Tag: The Fleshtones

“Folks, if you were not diverted by Russiagate BS you might have noticed the scandal of FBI infiltration of Trump campaign & coordination of intelligence agencies to undermine his presidency under guise of protecting the nation. This is nothing new.” (-Ajamu Baraka)

“”The persecution of Julian normalizes going after journalists and putting them in prison.” (—Stella Assange)

“The fact Dick fucking Cheney gets over 80k likes means that there are 80k people who are either brain dead or don’t know who Dick Cheney is” (-Whitney Webb)

“In the days when you were hopelessly poor, I just liked you more…” (-Morrissey)

“The FBI murdered Fred Hampton. It infiltrated the Black Panthers and Civil Rights movement. It smeared Malcolm X and told MLK to kill himself. It backed CIA cocaine trafficking into Black communities. It just raided the Uhuru Movement. Jimmy Dore is not your enemy. The FBI is. The FBI and the rest of the trillion dollar military industrial security state has nothing to do with protecting Black leftists or any working class American. It exists to suppress dissent and ruthlessly maintain the empire. It exists to protect the government from its people.” (-The People’s Party)

“Good to see Cleveland Police Foundation board member Nina Turner push back on calls to defund the FBI. If she ever wins an election, she’ll be able to join the rest of the Squad in voting to increase the Bureau’s budget!” (-Max Blumenthal)

“You might be a conservative if…you haven’t been calling to abolish the FBI after what they’ve done to the Panthers, MLK, and Malcolm X.” (-Kim Iverson)

“”Knowledge has always flowed upwards to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves.” (-Julian Assange)

“Every country our Gov’t helps winds up destroyed and in a state of chaos, and our weapons manufacturers always wind up billions richer.” (-Black In The Empire)

“Are you a pretend socialist or do you support the dismantling of the western empire?” (-Caitlin Johnstone)

Twitter outlines its plot to “protect” the US midterm elections from “misinformation” (reclaimthenet.org)

“Incredible. I’ve reported from conflict zones and dictatorships around the world for 18 years and I’ve never been arrested for journalism. And yet it happened to me here in Britain. They confiscated all my devices.” (-Saeed Taj Farouky) Palestine Action on Twitter: “BREAKING: British police arrest an Arab photographer for no reason, outside the occupied ‘Good Packing Company’ who package and transport Israel’s military hardware #ACAB #ShutElbitDown https://t.co/JhIQel2CEB” / Twitter

“I’m out now but they still have my phone and laptop.” (-Saeed Taji Farouky on twitter)

Julian Assange: WikiLeaks founder′s case endangers press freedom, his wife tells DW | News | DW | 11.08.2022

THE GUTTER GOSPEL OUT CROWD DROPOUTS AND DISGUSTEENS WILL ALWAYS LOVE AND REMEMBER GORD LEWIS AND THE FANTASTIC PUNK OF TEENAGE HEAD (RIP)

Gord Lewis dead: Son arrested for murder of Teenage Head guitarist (usatoday.com)

Teenage Head guitarist Gord Lewis found dead; Jonathan Lewis charged with second-degree murder | TheSpec.com

https://nypost.com/2022/08/10/son-of-teenage-head-guitarist-gord-lewis-alerted-media-about-dads-decaying-body-report/

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/he-epitomized-cool-gord-lewis-brother-speaks-on-the-teenage-head-guitarist-s-murder-1.6022348

THE FABULOUS CAIT JOHNSTONE ROGUE JOURNALIST TRUTH TELLER EXTRAORDINAIRE!

Following objections from the Ukrainian government, CBS News has removed a short documentary which had reported concerns from numerous sources that a large amount of the supplies being sent to Ukraine aren’t making it to the front lines.

The Ukrainian government has listed its objections to the report on a government website, naming Ukrainian officials who objected to it and explaining why each of the CBS news sources it dislikes should be discounted. After the report was taken down and the Twitter post about it removed, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said this was a good start but still not enough.

“Welcome first step, but it is not enough,” Kuleba tweeted. “You have misled a huge audience by sharing unsubstantiated claims and damaging trust in supplies of vital military aid to a nation resisting aggression and genocide. There should be an internal investigation into who enabled this and why.”

CBS Removes Documentary on Ukraine Military Aid After Pressure from Ukrainian Government#Ukraine‘s FM called for investigation into the documentary, which found that most military aid wasn’t making it to the frontlines
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #cbsnews https://t.co/SZWXdeNyRf pic.twitter.com/zE3fdNDNLA

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) August 8, 2022

The CBS News article about the documentary was renamed, from “Why military aid to Ukraine doesn’t always get to the front lines: ‘Like 30% of it reaches its final destination’” to the far milder “Why military aid in Ukraine may not always get to the front lines.” An editor’s note on the new version of the article explicitly admits to taking advisement on its changes from the Ukrainian government, reading as follows:

“This article has been updated to reflect changes since the CBS Reports documentary ‘Arming Ukraine’ was filmed, and the documentary is also being updated. Jonas Ohman says the delivery has significantly improved since filming with CBS in late April. The government of Ukraine notes that U.S. defense attaché Brigadier General Garrick M. Harmon arrived in Kyiv in August 2022 for arms control and monitoring.”

CBS News does not say why it has taken so long for this report to come out, why it didn’t check to see if anything had changed in the last few months during a rapidly unfolding war before releasing its report, or why it felt its claims were good enough to air before Kyiv raised its objections but not after.

Someone uploaded the old version of the documentary on YouTube here, or you can watch it on Bitchute here if that one gets taken down. It was supportive of Ukraine and very oppositional to Russia, and simply featured a number of sources saying they had reason to believe a lot of the military supplies being sent to Ukraine aren’t getting where they’re supposed to go.

