that so many people never let me forget any of that, or took a half a minute to find out what happened after that, they all got these revisionist whitewashed, photoshopped lives. So yeah call me crazy, I like Sebastian a little bit at this point, I can’t help it.
Back in the eighties, some stoner dickhead dude gave me a bunch of guff cause he liked summa my same girlfriends, dated some too and I think for like one brief season he bared a passing resemblance to Poor Dumb Bas and all the chicks were all over him like groupies in a Cinderella video.
I had some long lingering bad blood for like, my white trash burnout heavy metal wouldbe rivals who broke into my best friend’s house and stole his guitar cause they were mad some chick liked me. Now I see they all came from real bad, abusive smalltown evangelical trailer park cultures, also. One went on to become bassist in one of those semi famous Gwar like theatrical monster mask thrash bands in Arizona. I had TRIED to befriend him, way back in the day, but he was not ready for makeup wearing punk rockers who his black mini skirt and satin jacketed big hairsprayed haevy metal groupie blonde bombshell ultravixens crushes were in love with. They used to call me Boy George. I love Boy George though. In my elderly goth years, I got a heart full of forgiveness for almost everybody. Anyways. I liked the big, slick, formulaic Skid Row hits even though Sebastian was a bigmouth idiot always trying to impress Axl by being even more of a dumbfuck bullying, redneck wannabe, toughguy-saying stupid homophobic shit, throwing bottles, beating up fans or photographers, acting badly. So when he offended his High Holy Hairness, the great moneybags poster gawd, Bon Jovi, so the Skids songwriting duo, Snake n Rachel, who hired him to sing their songs and make them all bigshot mainstream stars, never forgave him for offending The Hair Emperor Who Seemed To Take That Guitar Mafia Shit A Bit Too Seriously Firing Almost Everybody, and it’s been sad to behold those guys so spitefully always rejecting all his heartfelt overtures to reunite the band for their army of sentimental fans. Those other guys got all the publishing money and boyhood connection to Bon Jovi Inc. and own the trademark so they’ve hired like 45 different coverband substitute dudes over the years and still get booked for festivals and shit by trading on the name. Sebastian still says and does stupid shit sometimes, but I’ve developed a strange compassion for him. He was THE YOUTH GONE WILD that sold all those records and magazines back in the day. Those are the facts. Some kids I lived with on the Sunset Strip at the end of the Metal Years were even photographed for the article about dead end rock dreams when Sebastian was on the cover of “Rolling Stone” in the silver pants. I lived out those dead end rock dreams. Three things I’ve come to understand about Sebastian-he had a big family of weirdo hippie creatives and an extra amount of enthusiastic yard dog energy, he really, really loves rocknroll, particularly KISS, corny cliche heavy “DUDE!” metal, and some awful progressive seventies bands, and it totally broke his heart to discover the whole shady, gotten even worse, corporate music industry was ran by mobsters, prissy primadonnas, connected creeps and drug smugglers only interested in hustling poor people, exploiting youth, and stealing all the publishing. That rock group show he did on tv 20 years ago kinda underscored how he looked up to dudes like the Nuge and Doc McGhee who just ain’t real nice fellas. It is quite sad when aging heavy metal honchos do those dumb commercials for predator lenders that target their fanbase for ripoffs. I’m always gonna advocate for the poor, I’m always gonna be working class. When the rich people have their highfalootin’ Eyes Wide Shut Fancy Galas, and “the help” all have to wear Covid masks, but not the rich elites, that is NOT Science. Nope, bullshit, nope, fuck you. Germs don’t know who is rich or who is poor. That is some elitist occult programming bullshit. Anyways….!
Overall,I don’t mind Sebastian anymore, the Metal Sludge website just seems to rake him over the coals so often, I ended up kinda feeling sorry for the guy. I don’t think he’s probably any less of a decent person than any of those other super famous mainstream hairspray dudes. Like Motley Crue members seem less likable than Sebastian, who’s just not that liberal or progressive. I don’t suspect he’s a big reader, ya know? He does like record shopping though. Our common friend, a Canadian punk legendary super hero, wanted to add him to our double secret underground music group on social media, and I never added him cause who wants to argue with big mouth spazwad fame-hag, Bas when he blurts out shit about how great Ronald Reagan Republikkkanism or Gene Simmons greed is good garbage is, or whatever, but when I see the Skid Row guys with their made for tv updated “Gangs All Here” group, even though their American idol replacement guy has a heart strings pulling backstory and a high pitched vocal range and the whole deal, I’m more inclined to stick with motormouth Sebastian, perpetual fuckup juvenile flaws and all. I’m not into Guns N Roses without Steve Adler and Izzy Stradlin, either. Sebastian was like, twenty when the super fame hit him, so ya know, I aint mad at him for saying or doing dumb shit when he was a kid. He aint no perfect saint, but the job description was wild and crazy rocknroller. He was good at that. Whatever the industry weasels and moneymakers got to say about the guy sounds like sour grapes to me, the bass is always jealous of the face. The copyright guys of this world whose rich parents trained ’em how to pay lawyers and own trademarks and do all the publishing paperwork always seem like failed frontmen to me, but the other side to that is an awful lot of frontmen end up being failed copyright owners who get ripped off and uncredited and our original works get stolen by unscrupulous business guys who don’t care if we are parents or struggling in deep poverty. They are just out for their selves, wanna be celebrities, have prestige, throw art they did not compose on to their property piles, probably impresses a few Kardashian like McDonna materialist woman, but not GOOD or honest women. Integrity matters to some people. There’s some guys from my long gone groups I would not reunite with to play music anymore because our values are completely oppositional, what they stand for and believe in and what I do are not the same anymore, at all, maybe never were, but I also did not sell ten zillion records to legions of pained teenagers with my old punk rock anthems or syrupy love ballads. Those guys soundtracked an awful lot of people’s anguished, stonewashed, detention halled adolescence and I like “I Remember You”, “18 & Life” and “Youth Gone Wild” in spite of all the reasons I should not. Come on back Sebastian Bach, all is forgiven. I Remember You.
BROTHERS & SISTERS & FRIENDS OF THE REVOLUTION
If you find yourself feeling more paranoid, upset, distressed, anxious, or worried than usual, just be cool, try to keep a cool head, it’s a natural response to all the fictitious total bullshit the powers that be keep pummeling us all with-the bad tv, the lies for war, the shite corporate occult-pop and creepy-groomer Dizney technoslut artificial hip-pop, all their bogus, disingenuous, proxy provocateurs, mercenaries, pants suited teleprompter reciters mesmerizing middle class boomers with soothing voices into believing cheap excuses for all the ripoffs, and constant fear programming that’s SUPPOSED to keep us divided, distrustful, in a state of paranoia, and depression, so we all think we need more “protection” from THE MAN. If you find yourself feeling extra suspicious, judgmental, on high alert, or fraying some, around the edges, it’s probably just THE PROGRAMMING. Family, friends, relatives, co workers, the social engineers wanna keep the people arguing about all the culture war bullshit and wedge issues, so we never pause to take note of how badly the ruling class are screwing us all over, lying their asses off, and manufacturing consent for more stupid wars and intentionally devaluing the Yankee Dollar to prepare for ushering in their C3P0 protocol droid Gates Reset bullshit. I got relatives still fretting about “anti-maskers” and “Russian Trolls”! TV is designed to keep everybody in a perpetual Fear state so we will believe the secret societies and intelligence agencies should take away more rights, you know for one of their advertising slogans, everybody’s always in a USA! USA! good guys coming to the rescue Marvel comics propaganda spell. The narrative is always the same: the external boogeyman du jour is an evil killer on the loose, whereas Western oil company shareholders plundering oil is just okeydokey and apple pie and when Murkkkans bomb the piss outta poor countries they invade, it’s always for “democracy”. Democracy? we don’t even have nothin’ like that here-just some remnants from another time, media spectacles and some monopolies that own everything-Blackrock and Vanguard. Showbiz has been weaponized by the global elite Gates Reset tech creeps. Even Waxl Rose is goin’ on about “PUTIN!” I don’t know, man, I think Murkkkans are too gullible and always tend to support Nato/Pentagon propaganda talking points blindly, uncritically. They watch tv, repeat official narratives and want to help shitlib superstar celebrity torture-heiress, Lyn Cheney (D) stop all the “disinformation spreading on the internet”!
“Divide and conquer that’s their game beneath the hair and clothes we’re really all the same, threaten our lives with nuclear war gonna crucify us just once more…” (Lords Of The New Church)
DISGUSTING PROPAGANDA IS ALL THAT REMAINS IN THIS HOLOGRAM POLICE STATE NWO-VERSE
HEAT EXHAUSTION, DODGING DESERT DOGS, WRASSLIN’ WITH THE BOREDOM OF TOO MANY 100 DEGREE DAYS, AND ALWAYS WANTING VODKA, UNDER PRESSURE
Wowwee, this was a happy surprise I got from my wonderfully talented and thoughtful and ever so kind and considerate compadre, Evad the charismatic and original vocalist of Hollywood’s whizbang underground firecracker bands, FACTORY SUPERSTARS and MOONCHASERS-an old cassette demo-tape from 95(?) I think it said. This band from L.A., I’m assuming, were sunny pop heroes in the tradition of, oh, you know-Jellyfish, Tsar, Material Issue, Imperial Drag, Dramarama. Just exquisitely well played sunny pop with a limited recording budget but you can tell they would have been real formidable with any kinda support or backing. The singer’s great, has a voice somewhere along the lines of say, the Gin Blossoms guy, or Dave Pirner, maybe. Everybody knows that JIMMY JAMES (Coma-Tones, Rock City Angels, Barrio Tiger) is one of my very favorite guitarists on the planet, and that’s the reason Evad sent me the tape-he knew I’d love hearing this rare relic from a pretty marvelous pop group Jimmy Played for in the 90’s. “Og, Girl” the guitar playing almost reminds me just a little of Steve Stevens and I really love the singer’s voice. FAB were right up my alley, super sunshiny, silvery melodic with just the right touch of sleazy garage snarl. Aint no guitarists nothin’ like that where I been living these past twenty five years, I’ll tll ya that much. Maybe they don’t even exist no more. Certainly, a highly endangered species. Jimmy is what Hunter S. Thompson would’ve called a snow leopard. Elusive. Special. I know Bob “Derwood” Andrews moved somewhere nears Joshua Tree but does not frequently care to revisit the Generation X days and you know that was my fave band ever, he also says he “does not jam”. So there you have it. This guy K Bombay from Hollywood is real, real good, but he’s always in multiple bigtime local name act bands. JIMMY, of course, you know and love from THE HANGMEN and JUNKYARD, two of this tragically disintegrating, steadily decaying country’s Last Good Rocknroll bands. Evad knows what I like, we are both into alot of the same kinda music, like Rod Stewart and Dramarama. He was correctamundo that I thoroughly love this band FAB a whole lot-it’s just real punchy summertime pop like the ideal sonic accompaniment to a refreshingly fizzy bangin’ ice cold blender drink, like maybe say mango, cherry and vodka slurpeys or something like that. “Summer Caprice” reminded me, ya know, of all those Poptopia kinda bands. “Miserable” is reminiscent of me, Redd Kross, American Heartbreak,Beat Angels, or Celebrity Skin. I love it and every little thing Jimmy James does is magic, magic, magic, magic, magic, magic. I looked around online for more info about that band but nothing really surfaced, too many Beatle tribute bands with that name, but I’d love to know where the other guys from that group are now. Talented lot. Good singer!
