Been with my old lady so long now, I don’t even like when she is away driving somebody to the airport. Don’t like it one bit. Been up with the teenager all day, he’s been exploring his rather unconventional interests online and I’ve been watching the Duran Duran Reunion concert. It was really so, so good, they all still have all that brilliant energy even in their old ages. I sure do love Duran Duran and especially have always appreciated the way they commit 100% on stage. Been reading the Alvin Gibbs book about touring with Iggy, Andy and Paul Garisto on the “Instinct” tour. It’s so great. He’s one of my favorite bassplayers, for sure. “Neighborhood Threat”.
“Instead of championing free speech, the U.S. actively persecutes journalists and whistleblowers. I’ll pardon brave truth-tellers like Julian Assange and investigate the corruption and crimes they exposed. This isn’t the Soviet Union. The America I love doesn’t imprison dissidents. #FreeAssange#Kennedy24 Other brave truth-tellers include John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner, Daniel Hale, Thomas Drake, Jeffrey Sterling, and Edward Snowden. They were trying to return America to its democratic and humanitarian ideals.” (-Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
The U.S. unfortunately has no standing to lecture anyone about treatment of the press now because of its continued prosecution of the Assange case.” (-Matt Taibbi on these gross puppet politicians calling for people to be jailed for telling the truth. If you start digging into who funs them, it’s all the usual suspects. So terrible.)
RFK Jr is polling at 21% in the latest Emerson poll. But sure, there’s no reason for debates.” (-Prof Zenkus)
“There is an anti war movement starting in Taiwan that is urging people not to fall for the west’s war mongering with China
They are calling for dialogue and peace So of course pro war media outlets start smearing them immediately” (-Revolutionary Blackout Network)
“President Biden assured us Monday that the banking system is “safe and sound.” Today, bank stocks are crashing. The American people deserve more than glib assurances and perception management. #Kennedy24 The banking collapse is the tip of an economic mega-crisis. It’s not just the banks. Job openings plummeted for the third month in a row. Core factory orders dropped for the second consecutive month. Inflation is destroying the middle and working class. We need to turn our attention to rebuilding our nation — NOW. #Kennedy24” (-Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
“Freedom of the Press does not exist in this country, Freedom of Speech is under direct attack, this is not a democracy, Dems and the GOP both work for the wealthy and corporations, our foreign policy is all about stealing and maintaining hegemony, basically everything is a lie..So they are just gonna keep having the Correspondents dinner and act like the US didn’t kidnap, jail, torture and doesn’t still have Assange in prison. Whenever you see there is an attempted coup or Civil war reported somewhere in the world the first question you should ask yourself is if the leadership in that country recently defied the United States in some way. “It’s not a war crime when the United States does it”, I believe is in Chapter 3 of the “Rules Based Order” .
Just kidding the “Rules Based Order” actually doesn’t exist, it’s just some shit the US made up that means America does whatever it wants.” (-Black In The Empire)
“You couldn’t design a more effective totalitarian dystopia than the one we’re in right now. One where everyone’s brainwashed by propaganda without even knowing it, where everyone thinks, acts, votes and shops exactly as their rulers want them to, all while thinking they are free. (-Caitlin Johnstone)
Steve Jones was one of our fave guitarists when we were kids, and several guys in my old bands, grew up learning how to play guitar by playing along to Steve Jones. I was never into that Velvet Revolver band everybody else seemed to like, but I did really like the Neurotic Outsiders stuff!!! Better than anything by GNR since the first lp. They were originally known as Neurotic Boy Outsiders, which was a headline some British rock crit wrote about the Smiths, early incarnations also featured Billy Idol and various Stray Cats. It rocks.
THE REAL LEFT WILL NEVER VOTE FOR A TRAITOR, TURNOCAT, SPOOK OPERATIVE AGAIN AFTER ALL THE INSANE BETRAYALS. THEY DID NOTHING. THEY RAN ON ALL THAT BERNIE SHIT & THEN CANCELLED THE WHOLE PLATFORM & BECAME APOLOGISTS FOR GROPEY JOE WARS, RACIST POLICE STATE, KIDNAPPING FAMILIES IN BORDER GULAGS, NO FREE HEALTHCARE, NO HIGHER MINIMUM WAGE, NO MORATOROIM ON EVICTIONS> PRIVILEGED COLLGE PEEPS THINK OBEDIENCE SIGNALING & EMPTY JUSTICE TWEETING AND RECITING TRANSPOSITIVITY SLOGANS IS WOKE ACTIVISM. THE FRAUD SQUAD ARE JUST LINDSEY GRAHAM IN PANTS-SUITS! THEY WILL NEVER DO ANYTHING TO HELP THE POOR OR STOP THE WARS!
“Anyone who doesn’t think the government killed my father either hasn’t given the issue much thought, or is insane.” ( -Sean Lennon)
Big Pharma doesn’t want to lose profits, Gov’t Health Agencies don’t want to lose credibility, Corporate media doesn’t want to lose advertising dollars, and politicians don’t want to lose votes. Somebody is lying
Maybe it’s the people that lie about every war and just had a leak come out that proves that they were lying? Russia must have super soldiers.
Western media says they’re out of weapons and what they have is inferior. Their command is incompetent and fighting each other. Their troops are demoralized.
Somehow in spite of Ukraine being given billions in weapons, they can’t get Bakhmut back.” (-Black In The Empire)
Fifty years of Aerosmith, how they gonna do the farewell tour without Joey Kramer? That’s fuckedup, wrong. I might be the only lead vocalist/rocknroll frontman in the world who does not think he’s a better drummer than the drummer, that’s always been a problem with that band. Tyler thinks he’s the drummer. So yeah I dunno what went wrong between those guys-I just think it sucks when you leave somebody behind. I didn’t even like it when Blondie snubbed the old lads at the Hall Of Fame. Who knows though? Maybe Kramer’s sick of their shit. Happened to Mick Mars. It’s easy to see why he got bored with all the other three perpetually star tripping. Meanwhile, the Crue’s happy they got a younger guy with John 5. I never really liked the Black Crowes after their initial splash of doin’ like a Faces/ Stones thing, cause they sorta became a bearded Hollywood royals, personal tailored, Grateful Dead kinda millionaire jammy thing and started writing songs about growing beards and going to Palm Springs techno festivals with acrtresses and stuff. Even when I actually lived in Laurel Canyon, I was never really into the Dave Matthews shit. I used to walk down that dangerously curvy road to fetch wine for an old retired songwriter from the Country Store-scary shit-not the haunted mansions or serail killers-the fucking speeding drivers in their speedy rich people cars! John Maher is touring with the Dead. Not my thing, at all. Black Crowes made it big and turned into the Counting Crows, stopped rocking as hard as Sherl Crow. I did like a couple songs on “Southern Harmony” though. I came across a press release claiming Joey Kramer chose not to tur top focus on health and family and of course that makes me feel better than varying Aero-Eras where wives and lawyers and management and A& R/producer/songwriting people.industry parasites took control of the band and turned people against each other. They were the preeminent sex and drugs and rocknroll band and I always think it’s corny when the temperance league dispatched it’s scolding committees to slander them for altering their consciousness. I don’t get the concept of retroactively punishing motherfuckers for being wild and free in the mellow golden seventies. Aerosmith were the soundtrack of our young lives in scarlet scarves and paisley bellbottoms, even though I was not a teenager in the 70’s “Dazed & Confused” era, I came alive in that perfect era in between Greatest Hits Aerosmith, the red and white cassette, right? And their comeback with Run DMC and “Rag Doll” and “Angel” and “Elevator”, all that, when all the Guns N Roses bands were kinda in peak Wear-osmith imitation mode. I’m one of those bad weirdos who thinks the syrupy ballad mongering song doctors and outside writers were terrible for that band, I liked the suzzy, druggy, streetwise, ghettofied seventies stuff way better than any of that corporation jelly roll jive bullshit they did for money in the late eighties onward. Tyler wrote “Dream On” so it aint like he really needs help with lyrics and if he does, he should call me instead of Linda Perry, honestly-she writes greeting cards for dental hygenists. I love Aerosmith, was sad when they turned against Tyler, was sad when they turned against Joey Kramer, am glad they are still treading the stages but it don’t feel right without the whole gang reuniting for their fond farewell spectacle. Kramer is part of the band, man. So yeah that’s a bummer. I’d rather see Billy Idol or the Psychedelic Furs or the Cure than any victory lap half hearted money grab–like I’d never pay to see Guns N roses without Adler and Izzy, it just aint the same at all. Nahh. I’ll pass. I am kinda in the mood where I’d be maybe willing to venture out into society again if there was a good show within striking distance-my old lady was gonna buy tickets to see Roth in Vegas but he cancelled. I never see shows anymore. I did see one singer/songwriter guy from Seattle at a little gallery and he was good. Mostly I just labor in the yard and take care of an oversized bored and restless teenager. I’m a brokeass pauper in a desert ghost town surrounded by death, death, death these days. I don’t think anybody ever beat the “Same Old Song & Dance” and “Back In The Saddle Again” and “last Child” and “Walk This Way” era Aerosmith, least of all Corporate Sober Powertrip Board Of Executives Create By Committee Richman Aerosmith. Some mainstream comedian did some routine about how all their commercial madeover Aero-careerist vidogame crap was kinda all soundin’ the same, “Cry–in’/Dy-inn”, “Jay-ded-crazay-baybeh-Jay-neee-Anngel” and they weren’t wrong, but I still have a measure of heartfelt gratitude for all those cats. Even on their later records they are liberally sprinkled with some pretty good tunes here and there. I love “What It takes”, “F.I.N.E Fine”, even “Pink” and “Jaded” and “Legendary Child” a little bit. Peace out is right. Peace to the Aerosmiths. Special love goin’ out to Joey Kramer cause he played cans on all those songs that accompanied all my roadtrips, girl parties, afternoon hangs, wild all week bashes, etc., etc. Thank You for the music, brother! All of yas!
BIG 5 MOCKINGBIRD MEDIA IS ONE PERCENTER PROPAGANDA! NOT A FREE PRESS! IF THE PRESS WAS FREE, YOU WOULD NOT BE LOCKED OUT OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR BEING ANTIWAR! FREE ASSANGE NOW!
“The collapse of U.S. influence over Saudi Arabia and the Kingdom’s new alliances with China and Iran are painful emblems of the abject failure of the Neocon strategy of maintaining U.S. global hegemony with aggressive projections of military power. China has displaced the American Empire by deftly projecting, instead, economic power. Over the past decade, our country has spent trillions bombing roads, ports, bridges, and airports. China spent the equivalent building the same across the developing world. The Ukraine war is the final collapse of the Neocon’s short-lived “American Century.” The Neocon projects in Iraq and Ukraine have cost $8.1 trillion, hollowed out our middle class, made a laughingstock of U.S. military power and moral authority, pushed China and Russia into an invincible alliance, destroyed the dollar as the global currency, cost millions of lives and done nothing to advance democracy or win friendships or influence.” (-Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
“It is still an overreach of power when the people charging and caging protesters exercising their constitutional right to dissent are democrats. It’s just as fascistic!” (-Hannah Riley #Stop Cop City)
“I don’t vote for Democrats or Republicans for the same reason I don’t vote for Amazon, Black Rock, Citibank, or ExxonMobil.
They’re the exact same things: corporations.” (-Stephanie Voltolin)
“Being pissed at Democrats for kicking millions off Medicaid and slashing food stamps for poor families isn’t “playing into Republicans’ hands”. Liberals are seriously fucked with this logic. If they don’t want their bad behavior to be pointed out, maybe don’t do bad shit.” (-Prof Zenkus)
“The media blackout on Biden taking Medicaid away from millions is journalistic malpractice.” (-Holding Biden Accountable)
“We have a massive housing crisis here and mega landlords are using that to push out low income people for no reason at all to raise rents.” (-Barbarism Critic)
“Susan (@SusanSarandon), the issue that Stephanie raises is at the root cause for leftists rejecting electoral politics. Why fight the system if we’re going to assimilated into that same system after a progressive loses due to the primary being rigged?
It seems to be manipulative.” (-Liam Dorris)
“With special forces, mercenaries, Western arms & a global propaganda arm created & maintained by the West, the Russia Federation is indeed fighting the “West” with Ukraine providing the NATO ground forces in yet another losing battle for the West.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
THE PRESSURE IS A MOTHERFUCKER
Man, we keep having to take on more side hustles just to barely get by, the stress is anguishing, ever since the monopolies started robbing us during the Covid shutdowns and they have not only not relented, but they’ve actually INCREASED all the super inflation at the grocery store and gas pumps and the Biden admin is cutting the social safety net and foodstamps again but of course the middle class people don’t care and just never stop talking about Stormy Daniels and “RUSSIA!” We are so fucked, all my brothers and sisters and friends of the revolution. I’m kinda in a bit of a blue funk here this morning, it’s tough parenting under all this kinda stress, it’s hard on relationships and there is this ever tightening vice grip of expectations on all us poor people, and the higher ups get to sorta extort always more energy and attention from us, as if our only value is in them wringing us dry like batteries, this fuckedup country really is feeling more like the Matrix, everyday, ya know? In Missouri, fanatical rightwingers even wanna defund public libraries. Torturers and rightwing imperialists like Desantis and Lyn Cheney and Nikki Hayley are all waiting in the wings cause nobody really wanted Gropey Joe the first time. I wanted to make art, make records, entertain the working class and make a difference, help raise consciousness in my time, ya know, but it feels like I’m running out of time, and like Erin Brockovich says, there aint no cavalry on the horizon, Superman aint coming to save nobody. The fix is in. Always has been. So where were the spiders?
“As a former MSNBC Democrat I feel I can say that they are the most brainwashed people in America….Afghanistan and Russia have worked out so well that our Gov’t should absolutely try to start something with China next, I mean what could possibly go wrong?
What else are neocons to do? China didn’t take our jobs, our politicians and corporations gladly gave them away. The US officially states Taiwan is part of China, so our country doesn’t recognize Taiwan’s independence. China isn’t threatening us, we’re surrounding them and using Taiwan to stop their rise. Russia has survived 10 rounds of economic sanctions that we were told would destroy their economy and end their ability to wage a war. They survived approx $125 billion in cash, weapons and training given to Ukraine by NATO. I should thank the Biden Administration for being so incompetent that in spite of the fact that the owners will stop at nothing to remain the world’s hegemon, they actually accelerated the start of a new multipolar world. More American taxpayer dollars go to killing people around the world than taking care of our own citizens. When I stopped voting
for Democrats because I realized what a corrupt, lying Party they were, it didn’t make me start voting Republican.
It just made it clear to me how screwed all Americans really are, including the Black community that has let the Dems con us for 5 decades. How could anyone claim that NATO is really a part of this war? They are just providing training, intelligence, $125 billion in weapons and cash, and have placed 10 rounds of economic sanctions to try to destroy Russia’s economy. They are more like innocent bystanders.
The rulers will once again try to get people more interested in finding the ‘Leaker’ than holding them accountable for telling us a bunch of lies again. It will work. The US Gov’t committed more than $100 billion in American taxpayer money to their donors and Ukraine the most corrupt country in Europe The results have been weapons manufacturers getting richer, politicians getting kickbacks, 20% of Ukraine being taken and lots of dead soldiers. The only war the West is winning is the propaganda war, but the problem is that the only place they’re even winning that is in the West…Seriously now Are there really adults that can look at people like Hillary, McConnell, Pelosi, Biden, Ted Cruz or McCarthy for example and think to themselves “Yeah, I know these people really care about me”?” (-Black In The Empire) Russia is beating the West, and the world is noticing.
“One of the biggest obstacles to building a robust anti-war movement is people’s belief that their own individual activism and opposition makes no difference, which is simply not true. Your individual activism and opposition makes *ALMOST* no difference, not no difference. These might sound similar, but they’re actually literally an entire infinity apart. If your efforts to oppose our track toward WW3 made no difference, then those efforts would be pointless. But if your efforts make even the slightest bit of difference above absolute zero, all that means is a lot more people need to join you to help turn us away from this dangerous trajectory. Hollywood has given us the wrong impression of how these things work, because the narrative structure of movies always places all its emphasis on the actions of the individual protagonist having an immensely consequential effect. Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star. Frodo destroys the One Ring. The Avengers save the universe. They need to make the hero’s actions have major consequences to make you care about their adventure. But real life isn’t like that. In real life it takes many, many people to bring about real change. The actions of one individual make very little difference; even people like me who have larger-than-average voices are just a tiny drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. Real change doesn’t depend on the individual, it depends on the collective. We can see this just by looking around society, at what a massive billions-of-cast-members collective improvisation human civilization is. It takes the collective to keep civilization functioning, and it will take the collective to change it. One bee sting won’t protect the hive, but many bee stings is deadly. The bee doesn’t hesitate because its one individual sting isn’t going to bring about its Hollywood ending — it just stings. We need to be like that. Sting with all the power of your one sting, whatever that may be. Organizing. Attending protests. Guerrilla street activism. Writing. Tweeting. Making memes. Distributing literature. Talking to people. Making videos. Whatever you can do to help wake up the rest of the bees and alert them to the threat that our collective hive has come under. You won’t stop the empire by yourself. You won’t make a major difference. But you will make *A* difference. And there’s nothing anyone can do to stop you from making that small difference that you can make. Take that unstoppable small difference and work toward getting as many of the others to do the same, because enough unstoppable small differences will necessarily add up to becoming an unstoppable big difference. And once we hit that point, healthy change becomes inevitable.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
Sometimes I wonder if I’m more sick of these lying Democrats and Republicans or our citizens that keep fighting to defend the corrupt team of their choice” (-Black In The Empire)
LOOKIE HERE. OOPS, WHOOPSIE DAISY, ANOTHER ACCIDENTAL ACCIDENT IN A WORLD OF COINCIDENCES CAUSE ALL THE SMART PEOPLE TELL ME THERE ARE NEVER ANY CONSPIRACIES OR BILLIONAIRE TECHSUREVEILLANCE MICROCHIPPED CASHLESS SOCIETY ROBODOG ROLLOUTS OR DEPOPULATION AGENDAS UNDERWAY! WHOO! WHAT A RELIEF!
“There will be immense pressure to increase the police budget and for the left to roll over, but we cannot let that happen. The time to begin organizing a massive protest is now. The left can create an alternative to the boss’s party, but only if we fight for it.” (-Rampant Magazine)
“Happy Easter! Police murdered an environmental activist in your backyard.”
“So this is love Well she finally kissed me Had me all fuckedup inside I was in love but Cupid missed me She up and left and I almost died But I was young and I was far from lonely I been that way for a long, long year Needed a girl to call my one and only Is that you?”
For some reason the feral desert cows that the insane assholes of this state’s bureau of land management want to kill off for no good reason, other than wanting to decrease everybody’s ability to be self sufficient as they poison the farmlands with their toxic fires and gmo seeds and Roundup and shit, these feral cows like to wonder around at night and always seem to fertilize this particular patch of land I inhabit, I feel like I mighta heard ’em clompin’ around out there about four in the morning, I aint been outside to investigate yet, but I just hope they did not knock down my fence cause I been workin’ so hard to repair that fuckin’ fence. Anyways…Ya know like everybody else back in 1987, I had high hopes of Guns N Roses carrying the torch for wild rocknroll, but they just got too rich to be good, too much too soon and fell in love with that merch moolah, and lost their songwriter, Izzy, and the drummer Steven Adler who gave ’em that wild, carreening roller coaster reckless train goin’ up around the bend sortof feeling and it was a cryin’ shame and a bummer, and I never fully got over it, much like when Diamond Dave left Van Halen and they tried to replace him with Sammy Hagar who many say is a nice guy, but I guess his frequency is just different from mine, he’s just too Jimmy Buffet for me, too fratboys on spring break. The magic of Van Halen was in having the best drummer, the greatest guitar player, a fun bassist with a Jack Daniels bottle shaped bass guitar and a high harmony Beach Boys vocal appeal, Diamond Dave doing flips and karate kicks and dressed like Ric Flair raided Steven Tyler’s roadcase, he is part ninja kung fu warrior, part philosopher, speaks several languages, is world traveled, has all kindsa interests, loves to dance, does Chaplin like comedy routines and self references as a combat hippie. It was that dynamic between him and Vard, as the band called him, that made all those records so fabulous. Force of nature lightning show sonic illustrator Eddie wanting to be thunderously hard and Dave bringing in all the samba and salsa and surf and dreamy, beachy, melodic pop influences, together, you know there was no one like ’em and never will be. Now, that first David Lee Roth Band, they had something, too. I’ve been wishing he’d reunite the “Eat ‘Em & Smile” lot since forever-I can listen to that album and even “Skyscraper” all day, but mostly, when I need to feel Alive With Pleasure, I still reach for my old Van Halen cassettes. They were really the band that first got me dreaming in technicolor spectacle. Roth is another dude I really love and respect even though I understand he is way to the right of me, politically speaking, but he remains one of the only public figures I know of who is still loudly speaking out about the value and importance of free speech and opposing censorship which I appreciate and admire, I listen to his podcasts every time he drops one and he has given me a lifetime of encouragement and inspiration from afar. Thanks again, David. He was like the big brother I never had. In the punk rock days, nobody knew I was doing my impersonation of Roth, no one could recognize it, cause I look more like Joey Ramone, but it was always Roth. To me, he is Elvis and Evil Keneiva, Bruce Lee and Roy Rogers. Only Little Richard makes me happy like that, just instantly. Shazam! Dolemite, Motherfucker! Okay, and maybe sometimes, Rick James! I took a lot from him, too! But anyways, “Low Rez Sunset” has been my main jam for over a year, I think! Even my old lady likes it.
RICK FROM ACETATE RECORDS SENT ME SOME RHINO BUCKET IN THE MAIL YEARS AGO
and I was surprised by how good they were in a pure and unadulterated impure adulterous sleaze sortof way! You do like AC/DC, all night road trips, greasy spoons on the side of the highway, roadhouse bars where everybody’s wearing black leather and only old school rocknroll’s on the jukebox? Rotgut whiskey bottle, “Blood Sweat, & Beers”? Then you’re gonna love Rhino Bucket in spite of their crazy name. Georg Dolivo has the exact voice summa my old sleaze metal compatriots always wished I woulda had back when I was still singing in some deadend sleazepunk gangs who could never keep a steady drummer long enough to complete a record. Exactly the band my old rhythm guitar player with the Malcolm Young obsession always wanted to be in. They formed in Van Nuys in the late eighties and reminded me variously of AC/DC, Jackyl, Junkyard, Flies On Fire, Supersuckers, Four Horsemen, Uncle Sam, Kix, all scuzz and sleaze and snarl and they had such all night motherfucker road dogs energy to burn. They even got a song called “Monkey Boy Highway” which reminds me so, so much of an old travel companion of mine way back in the day. They will make you want to drink. It’s my understanding that they are huge in Wapakoneta. Check ’em out.
“Liberals are not just brainwashed, like large segments of the left, they are the willing allies of liberal bourgeois totalitarianism.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
Riots in Bordeaux during an unauthorized demonstration against Macron’s pension reform, Thursday March 30, 2023 (Photo by Fabien Pallueau/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“Biden brags about giving police $30 billion. That’s white supremacy. NATO is white supremacy. Biden bragging about crime bill is white supremacy. ” (-Margaret Kimberley)
YOU DO NOT BELIEVE IN TRUTH, PEACE, FREE SPEECH, REAL JOURNALISM OR FREE SPEECH IF YOU DO NOT SUPPORT JULIAN ASSANGE & ACTIVELY CALL FOR HIS RELEASE. JUST SAYIN’.
“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)
Something suspicious is going on. Last week’s Pentagon leaks have been reported on extensively by the corporate media. Why? When leaks legitimately reveal the inner workings of the US empire, those leaks are either not covered by the corporate media or the leaker is actively…” (-Lee Camp)
One of those fabulous, few and far between real rocknroll bands that were really tearin’ it up way back when I first became domesticated and abandoned the suckass indie pop/post grunge preppie faux punk scene in the late nineties and retreated into home life with my three older kids, so sorry I never got a chance to see these cats live, but they laid alot of high quality music onto tape and we can always enjoy them on Youtube. Hats off to the Dragons!
always reminded me of Brian O’Blivion and vice versa, so talented, and ya know his old band were the zenith of glammy popnroll, am not at all surprised that Redd Kross had the good taste to recruit Jason Shapiro. His solo record is like a cross between that band TSAR, you know the one, that did that awesome tune, “Calling All Destroyers” meets the sugary sweet power pop side of Sparks with some Jellyfish or Imperial Drag for desert! Delicious, but a bit like raw cookie dough, you can end up with a sugar overdose.
“I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [libertarianism] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.” (-Christopher Hitchens)
CONTROLLED BIG 5 CORPORATE “NEWS” IS STILL FAKE AS FUCK RULING CLASS ONE PERCENTER GATES-RESET PROPAGANDA
YOU THINK USA CARES ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS WHILE FUNDING ATROCITY? YA THINK It”S CLASSY TO BOMB DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS HOSPITALS OF FUND MURDEROUS RIGHTWING PUPPET COUPS LIKE IN PERU?
“The people with all the capital have convinced the rest of us that capitalism is the best system the world has ever seen. As Americans cheer watching our Gov’t transfer $100 billion from us to their donors to spend on a proxy war that they provoked, the non-Western world is forming alliances to protect themselves from us and moving off the dollar
I don’t know if our citizens or owners are dumber.” (-Black In The Empire)
“Bernie Sanders defending NATO and claiming to not “pay attention” to Ukraine is an unforgiveable example of how there is no “left” in the U.S. two-party system.
It’s one War Party with two wings.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Bernie Sanders position on Ukraine war is as immoral as the rest of the pathetic right-wing democrat party that he is a part of.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“They don’t just control the opposition, they control the opposition to the opposition. Figured out that neither party serves you? Well guess what, friend? You’re in luck! There happens to be a totally organic populist revolution happening on whichever side of the aisle you’re on!” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege, it will always be at the expense of truth and justice.” (-Chris Hedges)
“We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power” (-Chris Hedges)
Round up all your friends and horns and hoopla and hoola hoops, colorful banners and funny hats! You know back in college when you liked R.E.M., and Tracey Chapman, you used to tell yourself how if you were alive in the sixties, you’d be marching with King and Malcolm, or campaigning for the Kennedys, if not the radical Yippie, Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation power to the people left, well? You might need to hit the mirror, Jack. Did something change? Remember when John and Yoko brought the Panthers and Ralph Nader on tv and you agreed with everything they said? In the words of one of the last good punk bands, Electric Frankenstein, the Time Is Now. Two seconds to decide. I fully get why our Australian bretheren scoff at the idea of Brother Kramer calling himself and his professional punk hotshots the MC5, but the message man is the thing, that song is timeless, bigger than any of them, Wayne sez we are all the MC5….so, right now it’s time to, KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS!