The original article quotes the aforementioned Jonas Ohman as follows:

“All of this stuff goes across the border, and then something happens, kind of like 30% of it reaches its final destination,” said Jonas Ohman, founder and CEO of Blue-Yellow, a Lithuania-based organization that has been meeting with and supplying frontline units with military aid in Ukraine since the start of the conflict with Russia-backed separatists in 2014.

“30-40%, that’s my estimation,” he said in April of this year.

“The US has sent tens of thousands of anti-aircraft and anti-armor systems, artillery rounds, hundreds of artillery systems, Switchblade armored drones, and tens of millions of rounds of small arms ammunition,” CBS’s Adam Yamaguchi tells us at 14:15 of the documentary. “But in a conflict where frontlines are scattered and conditions change without warning, not all of those supplies reach their destination. Some also reported weapons are being hoarded, or worse fear that they are disappearing into the black market, an industry that has thrived under corruption in post-Soviet Ukraine.”

“I can tell you unarguably that on the frontline units these things are not getting there,” the Mozart Group‘s Andy Milburn tells Yamaguchi at 17:40. “Drones, Switchblades, IFAKs. They’re not, alright. Body armor, helmets, you name it.”

“Is it safe to characterize this as a little bit of a black hole?” Yamaguchi asked him, perhaps in reference to an April report from CNN whose source said the equipment that’s being sent “drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time.”

“I suppose if you don’t have visibility of where this stuff is going, and if you’re asking that question, then it would appear that it’s a black hole, yeah,” Milburn replied.

“We don’t know,” Amnesty International’s Donatella Rovera tells Yamaguchi at 18:45 when asked if it’s known where the weapons being sent to Ukraine are going.

“There is really no information as to where they’re going at all,” Rovera says. “What is more worrying is that at least some of the countries that are sending weapons do not seem to think that it is their responsibility to put in place a very robust oversight mechanism to ensure that they know how they’re being used today, but also how they might and will be used tomorrow.”

Don’t worry, @CBSNews, I saved it for you. https://t.co/XIUkXjqMSw pic.twitter.com/wbe0fdngJH

— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) August 8, 2022

A news outlet pulling a report because their own government didn’t like it would be a scandalous breach of journalistic ethics. A news outlet pulling a report because a foreign government didn’t like it is even more so.

We’ve already seen that the western media will uncritically report literally any claim made by the government of Ukraine in bizarre instances like the recent report that Russia was firing rockets at a nuclear power plant it had already captured, or its regurgitation of claims that Russians are raping babies to death from a Ukrainian official who ended up getting fired for promoting unevidenced claims about rape. Now not only will western media outlets uncritically report any claim the Ukrainian government makes, they will also retract claims of their own when the Ukrainian government tells them to.

It’s not just commentators like me who see the western press as propagandists: that’s how they see themselves. If you think it’s your job to always report information that helps one side of a war and always omit any information which might hinder it, then you have given yourself the role of propagandist. You might not call yourself that, but that’s what you are by any reasonable definition of that word.

And a great many western Zelenskyites honestly see this as the media’s role as well. They’ll angrily condemn anyone who inserts skepticism of the US empire’s narratives about Ukraine into mainstream consciousness, but then they’ll also yell at you if you say we’re not being told the truth about Ukraine. They demand to be lied to, and call you a liar if you say that means we’re being lied to.

“Russian Propaganda” Just Means Disobedience

Empire apologists are raging at @amnesty for pausing its aggressive facilitation of western imperialism to issue one brief criticism of the way Ukrainian forces have been endangering civilian lives.https://t.co/puddbmoiu5

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 6, 2022

You can’t have it both ways. Either you want the mass media to serve as war propagandists or you want them to tell the truth. You cannot hold both of those positions simultaneously. They are mutually exclusive. And many actually want the former.

This can’t lead anywhere good.FREE JULIAN!

Not all of us are gentrified or assimilated cogs of the Bad Machine. I do not have to agree with you about your preferred oligarch candidate to support your right to ask questions, contest election results, protest media lies and the growing tech surveillance dystopian police state, and/or demonstrate against these fuckedup forever wars based on fabrications and provocations. If the whole thing was not a secret society and deep state rigged sham, don’t you think even one politician would be loudly advocating for our right to privacy as promised in the Fourth Amendment, freedom of assembly, free speech, and freedom of the press? Why does every mass media warpig platform keep bleating on and on about torture lobbyist Lyn Cheney (D), or her waterboarding war criminal father who killed millions of innocent Iraqis for Halliburton and Carlyle Group profits, and their obscenely crooked opinions? Most Murkkkans believe that first Bush selection was a deep state fix is in operation. Many recognize the matter of fact irrefutable, proven in court, on the record, hard awful truth that Clinton and Wassermans Scholtz, Podesta, and company rigged primaries against Bernie and then, did it again when they ran 22 establishment candidates against his tax the rich platform and spent a Billion Bloomberg Bucks running against him, but then, mysteriously, Sanders and Turner and Gabbard all GOT IN LINE endorsing longtime conservative bureaucrat Gropey Joe and expanding the domestic police state and funding needless wars. It was never just Republikkkans suspicious of the election count. Now, every three days media tells us what failed comic actor Zelensky is demanding-more weapons, more billions, no reporting about what’s happening on the ground. I do not remember voting for Zelensky-do you? Why does he get 8 billion every five days, but we no ones get ripped off at the gas pump and grocery store, jackedup rents, kkkops shooting black folks in the back, and super inflation all blamed on Trump or Putin. If this country’s real rulers gave a fuck about human rights, they would not be bombing all these human beings, mass incarcertaing black people, overthrowing our neighbors, or paying proxy armies to do their dirty work, or enabling, hell, super funding (!!!) Israel and the KSA to commit atrocities. No wonder these imperialist liars and think tanks and weapons companies and their compromised phonies like AOC and Sanders won’t FIGHT TO FREE ASSANGE! Dick Cheney’s mercenary Blackwater contractors may have started the fires in Cuba for all we know. They’ve tried to kill the Cuban revolution for what, sixty years? Paid a nazi to track down Che, cut off his hands, call that freedom. They keep trying to overthrow Venezuela, also. They want to replace their sovereign leaders with Klaus Schwab future leaders cult puppets. That’s not democracy, children.