GOTHS AGAINST FASCISM! I dunno about you, but growing up, I was into like, new wave, ya know? New Order, all the Mute records stuff, The Normal, OMD, Human League, Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, Suicide, Berlin, all the synth duos. My friend and colleague Laur is making some really fantastic new music in that same spirit. Check ’em out~!
THE TECHNOFASCISTS & THEIR PIG-MEDIA DECEIVERS ARE ALREADY HERE!
I do not know that much about what happened to all the other aging culture war survivors, we were just scraping by, with bare minimum dishwasher and caregiver salaries, BEFORE Superstar 16 Magazine Coverboy Ubiquitous Media Celeb Doc Fauchi Warns Us About Next Wave Of Monkeypox closed things down and the local indies all went outta business and now, with Biden’s war on Russia and nutty nonstop Nato saber rattling against China and Iran for Israel, ya know, it’s gettin’ really shaky out here in new normal nomad country! They arrest about ten people a day in these ghost towns and that’s a big number when there’s only about 3,000 year round residents. Where were you when they Kyrsten Sinema/identity politricks faux-woke/greenwashed/pinkwashed world war, censorship, fascism, and jailing all the real journalists? Mainstream Media bleats on about Biden’s perpetual unconditional love affair with the gruesome Saudis in spite of their savage dismemberment of Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, but that’s no surprise to anybody who’s aware of how USA’s other “shared values” special friends Israel treats journalists, like the one they just assassinated: Shireen Abu Akleh, for the crime of reporting while being Palestinian-American. The Vault 7 whistleblower just got the book thrown at him and poor Julian Assange is still being tortured in Belmarsh. Michael Hastings embarrassed some generals and Democrat lady figureheads and next thing you know he was burned to death in a blazing ball of fire. (RIP) Of course, all your shitlibs look the other way and eagerly consume more crass ass propaganda about what a victory it is for “GIRL POWER” when Sinema kills the fight for fifteen while wearing a goofy backpack and Zinny glasses cosplay outfit, or Gina Haspel tortures people for feminism or drone operators are women, or self identify as women. Evil as evil, do the gender all ya want. Insanity! The shitlibs still ignore Tara Reade, too. FREE DANIEL HALE!
Imagine being so booj, you believe people like Lyn Cheney and Klaus Scwab and Bill Gates want to HELP you! If you are working class, you gotta count it as a big win when you stumble across something with any potential resell value at the second hand donations store, before it gets snatchedup by the boutique owning, high price tourist trap, gloating showoff, shit- hoarders. Kinda get mixed feelings when you find a t shirt or cd you deeply dig, but know you gotta fork it over for resell cause we are all scrounging to just barely even get by, in Biden’s Inflation. I know sucky shitlibs who are so baffled bi stubborn partisan blindness, they actually cheer when whistleblowers are locked for revealing the truth about what their corrupt government does behind their backs. “The ‘anti-disinfo’ industry has nothing to do with protecting a gullible public from info that might cause them to make bad or unhealthy choices — it’s about directing a narrative to control the population and promote a one-world govt.(-Children’s Health Defense)
The guy who supposedly leaked the Vault 7 files is being portrayed by the government as a really unsympathetic and nefarious character, but when one considers all the dirty tricks and slanderous smears they heaped on Julian Assange and the way they covered up and failed to prosecute the Epstein/Maxwell client list, leaving a trail of bodies, the occult temple on Little Saint John’s Island, the Lolita Express logs, the rush to steamroll Epstein’s property, all that, it’s hard to take anything the government says that seriously.
The Vault 7 release – a series of 24 documents which began to publish on March 7, 2017 – reveal that the CIA has a giant arsenal of tools to use against adversaries, including the ability to “spoof” its malware to appear as though it was created by a foreign intelligence agency, as well as the ability to take control of Samsung Smart TV’s and surveil a target using a “Fake Off” mode in which they appear to be powered down while eavesdropping.
The CIA’s toy chest also includes:
Tools code named “Marble” – which can misdirect forensic investigators from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to their agency by inserted code fragments in foreign languages. The tool was in use as recently as 2016. Per the WikiLeaks release:
“The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion, — but there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-cia-employee-convicted-of-massive-leak-11657745296 Vault 7 is how The Public learned how Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings (RIP) was most likely assassinated by remote control technology. Consumerist morons don’t wanna know the truth, though, they just wanna be told over and over, by confident sounding media pros, that everything is SWELL and WE ARE WINNING! YAAAAYYY! This morning’s headlines said that (slightly paraphrasing) “Caring philanthropic SCIENTIST, BILL GATES is going to invest more money in his own foundation to RESCUE US ALL, BECAUSE HE CARES SO MUCH ABOUT US! WHAT A GUY! That’s the kinda shit the haves on the hill like to hear. PRESIDENT BIDEN’S gonna show those Iranians who’s BOSS! WE’RE WINNING! FOR FREEDOM! GO TEAM ZELENSKY! AND KAMALA! DR. JILL! GAYLE KING! BEYONCE! WHOOO! YAAY! TEAM SPIRIT! YEARBOOK CLUB!!!BIDEN THREATENS TO BOMB IRAN FOR THE ISRAELIS”
“Yeah that’s right! That stupid hospital was just OWNED by an epic Girlboss! ” (-Alan MacLeod)
This Girl Boss Propaganda Has Just Become A Bit Much Now, hasn’t It? Imperialism Is Not A Real Feminist Value. If the Empire cared about Women’s Rights, Or Mothers, they’d stop bombing, plundering, sending in killers to rape and pillage, in what? Twelve countries and counting….and mass incarcerating people for Wall Street profits. Mass Murder is not wokeness. Stop falling for this bullshit. Who cares what gender anybody is esp. if they harm other people for cash and prizes, that makes them evil-him/her/they/them, anybody. Same rules apply across the board. No specials.
“The Uvalde mayor calling journalists “chickenshit” for releasing the footage instead of criticizing all the outrageous stuff cops are doing in that footage is a masterclass in how politicians enable the police. Like politicians across the spectrum demanding we “fund the police” after countless murders and the largest popular uprising in recent history. Politicians will fund police and support them unless we literally force them to stop because cops protect the rich and powerful, not us.” (-Joshua Potash)
Big difference between me and most of my former associates is I never bowed to the capitalist high school hierarchy chains of command, or gave my consent to technofascist billionaires to incrementally enslave the rest of us, and I do not pray to the super rich billionaires. You have no duty or obligation to obey corrupt, sadistic, tyrannical motherfuckers. As a human being of conscience, you have a duty to challenge the assertions of known liars and undermine their new world order agendas and fight to protect the poor, the small, the people of Flint and all the innocent victims of these powerful forces of evil. This is a crazy time in Murkkkan history, when we are watching in real time, as the whole shebang is being eroded by just five or six unfathomably rich and evil billionaires in the shadows, as the billionaires and their monopolies are swallowing up everything, all the property, all the politicians, both parties, the whole corporate media, they own the cops and alphabet gangs and intelligence agencies, including like, Facebook and Twitter, ICE and NSA, DHS and TSA, and any last lingering remnants of anything even remotely like democracy or freedom are being erased by some arrogant aspirant gawd techlords with way too much money and worldly power. They piss on you and tell you it’s raining and you must learn new politeness lingo for their feelings. RESPECT THEIR CELEBRITIES FOR SCIENCE! That Capital Hill Endless Hearing is really appallingly, outrageously, insultingly fuckedup and full on fucking stupid, I thought it was ridiculous by the second day I heard EVERY millionaire media employee on tv hysterically repeat the phrase, “INSURRECTION!” ten thousand times a day. I remembered that line from the movie “Natural Born Killers”: “Repetition Works, David.” That whole shit show always felt like a psychological operation to me and I’ll tell you why. It was all cops and politicians opening doors and giving tours to outta state cops and politicians and a small handful of gullible follower future patsies. They do some of the same shit when the left protests-the undercover kkkop entrapment tactics. I’ve been to lots of protests that were at least as raucous as that one, where more than one window got broken.
All that bullshit talk about “desecrating the sacred halls of democracy”, what kinda bullshit robot would ever believe the temple where the money changer lobbyists bribe the bipartisan police state politicians is holy or sacred in any way? I don’t care if false hope supermodel on the red carpet, mimosa swilling Pelosi obeyer, AOC says she is miffed, still upset that some rightwingers held space in Washington for a few hours or mussed up Pelosi’s desk. They are not untouchable royals or infallible Olympian goddesses in my book. They are supposed to listen to us-we, the people, and do what is in our interest, not just the will of big cash grabbing, blackmailing, devious foreign governments, big corporations, Bill Gates, or the Military Industrial Complex. I WANT TO SEE MORE PEOPLE ON THE STREETS, taking action, PROTESTING INJUSTICE, not less. More love thy neighbor direct action and lend a hand activism, or volunteerism, no I don’t mean like when greedhead capitalists in Oregon instruct you to volunteer or intern (work for free) for their booj operations, I’m saying the people have got to look out for each other, cause pig media is trying to manufacture consent for even lower slave wages, even as the big shot billionaires quadruple their prices for everything we need to live. We gotta stop worrying about protecting the images of known liars and these phony baloney woke hustlers who pretended like they wanted to help us but then got right in bed with mama Pelosi and her private jet crowd. Shift our focus to the neighborhood, something we can positively affect. Look in on people. Do our part-we can’t wait for fake shitlib saviors, or cowardly uniformed enforcers to save any of us. Do it yourself, means you n me. Those rich people not only don’t give a fuck about us, it’s worse than that. They actively mean us harm and their bought and paid for, gaslight abuser controlled media will tell us they are doing us a favor, some kinda generous act of philanthropy, while we all get evicted, or water poisoned, or mysteriously get sick, or get hurt by agents of the state, or die suddenly. When they come for you, you’ll most likely be watching their unreality tv.
SOME SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE….
I thought Occupy Wall Street was on to something, when we were coming together, becoming grassroots organized on a very small, immediate, spontaneous local level and taking direct action, even though the thug kkkops came and chemical sprayed everybody and the pig-media tried to bury the message. Even though the middle class got mines tried to divert or undermine our actions for their own greedy, selfish, vampire/gentrifier landlordly benefit. Even though false hope Obama helped Mossad Rahm Emmanual and Wall Street Eric Holder coordinate a national crackdown on Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and impose curfews and attempt to thwart the will of the people. I liked how needs were being addressed almost instantly in the encampments. Somebody needed socks, or water, or boots, the call would go out, and the people would supply the needs of their brethren. Righteous.
