PROBABLY MY FAVORITE MODERN WRITER, CAITLIN JOHNSTONE ON VOTING! I VOTED MY LITTLE HEART OUT FOR RALPH NADER & DR. JILL STEIN, JUST AS HARD AS I COULD & IT MADE NO DIFFERENCE! THE KKKOPS EVEN KIDNAPPED DR. JILL STEIN TO PREVENT HER FROM ATTENDING A DEBATE! REMEMBER WHEN HILLARY’S THUGS BRUTALIZED RAY McGOVERN FOR GIVING THE PEACE SIGN & TURNING HIS BACK TO HER? SOME OF YOUR OWN LOVED ONES PROBABLY STILL THINK THAT’S SOME KINDA “FEMINISM”. THAT IT WAS “HER TURN” BUT THOSE RED PUTIN BERNIE BROS HACKED HER ELECTION WITH THOSE NEFARIOUS BUFF BERNIE FACEBOOK MEMES! A TANK WITH A RAINBOW FLAG ON IT IS STILL A TANK THIS FAUXWOKE IDENTITY POLITRICKS BULLSHIT IS THE SAME OLD HONKY DEATH MACHINE TRUSSED UP FOR HALLOWEEN IN THE SAME OLD DRAG I GOT EXPELLED FOR!
“Democrats are already sending out fundraising emails. Don’t give them a dime. They’ve done nothing to fight back against Republicans in any meaningful way because they are on the same side and serve the same wealthy donors. Invest in your local communities & help people directly.” (-Ryan Knight)
“The Democrats don’t even allow democracy in their own Party. I guess Graham cheering Russians being killed isn’t as bad as when Bush made a joke about killing a million Iraqis, Hillary laughed hysterically at murdering Gaddafi, Obama shrugged off us running a torture program or Albright saying killing 500,000 kids was worth it.” (-Black In The Empire)
“When there is a “Democratic Nominee” that the majority have not nominated (and in fact are rejecting), it doesn’t seem very democratic to me. “Democratic” in itself implies being a part of decision making. When the decision was made for you, though, again and again and again…” (-Human Bean)
“How do you think these people become billionaires?!
Through exploitation, abuse of power and fraud.” (-Jory Micah)
“The crazy thing about Azov is that Americans were fighting harder to say they weren’t Nazis than they were” (-Black In The Empire)
“The US never actually calls for Peace, because there is no money in it. For those who already forgot, our $113 billion didn’t stop Russia from taking Bakhmut, but it sure put a lot of money into the pockets of our weapons manufacturers.The Pentagon that usually can’t account for trillions of dollars, all of a sudden found $2 billion more to spend on Ukraine.
It’s a miracle! Neither Party is against sending billions to Ukraine or increasing Defense spending. Are Dem voters ready to listen to how this Dem vs GOP is all an act now, or you gonna keep voting for these Establishment crooks again in 2024? They aren’t fighting each other, their job is to keep us fighting each other, they all work for the same people, and that’s not us.. The next time you turn around Biden will be spending another few billion on Ukraine again. When they are gonna cap or cut something they always make sure to let you know it’s not gonna be Defense spending. The US must destroy their closest military rival Russia and their closest economic rival China to maintain their hegemony. All this talk about Freedom, Democracy, Sovereignty and Human Rights are a smokescreen, as you can tell by looking at how the US behaves on the world stage.. They might be able to argue that stealing money from the American people to help Ukraine makes sense, but the problem is that they know that Ukraine has no chance to take back all the territory they lost. Which means our Gov’t is just using Ukrainians as pawns to weaken Russia. The more of our money we allow our Gov’t to spend on this war, the richer the weapons manufacturers get, the more kickbacks the politicians get and the more Ukrainians get dead. One thing you can’t count on is that no one in DC will ever even pretend that Defense spending will not go up. The US convinced the West and their allies that the sanctions would destroy Russia They were wrong about that and about their ability to isolate Russia, because I really don’t think they understand how much the rest of the world wants to escape American rule.. America has mastered going around the world and getting brothers, cousins and neighbors to kill each other for their own geopolitical goals. Everytime somebody from the West goes to a country in Africa and talks about Putin war crimes they respond with “Why hasn’t your country arrested people like Bush, Blair or Obama?” They think Africans don’t know what’s happening in the world, when it’s Americans who don’t know. Maybe one day Americans will figure out that our Gov’t are the terrorists.” (-Black In The Empire)
FREE SPEECH, PEACE, HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT STANDS WITH ROGER WATERS AGAINST ALL SLANDEROUS TABLOID SMEAR MERCHANTS & LIARS ON THE TAKE! P.S. SHITLIB, AZOV NAZIS STILL SUCK!
You can’t even say you’re against the war without some deep state Biden admin spooks censoring you, or puttin’ you on some list. I am reading a good back about San Francisco punk by Will York, I’d previously thought it was by Will Shatter cause he features so prominently in the underground scene in the post punk era, but all those bands were way more radical than anything by anybody nowadays. The Manics were always kept off the airwaves over here, espacially after 9/11 when the Dick Cheney corporate spook armies weaponized the media, but to those of us who really received their vial, eye opening messages, they were transforming, if not always uplifting or peppy like the Green Day shit they thrust on us over here-the chewing gum commercial punques are the clown red lipstick of dictatorships. The Manics read a lot and encouraged their fans to learn and grow and think about the world around them. I always say my friends Max and Frank and Chaz “got” the Manics before I did-inititially, I was so ginned up about my own emerging catalog of protest songs back then that I dismissed them as come-lately Clash wannabes at first and was not all that impressed with “New Art Riot”, but “Stay Beautiful” won me over, I remember thinking it was like the Buzzcocks meets Generation X. Sounded great echoing off the high ceilings of my old roommate Nikki’s rent controlled apartment in Central Square. I always thought Murkkans were dumb fickle sheep cause even in muzak, the sceneseters always required an artist be Tipper Gore Approved by the man or some shit-you had to have a rich person vouch for you and give you money in order for people to listen to your stuff or take you seriously. Same college brainwashed P.C. idiots who all love and praise the Replacements til doomsday will Simon Cowell critique an off key band of inebritated janitors UNLESS some middle class money person throws some cash behind ’em. Same idiots who praise the Manics retroactively always gave me guff for being “too political”, it’s futile trying to communicate to most of the tv zombies who are too sports conditioned to only care about rooting for their hometeam to ever pay attention to anything except the trappings of mainstream success. They all like Rihanna or whoever they tell ’em to like, ya know? Say Nothings. They gotta have a hall pass from the ruling class, an applause sign from some media managing narrative control gatekeeper. At some point, even the Manics knew they needed to take time off cause they were getting a bit redundant, repetitive, but man, what a path they blazed, what a story-ever read about when they went to Cuba to meet Castro? I still love the Manics and think we need ’em now, more than ever. Help teach the kids about Richie Edwards, he was important. Who else would think to duet with Tracey Lords on an anthem about beauty as a commodity or objectification? He was an amazingly poignant and insightful and sensitive motherfucker. I love ’em all.
This was the closest we came to having a Murkkkan version of the Manic Street Preachers and of course they brokeup acrimoniously after their ep, “Young & The Useless”. I’ve been calling on ’em to reunite and make new music for decades. Used to talk to all those guys all the time before I got lockedout of social media for antiwar shitposting. I still love ’em.
I met Phoebe when I was just a lost soul latchkey runaway kid in NYC hangin’ around the Continental Divide in my torn Flesh For Lulu t shirt and bone necklaces and wondering the streets of the East Village all night long. She told me I have a very striking face, I think because of all the blue eyeshadow. She also told me one time that I’m never alone cause all the geniuses of all time are holding my hands, you know she is such an exceptional starburst of talent, kindness, love and soulpower. It’s weird how she is almost the opposite of me-I am primitive, coarse, untrained, unskilled, uncultivated, undisciplined, ugly, mean, and suffering from shattered hopes and lack of faith in this world, but I can still see myself in her, and all that is good and true about humanity, really. I will always love Phoebe Legere. And also Yvonne De La Vega! Me and Yvonne were fellow travelers, likeminded, kindred spirits, it was like some crazy instant connection, just effortless recognition. I was shattered when she died suddenly. God bless Yvonne de la Vega, a heroic, good hearted, righteous libertine freedom fighter! My kinda people. I miss her.
“In the COVID era gestalt, “Safety” means social control through fear. Fear is the instrument of tyranny. What happened to the daring and imagination that built this country? Can’t we aspire to something higher than safety? Yeah, it’s not safe all right. It’s not safe for you to see the data. It’s not safe for you to have your own thoughts. It’s not safe for you to question authority. It’s not safe to criticize the oligarchs who are crushing your freedoms and taking your money. Not safe for them, anyway.” (-Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
“It’s obvious that no one in Washington actually cares about US government debt, because, in their bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling, Biden and the Republicans agreed to INCREASE military spending to $885 billion – an 11% hike.
The war budget is roughly half of all federal government discretionary spending (and “non-defense” spending includes a lot of costs related to war, like veteran care, “international affairs”, and the massive police budgets). Concern trolling about the US federal debt is just a cynical strategy used to justify cutting the few remaining social programs that help poor and working people. Meanwhile, decreasing the war budget is never even considered for a second. It’s sacrosanct.” (-Ben Norton)
HEY VIRTUE SIGNALING CURRENT THING RECITERS! YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS!
WHEN I WAS A NEW WAVE RUNAWAY GUTTERSNIPE IN THE 80’S
Robbie Mailhouse the Dogstar drummer who used to be a soap opera actor when I knew him and his friend Dive DJ/video editor Morgan Reese used to let me crash at their bigass 11th floor Broadway/Astor Place loft apartment all the time. They got me into “Blade Runner”, “Eraserhead”, Love & Rockets, Joy Division, Fra Lippo Lippi, Negative Trend, Young Fresh Fellows, Happy Flowers, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, got me into bars, bought me pizza and beer, I will always be grateful to them.
The female answer to Zodiac Mindwarp were a blast! I think we saw them at Axis, not sure. Those years were pretty blurry. How cool was it when they were on that tv show with Circus Of Power, Joey Ramone, and Ace Frehley? The Good Old Daze! I miss the Cat Club and Lizmar Lounge!
As a young man, I did not dig much of that so called heartland rock-all the gritty hardknocks Cougar, Seger, Petty songs about divorce and foreclosure, elders dying, ripoffs and disappointments of small town life, ’cause I was really trying to go all big city new wave futuristic nightclub and block out all that factory life bullshit. I did not wanna know about the plight of lonesome farmers who were abandoned by their shopping class wives. Then, it all happened to me, by the time I was 26, all the former peers were scrambling en masse for higher ground-the dames were all lookin’ for the boy with the mama mansion or biggest truck. I never got that shit. The fellas were all cleaning up and being herded into university makeovers for high paying office jobs. A couple were tragically, insanely lured into military service, came back as sad shells-ghosts of their former selves, ruined, traumatized. One guy I knew went to jail for murdering his wife’s boyfriend. A few others were killed by drug dealers, one ex drummer became a cop. I was appalled by all that shit. I was still clinging stubbornly to my own little underground D.I.Y. basement punk lifestyle, resulting in semi permanent exile to the hot hose kitchen dishwasher status. Middle class people loved to borrow my ideas and point me to the closet where I could find the mop bucket and if I wanna get started in the men’s and women’s bathrooms, that’d be great.
I never liked Sundays, residual schoolbus on Monday morning dread, I guess, but nobody ever wants to rock. Now way back in the day, we all would pool our quarters and dollar bills and get in my buddy Scruff’s fuckedup, rusty, terminally unreliable Oldsmobile and cruise over to Indiana and hangout at a punk band’s house or at some cool chick’s place if her mom was gone, or the parking lot of the Holiday Inn where everybody drank in their cars, we’d all listen to Depeche Mode and Sisters Of Mercy and Killing Joke and the Godfathers and Skinny Puppy records, drink malt liquor, boys would skateboard for girl attention, I’d break out a flask of harder stuff. Had a nice girl friend who was always drinking big bottles of vodka and weeping over her many dead traveler gutter punk friends who seemed to always be overdosing. I knew I wanted my own bandhouse where I could host parties and shows for outta town visitors and made that happen with some girlfriend’s help and Little Caesars Pizza Pizza pizza maker money. Used to like making pizza- we all sang songs while we sauced and cheesed. Summa the older guys were embezzling but me I was not even good enough at math to steal! Plus I’ve always been pretty sure that what goes around comes around, so I try to do the next right thing, as often as possible. So yeah, Sundays are always like a slow painful grind, waiting around, tedious chores, nowhere to go, old people moving ever so slow. All the people from Flyover, trained from birth to either watch sports from dirty couches while draining cases of piss beer, or the real ambitious middle class motherfuckers are all outside shirtless, hosing down the truck. I’ll never be a two truck having motherfucker wanting to be seen on his riding lawnmower-just not my thing, man. I had to deal with the general public yesterday and it is hard on my bruised old soul. The town’s five token hipster’s-the lone purple haired guy from who knows where; the video editing tech guy; the managerial type money chick with all the tattoos who is too posh to look any peasants in the eye, the ubiquitous old man who is always cruising for chicks in spite of being married. I bought a two dollar record at a gentrification hipster yard sale. Had a Nerf war with the teenage son of mine. Read a book about punk rock in San Francisco and went to bed early, worried, haunted, depressed. Abandonment issues and fear of death with a touch of boredom and despair and distrust of the murderous, fix is in, house always wins, Predator Culture we live in. Now I am up early with the birds, this is the only quiet time I’ll have today as soon as my kid wakes up, he will be blasting his generation’s music and monologuing about becoming the New Tiger King for fifteen hours without taking a breath. I dread more undesirable interactions with creepy smalltown hustlers and still have not been able to wrangle the town’s lone old punk artsy eccentric to showup with his guitar. My wife’s co worker croaked about two weeks ago and I am constantly reminded how none of this is permanent, especially not the good parts, only the grief and drudgery and slavery and dread. Cats are hassling me to feed them. Then, I gotta water the garden and some old geezer who befriended my wife is supposedly gonna show up to help install some air conditioner in my kid’s bedroom, I’m always skeptical of big talkers who mainly wanna talk to my wife. There’s no young women in this town, so the crypt keepers follow her around in mobs bragging about how they’re gonna help our disabled son with their (fill in the blank) whatever they got, whatever their hustle is-gonna teach that boy some manners, gonna teach him how to be a muscle man, gonna let him pet their dog, gonna show him how to hunt, they got a big truck he can ride in, all that shit. It gets old. Creepy old men using my kid to hit on my wife while they themselves are married. Horrible. Men are gross. The winebox heiress airbandb remodelling new age psychic know it all rich women are even worse. More cooniving, manipulative, divide and conquer destructive. Destroying is their hobby. “There’s somethin’ happenin’ somewhere, baby I just know that there is…” Now I relate to the oldman dad rock I could stand as a kid with a leather jacket and a head full of rock dreams and a pair of creepers and a foo foo haircut.
NON STOP BOOTLICKIN’ COPAGANDA & CORRUPT POLITICIANS HELLBENT ON IGNORING THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE TO TRAIN MORE GESTAPO IN IDF STYLE URBAN COMBAT TACTICS. ONLY THE MOST CLOISTERED SHITLIBS BELIEVE IT CAN”T HAPPEN TO THEM OR THAT THEIR REPS CARE ABOUT THEIR PREFERENCES. THE CROOKED JUSTICE TWEETERS CAN JUST TAKE THE MONEY & FIX THE VOTE ANY WAY THEY CHOOSE.
“… the people demonizing Roger Waters are not idiots. They are liars. They know precisely what they are doing. They know Roger Waters is not an anti-Semite. They are aware of The Wall and his other work. They are not ignorant. They are propagandists.”
“The rise of censorship, the rise of the suppression of religious freedoms, of property rights, closing a million businesses without just compensation or due process, the abolition of jury trials, which are guaranteed by the Sixth and Seventh Amendment for any vaccine company that hurts you, all of these — and the rise of a kind of track-and-trace surveillance state has been troubling to people, both Democrats and Republicans. During that first year, we literally got rid of every amendment to the Constitution except the Second Amendment. We have a government today that is scared of its people. And I say to this, if people want integrity, they should vote for me. If people want to protect the Constitution, they should vote for me. If people think that the Bill of Rights is still relevant, they need to vote for me.” (-Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
“Our ruling class isn’t protecting us from disinformation, they are keeping us from the truth. Nothing like watching neutral corporate media take every chance they can to smear the people running against
Joe Biden in a Democrats primary race where they have already said they refuse to allow any debates
. These are the people who are gonna save our make believe democracy. Our Gov’t, media and Big Pharma can never admit that they all worked together and put profits over telling the truth during a time as terrifying as the pandemic was for our citizens and people all over the world. Even when the proof of what they did is now undeniable. We have reached the point where telling the truth about the jab will get you erased faster than telling the truth about Ukraine and all the other atrocities the US is involved in with our foreign policy around the world. Our rulers are using the politicians and the media that they own to censor the truth and make us believe that their lies are reality.
It’s not Russia or China, it is us Americans who are the most propagandized population in the world We have reached the point where telling the truth about the jab will get you erased faster than telling the truth about Ukraine and all the other atrocities the US is involved in with our foreign policy around the world. Iraq War Phil Donohue “MSNBC top rated show”, and Ashleigh Banfield fired, Jesse Ventura’s contract cancelled and Chris Hedges forced out of NY Times, all for telling the truth. Ukraine War. Tucker Carlson, only one not afraid to tell the truth, forced out. Pentagon celebrates.” (-Black In The Empire)
“Tony Blair and Bush have not been charged till this day. Obama is still free, after murdering Gaddafi and destroying Libya. We don’t want the ICC’s hypocrisy to apply here in our country. “
(—South Africa’s EFF Commander-in-Chief, Julius Malema)
PROCRASTINATING ON A SUNDAY
Where I grew up, it was actually the richer people who did most of the “bad behavior”. Ya know-think about it…who had all the access to underage booze and cocaine? Rich kids. Who beat up smaller people just because they can? Rich kids. Who got away with doing all kindsa dispicable hometown harms and still strut around like BMOC’s in their fat fucking fifties? The rich kids, which is kinda why I was never into the copaganda shows like, “COPS” , that always portrayed policemen as these sensitive, selfless Superman social workers being ever so patient with all the shirtless trailer trash domestic violence crazies and all those daytime tv shows, where producers encouraged adulterous poor people to come on their shows and fight it out. So yeah I was just thinking about how I always detested the way Jerry Springer gleefully exploited poor people on his stupid sensationalist show, but a comrade pointed out to me how he was a staunch advocate for free speech, and in this post Constitutional, post truth age where only billionaires get to decide what speech is legal and what speech gets deplatformed, where legacy media is even brazenly editing the shit out of Robert F. Kennedy videos for the crime of actually knowing the real science and citing the real studies and statistics and fighting for free speech and talking about industry capture of our regulatory agencies on tv, I will take a brief moment to say Cheers to a media personality who did not promote censorship as woke and progressive or scientific or any of that shit, like all the millionaires on tv they pay pay big money to lie to us peasants everyday about every topic. I guess I should be out there working on weeding the yard, but of course I’m here inside listening to the new Damned album, “Darkadelic” which is fantastic by the way, and also that fabulous Richard Duguay record I’ve been raving about! What would I like to do on a Sunday? I’d like to fetch a couple of 12 packs and invite the desert rat musicians over to help me bash out summa these new tunes I’ve been writing, but family obligations kindof prevent that from being a viable possibility today, so that is a real thorn in the side of the afternoon, here. I don’t wanna weed the yard or clean the catboxes, honestly. I wanna rock. I never hear any quality fucking real rocknroll in these horrible modern times, but man, when I do get a good daily reccomended dose of nutritious rocknroll it does kinda restore the pep to your step, if ya know what i’m sayin’, my brothers and sisters and friends of the revolution. I love the Damned and Richard Duguay so much. They show ya how it’s done. I’m supposed to be getting things ready for a possible visit from outta town family which can always get real dicey for many reasons, when coping with all the usual anxiety-parenting, inflation, bills, all that, it helps immensely to at least have some real genuine rocknroll music being made at a true standard of excellence. Not that many people still know how to do it, which is why I’m always surprised that no one asks me, anymore. I’m better than ever.
It’s kinda funny how intensely impacted I was as a kid from smalltown Kentucky by all these eighties post punk new wavers and eccentric goths from England, but that was the stuff that made me first really, really wanna be in bands, have a rdio show, write songs, create wild looks, publish my own fazines, host parties, appear on cable access cult tv, all that.
