“Shitlibs once again melting down because Noam Chomsky is 100% right about Ukraine war propaganda and the hypocrisy of the west” (-Revolutionary Blackout Network)
“…the FBI once again interfered in a presidential election by bolstering the fabricated notion that Hunter Biden’s laptop was possibly ‘Russian disinformation,’ thereby justifying unprecedented censorship of reporting about it.” (-Aaron Mate’)https://mate.substack.com/p/in-fbi-vs-tr
CORPORATE DEEPSTATE FUCKERS FUCKIN WITH THE ALGORITHIMS
I guess I been Writing too much since getting locked outta Falsebook by Zuck and his Langley spook cronies, but I suppose I just feel a bit powerless about all the bad corruption and wars and shit I see goin’ down and the most I can probably do is gently shake summa my former associates from their big pharama numb hypnoslumbers, even that much is a long shot, but as Lennon sang, “we’re all doin’ what we can…” My old lady might help me put one of those Substack things together but for now, I just wanna say thanks to all our friends and fellow glamrarchists for giving me a mic and a soapbox, here. I feel like it’s just us damaged dropout malcontents and aging androgynes against the fatcat fascists and evil billionaires and all their baffled tv watching slaves.
Hey man I can’t believe I’m sayin’ this, but much like Ajamu Baraka, the social media monopolists have not only censored, Facebook jailed, and finally, locked me outta their platform for being Anti-war, but where I used to get hundreds of “likes” on every fuckin’ post, gradually, over the past couple years, it looks like I only get one or two likes or reposts. I get that the fix is in, but do me a solid, as the kids say, and if you agree with anything I got to say here, “like” and repost and subscribe just in case any of it might work, so my webzine homies can know you value my rebellious ravings on some level. Thank You Friends.
TROUBLE BOYS
I guess it was my sixteenth birthday, when my arty downtown high school girlfriend brought these two hardcore/goth mohawked punks over to meet me. Some asshole local stoner heavy metal guys had crashed my no alcohol attic party and stomped loudly down the step dad’s stairs kicking or knocking heirloom Christmas decorations down the steps and disappearing an old bass amp on their way out, so my stepdad threw me out again, and I was happy to be free of him. I started hanging out with the mohawked guys who had a crappy goth band. I say crappy, cause that’s how I felt about it back then, but now, I see how creative and innovative they were with such limited technology. They were doing like a Ministry/Skinny Puppy thing on a no budget, D.I.Y. level and we would convene nightly in the older guitarist’s nasty rodent infested, loudly clanging furnace basement studio apartment nightly and he’d play us old seventies imported punk vinyl and we’d drink beer. I was already on my second make believe bullshit garage band with the metalhead guitar players and we could never find drummers where we lived cause we were not into Bon Jovi or even Led Zeppelin. I got along with a pothead drummer who went to the Catholic school and we used to walk home together, but he was friends with some real sadistic heavy metal goons, and burnt somebody’s house down and got away with it, and was afraid to be seen with me by the metalheads, so I never really trusted the kid, and looking back, I’m glad I chose to stay away from him. The older mohawk was really fascinated with Charles Manson so all his artwork always had like a visual reference to say, Barker Ranch, or something. I had grown up loving the Doors so I had always felt a calling to the desert, and now I live in the ghost town South West, I get to see stuff like a skunk just chilling with my outdoor feral cat friends on the side of our disintegrating trailer this morning. Some pimp named Red was said to have burnt down the guitarist’s low income housing apartment, but I had become good friends with the mohawk kids. One went to the downtown high school with me and my arty girlfriend but was given a wider berth for dresscode violations than me because he was honor roll and his mom sold real estate. He grew up and got into real estate. I’m still violating the dress codes.
Being an empty pocketed pauper with many responsibilities, it is seldom that I am able to indulge in some selfish purchase like a book or hat or something, but I’m aware of those Alvin Gibbs books-I know they’re out there, and the “Trouble Boys” book about The Replacements, and yeah, of course, I am kindof coveting those tomes. I often say that as a crazy kid, it was Dramarama and The Replacements who gave false hope to me and my gang of underage beer drinking record store clerks and alcoholic janitors that if we composed a diverse oeuvre of songs we might also be discovered and recorded and able to make a living performing shows, making record albums, and selling black skull t shirts from the back of our scuzzy black van-that was the popular mythology, anyway, pre Nirvana. There was a whole network of basement show and bandhouse venues, college radio stations, and medium sized magazines about underground music like CMJ and Alternative Press and Flipside and Maximum Rocknroll. Soul Asylum and the Goo Goo Dolls were two other examples of Replacements inspired garage rockers who broke into the mainstream. I loved the whole Replacements story because it was so easy for us to identify with all those characters-they were so much like my lot. I had an older guitar player who was living like a crusty punk, not bathing very often, kinda being a little antisicial and self destructive, who drank alot, but I knew he had real potential and artistic ability that bled out when he played guitar. I remember the first time hearing he had learned the Brian James solo from “I Never Believed” rather than just letting our other kid, the flash “Young Wayne Kramer” learn the part.
When half my band fled the Midwest and got convenience store jobs on the East coast, we met a kid named Jake who was a writer. In the words of the Great And Terrible Heavy Metal Impresario, Sleazegrinder, “he’s an even better writer than US!” Jake never officially joined the band but my lead guitar hero taught him how to play bass and he joined a more popular local band, but contributed many lengthy screeds to my subversive fanzines back in the day, before joining the nine to five world in later years. He shared my love of The Clash, The Replacements, and Hunter S. Thompson, we’d stay up all night long talking about resistance subcultures and him and his gutter punk girlfriend Theis would sing background vocals for me and my dueling guitarists in their big Park Drive bachelor pad. Summa the songs we wrote back then have been covered by other people. Even after those guys were on their way into proper adulthood, me and the crazy rhythm guitar player were still stubbornly trying to get discovered with our heartfelt garage punk Songs About Drinking! I kept trying to encourage the lost lads back into our broken dream, but they were already gone for good. The Replacements pissed all the Adult World people off at “Saturday Night Live” and on some Tom Petty tour. They drank. So many of their songs spoke so deeply to my generation, ya know even the squares who followed the prescribed path to cubicles and cable and purchasing Glade Air Fresheners and Dyson vacuum cleaners from Target on Sunday loved shit like “Unsatisfied” and “Answering Machine”. I’ve seen Joan Jett bring everybody at the county fair together-from the pink haired LGBT kids to the old bikers singing, “Androgynous”, which everybody now thinks she wrote. Of course I relate to Bob Stinson, many of my closest friends were tortured clowns and soulful guitarslingers. I was not as wild about the stuff they did without Bob Stinson, though all the tunes Paul wrote about band breakups and shit like say, “When It Began” and “Happy Town” and “Rocknroll Ghost” all got tattooed on my heart n soul.
I could always identify with The Replacements, until Paul started phoning in stuff like a professional pandering power balladeer. I liked all his early insecure romantic shit better than his overconfident actress wooing stardom shit. Me and a guy named Brett Milano, I think he was some bigfish Boston Rock critic, were both actually pogo jumping for joy in the front row, when we saw Westerberg with Dave Minehan from the Neighborhoods covering “Daydream Believer” at a tightly packed sweaty show in Central Square. By the time all those Professional Replacements Imitators came along-you know, like half the bands in “Big Takeover” magazine and EVERY band in “No Depression”, I was becoming increasingly cynical about the value of showbiz and celebrity and even the songwriting itself cause it was all becoming so rat race-y. People I grew up with just wanted to become “popular” and ride that fucking awful, loathsome, fuckedup alternative hoax grunge train no matter where it went-they’d join generic bands with dudes who had nothing to say. Whoever had access to pay to play “popularity”, post Nirvana, all the bands became so contrived and formulaic and insincere and eventually, every band was consolidated into just the fucking Foo Fighters, all that was left of rocknroll on the airwaves was Foo Fighters-the ultimate triumph of goober mediocrity. An emo kid band came out and called themselves Plain White T Shirts. They did a really overtly precious tribute to Westerberg and company, not only were all the middle class college people in the ya’allternative public radio world imitating Westerberg like those Wilco and Uncle Tupelo dudes, but now all these horrible fucking suburbanite emo kids were, too. I made friends with a crazy alcoholic bartender we’ll call A2-he’s dead now, but he used to wear this leather cowboy hat I gave him that made him look like a real pirate, and he had a dart team called the Whiskey Dicks, was something of a pool shark-he was the biggest Replacements fan I ever met, he’d always give me quarters for the jukebox and want me to play “Here Comes A Regular” at the little old man, dirty, dark divebar where we were both artists in residence for a couple of years, in our mid to late twenties. Like 25-27. I sure have missed that guy and most of our common friends who have also long since passed. I say my youth ended in ’95 when my high school friend overdosed like two weeks before he was set to graduate from a prestigious college way out in Seattle, but the next two years after that, I spent it with about seven or eight hard drinking, hard living, extremely soulful, kind, misunderstood, and extremely talented people at a disreputable hoodlum bar in the Midwest, all of us were kindof haunted and traumatized, embittered and broken hearted but making each other laugh through the tears and even dance in the streets. One by one, they all disappeared from this world but I still write songs about all of them that nobody ever hears. My wife told me the one I wrote a couple weeks ago was not as good as the stuff I used to write about ’em. I guess I never got over it. Any of it. And yeah I used to be better than I am now. Don’t you know who I think I used to be?
WHAT KINDOF EVIL CORPORATE OVERLORDS WOULD INTENTIONALLY ASSASSINATE THE REBEL SPIRIT OF REAL ROCKNROLL
Sorry Slaves, dude in the tall hat and the dress and rhinestone slippers who never holds any of his big cult child abusers accountable and lives in a city of gold is not more important than any truth teller with soul. One thing I always loved about Sinead is how she always insisted we can all sing undermining the whole Simon Cowell proper pitch Olympics. I kinda objected when she eviscerated Aerosmith for goin ‘down in the elevator but free passed Eazy E and Ice Cube, but now I am old, I see where she was coming from. Sinead got me into Public Enemy actually. Kristofferson was one of my favorite lyricists so when he came out onstage to defend her when Dylan failed to, made me like him even more. In the years since they killed Tupac, ya know all we’ve had are these dumb model robots like “Marky” Mark Wahlberg and Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber and Harry Styles and Miley Cyrus who they pummel into superfame with their bullshit mockingbird media first, and then pay Rolling Stone and Spin wankers to artistically legitimize later. I think they all suck so bad. Man I miss real artists with soul power like Tupac and Sinead an awful lot. I said it before, Fuck Dr. Phil and all assholes like him.
Man, I miss my old teacher-mentor-filmmaker-girlfriend, Lisa, sometimes. Don’t even know if she is alive or dead, she took me in off the street and protected me and I’m still sorry about the shit I did wrong under her watch. The Lower East Side was still a magical world back then.
HIPSTERS SUCK!
We had such a good staff at Tower Records-the mgt. were even decent. I don’t think I could befriend loss prevention people nowadays, but back then, Sam, Mike, Dave and Tim were all goodfella close pals of mine. Old dude Jim M. was a manager, Thom was the indie/import guy. Michael Dow, Noah from New Orleans, Chris who did his big college paper on the NY Dolls. Danielle who used to do my reg shift so I could sneak out the side door to Charlie’s Cheeseburgers. Mark O’Connor, Barrie and Dermot from Ireland. A chick named Erica who bleached my hair Warhol white in my wannabe Jeffrey Lee Pierce phase and sang the fuck outta Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” with a townie band uptown.
A real cool teacher from Missouri got me into Dramarama who were the best band besides The Replacements in the era we grew up in. My bands were way more glam than Replacements or Dramarama, like we were equally as in to Hanoi Rocks and Generation X as we were these song oriented bands, we wanted to put on a big blinding backlit Rock Show as well as write so many sad slow songs about drinking in small towns, but yeah it was hard to find an audience because we were too sincere and sentimental for the Guns N Roses mobs and too silvery trousered and pink winklepickered for the college peeps. The lady who booked the Middle East at the time, I don’t think she ever even listened to out tape because we had long black hair she wrote us off as headbangers. I met John Easdale at the Coconut Teaszer when his side project The Bentback Tulips were playing. He was so, so cool. I loved all his lyrics and the highest compliment I ever got from somebody besides Bebe Buell or Phoebe Legere was the underground music journalist who compared one of my shortlived dead end crash and burn bands to Dramarama. When Clem Burke was in the band they probably became the best band in the world and I am glad they are still around.
SCUM LIVES ON
When Billionaires And The Government Work Together To Control InformationFacebook restricted visibility of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 election after receiving counsel from the FBI, according to Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.“So we took a different path than Twitter,” Zuckerberg said during a Thursday appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. “Basically the background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”Zuckerberg said a decision was made to restrict that information on Facebook’s multibillion-user platform. He said that unlike Twitter, which banned the sharing of the article entirely, Facebook opted for the somewhat subtler option of censorship by algorithm.”The distribution on Facebook was decreased,” he said, adding when pressed by Rogan that the decreased visibility of the article happened to a “meaningful” extent.As we’ve discussed previously, censorship by algorithm is becoming the preferred censorship method on large Silicon Valley platforms because it can be done to far more people with far less objection than outright de-platforming and bans.BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for 7 days based on a general request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation. pic.twitter.com/llTA7IqGa1— Minds (@minds) August 25, 2022In addition to being censored across social media platforms, the Hunter Biden laptop story was first ignored and dismissed by the mainstream news media, then spun as a Russian disinfo operation. Those media outlets eventually came around to admitting that the leaked emails were probably authentic, and Hunter Biden tacitly authenticated them himself when he acknowledged that the information “could” have come from his laptop. Nothing that came from that laptop was anywhere near as scandalous as the unified front presented by the news media and Silicon Valley in reducing the political impact of an October surprise before a presidential election.And now we know that the reason the world’s largest social media platform censored that particular story was because they were cautioned by the FBI against allowing such information to circulate. How many of those other institutions suppressed that news story because they were told to by the FBI or other government agencies? How often are US government agencies involving themselves in the act of censorship? What other information is being suppressed in this or similar ways? What other information will be suppressed in the future?Because of the veils of government and corporate secrecy which obscure our view of the behaviors of power, we don’t get to have answers to these questions. All we get to have is what oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg choose to tell us, in whatever way and to whatever extent they choose to tell us about them.But even what we’ve been told is pretty ugly. A government agency and a social media platform of unprecedented influence teaming up together to silence impactful political speech is censorship by any sane definition. Mainstream liberals can come up with all kinds of arguments for why the continuallyexpanding justifications for online censorship are fine and normal and not really censorship, but are they able to maintain those justifications when government agencies are actively involved? Is it really better when political speech is being censored by a collaboration of government operatives and billionaires than censored directly by the government alone?ThreadTwitter is hiring a TON of FBI agents. Searching employment websites, it is clear Twitter has been extensively recruiting from the FBI, employing a dozen former feds.My new @mintpressnews investigation explores why and what this means for us.https://t.co/15hZwFz8X8— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) June 21, 2022Alan MacLeod has been putting out a number of reports with Mintpress News documenting the way many veterans from the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have been recruited to work for tech companies like Google/YouTube, Facebook/Meta, and Twitter. The intimacy with which these government and corporate entities are working together is growing closer and closer, and they’re making less and less effort to conceal it.In a power structure without clear boundaries separating corporations from the government, corporate censorship is state censorship. The mightiest power structure on earth is growing more and more brazen and shameless about this reality.You know you are living in an oligarchy when Mark Zuckerberg has more political influence over your country than any elected official. Democracy is an illusion. Those who live under the US empire are a propagandized and politically impotent population who only think they are free because they’ve been given the illusion of freedom, and less and less effort is being made to sustain that illusion.We are ruled by unelected sociopaths who have no wisdom, no compassion, and no intention of ever relinquishing their rule. This will continue unless and until enough of us wake up to what’s going on to stop them.