Ya’all suckup celebrity worshippers act like you don’t remember Obama letting Goldman Sachs handpick his cabinet, helping coverup the gratuitous human rights violations of Flint, or what BP allowed to happen in the Gulf, or how it was him who helped manufacture consent for overthrow of Libya, extrajudicial A.I. metadata based drone warfare, and all those Black Lives Matter uprising activists who were jailed or died mysteriously being under government surveillance. Now, the kkkop loving Republikkans are shocked that some of them are ALSO getting the bait n switch, entrapment, and agent provocateur, Cointelpro business. You gotta stand for PRINCIPLES, not just applaud unconditionally for celebrities or fake sports teams. Ya ever been wrong before? Does it hurt that bad to admit it? I mean I voted for Obama the first time, but he was speechifyin’ about CHANGE, not more drones and crony capitalism. We got hoodwinked by a slick taker in a shiny suit, is all. I knew when I saw Cheney upfront at the inauguration still runnin’ shit that we weren’t getting any real change, just an expansion of Cheney policies under the silvery tongued Obama Rebrand.
FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE DISSIDENT WHISTLEBLOWER HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATING TRUTH TELLER JOURNALISTS….BUT I WAS BUSY WATCHING FEELGOODIST P.R. ABOUT CHELLE AND MAYO PETE AND KAMALA AND DR. DR. DR. JILL ON NETFLIX WITH MY UKRAINE FLAG
The whole star spangled house of cards is built on the idea that we are allowed to protest-to peacefully assemble to redress our grievances and question official narratives and the hold the powerful to account. We’ve seen multiple administrations now violate our Constitution and Bill Of Rights by spying on us, making us piss in cups for minimum wage jobs, groping our loved ones at the airport, and outright inflicting permanent harm and abuse on citizen protestors at Standing Rock and Occupy Wall Street protests with chemical weapons, firehoses, non lethal ammunition, nightsticks, and now the full force of 24/7 propaganda being used to hammer some Maga protest that did not cause a fraction of the damage incurred by George Floyd uprisings that only resulted in politicians giving MORE MONEY TO SUPERFUND THE MILITARIZED JACBOOTED RACIST KKKOPS and KKKOPs killing more black people. Now pig-media, the Fraud Squad Fake Progressives & Halliburton/Blackwater Darling Lyn Cheney wanna make a big stink forever about some redhats throwing a tantrum on the steps of the Capital and use it as a justification to give MORE MONEY TO THE TECNOFASCIST POLICE STATE and create more laws against free speech. Who benefits? Lyn Cheney? That’s your silver knight coming to rescue you damsels in distress still offended by something Trump said to a legacy media Son Of A Bush? Lyn Cheney, daughter of deep state torture architect and false flag crony capitalist forever war profiteer DICK CHENEY? That’s your trust worthy female? You don’t think the Trump supporters had a legit beef with the notion that Gropey Joe, who nobody ever liked, just beat both Sanders and Trump, outta nowhere, just like that, without even campaigning or leaving his basement except to insult that worker in Michigan, and with promising the people exactly nothing, besides assuring his donor class Wall Street swells that “nothing will change”? But ya’all pink hats swore the ballot was easily flipped by RUSSIA!!! So how can you still believe these primary rigging DNC insiders who keep trying to sabotage and silence the whole left online and exclude the left from the fake debates and throw Green party candidates like Matthew Hoh off the ballot, why would you still imagine, the Bloomberg/Wasserman Schultz/Pelosi/Clinton factions are a friend to nurses or teachers or children or the elderly? The way that freedom works is if you want the right to march around your posh park with open containers and deli buffets protesting Trump telling Billy Bush that if you’re rich they’ll even let you grab their expletives deleted, or some frat boy fortunate son kangaroo court taking away YOUR RIGHTS, guess what, trigger warning, the scary lesser than bad and supposedly dangerous, “OTHERS” have the right to march around, and bellow into their bullhorns, about how wronged and cheated they feel, as well. Why would you ever put so much faith and blind trust in the hands of known liars and mass murderers? Who told you that cancel culture sets you free in your happy feelings aromatherapeutic gluten free safespace? Ommmm, my ass. P.S. The Gates-Meat is Soylent-Green.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI4AuWlO9iA Jimmy Dore is one of the many comedians being censored by the corporate fascist security state and cancelled by tech-bot billionaires with dystopian police state agendas, and ties to the war machinery. Max Blumenthal writes for the Gray Zone. Youtube is censoring both of them and many others, basically everyone on the Left. Anyone questioning corporate profit narratives, or wars based on lies. Lee Camp, Chris Hedges, Abby Martin. I said a few years ago, it would end up just being, Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson the Vanguard owned Division Puppets on billboard sized hypnoscreens and everyone from indie-media being slagged, silenced, and McCarthyist smeared as agents of “RUSSIA! and now, China! NYC is showing a stupid what to do in a nuke strike commercial, a modern adaptation of hide under your school desk. “Go inside, stay inside, stay tuned, and follow media”. People I once knew, who used to read history books, who should know better, have all fallen for every transparent media hustle of the past twenty, twenty five years.
“Because a bipartisan coalition of neocons and liberal interventionists successfully instigated a new Cold War by orchestrating a coup in Kiev, criminalized diplomacy with Moscow through the Russiagate hoax, and stoked a proxy war in Ukraine that could turn nuclear.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“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.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Never impose your language on people you wish to reach.”
“Let me say from the very beginning that we at Black Agenda Report do not think that Barack Obama is the Lesser Evil. He is the more Effective Evil.
He has been more effective in Evil-Doing than Bush in terms of protecting the citadels of corporate power, and advancing the imperial agenda. He has put both Wall Street and U.S. imperial power on new and more aggressive tracks – just as he hired himself out to do.
That was always Wall Street’s expectation of Obama, and his promise to them. That’s why they gave him far more money in 2008 than they gave John McCain. They were buying Obama futures on the electoral political market – and they made out like bandits.
They invested in Obama to protect them from harm, as a hedge against the risk of systemic disaster caused by their own predations. And, it was a good bet, a good deal. It paid out in the tens of trillions of dollars.
If you believe that what Wall Street does is Evil, then Obama’s service to Wall Street is Evil, and there is nothing lesser about it.
They had vetted Obama, thoroughly, before he even set foot in the U.S. Senate in 2004.
He protected their interests, there, helping shield corporations from class action suits, and voting against caps on credit card Interest. He was their guy back then – and some of us were saying so, back then.
He was the bankers’ guy in the Democratic presidential primary race. Among the last three standing in 2008, it was Obama who opposed any moratorium on home foreclosures. John Edwards supported a mandatory moratorium and Hillary Clinton said she wanted a voluntary halt to foreclosures. But Barack Obama opposed any moratorium. Let it run its course, said candidate Obama. And, true to his word, he has let the foreclosures run their catastrophic course.” (-Glen Ford)
“The “left” in the U.S is a running joke, nonexistent, regurgitating playbook NATO, state propaganda without even realizing it, lacking in an understanding of foreign policy & knowledge of the regime change playbook. This is why the left-right paradigm in the states is irrelevant.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“Biden voted against the 1991 Gulf War, then quickly said he was mistaken. He transformed into a top Iraq war hawk. During nearly 50 years in public office, Biden has seldom seen a U.S. war he didn’t support or help facilitate.” (-Jeremy Scahill)
WHICH WING OF THE TWOFACED FUCKING CORPORATE DYSTOPIAN WAR HAWK IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE LESSER EVIL AGAIN?
Like CLOCKWORK, pig-media headlines insist that We, The People, are JUST CLAMORING for NOTHING WILL CHANGE (BUT MORE INFLATION) AND ENDLESS WAR PREZ, GROPEY JOE to run for presidency again. You gotta be kidding me. What shameless lying assholes they are, but most of us at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid already knew that. In the USA!, USA!, nobody can speak out about anything, cause all those fake centrist shitlibs on like Huffpost and Salon controlled media, who get paid big salaries to lie, will attack them, so you know you never hear like say, any heavy metal dudes or punk rock celebrity types speaking out about JULIAN ASSANGE, except for ROGER WATERS! In the old times, rockstars like U2 and Jackson Browne and Lou Reed would go on Amnesty tours and shit, advocate for a free press, free speech, and freeing political prisonoers because jounralism is not a crime, of course, those were very different days. Back then, U2 had not yet sold their souls to become industry shills for bigtime money. Sinead was one of the last real fiery truthtellers. Look what they done to her, just terrible. Poor thing. Dr. Phil is not a helpful person, he is an Inside Edition/TMZ sensationalist exploiter.
“This country is a nation of thieves. It stole everything it has, beginning with black people. The U.S. cannot justify its existence as the policeman of the world any longer. I do not want to be a part of the American pie. The American pie means raping South Africa, beating Vietnam, beating South America, raping the Philippines, raping every country you’ve been in. I don’t want any of your blood money. I don’t want to be part of that system. We must question whether or not we want this country to continue being the wealthiest country in the world at the price of raping everybody else.”
“Our Gov’t, Corporate media and Big Tech have embarked on a crusade to make our citizens believe that they are the truth tellers and deciders of facts and any information that goes against what they tell us are propaganda, conspiracy theories or talking points from foreign agents.” (-Black In The Empire)
I worry about Sinead O’Connor, ya know, as someone who has always fought for social justice and equality, and struggled with family mental illness and never fitting in with the whole capitalist slavery bureaucrat mechanisms, I can’t even imagine what a horrid state she must be in, having lost one of her children. I struggle with not knowing where some of my kids are. I read her book and it was quite the gripping tale. I could feel her earnestness and torment, the whole way through it. When I unexpectedly came across a second hardback copy of her autobiography at a second hand donation store, I was mighty tempted to buy it just to have a spare copy on hand I might be able to gift a loved one with someday, but ever since Covid Clampdowns killed all the little shops, ya know the big box mega stores have been jacking all their prices up sky high, that low wage peasants like us can not afford to frivolous at all with what little money we make. We bought a weed whacker for $37 and after about fifteen minutes, the whole thing kinda blew apart in different directions, from hittin’ all them thick post monsoon desert weeds. Made cheap by Murkkkan corporations in China, what they call planned obsolescence. Hot day, almost 100, and my hands are still a little trembly from the yard work, that heat’ll take it out of ya. I feel sorry for anybody out there trying to hitchhike on the scorching hot highways today, bout three hours to the nearest Amtrak station, two to the Greyhound, probably. Our youngish doctor disappeared last year and now we’ve been seen just by these medical practitioners, our neighbor told us the guy had a stroke, in his forties, fine one day, now he is partially paralyzed. SUDDENLY. That’s a big word round these parts nowadays. Sudden paralysis, sudden deaths, ya know? Wonder what it is. Reading corporate media murmurs of a new plague mysteriously mutating, by the name of “The Ninja”. Now, that is not the least bit encouraging, the last two years just about wiped out my whole town, killedoff over fifty elderly folks, almost every mom n pop indie business, people got sick n died, and ever since shit opened back up, people still been droppin’ dead unexplained for “no reason”, just…”SUDDENLY”…middle agers just keelin’ over, droppin’ dead pretty frequently, mighty regular like-young man who worked in the local grocery store deli/meat department in his thirties, just up n died, family man, hard working black dude and everybody liked him, gosh, nobody wants to quarrel with any fanatics but “Died suddenly” has become the most frequent “cause of death”. Causation is not causality, I know them college people love to say that shit over and over, again, like it proves something, thought I’d say it, try it on for size. Yeah okay, feel SO SMART NOW~! Died suddenly describes the velocity someone died, not the cause of death-ya know? Every motherfucker just “dies suddenly”. For no reason. Don’t ask/don’t tell. One of my dearest pals. “Died Suddenly”. that was it, nothing more, they buried him behind a church in his hometown, sudden death, deal with it. “The New Normal”, they call it. Endless Censorship and War For Science & Diversity! Hut Two, motherfuckers, march or die. Read ’em and weep. Oh yeah nobody reads, we just supposed to stay inside with our hypnoscreens and await for orange alerts and follow orders and shit. “Own Nothing and Be Happy”. You, first, evil techlord occultist. These are undeniably some crazy times.