You know I read every book about the old punk, new wave, goth, glam, and new roamntic movements I can get my arthiritic old hands on. I’ve always been a distant fan of Phillip Sallon, cause he was the Original Club Kid, really influenced all the Perri Listers, Rusty Egans, Princess Julias, Marilyns and Martin Degvilles and Steve Stranges and Boy George. He kinda reminded me of a death rock Quintin Crisp, one of the old school proto Blitz Club scenemaker-designer-event organizer-nightlife celebrities back when nightlife meant something. In the eighties, it was not enough to just have wealthy parents and go to the bar every night, you were expected to like, contribute, create, compose, invent, innovate, perform. Phillip was part of the original first wave of Sex Pistols-Malcolm-Vivienne-Bromley Contingent punks, he ran a night called Planets back in 81 and his protegee George O’Dowd was the DJ. In 83, he promoted another venue called Mud Club not to be confused with NYC’s Mudd Club, his was in Leicester Square in collaboration with McClaren for all the fabulous stars of Smash hits magazine and The Face and I.D. I always vibed with Sallon cause I used to kinda promote my own after hours salons in various dark basements and tattoo parlors and sticky keg party basement speakeasies and always enjoyed being host to all the fabulous flames at all our old school rent party shindigs and rooftop luaus. I’ve also been beaten savagely by dumbfuck nazi homophobes and rednecks and fratboys for cutting a dash in conservative hellholes.
“You’re Not Deficient, You’re Just Ruled By Assholes.
In a totalitarian dystopia that’s held together by mass-scale psychological abuse, it’s entirely reasonable that people are finding themselves struggling with despair, alienation, depression and anxiety. “There’s no reason we can’t provide for everyone while technological advancement gives us all more and more free time. There’s no reason we can’t learn to live in collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem instead of in competition for the benefit of a few abusers. It’s actually amazing anyone’s functioning at all in a civilization that’s ruled by exploiters & abusers who dominate the world using mass-scale psychological manipulation.It’s a testament to human resilience that anyone is sane.
When everyone’s mind is always being pummeled…Everything seems phony, meaningless and needlessly difficult because it is. This isn’t a statement about human nature or life as it naturally exists, it’s a statement about the artificially constructed systems we live under currently.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
They are defending a genocidal NATO puppet regime set up after a US-led coup in 2014. They do so because they instinctively recognize that a non-subservient Russia & China represent a challenge to US hegemony, and thus their privilege. (-Primo Radical)
Another English band my former old punk crowd and me were quite thrilled by back in the day was Age Of Chance-we were all big Clash-Big Audio Dynamite-Dead Or Alive-Nena Cherry-Prince fans, and AGE OF CHANCE were a super cool and sleek new hybrid of all that lot! We had endeavored to sortof combine our own love of old Suicide and Sputnik and early rap influences as well, but usually, it would end up us playing with the primitive drum machines and casios on the guitar player’s cold cement floor and us three goths pretty much just getting drunk with my hip hop friends rather than really pioneering any great new wave crossover like when Afraka Bombatta and Johnny Lydon merged their genres.
FORGET THE SCRIPT! BREAK YOUR PROGRAMMING! BOYCOTT PIG MEDIA! IT’S ALL LIES, ANYWAY!
“Poverty can be really stressful, the inflation is no joke, everything doubled where we are post Covid clampdowns and ya know in July the Biden admin is supposed to drop some cashless society bullshittery. I can’t stand the tv watching mainstream identity politricks shitlibs. The gentrification motherfuckers can kiss my ass. At least the rightwing gun nut ranchers out here will leave you alone. The Kalltha Kops Karens were ruining my life up in Eugene and saying it was for sensitivity, pro noun etiquette, veganism, feminism and transkids rights, but really it was just some Gladys Kravitch nosy motherfuckers trying to control their environment by calling the cops on the loud autistic kid.” (-General Labor)
“Julian Assange is not only one of the few authentic heroes of our time, he has also shown all of us how to be a hero today. That it is possible to be a hero today” (—Slavoj Žižek)
“Every time the U.S. goes to war or gets involved in a war the red & blue imperialist politicians infiltrate the airwaves with the same lie: “We’re bringing ‘democracy’ to the world.” Wake up folks: The U.S. cannot bring democracy to the world when it hasn’t even brought anything that resembles a democracy to our own country. The simple truth is the U.S. doesn’t go to war to bring “democracy” to anyone. It goes to war to expand the U.S. oligarchy & further enrich the U.S. ruling class.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Authoritarians and censors always use the same tactic: choose initial targets who are too “distasteful” for mainstream voices to defend, then have the power entrenched: like choosing Milo and Alex Jones as the first online banishment cases.
That’s what this prosecution is for. The House should censure non-voting Delegate Stacey Plaskett for despotically threatening Matt Taibbi with prison. Her oath is to uphold the Constitution.
Threatening journalists with.” (-Glenn Greenwald on Biden admin persecution of black leftist group challenging government narrative regarding Ukraine)
“Is Biden racist & authoritarian enough for you to break ranks now?” (-Baba Yoga)
“Nick Cruse explains the liberal playbook. They gain political capital by claiming they’re going after white supremacy and domestic terrorism, then they turn the state against black people, indigenous people and workers.” (-Turncoat Don)
“Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson are speaking out against Black Socialists being targeted by the Biden administration meanwhile Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman are silent.
What does this say about the state of the progressive left???” (-Nick Cruse)
The idea of pressuring any politician without the use of targeted strikes, to actual challenge the capitalists that control this country, will never work. I mean they voted for Pelosi and Hakeem, with no strings attached. Modern Democrats are just VBNMW lifetime members.” (-Sam G)
At least RFK jr is actually challenging Biden on his actions in the executive branch Marianne Williamson, on the other hand, running to be commander in chief meanwhile she has zero disagreements with Biden regarding his most significant acts as Commander in Chief” (-Revolutionary Blackout Network)
Ramones – We Want The Airwaves (Official Music Video) – YouTube all pig-media being mockingbird controlled by deep state spook patrols while all grassroots peace activists are being redscare blacklisted or even persecuted by Biden. Unreal times, brothers and sisters!
The Clash – Clampdown (Live at the Lewisham Odeon) – YouTube Gropey Joe doubles down on Russiagate fictions accusing antiwar activists of being “RUSSIAN HACKERS!” When did DNC become warpig police state party of J. Edgar Hoover, Censor Crazed McCarythists? Kennedy thinks the Dems can be reformed, I do not.
BOILING FROG POST CONSTITUTIONAL POLICE STATE TYRANNY
I knew during the grunge/alternative hoax that they real punk rock underground was being infiltrated and dismantled, that all these fake as fuck corporate say nothing boyband punques might appeal to private school middle class clique suburbanite richkid preppie sports bar people, but had little or nothing to do with my old school punk rock that was all about freedom, individulaity, critical thining, and railed against tyranny, conformity, censorship and oppression. I saw how the hipster scene people did not give a fuck when racist kops killed unarmed black men all day, but they shat themselves for over a year when the same miliarized kops also killed a popular tattooshop white hipster. I saw how the tv watching class of people thought it was all day okeydokey if their rich as fuck upperclassmen popular kid superiors became bigtime drug dealers and left a long trail of bodies behind ’em everywhere they went, but if a black guy and a Spanish guy were hanging around and might have some dirtweed in their pocket-holy shit-they called the fuckin kops. Bimbos in kinderwhore dresses could stay shitfaced drunk forever amen, but if any lower class brats liked to have a cocktail in the afternoon, they’d alert the media and call in the state militia to swat that motherfucker. That’s where this country’s been going incremetally since the deep state stole an election from ruling class oil boy elitist ole P.M.R.C. Al Gore, the O.G. cancel culturer. Identity politicks totally hypnoscreen brainwashed the pinkhat centrist former left and Dick Cheny rebrands, Obama and the Clintons pulled the Overton window so far to the right that people have ideas now that make Nixon look like Abbie Hoffman, like being pro war and pro censorship, and pro secret billionaire honchos more surveillance and cashless society one world government agendas and pro spies groping on your granny and eavesdropping on all your private conversations but still ridiculously call themselves woke and left and liberal and progressive. It’s madness-everyday the Man is locking up anti war protestors, and people protesting ballsout state assassins at cop city, and tv focuses exclusively on hot garbage culture war bullshit distractions and insists the economy is just booming. Ask a lower class person how they cope with the Biden inflation and war economy. I don’t believe Bobby Kennedy can reform the DNC from within, I saw how Bernie Sanders got in lockstep, hut two goosestep formation behind Hillary, reciting lies for war saying he did not want to be Ralph Nadered. Kucinich supports Kennedy, I think the empire is disintegrating and there will be no voting the Davos puppets out. All those godless fanatics at the top want WW3 and are hellbent on their Agenda 2030 robotdog microchip Orwell control rollouts. Maybe people in other countries like France know what’s up, but Murkkkans just want some kind of fucking fakeass V.I.P. room access, to feel special and successful and second hand popular, so they will do anything to feel included with the winners. “USA! USA!” They will stand in line for abuse and swear they think Foo Fighters are good. Glen Matlock has even been making excuses for Green Day and Machinegun Douchey. Ugh. Not me, Jack.
are on tour, if you know me in real life, you know my main bands as a kid were Sisters Of Mercy, Lords Of The New Church, and Generation X, so it was always a gut punch when people with more resources could co opt our whole bag years after us, while we just spiraled and spiraled into obscurity, divorce, wet apron and hair net food service jobs, bouts of homelessness and ever deeper poverty, so all the Spooky Kids spinoffs and post Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson bands like Orgy and Black Veil Brides, they were always so hard to take. They kinda all look like us, but we had no producer, no influx of investment capital, no steady percussionist, no record deal, so one by one all the buckaneers jumped ship and it was hard to endure, it was like when Jack Sparrow lost the Black Pearl. I kinda almost even begrudgingly like Murderdolls, but you know my early goth gang who could never keep a steady drummer were called Murder Stars for years prior to the Dolls, my old pal Max even desgned a real whizbang logo I could never wait to see emblazoned on t shirts and stickers and posters and lunchboxes. I wish them all the best though cause I’m always rootin’ for almost everybody who’s “puttin’ the BAND back together!” You know what they say about great minds think alike and fools seldom differ. The hard fact is it don’t matter who has songs, it only matters who has access, which ultimately means money. It still kills me. Between us forgotten boys.
As a lifelong rocker, I can’t believe it took me so long to find out about Richard Duguay, that guy is so excellent, his new lp is so exciting, refreshingly outstanding, he really is a one in a million rocknroll motherfucker. Now I understand he was once in a band called Personality Crisis up in Canada and played with Duff at some point. I liked a couple songs offa that “Believe In Me” cd he made when I was still working at Tower Records, but I was mostly over that band after the “Spaghetti Incident” which was like okay, I thought their version of “Aint It Fun” was alrite, but I was already doing my own version with my basrment band the Bastards, Peter Laughner is one of my deepest influences, and I had had no real interest in their “User Illusion” shit and by the time their Night Train fanclub was offering package deals where you could like, get a t shirt and a backstage laminate and one meet and greet photo with some replacement member of the brand for $500 cause their loony Nazareth coverband singer had gone full corrections officer as soon as he got a taste of fame, beating up fans, threatening journalists, and firing all his cool bandmates, I was already lookin’ for some new bands I could believe in who were less get rich capitalist real estate and fifty dollar t shirt oriented and also less abusive redneck, Hee-Haw bully authoritarian, and thankfully, I did discover Hello Disaster who I think turned into Damnation, the Manic Street Preachers who shared a lot of my political beliefs and also my love and appreciation for the Clash and Van Halen and makeup and Generation X, and summa those cool undergound bands like on the Flipside magazine “Rock & Fucking Roll” and “Fist Full Of Rock” compilations like Electric Frankenstein and the Humpers, NY Loose and also Birdland from England formerly known as Zodiac Motel, they were good, after them, I kinda quit making fanzines to focus on my own bands, and archiving songs for albums that never got properly financed or finished and then became involved with eldercare and parenting, but Duguay is the last rocknrolla that has really affected me in a deeply resonating way, all his stuff is invested with a Thunders like sensitivity, Jim Morrison’s thoughtfulness, Tom Waits barfly poetry, and an Alice Cooper/David Bowie like flash and showmanship. He is a really fantastic artist and if you love my kinda trashy glam and gutterfied blues punk, you will doubtlessly love him, also. I also used to cover “Be My Lover”, and “Is It My Body” with my early origins glam gang, the Neons! I basically vibe with everything he does!
Duff Mckagan, Steve Jones and Iggy Pop performing with Neurotic Outsiders (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc)
I always liked Duff. I read his book and understood why he kinda had to go straight after his pancreas exploded. Sometimes his big corporate brand gets on my nerves with their endless sports stadium cash grab merchandizing bonanza victory laps and inability to write new songs or bring Izzy and Stven Adler back, I was never into Velvet Revolver, at all. I did like Neurotic Outsiders quite a bit. He’s touring with Iggy now.
Stockholm rowdies Glorious Bankrobbers never crossed over to the mainstream in the metal years but they did appear on Headbanger’s Ball and found an underground audience among punks and metalheads including me and certain members of the Humpers, who have outstanding taste in high quality good music. I know my man Billy Burke shares my love for Glorious Bankrobbers, Girl, Tex & The Horseheads, Jesse Ed Davis and Hanoi Rocks. I bet summa you do, too. Shout out to beautiful Bert in Chicago. The Glorious Bankrobbers was one of those too true to be good tales of cheated desire and sabotoged opportunity, they had all the righton talent, personality, musicianship and stage presence but they got mixed up with some bad industry people who did not have their better interests at heart, so they brokeup and the singer joined Backstreet Girls. The rest of the band reformed as Mental Hippie Blood, but now they have reconvened at long last releasing a new album called “Back On The Road” to help save rocknroll for the genrations to come if we can all unite somehow to stop the depopulation madmen from blowing up the planet. I’m pretty excited by their new songs. I always thought they were like a cross between Smack and Uncle Sam! Happy to have ’em back in action!
The ruling class have been so good at weaponzing media that all the insider office class type of bureaucratic dayjob people believe the official story of 9/11 and say there is no such thing as conspiracies and that the Cheneys are paragons of election integrity and Bill gates is a super scientist philanthropic savior and our only problem ever, ever, ever was fucking Trump, and fake news, which is only on Fox. I think the evil industry scumbags killed off lots of celebrities who became worth more to them dead than alive. Also JFK Jr.
“The CIA today is more than above the law, they are organized crime. It is high time to retire the 9-11 “truther” smear and demand an actual investigation and accountability on behalf of the thousands that died on 9-11 and the millions that died in the wars that followed. And for the people who think it is only “safe” to say it was just the Saudis, the Saudi intelligence service has, for many many decades, provably been an unofficial branch of the CIA. Don’t think they would have done anything this big on their own without approval from Langley. CIA links to 9-11 are now out in the open. However, the CIA-hijacker connection detailed in these new filings was also discussed in 2011 by Bush counter-terror czar Richard Clarke.” (-Whitney Webb)
I don’t think USA should overthrow gov’ts on China’s or Russia’s borders and then turn those overthrown countries into armed members of an anti-Russian/Chinese military alliance. I don’t think Russia or China should do that to the US either. We should avoid war–esp. nuclear war….So Michael Parenti has his “Conspiracy AND Class” lecture. She and others would say, “No, it’s just conspiracy.” Which…if people wanna think that…whatever. I am in the minority regardless, and I can’t expend lots of time debating first principles. Much of what she says is important and on point. We *should* be worried about WEF (et al) plans for totalitarian and centralized control of a digitized money system…because these are parafascist initiatives to institutionalize imperial capitalist despotism.” (-Aaron Good on differences between his perspective and Whitney Webb’s)
“Cops gonna cop. The amount of violence the State uses is in direct proportion to the amount of fear the State has of losing control.
French are protesting raising retirement to 64 yrs old. They raised it in U.S. to 67 & nobody even knows, and they’re protesting Bud Lite.” (-Jimmy Dore)
RFK SHOULD RUN THIRD PARTY, YOU CAN NOT REFORM THE DNC.
“In 1992, Mexico’s right-wing government passed absurd neoliberal reforms that gave mining corporations “preference over any other use or utilization of the land” – over all other industries, over Mexicans themselves.
AMLO’s government plans to reverse this ridiculous law” (-Ben Norton)
“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”
(-Henry David Thoreau; Essay On Civil Disobedience)
““Far more violence has been done in obeying the law than in breaking the law.” (-Robert Frost)
“The real story here is that the US government classifies everything under the sun so that average Americans don’t know what they’re doing. Plus there are over 1 million people with classified status. When you are a secretive military state with millions on your payroll, you can’t keep everything quiet.” (-Lee Camp)
“When evil men make bad laws, righteous men disobey them.”” (-Pastor Butch Paugh)
““Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” (-Albert Einstein)
“Only the truly evil do not believe in civil disobedience under any circumstance. If you refuse to disobey when the government demands that you commit atrocities, you are devoid of values. Every man with a conscience has some line in the sand over which the Government may not pass!”” (-David Kreiss)
“A reminder that the CIA paid the Dalai Lama $180,000 per year to protect a brutal theocratic aristocracy that tortured and maimed poor peasants in China’s Tibetan region. People like the Lamas are the US’s true “allies.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Fucking moron. Pathetic, power-worshipping empire simp. My god the mass media are so disgusting..WikiLeaks HAS published leaks on Russia. What kind of sick fuck publishes a smear piece on Julian Assange in the year 2023? How hard is it to do 30 seconds of research before publishing? The New York Post is a 220 year-old newspaper for fuck’s sake. It’s 2023. Assange has been in prison for 4 years for the crime of good journalism. Everything his supporters have ever said about him has been fully vindicated, and everything his detractors have ever said about him has been fully invalidated. This debate’s been over for years. Also what kind of idiot thinks Assange was some kind of omnipotent hacker who had access to every government’s secrets? He was a leak publisher; he could only publish what he was given. People who wanted to publish damning information on Russia went through outlets like the NY Times.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“The New York Times and Washington Post helped the FBI capture Jack Teixeira.
We knew they worked with the state, but they’ve given that idea a whole new meaning. What a bunch of snitching rat bastards.” (-Margaret Kimberley)
““Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience.”” (-Howard Zinn)
Had a nightmare that I leaked some classified information and was arrested and waterboarded by New York Times reporters.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“It’s funny to think that, less than a decade ago, “woke” and “red-pilled” meant the same thing. Every empire has been destroyed by the vices and ineptitudes of a corrupt, incompetent, out-of-touch elite.
If you can grasp this simple historical fact, then you can decode the truth behind all of the headlines we are seeing today.” (-Primo Radical)
Ya know, to me, the Hollywood Brats are as mythical as King Arthur and the Knights Of The Round Table or some shit, totally iconic, larger than life super heroes from days of yore. If you find yourself stone cold sober, anguished about all the grotesque fascism of Macron’s WEF goonsquads in France beating up people for the cashless society oligarchs, or just kinda pissy on a stuck at home Saturday alone, you know there is always that one thing you can do in case of emergency, break glass and turn up the Brats. As vital and important to me as the Dolls or Heartbreakers and I feel the same way about the Boys. I turn to the Brats when I am all outta hope.
A friend and kindred spirit and fellow traveler still carrying on the rebel poet tradition when most of our other last bandis and long gone jetboys have moved on or punked out. He is the real thing, a great producer, guitar player, songwriter, and rocknroll badass after my own chrome and tattered sentimental heart.
Ya know it’s still unreal to me that Nikki, Kusworth and Epic and Rowland are all gone! One of the real golden eras of my mostly humiliating life was when I lived with some people in an old drafty rent controlled apartment in Cambridge, we were all young, musicians, cartoonists, indie film and hiphop enthusiasts and a couple of us worked at record stores and loved all the jangly glam and bullet proof poets and velvet clad dandies who came before us. We were definitely from the same Ragged School as the Jacobites and Joneses and Hollywood Brats and Crybabys and Dogs D’Amour. That was the last hours of my original pirate band still actively collaborating and we were quite prolific in those years, all we really did was write and record more songs about revolution, drinking, and some new wave girls who’d broke our little hearts. Me and those two guitarists were a real formidable combination, none of us were pitch perfect Robin Zanders, but together we sounded pretty fabulous in a wet alleycat sorta way. The famous music writer Sleazegrinder was an early fan of our band the Original Suffering Bastards, he used to know the words to all our songs and frequently came to see our whiskey sodden rehearsals. First time we met, he gifted me with a copy of the Beasts Of Bourbon’s masterpiece, “The Low Road” and we became fast friends after that. I hosted his tv show for about a year and he wrote columns in all my early fanzines before he was famous. We went through half a dozen bassplayers and could only keep a drummer for maybe one recording session or haphazard show at Rvere Beach’s townie metal bar at a time. We were so visible on the club scene that local entertainment weeklies would publish photos of us decked out in all our chartreuse regalia and black leather strides out on the tiles makin’ the scene with our dangerous girlfriends and we had an extensive entrouge of rocknroll fans, a pretty significant cult following of people who came to our parties and shows, wrote about us in fanzines, filmed our practices, covered our songs, made t shirts from our band logo, the whole bit, which was always astonishing to me, cause we seldom played out and rarely recorded. We had perpetually tortuous drummer problems, all my life. Our shabbiest tape recorded rehearsal cassettes circulated and people seemed to really connect to the stuff we were doing back then. Local scenester Mikey D had me on his radio show. People said we sounded like the Crybabys and Black Halos who were still called Black Market Babies in those years I think, and Suicide Kings and Dramarama, and we were flattered by all those comparsions. We thought if D-Generation got a major label record deal there was a lot of hope for us. We were wrong. I still believe in some of the songs we co wrote in that velvet basement back then, still hope to record ’em before I die. Some of ’em have been beaten to death by other bands cover versions and I can’t stand to hear ’em no more, but all our stuff from back then was definitely informed by our love of the Jacobites who one of my life’s dearest soul sisters first got me hip to. Love, love, love ’em. It’s always been my fantasy that if I struck it rich, I’d buy that old apartment and turn that basement into my recording studio. I used to have a beloved sax player from those days who explained to me one time why I kept experiencing so much friction and confusion about my relationships with the bandmates and roommates and he said, “Everybody loves Hank Williams but nobody wants to live with Hank Williams”, I had to think about that. I loved my Hank Williams like friends, so ya know, I was just different. The sax player and his indie-cinema movie critc wife moved back to Hellhole, Ohio. The lead guitarist who’d been my best pal since we were like 12, he hung up all the blue velvet jackets and frilly girl’s blouses, went to med school and vanished into the daytime world. The reckless beat travelin’ rhythm guitar man lived in his van with his dog down by the river for a number of years before finally landing in a veteran’s aid apartment and I am gratified he got off the streets. He says he can’t fit in the snakeskin pants anymore and has nerve damage from motorcycle wrecks, barfights and that time he crashed through a windshield prohibiting him from playing much guitar or dominating the lip of the stage with his oversized and legendary windmilling Billy Duffy like guitar posing, or serenading scantly clad hippie chicks on bended knee, and swingin the bottle and jumping around like we used to. Our hard partying Irish tambourine bangers and sometimes bassists both apparently moved back to Ireland-one works at a newspaper and the other one was so handsome, he’s probably still making girls swoon in our old age-that’s why he could never really dedicate himself to a scuzzy gutterpunk gang, he had too many women following him around. One of our roommates became a baker. We had some good times back then. I’m still am who I am and looking for a new guitar hero for my gypsy camp bonfire outskirts of town glamrachist torch and twang cowpunk glitter gang.
