Gutter Gospel By General Labor: Getting Off The Grid With The Hippie Gardeners And Anarchist Cowboys, The Rev’s Durango EP, I Believe In Miracles, Kiss Dolls, Julian Cope Black Sheep, Cult!

“Summed up, the (1975) Trilateral Commission Task Force Report essentially explained that the ‘Crisis of Democracy’ is that there is too much of it, and so the ‘solution’ to the ‘crisis’ is to have less democracy and more ‘authority.”

RAIN

Brothers & Sisters & Friends Of The Revolution, I don’t know what we’re gonna do to turn this ship around. Evil billionaires at the top of the capitalist pyramids have consolidated unprecedented power, seized control of nearly all media, own the politicians outtright via not just campaign donations and shit, but legalized bribery, kickbacks, cronyism, and blackmail. All I really got worked out is we’re all gonna have to overcome our most basic biases and prejudices and form new alliances, new kinds of coalitions. I used to think you could “raise people’s consciousness”, but nowadays, with the mass surveillance panopticon and complete control of both old timey tv media and the new social platforms, I think it’s unlikely we’re gonna be able to wake anybody up, particularly as how the most stubbornly compliant and conformist protectors of the status quo-the middle class college safespace gatekeeper management class and landlord people have already been marketing branded as supposedly woke, and taught that anyone to the right (or left) of Hillary Clinton and Bill Gates is a dastardly commie, I think it’s becoming ever more unlikely that we can get our former peers to ever look beyond the advertising smokescreens of the imperialist great reset agenda. It rained and rained buckets last night, there was a glorious lightning show and we saw two skunks. A baby skunk got lost amidst the mosquito net draping we had hanging in the carport for our son’s swimming pool. I love the rain but kinda dread trudging through the knee deep muddy floodlands to the post office this morning. As my comrade John Dissed says, we gotta keep finding new ways to communicate with one another outside the bullshit sports team loyalist frame and empty suit charade of right versus left.

State of the Billionaire Press: Concerns over Media Objectivity after Bill Gates Gives $319 Million to News Outlets – Validated Independent News (projectcensored.org)

The Confluence of Surveillance and Censorship and Violence Against Journalists – The Project Censored Show

Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival and an Update on Julian Assange – The Project Censored Show

“Just 3 billionaires now hoard more wealth than half of our entire nation and the duopoly has you fighting each other instead of the ruling class who is rigging the system against you. Things won’t get better until the masses unite against the ruling class.” (-Ryan Knight)

‼️“The Democratic Party did everything they could to co-op the Civil Rights Movement”‼️ https://youtu.be/qg2zbnIAW7Q (-Sabby Sabbs)

REJECT ALL MONARCHIES, TYRANTS, DESPOTS, BILLIONAIRES, SPOOKS, & SECRET SOCIETIES

“The fawning adulation of Queen Elizabeth in the United States, which fought a revolution to get rid of the monarchy, and in Great Britain, is in direct proportion to the fear gripping a discredited, incompetent and corrupt global ruling elite.

The global oligarchs are not sure the next generation of royal sock puppets – mediocrities that include a pedophile prince and his brother, a cranky and eccentric king who accepted suitcases and bags stuffed with $3.2 million in cash from the former prime minister of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, and who has millions stashed in offshore accounts – are up to the job. Let’s hope they are right.

“Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories,” Patrick Freyne wrote last year in The Irish Times. “More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.”

Monarchy obscures the crimes of empire and wraps them in nostalgia. It exalts white supremacy and racial hierarchy. It justifies class rule. It buttresses an economic and social system that callously discards and often consigns to death those considered the lesser breeds, most of whom are people of color. The queen’s husband Prince Phillip, who died in 2021, was notorious for making racist and sexist remarks, politely explained away in the British press as “gaffes.” He described Beijing, for example, as “ghastly” during a 1986 visit and told British students: “If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.

The cries of the millions of victims of empire; the thousands killedtortured, raped and imprisoned during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya; the 13 Irish civilians gunned down in “Bloody Sunday;” the more than 4,100 First Nations children who died or went missing in Canada’s residential schools, government-sponsored institutions established to “assimilate” indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture, and the hundreds of thousands killed during the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are drowned out by cheers for royal processions and the sacral aura an obsequious press weaves around the aristocracy. The coverage of the queen’s death is so mind-numbingly vapid — the BBC sent out a news alert on Saturday when Prince Harry and Prince William, accompanied by their wives, surveyed the floral tributes to their grandmother displayed outside Windsor Castle — that the press might as well turn over the coverage to the mythmakers and publicists employed by the royal family.

The royals are oligarchs. They are guardians of their class. The world’s largest landowners include King Mohammed VI of Morocco with 176 million acres, the HolyRoman Catholic Church with 177 million acres, the heirs of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with 531 million acres and now, King Charles III with 6.6 billion acres of land. British monarchs are worth almost $28 billion. The British public will provide a $33 million subsidy to the Royal Family over the next two years, although the average household in the U.K. saw its income fall for the longest period since records began in 1955 and 227,000 households experience homelessness in Britain. 

Royals, to the ruling class, are worth the expense. They are effective tools of subjugation. British postal and rail workers canceled planned strikes over pay and working conditions after the queen’s death. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) postponed its congress. Labour Party members poured out heartfelt tributes. Even Extinction Rebellion, which should know better, indefinitely canceled its planned “Festival of Resistance.” The BBC’s Clive Myrie dismissed Britain’s energy crisis — caused by the war in Ukraine — that has thrown millions of people into severe financial distress as “insignificant” compared with concerns over the queen’s health.The climate emergency, pandemic, the deadly folly of the U.S. and NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, soaring inflation, the rise of neo-fascist movements and deepening social inequality will be ignored as the press spews florid encomiums to class rule. There will be 10 days of official mourning.

In 1953, Her Majesty’s Government sent three warships, along with 700 troops, to its colony British Guiana, suspended the constitution and overthrew the democratically elected government of Cheddi Jagan. Her Majesty’s Government helped to build and long supported the apartheid government in South Africa. Her Majesty’s Government savagely crushed the Mau Mau independence movement in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, herding 1.5 million Kenyans into concentration camps where many were tortured. British soldiers castrated suspected rebels and sympathizers, often with pliers, and raped girls and women. By the time India won independence in 1947 after two centuries of British colonialism, Her Majesty’s Government had looted $45 trillion from the country and violently crushed a series of uprisings, including the First War of Independence in 1857. Her Majesty’s Government carried out a dirty war to break the Greek Cypriot War of Independence from 1955 to 1959 and later in Yemen from 1962 to 1969. Torture, extrajudicial assassinations, public hangings and mass executions by the British were routine. Following a protracted lawsuit, the British government agreed to pay nearly £20 million in damages to over 5,000 victims of British abuse during war in Kenya, and in 2019 another payout was made to survivors of torture from the conflict in Cyprus. The British state attempts to obstruct lawsuits stemming from its colonial history. Its settlements are a tiny fraction of the compensation paid to British slave owners in 1835, once it — at least formally — abolished slavery. 

During her 70-year reign, the queen never offered an apology or called for reparations.

The point of social hierarchy and aristocracy is to sustain a class system that makes the rest of us feel inferior. Those at the top of the social hierarchy hand out tokens for loyal service, including the Order of the British Empire (OBE). The monarchy is the bedrock of hereditary rule and inherited wealth. This caste system filters down from the Nazi-loving House of Windsor to the organs of state security and the military. It regiments society and keeps people, especially the poor and the working class, in their “proper” place.

The British ruling class clings to the mystique of royalty and fading cultural icons as James Bond, the Beatles and the BBC, along with television shows such as “Downton Abbey” — where in one episode the aristocrats and servants are convulsed in fevered anticipation when King George V and Queen Mary schedule a visit — to project a global presence. Winston Churchill’s bust remains on loan to the White House. These myth machines sustain Great Britain’s “special” relationship with the United States. Watch the satirical film In the Loop to get a sense of what this “special” relationship looks like on the inside. 

It was not until the 1960s that “coloured immigrants or foreigners” were permitted to work in clerical roles in the royal household, although they had been hired as domestic servants. The royal household and its heads are legally exempt from laws that prevent race and sex discrimination, what Jonathan Cook calls “an apartheid system benefitting the Royal Family alone.” Meghan Markle, who is of mixed race and who contemplated suicide during her time as a working royal, said that an unnamed royal expressed concern about the skin color of her unborn son.

I got a taste of this suffocating snobbery in 2014 when I participated in an Oxford Union debate asking whether Edward Snowden was a hero or a traitor. I went a day early to be prepped for the debate by Julian Assange, then seeking refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy and currently in His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh. At a lugubrious black-tie dinner preceding the event, I sat next to a former MP who asked me two questions I had never been asked before in succession. “When did your family come to America?” he said, followed by “What schools did you attend?” My ancestors, on both sides of my family, arrived from England in the 1630s. My graduate degree is from Harvard. If I had failed to meet his litmus test, he would have acted as if I did not exist. 

Those who took part in the debate – my side arguing that Snowdon was a hero narrowly won – signed a leather-bound guest book. Taking the pen, I scrawled in large letters that filled an entire page: “Never Forget that your greatest political philosopher, Thomas Paine, never went to Oxford or Cambridge.”

Paine, the author of the most widely read political essays of the 18th century, Rights of ManThe Age of Reason and Common Sense, blasted the monarchy as a con. “A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself as King of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original…The plain truth is that the antiquity of the English monarchy will not bear looking into,” he wrote of William the Conqueror. He ridiculed hereditary rule. “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” He went on: “One of the strangest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is that nature disproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving  mankind an ass for a lion.” He called the monarch “the royal brute of England.”

When the British ruling class tried to arrest Paine, he fled to France where he was one of two foreigners elected to serve as a delegate in the National Convention set up after the French Revolution. He denounced the calls to execute Louis XVI. “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression,” Paine said. “For if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” Unchecked legislatures, he warned, could be as despotic as unchecked monarchs. When he returned to America from France, he condemned slavery and the wealth and privilege accumulated by the new ruling class, including George Washington, who had become the richest man in the country. Even though Paine had done more than any single figure to rouse the country to overthrow the British monarchy, he was turned into a pariah, especially by the press, and forgotten. He had served his usefulness. Six mourners attended his funeral, two of whom were Black.

You can watch my talk with Cornel West and Richard Wolff on Thomas Paine here.

There is a pathetic yearning among many in the U.S. and Britain to be linked in some tangential way to royalty. White British friends often have stories about ancestors that tie them to some obscure aristocrat. Donald Trump, who fashioned his own heraldic coat of arms, was obsessed with obtaining a state visit with the queen. This desire to be part of the club, or validated by the club, is a potent force the ruling class has no intention of giving up, even if hapless King Charles III, who along with his family treated his first wife Diana with contempt, makes a mess of it.” (-Chris Hedges)

“This idea that Democrats aren’t fascists is the biggest and most dangerous lie of all. When both parties have completely sold out the public and formed a corrupt merger between corporations and the state it means both parties and the entire political system are fascist.” (-Ryan Knight)

“The Democratic Party won’t even allow a vote on whether to stop taking dark money. The blatant corruption of the 2-party system by big money donors is why we need to build our own party.” (-Matt Hoh For Senate)

“Of course the US empire wanted this war. That’s why it knowingly provoked it and actively intervened to prevent peace from breaking out in the early days of the conflict. It’s been using this war to advance its Eurasian geostrategic interests at very little cost to itself.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)

www.opensecrets.org

“These folks are in your face with their agenda –  war profits and continued white world imperialist dominance. This right-wing neoliberal opportunist is just current face for that agenda.” (-Ajamu Baraka)

“The dark power of royalty. In 1971, the Chagos Islanders were expelled by the British to make way for a US base. This was made possible by a meeting of the Queen’s Privy Councillors (advisers) and approved in person by the Queen. Using the same power, Blair invaded Iraq in 2003.” (-John Pilger)

“Capitalism is based on wage slavery — doing something you don’t really love in order to survive. Basically most of us work 5 days a week in order to rent our freedom back on weekends. This is why many people are #QuietQuitting” (-Lee Camp)

“If you’re wondering why the DNC just refused to ban dark money it’s because Democrats took even more of it than Republicans in 2020. Remember this next time Democrats give their speeches about “saving democracy.” There is no democracy in the U.S. Both parties serve the oligarchy.” (-Ryan Knight)

“In Chile communists held a Sep. 11 march condemning the CIA coup and remembering the victims of the Pinochet dictatorship But they were attacked by masked provocateurs with knives, rocks, and sticks It’s unclear if they were fascists, cops, or anarchists.” (-Ben Norton)

“The American Dream never died. It never existed for most workers even in the best of economic times. Now it’s a cruel joke where 80 percent live one paycheck away from poverty, bankruptcy, homelessness or worse.” (-Danny Haiphong)

RESIST THESE SICK FUCK DICTATORS! JUST SAY NO TO CASHLESS SOCIETY & NWO!

NEVER FORGET BUILDING NUMBER SEVEN

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hunter-s-thompson-911-column_n_59b6b389e4b036fd85ccc97a

User Clip: Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth | C-SPAN.org

Peace Groups Decry Billions More in US Military Aid as Blinken Visits Ukraine (commondreams.org)

Opinion | Barbara Ehrenreich Showed Us the Need for Socialist Policies | Peter Dreier (commondreams.org)

FAKE FRIENDS, THE FRENCH SONG, ANDROGYNOUS, DO YA WANNA TOUCH, DIRTY DEEDS, HATE MYSELF, CHERRY BOMB, HIT AFTER HIT AFTER HIT AFTER…

Stadium Tour Comes to a Wild Close in Las Vegas (ultimateclassicrock.com)

Last big rock show I saw  was Joan Jett at a county fair about thirteen years ago. She was still as great as ever and brought all the people together.