“The”West” created this issue & this fraud & now have no clue how to exit out of this debacle. Zelensky, like Biden are not up for the moment & are in full meltdown now that they can no longer hide the reality of mess that is Ukraine.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“FICTION: A third party can’t win. FACT: There’s currently 127 Green party candidates holding elected office in 19 states & since 1985 the @GreenPartyUS
has won 1347 races. So please take your duopoly talking points & throw them in the trash where both corporate parties belong!” (-Ryan Knight)
This guy is so distinctively unique and one in a million talented in my book, he don’t need no causes or slogans, cause all his works and songs and very existence are like gutsy political acts unto themselves. He makes very deep and soulful music for damaged people, outlaws, bandidos. One of the only rare and endangered, last standing, independent minded, authentic maverick, genuine article rocknroll outsiders still fighting for freedom in this shithole country. His song “Brothers To The Darkness” makes me think of my longtime mainman and rascally rollin’ buddy, the infamous El Bastido, in his hillbilly overalls and big black engineer boots, we shared a lotta adventures straight outta Paul’s lyric when we were in our twenties and thirties, and I sure do miss the good brother. Between his 100 mph recklessness and my bad taste in women back then, it is an unlikely wonder that me and him both still walk the earth in our fifties. Saw an old Skid Row video on Vevo that reminded me of a crazy blonde bombshell the Ole Dirty Bastard brought home on the back of his motorcycle one time, who I had some real cool times with. Me n the heavily scarred and road rashed rhythm guitarist NF Bastard wrote all my best songs together-some of ’em really stood the test of time. Imagine Stiv Bators singing for the Four Horsemen, that’ll give you some idea, but we could never keep a drummer and both suck at making money so we kinda never got too far past the basement. Now we can’t even afford a basement! “Brothers To The Darkness” takes me back to my own misspent youth! Rev. Paul’s stuff really resonates with me, it’s from a similar psychic terrain, but he’s miles better singer than I ever was, really an epic talent, AND a great guitarist AND a helluva good songwriter! Little bit of Steve Earle in there, some Kris Kristofferson, too.
I listen to Paul sing from his heart and always feel like deeply consoled by it, like he makes me feel less alone, the dude gets me, or at least, his songs do! Me n Paul don’t have to share all the exact same religious or political beliefs to show respect for one another or support each other’s rights and common struggles. Hard for you college people to imagine, huh?! He’s different from me, a carpenter kinda knowhow dude, a home improver, craftsman, a gothic homesteader, a hardworking great artist, a loving father, and one of the most talented people I know. Also he’s a survivor of unspeakable trauma and hardships most safespace civilians would not wanna imagine having to endure but he carries himself with consummate grace and generosity and seeks to protect the meek. Here’s to all the good hearted badass motherfuckers. SALUDE!
DAN DENTON
This hard living, hard working, podcasting community activist and factory laboror from Toledo, Ohio is one of my fave artists from this country. He’s got a book out on Punk Hostage, has all kindsa poems that are on fire works of genius. Look for him. Dan Denton on Apple Music
“I’m a nomad. A Jewish road warrior. I do not have a concept of home. I wish I did. But I live with the idea that we have to get out of town before dawn.”
“It’s quite interesting that in American discourse, it is almost obligatory to refer to the invasion as the ‘unprovoked invasion of Ukraine’. Look it up on Google, you will find hundreds of thousands of hits. Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.” ~ Noam Chomsky
“The twerpiest, most cowardly people who never risked or sacrificed for any cause — and never well, due to their cowardice — are always the ones leading the charge against those whose life is shaped by that courage, precisely because they feel shamed by such people.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“Biden’s low poll numbers and failures among the youth brings laughs to CNN, with 94% Democrats under 30 wanting someone that’s not Biden for the 2024 ticket, & with more than 75% saying the U.S “is headed in the wrong direction.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“On the 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.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” (― Stokely Carmichael)
“The Espionage Act, Patriot Act, FISA, NDAA indefinite detention, stop and frisk, federal no fly list, civil asset forfeiture, “quick take” condemnations, Title 42 “emergency” expulsions, and red flag laws are all egregious violations of due process and our rights as human beings.” (-Justin Amash)
“Each new day brings another $billion to Ukraine. There’s an unlimited supply of money for war.” (-Peter Daou)
“I’ve spent my career working in the mainstream, and I’ve covered probably seven, eight, nine shooting wars; I’ve never seen coverage so utterly consumed by a tsunami of jingoism, and of manipulative jingoism as this one.”(-John Pilger)
“Obama’s appeal depends on your ignoring virtually everything he’s ever done.” (-Gritty Is The Way)
“Political False Dichotomies “People aren’t grasping the significance of the fact that Silicon Valley is now shutting down content creators not because they allegedly harm the public good but because they disagree with the US government about a war.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“NY state is buying hundreds of robot “friends” to keep the elderly company. Nowhere in the articles about this do the reporters mention that it shows how companionship & community have been replaced in America by isolation, loneliness, & an individualistic quest for money.” (-Lee Camp)
Genocide walrus John Bolton outright admitted to planning foreign coups with the US government in conversation with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday. That’s coups, plural.
While arguing that the Capitol riot on January 6th of last year was not an attempted coup but rather just Trump stumbling around trying to look after his own interests, Bolton hastened to pull authority on the matter when Tapper suggested that he might not be correct about how coups work.
“I disagree with that,” Bolton said. “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat — not here, but, you know, other places — it takes a lot of work, and that’s not what [Trump] did.”
Places. Plural.
Tapper just let Bolton’s remark slide like he didn’t just admit to something extraordinarily fiendish, but did eventually follow up with a request that the former National Security Advisor elaborate.
“I do want to ask a follow up,” Tapper said. “When we were talking about what is capable, or what you need to do to be able to plan a coup, and you cited your expertise having planned coups.”
“I’m not going to get into the specifics,” replied Bolton with a chuckle.
“Successful coups?” Tapper asked.
“Well, I wrote about Venezuela in the book,” Bolton answered. “And it turned out not to be successful – not that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president, and they failed. The notion that Donald Trump was half as competent as the Venezuelan opposition is laughable.”
“I feel like there’s other stuff you’re not telling me, though,” Tapper responded.
“I’m sure there is,” Bolton said, grinning like he just finished boiling a puppy.
Tapper pursued the matter no further, because he is a propagandist first and a journalist second, and he would be acutely aware that Bolton was saying things that you are not supposed to admit to on television.
Bolton’s sole admission to coup plotting runs counter to his comments about the US government’s failed attempt to oust President Nicolas Maduro while he was facilitating that bizarre operation under the Trump administration, telling reporters in 2019 that the empire’s Venezuela shenanigans were “clearly not a coup.”
Thread
Facebook has hired DOZENS of ex-CIA + other govt agents to run its content moderation, security + trust & safety operations, meaning they affect what the world sees in their FB feeds.
In other examples of the US empire just rearing its ugly head right out in broad daylight, an excellent new report by Alan MacLeod with Mintpress News shows that Facebook/Instagram parent company Meta has been hiring dozens of people who previously worked in the US intelligence cartel to help regulate what content gets seen on the social media giant’s platforms. Some were hired from straight out of the CIA or had (officially) left the agency very recently.
The CIA used to infiltrate the media. Now the CIA is the media. This trend of openly hiring US intelligence veterans to help teach the public what thoughts to think about the world began a few years ago in the legacy media, and now we’re seeing it in the new media as well.
This is part of a broader trend in which many of the ugly things the US empire used to do in secret it now does openly with the aid of propaganda spin. In addition to attempting coups right out in the open as we saw in Venezuela and just giving intelligence insiders positions of influence within both new and old media institutions, you’ve got things like the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which according to its own founding officials was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly.
We see NED’s fingerprints all over pretty much any situation where the western power alliance needs to manage public perception about a CIA-targeted government, from Ukraine to Russia to Hong Kong to Xinjiang, to the imperial propaganda firm known as Bellingcat. Rather than manipulate world narratives and foment discontent from behind the veil of hidden identities and cutouts as in CIA tactics of old, NED just manipulates them openly by pouring funds into narrative management operations which benefit the empire while framing it as promoting democracy and human rights.
What the empire has found is that you don’t need to hide as much from public visibility as long as you can manipulate what people think they’re seeing. If the public is sufficiently propagandized and consent has been adequately manufactured, you can get away with just proclaiming some random guy the president of a foreign country and seeing if you can manipulate the rest of the world into playing along with you.
If your narrative control is strong enough, you can even keep the empire running smoothly when information gets out into the open that you’d rather stay hidden. Very often these days major stories about imperial malfeasance will come out that simply have no impact, either because the mainstream news media unite to ignore them or because they spin those revelations as coming from someone bad or not containing important information.
People tend to overrate the power of the US war machine and underrate the power of the US propaganda machine. While the US military finds itself losing a war to the Taliban, the awesome power of its propaganda engine has people marching in perfect alignment with the will of the oligarchic empire.
When I was in an abusive relationship, the more ground down and submitted I became the more my abuser would flaunt his abusiveness in the plain light of day. Toward the end he was just outright admitting he was a sociopath and a manipulator and openly telling me he was going to do monstrous things to me before he did them, because he was that confident that he had me wrapped around his finger.
Luckily, he was wrong. And hopefully the empire is wrong as it makes this same calculation with all of us.
(-Caitlin Johnstone)
The United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia are plotting a war with Iran. The 2015 Iranian nuclear arms accord, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Donald Trump sabotaged, does not look like it will be revived. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is reviewing options to attack if Teheran looks poised to obtain a nuclear weapon and Israel, which opposes U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, carries out military strikes.
During his visit to Israel, Biden assured Prime Minister Yair Lapid that the U.S. is “prepared to use all elements of its national power,” including military force, to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon.