WEEDS
“People often ask me where I stand politically. It’s not that I disagree with Bush’s economic policy or his foreign policy, it’s that I believe he was a child of Satan sent here to destroy the planet Earth. Little to the left.” ― Bill Hicks
“They lie about marijuana. Tell you pot-smoking makes you unmotivated. Lie! When you’re high, you can do everything you normally do just as well — you just realize that it’s not worth the fucking effort. There is a difference.” ― Bill Hicks
People I’ve known in real life have actually told me they now love Lyn fucking Cheney just because she goes on tv and says she dislikes all purpose bad sexist boogeyman Donald J. Trump, like that is some kinda feminist forward leaning position. Still blows my mind how many rich white zipcodes have legalized reefer boutiques just operating out in the open, while other poorer peoples are still in fucking jail or on slippery slope probation or parole for non violent so called drug offenses. I never really liked reefer, personally, but obviously, believe no one ever should have gotten shot by cops in bed, or beaten to death, or mass incarcerated. for smoking a medicinal herb. I’ve been outside trying to cutdown my frontyard desert weeds, post monsoons, before the fanatical gentrification zealot fascist code enforcers show up again in their shiny black, new, tank like vehicles to fine us or whatever. I got blisters on both hands and it feels like I been workin’ on the railroad all the livelong day. I do my work with a very primitive garden tool my ole lady bought at the farmer supply store-we had an actual working and more realistic weed whacker from Wal Mart but it fell apart first time I used it. I know you’re REALLY smart having gone to college. You heard of planned obsolescence. So yeah, my hands hurt, my clothes are wet, I’m ill tempered alot of the time. Arthritis, depression, anxiety, PTSD,bitter about the band stuff, about being banned, but no relief is forthcoming. Burroughs said he had to write his way out of the hole-maybe that’s what I’m trying to do, too, against my better judgement. Man, I miss Bill Hicks, Paul K., Paul Mooney, Tattoo Mark, and Glen Ford. (RIP)
“The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud, and it’s fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, “Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, “Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.” And we … kill those people. “Shut him up! I’ve got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real.” It’s just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok … But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.” ― Bill Hicks
MARTIN TRUTHER AND PAUL WELLSTONE AND AARON SCWARTZ AND MICHAEL HASTINGS AND SETH RICH (RIP)
Mainstream media really is a fear factory, aint it?! One of my former Facebook friends was a fearless seventy something lady activist from California who died last year, she was a good soul who’d gardened and demonstrated and organized, she endured much in her lifetime including having her kids taken away from her by a richer former spouse, which is something I know about, and I’ll miss that good lady who would always give me courage, spur me onward, advise me, “fuck fear”, that’s how the sick sociopaths at the top of the ivory towers control us serfs and peasants. With fear. Fear they’re not gonna sign your band, or let you work at the record store, or steal your original work, or not let you ever record your original works, or blacklist you from all begrudgingly even desirable jobs, or offer all your girlfriends high paying easy jobs, or use their rich parent’s money to monopolize the Scene or take away your kids, or dispatch oversized, brainless mooks with dumbfuck Lollapalooza tribal tattoos and cargo shorts to pound you into the sidewalk again, or whatever. I’m not sure if it was Burroughs or Thompson who said that paranoia is just knowing a little about what’s really goin’ on. Bravery is doing the next right thing, in spite of your fear. Imagine being Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who saw his cousin put out that magazine, the title of which is said to have dimed his father’s killer. How frightened would you be, if you’d seen your uncles and cousins and nieces and nephews exterminated by shady powers and secret societies? He knew what happened to Paul Wellstone. Bernie Sanders promised to fight for The People, but apparently received the Dick Cheney memo and got in line and endorsed rightwing corporate police state Gropey Joe. Another Facebook friend, Martin Truther, talked about all this stuff before dying when the cops showed up and assassinated him in his home for failing to pay back taxes. I personally got no space in my life for people who cheerlead for the Cheneys or Pompeo or Clinton or Kissinger or Gates or Zuckerberg or Bezos or Musk or Bloomberg or Obamas or Bush family. I can’t even get past the Benie Sanders betrayals. But yeah, the secret police probably threatened him or his loved ones, and Lockheed Martin is the biggest employer in Vermont. I never believed that it was just another oopsy daisy, whoopsie coincidence when JFK Jr. died in a small plane crash so Hillary got to become senator from NY instead of JFK Jr. There are documentaries about it. Look for ’em. Same way Jackie O sought refuge and safehaven with billionaire super yacht owner from Murkkkan deep state, post hit, so did Princess Di, post jockey’s son Harry, post divorce, ya know?
Your shitlib friends all say the one and only thing that ever threatened Murkkan “democracy” is Trump lovers convening in the rotunda of the Capital insisting that elections were rigged, when Clinton and Wasserman Schutz had already admitted in court(!!!!) the DNC private services corporation fixed the primaries. The Dems argument was they have a right to fix the primaries, because they are a private corporation. Similar argument shitlibs have been taught to repeat ad nauseum is supposedly, how it’s not censorship, if big tech in bed with the soldout government, buries big stories for big pharma, big oil, the deep state, the DNC, or other power grabbing shock doctrine disaster capitalist billionaires. Everytime someone has a big audience and is critical of the USA, they have an accident-from Hugo Chavez to Gaddafi. Fred Hampton and the Kennedys. Bill Hicks to Seath Rich, they always mysteriously die young. Always an oopsy daisy coincidence, say the shitlibs. A random burglary. Pancreatic cancer. Small plane crash, suicide with two bullets to the back of the head. All these scientists, investigative reporters, almost all the people who made films or who wrote books about 9/11—just youtube that shit, Ferguson and Baltimore uprising activists, vault #7 and drone whistle blowers, Dr. David Kelly said that Iraq had no WMD’s, found dead. Shitlibs think Epstein killed himself and the fact that monarch mind controlled Hinkley, a Bush cousin, is free, is just another whacky, zaney, oopsy daisy coincidence. Um-hummm.
“There are so many things going on re 9/11 that just don’t make sense”.
— Senator Paul Wellstone
“I asked him how his week had been. He said, ‘it’s been tough. Vice President Cheney called me in and told me to get on their bandwagon or there would be serious ramifications in Minnesota. ‘And stop sticking your nose into 9/11; there are some rumors going around, but we are going to get to the bottom of this.’ When Paul made this statement, there were about 10 military veterans standing around us, and he spoke to them about 9/11…’There are so many things going on about 9/11 that just don’t make sense…’ Wellstone knew 9/11 was staged. Wellstone was after 9/11.”
–Pat O’Reilly, Wellstone’s close friend.
Although warned by Dick Cheney to “tow the line”, Senator Paul Wellstone questioned the official version of 9/11. For that he paid with his life. What follows are interviews with eyewitnesses, first responders and friends on his fatal “air crash”…
“The Joint Operations Command (JSOC): It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on.”
“Here is my final point…About drugs, about alcohol, about pornography…What business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, or take into my body as long as I do not harm another human being on this planet? And for those who are having a little moral dilemma in your head about how to answer that question, I’ll answer it for you. NONE of your fucking business. Take that to the bank, cash it, and go fucking on a vacation out of my life.” ― Bill Hicks
“Go back to bed, America. Your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again. Here. Here’s American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go, America! You are free to do what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!” ― Bill Hicks\
Even though top US officials admit that US troops are in Syria for “leverage” (a fancier way of Trump’s admission that US is there to steal oil), US outlets never report that. (-Aaron Mate’)
“Some 40% of Black DC public school students 12-17 will be refused education under this policy, which aims to coerce them into taking an injection that does not prevent viral transmission or infection, and which requires constant boosting. Welcome to actual vaccine apartheid”. (-Max Blumenthal Gray Zone)
DC’s NAACP chapter complains, “Mandatory vaccinations may negatively impact attendance, and attendance impacts school funding, resources and students’ academic success.”
“Billionaire Jared Kushner got PPP loans that were forgiven in full—meanwhile small business owners like Jamie, a Philly bar owner, will be paying off his PPP loan of $32,700 for the next 15 years.” (-Staus Coup News)
THE ULTRAS
By the time I made it out to L.A., glam was kinda dead, except for like the Last Call dregs who lived with strippers and played cattle call concerts at the Coconut Teaszer on like Thursday nights. Those Motley Crue babies were all way more into living out some kinda Tommy Lee party lifestyle than they were into songwriting, which was sorta my thing. My old girlfriend Steffani tried to introduce me to some famous locals and gave me phone numbers for people like Kristy Krash Majors who I had not that much in common with but I thank her for endeavoring to help my search for the right group of players. Another cat she hooked me up with was Alistarr from The Ultras who was dead cool and funny and generous and sweet to me. I was surprised by how open and accessible he was because having herd his Bruce Duff produced EP, I had already sortof put him on a pedestal. I felt like he was far and away the best lyricist in the whole glam scene. He had accomplished what I had set out to do, which was to form a larger than life spacedout seventies glam rock band with the showmanship and panache of old Ziggy Stardust and Alice Cooper but also writing vivid and lyrical SONGS! He was one of the only people I took seriously that I met in my hard times year and a half or whatever starving on the Sunset Strip. I was living on this horrible fortified wine they only sell in black neighborhoods called Cisco-the ingredients are classified as a trade secret. That shit makes people crazy. Alistarr was different from all the Aqua Net blackhairs who lived with my ex girlfriend because he was smart and cool and kind.
Most of the metal years people were just kindof fucking dumb. Alice was hip to stuff like, the Only Ones. The rest of ’em never got past Poison, Skid Row and the Crue. I liked all that shit when I was like fourteen and even seventeen, but by the time I made it out to California, I was 22 and kinda past “I Want Action” and “Same Old Situation”.
“Biden just authorized a ~$200 B bandaid for the gaping wound of student debt. But every year the president authorizes ~ $ 1 trillion for the bloated military that impoverishes us at home & endangers humanity the world over. The duopoly has plenty of money, just not for us.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Just one of the ways the US security state manipulates domestic politics behind the veil of democracy. Another example: the high election season Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot manufactured by the FBI.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Nothing to see here, just a billionaire with a monopoly on information was censoring accurate news stories at the behest of the FBI to favor a political party & outcome.” (-Jimmy Dore)
“Epstein was the mastermind of that Ponzi Scheme and, while Hoffenberg went to prison for that and related financial crimes, Epstein instead got involved with Clinton presidential fundraisers.” (-Whitney Webb)
“I don’t care what shitlibs say. Joe Biden is still a terrible president and a servant of oligarchs.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Still in Syria…. Getting rockets shot at us so Centcom can pull in a war budget, defense contractors can get paid & senior brass can have combat commands. And maybe we can bumble our way into a fight w/Iran/Russia/Turkey/Assad. What a scam.” (-Joe Kent for Wa-3)
“New documents show the US & EU plans to plunder Ukraine have been in the works for years. They plan to sell off public infrastructure, destroy worker rights, & secure massive giveaways to billionaires. Much of this has already begun.” (-Lee Camp)
“Ron DeSantis was the lone legal oversight for US Special Ops in Fallujah during the brutal troop surge, tasked with ensuring “fair & humane treatment of detainees and military compliance with law”—he previously had that same job at Guantanamo Bay during the Bush torture program.” (-The Empire Files)
Unless you count, say, Joe Strummer & The Mescaleroes or Hello Disaster, to me, the Last Band that mattered was the Manic Street Preachers. I had a girlfriend who was still in love with me back then who would go to the record store and buy me a stack of English tabloids and music papers, a fiddle of whiskey and a pack of cigarettes and bring it all home to me tied up with a purple ribbon. I read all the early hype from UK critics but was pretty skeptical, was not into the idea that the guy who wrote all the good lyrics could not play guitar, so that was already kinda weird, then the singer had that high Freddy Mercury vocal range but was shouting slogans like that first Clash album, spraypainted clothes, ehh. I was still trying to get my own band together in the Generation X/Hanoi Rocks vein, part glam and part punk, and I had been talking to and working with these guys from deep Massachusetts smalltown suburbia hoping they would become our fulltime rhythm section, but the bassists was a lyricist/songwriter and they were a package deal, so they ended up doing a very Manics influenced band with the shorthair and skinny ties and stuff called Bang Bang Satellite while me and my two faithful longhaired guitar cronies from the Midwest in the scarves and black leather pants continued to stockpile originals and have no reliable drummer for years on end. It was those Bang Bang Satellite guys who got me into the Manics. One of their wives published a cool fanzine called “Machine Gun Etiquette” and that gang collectively made me reassess the Manic Street Preachers. I had bought “New Art Riot” from Newbury Comics but dismissed it as Clash copycats. We had songs of our own I figured were every bit as good as “Suicide Alley'”. “Stay Beautiful” was what won me over, I played those four songs like a million times a day and yeah my old friend, the Famous Rock Critic, is telling the truth when he says I did not keep up with popular music or get into Crystal Pistol or Robin Black & The Intergalactic Rockstars From Mars or Whatever, or Brides Of Destruction or Velvet Revolver. The Last band that Really Mattered to me were the . They wrote about matters of the heart AND social commentary AND fought the empire and the forces of conformity AND wore makeup when they felt like it. They were the People’s Choice, the last real motherfuckers. I love ’em.
Cut your hair in front of businessmen Kill yourself and censor health
Destroy words and ignore their truth Wanna die and have never worked
I feel like falling, feel like falling I feel like falling, feel like falling I feel like falling, feel like falling
I can’t feel no need to care Narcotic of ambition poisoned my air
Wearing hate like they wear money Sucking down vodka, spitting out Perrier, huh
I feel like falling, feel like falling I feel like falling, feel like falling I feel like falling, feel like falling In hate
Oh, the road is beautiful You live stoned in obedience Your vanity kills people, paint your ego in blood Oh, the road is beautiful
The wall is a reason for you to believe Is there too many numbers for us to sleep? The wall is a reason for you to believe Because there are too many numbers, numbers, numbers
Oh, the road is beautiful You live stoned in obedience Your vanity kills people, paint your ego in blood Oh, the road is B.E.U.T.I.F.U.L.B.E.U.T.I.F.U.L Beautiful
(Manic Street Preachers)
GOOD NIGHT & GOOD LUCK, BROTHERS & SISTERS & FRIENDS OF THE REVOLUTION! STAY WILD! STAY FREE!
“U.S. propaganda is so sophisticated that it convinces people that we’re bringing democracy to the world when we haven’t even brought anything that resembles a democracy to our own shores. The U.S. brings capitalism, militarism, and oligarchy to the world and calls it “democracy.” (-Ryan Knight)
ME I’M JUST A ROCKNROLL SINGER
Besides the so called new normal everyday hardships of parenting in deepest poverty, struggling to even just get by in a nosediving recession with jackedup prices on every. fucking. thing., my main problem is like, a cosmic sense of total dislocation, of being outta time, cause some of us discarded old exiles were Born To Rock. But like Iggy Pop told David Letterman about Andy McCoy, and David Lee Roth said about meeting Steve Vai in a police lineup after a bust at the after hours club he once owned, CLUB ZERO, you know, you really always, always, always, have to go to the Big Cities to find the capable sleazy guitarslingers who can provide for themselves and who have even HEARD OF all my biggest influences and nowadays, you know, there’s just no way for us working class paupers to ever pay the $5000 a month rents in NYC and L.A., or Seattle or Portland, ya know? I’m even struggling in the dead end faded ghost town. One of my biggest influences as a lead vocalist, along with Joe Strummer (RIP), Gio Vitanza (RIP), Tex Perkins, Stiv (RIP), and Texacala, was, of course, CLAUDE from SMACK. Man, I just love that cat, but of course, nobody’s ever heard of ’em outside of London, Helsinki, NY and L.A., and I never understood why their brand of cool as fuck untamed rocknroll never caught fire with a bigger audience, it kinda just makes me think that people are fucking stupid. I honestly have had multiple conversations with grown adults these past twenty years who wanna look me straight in the eye and dare tell me how great the new Green Day or Foo Fighters or Miley Cyrus or Beyonce album is. I can’t stand that garbage. Give me Claude, everytime. Make mine Claude and the 69’s! If you ask me, this is what rocknroll sounds like-not that namby pamby trustfund bullshit tribute rock they all dish out nowadays. The last band I heard that had even like a glint of the raw soul and desperate animal magnetism of Smack was SILVER from Norway and even they were like twenty years ago. But yeah, they had some real magic, too! I was never quite so wild about 69 Eyes vampire-metal but I definitely did love their early Mr. Sleazy 45 they sent me to review in my fanzine when I was I dunno, 22? I liked their earlier raunchy first record sleazepunk dive bar stuff far better than their latter day epic productions that sound more like money and less like street. But anyways…yeah. SMACK. And SILVER.
SILVER had something special, man, a perfect vocalist, exceptional lyrics, near perfect music, they were like a swirl of the Lords, the Ultras, the Original Suffering Bastards, and Smack all rolled into one! Man, I love that band! In the immortal words of our beloved forefather, Chuck Berry, “it’s gotta be rocknroll music if you wanna dance with me…”
THE WHOLE SHEBANG IS FALLING APART FOR ALL US EVERYDAY PEOPLE WHILE YOUR JETSETTING, WHITE PANTS SUITED, INSIDE TRADING, CROOKED AS FUCK BIPARTISAN MILLIONAIRE POLITICIANS BAIT WW3!
“It’s all falling apart in the States. The economy, the narratives and the political lies. All of it. And they’re trying so hard to pretend everything is fine but it’s clear even to those in denial, that it isn’t.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“The IRA is another give away to fossil fuel industry & sells out the interests of indigenous and Black communities no matter how many uncle tom Black and indigenous folks you push out there to sing its praises. Hey Progressive Caucus talk about the side deal with Manchin!” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Evil warmonger and DNC icon Liz Cheney lost.” (-Garland Nixon)
“Kudos to the people’s legal defense that stopped fat cat party bosses from illegally throwing Hoh off the ballot. One of many victories won by the Center for Competitive Democracy (CCD), @voterchoice
“The Bush-era neocons are ready to support Ron DeSantis if he runs for president. Like them, DeSantis wants war with China, hates Venezuela and Cuba, and loves apartheid Israel. The so-called “poPuLiSt riGhT” is just a rebranding of neoconservativism 2.0″ (-Benjamin Norton)
“As Democrats continue to gaslight the public about their ‘big win’ here is what Brett Hartl, the director of the Center for Biological Diversity, is saying: “This is a climate suicide pact. It’s self-defeating to handcuff renewable energy to massive new oil and gas extraction.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Putin on U.S actions toward Russia & China: “It is evident that Western, globalist elites are attempting to distract their own citizens from very dire socio-economic problems; falling living standards, unemployment, poverty & de-industrialization.” (-Fiorella Isabel from Convo Couch)
“The process of setting up Zelensky as fall guy for the conscious policy of the U.S. to make Ukraine a de-facto member of NATO & bait Russia into a war in Donbas has started in earnest. There was going to be a war, with or without Zelensky.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“The bosses and shareholders of the British water monopolies are announcing record profits whilst our seas are polluted with sewage. We must bring water companies into public ownership, invest in infrastructure and pay workers fairly.” (-Jeremy Corbyn)
“Democrats don’t believe in democracy when they sue to kick third parties off ballots and suppress voters from having a real choice on election day. They believe in oligarchy. So stop being bamboozled by this corrupt anti-democratic party that fights against the progress we need.” (-Ryan Knight)
IT’S THE BILLIONAIRES AND MILLIONAIRES VERSUS THE REST OF US. STOP “IDENTIFYING” WITH YOUR OPPRESSORS.