Opinion | While Cuba Deals with Blazing Fire, the U.S. Heartlessly Watches and Waits | Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan (commondreams.org)

Medea Benjamin on Twitter: ““What is wrong with the f#cking Israelis?” Good question @rogerwaters asks as he breaks down and cries, reading a quote from a Palestinian boy afraid of being blown to pieces by an Israeli bomb. @codepink” / Twitter

Long USA wars channel cash to transnational security elites – (fpmag.net)

New footage of a US military convoy smuggling stolen oil out of Raqqah, Syria. The US army has been consistently looting the country’s oil and smuggling it into their Iraq bases. Washington steals over 80 percent of Syria’s oil output per day MORE http://thecradle.co/Article/News/1

“Marjorie Taylor Greene is a fascist white supremacist who ran with a campaign ad shooting the word socialism. No one on the left should ever praise this fascist. When she criticizes the FBI, it’s for opportunistic partisan reasons. She would love to use the FBI to crush the left.” (-Benjamin Norton)

https://www.youtube.com/richardmedhurst

SISTERS OF MERCY

The only drummers in our town were deep suburbia rich people in bed with musclebound jock abusers, playing Zeppelin and Priest covers, so my misfit cretin friends and I started out making really crap cassette tape demos with garbage drum machines from Sears and me singing through a bass amplifier. We were not Suicide or the Mary Chain, but we were learning how to write real songs. It was a big break through, when we started adding in a break, or middle eight, “third part”. My heavy metal guy who now lives uptown on Central Park West was good at that. I eventually, determinedly, stole my other, older guitar player from a smalltime D.I.Y. goth trio after the Pet Shop Boys keyboardist in the long trench coat went away to sportsfan college and the brooding and depressed Skinny Puppy influenced lead singer became a gravedigger in Indiana for awhile before resettling into real estate in Arizona. They were a good little band, creative, completely D.I.Y. and doing it with the most primitive of instruments. You don’t see that enough, anymore. I think he was hesitant to join forces with me at first, because I was not a conventionally good looking guy, like all his other collaborators, I lived in the bushes and an unheated attic and still had these ridiculous bug scientist glasses. I was a controversial, supposedly disruptive, smalltown hated Frankenstein’s monster into Duran Duran and Prince and Van Halen. We were anti-social, unaffiliated, unassimilated, free thinking outcasts. We did some Gun Club covers, me and that character, with our amateur hour early garage bands, but never graduated into the kind of darkly polished goth grandiosity I always aspired to, best personified by Bauhaus and Sisters Of Mercy. It’s said that Jeffrey Lee Pierce hated Andrew, and I get why, he had secured the big Jim Steinman production budget and got to make big epic Blade Runner videos and Patricia joined ’em. Me, I could only ever dream of receiving a Gun Club production budget. Heh! Most of my music is only on cassettes-recorded badly in echo-y kitchens, bathrooms, and dark basements on broken boom boxes. I could write a whole book about my many goth girlfriends and our struggles and adventures and fleeting moments of ecstatic bliss in the eighties, and in fact I did. Probably about three of ’em, but so many of my other friends have slick professional careers, family, mental illness issues, so it’s still too soon to publish that stuff, discretion being the better part of valor and all, but yeah, I love Sisters Of Mercy, never stopped listening to them, really. We would have liked to have gone to the Batcave with Flesh For Lulu, or been New Romantics at the Blitz, but we were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the closest we could come to having any fun was by wearing bad makeup and convening in a poorly heated basement apartment in a stinky building full of crazy poor people-hookers and pimpswho eventually burned the place down, and making tapes for girls of Arcadia, Joy Division, The Cure, and Mary Chain songs. We were poor white trash in a really repressive tank plant town. Targeted ceaselessly by juvie authorities, overzealous dress code enforcers, ignorant conformists and savagely homophobic rightwing brutes. The biggest sport in the Midwest is not college football or professional wrestling, it’s always been, yelling abuse at goth kids. Even when those atrocious nu metal idiots who love Korn and Hot Topic Marilyn Manson emo kids started kindof ruining the romantic subculture with their cheap and tawdry affectations, the stupid as fuck fratboys and Nascar idiots and Slim Shady honky drug dealer wannabes never stopped enjoying Middle Murkkka’s Favorite Pastime, Yelling Dumb Insults At Smaller Strangers Who Look Different, and now, it’s all been ransacked by manufactured Lady Gaga illuminati horror story slut puppets. I wanted to become a suave crooner ala Nick Cave or Andrew Eldritch, but at that time I was still more like a kooky Alien Sex Fiend/Specimen weirdo-reject. My girlfriend back when I was I dunno 17-ish really was like a the character Wynona Ryder played in Beetlejuice, she was a real highbrow intellectual bookreader who eschewed the daylight and only came out at night and had all the usual gothic obsessions. From Diamanda Galas and Psychic Tv, to Skinny Puppy and Roman Polanski movies. We mighta stayed together had I not been such a buckwild, hard partying, hedonist hellraiser back then. She was real cool. She had a black bedroom, not just dark but actually painted black, her mom and I became close for many years even after her daughter had moved on beyond me, she and I stayed in touch and I still have love for the both of them. I’m not one who really believes in past lives or anything but I always felt an abiding connection to them. I took it as a HIGH COMPLIMENT when idiot assholes my former friends now associate with would yell, “Look! It’s Sisters Of Mercy!” at me and my super cool deathrock girlfriend when we tried to go the record store in the mall together. What morons they were, and probably still are. No one ever changes from back there, they just jump on this week’s fad train-is it video game, Spice Girls, “Friends”, white rappers, commercial country, Skrillex, The(fraud) Squad TM, “Jersey Shore”, Spencer and Heidi from the Hills, the Tide pod deaths or fucking evil coven cultist Kardashians, Lil Nas X, Foo Fighters, Lyn Cheney (D), Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Kanye West, Dr. Fauchi, Nikki Minaj, Russiagate, whatever this week’s fad or media prescribed celebrity is. All those loathsome gamer dorks worshipping Elon Musk. All those sad girls slavishly emulating Miley Cyrus or Bella Hadid. They mainly chase fads and worship celebrities. Right now, it’s all “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul”. I’m not that into the glamourization or glorification of violent drug dealers, OR the DEA, I’ve just seen the corrupt and racist drug wars destroy so many people’s families. In this country, rich people with access to drugs are edgy hipster celebrities. poor people with access to drugs are scary bad criminals who should be killed by men in uniform or go to jail. It’s all fuckedup. Remember when Peter Murphy got busted in Potlandia and all the squares acted so SHOCKED and AGHAST that a famous post punk performer would ever dare to alter his consciousness recreationally with officially prohibited substances?? I detest yuppies who make believe they’re all Lou Reed hipster beat cool, but character assassinate people for doing drugs. This whole society runs on drugs. Look at your own medicine cabinet, motherfucker. Handsome Dick thinks booze aint a drug. Ha. How come boomers never hear anything about gigantic class action settlements awarded to people all the time when Johnson & Johnson or Bayer/Monsatan poisons folk,s or big pharma gives illegal kickbacks to doctors to overprescribe for Sackler profits and shit? Then they use that as justification for UNDER prescribing medications to people with legit pain and suffering, it’s all fucked, all corrupt, all upside down and all for profit and or black ops, and no I’m not really taking any advice from Dr. Phil or Dr. Drew or Dr. Oz or Dr. Jill Biden. I do like “Doctor Doctor” by the Thompson Twins. Doktor Jeep Plays On…I don’t know if anybody will create a monumental masterpiece as perfect as “Vision Thing” co starring Tony James the Space Boss ever again, but I still listen to Sisters Of Mercy, for medicinal purposes mostly. And flagrantly without a prescription.