Saudi Arabia, Israel and the U.S. function as a troika in the Middle East. The Israeli government has built a close alliance with Saudi Arabia, which produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks and has been a prolific sponsor of international terrorism, supporting Salafi jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and such groups as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the Al-Nusra Front.
The three countries worked in tandem to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who overthrew its first democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges. The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated and impoverished places on earth.
Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, has conducted an ongoing campaign of covert attacks on Iranian nuclear sites and nuclear scientists. Four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated, presumably by Israel, between 2010 and 2012. In July 2020, a fire, attributed to an Israeli bomb, damaged Iran’s Natanz nuclear site. In November 2020, Israel used remote control machine guns to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist. In January 2020, the United States assassinated Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, along with nine other people including a key figure in the anti-ISIS coalition, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. It used an MQ-9 Reaper to fire missiles into his convoy, near Baghdad’s airport.
If similar attacks had been carried out by Iranian operatives inside Israel, it would have triggered a war. Only Iran’s decision not to retaliate, beyond lobbing about a dozen ballistic missiles at two military bases in Iraq, prevented a conflagration.
On July 7, Iran informed The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it is using IR-6 centrifuges with “modified subheaders.” The declared purpose of the enrichment process at its underground facility at Fordow is to create uranium isotope enriched up to 20 percent—far below the 90 percent enrichment levels necessary to create weapons-grade uranium. Under the JCPOA agreement, enrichment levels were capped at 3.67 percent.
Israel has allocated $1.5 billion for a potential strike against Iran and, during the first week of June, held large-scale military exercises, including one over the Mediterranean and in the Red Sea, in preparation to attack Iranian nuclear sites using dozens of fighter aircraft, including Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets.
Israel and its lobby in the U.S. are working to scuttle negotiations with Iran to monitor its nuclear program. The preparation for war mirrors the Israeli pressure on the U.S. to invade Iraq, one of the worst strategic decisions in U.S. history.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in testimony before the British Iraq war commission, offered this account of his discussions with George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas in April 2002:
As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.
Saudi Arabia, which seeks to dominate the Arab world, severed ties with Iran in 2016 after its embassy in Tehran was stormed by protesters following Riyadh’s execution of Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. Saudi Arabia, with Chinese help, has built a plant to process uranium ore and acquired ballistic missiles. Saudi Arabia signed a series of letters in 2017 with the U.S. to purchase weapons totaling $110 billion immediately, and $ 350 billion over the next decade.
A war with Iran would be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. It would spread swiftly throughout the region. The Shiites across the Middle East would see an attack on Iran as a religious war against Shiism. The two million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern province; the Shiite majority in Iraq; and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey would join the fight against the U.S. and Israel.
Iran would use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship missiles, rocket and bomb-equipped speedboats and submarines, mines, drones and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquified gas supply. Oil production facilities in the Persian Gulf would be sabotaged. Iranian oil, which makes up 13 percent of the world’s energy supply, would be taken off the market. Oil would jump to over $500 a barrel and perhaps, as the conflict drags on, to over $750 a barrel. Our petroleum-based economy, already reeling under rising prices because of the sanctions on Russia, would grind to a halt.
Israel would be hit by Iranian Shahab-3 ballistic missiles. Hezbollah’s store of Iranian-supplied rockets that allegedly can reach any part of Israel, including Israel’s nuclear plant at Dimona, would also be deployed. Strikes by Iran and its allies on Israel, as well as on American military installations in the region, would leave hundreds, maybe thousands, dead.
In 2002, the U.S. military conducted its “most elaborate war game” ever, costing over $ 250 million. Known as the Millennium Challenge, the exercise was between a Blue Force (the U.S.) and the Red Force (widely considered as a stand-in for Iran). It was meant to validate America’s “modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts.” It did the opposite. The Red Force, led by retired Marine lieutenant general Paul Van Riper, conducted a swarm of kamikaze suicide boat attacks and destroyed 16 U.S. warships in under 20 minutes.
When the war game was reset, it was rigged in favor of the Blue Force. The Blue Force was given access to experimental technology – including that which doesn’t exist such as airborne laser weapons. Meanwhile, the Red Force was told they weren’t allowed to shoot down the Blue Team’s aircraft, had to keep their offensive weapons in the open and could not use chemical weapons. Even then, the Blue Force could not achieve all of its objectives as Riper unleashed a guerrilla insurgency on the occupying forces.
Why shouldn’t Joe Biden be feted by the murderous regime of Saudi Arabia and the apartheid state of Israel? He and the U.S. have as much blood on their hands as they do. Yes, in 2018 the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the assassination and dismemberment of my friend and colleague Jamal Khashoggi. Yes, Israel assassinated Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. But Washington has more than matched the crimes carried out by Israel and the Saudis, including against journalists.
The imprisonment of Julian Assange – who released the collateral murder video showing U.S. helicopter pilots laughing as they shot to death two Reuters journalists and a group of civilians in Iraq in 2007 – is designed to destroy Assange psychologically and physically. The corpses of civilians, including children, piled up by Israel and Saudi Arabia, who do much of their killing in Gaza and Yemen with U.S. weapons, don’t come close to the hundreds of thousands of dead we have left behind in the two decades of warfare we have perpetrated in the Middle East.
In 1991, a U.S.-led coalition destroyed much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, including water treatment facilities resulting in sewage contaminating the country’s drinking water. Then followed years of U.S., U.K. and French airstrikes enforcing a “No Fly Zone” along with crushing sanctions they imposed via the U.N. From 1991 to 1998, these sanctions alone were estimated to have killed 100,000 to 227,000 Iraqi children under the age of five, although the exact figures have been the subject of much dispute. The U.S. “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign of Iraqi urban centers during its subsequent invasion of Iraq in 2003 dropped 3,000 bombs on civilian areas, killing over 7,000 noncombatants in the first two months of the war.
By one estimate, the U.S. has been responsible for directly or indirectly killing nearly 20 million people since the end of the Second World War.
Israel and Saudi Arabia are gangster states. But so is the United States.
“There are few of them,” Biden, reacting to Democratic lawmakers who have criticized Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, told Israel’s Channel 12 news. “I think they’re wrong. I think they’re making a mistake. Israel is a democracy. Israel is our ally. Israel is a friend and I make no apologies.”
The angst about Biden’s not holding the Saudis and the Israelis to account on this visit is risible, as if we have any credibility left that allows us to arbitrate between right and wrong. The idea that Biden and the U.S. are brokers for peace was eviscerated long ago. The U.S. offers shameless support for Israel’s right-wing government, including vetoing U.N. resolutions that censor Israel. It refuses to condition aid on a respect for human rights even as Israel launches repeated murderous assaults against the civilian population in Gaza, labels Palestinian NGOs as terror groups, expands illegal Jewish-only settlements, carries out aggressive housing evictions of Palestinian families and mistreats Palestinian and Arab-American citizens at points of entry and within the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The idea that we represent and promote virtue illustrates the self-delusion that accompanies our moral and physical degeneration. The rest of the world, which recoils in repugnance at whom we have become, does not take us seriously. They fear our bombs. But fear is not respect. They no longer envy our hedonistic mass culture, tarnished by mass shootings, social inequality, the decay of our infrastructure, dysfunction and a Grand Guignol-style of politics that has turned civil and political discourse into a tawdry burlesque. America is a grim joke, one about to be made worse when the Christian fascists, bigots and conspiracy theorists take control of the Congress in the fall, and I expect, the presidency two years later.
The U.S., along with Israel, makes war on Muslims who, with an estimated 1.9 billion adherents, comprise nearly 25 percent of the world population. We have turned many in the Muslim world into our enemies. The Muslim world does not hate us for our values. It hates our hypocrisy. It hates our racism, our refusal to honor their political aspirations, our lethal attacks and military occupations and our crippling sanctions. Muslims express the rage felt by Guatemalans, Cubans, Congolese, Brazilians, Argentines, Indonesians, Panamanians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Filipinos, North and South Koreans, Chileans, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans – those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” They too were slaughtered by our high-tech military machine and subjugated, humiliated, forced to accept U.S. hegemony and killed in our clandestine torture centers or by CIA-backed assassins.
No one is held accountable. The CIA blocked all investigations into its torture program, including destroying videotape evidence of interrogations involving torture and classifying nearly all of the 6,900-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that examined the CIA’s post-9/11 program of detention, torture and other abuse of detainees.
Biden goes to Saudi Arabia and Israel as a supplicant. As a presidential candidate, he called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” and vowed to make it “pay the price” for Khashoggi’s murder. But with the rising price of oil, Biden is whitewashing the murder, along with the humanitarian disaster the Saudis have caused in Yemen, imploring the Saudis to increase output, a plea Prince Salman has rejected. Similarly, Biden is weak in Israel, powerless against the expansion of Jewish settlements and assaults on Palestinians, and unwilling to move the U.S. Embassy back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem, a move by the Trump administration that violates international law. Biden’s staff was reduced to pleading with the Israelis not to embarrass him as they did during his 2010 visit as vice president. During his 2010 visit, Israel announced it was building 1,600 new Jewish-only houses in illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. The Obama White House angrily condemned “the substance and timing of the announcement.”
How can the U.S. bar Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from a summit of the Americas in Los Angeles and embrace the Saudi regime and the Israeli aparatheid state? How can it decry the war crimes of Russia and unleash industrial violence on the Mulism world? How can it plead for the 12 million Uyghurs, mostly Muslim, living in Xinjiang, and ignore the Palestinians? How can it justify another “preemptive war, this time against Iran? The duplicity is not lost on most of the world. They know who we are. They know that in our eyes they are unworthy. Our inevitable demise on the world stage is cheered by the majority of the planet. The tragedy is that, as we go down, we are determined to take so many others down with us. (-CHRIS HEDGES)
HANOI ROCKS FOREVER! RAR-RAH WAR PROPAGANDA STILL SUCKS, FEAR & LOATHING OF BIG R.V. GENTRIFICATION BRUNCHERS, ON BEING AN ANTI-SOCIAL GLAMARCHIST IN A DEADEND GHOST TOWN, AND CAN’T STOP FALLIN’ APART…
(-BY GENERAL LABOR)
“New church Join the New Church Be a Lord Of The New Church Lords Of The New Church – now
Truth can’t be found on the television Throwaway youth ya gotta take a stand Music is your only weapon Spanners in the works go start your gang…..
New Church…” (-STIV LIVES!)
“It should not be assumed that the strategies and actions being employed by Washington and its allies in their proxy war against Moscow will always be in the best interest of Ukraine or its people.
Yet too much of the media coverage of Ukraine comes with a steady drumbeat of agitation for Biden and other Western leaders to “do more” — including escalatory measures like a no-fly zone that would increase the likelihood of nuclear war or World War III.
The desire to avoid this scenario by advocating for a negotiated solution to the war is not a capitulation to Putin and it is not appeasement. Yet it’s consistently portrayed that way by chickenhawk pundits at outlets that rake in millions from the weapons industry.