“No one is more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they’re free.” (-Goethe)
“Pat Tillman called the Iraq War “fucking illegal,” got shot to death by his own men, and then had his death covered up by the U.S. military.” (-Mike Gravel)
“The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.” (-Chris Hedges)
Man, my electricity went out when I was typing this, so I gotta try and remember what I said the first time cause not all of it saved. All the glitter kids are super stoked about the latest fab collab between the legendary Hiroshi Nakagome, “The Johnny Thunders Of Japan” and the World Famous Mister Ratboy best known for his work with MOTORCYCLE BOY, Hollywood’s coolest band who were “Kicked Out Of Hollywood” for hating the Sunset Strip, and the sexier, darker, more brooding and Velvet Underground influenced PILLBOX that beat from the heart of Alphabet CIty. Ratboy also released a series of memorable records with his more eccelctic group, SOUR JAZZ and an excellent solo album before relocating to Japan. Chris Barry the very charming Pillbox frontman returned to Canada and created an outstanding record called “Let It Throb” with his band, Throbbing Purple, I think Lou paris moved back to Cleveland, and Francois still knocks around on the Sunset Strip in his swanky leopard print and probably still has the best hair in L.A.
“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success,” defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” (-Chris Hedges)
I DON’T SPEAK COMMERCIALS
Man I ended up talking with a boomer I know who reads those corporate celebrity magazines, so she’s telling me like, how popular and with it Kamala “KKKOP” Harris and (Neo)Kanye “Batshit” West are with the young people of the streets, and I’m kinda just like half smiling, trying to imagine where and what young people might even remotely care about either of them, at all. At all. Like, “who”? This is just media juggernaut celebrity magazine fiction. I mean, Ye had those ridiculous $500 cream colored shoes all the white people coffeetable magazines promoted some years back, and I know he married that idle heiress with all the elective surgeries and seems to have been driven bonkers by that family and whatever kook cult they belong to, but young people are probably all into some new shit me and that boomer have never heard of. She still thinks of Amy Pohler and Whoopi Goldberg as edgy, radical comediennes. She thinks “Hamilton” is woke hip-hop. I’m not sure there’s even such a thing, ya know. I’m so old now I can still remember when “woke” meant being conscious of the lies, falsehoods, fabrications and phony fictions the empire manufactured to hustle up support for their endless Dick Cheney proxy wars agenda, and the divide the working class and mass incarcerate people of color for capitalist shareholder profits. Woke meant you did not fall for patriotic, racist whitewash, history revisionism, or stupid advertising slogans, or bullshit copaganda, or believe in the corporate media bullshit of the day, or subscribe to all those long debunked archaic cold war divide n conquer narratives, or follow along with any of the evil empire’s oppressor nonsense, now, the fake as fuck corporate media keeps trying to convince these boomers and some Gen X role playing nerds that woke means endless wars and kill the poor, but maybe with a Buddha statue at your rainbow flagged airbandb and a “TRUST THE SCIENCE” sticker and a Ukraine flag on your BLM Tesla, with maybe a cameo appearance from Bob The Drag Queen. I instantly loved Bob the Drag Queen way back in the day, but the capitalist war machine is still the capitalist war machine, with or without some feelgood bumper stickers, or zaney but lovable cynically cast backup dancers. It’s a dead dull Saturday in a nowhere dead end place, and my family is sick and I’m taking heavy doses of Vitamin C trying to not catch whatever they have, but it might be unavoidable. I’m restless and pissedoff and just hate sitting around. Worked on the garden, expecting some seeds in the mail today or Monday. Bitchy. Wanna Rock. Nowhere Calling to the Faraway Clowns. Oh yeah, that same boomer also wanted to tell me about some Republikkkan that got caught lying (GASP!) but somehow they never heard about any of Gropey Joe’s FIFTY YEAR LONG MADCAP WELL DOCUMENTED, EASILY PROVEN, INDISPUTABLE, ENTIRE CAREER OF LIES. Woke means never trusting the bullshittery on tv.
I was saying Donald Trump sucked, all the way back in the eighties, where’s my donut? Ya know what I mean? All the fraudsquad superstars and Lyn Cheney were required to do was say “ORANGE MAN BAD” and they all got to be overnight shitlib celebrities. What the fuck is that? I gotta say it on Twitter or something? “ORANGE MAN BAD”. There I said it again, now I shouldn’t I be receiving like some kinda special credit card approval in the mail, or job offers in the supposedly popular media, or some kinda discount buffet at the tiki lounge or somethin’? Drink tickets at the Tuesday night gentrification bar? Free hats from the expensive boutique? That’s all the shitlib superstars of the fradsquad and Lyn Cheney the torture and fracking lady have done, some empty, meaningless justice tweeting about “ORANGE MAN BAD”. Most of that was just to make new laws against public protest, to criminalize anyone who contests the fix is in election results, and superfund the racist gestapo cops even after four long years of protests against superfunding racist gestapo cops. Some representation we got, huh? I guess redundant disappointment AOC has started tweeting “IRAN ALSO BAD”. I’ll always remember her crocodile tears over CHILDREN IN CAGES while Trump was in office. Once Biden was in, they put some peppy wall paper on the walls, did a photo op with border kids reading Elmo or some shit and changed the name of the CHILD CAGES to “overflow facilities”, quadrupled the population there, and AOC never mentioned it again. Even when Obama or Biden actually out incarcerate their Republikkkan pals, rightwing media still screams about all the immigrants coming here for our good jobs and healthcare benefits. Does any of this make any sense at all? Good jobs with healthcare benefits? I guess they just mean AOC and her anti protest, pro censorship friends. Politics are fake. All these awful greedy awful people hate the poor. One of my friend’s wives who sadly, tragically, unexpectedly died was a real genius level super extraordinary talented artist, she was sucha brilliantly gifted artist that excessively rich honcho hipsters would even pay her big bucks to paint campy pop art for their ridiculous showoff mansions. Her mom and aunt were old school women’s rights activists who wanted to see a female president in their lifetime, but even she had to admit that this cold war witch, Hillary Clinton, cashing big checks from the bonesawing despot Saudi pharoahs for her so-called foundation, rigging the primaries against Sanders, smearing him as sexist, and the blaming “RUSSIA!” for the next however many years when she lost the election unexpectedly to Trump, and promoting fracking which fucks up all the water supply everywhere, and cackling like an unhinged lunatic over her delight in killing Gaddafi for her central banking friends was terrifyingly outta the realm of acceptablility, no matter what body she has, or what pro nouns make her feel most seen. The ruling class hate our guts and are never, never going to advocate for us, or protect us, or do our will. They work for billionaires, Gropey Joe even said that straightup to a worker in Michigan which is why nobody on the real left believes he won on Super Tuesday without some Mayo Pete affiliated software goosing, aside from the fact that he had no base and never campaigned except with his wife while wearing a mask from his basement, the one time he did hit the campaign trail he bellowed at a union man who challenged his Corn Pop nonsense: “I don’t work for you!”
“It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.” (-Chris Hedges)
“It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance ; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt.” (-Chris Hedges)
“One of America’s most vocal and steadfast advocates for supporting Joe Biden’s war policies in Ukraine. He voted to send $40 billion to Raytheon and CIA “for Ukraine,” and when asked if the US should send F-16 *fighter jets*, he seems not just ready but eager to send much more” (-Glenn Greenwald on sadly soldout pro war Sanders)
“We are living in the most expensive and dangerous timeline and Dems just keep telling you deal with it. They don’t even answer questions anymore, you’re just smeared as “pro Russia.” What a sick bunch. What are we doing?” (-Thia Ballerina)
““China, China, China.” “Russia, Russia, Russia.” Anything to distract us from the fact that our greatest enemy is our own government.” (-Jory Micah)
“Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jail and prisons, however, they can each generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year” (-Chris Hedges)
“Once you know someone is a compulsive liar, you’re not going to fall for their lies anymore. That’s how manipulation works: it’s only effective when you don’t know it’s happening. So our job is to wake people up to the fact that it is happening, and how precisely it is happening. Journalism will never have any meaningful impact on society as long as those in power can manipulate how that journalism is received by the public. This means that the real fight is in crippling their ability to do this by expanding public awareness of those manipulations. Investigative journalists do good and important work, but they’re only a small piece of the equation when it comes to circulating information and waking up the public to effect meaningful societal changes. The bigger part of the fight is in fighting the propaganda machine. The fight is no longer just getting information out there, it’s now also about making sure people see it and understand it correctly. There’s already enough publicly available information out there to incite revolution; only reason it doesn’t is because of imperial spinmeisters. The silver lining in this cloud is that fighting the imperial propaganda machine is something all ordinary people can do in their spare time. We can all circulate inconvenient facts, debunk and discredit the imperial spin machine, and help further degrade public trust in the MSM.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“No, there are no “UN troops” taking over Chile right now and rounding people up for bird flu. IDK why so many are asking me about this, but don’t trust a Canadian living in Canada to tell you what is going on in Chile.
Fearmongering BS doesn’t just come from MSM you know.” (-Whitney Webb)
A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom.” (-Chris Hedges)
“Dear Fellow Americans Our Gov’t lied us into the Iraq War and killed a million people, they just lied to us for 20 years about what was really happening in Afghanistan If you let them make you believe Putin went into Ukraine for no reason and Ukraine is winning you’re just dumb.
No matter what political label Americans gives themselves it appears that almost all of us still believe in American Exceptionalism.
Many Americans had and some still have WWII vets in their families Do they know that our Gov’t is now arming Nazis instead of fighting them?
The reason why the U.S. and NATO have been unable to destroy Russia with sanctions like they thought is because almost the entire Global South knows that the West are the liars and remembers what the West has done to their countries.
The U.S. couldn’t beat the Taliban, NATO can’t beat Russia so the next logical step is to try to start a war with China.
Agree with Russia going into Ukraine or not, Putin and Russia are the ones telling the truth about why the war started and the U.S. and the West are playing us for suckers again.
Americans don’t care about invasions when the US is doing the invading. It is the U.S. and NATO that has totally failed in what they promised.
They didn’t turn the ruble to rubble, they haven’t forced Russia out of Ukraine, taken back Crimea, forced out Putin, isolated Russia, or sent Russia back to the Stone Age. But they took $100 billion from us. When the U.S. and Europe says the world is with them, it’s because they truly believe that they are all that matters and what the other 85% of people in other countries think doesn’t really mean anything.” (-Black In The Empire)
“Political parties are a problem. A voter could agree with a policy and still vote against the candidate promoting the policy because they’re not in the same party as them. Parties keep us divided. As a result, we don’t focus on the elites using all of us.” (-Sabby Sabs)
“Every time Joe brag tweets about his booming economy he’s erasing ppl that are struggling, suffering, hungry, homeless, poor, without medicine, hurting and living paycheck to paycheck. I’m sorry, but he doesn’t give 1 solitary fk about you and it shows.” (-Thia Ballerina)
Man I had some mediocre dreams last night concerning old shit from the high school years, drumkits and arguing with people about recording costs. Stuck in the past. Woke up and checked my old mostly obsolete email cause I’d received some unexpected correspondance from distant quarters there and man the propaganada machine bullshit is RELENTLESS. Somehow during my misguided Bernie daze, when I wrongly thought he had the character, backbone, and integrity to stand up and fight the corrupt DNC and Hillary Clinton and the Military-Surveillance-Pharamaceutical-Media-Incarceration Monopolies, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer and Blackrock, I got on these bullshit DNC, gullible shitlib echo chamber mailing lists, so now I am being flooded with all this STAND WITH IRAN WOMEN and LGBT RIGHTS IN IRAN spam, deceptively manufacturing consent for war. Crassly manipulative wag the dog war piggery. Everytime the empire wants to target another country for um, “Liberation”, they start with the feminist angle, trot out AOC to demand the bombs be deployed on some foreign culture the deep state has determined is not woke and sensitive enough. They did the same shit with Afghanistan, then Syria. Destroyed Libya and laughed about it. If you think women and gay people have more freedom and better quality of lives after USA, USA goes in and flattens all their buildings and infrastructure and rough men come to town with big guns and kick everybody’s door down and shoot the males and do what they do in war to the women and children they are invading, you are an imperialist, white superemacist, or naieve. Women and gay people are not better off in Afganistan or Libya, just because their male family members have been slaughted and tortured and some rich ladies in Amurkkka got more billions donated to their “foundations”. Haiti does not want or need no white women who work for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin overthrowing their governments or helping to steal their natural resources for Davos billionaire profits. I see how they do it though-they whip up the identity politics Nato left, make them think it’s all for the kittens and the oppressed. If the empire could never be bothered to fix fucking FLINT MICHIGAN, how the fuck do you college people imagine they give a rat’s ass about “women’s rights” in Afghanistan? The fraud squad warpigs make me sick. What fakes, what liars, how can they sleep at night? Like babies, rolling in the money, I guess. Those grossout ladies on “The View” really have dumbed the KKKaryns down,.
Rainbow flags on tanks killin’ more poor brown people for oil is not okey dokey, or wokey wokey. Fix Flint. And if you don’t care about the poor people of East Palestine being poisoned by your big media programming mushroom cloud Blackrock buddies just you know cidentally becuse they supposedly just had no choice but to burn all those toxic chemicals there in the farmlands,where they wanna mine for Cobalt, while Bill Gates buys up all the remaining farmland everywhere, stop pretending you love marginalized peoples in foreign countries you know nothing about Sal the Agorist on Twitter: “https://t.co/KhfSj4mlOO” / Twitter
FROM PALESTINE TO EAST PALESTINE THE RICH ARE WAGING WARS ON THE POOR
You know I understand people are punished 24/7 with fear programming and fabricated bullshit hysteria about the boogeymen coming to steal their special privileges or whatever, which is the main reason the consumerist hypnospell see no evil motherfuckers just dutifully repeat what the spin doctor tv millionaires say until doomsday, which is here for a lot of us, but man, I will never really get the whole sham about how all the goosestepin’ gotmines still believe that talking about Obama and Beyonce all day makes them NOT RACISTtm, ESPECIALLY while they steadfastly ignore all the white supremacist wars of aggression, the mass incarceration of black people, and kkkops killing about six people a day in this country, the majority of them people of color, but somehow the tv still convinces them that applauding the soldout fraudsquad or Cailtin Jenner some more somehow means they aren’t absolutely batshit complicit with the HONKY DEATH MACHINE, that’s just slapped some feelgood bumper stickers on the back of their tanks. “COEXIST”, my ass. You mean coexist with other rich white people, mostly. And maybe some token models. A few. “I feel so seen”, the shitlibs all say. What about all the poor people whose lives are being destroyed by your bullshit diversity idol’s donor class bosses and forever prez?
“The media propagates a message that corporations want, and there’s a belittling and mocking of the poor and celebration of wealth. A kind of cutthroat, rapacious capitalism is celebrated on reality television shows where you betray and manipulate and push aside your competitors for fleeting fame and money. These are sick values, but they’re disseminated through corporate media in almost every program you watch.” (-Chris Hedges)
“It’s a bit difficult to maintain the US Security State had no role in Twitter’s censorship regime when *the General Counsel of the FBI* – centrally involved in Russiagate and all sorts of politicized abuses – ended up as Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, with paws in everything.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“You did not vote to “save democracy”, you voted to make sure we had 2 right wing anti-worker, pro-war parties that are both fascist. They both work in the interest of corporations to screw the workers & the citizens, that’s what fascism is, and you voted for it! Congrats!” (-Jimmy Dore)
“Class war: The “squad,” “progressive” caucus, & pro-NATO liberal-left have joined Bernie Sanders as the ultimate democrat party sheepdogs. Neither one of the bourgeois parties have anything to offer workers while both pretend to be concerned about working class interests.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Show me a liberal, and I’ll show you a white supremacist and imperialist war pig.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Michael Eric Dyson & Robert Reich do the same thing. Both of them will tell you the problem. But then they’ll tell you to VOTE FOR THE PROBLEM. They never lead you down a different path.” (-Sabby Sabs)
“BREAKING: As an online safety expect: my preliminary study reveals a severe spike over the last 5 days in hate speech and united attacks from liberal corporate journalists against @MTaibbi
, followed by visible spikes in personal attacks and violent rhetoric toward him generally.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“The purpose of modern censorship is not to prevent people from hearing an idea. It is to delegitimize the idea in the mind of the public, and excommunicate the heretic who dared express it from polite society and the public square.” (-Jay Battacharya)
“This is why everything mainstream is garbage. It’s not because everyone’s stupid and uncool, it’s because we live in a highly controlled society that only elevates politicians, celebrities, journalists, media, arts and trends which benefit our rulers.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Meanwhile RT & Sputnik were wiped off of social media.
Everything that we claim the “authoritarian” boogeymen do is what the US itself does all the time. That’s not hyperbole. Invading countries, interfering in elections, murdering journalists & insiders. Literally everything. Just like the mujahideen led to the Taliban, just like arming Saddam Hussein paved the way for the Iraq wars, just like interfering in Russia’s 1996 election allowed Putin to come to power, just like invading Iraq created ISIS.
But arming Azov Nazis in Ukraine will work out well” (-Primo Radical)
I CAN’T IMAGINE GOING TO ANY RIPOFF STADIUM CONCERT
Ever since Woodstock 99 and Warpedfest/Hot Topic/Amurkkkan Idol artificial booger punk killed events and 800 media groups turned into 5 companies that merged and consolidated into one or two, everybody’s selling their publishing to dark forces except for Prince who died mysteriously right after battling for years and finally getting his rights back, I’ve been less and less connected to mainstream society. Rolling Stone and Spin are bullshit. ‘Same people pay Tucker Carlson as Rachel Maddow. Same takeaway in different tones: billionaires are good, need more jails, more bombs, more war. Motley Crue and Def Leppard are planning another victory lap with Alice Cooper opening this summer, if a health crisis does not result in the state closing everything down again. I would like to see Billy Idol like in a theater or hotel sized venue before one of us croaks, but all my big plans always fall to dust, ya know that’s just how it is for us folks your philanthropic science saviors and their tv narrative heads refer to as the third world. For us “useless eaters” in the words of Clinton/Klaus mentor Kissinger. I’m not into the sunburn big screen sports shows, no matter how much pyro and inflatable strippers are piled on. My kinda real rocknroll is dirty, more intimate and emotional and in your face. Guns N Roses could be Eminem could be Garth Brooks could be any faceless lapdancer monarch puppet. For all of you who don’t take orders from evil German Bond villains or aspirant gawd techlord sociopaths, I’m gonna play you some songs right now that’ll help you feel the rocknroll rebellion again. I personally think it feels alot different from all that toxic mouspad industry-pop or any of the fascist youth rally heavy poof metal fourth of July flagwaving halftime bullshit. You tell me…
THE NWO IS NOT YOUR FRIEND. BILLIONAIRES ARE NOT YOUR SUPER SPACEMAN SCIENCE SPECIAL SEED SAVIORS!
“Americans do not elect representatives.
Our “democracy” amounts to us being allowed to suggest which one of two corrupt criminals becomes the capo who we pay protection money to. In either case, the crime syndicate will continue robbing us, murdering us & destroying our country. The US is not battling “authoritarianism.” The US is itself authoritarian and has always backed authoritarian regimes around the world. The US is battling nations who even mildly resist yankee hegemony. Being a “democratic” nation just means becoming a colony of Washington.” (-Primo Radical)
“Merkel reveals the Minsk Agreement was a stalling tactic that allowed the West to militarize Ukraine as an anti-Russian proxy and fortify it for an inevitable war. I’m struggling to find any coverage or analysis of this remarkable confession in English language mainstream media.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“If you want to know how the War Machine keeps Americans cheering for more war, here you go. TIME really do top notch propaganda. #WarPigs” (-Jimmy Dore)
“It might help the morale of any soon striking railway workers to know:
congress is breaking UN mandate/international law by attempting to stop the railway workers from striking.To be clear- I don’t mean that congress cares about breaking international law-
I’m just saying that this is just one more reason for railway workers to strike- no matter what congress says. Its gonna have to be a wildcat.
“Indeed. The #RightToStrike is a universal human right, codified in international law in ILO Convention 87, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights & the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. #Railroadstrike#RailroadWorkers#RailStrike” (-Craig Mokhiber)
“Hey NY Times and Charlie Savage
.. time to come clean on the 2016 DNC emails & Russia!” (-Ann Wright Voices Of Conscience and Code Pink)
If you are a fan of Dramarama – and who isn’t, there’s a great podcast I did with John Easdale that goes deep into the history and music of the band now available on your SiriusXM app. Tune in and enjoy over ninety minutes of amazing insight into a true, rocking band.
WARPIGS, TECHSURVEILLANCE OLIGARCHS, DEEP STATE SPOOKS LOCKED ME OUTTA FACEBOOK FOR BEING ANTIWAR! INSTEAD OF PULLING BIDEN LEFT, THE FRAUDSQUAD & SAD SELLOUT SANDERS PULLED SHITLIBS RIGHT! THE ROCK PRESS IN THIS COUNTRY IS JUST LIKE THREE YOUTUBERS! HERE’S MY FAVORITE!
And I don’t really give a fuck, as they’d been censoring me and everybody like Mike Prysner and Abby Martin and Cindy Sheehan and Medea Benjamin for years, rigging the algorithms, hiding our posts. Training dumbuck obedients into blindly supporting more online censorship because someone in some safespace college campus might find something from a scientific journal “objectionable”, “problematic”, or “offensive!” or AOC might be “traumatized” into superfunding the police state and proxy war for Wall Street global hegemonn. “Traumatized” by an old dude messing up Pelosi’s desk or some shit. Tim Yohannon warned us about Fake Corporate Punk and mass media consolidation way back in the early 90’s. Sal from Electric Frankenstein was talking about evil industry manufactured bullshit conumer dummy muzak way back then, too and tightknit control of playlists on the public airwaves-what he used to call the ANTI ROCK CONSPIRACY. It’s all fake muzak, now. Plink 182 spazpunk garbage and billionaire heiress feelings. It’s all fake news now, what a horror show. Vangaurd and Blackrock own it all, so we gotta all do our part to amplify indie media and dissident journalists from Michael Hastings (RIP) to Julian Assange! The entire Left has been silenced in the big 5 corporate mass media. Village Voice is gone, Flipside’s gone. I don’t even think Falling James writes for L.A. Weekly anymore. One of the only falsebook friends I miss seeing regular updates from is this super cool younger rocknroll reporter from California I think named Mikayla Beyer-her fantastic glam interviews with so many of our rocknroll heroes are among my favorite things online along with that Metal Sunday Social Club the dude from Blackboard Jungle does and Wasting Some Time with Jason Green. She is awesome. Thank you for your service, sister. She loves all the same glitter trash we do. I can’t ask my mom for a birthday or Christmas subscription to UK import punknroll bible “VIVE LE ROCK” as she’s a retired school teacher ona fixed income, that’s shit’s like $25 a copy now, so all my rocknroll has to come from like the youtubes. I’m a pauper.
“There are “woke” psyops and there “anti-woke” psyops.
There are billionaires funding “progressive” media & politicians, and there are billionaires funding “populist” media & politicians. There are feds in antifa and in the Proud Boys. It’s pro-wrestling. A “worked shoot.”” (-Primo Radical) “
Permanent cultural conflict prevents middle & working class subgroups from unity on common causes, that could threaten elite power. Always enough hostility & distrust (or so they make it seem) to never work together.” (-Erik Reisz Hajdu)
“Once you realize that Republicans and Democrats are competing factions of the mafia, American politics makes a lot more sense” (-Whitney Webb)
“As part of its war that killed 3 million people in Korea, the US used biological weapons
But the CIA tried to cover this up in a “counter-propaganda” operation, falsely claiming it was a communist “myth” (-Ben Norton)
“Liberals say that conservatives are stupid because they do not listen to facts, logic, data or history — flippantly ignoring these things in defense of pre-programmed beliefs and their tribe.
Why is it, then, that liberals cannot recognize when they do the exact same thing?” (-Primo Radical)
“Full disclosure if John Bolton or Mike Pompeo somehow secure the Republican presidential nomination I will become a pussyhat-wearing shitlib for the remainder of the 2024 race.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“The final version of the NDAA includes a provision granting the Pentagon “emergency” procurement authorities until at least September 30, 2024 to furnish all “materiel and related services” to Ukraine. Translation: the US is now in full wartime industrial production mode” (-Michael Tracey)
“This country is a nation of thieves. It stole everything it has, beginning with black people. The U.S. cannot justify its existence as the policeman of the world any longer. I do not want to be a part of the American pie. The American pie means raping South Africa, beating Vietnam, beating South America, raping the Philippines, raping every country you’ve been in. I don’t want any of your blood money. I don’t want to be part of that system. We must question whether or not we want this country to continue being the wealthiest country in the world at the price of raping everybody else.”(―Stokely Carmichael)
Yes they should be pardoned! And the war criminals responsible for over a million deaths tried instead. Quit hiding the #Costofwar” (-Jodie Evans on Assange and Snowden poll)
The fact that Joe Biden was yelling and pointing fingers at workers during the campaign was your first clue that he was going to be an anti-labor president and another puppet of the oligarchy.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Making a rail strike illegal just proves how terrified the ruling class is of worker’s power.
The largest strikes in history – that gave us things like a 40 hr work week & took kids out of mines – were illegal. So, what if you called their bluff? #RailStrikes#Railworkers” (-Elenor Goldfield)
“NATO is not the aggressor.