The Sisters Of Mercy Homepage (the-sisters-of-mercy.com)

EPSTEIN DID NOT KILL HIMSELF!

“More proof that “globalist” doesn’t mean anything and is just a right-wing buzzword Viktor Orbán, the far-right leader of Hungary (member of imperialist NATO/EU) gave a speech in the imperialist US condemning “globalists,” while surrounded by warmongering neocon US imperialists” (-Benjamin Norton)4108

“What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I’m a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.” (-Julian Assange)

What Does Ghislaine Maxwell Know About Jeffrey Epstein’s John Does? (lamag.com)

https://rokfin.com/post/95602/One-Nation-Under-Blackmail

THE BIG 5 PROPAGANDA PULPITS PAY MILLIONS TO KNOWN LIARS, DEMONIZE REAL ON THE GROUND INDIE JOURNALISTS.

“The government giving handouts to for-profit real estate developers to build so-called “affordable housing” [that’s not actually affordable at all] is NEVER going to end homelessness. We need a housing first solution, which means providing unconditional public housing.” (-Ryan Knight)

“I don’t want self-driving cars and trips to Mars, I want a planet where we don’t get headlines like “all the rain is now toxic” (-Joshua Potash Read Wobblies and Zapatistas)

“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.” (-Julian Assange)

“REMINDER: The FBI murdered Fred Hampton. They are not our friends.” (-BlackBernieBabe on twitter)

“Democrats somehow still being shocked to find Roger Waters is to their left is always every bit as funny as Republicans doing it with Rage Against The Machine…” (-Weston Pagano)

VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO SHITLIBS GO FUCK YOURSELF!

“We’re being taken for a ride. We’re being totally looted by a bunch of people who fuck kids”. (- Whitney Webb discussing the manufactured economic crises that enrich the oligarchs.)

“BREAKING: A federal judge just ordered the NC State Board of Elections to place the Green Party and our campaign on the ballot. We won against the Democratic Party establishment’s scheme to sabotage our campaign for working people. Now let’s win this race and make history!” (-Matthew Hoh For Senate)

“The last thing the rulers want is a united country, because we might all unite against them” (-Black In The Empire)

Shared post – Why Kim Iversen Is No Longer On The Hill’s Rising (locals.com)

Stella Assange on life with and without Julian: ‘I thought, this guy needs all the help he can get’ (telegraph.co.uk)

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/08/08/sinema-received-over-500k-private-equity-shielding-industry-tax-hikes

Pentagon Contractors in Afghanistan Pocketed $108 Billion Over 20 Years (commondreams.org)

70+ Economists Say US Must Return $7 Billion Stolen From Afghan People (commondreams.org)

Ickonic on Twitter: “In episode 4 of InnerViews, Sean Stone sits down with Whitney Webb to discuss a range of topics from the 2008 financial crisis to her take on Epstein. Stream the full episode now exclusively at https://t.co/cvvIalKbTp #Ickonic #InnerViews #SeanStone #News #WhitneyWebb https://t.co/SnTiWTr3A1” / Twitter