In the fog of war, we need investigative journalism that goes beyond the propaganda of imperial powers to report on human suffering, profit motives, and the prospects for peace.” (-Jeremy Scahill)
If you get the feeling that all this Ukraine flag-waving is one more vapid mainstream propaganda initiative used to manufacture consent for an agenda that has nothing to do with what you’re being told, it’s because that’s exactly what is happening.
n this war Russia has killed many Ukrainians and Ukraine has killed many Russians and the US empire has killed many Ukrainians and Russians.
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It’s nuts that there are still grown adults who think Putin invaded Ukraine for no other reason than because he is evil and hates freedom.
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Focus less on the Azov Battalion and more on the fact that the US deliberately provoked this war with the goal of toppling Moscow and is threatening all our lives with increasingly reckless brinkmanship against a nuclear superpower.
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People who promote a US/NATO war with Russia are more dangerous and depraved than racists, homophobes, transphobes and antisemites, and they should be treated accordingly. They are the most dangerous extremists on earth. This should be completely uncontroversial and obvious to literally everyone.
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More Americans know Marge Simpson’s sisters’ favorite TV show than know their government is waging a deliberately provoked and profoundly dangerous proxy war against a nuclear superpower. This is because mainstream western media — all of it — is propaganda.
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Everyone should be able to say whatever the fuck they want about a proxy war instigated by the world’s most powerful government that could very easily end up sparking a nuclear war.
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If you’re on the side of the US empire on any issue you are on the wrong side. This doesn’t mean the other side is always necessarily in the right, it just means a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by lies, murder and tyranny will always be in the wrong. Yes, it is that simple.
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It must be the most soul-destroying thing in the world to go to journalism school, study hard, graduate in front of your whole family, work your ass off building up a resume, get a steady job, and then find yourself writing hit pieces about disobedient Youtubers for The Daily Beast.
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Twitter is nature’s way of dispelling the common misconception that liberals are smart.
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If I was the world’s biggest narcissist, I’d probably try to become the richest person on earth, and do everything I can to make sure everyone’s always talking about me, and convince everyone that I’m going to save the world with my technology so I get a weird cult to worship me.
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Twitter being biased in favor of one nation’s government is vastly more consequential than Twitter being biased in favor of one US political party. So far we’re only seeing emphasis on the latter, indicating that Twitter will continue functioning as a US propaganda/censorship apparatus. It should probably get more attention that it’s effectively impossible to have any kind of major media company in the US and not have it be absorbed into the US propaganda machine.
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The Assange case is very simple: the most powerful government in the world is trying to criminalize journalism about its nefarious behavior anywhere in the world. You can sum it up in a breath. It’s only narrative spin and smears that make it seem like some big complicated thing.
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Empires haven’t disappeared as the world grows more conscious of the evils of empire, they’ve just gotten sneakier and bitchier. They used to nail you to a piece of wood in public if you defied them, now they’ve got to go through this whole deceitful lawfare process just to kill one journalist.
Empires used to just openly conquer foreign territories because they want to own them. Then it became about “civilizing” them. Now they pretend it’s about “freedom and democracy”, and they don’t even make you change your flag to theirs.
Empires used to exterminate entire towns who dared to disobey them, now they have to launch these giant bitchy propaganda operations to psychologically manipulate populations into hating their enemies.
Empires are just really sneaky, bitchy, gossippy, backstabby versions of what they’ve always been. They’re just as oppressive and violent, but the fact that there are more eyes on their behavior means they have to be so much more manipulative and covert about what they do.
The more visible things become, the more hard work and cleverness is required to run an empire. That’s why they’re working so hard to make things less visible via censorship, propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the criminalization of journalism.
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The biggest mistake you can make is to trust that your leaders’ actions would seem more sensible and appropriate if you knew what they know and understood what they understand. The wars really are as horrific and as pointless as they appear. The escalations in tyranny really are as bad as they seem. It’s not that you don’t understand what you’re looking at, it’s that you’re not a sociopath.
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Your thoughts and opinions matter. Know how you can tell? Because every single day the world’s most powerful people pour an immense amount of wealth and energy into trying to manipulate them.
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When a loved one is very self-destructive you can’t control their fate; at some point you’ve just got to let them make their mistakes and hope something in them wakes up before they wind up dead. That’s pretty much how you’ve got to be with the entire human species at this point.
The hyperbolic language westerners use to describe fairly normal modern warfare in Ukraine suggests they’ve invested exactly zero thought in what their own governments have been doing in the middle east for the last two decades.
It’s like, yes, killing, violence and destruction is what war looks like. You’re describing the thing that war is. It’s creepy that you’re only just discovering this now. What did you think your government has been using to conduct its wars this whole time? Dank memes?
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Before the Ukraine war I would’ve told you it’s impossible for me to despise shitlibs any more than I already do and impossible for me to have less respect for their foam-brained worldview. But I would have been wrong. Very, very wrong.
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If your understanding of world events doesn’t account for the easily quantifiable fact that the US is the most tyrannical regime on earth by a massive margin, nothing else in your understanding of world events will be fact-based.
There’s only one government that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, continually working to destroy any nation who disobeys it, and has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions. It isn’t Russia. It isn’t China. One must account for this reality.
That’s tyranny. That is the thing that tyranny is. If it isn’t tyranny to bully and brutalize the entire world into obedience by any degree of violence necessary, then tyranny is a meaningless concept. The US just happens to export the majority of its tyranny outside its borders.
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The RAND Corporation has responded to the way people have been highlighting its Pentagon-funded 2019 report on strategies for crippling Russia by attaching an editor’s note declaring that people who do this are Russian propagandists.https://t.co/a4h0AhM5GXpic.twitter.com/o7QkfPkRc3
The fact that CNN+ couldn’t even get 10k people to pay for its content shows why Silicon Valley needs to tilt its algorithms to boost mainstream media content while hiding indie media: people only look at that bullshit when they’re forced to. If it wasn’t for Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation outlets like CNN would have died years ago.
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Journalism would greatly benefit from its practitioners becoming far more disdainful of the approval of their peers, rather than seeking that approval like crack fiends. In journalism when you were respected by all the other journos it used to mean you were probably doing something right; now it’s a sure sign you are doing something wrong.
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Can’t shake how weird it is that we’re hurtling toward nuclear annihilation and we’re still all babbling about Will Smith and face masks.
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Future generations, if there are future generations, will look back in horror at the fact that we just let billionaire corporations not only profit from war but actively lobby for more war via think tanks, campaign funding and other influence ops.
(-Caitlyn Johnstone Rogue Journalist)
To state the obvious, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a bald-faced war of aggression. And brave Ukrainian and international journalists have risked — and lost — their lives to bring firsthand accounts of Russian atrocities to the world’s attention.
But here in the United States, too many in the corporate news media have reacted by becoming propagandists for the U.S. and NATO — even as Biden administration officials privately admit that they’ve been intentionally manipulating reporters by circulating unverified intelligence.
At The Intercept, we refuse to accept the neo-McCarthyist herd mentality that it’s traitorous for U.S. journalists to question the actions or motivations of our own government. Reporting the truth about U.S. foreign policy doesn’t make me, or anyone else, “a stooge for Putin.”(-Jeremy Scahill)
“Neoliberals continue to expose their true right-wing totalitarian character. Look at the freakout from another U.S. oligarch taking control of another social media platform who claims to be committed to “free speech.” When did free speech become a threat? Oh- under neoliberalism.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
WAS THE MEANEST DUDE ON THE MEANEST MACHINE
I loved when Sami Yaffa memorably said, “Hanoi Rocks weren’t really a hair band, we were more like a hat band”. When we were wild teenage hoodlums from the Midwest, we heard songs like “Sweethome Suburbia” and “Teenangels Outsiders” and totally vibed with the Hanoi Rockers, even into their solo careers. “Dead, Jail, Or Rocknroll”, which Mike wrote with Little Steven really was a working class anthem for blue collar kids like me and my old rhythm guitarist, N.F. Bastard, who still lives in a rightwing hellhole that locals proudly refer to as “Flag City” and “Handcuff County, USA”! The eighties generic metal bands who copied Hanoi mostly sucked so bad. They just had nothing to say. I can admit to liking a couple songs by L.A. Guns and Cinderella, I guess. Absolutely Love Junkyard and Circus Of Power who were goodtime hell yeah rocknroll bands. I obviously love The Cult, the earlier, the better. I LOVE SMACK, but never considered them a hair band, though they were a bit more sleaze metal than Hanoi. Spookier, too, maybe you could say they were darker, almost more goth. All the dumbfuck heavy metal posers just seemed to be writing “Partytime” by 45 Grave over and over but with wanky metal solos and cheesy keyboards. I tried to play a song by Autograph yesterday, just because almost all those guys are dead, and that eighties slick radio production was just so horrible.I tried watching some snippets from the Rainbow Bar & Grill parking lot party and just none of those bands were really very good at all-the joke band playing covers were almost indistinguishable from the brainless eighties cock rockers. Hanoi Rocks, and Michael Monroe, in particular, were always a lot smarter than their spandex lifeguard imitators. They had a social conscience like The Lords and The Clash and Disciples Of Soul and made music with smart lyrics about real stuff us hardknocks guttersnipes could all really relate to. Can’t wait to hear their new full length cd. I also really wanna hear that new record that Paul Black from The Joneses and L.A. Guns made with Jo Dog from Dogs D’Amour. Jo Dog is one of the most underrated guitar players around. I spend most of my time outdoors these days, because I can not stand the bullshit nonstop corporate media war propaganda and wealth worshipping of thee evil Davos billionaires and their private mercenary, black ops proxy armies, and dystopian surveillance-tech profiteering. When we were younger, music was our medicine. MTV used to show “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams”, “Around The Bend”, “Dance With Me”, “Open Your Eyes”, “Smokescreen”, and “Man With No Eyes” on motherfucking TV! can you imagine what that was like, to see that stuff when we were thirteen and fourteen and eighteen and nineteen? The bad men in the shadows have tried to snuff out real rocknroll for years and replace it with creepy, manufactured, artificial capitalist rap and slutty techno pop, all toxic and poisonous to the soul, really, but there are still a few last real rocknrollers out there making genuine music from the heart with brains and guts and soul and style. Mike’s one of the Best Rockstars who ever lived! Like Lemmy or Little Richard!
LONELINESS LOVES ME MORE
Everybody in my neck of the woods is stoned on the legal white people reefer. I never liked weed. It might be the heat, I’m just exhausted all the time. Sheesh. Maybe the monotony. Not even that easy for an independent lone wolf like me, I can only do so many hours with the electro-screens or chair sitting and then, I have to move. It’s something in me. I still call it Rock! Ain’t nothing to do in the desert except go on long walks on the mountain, look for stuff. Been here four years, never found an arrowhead, it’s all been ransacked 100 years ago. All those old miners, “gold in them thar hills!” Whiteys still got goldrush fever, only now, it all has to do with reefer. Healthfood boutiques, airbandb’s. Aint no music, really, some sad folkies and yuppies all play techno at any gatherings. All lame. Offroad yeehaw ATV’s blow by on dirt roads blaring commercial country, Shadies blast corny, commodified capitalist occult rap. Yuppies have invaded.