JULIAN COPE

first came to my attention via “World Shut Your Mouth” on 120 Minutes, he had been in the Teardrop Explodes and made a long series of very esoteric and farout psychedelic records, the whole Black Sheep crusade really reminded me of me and my old gang before we all shot off like hard cracked billiard balls in different directions. Real cool stuff. I wanna do it all again. Sundays are such a slow moving grind in this still hot dead end desert ghost ville, I almost hope my part time employer calls with some kooky chore-yesterday it was picking up sticks and moving piles of wooden sticks with rusty nails and floorboards and shit from one property to another and rolling some impossibly heavy cement planters full of dirt into a spider ridden garage. I’m so bored and restless on a day like today-of course, what I really wanna be doing is making new music, I put some signs up on a local billboard. Hard to recruit a ragged army from the half crazed skeletons and desert rats around here, but I keep on searchin’. I’m gonna buy the kid some drums once we get relocated. I just came back indoors from a long walk in the hot sun, ya know people ask me with how I cope with the monotony of such a rundown dead broke deadend trailer town, town. Photography, I guess. It’s always a sad thing when you bring the camera but forget the memory card. I take pictures of the river and rocks and flowers and clouds. My shirtless teen just informed me it is 9/11. Apparently twenty one days ago today my middle kid’s mom memorably first informed me she “did not want to be part of a couple”. I think I stuck around for another year after that still trying hopelessly to stay a part of my children’s lives, but sadly, it did not work out-she held all the cards and power, moved ’em cross country, bonded ’em to a long series of strangers and by the time I got out there, the younger one had mostly forgotten me-just another of her mom’s many suitor ex employees. So yeah 9/11 was an inside job. The war on terror was a big bullshit lie. There were no WMD’s and W later laughed about it. Rumsfeld had given a speech about missing trillions the day before. Art students in the basement, Lucky Silverstein, Prince Bandar, Marvin Bush, Cheney called off Norad. No wingspan in the Pentagon hole. All bullshit. I thought you knew. Figure out Building #7. Everything since has been more lies, fictions, propaganda, bullshit, made up puppet stars like Zelensky and Obama and AOC and fascism…with a handful of preassigned and vetted, controlled opposition, red carpet diversity muppets. Teen Beat celebrity pinup politicians. Marionettes. Just More Fuckin’ Endless Dick Cheney, Rebranded. Now…the daughter. UGH! Once upon a time I found myself doing some handy work for a wealthy rancher/airbandb heiress house hoarder who every time I was ever around her, she always mentioned “the patriarchy” as her way of deflecting from the fact that she holds all this surplus property and unearned power and excess privilege-it’s triggering for me cause I’ve had issues with these heiresses before-they won’t get off their daddy’s gravy train but they resent the power he has over their mom and sibling’s lives, so they transfer all those resentments and hostilities neatly over to their underling employees or tenants, particularly in Honkytopia, Oregon-Gender is Religion there. Wealthy rancher/airbandb heiress house hoarders always seem to gravitate towards some kinda new age religion that reassures them they deserve all their power, and a spa day, and “market value rent” even if it’s just residual karma from all their charitable acts in past lives. Don’t call them bossy-call them greedhead oppressor capitalists.

Remember when John Denver, Frank Zappa, Jello Biafra, Dee Snider, all those people got tied up in court and shit and had to go to Washington to fight for free speech? Since 9/11, the corporate monoploy/state media brainwash media has been so fucking crazy relentless, that people who call themselves “Progressives” and also, on the right, some so called “Patriots” all fuckin’ cheerlead for censorship and top down, uniparty, authoritarian, narrative control. That’s fuckedup. All you have to do is get some Karen to say some shit’s Offensive. The police state not only spies on, but controls the discussions on all social media platforms, they monopolize the new media just like they monopolized legacy media in 1996. Meanwhile, like Julian Cope, I also try to rally all the black sheep.

MUSICIANS WANTED

Where are all the wild rockers at? THE LONELINESSMAXIMUM TORCH & TWANG seeking guitar, bass, and drums for underground rebel rock band influenced by The Clash, Mescaleroes, Gun Club, Lords Of The New Church, Tex & The Horseheads, The Pogues, The Coma-Tones, Beasts Of Bourbon, The Scientists, Chris Isaak and James Calvin Wilsey

“The United States is involved in every world conflict and our Military Industrial Complex profits off of all of them.” 

(-Black In The Empire)

“Fresh off his appearance at Wall Street, where he pitched corporations on the plunder of his country’s assets, Zelensky will appear at a conference of arms makers in Texas to present his country’s war as a fantastic business opportunity. #SlavaRaytheon” (-Max Blumenthal)

“The possible next NATO Secretary-General, Chrystia Freeland, is the granddaughter of a Nazi collaborator who recently displayed the banner of a Nazi-allied organization responsible for the mass murder of Jews and Poles. Only days ago, Chrystia Freeland was denigrating Canadian truckers as Nazis & imposing emergency law to crush their protest movement. But when Russian forces entered her family’s native Ukraine, she reached for the flag of the Nazi-allied UPA. (She’s since deleted this image)” (-Max Blumenthal)

“Remember when a swastika at Canada’s trucker protest became the focal point of media coverage? Apparently the deputy prime minister posing with the banner of Holocaust collaborators who slaughtered tens of thousands of Poles, Jews & Roma doesn’t inspire the same outrage.” (-Wyatt Reed)

“Bill Gates promoted and exported the “Monsanto model” of agriculture and helped trap farmers in debt slavery. If you think it’s a good idea to trust him on environmental issues and climate change, maybe re-visit his previous efforts to “green” the world.” (-Whitney Webb)

“The world according to Western imperialism: Vladimir Putin in power for two decades? Dictator! Xi Jinping in power for one decade: Dictator! The Queen in power for seventy years until her death?  Benevolent leadership over a democracy! There are 195 nations in the world. Only 22 of them haven’t been invaded by Britain since the institution of its colonial monarchy. Anyone surprised about the many who didn’t shed a tear over Queen Elizabeth’s death doesn’t know their history.” (-Danny Haiphong)

POISON HEART

Somebody seems to have stolen and relocated one of my kid’s semi-feral outdoor cats again and I have my suspicions it is probably an old grump with some mental health problems who lives nearby and has done that kind of thing before. He hates cats and loud kids and probably wants us to move, which, you know, we wouldn’t mind relocating at this point-ideally to some place more secluded with less OCD busybodies cussing at animals and trying to keep control over nature, wildlife, the whole terra firma at all times, because we’re not that wild about the changes we see happening in the neighborhood, with the developers putting up these real big, ugly, overnight McMansions hoping to quote “attract big California tech money”, and the cops and code enforcers and even a private drone company all being deployed by a corrupt city hall in bed with the shady developers to put the screws to the elderly home owners so they’ll be willing to sell cheap to the development swindlers. If we were more mobile, we’d already be gone, but ya know you can’t pay rent with two minimum wage incomes in this price gouge capitalist got mine, greedhead culture.

I remember thinking way back in the eighties how if I could only get a job and pay my own rent, I wouldn’t have to eat all that shit from the hate mob jealous cows of conformity, who hated anyone with principles, or style of their own, and forever felt obliged by Law to yell shit like, “Joey Ramone! and “Boy George!” whenever they saw me walking down the hallway. It just enraged all the morons that I wore a little hair product and hoop earrings and black smeared eye makeup. I thought that middle school shit would end when I finally turned 18 and the juvie authorities would have to leave me alone. I was wrong, middle school went on forever-pretty much everyone I knew as a kid, is basically just like they were back then-if they sucked up to anyone they thought was rich n popular in seventh grade, they are frequently still doing that shit in their fifties. If they were greedy hoarders who had a whole pack of unopened Marlboros but would rather smoke yours…if they were a deadbeat mooch who refused to ever wash a plate or pay rent in 1985, oftentimes, they’re still like that when approaching retirement age. If they only hung around you for access to girls and beer or sponging up the fine ideas, don’t expect they became more capable of being respectful, kind, loyal, or loving in their old age. I’m STILL that hated Joey Ramone from the bad part of town that aint about courtin’ favor with those dorks on the hill. Fuck those people. I don’t wanna be like the gentrification tv watchers. Don’t need no makeover, aint trying to be the Hot Topic or become Urban Outfitted, you dig? Aint my job to obey the squares and copycat clones cause you think they’re somehow second or third hand fake famous or vaguely associated with some kind of wealth or VIP privilege. I don’t even like those people. Certainly not their absolutely shite, redundant, embarrassingly corny joke bands. One of those suburbanized hipster fauxpunks compared a 45 I made 24 years ago to “Halfway To Sanity” era Ramones like that was supposedly this devastating putdown. I love all that stuff. Dee Dee was important. Joey, too, all of ’em. I was not that into CJ, but he helped ’em soldier on, so, yaknow God Bless Us, Every Cretin. Yeah I’m still a Ramone, at heart. I ranaway to NYC as a kid and all those guys and Lou Reed and Quentin Crisp and Stiv and Cheetah and Warhol and Haring and Basquait were all still around-ya know? the world was just a much groovier place, before the ruling class, inside job billionaires like Chertoff and Kerry and Bloomberg and Giulianis kicked all the poor people out of the once cool cities and tried to force their dumb rich kids on us, like ya know-The Strokes and Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus. No thanks. Breaks my heart the Ramones all felt like bitter, and unsuccessful before they died, in spite of touring the world and getting to make all those great records just cause they never made ya know like Bruce Springsteen money, but they gave so much strength and inspiration to so many people. You won’t see their kind get access to the mainstream airwaves, probably ever again. Just more bullshit fake rich people making bullshit fake music, that says nothing, means nothing, makes no difference, at all-just puts you to sleep. I’m so sick of all the fucking sucky bullshit muzak and dumbshit motherfuckers, who can’t tell the difference, anyway. I mean, I was never even really into like, Rancid, or D-Generation, but they suddenly seem like The Beatles and The Stones compared to the shit they try to force on us now. Back in the eighties Joey was still like throwing these real cool Acid Glitter Trashball Extravaganzas in NYC with all star lineups like Debbie Harry, Alison Gordy, Mike Monroe’s Blonde & Blue, Stevie Klasson and the Oddbalss, NYC punk heroes galore! Man those crazy hoo haw spontaneous shindigs inspired by own infamously epic all night house parties way back at our old bandhouse, Paradise Lost where people would come from three different states on the weekends to perform, jam, collaborate and sometimes the hootenannies might last for weeks. Joey just had so much heart-even when he was dyin’-his last record was called. “Don’t Worry About Me”! Ya know? Whenever I get real depressed, I watch like, Dee Dee interviews on Youtube…maybe some Kid Creole, Big Audio Dynamite and Zapp…”I Believe In Miracles” has carried this old jetboy through an awful lot of hardships and heartaches over the years, I’ll tell you that. “Poison Heart” says it all!

“Hey, you learn something new everyday. I just learned today from CNN that the notion of the U.S. as the global hegemon is part of the Russia “disinformation” campaign. The over 800 U.S. bases & trillion dollar military spending are in place to enforce global freedom. Thanks CNN.” (-Ajamu Baraka)

“Americans: drinkable water please US government: Sorry did you say send billions of dollars worth of weapons to Ukraine and Taiwan? Americans: no, drinkable water US government: Alright, you drive a hard bargain but here’s billions of dollars of weapons for Ukraine and Taiwan.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)

“On September 11th, 2001 the U.S. exploited attacks on the World Trade Center that killed several thousand to spend trillions on endless war that have murdered millions and erected the most expansive surveillance state in human history. This is the legacy of the War on Terror.” (-Danny Haiphong)

“Increasingly in cities across Europe the people are heading to the streets in response to the shifting of the cost of the Ukrainian adventure on to the working classes. But in the U.S. where the liberal/left has subordinated itself to the agenda of the neoliberal right – silence.” (-Ajamu Baraka)

“Liz Truss will be the next British prime minister. She told a town hall recently that she’s ‘ready’ to launch a nuclear war.” (-Dave Decamp)

“BREAKING: The Biden administration has announced a $3 billion package to Jackson, Mississippi to fund massive repairs and updates to water infrastructure. Just kidding. That money is going to weapons for Ukraine.” (-Danny Haiphong)

“$21 TRILLION of unaccounted-for “adjustments” by the DOD while we’ve been in Afghanistan. That’s enough to end world hunger for 700 YEARS!” (-Lee Camp)

“The US empire’s Venezuelan coup puppet Juan Guaidó is honoring Queen Elizabeth and thanking the British empire for supporting him in his coup attempt against Venezuela’s actual, elected government” (-Ben Norton)

“I feel like we don’t talk enough about the fact that a 2019 study commissioned by the US Army found that the US could advance its geostrategic interests in Eurasia by baiting Russia into overextending itself in wars against US proxies in Ukraine and elsewhere.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)

Zelensky Literally Selling Ukraine To Wall Street (rumble.com)

9/11: 21st Anniversary Events – Activist Post

Richard Medhurst on Twitter: “”Putin Price Hike” Or Your Politicians Who Screwed You? https://t.co/XAwHUsi8C6″ / Twitter

Cease Fire and Negotiate Peace (actionnetwork.org)

2019 RAND Paper Warned US of Failure During Ukraine Conflict – YouTube

Jacobin

OASIS MOTOR COURT NEXT EXIT

The Greatest Evil is War by Chris Hedges: 9781644212936 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

The World Can’t Wait! Stop the Crimes of Your Government – World Can’t Wait (worldcantwait.net)

KISS DOLLS

Yeah we sat through like three and a half ours of KISS last night. As usual, a tightly controlled, robotic Gene n Paul narrative about how everybody just loves Eric and Tommy their compliant and proficient substitute stand-ins for Peter and Ace. Only missteps they ever admit are Gene’s “ego trip”, the “Phantom…” clunker that was supposed to be “Star Wars Meets A Hard Day’s Night”, and the ice skater clothes and generic power ballads of the Bon Jovi era. Did you hear Paul’s awful Amerikkkan idol garbage side project FM Station or whatever it was? Just HORRIBLE. I did appreciate how they paid honest tribute to the influence of the NY Dolls even if the last word on the subject was Paul insisting KISS blew them away musically. Lots of people disagree. If their primary statement, their manifesto was “rocknroll all night and party everyday”, how ya gonna be mad at Ace and Peter for livin’ it? Gene probably liked that “Nookie” song, what he cares about is groupies and merchandising, cashing in. I mean he told his son Nick not to work on his own car-that’s a job for the little people. So yeah, basically you already know the story-Gene’s a dick, but him and Doc McGhee are very good at making big bucks, they do admit that their cokehead eraly collaborators Ezrin and Aucoin were at least as fucked up as Ace and Peter and are probably equally responsible for all their early successes-Paul’s a lovable, mostly affable cartoon character who overcame the odds and fought his way to the top but basically is Gene’s real wife, he acts like Edith to Gene’s Archie Bunker. To Gene’s credit, I find summa their toys and swag more entertaining than much of their latter day music and from watching his old tv show, it sems clear that the guy loves his family, if not Ace and Peter. ACE is the rocknollingest motherfucker, I’ve said it from day one, maybe your preferred guitar player knows more fancy scales but ACE’S GUITAR SHOOTS FIREBALLS! Peter Chris sounds like a demanding primadonna sometimes with the Andy Summers like touring demands, but I’m one of those old dudes who only cares about the original KISS, whatever their merchandise juggernaut big machine, money printing operations look like now, same with GUNS N ROSES. They might have super fame and stadiums full of commercial country or sports fans who don’t even like real rocknroll, who never heard of Steven Adler, bot none of these rich guys in all the wigs with the employee ringer bands write good songs now. Did you hear that “Absurd” song Guns N Roses put out, trying to sound like UK Subs? Just was not very good, was it? Kinda thing we all mighta wrote in the basement circa 87, fake English accent and everything. Not interested in KISS without Ace Frehley and Peter Criss and I’m not interested in Guns N Roses without Steven and Izzy, yes I know they are all superfamous money making capitalist hundred dollar t shirt peddlers, but I’m still into bands having good songs. I probably heard “Sweet Child” enough for a lifetime. IZZY or bust. Funny thing about most Murkkkans is how we don’t really give a fuck about originality, artistry or sincerity or talent or truth or soul. Murkkkans were all trained from birth to unconditionally worship wealth and power-whether that is the evil Davos Billionaires, or John Gotti, some monarch or Saudi despot, some no talent plagiarist imitators, people just follow the whiff of moolah. None more so than Moneybags Gene. His personal logo is even a dollar sign. At least they provided some hardworking entertainment value way back in the 70’s-there is nothing, now, rocknroll wise, in the corporate media but that illuminati pop garbage. Blink 182, Dave Grohl. Ick.