Blonde Angel – YouTube that’s what Andrew Loog Oldham aclled Marrianne Faithful, but it of course reminds me of my first love, the girl who got me into the Smiths and Depeche Mode in like 1983 or 1984 or something.
“Imagine if a Russian media outlet worked with their security services to lead a manhunt for a leaker. That would be seen as the most evil thing in the world, and proof that it’s a totalitarian hellscape. But when the NYT does it for the US regime it’s Brave and Heroic Journalism…it’s hard to believe they actually proudly published this. It’s like if Daniel Ellsberg wanted to hand them the Pentagon Papers, and they immediately called the FBI and CIA to rat him out and then gloated about it. It’s so incredibly bizarre, and shows just how depraved they are…” (-Zei_Squirrel)
““Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.” (-Albert Einstein)
I really enjoyed the Don Letts movie, I was wrong when I thought I already knew everything about Don Letts. This film is very educational and informative as well as entertaining and you know if you are a parent or auntie or uncle or mentor to any young people, it is a good one to show all generations to follow, so they can see what is possible, even if it does not happen just like that everyday, anymore. It all started out a cool kid from Brixton who worked at early punk boutique Acme Atrractions and got ahold of an early video camera and started video taping shows at the 100 Club, creating the landmark “Punk Rock Movie” and the iconic “London Calling” video, expressing himself by whatever medium he had available. All my loved ones know how much I love Big Audio Dynamite. I had no idea the Don did all those videos. I mean I knew about Lydon and the Clash, but he created some of THE best videos of all time, one after another. Bam. Musical Youth “Pass The Dutchie”. Bam. Pretenders “Back On The Chain Gang”. Bam. Gap Band “Party Train”. Just on and on and on and you don’t stop. I’m glad he’s enjoying a resurgence.
““Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.”” (-Mark Twain)
“Who wants to bet that US surveillance state cut-out Belling Cat has had access to classified documents?” (-Margaret Kimberley)
“Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.” (-Benjamin Franklin)
“This spirit is resistance to illegitimate authority and to forces that deprive people of their life and liberty and right to pursue happiness, and therefore under these conditions, it urges the right to alter or abolish their current form of government – and the stress had been on abolish. But to establish the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we are going to need to go outside the law, to stop obeying the laws that demand killing or that allocate wealth the way it has been done, or that put people in jail for petty technical offenses and keep other people out of jail for enormous crimes.” (-Howard Zinn)
BREATHE, HYDRATE, TAKE VITAMINS, GET SOME SUNSHINE, LISTEN TO MUSIC, SELF CARE & PRAYING
Bitterness, animosity, resentment and anger can grip you enexpectedly if you find yourself trapped with no mobility or freedom. I do my best to entertain myself with very limited resources and mercifully my wife bought me a fresh notebook, some pens and a new memory card for an old camera we found, so I photograph flowers and sunsets and I write lyrics for future songs about this fuckedup world we live in. Two differnt friends asked to hear summa my crummy old demos this week and I was flattered when they liked that stuff cause it was all poorly recorded, unfinished and recorded with mutinous mercenary sidemen who weren’t really committed to the operation, so it was a wonder any of it ever, ever generated any positive reviews, but it all did. I also got two scathingly meanspirited, flatout hateful reviews and those were my favorites, honestly. I think they were right about all of it. I’m restless, irritable and discontented. Keep tryin to recruit a new rebel army. Wanna gypsy glamarchist real rocknrolol band, wanna travel, play shows, record new music, in the immortal words of Joe Strummer, “LET’S ROCK AGAIN!”
OLDSCHOOL VAN HALEN EVEN INFLUENCED A GENERATION OF ATOMIC PUNKS PLAYING DRAFT BEER STICKY BASEMENT SHOWS ON HICKTOWN BILLS WITH THRASH BANDS
Remember that US FESTIVAL press conference bad blood between the hard rock camp and the new wavers? I was at reform school in South Eastern Kentucky that year but could not really pick a side. Part of me was all let me entertain you showbiz like Roth, and part of me was all power to the people like the Clash and MC5. Nothing’s changed.
Ya know I wake up early with the cows and roosters and turkeys and coyotes out here in the no man’s lands and kinda review my dreams as I make my coffee and I still have a lotta dreams about being in all those long dead flash metal suicide rocknroll gutter gangs back in the late eighties and first half of the nineties. last night me and my old sideman Nasty McBastard were gettin’ up to all kindsa dangerous shenanigans onstage at some heavy metal club with actual good lighting! I remember one run down white trash heavy metal hole from the old days had the big mondo deluxe stage lighting for every band that played whether you were the crummiest Megadeath cover band or the biggest, toughest Judas Priest homophobe macho dicks. Anyways, yeah, you know this song by heart, how we were part Fleshtones, Little Richard, Humpers, and part Van Halen but like a low budget Van Halen, always playing through pawn shop, second hand, hand me down equipment-Boogie had stolen me a microphone from some old high school music room he’d gone to. I mean we were peasants, real dead broke have nothings, except for Boogie who had a motorcycle and a real flash couple of drumkits.Somebody always ended up giving Nasty a van, probably to get him outta sleepin’ in their toolshed! The far out part was how we kept trying to connect with midwestern divebar punters even though we had these really outta style seventies glam influences like Alvin Stardust and Alice Cooper, Slade and T Rex, but with an angry sorta three chords and a grudge Deadboys style musical approach via nasty B, so we never really got outta the rut of playing those smalltown shitholes for rednecks that could not understand us, and objected strongly to the makeup, or punk rock basement shows with all hardcore bands except two token twerp Green Day imitator kid groups in the Post-Cobain era, but at least the forty ounce malt liquor in a brownbag and heavily tattooed punk kids and loud strippers could always dig where we were coming from, back then, at least on a less inebreiated night, we did not like to fuck around with too much in between song banter, we liked to whollop ’em with hit after hit and leave ’em singin’ our songs like the Stones audience on the way to the parking lot still singin’, “I say yeah, yeah, yeah, whoo!” Now summa the punks we played for went on to local stardom with their groups and even got selected to appear on fancy UK glossy metal mag compilations by my own former tv show partner long after we ourselves dissolved in a chaotic smoke of empty bottles and finger pointing and acrimony and broken down black band vans with skulls painted on the side, on the side of the road with that only so-so Cult album, “Between Good & Evil” blaring on the impressive sound system Nasty McBastard must have charmed offa some midwest farmer’s daughter. Last time I saw the old drummer, Boogie Jackson, He was shakin’ up some crazy strong zombie voodoo drinks from behind the bar at one of those hopeless old man dives in the midwest where everybody’s wearin’ the white stained unisex oversized Nascar t shirts, losin’ their teeth and lookin’ for some more crack. Our last ne’er do well bassplayer The Kid, he had more 90’s influences than we did-he liked Urge Overkill and Veruca Salt-always had a black eye from runnin’ his mouth off and started going to jail for varagrancy after spending his inheritance on drugs in Hollywood with his high school stoner friends and paying for the town’s token openers for bigname punk bands to go into the expensive, prestiegious, local rockstars recording studio to record a whiplash, absolutely outstanding barn burner cover of one of my songs.Wow man they really bashed it out with flair. It souned like Hardcore Superstar or Backyard Babies-slick sleaze metal par excellence, of course nobody knows I wrote it. Even still, all we did was laugh and laugh even amidst all the failure and humilation that awaits an Our Gang no budget, downwardly immobile band of junk shop glam, heathen rabblerousers in the school to prison pipleine flyover states of drive through fast food, Budweiser 24 packs and sports bar indoctrination tv slavery. We had a lotta crazy kicks together, Me and Nasty and the wild smiler drummer Boogie, but he was always in trouble with the law, basically for too much loud partying in a too small town. He was trying to live like an L.A. Sunset Strip rockstar poolside at the Riot House, I think we all were, but he was in a small rightwing cop and farmertown with flags on every corner. They’d see him comin’ from miles away, either cause he’s ridin’ his motorcycle on the sidewalk, wearing all black leather and atomic pink snowmobile sunglasses in the daytime banking hours and trying to negotiate girls back to his place two at a time before the bankers got off work, that kinda thing, eventually he wisedup and relocated to New Orleans where a more tolerant and artistic culture appreciates outlandish drummers with big personalities, if you’ve ever seen “Better Call Saul”, reimagine Saul Goodman as a heavy metal drummer and that’ll get you somewhere close. The wouldbe Steve Jones guitar desperado throwing all the big Billy Duffy poses in one of my old cowboy shirts he always stole and cut the sleeves offa to showoff his big muscular hulk smash arms with alll the flames and angels tattoos the original girl magnet Joe Perry lookalike lead shredder had given him when he was first learning how to tattoo before abandoning us for a professional career in straight society, the flame tattooed AC/DC guy misappropraited his current amplifier from a famous garage band who were supposed to produce us. There was a really popular collegetown band who were like a combination of the Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, who were very much of the time with Scott Ian from Anthrax style goatees and unbuttoned paisley shirts, Tarzan lifeguard chests, combat boots and shorts and flannel, who packed the nightclubs and I always thought their main appeal was that they were so loud, playing at Marshall stack Motorhead volume, that’s how they connected with all the straights and squares was mainly through volume. I saw them probably twenty times and don’t remember even one song. There was also a trust funded local franchise Cramps band and it was the same way-they weren’t really sayin’ nothing, just doing the standard local Cramps impersonation, but they also had really sweet equipment they were playing through loudly-they nicked an early drummer from us. They resonated with all the normals way better than we scrappy from the heart amateurs ever did but they were really kinda just doing the uptown haves version of our thing. Our brand of Stooges or Carmps punk rock was always sorta spiked with an extra dose of Animal House and Peter Zaremba. We had memorable songs, but they had more memorable tube amps and vintage echo machines, smoke machines, bougeoise confidence peddlers-they were part of the machine-everytime we crashed and burned, they got promoted. It is ongoing. By the textbook Sid Vicious punques from the college towns were all still in their greasy hot rod phase, 20 bands all playing dorky odes to Billie Joe and imitating the Queers and New Bomb Turks, so they did not know what we were doin’ up there with all the stadium rock exaggerated gesturing and good times pop anthems. The stuck even furthur back in the past than we were heavy metal elements, were all into like either Metallica caveman Cookie Monster vocals or the ear piercing police siren singing of those Iron Maiden types, so not all of them were as receptive to our more Zodiac Mindwarp influenced, Dollsy, glammy, trashy punknroll-that’s how it kinda went. We got a lotta hostility from the Metallica hicks, again, cause the makeup, but we successfully got whole rooms pogoing like poprcorn when we played for the punques, maybe one straight edge Minor Threat brooder kid would be frowing at us cause we drank and smoked onstage, flagrantly when that was still being phased out by the man. We knew we needed better gear if we were ever gonna resonate with these midwesterners who never really liked much rocknroll music, anyhow.I had auditioned this really good Eddie Hazel and Jim Hendrix influenced slick guitar player from the popular grunge and funk group to potentially replace our lost lad in a big loft in the millionaire side of town and while I was sorta improvising beat lyrics about how the trust fund nepo kids who’d flooded into our former college punk and indie underground were all gonna end up back at their parent’s country club in the next ten years, he looked at me and unforgettably said, “so it’s gonna be like the Trash Brats with Duran lyrics”? He was sayin’ it like it’s a bad thing, but he was not entirely wrong Of course, I was seein’ it more like the Four Horsemen with gonzo beat influenced Jim Morrison meets Joe Strummer lyrics, as I was still in my peak drunken black leather delusion of ramshackle, freestyle, anti gravity acidhead Dionysian lovegod feather boa grandeur. I felt like me and him coulda been a good songwriting combination but he thought I ws too wild and considered offensive by all the posh people he consorted with back then. I still like that guy. I just like him from afar cause I could never stand his friends and it was mutual. He was smart, talented and funny, I still have black sharpie cartoons he did of me while working at a punk boutique I used to visit while on our daily boring collegetown pub crawls. There was a class divide. That became a thing in the mid-90’s, for sure. We were said to be too punk for metal, too metal for punk, but the real problem was we sucked at making money. Money Changes Everything. Motherfuckers we loved who married up don’t even talk to us no more. Our friends who made it big in show business kinda underemphasize their associations with us now, when they used to sortof used to overemphasize their associations with us like a doorknob when they were on their way up, you feel me? To borrow a famous friend’s phrase, we were like “the Cramps without adequete food or shelter”.
I saw Diamond Dave and Steve Stevens playin’ with some corporate mercenary private show super group online yesterday-they were hammering out the hits for some Home Depot managers convention. Unreal! Once you got a taste of the tinsel you never stop wanting to return to glory, return to splendour, get back in the van and light out for desperate bars in distant cities with your scuzzbucket bandidoes and an unquenchable desire to light up the sky. No matter how old you get-it never goes away. I’m wearin’ a purple scarf right now.
“Trying to watch a little of the Grammys right now. Don’know if I’m just a bit too old, or a little too buzzed from a couple cocktails… What happened to rock ‘n’ roll??? ” (-Michael Anthony of VAN HALEN)
“I said, ‘No, no: it works both ways. We want the freedom to be ourselves, to say what we like, even though it offends some other people. I gotta let him be who he is and say what he likes, even though it offends me, because that’s freedom.” (-Real Artist and Free Speech Advocate, Melissa Etheridge, on censorship and cancel culture calls to boycott LCD mooks like Eminem)
“US arrogance is writ large all over the world, including in the perhaps little known Hague Invasion Act passed by Congress and signed by George W. Bush in 2002, roughly seven months before the US attacked Iraq.
Formally known as the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, this choice bit of legislation makes it lawful—not internationally, but lawful according to US statute—for the US to invade the Netherlands to save any US official, service member, or citizen, or those of any of its allies, should they ever be brought before the International Criminal Court, no matter how heinous or well-documented the crime.
This is US arrogance taken into a fabulist realm, but why should we be surprised? Last December it was announced that the US Navy’s next amphibious assault ship LHA-9 will be the USS Fallujah.” (-Ann Garrison)
ANTHONY CASTILLO FROM SLOW MOTORCADE ON THE HOLLYWOOD STARS
The Hollywood Stars were a cool band and a strange band at the same time. Thier first album was released on Arista Records in 1977, when punk rock was in full swing worldwide. They were a band more suited for a 1975 record release. To be fair, the first Cheap Trick album was also released in 77, though Chep Trick, while also very melodic, were more of an arena hard rock band than a big power pop band like the Stars. I saw the Stars as the last gasp of velvet blazer, jumpsuit, ruffled shirt, flared trouser, cool haircut, big power pop rock bands, in the mold of the Raspberries, Arrows, Nick Gilder and others. Don’t get me wrong,1975 is maybe my favorite year in rock’n’roll. I love that one year that was the transition from Glitter Rock to Punk Rock. Some really great stuff come out of that year/time period, stuff like Dwight Twilley Band, Rick Derringer, The Arrows, Ian Hunter’s first solo release, The Dictators and much more. I knew of the Stars, but I remember buying the Hollywood Stars record on the cover alone, the look of the band, seeing Kim Fowley as co-song writer was good enough for me. When I got home and played the LP, I was pleasantly surprised. While Mark Anthony’s voice was a little dramatic in tone, songs like the first track “All the Kids on the Street”, “Make it to the Party”, and the heartbreaking “Sunrise on Sunset” were great then, they stand the test of time and still sound great today. Give them a listen you might be surprised at what you may have missed.