Greedhead conquistador, money seeking competitor/predator personalities with voracious appetites and something to prove to their family of origin, always follow us dropout gypsy, nomadness people wherever we go, not because they really want to be here, they just sense our quiet lives and humble serenity and moments of happiness and gotta find a way to destroy that, somehow. I always almost begrudgingly feel somewhat sorry for these dudes who have wealth, multiple recreational vehicles, brand new shiny status symbols, two motorcycles, a legal reefer card, an all day spot at the bar in the window, pix from their vacation safari, all the glamour shots with the big shit eating grins holding the big gold trophy who still can not be contented, because there is an abandoned slum down the street, or some litter on the river. The controlling types who need to feel victorious and ever dominant over some kinda totally disadvantaged poor people. What tortured animals they must be. I know dudes whose greatest accomplishment in life is always repeating to their wife or brother how they got more than I do. I’m an eighth grade dropout, no car, no property, and that’s what they’re proudest of, must always find ways to emphasize and broadcast. Who cares, man? Really? Myself, I’m like Spicolli, some waves and a cool buzz, and I’ll be fine. I take pictures of rabbits, am mostly content to watch the river of life pass by, but then again, that’s probably only after three action packed lifetimes worth of hard road escapades, getting ripped off, thrown out, beatup, impersonated, having the companionship of many dynamite women, genius roadhog brothers, all night rocker hellions, ya know, family, parties, shows, fun. Even in our peak moments of glory days small pond popularity though, when young kids would wanna shake our hands as we strutted down the street like drunk cowboys, there were just always, the capitalist private school competition-weasels, ever present on the fringes watching, like male Karens, snitch-squads, safety patrol, worrying that we were tasting too much freedom by embracing the day, all the jealous and bitter fortunate sons on the phone with their moms and lawyers and unattractive gossip groupies, just hissing spite and venom our way. That’s how I came to see my fellow Murkkkans, as really petty and hateful, class bigoted, popularity chasing, gotta have it, me, firsters. They need to update that juicer again, forever demanding a bigger hot tub! I wrote a song about ’em when I was 22, I’m over ’em, only time I seem to start feelin’ bad in this life, is when I get involved with the ratrace shit-havers, they are not sincere people. Just out for themselves, they just throw everything on the pile. They could never slow down and stop consuming long enough to sit with the deer outside at dusk, or see the morningtime flickers on the river. They are usually ready to leave these nowhereland desert ghost towns by the third day.
Hell, one of my newer tunes is called “The Nine To Fivers Always Lie”, it’s a reminder to myself to not get involved. The ambitious grifter builder types who keep hyping how they are gonna put this place on the map and make a million dollars overnight have not even been here for the summer yet. Ha. 120 degrees in the shade, makes you laydown flat, ain’t no drive fast, look at me, showboat, rat-racing. They’re all in the wrong place. I think they meant to go to Austin. Or Portland. They wanna be seen holding their paid for trophies, being winners. Try again. I don’t get all that uptight about the booj pig invasions no more cause out here “where the real winds blow”, it’s a much, much slower pace, and all these buy low sell high eaters of culture, they can’t stand it, after a few days, they all go nuts here, almost overnight-even the couples who come to town with big Dollar Signs in their eyes, after enough nights of having to socialize with bitter elderly folks, they start goin’ stir crazy, can’t get enough Amazon boxes delivered to their doorstep to still feel connected to wealth or ratrace consumersim, they start begging their friends to follow them into the boonies because there is no nightlife, no shopping, no touring bands, no news-stands, no Chipotle, no indian food, no falafels, they start calling outta state DJ’s asking them to come spin at their private parties, but even if you’re the Fonzie-est Fonz around, the Fonzie-est Thunder Road Grease Lightnin’ stud in town, you know, it’s still just some old new age spinster psychic widows who live with two pitbulls and hear transmissions from aliens who they are at the bar impressing. The old men all hate big talkin’ city slickers. Can’t wait to see them fail, smiling to their face, betting against ’em behind their back. You ain’t got enough money to turn Tombstone into Brooklyn. Gentrifers are hot on our trail, but you know, they can’t stand the monotony for long, it even gnaws at me, sometimes, and I been poor all my life-even when I lived in big cities, it aint like I really ever had money to buy fancy hats or go to fancy shows or restaurants or nightclubs that often.
There’s a guy down the street who lives in an aluminum garage, has a rocking chair, does not say hi when we pass each other on our multiple daily walks. I think he might have a disability. Used to be another old dude with blonde hair who sat at a desk all day with the door open in his brokedown purple house down the street until he died. Wife and I were appalled by all the rescue workers loud and jovial, non chalant, partytime laughter while they removed him on a gurney zipped up in a bodybag. Her sister’s a nurse though, says it’s all like that.
Even if you think of yourself as a sensitive Che Guevara friend of the people, when you actually live with an extremely poor, proletariat population of desperately lonely old age people seeking attention from every postal worker-cautiously, indecisively, perusing the various stamp options, and weighing their many options, having trouble deciding…it gets hard to be patient…all the lonely widowers, and black masked Elanor Rigby’s, belaboring the unhappy chainsmoker pharmacist who smokes out back all day with their heavy rotation grandchildren stories…the meth culture lower class crazies who ride around on bicycles playing gangbang rap music, cause they wanna be like Badger or Combo on “Breaking Bad”, names I only know about because my teenager’s former classmates are all neckdeep in low level gang culture vaping fetishism. We were at the dollar store a week ago, and outta town travelers were LOSING THEIR MINDS that there was only one cash register open, they are pissy middle classers not used to having to wait, and every customer is problematic, has a handful of expired coupons, or needs special help, there’s a line to the back of the store-a pissed off lady cop, a buncha old women with full shopping carts because this is where they buy their groceries, they live on this total gas station quality shitfood, two massively obese, overweight people dripping with sweat profusely, an angry drugsick druggy mom buying a six dollar Easter basket with her EBT card, slow witted people asking each other why the foodstamps have not been replenished for a month and there’s no chatter about it online. Ya know this is how it is for the majority. Some crazy old bastard man comes in yelling, cuts to the front of the line, starts bellowing about where’s the vitamins, won’t shutup, nobody knows what he’s talking about, macho lady cop getting unhappier. Restlessly putting her hand on her taser, gun, nightstick, while touristy, entitled, outta town karens wanna speak to the manager. Even me, man, I’m like, “let’s just leave”. I got a lot more compassion for retail shitworkers than middle classers do because I’ve been the basic math incompetent lone cashier trying to accommodate white trash crazies buying scratch off lotto cards while the me, first people behind them are screaming at me, belligerently, AS IF I have any say about how many people are scheduled by management. Maybe the lack of math skills are my fault, but Target shoppers screaming at minimum wage earners has never made any of us smarter.
When I was a kid, I first saw some pictures of Hanoi Rocks in grocey store news stand heavy metal magazines around the time I was first sent to reform school, man, I loved those leopard skin creepers and winklepickers, cowboy ties and gold lame suits, beautiful Doc Holiday hats and concho straps. Eventually, I got ahold of a used cassette copy of “Back To Mystery City” from a road trip record store in Indianapolis. It became one of my fave records along with Generation X “Into The Valley Of The Dolls” and the Pretenders first two albums and “London Calling”. Changed my life, really. They were the zenith of rocknroll back then, when it peaked, the high point. “Mystery City” had it all. It was like a psychedelic surf, amphetamine driven, fun house carnie, decadent and dangerous, rockabilly roadhouse, highway storming, seedy latenight, Alice Cooper and Aerosmith and Deadboys influenced, summertime love song, adolescent drinking, highway antheming, rocknroll rebel rousing celebration. To my mind, nobody’s ever come close to revisiting that hour of epic awesomeness, certainly not Guns N Roses, though I do still like, “Night Train”, “Rocket Queen”, “Mister Brownstone” and “It’s So Easy”. Lotta people seem to prefer “Two Steps From The Move”, but for me, “Mystery City” was their main masterpiece. Then we got the “All Those Wasted Years” VHS video and holy smokes. Mike was like a cross between Bowie and Idol, just so impossibly larger than life with that oversized Warhol white shock of Johnny Thunders hair! Andy was all Chuck Berry duckwalks and evil Keith Richards sneers. Razzle was the lovable Neil Smith jungle beat. Nasty and Sami were also stars, it was like a band of five frontmen, you never see that anymore. Five major talents sharing space, creating something much bigger than anything we’d seen since The Stones or The Clash. They were everything I loved about the Stray Cats meets everything I loved about the NY Dolls and Generation X and the Rolling Stones. Their anthems were as triumphantly inspiring as “Born To Run”. “Tooting Bec Wreck” was a total theme-song for all us lonely planet boys and misunderstood weirdos from nowhere places. Once we heard those songs, all we wanted to do was get lost in the city and meet the lone star queens! About a year after that, I ran away to NYC and discovered Lords Of The New Church and met people like Stiv Bators and Martha Quinn. Rocknroll was always in my blood, I grew up on Alice and Iggy, The Cramps, the Pistols and Bowie and T. Rex, but it was mainly Hanoi Rocks, Lords Of The New Church, Flesh For Lulu, The Alarm, Godfathers, and Generation X that made me wanna start my own bands. They say never meet your heroes, met Andy and he was ya know, kinda wornout, met Mike twice and he was exactly everything you would ever hope he would be. Still a punk, still with the people. Just lovely and gracious, like Stiv. So here we are all these decades later, and I’m still always excited to hear all his new jams. He’s got a song called, “Can’t Stop Falling Apart” you’re probably gonna love, if you’re anything like me.
“Every day, I feel like running away… much as I did as a teenager in Vermont in the ’50s. But now, there’s nowhere to run to. All the cool places have been ruined. Soon, we will all be evicted from the planet, and so the world will end just as I leave it.
What will emerge from the polluted, radioactive primordial soup that’s left [after all the higher life forms are extinct] remains to be seen, but the gods have infinite time to come up with something more interesting than what’s left of the human race.”
(-Peter Crowley)
Quick! Tell me the best remaining rock band on the planet. You probably said Motorhead, Jim Jones Revue, Beasts Of Bourbon, or Michael Monroe, right? Maybe a couple of you thought Morrissey, Manic Street Preachers or Primal Scream. I’m partial to Tango Pirates and Captain Zapped. Best frontman? Did you say Iggy, Idol, Tyler, Jagger, or Michael Monroe? If you like rocknroll, and you ain’t talkin’ ’bout AC/DC, Joan Jett, or the Stones, chances are, you’re usually most likely still yappin’ on about ageless glam rock peacock, Michael. We always come back to Michael. He never sold out, never cashed in, never gave up, never crapped out. Michael Monroe endured it all ten times, overcoming every setback and tragedy known to man, kept coming back again and again, a constant inspiration to millions, worldwide. On solo lp’s like “Nights Are So Long” and “Peace Of Mind”, Monroe has always made category defying rocknroll music that shocks, rocks, and shakes us. Powerful originals like “Dead, Jail, Or Rocknroll”, “Loneliness Loves Me More”, “Make It Go Away”, and “Smokescreen” have soothed our broken hearts, stirred us to form our own glam bands, sound tracked our love affairs and long lost nights of drunken debauchery. He made a couple of awesome comeback records with Hanoi Rocks that produced more memorable hits-“People Like Me”, and the chilling, “Center Of The Universe”. He’s always surprised us with the coolest covers by artists as diverse as the Damned, Hoyt Axton, Alice Cooper, the Deadboys, and Leonard Cohen. The man’s got fabulous taste, tons of heart, and seems to eat well, because while the rest of us age, he still high kicks and jumps around like he’s twenty. “Classic Rock” magazine voted his last record “Sensory Overload” album of the year and “Little Steven’s Underground Garage Radio Show” listeners voted his song, “Trick Of The Wrist” coolest song of the year.