The vaccine is safe & effective. The Hunter Biden laptop is disinformation. Trump colluded with Russia. Epstein & Maxwell had no clients. Assad gassed his own people. We are winning in Afghanistan. Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.” (-Primo Radical)
So far billions in American taxpayer money has achieved getting over 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed and almost 20% of their country taken For nothing our Gov’t could have told Ukraine to honor the Minsk agreement they signed and none of this would have happened. Reminder: Victoria Nuland is caught on tape picking Ukraine’s new Gov’t before the coup in 2014 even happened and Biden is on video bragging about firing their prosecutor That’s the sovereign Ukraine they keep talking about. The EU is even getting pissed about the US profiting off of this war by ripping them off, while our own American citizens are still cheering on watching billions of our dollars being stolen from us and given to the ruling class again” (-Black In The Empire)
DEAR SANTA
Please get me that RAZZLE book for Christmas. I’ve been pretty good this year.
“Suckering Europeans into war with Russia, blowing up Nord Stream pipelines, Inflation Reduction Act, soaring energy & food prices, the assault on the German economy – European political class is a little late understanding that U.S. policy is & has always been “America First.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Nancy Pelosi will be stepping down after 627 years as leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. She will be remembered by the piles of money she secured for herself & her friends.” (-Lee Camp)
“Reminder: fascist Bolsonaro only came to power due to a political coup in 2016 and judicial coup in 2018 (both backed by the US)
Brazil’s supreme court later absolved Lula of all the fake charges against him The UN said the lawfare violated Lula’s rights” (-Ben Norton) “
Congress, a corrupt institution with a 21% approval rating, has no right to override the will of railway union rank and file.” (-Party For Socialism & Liberation)
Are you hip to these guys? By the time RATBOY was doing SOUR JAZZ, Giliani and all those billionaire gentrification scumbags had been sending buses full of riot pigs to crack people’s skulls in Tompkins Square Park for the sin of being poor in Lower Manhattan. They pushed out all us lower class brats to make way for all those loathsome trustfund hipsters and Wall Street shysters, so I never saw Sour Jazz play live, but Cowboy Mark came to visit me at my ex wife’s house in the midwest where they manufacture the fratboys when my kids were young. Very charming and lovable guy. I interviewed singer Lou a couple times I think and the drummer went on to play with Walter Lure’s post “RENT PARTY” Waldos for long time and even sang a song on their final album. I thought you outlaws and activists, guttersnipes and beat poets might enjoy some SOUR JAZZ songs in thee dismal ever darkening times that all the prophets from Alice Walker and Russell Means to Assata Shakur and Julian Assange all warned us about. So here, my dears.
Barely anyone is talking about DNC & Biden’s move last week to alter the primary calendar to ensure no progressive (*cough* Bernie Sanders) could ever compete w/ the establishment (*cough* oligarchy’s) candidate again. ” (-Lee Camp)
“How comical is this? The FBI is blaming racists for an attack. The agency of COINTELPRO that murdered countless civil rights leaders, including MLK, and created the Crips and Bloods. Nice one, CNN.” (-John Dissed)
Since the US overthrew democratically elected Arbenz in Guatemala, >100k civilians have been murdered by military dictators that followed. There’ve been at least 68 such regime change operations since WWII. Once you know, you can’t be silent.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Zelensky is a sad figure. Elected on a platform of peace only to get bullied by the far-right and Washington; now such a tool of the far-right that he bans the church of millions of Ukrainians.” (-Aaron Mate’)
“Congress tells us they can’t pass anything because of “gridlock” and “lack of bipartisanship.” They can’t pass Build Back Better, they can’t codify Roe.
But apparently they were able to find the bipartisanship when it came to stripping rail workers of the right to strike.” (-Kei Pritsker)
“Kirchner said the corrupt right-wing’s goal is to prevent her from running for office. And they succeeded
CFK said their “henchmen” can “imprison me, but I will never be your pet. Never!” She said a rich oligarch may pay criminals to shoot her. They want her “prisoner or dead”
“”Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” (-James Baldwin)
Kirchner: The right-wing oligarchs and media “condemn me because they condemn a model of economic development and of recognition of the rights of the people” She stressed they are the corrupt ones; they left the country trapped in $45 billion in IMF debt” (-Ben Norton)
“I was born in a bourgeois community and had some of the better things in life, but I found that there were more people starving than there were people eating, more people that didn’t have clothes than did have clothes, and I just happened to be one of the few. So I decided that I wouldn’t stop doing what I’m doing until all those people are free.” (-Fred Hampton)
“As usual, liberal employees of media corporations can’t keep their lies straight.
If NY Post’s stories were “nothing burgers” – just pics of Hunter’s genitals – why did they try so hard to get them censored, spreading CIA’s lies that the docs were “Russian disinformation?”” (-Glenn Greenwald) “
The US government has approved at least $51.4 billion in military aid for Ukraine since the last week of February
That’s roughly $185 million PER DAY on average.” (-Ben Norton) “
I think we live in an industrial dimensional reality where we’re programmed to believe what we’re told. We’re programmed to believe them. We’re programmed to believe what that ruling class wants us to believe. (— John Trudell)
THE COUNTDOWN In about an hour I gotta go get another tooth pulled, losing your teeth is a real mindfuck, ya know you can dye your hair and drop the weight and almost forget you are fifty something, but the teeth starting to fall out due to advanced periodontal disease is a constant reminder of the ticking clock. Kinda makes ya wanna cry a little. My old friends, the poor ones without some fancy health insurance have already lost their teeth. My friends keep dropping dead, one by one, so many died young, now that has accelerated-people are dropping dead all over the place, even on live tv and all the obits just say “died unexpectedly” or “died suddenly”. Kids with heart attacks? Under sixty having strokes? “Just died unexpectedly”. Unexpectedly is not a cause of death. I remember the video someone made of my New Orleans street musician where they guessed he was twenty five years older than he was at the time. Life outdoors in the elements gets brutal fast. Middle class people been tv trained to just think the poor huddled masses do not deserve teeth or optical. Our appearance keep changing as we get older. There were a few years I recall when I wore almost the same outfit everyday-long black hair, little bit of eye makeup, maybe one dangling Lords sword earring, Godfather fedora, red leather jacket, white tuxedo shirt, black leather hardcore belt with chains I lost in a messy eviction, black Lip Service bondage pants, leopard skin creepers. Midwestern sports towns would not let you work hardly anywhere, unless you had short hair. Even the record store in the mall where my Michael Hutchence lookalike older bassplayer worked when I met him always insisted I was too Ramonesey, longhaired. Longhair was okay for him cause he was conventionally Handsome, whereas I am not. A kid I knew in a collegetown hot rod band who died when his disease spread while he was in jail for DUI’s was allowed to bag groceries at Krogers in spite of his crazy punk rock hair, but for the most part, only elite hipster businesses would let you work there with tattoos. Now everybody you see has tattoos, it was different when I was a kid, and my twenties seemed to be all about the screws getting steadily tighter, like when they took away all the bus stop benches in the cities, removed all public phones mandating traceable personal cellphones, started groping you in the airport, locked all the public restrooms in the parks, doing the whole psy op about anthrax and orange alerts and Bush telling you to but duct tape from his Home Depot pal Tom Ridge. I knew people who went to jail for pot and acid. Singer in a psychedelic garage band did like two years for a pocket full of weed. They made me piss test for dishwasher jobs and as a pizzamaker at the bowling alley. I was the only one who was forced to piss test because the way I looked, they’d presume I’m a hippie stoner. I’d tell ’em straight up, I’m more of an old fashioned Jim Morrison boozeman, but they’d still make you go pee in a cup to get their minimum wage job. Knew a guy who got a city job, good money, easy peasy, twenty bucks an hour to stand around in an orange vest, but he had to do all these stupid human tricks to get that gig, even though he’s a decorated veteran, he had to smuggle somebody elses urine into their piss clinic. Cause he’s a reefer afficianado. So many boomers and white middle class suburbans are being granted reefer rights, but not all the non violent drug offenders are free from the forced labor in private prisons promoted by people like Kamala Harris. Techlords purged me from Facebook, Garland Nixon from Twitter, Dr. Naomi Wolf from Twitter, and scrubbed years and years of interviews by Chris Hedges, Abby Martin, and Lee Camp from Youtube. Fauntleroy clingers on from namebrand bands gone outta thier way to help The Man enforce his Official, for profit, bogus falsehood, tyrrany Narratives online, throwing all their second hand fame around. It astounds me that any of the human beings I grew up with, especially the ones who once and maybe still owned punk rock records or grew up hearing me talk about the Panthers, antiwar movement, the Wobblies, the American Indian Movement or Michael Hastings still support the police state and the Ted Talk stated objectives of totalitarian Davos billionaires who want a microchip cashless society and control of every aspect of your little life-evil rulers who meet in secret and handpick people like Sinema, Trudeau, Macron, and Desantis. It’s a crazy world and fictitious times. It was Michael Moore who used that phrase, but now, he just became a legman for the crooked DNC. I liked him better when he fought the billionaires and advocated for low wage workers, social justice causes and unions, now he’s just another “russiagate” Hillary obeyer like the Squad and Bernie-you think all those people got actual threats from the deep state during the Covid Panic? ‘Cause they ALL got in line to support Gropey Joe Biden, as corrupt a candidate as any we’ve ever seen. Remember Anita Hill or the Crimebill? Tara Reade or the Patriot Act? The gropey Big Guy is not all there. Like Reagan, tthey just lead him around. Weekend at Gropey Joe’s. I think all the politics are a staged dog n pony show, wagging the dog for the secret societies and spy agencies. One of my alltime rocknroll heroes just told me he loves me very, very much and it almost made me cry. Ya know when everything seems so ridiculously dystopian and all your ex friends only speak in bumper stickers, dayspa jingles or pharma commercials, it’s really moving to receive a kind word from someone who is still conscious and not baffled by the bullshit. I really, really love him, too. Another way I know I’m getting old is I got more psychic space for some sillier say nothing bands I would have scorned or scoffed at twenty years ago when I still had some longshot, raggedy, underpracticed, low budget, part time, heavy boozing, self destructive basement punk bands of my own. Like this snot slick group, DERAPS–they got the California hair band sound, they’re mostly Van Halen but with a little White Lion and Honeymoon Suite thrown in the mix-pop metal, cheerful, slick, rich, born on Malibu beach kinda vibes, but to make it all even a bit weirder, they’re from Quebec Canada and like jam with Eddie Van Halen’s friends from Toto who played on “Thriller” and shit like that-I don’t mind ’em, something ’bout them appeals to me against my will and better judgement, I guess they give me that checkered Vans and Eddie Van beer in the cooler and frisbee dog feeling. Not punk rock by any stretch of the imagination-the opposite of that totally-posh metal, but I kinda dig it. It’s very much in the corporate hairband assembly line tradition of Warrant and Bullet Boys and Whitesnake and Winger and Nelson, but the weedly musicianship is of a higher caliber ala Nuno or Eddie Van. If you were one of the ten people still alive who read any of my fanzines in the 80’s, you’ll know I used to mercliessly slag any formulaic hair metal merchants for co-pting our subversive street subculture.
I don’t get around much, anymore. In my wild, wild youth, I spent several lifetimes fuckin’ around in dark bars and ending up in come crazy places like the Sunset Strip where I met a lotta people with black hair who wanted to be like Guns N Roses and Posion and the Crue and purple haired Zeroes. I remember most of those metal years black haired guys being kinda dumb and untalented and 100% incapable of writing a song to save their lives, but I did like that guy from Queeny Blast Pop, probably cause when we met he was soft spoken and polite actually, reminded me a bit of myself onstage. He continues to be pretty good as far as I’m concerned and I’m always lookin’ for some new rocknroll being made with some energy, a little style, a little heart. Not bad if you ask me. At least as good as ya know, say, Stars From Mars or Plastic Tears. I saw Lesli’s guys live opening for L.A. Guns about I dunno, twelve or thirteen years ago and they were still good, wild onstage, couple catchy tunes, brought out all the old leather jacket wearers. People at that show kept asking me if I was Phil Lewis. Other old people probably recall me absolutely slaying all the hairspray metal dudes in my more punk leaning fanzines during the assembly line spandex Headbanger’s Ball Days, but lately, I’ve been kinda sentimental for even the cheesier overproduced deedle deedle metal bands I used to kinda disdain. I can appreciate a little “One More Reason” or “Electric Gypsy”, now. Like when I was a kid, I did not really listen to much Ozzy or Twisted Sister. I was very new wave, like totally immersed in synth pop and death rock, now I don’t mind me some heavy metal. Especially ’round the bonfire at night. The problem with my desert southwest border radio classic rock station is it’ll play some Van Halen, George Thororoughgood, ZZTop and Billy idol, but then they play like, Yes. And I still say no to Yes. In the deadend ghost town here, aint nothin’ happenin’ at all in the way of music, ya know the only musicians are like outta towners who play at the tourist trap-I saw a death rock guy in all the pentegrams and upside down crosses on his battle vest yesterday and knew he was not from here. We saw a nazi couple about a month ago, I hope they aint livin’ here, but it would not surpise me, all the ranchers are super fucking far to the racist extremes rightwing. People behind us have the biggest fucking turkey I’ve ever seen in my life gobble gobbling around their backyard. I don’t fuck with other people’s stuff, but it is a bit hard to not wanna like quietly, open a gate and free the fucker, but where would he go, really? He’d just get eaten by the wolves and coyotes. I think they’re fattening him up for Christmas. Loony old demented Gropey Joe told some badly scripted fuckin’ photo op jokes the other day, but you know this aint no democracy cause he’ll pretend pardon a turkey but not a righteous and heroic human being. Everybody witgh any measure of integrity whatsoever has demanded the Ivy League posh people free Julian Assange and Leonard Peltier, but those tyrannical fuckin’ rich billionaire deep state secrecy people who rule over us don’t give a fuck who we want pardoned. They’re all just like, laughing at us and how most people will believe any crazy crackpot farfetched bullshit they wanna sell ’em from “lone gunman magic bullet” to “found the passport, melted steel, Muslims with boxcutters so buy duct tape”, so long as a Serious PersonTM in a pinstriped pants suit says it on tv.
I love alla Morrissey’s solo stuff, too, but there is something still special about those old Smiths records, ya know? Morrissey got me into Osacr Wilde, as a kid. Not sure how I feel about his new producer, yet. Moz guests on the new Iggy lp, “EVERY LOSER”. The most beautiful new wave girl got me into the Smiths when we were jut thirteen and fourteen, all that post punk and new romantic, goth and new wave stuff especially imprinted deep on my soul, ya know I’m still listening to the eighties music even now in these cold times when it’s impossible to know what’s going on, the powerful forces of Wall Street weapons makers and pill pushers beat us crazy with abusive gaslighting and fear propaganda and pro war, fascist hoopla, you can see it on everybody’s faces-the horror, the trauma, the shutoff utilities notices, and threats of eviction, at our old place we did not have adequate heat, now we got broken water heater problems, I’m in solidarity with everybody who’s in the struggle, all the people with nowhere to go-I got a lot more empathy for the people barely gettin’ by, than I do with all the phony fake hipster shitlib haves, paying to play, hoarding their platforms, buying some kinda make believe illusion of “being popular”, and shithoarding their piles of More Stuff, it’s fuckedup. I don’t even talk to people where I live no more, except for a couple of hardworking retail slaves at the low pay grocery store, cause the insufferable ESP new age landlord hot tob Karens and Fonzie hipster airbabandb owners pushed us out of our old neighborhood and now we are deep into ya know, Rush Limbaugh, love the kkkops, rightwing rancher, insufferable blowhard, talk radio terrain. Navigating pitbull meth head culture on foot aint all roses. Tumultuous territory in troubling times. Divided States Of Amnesia. It’s dangerous out here. Do you remember the bills you have to pay or even yesterday? I’m just a broken record, by now. A whole stack of broken records, really. And a couple of dogeared old books, right? It all started with the Monkees and Prince, Cyndi Lauper, Adam Ant, Nik Kershaw, Dexy’s, Lords, Hanoi and Billy Idol, “ASK” by the Smiths and “Rubber Ring”. Some Nick Cave and Gun Club and Beasts Of Bourbon and here we are.
I’m still trying to find out whatever happened to all those guys from the Indianapolis glam band CHATTERBOX formerly known as Too Cool, who were around in the late eighties that were influenced by Dogs D’Amour, the Quireboys, the Black Crowes and the Faces, the ones with the scarves, who played Arthur Lee covers. Let us know if you know those cats, Stephen Lee Canner (Dirty Sidney Cox), vocals; Garry Wayne Finley (Slim Chance), guitar; Dave d’Eath (bass); Ryan Payne (Poppy Rimdeau), drums, or how to contact ’em. I’d love to interview ’em. They were sorta midwestern glam contemporaries of my ole teenage bands, Vain Damage, the Neons, and Teenage Devil Dolls, and of course, Detroit’s glammest Motor City sons, Trash Brats, in the late eighties.
NEW “WHOLE OF THE LAW” VIDEO DROPS! THE WORLD FAMOUS MISTER RATBOY & HIROSHI THE GOLDEN ARM ARE STAYING GOLDEN!!!
“KILL A PUNK FOR ROCK & ROLL PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARTY PEREZ 1976-2019” (-HoZak Books)
This photographer Marty Perez travelled the old beat highway and college radio music circuit for years and really doies a startlingly effective good job at capturing the restless rocknroll subculture-he’s got it all here, the truck stops and hangovers, sick in the parking lot, the “Dazed & Confuzed” sevnties stoners, the rich kid grunge poser motherfuckers, the old school Batcave rockabillies, From Big Star in their satin baseball jackets to Lazy Cowgirls doing what they do best, writing the songs that make old junkies cry and tearing up some shithole bar.The Clash, the Replacements, Bad Brains, 68 Comeback-I used to drink with one of those guys, the dead one-Jack (RIP), Fastbacks, Aerosmith and Black Oak Arkansa-they’re all hear and sweatty. The pictures of their fans are really what tells about half the story. The kinda real cool photography book that says it all loudly, that you and your loved one can treasure on their coffeetable for the rest of their life. Pretty much everything HoZak does, they do very well. I don’t know the HoZak gang personally, but they keep churning out valuable works by important artists and they sure seem like they know exactly what they’re doing. Reminding me of when Sympathy hit their stride in the nineties before he got White Stripes fad rich and crappedout. These HoZaks are the people who brought you books about Chris Isaak and James Calvin Wilsey, and like, Jeff Drake the rocknroll bankrobber. They’re a music label, too. HOT STUFF! CAN”T GET ENOUGH!
WAS KUCINICH THE LAST ANTI WAR DEMOCRAT? * FOLLOW REAL JOURNALISTS, LIKE ABBY MARTIN & GARLAND NIXON, SY HERSH & WHITNEY WEBB, ALL THE WRITERS DEPLATFORMED BY THE BIG MACHINE! WHAT HAPPEND TO JEREMY SCAHILL & AMY GOODMAN? SHEESH! IT’S SAD-THEY EVEN GOT TO CHOMSKY. YA KNOW? JOE LAURIA AND AARON GOOD BOOKS MAKE GOOD HOLIDAY GIFTS! ABBY MARTIN SELLS PSYCHEDELIC ARTWORK!
“Wow Ron DeSantis was the sole legal oversight officer for the whole Special Ops task force in the Anbar province of Iraq at the height of JSOC’s 2007 killing spree.” (-Seth Harp)
As a homeschooling primary caregiver to a kid with a disability, I got sucked into False-Book there for a couple of years and it was another trap for troubadours, big deadend time suck, and I was getting censored or FB-jailed all the time for antiwar posts all the time, the sillicon valley spy pigs made sure my posts had like a severely limited reach, which is why it has been a real treat that my righteous comrades in the worldwide freedom struggle have provided me with platforms outside of Zuck’s Censorverse. I was being hassled relentlessly by the infowar “fact checkers” for being offscript, actively opposed to the Pentagon’s bullshit Hillary Clinton cold war Russiagate propaganda narratives, until finally, the spooks just locked me out of my account. I only miss a few people from that social media world like Lo Daniels, Scott Bassman, Robert Ott, and Cindy Barnes MacDougal. I’m pretty antisocial nowadays. Tell Dorothy and Scarlet I said hello. And the Humpers. It is a crazy time to be alive, but we don’t really get to pick the hour we are born into. How the fuck did I end up in an era where the so called academics, the self proclaimed critical thinkers, are terrified of reading books, films, and new information and just wanna silence any voice that does not soothe them like their fucking massage “therapist” or NPR radio personality pimping wars, drones and torture in kindly ex hippie tones “for science and feminism”?! It’s a batshit time, everything seems Bizarro world universe, backwards and upside down-and has been like that since what, ’95? You got some big mouthed guitar player shouting down fucking scientists he thinks might threaten his special VIP backstage second hand celebrity status. Barowner celebrities beating up homeless guys and being applauded by their suckup for free drinks entrouge. It aint good, this dark path the techlords are leading all the need a fix, consumerist zombies, and latest thang upgraders, and obedient virtue signaling followers down. No sex in the champagne room, but they don’t get it, they think there’s a special prize for being assholes. Maybe there is. I dunno anymore. I just know everytime I get involved with the popularity sekers and the mad herd slogan repeaters, the collector scum and hipster capitalists, I get burned again and again and again and again. Start to feel like Charlie Brown, and the pigmedia is the teacher voice…”wha wha wha wha wha wha wha wah..” Better off in my garagey make believe world, like Snoopy n Woodstock having their imaginary adventures on his Red Baron flying doghouse. I used to live closer to where I thought the action was, but the closer I looked, the more I realize there really was no action, besides some oversized monkey bouncers in baseball caps and staff shirts punching out punk rockers, yuppies running ripoff record stores, and a buncha gentrifiers pressuring city hall to sick the kkkops on the poor people, and some trendy hustler rich kids fucking showing off their designer wardrobes and playing redundant covers in high dollar fake divebars for lawyers and hedge fund managers, fat actors, and slumming tourists, who just came to get their picture taken with the framed photo of Sid N Nancy or pay twenty bucks for a GG & The Jabbers burger. I aint really seen no real rock action since it was you and me makin’ a crazy racket way back in that derelict ghetto apartment together. I mean can ya really even count those fucking fratboys with the deep cocaine pockets who inherited a recording studio from their rich media pig parents? Their whiteboy Barry White covers or trustarfarian sidekick’s Formulaic Spooky Detective Rock? I mean, c’mon. Yeah they bought an echo machine. So what, they got nuthin’ to say and never did. And all the people on tv are millionaires who get paid their millions to lie to you for their billionaire bosses, and still the people continue to just mindlessly blame the other wing of the war party, or some external boogieman they know almost nothing about-like Assad or Hussein or Maduro or whoever. They think they’re gonna get some special cookie for pretending that another random blue suit mannakin Klaus Schwab sock puppet is the interim prez of Venezuela while the mercenaries and oil gougers keep trying to overthow more socialist democracies to plunder their oil, and you been trained to call that freedom like a ventriloquist dummy, cause your mom likes Pelosi. Or your wife’s mom. Some mean rich lady. Tells you what to think and who to vote for. How you need to get a third job and work harder while she drinks wine from a box and talks on the phone about how you aint good enough. Needs more pills. For science and diversity and Muslim girl’s rights in Afghanistan..”Stay At Home Moms are the hardest working people in the world!” The Oprah audience roars with it’s applause sign standing ovations, and then, there’s a giftbag under the seat, and here comes NY Times bestselling author/diet expert, Fat Doctor Phil to explain why your children need to be locked up if they aren’t already involved in some kinda ROTC program with plans to join the military for college money. This country has been fuckedup for a real long time. Judge Judy says you need a fourth job. TLC don’t want no scrubs.
“You talk about the high cost of living — and you vote to increase the cost of living every time you vote the capitalistic ticket. Are you a working man and in the capitalist’s party? What business have you there?” (-Eugene V. Debs)
“Isn’t it odd that all major media outlets under our “free press” system happen to agree on all social, economic & geopolitical issues?
If the press is “free,” then shouldn’t we see major philosophical differences on fundamental topics — like US military occupation of the planet?” (-Primo Radical)
“For the millionth time:
ANTIFA = Anti-fascist.” (-Peter Daou)
It’s hilarious seeing kids today screaming “NAZI” at everyone while wearing a NASA tee shirt.” (-Esostericbot)
Russia is now demanding that Europe pay for gas in rubles. Europe gets 40% of its gas from Russia. That’s 200-800 million euros per day. Putin is basically saying: you want to play sanctions? Either pay up in rubles or freeze.” (-Richard Medhurst)
“Ukrainians are ready to live without light and heat for two or three years”- Zelensky’s wife Olena says from one of her 4 mansions while her husband hides behind a green screen.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“Capitalism’s answer to ‘What about the poor?’ has always been ‘They should work harder,’ and its answer to ‘What about those who can’t work?’ has always been ‘They should die quickly.’ ” (— CaitlinJohnstone)
“Can’t stop thinking about how Warren Buffett, the owner of BNSF Rail, made more money in 1 day than it would cost to guarantee 15 paid sick days to rail workers. Buffett could avert a rail strike today by giving workers what they need: paid sick days. That’s how you give thanks.” (-Warren Gunnels)
“This app is crawling with freaks who seriously believe that nobody should be allowed to criticize the foreign policy of the most powerful government on earth. Right wingers correctly believe that liberals subscribe to an artificially constructed worldview designed by the powerful in the service of the powerful, but incorrectly believe that they themselves do not.
Common debates:
– Which status quo party is best – Which side of the culture war is correct – How the western empire should act – What capitalism should look like Uncommon debates: – Should status quo politics exist – Should the western empire exist
– Should capitalism exist”
“Our rulers will openly imprison a journalist for telling the truth and then self-righteously pontificate about the need to stop authoritarian regimes from persecuting journalists.”
“It is cute to see North Americans going to the World Cup to preach about human rights in Qatar, where the US has a massive military base that it kills people from……”
““I believed that by revealing to the world the vital information that was being concealed, I would contribute to freedom and to make the world a better and safer place.”
“I wonder how many journalistic/human rights prizes Julian #Assange has to win before the absolutely outrageous persecution by the #US and #UK comes to an end and he is free. He hasn’t been since 2010.” (-Stefania Maurizi)
“The US literally created Al Qaeda through its proxy war in Afghanistan than allowed it to flourish by destroying the entire region via endless war yet we are supposed to believe that RUSSIA is a state sponsor of terrorism?