“No other way to say it now: my former colleagues in mainstream media are spineless, corrupt, amoral fuckwits.” (Matt Taiibi)
DEMOLITION 23
From a young age, I always got hired on as like the resident punk at record stores. greedy capitalists loved me even though I could be a surly kid, and always kinda looked weird compared to normies they preferred to hire on, mostly because I made them lots and lots and lots of money. I was no record store snob because I have always believed that real music made from the heart appealed to all of humanity’s better nature and wanted to get people listening to the good stuff, the real soul and punk and rebel rockers, cause I think good music makes us better people. Now I can remember when that dumb movie “High Fidelity” came out, several people tried to accuse me of being a record store snob because I was never as into the post grunge, contrived “altenrnative” that was forcefed on everybody by the big corporations. I was not as into Soundagrden or Nirvana or D-Generation or New Bomb Turks as most other people seemed to be. I already had my own music I believed in, so the whole “hello hello hello how low” thing was never as mindblowing to me as it was to all the civilians who’d come flooding in to Tower Records on snowy days. I prided myself however on steering customers towards quality rocknroll though, cause that’s what my old record store guru, Dave A. had done for me so I always figured it was sortof my responsibility and moral debt and obligation to let all the people, even the Harvard dickheads, know that there was better music on the shelves than what they were consuming based on bullshit marketing and repetition airplay. In spite of all my class resentments, I felt it was only fair and honest to try n hip the mad herds to Mother Love Bone or Thee Hypnotics even though the man was pushing Alanis Morissette and Matchbox 20. I was getting sick of richkids though-it was hard being a broke pauper in Cambridge, Ma., with all that insane New England class privilege and class snobbery and excess money floatin’ all around me, gettin’ pressured by the inlaws to somehow magically produce More Money, and every girl at the cash register asking me about Evan Dando. My first girlfriend came to town to go to a prestiegious school and I was having all these fantasies of escaping a spiraling living situation by moving in with her, so I took the day off work to take her to the House Of Blues and by the third drink, she was asking me if I could maybe introduce her to Evan Dando. Fast forward to maybe three years later…
I ended up working for a real asshole at a bigger city recordstore who sexually harrassed his female employees, verbally abused all the males, tried to only hire namebrand hipsters with indie record deals who he poured favoritism on and made us lower ranking underlings work all their extra hours when they were on tour while salaried, which meant I was getting no additional moolah for fifteen extra hours, he threw a drunk homless guy on the ground and made the elderly oldster bleed unremorsefully and I was thinkin’, “but for the grace of God there go I”, and then, he gave me massive psychological shit for failing to rip off the public sufficiently when buying used cd’s for resell, and started accusing me of stealing from him, and going into gross, explicit rants about how attractive certain women I used to date were, so yeah I quit that place and never looked back, and a chick I dated walked because of it. Such is life. So then…
So there I was, mindin’ my own business, probably thinkin’ ’bout some girl, smokin’ on the job, which was still a thing you could do freely back then. Smokin’ while kinda leisurely putting used cd’s away for a former co worker of mine who’d done good with the inheritance and selling bootlegs and had his own store that he promoted via his own radio show that I think my old girlfriend the Famous Radio Personality helped him wrangle. He’d play all this absolute shite Nu Metal for the rural smalltown farmboys in that area code and they’d all flock to his tiny record store in their pickup trucks to purchase all the latest Korn and Limp Bizkit, all that vile dumbfuck shit and puke, while his brother ran a tiny balloon and pizza delivery and beer drive through in the same building. Some pudgy kids from the suburban honky schools I’d been kicked out of for having No Doze in my locker and wearing too much makeup and hairspray in tribute to my idols of Hanoi Rocks and Lords Of The New Church, these kids came in being real familiar with the shopkeep, turned out the blonde one was his cousin, and one of ’em was lookin’ at me funny cause I’d shaven my head in a cruel mood sudden burst of artistic fervor and it was still growin’ back out slowly, plus I was wearing a pair of like leopardskin glasses frames and he asked me if I’m myself and yeah, of course I am, and he started excitedly babbling to me about how he’d heard all the wild stories about my long forgotten teenage bands and the bandhouse we used to have week long tristate hootennannies at, and the crazy muscle cars we spraypainted with skulls in dayglo colors out in the yard and the former bassplayer’s smalltown celebrity, and the other former bassplayer’s smalltown celebrity, and the former drummer’s zaney ska band, and didn’t I used to date this girl and that girl and that girl and this girl, how he was in a new band with the other former drummer, but he was also hoping to enlist all my other former bandmates to play for his pop/punk era group who were kinda like the Violent Femmes and Green Day. You can imagine my excitement. So yeah, both of these kids were real suburban dudes, totally superfunded by their parents with the surplus income streams and nice cars and one of ’em was on his way to recording engineering school right after graduation and can I introduce him to Somebody Famous he heard I might know down there and of course they started playing senior year hookey all the time and showing up everyday by eleven to quiz me about rocknroll and the shopkeep was delighted cause these bozos wer buying hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of cd’s, big stacks of ’em, anything I said I liked-Action Swingers, Thee Hypnotics, Warrior Soul, MC5, Sam Cooke, Standells, Louis Prima, or Funkadelic, it all went on the big stacks. Usually I’m not always so inclined to give Nu Metal DJ’s on commercial classic rock stations and their eager beaver capitalist protegees master classes in rocknroll hoochie koo, but like I said, I was goin’ through some life changes at the time, living in a $90 a week motel room, not eating, and spending all the money I made by smokin’ cigarettes and tellin’ stories to rich kids from deepest suburbia on vodka I bought from the drivethrough. The bigmouthed overconfident one savvily suggested they become my backup band if I wanted to get back to performing some shows at the little hole in the wall bars in the middle of nowhere, where they claimed I still had a big fanbase of people who remembered me, the local bands who were popular by then were all in my old band’s audiences, and they brought a whiz kid guitar player overto meet me in my sodden state at the motel late one night, he seemed like a nice enough kid. I summoned my former rhythm guitar player the AC/DC guy from three towns over and we commenced to teach the bigmouthed overconfident bassplayer our old punk rock set, like twenty two minutes of hit n run grudge-pop, and he claimed he was gonna whip his boys into shape and book us a gig and yada yada yada. This went on for less than six months probably cause I was gettin’ bored and restless without wheels or womanly companionship, I was alwys stuck either on that wooden stool at the record shop humoring these chubby brats or back at the lonely motel room, listening to cassette tapes I asked those kids to make me on a borrowed boombox the shopkeep loaned me. Some of that music they were buying by the trunkload that I could never afford from the fifty dollar Johnny Thunders Bootlegs to the seventyfive dollar double cd import only Australian bluespunk geniuses I always wax devoted about, Beasts Of Bourbon and affiliates. These kids bought up all that stuff just cause I said I liked it, all the spinoff bands and side projects-the Cruel Sea, the Surrealists, all the Hanoi affiliated stuff. It was kinda weird seein’ these two dudes with all that money to burn but they were buying musical equipment based on my merest say so, too, and I’m not even a tech-guy, I’m not a musician, just a streetpunk shouter like Joe Strummer so anything I like is just born out of aesthetics or affinities. So yeah they made me a cassette tape of the DEMOLITION 23 record and I was tellin’ ’em how this was exactly the kinda punk rock I needed to get back into doin’. Some other customers came in who’d seen me and the AC/DC guy take over at some sports bar mostly dominated by Pearl Jam coverbands, we went up there one shitfaced drunk nad bleary night and blasted out some old Alice Cooper and Deadboys covers and everybody kinda went crazy over it, then, the old ladies from the record store in the mall who would never give me a job because I had a bad reputation and they said my hair was too long, they’d come in to the store remembering shows me and the lads had played at some shit nowhere downtown bar called the Mill Cafe where all the girls were screamin’, so these two dorks are takin’ all this in and maybe they were kinda just hustling me for ideas and information, but it wouldn’t matter anyways cause I’m all about spreading the Gutter Gospel and promoting the real good music I believe in to all the people, if they were here today, I’d be tellin’ ’em all about the new Richard Duguay record, ya know? That’s how I am, but one morning I woke up and just had that sense of fuck this, there’s gotta be more to like than just selling hundreds of 60 Ft Dolls cds to Doofus Punques from deepest white suburbia for my get rich former co worker the inheritance guy done good on bootlegs and I took twenty five bucks outta the cash drawer and with some cash I had left from the past week, I had less than a hundred bucks and a pack of cigarettes and it was time. I just got on a Grayhound and left that town. About six months later, those guys had been into the recording studio like ten times, had relesed three or four singles, a couple different cds, changed the name of their doofus band, moved to the nearby collge town, recruited my old bandmates including my Boston sax playing roommate and become totally overnight famous in the region kinda doing a hybrid of my thing and their thing. It is always startling to see what can be accomplished with a big budget in no time at all-all that money buys. Next time I saw those kids was online, they were all wearing MC5 shirts and stalking Michael Davis. Mike’s a good guy, or was, so he not only encouraged all those kids, but their brother band from my same fuckedup tankplant highschool town who were Beastie Boys whiteboy rappers also overnight became big garage rock Hanoi Rocks/MC5 fans with a good. loud drummer I kept that Demolition 23 casssette the guy I used to think was way, way, way overconfident made for me and he’d thoughtfully recorded a solo Mike Monroe cd on the other side for me, or maybe it was a compilation of stuff from Mike albums I could never afford, but I remember loving a song called, “Where’s The Fire, John” cause that was my ex bassplayer’s name who joined all the popular well funded kid bands in the college town. Made me wanna ask him that same question. Another song that really slayed me was called “Loneliness Loves Me More”, and hell, you might know my desert ghost town part time band is called the Loneliness, not named from that song really, probably more “When Doves Cry” or my general state of being. Their cover of “Machinegun Etiquette” was just an assault, really, they tore that tune apart. “Scum Lives On” was Our Heroes on full blast heavy doses of Little Steven, Stiv Bators and the Clash doin’ the kinda righteous right on, say it, brother testimony we’ve been known to do ’round here. “Nothing’s Alrite” sang about different generations and how we were all gettin’ dumbed down and numbed out on cable, big pharma prescription pills, and the mass hallucination hypnospell since Bush/Cheney. My anthem for quite awhile was “Hammersmith Palais”. I wasn’t havin’ no fun, either. I remained resentful about how the record store loitering lurkers all got to be in superfunded superfamous collegetown legendary, go on tour, level bands with a cannibalized version of my old crew, but that’s how it is, right? Money talks, bullshit walks. I’m still a pedestrian in a packs of pitbulls desert town and I still aint got no bread to shellout on the WICKED COOL records re-release of the Demolition 23 cd with the bonus tracks, but you probably do, so have at it, brothers and sisters and friends of the revolution and you leeching capitalist cover band garage rawkers in the back with the credit cards, too.
RICHARD DUGUAY ASTONISHES ME!
I know I keep sayin’ it but when you finally get that beautifil LP with the gatefold cover and lyric sheet in your hands and play the new Richard Duguay record, you’re not gonna be able to stop playing it for a long time. I know you won’t believe me until you hear it, but pick your favorite Bowie, Cooper or Doors record. it’s approximately that good. Music for the ages. He reminds me of me. Sings like Alice and Zodiac, but with some down on the streets Tom Waits soul. He is exceptional though, really just top notch Olympian level greatness at every level, the lyrics, the songs, the threads. Beautiful Decline is gonna outlive you and me.
Most people I still know are pretty traumatized by all the WW3 brinksmanship and war profiteering scumbag chickenhawks playing chcicken with nukes and zillion dollar proxy armies and tv lies and unreality. If you’ve managed to stay human after the past five to twentyfive years of being punishingly pounded with hate and fear propaganda, cheers to ya. I’ll share a holistic medicinal home remedy with you, my brothers and sisters and friends of the revolution this morning. THE WATERBOYS. Especially “This Is The Sea” and “Fisherman’s Blues”. Those records are like old whiskey. They’ll heal what ails ya.
Psy-ops are a thing. Culture war is a big red herring distraction from empire’s war on ten other countries, censorship, selective law enforcement targeting journalists, whistle blowers and nature preservers. We all know corporate media never talks about real shit like crazy povery, insane rents and Wall street greedhead inflation, only diversionary divisions intended to keep the people fighting rather than uniting against the Billionaire Agenda that hides behind puppets and phony headline grabs. If you know the empire does not care about poor people anywhere, you should know they don’t really care about any marginalized communities except when they can be used or manipulated to advance a shady agenda of some kind.
If you think offensive speech is the same thing as violence, you have probably never been repeatedly queerbashed by mobs of rednecks in real life, or beaten unconscious by oversized hockey players trying to court favor with grunge years Less Than Zero hipster wannabe drug cliques. I lived in places that are permanent middle school, where the same old preppies whose sports moms always rewarded their bad behaviors and bought them their big golden trophies and sports car and biggest cake birthday parties, way back when, are still monoplizing the town’s resources and ruling over their minions like Baby Doc junior despots. Terrible, tightknit in crowd scenes where all the goony sycophantic followers just unconditionally worshipped at the feet of these sicko sadist money holders, drug sons of rich people, no matter how abusive or ugly the fratboys behaved, all the suckup bimbos and weak minded follower, adult cartoon quoting, Foo Fighter fanboy suckup wimps and swetty gamers just praised their names as holy innovating rockstar playboy messaiahs and continue to, decades later. These local gentry guys did nothing of value but ran some businesses for rich people and dealt some drugs on the sly. and became like symbolic can’t lose place holders for powerful entities, they had a third hand whiff of authority, and executive entitlement as Max Headroom lookalike drug sons of rich CEO’s, and that was enough to continue to impress the mad mobs of mediocrity, the hamburglars and secretaries just applaud anything that vaguely signals money in the bank. As horrified as I was by the casually committed atrocities of the bully class, what really left the deep imprint on my frail psyche was all the complicit scene of the crime smilers who celebrated their corruption and brutality like in those old postcards of lynchmob hangings, where you’d see all those white people smiling. That’s the part I can’t get past, am haunted by-the blindly obedient followers.So afraid of losing a parcel of their belonger privilige, the free drink tickets and easy jobs mean way more to the tv brainwashed rah rah Black Friday shoppers than anything like right and wrong. The spectator society that seem to love brute violence. That is still crazy as fuck to me, but even old friends I use to know and revere all fell like dominoes into that dummy paradigm of asskissing all the local Hunter Bidens and Jared Kushners and enabling five privileged abusers to shit on whoever they want, whenever they want, however they want, forever, amen. I figure that must be how these corporations get away with it, they get everybody to carry a little complicity and involvement and repeat their lies and swear their alliegence to the frathouse system in exchange for their membership. I figure there will always be some shady sociopaths who get off on throwing their weight around and keeping a boot on the necks of the less powerful, but I never bought into the old saw about how that’s just how people are, it’s just the way of things and we all gotta get in line with the hut twos and accept it or else. If all people were just bullies or moral cowards, there would not have been so many people’s movements and the billionaires would not have to weaponize all media and invest so many billions into fanatical narrative control and all day censorship. I take heart from the people of France who have risen up against their tyrannical, oppressor ruling class dictators trained by the Future Fascist Schools. If somebody tells you to do harm, or that killing or beating someone is for democracy and popularity or any false cause, tell ’em to go fuck themselves. Even if it means you lose your Saturday night headliner status at the gentrification lounge. Universities are so completely infiltrated with identity politricks fraudsquad feelings thinly veiling ballsout warpiggery nowadays and people are so corporate narrative bamboozled, there’s been like two and a half generations tricked into believing that wars of empire are for transkids freedom and women’s rights, and that rewriting old novels or censoring naughty words from classic books is somehow progressive. It’s not. You’re being lied to and duped by facking nazis who offer you a bullshit Zuckbot Metaverse Unreality Show where rich techlords decide what you are allowed to like or think or quote or remember and that if they sweep all the historical unpleasantries back underneath your fucking Amazon paisley carpet, you’ll have more attention for their Netflix n chill new world order conditioning and online shopping. I say, “Fuck That Shit”. Censoring history or rewriting books is not progressive, people, it’s marketing. PR bullshit. Fakeass unreality. Resist the NWO. Remember the past, learn from history, you can’t just memory hole everything that feels ikky and repeat nonsense slogans about Lil Nas X is the new Marvin Gaye or Obama is MLK Jr’s dream come true, this is corporate bullshit. AOC does not care about poor people-she herds ’em into the forever wars meatgrinder, exactly the same as Mitch McConell and Lindsey Graham and Obama. Stop worshipping “popularity” puppets. Stop trusting your tv.
JUST LIKE IN FLINT & BP ECOCIDE IN THE GULF, THE FALSE-MEDIA DID A WATER DRINKING POLITICIANS PHOTO OP THEN MOVED ON, INDIE WATCHDOGS STATUS COUP STAYED ON THE GROUND!
Man I feel for everybody who is so viscerally ill affected by these mass shootings that have become so common, epecially traumatized kids, parents and teachers. The other people soapboxing about it are usually just repeating their partisan memo, hometeam talking points. The new cold war, pro censorship fauxwoke karens of the got-mine fake left wanna ban all the guns and just trust the nice policemen to protect them. They figure they will provide an essential service as a snitch for the Gates Reset and will get to keep all their special microchip, first in line, electric car privileges and VIP parking and shit. The rightwingers wanna keep assault grade military weapons easily accessible and in the hands of white supremacist white property owners. People like me just annoy all our former associates cause we always keep pointing out how the nonstop glorification of violence by all copagandizing pigmedia worship of a supposedly so heroic man in a uniform kicking in somebody’s door wherever Exxon or Chevron or Nestle or whatever big Wall Street oligarch’s firm want to loot more oil like in Syria with Genie Energy is part of the bloodsoaked culture of violence problem. How can tv watchers keep complaining about “RUSSIA!” while their own Dem administration keeps couping countries in the global South and kidnapping their leaders? They sent their proxies to bust into the Pakistan leader’s home cause he said he does not want Biden flying drones out of his country. The secret police mercenaries kidnapped the democratically elected leader of the Peruvian people-Castillo, a farmer, and killed many protestors in Peru, I mean all this horrible shit is happening right now while tv keeps motherfuckers talking about bullshit. Murkkka’s ongoing occupation of the lower oil rich third of Syria’s sovereign land is somethin’ no safespace know it all sensitivity shitlibs ever wanna talk about. The empire’s shameless social engineers even gave an Oscar to a propaganda flick claiming the false flag proxy war mercenary looters who invaded Syria were savior humanitarians and shitlib celebrities like MIchael Moore never said shit to contradict that fictitious script, it’s all connected, the military budget, the imperilaism, Bernie Sander’s sellout to the DNC, the empty virtue singaling of the fake left that has replaced reading or action, the racist kkkops, the perpetually offended and outraged Kalltha Kkkops Karyns, the fake history whitewash in our schools, the corruption of the media and universitives by Pentagon funding, and all platforms of corporate media selling more coups and imperialist provocations and glorifying these memory holed warpigs like Cheney and Obama and Colin Powell and Bolton and Condoleeza just creates a relentless culture of dead kids, which some of the psychopathic billionaire “philanthropists” have REPEATEDLY said out loud they want, in order to cull the herd, depopulate the world so they can blame the enviornment on poor people and never have to alter their own elitist jetset private plane fuckedup war culture that causes all the damage. Karyns care about kittens and pollution but they can’t bring themselves to admit very often that the biggest polluter is the military cause they all have that one relative who served, and therefore the whole institution, must be somehow sainted. Also, Obama. Namaste, motherfuckers.
“”Do you know what oligarchy is? It’s the government of the rich. And democracy is the government of the people. So they don’t want a government of the people” (-AMLO)
“Joe in Ukraine while folks in an Ohio town can’t breathe the air or drink the water safely but have been denied federal emergency relief. This pretty much sums up how this government, despite party, values war over workers.” (-Dr. CBS on Twitter)
“There will never be a US anti war coalition that doesn’t include people with awful ideas. If you think that “legitimizing” them is more dangerous than having no organized resistance to war, then fine. I hope that comforts you next time we bomb a poor country into the stone age.
I’m sure there’s some Fed field manual that says “If a movement becomes broad enough, intervention is minimally necessary. Internal discord about purity politics will cause fractures within the coalition long before they present any sort of threat….(-Bryce Green)
“”Sanders said he would support Biden if he ran for reelection in 2024, adding that he has done “a good job” “
Bernie Sanders is trash. A lost cause. Move on people.” (-Dirtbag Leftist)
“Neither Trump nor DeSantis are coming to save you.
The sooner you realize this, the sooner you can start taking decisive steps to protect yourself & your loved ones from the coming political-economic shitstorm.” (-Sally Mayweather)
DAVID RYDER PRANGLEY
Did you ever see that funny as fuck flick, “Still Crazy”? It’s kindof like “Spinal Tap” but with heart and friendship. You should see it if you’re an aging rocker-really, really good stuff!One of the best remaining rocknroll still crazies I know of is David Ryder Prangley, who’s got like a little bit Brett Smiley, a little bit Michael Des Barres and A little Bowie in his sound, kinda like a Welsh Richard Duguay, maybe more goth, a death rock Marc Bolan-what planet did he come from? I dunno, he’s groovy, though! He used to be affiliated with Rachel Stamp and played bass for Adam Ant. Is he goth or glam or classic rock or prog? Who cares, he’s creative and cool, writes pretty music. “Forever In Starlight” is something special. He’s fabulous, I really love his jams! Ronald Koal meets the early Dimestore Haloes? He’s just great, part glam, part gloom, poetic like Donovan or Bolan, right?! Right on!!
SO MUCH EXCITEMENT! YA KNOW THE ROCKNROLL PEOPLE CAN’T WAIT FOR RICHARD DUGUAY’S NEW RECORD!!!
Wow, kids, the NEW RICHARD DUGUAY ALBUM “BEAUTIFUL DECLINE” is some fantastic rocknroll genius, if you heard his last last lp, and all my friends have cause I pushed it on to all their Walkmans, you already know this cat is really a master of the form, if yoyu like Alice Cooper, David Bowie, the Doors, or Rolling Stones, and who doesn’t, he’s like the last motherfucker who really knows how to make excellent records at that high level of both production and songwriting. Holy smokes, he’s so good-do yourself a big favor and pawn the dog if you have to, but get yourself a copy of anything by Duguay as soon as you possibly can.
“If anti-war protests made no difference, the US empire wouldn’t have completely abandoned full-scale ground invasions after 2003 and switched to sneakier, less effective means of warfare while launching unprecedented narrative management systems to suppress anti-war sentiments.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Don’t let some people who vote blue no matter who talk you out of supporting a cause you feel is just and worthwhile. Their idea of organizing is coming together to tear down other people’s hard work and effort. Notice how they never offer any type of better alternative…Do I like or agree with all of the speakers at this event? No, but I agree with the overall message. Like I said, it’s always the same people trying to tear these rallies apart. Don’t let them be the reason you don’t take part in something if you feel it’s a just cause.” (-Perpetual Shadow Ban)
“The Ohio train derailment & US attack on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline are two of the most devastating environmental disasters of this generation. Both are man made — one by a corporation & one by the CIA. Where the all of the major environmentalist groups & celebrities?” (-Anya Parampil)
I know…I know…if I’m gonna keep typing these kooky columns, I’m gonna need a proof reader. I know.
The way people like me used to love Iggy and Bowie, Lux & Ivy, Jeffrey Lee and Deborah Harry, Stiv Bators, and the New Romantics, man that’s how all these goofy college people in the new cars love Zelensky, Bill Gates, Kamala Harris, the batshit crooked Bidens, Dr. Anthony Fauchi and AOC. It’s batshit, the Thank Obamas. Elon Musk also has his devoted groupies. It’s all madness, I say. These rich people worshipping blue no matter whos and pink pussy knitted hat wearers are every bit as stubbornly blind and cultish as all those sad Qanon people who thought Trump was gonna arrest all the pedos.
Partisan Media is treating the toxic bomb story like a partisan issue. Breitbart, the rightwing Qanon, Steve Bannon, Trump associated page is like the only place where I’m reading updates about the explosion. My only theory is maybe the establishment wants shitlibs to associate the catastrophe with the right, so when Biden and the big money war Dems ignore it, the blue no matter whos can just ignore it, too. If the industry captured EPA says the air is safe, they’d never lie, they’re scientific! I kinda noticed how only rightwing blue blood. Tucker Carlson, will ever allow voices from the leftist antiwar movement to appear on his show, none of them are ever welcome on MSNBC or CNN, ya know, I gotta think it’s the same strategy-get inattentive Biden voters associating the antiwar left with Carlson, as away to take the momentum out of the movement among unconcerned, got-mine Democrats who still think WW3 is no big deal, cause Sean Penn and Letterman seem to love the overnight manufactured war celebrity. It’s a dark, dark time, and I see why everybody is so divided and confused. Toxic fumes are nothing to do with party prefrence, toxic fumes don’t care if you vote for this war party, or that war party. Or your opinions about gender reassignment surgery for children or wokeish pro nouns. Toxic fumes kill indiscriminately. WTF? Partisan media is fucked, can you imagine the Huffpost or NY Times outrage if Trump was in another country planning war escalations and shoveling more billions to corrupt regimes while so many people are homeless and sick and can’t pay rent here, and espcially, after the big train wreck chemical catastrophe in Ohio and nobody was helping those people?