Man, ya see so many unwell human beings walkin’ around talking just mad UFO jibberish to themselves nowadays. Sure, some of them are on the crystal meth or newfangled zombies of death drugs, but so, so many more of ’em are suffering from mental illness and there is no help for them. The establishment has designed this slippery slope, so people who are mentally ill are most often mass incarcerated in abusive, sadistic prisons, or left outside in the elements to rot and die. I even see some property owners getting The Business from a corrupt smalltown city hall that’s in bed with like ten rich people, so they have decided to sic these code enforcers on all the poor people, to make them sell their property, drive ’em out, or bleed their resources fighting the gentrifiers. It’s sad. I know a couple of sad and lonely old single people who dwell inside these rickety little metal boxes who have to listen to the builder’s insanely loud Mexican music all day, big machines moving dirt, and bam bam bam hammering, and when they complained to city hall, the soccer mom figureheads they seat behind some table to give the illusion that “educated women” are calling the shots, they sent in the code enforcers and kkkops to fuck with the hermits. and hassle the kindly old new age painter lady for having an artful frontyard with blue bottles and wire and found object decorations on her fence frowned upon by fatcat real estate assholes. It’s fucking sad to see the stress all these poor retirees have been put under by the crooked Mister Burns people from the golf club and their know nothing shitlib winebox shitfaced sock puppets, who just rubber stamp anything that some moneybags developer calls “progress”, even if it makes no sense. I hadda take a job as a mover and almost got bit by a black widow spider that was hiding among the boxes with three inches of dirt I was relocating from one lady’s spare house to another of her spare houses. It’s deep puddles rainy today, I’m kinda dreading going back to work later this afternoon. More spiders, cobwebs, perilously HEAVY antique furniture, heavy boxes of expensive art books. Woman telling me how she shitcanned seven trucks full of her parent’s belongings. My girlfriend got bit up by like a half dozen fire ants. We do what we gotta do for our kids.
MOTHERFUCKERS ALL WORSHIP THE WHITE COATS LIKE UNCLE JUNE ON THE SOPRANOES
The medical mafia in this country is so fuckedup now, you can’t even see a real doctor. Our primary physician had a stroke and became half paralyzed and is on permanent leave now, and if you talk about how or why it happened, in his forties, “just suddenly” people wanna silence and punish you, so now, you can only see nurse practitioners at the overbooked hicktown hospital, if you wanna loiter round for hours in rooms full of coughing old people, some of whom are not even able to prescribe, cause they aint got the credentials of the paralyzed guy. One of my family members needs new prescriptions because of their adolescent growth surge but his prescribing doctor moved his office to three hours away and our vehicle won’t make it, we made an appointment with a new physician and when the child was taken to an early morning appointment, which is a hardship for someone with his particular disability, they were told the doctor had arbitrarily cancelled the appointment, so meanwhile, the poor kid is having all kinds of erratic behavioral eruptions as a result of his medications being so inadequate and some of the resulting violent outbursts can be dangerous to his and his family’s safety and wellbeing. Dumb fucking middle class people believe that pills are the answer to everything, pils, pills, some shots, more pills, more pills, always more pills, some boosters, an “I VOTED TODAY” sticker, a pinkhat mach, some more pain pills, big medicine cabinets overflowing already with mama’s little helpers, cause they’ve seen ten billion commercials for every drug in the world on MSNBC and CNN but then when proper dosages are denied to patients by a clusterfuck smalltown hospital, it’s just tough luck. That’s all you will ever hear from the quack quack quacking petit booj on the hill. How YOU shoulda done this, or you shoulda done that. Shoulda gotten better health insurance, or shoulda owned a more reliable vehicle, should have married up or inherited privilege from their families the hard way, shoulda sued the school system, shoulda sued the doctors, shoulda gotten a fourth booster for science like DOCTOR JILL BIDEN who is sick with the plague, or blah blah, whatever. This conventional wisdom held by all the haves on the hills sometimes results in real tragic consequences like with our poor doctor, who took his medicine, did what he was told, and now he can’t perform his job, or move half his body. That’s fuckedup, and he can’t sue nobody. Tough shit. Same with my dead friend in the midwest, he took a nap after a second shot and never woke up again, too bad, tough titties-guess he shoulda bought bitcoin or shoulda volunteered to go to war with Russia, always something that he did wrong, according to the quack quack quacking tv watcher know it alls who think the Democrats are real. So ya gotta wonder what doctor worshipping shitlibs have to say to that guy, who can’t move half his body now, even though (!!!) he spent all those years in med school and his student loans probably still aint even paid off-what he shoulda done different. He was already complying with their preferred narrative, hut two hut two, and yes sir to Super Scientific Higher Up Expert Dr. Bill Gates and wee wee wee wee all the way home, every bit of it, went to med school, bought a big house, learned to golf, paid for insurance, obeyed The Man for science. Only one industry exists with a total immunity shield. He can’t sue the supposedly benevolent makers of certain warp speed “immunizations”. Tough shit, doctor, fuck you. Poor guy! Now we aint got no family doctor, but so long as somebody who was already obscenely rich, is getting super duper extra rich, somewhere, and having smirking conversations with Emperor Klaus, about how they’re gonna have all kinds of new business opportunities in the near future, and laughing like twin Bond villains, that’s all the army ant tv watchers care about. They’re all strung out on the government pills.
So yeah it’s becoming a bit frightening as a pedestrian, just walking around this deadbroke town, you got all the angry, drunk driving, vroom vroom flatulent, big white truck pitbull cowboys driving 100 miles per hour on these winding river roads, their vicious dogs snarling out the passenger seat window. The Lake People in the golfcarts and three wheelers also speeding about as fast as they can, picking up ice for their beer coolers from the downtown ice machines, but it’s not quite so fast really. The embittered women who married their pitbulls and don’t believe in leash laws and think they can control their animals with their Georgia O’Keefe extra deluxe psychic fortune teller intuitive E.S.P. powers, the ninety pound fentanyl crazies who look like world war two victims, the toothless people with the shaven heads and broken window shields driving in lazy half lidded circles and trying to mad dog menace the peaceful passerby. You got the pink and red clad woman from TAOS who insults strangers on the sidewalk for existing. The pissed off oversized biker bearded dude who screams loudly to one of my neighbors about “revenge” all day. The hermit down the block in conflict with the kkkops over his rock garden landscaping choices and brokedown car ownership. The middleclass woman who was trying to sue to stop a bridge being built on her deadend street now becoming a target of kkkode enforcers but she already has a really perfectly neat and Iowa orderly yard, is ex military with money in the bank, so it’s harder for them to fuck with her. The suckup obedience yuppies of city hall are all helping pass fascistic Gates-Reset ordinances saying it is now legal for them to employ a private drone company to inspect homeowner’s private backyards and determine who can, or can not park R/V’s or cars behind high fences on their own properties. Some liberty. They have plans to confiscate people’s stuff if they don’t like it. That is insane to me. Even the most patriotic flag waving gung ho, military lovin’ Thank A Kkkop Republikkan KKKowboys gotta start seeing that’s something’s rotten with this particular city government. There are crazy, unhappy people yelling obscenities everywhere you roam. Some dickhead yuppie pricks banned an old lady with dementia from dancing with her elderly friends at the jackedup tourist trap bar here. They sortof say hi to me sometimes, mistaking me for some gentrification hipster, but I find it difficult to be civil to money grubbing gentrifiers with no compassion for the sick or the poor or the old or disabled. Fuck you, prick. Go back to Hipster City, this is a dead end desert ghost town full of predominantly poor widowers. Maybe you money whore, city slicker, get rich quick people are the ones who should be banned. Leave us alone. Here come the tech-tyrants and deep state faux woke, shady spook social engineers and thought police and squidgame mk ultra hip-pop bullshitters.
“Imagine thinking Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi are on the side of the people when they have spent their entire political careers being on the side of corporations. That’s how brainwashed and propagandized Democrat party voters are. #BlueMAGA” (-Ryan Knight)
MOONCHASERS ARE ONE OF THE ONLY GOOD UNDERGROUND BANDS LEFT IN THIS COUNTRY, ALL EVAD’S BANDS ARE GOOD. HOPEFULLY, I’LL HAVE A WINTER KILLS FEATURE INTERVIEW WITH TOM SANFORD FOR YOU SOON!
“Democrats just passed a bill which massively expands new fossil fuel extraction and handcuffs renewable energy to fossil fuels yet they are on TV waging the propaganda campaign of the century by declaring they saved the planet when they actually just accelerated its destruction.” (-Ryan Knight)
LET THE COWBOYS RIDE
This is what the fanatical sports moms, preppie jocks and elitist admin thought me and my friends were like, but really, we were just lonely latchkey kids who were really, really into like, Cyndi Lauper, Psychedelic Furs, Billy Idol, and Echo & The Bunnymen, you dig? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb0MXivyeuA A lotta eyeliner and hair gel. I think my dream, that I harangued a couple of my scrappy friends into believing in, for at least a few years, until eating canned beans and mostly living on beer in rundown ghetto, rodent infested apartments started losing it’s appeal and the parents were pressuring ’em all to go to go to school and shit, I wanted to be like, you know, The Clash, The Alarm, The Lords Of The New Church– a big haired bandido rebel gang fighting the power with poetry and sincerity and singalong choruses and big hollow body guitars, three chords and the truth. I was not fucking around, I’m still that, and I’ll be 53 in December. Steve Stevens guitar heroes, Pete Farndon bassists, Clem Burke style drummers apply within. Songwriting motherfucker wants to front dangerous outlaw punk band. Last of the Last of the Last of the Last.
Aint it a bitch how music imprints on you forever, even the cornier stuff you don’t necessarily like? Journey, for instance? “Send Her My Love…memories remain, send her my love…roses never fade…” There’s a video somewhere, of two of my craziest dead drinking companions, Mark and Adam, all dolled up like me in the feathers and furs, with one of my bombshell, crazy good times all the time, loudly yelling, yeehaw, hoarse voiced screaming wild stripper ex girlfriends singing “Separate Ways”. I look for it somedays cause lord I miss those brothers. Dead forever. Ugh! Ya know? In the sad, horrid, painful mornings, when I was in the fourth to eighth grades, I was forced to go to this dreadful, bullying, miserable, torturously mean, middle school in fuckedup fucking Ohio, radio DJ Ed Goble from WKKI “Ohio’s Best Rock, Broadcasting From The Western Ohio Branch Campus In Celina” would play Madonna‘s “Crazy For You” from the “Vision Quest” soundtrack and “Only The Young” by Journey, every morning before I had to go wait in the frontyard for the #24 bus in the snow with Tracey D. from across the street who hated me. I always got stuck sitting next to notorious booger picker, Musto. “You again, Musto”. Then, it was a three flights of stairs climb to the third floor music room in the 100 year old fucking dusty old building, assholes elbowing me on my way up, struggling to carry a big snaredrum case, I was just a scrawny pipsqueak like in those comicbook fifties Charles Atlas ads.
At Baptist boarding school, in deep Appalachia, Fat Jerry had a tiny A.M. radio we had to keep hidden from the older boy’s dorm snitch-patrol, cause all secular music was forbidden, and I’d hear another fucking syrupy Journey song, in my metal bunkbed at night, the horrible sap of “Faithfully”, and think of this older girl I had a crush on named Carol Harlowe. I hated depressing Bob Seger songs about being a perpetually down on your luck, twice divorced, nowhere loser loitering around some stinky pool hall down on Main Street and John Cougar songs growing up, because I did not want to hear that authority always wins, I thought rocknroll songs should give people optimism that they COULD triumph over the corrupt powers that be, and back then, I absolutely could not “be myself” in those tank building “smalltowns” I grew up in. I wanted escapism, back then. Van halen, Adam Ant and Duran and Bowie and Prince. I like a lot of stuff other people seem to hate, like the Thompson Twins and even some Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw. It all reminds me of when my first real friends and I were just meeting each other out there in eighties Swatch Watch suburbia. As I got older, of course, I changed my mind about all those melancholy Amerikkkana balladeers from classic rock radio, the John Cougars and Tom Pettys, because my life had turned into one of those fucking battered and bruised, bad luck songs. “Runnin’ against the wind…”
“Wherever you are tonight, I wish you the best of everything in this world and honey I hope you find whatever you were lookin’ For…”
“She calls me baby, she calls everybody baby…it’s a lonely old night, but aint they all?”
“stay on the streets of this town and they’ll be carvin’ you up, alright”
“big town’s got it’s losers, small town’s got it’s vices…”
Me and my ole lady talk sometimes about needing to become the stable and reliable presence for my children like you know my grandparents were for us. The people who stay together through the hard knock times and don’t change their phone number or chase any fadgadget latest thang bandwagons or move all the time. My smalltown grandfolks mostly raised me. They disapproved of my makeup, my nose ring, my early jailhouse tattoos, my dropping out, my many girlfriends, my underage drinking, all that kinda stuff, but the fridge was always full and I was always welcome, they had a bed in the basement and heat in the winter, hot showers and A/C in the summers. They always had a big garden that fed many neighbors and a deep freeze and many basement shelves full of stuff to feed a family of ten or twenty whenever my aunts or cousins, or kids and me felt like visiting. My grandfather would always take me on long car rides to look at cows and white buffalo and lecture me about how I needed to “learn computers” because the monopolies were going to destroy the mom and pops. Of course, he was right. He wanted me to become a car dealer and my compliant country clubbin’ golf lovin’ cousins who took over the business rather than me cause I could literally just not “play ball” drove it into the ground in just a couple of years. He died in a veteran’s home when my ex wife was breaking up with me and taking my kids across country without my permission, but she was rich and I was poor, plus she had the gender card which is better than any backstage pass. “Membership has it’s privileges” and as a member of the ruling class-she has The Master Card. All I got’s a hand fulla jokers. My protective WW2 vet grandfather’s sad passing was followed soon by my grandmother, broken hearted, hard drinking, much beloved aunt, many uncles, all their neighbors who I’d known all my life. My ex did not even bother to give me the message my mom left about the neighbor’s funeral I was expected to be a pallbearer at, too busy shopping for new properties with a crunchy granola, khaki clad, bachelor #2. I was sadder than I can express when their other daughters sold the house I grew up in, after their deaths and shitcanned so much of my grandparent’s lifetime of cherished objects in their rush to go on vacations and spend the inheritance on new properties and my cousin’s rich wife’s desire for More Stuff. Her dad was a doctor so even though my cousin was a car dealer, it’ll likely never be Good Enough. What kinda madness is this bullshit? Everywhere you look it is sourfaced sisters competing for the old people’s inheritance. My grandma died while my spouse was pregnant. Smalltown hospital almost killed my spouse with doctor refusing to see her forcing her to drive two hours to a better emergency room where they immediately performed an emergency appendectomy saving her and our baby, and the crooked smalltown hospital that had already sewn 13 bandages inside my grandmother during a botched surgery, they still send creditors after us, for our showing up, even though no service was provided other than some unqualified nurse telling us her ’bout to burst appendectomy as “probably just gas”, these capitalist pigs want us to PAY THEM $5000 for jeopardizing my wife and child’s lives. Thoroughly indoctrinated suckass suckups just wanna praise these evil tv doctors and Merck and Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson some more. I had to leave the Midwest, it was preposterously, insufferably, punishingly oppressive, if you aint some preppie golf playing motherfucker, which I am not. The Midwest is all about keeping us slaves in the itchy polyester uniforms and the wet aprons for minimum wage forty hours a week forever. Or mass incarcerated for non violent reefer offenses and once they get you in the system, you’ll be getting probation violated, fined, frisked, piss tested, spied on, and kept under heavy manners for the rest of your days, smalltown screws hounded several of my old friends into the grave. If you’re poor, all you get’s a hairnet, a timesheet, and a fuck you punch in the eye, just cause. You shoulda been a preppie golf playing motherfucker.
I LIVE BY THE RIVER…SOMEDAY A REAL RAIN’S GONNA FALL
The perpetually alarmist crazy hermit down the block is running around like Chicken Little or Noah, warning everybody we all need to rush down to the fairground in the nearby town to retrieve some emergency sandbags because they say there is gonna be seven inches of rain falling on the town this weekend and my part of town always floods, which is why is is sortof laughably extra ridiculous that the kkkops and kkkode enforcement spend so much time and town resources on badgering old hermits for having too many cars or rocks or old metal signs on their properties, cause this creepy local developer’s master plan to gentrify the field by the waste treatment center is a fool’s errand. I live in a 53 year old disintegrating leaky trailer a couple blocks from the river and the garage out back where I’ve stashed my few remaining souvenirs and possessions of sentimental value is doubtlessly gonna get soaking wet later today so I threw a tarp over the clothes rack and positioned some buckets underneath the holes in the ceiling from the sun warped wood. High winds blew off the shingles, the elements are becoming ever more brutal. Media fearmongers endlessly about carbon emissions while simultaneously propagandizing for the War Machine causing the harm and the exact same One Percent Shady Asshole Billionaires who fly around on private jets all day, fucking up the environment some more. So whenever these same evil fuckheads say they’re gonna somehow fix it, with their geoengineering, and mutated mosquitoes, and cloned lab meats, and GMO vegetables, and microchipped cashless society “FOR SCIENCE”, I kinda don’t believe them. We might be having to relocate in the near future and that seems fraught with a lot of work and worry, risk, and uncertainty, especially in immobilizing, high gas prices, jackedup groceries and preposterous rent, perilous times such as these, where every last tv programmed selfish propertarian asshole feels just not only entitled but almost obliged to overcharge the lowly slaves for ripoff rents like their higherup Vanguard and BlackRock Davos monopolist fascist techlords do. Mainstream headlines have just admitted that Bill Gates wrote much of the latest Biden administration legislature and while his corporate media, P.R. puppets praise him and Biden all day, that can’t be real good news for any of us poor people at the bottom.