SBF is having Thanksgiving dinner in a penthouse with his family. The NYT will interview him next week. Amazon is already planning an eight-part mini series about it with two Marvel directors. … “clown world” doesn’t even begin to describe it.” (-Zack Voell)
“I feel strongly for the Ukrainian people. They have been lied to by corrupt politicians. They are pawns in the geopolitical games of a failing US Empire.
The US Govt doesn’t give a shit about Ukrainians or else they would have prevented this suffering when they had the chance.” (-Kim Dotcom)
“Those in charge of labeling ideas as “disinformation” are the most biased, duplicitous and propagandized people in the world. They do not care about objectivity. Their job is to discredit dissent and try to prevent the masses from realizing our “leaders” are corrupt psychopaths. The woman who was supposed to head up the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board — before embarrassingly being exposed as an unhinged lunatic — is now literally a foreign agent working with a British outfit to censor the American people.” (-Primo Radical)
“Some are finally realizing that this may very well be the last battle for humanity. That the ‘control’ which people tout as the reasoning behind everything, was already had through generations of nudging and prodding so why the sudden rush? There is now a ‘deadline’ it would seem and the question for me is: why?
If anything can be learned from the history of our benevolent ‘rulers’, is that they don’t shoot for single outcomes; multi-layered operations are the ‘norm’ and naivete and ignorance are their greatest weapons.
How unprepared we are for this battle; having been divided and conditioned over generations, to accept the life of serfdom or ‘slavery lite’ as ‘the best system in the world’ and as the only way to ‘live’.” (-by Sylvain Lamoureux)
“Interesting how the AP fired the junior journalist on the fake-news story but not his senior manager who was co-credited as an author of the article. Selective dismissal in order to create a scapegoat, indeed they should have both been sacked on the spot.” (-Uro)
“A society at war with itself with violence at the core of its cultural values. The real problem is that this pathological society is not just a threat to itself but to the world.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“If you want an example of how Americans hard working citizens lose trillions no matter whether the Dems or GOP get to be the face of the Empire, watch how the rulers got us to cheer them stealing billions from us on the proxy war in Ukraine” (-Black In The Empire)
If you grew up in the eighties, you were impacted by all those flicks-“I6 Candles”, “Some Kind Of Wonderful”, “Pretty In Pink”, all the Brat Pack shit, I don’t think it was a Hughes film but I always loved “Weird Science”. My only complaint with his movies is how the takeaway message was always sell out, growing up means marrying the rich dude. Remember the zany record store owner in “Pretty In Pink”, how she conforms for the money? That was always sad to me, and I knew way back then, I was never gonna do that. Somehow I went from being a Duckie character to being an Andie’s Dad tyope character as played by my fave actor, Harry Dean Stanton. His music was also pretty badass if you ask me. They repackaged all the John Hughes s/t tunes into a big Xmas boxset or something, I read about it on one of those Shitlib websites like Salon. He really did have pretty decent taste in music. But I never like when the system weaponzies our music against us. But he nailed it usually-Flesh For Lulu, Jesse Johnson Revue, New Order, the Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen. I wept many a tear to those songs over the decades. The OMD tune still cuts me up. “Someday…”
“I don’t want to hear about the protests in China when the U.S. had MILLIONS of people in the streets protesting police violence and still there hasn’t been an ounce of accountability for the thousands who have been killed by American cops.” (-Danny Haiphong)Man I been listening to a lotta last band that mattered, Mescaleroes lately, now that was about all I listened to in that decade when those records all came out-them and Ian Hunter’s “Rant” and maybe one ofr two by Manic Street Preachers, but less n less so as the years whizzed by. I was going through a real bad time, about twenty some years back, with the ex wife dumping me and taking my kids far, far away but with the kind and caring help of a brainy Boston fanzine publishing goth bombshell, I’d scraped together a shithole apartment in a crack neighborhood the rich trendies were in the process of gentrifying. Cops killed a “suspect” in our alley one night-shot ‘im 8 times and then yelled “drop your weapon”, it was later shown he had no weapon but they told the papers that he was coming at them to steal one of their wepons, but all the bullet holes were in his back, they hit him six times outta 8 shots fired. Me and my couuent girl who was there with me that night remained mighty traumatized by always seeing so much of that everyday kkkop violence so up close and personal like, on toppa the usual nazis and jock dickheads who were forever hounding me and my drunkroll black sheep brethern, we kept testifying to my former associates about all the horrors we’d gone through, but nobody cared really, they all just wanted to be on the WINNING TEAM. They were all prepared to look the other way no matter how many atrocoties were committed by the popular kid status quo, the local gentry, the establishment, the racist kkkops hired by corrupt barowners to push the poor people off the boulevard and outta sight of rich yuppies. The Scenester brunch dummies did not care what kinda stupid human tricks they would be obliged to perform at their Master’s command, they were up for anything, s’long as they got to keep their privilege lifestyles and cushy jobs working for bad people. I split that town for good soon after that but I do remember one real bad day when all my kids and their moms, and my mom and her husband, had all shown up at that shithole apartment in one day for various reasons, but then outta nowhere, my ace buddy Howie who is also sadly dead now, he came to my door unexepectedly. Drove all the way from Chicago to tell me Joe Strummer had died. I was of course devastated. Still am, really. I never really got over any of it. Joe was like my only guy. Only famous cat who mattered to me by then. Okay…Joe, Hunter, Baldwin, and Bill Hicks, we’ll say. This planet is a poorer place without them. ‘Miss Howie, too. Oh, man, it’s a little heartbreaking-all the tantalizingly shiny brand new boss as hell hipster product they love to dangle over our heads on “Record Store Day”. Of course, summa my best friends and I were record store dudes for years and years, until the corporate Alternative muzak sham attracted the suburban shopping mall people into what was formerly an outsider underground, and the big fluorescent lights got added, and all those capitalist nerds and mainstream, Nascar watching, fast food cargo shorts people who got the startup capital from their dead relatives sewed up the bootleg and cool vinyl markets, the squares came in, pushed the outcast bastards out, right? That was fucked up, and of course, I still remember being troubled in those hard times. Irony, they started peddling “irony”. “LOSER” t shirts worn by rich people. What they were saying to us working class dropouts and holdouts and anti hierarchy conscientous objectors is if you aint a richie, you aint shit, you can’t even be a loser, that role was already being monopolized by super rich kid, hipster culture appropriator supreme, Beck. Fuck man, I really started not liking even being around all the middle class grunge people with the shorts and combat boots and big ugly piercings and long green goatees. They’d charge ya three times what the mall wanted for the same shit and act like they were saintly indie martyrs. They’d put cartoons of all these old blues and country addicts on their gentrification logos but complain all day about poor people being unsightly drunks and undesirables. They’d all wanna shake hands with the famous old dudes being popularized by trust funded garage rockers but rip off all us compelte unknowns and broken hearted songwriters having to sell off all our most treasured possessions and autographed books and records and Prince movie teater standees for mere pennies in order to keep our electricty on. When those Jon Spencer rich people were coming in, I was goin’ out. Never liked Sonic Youth or the Beastie Boys that much, let alone their eight zillion college town imitator wannbes. Soundgarden clones were the worst. Now I see all the hoopla hype and fresh merch all over the internet and sometimes I get bitchy if I can’t be part of the acquiring of neat-o Santa wishlist stuff but you know, then I remember, I made my choice. I maybe coulda buttoned my lip and got some flannel and suckedup to the sports bar people and watched the fucking Simpsons and Friends and Portlandia and praised Fred Armisen and Dave Grohl and obeyed The Man and got purple yurt airbandb legal reefer faux woke and stayed in line with all the comic con dorks and “Guitar Hero” players, but I chose a different path, and that long and dusty desert trail brought me to a place without hipster swag on Record Store Day, and no object or collectible has ever made me happy, anyway, but yeah sometimes it’s hard not to covet the never ending assembly line of Seventies Punk Product. I still love all that rocknroll shit. It is how it is. I know the punk aint in the Collection, it’s in the way of life. Punk’s not dead, Joe’s in my head. “I don’t have any message other than don’t forget you’re alive…” I used to give all my books to people, most fequently, either my kids or ex bandmates, hoping they might find a flash on inspiration in the true stories of the old guard, but ya know looking back, it don’t seem like many of ’em even read those books, ya know, they never seemed to carry much of the old ideas with ’em any longer. I reccomend reading “The Ballad Of Joe Strummer” by Chris Salewicz, it’s really good, probably important, even. Joe called him “Sandwich”. Oh, man. My surly teen just konked out on the couch after refusing to take his medicine which means our evening is probably gonna be a rough one. I had a fantastic day with my lady love yesterday and for that I am deeply grateful, those are few n far in between, in these frosty days of obscene inflation, external pressure, fear mongering, proxy wars, non stop stress, and high anxiety. A friend’s spouse reset our water heater so we had hot water on the holiday but now it has stopped working again. As Gilda Radner used to say on SNL, “it’s always somethin’!” The town’s only remotely affordable second hand store closed for four days and none of us know what to do with ourselves.
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.’ (- Joe Strummer)
“After school, in 1970, I got into Central College Of Art in Southampton Row as I wanted to be a cartoonist, and I loved it, but at the back of my head was this need to be a musician.” (- Joe Strummer)
“A society at war with itself with violence at the core of its cultural values. The real problem is that this pathological society is not just a threat to itself but to the world.”
(-Ajamu Baraka)
BABYSHAMBLES
Evad turned me on to this Babyshambles lot. Pretty rad.
“ Massive country-wide blackout in #Cuba after the passing of #HurricaneIan. Strong winds took down Cuba’s National Electric System, leaving the entire country in the dark. Cuba’s vast darkness is visible from space.” (-Alejandro Galiano)
“Love is now the law.” Communist Cuba approves same sex marriage law in historic referendum & allows surrogate pregnancies, broader rights for grandparents in regard to grandchildren, protection of the elderly & measures against gender violence. Revolutionary greetings CUBA.” (-Miyukh Biswas)
“Sikorski was Polish Defense Minister when his govt took a $15 million payoff from the CIA to host a black site where suspects were brutally tortured. “We do not apologize” for hosting the black site, he said Roger Waters is a musician being cancelled for calling for negotiations.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“In 2020, ex CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threatened that the US would “do everything” to stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany. “Everything” sure does include a lot. I’m pretty sure sabotage falls under “everything” (-Ben Norton)
“The Nordstream 2 pipeline allows Russia to send gas to Western Europe without paying transit fees to Ukraine and Poland. Russia just completed it in the teeth of massive opposition from Ukraine, Poland and USA. Now they are trying to convince you it was Russia who blew it up”. (-Craig Murray)
“The Wolfowitz Doctrine, set up after the fall of the USSR, made it US policy to ensure no other superpower develops which can rival US supremacy. It’s important to understand that this wouldn’t just apply to nations like Russia and China, but to the EU as well.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Inflation is hitting working people hard. I’m the only US Senate candidate in NC supporting true living wages, as well as public systems to provide healthcare, housing, education, childcare, energy, and broadband.” (-Matt Hoh For Senate)
“Nobody falls harder for smooth-talking corporate politicians (like Barack Obama and Pete Buttigieg) than liberals.” (-Ryan Knight)
“The moment we stop hating each other is the moment we all turn our attention & our anger toward our true oppressors.” (-Lee Camp)
“Senator Bernie Sanders’ insurgent presidential campaign in 2016, sabotaged from victory for the nomination by Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party apparatchiks, could be seen as a mass voter action. However, Sanders has yet to take this huge support and mailing list and convert it into a mass movement. And so, the painful years keep passing.
Other majoritarian reforms and redirections have similarly failed to coalesce into mass movements, as occurred for Civil Rights and environmental protection in the Sixties and early Seventies. Reforms such as living wage, to allowing workers to more easily form unions’ bargaining with big business, ending the student loan gouging and rackets, eliminating the huge tax escapes for the wealthy and corporations, investing in rebuilding communities’ public works all over the country, cracking down on the corporate crooks draining consumers’ pocketbooks, harming their safety and ending the corrosive impact of corporate campaign contributions. All these measures have broad public support.
What are some reasons for a sedentary citizenship in a country? Remember our Constitution starts and ends with “We the People,” not “We the Corporations.” You, the readers, know all the ways powerful forces keep people down, feeling powerless and distracted with 24/7 so-called entertainment, plus everything in between. Many aggrieved people have a hard time just getting through the day.
Imagine if, despite the obstacles to action, just one percent of the citizenry got knowledgeable and mobilized for Congressional reforms that have a quieter, large majority of the people behind them. One percent of adults is about 2.5 million Americans spread throughout 435 Congressional Districts. In the Sixties, it took a lot less than that level of organized and committed people.
Someday, some leaders will emerge in the above-noted fields and other crucial areas of injustice and practice this one percent theory.
I wrote a small book, Breaking Through Power: It’s Easier Than We Think, to explain how optimistic critical masses throughout American history worked together to improve our society. I described the kinds of changes that one percent of the people could advance to revolutionize politics for the common good and “the pursuit of happiness.” For that to happen, a sufficient number of people have to civically believe in themselves and lock arms together on actions for a change. (See, https://nader.org/breaking-through-power-to-do-list/).” (-Ralph Nader)
lawsuit against Air Force’s open burn pits & detonations causing environmental destruction of sacred lands. Once again the US military is deemed to be above the law.” (-Abby Martin)
“The loss of Barbara Ehrenreich to the many causes of justice in our country is evident in her many realistic writings. Her most famous book, Nickel and Dimed, represented reporting at its best—experiencing the lives of poor people, speaking with them, and then conveying their grim reality to millions of Americans who might take their critical services for granted. Her empirical writings about reality in America comprise an antidote to the escapism inside virtual reality. Her message for decades was: Face up to the realities and you can produce the face of justice.” (-Ralph Nader)
THIS SOCIETY HAS GONE TO SHIT SO FIVE GUYS CAN FEEL LIKE GAWDS
Aww, man, my nice neighbors down the block who love our loud kid and share their garden vegetables have had Covid for three days and need us to fetch cat food for them. Cuba has no electricty but I did not even know that because cable tv only covers Cuba when they wanna shit on them some more-even Sanders disgracefully slags Cuba and Venezuela all the time. I love the Cuban people and they are in my prayers. We got lotsa relatives in Florida which is also getting it’s ass kicked by the hurricanes. If we measure ourselves by what our loved ones think of us, what happens when they embrace the unrealistic media programmed false standards of the corporate fascist death machine?
Been watching all the punk rock shit on Amazon Prime, I never used to watch tv and actually got angry when my former peers started talking about sit coms and so called “adult cartoons”, I was like, appalled. Back then I was kinda starring in my own show. My bartender brother Andy would try to turn on the Simpsons at the bar and I would raise hell, like fuck no, motherfucker. I could never stand the tv people. and here, now, I am finally succumbing-becoming one of ’em, but it’s like this. Aint nowhere to go no more. Deep state locked outta social media for anti war posting. I’m broke, there are only two bars in this town and I don’t frequent pubs anymore cause I can’t stand the drama, the price gouging, the yuppies, the really gross and obnoxious horny old men. Usually, I go on these long walks to burn off all this restless energy, and take breaks from my teenager’s non stop media blare, but man, between the nutty sadist lady in the convertible who uses her leashless pitbull to fuck with people outta some weird spiteful malice all day, everyday, and the nutjob property owners and nothing to lose crackpots, just looking for some kinda Hatfields & McCoys style feud over anything, I’m kinda inclined to stay put, even though I’m anxious, fretful, worried about money, loved one’s health, employment, the future, bureaucracy, hyper inflation, superiority complex bosses-landlords-former friends, the cold, cold hearts of ex loved ones, the total lockstep goosestepping conformity of professional class media, etc., etc. My family is preparing to move into a new place next month and after a lifetime of fucking crazy instability, insane poverty, and unreliable former associates, I don’t really like change no more. If you suffer from depression, the same lonesome hours of remembering all the bad memories and old traumas that drive you outside, will find you sitting yourself straight back in that uncomfortable chair again, when you meet the angry, impossibly propagandized and misinformed people, just eagerly spoiling for any kind of fight or conflict, out there. Everybody’s pissed off. All these retirement aged busybodies just look for somebody to have confrontation with-they’re pissed off they can’t get laid, they don’t like thee outtatown city slickers showing up and successfully lobbying city hall to hassle locals. They don’t like the fauxwoke gentrification people moving in and opening the new age aibandb’s or overpriced coffee shops or gourmet pizza places, attempting to change the desert southwest cowboy culture to conform to some Brooklyn Hipster Aesthetic. They don’t like kids, they don’t like cats. They don’t like anything. They are unwell old hermit loner loose cannons. Shit will shock you like a sucker punch when you encounter all these dead inside abuser motherfuckers with zero moral sensitivity or compassion who just gotta take the cheap shot, come for you AGAIN, they’ll send you fleeing right back to your lonely room when you remember how brutal the culture’s become out there. Ya know how maybe sometimes, you wanna use alcohol to self medicate and relax with, and maybe some consoling old rocknroll tunes that remind you of all your more innocent or victorious hours, just for some simple respite and escapism, a fleeting relief from the pain and futility of your sad existence, but it only lowers your inhibitions enough to make you drunk dial, foolishly still looking for some kinda long distance connection with some long gone ex friend, and upon talking to ’em you are horrified to remember you aint got nothing in common with ’em no more, that they’ve bought into the script, society, tv, the whole bamboozle. You find ’em quoting the adult cartoons or propaganda trope of the day? Heartbreaking shit aint it? Hard to get over all those callous rejections, casual rip-offs, and wounding betrayals, I know. You know man I can not stand how the evil mockingbird monopoly fake muzak industry makes all these old dinosaur stadium acts collaborate with their nobody little beta programmed puppets like Taylor Momsen and Miley Cyrus-that’s how they try to legitimize all those crappy One Direction-NSynch-Pink-182 robots at those stupid tribute concerts and fake awards shows. I don’t care for any of that fake music or Foo Fighter class clown joke show mediocrity.
PSYCHOS IN THE DESERT
So there is this really influential bureaucrat lady who lives behind us, she is one of those kinda animal lovers who have all five of her dogs names posted on wooden signs in her front yard. Somedays, she goes to work and leaves all five dogs in the backyard barking all day. This pisses off a lunatic neighbor of mine who hates animals. He yells at them, tries to scare ’em into silence with bottle rockets, cussing at them, shit like that. I think he caught one of our outdoor cats in a coon trap and relocated it, he did it before but, wherever he dropped the other cat off, she found her way home after my family mourned her absence, many months later. My kid posted missing cat photos all over the local social media pages. We are getting ready to move and I can’t wait. I see why everybody has the high fence compounds in the desert-it’s because there are way way way too many fuckedup psychos in the desert southwest. Mentally ill people. Seems like everytime I go for a simple walk around here there’s some kindof ridiculous conflict with unwell humans. Looking forward to fixing the fence at the new place and hunkering down and staying away from angry humanity. They are all so irrationally pissedoff and stressed out and looking for any excuse to make some kinda scene. I’m watching that Germs movie, “What We Do Is Secret”, it’s really good so far. I can’t wait to relocate deeper away from the gentrifier scumbags and McMansion building hot tub fuckers, retreat into some deep woodsy enclave. So sick of these awful money hipsters who wanna push us around everywhere we travel. Some rich artist dude has his Ludwig drums in a storefront for sale for $700. That’s way too much for me, but I want to buy some cheap drums so I can make some primitive music by myself, or maybe with my kid. I’d love to see him get into making music. Not the industry side or popularity hipster bullshit, but the creative get down part. For all the heartache and frustration, I’ve endured over all the brokeup bands and plagiarists and ripoff artists who steal my shit, it’s still provided me with a therapeutic outlet all these years, a creative and productive way to blow off steam. If you aint a yup yup joiner, growing up in the midwest, getting on the schoolbus, trudging into the locker room, having to walk into college bars full of grunge jocks who slept with your old girlfriend, it’s all like being a standup comedian bombing onstage, but like, 24/7. You just feel like you’re falling. Forever. You have to leave. The midwest is permanent middle school. Nobody deserves that kinda Divided Slaves Of Gitmo fuckedup fast food job hairnet torment.
FUCK YOU AND YOUR STUPID FUCKING DOG, TOO
I used to think cat people were crazy. Man, now I live in the desert where every asshole property owner has the by-law, obligatory twin pitbulls. I’ve been attacked twice so I no longer think it’s cute and cuddly. Me n the kid are walking to the river this morning when a big dumb barking dog comes hollering at us. We bark back at him, “Woof, woof” and his psychopathic property owner fatfuck dickhead comes running out from behind the house, screaming at us, “don’t tease the dog!” To which I respond, “If he’s gonna say Good Morning to us, we’re gonna say hello back!” The nutcase who thinks he owns the street screams some bullshit threats back at us and I’m realizing this is about to go to guns or fisticuffs and my kid is with me, so I tried to let it go, deescalate, let the crazy fanatic feel l like he’s having the machoman propertarian last word, but he just keeps frothing at the mouth. Rabid, screaming some whackjob hostile hysterical nonsense at us. So I said something like, “Your dog is friendlier to his neighbors than you are!”, which sent him into a fuckedup tizzy. I kinda hate these fucking stupid ass property owners and their goddamn delusions of their weaponized pets being more entitled and privileged than us poor motherfuckers just walking down the street. Why do goddamn no brains Tarzans kid themselves that having a pitbull or a truck give them special rights over the whole street? Go fuck yourself, dog breath! He’s allowed to bark at us, but we’re not allowed to bark back at him? Pet owners are fucking insane man with their animal worship. Seriously out to fucking lunch.
CHEAP CASSETTES
Man Chaz has always been a pretty good singer/songwriter but it must be emphasized how good a guitar player he’s become, too. I’m happy for him. He has succeeded where I have failed. He’s become a really great songwriter/performer. Does music on his own terms, makes records, has a worldwide cult following and keeps getting better at all of it. Cheers!
“It shouldn’t be controversial to call for the abolition of the CIA. The CIA has destroyed dozens of countries and waged hundreds of covert operations to satisfy U.S. interests at the expense of everyone else. It needs to be scrapped, along with the rest of the war machine.” (-Danny Haiphong)
KILL FOR THRILLS & FUCK SCHOOL
If the person you had your longest term, sincere relationship with, suddenly, no longer has any credibility because they did not marry into wealth or get a ceramics degree or stay at the lightbulb changing janitor job working for his friend’s dad’s company back in Squaresville, USA, you might wanna look deeper into that. Just cause somebody did not get a hall pass from the ruling class, or suck up to the man, don’t make him crazy or stupid. ESPECIALLY if you still shell out untold thousands to go to so called punkque festivals and wear a blaque jacket and self identify as old school.
I never went to college or even finished high school. They gave me so much shit growing up, I had no fucking desire after that last time when I was about 17 and the weasel vice principal caught me hanging out with the downtown school dumbfuck headbangers who were smoking in the boy’s room and he singled me out to make an example of, as usual, after Ray Hughes handed me his lit Marloboro Lite before marrying a new wave chick that looked like Stacey Q who both me and my dead friend Jaysin had dated. Vice principal blackmailed me into letting the cosmetology teacher cut off my long hair-she cried, all the girls in vocational cried, he said he was gonna get the shithead corrupt juvie judge to send me to Toledo for more corrections if I didn’t consent to it and I’d already done three months in their abusive juvie jail. I looked so awful with that fuxcked up haircut, I never went back to school and make no apologies for it. Other ex friends of mine made it their whole identity forever-the college experience transformed them. I never thought I should like have to pay some asshole, or institution, I know how to read. I mean my wife n kid have watched “Dawson’s Creek” and I know some teachers who like R.E.M., and have brushed with millions of idiotic Beastie Boy frathouse types who I could never stand, and had to hear alot of Gender worship from various big city shitlibs, but that’s about as close to the college experience I ever got, you know aside from working at Tower Records Harvard Square and watching my loss prevention friends bust those Richie Rich Harvard motherfuckers for stealing cds everyday. I don’t think I could be friends with cops at this point but back then, I really kinda just got along with the Cambridge constables who busted Harvard motherfuckers with backpacks full of bad music everyday. Yo Yo Ma, Pearl Jam, Tuvan throat singers, Bare Naked Ladies, Presidents Of The United States, and Crash Test Dummies. I did however have some stages in my life where I had a party all the time communal dorm like existence, like when I had my series of bandhouses in Ohio and Boston. The first was the most fun because it was with my original friends from the teenage years ya know, and my first big major girlfriends. I mean I was single back then and dated five or six girls at once, but it was no secret or anything. They were all kinda there hangin’ out. Sometimes, together. I was into punk rock and glam and we were just learning how to write songs. We played alot of covers, people were still learning. We did a Dogs D’Amour like rendition of Janis Joplin’s “Piece Of My Heart”, Quireboys “Seven O’Clock”, Dogs D’Amour “Wait Until I’m Dead”, Alice Cooper’s “Be My Lover”, “Under My Wheels” and everybody’s favorite, “Is It My Body”. A bunch of Stiv Bators songs. Some Gun Club, Cramps, Misfits, Circus Of Power. My own songs kinda sucked back then, they all sounded like fake Dogs D’Amour. I was itchin’ to ecsape that town L.A.M.F. cause I’d been through the wringer with Catholic school wrestling team assholes, deep suburban preppie football motherfuckers, jealous shitkicker redneck hate mobs, and real asshole zero tolerance juvenile authorities who looked the other way when the rich kids did fucked up shit but really made it a personal crusade to torture working class weirdos for being into the Replacements and Deadboys rather than sports or acquiring the most golf shirts. Man it was some hellish bullshit tribulations for years on end back there. Scarred For Life shit. Some of the guys in my band though, ended up becoming real like popular with the mainstream crowd, so they weren’t in any hurry to get outta town, HELL A COUPLE OF THEM ARE STILL BACK THERE WITH THE SPORTOS DOING JAGER SHOTS RIGHT NOW-they came from preppie suburbs and were invested in that whole hierarch, they liked that quarterback and cheerleader suburban scene. Not me, all I could do is dream about leaving. I’m the black spot on their permanent record. We read “RIP” magazine every month and really devotedly followed the bands on the coasts. Oh yeah, and Kerrang! from the UK! We sometimes too these big road trips to NYC to record- shop and buy punk t shirts from Trash & Vaudeville or see the Ramones and shit. We saw Faster Pussycat a couple times, the rest of the kids from my Little Ceasars job and my baby mama all went to see Guns N Roses but I had to work that night. One of the “new bands” me and a couple pals were all ginned up about was called KILL FOR THRILLS-they kinda had the image we were shooting for, some pretty good, well produced songs and they were better players than we were back then. I had already been a fan of Gilby’s old band, Candy for a number of years. I found my copy of “Whatever Happened To Fun” at a shortlived record store on Second Street in Maysville Kentucky! Believe it or not. But yeah, man, that was sorta my kinda thing back then, what me and at least a couple of my former gang were still setting out to do. My long gone Catholic school friend embezzled money from his fast food management job and wanted to invest it in our band having better clothes, relocating and recording. He was the first person to really sincerely believe in my songwriting. He died when I was 25 and I kinda never got over it. I co wrote a great song about him when I was about 27 called “Thick As Thieves”. I still stand by it. It belongs on a record. It’s a true story too.