“In nearly 200 years of genocidal colonialism, the British empire stole $45 trillion in wealth from India (17 times more than UK GDP), killing millions The UK monarchy, Queen Elizabeth, the royal family are simply symbols of murder, exploitation, and theft.” (-Ben Norton)

“In Syria, the White Helmets have cooperated with sectarian death squads and operated exclusively in their territory. A top Al-Qaeda leader praised the White Helmets as “hidden soldiers.” The OPCW enlisted these hidden soldiers as its field team.” (-Aaron Mate’)

“Fresh off his appearance at Wall Street, where he pitched corporations on the plunder of his country’s assets, Zelensky will appear at a conference of arms makers in Texas to present his country’s war as a fantastic business opportunity. #SlavaRaytheon” (-Max Blumenthal)

“The actual authoritarian cults of personality are Western capitalist imperialist regimes, which claim to be “democracies” but force their populations to love the symbol of an unelected hereditary monarch while their societies are truly governed by billionaire capitalist oligarchs.” (-Ben Norton)

“Maybe the country that is the threat to the world is the one with damn near 1000 military bases.” (-Black In The Empire)

The Queen and Her Legacy:  21st Century Britain Has Never Looked So Medieval (mintpressnews.com)

Craig Murray: That’s Enough Monarchy for Now, Thank You – Consortium News

What if the 2024 ‘Whispers’ Are Right? – Consortium News

https://www.youtube.com/user/LeeCamp2

BLEEDING HEART GRAFFITI

One of the last records that I remember reached any kind of mainstream audience at all that still had a lotta heart and soul and rocked was the underrated self titled CULT lp that came out around the same time I made the foolish mistake of moving back to the midwest hoping to peacefully co parent with my oldest kid’s baby mama. I shoulda known better, I never fit in in the midwest and can’t stand the preppie privatee school motherfuckers and extra large frat bros who ran everything back there. But Ian and Billy were still saying shit that was real and true even in the godless grunge years. 

“Beyond Good & Evil” was the cd me and my old sideman Nasty Bastard were blaring as we were howling down the highway, goin’ back to Boston to record at our old pop pal’s studio when the van naturally broke down in the middle of nowhere but some old farmer very kindly brought us some beer and canvas chairs and said we could feel free to camp overnight and swim in his pond. A friend of Nasty’s put me on a bus and took the van in for repairs that took forever, so while he was tied up fixing the van, I was able to record maybe four or five songs with the rest of our old lineup but we coulda-shoulda-woulda accomplished so much more had Nasty been with me for the second and third parts of that trip. I got about two good songs out of the whole escapade. A couple of those tunes were compared by Ringo Kidd to Nikki Sudden which is a high compliment in my world. “It’s just the truth in your eyes…” Both mine and Nasty’s ex wives dumped us after that failed mission to record our album that was supposed to be called “Born Again To Lose”. Crazy world. I still standby almost all our old songs from that era. Always haunted by the what if…’s…What if we would’ve finished those records, what if fans of say, Black Halos and The Hangmen and Jim Jones Revue got to hear those old songs fully fleshed out, etc etc It’s the stuff of a whole lotta heartbreak and tears.

NEWS, SPORTS, & WEATHER DESK

“Tragically, the perfect symbol of Chile’s pro-imperialist, anarcho-liberal President Boric: protesters repressed while commemorating the CIA coup against Allende. Chile never truly dismantled the structures of the Pinochet dictatorship. They remain in the police and constitution” (-Ben Norton)

Caitlin Johnstone – Daily Writings About The End Of Illusions

Caitlin Johnstone: Ukraine & the Triumph of Militarism – Consortium News

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzYBW4-xkmcpYMtdyrXkTeQ

https://www.youtube.com/user/tytcomedy

Having a Queen Was Stupid; Having A King Is TOO Stupid  —  Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix – Caitlin Johnstone

Chain of corruption: how the White Helmets compromised OPCW investigations in Syria – The Grayzone

“Ukraine is shelling airports, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure in Donetsk. The Western media is silent, making it complicit in war crimes.” (-Danny Haiphong)

105. Whitney Webb: Epstein, the Clintons, and the Bush Crime Family (buzzsprout.com)

Remembering Barbara Ehrenreich & Work Left Undone – Consortium News

The Historic Collapse of Journalism – Consortium News

Zelensky Will Request More Weapons Directly at Conference With Top US Arms Makers – News From Antiwar.com

 REV. PAUL S. CUNNINGHAM

I guess I made friends with the brimstone preachin’ cowboy Rev. years ago on social media and we’ve been keeping in touch for a long time now, we got a lot in common, really. I’ve always loved the real original, stand alone voices from the wilderness, he don’t really sound like no one but himself which is pretty fuckin’ cool if you ask me. Musically speaking, I guess there are some glints of Jo Dog’s elegant bluesy leads from way back in the “Graveyard Of Empty Bottles era”. I love the pianos on “Pictures & Gasoline”. Very deep and soulful cat, insanely talented. Do you like the Rolling Stones or Tom Waits? Like I told somebody in an e-mail, this is haunted and inspired songwriting. “Brothers Of The Darkness” is a gunfighter ballad or trail song from the bottom of the black bottle. I’m just gonna keep talkin’ about this character’s tunes cause I recognize him as one of the most remarkably gifted of my generations’ outlaw colleagues. That guitar solo in “Brothers Of The Darkness” is a thing of real subtle and profound beauty. His slide guitar playing is so Stonesy and the piano is beautiful.


50 Insanely Glamorous Photos of Marilyn Monroe You Have to See Right Now (msn.com)

Rudy Havenstein, Prince of Whales and Sea Turtles. on Twitter: “”Who was Mark Middleton?” #Rubin #Summers #Epstein $GS https://t.co/AinzwmXW0a” / Twitter
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Historian Paul Street (substack.com)

Mississippi Goddam | Black Agenda Report

The White House Defends Social Media Platform Collusion – Activist Post

Biden’s MAGA Obsession Won’t Help Democrats | Black Agenda Report

https://youtu.be/Iiikz-du4C8
‘Caterpillar’ Lyric Video – by John Dissed – Discontented (substack.com)

Demolition 23.’s debut self-titled album featuring Michael Monroe to be reissued with three bonus tracks – Sleaze Roxx

Peace Talks Are More Essential Than Ever as War Rages on in Ukraine – FPIF

For Percy Bysshe Shelley, Literature Was the Spark of the Revolution (jacobin.com)

Gutter Gospel: Your Ole Pal General Labor The Antisocial Glamarchist Rants About The 80s Sunday Night Happy Hour, The Alarm, Smack, Silver, The Toledo Poet Dan Denton, Moonchasers, Ronald Koal, & The Soldout Murkkkan Fake-Rawk Press. 

https://ok.ru/video/7353535122

“U.S. propaganda is so sophisticated that it convinces people that we’re bringing democracy to the world when we haven’t even brought anything that resembles a democracy to our own shores. The U.S. brings capitalism, militarism, and oligarchy to the world and calls it “democracy.” (-Ryan Knight)

ME I’M JUST A ROCKNROLL SINGER

Besides the so called new normal everyday hardships of parenting in deepest poverty, struggling to even just get by in a nosediving recession with jackedup prices on every. fucking. thing., my main problem is like, a cosmic sense of total dislocation, of being outta time, cause some of us discarded old exiles were Born To Rock. But like Iggy Pop told David Letterman about Andy McCoy, and David Lee Roth said about meeting Steve Vai in a police lineup after a bust at the after hours club he once owned, CLUB ZERO, you know, you really always, always, always, have to go to the Big Cities to find the capable sleazy guitarslingers who can provide for themselves and who have even HEARD OF all my biggest influences and nowadays, you know, there’s just no way for us working class paupers to ever pay the $5000 a month rents in NYC and L.A., or Seattle or Portland, ya know? I’m even struggling in the dead end faded ghost town. One of my biggest influences as a lead vocalist, along with Joe Strummer (RIP), Gio Vitanza (RIP), Tex Perkins, Stiv (RIP), and Texacala, was, of course, CLAUDE from SMACK. Man, I just love that cat, but of course, nobody’s ever heard of ’em outside of London, Helsinki, NY and L.A., and I never understood why their brand of cool as fuck untamed rocknroll never caught fire with a bigger audience, it kinda just makes me think that people are fucking stupid. I honestly have had multiple conversations with grown adults these past twenty years who wanna look me straight in the eye and dare tell me how great the new Green Day or Foo Fighters or Miley Cyrus or Beyonce album is. I can’t stand that garbage. Give me Claude, everytime. Make mine Claude and the 69’s! If you ask me, this is what rocknroll sounds like-not that namby pamby trustfund bullshit tribute rock they all dish out nowadays. The last band I heard that had even like a glint of the raw soul and desperate animal magnetism of Smack was SILVER from Norway and even they were like twenty years ago. But yeah, they had some real magic, too! I was never quite so wild about 69 Eyes vampire-metal but I definitely did love their early Mr. Sleazy 45 they sent me to review in my fanzine when I was I dunno, 22? I liked their earlier raunchy first record sleazepunk dive bar stuff far better than their latter day epic productions that sound more like money and less like street. But anyways…yeah. SMACK. And SILVER.

SILVER had something special, man, a perfect vocalist, exceptional lyrics, near perfect music, they were like a swirl of the Lords, the Ultras, the Original Suffering Bastards, and Smack all rolled into one! Man, I love that band! In the immortal words of our beloved forefather, Chuck Berry, “it’s gotta be rocknroll music if you wanna dance with me…”

The System Is Causing Food Crisis, Not the War – Consortium News

THE WHOLE SHEBANG IS FALLING APART FOR ALL US EVERYDAY PEOPLE WHILE YOUR JETSETTING, WHITE PANTS SUITED, INSIDE TRADING, CROOKED AS FUCK BIPARTISAN MILLIONAIRE POLITICIANS BAIT WW3!

“It’s all falling apart in the States. The economy, the narratives and the political lies. All of it. And they’re trying so hard to pretend everything is fine but it’s clear even to those in denial, that it isn’t.” (-Fiorella Isabel)

“The IRA is another give away to fossil fuel industry & sells out the interests of indigenous and Black communities no matter how many uncle tom Black and indigenous folks you push out there to sing its praises. Hey Progressive Caucus talk about the side deal with Manchin!” (-Ajamu Baraka)

“Evil warmonger and DNC icon Liz Cheney lost.” (-Garland Nixon)

“Kudos to the people’s legal defense that stopped fat cat party bosses from illegally throwing Hoh off the ballot. One of many victories won by the Center for Competitive Democracy (CCD), @voterchoice

. Thank you, CCD, for keeping democracy alive!” (-Dr. Jill Stein)

“The Bush-era neocons are ready to support Ron DeSantis if he runs for president. Like them, DeSantis wants war with China, hates Venezuela and Cuba, and loves apartheid Israel. The so-called “poPuLiSt riGhT” is just a rebranding of neoconservativism 2.0″ (-Benjamin Norton)

“As Democrats continue to gaslight the public about their ‘big win’ here is what Brett Hartl, the director of the Center for Biological Diversity, is saying: “This is a climate suicide pact. It’s self-defeating to handcuff renewable energy to massive new oil and gas extraction.” (-Ryan Knight)

“Putin on U.S actions toward Russia & China: “It is evident that Western, globalist elites are attempting to distract their own citizens from very dire socio-economic problems; falling living standards, unemployment, poverty & de-industrialization.” (-Fiorella Isabel from Convo Couch)

“The process of setting up Zelensky as fall guy for the conscious policy of the U.S. to make Ukraine a de-facto member of NATO & bait Russia into a war in Donbas has started in earnest. There was going to be a war, with or without Zelensky.” (-Ajamu Baraka)

“The bosses and shareholders of the British water monopolies are announcing record profits whilst our seas are polluted with sewage. We must bring water companies into public ownership, invest in infrastructure and pay workers fairly.” (-Jeremy Corbyn)

“Democrats don’t believe in democracy when they sue to kick third parties off ballots and suppress voters from having a real choice on election day. They believe in oligarchy. So stop being bamboozled by this corrupt anti-democratic party that fights against the progress we need.” (-Ryan Knight)

The Protest Songs Of Prince (shadowproof.com)

IT’S THE BILLIONAIRES AND MILLIONAIRES VERSUS THE REST OF US. STOP “IDENTIFYING” WITH YOUR OPPRESSORS.