Critical thinking humans I know have always understood you can’t blow up three buildings with two planes and wonder why the goverenment who destroyed so many lives with their phony drug war are now suddenly encouraging people, predominantly in tonier zipcodes, to smoke pot, and why they are even steadily legalizing psychedelics after screaming about them and locking people up and killing people over them, since the sixties. I am not one to just blank check trust big pharma or believe our so called representatives just want us mellowing out and having spriritual awakenings because they love us. This shit with the toxic fumes is beyond my belief. All my early morning thoughts keep straying to those poor people in Palestine (coincidence?) being stubbornly ignored by the war mongering government after getting sick from the bomb train chemical explosion that’s poisoned their community, one more ruined sacrifice zone of the capitalists, and the accompanying corporation news coverup, ya know those toxic fumes are also harming people in Pennsylvania, home to all those Amish folks, and organic farmers and seed protectors. What a shitshow. There’s been three other train wrecks since then. My ex classmates would rather defend some goony puppet rapper and his inappropriate for young people weird occult fetish behaviors, than even consider, what they might do if that was their hometown. I mean you kinda gotta get the kid in the car and drive as far away as you can, but what happens to your belongings? They trot out that secret police twerp asset Mayo Pete to do nothing, and pretend he did something, the old Obama playbook. “Nothing to see here, folks, get back to work.” It’s rough business, these tools are so awful. Ugh. Terrible people, how do they live with themselves? I mean I know they like the money. I get that.
Of course I’m bummed out MEDEA BENJAMIN let some dubious non profit industrial complex, PC scolding committee types talk her out of protesting the war machine on behalf of CODE PINK, but the venerable CODE PINK stalwart peace maker and former 29 year veteran, Col. ANN WRIGHT was there, she was great, a real heroic person of integrity and compassion. Dan Cohen, David Swanson, so many great speakers really hit it outta the park. Makes me a bit leery of CODE PINK as an organization, like who’s calling the shots from behind the scenes, which is what some local keeps saying about Antifa, and yeah every real grass roots people’s movement is infiltrated, that is true, but I’ll still be following ANN WRIGHT, MEDEA BENJAMIN & ARIEL GOLD, online. It’s really sad how the whole media has been weaponized by the owners and the Pentagon, even this morning, “Rolling Stone” which was once a platform for the antiwar counter culture, printing people like Michael Hastings who was probably asssinated and Hunter S. Thompson, now it has some sorta bogus article about how censorship and cancel culture are just wonderful, rather than manipulative devices used by the empire to silence dissent or real scientific method, or historical facts saying, or independent journalists; by the media programmed vigilante squad safesapce rubes who still cling to dominant think tank narratives they hear from authoritative sounding teleprompter readers on the tv. Most people do not understand that when they consume corporate media, they are being programmed by the evil marketing of the military industrial comlex. Most people are afraid to speak out. They have to fret about being Fascist Book jailed, or taken off Twitter by the many FBI information-police still employed by Elon Musk, for contradicting official narratives. Even some of my most sensitive and well intentioned peeps who loved R.E.M. and U2 in the eighties they never stand for anything but like, consumerism or celebrity feelings. Cable brainwash echo chamber tv and the Thank Obama culture have them believing this nonsense about how the Empire is made holy by the presence of some non binary people of color being seated in the front row. The intersectional fauxwoke empire is still just the wag the dog sideshow of the One Percent, who profit from the forever wars. Don’t fall for it. Say your thing, don’t fear the reaper, be true to yourself and your own conscience and instincts and core values-resist the goose-stepping, authoritarian bullshit. I know people who are afraid to protest war, cause the mainstreamers will call ’em dirty commies, or antivaxxers, or antisemetic, or accuse them of having cysborn heteronormative pass privilege, or of being disobedient, or impolite or whatever, who cares, fuck ’em. War is some horrible inhumane murderous atrocity. If speech is violence, how much worse is mass murdering for access to oil, lithium, opium, or the Devil’s Chessboard? I’m antiwar, not a pacifist exactly, but a human being who recognizes he’s being lied to by the same dark forces who always lie. Smedley Butler tried to tell us two generations ago. Don’t be a slogan repeating rube for the Bloodthirsty Plunderer’s Death and Carnage Machine! Yeah somebody might disagree with you about some shit. That’s how it is when you step outside the sensitivity safe space for rich people who don’t have to experience anything they might ever find “offensive”. The think tanks infiltrated the colleges, invented the P.C. scolding to take down anybody who remotely threatens the big monopoly shareholder’s advertising campaigns. The secret police are the pig media now. The techsurveillance globalists own the online media. The whole thing is used to manufacture consent for murder and theft. Stay strong, don’t believe the hype. I stand with the real human rights and civil liberties advocates. Like Howard Zinn said, and I paraphrase, they have the propaganda pulpits and guns and blind loyalty of the nazis of death but we got the poets and the troubadors. So we win. Don’t get baffled by your television. Your television millionaires are not gods, they’re just overpaid assholes who cash big checks for telling big lies over and over again.
“Our rulers pour so much effort into manufacturing consent because they absolutely require that consent in order to rule. Their worst-case nightmare scenario is the emergence of a large, robust movement of people saying “NO” to the imperial war machine, because military violence and the threat thereof is the glue that holds the empire together. It’s bringing public consciousness to the very most important aspect of the empire, which also happens to be the very least defensible.
Noam Chomsky said “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state” because over the centuries those who seek large-scale power over other humans have discovered that dominating people psychologically is more energy-efficient than dominating them with brute force, and is far less likely to see them wind up on the business end of a guillotine blade. If you can simply trick a profoundly unfree populace into thinking that they are free, you don’t have to waste any further energy wrestling their freedom away from them.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Of course a few thousand people at one protest is not going to bring peace to our world. Even a few million wouldn’t be enough. But public demonstrations are one of the many ways in which our society can be drawn toward awareness of what’s really going on in our world, what our rulers are really up to, and how much we’ve been lied to all our lives. From there health can follow, because with enough awareness people will cease consenting to things that they’ve come to recognize as being against their interests.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“BP had a 110% increase in profit over the year before even though Americans are struggling to pay for gas. Shell also had a 110% increase in profits. ConocoPhillips had a 131% increase in profits.
ExxonMobil had a 144% increase. This is an all-out war on American consumers.” (-Lee Camp)
“To live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
~Howard Zinn
“”If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word freedom out of your vocabulary.” (-Malcolm X)
We’re Being Trained To Worry About ‘Russian Propaganda’ While Drowning In US Propaganda One of the weirdest, most insane things happening today is the way the entire western world is being trained to freak out about “Russian propaganda” — which barely exists in the west — while ignoring the fact that we are spending every day marinating in billions of dollars worth of US empire propaganda.CNN has an article out titled “Darya Dugina’s death provides a glimpse into Russia’s vast disinformation machine — and the influential women fronting it” on the recently assassinated daughter of Alexander Dugin, a Russian political thinker of wildly exaggeratedinfluence.The article uses Dugina’s assassination to further stoke its audience’s ever-growing panic about Russian disinformation, quickly becoming a commentary on Russia’s entire propaganda network without bothering to articulate how Dugina’s death “provides a glimpse” into its workings.Without the slightest hint of self-reflection or irony, this CNN article about Russian propaganda cites as its two main experts a think tanker from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and a think tanker from the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). The Atlantic Council is a NATO narrative management firm that is funded by NATO, the US government, the UK government, various other US-aligned states, the arms industry, and numerous billionaires. CEPA’s donor list looks similar to the Atlantic Council’s and includes US arms manufacturers and the US government through both the US State Department and the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy. Both are used to promote the information interests of the US-centralized power alliance in Europe and North America.As we’ve discussed previously, the way news media cite corrupt warmongering think tanks to discuss foreign policy without ever mentioning their immense conflicts of interests is plainly journalistic malpractice. But this practice is ubiquitous throughout the western news media, the because western news media are propaganda outlets.In which @CNN chooses to smear the assassinated Dugina as a “disinformation” purveyor (rather than just someone with a “pro-Kremlin world view”). Note that not only doesn’t the word “terrorism” appear in this long article, not even “assassination”. https://t.co/Fx6WCoDkNH— Left on the News (@leftiblog) August 30, 2022The article cites RT, the Internet Research Agency, and something called United World International as examples of “Russia’s vast disinformation machine,” despite every one of those institutions having a degree of influence that is the exact opposite of “vast” in the western world. In 2017 RT accounted for all of 0.04 percent of total TV viewership in the UK. A study found that the much-touted US “election interference” campaign by the Internet Research Agency in 2016 consisted mostly of posts that had nothing to do with the election and comprised “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” seen on Facebook. I’d be surprised if anyone reading this has ever even heard of United World International, and CNN’s own article acknowledges that before that outlet was banned from western social media its accounts only ever had a few thousand followers.Compare those paltry numbers to the nonstop barrage of empire propaganda that westerners are fed every day of their lives by every news media outlet of significant influence — whose coverage of the Ukraine war has eclipsed that of all recent wars the US has been directly involved in — and it becomes clear that this message we’re being fed that we all need to panic about Russian propaganda is itself propaganda.The CNN write-up criticizes RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan for saying in 2012 that “When Russia is at war, we are, of course, on the side of Russia.” As though CNN ever sides against the US during US wars. Not only does CNN consistently take the side of the US government in every single war, it conducts brazen propaganda operations to help start new ones, like the time it staged a scripted interview with a small Syrian child calling for US military interventionism in Syria.The only difference between Russian state media and US state media is that Russian state media is honest about what it is.This story disparaging @TheGrayzoneNews approvingly cites “Ross Burley, co-founder of the Centre for Information Resilience.”Politico’s @e_casalicchio doesn’t mention that @rwdburley is a UK state propaganda operative who has called for Grayzone to be censored. Why omit that? https://t.co/Qo1L5w4DKp— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) August 29, 2022This wave of nonsensical, artificially created panic about Russian disinformation has been used to dismiss any and all information which comes out that casts the US empire and its lackeys in a negative light as Russian propaganda or the work of Russian agents. We’ve seen this over and over again, from the way Julian Assange has been falsely cast as a Kremlin operative to the way indie media are falsely framed as Russian propaganda operations.The latest example of this deception is the way incriminating leaked emails of prominent British figures published by The Grayzone have been dismissed in a new Politico hit piece as a dishonest representation of emails obtained by Russian hackers per “the Russian playbook”. Grayzone staff hastened to point out that not only does the Politico article fail to grapple with the rather important question of what the leaked emails actually contain, but that it failed to mention that its primary source is a UK Foreign Office veteran and psyops specialist who has a publicly stated vendetta to get The Grayzone censored online.The manufactured hysteria about a nonexistent epidemic of Russian propaganda in the west has people so blinkered and confused that it’s become impossible to criticize the most powerful government in the world for its planet-threatening brinkmanship with a rival nuclear superpower on any online forum without getting accused of being a secret agent for the Kremlin. My own social media notifications are continuously lit up with accusations of Putin loyalty and rubles in my bank account just for criticizing the most dangerous impulses of the most powerful and destructive government on earth, despite never having worked for Russia or any other government.What’s funny about all this is that by constantly warning of the dangers of Russian propaganda, imperial spinmeisters are admitting that they know it’s possible to manipulate public thought at mass scale using media. They’re just lying about who’s doing it to us.In reality, they’re not worried about Russian propaganda. “Russian propaganda” is just a spooky story we are told to keep us from noticing that our civilization is saturated in US propaganda. (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“The most important function of mainstream journalism today is to attack and try to discredit anyone who is actually doing what journalists are supposed to do.” (-George Szamuely)
“China doesn’t have 800+ military bases around the world. Russia doesn’t sanction 39 countries. Neither country is engaged in seven bombing campaigns abroad. That would be the United States, the imperialist hegemon and kingpin of chaos.” (-Danny Haiphong)
MY LIFE AS A ROLLING STONE DOCUMENTARIES
are a thoroughly entertaining series even if your kid’s yelling through about half of it. Man do I ever love Lisa Fischer. ‘Bout halfway through the Charlie finale and a little bummed there was almost nothing about ya know, Brian, or Billy Preston, or Bobby Keyes, but all n all pretty excellent. I could watch countless, endless hours of archival Stones footage.
FREE THE PRESS!
You might remember how I warned inattentive folks during the DNC rigged primaries and Rachel Maddow-Pink Hats-Hillarybot Hysteria-When Liz & Hillary Slandered Sanders As A Sexist But Not Bill Clinton or Gropey Joe, (HUH?)-Fanatical-Russiagate’s initial first round, you know when Libya butchering, cackling warhawk Clinton was going on tv and calling people like Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein and Susan Sarandon Double-Secret, “Putin-Puppet”, Trump lovin’ Russian Trolls, and that kinda McCarthyist smear was being allowed to stand, and routinely repeated by gullible shitlibs online, that they’d end up saying everybody was a dirty commie, EXCEPT for facking multi million dollar super high salaried propagandist and new cold warrior Rachel Maddow, and here we are. Hillary asked why she could not just drone whistleblower journalist Julian Assange and now, she and her deep state cronies still have him locked up in Belmarsh while she still gets to trash talk good people on the tightly restricted airwaves of the USA USA corporate media. Mickey Dolenz having to sue the FBI who apparently thought the antiwar MONKEES were “too subversive”. What a laugh. “Monkees”, “More Of The Monkees” and “Headquarters” were like my go-to records as a young kid, and my dearly departed brother from another gutter Tattoo Mark who died on the mean streets of New Orleans used to tell girls at the bar that all my songs, “Always sound like the Monkees, if they were singing about slitting their wrists”. He’d also say I look “Just like Rachel, Lou Reed’s jilted lover”. He was my favorite insult comedian, a deep swamp bullfrog blues belter and a fantastic poet. (RIP) MONKEES FOREVER! Those rich scumbag, boomer aged, greedy, horrible fucking inhumane warpigs should have smoked a lot more pot, dropped a lot more acid, and listened to the words of the Monkees song, “For Pete’s Sake”.
SOME REVEREND PAUL FOR YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE! LOOK FOR HIS NEW EP!
JUVENILE WRECKS
I LOVE THIS!
KID STARDUST
All us hardcore fans of Richard Duguay can’t wait to hear his follow up to his glam rock masterpiece, BAD JUJU. If you don’t have that album yet, you are fucking missing out.
He’s astonishingly great! You might know he played with DUFF from Guns N Roses and Neurotic Outsiders. I think he’s just a smashing songwriter ala vintage Alice Cooper, Bowie, and The Doors.
The Ukraine conflict has plunged the world into a geopolitical crisis. But this is not, as the writer Patrick Lawrence points out, the only crisis. The war in Ukraine has exacerbated the crisis within the western press, inflicting damage that he believes is ultimately irreparable. The press in the U.S. and most of Europe slavishly echoes the opinions of a ruling elite and oversees a public discourse that is often unhinged from the real world. It openly discredits or censors anything that counters the dominant narrative about Ukraine, however factual. For example, on August 4, Amnesty International published a report titled “Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians.” The report charged Ukrainian forces with putting civilians at risk by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals, a violating the laws of war. To call out Ukrainian for war crimes, however well documented, saw the press and the ruling elites come down in fury on Amnesty International. The head of Amnesty International’s Kyiv office resigned, calling the report “a tool of Russian propaganda.” In one of the many broadsides the Royal United Services Institute in London wrote that “The amnesty report demonstrates a weak understanding of the laws of armed conflict, no understanding of military operations, and indulges in insinuations without supplying supporting evidence.” It is nearly impossible to question the virtues of Ukraine’s government and military. Those that do are attacked and banned from social media. How did this happen? Why is a position on the war in Ukraine the litmus test for who gets to have a voice and who does not? Why should a position on Ukraine justify censorship? Joining me to discuss these questions is Patrick Lawrence who a correspondent and columnist for nearly thirty years for the Far Eastern Economic Review was, the International Herald Tribune, and The New Yorker. He is the author of Somebody Else’s Century: East and West in a Post-Western World and Time No Longer: America After the American Century.
“Dancing on the graves of Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Palestinians, Venezuelans. She’s dancing on the grave of Berta Cáceres, a real “gutsy” woman murdered for standing up to Hillary’s thugs.” (-Ali Abunimah)
“”You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker.” (-Malcolm X)
“By “international”, PBS means *US* sanctions The US illegally froze $9.5 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank assets and refuses to give them back. That’s called theft The US is now helping starve millions of Afghans The US-NATO military war ended, but economic war continues” (-Benjamin Norton)
“I trust Joe Rogan more than I trust Joe Biden.” (-Nick Adams)
“This is funny because the forces most aggressively undermining liberal rights from duopoly, including speech & freedom from war, are precisely the sector of the ruling class that Biden & corporate democrats represent. So, curious to see how they spin this.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Cancelling student debt is a handout when it’s the economic elite talking.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“They put your mind right in a bag, and take it wherever they want.” — Malcolm X
” Why is it only a “handout” when people are in need? When we give the rich a $1,900,000,000,000 tax cut, did anyone call it a handout? When the House passed an $840,000,000,000 military budget, did anyone call it a handout? But canceling student debt is a handout? What a joke.” (-Public Citizen)
“If the 74 million people who voted MAGA are “semi-fascists” according to Biden, does that make the 81 million that voted for Biden & the “America exceptionalism” of the democrats full fascists?” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Stop moralizing with capitalists. Capitalists don’t have morals. They have ideology which fits with their model of exploitation.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“1 in 6 American homes are behind on utility bills and we’re sending money to Ukraine. Tsunami of shutoffs coming and Bernie doesn’t give a f#*k.” (-John Dissed)
“The WEF’s Young Global Leaders program is a replica of Henry Kissinger’s CIA-funded International Seminar, which Klaus Schwab attended. Kissinger was a mentor to Schwab & also helped launch the Young Global Leaders program himself.” (-Whitney Webb)
“Finland, Sweden, and Norway CAN’T be socialist. Why? Because they are in NATO. No self respecting socialist country would join an imperialist military alliance and help the US destroy the world on behalf of capitalism.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Obama armed the terrorists in Syria that killed my family and friends, beheaded our priests, and burnt down our churches.” (-Hannibal Khoury on Twitter)
My ole lady threw her back out while doing heavy lifting for our sometime local employer and I feel pretty bad for her. Developers are driving us off our street with plans to spend the next few years with big machines and dirt movers and scandalously shady home builders building a big series of overnight popup McMansions. They start the hammering early nowadays. We got outdoor cats and a kid with a disability all this traffic puts at risk, there’s supposed to be like 200 new people across the street here and we kinda feel the squeeze. The old unwelcoming gentrification pressure I been subjected to since about ’95. When the haves wanna push out all the have nots. They wanna make the owners sell these lots to the big investors. That’s why we’ve had to take these new hard labor heavy lifting jobs as a side hustle moving shit for rich people. We gotta hustle up money to relocate. This rickety old desert trailer has been good to us these last few years but with the leaky roofs, freaky hermit neighbors, lack of furnace and creepy builders, it’s feeling like it might be time to pull up our circus tent stakes and ya know, kinda ease on down the road, like in that old Keith song. “I Will Walk Before They Make Me Run.” Hopefully, if the Good Lord’s willing and the crick don’t rise, we can be resettled somewhere safe by Christmas, but it’s gonna require some luck, longshot potential landlord cooperation and a mammoth amount of work and worry and more heavy fucking lifting and landscaping which is not my idea of good times, but our oversized teenager has outgrown the 53 year old trailer. The creeps in authority here have also put us all on notice by repeatedly deploying cops and code enforcer goon squads on our street to intimidate the elderly an disabled residents.