CHERRY BOMBZ
I remember goin’ through some hard times after a divorce years and years ago and living in a shithole $90 a week hotel next to the Squirty Worm Family Fun Plaza in Nowhere, USA. I was working at a friend’s record store in a drive through beer place with a pizza joint in the other tiny room. It was a startup venture. I was allowed to smoke, I think he paid $8 an hour cash for me to sell rocknroll records to fat rich kids from two honky suburban high schools I’d been kicked out of, tell ’em stories, teach ’em about punk rock, they’d play hooky to come spend their parent’s money in the shop cause I was there, and at least a couple of ’em went on to make records, open up for my heroes’ bands, and even sought out several of my own former bandmates from different cities to be in their well funded hipster garage bands. Another guy was stalking Mike Davis from the MC5 for awhile who he knew I was friendly with. So yeah man, I was drinking about a fifth of vodka a night, listening to Material Issue and 60 Ft Dolls and the Beasts Of Bourbon, selling lots of cd’s, sulking, chainsmoking, and feeling bad about my life. The Cherry Bombz bootleg VHS came in and I got real depressed because I had no VCR-the triple ex girlfriend’s bitchy popular gay friend had talked her into keeping, or shitcanning, all my stuff except a box of 45’s which was promptly stolen by a slacker grunge ex bassist friend of mine, who got an inheritance, and paid for my ex roommate to record covers of songs I’d written, at an expensive recording studio I, myself, could never afford. That was becoming a big trend back then-other people doing versions of my tunes. My life’s sorta been a comedy in that way. Even the day I was picking up my box of 45’s from the dumbfuck grunge bar, some dickhead beardo bartender hockey wannabe Soundgarden fan was giving me some senseless scenester grief cause he had the hots for my other ex’s sister with the big boobs and I guess he figured being a dick to me was just gonna make her hot n horny for his dumbfuck jock ass. Is there anything in the world worse than a dickhead bartender?
So yeah I remember how excited we all were when we first started seeing those little pictures of the Cherry Bombz in the heavy metal magazines. I was not hip to Anita or her band that had the Cannibals song back then, but was dazzled by a band that co starred former members of Lords Of The New Church, Hanoi Rocks AND The Clash. When we finally got our dirty hands on the Cherry Bombz wax, we gawked for hours at the pix on the LP sleeve only DREAMING of someday owning our OWN blue leather pants and velveteen clad gypsy toubadour apparel. Back in Shmohio, Loverboy had always been a big radio band you could seldom avoid. I ended up really loving “Hot Girls In Love” AND “House Of Ecstasy”. Later on, we discovered Suicide Twins and loved those songs even more but never understood why anybody woulda lip synched a Rene Berg lead vocal when they both had voices just as likable. I’m having a bad day today, under a lotta stress so I probably got no business traipsing down the bottle strewn Memory Gutter again, it only makes you feel worse. Used to think me and this one cat were like a no name smalltime dirty dive bar version of the Suicide Twins but we broke up a long time ago. Still wrote about fifty great songs together. Right now, my kid is attempting to make “Breaking Bad” inspired rock candy and is using blue food color but not wanting any supervision or assistance from me and it’s stressing me the fuck out. ‘Afraid he’s gonna stain the counter tops or floor tiles and I’m gonna take the blame. My life’s been a comedy that way.
BREAKING: The Cuban people voted Sunday to approve some of Latin America’s most progressive laws on family, women’s and LGBTIQ+ issues.
“People who want to quibble over whether or not Julian Assange is a “journalist” miss the point. The issue is his case (and other Espionage Act cases where the « espionage » is talking to media) has relevance to media either way, criminalizing mere knowledge/possession of secrets.” (-Matt Taibbi)
I was back in my Kentucky hometown when my grandmother was getting older helping care for her when a record store called Sam Goody was going out of business and liquidating all their stock. They had all kindsa stuff I wanted. Ramones dolls, big cool Clash books and this New Romantics A-Z magazine. Me and my old lady, we were so poor back then, it was a hard struggle to pay heat in this drafty old historic building we lived in. She was a waitress and George Clooney’s parents were among her regulars. I was a dishwasher and was very unhappy cause my kids had been relocated across the country without my permission by their mother. I was really suffering over them being gone. Has not changed. Anyhow, it’s been about twenty years since then and I still aint got a copy of that magazine from England but I have not given up. I do not quit. I am still trying to find a new band. I am still trying to record my songs. I am still trying to find my long lost childern. Still hope to get a copy of that new romantics magazine someday. Adam Ant was on the cover.
SHIT IS FUCKED UP IN THE USA USA
They lie to us, they spy on us, grope your granny at the airport for security theater Chertoff/Kerry profits, training you to accept totalitarianism, they take away our rights and people are duped into believing they are somehow represented by some pro war, pro kkkop, token women of color (D) who vote with the Republikkkans like 95% of the time. Tweeting Orange Man Bad don’t help anybody at the bottom.
“I spoke with renowned journalist John Pilger about the US’s war on Julian Assange. Pilger called Assange’s torture by US and Western authorities a historic miscarriage of justice where journalism itself has been criminalized.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Biden and the Democrats continue to gaslight the public about “how great the economy is” as we enter a recession.” (-Ryan Knight)
“In the span of 1 week my comedy show of 8 yrs was canceled because of sanctions, my podcast of 12 yrs was banned by Spotify & my youtube is now banned across Europe. All in the name of US imperialism. If you want to keep supporting my work, check out http://Patreon.com/LeeCamp” (-Lee Camp)
“The United National Anti-war Coalition (UNAC) will be going to the streets the third week of October to oppose war in Ukraine & all of the never-ending U.S./NATO wars. Let’s see what kind of coverage we get from the U.S. “free press.” (-Ajama Baraka)
“Why aren’t progressive Dems in Congress calling for ceasefire and negotiations in Ukraine instead of more weapons?” (-Medea Benjamin)
“None of them are really progressive or anti-war in any meaningful way, they are vetted and bribed and blackmailed controlled opposition. Warpigs in pink wigs.” (-General Labor)
The best western journalists are overwhelmingly despised while the worst are acclaimed millionaires. Western civilization is built on lies, dependent on lies, powered by lies. Don’t seek widespread approval. It’s worthless.
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Live long enough and you’ll learn that the people who’ll really hurt you and screw you over aren’t the obvious, overt monsters but the sly manipulators who smile to your face. The US empire is a sly manipulator smiling and posturing as the good guy by contrasting itself with overt monsters.
As our consciousness has expanded it’s become unacceptable to be seen as an overt tyrant by the public, but that just meant the emergence of a sneakier form of tyranny. The age of the brute gave way to the age of the manipulative bitch. This manipulative bitch of an empire has been instigating and orchestrating violence at mass scale and then using its unrivaled narrative control machine to blame the violence on other powers. And its provocations are only getting more and more aggressive and more and more dangerous.
If humanity meets its end, it will come not at the hands of the overt monsters but the sly manipulators. The trajectory toward the horrifying global conflict we appear to be fast approaching was set by the manipulative bitch of the US-centralized empire.
If there’s one thing sly manipulators hate, it’s people who continuously highlight whenever they are being manipulative. That’s what drives the ongoing push to silence, censor and marginalize critics of empire. Julian Assange is in prison because he spotlighted the manipulative bitch.
Manipulators can only manipulate when their manipulations are invisible to their subjects. A grassroots push to bring public awareness to the empire’s manipulations would hamstring the empire. The empire knows this, hence the push to neutralize empire critics in myriad ways.
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Friendly reminder to the English-speaking world that Iran is none of your fucking business and any kind of intervention from your government literally always makes things worse.
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Remember, it’s crazy and conspiratorial to say the CIA likely is involved or will soon become involved in domestic uprisings in a US-targeted nation. The sane position is to believe that the CIA never does anything, and its officers are all sitting in their Langley offices watching Netflix. The responsible, correct view is that the CIA’s extensively documented role in fomenting domestic uprisings around the world is strictly a thing of the past, and that the agency now receives billions and billions of dollars each year to do nothing whatsoever.
If you lived with someone who always steals things you’d suspect them anytime one of your valuables goes missing, but you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist if you think domestic uprisings in a US-targeted nation might involve the CIA. We learned the CIA was literally plotting to assassinate Julian Assange five years ago and people still act like it’s crazy and outlandish to suggest that they’re doing evil things in the world currently.
If you don’t want people speculating about CIA involvement whenever there’s unrest in a nation the US government doesn’t like, you should be calling for the dismantling of the CIA. Otherwise you’re just supporting the CIA as it works to foment those kinds of uprisings and yelling at people who don’t like it.
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People don’t “serve” in the military, they work in the military. It’s a job. And if it’s a job with the US or any of its imperial member states, it is one of the most unethical jobs that anyone can possibly have.
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People who defend the US empire from criticism aren’t actually defending the empire, they’re defending their worldview. They’re staving off the flood of cognitive dissonance they’d experience if they saw that everything they believe about the world is a propaganda-induced lie.
That’s why so many of them say things like “Of course our government does bad things BUT-” and then make up some nonsensical gibberish like “you think Putin is an innocent little flower” or whatever. They don’t love the empire, they’re just flailing around protecting their worldview. Their arguments consistently lack robustness because they’re not invested in defending some globe-spanning power structure (people don’t usually do that unless they’re paid to), they’re just throwing up any walls they can that will protect their worldview.
Still, though. Imagine being such an embarrassing, sycophantic bootlicker that you’re emotionally incapable of handling the fact that there are a few fringe people on the internet who spend their time criticizing the most powerful and destructive government on earth. Imagine actually seeing that as a problem. There are actual people who sincerely see the existence of empire critics anywhere online as a problem that needs to be solved. How far gone do you have to be to live like that? How much bullshit must you have poured over your mind and heart for that to seem sensible?
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Most people get that you can’t win a nuclear war, but not enough people understand that you also can’t even remain fully in control in a nuclear standoff. There are too many small moving parts, too many things that can go wrong. Google “nuclear close calls” if you doubt this.
Our rulers are ushering us into a nuclear standoff of steadily increasing escalation, and they cannot, cannot, cannot control its outcome. They’re gambling everyone’s life hoping to win the prize of planetary domination, and their game is getting more dangerous by the day.(-Caitlin Johnstone)
The U.S. government has become a master of deceit.
It’s all documented, too.
This is a government that lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, and tracked; and wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad.
Worse, this is a government that has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.
With every passing day, it becomes painfully clear that this is not a government that can be trusted with your life, your loved ones, your livelihood or your freedoms.
Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare (or psy ops) can take many forms: mind control experiments, behavioral nudging, propaganda.
As Brianna Nofil explains, “MK-Ultra’s ‘mind control’ experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals.”
Fast forward to the present day, and it’s clear that the government—aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation—has updated its psy ops warfare for a new era. For instance, the government has been empowered to use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace.
It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters.
Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.
The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.
The government’s fear-mongering is yet another key element in its mind-control programming.
It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.
Fear not only increases the power of government, but it also divides the people into factions, persuades them to see each other as the enemy and keeps them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.
This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.
It was almost 100 years ago when Bernays wrote his seminal work Propaganda:
“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
(- John & Nisha Whitehead)
“Obama, 2016, when neocon Jeffrey Goldberg demanded to know what he wouldn’t arm Ukraine: “Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one.” Liberals and their neocon leaders, 2022: Why, yes, I do think Ukraine is important enough to risk nuclear war over.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“There should be a “Progressive Challenger” to Joe Biden in 2024 AND IT ABSOLUTELY SHOULDN’T COME FROM THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY The Democratic Party IS NOT THE WAY TO GO!” (-Compton Jay)
“I stand with the people of Iran, Russia, and China against the predatory and murderous US regime seeking to destabilize them via sanctions, color revolutions, and war provocations. If you don’t, you cannot call yourself an anti-imperialist or even a proponent of peace.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“After Zelensky’s de facto call for the cleansing of ethnic Russians from Donetsk and Lugansk, his arrest of their political representatives, and the banning of their language, it’s really a mystery why they are voting the way they are in today’s referendum” (-Max Blumenthal)”Labour’s “antisemitism crisis” under Jeremy Corbyn was one of most intense propaganda campaigns ever fought in peacetime Britain. It was a fraud pushed by the Labour right, Israel lobby, mainstream media, among others. The truth is finally out. Watch:” (-Matt Kennard)
DID YOU BUY A COPY OF THE GOLDEN RAT LP FROM VICIOUS KITTEN?
As a shut-in hermit, primary caregiver for a couple of years, it surprised some of my old goth gang when I got social media addicted, cos in the nineties I had been a total internet resistor. My way of communicating with folks was always via punk postcards we’d buy at new wave boutiques, mix-tapes, in your face basement shows, and D.I.Y. fanzines – which is how I became pen pals with ‘The Golden Arm’, Hiroshi Nakagome, aka ‘The Japanese Johnny Thunders’. If I remember correctly, he had an early band back then called The Remains that gradually changed into The Golden Arms. All his music was totally seventies influenced, and straight out of the Church Of Thunders. He really had the touch. Real rock ‘n’ roll is all about feel, and soul, and jungle instinct. Either you have it or you don’t. Hiroshi has it, in spades. He was also famous for cutting quite the dapper silhouette. Man, that courageous cat really knew how to send a vibe.
Motorcycle Boy from Hollywood were one of the most original sounding bands of their era. They might have been influenced by the New York Dolls, Iggy, the Cramps and Stray Cats, but they totally found their own sound. Their lyrics were unique, and they looked like all the greatest rock stars of every era. A little bit Elvis, a little Sputnik, a little bit Thunders, and a little bit Clash. Man were they cool. I found the band via the much missed newspaper print pages of Flipside magazine, the one true bible for the underground back in those years. In 89 they also released the immortal single, ‘Feel It’ b/w ‘One Punch’. Triple X Records (the label that first brought you bands like Jane’s Addiction and The Ultras) then released the classic, Sylvain Sylvain produced album ‘Popsicle’, and they became one of the most popular rock ‘n’ roll bands of their day. Back then the corporate media juggernaut was mostly emphasizing faux-alternative and gimmicky hipster bands, yet all my diehard underground rock ‘n’ roll friends were totally smitten with Motorcycle Boy. Everybody in my extended circle were trying to dress like them and covering their song ‘Get Around’. I always said they had the greatest haircuts in rock ‘n’ roll!
The ‘World Famous Mr Ratboy’, the innovative sonic architect behind Motorcycle Boy, took his big, hollow bodied guitars and red leather jackets to NYC, where he formed Pillbox with Canadian new wave pinup star, Chris Barry, previously with the 222’s and 39 Steps. Pillbox’s much beloved record, ‘Jimbo’s Clown Room’, was one of the only real standout rock ‘n’ roll masterpieces of its era and was recently re-released on vinyl. It was like a restless, sleazy, nocturnal collection of howling catcalls, moonlit rooftops and sultry swagger. Equal parts Birthday Party and Gun Club, all my close friends consider it one of their all-time favourite records. For years my old personal road buddy, notorious hellion, AC/DC bar brawling, degenerate hoodlum guitar player, NF Bastard, made careful study of that album’s hypnotic riffage, integrating a little of that circling cascade, sonic spiral into his own sound.
There is only one ‘World Famous Mr Ratboy’ though, who was probably the most distinctive stylist of his time, with a one in a million, signature sound as immediately recognizable as Brian James or Neal X. Pillbox were on Circumstantial Records, a cool label that was also home to the Road Vultures and the Trash Brats. Yet without the promo muscle of a major label, it was through word of mouth and homemade fanzines that made ‘Jimbo’s’ a cherished artefact, forever sought-after by punk ‘n’ roll record collectors and reckless rock ‘n’ roll hooligans all over the world. It was followed by ‘A Gift From Mr Ratboy, a solo album with some real standout hit songs like ‘Rocket To Reno’, and a class act, cover of the deadpan Lou Reed gem, ‘A Gift’.
In the early 00’s, the ever prolific Mr Ratboy assembled still another crack team of Stooges enthusiasts called Sour Jazz, releasing a steady succession of catchy and diverse albums that showed impressive range, and relentlessly reimagined rock ‘n’ roll, adding P-Funk and James Brown influences in their glittering Alphabet City gutter stomp. Mr Ratboy then relocated to Japan, where he has continued to tirelessly generate an inspired oeuvre, most recently collaborating with the mythic Golden Arm Hiroshi as The Golden Rat. In the death plague years, those rock ‘n’ roll perfectionists delved deep into their own favourite record crates to carefully curate a loving and surprising collection of heartfelt renditions of some of their most cherished tunes. From a soulfully sung ‘Dancing Barefoot’ to a snarky ‘Some Girls’, their exemplary version of Bowie’s ‘Pinups’ is certain to become a closely guarded favourite of real rock ‘n’ roll aficionados from here to Elvis Presley Boulevard. In the words of Lux Interior, they got good taste!
Cherry Bomz (guitarist Andy McCoy, guitarist Nasty Suicide, drummer Terry Chimes, bassist Dave Tregunna and singer Anita Chellemah), rock band, pose for a group portrait, in October 1985. Cherry Bomz were formed by Andy McCoy after the break-up of his former band, Hanoi Rocks. (Photo by Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images)
Taken from The GOLDEN RAT album ‘We Got A Right’ on Vicious Kitten Records, “The Whole Of The Law” is a cover of The ONLY ONES featuring Daigenta Okajima on Saxophone.
““Am I really relishing my time here on this earth? Appreciating the thunderous beauty which surrounds me? Treasuring my encounters with my loved ones? Cherishing the sensory kiss of each moment? Adoring this world while it lasts?” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Americans are conditioned to drop any leftist pretenses when the targeted country is one that the US government doesn’t like. Take Iran. US has been trying to overthrow that government since 1979 and now everyone is an expert. US imperialism is one big psyop.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“These people either live in another universe or they think everyone in the world is ignorant. Biden condemned everything that the U.S. has done to establish and maintain its empire. Crazy.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Imagine living in a country that was as anxious to fix the Flint water crisis as it is to spend billions on Ukraine.” (-Black In The Empire)
“Hey Gavin Newsom,
Homelessness in California is even worse now than when you made this speech 14 years ago promising to end it. What’s sad is how many liberals continue to blindly support corrupt Democrats like you who pretend to care about the poor while you serve the rich.” (-Ryan Knight)
“The climate is not dying. It’s being killed, by fossil fuel tycoons, greedy developers, war profiteers etc – & the politicians they fund. Science clarifies the emergency & what we must demand of our elected officials. Join us!” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“The US is occupying 1/3 of Syria, so invoking the UN charter is awkward. But White House speechwriters are crafty; they got around it by getting Biden to say that countries cannot take “territory *of their neighbors* by force.” (-Aaron Mate’)
“Remember, it’s crazy and conspiratorial to say the CIA likely is involved or will soon become involved in domestic uprisings in a US-targeted nation. The sane position is to believe that the CIA never does anything, and its officers are all sitting in Langley watching Netflix.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
STOP SUPPORTING IMPERIALISM, COLNIAILISM, GENOCIDE AND WAR PROFITEERING!
“In nearly 200 years of genocidal colonialism, the British empire stole $45 trillion in wealth from India (17 times more than UK GDP), killing millions The UK monarchy, Queen Elizabeth, the royal family are simply symbols of murder, exploitation, and theft.” (-Ben Norton)
“People really need to stop whitewashing the British royal family. They oversaw genocidal colonialism around the world, killing millions. They loved fascism. As a child, Queen Elizabeth was taught to Nazi salute. The monarchy should be abolished asapPeople really need to stop whitewashing the British royal family. They oversaw genocidal colonialism around the world, killing millions. They loved fascism. As a child, Queen Elizabeth was taught to Nazi salute. The monarchy should be abolished asap” (-Ben Norton)
A HEROINE WHO DON’T LOVE THE HERO IN THE END OF THE FILM
So yeah here I am looking out the window at the garbage truck and having some foo foo fancy coffee I pilloried from the wife, my nearest and dearest lifelong hombres and fellow travelers keep dropping dead in waves, or disappearing into the daytime control freak world of manipulative hustling and bullshit artistry and backstab competition, always racing to the next fuckin’ red light. They’ll kill ya for a drink ticket at the old people bar. While sorting through some boxes looking for long lost photographs of a bloved high school friend who died recently, I came across a cashe of old pix of another friend who died a couple years back, from when we were in the midst of our most devoted Dogs D’Amour years, he wore the dogstags, not I. We all wore the scarves and suitjackets and bone jewelry and cowboy shit, though. Hell, some of his still do, I’m all black flags and silver spurs until the bitter end, but an awful lot of white has started appearing in the beard which is weird as fuck for me, I’m starting to look like Uncle Motherfuckin Sam here. Tyla and Bam, Jo Dog and Steve meant everything to us at eighteen and nineteen and twenty and twenty one. Those songs never really faded too far from memory, either. Now who knows, what really goes on with bands, behind the scenes, behind clothes doors, it’s always something to do with control, or money-publishing, merchandise, usually someone’s wife is in control, just like in Spinal Tap: “my life was a cosmic shambles before I met…” whichever Nancy Spungon convinces whichever longhaired three chords knower that he no longer needs the original bandmates, that he is an island and an emperor and a merchandising empire unto himself, bands are like really complicated marriages, it was hard enough to get five people to agree to not grow mustaches or wear shorts or sweat pants onstage-next thing ya know, it’s ten people with opinions, now twenty. How did the big oaf flannel wearer with the pickup truck get a vote? I dunno what happened between the pirate king Tyla and all the other Dogs D’Amours, sometimes from afar it can be easy to conclude he just wants to hog the gold for himself like that shit hoarder dragon in those elf movies. We see a lot of shit hoarding nowadays-all the grasping gotmines certain they can take it ALL with them: “mine, mine, it’s mine, it’s all mine ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.” All I know is it’s not the same without the blokey blokes from way back when, man I miss the Dogs like hell somedays-that was our splendid time in the garden -our hour for magic-it was like recess all the time until the grunge was shoveled on us- but some of us still have those old albums and they were magical, wonderful, could take you away from the glum and dumb, the pain of the mundane. Jo Dog is a real extra exceptionally talented guitar player/artiste, Bam and Steve are all like the best of the best. It seems like no one told poor old Tyla, halfheartedly swashbuckling on sober stools with fill-in guys who do what he tells them. Just not the me, but I guess nothing will ever be the same, none of us can ever go back to our sunny youth when one lad shows up with his Marlboros and Mountain Dew, another comes by with his Cambridge Light 100’s and his Carling’s Black label 12 pack, then the lad with the Swisher sweets or New Coke or Jolt or whatevr the Latest Thang of the day is, here’s the day drunk sloshey guy already swingin’ the bottle and it’s not even three yet, here’s the kid with the two liter and the big box of cereal-and commence to get down like a crew of all for one yo ho ho, fill up your boots me hearties pirate lords. Can’t help it, I’m a diehard sucker for the happy ever after story, but it is seldom seen, ya know Izzy Stradlin said, “Bullshit. They don’t want to split the loot equally, moving on.” People who get assimilated by the sports bar popular kids rattrace forget how to share and play nice, a band is made of many different moving parts, without a committed dependable drummer, you aint goin’ nowhere no matter how good you think your songs or solos or dopey second hand Roy Rogers cowboy wardrobe might be, ya gott have all five guys willing to share the pie, rather than fucking hoard it all for themself, that is not easy to learn in a winner takes all brainwash culture. I myself have never had the leadership or people skills to effectively mitigate all those clashing agendas and ego trips and astologer girlfriends and desire to play ska. Greedhead culture kills rocknroll as frequently as any shadowy groomer horror story, anti rock secret society, Pussycat Doll explotation conspiracy. One of the best things about leaving the midwest back in the early nineties was escaping to a big town where they had like twenty five different Dogs D’Amour records and 12 inch singles always in stock, right there on the shelf! Posters! Fuckshit! Amazing! What bounty, what treasure-and then, some girl at Newbury Comics told us about the also marvelous Jacobites and Waterboys and Bounty Hunters! One of our lot got caught up going to the dark bar to get high and dance like Pan shirtlessly in borrowed without permission, too small for him really leather pants surrounded by a pickup harem of enthusiastic nymphettes who all mistook him for an indian cause he dyed his hair black, he kept having to fight off jelaous gorillas. One guy met some disciplined nerd academics and rich girls who Wanted More Stuff and got seduced by the dark side of the force abandoning the rock brigade to pursue better homes and gardens in the nine to five capitalist society. Me, I got distracted by some boozy women and unreliable drummers and shoved off my soapbox in the grunge years by some Long Goateed Malibu Grunge Kens. Jo Dog went on to join the crash and burn superstars, Shooting Gallery, who were fucked over by a record producer and going on tour opening for KISS, before breaking up in shambolic acrimony. Let’s focus even for a few minutes on the past though, shall we? It was glorious back then and wonderful to be young with the Dogs putrid green vinyl spinning in the background. “As you are now, so once was I…As I am now, so you shall be….”