His latest guitar bender, Steve Conte, has already co-written timeless anthems like, “Temptation To Exist” and “Plenty Of Music” with the surviving members of NY Dolls, and has similarly shattered the long odds and even managed to win over the majority of impossible to please Cult Of Thunders die-hards. Sami Yaffa, you all know as the living legend from Hanoi Rocks, Jetboy, Smack (briefly in L.A.), NY Dolls, Mad Juana, and the Compulsions. Dregen from the Backyard Babies and Hellacopters replaced Ginger from the Wildhearts, and since Dregen’s got his own album and tour to do, Rich Jones from the Black Halos, Yo Yo’s, Ginger, Neil Leyton, Yo-Yo’s, Amen, etc., has stepped up, to fill-in on theis new tour. Karl Rockfist, you know from Chelsea Smiles, Danzig, and Dizzy Reed. This is an unparalleled revolving door roll call. The best of the best, so expectations are high. The smash hit single, “Ballad Of The Lower East Side” rocks like “78”, their last smash debut single, it cribs a line from one of the Rolling Stone’s best 45’s and takes us on a crash course tour of the gritty, industrial, burntout backstreets of beautiful, badass, bohemian NYC… before far right extremist Mayor Rudolph Giuliani closed the after hours pubs, 9-11, the surveillance state, media-monopoly fed, mass consumerism and conformity, stop n frisk, NYU landgrabs, the billionaire nanny state, the perversely jacked-up rents and gratuitous ongoing Disneyfication of the city formely known as the melting pot, by despicable one percent mayors and their thug police that billionaire Mayor Bloomberg proudly refers to as, “the world’s sixth biggest army”.
Even dapper old rich guy David Byrne groans about how the global elites and their trust funded children have squeezed all the egalitarian heart and artistic genius out of Lower Manhattan. Patti Smith says “Don’t Come Here”. The gilded age banksters and war profiteers want us all dumb and running on the hamster wheel, competing with one another, and focusing numbly on idle heiresses, video games, diet products, marrying-up, plastic surgery, divorce and pre-nup’s. Waving flags and chanting “Woof, woof” like dogs, rooting for war like it’s merely sports. We’ve had to all, at least, contemplate the hard fact that the people on top of the capitalist pyramid are actively eviscerating our civil liberties, building internment prisons while closing our schools, groping us in our airports and chemical spraying us in our public squares, spying on us, crackingdown brutally on free speech, and pushing us out of our traditional bohemian enclaves, actively depopulating with their Monsanto toxic foods and bad medicines, pollution and nuclear radiation. In uncertain times, we deserve real rocknroll with a rebellious spirit, that reflects the reality of our situation and encourages the young to resist the inhumane injustices. Dregen delivers “Child Of The Revolution” to “Horns & Halos”, and it, too, is outstanding. It’ll remind some dedicated listeners of “Teenage Revolution” from “Street Poetry”. Michael and his glorious gang of eternal teenagers always pay homage to the old school cool of Downtown, when even us working class libertines and punk rockers could still find a rat’s nest squat, or share a rundown hovel with other runaways, musicians, film makers, drug dealers and hookers, before the hedge-fund managers and lawless white collar criminals overthrew our justice system, and drove everyone away from NYC except for the Olsen Twins and Lenny Kravitz, and those bridge and tunnel white shirted bullies of the enforcer class. Who the fuck has four grand a month for a shoebox apartment in a neighborhood full of shitty chain stores and jet-setter designer label garbage? For what? Even our historical landmarks are systemically being erased and replaced with awful shit for horrid, rich, slave owning pigs. Corporate music sucks beyond belief. Way worse than it did, even in the insufferable, 90’s black days of phony “alternative” marketing and moaning grunge Tarzans. Meanwhile, Mike and his dizzyingly energetic crack team of swanky, quick draw artistses keep the authentic gutter soul and delinquent spirits of Stiv Bators and Johnny Thunders close-by, even as their explosively epic aural assaults also bring to mind stadium pop of Cheap Trick, and the F.M. radio rawk of Golden Earring, Mott The Hoople, Nazareth, and Rose Tattoo. Michael’s always excelled at the rebel songs-think back to “While You Were Looking At Me”, “Smokescreen”, and “Too Rich To Be Good”, etc., and “Horns & Halos” does not disappoint.These cats are stylistically all over the place, as usual, sounding like fifties Little Richard, or the Heartbreakers one minute, or Guns N Roses, or 69 Eyes, the next. Hopefully, his also talented, sometimes songwriting collaborator, Ginger is making a cool mint performing alongside Courtney Love, so he won’t always have to resort to relying on the fanbase to finance his frolics with Kickstarter campaigns. You know the economy has really nosedived when even bigtime marquee, namebrand artists, of Ginger’s caliber are apparently struggling to record and release their own independent music. Ginger co wrote the exquisite “Superpowered Surperfly” and other class tunes on the last Michael Monroe album, before returning to his own headline making songwriting juggernaut and well known crowdsourcing approach to fundraising. Monroe only works with the top guns in the music biz. I’ve still never heard the Jerusalem Slim cd he and Sami recorded with Steve Stevens and Ian McLagan, but I hear Stevens has started a new band with Duff and Sebastian Bach. I have very much enjoyed Monroe’s collaborations with Slash, which are probably, next to Izzy’s albums, the best work we’ve heard from Guns N Roses alumni since Michael guest starred on their punk covers album twenty some years back.
Andy McCoy remains one of the world’s premiere rocknroll guitar virtuoso’s, but has chosen to pursue his painting, and television shows in recent years, introducing us to his Finnish gutter rock hellions, Greasy Helmet, who are the throwback essence of nasty comic-book metal, a bit like Buck Cherry without the brains, and while there’s obviously no replacing an artist of McCoy’s musical stature, Mike Monroe’s carousel of creative collaborators like Nasty Suicide, Jay Hening (R.I.P.), Stevie Klasson, Slash, Dregen, Ginger, and Steve Conte have all done a heroic job of maintaining that top-notch quality level that fans of glam rock’s favorite frontman take for granted. Some fans say Michael Monroe’s current line-up are providing an infinitely more satisfying rocknroll experience, than most any of their former peers, by not limiting their songwriting to a narrow subject matter, and by avoiding tiresome, eighties adolescent, formulaic themes, like so many stunted hairband veterans. Michael Monroe has never been the least bit inhibited about exploring various musical sub-genres, it’s all punk rock to him, his last platter co-starred Lemmy and Lucinda Williams, that vintage Hanoi Rocks stardust always glinted with sparks of surf, disco, reggae, echoes of the Cramps, the Clash, etc. The same holds true now, as probably my favorite song on the last Michael Monroe l.p. was almost Gram Parsons style Americana, more cosmic cowboy, than cosmic ted. His latest side has bits that will call to mind everyone from Aerosmith to the Waldos to the Alarm to Joe Strummer & The Mescaleroes.
Wealth inequality and shock doctrine austerity have made real street rock an endangered species, just like Mike sings on Demolition 23. Alley brats, like most of you and me, can’t even afford a rehearsal space or new guitar strings in the darkening age of eight twenty five an hour, that’s minimum wage here in the states, so we deeply value these last few, precious, real rocknrollers who still have something genuine to communicate, more and more with each passing year, even as we keep ailing icons Little Richard, Billy Rath, Henri Paul Tortosa, and Bootsey X in all our rocknroll prayers. Michael Monroe and his scrappy lads still dress like they always did, they still make music like they always did, with nary a concession to any of the soulless mousepad muzak the corporations have pushed on us all, against our will, for these past twenty odd years.
I like that “Horns & Halos” comes with a handsome booklet and lyric sheet. Album opener, “TNT Diet” kicks off with an audio assault against gloomy grunge poseurs and insincere hipster types who pay top dollar for fashionably distressed attire to make it appear as if they worked in the carwash all day. Pure UK Subs style punk aggression. Somebody pissed him off. “Eighteen Angels” is lyrically elegant with a slinky groove, sure to move the hips of your favorite bombshell barfly, it’s cool, Stones-style funk with a helluva harmonica hallelujah rousing the ghost of Little Walter, or at least sayin hi to ole Sugar Blue. “Saturday Night Special” is a blazing little number about the ill advised perils of self destructive tendencies, penned by Mister Steve Conte as a bit of a cautionary tale, and a reminder to us all. Michael really sings the glitter offa this one here. “Stained Glass Heart” is another one that really impresses one, with Michael singing exceptionally well, at the top of his game. Looks like Dregen and Steve co-wrote that one, it’s the best new song I’ve heard in quite some time. It’s pretty, poetic, with an essential and uplifting message to the real rocknroll people: “Love remains and we will carry on!” Brilliantly played guitars. “Stained Glass Heart” is a #1 hit in this aging desperado’s ultra-underground. Just this much would be more than most lingering rock revival acts could still deliver, but wait, the best is yet to come. “Horns & Halos” is a sneering, philosophical rabble-rouser, about how we all have darkness and a sinister side, but also, always the infinite, and instant capacity for forgiveness, truth, and being COOL, anytime, we so choose. “Child Of The Revolution” is really touched with grace, and makes me want to hear Dregen’s new solo album. “RISE UP! YOU’RE A CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION!” is the song I’ve been waiting to hear from these guys, since the brownbag corner gang favorites, “Scum Lives On” and “Hammersmith Palais” set the bar so high. “Soul Surrender” has an urgent chorus and a skanky reggae tinged vibe, shot through with more of Michael Monroe’s trademark positivity and pure white light. “Half The Way” is driving rock with gutsy vocals and sleek musicianship. “Ritual” is another highlight, it’s really unique, a thing of gothic beauty and noir sensuality, like the Lords Of The New Church meets Mick Taylor era Rolling Stones. Artistically, a triumph. “Ritual” is kinda…well, mystical. “Hands Are Tied” is an anti-drug anthem. And thus ends another classic from an unstoppable band that just can’t fail. Well worth your investment.
(@minds) 
Twitter is hiring a TON of FBI agents. Searching employment websites, it is clear Twitter has been extensively recruiting from the FBI, employing a dozen former feds.My new 
Veglam 