Man, ya see so many unwell human beings walkin’ around talking just mad UFO jibberish to themselves nowadays. Sure, some of them are on the crystal meth or newfangled zombies of death drugs, but so, so many more of ’em are suffering from mental illness and there is no help for them. The establishment has designed this slippery slope, so people who are mentally ill are most often mass incarcerated in abusive, sadistic prisons, or left outside in the elements to rot and die. I even see some property owners getting The Business from a corrupt smalltown city hall that’s in bed with like ten rich people, so they have decided to sic these code enforcers on all the poor people, to make them sell their property, drive ’em out, or bleed their resources fighting the gentrifiers. It’s sad. I know a couple of sad and lonely old single people who dwell inside these rickety little metal boxes who have to listen to the builder’s insanely loud Mexican music all day, big machines moving dirt, and bam bam bam hammering, and when they complained to city hall, the soccer mom figureheads they seat behind some table to give the illusion that “educated women” are calling the shots, they sent in the code enforcers and kkkops to fuck with the hermits. and hassle the kindly old new age painter lady for having an artful frontyard with blue bottles and wire and found object decorations on her fence frowned upon by fatcat real estate assholes. It’s fucking sad to see the stress all these poor retirees have been put under by the crooked Mister Burns people from the golf club and their know nothing shitlib winebox shitfaced sock puppets, who just rubber stamp anything that some moneybags developer calls “progress”, even if it makes no sense. I hadda take a job as a mover and almost got bit by a black widow spider that was hiding among the boxes with three inches of dirt I was relocating from one lady’s spare house to another of her spare houses. It’s deep puddles rainy today, I’m kinda dreading going back to work later this afternoon. More spiders, cobwebs, perilously HEAVY antique furniture, heavy boxes of expensive art books. Woman telling me how she shitcanned seven trucks full of her parent’s belongings. My girlfriend got bit up by like a half dozen fire ants. We do what we gotta do for our kids.

Why the Inflation Reduction Act is Less a “Climate Bill” and More a Poison Pill for Black and Indigenous Communities and Movements | Black Agenda Report

The History and Significance of Black August | Black Agenda Report

Jacobin

RNA for Moderna’s Omicron Booster Manufactured by CIA-Linked Company (unlimitedhangout.com)

MOTHERFUCKERS ALL WORSHIP THE WHITE COATS LIKE UNCLE JUNE ON THE SOPRANOES

The medical mafia in this country is so fuckedup now, you can’t even see a real doctor. Our primary physician had a stroke and became half paralyzed and is on permanent leave now, and if you talk about how or why it happened, in his forties, “just suddenly” people wanna silence and punish you, so now, you can only see nurse practitioners at the overbooked hicktown hospital, if you wanna loiter round for hours in rooms full of coughing old people, some of whom are not even able to prescribe, cause they aint got the credentials of the paralyzed guy. One of my family members needs new prescriptions because of their adolescent growth surge but his prescribing doctor moved his office to three hours away and our vehicle won’t make it, we made an appointment with a new physician and when the child was taken to an early morning appointment, which is a hardship for someone with his particular disability, they were told the doctor had arbitrarily cancelled the appointment, so meanwhile, the poor kid is having all kinds of erratic behavioral eruptions as a result of his medications being so inadequate and some of the resulting violent outbursts can be dangerous to his and his family’s safety and wellbeing. Dumb fucking middle class people believe that pills are the answer to everything, pils, pills, some shots, more pills, more pills, always more pills, some boosters, an “I VOTED TODAY” sticker, a pinkhat mach, some more pain pills, big medicine cabinets overflowing already with mama’s little helpers, cause they’ve seen ten billion commercials for every drug in the world on MSNBC and CNN but then when proper dosages are denied to patients by a clusterfuck smalltown hospital, it’s just tough luck. That’s all you will ever hear from the quack quack quacking petit booj on the hill. How YOU shoulda done this, or you shoulda done that. Shoulda gotten better health insurance, or shoulda owned a more reliable vehicle, should have married up or inherited privilege from their families the hard way, shoulda sued the school system, shoulda sued the doctors, shoulda gotten a fourth booster for science like DOCTOR JILL BIDEN who is sick with the plague, or blah blah, whatever. This conventional wisdom held by all the haves on the hills sometimes results in real tragic consequences like with our poor doctor, who took his medicine, did what he was told, and now he can’t perform his job, or move half his body. That’s fuckedup, and he can’t sue nobody. Tough shit. Same with my dead friend in the midwest, he took a nap after a second shot and never woke up again, too bad, tough titties-guess he shoulda bought bitcoin or shoulda volunteered to go to war with Russia, always something that he did wrong, according to the quack quack quacking tv watcher know it alls who think the Democrats are real. So ya gotta wonder what doctor worshipping shitlibs have to say to that guy, who can’t move half his body now, even though (!!!) he spent all those years in med school and his student loans probably still aint even paid off-what he shoulda done different. He was already complying with their preferred narrative, hut two hut two, and yes sir to Super Scientific Higher Up Expert Dr. Bill Gates and wee wee wee wee all the way home, every bit of it, went to med school, bought a big house, learned to golf, paid for insurance, obeyed The Man for science. Only one industry exists with a total immunity shield. He can’t sue the supposedly benevolent makers of certain warp speed “immunizations”. Tough shit, doctor, fuck you. Poor guy! Now we aint got no family doctor, but so long as somebody who was  already obscenely rich, is getting super duper extra rich, somewhere, and having smirking conversations with Emperor Klaus, about how they’re gonna have all kinds of new business opportunities in the near future, and laughing like twin Bond villains, that’s all the army ant tv watchers care about. They’re all strung out on the government pills.

‘No Farms, No Food:’ Dutch farmers confront billionaire ‘green’ elite’s food system reset plan – The Grayzone

The Epstein Network, the Mafia, & One Nation Under Blackmail with Whitney Webb – Activist Post

So yeah it’s becoming a bit frightening as a pedestrian, just walking around this deadbroke town, you got all the angry, drunk driving, vroom vroom flatulent, big white truck pitbull cowboys driving 100 miles per hour on these winding river roads, their vicious dogs snarling out the passenger seat window. The Lake People in the golfcarts and three wheelers also speeding about as fast as they can, picking up ice for their beer coolers from the downtown ice machines, but it’s not quite so fast really. The embittered women who married their pitbulls and don’t believe in leash laws and think they can control their animals with their Georgia O’Keefe extra deluxe psychic fortune teller intuitive E.S.P. powers, the ninety pound fentanyl crazies who look like world war two victims, the toothless people with the shaven heads and broken window shields driving in lazy half lidded circles and trying to mad dog menace the peaceful passerby. You got the pink and red clad woman from TAOS who insults strangers on the sidewalk for existing. The pissed off oversized biker bearded dude who screams loudly to one of my neighbors about “revenge” all day. The hermit down the block in conflict with the kkkops over his rock garden landscaping choices and brokedown car ownership. The middleclass woman who was trying to sue to stop a bridge being built on her deadend street now becoming a target of kkkode enforcers but she already has a really perfectly neat and Iowa orderly yard, is ex military with money in the bank, so it’s harder for them to fuck with her. The suckup obedience yuppies of city hall are all helping pass fascistic Gates-Reset ordinances saying it is now legal for them to employ a private drone company to inspect homeowner’s private backyards and determine who can, or can not park R/V’s or cars behind high fences on their own properties. Some liberty. They have plans to confiscate people’s stuff if they don’t like it. That is insane to me. Even the most patriotic flag waving gung ho, military lovin’ Thank A Kkkop Republikkan KKKowboys gotta start seeing that’s something’s rotten with this particular city government. There are crazy, unhappy people yelling obscenities everywhere you roam. Some dickhead yuppie pricks banned an old lady with dementia from dancing with her elderly friends at the jackedup tourist trap bar here. They sortof say hi to me sometimes, mistaking me for some gentrification hipster, but I find it difficult to be civil to money grubbing gentrifiers with no compassion for the sick or the poor or the old or disabled. Fuck you, prick. Go back to Hipster City, this is a dead end desert ghost town full of predominantly poor widowers. Maybe you money whore, city slicker, get rich quick people are the ones who should be banned. Leave us alone. Here come the tech-tyrants and deep state faux woke, shady spook social engineers and thought police and squidgame mk ultra hip-pop bullshitters.

“Imagine thinking Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi are on the side of the people when they have spent their entire political careers being on the side of corporations. That’s how brainwashed and propagandized Democrat party voters are. #BlueMAGA” (-Ryan Knight)

WATCH: Waters Joins Assange Rally at DOJ – Consortium News

WEF Proposes Globalized Plan to Police Online Content Using Artificial Intelligence • Children’s Health Defense (childrenshealthdefense.org)

Julian Assange’s Attorneys Sue CIA’s Mike Pompeo – Activist Post

Digital Identity – What’s Your Trust Score? – Activist Post

MOONCHASERS ARE ONE OF THE ONLY GOOD UNDERGROUND BANDS LEFT IN THIS COUNTRY, ALL EVAD’S BANDS ARE GOOD. HOPEFULLY, I’LL HAVE A WINTER KILLS FEATURE INTERVIEW WITH TOM SANFORD FOR YOU SOON!

Moonchasers – N1M

Lord of the L.A. Wasteland Evad Fromme on The Factory Superstars | Interviews (i94bar.com)

“Democrats just passed a bill which massively expands new fossil fuel extraction and handcuffs renewable energy to fossil fuels yet they are on TV waging the propaganda campaign of the century by declaring they saved the planet when they actually just accelerated its destruction.” (-Ryan Knight)

LET THE COWBOYS RIDE 

This is what the fanatical sports moms, preppie jocks and elitist admin thought me and my friends were like, but really, we were just lonely latchkey kids who were really, really into like, Cyndi Lauper, Psychedelic Furs, Billy Idol, and Echo & The Bunnymen, you dig? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb0MXivyeuA A lotta eyeliner and hair gel. I think my dream, that I harangued a couple of my scrappy friends into believing in, for at least a few years, until eating canned beans and mostly living on beer in rundown ghetto, rodent infested apartments started losing it’s appeal and the parents were pressuring ’em all to go to go to school and shit, I wanted to be like, you know, The Clash, The Alarm, The Lords Of The New Church– a big haired bandido rebel gang fighting the power with poetry and sincerity and singalong choruses and big hollow body guitars, three chords and the truth. I was not fucking around, I’m still that, and I’ll be 53 in December. Steve Stevens guitar heroes, Pete Farndon bassists, Clem Burke style drummers apply within. Songwriting motherfucker wants to front dangerous outlaw punk band. Last of the Last of the Last of the Last.

Aint it a bitch how music imprints on you forever, even the cornier stuff you don’t necessarily like? Journey, for instance? “Send Her My Love…memories remain, send her my love…roses never fade…” There’s a video somewhere, of two of my craziest dead drinking companions, Mark and Adam, all dolled up like me in the feathers and furs, with one of my bombshell, crazy good times all the time, loudly yelling, yeehaw, hoarse voiced screaming wild stripper ex girlfriends singing “Separate Ways”. I look for it somedays cause lord I miss those brothers. Dead forever. Ugh! Ya know? In the sad, horrid, painful mornings, when I was in the fourth to eighth grades, I was forced to go to this dreadful, bullying, miserable, torturously mean, middle school in fuckedup fucking Ohio, radio DJ Ed Goble from WKKI “Ohio’s Best Rock, Broadcasting From The Western Ohio Branch Campus In Celina” would play Madonna‘s “Crazy For You” from the “Vision Quest” soundtrack and “Only The Young” by Journey, every morning before I had to go wait in the frontyard for the #24 bus in the snow with Tracey D. from across the street who hated me. I always got stuck sitting next to notorious booger picker, Musto. “You again, Musto”. Then, it was a three flights of stairs climb to the third floor music room in the 100 year old fucking dusty old building, assholes elbowing me on my way up, struggling to carry a big snaredrum case, I was just a scrawny pipsqueak like in those comicbook fifties Charles Atlas ads. 

     At Baptist boarding school, in deep Appalachia, Fat Jerry had a tiny A.M. radio we had to keep hidden from the older boy’s dorm snitch-patrol, cause all secular music was forbidden, and I’d hear another fucking syrupy Journey song, in my metal bunkbed at night, the horrible sap of “Faithfully”, and think of this older girl I had a crush on named Carol Harlowe. I hated depressing Bob Seger songs about being  a perpetually down on your luck, twice divorced, nowhere loser loitering around some stinky pool hall down on Main Street and John Cougar songs growing up, because I did not want to hear that authority always wins, I thought rocknroll songs should give people optimism that they COULD triumph over the corrupt powers that be, and back then, I absolutely could not “be myself” in those tank building “smalltowns” I grew up in. I wanted escapism, back then. Van halen, Adam Ant and Duran and Bowie and Prince. I like a lot of stuff other people seem to hate, like the Thompson Twins and even some Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw. It all reminds me of when my first real friends and I were just meeting each other out there in eighties Swatch Watch suburbia. As I got older, of course, I changed my mind about all those melancholy Amerikkkana balladeers from classic rock radio, the John Cougars and Tom Pettys, because my life had turned into one of those fucking battered and bruised, bad luck songs. “Runnin’ against the wind…”

“Wherever you are tonight, I wish you the best of everything in this world and honey I hope you find whatever you were lookin’ For…”

“She calls me baby, she calls everybody baby…it’s a lonely old night, but aint they all?” 