JOE BIDEN I.R.S.
What d’ya think about Gropey Joe adding a million IRS agents, you know they said during their big profits Covid snatch n grab they wanted to be able to spy on all your transactions as a way of ushering in their cashless society Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab fascist reset bullshit, but a lot of people still think Pelosi and Schumer are some kinda proper and polite social justice champions since they did a photo op with the Kenta cloth, even though, they just relentlessly continue fucking over poor people and coup-ing whoever they want, in the words of Oligarchy hipster Elon Musk.
Way back when we discovered Steve Earle, I used to think he’d discover me cause we had some shit in common. Ha. Did not work out that way at all. Even the motherfuckers who KNOW pretend they don’t know.
“The years long Russiagate investigation is responsible for ordinarily sensible people losing their minds. Hardly anyone recalls that the charge of collusion was actually disproven, that Robert Mueller only indicted for process crimes, such as those which occur when people let down their guard and talk to the FBI. Most Americans who know the name Paul Manafort think he was a Russian spy but don’t know that he went to jail for tax and bank fraud. Propaganda works very well when it is repeated over and over again.
Worse than the silly Trump inspired derangement is the way that those who call themselves left or progressive have chosen to defend federal law enforcement and bad legislation like the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act is a relic from the earliest days of the cold war, and Woodrow Wilson’s infamous Palmer Raids which targeted the left for persecution and prosecution. Barack Obama used it more than all previous presidents combined in order to prosecute journalists who published what the state didn’t want us to know. As for the FBI, its Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO, created dissension in the liberation movement, targeted individuals for prosecution, spied on Martin Luther King and told him to commit suicide, and killed Fred Hampton and Mark Clark among others. The FBI continues to use informants to entrap Black people in phony terror cases.” (-Margaret Kimberly at Black Agenda Report)
“I’m supposed to believe that a government currently flirting with global nuclear extinction was trying to “keep us safe” from covid…really?” (-Garland Nixon)
“What is amazing is that there are still people out there who really believe the U.S. is supporter of democracy & that democrats are somehow different than republicans on these issues.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“What is the ‘noble cause’ for which you sent our country to war? (-Cindy Sheehan)
“I spend so much time Believing all the lies To keep the dream alive
Now it makes me sad It makes me mad at truth For loving what was you”
(-Billy Idol)
DEATH IS EVERYWHERE
Man, two of my old goth girlfriends are appearing in a movie someone is making about the midwestern punk scene in the 1980’s. When I think of Depeche Mode and New Order and The Cure and Peter Murphy, Einstürzende Neubauten logos painted in silver on black, dry ice, and all that eighties new wave music from 120 Minutes, I think of them. We were pen pals for years, our envelopes decorated with Morrissey and Martin Gore lyrics and Black Sharpie Spider Illustrations, and me and my other rocker dude friends we’d try to travel to Ft. Wayne in our extra shitty vehicles to visit them every Sunday night we could at a goth bar called Seventh Level to see bands like Die Kreuzen or Defenestration. “I’ve got to get to you first…before they do, it’s just a question of time, before they get their hands on you, and make you just like the rest, I’ve got to get to you first…” Always a real cool time, a dozen rosaries and fishnet and safety pins, underage booze in the parking lot, leather jackets, cigarettes, too much eye makeup and shyly holding hands. Dancing to a Robert Smith lookalike named Terry who spun like 12 inch dance remixes off Ministry and Specimen and shit. One of those chicks used to get drunk on vodka and cry a lot about her dead friends and loved ones, end up vomiting…JUST LIKE ME. I used to think we were soul mates. Vomit wet kiss! Hoo hoo! Me and those punk girls were were all bonded by our grief related depressions and mutual appreciations of hard liquor. One loved Blixa Bargeld, the Thompson Twins, and anything black, androgynous or rebellious and defiant. The other one loved Prince and Iggy and Arcadia and became my dearest most trusted advisor and confidante for years and lovingly made me beautiful handsewn new romantic clothes for the stage that I’d always end up vomiting on from pre show jitters. Lotta vomiting back then cause those girls and their frenzied, combat booted Ft. Wayne punk crew were hardcore partiers, and me and the lads we kept like a full bar on the front porch of my band house until the hellion motorcycle cowboy moved in and initially sorta became our road manager, before eventually being promoted to Future Cobalt Stargazer In Training. Those two chicks were the twin queens of the scene the movie is about. I can’t wait to see it-one of ’em’s flying back into Indiana tonight to get filmed for the documentary and the other one’s already filmed her part. I wonder whatever happened to black leather Vickie, another fishnet legged ultra vixen who I can still see so brightly in my mind…I can see her hairdo, her vivid smile, red lipstick, pack of Dunhills, maybe the scent of cloves…I seem to remember I had a series of these fast forwarding, fleeting intimacies with various Ft. Wayne punkers-all us outsider kids would connect on the sidewalk and get close like almost instantly only to never see each other again, just a fading memory of the briefest of vodka blurry goth parking lot deeply cherished moments in the car while quoting Ian Curtis, immediate soul baring kinda friendships. Those were better times. I got along smashingly with Hope Nichols from Fetchin’ Bones-she had a real Janis Joplin heartfelt soul singer appeal, we were like peas in a pod. We saw so many good and exceptionally entertaining bands play there. Pixies first album, Flaming Lips first album. Trash Brats first cassette. Primitive Baptist Church playing Modern Lovers covers. Elvis Hitler, Chainsaw Kittens, on and on and on and on, which side are you on?
I was supposed to be in a couple of movies that never came out. One was about the English rock group Thee Hypnotics who I met their first night in the USA, USA! Where I live now, there are almost no women and very few young people-some nutty supposedly psychic new age pitbull widows, and Miner Fortyniner Ok Corral lookin’ old ranchers, grizzled cowboys, weird hermits, rightwing survivalist militias. You know the weirdest part is how these old crazies give me a LOT less shit than any of the safespace shitlibs of the Pacific Northwest, or ignorant middle class fratboy fauxhipsters of the flyover states. Mostly, people don’t even see me, I’m almost invisible here. I carry a stick on the trails, cowboy hat, nobody is trying to really make me shut the fuck up, like they always did in privileged gentrification enclaves where the local gentry all inherited rental properties and hipster popularity businesses, so they become real fanatical about guarding their turf, making sure no lowlife outsiders cast a shadow on their Fauntleroy Limelite, Suck-Pop derivative, Parents Paid-For Fame Thrones.
People I knew are always dyin’ now. Feels like a graveyard. I wanted to get stamps to send you a postcard, but the post office closes at noon. A rainy Thursday, ya know since I got lockedout of social media by the pro war deep state, I don’t really hear much from nobody. Most mornings I don’t even get an email except from like the Sunglasses Hut. I worry about my wife and kids, my teeth, my mom, my friends, and the future. Noooo future for me. Bill Gates and Jamie Dimon and Joe Biden’s weapon making friends are havin’ a ball, though. A creepy Eyes Wide Shut ball, where the servants all have to wear covid masks, and the zillionaires roll around naked in their filthy lucre. The media still do stories everyday pretending like somebody is still investigating the Jeffrey Epstein island but only the Maxwell chick is lockedup-none of the ruling class jet set predator male millionaires.
The concept of “wealth hoarding” has gained traction in the wake of the Occupy movement and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, the idea being that billionaires are amassing treasure like mythical dragons in the same way someone with a hoarding disorder amasses newspapers or clothes.
It’s an understandable way of looking at the problem. The capitalist class is indeed grabbing up a greater and greater percentage of the wealth that’s being generated by the working class, and it just doesn’t make sense that someone would need billions of dollars when you can only drive one car at a time, wear one pair of pants at a time, eat one meal at a time, etc.
For normal people, the idea of wealth is associated with security, so once your family’s needs are met and their future is secure it’s hard to understand the impulse to keep amassing wealth far beyond that point without it being driven by some kind of compulsive neurosis. The fact that they pour so much money and energy into manipulating political systems to ensure they aren’t forced by taxation to share more of their wealth with the public makes them look even more like compulsive hoarders.
But this notion of vast wealth as a hoarding behavior misses the mark. And no, it isn’t because billionaires are awesome beneficent job creators whose wealth is being used by banks to grant people loans for homes and businesses and making the world a wonderful place to live.
It doesn’t work to think of the very rich as wealth hoarders because what they are doing has very little in common with the behavior of a compulsive hoarder. A compulsive hoarder gains nothing from their behavior, which generally ends up being self-destructive and socially alienating. It costs them everything, and gives them nothing. Their behavior is born of neurosis, and is entirely irrational.
The so-called wealth hoarders are not amassing wealth at the expense of others out of neurosis, and the motives driving their behavior are perfectly rational. They’re just a lot more depraved and a lot more uncomfortable to think about.
The ruling class continually extracts wealth from the public not so that they can become wealthier than they already are, but to keep the public from having that wealth. They’re not worried that they’ll be unable to support their needs in the future if they don’t extract another billion dollars, they just understand that the wealthier everyone else gets, the less their own wealth matters. They’re not wealth-hoarding, they’re wealth-obstructing.
Wealth is a zero-sum game, as is its good friend power. The more power everyone else has, the less power our current rulers would have over us. This is why so much energy goes into ensuring that votes have as little effect as possible on the operations of the state and making sure everything stays the same no matter what the public wants.
Imagine if ordinary people started having as much influence over the direction human civilization will take as war profiteers, oil tycoons, globalized wage slavers and Silicon Valley plutocrats. Imagine if the working class had enough disposable income to begin funding grassroots political campaigns, building their own media networks, or even funding think tanks and NGOs to advance their own interests like plutocrats do today. Imagine if everyone could afford to work less and relax more, and finally start learning about what’s really going on in the world.
Wealth is meaningless if everyone is wealthy. Power is meaningless if everyone has power. The kings of our day have a vested interest in keeping everyone poor and powerless, because if everyone is king, then no one is king.
This is why our status quo systems work the way they work, and this is why you see a convergence of interests from such groups as corporate plutocrats, plutocrat-owned politicians and media, the arms industry, and military and intelligence agencies. These groups all have a vested interest in preserving the status quo and the ability to put that agenda in place, so they’ve fallen into a natural, de facto alliance with each other toward that end.
Workers around the world: lost $3.7 trillion in the pandemic Billionaires around the world: gained $3.9 trillion in the pandemic
It’s the biggest one-year wealth transfer in history, yet somehow barely anyone is talking about it.
It’s why we’ve seen a historic upward transfer of wealth during the Covid pandemic, with billionaires raking in trillions while ordinary people struggle with unemployment and soaring prices. And it’s why that transfer of wealth has been happening for decades since long before Covid. In a system where money is power and power is relative, a ruling class naturally emerges which needs to suppress the wealth and power of its subjects in order to continue to rule.
Rulers do not historically give up their rule voluntarily, so we can expect this continual pattern of wealth obstruction via wealth extraction to continue until people get tired of being kept poor and powerless by those who benefit from their poverty and disempowerment and use the strength of their numbers to force the emergence of a more equitable system. We can also expect our rulers to do everything in their power to prevent this from happening, including propagandizing the public into accepting the status quo and believing that anything better is impossible.
Drastic change in the not-too-distant future does seem to be inevitable, though, if only because we’re headed toward environmental collapse or nuclear winter if we don’t rise to the revolutionary occasion first. Humanity’s self-destructive patterning is in a race with our better angels, and right now it’s anybody’s race.(-Caitlin Johnstone)
THE GOOD OLE FLAME
Growing up in this crazy world, me and a few of my lifetime’s closest friends and much loved allies had so much fuckedup shit happen to us, it affected us all differently, but we were all altered, permanently impacted by those shared experiences. Some of ’em are on different paths, different trips, different realities, different frequencies, now. I spoke to one of my most loved friends on the phone about a week ago. He’s real serious now. Has a lot of responsibility. I could still hear some faint traces of the person I remember, though. Another old favorite, he’s still the same like in the Bob Seger song, “Still The Same”-just looks a lot older, not quite beyond recognition, just ravaged by all the decades of improbably rough livin’ and the road years take their toll on one’s appearance, but no other discernible change is present, whatsoever. Might as well be 1987. His primary source of joy was always louder music, harder highs, faster car speeds, more women, his drug of choice was always just more. I probably relate to him the most. We can’t really collaborate or work together like we used to, because even though he is still a wild wolf, full blast and never surrender all night ramblin’ man, footloose and fancy free, never settled down at all, not even for a day, I have had to put my children’s welfare and well-being first, for a long time, there’s not been that space or surplus for late night moon howlin’ like there used to be. I can’t just be lightin’ off for the horizon no more, like we used to when he remembers, me n him on a single bicycle, in the snow, fleeing some ragingl, irrationally drunk woman who was throwing bottles at us like Carrie Fisher in the Blues Brothers or some shit…and man, oh man, did we ever have some times together. I ain’t seen him in about fifteen, maybe even sixteen years, since my old lady was pregnant with our teenage kid. Had to tell ‘im we’re too broke and hardup to have any visitors nowadays. We’re in the hard struggle. Barely gettin’ by, our cupboard is bare, no free beer party here. We can hardly afford toilet paper or razors, all my socks have holes in ’em. Some of the others, ya know I carry ’em all around with me, everyday, year in and year out, like a bag of bricks burdensome heavy weight from the past, but I can not really relate to them at all anymore, and my endeavor is to sortof emotionally release them, not need nuthin’ from ’em, not look for some kinda “everybody loves a happy ending” reunion with ’em, no more. Sometimes, I can’t really help it, though. I’m always dreamin’, always was a dreamer, always tried to make it all happen for everybody. Rocknroll and the good times, you know what I mean. “and you’re still tryin a have fun…”
Life is too short, as Peggy Lee sang, “might as well break out the booze and have a ball”. The ruling class billionaires who wrecked the environment, and economy, and any hope for a decent standard of living or quality of life here, who do these richman for profit wars for no noble reason, they have all the bioweapons labs and pharmaceutical company stock and manufacture more fuckin hightech weapons and surveillance tech to control us all, if not kill us outright, they don’t have to do any of that, they choose to do all that because they are sociopathic tyrants. I noticed that some of my other online columns are being blocked somehow. For us it’s a big fuck you, for the self congratulating greedhead Fauntleroys podcasting live from their oversized white mama mansions high on the hills, for them,
He was one of my nearest and dearest soul brothers.
DAN DENTON BLUE COLLAR GOSPEL HOUR
Up early on a rainy day, spazzy cats are annoying me by loudly and recklessly running around all crazy and knocking stuff offa counters like they got some sugar spike from their food. Nothing really goin’ on with me. I hear all the neighbor’s dogs barking because some registered sex offender McMansion building fly by night developer, his ten dollar an hour minions, plus big shiny vehicle code enforcement and the kkkops and surveyors keep creeping around in our back alleyway every morning and will not tell the home owners why, all we know is they’ve been targeting some older hermit hoarder for having too much found object art on his property and stacks of rocks and cactus and old vintage metal signs and shit. The McMansion builder creepster and his real estate cronies imagine they can gentrify the waste treatment floodzone area. That’s all the excitement we got here in the dead dull desert. Rich people keep displacing the poor, while the middle class shrug and look the other way and read happy headlines about how Bill Gates is writing their puppet politician’s big business benefitting shitty policies that they hawk as some kinda “BFD” victory for the environment or the poor, but it’s always all fucking total bullshit-you will always know it’s an extra heap of bad bullshit, whenever they think they should bring classy droner Obama back outta his plantation mansion to help sell some fuckedup shit. Like he did when the professional athletes wanted to go on strike to protest kkkops killin’ all the black people everyday, or when the politicians of Michigan helped poison Flint, or when they wanted to rebrand Bush/Cheney fabricated, imperialist “war on terror” as hip and progressive, or when BP dumped all that oil into the Gulf. Shit’s real bad when they call in their secret weapon phony baloney Obama to make all those dense NPR listening, middle class people feel good. Mostly the masses we call the shitlibs stay exclusively focused on consumerism, acquisition, vanity brand building, and boring and tedious old reignited culture war diversions.