Live w/ Whitney Webb Talking Maxwell Epstein & More! 8/10/22 | Rokfin

WENDY WILD, THE DIVE, KING TUT’S, ANTOINETTES, JICKETS, FLESHTONES

I was always into rocknroll-The Monkees, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Iggy, Bowie, Alice, Pistols, Go- Go’s, Pretenders…from a young age. My early role models were the Fonz, Dr. Johnny Fever, Stiv Bators, and Peter Zaremba. Then, I saw the Surfers at Dancetera while tripping-Gibby blew my mind. I tried to bring that libertine bohemian spirit with me back to the football hellhole of the Midwest where they manufacture the fuckedup fratboys, but needless to say, they are still not ready to let their hair down and dance around the fire-they are idiots. Every generation says it– that the Golden Days have already been and gone, but yeah, by the time D-Generation were doing their big Coney Island High nightclub, I was sortof over it, the trust funders and deep pocketed millionaire kid forces of gentrification moving in and ruining my East Village, as McDonna once sang, “This Used To Be My Playground”. I used to drink underage in every bar in NYC, only started getting I.D.’d everywhere I went in like, grunge/alternative sucksass 1995. My exultant merriment was happening in bars like King Tut’s, Danceteria, Robots, Downtown Beirut and the Pyramid Club way back in 1984-1986. Wendy fucking Wild ruled my world. I saw The Antoinettes while tripping on acid! If you wanna know about what The Scene was like back then, read that book about The Fleshtones, “SWEAT”! That Love Delegation LP was a real driving force in my life. I was good friends with Larry Lame’ and Chet Grant from the Jickets as a 14 and 15 year old runaway living on Rivington Street. I did not like the nerdy keyboardist, Sid, because my beautiful older girlfriend started dating him at some point and I kinda distanced myself from Petey also just outta guilt by association. We used to see ’em play at the after hours bar Neither/Nor. We hungout at the Dive alot. It’s crazee to me how those wild, wild days and nights are gone forever. So many people I knew and loved are already long gone.

https://youtu.be/82OUkQcrYnI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6UPKnPg3Bg

https://youtu.be/VezFhcdAAo0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22GXqWQ84oo

https://youtu.be/6jvAbLkEc0M

The Fleshtones – Live 1983 Glasgow, Scotland (Full show) – YouTube

I was friends with Phoebe in my long lost youth and interviewed her in her hotel room bed for my old cable access tv show. She’s one of our greatest geniuses. Always encouraged me and made me feel good about myself, I will always love her.

Things were a lot more fun back then. I used to run around with Spacely as a kid. He dated a chick named Lily and I dated her friend. He taught me how to shoplift.

I never saw Thunders with Billy Rath-only with Tony Coiro Heartbreakers reunions and the Oddballs. Red Spot was a real cool one, me n Thunders had a moment. I did not feel like he liked me, but I’d stolen his hairdo off the cover of “Night Of The Living Dolls”!

When Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party Brought Klaus Nomi, Blondie & Basquiat to Public Access TV (1978-82) | Open Culture

THE RAT

Boys from Nowhere: The Story of Boston’s Garage Punk Uprising | Film Threat

I never saw this dude’s movie but I lived it and sortof knew Mitch and Mr. Butch from the Rat, and Monoman and Willie Loco and Minehan and Whitfield and Dando a little from my record store jobs. Parcellin memorably compared my singing to John Felice, and Tom Shannon has said his song, “My Friends” was about me and Alpo from Real Kids.

Cheater Slicks – Don’t Like You (Full Album) – YouTube

The Corner Man (Lyrics) Barrence Whitfield & The Savages – YouTube

WAR ON JOURNALISTS AND WHISTLE BLOWERS WHILE PIG-MEDIA MANUFACTURES CONSENT FOR WAR & FASCISM

Kim Iversen (@KimIversenShow) / Twitter

Millionaire media whores paid to pen excited headlines about the latest Jeff Bezos mega yacht or Elon Musk space ship to Mars fantasies or Bill Gates opinions. Orange Man Bad tweeting AOC’s many millions of fawning wish they were her boyfriends. Middle class gender fixaters actually spending money on Hillary Clinton’s boastful merchandise bragging proudly about how she got away with all that murder of Libya, while they try to bust Trump for a protest at the Capital…and gender worshippers reveling in her secondhand glorying. Horrific.

 We live in a country that’s so media ruled, they get people crying and fretting, and shitting themselves over bawdy talk, blue language, black comedians who are never supposedly P.C. woke enough, or even about actual real doctors, or members of our permanent ruling class, saying the latest advertising slogans are phony, but mass murder? Totally okeydokey with the haves on the hill, and the got mines, and Amazon shoppers, s’long as the correct party, They/Them, Blue No Matter Who, is in office; or the hasbeen wish they were still relevant, desperate for some airtime celebrities are rolled out, to promote a certain flag. That’s some insane shit. 