“stay on the streets of this town and they’ll be carvin’ you up, alright”

“big town’s got it’s losers, small town’s got it’s vices…”

Me and my ole lady talk sometimes about needing to become the stable and reliable presence for my children like you know my grandparents were for us. The people who stay together through the hard knock times and don’t change their phone number or chase any fadgadget latest thang bandwagons or move all the time. My smalltown grandfolks mostly raised me. They disapproved of my makeup, my nose ring, my early jailhouse tattoos, my dropping out, my many girlfriends, my underage drinking, all that kinda stuff, but the fridge was always full and I was always welcome, they had a bed in the basement and heat in the winter, hot showers and A/C in the summers. They always had a big garden that fed many neighbors and a deep freeze and many basement shelves full of stuff to feed a family of ten or twenty whenever my aunts or cousins, or kids and me felt like visiting. My grandfather would always take me on long car rides to look at cows and white buffalo and lecture me about how I needed to “learn computers” because the monopolies were going to destroy the mom and pops. Of course, he was right. He wanted me to become a car dealer and my compliant country clubbin’ golf lovin’  cousins who took over the business rather than me cause I could literally just not “play ball” drove it into the ground in just a couple of years. He died in a veteran’s home when my ex wife was breaking up with me and taking my kids across country without my permission, but she was rich and I was poor, plus she had the gender card which is better than any backstage pass. “Membership has it’s privileges” and as a member of the ruling class-she has The Master Card. All I got’s a hand fulla jokers. My protective WW2 vet grandfather’s sad passing was followed soon by my grandmother, broken hearted, hard drinking, much beloved aunt, many uncles, all their neighbors who I’d known all my life. My ex did not even bother to give me the message my mom left about the neighbor’s funeral I was expected to be a pallbearer at, too busy shopping for new properties with a crunchy granola, khaki clad, bachelor #2. I was sadder than I can express when their other daughters sold the house I grew up in, after their deaths and shitcanned so much of my grandparent’s lifetime of cherished objects in their rush to go on vacations and spend the inheritance on new properties and my cousin’s rich wife’s desire for More Stuff. Her dad was a doctor so even though my cousin was a car dealer, it’ll likely never be Good Enough. What kinda madness is this bullshit? Everywhere you look it is sourfaced sisters competing for the old people’s inheritance. My grandma died while my spouse was pregnant. Smalltown hospital almost killed my spouse with doctor refusing to see her forcing her to drive two hours to a better emergency room where they immediately performed an emergency appendectomy saving her and our baby, and the crooked smalltown hospital that had already sewn 13 bandages inside my grandmother during a botched surgery, they still send creditors after us, for our showing up, even though no service was provided other than some unqualified nurse telling us her ’bout to burst appendectomy as “probably just gas”, these capitalist pigs want us to PAY THEM $5000 for jeopardizing my wife and child’s lives. Thoroughly indoctrinated suckass suckups just wanna praise these evil tv doctors and Merck and Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson some more. I had to leave the Midwest, it was preposterously, insufferably, punishingly oppressive, if you aint some preppie golf playing motherfucker, which I am not. The Midwest is all about keeping us slaves in the itchy polyester uniforms and the wet aprons for minimum wage forty hours a week forever. Or mass incarcerated for non violent reefer offenses and once they get you in the system, you’ll be getting probation violated, fined, frisked, piss tested, spied on, and kept under heavy manners for the rest of your days, smalltown screws hounded several of my old friends into the grave. If you’re poor, all you get’s a hairnet, a timesheet, and a fuck you punch in the eye, just cause. You shoulda been a preppie golf playing motherfucker.

Peter McCullough, MD MPH on Twitter: “Neither Dr Victory nor Dr Drew were surprised with this announcement by the World Council for Health for a global recall of all the mandated products for alarming numbers of excess deaths shortly after administration. https://t.co/JIAknierOS” / Twitter

“As always while liberals & left collaborators celebrate, “the so-called climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act…are nothing to celebrate for Black and Indigenous communities. ” (-Ajamu Baraka)https://” (-Ajamu Baraka)reduction-act-less-climate-bill-and-more-poison-pill-black-and-indigenous-communities

Why the Inflation Reduction Act is Less a “Climate Bill” and More a Poison Pill for Black and Indigenous Communities and Movements | Black Agenda Report

Revealed: Documents Show Bill Gates Has Given $319 Million to Media Outlets (mintpressnews.com)

Abby Martin & Mike Prysner join the show! (callin.com)

Ghost Stories of Capitalism: Mental Health is a Class Issue (substack.com)

“Democrats pass bills that are written by corporate lobbyists & then falsely claim these bills are a “win” for the people.” (-Ryan Knight)

Young Americans Who Go Hungry – Consortium News

Polls Show Almost No One Trusts US Media, After Decades of War Propaganda and Lies – Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces about Venezuela and beyond

I LIVE BY THE RIVER…SOMEDAY A REAL RAIN’S GONNA FALL

The perpetually alarmist crazy hermit down the block is running around like Chicken Little or Noah, warning everybody we all need to rush down to the fairground in the nearby town to retrieve some emergency sandbags because they say there is gonna be seven inches of rain falling on the town this weekend and my part of town always floods, which is why is is sortof laughably extra ridiculous that the kkkops and kkkode enforcement spend so much time and town resources on badgering old hermits for having too many cars or rocks or old metal signs on their properties, cause this creepy local developer’s master plan to gentrify the field by the waste treatment center is a fool’s errand. I live in a 53 year old disintegrating leaky trailer a couple blocks from the river and the garage out back where I’ve stashed my few remaining souvenirs and possessions of sentimental value is doubtlessly gonna get soaking wet later today so I threw a tarp over the clothes rack and positioned some buckets underneath the holes in the ceiling from the sun warped wood. High winds blew off the shingles, the elements are becoming ever more brutal. Media fearmongers endlessly about carbon emissions while simultaneously propagandizing for the War Machine causing the harm and the exact same One Percent Shady Asshole Billionaires who fly around on private jets all day, fucking up the environment some more. So whenever these same evil fuckheads say they’re gonna somehow fix it, with their geoengineering, and mutated mosquitoes, and cloned lab meats, and GMO vegetables, and microchipped cashless society “FOR SCIENCE”, I kinda don’t believe them. We might be having to relocate in the near future and that seems fraught with a lot of work and worry, risk, and uncertainty, especially in immobilizing, high gas prices, jackedup groceries and preposterous rent, perilous times such as these, where every last tv programmed selfish propertarian asshole feels just not only entitled but almost obliged to overcharge the lowly slaves for ripoff rents like their higherup Vanguard and BlackRock Davos monopolist fascist techlords do. Mainstream headlines have just admitted that Bill Gates wrote much of the latest Biden administration legislature and while his corporate media,  P.R. puppets praise him and Biden all day, that can’t be real good news for any of us poor people at the bottom. 

JOE BIDEN I.R.S.

What d’ya think about Gropey Joe adding a million IRS agents, you know they said during their big profits Covid snatch n grab they wanted to be able to spy on all your transactions as a way of ushering in their cashless society Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab fascist reset bullshit, but a lot of people still think Pelosi and Schumer are some kinda proper and polite social justice champions since they did a photo op with the Kenta cloth, even though, they just relentlessly continue fucking over poor people and coup-ing whoever they want, in the words of Oligarchy hipster Elon Musk.

Police Lied to Search Breonna Taylor’s Home – Consortium News

Revolutionary Blackout Network�� (@SocialistMMA) / Twitter

If You Support NATO, You Are RIGHT WING Watch Now –> https://youtu.be/R58IPOROrh8

Exposing the neocon ‘right-wing populism’ scam, from Trump to Tucker Carlson – YouTube

The Grayzone on Twitter: ““The weapons are stolen, the humanitarian aid is stolen, we have no idea where the billions sent to this country have gone” Ukrainian army vets and US volunteers tell @LindseySnell & @CoryPopp how Kiev plundered aid, endangered civilians and lost the war https://t.co/W6cV6O5I1q” / Twitter

GUITAR TOWN

Way back when we discovered Steve Earle, I used to think he’d discover me cause we had some shit in common. Ha. Did not work out that way at all. Even the motherfuckers who KNOW pretend they don’t know. 

“The years long Russiagate investigation is responsible for ordinarily sensible people losing their minds. Hardly anyone recalls that the charge of collusion was actually disproven, that Robert Mueller only indicted for process crimes, such as those which occur when people let down their guard and talk to the FBI. Most Americans who know the name Paul Manafort think he was a Russian spy but don’t know that he went to jail for tax and bank fraud. Propaganda works very well when it is repeated over and over again.

Worse than the silly Trump inspired derangement is the way that those who call themselves left or progressive have chosen to defend federal law enforcement and bad legislation like the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act is a relic from the earliest days of the cold war, and Woodrow Wilson’s infamous Palmer Raids which targeted the left for persecution and prosecution. Barack Obama used it more than all previous presidents combined in order to prosecute journalists who published what the state didn’t want us to know. As for the FBI, its Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO, created dissension in the liberation movement, targeted individuals for prosecution, spied on Martin Luther King and told him to commit suicide, and killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark among others. The FBI continues to use informants to entrap Black people in phony terror cases.” (-Margaret Kimberly at Black Agenda Report)

“I’m supposed to believe that a government currently flirting with global nuclear extinction was trying to “keep us safe” from covid…really?” (-Garland Nixon)

 “What is amazing is that there are still people out there who really believe the U.S. is supporter of democracy & that democrats are somehow different than republicans on these issues.” (-Ajamu Baraka)

“What is the ‘noble cause’ for which you sent our country to war?  (-Cindy Sheehan)

Trump Derangement Syndrome Returns | Black Agenda Report

The Chris Hedges Report Podcast: John Kiriakou (substack.com)

Conspiratainment Bingo! “New World Next Week” with James Corbett and James Evan Pilato – Activist Post

“I spend so much time
Believing all the lies
To keep the dream alive

Now it makes me sad
It makes me mad at truth
For loving what was you”

(-Billy Idol)

DEATH IS EVERYWHERE

   Man, two of my old goth girlfriends are appearing in a movie someone is making about the midwestern punk scene in the 1980’s. When I think of Depeche Mode and New Order and The Cure and Peter MurphyEinstürzende Neubauten logos painted in silver on black, dry ice, and all that eighties new wave music from 120 Minutes, I think of them. We were pen pals for years, our envelopes decorated with Morrissey and Martin Gore lyrics and Black Sharpie Spider Illustrations, and me and my other rocker dude friends we’d try to travel to Ft. Wayne in our extra shitty vehicles to visit them every Sunday night we could at a goth bar called Seventh Level to see bands like Die Kreuzen or Defenestration. “I’ve got to get to you first…before they do, it’s just a question of time, before they get their hands on you, and make you just like the rest, I’ve got to get to you first…” Always a real cool time, a dozen rosaries and fishnet and safety pins, underage booze in the parking lot, leather jackets, cigarettes, too much eye makeup and shyly holding hands. Dancing to a Robert Smith lookalike named Terry who spun like 12 inch dance remixes off Ministry and Specimen and shit. One of those chicks used to get drunk on vodka and cry a lot about her dead friends and loved ones, end up vomiting…JUST LIKE ME. I used to think we were soul mates. Vomit wet kiss! Hoo hoo!  Me and those punk girls were were all bonded by our grief related depressions and mutual appreciations of hard liquor. One loved Blixa Bargeld, the Thompson Twins, and anything black, androgynous or rebellious and defiant. The other one loved Prince and Iggy and Arcadia and became my dearest most trusted advisor and confidante for years and lovingly made me beautiful handsewn new romantic clothes for the stage that I’d always end up vomiting on from pre show jitters. Lotta vomiting back then cause those girls and their frenzied, combat booted Ft. Wayne punk crew were hardcore partiers, and me and the lads we kept like a full bar on the front porch of my band house until the hellion motorcycle cowboy moved in and initially sorta became our road manager, before eventually being promoted to Future Cobalt Stargazer In Training. Those two chicks were the twin queens of the scene the movie is about. I can’t wait to see it-one of ’em’s flying back into Indiana tonight to get filmed for the documentary and the other one’s already filmed her part. I wonder whatever happened to black leather Vickie, another fishnet legged ultra vixen who I can still see so brightly in my mind…I can see her hairdo, her vivid smile, red lipstick, pack of Dunhills, maybe the scent of cloves…I seem to remember I had a series of these fast forwarding, fleeting intimacies with various Ft. Wayne punkers-all us outsider kids would connect on the sidewalk and get close like almost instantly only to never see each other again, just a fading memory of the briefest of vodka blurry goth parking lot deeply cherished moments in the car while quoting Ian Curtis, immediate soul baring kinda friendships. Those were better times. I got along smashingly with Hope Nichols from Fetchin’ Bones-she had a real Janis Joplin heartfelt soul singer appeal, we were like peas in a pod. We saw so many good and exceptionally entertaining bands play there. Pixies first album, Flaming Lips first album. Trash Brats first cassette. Primitive Baptist Church playing Modern Lovers covers. Elvis Hitler, Chainsaw Kittens, on and on and on and on, which side are you on?

I was supposed to be in a couple of movies that never came out. One was about the English rock group Thee Hypnotics who I met their first night in the USA, USA! Where I live now, there are almost no women and very few young people-some nutty supposedly psychic new age pitbull widows, and Miner Fortyniner Ok Corral lookin’ old ranchers, grizzled cowboys, weird hermits, rightwing survivalist militias. You know the weirdest part is how these old crazies give me a LOT less shit than any of the safespace shitlibs of the Pacific Northwest, or ignorant middle class fratboy fauxhipsters of the flyover states. Mostly, people don’t even see me, I’m almost invisible here. I carry a stick on the trails, cowboy hat, nobody is trying to really make me shut the fuck up, like they always did in privileged gentrification enclaves where the local gentry all inherited rental properties and hipster popularity businesses, so they become real fanatical about guarding their turf, making sure no lowlife outsiders cast a shadow on their Fauntleroy Limelite, Suck-Pop derivative, Parents Paid-For Fame Thrones. 

   People I knew are always dyin’ now. Feels like a graveyard. I wanted to get stamps to send you a postcard, but the post office closes at noon. A rainy Thursday, ya know since I got lockedout of social media by the pro war deep state, I don’t really hear much from nobody. Most mornings I don’t even get an email except from like the Sunglasses Hut. I worry about my wife and kids, my teeth, my mom, my friends, and the future. Noooo future for me. Bill Gates and Jamie Dimon and Joe Biden’s weapon making friends are havin’ a ball, though. A creepy Eyes Wide Shut ball, where the servants all have to wear covid masks, and the zillionaires roll around naked in their filthy lucre. The media still do stories everyday pretending like somebody is still investigating the Jeffrey Epstein island but only the Maxwell chick is lockedup-none of the ruling class jet set predator male millionaires. 

Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act “Secretly” Brought To You By Bill Gates – Activist Post

https://www.activistpost.com/

Those Angry at Rushdie’s Stabbing Have Been Missing In Action Over a Far Bigger Threat to our Freedom (mintpressnews.com)

The Shadow Bank That Owns The World (mintpressnews.com)

Jeffrey Epstein – MintPress News

Kim Iversen: What I Would Have Asked Fauci If I’d Been Allowed to Interview Him • Children’s Health Defense (childrenshealthdefense.org)

IF EVERYONE IS KING THEN NO ONE IS

The concept of “wealth hoarding” has gained traction in the wake of the Occupy movement and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, the idea being that billionaires are amassing treasure like mythical dragons in the same way someone with a hoarding disorder amasses newspapers or clothes.

It’s an understandable way of looking at the problem. The capitalist class is indeed grabbing up a greater and greater percentage of the wealth that’s being generated by the working class, and it just doesn’t make sense that someone would need billions of dollars when you can only drive one car at a time, wear one pair of pants at a time, eat one meal at a time, etc.

For normal people, the idea of wealth is associated with security, so once your family’s needs are met and their future is secure it’s hard to understand the impulse to keep amassing wealth far beyond that point without it being driven by some kind of compulsive neurosis. The fact that they pour so much money and energy into manipulating political systems to ensure they aren’t forced by taxation to share more of their wealth with the public makes them look even more like compulsive hoarders.

But this notion of vast wealth as a hoarding behavior misses the mark. And no, it isn’t because billionaires are awesome beneficent job creators whose wealth is being used by banks to grant people loans for homes and businesses and making the world a wonderful place to live.

It doesn’t work to think of the very rich as wealth hoarders because what they are doing has very little in common with the behavior of a compulsive hoarder. A compulsive hoarder gains nothing from their behavior, which generally ends up being self-destructive and socially alienating. It costs them everything, and gives them nothing. Their behavior is born of neurosis, and is entirely irrational.

The so-called wealth hoarders are not amassing wealth at the expense of others out of neurosis, and the motives driving their behavior are perfectly rational. They’re just a lot more depraved and a lot more uncomfortable to think about.

The ruling class continually extracts wealth from the public not so that they can become wealthier than they already are, but to keep the public from having that wealth. They’re not worried that they’ll be unable to support their needs in the future if they don’t extract another billion dollars, they just understand that the wealthier everyone else gets, the less their own wealth matters. They’re not wealth-hoarding, they’re wealth-obstructing.

Wealth is a zero-sum game, as is its good friend power. The more power everyone else has, the less power our current rulers would have over us. This is why so much energy goes into ensuring that votes have as little effect as possible on the operations of the state and making sure everything stays the same no matter what the public wants.

Imagine if ordinary people started having as much influence over the direction human civilization will take as war profiteers, oil tycoons, globalized wage slavers and Silicon Valley plutocrats. Imagine if the working class had enough disposable income to begin funding grassroots political campaigns, building their own media networks, or even funding think tanks and NGOs to advance their own interests like plutocrats do today. Imagine if everyone could afford to work less and relax more, and finally start learning about what’s really going on in the world.

Wealth is meaningless if everyone is wealthy. Power is meaningless if everyone has power. The kings of our day have a vested interest in keeping everyone poor and powerless, because if everyone is king, then no one is king.

This is why our status quo systems work the way they work, and this is why you see a convergence of interests from such groups as corporate plutocrats, plutocrat-owned politicians and media, the arms industry, and military and intelligence agencies. These groups all have a vested interest in preserving the status quo and the ability to put that agenda in place, so they’ve fallen into a natural, de facto alliance with each other toward that end.

Workers around the world: lost $3.7 trillion in the pandemic
Billionaires around the world: gained $3.9 trillion in the pandemic

It’s the biggest one-year wealth transfer in history, yet somehow barely anyone is talking about it.

— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) March 25, 2021

It’s why we’ve seen a historic upward transfer of wealth during the Covid pandemic, with billionaires raking in trillions while ordinary people struggle with unemployment and soaring prices. And it’s why that transfer of wealth has been happening for decades since long before Covid. In a system where money is power and power is relative, a ruling class naturally emerges which needs to suppress the wealth and power of its subjects in order to continue to rule.

Rulers do not historically give up their rule voluntarily, so we can expect this continual pattern of wealth obstruction via wealth extraction to continue until people get tired of being kept poor and powerless by those who benefit from their poverty and disempowerment and use the strength of their numbers to force the emergence of a more equitable system. We can also expect our rulers to do everything in their power to prevent this from happening, including propagandizing the public into accepting the status quo and believing that anything better is impossible.

Drastic change in the not-too-distant future does seem to be inevitable, though, if only because we’re headed toward environmental collapse or nuclear winter if we don’t rise to the revolutionary occasion first. Humanity’s self-destructive patterning is in a race with our better angels, and right now it’s anybody’s race.(-Caitlin Johnstone)

THE GOOD OLE FLAME

   Growing up in this crazy world, me and a few of my lifetime’s closest friends and much loved allies had so much fuckedup shit happen to us, it affected us all differently, but we were all altered, permanently impacted by those shared experiences. Some of ’em are on different paths, different trips, different realities, different frequencies, now. I spoke to one of my most loved friends on the phone about a week ago. He’s real serious now. Has a lot of responsibility. I could still hear some faint traces of the person I remember, though. Another old favorite, he’s still the same like in the Bob Seger song, “Still The Same”-just looks a lot older, not quite beyond recognition, just ravaged by all the decades of improbably rough livin’ and the road years take their toll on one’s appearance, but no other discernible change is present, whatsoever. Might as well be 1987. His primary source of joy was always louder music, harder highs, faster car speeds, more women, his drug of choice was always just more. I probably relate to him the most. We can’t really collaborate or work together like we used to, because even though he is still a wild wolf, full blast and never surrender all night ramblin’ man, footloose and fancy free, never settled down at all, not even for a day, I have had to put my children’s welfare and well-being first, for a long time, there’s not been that space or surplus for late night moon howlin’ like there used to be. I can’t just be lightin’ off for the horizon no more, like  we used to when he remembers, me n him on a single bicycle, in the snow, fleeing some ragingl, irrationally drunk woman who was throwing bottles at us like Carrie Fisher in the Blues Brothers or some shit…and man, oh man, did we ever have some times together. I ain’t seen him in about fifteen, maybe even sixteen years, since my old lady was pregnant with our teenage kid. Had to tell ‘im we’re too broke and hardup to have any visitors nowadays. We’re in the hard struggle. Barely gettin’ by, our cupboard is bare, no free beer party here. We can hardly afford toilet paper or razors, all my socks have holes in ’em. Some of the others, ya know I carry ’em all around with me, everyday, year in and year out, like a bag of bricks burdensome heavy weight from the past, but I can not really relate to them at all anymore, and my endeavor is to sortof emotionally release them, not need nuthin’ from ’em, not look for some kinda “everybody loves a happy ending” reunion with ’em, no more. Sometimes, I can’t really help it, though. I’m always dreamin’, always was a dreamer, always tried to make it all happen for everybody. Rocknroll and the good times, you know what I mean. “and you’re still tryin a have fun…”

Life is too short, as Peggy Lee sang, “might as well break out the booze and have a ball”. The ruling class billionaires who wrecked the environment, and economy, and any hope for  a decent standard of living or quality of life here, who do these richman for profit wars for no noble reason, they have all the bioweapons labs and pharmaceutical company stock and manufacture more fuckin hightech weapons and surveillance tech to control us all, if not kill us outright, they don’t have to do any of that, they choose to do all that because they are sociopathic tyrants. I noticed that some of my other online columns are being blocked somehow. For us it’s a big fuck you, for the self congratulating greedhead Fauntleroys podcasting live from their oversized white mama mansions high on the hills, for them, 

it’s like an endless party…

BOBBY CLOYD FOREVER! (RIP)

He was a real rock ‘n roller. He loved music. We loved him – RIP Bobby Cloyd | By WATERSHED (facebook.com)

He was one of my nearest and dearest soul brothers.

DAN DENTON BLUE COLLAR GOSPEL HOUR

Up early on a rainy day, spazzy cats are annoying me by loudly and recklessly running around all crazy and knocking stuff offa counters like they got some sugar spike from their food. Nothing really goin’ on with me. I hear all the neighbor’s dogs barking because some registered sex offender McMansion building fly by night developer, his ten dollar an hour minions, plus big shiny vehicle code enforcement and the kkkops and surveyors keep creeping around in our back alleyway every morning and will not tell the home owners why, all we know is they’ve been targeting some older hermit hoarder for having too much found object art on his property and stacks of rocks and cactus and old vintage metal signs and shit. The McMansion builder creepster and his real estate cronies imagine they can gentrify the waste treatment floodzone area. That’s all the excitement we got here in the dead dull desert. Rich people keep displacing the poor, while the middle class shrug and look the other way and read happy headlines about how Bill Gates is writing their puppet politician’s big business benefitting shitty policies that they hawk as some kinda “BFD” victory for the environment or the poor, but it’s always all fucking total bullshit-you will always know it’s an extra heap of bad bullshit, whenever they think they should bring classy droner Obama back outta his plantation mansion to help sell some fuckedup shit. Like he did when the professional athletes wanted to go on strike to protest kkkops killin’ all the black people everyday, or when the politicians of Michigan helped poison Flint, or when they wanted to rebrand Bush/Cheney fabricated, imperialist “war on terror” as hip and progressive, or when BP dumped all that oil into the Gulf. Shit’s real bad when they call in their secret weapon phony baloney Obama to make all those dense NPR listening, middle class people feel good. Mostly the masses we call the shitlibs stay exclusively focused on consumerism, acquisition, vanity brand building, and boring and tedious old reignited culture war diversions. 

    My teenager was so super stoked and excited about the finale of “Better Call Saul” and the trailer for the new season of “Cobra Kai” all day yesterday, he stayed up all night in nervous anticipation. I got some kinda digital microphone with a good echo on it and am hoping to get my old lady to help me rerecord an old song I rewrote with it. Can’t do anything like that when the kid is awake, though. Still astounds me how so many piss pond music scenesters are always so willing and able to divert so many funds and resources to propping up all the same old/same old, say nothing, so what, imitator franchise clone, trust fund suburbanite, middle class hipsters who don’t even really care about music or have anything to say, they just throw their having a fake band and some bullshit cd’s somebody else paid for, on to their already toppling towers, their special privilege, prestige and property piles, stackedup in the spare rooms of their mama mansions, I find them worse than appalling, they’re like these insatiable Narcissistic Little Jared Kushner/Hunter Biden motherfuckers, but with Nirvana t shirts. So yeah, fuck yeah, man. I’m still depressed about all that shit, trying not to go back to cigarette smoking. I looked in on my buddy Dan the blue collar poet from Toledo, who I don’t get to interact with as much, since being purged from social media by Zuckbot censorers. Aint he somethin’? Not only is he a fantastic writer and kindred spirit, but he’s a right the fuck on, working class hero, courageous union man, been working in factories in the Midwest for decades. I really feel for him, cause those fucked up, dehumanizing factories really wore out and killed summa my old homeboys. I lasted less than a day(!!!) when my stepdad pulled strings with one of his golf buddies to get me a job at the rubber plant, the one where the guitarist of the local Metallica coverband lost his hand. I could not drive the forklift which was the cherry, sought-after, prestigious spot the other workers preferred, and they all wanted to kill me already, cause just walking up the mile long sidewalk from the parking lot, the hillbillies had mistaken me for a chick and embarrassed themselves with some misplaced catcalls and wolf whistles, cause way back then, I was about 27 I guess, I still had my last good Johnny Thunders shag haircut with the razor cut bangs and shit and a chick had broken up with me for some  popular dude and I was so depressed about it I dropped like thirty pounds instantly, almost overnight, so I suppose from far away, I would have appeared significantly less butch hetero-masculine than all the old workers. So yeah I got truck loads of compassion for Dan Denton, we lived in some of the same kinda dead end, no hope, dream killin’, white trash hell holes. If you love Bukowski, check out Dan’s books. He’s on Punk Hostage Press. And Oh Yeah, If you see Iris, tell her I said hello.

The Blue Collar Gospel Hour on Apple Podcasts

Dropped Cigarette Butts and Methadone Clinic Daydreams (substack.com)

www.punkhostagepress.com 

“The “Bernie bros” was some creative propaganda that played right into the race pimps in the democrat party & diverted people away from the issues that needed to be debated. People forget that me and Jill ran on a Green New Deal platform that was stolen & gutted by AOC.” (-Ajamu Baraka)

“There is a disturbing trend where the politicians (both Democrat and Republican) who sold out our communities at every turn are criminalizing homelessness instead of providing public housing & healthcare. They’re criminalizing the problems that their corporatist policies created.” (-Ryan Knight)

“FYI—Liz Cheney opposed the Voting Rights Act, min wage increase, Equality Act, Equal Rights Amendment, George Floyd Act, BBB, Infrastructure bill, Inflation Reduction Act, $35 Insulin bill, Women’s Health Protection Act, anti-gas price gouging bill—& voted w/Trump 93% of the time.”

(-Qasim Rashid, Esq.)

BEER FOR BREAKFAST

Man I always thought this was a startlingly cool blog. All the coolest shit. And that fanzine from Australia.