SEPTEMBER GURLS
I’ve been in love with Chrissie Hynde for a real long time, since the third grade, probably. I used to try for her bangs, I got her eyeliner down pretty good. Pretenders are still my fave band along with Hanoi, Clash, Gen X, the Spiders From Mars, and the Stones. First song I ever sang with a full band was “Message Of Love”! She dedicated a song to me once in Boston. She totally gave me the icy freezout cold shoulder on another occasion, but of course I get it, now. She is adept at drawing boundaries cause she’s been super famous since what? 78? She was not some posh snob or anything-in fact, the first time I met her, she was walkin’ around by herself in Kenmore Square. So yeah she is my favorite female singer of all time followed by Sinead, Ronnie Spector, Patti Smith and Shangrillas-right? As a songwriter, she’s near the top of my list, with Stones, Easdale, Kristofferson, and Paul K . Farndon is my favorite bassplayer, along with Tregunna, James, Patricia Morrison and Yaffa. Martin’s my fave drummer besides Razzle, Nolan, Burke, and Ashton. Top 3 guitarists are Ronson, Honeyman Scott and Bob Derwood Andrews. Love Derwood like mad but he sez he does not like to jam or have any interest in discussing his old music, they cut him outta the publishing, so I can empathize. I’m also dead broke in the desert while other people are living at the top of ya know, neon lit eyeball pyramids and shit. Famous on the backs of complete unknown forgotten poors. So yeah it’s crazy that Chrissie turned 71 on September 6th, two of my three baby mamas have that same star sign, plus two of my favorite writers-John Easdale and Iris Berry. December Boy’s got it bad. Whenever I write songs I’m really just trying to capture some Polaroid from my own long gone past as vivid and alive as almost anything by John Easdale or Chrissie Hynde. They make it look alot easier than it is. I bled and bled for it and still dunno if I’ve really ever come close-certainly not in any kinda decent studio setting. “They just don’t make ’em like they used to-you shoulda just stuck with me!”
OZZY
Best lyric of all time: “Finished with my woman cause she couldn’t help me with my mind”. The ugly blue dragon tattoo. Pissing on the Alamo. Ya know? Poor boy from factories of Birmingham. When I was in detention hall, my beautiful new wave girlfriend sent me the handwritten lyrics to “Goodby To Romance”. When I was at the Oneida Baptist Institute in deepest Southeastern Appalachia, the US FEST was happening and all the heavy metal kids from all over the world who’d been sent to that Hitlerian reform school for behavior modification abuses was coveting that forbidden music which the superstitious authoritarians were making money offa making it taboo. Turned out Ozzy was a lovable nut, maybe less dangerous than a drunken Ringo Starr. He’s moving back to England and I can’t say I blame him. Wish I had a bottle. This song is going out to you.
“The “white lives matter more movement” co-directed by Zelensky & Joe Biden will be in high gear over next few days “whitewashing” history.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
OUR SEMI FERAL BOY CAT’S GONE MISSING
In the four or five years we’ve been here, multiple cat litters were birthed on our end of the street, in the back yard and “Cat Alley”, in between our street and our backyard neighbor’s since we lived here and we successfully homed about 14. The mama cat was captured by a grumpy old man and taken far away and we mourned her being gone for about five months and one day, she just reappeared-she had found her way home. My kid called her Mama Friday, and she was an expert mouser who kept our garage, trailer and porch area mostly free of mice and we fed her and got her one of those heated cat teepees for the porch in the winter, her last two kids were the runts nobody wanted so we named and kept them, got ’em all spayed and neutered and their ears are clipped, so local animal control can tell they are homed, too. My kid named the boy Skitzie and the girl Pepper. Pepper loves the porch and we keep a giant wooden painting up there so she can not bring dead birds and bunnies and leave them on the porch but at night she jumps the painting and sleeps on a wooden chair. Skitzie was the only outdoor cat you could really pet. Pepper and Friday stayed pretty feral, continued to eat lizards and birds and small snakes. Skizie got in fights with the neighborhood toms who’d showup to mooch off our cat’s food. Sometimes, they climb the tree and get on the roof at night. They are friends with a skunk who also eats summa their kibble and kinda hangs around. I don’t think thy get along with the raccoons but the racoons like the roofs according to a cowboy eccentric who lives in a hoarder trailer next door. Two days ago, my partner noted that Skitzie had gone missing and was absent from three meals straight. This morning marks his fourth meal when he is always here like clockwork, usually before the girls. He likes to hunt in the field across the street and the big machines have broken dirt to start building some development folly, sometimes he hangs out with the four indoor/outdoor cats that belong to the couple at the end of the street, three doors down, but I asked the lady and she has not seen him, either. So chances are coyotes got him, he got snakebit, or some asshole took him. It’s a bummer, all three of us feel a pang in our hearts. I also have an adult child I never hear from, so life is like a procession of insufferable losses, death, AWOL loved ones, cheap shot ripoffs, old pals who’d rather hang out with dumb, pretentious rich people, and we carry grief. I’ve been known to drink over that kindof stuff, but right now, I’m doing some part time ranch hand, jack of all odd jobs, outdoor laboring and I gotta stay wide awake and on call, between the work and parenting, there’s no time to cry. I can’t even tell you how bummed out I am, but I am endeavoring to keep my braveest grownup face on.
BILLY FUCKIN’ IDOL
In times of darkness, bullshit, deception, mass hypnotism and so much uncertainty, I still turn to rocknroll saints like Van Halen and Billy Idol for sustenance. I LAUGH at big city hipster mimosa dorks who think that having money or buying some nice shoes makes you somehow have even a glint of rocknroll authority or real genuine entertainer soulpower-these fucking gentrified cover band jokesters just get on my nerves, make me laugh almost, but these same fuckin dorks who can never shaddup about Johnny Thunders or some distant begrudging tie they have to somebody from D-Generation or Dictators or whoever, they can never recognize real rocknroll when it’s lookin’ ’em dead in the eye. BILLY FUCKIN’ IDOL is a punchline to those fakes and rubes and dorks and pay to play karaoke dorks because they find him threatening-not only is he pretty as a Presley, but he still has the hardest rockin’ band in the business and he STILL writes great songs, which none of those rich people in the booj cities can do. That’s why all their bands predominantly covers. All they really ever do is glaot about their zipcodes, their money, their pay to play privilege-nobody cares about their dork bands. BILLY FUCKIN’ IDOL still has all the real stuff of the heart-the charisma, the poetry. Now I am running through streets that are frightening… that shit’s as real as “Untouchables” or “Stars Look Down”. He’s as good as it gets in the business of playing real rocknroll. The greasy come lately kid bands with the expensive hats and stripper tattoos don’t even come close. rocknroll is about playing SONGS, from the heart, from the heart, I couldn’t tell no lies. Thankful as fuck I can still turn to the important and life affirming punknsoul of Billy Fuckin Idol. I hope to see him live before I die. I think we’re all sick to death of all those instafame pig-media juggernaut overnight fake meta celeb-bots they force feed us nowadays and when you see or hear real authentic passionate rocknroll, you remember there’s no comparison, either you got it or you don’t, and just cause some mama’s boy dickhead can pay for a fancy costume don’t mean shit. You can’t buy real rocknroll and when you experience the real stuff, it’s impossible to play along with that middle school dork shit. BILLY FUCKIN’ IDOL‘S been saving my lifea gain and again since I was about thirteen or fourteen or some shit. Dunno if it was true but an old associate once claimed he played a song of mine for Thommy Price and the dude was said to have really liked it. I love Steve Stevens, as well! Derwood’s probably my third fave guitarist after Ronson and Honeyman Scott. I wish I could find a guy like that to make new rocknroll with. As Giovanni Vitanza from The Coma-Tones sang, aint gotta fake it cause I know how. In the punk days he was derided for being plastic punk poster pinup prettyboy danceable, but now when Strummer’s gone, Ari Up’s gone, all the crazy wild eyed beautiful outlaws are dying off one by one, he is a testament to staying wild and free. I love him like a forefather, my brethren, God Bless Him.
Billy Idol Juni 1984 in München | Verwendung weltweit
❖You’re not jaded; everything really is just as phony and vapid as it looks.I say this because if you are reading this it’s likely the result of a personal quest for truth which has led to a gradual peeling away of the lies our society is made of. Your eyes probably found this text because you’re the sort of person who’s been trying to make sense of the world in a sea of propaganda and deception, which often results in a growing disgust not just with the power structures which oppress and tyrannize humanity, but with our entire civilization.This experience is very common for people like yourself, and it’s very common because it arises from a clear perception of reality. From the very beginning human civilization has been built around serving the interests of the powerful, from religion to philosophy to the arts to law. As the world has gotten smaller and it’s become possible to artificially manufacture culture with mass-distributed media, this has only become more the case.That’s why the more you learn about the world, the more fake and stupid our civilization looks. It’s because it is fake and stupid. Our news, our entertainment, our jobs, our legal systems, our political systems, our education systems, our financial, monetary, economic and commercial systems; the way our entire civilization is structured and organized has nothing to do with what’s true and good and everything to do with keeping human organisms compliantly turning the gears of capitalism and empire.#TheSimpsons#Simpsons#Ukrainepic.twitter.com/aWvgTUGJKP— The Simpsons (@TheSimpsons) February 26, 2022Mainstream culture is one giant psyop geared toward keeping people fueling the oppression machine. Not because of some grand conspiracy (though there’s plenty of that too), but because the manufacturers of culture have a vested interest in preserving our unwholesome status quo. The media are owned by plutocrats who have an interest in making sure everything they’re putting out sustains the imperial status quo upon which their kingdoms are built. The Pentagon has more influence over Hollywood than people like you or I ever will.Things get elevated to mainstream levels of attention and influence by the people with the wealth and power to elevate them, and they’re always going to elevate things which serve their interests by manufacturing consent for the status quo their wealth and power are premised upon, not things which harm their interests like material that expands class consciousness or highlights the depravity of the US-centralized empire.So mainstream culture presents a fraudulent image of reality. It’s written into the code of everything that’s mass produced — not just in Prager University lectures on the evils of socialism or propagandistic news stories about weapons of mass destruction, but in sitcoms, in advertisements, in clothing brands, in pop music, in textbooks, in trends. When it’s not constant messaging that capitalism is totally working and the world is ordered in a more or less sane and truth-based way, it’s manipulations designed to shape our values and measures of self-worth to make us into better gear-turners.If you’re noticing this ubiquitous fraudulence, it’s not because you’re becoming distant from the rest of society, it’s because you’re becoming more intimate with it. You’re getting in real close, so close you can see the nuts and bolts of it, see how the sausage is made.The Phoniest, Most PR-Intensive War Of All Time”Now, I know what you’re thinking: how is Zelensky making time for a Vogue photoshoot amidst his busy schedule of PR appearances for other major western institutions?”https://t.co/stflCQnrtw— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) July 27, 2022So if this is happening to you, don’t worry. You’re not turning into some kind of jaded hipster who’s too cool for what everyone else is into, you’re just seeing the bullshit for what it is. Sure a rejection of mainstream culture can just be pure ego-driven “look at me I’m so special” crap, but it’s also what happens when you sincerely move in for a closer look at the mass-scale psychological fabric of human civilization.This is what Terence McKenna was talking about when he said “The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.” And it’s what Jiddu Krishnamurti was pointing at when he said “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” A lucid perception of reality today will necessarily be accompanied by the ever-present smell of bullshit.And that’s not your fault. It’s not your fault that you were born into this world where so much of everything is fake and stupid. So be gentle with yourself in your sense of alienation. And take comfort in knowing that others see what you’re seeing too.But mainly learn to take comfort in the fact that, just underneath the logos and screens and suburbs and Hollywood actors pretending to be people, reality is roaring. There’s a whole world of wonder and authenticity shining ferociously from just beneath the surface. It’s just got nothing to do with the artificial culture that’s been mass-produced by the powerful and funneled into our minds.Zelensky rings New York Stock Exchange bell, launching campaign to entice foreign investors while crushing labor rights of Ukrainians.His appearance coincided with the Euro’s collapse and economic crisis fueled by the Ukraine proxy warBy @RealAlexRubihttps://t.co/KAiwt94ECD— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) September 7, 2022Underneath all the social engineering and power-serving control mechanisms, there’s a whole life of raw terrestriality that is much, much older and much, much stronger than the lies of the machine. You can see it crackling everywhere, even in the densest parts of the matrix.You can see it in the sky. You can see it in the bushes and the pigeons. But you can also see it in the bus billboards and skyscrapers, in the flashing signs and blaring screens. And you can see it in the giant-brained bipedal primates you’re surrounded by each day, hiding just behind the dance of imperial fraudulence in their heads. You can see it even in those who are most asleep at the wheel, the most enslaved to the mind viruses of the machine, if you look. Once you learn to see it, you can observe nature winking at you even from inside the most rage-faced pundits and most self-absorbed social natterers. It’s there.In reality this sense of alienation is just an awkward transition phase between buying into the imperial dreamworld and a deep, deep intimacy with humanity as it really is beneath all the obnoxious programming. Beyond the revulsion at the phony facepuppets, something ancient, authentic, and exuberant is dancing. And it is more real and more true than our disgust with this civilization.Look closer and you see the fraudulence. Look even closer and you see what’s real. Your sense of alienation is entirely valid and based in truth, but we’re not meant to stay there. Truth beckons us forward. Truth is beckoning us all forward. And these mind cages they have built for us aren’t real enough to hold us in for much longer. (-Caitlin Johnstone)
Angela: Angela Davis, that is. At the start of filming in 1969 she was an unknown philosophy professor at UCLA, but by the time the committed communist was imprisoned shortly thereafter, she was already an icon. The film shows Davis both in public and private: at seminars, at demonstrations for political prisoners and the Black Panthers and at …www.youtube.comThe Right to Be Left Alone – Activist PostABC Tried to Bury This James Baldwin Interview. Four Decades Later, It’s Blisteringly Relevant. – YouTube ABC Tried to Bury This James Baldwin Interview. Four Decades Later, It’s Blisteringly Relevant.Buried by ABC at the time, the segment has resurfaced over four decades later, revealing a unique glimpse into Baldwin’s private life—as well as his resounding criticism about white fragility, as blisteringly relevant today as it was in 1979. Video Credit: Sylvia Chase: Writer, interviewer, Narrator Joseph Lovett: Producer, Director Richard …www.youtube.com“Hey, bet you forgot about the Afghans who worked for the U.S. & West still in limbo while the West went all out for Ukrainian refugees. Can anyone help me understand the difference in treatment?” (-Ajamu Baraka)
Hiroshi Nakagome, the Japanese Johnny Thunders of the GOLDEN ARMS and World Famous Mister Ratboy from Pillbox, Motorcycle Boy and Sour Jazz have a cool new record out on Vicious Kitten, the Australian Label that used to be a fanzine in the early nineties. This is their new video!!!
“Ukraine was ordered to launch an offensive even though the military thought it was unwise. The military leaders don’t understand this is a PR war. With the offensive, ruling class servants are able to steal more of the peoples resources for MIC.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“As Zelensky outlaws labor organizing, he appeared on Wall Street to launch #AdvantageUkraine, a shameless appeal for the corporate plunder of Ukraine which promises rapid deregulation and features the country’s arms industry at the top of its “investment menu” (-Max Blumenthal)
MIKE’S SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY CONCERT IN FINLAND TO FEATURE HIS SOLO BAND, DEMOLITION 23, & A REUNION OF ORIGINAL ROCKS LINEUP! WOW!
One of the greatest bands of all time are reuniting the original lineup for One Night Only! Of course we all love and miss Razzle, but you know Gyp Casino played on the first three Hanoi Rocks classics and now they are getting back together! As my old pal Chaz Halo says, I also hope a lot of footage washes up on youtube since neither of us are in the money enough to fly to Finland, but this is real big news for all of us weirdo glitter/glam kids who grew up loving that band and their uniquely inimitable brand of original, amphetamine punk-rockabilly-ska-disco-psychedelic-honky tonkin-sleaze anthem, stardusted surf and scuzz, downtown gutter punknroll! Holy Smokes!! Ya know? I’ve been liking the Lordsy new MM group song, “Derelict Palace”, it’ a little post-punk or new wave. I’m pretty lit about the big show. History in the making. How awesome would it be if they came to the States? I know a Lords Of The New Church influenced guttersnipe goth gang that might be willing to reunite to open for ’em at the Whiskey or wherever. Lucky Sugarbuzz from the legendary Hollywood glam rag Sugarbuzz Magazine said: “WOW!!!!!!!” My new new wave starlet friend and idol Laurent Chopard from Other-ed, says, “I saw that earlier! Crazy and even crazier with Demolition 23 opening! I hope they’ll play at least one show in London on a weekend but I’m afraid it’s just going to be a one shot. This one is too short notice for me to go…” Evad Fromme from Moonchasers and 13 Knots said, “I saw this. I hope they play more shows. Would love to see them. I’d like it if they just played the Bangkok Shocks record front to back!” John Dissed, the free speech advocate and songwriting stalwart said, “That’s so cool. Mystery City is my fav too! Had that in high school and played the shit out of it. Great songs.” Brian Morgan NYC guitarist from The Carvels, Saviors, and Disruptors sez, “HA! I was gonna send this to you when I got home from work. Who’d have ever thought, yeah? So what HAS Gyp Casino been up to for, um, almost 40 years? I must say, Andy looks pretty bad. I keep seeing the rubber tip on his cane in this pic and thinking of puffy gray velcro tennis shoes and big visor sunglasses, a retirement community in Florida, yeesh. I guess a good reminder to at least try to keep up SOME sort of maintenance as we rock’n’roll into our dotage. Shame it’s in Finland, I’d go for sure. Then again, I’m planning to be up front center in Glasgow in November for the original Damned line-up’s gig. Bless ’em all! “
Up early listening to the big machines outside-this used to be a quiet deadend street, mostly empty old trailers only inhabited by elderly people for about two or three months in the winters-second homes. One guy down the block died and they never cleaned up his debris or resold his place-another guy died and it looks like they might be preparing it for resell, but most people don’t wanna live in this part of town because of the holy shit high heat and two or three obvious drug dealer houses-you know the vibe-all night traffic, shady lady, high fences, shifty customers with broken windshields, barking twin pitbulls. Also, the stinky sewage treatment plant and the stinky river both smell like shit, however some gentrifying home builder has built three pop up McMansions down the road and there are plans to build 100 new apartments in the field across the swamp ditch. So yeah, we are kinda feeling the need to imminently relocate looming over us like a shadow. We had to scrap our plans to move to Joshua Tree during the grueling two year long Covid clampdowns and now they’ve jacked the rents up even higher in that whole region, two small mom n pop greasy spoon restaurants closed last week in my ‘ville, ya know I’m a dishwasher, so it’s not like we are as mobile as we once were-even the notoriously bullshit mainstream media is having to admit that millions of Murkkkans are being evicted or falling to houselessness while the government gives always mor billionaire handouts to their proxy forces in the Ukraine and Israel and the big propaganda unreality tv silences real journalists and doctors and intelligence experts and historians and focuses mostly on glamourizing cults, cannibals, models who only ever vote for endless wars, and handouts to their billionaire police-stat donor class bosses, and glorifying the oligarchy. I have anxiety, where we’re gonna live, how we’re gonna keep paying these outrageous Reset gouger electric-grocery-gas-and rent bills. Honestly, man, I could use a fucking drink. Alas, I have to work today, doing some landscaping for a land baroness who may or may not give us the privilege of becoming on call servants, laboring at her whim, in exchange for renting one of her prohibitively expensive, rundown properties she bought years and years ago at auction in this dead end desert, end of the road ghost town, where people come to die. I finally heard from one of my talented, beautiful, long absent children, who seems to be thriving in the Big City Of Hipsters. It was thrilling to hear his voice. I live for those kids. Sadly, it’s just not viable for us to live in those overpriced, urbanized, legal reefer, rich people zipcodes anymore. All these tech platform purges of left activists and dissident journalists should have everybody fretting, but so many of my former roll call just stay in that Netflix N Pharma, cozy, NPR hypnospell, I can’t reach ’em anymore. they all just wannabe faux woke and Tik Tok famous. My outdoor semi-feral boy cat buddy, “Skitzey”, has missed three meals and while I know the cats tend to go into hiding, like under the trailer and stuff, during heat waves or when all the noisy machines are growling, it’s not like that fella to skip any meals, and while it’s premature to mourn, there’s been talk of coyotes eating yard pets in this town, and we had a kind cowboy artist friend wrangle a rattlesnake who was having a reckoning with the missing cat’s sister about a week ago, so I’m kinda upset by the little boy’s disappearance, he’s lived in our carport/garage/porch area for about three years now and rids the area of rodents. I keep goin’ outside, searchin’ the alley and the trail for him. My disabled teenager outside in the rocks calling his name would break your heart.
“Cuba exports doctors while the US exports war. It’s beyond time to pressure Biden to drop this outrageous terrorist designation as well as end the criminal blockade once & for all. Stop punishing this small country for charting its own path. Let Cuba live!” (-Abby Martin)
“When the U.S. & Europe finally decide to stop sacrificing Ukrainians & end the war Ukraine will have to be demilitarized & neutral. Yet, the psychos making decisions pretend that they will be able to avoid that inevitability.”