My teenager was so super stoked and excited about the finale of “Better Call Saul” and the trailer for the new season of “Cobra Kai” all day yesterday, he stayed up all night in nervous anticipation. I got some kinda digital microphone with a good echo on it and am hoping to get my old lady to help me rerecord an old song I rewrote with it. Can’t do anything like that when the kid is awake, though. Still astounds me how so many piss pond music scenesters are always so willing and able to divert so many funds and resources to propping up all the same old/same old, say nothing, so what, imitator franchise clone, trust fund suburbanite, middle class hipsters who don’t even really care about music or have anything to say, they just throw their having a fake band and some bullshit cd’s somebody else paid for, on to their already toppling towers, their special privilege, prestige and property piles, stackedup in the spare rooms of their mama mansions, I find them worse than appalling, they’re like these insatiable Narcissistic Little Jared Kushner/Hunter Biden motherfuckers, but with Nirvana t shirts. So yeah, fuck yeah, man. I’m still depressed about all that shit, trying not to go back to cigarette smoking. I looked in on my buddy Dan the blue collar poet from Toledo, who I don’t get to interact with as much, since being purged from social media by Zuckbot censorers. Aint he somethin’? Not only is he a fantastic writer and kindred spirit, but he’s a right the fuck on, working class hero, courageous union man, been working in factories in the Midwest for decades. I really feel for him, cause those fucked up, dehumanizing factories really wore out and killed summa my old homeboys. I lasted less than a day(!!!) when my stepdad pulled strings with one of his golf buddies to get me a job at the rubber plant, the one where the guitarist of the local Metallica coverband lost his hand. I could not drive the forklift which was the cherry, sought-after, prestigious spot the other workers preferred, and they all wanted to kill me already, cause just walking up the mile long sidewalk from the parking lot, the hillbillies had mistaken me for a chick and embarrassed themselves with some misplaced catcalls and wolf whistles, cause way back then, I was about 27 I guess, I still had my last good Johnny Thunders shag haircut with the razor cut bangs and shit and a chick had broken up with me for some popular dude and I was so depressed about it I dropped like thirty pounds instantly, almost overnight, so I suppose from far away, I would have appeared significantly less butch hetero-masculine than all the old workers. So yeah I got truck loads of compassion for Dan Denton, we lived in some of the same kinda dead end, no hope, dream killin’, white trash hell holes. If you love Bukowski, check out Dan’s books. He’s on Punk Hostage Press. And Oh Yeah, If you see Iris, tell her I said hello.
“The “Bernie bros” was some creative propaganda that played right into the race pimps in the democrat party & diverted people away from the issues that needed to be debated. People forget that me and Jill ran on a Green New Deal platform that was stolen & gutted by AOC.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“There is a disturbing trend where the politicians (both Democrat and Republican) who sold out our communities at every turn are criminalizing homelessness instead of providing public housing & healthcare. They’re criminalizing the problems that their corporatist policies created.” (-Ryan Knight)
“FYI—Liz Cheney opposed the Voting Rights Act, min wage increase, Equality Act, Equal Rights Amendment, George Floyd Act, BBB, Infrastructure bill, Inflation Reduction Act, $35 Insulin bill, Women’s Health Protection Act, anti-gas price gouging bill—& voted w/Trump 93% of the time.”
(-Qasim Rashid, Esq.)
BEER FOR BREAKFAST
Man I always thought this was a startlingly cool blog. All the coolest shit. And that fanzine from Australia.
Vicious Kitten RecordsAfter a hiatus of 18 years, Australia’s Vicious Kitten Records has been relaunched. The first release is a 7″ single by NYC punk legend Kevin K – who has teamed up with Ricky Rat (Trash Brats / Dead Boys) on a hard hitting Ramones-like anthem called ‘Identity Crisis’.www.australianrockshow.com
The I-94 Bar – Real Rock Action from Sydney, Australia, via The Bowery and The Motor CityGetting ripped, and not ripped off, in Ocean County. Written by The Barman on 04 August 2022.. Wasteland Blues – O.C. Rippers (Ruined Records). Ocean County, New Jersey, is a 40-minute drive from the Ashbury Park foreshore of Bruce Springsteen and a million miles from his $5000 concert tickets.The same goes for the music of O.C. Rippers, whose 16-song “Wasteland Blues” album is a million …www.i94bar.com
They talk about the year that punk broke but it was really the year they broke punk. I do not consider corporate Alternative or Mickey Mouse lapdancers punk, at all. Fuck that Foo Fighters phony fucking unlistenable bullshit. Yungblud, Avril Lavigne, Machine Gun Kelly, Lil Nas X, that’s some fuckin toxic manufactured bullshit from the pit. It’s been proven how Rolling Stone and Spin are controlled opposition operated by the usual assortment of Langley spooks and pissedoff ex/fake/bullshit depopulation and police atate agenda-promoting shitlib mouthpieces of the Davos ruling kkklass. Got Mines and Airbandb owners don’t wanna know what’s really happening out here where the wild winds blow, they just love the comforting, soothing tones of fucking NPR and Democracy Now, even though it’s all been hijacked, infiltrated and weaponized by the donor class and billionaire secret society oligarchs. There really aint that much Real Rocknroll to really write about in USA, USA, nowadays. Think about it-there’s no real underground anymore, it costs too much, only people making music that aint controlled are the same old dogshit rich people. Of course I yearn ever so fondly for my long lost eighties when there was so much good new music being made, the news stands had like twenty different print magazines about rocknroll every month and that aint even counting like the teenybopper mags of black music mags. Fuck Rolling Stone. I like Matt Taibbi but they never even stood up for Michael Hastings, their own writer who was assassinated by the secret police for embarrassing a Democrat and a general. (RIP) Research Vault 7. So sad.
“Biden barely campaigned at all, made a bunch a promises, hasn’t kept one, shuffles around spouting threats that could trigger world war, and has Americans circling the drain. His oligarchy donors are doing great, however. He’s a constant embarrassment to hardworking Americans.”
(-Richard Caugh1 on Twitter)
“Imagine wanting to be a cop as a kid, wanting to grow up and get into the police academy so you can fight crime and bad guys, and then you get there and you find out the whole job is writing tickets and destroying homeless encampments.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“The US gov has been working to declare anyone who speaks the truth about the proxy war in Ukraine an “information terrorist” and possibly even prosecute them as war criminals!” (-Lee Camp)
“You have to give Democrats a little credit here for conditioning their followers to think they’re actually fighting “fascism” while kicking third parties off ballots, taking even more corporate money than the GOP, and passing the highest military budget in history. You delivered for the military industrial complex, Big Oil companies, Wall Street, and the ruling class. U.S. under Biden & Democrat-led Congress: Passed biggest military budget in history of $840 billion/year Passed a fake Climate Bill that expands fossil fuels Provoking war with China & Russia The party is a well-oiled propaganda machine for capitalism & imperialism.” (-Ryan Knight)
“When Kissinger, a criminal, is to the left of neoliberals & even substantial numbers of leftists on issue of Ukaine, it graphically demonstrates how far to the right the U.S. has moved.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“At 99, Kissinger makes more sense on Ukraine than octogenarian US lawmakers, who push weapons not diplomacy. He says we are at the edge of war with Russia “without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.” (-Medea Benjamin)
“The US military is one of the largest polluters in the world, and it’s destroying our islands in Hawaiʻi. Visiting Maunakea yesterday, I heard explosions at Pohakuloa Training Area. They likely started this fire, which burned 700+ acres last night. We need demilitarization now.” (-Uahikea Maile)
“If you are a male & not supportive of the NATO war, not only are you subject to forced conscription but you can not even travel outside of the country legally now. I know this is falling on deaf ears in the West – but when are you going to call for an end to this war?” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Nancy Pelosi lives lavishly while her San Francisco district is plagued with homelessness that she criminalizes. She is wicked.” (-Jory Michah; M.A. Christian Doctrine & History)
SADLY, THIS IS WHAT HE GETS FOR SHEEPDOGGING FOR THE CORRUPT WALL STREET DNC SERVICES CORPORATION. NO ONE EVER WANTED GROPEY JOE.
Deborah Hrbek, #Assange US lawsuit: “I have the right to assume that the U.S. government is not listening to my private & privileged conversations with my clients, & that info about other clients & cases I may have on my phone or laptop is secure from illegal govt. intrusion”
WHEN I WAS A KID & THE PMRC FANATICS & CROOKED JUVIE JUDGES WERE BOOTCAMPING KIDS FOR HAIRSPRAY & BLACK T SHIRTS
At least we had the Cutting Edge Happy Hour and Headbanger’s Ball-ya know? The director of the CIA’s kid Miles Copeland managed his brother’s band, the Police and ran our favorite record label, I.R.S. Records who somewhat suspiciously signed all our favorite bands-The Go-Go’s, The Alarm, The Fleshtones, Bangles, Three O’Clock, etc etc Weren’t The Cramps and Concrete Blonde and Wall Of Voodoo even on that label? My memory aint what it should be, we used to party quite a bit back in the 80’s. The great and wonderful PETER ZAREMBA memorably hosted the Sunday night show that introduced a lot of Midwesterners to The Replacements and Mary Chain and Love & Rockets and REM and Alex Chilton, it was so glorious watching Peter’s improv skits filmed at Boardner’s on Cherokee my old street, I think, and showing us all these whacky interviews with people like Lone Justice, Zodiac Mindwarp and The Pogues and shit. What do kids today get? A lotta bullshit. Nikki Minaj and Taylor Swift. When we had a cable access tv show in Boston in the early 90’s, the director may have been thinking about camp horror movies and robot toys and sexy vampire girls, but me, I was channeling “The Young Ones” and Peter Zaremba’s after hours, blue whale guzzlin’, fun lovin’ hijinks on the Happy Hour! Long Live The FLESHTONES! Long Live the Go Gos! Long Live The Alarm!
AS STOKELY CARMICHAEL TAUGHT US, “ORGANIZE! ORGANIZE! ORGANIZE!” …..BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF THE REVOLUTION, NOW IS THE TIME TO BOYCOTT PIG-MEDIA AND PLANT YOUR GARDENS, TRADE SEEDS, STOCK YOUR BASEMENTS, PREPARE FOR THE WORST, ORGANIZE YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD, AND EDUCATE YOUR PEOPLE! STAY WILD! STAY FREE! GOOD NIGHT & GOOD LUCK! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ShDbp3YlZw
I woke up at about 4:55 this morning and I’m generally an early riser, but that’s a bit early even for me. My neighbor’s got a confused rooster. I went outside while the sun was risin’ to spend time with the outdoor feral cats we feed and neglected to wear a shirt or shoes so I got bit up by mosquitoes and these desert mosquitoes are like mutants, maybe of that Bill Gates variety, who knows, but their bites never seem to go away. It rained last night so everything feels kinda musty, in a couple hours I gotta trudge across town through perilous streets of leashless desert dogs and crazy people, always kinda dread facing the world out there. The woman in red who talks to herself, the Slim Shadies on the bad drugs. Something ’bout the day feels ominous, just got this foreboding sense of unease. I feel pretty disconnected from everybody I grew up with, just alienated by this whole culture. The casual acceptance of this unsparing war on whistle blowers and journalists like Daniel Hale and Julian Assange. The dreary, demented, ancient, old, ghoulish warpigs like Biden and Pelosi, and their belligerent saber rattling and senseless provocations for always more wars. The pitiless, bloodcurdling movies and evil muzak being pushed on the kids by these shady elite occultist creeps. The smileyfaced, see no evil yuppies, always looking the other way, rather than admitting the country’s crumbling into not just recession, but two starkly different realities-one for the privileged super rich and dwindling middle class, another brutal, merciless one for the majority who are falling into houselessness at an alarming pace, or just “dying suddenly”. Some of my own relatives social distance themselves from my immediate family, I suspect cause they’re afraid they might catch The Poverty and their helpful philanthropic super scientific saviors at Pfizer might not have a pill for that particular affliction. I don’t know how people can call themselves media professionals or educators and have any self respect while regurgitating all these known fucking lies for war and bullshit narratives and slogans that are supposed to okeydoke all the corruption and decay all around us. I’m too old to wanna live with a house full of crazies eating your food and shit, like when we were in our twenties, and slept ten to a room in those disgustingly filthy communal band houses with the black hair dye stains in every sink and ten thousand empty beer cans on the floor. I don’t see how any of these poor people who work fulltime slave jobs for minimum wage are even covering their rent in this ripoff real estate market except if they live with a bunch of other slaves. I feel like an awful lot of people probably drink just to cope with anxiety and depression, next time you’re in line at the checkout counter, just take a look at all the booze everybody’s buying. And lotto tickets. Where I live, there are no bands. People are too poor to have bands. There’s like a crazy dude with an obvious drug problem who picks his face and arms, he kinda plays a couple chords on an acoustic guitar in front of the grocery store. That’s about it. Some old country music elderly people I guess. A Mexican band from three hours away plays at the Moose Lodge. Whenever I get hold of an all too elusive copy of “VIVE LE ROCK” magazine, it seems like they still got a thriving rocknroll scene in the UK and also in Australia. Must be affordable rents in those places. Imagine Max’s or CB’s happening today with the gentrification rent gouging, right? I mean…come on. You heard the millionaire mimosa-rock? It’s all just so so art school artsy fartsy like The Strokes or lowest common denominator formulaic like Green Day and Foo Fighters, I’m looking for some heartfelt original voices, not just more motherfuckers whose parents told them they’re the best and bought them a trophy and a motorcycle and a special fame career. UNPRECEDENTED CENSORSHIP, DEVIOUS AND DECEPTIVE PROGRAMMING, ABUSIVE GASLIGHTING LIES, AND FASCIST FATCAT PROPAGANDA ARE OVERWHELMING US ALL!
“Alan MacLeod has a new article out with Mintpress News showing how most of the supposedly independent “fact-checking” organizations which Facebook has partnered with to police the information people are allowed to see on the platform about the war in Ukraine are, in fact, funded by the United States government.
“Most of the fact-checking organizations Facebook has partnered with to monitor and regulate information about Ukraine are directly funded by the U.S. government, either through the U.S. Embassy or via the notorious National Endowment for Democracy (NED),” MacLeod writes.
NED is indeed notorious because, as MacLeod explains, it was set up to do overtly many of the operations which the CIA used to perform covertly, like circulating propaganda in empire-targeted nations, funding foreign uprisings, and facilitating the 2014 coup in Ukraine which set in motion the events that would eventually lead to Russia’s invasion of the nation this past February.
Macleod shows how US government money is funneled into Facebook’s “fact-checking organizations” through NED and other channels, the result being a US government-funded narrative management operation in a social media platform which has almost three billion active users.
Most of fact-checking organisations Facebook uses to police content on Ukraine are directly funded by the US government— either by the US embassy or through notorious CIA front group, the NED. My new investigation exclusively at @MintPressNews:https://t.co/FH4R0HKs1s
Most of fact-checking organisations Facebook uses to police content on Ukraine are directly funded by the US government— either by the US embassy or through notorious CIA front group, the NED. My new investigation exclusively at @MintPressNews:https://t.co/FH4R0HKs1s
This article is just the latest installment in a series of pieces MacLeod has been putting out with Mintpress over the past few months documenting the many strings you can see between major Silicon Valley platforms and the US-centralized empire, which are becoming clearer and more numerous by the year.
Last month MacLeod released a report on the many veterans of the CIA and other branches of the US intelligence cartel who are being hired to high-level positions within Facebook’s parent company Meta which help determine what kinds of information get visibility on the company’s social media platforms. Meta’s “senior product policy manager for misinformation” was hired straight out of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2019 and now helps Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp sort out information from misinformation.
Last month MacLeod also put out an article on the many CIA veterans who have been hired to help Google decide what information gets seen in its searches and on Google-owned platforms like YouTube. Google is easily the single most influential corporation on earth when it comes to public access to information.
Even TikTok, MacLeod documents, has begun hiring a bizarre number of former NATO employees to police its content at the same time it has begun aligning with other Silicon Valley platforms in its censorious policies toward content from Russia.
National Security Search Engine: Why has Google hired so many ex-CIA agents to run its most important internal and external operations. My new investigation for @MintPressNews: https://t.co/Bayhjqc1R0
National Security Search Engine: Why has Google hired so many ex-CIA agents to run its most important internal and external operations. My new investigation for @MintPressNews: https://t.co/Bayhjqc1R0
MacLeod’s important work builds on that of other reporters like Yasha Levine, whose book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet describes the way humanity’s unprecedented access to information has been intertwined with US imperial power from its very inception.
Silicon Valley is at least as fundamental a component of US imperial narrative control as the legacy media and Hollywood, and is becoming even more so. Together they comprise the empire’s narrative control apparatus, which is just as essential to the functioning of the empire as its military or economic might.
The expansion of human consciousness on issues of political and social justice has brought with it a growing public intolerance for tyranny and oppression, which has made it necessary for the world’s current empire to rule over us by providing us with the illusion of freedom. We are told that we live in a democracy where the people control their own fate, but in reality we are inundated with propaganda from the moment we are born that is designed to psychologically manipulate the way we think, act and vote. As Noam Chomsky said, “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
Silicon Valley is filled with spooks and liars for the same reason the mainstream news media support every war and continually normalize the freakish injustices of our society: because whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Perception is reality, and if you can control how people perceive reality then, as far as their behavior is concerned, you control reality itself.
We will remain trapped with the abuses of the status quo oppression machine until we awaken to this fact.
HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD
To me, The Coma-Tones were the best band in the world. I always related to alla Gio’s songs and Jimmy is just stellar. I felt personally affected for a long time when Gio left this world, he was one of the very, very few people I DEEPLY related to on a very deep and intimate Beasts Of Bourbon level. This is my kinda rocknroll, dunno why nobody seems to get it anymore. They were all soul. Street, guts, heart, love ’em. (RIP)
STARS FROM MARS
I remember when we were glammed out teenagers still stranded in the Midwest and just dreaming about the faraway lights of Tinsel Town, we saw their pictures in the glossy magazine they sold at Noir Leather in Detroit, “Propaganda” and somehow we found their mailing address and sent away for their demotape which arrived on cassette with a cool flier of the Stars From Mars as little cartoon characters. The songs were pretty low budget. Tunes like, “Kick Dat Cat”, I think one was called. Demos, indeed. I liked “We Got Tonight”. I always rooted for that band. They reunited in recent years. Ya know that David Lee Roth/John 5 song, “Nothing Could Have Stopped Us” drove me to reach out to certain former bandmates to see if they had a desire to wave the torch again, but I think they are all pretty happy where they are now. I don’t think they like being reminded of their roots, where we came from was not a pretty place, I kinda represent their hard times, the bad years before they escaped the poverty and they’ve kinda all moved on up to thee top, to a deluxe apartment in the sky. I’m like the skeleton in the closet. What can ya do? Happy to see my former colleague Dazzle Star back out there, treading the boards. I think he smokes.
“The Taiwanese are the next people to be sacrifice for U.S. geostrategic interests. You wonder why the neocolonial leaders of these nations don’t seem to understand how expendable they & their people are for the U.S.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“It’s a war against the truth”, says @DavidShoebridge, 1 of the 7 Australian politicians speaking out in support of #Assange on the first week back of parliament. Others urgently affirmed “Peace can be started with truth”.
LOST FIVE OR SIX OF MY TEENAGE METAL FRIENDS TO MILITARY CULTURE, ONE KILLED HIMSELF, OTHERS TOO BOO-YA JACKEDUP TAKER AGGRESSIVE TO HAVE RELATIONSHIPS WITH, SO SAD.
Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army Colonel who fought in Vietnam, and Danny Sjursen, a retired Army Major who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, have just published Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars. Bacevich and Sjursen, West Point graduates, like many writers in the book, come out of the military culture. They began as true believers, embracing the myths of American goodness and virtue and the military honor code pounded into them as young cadets at the military academy. The reality of combat, as it has for generations, exposed the lies told by the generals and politicians. We are not a good and virtuous nation. God does no bless us above other nations. Victory is not assured. War is not noble and uplifting. The clash between the reality of combat, and the mythical version of combat consumed by the public, one that propels young men and women into war, creates not only dissonance and moral injury, but an existential crisis combat veterans, at least those who are self-reflective, must cope with for the rest of their lives.
THE WAR BETWEEN THE HAVE “GENTRIFIERS” AND HAVE-NOTS HOUSELESS IS HAPPENING EVERYWHERE NOW
This ECONOMIC TERRORISM—which is what gentrification really is—is happening all over the U.S. while wealthy pundits wax poetic on cable news that we’re “not in a recession.”
“It seems like Akron is hunting its own homeless; it doesn’t matter where we go, if we put up a tent they’re there tearing it down…they look at us as the scourge of society,” -Pandora, homeless in Akron
NEWS: GOING LIVE soon from Philadelphia where a protest encampment has popped up to fight the eviction of low-income tenants—i.e. ECONOMIC TERRORISM! https://youtu.be/w3uF6JCbSG8
“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has left Taiwan after a brief but diplomatically corrosive visit, the aftereffects from which may be felt for years to come.
Toward the end of her speech alongside Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, Pelosi’s brain underwent one of its increasingly common software glitches, causing her to begin babbling inarticulately.
Here is a transcript of what Nancy Pelosi’s brain said:
“In our earliest days at our founding of our country, Benjamin Franklin, our presidency, said, freedom and democracy. Freedom and democracy, one thing, security here. If we don’t have- we can’t have either, if we don’t have both.”
Nancy Pelosi in Taiwan with wise words from “Benjamin Franklin, our presidency” on “freedom and democracy on one thing, security here.” pic.twitter.com/mElfFUoF5C
Of course Benjamin Franklin was neither a president of the United States nor a “presidency”, and the quote Nancy’s floundering brain was reaching for was “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” These are not difficult things to remember or articulate for someone with functioning gray matter.
This is right up there with other famous neural malfunctions by the speaker, like her “Bernie loves hearing” gibberish from last year or her bizarre “Good morning, Sunday morning” restart in the middle of an interview a couple of years ago, and it calls to mind a DC pharmacist’s casual remark in 2017 that he had filled prescriptions to treat Alzheimer’s disease for some powerful decision makers on Capitol Hill.
None of which would be a problem, if we were talking about some little old lady whiling away her twilight years at a retirement home in Florida. But we are not; we are talking about one of the most powerful elected officials in the most powerful government on earth, third in the line of succession to the presidency after the vice president.
More importantly, we are talking about someone who just participated in an incendiary visit to Taiwan which has ensured the escalation of dangerous cold war tensions between major world powers, and could potentially have triggered a hot war with China.
US war machinery, including aircraft carriers and large planes, were mobilized to provide security for Pelosi’s visit ahead of her arrival. The United States military was literally just used to help a dementia patient try to start World War Three.
China’s response to Pelosi’s provocation has thankfully been relatively measured, though we’re about to see Taiwan fully encircled by the Chinese navy for a show of force unlike anything we’ve seen in decades, and Chinese sanctions upon Taiwanese commerce are still being announced. There will be political pressure in Beijing to escalate tensions with the US so as not to look weak, and the intensity of the new cold war has certainly been ratcheted up a notch, but when it comes to hot war it looks like humanity’s better angels have prevailed for now.
None of this makes it acceptable for the world’s most powerful government to send a politician whose brains are leaking out her ears to try to stir up hostilities under cover of its military forces.
The world is worse now than it was before Pelosi’s plane touched down. Less safe, less wealthy, less kind, and more frightening. Not one ordinary person has benefitted from her insanely hawkish provocation made in her final years on this earth, especially not the people of Taiwan.
The US empire is sick, and it is playing sick games with all our lives. As far as I’m concerned, its downfall can’t come soon enough. (-Caitlin Johnstone)
WHERE IS THE ANTI WAR MOVEMENT AND THE PUNK ROCK RESISTANCE? STOP WORSHIPPING OBAMA AND BEYONCE AND START PAYING ATTENTION TO HOW THE RULING CLASS WANT WORLD WAR 3!!!
“In this video, I analyze the US war drive against China. Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan is just the latest provocation. The Pentagon has war plans, CIA officials call for war, US troops on the ground, US sending billions in weapons, think tanks want nukes.” (-Benjamin Norton)
“Fearing a new conflict over Taiwan, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg released a shocking account showing how the Joint Chiefs pressed Eisenhower to launch a nuclear war on China. Ellberg’s warning is more relevant than ever.” (-Max Blumenthal)
OUT HERE IT’S COLD A LONG AND LONELY, LONG & LONELY ROAD
REMEMBER THE EX IDOLS? THEY WERE PHOTOGRAPHED WITH MY FRIEND ALIA IN DETAILS MAGAZINE BACK IN THE DAY.
I thought they were pretty good for a grunge era hard rock group. My ex bassplayer loved ’em, said they were like Nirvana meets Van Halen with brain dead lyrics. That made no sense to me until I heard ’em, I liked ’em better than Green Day or any of that shit that got popular and trendy circa the mid nineties. Gary X Finneran was the pre P.C. singer with the scroungier Birdland/Billy Idol like good looks. He also had a band called Tragedy Club, but sadly died on May 10, 2009 at the age of 45. People keep droppin’ dead, left and right all over. especially lately. Half my generation seems to be leaving the planet. There’s a couple hipsters in my county with the dreads and tattoos, they hate it though, they’re only here cause their mama has money, they seem to want some kindof attention from me I don’t really have the energy to give ’em, especially not in the sweltering heat, so now they’re feeling kinda hath no fury scorned. Whatever. One guy asked me what kinda music I like I said, “The Stooges, Smack, Fishfaces, stuff like that.” Never heard of any of ’em. I changed my answer, “David Bowie, Stones, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper?” That helped a little. At least he nodded. One guy just found out about Iggy last year when I told him about him. Hard to find proper punknroll players in times and places such as these. Somedays it really gets me down. I can’t really even import anybody from outta state because there are no jobs here, we are way, way too poor to support anybody else, can’t provide for no musicians.
WHERE IS THE ANTI WAR MOVEMENT AND THE PUNK ROCK RESISTANCE? STOP WORSHIPPING OBAMA AND BEYONCE AND START PAYING ATTENTION TO HOW THE RULING CLASS WANT WORLD WAR 3!!!
“I thought the Obama administration was the most dangerous administration since 1945 until this one. One of the reasons this one is so bad is because it is made up of inept retreads from Obama & neocons who abandoned the republican party in 2016. This reckless and irresponsible act by Pelosi is the psychopathology of white supremacy and could very well have the U.S. in another war.” (~ 2016 Green Party Vice President nominee Ajamu Baraka)
“People in Taiwan are largely protesting Pelosi because what people in most countries who’ve been impacted by U.S intervention do not often forget is the destruction after, & what they most want is the simple sovereignty to determine their future.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“This asshole’s brains are leaking out her ears and they just let her fly to Taiwan to ramp up hostilities between nuclear-armed powers. The US just spent ninety million dollars helping a dementia patient try to start World War Three.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Politicians like Nancy Pelosi don’t care because no one in her family will be risking their lives in the war.” (-Jay Davis)
“Our intelligence community is the best.” (-Mayo Pete Buttigieg)
“At overthrowing sovereign countries, bombing innocent people, supporting fascists, murdering & incarcerating activists & journalists, resource exploitation, and meddling in elections yes the absolute crown jewel.” (-Fiorella Isabel responding to Schwab school tool-time deep state suckup Mayo Pete)
“Reminder that, in his living room, Pete Buttigieg has a huge map of the trillions of dollars worth of natural resources and minerals in Afghanistan, a country he helped militarily occupy. Remember when garbage propaganda websites like Daily Beast viciously smeared anyone who suggested that Pete Buttigieg (a former Naval intelligence officer who worked alongside the CIA in Afghanistan and worked for CIA contractor McKinsey) was a US intelligence community asset?” (-Benjamin Norton)
I KNOW YOU AIRB&B PEEPS JUST WANNA READ SOME MORE SHIT ABOUT FACKING BEYONCE, BUT THIS ALERT IS FOR THE PUNKS:
obtains & publishes, freely, information it obtains: the literal definition of journalism. It happens every day in newsrooms…” Senator Jordan Steele-John
“Buttigieg is out here professing his love for the CIA. Kamala is talking in circles. Pelosi is getting rich off insider trading. Biden is pushing us into recession & war. And Bernie is telling us we have to keep voting for this corrupt party. NO THANK YOU! #ThirdPartyOrBust” (-Ryan Knight)
“Overdraft fees were created in 1990. Credit scores were created in 1989. We can live without them.” (-Nina Turner)
You might know that in addition to the explosively great new Godfathers full length record album, “Alpha Beta Gamma Delta” on Cargo records, they have also released an EP with some special bonus tracks for hardcore fans like us!
Featuring 2 tracks from the ‘Alpha Beta Gamma Delta’ album (‘Midnight Rider’ & ‘OCD’) & 2 tracks (‘When The Cowards Fall’ & ‘Fade Away’) NOT available on the album .& exclusive to the EP!!
USA USA WAGING WARS ON WHISTLEBLOWERS & ACTIVIST GROUPS AGAIN. JUST LIKE THEY DID IN THE SIXTIES. COINTELPRO AND McCARTHYISM ARE HAPPENING HERE AGAIN, NOW!
“I AGREE…. “NATO is a war machine, a military tool in furtherance of US hegemony, and a systemic threat to world peace and stability.” —Wu Qian, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defense.” (-Garland Nixon)
“NATO’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.” (~Fidel Castro)
“Things have gotten worse since Biden and the Democrats took power, yet DNC apologists are still out here trying to bully third party voters. They will never admit that they are wrong. They don’t have the courage to leave this abusive relationship so they attack the people who do.” (-Ryan Knight)
“BlackRock isn’t just hoarding housing and land so that nobody can afford to buy a house, they’re also taking control of the world’s largest media conglomerates so that the public never hears about their malicious plans.” (-Mint Press News)
“I thought the Obama administration was the most dangerous administration since 1945 until this one. One of the reasons this one is so bad is because it is made up of inept retreads from Obama & neocons who abandoned the republican party in 2016.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“It continues to be so hilarious how angry people get that some golfers are playing in a league funded by Saudi money, when the US and the UK Governments continue to lavish the Saudi regime with arms, surveillance tech and intel that ensures they remain in power.” (-Glenn Greenwald)
“Why did Jill Stein & Susan Sarandon deport more Haitians then the last 3 Presidents combined? Why are kids still in cages. Why are they adding 100,000 police to the police in the U.S? Why didn’t they codify roe v wade when they had the chance? Oh Wait, Biden did all of that!” (-Radical Jesus)
IGILANTE WOKENESS BRIGADE AND FEELINGS SQUAD SCOLDING COMMITTEE DISAPPROVES OF YOUR TONE! ARE YOU SOME KINDA…”CONSPIRACY THEORIST”???
When you start talking about racism and classism in the USA, USA, those safespace entitled property owners who benefit from preserving the status quo, will start looking to find fault with your commentary, they have been trained by the establishment to try to “bust” you, TMZ style, find some flaw or weakness in your arguments, or point. What do the college people call that, again? Debate team, or some shit? Cancel culture? “See something/say something”, they teach the management class peeps all these jive silencing techniques to kinda like try to silence the people, send us to the back of the bus, try to get us to quit talking about the lies for war and buy into their bullshit identity politricks she/her “FACT CHECKER” Snopes narratives. Ha. These suckup bench warmer types want us to get back in line, like them, they gonna try n rope us back into their mainstream Netflix fake woke scripts, like they think they can make us fear we’re gonna get excluded, unpopularized, or demonetized or something. Thing is, that only works on people who were insiders, popularized, or monetized to begin with. One good thing about not being a salaried media professional is like, I don’t have to pretend to like Jack White or Kanye West or that Grimes chick or the Insane Clown Posse or Kid Rock or Lil Nas X. Not even slightly interested in cashing big checks to lie about that. I was desperate one time when no one would help me and I had nowhere to go and admittedly took some paychecks from an entertainment weekly, but for the most part, I just ignore people who try to oblige me into make believe liking shit that just aint that good, because it’s part of some kinda distant social hierarchy that has nothing to do with me. I aint in the hierarchy, so why would I care about all these folks who keep getting financed to make albums all the time, without having to even write any decent songs. I dunno, man. That middle school cafeteria shit was just never my bag, at all. What are these social climbing clowns and weasels gonna do if I refuse to make believe I like Kid Rock or some shitty mediocrity tribute act? Not bankroll my records, not let me headline Saturday Night at the homeless hating yuppie/hipster bar? Not charge me two grand a month to live in their special privilege zone? No free drink tickets to see some kid in a costume playing records some old lady just told him about at the gentrification bar on Tuesday night? I used to be jealous that Rob Sheffield makes lots of money, lives in NYC, and gets to socialize with Duran Duran, but look at what he has to do for it. Talk about Britney and all that shit all the time for twenty five years. No thanks, I got no patience for the corporation jellyroll boyband shills or mk ultra pop sluts or middle class politeness brigades or being admonished for my supposed lack of wokey wokeness by facking landlords or navel studies graduates. Sometimes, it seems they might even do it on a subconscious level, the haves on the hill will let you know they have disliked your being outspoken against the bullshit wars and social ranking system jive, they wanna draw a red circle around something you’ve said wrong, find an error, correctify you, like you need their permission or endorsements or it’s gonna affect your grade point average or something. Middle class booj people all think they’re Kall the Kops Karens special agent wokeness patrols and vigilante squads, always scrutinizing your tone, forever looking for that gotcha moment, always implying you’ve done something “incorrect”. If middle classers try n lay their Starbucks and NPR vote blue no matter who politeness, etiquette rulebook or “Her Turn” Hillarybot social climber obligation trips on you, just walk away. Trust your own gut instincts. Keep fighting. You were not born to make middle class property owners feel good about themselves or their favorite “Dynamite Magazine” pinup red carpet celebrities. The punks who came after me for not digging AOC’s empty grandstanding were like rabid dogs. God bless ’em, they’re just old and obsessed with their STUFF and outta touch.
I never considered myself any kinda like tough guy or anything, though I have had to fight, for much of my life. Price I pay for lookin’ cool. You can’t grow up in places like Ohio or Indiana without having to fight the dumb fuckin’ ruling class mama’s boy jocks and rednecks, particularly not if, uh, you know, you wear makeup and spray your hair up like Steve Stevens or Johnny Thunders. Which I’d been known to do for quite some many years. Nowadays, with all these really loathsome creepy pervs and wannabe gurus like Jared Leto and Ezra Miller wearing all the traditional affectations of Jack Fairy Velvet Goldmine glam, it makes me feel less and less inclined to wanna be associated with transhumanist cyborg and mk ultra slave promotors. The fascist billionaire techfascist warpigs man they ransack every subculture and steal all the styles and symbols and cool ideas to advance their sick Gates Reset Agenda to younger generations via Tik Tok and super hero movies and that awful, awful fake and toxic hip-pop they do now with the heiresses and the influencers from youtube. Been more than 25 years of conditioning people to be adverse to bodily autonomy even just in the airports, independent choices, free speech, freedom of the press, facts based news reporting, the deep state fascists and spooks infiltrated and undermined all the institutions like ACLU and Amnesty, organizations that used to fight for free speech, fight for objectionable speech, and the right to say shit that cloistered safespace, gentrification special class sensitivity kids might be offended by. Most of punk rock was all about being offensive. Shock tactics, provoking outrage intentionally, from Iggy on–Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, Butthole Surfers, Viletones. Now it’s just like a buncha Industry Brainwash producer/handler creeps, their disassociated DIZneyfied lapdancer puppets, negative programming, and some namby pampy richkid garbage muzak that says nothing, that has no message, it’s just an excuse for people with throwaway money to buy new clothes, you know? You know that old LOVE & ROCKETS lyric, “I wanna hear a song that makes me believe in something!”? I’m lookin’ for that tune with a point of view, with genuine emotions, what happened to all the real music? Amurkkan Idolized it all, they turned it into sports and pay to play Hunger Games knife fighting. Like Sylvain sang, “What’s That Got To Do With Rocknroll”? You know they’re even making sexy spy movies glorifying bio-warfare? I mean, WTF?