Our neurotic, needy, big fat cat pawed his way into the bedroom and woke me up about five thirty this morning and I was not ready to get up, but the neighbor’s confused rooster is cockadooing and I fed some outdoor feral cats and looked up at the night stars. My bored teenager is asking me to remember my own bored teenager shenanigans and I was telling him about how fun it was when we had two turntables and a mixer so we could make real mix tapes for people. My friends Sean and Fred had all the old, old, old school early rap 12 inches, ya know just shelves and shelves of ’em, and ya know like Midnight Star eighties soul and R & B. “Ready For The World” and Lisa Lisa-right? LL Cool J, Whodini, Ice T, Kurtis Blow and Run DMC. I can’t tell him much of the real story, he’s just nowheres near ready for all that, but I had a friend who I met in detention hall who was like a Biz Markie charismatic beatbox-he was a big onery rascal who used to sneak his daddy’s Cadillac out at night, we’d push it down the block then jump in and drive it out towards deep suburbia where the girls with the Farrah hairdos all lived. We’d be knocking quietly at their windows like in that Shaun Cassidy song, “Hey Deanie Won’t You Come Out Tonight”. They seldom did, but sometimes, there were about three girls from the local church, who would met us under the underpass by the railroad tracks. The one named Missy would always bring her hair brush with her everywhere. I guess she had some bad misadventures in more recent years, she shocked us all with so many of her choices. They all did, really. Yikes. Some of ’em got involved ya know with like the piss town drug culture, some others became Joe Job work a day, paycheck chasers, buying houses, building empires, buying real estate and all that shit. Two classes of people you really don’t wanna get involved with much are slave wanting empire havers and drug culture. You always get burned. I remember when there was no such thing as free long distance, ya know, pre NSA, pre I-Phones, you had to pay these fuckedup sky high phone bills, so I got a couple old homies still mad at me for using their phones while trying to contact people in faraway cities trying to organize shows for my greasy hoodlums bands and look for drummers and all that kinda stuff. Even the motherfuckers I reimbursed fully way back in the olden daze still go round complaining about it decades later. We all watched Duran Duran and Inxs on MTV and later on, VH1 kindof started off as the soft rock easy listening MTV, all Michael Bolton bullshit and like adult mush ala Phil Collins. MTV, man. That was everything, where we saw Billy Idol and Prince, Van Halen, and Adam Ant. “120 Minutes” and “Headbanger’s Ball”. Hard to believe there was a time when we could see bands like Lords Of The New Church and Zodiac Mindwarp on fucking television. Now everything is like New World Order Metaverse Goggles bullshit manufactured unreality shows about belting the Whitney Houston high note, it’s all artless, like Olympics sports competition. A world of fabricated suckiness. Imagine being such a crazy tyrannical overlord, you intentionally make show biz puppets that suck on purpose. We used to hear songs like, “Open Your Eyes” and “London calling”, but now it’s like all designed to dumb you down and numb you out, get you to not read, just be a mindlessly compliant slave, purchase, obey, die. As Stiv sang in “Ready To Snap”: “they’ll take their pills and they’ll never question why”. I never, never understood all these guys who would actually watch televised sports. I used to get stuck in hotel rooms with my grandfather watching golf for hours on trips to the Motor City to buy cars for his Smalltown, Kentucky car dealership. Kentucky is all about college basketball, like Ohio is obsessed with college and pro football. Not me, man. I was into Prince and Bowie and all those kooky new romantics, even the real daffy stuff like ABC and Visage. I remember liking “The Surreal Life” and “Rotten TV” in later years, before they took good music off the airwaves and replaced it with those fuckedup fucking unlistenable “I Want It That Way” make no sense, expensive tennis shoes boybands, monarch programmed stripper pop, and aspirational beach house lifestyle programming like “90210” and “Friends”, “Dawson’s Creek”, “the Hills” and “Kardashians” that glorify idle rich kids and all that awful shit like Katy Perry candy jingles and like, all those hundreds of different creepy occult pop videos, Madonna’s daughter just did one where she and some dude are cavorting around on Houdini’s grave. I been outta step with faux popular culture for years and years now. I don’t even believe any of it is really popular, it’s just bad bullshit thrust upon us against our will by the creepy sociopaths and billionaire tech-lords who own the pig-media. My kid has Autism but all those gnarly Youtube clips of “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” seem to make dope dealing and dirty lawyering and crooked copping all seem glamourous to him and his former classmates. Sheesh, and then there’s all that illuminati-pop garbage.
My old Detroit friend, I-94 Recordings honcho in chief, Jim Rinn, sent me some kinda digital version of a Candy Snatchers single. He’s the cat who brought you Cranford Nix Jr., the Trash Brats, and those essential and historic “DRUNK ON ROCK” compilations! Also this whole Detroit B Side series everybody’s talkin’ about. Check out all his boss swag. I’m a notorious luddite and tend to shun new tech, I’m still like a cassette tapes and records and cd’s kinda guy. I can’t really figure out all that Dropbox shit ya know I never had an I-Pod or I-Phone or any of that, but I used to see the Candy Snatchers perform pretty frequently way way back when I still went to see live rock shows. The dead guy was rude to me once, he was a good player, wild onstage, really flailed about and banged his head like a super adrenalized righteous glam stomper, but ya know he was all jackedup on the road and they were the excessively inebriated darlings of the underground back then, so he was feeling a disproportionate sense of self importance and made some ridiculous comment about my girlfriend at the time, all these live fast/die young tough guy punks were always trying to sortof be swaggering lady killers back then, but really, they were sometimes just coming off like brainless heavy metal dickheads. Locker room shit talkers. I will say they stormed the stage like crazy motherfuckers, grossed everybody out with the bloodshed. Larry reminded me of Danzig a little bit, or Elvis, actually, he had undeniable raw power. The fad chasing, disposable income enjoying, “garage rock” bandwagon, vinyl buying, Midwestern hipster scenesters who sucked up to the ripoff recordstore owner who inherited some money and thought he was Martin Chess or some shit, they were all pinned to the back wall of the bar, actually cowering, meekly afraid of the Candy Snatchers!!! I remember how they’d all stand in the back with their Rolling Rocks, totally intimidated by those guys. I guess one of those guys got in trouble with the law for something. The one with the sunglasses after dark who used to talk to me about Hanoi Rocks all the time. They kindof reminded me of the Dwarves and Electric Frankenstein, ya know? But my main fave band from that whole scene, before punk rock died was, of course, THE HUMPERS. The Humpers put on the best shows AND wrote the best songs. Of course we also all loved Scott Deluxe Drake‘s solo bands and his brother’s group, The Joneses, and their spinoff project, The Vice Principals. That was our favorite kinda rocknroll. The wild, untamed kind! I also remember Knox and TheVibrators putting on a great show back then, they played at an illegal after hours type venue and were such a blast, me and a spiked black jacketed, now sadly dead, punk rocker named Jude (RIP) and a hard drinking crusty street kid I loved who worked at my ex girlfriend’s pizza place named Howie (RIP) who is also gone too soon, were like singing in the mic with Knox all night, I think he played all of “Pure Mania” live that night. These new younger guys Jonesy are pretty good throwbacks to the sad last daze of like Teengenerate and the Rock & Fucking Roll record label ran by Martin Mcmartin and those Sal Electric Frankenstein Fist Full Of Rock compilations. I kinda like ’em. ‘Lot like me n my friends when we were young, and dumb and joyfully playing a lotta Hollyood Brats and NY Dolls influenced basement band bubblegum, really. They look like they’re having a lot of fun. Shades of Doctor Boogie or the Sweet Things. Dig! I think they’re kinda fun, personally.
BILLIONAIRE CORPORATE MONEY BOUGHT ALL THE POLITICIANS
Gov. Ronald Reagan explains his requested shutdown of California’s higher education system in Sacramento, Calif. on May 6, 1970. Photo: Bettmann Archive
THE ORIGIN OF STUDENT DEBT: REAGAN ADVISER WARNED FREE COLLEGE WOULD CREATE A DANGEROUS “EDUCATED PROLETARIAT”
In 1970, Roger Freeman, who also worked for Nixon, revealed the right’s motivation for coming decades of attacks on higher education.
WITH THE vociferous debate over President Joe Biden’s announcement that the federal government will cancel a portion of outstanding student debt, it’s important to understand how Americans came to owe the current cumulative total of more than $1.6 trillion for higher education.
In 1970, Ronald Reagan was running for reelection as governor of California. He had first won in 1966 with confrontational rhetoric toward the University of California public college system and executed confrontational policies when in office. In May 1970, Reagan had shut down all 28 UC and Cal State campuses in the midst of student protests against the Vietnam War and the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. On October 29, less than a week before the election, his education adviser Roger A. Freeman spoke at a press conference to defend him.
Freeman’s remarks were reported the next day in the San Francisco Chronicle under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education.” According to the Chronicle article, Freeman said, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”
“If not,” Freeman continued, “we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.” Freeman also said — taking a highly idiosyncratic perspective on the cause of fascism —“that’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.”
Freeman was born in 1904 in Vienna, Austria, and emigrated to the United States after the rise of Hitler. An economist who became a longtime fixture in conservative politics, he served on the White House staff during both the Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon administrations. In 1970 he was seconded from the Nixon administration to work on Reagan’s campaign. He was also a senior fellow at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution. In one of his books, he asked “can Western Civilization survive” what he believed to be excessive government spending on education, Social Security, etc.
A core theme of Reagan’s first gubernatorial campaign in 1966 was resentment toward California’s public colleges, in particular UC Berkeley, with Reagan repeatedly vowing “to clean up the mess” there. Berkeley, then nearly free to attend for California residents, had become a national center of organizing against the Vietnam War. Deep anxiety about this reached the highest levels of the U.S. government. John McCone, the head of the CIA, requested a meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, to discuss “communist influence” at Berkeley, a situation that “definitely required some corrective action.”
The success of Reagan’s attacks on California public colleges inspired conservative politicians across the U.S. Nixon decried “campus revolt.” Spiro Agnew, his vice president, proclaimed that thanks to open admissions policies, “unqualified students are being swept into college on the wave of the new socialism.”
Prominent conservative intellectuals also took up the charge. Privately one worried that free education “may be producing a positively dangerous class situation” by raising the expectations of working-class students. Another referred to college students as “a parasite feeding on the rest of society” who exhibited a “failure to understand and to appreciate the crucial role played [by] the reward-punishment structure of the market.” The answer was “to close off the parasitic option.”
In practice, this meant to the National Review, a “system of full tuition charges supplemented by loans which students must pay out of their future income.”
In retrospect, this period was the clear turning point in America’s policies toward higher education. For decades, there had been enthusiastic bipartisan agreement that states should fund high-quality public colleges so that their youth could receive higher education for free or nearly so. That has now vanished. In 1968, California residents paid a $300 yearly fee to attend Berkeley, the equivalent of about $2,000 now. Now tuition at Berkeley is $15,000, with total yearly student costs reaching almost $40,000.
Student debt, which had played a minor role in American life through the 1960s, increased during the Reagan administration and then shot up after the 2007-2009 Great Recession as states made huge cuts to funding for their college systems.
That brings us to today. Biden’s actions, while positive, are merely a Band-Aid on a crisis 50 years in the making. In 1822, founding father James Madison wrote to a friend that “the liberal appropriations made by the Legislature of Kentucky for a general system of Education cannot be too much applauded. … Enlightened patriotism … is now providing for the State a Plan of Education embracing every class of Citizens.”
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance,” Madison explained, “and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Freeman and Reagan and their compatriots agreed with Madison’s perspective but wanted to prevent Americans from gaining this power. If we want to take another path, the U.S. will have to recover a vision of a well-educated populace not as a terrible threat, but as a positive force that makes the nation better for everyone — and so should largely be paid for by all of us.
“That’s the Democratic Party for you. Progressive in the streets, murderous imperialists in the sheets.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“What’s most sickening about Ana & Cenk’s mindless strawman smears is they completely erase suffering imposed on millions of ordinary Syrians by US-led dirty war & unilateral sanctions. An ancient, beautiful country was almost completely destroyed.” (-Anya Parampil)
“Biden is now the least popular president since polling began: 3 points lower than Trump was at this point, 7 points lower than Obama. Biden cannot run again. Democrats need a totally new plan.” (-Gravel Institute)
“BREAKING: This pro-worker, pro-choice, anti-war Senate candidate was just thrown off the ballot by Democrats – the party that refuses to fight for workers, choice & peace. After throwing Greens off the ballot in 2020 in TX, WI, PA, Dems are at it again. Tell them they’re not “for” voting rights if they’re kicking their opponents off the ballot. Send a message by supporting @MatthewPHoh – the latest target of Dems’ ballot suppression schemes.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“The NC State Board of Elections just voted 3-2 not to certify the Green Party ballot access petition. We needed 13,865 signatures, and the @NorthCarolinaGP submitted 15,953 verified signatures. We did everything required, and they just said no. Is this what democracy looks like?” (-Matthew Hoh For Senate)
“The reason the prison industrial complex gets uncritical support from the media, the politicians, and the ruling class is because they understand that the police serve their class interests. The ongoing police state crackdown is the result of the class war that have been waging intensely against the working class my entire life. The ruling class destroyed the quality of life for many Americans and around the world and things are not going to get better. There is a homelessness, climate, and food crisis coming. As the wealth gap continues to soar beyond comprehension the state will need a way to control the workers that they reduced to desperate wage slaves. The expansion of the police state is the response to their society breaking policies. This was always the end result of capitalism. ” (-Nick Cruse)
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” (- JFK)
The notion that @TheDemocrats aren’t fighters is a lie. Look how hard they fought against Bernie. Look how hard they fight to suppress third parties. Look how hard they fight to pass legislation that benefits their corporate donors. They do fight. They just don’t fight for you.” (-Ryan Knight)
“The United States has dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries over the past 20 years or 46 strikes per day. China has not bombed a single country over the same period. The U.S. calling China “imperialist” or “aggressive” is pure projection.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“After throwing Greens off the ballot in 2020 in TX, WI, PA, Dems are at it again. Tell them they’re not “for” voting rights if they’re kicking their opponents off the ballot. Send a message by supporting @MatthewPHoh – the latest target of Dems’ ballot suppression schemes.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Green party candidate @MatthewPHoh got on the ballot in North Carolina and @TheDemocrats are waging a campaign to get him removed from the ballot and subvert democracy. It’s time for folks to wake up and understand that the Democrats are not on our side either & oppose democracy. People are homeless because of capitalism. People are dying from a lack of healthcare because of capitalism. People are overworked, underpaid & unhappy because of capitalism. Capitalism was not designed for the betterment of society. It was designed to enrich the ruling class.(-Ryan Knight)
“We have a word for the belief in the division between self and other: Fear. Capitalism is just encoded fear. It’s the fear we’ve agreed upon and thereby enforce upon everyone. Capitalism is rule by fear.” (-Patrick H on Twitter)
“Because Obama is trending, here’s an incomplete list of his stellar accomplishments: 1. Bailed out Wall Street 2. Destroyed Libya 3. Jailed whistleblowers, deported immigrants, and used drone strikes in record number 4. Expanded Bush’s wars from two to seven 5. Kill List” (-Danny Haiphong)
When I was a kid, I ranaway to Manhattan and met Stiv and Martha on Saint Mark’s Place. He was beyond kind and nice and so was Martha and they really went out of their way to be super groovy to me and I loved all his bands and modelled myself after him as a young gutter brat in many ways. Followed him around. I first got the Bebe Buell “Covers Girl” LP from a used record store in Ohio and used to spin it over the big P.A. system we had at the old farmhouse my band lived in back in the late eighties. It sounded so great. Then, I got her 45 on Ultra Under, my friend Ratboy played with her for a moment and man, her taste in music was just impeccable, which I suppose comes as no surprise, being as how she dated all my favorite singers: Stiv, Tyler, Jagger, Costello, Butler. JT from D2…As I got older I was writing for some national punk mags and a major entertainment weekly, so that gave me added access to summa the underground stars I loved who’d crossed over into Corporate Monopoly Fame in the mainstream world I spend my life avoiding, and I remember really loving chatting with Bebe Buell on the phone, she was so down to earth, funny, insightful, and easy to talk to, I’d end up revealing personal stuff to her, and all her wise voice of hard won experience advice, was always right on, even if I was not yet able to apply it effectively at the time, she planted some good seeds in my head. I really liked her. Smart, cool, funny, personable human being even when we disagreed about the official 9/11 narrative, or Tyler agreeing to participate in some NFL halftime shit with Britney Spears. I thought it was super sweet she still protected him. I STILL play her record, “RETROSEXUAL” quite a bit and think of her not so much in the FAME category, but in the cool underground, tiny cult band context, and she is fantastically entertaining and relatable and righteously real and very liakable in my book. You know that Power Station cover of “Bang A Gong” was originally supposed to be John Taylor producing Bebe? If you know me, you know my fave bands are pretty much the Lords, Duran, the Furs, Gen X, etc etc So yeah, I think Bebe is real cool. Somehow she did not get poisoned by the fanfare and centerfold stardom and celebrity status and paparazzi and access like most all of ’em. I think John Taylor is still really human, too, I saw him interviewing Billy Idol during the Covid clampdowns and talking about when him n Nick Rhodes went to see Generation X as kids and he loves Billy just like we do. I always regretted never getting to see Neurotic Outsiders. When me and my dead pal Bobby used to go see Duran, Taylor started remembering our faces and being real gracious cause we were not your typical Duran fans but obviously loved them and knew all the words. So yeah, anyways, I still love rocknroll. Especially the seventies and eighties stuff. My wild, wild youth! If I lived in the same city, I’d still go to the bar to see her live which is something I can rarely say about anybody nowadays. The thing about Bebe is, even if her kid was not a movie star and she had never dated all our favorite rockstars, she’s still somebody you would want to hang around with at the dingey old bad side of town hole in the wall divebar, and watch perform onstage. She’s got good taste, a rebel heart, personality, style, panache. I love all the old school, “let me entertain you” show people.
SMALLTOWN BULLSHIT
Man in the 80’s new wave era, unless you lived in I dunno San Fran, or West Hollywood, or the West Village, or vacationed on Fire Island, there was no influential LGBT advocacy organization on the ground-or “Pride Parades”, no 100 RuPaul spinoff tv shows, certainly not in the bigoted, uptight, conformist conservative fucking tank plant towns of the Midwest-nothing but flag-wavers and gung-ho G.I. Joes who could not wait to make their parents proud by killin’ brown folks in oil rich regions for freedom. Now they tell him they should kill brown folks in oil rich regions for pride and gender diversity and woke feminism. There was no safe space or acceptance, not even for Devo fans, okay? They wanted to KILL punk rockers. It was all Hut-Two, Hut-Two. There was no rainbow flag, I can tell you that. No big media campaigns or corporate juggernaut promoting gender crayola boxes. Just boxes. Tiny boxes. No space for anyone different, at all. Zero tolerance policy. They didn’t much like black people, either-almost once a year, the kkkops felt obliged to shoot a black guy in the back 100 times just as an example so nobody would feel tempted to get too uppity. All the old asshole white men just bitched and bitched that black teenagers wore baggy clothes and hoodies, wanted ’em to “learn a lesson” about conformity and keepin’ them pants buckled up, Urkel high for apple pie. Fuck that place was a hellhole. I got beat up ALL THE TIME and even the moms would make excuses for the bully abusers, like it was right and proper to beat the fuck out of somebody who refused to acknowledge your class superiority. Or properly show respect for your athletic achievements or many different colored golf shirts or shitty meant nothing fake band that she financed. Nothing changed, man, I just read how the kkkops filled a poor guy with lead back there…again. Just shot him in the back, said they “feared for their lives”, next, they will investigate themselves and find they did nothing wrong. White people will all insist he was asking for it, had a relative with an overdue library book or some shit. I used to wear makeup and it even enraged the old white haired women folks who ran the popular local hamburger joint. They would always call me ma’am and let it be known they disapproved of any deviation from the Richie Cunningham/Howdy Doodie/Arrow Straight Aryan All Amerikkkana. I remember how much we all loved that Lou Reed song from his tribute to Warhol: “there’s only one good thing about a smalltown, you hate it and you know you’ll have to leave.” Then, in the suckshit nineties, these super rich fatcat fascists like Guiliani, Chertoff, and Bloomberg remade all the former bohemian enclaves over in their fatcat fascist image, sent in shocktroop gestapo by the busload to kick out all the poor people. Many of us had to go back to the small-town, were confused and aghast that the rich people there had ALSO jacked all the rents up impossibly high. The very same vermin infested shitholes we dwelled in, and complained about in the eighties and early nineties, were now priced way outta reach, had rich folks living there. I started noting that almost every town we nomad migrants traveled to as carpetbagger minimum wage earners, they all started having some shit in common. Like lots of empty retail spaces being hoarded by boomer aged people waiting for corporate gentrification billionaires to pay ’em top dollar for their empty buildings. All those boomers waiting for their big bank cash money payday would rather have buildings sit empty than poor people living in them. Fake businesses-all those same bored folks whose kids and grandkids moved far away after college, they do have these two day a week fake businesses that can not possibly ever turn a profit. Like a tea room open two days a week, an antique shop only open on the weekends and only affordable to outta town tourists. A bar that wants $9, plus a sizable tip for one cup of beer. Where I am now, if there is a holiday, you know they take two MORE days off that week, ya feel me? Like today aint EVEN the Fourth of July, but every store in town except Wal-Mart on the edge of town and the $9 beer joint are closed. These old people just got the fake cupcake place, or fake flower shop, or overpriced boutique, or make believe art gallery as a social outlet, but they’re so fuckin’ lazy, they can’t bring themselves to be open more than fourteen to twenty hours a week, but still, they all complain about how hard they work, and that it’s the lazy poors who “don’t want to work” cause that $600 stimulus check from two years ago. There is a yard sale two streets over somebody went to all the trouble of setting up beneath their carport, I have a tiny resell business, so I always look for kooky, kitschy stuff at garage sales and flea markets, but dig this: I showed up at that yard sale at 9, 11, and 1, and they just put blue tarps over all their shit and decided, you know what, it’s too hot today, and besides, there’s a holiday two days from now, so even the yardsale boomers are not opening on a Saturday. Nothing is opened on Sundays or Mondays except the grocers. Most mom n pops were killed off during the Death Plague Clampdowns, so now there are all these storefronts that people pretend are “art galleries”, but they are never open, it’s just a tapestry in the window and some old shit in storage. Some of these gougers don’t really wanna sell their old shit or they’d price it to move. one old gouger wants $25 for three unplayable water damaged records he bought from a storage space auction. So many old gougers either just wanting to show off their old shit, have a store as an excuse to talk to traveling females, or just wanna gouge the tourists, if I see somebody who is rich sourcing the second hand store and pricing shit like E-bay, I never go back. Especially not if they brag. I’ll buy me a red leather vest somewhere else. Summa these old landlords are so lazy, they don’t even change the bedding at their bed and breakfast, they pay some poor slob minimum wage to do it, and still bitch. I don’t remember ever liking shit hoarders, especially not greedy motherfuckers who hoard houses, if you got multiple empty investment properties, and no one told you “you suck”, today, allow me. I got a sad e-mail today from a former peer who’d been chastised by a local big fish in a small pond inheritance-celebrity, who obnoxiously suggested he hang up his musical operations, in order to quote, “pass the torch”, to his cousin’s crummy, commercialized, formulaic, rich kid garage rock band, ya know, it just reminded me of how much I sincerely REVILE asskissing phonies who just suck up to dumb power, I hate these fat fucks. Maybe I’m the only one who herd how White Stripes directly ripped off Smashing Pumpkins, I guess. ‘Go back to your frathouse you, Ronald McDonald motherfucker. “BUT WE’VE DISCOVERED THE SONICS!!!!” Fuck off, get lost, you Republican motherfuckers. Being fat and blonde and rich don’t make you any kind of artistic genius.