(-Ajamu Baraka)
“The majority of people in the US and millions more are at risk of eviction in the next month.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“I don’t criticize Democrats cuz I side with Republicans, I criticize Democrats Cuz THEY side with Republicans. Our fight is not Left/Right anymore, it is Us vs.Them. We have 2 corporate party’s that serve Wall St/War Machine/Corporations & crush everyone else.” (-Jimmy Dore)
“Even mainstream media outlets in Brazil and the US have acknowledged that fascist leader Bolsonaro and his multimillionaire capitalist oligarch backers have been discussing launching a military coup if he loses the election.” (-Ben Norton)
“100,000 Czechs protest their government’s support of the NATO proxy war in Ukraine and the controlled demolition of Europe’s economy. The rally brought together Communist party activists with members of right-wing Freedom & Direct Democracy Party.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“The very fact that these neoliberal corporate hacks can say this and get away with it is a graphic example of the corruption of organized labor & lack of class consciousness among working class.” (-Ajamu Baraka scoffing at pants suit hack Kopmala bullshitting about Biden support for working people on Labor Day)
“President Joseph Biden: “This is a nation that rejects violence as a political tool. We do not encourage violence.” Senator Joseph Biden: “I was suggesting we bomb Belgrade. I was suggesting we send American pilots in and blow up all the bridges…” (-Max Blumenthal)
It’s Not Okay For Grown Adults To Say The Ukraine Invasion Was “Unprovoked” On a recent interview with the Useful Idiots podcast, Noam Chomsky repeated his argument that the only reason we hear the word “unprovoked” every time anyone mentions Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the mainstream news media is because it absolutely was provoked, and they know it.”Right now if you’re a respectable writer and you want to write in the main journals, you talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to call it ‘the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Chomsky said. “It’s a very interesting phrase; it was never used before. You look back, you look at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked, nobody ever called it ‘the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.’ In fact I don’t know if the term was ever used — if it was it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.””Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked,” Chomsky said. “That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top US diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the CIA.”Chomsky is of course correct here. The imperial media and their brainwashed automatons have spent half a year mindlessly bleating the word “unprovoked” in relation to this war, but one question none of them ever have a straight answer for is this: if the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, how come so many western experts spent years warning that the actions of western governments would provoke an invasion of Ukraine?Because, as Chomsky notes, that is indeed the case. A few days after the invasion began this past February a guy named Arnaud Bertrand put together an extremely viral Twitter thread that just goes on and on and on about the various diplomats, analysts and academics in the west who have over the years been warning that a dangerous confrontation with Russia was coming because of NATO advancements toward its borders, interventionism in Ukraine, and various other aggressions. It contains examples like John Mearsheimer explicitly warning in 2015 that “the west is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked,” and Pat Buchanan warning all the way back in 1999 that “By moving NATO onto Russia’s front porch, we have scheduled a twenty-first-century confrontation.”Empire apologists love claiming that the invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO expansionism (their claims generally based on brazen misrepresentations of what Vladimir Putin has said about Russia’s reasons for the war), but that’s silly. The US war machine was continuing to taunt the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine right up until the invasion, a threat it refused to take off the table since placing it there in 2008 despite knowing full well that this threat was an incendiary provocation to Moscow.Most fascinating thing about the Ukraine war is the sheer number of top strategic thinkers who warned for years that it was coming if we continued down the same path.No-one listened to them and here we are.Small compilation of these warnings, from Kissinger to Mearsheimer.— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) March 1, 2022This is to say nothing of the US empire actively fomenting a violent uprising in 2014 which ousted Kyiv’s sitting government and fractured the nation between its more Moscow-loyal populations to the east and the more US/EU-friendly parts of the country. This led to the annexation of Crimea (overwhelmingly supported by the people who live there) and eight years of brutal warfare against Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas. Ukrainian attacks on those separatists are known to have increased exponentially in the days leading up to the invasion, and it has been argued that this is what provoked Putin’s final decision to commit to invading (which was a last-minute decision according to US intelligence).The US power alliance could very easily have prevented this war with a few low-cost concessions like enshrining Ukrainian neutrality, rolling back its war machinery from Russia’s borders and sincerely pursuing detente with Moscow instead of shredding treaties and ramping up cold war escalations. Hell, it could likely have prevented this war just by protecting President Zelensky from the anti-Moscow far right nationalists who were openly threatening to lynch him if he began honoring the Minsk agreements and pursuing peace with Russia, as he was originally elected to do.Instead it knowingly chose the opposite course: continuing to float the possibility of formal NATO membership for Ukraine while pouring weapons into the nation and making it more and more of a de facto NATO member with closer and closer intimacy with the US war machine, and then either ordering, encouraging or tolerating Ukraine’s aggressive assault on Donbas separatists.Why did the empire opt for provocation over peace? Congressman Adam Schiff gave a pretty good answer to that question in January of 2020 as the road to war was being paved: “so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.” If you relinquish the infantile idea that the US empire is helping its good friend Ukraine because it loves the Ukrainian people and wants them to have freedom and democracy, it’s not hard to see that the US sparked a convenient proxy war because it was in its geostrategic interests to do so, and because it wouldn’t be their lives and property getting laid to waste.Brian Berletic put out a good video a few days ago about a Pentagon-funded 2019 Rand Corporation paper titled “Extending Russia – Competing from Advantageous Ground,” which is exactly what it sounds like. The US Army-commissioned paper details how the empire can use proxy warfare, economic warfare and other cold war tactics to push its longtime geopolitical foe to the brink without costing American lives or sparking a nuclear conflict. It mentions Ukraine hundreds of times, and it explicitly discusses the same economic warfare tactics we’re seeing today like sanctions and attacking Russia’s energy interests in Europe (the latter of which Berletic points out is also being used to bolster US dominance over its vassals in the EU).The paper even explicitly advocates continuing to threaten NATO membership with Ukraine to draw out an aggressive response from Moscow, saying, “While NATO’s requirement for unanimity makes it unlikely that Ukraine could gain membership in the foreseeable future, Washington’s pushing this possibility could boost Ukrainian resolve while leading Russia to redouble its efforts to forestall such a development.”President Biden has made calls for regime change in Moscow that can’t even really be called thinly disguised, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has openly said that the plan is to use this war to “weaken” Russia, which other US officials have told the press is indeed the policy. Comments from the Biden administration continually make it clear that the US alliance is buckling down to keep this war going for years to come, which would fit in nicely with Washington’s known track record of deliberately drawing Russia into military quagmires against US proxies in both Afghanistan and Syria.So make no mistake, behind all the phony hand-wringing and flag-waving, the US-centralized empire is getting exactly what it wants from this conflict. It gets to overextend Russia militarily and financially, promote its narratives around the world, rehabilitate the image of US interventionism, expand internet censorship, expand militarily, bolster control over its European client states, and all it costs is a little pretend empire money that gets funneled into the military-industrial complex anyway.Which is why when it looked like peace was at risk of breaking out in the early days of the conflict, the empire sent in Boris Johnson to tell Zelensky that even if he is ready for the war to end, his partners to the west were not.Russia and Ukraine agreed to a negotiated settlement to end the war in April, but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson intervened to stop the peace deal.The US and EU instead escalated the proxy war, as the Biden admin admitted, to try to “weaken” Moscowhttps://t.co/xsCvovq8Km— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) September 4, 2022So as you can see, the notion that this war is “unprovoked” is a fart-brained fairy tale for idiots and children; there’s no excuse for a grown adult with internet access and functioning brain matter to ever say such a thing. If China had backed a coup in Mexico and now had a loyal vassal in Mexico City who was letting Beijing distribute weapons along the US border while continually shelling English-speaking separatists in Baja California who are seeking US annexation, there’s no question that Washington would consider this a provocation and would respond accordingly. You can tell me that’s not true, but we’d both know you’re lying.But as Chomsky said, the press are still spouting this “unprovoked” nonsense anyway.”Russia is widely believed to have been taken aback by the West’s assertive and unified response to its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,” reads a CNBC article published just minutes prior to this writing.”The diplomatic visit underlines the importance of the Russian relationship for China, even in the face of international blow back against Moscow after its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine earlier this year,” reads a new report from CNN hot off the presses.”It was an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country,” a source is quoted as saying in another CNN article published a few hours ago.It is, as Chomsky observed, really freaky how hard they’ve been hitting us with this line every time the invasion of Ukraine is mentioned. It seems like every time it comes up they’re obligated to say it, like how Michael Jackson had a quota for how often MTV hosts were obligated to refer to him as “The King of Pop Michael Jackson” when his name was mentioned.In the mass media you’re not allowed to talk about the known US/NATO/Ukraine actions which experts have been warning for many years would lead us to where we’re at. You’re only allowed to say Putin attacked Ukraine completely unprovoked, in a vacuum, solely because he is evil and hates freedom. And you have to do it while saying the word “unprovoked” at every opportunity.NATO chief admits that NATO allies have been training and arming Ukraine since 2014.Something to remember whenever Western media refers to an “unprovoked” invasion. pic.twitter.com/SGHF46yayz— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) August 29, 2022Empire apologists get upset when you talk about the fact that this war was provoked because a large amount of empire apologia in 2022 is built around pretending that provocation just isn’t a thing. By some trick of Orwellian doublethink, this concept we’ve all lived our entire lives knowing about and understanding is now suddenly a freakish and ridiculous invention of the Kremlin.We’re all guilty of doing the things we knowingly choose to do. If I choose to provoke someone into doing something bad, then they’re guilty of choosing to do the bad thing, but I am also guilty of provoking them. I’m not saying anything new here; this is the plot behind any movie or show with a sneaky or manipulative villain, and it’s been a part of our storytelling since ancient times. Nobody has ever walked out of Shakespeare’s Othello thinking that maybe Iago was just an innocent bystander who was trying to help out his friends.Most of us learn that provocation is real as children with siblings, kicking the other under the table or whatever to provoke a loud outburst, and we’ve understood it ever since. But in 2022 everyone’s pretending that this extremely basic, kindergarten-level concept is some kind of bizarre, alien gibberish. It’s intensely stupid, and it needs to stop.Empire apologists will also argue that saying Russia was provoked into invading by the US empire is like saying a rape victim provoked her rapist by wearing a tight skirt, or a battered wife provoked her abuser by disobeying him. And as a survivor of multiple rapes and an abusive relationship I must say I find it extremely offensive when people compare blaming the most powerful empire that has ever existed for its well-documented aggressions to blaming victims of rape and domestic violence. The poor widdle globe-spanning empire is not comparable to a rape victim, and if you find yourself thinking that it is it’s time to re-think your entire worldview.It’s not okay to be a grown adult in September of 2022 and still say the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. You’ve got a brain between your ears and an entire internet of information at your fingertips. Use them.”The US military budget was already more than three times more than the next-largest spender (China), more than the next 12 countries combined. Just randomly toss another $45 billion onto the pile. The excuses: inflation and Ukraine. What about the living standard of Americans?” (-Glenn Greenwald)Immobility Plan 2035 – Activist Post
“Liberalism is not leftism. Liberalism is reformism. And capitalism and imperialism cannot be reformed.” (-Danny Haiphong on the red carpet diversity muppets who pretend to care about healthcare, eviction moratorium, universal housing, student debt forgiveness, demilitarization of police during election, then vote for more war and giveaways for billionaires when Pelosi orders them to)
“This monstrosity destroyed Libya”. (-Danny Haiphong on Hillary Clinton)
“Haiti and Honduras too.” (-Ahimsa Mediation)
“The U.S is not only waging a war on other nations via sanctions & interventions, it’s also waging an economic war on its own people. The sooner U.S Americans realize their enemy isn’t people in other nations but the fascists in power, the sooner they can begin to stop the empire.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
Maximillian Alvarez on Twitter“Keeping the #LaborDay solidarity going, ICYMI on @WorkingPod I spoke with Amazon worker & union organizer @AmazonUnionofKY. Matt was fired in suspected retaliation for his organizing. Help spread the word & donate to his survival fund if you can ❤️ ✊🏾”twitter.com
“YouTube has censored
@Action4Assange’s latest panel raising awareness about the plight of political prisoner Julian Assange. Viewed must sign in then pass through two baseless warnings about “inappropriate” content. https://youtu.be/acR0t6mjwAk” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Don’t let them fool you. The so-called richest nation in the world could fund healthcare and housing for all, but it doesn’t want to because then it couldn’t exploit poor and working class people.” (-Ryan Knight)
“If Julian Assange is silenced, others will also be gagged either directly or by the fear of persecution and prosecution.”—
“Biden is literally to the right of Henry Kissinger and people are trying to say he is ‘the most progressive president in history’ lmao.” (-Benjamin Carollo)
“Assange had a stroke in the courtroom and no court official even noticed. That tells you all you need to know: A victim of torture – suffering the health consequences of torture – should not be extradited or even tried. He should be freed.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
Nelson Mandela:”No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails” Alleged #Vault7 source Joshua Schulte (whose retrial began on Tuesday), held in ‘barbaric conditions in US prison’, in an inhumane existence, “worse than death”
“Every person in the United States should be able to claim Raytheon as a dependent on their taxes.” (-Drop The MIC)
“The big winners of the Biden Presidency have been Pfizer, Moderna, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. If you think Biden is doing a good job you shouldn’t be mocking Trumpers”
(-Black In The Empire)
“At a Council on Foreign Relations forum about “fake news,” former Editor at Time Magazine Richard Stengel directly states that he supports the use of propaganda on American citizens – then shuts the session down when challenged about how propaganda is used against the third world…Ben Decker also labels the alleged leak of documents last year showing offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands associated with Emmanuel Macron as fake news, despite the fact that the leak’s authenticity has never been definitively confirmed or debunked.” (-William Craddick)
“Biden is spending money, but he is not spending money on the people. He is spending on the military and proxy wars in order to expand U.S. imperialism and enrich U.S. oligarchs at our expense.” (-Ryan Knight)
“That Biden is credibly called a socialist by electorally viable congressional candidates who clearly have no idea what socialism actually is, to me indicates that our Overton window is now centered somewhere between Genghis Khan and Mussolini.” (-mousdrvr on Twitter)
You might even find that expanding consciousness in one way helps your ability to expand it in other ways. You might find for example that expanding your awareness of how your own mind operates gives you more awareness of how other people’s minds operate, and how they can be manipulated by powerful people using propaganda. You may also find for example that expanding your awareness of the plight of people less socioeconomically and geopolitically advantaged than yourself expands your own personal awareness of the various socioeconomic and geopolitical dynamics which have given rise to the way your life is right now. You may also find for example that expanding your consciousness of your own inner processes gives you a serenity which makes it easier to look squarely at the horrors you encounter when expanding your awareness of what’s going on in the world, and gives you the humility to see that you are not fully separate from those horrors.
The game of humanity will keep improving as long as our consciousness keeps expanding. I’d go so far as saying that’s the only thing that can cause things to get better, and that failing to do it guarantees things will get worse.
Like a video game, I believe we humans are free to either win this game or lose it. We will either keep expanding our awareness of what’s really going on in this weird universe our mothers birthed us into, or we will wipe ourselves out via nuclear war or ecocide.
Either way, if you choose to accept what’s being said here, we do each have the power to make things better by exactly one unit of human effort. We can help spread awareness of what’s going on in the world by fighting the lies we’ve been told by the powerful and drawing attention to things the powerful would rather keep hidden. We can help spread awareness of the human condition with art and with empathy. We can expand our own consciousness by getting very curious about how we operate and what makes us tick, and being very real with ourselves about what we find in that exploration.
Whatever you choose to believe about all this, it’s your adventure. I wish you the best in your travels.
“Think about what scummy liars these Democrats are. They write books boasting about how they bullied Cuba not to let Snowden pass through, thus trapping him in Russia. Then they use his presence in Russia to imply he’s a spy: when they *know* he’s there because they forced that.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“A virulent manipulator’s entire social existence revolves around influencing the narratives people have about what’s going on in their circle in a way that benefits the manipulator.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
has not only deleted my podcast “Moment of Clarity,” they have now deleted my artist profile and my 2 comedy albums from years ago. I was given no warning or reason for this. I also learned recently that a writer for a mainstream outlet personally tried to include positive mentions of me & my work in multiple articles & had them yanked out by her editor. Even just a positive sentence about me is forbidden in mainstream outlets.
Simply for being anti-war and anti-imperialist, I am the most-censored comedian in America. You can keep supporting my work by becoming a member at LeeCamp dot net.” (-Lee Camp)
“Joe Biden, don’t come to Los Angeles like you’ve been some vanguard for human rights!”
@CornelWest goes off on the crimes of the U.S. empire, and calls for democracy from the bottom-up rather than neoliberal identity politics.
“Biden did not send $54 billion in military aid to help Ukraine. He sent it to fight a proxy war with Russia “down to the last Ukrainian.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“The two established wings of the oligarchy, the old Republican Party represented by politicians such as Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee, and the Bush family, are now united with the Democratic Party elite into one ruling political entity. The ruling parties were already in lock step for decades on the major issues, including: war, trade deals, austerity, the militarization of police, prisons, government surveillance and assaults on civil liberties. They worked in tandem to pervert and destroy democratic institutions on behalf of the rich and corporations. They desperately work together now to stave off the revolt by enraged and betrayed white working men and women… (-Chris Hedges)
“The US-centralized empire is a giant macrocosm of this entire dynamic. It pours vast amounts of energy into narrative control in the form of propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the war on journalism. It weaves nonstop narratives about how great it is and how horrible its enemies are. And it fears being seen more than anything in the world.
The vast globe-spanning power structure that is loosely centralized around the United States is a powerful military force and a powerful economic force, but its most potent weapon by far is its ability to control the narrative about what’s happening in the world. The use of oligarchic media, Silicon Valley and Hollywood to manipulate public thought and thereby control the way people think, act and vote at mass scale all around the world is unlike anything ever seen in any empire in history.
Propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening. Censorship only works if it doesn’t draw attention to the information being censored. The US empire’s nonstop campaign to control the world’s dominant narratives only works if it isn’t in the spotlight of public scrutiny. This is why those who draw attention to these things are smeared, demonized, censored, marginalized, imprisoned and worse by the managers of empire.
Manipulators hate to be seen, but if you ever find yourself in a relationship with one, your ability to escape depends upon your seeing them. This extreme clash of interests often brings up white hot rage in the manipulator which can be frightening and dangerous.
And I think humanity is entering that stage of the relationship with the US empire. A manipulator who’s just beginning to be seen by a few more pairs of eyes than it would like, causing flickerings of panic to begin to surface. Because once those eyes see what’s hidden underneath the veil of narrative manipulation, they don’t often look away. If anything, they tend to point and draw more attention to it.
It’s a scary time to be alive. But it’s also fascinating. Unlike anything that has ever happened on this planet before.
I look forward to finding out if we escape.” (-Cait Johnstone)
The inevitable end to global white world supremacy is driving some in the West mad. It is not enough that the people of Ukraine are being sacrificed, the U.S. is making dangerous moves with China & Taiwan. (-Ajamu Baraka)
Over centuries of dynasties, upheavals and revolutions, powerful people have learned that the best way to dominate a population is to manipulate them into serving your interests while giving them the illusion of freedom and control. The invention of mass media has facilitated this new form of tyranny, as has the emergence of psychology as a field of study. These two factors have combined together to give rise to the steadily advancing science of modern propaganda.
This is why the world is as it is: because the people have been psychologically manipulated at mass scale away from using the power of their numbers to create systems that benefit them instead of a few powerful sociopaths.
This is the source of all our major problems. Understanding it, and finding ways to overcome it, is the solution. The only reason they’ve been able to control us in this way is because they understand all the many ways our minds can be manipulated better than we do.(-Cait Johnstone)
Call ’em what you want-the deep state or powers that be or one percent or oligarchy or permanent ruling class, but you gotta start admitting the shadow government and it’s media are going to crazy lengths to control our communications whether that’s through outlawing assembly, censoring dissident journalists, spying on our electronic conversations and phonecalls, deplatforming and demonestizing us for straying off their preferred narrative, or trotting Disposition Matrix Millionaire Obama out to talk pretty about need to “detoxify” the internet discourse, which is coded newspeak for clampdowns on anybody opposed to endless war and panopticon corporate wiretaps. People who go to college never heard of Cointelpro nd if they have, they can not seem to remotely contemplate that it still exists, they think the SQUAD is gonna save ’em with pro noun preferences, happy slogans, and empty justice tweets. Russiagate serves as all purpose ruling class cover story now. Same way they blamed everything on boogeymen Hussian/Gaddafi/Bin Ladin/Assad/ISIS under Bush/Cheney/Obama. Just tell ’em a boogeyman is coming for their freedom fries.
If you start researching the Davos billionaires, Bilderberg, World Economic Forum and the Klaus Scwab-Kissinger-Bill Gates transhumanist agenda being openly promoted by John Kerry, Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau and many others, of course it is horrifying that the wealthiest one percent of the one percent plan on enslaving humanity with microchips and cashless society control grid, surveillance-tech capitalism authoritarian one world government shit, and that it’s not just some whackjob Alex Jones hysteria being used to sell rightwing militia survivalist swag and vitamins anymore, but I’ll tell ya, between you and me, just us kids here, all my ex associates ALREADY seem like unfeeling, programmed droid, dystopian, transhuman cyborgs. They just obey the fucking tv, they never think for themselves, or read, and slavishly imitate whatever they watch on TV. Whatever “The Latest Thang” is. Netflix, which Obama and Chelle are involved with, is all some creepy, sick secret society programming-you can confirm that just clicking through their “programs”. I don’t watch tv or believe very much of what is firehosed at us via the mockingbird monopoly media. I think the emperors are having fun at your expense-telling you to go buy duct tape and shit. For freedom. Everytime I turn on the computer or flip through the tv hypnoscreen, I see the propagandists are still eager beaver milking the whole hog fuck out of that bullshit Thank a KKKOP capital hill psy-op story designed to manufacture populist consent for outlawing protests. Man oh man, how can people pat themselves on the back all day for their critical thinking skills supposedly cultivated at the prestigious, prohibitively expensive. posh sports university in the Pacific Northwest, and then, immediately fall for this dummy Qshaman HYSTERIA? All you hear on Pig Media nowadays, is “Putin!!!” is somehow, other side of the world responsible, not only for people disliking Hillary Clinton, but also, now for Murkkkans corporations price gouging inflation ripoffs and greedhead jackedup rents, or that Trump’s maga protest was an “insurrection” so Murkkkans should just give up their rights to protest and stand in line at Best Buy for the next round of programming updates and gadgets and obey the Davos techlords for science. All your AOC worshipping shitlib friends even love openly evil Lyn Cheney now cause she said “Orange Man Bad” and “insurrection” one million times. I thought the George Floyd protests where the undercover proud boys burned down police stations looked more like proper insurrections than when some love a man in uniform hillbillies broke a window and climbed a wall, painted their chest and messed up Pelosi’s desk, but I believe in free speech. These illuminati puppets they got infiltrating all the governments worldwide were trained at the Kissinger/Schwab Fascist School but people with Ukraine flags on their falsebook profiles never even heard of any of that. Would not believe you even if you tried to tell ’em. They got some headline today about how useless pants suit, Kopmala is gonna be “TACKLING ONLINE ABUSE”. Of course as Bill Gates and his World Economic Forum secret society friends keep changing definitions of words in the dictionary to promote their Reset plan, the meaning of abuse will be efficiently altered. “ABUSE” is when no soul bureaucrats like Kopmala keep forced-labor slaving, non violent drug offenders in for profit prisons as long as possible, to increase shareholder value. “ABUSE” is when you incarcerate black parents for truant teenagers skipping schools that are fuckedup target ranges nowadays anyways. “ABUSE” is when you send mercenaries to kidnap a publisher from a foreign embassy and lock him up in a torture gulag for years, causing him to have a stroke, for embarrassing the criminal enterprise of murderous imperialism. These shitlibs gonna change the meaning of the word “ABUSE” so it becomes anybody speaking truth about power. This is the kind of bullshit you have to resist. NOT some college asshole disapproving of a comedian. That vote blue no matter who bullshit mighta worked out for some people who were already rich and just worried about poor people disobeying some authority figure, but the majority of us are falling deeper and deper into dangerous poverty while the middle class people keep watching tv. As Ryan knight said, “Biden’s approval rating keeps falling because the people aren’t buying his lies anymore about how “great the economy” is when they can’t afford housing, healthcare, and groceries.” Matzo Ball Dan adds, “The embarrassing attempt at spinning this economic catastrophe by calling it ‘Putin’s price hike’ isn’t convincing anyone.” THESE are the kinda discussions Obama and Kopmala’s billionaire bosses have ordered them to help eradicate.