   I guess I first saw the tendency of people to wanna go along to get along, or go with the flow, or say anything to fit in with the mad herd and powers that be, by pretending to believe the dummy bully culture, all the way back in middle school, when I contradicted the wrestling coach and his nakedly racist version of Murkkkan history and he grabbed me by my little bony arm, repeatedly-probably at least three different times, dragging me to the back of the classroom and put me in the closet as a “let that be a lesson to the rest of you” example to my classmates. Of course, those rich jock preppie motherfuckers were thrilled to see a “wimp” and “fag” and bigmouthed “nerd” like me being shutdown and silenced by the musclebound rightwing wrestling coach. They loved that shit. The sports moms on the corner, too. They’d see me bleeding from my palms, elbows and knees, after getting knocked off my girl’s bicycle by their son’s basketball playing friends and yell at me to go home, as if my blood was soiling their precious end of the street. When I foolishly revisited a bigger city of that state after spending considerable time on both coasts, I did not expect to be hassled again in the godawful grunge/alternative era by some locals-only, uncool jock, music scene infiltrating social hierarchy, but that’s exactly what happened. I was tight friends with a famous local promotor-singer-disc jockey, who put a scuzzy bar on the map by booking cool underground and indie bands from bigger cities, but when he left town to take a bigger job, the local gentry who took over his former duties were an uptight dick clique, a real bitchy, territorial pissing, private school circle of rich kids, and man, they were some ruthless bullying fratboy fascists, fatcats, wannabe drug dealer, or mobster types. You can see ’em all on social media podcasting about their three years of being grunge famous, back in the nineties-they were mostly all rich fucking kids and have since gone to business school and shit, residing in their family mansions, all of ’em wearing these ridiculous capitalist outfits. Navy blue country club blazers and khaki pants, glasses and dumb haircuts. Talking all corporate lawyerly. And just like in eighties honky-suburbia, they had these overindulgent mothers helping them crowd out undesirables, and groom any temporary potential targets that appealed to the fortunate sons. I was shocked by all that, but then, one day, I saw the nice guy bartender drummer get in line, then, the seemingly benevolent Cheap Trick record store nerd, and just like that, one by one, all the once friendly followers, who wanted to climb some perpetual middle school social pyramid, they all started adopting a bullshit, transparent, mostly fabricated, good guys/bad guys narrative. Good guys, in their version, were the rich drug dealers and popular abusers who ran the scene, the bad guys, according to them, were of course, the misfits and dropouts with face tattoos who hung out at the dirty divebar down the street. It was quite the opposite really, but I was watching people fall for it, fall in line. 

   Then, 9/11 went down-a goofy dude I worked in a hot kitchen with was a jam band pothead, you know a Midwest Bob Marley “Legend” boxset, freshman college kid, faux hippie, after seeing the footage of the towers collapsing in NYC one million times on tv, and listening to all the rah-rah Rush Limbaugh and Bill Cunningham pro war talk radio bullshit, this dumb kid in the tie-dye with the longhair enlisted to go kill “those Muslims” who he believed were to blame for the asbestos towers crashing to the ground, he never heard nothing about Cheney and Norad, Israeli art students, Marvin Bush, Lucky Silverstein’s insurance policy, Prince Bandar Bush, the missing trillions Rumsfeld speech the day before, or Building #7 being “pulled” cause no plane ever hit it. I started to observe humans getting in line with whoever they thought could provide them with some kinda easy job, or party invitations, overnight ticket to local stardom, name on the guest-list, whatever. No matter how evil, no matter how corrupt. Nobody read books, nobody hung around together listening to records anymore, they all got the cellphones and started watching the lifestyle programming and boyband/lapdancer videos that replaced real music in the Carson Dailey era. I could not be party to any of that bullshit, so I had to withdraw into my private world seclusion of old cassettes and stacks of books. Then after losing a shitty restaurant job, I was forced to sell most of my books and records to the smirking inheritance gloater at the hipster record store for pennies, but it was not enough to keep the lights on for very long. I was forced out. I kinda became a migrant worker, had to go where there was work. They piss tested me at the hometown bowling alley for a pizzamaker job and I commenced a very long and grueling career as a dishwasher and pizzamaker for a town full of redneck Republikkans and crazy predator crackheads, and knew I would have to leave that part of the country. I would never fit in with the frat boys, nor did I crave their acceptance like so many of my groveling former peers who would do stupid human tricks for permission to drink Jager bombs with the assholes at the sports bar. They really seemed like cattle, cows for the slaughter. Just sadly oblivious. I did not want to become them. I wanted to flee back to the eighties Pyramid Club, all day-glo garage rock, paisley underground pop songs, Blue Whales and jangly jewelry with Wendy Wild, the Antoninette’s, or the Fleshtones….but all that was being erased by the billionaires and social engineers, too-or hijacked and co-opted for their bizarre Gates Reset agendas, where it was a lot less fun, cause I always kinda rejected all dresscodes and B-52’s wigs were becoming like, Netflix mandatory in certain zipcodes. Huh? What? Confusion was the new weapon of the ruling elite-anything that sparkled spontaneously, or united people from various tribes, or represented any kinda traditional subculture rebellion, was being mass-marketed and weaponized against us. Instead of do your own thing, it was all about conform and obey and change your way of talking, alter your way of living, you were supposed to only “identify” as this or that, or with that or this corporate vetted preassigned celebrity, and stay home and watch tv, and live vicariously, second hand ,through the ludicrous notion of these supposedly “self-made” (har har har) idle heiress, rich people getting plastic surgeries and buying things, being so bitchen and admiration worthy, that was supposed to be one’s self-empowering “identity”. Tik Tok’ing. And that was all coming from the media programmed faux left. Gentrification, they called it. Be rich, or get out. I got out. As a wiseman named Useless Bastard used to say, “Fuck Those People. Nobody Cares. Nobody Remembers”. He was so right-on. People I thought I knew, were suddenly all thumbs up, A-okay with drones, torture, mass murder, so called pre-emptive wars, mercenary armies, mass warrantless wiretaps, and TSA granny gropers in our airports fondling their loved one’s body parts. AND SCARED TO SAY OTHERWISE! Just worry about enforcing preferred pro nouns on the Twitters, getting your stickers for getting your third boosters, single mindedly gender-identifying, and waving flags for Ukraine, because nothing else matters. They never stopped thanking Obama. I think of them as “Thank-Obamas”, that seems to be all they are capable of doing now-that is their college graduated critical thinking: “Orange Man Bad”. Yes, yes, we know that…you said that, already…and of course finding extra additional new ways of punishing that scary and dastardly and unforgivable ULTRA SUPER VILLAIN the Q-Shaman! “Thanks Obama! FOR KEEPIN’ IT CLASSY! He ALWAYS walks behind CHELLE! BRING BACK OUR GIRLS! LADIES FIRST!” CLASSY! CLASSY! CLASSY. “Keepin’ it classy!” Ya know that’s the real issue here, people been media conditioned to uncritically worship rich people. Class.