“Today President @lopezobrador_ of Mexico called for dismantling and returning the Statue of Liberty to France if #Assange is not freed.” (-Stella Assange)
I feel salty everytime I walk past these fake boutique businesses that are only open two days a week, rich people keep ’em as hobbies and price everything for outta town tourists who somehow still got boomer money to throw away while traveling in their gas guzzling oversized vehicles. The worst part is how the old sons bitches just GLOAT about their shit. Ripoff is their middle name. All the super rich motherfuckers want you to believe that “inflation” is a result of some foreign boogeymen and not just the usual suspect greedheads gouging us again-if you blindly worship rich people, you might even believe their bullshit. Out here in Nowhere Land, the ancient population keeps dwindling cause no one wants to be in a dried up deadend, nothing to do ghost town. You walk past house after empty house, all filled with furniture that rich people just store their surplus shit in. Lotta the houses are only occupied two months a year by outta state land yacht RV owners. It’s fuckin’ nuts. I walked around today and passed some old Col. Sanders lookin’ geezer dressed up like Uncle Sam, riding a big tricycle, he probably thinks I look like a crazy cartoon character in my animal print, too. I learned to not wear makeup to the tractor supply place, or boomer bar, to not wear pink to the Moose Lodge. I don’t really go to those kinda places anyway and all the crazy meth cowboys and rich ranchers tend to leave me alone cause I can pass for a Good Ole Boy in the leather and cowboy hats. I’m glad to be removed from the backstab ratrace and the Big City stop n frisk bullshit, but even here at the end of the dirt road where nobody wants to be, where it’s over 100 degrees and there’s nothing to do, some boomer assholes have built 11 or 12 local bed and breakfasts with hot tubs that sit empty in the crazy heat while the landlord scum keep expecting to get rich overnight. Paint the steps purple, add Buddha statue. Years ago, those were affordable, one income, working class rental homes. Now they want a $150 a night to look at the black velvet painting. The new agey make a bucks are gross as fuck. I quit smokin’, have a lot more energy, but can admit the boredom starts to gnaw at me. Nothing here but death, birds, a smelly river, and more monotony. Hot wind. Dust and wildfire gets in your eyes. Loose pitbulls chase you down the streets, killed an old woman on a bicycle three or four years ago.
I’M TOO BROKE TO PAY BIG BUCKS BUT STILL MISS REAL ROCKNROLL RECORD STORES Hey, remember THESE GUYS? “Detroit, California”? Guitar maestro TONY FATE?!! I think he was also in The Sins, Bellrays, and Black Widows? One of El Lay’s GREAT underrated underground punknroll virtuosos. Ala Rich Coffee, Billy Burks and Jimmy James. I still got an old Bellrays flyer in my leaky water damaged garage.
You know I never imagined I’d see the day when all the record stores were dead. Even Tower, HMV, Amoeba. WTF? By the mid-90’s, they were all being ran by megalomaniac, capitalist dickheads, who only hired chicks to work under them. Pains me everytime I think about Freebeing, Trash & Vaudeville, Gem Spa, CBGB’s and Bleecker Bob’s all being driven outta business. I guess I miss being a record store guy, cause I’m still telling people about bands I believe in, all day most every day, even though, not that many people in my part of the world seem to care about rocknroll music. 100 people in this unaffordable big city, 100 people in that. I’ll probably keep ranting about freedom and OLD rocknroll and RIGHT-ON real people’s movements and resistance struggles, though platforms may change, heaven knows. I remember when they came out really liking ’em, I read about ’em first in FLIPSIDE and then, Tony F. sent me their little cassette for review in my fanzine and I really liked Manson Lee’s voice but was trying to get Tony Fate to join my band. That’s how we were back then. Now summa the kids I’d grown up with were into like, hardcore and ska, but those scenes in Murkkka were just about a lotta macho posturing, male bonding gym memberships, Owning Stuff-Vespas, imported boots, and at best, half hearted repetition of some wornout empty mantras. I liked the policy of keeping cover charge and record prices low, that those P.C. DC hardcore guys enforced, but me and my gang were far from straight edge, and it really did seem like so many of the hardcores were just preppie suburbanites at heart who did not want to be around uncouth street people or anarchic gutter drunks, they wanted to be hazed into richboy upper crust fraternities. With Vespas, imported boots. Even now, some of ’em are at the sports bar, trying to tell the fat old, Limbaugh lookalike country clubbers about Operation Ivy or some shit. I never got that. Who the fuck wants to hang around with golfers at the sports bar? To get validation from somebody’s seventy five year old mom or retired volleyball coach? So yeah, my idea of punk leaned heavily towards untamed, outsider, wolfman rocknroll. In the Detroit Rock City tradition. I hated the fuckin’ Offspring-what the fuck was that shit? Awful. I just never got into the Green Day bullshit at all, it just seemed like fully commodified goofball booger rock. When Lookout Records and all those Ramones and Clash derivative waves of bands were doing the whole dressup like the Ramones and Clash thing, I’d kinda let my defenses down for five minutes and somebody’s pushy mama had second hand nagged me into accepting an unpaid position at a richman’s record store, chasing a carrot that I could never catch due to my lack of even basic computer skills back then, I found myself laboring all day as an unpaid lowly coffee retrieving sidewalk snow shoveling under assistant, all whilst listening to all these wealthy, well to do, Harvard college kids, alternahunks, straightedgers, and big mouth collectors talkin’ ’bout SSD Control toughguy music, or more commonly, The Toasters and Selector and Bosstones all day and I never got along with Richie Riches. Or Beastie Boys wannabes. Don’t get me wrong, me n my first little new wave girlfriend loved early two tone and eighties ska bands and I kissed her while listening to the Beat and even General Public, we were new wave weirdos all the way in our early teens and me til this day, really, and I had always had black-white music subculture alliances of our own, just…the Boston rich people were so fuckin tedious, lame, and like I said, they just worshipped the Bosstones like gawds. I don’t waste no time in campus etiquette debate team arguing with partisan devotee college people, cause really, aside from rooting for their sports team heroines, or sheepdog heroes, they don’t even believe the shit they say they believe in-that’s self evident from the way they live their lives-the behavior they model, never thinking of anything but their own comfort, prestige, belonging, to the masters. Hoping to get patted on the head some more-fuckin apple polishers, script memorizers hoping for some extra credit from the man. For their fuckin bumper sticker. It might say, “Coexist” or “Save The Whales” or “Recycle” or “I only use dirty cloth bags cause I love sea turtles and spotted owls” or whatever, but they sure as fuck don’t want to have to see no poor people on their block, eating the “wrong” foods, using the “wrong” lingo, laughing at the “wrong” comedians, reading the “wrong” banned books. These are the Nimby Shitlibs fucked up on the Two Buck Chuck. “Trust The Rich”, “Protect Authority”, “Suckup To Power” they tell me, over and over. Makes me wanna blast some loud motherfuckin rocknroll motherfuckery.
When the people I’ve missed no longer exist, at least I can sometimes escape this fucked up, loveless, hateful, billionaire monopoly pig-media, hopelessly bamboozled cruel age, melt into the music and remember when we were young. Ever so grateful for the good ones that still remain, and the good ones on the other side and even summa the people who used to be something else. For a long time, I think I kinda saw myself as like a dude version of Patti Smith but I could not seem to keep a steady lineup of my band to save my life. Bands cost money and I had none, so everybody kept splitting to go fuck off with some lameass rich people, even if that meant totally compromising their own talents and playing nerdy, third time recycled, imitation songs novelty rock. It was sad and how can you tell ’em? You can’t. Even the one guy who was always real loyal to me, chaos follows wherever he goes, he has no money and is incapable of providing for his ownself let alone investing in special operations, and his life has been even more unstable and crazy than my own, and he has a bad habit of punching people. And crashing motorcycles and shit. Only guy I’ve ever known who threw a guitar outta window while trying to practice some kinda dramatic Steve Vai stage trick. Fuckin A. For years and years, I foolishly held forth that we would find a way to reunite and record, as the Blues Brothers would say, “PUT THE BAND BACK TOGETHER”. Now, the other guys are too rich to give a fuck about my proletarian revolution rock songs, while me and the excessively damaged bar brawler guitarist-we are too poor to pay for even basic shit like rent, recordings, mastering’s, ASCAP dues or rehearsal spaces, and I am too immersed in being responsible for a high needs kid with a disability and have no room at the inn to take care of any old carousers or artful dodgers. Sadly, everybody still remembers all the years and years when my cribs were open all night, extra futon in the basement crash pads, some errant hustler vagabonds I’d foolishly given my extra keys to, ruined that shit for everybody, years ago. Those days are over and we can no longer roll out the red carpet anymore, we got a kid with a disability and that ain’t the same thing as when six dudes and their girlfriends were all part time pizza shop employed and there was a surplus. Aint no free store/ beer garden/ all night booze party here. This aint no halfway house. Aint no bed and breakfast. Aint no soup kitchen here. We are closed for business.
TIN MACHINE
No idea why so many people slagged TIN MACHINE. I love them, great songs, great lyrics, innovative musicianship AND most importantly to people like me. It rocks like shit fuckin’ crazy-if you ask me, there’s not one duff track. I mean, maybe you could complain about their Wall Street “greed is good” pinstriped stockbroker threads? I brushed with Reeves frequently when he was in a little bitsy band in Boston called The Atom Said who might remind some people of The Bellrays, but anyways, I been on a Tin Machine jag here lately. There just aint enough good guitar players to go around these days. You all know and love the Sales Brothers.I just turned an artist friend onto “Lust For Life” last year, and he was playing it in his gallery last time I stopped by there and it still sounds vital 45 years later. Reeves joined The Cure. The Cure. How awesome is that. Top of the heap.
MELONCHOLY MORNING
I can’t even bring myself to taking the cat shit outside this morning cause I just ain’t got the stuff to humor my exasperating neighbor. Ain’t heard from an old homie in a coon’s age so I went trolling on the social media platforms and I see them busy doing George Jefferson Laundromat Mogul stuff. Moved on up and yada yada. It was a foolish mistake of mine to cling to the notion we were ever real friends. I was just deluded for so long. Really only saw dude maybe three times in the past thirty years. My bad. No wonder everybody wants to stay fucked up on the trendy, high priced bar concoctions, or legal white people reefer, or government pills, cause clarity is a motherfucker. It hurts. I can see clearly now that at least ten people who I loved really never actually loved me back, at all, at all. That’s a rough one to process. Reality ain’t consoling and reassuring, like vaguely uplifting politician speeches on late night tv, or big pharma happy pill commercials, or anything related to the Advertising World that always promises instant fulfillment, popularity, and luxuriant resort heaven. I go for walks in the burning hot sun when I get restless, but it’s like a perilous gauntlet now, between crazy, needy, attention starved neighbors, meth head drug goons, and madwoman and militia man weaponized pit bulls off the chains, everywhere you stroll. Loose dogs are all over town. I’m depressed, also got family members having mental health challenges. I find it hard to cope in this age. One eccentric local said he tries not to judge all the kooks in cults and safety in number cliques or people who flee lucid consciousness into some kind of chemical induced, semi blackedout state of numbness, cause it’s such a fuckedup time to be alive with all the social engineers manufacturing a totally false metaverse unreality all around us and so many former peers or relatives buying in. He’s probably right. I need to be more compassionate. I just can’t get involved with no more Me Show, parasitical, taker, crazies. everytime I get involved with them, I lose, it costs me.
Back from my first walk of the day, hair dripping, wet glasses, sweaty as fuck. The recent monsoons that repeatedly flooded my leaky old garage have brought back the unwelcome swarms of bugs by the riverside. I passed the ripoff tourist trap coffeeshop complainer who gouges the travelers but never stops moaning about how he does not like his job or make enough money. I passed the Viet Nam vet with his barely legal outdoor wet bar and extravagant vintage car collection. I passed the elderly pagan tarot card reader in the kilt sitting on his porch in the shade. The muscleman from the gym seems to have a new broad in his oversized jeep. I was thinking about some hometown old people who once told me there is “no such thing as a geographical cure” cause anywhere you go, there you are, but I believe they were only half right. Might be true that some of us stay fuckedup in the head about shit that happened to us, but first hand research in the field has taught me that until you remove yourself from abusers, you can not really even begin to heal, because they do not recognize boundaries. You have to go away from them, I stayed in bad places where I was unloved and unwelcome for years, trying to change the predator’s minds. Don’t waste your time. If there is any hope of changing a mind, it is only one’s own, and even that’s a real long shot. Back when we were amateur entertainers, we took some sense of self worth from the smiles, from the applause of punters, from establishing a connection and solidarity with a room full of strangers. Later on, I came to draw some kind of satisfaction from being a caregiver, from serving people who seemed to need my help. Now my kids are grown and flown, my grandmother’s gone, her house was my haven. None of my former bandmates get along, there is acrimony over clashing lifestyle choices and political beliefs and mercenary careerist moves. I find myself with alot of time to fill and little means to improve my art. Hence, the restlessness. On one hand, there is a loneliness that comes outta the silence of a graveyard silent, dead dull ghost town, on the other hand, one remembers the ridiculous price for getting involved with people in a capitalist greedhead dummy sports culture. These fat, horny overprivileged white devils only ever come to plunder. To rob our peace and kill the joy. They never learned how to give or share. It’s often said that the real definition of insanity is doing the same thing, expecting a different result. I don’t think people change, not really. ‘Ones I thought changed, looking back, they were always the way they are, takers, hoarders, hustlers, users, plagiarists and scam merchants only out for themselves. They pat ’emselves on the back and call it winning and achieving and being successful, they are proud ripoff artistes. Capitalists. I just aint got the energy for the heartbreaks no more. I got a song that sez “you can’t negotiate with plagiarists”.
“I know you tried and I tried, too/Sometimes all our dreams just don’t come true.” (-Chris Isaak)
“UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, who approved extraditing #Assange to the US on 17 June, brags about the Home Office today hosting Mike Pompeo, who tasked CIA assassination plans of Julian while he was Trump’s CIA Chief.” (-Stella Assange)
“Hello pre-crime, brought to you by the national security state, palantir and “academia” (-Whitney Webb, Unlimited Hangout)
VIVE LE ROCK!
Back when we were the new wave kids, this was one of my main inspirations, what I wanted my crew to do our own unique version of-problem with being in midwestern smalltown garage bands is, no one really has any recording apparatus, experience or expertise, and the older people with the access to equipment and shit all just wanna be get rich quick slick professionals, they all have these shortcut to fame, get rich schemes, either playing lousy covers at old man lodges. Or copying whatever the current trend is, or replacing the inflammatory original front man with some kinda copycat Ken Doll, they are bandwagon chasers, and by the time they catch up with the bandwagon, there is already a new trend in play, which is why I say you have to do your own unique version of what you like, you have to bring your own pain and joy, put your own flavor on it, your own ribbon, that’s what early hip-hop people mean when they said “fresh”, it’s gotta be fresh, or you waste people’s time cause they could just be going to an earlier source. Wannabe professionals mostly like to jump on the coat tails of some successful entity, by becoming a bigger groups’s opening band or becoming their copycat clones, or closet organizers or personal assistants or whatever. Their go-fers, pool boys, or selfie stick and rocks glass ice fetchers. Used to know this stunningly beautiful chick who had a whole entrouge of fake friend flatterers on call telling her how pretty she was all the time, they sat at her feet, but they just wanted her stuff. I was never that good at careerist strategies, I just like the being creative and designing and entertaining aspects and could not hire people to correctly record my work, so it’s all in an unfinished state and it’s torturous on somedays. Decades later, the UK magazine that took the name, became my fave rocknroll bible in the world, maybe even eclipsing “Creem” and “Flipside” as my all-time fave periodical. Me, I live Miles From Nowhere, now and they aint not no international news stands anywhere around here. Just cactuses and rocks and deer scat. Only things I miss about the Big City are Indian food and “Vive Le Rock”. I still love Adam and Marco. Marco played on Sinead’s early stuff. Still love Bow Wow Wow, as well. God Bless Matthew Ashman! (RIP)
“The moral rot of a society could not be clearer when you see a society that shuns the working class and the poor. Instead of investing in uplifting people out of poverty and improving the quality of life, the priority of capitalists is building a strong national security state. The capitalist class benefits from this in a few ways. Most importantly for them, it helps create an economic complex that is built upon maintaining their power and established social order.
Giant police and military budgets are justified because it creates jobs and carries entire industry, thus creating a funnel of corruption. For example, Raytheon donates a staggering amount of money to politicians and corporate media. In just the first three months of 2020 alone, Raytheon has donated $3.5 million to pro war politicians. Corporate media and politicians then push for war, enriching said industry. The industry then handsomely rewards them with career opportunities, donations, and more ads. This is known as the revolving door and it is through this mechanism that the prison and military industrial complex gains power
The infiltration of government by Betsy Devos and her family is a great example of this. Lloyd Austin, our current defense secretary came from the board of Raytheon. The prison and military industrial complexes dominate our society because of this revolving door of corruption. These complexes greatly serve the capitalist class, and not the workers, because it serves to maintain established social order. The police state is not designed to prevent crime, it’s to serve capital. Federal Courts ruled that the police do not have any legal duty to defend us.
You are not class conscious if you do not support ending the U.S. police state
Most of the time spent by the police is imposing regressive fines and fees towards the working class. The police also spend a large number of resources fighting the drug war which is massively unpopular. The unpopularity of the New Jim Crow, I would argue, gives our police and national security state the lack of authority and mandate over the people. We need to educate people during the road to abolition to think about the relationship between government power and the populace this way. We are not there yet, but we need to start making that argument. Now consider the police solves less than 2% of serious crimes then it’s clear they don’t serve the worker, but another established authority altogether which is capital.” (-Nick Cruse)
“When you realize the US only has one party, you cease seeing it as a good party protecting people from a bad party and start seeing one giant party threatening to take away people’s civil rights if they don’t obey and submit. You suddenly understand that saying one party is a “lesser evil” is like saying a boxer should want to get hit by his opponent’s left hand because his right cross hurts more. It’s two arms on the same boxer, and they’re both working together to knock you out.
A boxer doesn’t go into a match planning to get punched in the face by his opponent’s left hand while avoiding the right, he goes in planning to defeat his opponent. The opponent is the uniparty and the oligarchic empire which controls it.
It is true that each hand is used differently in boxing, with the lead used mostly for jabs and hooks and the rear hand mostly for crosses, but they’re both used together to set up a knockout blow. The fact that the parties are used differently doesn’t mean they’re not working together.
Most good boxers will tell you they’d rather fight someone with a solid cross than someone with a solid jab. Sure the jab does less damage at first, but it’s such an effective strike that it can nullify your entire offense and grind you down until you can’t continue. In exactly the same way, the Democratic Party is far more effective in shutting down revolutionary movements and stagnating progress than the Republicans, and, just like a jab-cross combination in boxing, is used to set up the Republicans to deliver the knockout blow.
What is the correct response to this? Is it to say “Hmm, I’d better let him punch me with his left hand, because if I don’t he’ll hit me with his right and it’ll hurt more”? Or is it to bite down on your mouthpiece and start throwing heavy leather until you knock his ass out?”
HERE IS THE DUDE OF DUDES! I mean I just love all this cat’s rocknroll so much. He writes all the songs I forgot to. He says it all. Love him! Look for all his stuff!
That’s the face of the Nice Guy Empire, also known as the rules-based international order, also known as the liberal world order, also known as the US-led world order. It presents the facade of humanitarianism and democratic ideals, but underneath the performance it’s just as savage and bloodthirsty as any other empire in history. (-Caitlin Johnstone)
HOLY SHITE! THE COFFEE MAKER IS NOT WORKING!