Beer For Breakfast: 2013 (beer-for-breakfast.blogspot.com)

Vicious Kitten Records (australianrockshow.com)

Vicious Kitten RecordsAfter a hiatus of 18 years, Australia’s Vicious Kitten Records has been relaunched. The first release is a 7″ single by NYC punk legend Kevin K – who has teamed up with Ricky Rat (Trash Brats / Dead Boys) on a hard hitting Ramones-like anthem called ‘Identity Crisis’.www.australianrockshow.com

If you like good music, this is another cool mag. Most people seemed to have forgotten what real rocknroll was always all about. They turned it all into corporate bummer buzzkill grunge/alternative or like that awful, bad for you, toxic Aspartame laced MK Ultra fake-pop.  The I-94 Bar – Real Rock Action from Sydney, Australia, via The Bowery and The Motor City (i94bar.com)

The I-94 Bar – Real Rock Action from Sydney, Australia, via The Bowery and The Motor CityGetting ripped, and not ripped off, in Ocean County. Written by The Barman on 04 August 2022.. Wasteland Blues – O.C. Rippers (Ruined Records). Ocean County, New Jersey, is a 40-minute drive from the Ashbury Park foreshore of Bruce Springsteen and a million miles from his $5000 concert tickets.The same goes for the music of O.C. Rippers, whose 16-song “Wasteland Blues” album is a million …www.i94bar.com

…and who paid for the raid? | Black Agenda Report

…and who paid for the raid? | Black Agenda ReportDo you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles. Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can. Donateblackagendareport.com

ROCK PRESS IS DEAD IN USA USA

They talk about the year that punk broke but it was really the year they broke punk. I do not consider corporate Alternative or Mickey Mouse lapdancers punk, at all. Fuck that Foo Fighters phony fucking unlistenable bullshit. Yungblud, Avril Lavigne, Machine Gun Kelly, Lil Nas X, that’s some fuckin toxic manufactured bullshit from the pit. It’s been proven how Rolling Stone and Spin are controlled opposition operated by the usual assortment of Langley spooks and pissedoff ex/fake/bullshit depopulation and police atate agenda-promoting shitlib mouthpieces of the Davos ruling kkklass. Got Mines and Airbandb owners don’t wanna know what’s really happening out here where the wild winds blow, they just love the comforting, soothing tones of fucking NPR and Democracy Now, even though it’s all been hijacked, infiltrated and weaponized by the donor class and billionaire secret society oligarchs. There really aint that much Real Rocknroll to really write about in USA, USA, nowadays. Think about it-there’s no real underground anymore, it costs too much, only people making music that aint controlled are the same old dogshit rich people. Of course I yearn ever so fondly for my long lost eighties when there was so much good new music being made, the news stands had like twenty different print magazines about rocknroll every month and that aint even counting like the teenybopper mags of black music mags. Fuck Rolling Stone. I like Matt Taibbi but they never even stood up for Michael Hastings, their own writer who was assassinated by the secret police for embarrassing a Democrat and a general. (RIP) Research Vault 7. So sad.

Establishment smear merchants The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone and their perceptible intelligence ties – The Grayzone

TV is bad for you. Don’t watch that brainwash batshittery. There’s Something Terribly Wrong With “Euphoria” | The Vigilant Citizen

IT’S UP TO YOU NOT TO HEED THE CALL UP….STOP BEING A DUMFUCKERY DUMBFUCK MOTHERFUCKIN’ CHEERLEADER FOR BILLIONAIRE WARS!

Modern US Warmongering Is Scaring Henry Kissinger (substack.com)

“I hated women so much I wanted them to have an anti-war, pro-abortion, GreenNewDeal, feminist choice.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)

FBI Raid & Much More (Eleanor Goldfield & Lee Camp) (rumble.com)

‘Near-Perfect Detection:’ World Economic Forum Pushes AI Censorship of Online Speech (breitbart.com)

“Biden barely campaigned at all, made a bunch a promises, hasn’t kept one, shuffles around spouting threats that could trigger world war, and has Americans circling the drain.  His oligarchy donors are doing great, however.  He’s a constant embarrassment to hardworking Americans.”

(-Richard Caugh1 on Twitter)

“Imagine wanting to be a cop as a kid, wanting to grow up and get into the police academy so you can fight crime and bad guys, and then you get there and you find out the whole job is writing tickets and destroying homeless encampments.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)

“The US gov has been working to declare anyone who speaks the truth about the proxy war in Ukraine an “information terrorist” and possibly even prosecute them as war criminals!” (-Lee Camp) 

“You have to give Democrats a little credit here for conditioning their followers to think they’re actually fighting “fascism” while kicking third parties off ballots, taking even more corporate money than the GOP, and passing the highest military budget in history. You delivered for the military industrial complex, Big Oil companies, Wall Street, and the ruling class. U.S. under Biden & Democrat-led Congress: ✅ Passed biggest military budget in history of $840 billion/year ✅ Passed a fake Climate Bill that expands fossil fuels ✅ Provoking war with China & Russia The party is a well-oiled propaganda machine for capitalism & imperialism.” (-Ryan Knight)

“When Kissinger, a criminal, is to the left of neoliberals & even substantial numbers of leftists on issue of Ukaine, it graphically demonstrates how far to the right the U.S. has moved.” (-Ajamu Baraka)

“At 99, Kissinger makes more sense on Ukraine than octogenarian US lawmakers, who push weapons not diplomacy. He says we are at the edge of war with Russia “without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.” (-Medea Benjamin)

“The US military is one of the largest polluters in the world, and it’s destroying our islands in Hawaiʻi. Visiting Maunakea yesterday, I heard explosions at Pohakuloa Training Area. They likely started this fire, which burned 700+ acres last night. We need demilitarization now.” (-Uahikea Maile)

“If you are a male & not supportive of the NATO war, not only are you subject to forced conscription but you can not even travel outside of the country legally now. I know this is falling on deaf ears in the West – but when are you going to call for an end to this war?” (-Ajamu Baraka)

WikiLeaks on Twitter: “The CIA plan to kill or kidnap @WikiLeaks Publisher and Journalist Julian Assange in London | @CBSNews #FreeAssangeNOW https://t.co/FbbkiJ1WfW” / Twitter

Glen Ford’s Ukrainian Crystal Ball | Black Agenda Report

WEF: The Future Of Work Is In The Metaverse – Activist Post

Rock Singer’s Fatal Brain Injury Caused by AstraZeneca Vaccine, Inquest Concludes • Children’s Health Defense (childrenshealthdefense.org)

Jeremy Scahill: WITH SOLEIMANI ASSASSINATION, TRUMP IS DOING THE BIDDING OF WASHINGTON’S MOST VILE CABAL – The Greanville Post https://cutt.ly/7XfI3rh

CIA ORGANIZED SECRET ARMY IN WESTERN EUROPE – The Washington Post

BONUS: Climate Solutions + A Mad God Destroys Hollywood | DOSED with Abby Martin (callin.com)

ESSAY AND PETITION: Massacre at Attica, The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, 1971 | Black Agenda Report

THE UNDISPUTED 80’s GOTH KING OF THE FUCKEDUP MIDWEST WAS NOT REZNOR OR WARREN.

YOU HAVE TO RESIST THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Ray McGovern [and Michael Wong] on the US/Russia/China Triangle and Danger of Nuclear War – Ray McGovern

Was the 2008 Financial Crisis Part of The Great Reset? • Children’s Health Defense (childrenshealthdefense.org)

CovertAction Bulletin – Don’t Let FBI’s Trump Raid Fool You: They’re Still Enemies of the People – CovertAction Magazine

More Skeletons in Obama’s Closet: Mass Grave in Lugansk, Ukraine Yields Over 200 Bodies – CovertAction Magazine

“Nancy Pelosi lives lavishly while her San Francisco district is plagued with homelessness that she criminalizes. She is wicked.” (-Jory Michah; M.A. Christian Doctrine & History)

SADLY, THIS IS WHAT HE GETS FOR SHEEPDOGGING FOR THE CORRUPT WALL STREET DNC SERVICES CORPORATION. NO ONE EVER WANTED GROPEY JOE.

Pathetically, Hillary Clinton Is Smearing Bernie Sanders as Sexist Again (jacobin.com)

Dick Cheney Was a Way More Effective “Threat to Our Republic” Than Donald Trump (jacobin.com)

When the Mob Tried to Whack Dennis Kucinich (jacobin.com)

CIA, Pompeo Sued For Alleged Spying On Assange Visitors (thedissenter.org)

We Always Knew the Dangers of NATO Expansion – Antiwar.com Original

Meet the veterans who chose ‘paths of dissent’ – Responsible Statecraft

Deborah Hrbek, #Assange US lawsuit: “I have the right to assume that the U.S. government is not listening to my private & privileged conversations with my clients, & that info about other clients & cases I may have on my phone or laptop is secure from illegal govt. intrusion”

Pompeo Sued Over Surveillance of Assange Visitors – Consortium News

conspiracy – The Corbett Report

WHEN I WAS A KID & THE PMRC FANATICS & CROOKED JUVIE JUDGES WERE BOOTCAMPING KIDS FOR HAIRSPRAY & BLACK T SHIRTS

At least we had the Cutting Edge Happy Hour and Headbanger’s Ball-ya know? The director of the CIA’s kid Miles Copeland managed his brother’s band, the Police and ran our favorite record label, I.R.S. Records who somewhat suspiciously signed all our favorite bands-The Go-Go’s, The Alarm, The Fleshtones, Bangles, Three O’Clock, etc etc Weren’t The Cramps and Concrete Blonde and Wall Of Voodoo even on that label? My memory aint what it should be, we used to party quite a bit back in the 80’s. The great and wonderful PETER ZAREMBA memorably hosted the Sunday night show that introduced a lot of Midwesterners to The Replacements and Mary Chain and Love & Rockets and REM and Alex Chilton, it was so glorious watching Peter’s improv skits filmed at Boardner’s on Cherokee my old street, I think, and showing us all these whacky interviews with people like Lone Justice, Zodiac Mindwarp and The Pogues and shit. What do kids today get? A lotta bullshit. Nikki Minaj and Taylor Swift. When we had a cable access tv show in Boston in the early 90’s, the director may have been thinking about camp horror movies and robot toys and sexy vampire girls, but me, I was channeling “The Young Ones” and Peter Zaremba’s after hours, blue whale guzzlin’, fun lovin’ hijinks on the Happy Hour! Long Live The FLESHTONES! Long Live the Go Gos! Long Live The Alarm!

Documentary | We Were Once Rebels

“Boy you better shut your mouth, I can’t afford the bail, now don’t go tellin’ secrets, this record’s gotta SALE!”

SING ALONG WITH ME!

SOME OF US ARE STILL REBELS….THIS IS A REBEL SONG! AND GOD BLESS SINEAD O’CONNOR! 

In Rebuke of the Dishonorable David Petraeus – Antiwar.com Original

Nancy Pelosi, White Supremacy, and China | Black Agenda Report

Biden Administration Readies About $800 Million in Additional Security Aid for Ukraine -Sources (usnews.com)

Antiwar.com

AS STOKELY CARMICHAEL TAUGHT US, “ORGANIZE! ORGANIZE! ORGANIZE!” …..BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE REVOLUTION, NOW IS THE TIME TO BOYCOTT PIG-MEDIA AND PLANT YOUR GARDENS, TRADE SEEDS, STOCK YOUR BASEMENTS, PREPARE FOR THE WORST, ORGANIZE YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD, AND EDUCATE YOUR PEOPLE! STAY WILD! STAY FREE! GOOD NIGHT & GOOD LUCK! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ShDbp3YlZw


Baby Let’s Twist, Memoirs of a Runaway Heart / Andy Shernoff interview

Baby Let’s Twist

Memoirs of a Runaway Heart

By Thomas ‘Thomaxe’ Goze

So that’s it, here I am sitting in this dive bar where I’ve already sat one too many nights, New York City of all places. This time is different though…this time all of a sudden everything seems to sort of make sense. I’m not sure how or why it is all coming together, but maybe it’s just that tonight Otto’s Shrunken Head has turned into an open-door, a vortex where worlds collide, as if trying to tell me “It’s alright buddy…have another one”.

On the small stage that can barely fit a full band I’m witnessing Andy Shernoff, one of my all-time favorite musician/songwriter, setting up alongside vocalist Tricia Scotti, and harmonica player Brian Hurd. The three of them are about to start playing the last show of their residency, marking the end of 4 weeks of unrehearsed impromptu acoustic performances of Andy’s latest songs as well as new takes on some of his Dictators classics. Oh, did I forget to mention that Mr. Shernoff was a founding member and most prolific songwriter for the legendary Dictators? Well, I figured you knew…

Sitting on my right is NYC’s underground rock artist JOff WilsOn (the man with a thousand never-recorded hit songs) who happens to also be my band mate since he brought me in his Bowery Boys on second guitar. Actually, I only ever had played punk bass on stage before meeting JOff…

But let me stop here for a minute before I go on with this story, and allow me to take you on a short journey through time…it will all make sense…I promise.

TX1

Years earlier:

I’m standing in front of the window of a small room I’m renting holding a used Gibson Les Paul that I just purchased with the little money I had left. I strap it up on my shoulder and plug it in a tiny 12 watts amp. I’ve never played guitar…except for the crappy acoustic I bought when I was a kid and could never really figure out what to do with. Later in my early 20’s I had picked up a bass at the encouragement of my good friend Dee Jaywalker (Definitivos, Marky Ramone & the Speedkings, etc…) who taught me my first songs so I could follow the path of my favorites: Dee Dee Ramone, Arthur Kane, and…Andy Shernoff…

See where I’m getting at now?

So standing by the window, looking down at the street, I press on the drive button of that amp and only with the knowledge of power chords I start playing… “I shuffle down the street, my eyes are on my feet…I got no place to go…”. The song is Stay With Me, written by Andy Shernoff for the Dictators.

And as I’m playing my first song on guitar, I see a car pulling out of the parking lot on the other side of the street. I kind of want it to stop, just to acknowledge the fact that I’m standing there, or maybe that I exist, yet I know it’s foolish…and I know it won’t.

So I just keep playing as I watch it drive away “…my heart is calling won’t you stay with me”. The car is my ex’s, she lived in the building next door, now she’s leaving to never return, and that’s fine.

The scene looks like it is out of a movie…I mean…what were the odds? The song choice makes sense…I guess I was playing it for a reason too, though I sure don’t want her to stay, but it still sucks. She’s nothing more than the reflection of my own bad choices and life failures. She was bad news, she was poison and all I wanted was to go cold turkey… so I got myself a guitar and here I am pretending I don’t care about anything else, and I think I really don’t.

I was born and raised in France, but I’m here, of all places, in New Paltz, NY. I don’t know it at the time, but that’s also where the Dictators met, and got started…

Is this beginning to make sense?