Tripped over a $1 copy of the Gary Numan 1979 classic Beggar’s Banquet LP, “The Pleasure Principal” at the shitty second hand store today and you know, it’s been about two months since I came across a couple Devo and Ramones LP’s. I live in a nowhere town, so any kinda weirdo music is real elusive. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. All those records remind me of spending the night at my old buddy Jaysin’s house where he had created an elaborately glam and kooky “fabric jungle” outta animal print and xmas lites, he had a very stern anti guitar stance, back then. No guitars, fuck guitars, he hated guitars. All he liked was Gary Numan, Depeche Mode, and New Order. He had great hair, cool clothes, and chicks adored him. I slept with one of his favorite local big haired new wave chicks and he never forgave me, even though he had gone on to sleep with multiple chicks I similarly liked and demonstrated particular interest in the one he knew I had the most sentimental attachment to. All this is eighties nonsense from when we were 14. 15. 16, but since he killed himself two years ago, it stays on my front page. All those songs, all those bands, the girls and clothes and haircuts. I’m haunted when the minutes drag. Back then, I used to have pictures of Lisa Bonet and Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Charlie Sexton and Boy George all over my room. Jaysin and I would play around with crappy keyboards and drum machines for hours on end, quarreling about whether or not we should bring our common friend, Dave, into our band on guitar. I kept insisting that you know, Andy Taylor’s “Hold Back The Rain” and “Take It Easy” lick was essential to any songs I might ever compose. I’m 52 now and nothing’s changed. Last I knew of Dave playing guitar was when he joined the Dimestore Haloes during med school. I miss the kid, we were like brothers growing up. For me, he was irreplaceable. Kinda like Andy Taylor in Duran Duran. I called him up at work this morning, like I did our old writer-collaborator-Haloes bass man Jake, a couple weeks ago. They both seem happy. Both have Serious Jobs. Married men. Totally Respectable. God bless ’em! It’s so strange getting old and seeing everybody doing their own thing, I always felt like this one chick who we met in line outside an L.A. Guns and Quireboys concert changed our course, when she asked to take out picture in all our ridiculous cowboy glam threads, she was rich as hell, she came from South Africa and her dad owned a cigarette company, she kinda had a siren like effect on our guitar hero. Lured him outta the punk underground and into straight society. Whatever makes ’em happy. Me, I’m rootin’ for everybody. Not everybody stays wild n rebellious forever. That’s okay. You gotta do your own dance, follow your own calling. Our old pal, Ron E. runs a commercial photography business. Bobby’s Dead which horrifies me again almost every morning when I wake up and have to re-remember again. No idea whatever became of Tony M. Let’s just say none of the old gang look like L.A. Guns anymore. Just me now, cheese stands alone. I still wanna rock like fuck.
@StatusCoup will be LIVE from Phily encampment tonight around 7pmest following up talking to tenants…NO OTHER independent outlet is doing this kind of ON-THE-GROUND reporting on the stories that actually matter—the stories the corporate media COVERS UP. If it’s possible for you, please SUPPORT
“U.S. white supremacy doesn’t even hide its positions. explaining objective of Pelosi trip: “America’s determination to preserve democracy, Western values and military and economic primacy in the Pacific and across the world.” No equality or respect here.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
I am just not happy today, trying not to bitch. I try to walk the grief off. Rocknroll is usually still the answer.
‘Alpha Beta Gamma Delta’ will be released Friday 16th September but is available to pre-order NOW via
“Amateurism & ineptitude best describes current U.S. leadership. And if there is “mistrust” between Zelensky & his masters in the U.S., Friedman alludes to, is because Zelensky finally understands Ukraine has been used, unfortunately its too late.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
I just came home from a long walk to the post office in the lonesome desert heat and find myself writing these lyrics about old former friends and flames I thought I’d mostly forgotten. I heard from a colleague, Mr. John Dissed who was censored on Twitter, Facebook Jail style for talking about a new book by much maligned author Robert F. Kennedy, called “Message To The Liberal Class” and the likelihood of some collaborations of ours potentially seeing some online censorship, but I just told I’m, “whenever we get a chance to broadcast our tiny signals to a propagandized world that’s currently goose stepping so eagerly towards techfacsism I say we push the envelopes as far as we can. it aint much alrite I know…but maybe the next guy hears it…and he does his little bit, and on and on! Joe Strummer said strike tiny blows against the evil empire. ya know?” Imagine writing a book and the self congratulating academic world being too terrorized and propagandized to read it. I empathize-ya know? I wrote a bunch of songs and people are too afraid to record ’em. They might get in trouble, their wive’s moms might not like it, somebody on Twitter might find ’em “offensive”. What a fucking crazy Kafkaeskue nightmare shitscape we have all entered. Stay Wild! Stay Free! Good Night & Good Luck, brothers and sisters and friends of the Revolution.
“I don’t understand how people can recognize the rot, and not reject the bipartisan system enabling it.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“It’s pretty cool that most cities are becoming unlivable, billionaires got 700% wealthier during a global plague, the planet is literally cooking, and major political institutions are basically hardwired to neutralize leaders and movements who actually want to fix it.” (-Luke Savage)
“The US government has taken your student debt forgiveness, your healthcare money, your public school funding & sent it in the form of weapons to Ukraine. Billions of dollars. Now those weapons are ending up sold on the black market to terrorists.” (-Lee Camp)
“It is absolutely insane how many Americans worship the politicians and billionaires who are fucking us all over. You are not supposed to worship these greedy psychopaths. You are supposed to make them fear the people. That is the only way anything will ever change.” (-Ryan Knight)
“Y’all liberals can see the Democrats filling their coffers campaigning on the very rights you’ve lost *under their watch*. What makes you think Democrats have *any incentive at all* to actually protect your rights when it’s so lucrative for them not to?” (-Blue Check Beth)
I DON’T MISS FACEBOOK, FUCK THOSE FASCIST FUCKS! ALL THEY DID IS CENSOR US AND SELL OUR BIDNESS TO THE MAN! YES, IT IS CENSORSHIP, AND NO THEY AIN’T REALLY PRIVATE-THEY ARE THE MERGER OF CORPORATION & STATE! THEY EVEN FB JAILED ME FOR POSTING THAT MUSSOLINI QUOTE!
The whole sham, the whole shit show is designed to make some gullible middle management, clip-on tie, khaki clad, trains on time secretarial motherfuckers think that their complicity, lockstep obedience, conspicuous silence and sucking up to the bad guys is gonna somehow get ’em some extra special V.I.P. only badge, with deluxe privileges and a nicer parking spot outside of the tumor factory or torture gulag. Tuesdays are Ladies Night with special drink discounts at the bioterror weapons lab for feminist freedom.
Of course I always understood I’d eventually be lockedout of Fascist Book for my anti-war shit posting. How they supposed to manufacture consensus for always more Forever-War bombings and their NWO Gates Reset, if the loudmouth peasants keep cross talking and sharing off-script factual information with one another? I am shocked and awed by how savvy they’ve become with marketing and advertising strategies. Everytime they wanna conduct another regime change war or coup, the military industrial complex and it’s mockingbird big 5 media always insist now that it is for Wokeness, Feminism, Trans-Rights, and Science! Everytime they wanna superfund the domestic police state, they just trot AOC out on her red carpet to insist she was insulted or lied about or traumatized or offended by impolite sexists, again. So the racist cops are gonna need more weapons and surveillance tools to protect AOC from sexists! I remember Laura Bush on Oprah Winfrey’s show, telling all our former mother in laws and ex wives and their sisters that the reason Amurkkka had to occupy Afghanistan for all those years was not to slow bleed Russian resources, or plunder their minerals, and opium, but it was all for (drum roll…….) FEMINISM and Muslim women’s rights! Cause everybody knows women oppressed under the Taliban will become alot more liberal and educated as soon as Murkkkan soldiers invade and cut off their son’s fingers for trophies and bomb the nation back to the stone age. So isn’t that comforting to know? It wasn’t just that some Muslim boogeyman trained by our own secret police was supposedly hiding there, after masterminding the Pentagon accounting room being destroyed by a plane with no wingspan, passengers, or luggage, coincidentally the day after Rumsfeld gave a speech about missing trillions, but USA! USA! had to kill all those people for….FEMALE MUSLIM LITERACY. cause the Empire CARES! The woke, trans-friendly, trustworthy scientific, vibrant and diverse, black lives, feminist freedom fries empire is teaching women how to read by liberating them, ya know–with drones. This kinda grotesquely fake narrative is increasingly being met with collective incredulity and wariness which is why all the spooks are controlling Twitter and Facebook. Like Cait Johnstone says, though, all these General Dynamics bulletproof stormtrooper robots are gonna be used against us in the next few years. But it’s for Science! And your own protection! Jane Goodall and Greta Thunberg said so at the World Economic Forum! So it must be true. Unless you hate teenage girl power climate warriors and kindly old ladies who want to protect the monkeys!
Man, my old pal Brian got a song placed on the “Stranger Things” soundtrack, which means Winona Ryder has probably heard his music. How cool is that?
WORK WILL NOT SET YOU FREE
Shit havers never like to talk that much about how they got their shit, the whole capitalist meritocracy pose is tedious as fuck, though, cause all of us who been around and seen some things, we all know that 95% of the wealth in this world is inherited or married into, and the rare and exceptional people who make it big with their unusual talent or good looks, sometimes they get killed by the establishment after generating profits for them and somebody decides they’re worth more dead, so shady attorneys can take control of their publishing and merchandising. I never worshipped the rich, always saw ’em as a criminal class of abusers and predators. Secret police have infiltrated and terrorized or exterminated every human rights activist, social justice movement leaders, or truth telling whistle blowers of the last sixty years, so when big media are all of a sudden hyping some outta proportion rap about how the system has decided this special interest group or that niche marketing pie chart demographic is gonna start receiving some all of a sudden special sensitivity treatment or protections from the good ole boy honky establishment, I always figure they making some money from it somehow, or manufacturing controlled opposition. The empire does not love you and did not develop a conscience just because they recognized your particular brand of special virtue. People who get privilege like to believe they earned it with their own uniqueness, karma, hard work, or special talents. They at the top, cause they so, special. Noblesse Oblige, if it ever existed in real life, ‘been dead for years now-these evil bloodsucking people just hire publicists to SAY they got some fake charity, or rescued a kitten from a tree or whatever. Gave money to the Innocence Project. Fake arrested at the pink hat astro turf protest for puppies rights. That kinda shit. Photo ops and empty staged, blue screen, p.r. smokescreens.
Beauty is an advantage in some ways, but it’s ephemeral as hell and I’ve seen many gorgeous people whose youthful physical beauty faded just go crazy over it-suicides and shit. Even murders. The prettiest girl in my girlfriend’s hometown highschool got stalker killed by her psycho obsessive boyfriend and his family who were friends with the cops got the cops to help feed her dead body to the lions. You know you can’t make this shit up. Other real breathtakingly gorgeous people got so cozy trading on their looks for easy jobs and shit, they failed to cultivate their other talents. I knew girls with artistic ability, actresses, songwriters, all those things, but they got comfortable and let it all slide. Why work hard on your paintings if everybody wants to give you pills afterhours and tell you how talented and pretty you are some more? Many hoped to marry into wealth and then got used to being used and settled for free drinks forever at somebody’s kid’s sports bar, or being a town bimbo, or whatever. So in that sense, beauty is a disadvantage, it attracts disingenuous predators and makes one a target. It seems to me like at some point, it would be hard to have any idea about what’s going on in the world, if everywhere you go, people are flattering, promoting, gifting, or free passing you for your beauty. One of my ex girlfriend’s sister was like in a crazy delusional bubble cause everywhere she went, she got upgraded, everything’s for free, she trusted all the worst people, probably still does. We all have our cross to bear, I suppose. Hers is like convertibles and compliments, massages, and alimony and plane tickets everywhere. I got famous female friends who are soughtafter beauties and mistakenly always think their Matt Sorum supergroup side project N.A. celebrity book signing author former rockstar buddies and producer suitors and shit are gonna discover or celebrate me, cause they so nice to THEM. It’s a crazy world. Fame people guard their turf. It’s a whole different trip for a gutter punk.
You ever have motherfuckers damn you with faint praise, like say you are a clever phrase chiseler or wordsmith, or “knows how to dress”? That’s how people who paid for a certain level of prestige on a bought platform assert their status as shit havers. They can’t be admitting you got any talent or formidable ability as a singer or frontman with an ability to connect to people and look ’em in the eye and transfer a whole vibe to lift a room, cause that would threaten their whole bullshit story about how you are just uneducated and lazy or drank too much, or whatever, always some bullshit about how you are undeserving of some shit, that you are preposterously less than them, “You just haven’t earned it yet, baby”.
HERE AND GONE
Really, what it’s all about, is mere access. It’s all class based. Some poor people can not afford to pay somebody $100 an hour to record their music. If I get my music recorded, it changes shit cause it’s hard for money having motherfuckers to control some false narrative among the haves on the hill being so extra talented if my work is ever preserved. So that’s what I really got get back to focusing on. Archiving the songs. Difference between me and the money having motherfuckers is they still cover shit I wrote when I was eighteen, and I got a lot better than that shit. Or the shit I done when I was 25-29. Some people liked the idea of me being found dead in a room somewhere so they can falsely claim they wrote all my shit and more than five people might pretend believe them. People who had girlfriends pay for them to have pay to play fame, or parents who superfund all their fucking ridiculous videos and shit don’t want me behind some microphone. I can still get down. It’s been fuckedup seeing so many bullshit mediocrity fakes on every billboard, while so, so many of my soulful and genius brothers and sisters died young and been forgotten by the mad herd in their rush to winner’s circle, finishing line, look at me, ma, in-law assimilation. My Pal Adam was a heart of gold comedian soulman street punk, funniest, most loving, affectionate, tragic, hilariously self destructive rockstar brother confidante mirror reflection you could ever meet. I wrote two or three books he’s a central character in. Midwesterners hated and feared the brother, went outta their way to expel him from bars, ban him from trendy places, hiss gossip about the dear sweetheart, he spooked the trendy hipsters. After I left town, he got tattoo shop popular. Like a mascot of the middle class, as tattoos came into the mainstream, he came to be embraced by the mainstream and I think he was happy about that. I loved him so much, I could not begrudge him that. Prior to the tattoo thing he was an outrageous punkrock impresario and member of several unforgivably, scandalously offensively named bands, including one of my own. That character was everything any legend was ever made of and more. Too spontaneous and lovable and sensitive and beautiful to live. A Real Rocknroll Motherfucker. I can feel him in my heart and with me even now. What’s up baby? AY! He used to get shitfaced and yell at me from across the divebar: “I’m IN YOUR BAND! I’M IN YOUR BAND!” Our bartender, a lively and boisterous son of Hunter S. Thompson named A-2, he and I had this shtick about roll call where we’d convene our divebar social club and read the minutes from our last meeting and name off all our friends, who’d all vanished in a rapid procession of sad and lonely deaths. Now HE’s gone, too. (RIP) A-2!