Even droners and torturers, people who spy on their phonecalls, fondle their family, rig primaries, outlaw protest, censor the internet, laugh about toppling Libya and assassinating their leader, or who continue to unapologetically lie them into ever more endless wars. As long as they say they like Beyonce. Ellen “being nice” to George Bush. Vanity Fair photographers taking glamour shots of W at a make believe ranch in a cos-play cowboy hat, like he is anything more than a deep state fratboy fortunate son. Condoleeza on 30 Rock. Dick Cheney on commercials. Nobody Cares, Nobody Remembers.

CBS deletes documentary promo on corrupt Ukraine military aid after US gov’t pressure – The Grayzone

John Shipton’s desperate bid to bring Julian Assange home (smh.com.au)

“You can either be informed and your own rulers, or you can be ignorant and have someone else, who is not ignorant, rule over you.” (-Julian Assange)

ESSAY: Women in Prison: How We Are, Assata Shakur, 1978 | Black Agenda Report

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

Dozens Of Whole Foods Stores Allow Customers To Pay With Palm Print Biometric Data | ZeroHedge

“Reality is an aspect of property. It must be seized. And investigative journalism is the noble art of seizing reality back from the powerful.” (-Julian Assange)

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

For the American Empire, Hypocrisy and War Go Hand in Hand | Black Agenda Report

Crazy Like a Woodfox | Black Agenda Report

Hamilton murder victim believed to be Teenage Head guitarist Gord Lewis – YouTube

“Our Gov’t lied about and hid what was really happening on the ground in Afghanistan for 20 years The lies they are telling us now about what’s really happening on the ground in Ukraine are already falling apart now.” 

(-Black In The Empire)

“There is something surreal, or perhaps psychotic about this position coming from a U.S. official from what is clearly a failed democracy controlled by capitalist oligarchs. Hey Blinken, here is a tip. Build a democracy in the U.S. before commenting democracy anywhere.” (-Ajamu Baraka)

“The FBI terrorized striking workers throughout the early 20th century. The FBI waged war on the Black Panther Party, killing and imprisoning its leaders. Why would I trust the FBI to bring justice to anyone, let alone Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump? (-Danny Haiphong)

“Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as functionaires, functionaries, not journalists.” (-John Pilger)

“A bunch of neoconservative hawks at right-wing Washington, DC-based think tank CSIS (which is funded by the US, more Western governments and the weapons industry) are sitting around drinking coffee and playing board games to plan how they can wage war on China and colonize Taiwan”. (-Benjamin Norton)

“CBS: Here’s an investigative report on how only 30% of the weapons we’re sending to Ukraine are getting to the frontline! Ukrainian government: No. Take it down. CBS: Okay sorry. If you think it’s your job to always report information that helps one side of a war and omit information which hinders it, then you have given yourself the role of propagandist. You might not call yourself that, but that’s what you are by any reasonable definition of that word. And western Zelenskyites see this as the media’s role as well. They’ll angrily decry anyone who inserts skepticism of the US empire’s narratives about Ukraine into mainstream consciousness, but then they’ll also yell at you if you say we’re not being told the truth about Ukraine.You can’t have it both ways. Either you want the mass media to serve as war propagandists or you want them to tell the truth. You cannot hold both of those positions simultaneously. They are mutually exclusive. And many actually want the former.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)

“Russia and China to the United States: We want peace and cooperation. The United States: No thanks. We want to make billions in profits on war with each of you. Mainstream media: Russia and China are being aggressive!” (-Danny Haiphong)

Bloodthirsty neoconservative Republican US Senator Ted Cruz threatens democratically elected left-wing leaders in Latin America and elsewhere: “Any leftist leader who chooses socialism will be held accountable by the United States” A mafia-style threat from the global dictator. (-Benjamin Norton)

“Roger Waters was right. Joe Biden is a war criminal.” (-Danny Haiphong)

“Conspiracy theorists” and “anti vaxxers” have been howling about inflated Covid death tolls for two years. Now that massive capital has been extracted and unprecedented control has been exerted, corporate media can acknowledge the facts too. (-Max Blumenthal)

Gates calls social credit scores an ‘asset’ — are they coming to the US? – Rebel News

CBS Wanted To Do Critical Reporting On Ukraine’s Government But Ukraine’s Government Said No (substack.com)

“1. Zelensky closes all opposition media in Ukraine.  2. Biden Institutes massive media censorship in US 3. Zelensky arrests leading political opposition leader 4. Biden FBI attacks leading political opposition leader in US. Like Puppet, Like Puppet master.” (-Garland Nixon)

Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: “Here’s last night’s Fox segment I did on the repulsive but revealing embrace by liberals of both Dick and Liz Cheney (beyond the above examples, Pelosi heralded Liz as a “leader of great courage, patriotism and integrity”), despite crimes far worse than what they accuse Trump of: https://t.co/QWxLd6zgUH” / Twitter

Revolutionary Blackout Network🥋 on Twitter: “Jim Crow Joe and Kamala Harris pretending to care about Brittney Griner while they are actively waging a drug war is insane. They literally have no shame https://t.co/ECH11kdlnw” / Twitter

“It’s only when journalists understand the role they play in this propaganda, it’s only when they realize they can’t be both independent, honest journalists and agents of power, that things will begin to change.” (-John Pilger)