Back to present days, our scene at Otto’s:

Andy is about to start his set when I see Ramones producer/co-songwriter Daniel Rey pop his head in…he walks in my direction and sits next to me. He doesn’t know it but I got his band The Martinets signed to European label Tornado Ride Records a couple years earlier, I’ve seen them perform many times, they even played my birthday show 4 years earlier. I’m friends with their front man/Songwriter Eamonn, but just never introduced myself to Daniel. I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t speak much, unless it’s necessary.

The Shernoff trio starts playing and everything is making more and more sense…Andy, my first song on guitar, JOff who got me my first gig as a guitarist…and now Daniel Rey… who is credited for co-writing a version of Poison Heart with Dee Dee Ramone…who was an inspiration for coming from France to NYC and the reason why I joined my first band on bass in NY…The Gonedaddys, fronted by another Ramones collaborator/songwriter, Skinny Bones…

Andy keeps playing…it’s a great show and everyone is loving it…but what am I saying? It’s always a great time.

Since I learned my first song on guitar I have had the chance to see Shernoff perform on many occasions, solo and with his band the Master Plan. In fact, I even got the Master Plan signed to Tornado Ride/Nicotine Records the same way I did with the Martinets. I hadn’t gotten a chance to see him perform since his residency at the Lakeside Lounge a year ago, it was around the same time that my grandpa passed away, and on the eve of his funerals I had decided that-since I couldn’t be there and that he loved music so much- I would celebrate his memory by going to Andy’s show. That night he played a song he had written for his late mom, and it felt like it was for my grandpa too. Shortly after, it was the Lakeside Lounge that closed its doors forever.

So the show goes on and I’m sure of it now…Otto’s has turned for one night into some kind of a vortex…and under this new light it appears as if everything happened for a reason…ultimately leading all the way to here and now…

I just wish my old friend Dee Jaywalker could be amongst us…he took me under his wing after we met when he played lead guitar in Marky Ramone & the Speedkings. It was in France in 2002 just a few months after Dee Dee passed away, and that night I got invited on stage to sing one song; and then to join in the van for a few shows. Later Dee got me to pick up a bass, and then we organized Walter Lure’s first euro tour in 25 years back in 2007…and went on the road. So here I am thinking about him as he seems to be the only piece missing in right now here at Otto’s…

Then I look down, and smile…realizing that the leather jacket I’m wearing was a present from him…it used to be his own favorite…

The puzzle is now fully complete, all the pieces are in place, it just needs one final touch…so at the end of the show, as everyone is applauding and asking for more, I turn around towards Daniel Rey…pull up my sleeve, and show him the tattoo on my left wrist (I got it there so that I could see it whenever I’d play)… “I thought you’d appreciate it” I tell Daniel; he looks at it and smiles…It reads “Poison Heart”.

As I step out the door and start walking in the cold to catch a subway back home, I realize I’m feeling OK…because I may have been born with a runaway heart…but it sort of got me somewhere after all…

Thomas Goze, NYC

https://www.facebook.com/thomas.goze.9

Where are they now:

Dee Jaywalker: After touring/recording extensively with Marky Ramone, Dee Jaywalker played with his solo band and later joined Walter Lure on guitar for a Euro tour/record in 2007. Since then Dee started playing again with Belgian legendary punk rock band The Definitivos who got reunited. He also performs with his Rockabilly band The Greyhounddogs. https://www.facebook.com/dee.jaywalker

Skinny Bones: After the critically acclaimed release of his Gonedaddys album Shot My TV, Skinny Bones embarked on a successful euro tour ending at the Ramones museum in Germany. The Gonedaddys have been on hold since but Skinny- who is working as a sound engineer- keeps writing/recording music when his busy schedule permits and is planning more in the near future.

JOff WilsOn: JOff plays live in NYC on a weekly basis might it be with The Bowery Boys or with various well respected musicians of the Lower East Side. He is planning to finally record some of his songs this year. https://www.facebook.com/joff.wilson1, www.theboweryboysnyc.com

Daniel Rey: Daniel just finished recording a new album with the Martinets who are currently looking for an appropriate label to do the release. https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Martinets

And as for Andy Shernoff….read it from the man himself:

AShernoff

-So Andy, You just finished a month residency of acoustic shows at Otto’s Shrunken Head, and already booking more clubs. Can you tell us how this all started and what is the idea behind it?

I’m a songwriter and the only way for me to know if a song connects with people is to play it live. It’s a bit nerve-wracking playing new songs in public but what makes you uncomfortable also allows you to grow. That was the purpose of the Otto’s residency. Overall, I’m going through a very difficult transformation from a bass player known for aggressive punk and hard rock to an acoustic singer/songwriter ….or as I like to call myself the ‘insensitive singer -songwriter’ so I’m constantly putting myself in uncomfortable situations.

-How did you meet Tricia and Brian with whom you’ve recently been playing?

We travel in the same music circles and have many mutual friends

-Last year you released a 7inch, how, when and were was it recorded?

You are referring to “Are You Ready To Rapture”. I recorded an intricate demo at home where I mapped out all the parts. Then I tracked it at Headgear studios in Williamsburg using my demo as a guide. I overdubbed in my home studio and then mixed it at Headgear with John Agnello who’s an old school Record Plant engineer but is now an indie rock kingpin producer

-One of the songs was written with Joey Ramone, was it ever recorded before?

I recorded numerous demos with Joey over the years. Some made it to Ramones records while others like the song you are referring to, “Make Me Tremble” was simply not appropriate for The Ramones. However I thought the tune was really cool and showed a different, softer side of Joey that should be heard. I wanted to put it on my single so I approached the people who handle Joey’s estate and they were kind enough to let me use it. We ran into a problem was we couldn’t find the master tapes. We had to use the rough mix I had on DAT tape so we couldn’t remix it. The version you hear is what we walked out of the studio on that day in the early 90’s.

-Can you tell us a little bit about your friendship with Joey?

Joey was a sweetheart. We had a common bond in music and growing up in Queens. When I first met him he was very shy and awkward but as The Ramones grew in stature he became more confident and assertive. He had a sly sense of humor and severe case of OCD, which has been documented in several books. At the time everybody I knew was weird so he was just another in my collection of weirdo friends. I think Joey made the world a better place by demonstrating that outsiders and weirdos can contribute to society…. and Joey definitely made the world a better place.

-You also wrote with Dee Dee, how was he to work with?

Dee Dee was probably the most amazing character I ever met in my life. He was certifiably schizophrenic, literally a different person every day. One day he was your best friend and the next day he thought you were plotting against him.

He was the most spontaneous artist I ever met, capable of writing a great song on demand.

I call him the idiot savant of rock and roll…. in the Ramones he was an absolute genius but outside of the band he had a hard time getting through life.

-Tell us about your latest hit, the Are You Ready To Rapture…what inspired you to write the song? Is it pissing some people off?

I was ignorant of the Rapture growing up. The only person I knew who believed Jesus was returning to Earth was the crazy preacher standing on a box in Times Square screaming at everybody to repent for their sins because the end was nigh.

A few years ago I became fascinated with evangelicals. I saw these people entering politics and trying to make other people live by their personal delusions and superstitions. It was obvious how dangerous they were….war was inevitable in the Middle East because it is a precursor to the return of Jesus and climate change was a hoax because god said he wouldn’t destroy the earth after Noah and the great flood. I wanted to write a song that accurately represented their beliefs, though I assume they might quarrel with my referring to the resurrected Jesus as the Jewish Zombie.

-Who made the animation for the video? Did you know what you wanted or did you give freedom to the artist to get inspired by the song and come up with his/her own thing?

That was the brilliant work of Brian Musikoff who has done animation for comedians like Patton Oswalt and Brian Posehn. I loved his style and felt his sense of humor would really take the tune to another level and I feel he really brought the lyrics to life. Animation is a very long and slow process but we worked together exchanging ideas until we made something we knew we would be proud of.

-It got an award right?

Absolutely, it was a finalist in the Atheist Film Festival

-So what’s with all the religion-themed songs lately you’ve got at least 2 others that I believe you’ll be recording soon?

My new EP “On the First Day, Man Created God” will be four interconnected songs about religion and faith. It’s such a great topic with cool stories and tons of drama about the human condition.

-What was the Reason Rally in DC that you recently played?

It was the largest secular gathering in the world, sort of a Woodstock for atheists. It was held on the National Mall in Washington DC, the same place where Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech so it was a pretty big deal. . I performed along with Bad Religion, Eddie Izzard, Penn Gillette and speakers like scientists Richard Dawkins and Laurence Krauss. It was a highpoint of my musical life and the largest crowd I have ever performed in front of.

-Your second single just came out, and is dedicated to your mom. Can you tell us a little bit about this record?

It contains four songs that I worked up during my residency at the late and lamented Lakeside Lounge. I dedicated it to my mom who died about 2 years ago. She was slipping into Alzheimer’s which is a cruel and dehumanizing disease, so I wrote the title song -Don’t Fade Away – about my experiences and dedicated the record to her.

-Some people might not know –shame on them- but you are also an acclaimed music producer. Which albums did you produce are the ones you are the most proud of? Did you produce your latest two singles? Are you looking into doing more producing in the future?

I produce all my own records these days. I know what I want and I know how to get it, I also work cheap. Outside of The Waldos’ record I won’t choose favorites. I’m also not really looking to produce these days. It takes my energy away from my own music.

-You’ve got an acoustic version of a Dictators song on the single, do you plan on re-recording more?

Actually, I’m planning on an EP of acoustic versions of Dictators songs for next year.

-Your band Master Plan performed in Europe in 2012, any more shows coming up? Any plan to record a 3rd album?

I love playing with Master Plan but the members live all over the country so getting together is very difficult, so no plans for that band in the near future.

-So what’s next for Mr. Andy Shernoff in the year 2013?

More music and more videos!

-You started out as a music reviewer/writer when you were in college, do you miss this kind of writing?

Not at all, I was very young at the time and to be honest it was all a scam to get free records.

-Ha ha, I originally did it to get in for free at shows! How can people find out about your next shows/records/etc…and purchase the singles?

You can buy the records here…

http://andyshernoff.com/shop

and I’m on all social media

Andy Shernoff Appreciation Society on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Andy-Shernoff-Appreciation-Society

and

http://twitter.com/andyshernoff

-Any word of wisdom for kids who are picking up instruments now that more than ever R’n’R needs some serious saving?

Don’t be a phony!!!

Interview by Thomas Goze, April 2013

Rock’n’Roll Highschool

Joey Ramone passed away, but we all know that he will always
live in every rocker’s heart. Indeed, everyone listening to punk rock
(whether it is spiked punk rock, skate punk rock, pop punk, hardcore punk or glam punk rock) owes The RAMONES something. We’ve all been to the ‘Rock And Roll Highschool’,all hanged out on the ‘Rockaway Beach’ and we still ‘Believe In Miracles’. Veglam wanted to hear what glam punk rockers would like to say about The RAMONES!

“Where we come from in Sweden people seem to always have loved the mighty Ramones. You can’t go to a gig with a new band without them playing ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’! The first meeting for me with punk-rock was The Ramones and I absolutely loved it and has been a great fan ever since. The Scarecrows first stuff was almost too Ramones-influed, actually in one of our first gigs we played 3 Ramones covers. Not ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ though! I guess that every age, every day has got their own Ramones-clones. Sid Vicious was a Dee Dee, I was a Joey. Judy was a Punk, Jacky was a Runk! I will allways love the kings of 3 chord rock n’ roll bliss! The Ramones are just too tough to die!” (Manxxx/The Scarecrows.)

“The Ramones were a huge influence on me and the Trash Brats. I think that is sorta obvious in our sound. I think they were one of the best punk and rock & roll bands ever. They showed us all how to keep it short and great. Real songs and not over-jamming whanking bullshit. The best rock & roll songs are all about the song and not how much junk the guitar player or bass player etc can jam into it. The ramones were the kings of simple 2-3 minute tunes of rock & roll joy, and really helped save rock & roll in the 70’s from all the overblown radio rock shit like fleetwood mac, elo, etc etc. They proved that regular every day guys that love the music could pick up guitars and play regardless of what the business seemed to say-that ya had to have huge record contracts and play for years etc..the ramones threw all of that out the window-bless joey and them for it. I don’t know if he ever fully realized the huge impact that he had on us all before he left us, but i somehow have a feeling he did-and just maybe knowing that, makes mesmile. Joey and the Ramones music will be with us as long as rock & roll is alive.”
(Ricky Rat/the Trash Brats.)

“The first time i heard about the ramones was back in 1976 when my mom got back from l.a. and brought some hot records home. that was the ramones first album and the b-52’s. i was a pantyshitter at that time but still i was very impressed by the style and sound of the ramones. my mom was anyways a huge influence on me. she always knew what’s going on because she used to make clothes for a local punk rock store in zurich. when she told me how the ramones were like live it blew me away! it was none of that shitty top of the pops-behaviour! it was REAL attitude! so that’s when i decided to walk the path of glam punk.
Zygi has also a nice story to tell :
he used to be the singer for quite a famous swiss 60s garage band called the Hitchhikers. they were good and soon they got the opportunity to open for the ramones! unfortunately the day before the gig was the band decided to part ways with zygi! but it was zygi’s band! so bummed out and dead sad he got drunk for some months… the other side of the story goes like this: the band had to get immediate replacement – no matter what. so they picked up the first ugly punk rat on the street and thought him to sing. he couldn’t sing actually and the gig with the ramones turned out to be a disaster. Imagine a screaching grawling horror voice to nice 60s beat.. oh well yeah, we had all our little memories with the ramones – some are good and some are bad… as live goes…”
(Sarah and Zygi/Gutter Queens)

“My Psycho dad took me to a Ramones show in ’78. I wandered backstage and got a eyeful when I spied Joey sitting on the lap of the fattest girl I’d ever seen. Whan they saw me, they said ‘Hey, what the fuck do you want ?’ I said I wanted a beer and they told me to fuck off ! Outside the club adter the gig, my dad got into a fight with a pagan biker who hit him over the head with a bottle. I had to drive us home that night and I was only 8 years old !” (Johnny Jetson/Space Age Playboys)

“I had a dream last nite : Joey just started a new band with Johnny Thunders, Sid Vicious & Razzle. He seemed all happy, the other guys looked fine too. Their tunes sounded great… Then, I woke up ???” (‘O’/Undercover fuckin’ Slut)