I wake up with the roosters so the faraway gas station ain’t open yet. Now I know it ain’t no tragedy, but not the way I like to start my day. Been getting everyday static and grief from my beloved belligerent bored teenager and man I am psychically and emotionally drained this morning, it’s been goin’ on for about a week as he fixates on fireworks but there is a burn ban due to wildfires. Now in my Joe Strummer book it talks about some foreign, exotic land where the morning breakfast shop serves whiskey in the coffee and you can drink and eat, write and talk, and linger freely all night and all day. Can you even imagine? It’s been 25 years since I been to an all night diner, last time was with a skinhead girl, a combat booted feminist, hardcore singer I worked at a pizza place with, she wanted my help forging an underground record label, but then, she got pregnant by the local pickup artist and he promptly dropped dead, so there went that idea. I liked that chick, remember her singing, “what did I ever see in you, what did I ever believe in you?” at a basement show of metal/punk crossover bands, her group was called something politically incorrect that fauxwokes would consider offensive in the techlord reboot era, she was a real life tank girl, and in the punk rock subculture we both inhabited back then, it was effective to be shocking and provocative and controversial. We did not tiptoe around middle class people sensibilities and genteel feelings bullshit. She said what she meant and said it boldly. There was, at least, I like to think, a good and righteous love and solidarity between us, we were brother and sister in a common struggle, we worked for these booj fauxwoke people though, who only gave raises and promotions based on shit like popularity and gender, so that did create some tension when a hardworking drummer friend of ours I nicknamed Angry was passed over time and time again, and I was told I’d be assistant managing in the owner’s absence while they were on their la-di-da jet-set European vacation but instead, last minute, they brought in these already affluent trendy hipsters from the gentrification popularity bar down the street with their skinny ties and third hand associations to semi (not really that) famous people; so all the rank n file pizzamakers, we were all pissed off and grumbling, and The Bosses offered zero explanation other than they were the Bosses-their house, their rules, then, they suddenly sold the joint for a shit ton of money and we all eventually got left out in the cold, went our separate ways. I learned you can’t get too involved with bourgeoise people because it always ends badly, with them callously exploiting and discarding you when they are through with their fad lads adventure. You ever hear that PULP song, “Common People”? Lived it, baby. That’s the short version. Anyways, I have noticed how effectively the rulers have tightened up society and severely limited our free access to public spaces where we havenots can meet up and make plans, collaborate and brainstorm, unionize, form bands, and offer one another empathy and mutual aid. In some towns, the parks are closed, the public restrooms are locked, they hassle anyone at the library who does not present as sufficiently compliant, and college educated middle class landlord-like. Only Bosses have rights in the New Emerging Surveillance Tech Tyrannical Disorder. All under cover of protecting the public health and the public good. Just one big bogus Pink N Greenwash, the old preppie handbook colors, where they never mention that it’s the private plane politicians, Big Corporations and NATO military doing all the damage to the environment. They shutdown all the little businesses during the Covid clampdowns and this week’s ruling class manufactured crisis is “Putin’s Price-Hike” or “The Q Shaman Insurrection! Insurrection! Insurrection!” I just notice they always got some emergency crisis headline that’s supposed to somehow legitimize them stealing more civil liberties from us little people. YTK or immigrant caravans, Bird Flu or Bin Ladin, The New Death Plague, or Latest Boogeyman. Mad Cow or Bird Flu, “China Virus” or “RUSSIAGATE!”, or another protest curfew, to protect the few-the swells in the tower. Remember what Obama let happen in Standing Rock and Flint or what he did to Libya or the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter coordinated crackdowns and surveillance of activists like Sandra Bland who was being followed and ended up dead in police custody? No? You just remember liking that Beyonce song? Being “classy”? “WAITRESS! MORE ICE!”
“I really think these people are psychotic. Blinken, you have no moral standing to discuss repression anywhere in the world. Do you not know that over 14 thousand people were arrested during the Floyd protests in 2020?” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Don’t forget what almost $60 billion could have done for the struggling people of this country?” (-BLACK IN THE EMPIRE)
“Earlier this week, NYPD arrested Jazz Ajilo, a beloved subway musician. New Yorkers were outraged. In response, Mayor Adams said the subway is out of control and he was elected to fix it. It’s “not the place for disorder.” (-Leah Goodridge)
“The Democrats are not socialists at all. They are capitalists and imperialists to their core who have done nothing but sell out the planet while hiding behind a hollow brand of identity politics that hurts (not helps) the marginalized communities they claim to care about.” (-Ryan Knight)
“After 18 days of general strike, Indigenous movements in Ecuador forced the government to lower gas prices, limit fossil fuel projects, and protect nature. ¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido!” (-Pawel Wargan)
“The US, currently militarily occupying 1/3 of Syria to steal the war-ravaged country’s oil and wheat, accuses the Syrian government of “disdain for international norms of behavior and hypocrisy regarding claims of sovereignty.” (-Aaron Mate)
It really is like the Matrix, motherfuckers on the haves side of town forever fight to protect the sick system, the corrupt status quo, the rigged sham. They got their stupid degree and own some property and Amazon boxes on the porch and now they don’t wanna know if the system is fucking over the people, or torturing, or spying, or propagandizing, or mass incarcerating people for victimless crimes, crushing unions, inflitating and disrupting activist groups, or even mass murdering. It’s all an empty charade-the feelgood slogans and virtue signals and fakeass tokenism and do nothing diversity squads and I Voted Today stickers and Ukraine Flags. Rich people having fun at our expense. I have no answers, don’t really understand anybody, other than in my life, everybody seems to follow the powers that locally prevail, whatever those powers represent or demand. The rich can do no wrong and the poor can never be right-they must be punished. I’m from like a Eugene Debs and Stokely Carmichael and Woody Guthrie and Fred Hampton tradition, a lifelong outsider, and I do not seek gold stars from the people on the hill, I just assume they hate me. They think I’m comin’ to take away their channel changer or pizza rolls or challenge their expertise gleaned from Bill Nye The Science Guy or whatever. They don’t wanna Catch The PovertyTM. Studiously avoiding guilt by association with my bad antisocial anarchist reputation. Anytime I ever asked somebody for you know, a small merit raise, or to let me use their recording studio, or work at their goth boutique, or kick down some of their infinite disposable funds for me to finish a recording with, in exchange for all my elbow grease labors, and caregiving and nurturing, vital contributions to their tiny empire brand building, that’s when they always cut ties with me and told their booji wives or personal assistants it was ’cause of my character defects, I have some flaw, or wild glint in the eye, they don’t like my face, or tone, or inebriated nights of loud singing thirty years ago, or some shit. So obviously, I left them with no choice but to abruptly abandon me, taking with them my more cherished belongings, and common associates, a whole suitcase fulla photos and threads, and a bunch of my song ideas and intellectual properties and copyright it under their name. ETC., ETC. They call that sticking with the winners, earning their success with their inlaw inheritance the hard way in the USA! USA! My Canadian rocker friend and I keep comparing notes about how ludicrous this whole pig-media manufactured unreality has become, just bullshit actors in front of blue screens saying friendly advertising slogans while letting the super rich steal the basic human rights and freedoms from the majority: brazenly right in front of people’s noses, but most of them are too preoccupied by their own piles of stuff, putting together their Ika furniture, pampered pets and celebrity privilege to even get some vague notion of what is really going on. Me and that guy both retreat back into the music and memories of the eighties, takes us to a sweeter time. Is it just me, or was everybody you know just a whole lot less evil, back then?
“Don’t you know it is wrong to cheat the tryin’ man?” (The CLASH)
“The War on #Russia — New York Times admits #CIA and US/EU “commandos” are and have been active in #Ukraine , while #NATO announces huge increase of troop deployment to Europe from 40K to 300K” (-Dan Kovalik)
“I’m starting to wonder whether the US Government’s ability to find ways to justify its posture of Endless War – and that’s what it is: endless – might have something to do with how a tiny slice of Americans (corporate and security state elites who wield huge power in DC) benefit?” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“Neoliberalism is blaming @SusanSarandon while Nancy Pelosi reads poetry.” (-Nina Turner)
“The left needs to focus its attack on the police state of the United States because it is one of this country’s largest hypocrisies that exposes the conservative and liberal class. The “fiscal conservative” claims they are for small government that does not tread on them. Meanwhile they support insane police budgets that do not justify themselves. More people are waking up to this fact after the Uvalde Police Force allowed a mass shooter to kill a bunch of innocent kids. Despite the obvious incompetence of the police, conservatives want to fund them more because they are 100% ok with living in a giant nanny state government because it gives them the illusion of security.
Meanwhile liberals pretend they are woke, oppose racial discrimination and white supremacy. Then they support funding the police more and expanding their powers despite the system of policing being built on white supremacy and maintaining social hierarchies. Liberals promote and pretend they understand Critical Race Theory but this is a giant part of CRT. The recognition that while individual racism is harmful, the most important form of racism to confront is institutional racism. Meanwhile, the Democrats not only helped built this caste system that we live in, they are doubling down on funding them more. By doing this, they misdirect the energy people have that wants to dismantle white supremacy into making it stronger. While this is going on, liberals preach about anti-racism and against white supremacy just to fight the culture war against the right.
The Police State Never Loses
The liberal response to cop violence and incompetence is to give them more money for training. Conservative big government bootlickers response is to “back the blue” in response to the “radical left” attacking the police. Both parties worship the police despite the fact that police allow kids to die in mass shootings, do nothing to prevent crime, and do nothing to make us feel safer. The Police fail the public over and over, but they constantly get more funding. When “crime” goes up, the police need more funding to stop the ongoing crime wave. When “crime” goes down they fund them more in order to keep the peace. It’s important to remember that police have PR departments and advisors. Whenever they need a budget increase, they claim crime is up when many of times that is simply not the case (overall crime has decreased for decades now). Or they simply just arrest more people and claim that crime is out of control, citing their own arrest statistics.
The media always play their role as loyal as one would expect from corporate state tv. Copaganda in corporate media is one of the cops most efficient weapons. Whenever they lobby for a budget increase, the media all across the political spectrum repeats uncritically the propaganda that comes from the police and prison industrial complex about the rise in crime and the need to add more police officers. The propaganda became even more absurd in the wake of the George Floyd protests and popularity of the Defund the Police Movement. The media would run cover for the incompetence of the police, by blaming “crime waves” on the Defund the Police movement despite the fact that the police was not reduced.” (-Nick Cruse)
“NATO and a War Foretold. NATO chief bragged that Western intelligence predicted the Ukraine war months before Russia invaded; but predictions-and warnings–go back 30 years. And went unheeded.” (-Medea Benjamin) Opinion | NATO and a War Foretold | Medea Benjamin (commondreams.org)
“As covered in the @nytimes, the US has now admitted to having CIA on the ground in Ukraine. Question: If you’re funding, arming, & advising a military and you have “boots on the ground,” at what point do you admit you’re involved in a proxy war??” (-Lee Camp)
“Joe Biden made sure Clarence Thomas got on Supreme Court & has been the enemy of poor people his entire career.” (-Jimmy Dore)
NO CAVALRY IS COMING AND I’VE GIVEN UP ON EVERYBODY. DIRECT ACTION. THAT’S ALL WE GOT.
These grossass fake leftist do nothing imperialist Dems are actually fundraising with their stupid Capital Hill Protest Fake Outrage, and abortion, like they are just helpless babies with no power, but they will never do anything to help you, only their Republikkkan donor class owners. Sometimes I’ll read about Ireland or Australia or France or Merry Olde and dream about taking a ship abroad, relocating somewhere more free where you don’t get hassled by the man for walking down the street or cancel culture ratpacked by the ever-obedient college navel gazers for being off script. I see these movies about punk rock and read the books and can hardly even imagine knowing five people who aint been completely rebooted by the false narratives of the corporate reset billionaires. I’d love to gather round the bonfire or belly back up to some bar and sing some songs and find some free minded people who aint just here to take orders and generate wealth for their evil so called superiors. You might recall that Jesus & Mary Chain song, “Man On The Moon”? That’s totally how I feel this morning, just disconnected all the way. Don’t wanna climb on the risky roof to try and repair holes, don’t wanna walk to the stinky river, don’t wanna fuck around typing shit on this stupid computer. Don’t wanna try to be understood. Certainly not accepted or forgiven. Just…bereft. I got a disabled kid who suffers from struggling to fit in with the general ed. neurotypicals cause his idea of being like them is by imitating their snarky, greedy, namebrand, violence and competition thing, and ya know, weirdly, that’s how most of society is really starting to look and operate at this point, hard to teach a kid not to impose their will with extortion tactics and bullying and lies and namecalling and shit when that is exactly how the political parties, kkkops, politicians, popular grownup scenesters and shysters and supposedly oh so upstanding and philanthropic rulers behave. Imposing their will with violence. Trained the neo feudal wishful thinking pinkhat gatekeepers to pay no mind to the men behind the curtain-here’s a pretty lady saying nice things in pleasing tones, or still tweeting about how bad Qshaman was. Get real. They’ve all forgotten how. Their Nike gentrification obedience overlords have that consumerist swoosh slogan “Just Do It”. Hell, I’d like to see ’em just even, “Do…SOMETHING”. Their only functions are repeating tv talk and ordering shit online.
I remember over twenty years ago, me and my old lady going to a library downtown in the tv shitfaced, flyover, middle managerial, plantation states to look for some real and authentic get shit done activists to work with at a midwestern FOOD NOT BOMBS, well it was a real disappointment cause as my partner said, that midwestern chapter it shoulda been called, FLIRTING NOT FOOD. If you want to see a real model of live action, bad ass, do it yourself for the people, seize the day right now ACTION, this is how it’s done. My heroes:
“After 18 days of general strike the people of Ecuador have forced the government to lower gas prices, limit oil exploration and mining, and protect parks and water sources. The government now has 90 days to deliver on the other demands of Indigenous groups, or they strike again.” (-Joshua Potash; READ WOBBLIES AND ZAPATISTAS)
“The only thing worse than the cultists of the Democratic party are the cultists who haven’t learned that the GOP is simply another flavor of warmongering Wall Street puppet oligarchy. They somehow believe that Israel/corporate puppets like Trump or DeSantis are the answer.” (-Garland Nixon)
“Imagine if every uninformed Democrat like Rosie (O’Donnell) decided to pressure the Democrats!!?!? Who are actually in power & have complete control of government, instead of being led around by their nose by propagandists from one of the corporate parties who uses abortion to fundraise.” (-Jimmy Dore)
GREG ALLEN’S FRINGE RELIGION
A rocknroller who jammed with Jerry Nolan and Two Saints and Daughters alumni. I used to see him at the RAT.
I KEEP TRYING TO TELL MOTHERFUCKERS THAT SHIT’S FUCKEDUP & SHIT…
So I been diggin’ this heavy metal writer from Metal Injection and Dangerous Minds by the name of Cherry Bomb. I figure my talented and perceptive colleague, DISCONTENTED Podcaster/singer-songwriter, researcher, John Dissed, will find this of special interest. Dangerous Minds always has some unexpected and entertaining writing about stuff I like. www.johndissed.com
“As covered in the @nytimes, the US has now admitted to having CIA on the ground in Ukraine. Question: If you’re funding, arming, & advising a military and you have “boots on the ground,” at what point do you admit you’re involved in a proxy war??” (-Lee Camp)
“Joe Biden made sure Clarence Thomas got on Supreme Court & has been the enemy of poor people his entire career.” (-Jimmy Dore)
“It’s past time that @POTU should pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. If you agree, please retweet.” (-Matthew Hoh For Senate)
“It’s really not hard to explain. It’s very simple: Democrats have done nothing with their political power to help the people because the party is corrupt and serves Big Business and the ruling class. Democrats don’t even care if they lose because it will help their 3 main objectives: 1. Fundraising 2. Enriching their corporate donors 3. Keeping the people trapped in the duopoly If you think this party cares about democracy or human rights then you’re not paying attention. Democrats have done nothing for the past 50 years except capitulate to Republicans because they serve the same wealthy donors & the same decrepit capitalist system, yet liberals think the solution is to keep voting for them instead of fighting for something better. It’s insanity!”
(-Ryan Knight)
“You don’t have to engage with the liberals blaming Bernie, Susan Sarandon, Jill Stein, etc. for this. They got the political order they wanted and it still failed them, and the cognitive dissonance is breaking them. They will not be meaningful allies in the fights to come. Let them stew in their misplaced rage forever. But move on and focus on the fights that matter.” (-Craig Rangoon)
“Pompeo’s speech is one long rimjob for the military-industrial complex which indirectly employs him. He repeatedly sings the praises of the weapons that are being poured into Ukraine, two of them by name: the Patriot missile built by Raytheon and the Javelin missile built jointly by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, both of whom happen to be major funders of the Hudson Institute. He repeatedly decries the “disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan,” and excoriates the Biden administration for failing to control the world’s fossil fuel resources aggressively enough in its efforts to “prostrate itself to radicals.”
Pompeo, easily ranked among the most fanatical imperialists on the entire planet, hilariously says that “China’s Belt and Road Initiative is a form of imperialism.” He decries a “genocide” in Xinjiang and repeatedly implies that China deliberately unleashed Covid-19 upon the world, calling it “the global pandemic induced by China.” He repeatedly claims that Vladimir Putin is trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union.
Along with praise for NATO and for the various anti-China alliances in the Indo-Pacific, Pompeo names “Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan” as “the three lighthouses for liberty” which those alliances must work to support militarily. You will notice that those three “lighthouses” just so happen to be the hottest points of geostrategic conflict with the top three opponents of the US empire: Russia, Iran, and China.
But there are a couple of things Pompeo says which have some real meat on them.
“By aiding Ukraine, we undermined the creation of a Russian-Chinese axis bent on exerting military and economic hegemony in Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East,” Pompeo says.
“We must prevent the formation of a Pan-Eurasian colossus incorporating Russia, but led by China,” he later adds. “To do that, we have to strengthen NATO, and we see that nothing hinders Finland and Sweden’s entry into that organization.”
That’s all the major international news stories of today are ultimately about, right there. Underlying all the smaller news stories about conflicts with nations like Russia, China and Iran, there’s one continuous story about the US power alliance trying to secure planetary domination by relentlessly working to subvert any nation which refuses to align with it, and about the nations who oppose that campaign working against it with steadily increasing intimacy.
This is all the Russia hysteria from 2016 onward has been about. This is all the phony, hypocritical hand-wringing about Taiwan, Xinjiang and Hong Kong have been about. This is all the staged histrionics about human rights in Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba have been about. It’s all been about manufacturing international consent for an increasingly dangerous campaign to secure unipolar global hegemony at any cost.
It’s worth calling this to mind, as NATO for the first time designates China a threat due to its alignment with Russia and as NATO’s secretary-general admits that NATO has been preparing for a conflict with Russia since 2014. It is worth calling to mind the fact that the US has had a policy in place since the fall of the Soviet Union to prevent the rise of any rival superpower to deny any serious challenge to its planetary domination. It is worth calling to mind that in 1997 the precursor to the US Space Force committed to working toward “full spectrum dominance,” meaning military control over land, sea, air, and space.
People like to talk about secret conspiracies by shadowy cabals to establish a one-world government, but what is by far the most tangible and imminent global domination agenda has been orchestrated right out in the open. The US government has long sought to unite the world under a single power structure, no matter how much violence and devastation it needs to inflict upon humanity and no matter how much world-threatening nuclear brinkmanship it needs to engage in to do so.
This is the US empire which corrupt psychopaths like Mike Pompeo support. A power structure which wages nonstop wars in order to keep the peace, which continually oppresses populations around the world in order to protect freedom, and which risks nuclear war with increasingly reckless aggression to in order save the world.(-Caitlin Johnstone)
“After throwing Greens off the ballot in 2020 in TX, WI, PA, Dems are at it again. Tell them they’re not “for” voting rights if they’re kicking their opponents off the ballot. Send a message by supporting @MatthewPHoh – the latest target of Dems’ ballot suppression schemes.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Green party candidate @MatthewPHoh got on the ballot in North Carolina and @TheDemocrats are waging a campaign to get him removed from the ballot and subvert democracy. It’s time for folks to wake up and understand that the Democrats are not on our side either & oppose democracy. People are homeless because of capitalism. People are dying from a lack of healthcare because of capitalism. People are overworked, underpaid & unhappy because of capitalism. Capitalism was not designed for the betterment of society. It was designed to enrich the ruling class.(-Ryan Knight)
“We have a word for the belief in the division between self and other: Fear. Capitalism is just encoded fear. It’s the fear we’ve agreed upon and thereby enforce upon everyone. Capitalism is rule by fear.” (-Patrick H on Twitter)
“Because Obama is trending, here’s an incomplete list of his stellar accomplishments: 1. Bailed out Wall Street 2. Destroyed Libya 3. Jailed whistleblowers, deported immigrants, and used drone strikes in record number 4. Expanded Bush’s wars from two to seven 5. Kill List” (-Danny Haiphong)
“The CIA and special operations forces from Britain, France, and Canada are physically in Ukraine, helping direct the proxy war on Russia, overseeing weapons, training, and intelligence. Some Ukrainian forces even have US flag patches.” (-Benjamin Norton)
“The fact that is considered legal for a corporation to compile perfect records of your private life simply because you had to “click OK to continue” to make your phone work is a perfect expression of who holds the power in society and why they should be cast into the sea.” (-Edward Snowden)
“Love buys a six pack and gives in to the bums.” (-Joe Strummer)
on the News (@leftiblog) 
Veglam 