DARKEST DAZE

Three monopolies most tv watchers have never heard of are buying up everything. BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard are like the Borg from Star Trek, or Bill Gates. While their monopoly media keeps you brainwashed with partisan pingpong pass the buck politics, they are actively purchasing all the property and so-called “homeland” farmland, they already own all the weapons manufacturing companies and big pharma and big 5 mockingbird media, which has obviously merged with deep state intelligence agencies. Gullible Lyn Cheney shitlibs keep squawking on about how Q Shaman shirtlessly bellowing in Capital hill was the darkest day in “the history of democracy”. HUH? WHAT? “This is what democracy looks like”-people convening on the steps of washington and in the rotunda to address their grievances. Over on the Qanon Maga quacky right, the Breitbart Bannon bunch are moaning about how the FBI raiding Trump’s Mar A Lago compound is the “darkest day in Murkkkan history”. I saw evil Dick Cheney trotted out to call Trump a coward-the guy who brought you torture gulags, the war on terror, 9/11 tyranny, and shot his lawyer in the face. I also saw Trump’s new commercial with all the rumbling thunder where he says Biden has made the USA into a joke to the rest of the world. Then, he goes on to say that he wants to perpetuate or start wars with Russia, China, and Iran…for patriotism…JUST LIKE BIDEN, and all the pig-media brainwashed shitlibs and Hillary Hawk democrats. What a fuckedup shitshow, but pig-media keeps Murkka in their rock ’em sock ’em robots blue versus red hypnospell, so we, the people, never unite beyond our preferred tie color to defy the ruling class mega donors and corrupt Davos billionaires and their lobbyists. All the BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard operatives and Klaus Schwab secret society agents are working together, so the job of all pig media is to keep you and me divided, and boy, have they gotten good at it. Aint that hard though, is it? Like with self- checkout counters-me, first ratracing middle classers are happy to do the work themselves if it means paying faster. All the consumerist shitlib people can’t wait to be Bill Gates microchipped if it means a shorter line at the airport private parts groping terminal for woke science and feminist diversity. The shitlibs will believe ANYTHING s’long as there is an attractively darker hued female AOC presented to them as an object of blind worship and second hand “identification”. It’s really gotten weird with the faux wokes. They keep Tik Tok and Netflix programming them with this whole new age obedience-cult,  transhumanist cyborg techlord lexicon. I would not be that surprised if the fake liberals of the corrupt DNC and crazy gun nut racist rightwingers of the Republikkkans eventually succeed at baiting the people into civil wars so they can declare martial law and put people in camps and execute them for wrongthink and chip everybody into a Davos obedience cashless society hustle where you can’t get food if you disobey Kalus Schwab and Pill Gates. People like me will get the Victor Jara treatments. My ex associates will still be Thanking Obama. Drinking mimosas, praising Gayle King. Talking’ about some big money, whore of babylon manufactured puppet celebrity.

Lee Camp [Redacted] on Twitter: “Who REALLY owns the world? This is who. https://t.co/2TOmOclNuq” / Twitter

“Jim Crow Joe Biden is to the right of Republican voters. He’s to the right of red states that have decriminalized, legalized medical marijuana.” (Rey Da Pollinator @ Atlas Rey)

Boys From Nowhere – 66-5-4-3-2-1 (Troggs cover) – YouTube

BILLY GOES BANG!

Man, when I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I so wanted to be like Billy G. Bang in the pink leather pants-when I read in Kerrang! how he had suddenly quit the Dragons, I wrote to ex Lord Danny Fury in the UK, who read my fanzines, and offered my services as a heavily Stiv influenced replacement frontman. I did my best to dress all my friends up like the Dragons and Shooting Gallery but it was real hard to assemble a glam gang in my unfortunate part of the country back then, everybody was going grunge or doing a really lame buzzsaw generic New Bomb Turks imitation in the shorts and baseball caps and I could not relate to any of that. Gentrified was just another word for generic. I’d grown up on Alice and Bowie and The Stones and Lords so I wanted my bands to look as cool as we sounded. I had great faith in our songs that were kinda like The Hangmen or Black Halos. Sleazy, hard hitting, firebrand politico-punk. The Wanderers minus the prog production. I knew I did not have Billy’s higher end range, and was nowhere near as pretty, but I did have a lotta bottle back then and a gutter punk quality that would have complemented what all those big hatted gutter glam Dragons guys did. On the night when Bush first started bombing Iraq, I went to meet with Steve Von Saint in NYC at some big dark nightclub, might been Webster Hall, or the Ritz, I’d been a fan since I was a 15 year old runaway of fancy pants ex Angels In Vain guitslinger Steve Von Saint who Danny told me to chase down and we just sadly very simply did not hit it off, he kinda was half lidded under those bangs and distracted and blase and real deadpan seemingly way more enamored with a pink paisley umbrella twirling dandy named Nick who worked at a store called Mudhoney downtown and was bedecked in more lace and frills than Prince and the whole Revolution. I told Steve Von I wrote better songs than “Devil Calling” which was by Hanoi Rocker Nasty Suicide I think, and that’s just the kinda obnoxiously belligerent and socially abrasive thing I was known to blurt at that age. I think I was about 22. Purple plastic pants from Lip Service. Leopardskin newsboy cap and pink creepers, big mouth, garishly applied makeup all black eyes and red lipstick ridiculously and clowninshly emphasizing my yellow teeth, heavy drinking, sleazy, over confident, overtly cocksure brat. I got to know BGB a little on social media years ago and sent him some interview questions he never responded to, but then I saw how he had already done this interview covering alot of the same history I’d been inquiring about. I was looking forward to reading his autobio, as he is a fantastic storyteller as you will see upon reading the int I will link to. Shooting Gallery were the most talented band to ever fail so grandly, so splendidly, so completely! God bless ’em! Andy should reunite that lineup.

Is the music loud enough ?: Billy G.Bang! (aka Billy Douglas) – part 1

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