On a recent interview with the Useful Idiots podcast, Noam Chomsky repeated his argument that the only reason we hear the word “unprovoked” every time anyone mentions Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the mainstream news media is because it absolutely was provoked, and they know it.”Right now if you’re a respectable writer and you want to write in the main journals, you talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to call it ‘the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Chomsky said. “It’s a very interesting phrase; it was never used before. You look back, you look at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked, nobody ever called it ‘the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.’ In fact I don’t know if the term was ever used — if it was it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.””Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked,” Chomsky said. “That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top US diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the CIA.”Chomsky is of course correct here. The imperial media and their brainwashed automatons have spent half a year mindlessly bleating the word “unprovoked” in relation to this war, but one question none of them ever have a straight answer for is this: if the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, how come so many western experts spent years warning that the actions of western governments would provoke an invasion of Ukraine?Because, as Chomsky notes, that is indeed the case. A few days after the invasion began this past February a guy named Arnaud Bertrand put together an extremely viral Twitter thread that just goes on and on and on about the various diplomats, analysts and academics in the west who have over the years been warning that a dangerous confrontation with Russia was coming because of NATO advancements toward its borders, interventionism in Ukraine, and various other aggressions. It contains examples like John Mearsheimer explicitly warning in 2015 that “the west is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked,” and Pat Buchanan warning all the way back in 1999 that “By moving NATO onto Russia’s front porch, we have scheduled a twenty-first-century confrontation.”Empire apologists love claiming that the invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO expansionism (their claims generally based on brazen misrepresentations of what Vladimir Putin has said about Russia’s reasons for the war), but that’s silly. The US war machine was continuing to taunt the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine right up until the invasion, a threat it refused to take off the table since placing it there in 2008 despite knowing full well that this threat was an incendiary provocation to Moscow.Most fascinating thing about the Ukraine war is the sheer number of top strategic thinkers who warned for years that it was coming if we continued down the same path.No-one listened to them and here we are.Small compilation of these warnings, from Kissinger to Mearsheimer.— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) March 1, 2022This is to say nothing of the US empire actively fomenting a violent uprising in 2014 which ousted Kyiv’s sitting government and fractured the nation between its more Moscow-loyal populations to the east and the more US/EU-friendly parts of the country. This led to the annexation of Crimea (overwhelmingly supported by the people who live there) and eight years of brutal warfare against Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas. Ukrainian attacks on those separatists are known to have increased exponentially in the days leading up to the invasion, and it has been argued that this is what provoked Putin’s final decision to commit to invading (which was a last-minute decision according to US intelligence).The US power alliance could very easily have prevented this war with a few low-cost concessions like enshrining Ukrainian neutrality, rolling back its war machinery from Russia’s borders and sincerely pursuing detente with Moscow instead of shredding treaties and ramping up cold war escalations. Hell, it could likely have prevented this war just by protecting President Zelensky from the anti-Moscow far right nationalists who were openly threatening to lynch him if he began honoring the Minsk agreements and pursuing peace with Russia, as he was originally elected to do.Instead it knowingly chose the opposite course: continuing to float the possibility of formal NATO membership for Ukraine while pouring weapons into the nation and making it more and more of a de facto NATO member with closer and closer intimacy with the US war machine, and then either ordering, encouraging or tolerating Ukraine’s aggressive assault on Donbas separatists.Why did the empire opt for provocation over peace? Congressman Adam Schiff gave a pretty good answer to that question in January of 2020 as the road to war was being paved: “so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.” If you relinquish the infantile idea that the US empire is helping its good friend Ukraine because it loves the Ukrainian people and wants them to have freedom and democracy, it’s not hard to see that the US sparked a convenient proxy war because it was in its geostrategic interests to do so, and because it wouldn’t be their lives and property getting laid to waste.Brian Berletic put out a good video a few days ago about a Pentagon-funded 2019 Rand Corporation paper titled “Extending Russia – Competing from Advantageous Ground,” which is exactly what it sounds like. The US Army-commissioned paper details how the empire can use proxy warfare, economic warfare and other cold war tactics to push its longtime geopolitical foe to the brink without costing American lives or sparking a nuclear conflict. It mentions Ukraine hundreds of times, and it explicitly discusses the same economic warfare tactics we’re seeing today like sanctions and attacking Russia’s energy interests in Europe (the latter of which Berletic points out is also being used to bolster US dominance over its vassals in the EU).The paper even explicitly advocates continuing to threaten NATO membership with Ukraine to draw out an aggressive response from Moscow, saying, “While NATO’s requirement for unanimity makes it unlikely that Ukraine could gain membership in the foreseeable future, Washington’s pushing this possibility could boost Ukrainian resolve while leading Russia to redouble its efforts to forestall such a development.”President Biden has made calls for regime change in Moscow that can’t even really be called thinly disguised, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has openly said that the plan is to use this war to “weaken” Russia, which other US officials have told the press is indeed the policy. Comments from the Biden administration continually make it clear that the US alliance is buckling down to keep this war going for years to come, which would fit in nicely with Washington’s known track record of deliberately drawing Russia into military quagmires against US proxies in both Afghanistan and Syria.So make no mistake, behind all the phony hand-wringing and flag-waving, the US-centralized empire is getting exactly what it wants from this conflict. It gets to overextend Russia militarily and financially, promote its narratives around the world, rehabilitate the image of US interventionism, expand internet censorship, expand militarily, bolster control over its European client states, and all it costs is a little pretend empire money that gets funneled into the military-industrial complex anyway.Which is why when it looked like peace was at risk of breaking out in the early days of the conflict, the empire sent in Boris Johnson to tell Zelensky that even if he is ready for the war to end, his partners to the west were not.Russia and Ukraine agreed to a negotiated settlement to end the war in April, but British Prime Minister Boris Johnson intervened to stop the peace deal.The US and EU instead escalated the proxy war, as the Biden admin admitted, to try to “weaken” Moscowhttps://t.co/xsCvovq8Km— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) September 4, 2022So as you can see, the notion that this war is “unprovoked” is a fart-brained fairy tale for idiots and children; there’s no excuse for a grown adult with internet access and functioning brain matter to ever say such a thing. If China had backed a coup in Mexico and now had a loyal vassal in Mexico City who was letting Beijing distribute weapons along the US border while continually shelling English-speaking separatists in Baja California who are seeking US annexation, there’s no question that Washington would consider this a provocation and would respond accordingly. You can tell me that’s not true, but we’d both know you’re lying.But as Chomsky said, the press are still spouting this “unprovoked” nonsense anyway.”Russia is widely believed to have been taken aback by the West’s assertive and unified response to its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine,” reads a CNBC article published just minutes prior to this writing.”The diplomatic visit underlines the importance of the Russian relationship for China, even in the face of international blow back against Moscow after its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine earlier this year,” reads a new report from CNN hot off the presses.”It was an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country,” a source is quoted as saying in another CNN article published a few hours ago.It is, as Chomsky observed, really freaky how hard they’ve been hitting us with this line every time the invasion of Ukraine is mentioned. It seems like every time it comes up they’re obligated to say it, like how Michael Jackson had a quota for how often MTV hosts were obligated to refer to him as “The King of Pop Michael Jackson” when his name was mentioned.In the mass media you’re not allowed to talk about the known US/NATO/Ukraine actions which experts have been warning for many years would lead us to where we’re at. You’re only allowed to say Putin attacked Ukraine completely unprovoked, in a vacuum, solely because he is evil and hates freedom. And you have to do it while saying the word “unprovoked” at every opportunity.NATO chief admits that NATO allies have been training and arming Ukraine since 2014.Something to remember whenever Western media refers to an “unprovoked” invasion. pic.twitter.com/SGHF46yayz— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) August 29, 2022Empire apologists get upset when you talk about the fact that this war was provoked because a large amount of empire apologia in 2022 is built around pretending that provocation just isn’t a thing. By some trick of Orwellian doublethink, this concept we’ve all lived our entire lives knowing about and understanding is now suddenly a freakish and ridiculous invention of the Kremlin.We’re all guilty of doing the things we knowingly choose to do. If I choose to provoke someone into doing something bad, then they’re guilty of choosing to do the bad thing, but I am also guilty of provoking them. I’m not saying anything new here; this is the plot behind any movie or show with a sneaky or manipulative villain, and it’s been a part of our storytelling since ancient times. Nobody has ever walked out of Shakespeare’s Othello thinking that maybe Iago was just an innocent bystander who was trying to help out his friends.Most of us learn that provocation is real as children with siblings, kicking the other under the table or whatever to provoke a loud outburst, and we’ve understood it ever since. But in 2022 everyone’s pretending that this extremely basic, kindergarten-level concept is some kind of bizarre, alien gibberish. It’s intensely stupid, and it needs to stop.Empire apologists will also argue that saying Russia was provoked into invading by the US empire is like saying a rape victim provoked her rapist by wearing a tight skirt, or a battered wife provoked her abuser by disobeying him. And as a survivor of multiple rapes and an abusive relationship I must say I find it extremely offensive when people compare blaming the most powerful empire that has ever existed for its well-documented aggressions to blaming victims of rape and domestic violence. The poor widdle globe-spanning empire is not comparable to a rape victim, and if you find yourself thinking that it is it’s time to re-think your entire worldview.It’s not okay to be a grown adult in September of 2022 and still say the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. You’ve got a brain between your ears and an entire internet of information at your fingertips. Use them.”The US military budget was already more than three times more than the next-largest spender (China), more than the next 12 countries combined. Just randomly toss another $45 billion onto the pile. The excuses: inflation and Ukraine. What about the living standard of Americans?” (-Glenn Greenwald)Immobility Plan 2035 – Activist Post Immobility Plan 2035 – Activist PostOp-Ed by Gary M. Galles. In 2015, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced his Vision Zero plan to eliminate the more than 200 annual non-driver traffic fatalities by 2025. In concert, the City Council adopted Mobility Plan 2035, a 20-year initiative to remove automobile lanes and make more room for bus and bike lanes to upgrade pedestrian and cyclist safety.www.activistpost.comhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpASSqz1hGc Ukrainegate impeachment saga worsens US-Russia Cold WarPushback with Aaron Maté As the House opens impeachment hearings for President Trump, Professor Stephen F. Cohen warns that the US military assistance at the heart of Ukrainegate escalates the US-Russia Cold War. Guest: Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton University, contributing editor …www.youtube.com“Liberalism is not leftism. Liberalism is reformism. And capitalism and imperialism cannot be reformed.” (-Danny Haiphong on the red carpet diversity muppets who pretend to care about healthcare, eviction moratorium, universal housing, student debt forgiveness, demilitarization of police during election, then vote for more war and giveaways for billionaires when Pelosi orders them to) Autocracy, American-Style – Consortium News Autocracy, American-Style – Consortium NewsAs a deterrent threat and control it fails for two reasons. For one thing, the frivolous approach taken by many in Congress in recent years has tarnished its dignity and seriousness.consortiumnews.com“This monstrosity destroyed Libya”. (-Danny Haiphong on Hillary Clinton) “Haiti and Honduras too.” (-Ahimsa Mediation)”The U.S is not only waging a war on other nations via sanctions & interventions, it’s also waging an economic war on its own people. The sooner U.S Americans realize their enemy isn’t people in other nations but the fascists in power, the sooner they can begin to stop the empire.” (-Fiorella Isabel) Maximillian Alvarez on Twitter: “Keeping the #LaborDay solidarity going, ICYMI on @WorkingPod I spoke with Amazon worker & union organizer @AmazonUnionofKY. Matt was fired in suspected retaliation for his organizing. Help spread the word & donate to his survival fund if you can ❤️ ✊🏾” / Twitter Maximillian Alvarez on Twitter“Keeping the #LaborDay solidarity going, ICYMI on @WorkingPod I spoke with Amazon worker & union organizer @AmazonUnionofKY. Matt was fired in suspected retaliation for his organizing. Help spread the word & donate to his survival fund if you can ❤️ ✊🏾”twitter.com “YouTube has censored@Action4Assange’s latest panel raising awareness about the plight of political prisoner Julian Assange. Viewed must sign in then pass through two baseless warnings about “inappropriate” content. https://youtu.be/acR0t6mjwAk” (-Max Blumenthal) “Don’t let them fool you. The so-called richest nation in the world could fund healthcare and housing for all, but it doesn’t want to because then it couldn’t exploit poor and working class people.” (-Ryan Knight) “If Julian Assange is silenced, others will also be gagged either directly or by the fear of persecution and prosecution.”—@StefSimanowitz@amnesty#FreeAssangeNOW#DropTheCharges “Biden is literally to the right of Henry Kissinger and people are trying to say he is ‘the most progressive president in history’ lmao.” (-Benjamin Carollo) Roger Waters begs Olena Zelenska to “stop the slaughter” (faroutmagazine.co.uk) Roger Waters begs Olena Zelenska to “stop the slaughter” in new open letterfaroutmagazine.co.uk“Assange had a stroke in the courtroom and no court official even noticed. That tells you all you need to know: A victim of torture – suffering the health consequences of torture – should not be extradited or even tried. He should be freed.” (-Dr. Jill Stein) https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Joint-Statement-on-Discovery-Disputes-Combined.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m97-oPi5_rI SND Live w/Whitney WebbPowered by Restream https://restream.io/ Buckle up for another high test, wide ranging interview with the one and only Whitney Webb! We open the show by discussing two of Whitney’s latest articles at Unlimited Hangout- while being interrupted by a potential intelligence contractor with a leafblower. Whitney Webb: https://unlimitedhangout.com/www.youtube.comFREE THE PRESS!!!WikiLeaks@wikileaksNelson Mandela:”No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails” Alleged #Vault7 source Joshua Schulte (whose retrial began on Tuesday), held in ‘barbaric conditions in US prison’, in an inhumane existence, “worse than death”https://pix11.com/news/national-news/ex-cia-engineer-in-wikileaks-case-says-hes-incarcerated-like-an-animal/Ex-CIA engineer in WikiLeaks case says he’s incarcerated like an animal – PIX11NEW YORK — A former CIA software engineer charged with leaking government secrets to WikiLeaks says it’s cruel and unusual punishment that he’s awaiting trial in solitary confinement, housed …pix11.comIn Vault 7 Leak Trial Schulte Crosses FBI Agent On How Secret CIA Site Has Visitors Center, Pompeo (substack.com) In Vault 7 Leak Trial Schulte Crosses FBI Agent On How Secret CIA Site Has Visitors Center, PompeoBy Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Thread Song BBC – Decrypt – LightRead – Honduras – Pod Schulte Trial Tale on Patreon SDNY COURTHOUSE, June 15 – When jury selection was completed for the retrial of accused CIA Vault 7 leaker Joshua Schulte, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Judge Jesse M. Furman told the jurors, Do not read or say anything about the case.matthewrussellleeicp.substack.comPriti Patel, hear this loud and clear: Julian Assange must not be handed over to the US | Duncan Campbell | The Guardian Priti Patel, hear this loud and clear: Julian Assange must not be handed over to the US | Duncan Campbell – The GuardianA Julian Assange supporter outside Westminster magistrates’ court where an extradition order was made on 20 April. Photograph: Tayfun Salcı/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstockwww.theguardian.comJOHN KIRIAKOU: A Whistleblower’s Agony – scheerpost.com JOHN KIRIAKOU: A Whistleblower’s Agony – scheerpost.com(Vectorportal, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons) By John Kiriakou / Consortium News. A C.I.A. whistleblower languishes awaiting trial in a federal prison under inhumane conditions and almost nobody is paying attention.. Joshua Schulte is a former C.I.A. hacker, one of those computer geniuses whose job it is to work his way into the computer systems of our country’s enemies in support of some of …scheerpost.com“Every person in the United States should be able to claim Raytheon as a dependent on their taxes.” (-Drop The MIC)”The big winners of the Biden Presidency have been Pfizer, Moderna, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. If you think Biden is doing a good job you shouldn’t be mocking Trumpers” (-Black In The Empire)”At a Council on Foreign Relations forum about “fake news,” former Editor at Time Magazine Richard Stengel directly states that he supports the use of propaganda on American citizens – then shuts the session down when challenged about how propaganda is used against the third world…Ben Decker also labels the alleged leak of documents last year showing offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands associated with Emmanuel Macron as fake news, despite the fact that the leak’s authenticity has never been definitively confirmed or debunked.” (-William Craddick) “Biden is spending money, but he is not spending money on the people. He is spending on the military and proxy wars in order to expand U.S. imperialism and enrich U.S. oligarchs at our expense.” (-Ryan Knight)”That Biden is credibly called a socialist by electorally viable congressional candidates who clearly have no idea what socialism actually is, to me indicates that our Overton window is now centered somewhere between Genghis Khan and Mussolini.” (-mousdrvr on Twitter) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eB3kQCETjU ‘Quiet Quitting’ Is Rocking Corporate AmericaThe corporate media have taken up a new narrative in their constant battle to protect the business world from the demands of workers. Quiet quitting is the act of doing exactly what you’ve been hired to do at work and no more. The rich hate it and that’s why the talking heads in the media are working overtime to let the public know that it …www.youtube.comYou might even find that expanding consciousness in one way helps your ability to expand it in other ways. You might find for example that expanding your awareness of how your own mind operates gives you more awareness of how other people’s minds operate, and how they can be manipulated by powerful people using propaganda. You may also find for example that expanding your awareness of the plight of people less socioeconomically and geopolitically advantaged than yourself expands your own personal awareness of the various socioeconomic and geopolitical dynamics which have given rise to the way your life is right now. You may also find for example that expanding your consciousness of your own inner processes gives you a serenity which makes it easier to look squarely at the horrors you encounter when expanding your awareness of what’s going on in the world, and gives you the humility to see that you are not fully separate from those horrors.The game of humanity will keep improving as long as our consciousness keeps expanding. I’d go so far as saying that’s the only thing that can cause things to get better, and that failing to do it guarantees things will get worse.Like a video game, I believe we humans are free to either win this game or lose it. We will either keep expanding our awareness of what’s really going on in this weird universe our mothers birthed us into, or we will wipe ourselves out via nuclear war or ecocide.Either way, if you choose to accept what’s being said here, we do each have the power to make things better by exactly one unit of human effort. We can help spread awareness of what’s going on in the world by fighting the lies we’ve been told by the powerful and drawing attention to things the powerful would rather keep hidden. We can help spread awareness of the human condition with art and with empathy. We can expand our own consciousness by getting very curious about how we operate and what makes us tick, and being very real with ourselves about what we find in that exploration.Whatever you choose to believe about all this, it’s your adventure. I wish you the best in your travels.(-Cait Johnstone) I think we are constantly faced with the same decision. The decision to be blindly obedient to authority versus the decision to try and change things by fighting the powers that be is always, throughout history, the only decision.Abbie Hoffman Chris Hedges: Let’s Stop Pretending America Is a Functioning Democracy (mintpressnews.com) Chris Hedges: Let’s Stop Pretending America Is a Functioning DemocracyP RINCETON, NEW JERSEY () — There is a fatal disconnect between a political system that promises democratic equality and freedom while carrying out socioeconomic injustices that result in …www.mintpressnews.com ” Here’s how the US government built a fake Ukrainian “resistance” funded thru the Nat’l Endowment for Democracy, Solidarity Ctr & other CIA-linked orgs, & here’s why DSA members are promoting this “resistance” to justify imperialist war vs Russia.” (-Eric London) The Democratic Socialists of America and the invention of the pro-imperialist “Ukrainian resistance” – World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)The Democratic Socialists of America and the invention of the pro-imperialist “Ukrainian resistance” – World Socialist Web SiteAshley Smith (Twitter) The claim that Ukraine is a “colony” of Russian “imperialism” is an intentional historical slight-of-hand. It bypasses the Russian Revolution of 1917, which …www.wsws.org“Think about what scummy liars these Democrats are. They write books boasting about how they bullied Cuba not to let Snowden pass through, thus trapping him in Russia. Then they use his presence in Russia to imply he’s a spy: when they *know* he’s there because they forced that.” (-Glenn Greenwald) “A virulent manipulator’s entire social existence revolves around influencing the narratives people have about what’s going on in their circle in a way that benefits the manipulator.” (-Caitlin Johnstone) “The censorship against me continues. It appears@Spotify has not only deleted my podcast “Moment of Clarity,” they have now deleted my artist profile and my 2 comedy albums from years ago. I was given no warning or reason for this. I also learned recently that a writer for a mainstream outlet personally tried to include positive mentions of me & my work in multiple articles & had them yanked out by her editor. Even just a positive sentence about me is forbidden in mainstream outlets. Simply for being anti-war and anti-imperialist, I am the most-censored comedian in America. You can keep supporting my work by becoming a member at LeeCamp dot net.” (-Lee Camp)
“Joe Biden, don’t come to Los Angeles like you’ve been some vanguard for human rights!”@CornelWest goes off on the crimes of the U.S. empire, and calls for democracy from the bottom-up rather than neoliberal identity politics. “Biden did not send $54 billion in military aid to help Ukraine. He sent it to fight a proxy war with Russia “down to the last Ukrainian.” (-Danny Haiphong)”The two established wings of the oligarchy, the old Republican Party represented by politicians such as Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee, and the Bush family, are now united with the Democratic Party elite into one ruling political entity. The ruling parties were already in lock step for decades on the major issues, including: war, trade deals, austerity, the militarization of police, prisons, government surveillance and assaults on civil liberties. They worked in tandem to pervert and destroy democratic institutions on behalf of the rich and corporations. They desperately work together now to stave off the revolt by enraged and betrayed white working men and women… (-Chris Hedges)
Usually when you ask somebody in college why they are there, they’ll tell you it’s to get an education. The truth of it is, they are there to get the degree so that they can get ahead in the rat race. Too many college radicals are two-timing punks. The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it.Abbie Hoffman “The US-centralized empire is a giant macrocosm of this entire dynamic. It pours vast amounts of energy into narrative control in the form of propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the war on journalism. It weaves nonstop narratives about how great it is and how horrible its enemies are. And it fears being seen more than anything in the world.The vast globe-spanning power structure that is loosely centralized around the United States is a powerful military force and a powerful economic force, but its most potent weapon by far is its ability to control the narrative about what’s happening in the world. The use of oligarchic media, Silicon Valley and Hollywood to manipulate public thought and thereby control the way people think, act and vote at mass scale all around the world is unlike anything ever seen in any empire in history.Propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening. Censorship only works if it doesn’t draw attention to the information being censored. The US empire’s nonstop campaign to control the world’s dominant narratives only works if it isn’t in the spotlight of public scrutiny. This is why those who draw attention to these things are smeared, demonized, censored, marginalized, imprisoned and worse by the managers of empire.Manipulators hate to be seen, but if you ever find yourself in a relationship with one, your ability to escape depends upon your seeing them. This extreme clash of interests often brings up white hot rage in the manipulator which can be frightening and dangerous.And I think humanity is entering that stage of the relationship with the US empire. A manipulator who’s just beginning to be seen by a few more pairs of eyes than it would like, causing flickerings of panic to begin to surface. Because once those eyes see what’s hidden underneath the veil of narrative manipulation, they don’t often look away. If anything, they tend to point and draw more attention to it.It’s a scary time to be alive. But it’s also fascinating. Unlike anything that has ever happened on this planet before.I look forward to finding out if we escape.” (-Cait Johnstone)You are talking to a leftist. I believe in the redistribution of wealth and power in the world. I believe in universal hospital care for everyone. I believe that we should not have a single homeless person in the richest country in the world. And I believe that we should not have a C.I.A. that goes around overwhelming governments and assassinating political leaders, working for tight oligarchies around the world to protect the tight oligarchy here at home.Abbie Hoffman The inevitable end to global white world supremacy is driving some in the West mad. It is not enough that the people of Ukraine are being sacrificed, the U.S. is making dangerous moves with China & Taiwan. (-Ajamu Baraka)Over centuries of dynasties, upheavals and revolutions, powerful people have learned that the best way to dominate a population is to manipulate them into serving your interests while giving them the illusion of freedom and control. The invention of mass media has facilitated this new form of tyranny, as has the emergence of psychology as a field of study. These two factors have combined together to give rise to the steadily advancing science of modern propaganda.This is why the world is as it is: because the people have been psychologically manipulated at mass scale away from using the power of their numbers to create systems that benefit them instead of a few powerful sociopaths.This is the source of all our major problems. Understanding it, and finding ways to overcome it, is the solution. The only reason they’ve been able to control us in this way is because they understand all the many ways our minds can be manipulated better than we do.(-Cait Johnstone)Call ’em what you want-the deep state or powers that be or one percent or oligarchy or permanent ruling class, but you gotta start admitting the shadow government and it’s media are going to crazy lengths to control our communications whether that’s through outlawing assembly, censoring dissident journalists, spying on our electronic conversations and phonecalls, deplatforming and demonestizing us for straying off their preferred narrative, or trotting Disposition Matrix Millionaire Obama out to talk pretty about need to “detoxify” the internet discourse, which is coded newspeak for clampdowns on anybody opposed to endless war and panopticon corporate wiretaps. People who go to college never heard of Cointelpro nd if they have, they can not seem to remotely contemplate that it still exists, they think the SQUAD is gonna save ’em with pro noun preferences, happy slogans, and empty justice tweets. Russiagate serves as all purpose ruling class cover story now. Same way they blamed everything on boogeymen Hussian/Gaddafi/Bin Ladin/Assad/ISIS under Bush/Cheney/Obama. Just tell ’em a boogeyman is coming for their freedom fries.The FBI knew RussiaGate was a lie — but hid that truth (nypost.com) The FBI knew RussiaGate was a lie — but hid that truthThe FBI knew the Trump-Russia collusion narrative was utter bunk even as it suggested otherwise to Congress, the courts and the public early in 2017. Evidence revealed by special counsel John …nypost.comBats Should Not Be Blamed for COVID, Say Israeli Researchers + More • Children’s Health Defense (childrenshealthdefense.org)Bats Should Not Be Blamed for COVID, Say Israeli Researchers + MoreThe Defender’s COVID NewsWatch provides a roundup of the latest headlines related to the SARS CoV-2 virus, including its origins and COVID vaccines.childrenshealthdefense.orgIf you start researching the Davos billionaires, Bilderberg, World Economic Forum and the Klaus Scwab-Kissinger-Bill Gates transhumanist agenda being openly promoted by John Kerry, Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau and many others, of course it is horrifying that the wealthiest one percent of the one percent plan on enslaving humanity with microchips and cashless society control grid, surveillance-tech capitalism authoritarian one world government shit, and that it’s not just some whackjob Alex Jones hysteria being used to sell rightwing militia survivalist swag and vitamins anymore, but I’ll tell ya, between you and me, just us kids here, all my ex associates ALREADY seem like unfeeling, programmed droid, dystopian, transhuman cyborgs. They just obey the fucking tv, they never think for themselves, or read, and slavishly imitate whatever they watch on TV. Whatever “The Latest Thang” is. Netflix, which Obama and Chelle are involved with, is all some creepy, sick secret society programming-you can confirm that just clicking through their “programs”. I don’t watch tv or believe very much of what is firehosed at us via the mockingbird monopoly media. I think the emperors are having fun at your expense-telling you to go buy duct tape and shit. For freedom. Everytime I turn on the computer or flip through the tv hypnoscreen, I see the propagandists are still eager beaver milking the whole hog fuck out of that bullshit Thank a KKKOP capital hill psy-op story designed to manufacture populist consent for outlawing protests. Man oh man, how can people pat themselves on the back all day for their critical thinking skills supposedly cultivated at the prestigious, prohibitively expensive. posh sports university in the Pacific Northwest, and then, immediately fall for this dummy Qshaman HYSTERIA? All you hear on Pig Media nowadays, is “Putin!!!” is somehow, other side of the world responsible, not only for people disliking Hillary Clinton, but also, now for Murkkkans corporations price gouging inflation ripoffs and greedhead jackedup rents, or that Trump’s maga protest was an “insurrection” so Murkkkans should just give up their rights to protest and stand in line at Best Buy for the next round of programming updates and gadgets and obey the Davos techlords for science. All your AOC worshipping shitlib friends even love openly evil Lyn Cheney now cause she said “Orange Man Bad” and “insurrection” one million times. I thought the George Floyd protests where the undercover proud boys burned down police stations looked more like proper insurrections than when some love a man in uniform hillbillies broke a window and climbed a wall, painted their chest and messed up Pelosi’s desk, but I believe in free speech. These illuminati puppets they got infiltrating all the governments worldwide were trained at the Kissinger/Schwab Fascist School but people with Ukraine flags on their falsebook profiles never even heard of any of that. Would not believe you even if you tried to tell ’em. They got some headline today about how useless pants suit, Kopmala is gonna be “TACKLING ONLINE ABUSE”. Of course as Bill Gates and his World Economic Forum secret society friends keep changing definitions of words in the dictionary to promote their Reset plan, the meaning of abuse will be efficiently altered. “ABUSE” is when no soul bureaucrats like Kopmala keep forced-labor slaving, non violent drug offenders in for profit prisons as long as possible, to increase shareholder value. “ABUSE” is when you incarcerate black parents for truant teenagers skipping schools that are fuckedup target ranges nowadays anyways. “ABUSE” is when you send mercenaries to kidnap a publisher from a foreign embassy and lock him up in a torture gulag for years, causing him to have a stroke, for embarrassing the criminal enterprise of murderous imperialism. These shitlibs gonna change the meaning of the word “ABUSE” so it becomes anybody speaking truth about power. This is the kind of bullshit you have to resist. NOT some college asshole disapproving of a comedian. That vote blue no matter who bullshit mighta worked out for some people who were already rich and just worried about poor people disobeying some authority figure, but the majority of us are falling deeper and deper into dangerous poverty while the middle class people keep watching tv. As Ryan knight said, “Biden’s approval rating keeps falling because the people aren’t buying his lies anymore about how “great the economy” is when they can’t afford housing, healthcare, and groceries.” Matzo Ball Dan adds, “The embarrassing attempt at spinning this economic catastrophe by calling it ‘Putin’s price hike’ isn’t convincing anyone.” THESE are the kinda discussions Obama and Kopmala’s billionaire bosses have ordered them to help eradicate.Activism Derailed, Drugs As Weapons Against Us, With John Potash (rumble.com) Punishing patients in pain won’t reduce opioid deaths – Chicago Sun-Times (suntimes.com) Punishing patients in pain won’t reduce opioid deathsThe Trump administration wants to cut opioid prescriptions by another third in the next three years. What could go wrong? We already know.chicago.suntimes.comCanada’s now going fully BIO-FASCIST right before our eyes (substack.com) Canada’s now going fully BIO-FASCIST right before our eyesThey’re vaccinating for monkeypox, phasing out free speech online, starving wayward doctors, and planning to impound the people’s guns (while making opiates, cocaine and MDMA readily available)markcrispinmiller.substack.comCanadians DON’T have an “absolute right to own private property,” says Fidelito’s Justice Minister (substack.com) Canadians DON’T have an “absolute right to own private property,” says Fidelito’s Justice MinisterJustin “Trudeau” may worship Queen Elizabeth, but his heart belongs to Daddymarkcrispinmiller.substack.comajamu baraka – Twitter Search / Twitter
Ya know I reached out to some people who’d known my teenage best pal, HIS ALSO PURPLE BADNESS, COWBOY BOBBY CLOYD in more recent years cause he was just one of the real right-on, supportive, lovely ole homies I never, never expected to leave the planet before I did, no one seems to have any demos by his old bands SHINE or THE HEALERS which is a real drag, but I met one of his local midwestern colleagues online and liked his band and thought I’d share it with you. Dandy – YouTube
The illegal and immoral US blockade of Cuba prevents food, medicine and essential goods from reaching the Cuban people. Canada should join Mexico and other states in calling for an end to this aggressive, unjustified violation of international law.
Police have been cosplaying for years as the “thin line between safety and complete anarchy” when we have countless studies that show the safest communities are the ones with the most resources and not police.
“Yeah I’m just starting to play again the had to move my ulnar nerve(funny bone) to the side of my arm and carpel tunnel procedure to unlock my right hand it has helped I can hold a pick again and my Rhythm generator is returning. I’ve been playing a 5string guitar tuned to Keith G and am just to the point where I don’t sound like a stones song so when I get another amp I’ll send you nasty riffage 2.0 lol the last 2 years have been brutal I had to sell my yellow guitar and amp truck and everything else of value you know back to zero…again.” (-Nasty Bastard of The Bastards)
“It’s shocking that a U.S. president would involve the FBI and Homeland Security in efforts to quash dissent. Has no one in the White House read Thomas Paine or Orwell or Huxley or Heinlein or Arthur Koestler or Hannah Arendt or Solzhenitsyn? What do they think the lessons were that we were supposed to have learned from Watergate? From McCarthyism? From Vietnam?”
I used to communicate with Susan Sarandon on Fascist Book-she quit and I got froze out. She remains an inspiration. Brothers and Sisters and Friends Of The Revolution, Stay Wild! Stay Free!
” (-Jory Micah)
Massive country-wide blackout in 
If you want to keep supporting my work, check out 
of these warnings, from Kissinger to Mearsheimer.— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) 
Veglam 