Even when my smart and talented friend King Corey from the famous hiphop pioneers DEE MOE FRESH CREW, was dying of lung cancer, he still felt obliged to take a job working at Bob Evans, ya know with the timeclock and the dirty mop and the polyester uniform and rude hick customers for minimum wage, that’s how strong the hicktown programming was where I came from. Even on his deathbed, he’s trying to get approval from his loveless fellow programmed workers by laboring for not even enough money to rent a one bedroom. He collapsed on the job and had to be ambulanced to an emergency room. His ex still did not come back to him, you dig? If somebody don’t love you, no amount of hairnet and floorscrubbing and wearing the wet bloody aprons is gonna change that, at all, ever, ever. Some rich motherfucker is having an open bar party paid for by his parents to celebrate his getting outta jail while you pick chicken upstairs for minimum wage in the rat infested kitchen. Which one of you is the popularity seeking female gonna leave with? Have some dignity, don’t make a fool of yourself, like I did. Walk away and never look back again. Some motherfuckers don’t love you, that’s just how it is. My friend, Austin, a lovely kid, funny, sweet, also stayed in that horrible town where it was always either fast food, factory, crackdealer or jail. He died of stab wounds during a domestic violence episode. My friend Kevin died of stab wounds, when some outta town drug dealers killed him, Jamaicans from Detroit according to one story. My friend Bobby H. died in a motorcycle wreck. Anthony got murdered with a gun in front of many witnesses but the killer only did like 30 days cause his drug dealer connections to corrupt politicians. Jen and Tracey killed themselves. Marc went to jail for murdering his wife’s boyfriend. Mitch o.d.’d when we were 25 on the verge of graduating from a prestigious engineering school in Seattle, nobody ever believed in me as much as he did, he was my Catholic school friend and first wouldbe rocknroll manager, he invested in my bands, and was actively making plans to REALLY invest a whole lot more, get us to that next platform where our songs could be heard and evaluated based on their actual merit-we’d just seen him and made plans to reconvene after his graduation, but poof! He was gone just like that. His friend Tracey brought me his leather jacket on a plane from Seattle. I don’t think he really wanted to be an engineer, that was all to please his mother. His mother told me he had left behind some intimate journals addressed to me, but his brother, a mainstream wannabe popular guy decided that since I dressed in black and wore makeup and shit, I must be somehow to blame for his brother’s overdose with rich helicopter owning millionaire drug people on the other side of the country. Everybody grieves in their own way, in these smalltown catholic school cliques and sportsbar popularity culture, blaming the symbolic others is always a big part of ALL their rituals. Preppie sportos blame the outsiders and punks. Democrats blame Republicans, Republicans blame Democrats. No one can blame the Rich, ’cause they have all been trained to “identify” as rich, to “self identify” with millionaires on the tv. If you aint born rich and famous, you must be a slave to the rich and famous, or what other value could your life possibly ever have, and how can you ever, ever, ever be worthy of any kind of love? “Is he on the clock or off the clock”? I used to get up at 5 in the morning, walk a mile in the dark, ride for an hour in the back of a truck with non English speaking paint crews who’d meet up in the parking lot of Sherwin Williams and work all day painting McMansions, come home ruined, exhausted, destroyed my knees for nothing-all for a rich, beautiful starlet chick who broke up with me anyway. Dumb midwestern males like me were taught we could “earn” love. That you needed alot of money, ya know, to buy a girl. That is a dastardly lie. That aint love, that’s bartering. Walk away and never look back . One of my former bandmates, K.M., abruptly met some speed freak chick and quit the group to wing off with her and some well connected math metal drummer who had like cheap access to fancy recording studios and smack and rose to imminent fame by riding the famous yokel band’s coattails which is why I never liked him, he just seemed like such a suckup in the pocket of the well to do status quo, well, they went out West with a couple other midwest transplants, really made a splash, seemed to be two steps from the move, recorded, played out, opened for shit tons of famous hipster bands, got written about glowingly in all the magazines and entertainment weeklies, one of our old originals has long since been recorded by famous people in NYC, my old bandmate became a popular vocalist doing a not entirely unfamiliar version of something I mighta seen before, but he’d become semi pseudo underground famous in San Francisco and L.A., but died, of drugs and brandy one night. Fun loving, Presley-charismatic, charming like a rattlesnake motherfucker. Beautiful, funny, alcoholic, drunk driving hillbilly kid from my homestate of Kentucky. People still write me letters asking me about him.
Back in my New Romantic/Rocky Horror daze, a couple of my best friends and former wouldbe sometimes bandmates were just so good looking, they ended up staying too busy to really make that much art-my original keyboardist, Jaysin B. loved to sing and play and dance and pose, he was instrumental in me meeting my other original punk and scrappy new wave cohorts and getting our early bands started, but he got slowly suckedin to the Dutiful Midwestern Workin’ Man Trap. Ended up killing himself cause no man’s ever a manly enough provider once they assimilate you to that whole worker bee circuit of assembly line, speed, come down weed, back to work speed, come down weed, DUI bust, thirty days in jail, that whole gauntlet, pinballing between church on time and Dr. Phil Hallelujah Sobriety Societies and GET BACK TO WORK, SLAVE! Sad he’s gone. My superstar DJ bassplayer was the King of the Midwest In the 80’s, only Ronald Koal might have enjoyed more money for nothing and your chicks for free, regional celebrity than that guy. When he lost his looks, it adversely impacted him, same as my former keyboard player. He’d always been the best looking blue eyed teen beat pinup star where we grew up. Women just threw themselves at him-one of my male bosses, where we all worked, did too! I think he got depressed when he no longer looked like Michael Hutchence, turned to drink, spent all his time in bars with preppie conservatives and businessmen golfers from our hometown highschool. They got him into the factory life, also. He died last year. I have my suspicions, but nobody really told me how or why he died. I’m still not over it, in our teens and into our late thirties, we were tight as hell, ya know, one of my whole lifetime’s dearest brothers, and I’ve known many cities filled with people, he was somebody special. Bobby. “Died Suddenly”. A girl I deeply loved named JP, but whom I was very foolishly, not nearly as devoted to as I shoulda been, cause I was in my mid to late 20’s, and still involved with some other stormy diva it took forever to escape, she worried she was losing her looks, too, I mean, she was still a bright, vivid vision that almost all men were instantly spellbound by, but she’d been a model in her youth and she was not twenty anymore, though she was a sensitive, soulful, sweet, good hearted heroine. A honky tonk hippie, hard drinkin’ good time girl bartender, she could throw dumb drunken apemen outta the bar, cut it up with the best of the town gutter poets, she was one of the real wildflower Good Ones, ya know? I messed up letting her date those dumb oversized Tarzan grunge dudes with the goatees and Lollapalooza tattoos and the “cruelty based sense of humor” and access to hard drugs, she killed herself on the same day and same age that her mom had. I never knew how haunted our poor girl really was, I miss her. Wrote summa my best songs about her. People should hear ’em, she had a real magical quality. She was a big star in a nowhere place. We all were. Now, so many of the Also-Rans married up or inherited houses and shit, you see ’em joining these high visibility tribute bands, playing covers, kinda corny, halfassed imitator acts, but leaving behind 1000 mediocre cds in unsold boxes in the basements but at least I guess they got some low level namebrand recognition and maybe five dork fanboys each. Like I said, summa my favorite people already been here and gone and even my scrapbooks of pictures they were all in got stolen during some midnight eviction moves a couple decades ago. I still wake up thinking about ’em. Man, I dunno, free drinks popularity can be a real distraction. Some of my most talented friends like Mark and Robert who I considered real badass full fledged geniuses did not leave behind the body of work I expected them to, cause they got sidetracked by lifestyles, or needy women, and doing research studies to pay the rent at the Y and dying young as a result. I know you been programmed to worship the pharmaceutical industry but fuckedup side effects are real. You’ll find out.
My friend Paul had almost zero commercial success whereas every bloated ego fratboy poser dick who ever covered one of his songs struts around like he’s Jay Z-Diddy-Kanye-Prince, just endlessly bragging about his famous grunge friends or 25 years ago mainstream tv appearances. Paul’s songs changed the lives of everybody who really got to soak in them. I think he was easily as good as Alex Chilton, Paul Westerberg and Lou Reed. I used to call on him whenever a woman was breaking my heart-they don’t let a woman kill you in the Tower Of Song. He’d always say to me, “are you doing the work, boy?” reminding me to write, and not just hammer myself to death with the liquor and drugs. Urging me to put it in the songs, he made me a better songwriter, for sure. “You been reading your Burroughs?” Paul was always telling me to read the Beats, but I think Herbert Huncke mighta been his favorite. He was like my priest. I know some other people felt that way, too. We might be few and far between, but the people he really touched, are permanently altered by his grace and friendship and genius, he was a lovely motherfucker, no matter what his stupid detractors might say. Jealous dogs. My brother, Dave A., who worked for thirty five years at the same record store, taking buses for minimum wage, going home and drinking malt liquor and listening to the old blues records and doing it again, his life really was like a blues song, man. He’s gone, too. A local dude sold his lp’s off for the widow, I did not even get one, kinda an extra heartbreak, man I love that guy, everyday he is in my head and in my heart. I had memorial buttons of him made and put ’em on all my hats and jackets. He’s who got me into the Stooges, Doors, and Stones when I was about 12. He had a rockabilly band that used to open for my group.
It’s gotten so weird ya know, how all the good ones really are gone. I dream about them all. Famous actor I knew as a teenager in NYC, also named Mark, died from Covid. Nice man-even when he was busy dating McDonna, I could call him up and bore him with all my angsty teen Smash Hits magazine bullshit. Everybody’s leaving. It’s been hard. My aunt, my grandparents, it’s just relentless. I had a perfect prettyboy drummer but he became a fucking cop. You can’t make this shit up. Aint that a shame?
“180 Democrats and 149 Republicans just came together to pass an $840 billion war budget for 2023, which is the biggest in history. If you haven’t figured out that both parties exist to preserve our decrepit capitalist and imperialist system then you’re not paying attention.” (-Ryan Knight)
“The most obscene defense bill in history passed and earmarks made a triumphant return, but there was little outcry, thanks to a progressive rebrand of the war machine: The Great American Military Rebrand (substack.com) ” (-Matt Taibbi)
You probably won’t see too many links to anything I ever write on Falsebook because of how the secret police control the algorithms and they lockedup my previously shadow banned account for antiwar posts and links to Jacobin magazine, Mint Press, Real News, Convo Couch, Gray Zone, Unlimited Hangout, Last American Vagabond, Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, Abby Martin, Dr. Cornel West, Jeremy Scahill, Ray McGovren and Col. Ann Wright, Scott Ritter, John Kirakou, Project Censored, Code Pink, Wikileaks, Consortium News, Antiwar.com, David Swanson, Cindy Sheehan, Black Agenda Report, Last American Vagabond, Activist Post, etc. Assange called it the world’s most abusive spy machine.
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” William Casey, CIA Director 1981
“NEVER PUT ANYONE IN A CHOKEHOLD. THAT’S WHAT THE PIG DOES”. (-IAN ASTBURY)
HYPNOSPELL
“An unconscious human is one driven compulsively by deep-seated mental habits they don’t really see and can’t do much to control, so they’ll often find themselves engaged in unwholesome behavior patterns like addiction, unkindness, greed and neurosis, and making the same mistakes over and over for reasons they don’t quite understand.
A conscious human is one who doesn’t have unseen conditioning pulling the strings from behind the scenes in their subconscious mind, because they have done their work and drawn their inner demons into the light of consciousness where they can be healed. They are therefore able to move through life deliberately and in the interest of what’s best, rather than compulsively and in a way that spreads trauma to others.
A conscious humanity would mean that this way of functioning blossoms throughout the entire species.
Doesn’t it kind of look like that might be what’s happening? Like all the chaos and confusion of these strange times could simply be the birth pangs of a species whose relationship with consciousness is about to take a dramatic pivot? The increasingly shrill mass media narratives rapidly approaching white noise saturation? The increasingly widespread awareness that our society’s rules are made up and we can change them whenever we want? The mysterious increase in incidents of spiritual awakening as reported by teachers of enlightenment? Just how goddamn weird everything’s been getting these last few years?
I think it’s possible. I think it’s possible we are moving as a species toward an adaptation that will enable us to survive in a situation which is very different from the one we first emerged in, as every species eventually does if it doesn’t go extinct. If this is indeed what is happening, it stands to reason that it will be an adaptation that prevents us from wiping ourselves out via ecocide or nuclear war, and that a collective movement into consciousness is what that adaptation will look like.
A conscious species would be able to work in cooperation with its ecosystem, rather than compulsively consuming it due to primitive impulses to obtain and dominate and egoic impulses to be rich and have more. A conscious species would be able to convert civilization from competition-based models into collaboration-based models, where rather than trying to climb over each other to get ahead we all work together to make sure everyone has what they need to live. A conscious species would no longer see the sense in dividing itself up into separate competing nation-states which brandish armageddon weapons at each other out of fear and greed.
The more I learn about humanity, and the more I learn about myself, the more possible such a world appears to be. Sure the world’s a chaotic and distressing mess right now, but so is childbirth. However bad things get for us, as long as we’re still alive our problems are nothing that can’t be fixed with a collective movement into consciousness.
Anyway. That’s my pet theory right now. And the cool thing about my theory is that if you like it too, you don’t have to wait for it to come true. You can start becoming more conscious on your own right now and leading the charge for the rest of us. Investigate your true nature, heal your wounds, be responsible with your actions, and begin working to coax all your endarkened bits into the light.
And then hopefully the rest will follow. If they don’t, worst-case scenario is you wind up a lot more happy and functional than you otherwise would have been, because you brought so much more consciousness to your inner processes and your habits of perception and cognition.
This is where the real adventure is at, in my opinion. This is where the rubber meets the road.
I will meet you there.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
JUST GOT BACK FROM THE BEST CATHOUSE IN TOWN
George Michael and Duran Duran were big faves of mine growing up and I been reading articles about how Princess Diana naturally loved those bands, too.
I went into detox back in the day, I dunno, I’d been drinking too much during a stupidly public breakup I did learn a lot from. Mostly, I think I just needed to retreat from all the voyeuristic local opinion havers who were rooting for my infinitely more popular faux moviestar richboy replacement. I just really needed a break, to get off the street. While I was in there meeting some beautiful girls and making friends with old dealers who knew rockstars and racked up federal charges, smoking too much, but enjoying the valium and mashed potatoes and naps, Princess Diana, who’d been dating a rich and famous billionaire Muslim and looking for protection from the crown and m16, kinda like Jackie O was able to find fleeing the USA deep state via Onassis, the mainstream tv story had it that the paparazzi just got carried away and chased her chauffer driven car into a tunnel where her car accidentally just crashed. People less trustful of official government narratives concerning royals and billionaires, particularly ones who seem to have almost certainly birthed two children by two different men, embarrassing Windsor, she knew too much, wronged the pompous blueblood bloodlines, and coincidentally according to many coincidence theorists just whoopsy daisy happened to die tragically young, Elton did that awful song forever. Coincidentally her now long grown sons, who look entirely different from one another are no longer friends, coincidentally, and the one said to have been sired by the redhaired jockey, has left the royal family, just coincidentally. Around the same time, a guy we’ll call PJ, a sketchy dude who’d saved my life once was hanging out a car window, drunk, maybe high on crack, being wild and rowdy on his way home from seeing Hoodoo Wagon, our poet friend’s blues band somewhere in deep suburbia, when he fell out on the freeway and the people in the car saw his feet come off and his body splatter on the highway, driver faced homicide charges, the whole carload of witnesses were terribly traumatized by seeing our friend splattered all over the road, they all delved ever deeper into dope to help ’em cope. I also mourned, as I had gotten to know him over many long nights of card playing and hard partying while he anguished over losing access to his daughters who he loved. I lived with that guy for awhile-he had a bad reputation among the straights but we all did, we were the outsiders, but he was always right on to me. Righteous. A Diamond G. A Goodfella.
A different rich drugdealer who was court ordered into rehab with me, came back from a three hour pass with a bunch of booze and drugs and shared ’em with me, so at that point, I kinda thought, well, I might as well split and I set off an alarm by going awol or whatever leaving out the side door against medical advice. I walked up the impossibly hot hill to my street musician friend’s third floor walkup dangerous ghetto dwelling and he started telling me all these wild stories about all the stuff that happened while I was in detox at the Cathouse, what they called the ghetto rehab I had been in. I liked summa the people I met there-Miss Betty, Capable Jesse. I think they’re all dead now. I learned some important stuff in that coocoo’s nest: “take what you need and leave the rest”. Also, “if nobody told you they love you today….love yourself”. I’m still workin’ on that one. The dude who fell out the car window had the same first name as me, so while I’d been gone from the public eye for quite some time, some people who’d heard about the death of the regular from the notorious hoodlum bar we were both semi-permanent residents at, dying, some people thought they were talking about me. I ran into a former co worker who looked like he’d seen a ghost and the poor boy had actually spent time mourning me. I’m still here, like what? 23 years later, knocks wood. (RIP) PJ
When I was a teenager, from ages like, 13 or 14 til at least 19 or 20, I loved an arty, beautiful, brainy, playful and wonderful new wave chick from the other side of the tracks and George Michael always makes me think of her.
“If the International Criminal Court was a real court, Blair will have already been convicted & serving time on the same tier with George W & Obama.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Democrats never deliver on their promises (even when they have a majority) because delivering for the people was never their objective in the first place. The DNC is a corporation whose sole function is to co-opt & destroy social movements that challenge the capitalist oligarchy.” (-Ryan Knight)
“We’re fighting back against the corrupt Democratic Party establishment’s coordinated campaign to deny our rightfully earned place on the ballot. If you want to stand with us and fight for real democracy, here’s how you can help! https://matthewhohforsenate.org/fightback/” (-Matthew Hoh For Senate)
“The land of the free” is just another capitalist lie. We are not free. We are owned and controlled by a handful of giant corporations and greedy billionaires who work in tandem with the capitalist state [the U.S. government] to exploit the people and planet for profit.” (-Ryan Knight)
WOKEWASHING FOREVER WARS….GENTRIFICATION BRUNCHERS ONLY IN REAL SOLIDARITY WITH OTHER RICH MOTHERFUCKERS
“Callin’ it your job, ole hoss, sure don’t make it right, but if you want me to, I’ll say a prayer for your soul tonight…” (-John Cougar)
These chain of command types, who come in big gang, power tripping, gratuitous overkill vulgar displays of overpowering force, the four cars fulla cops in bulletproof vests, the ten or so hillbillies in the white trucks and gigantic earth movers, and the bureaucratic rich women on the phones in their shiny new oversized Arnold Schwarzenegger like black vehicles, code enforcement paychecks and fancy government title havers, are some ugly sons a bitches who you wouldn’t want fucking waking up your sleeping family or tearing up your street, or bulldozing YOUR neighbor’s yard, just cause some corrupt local millionaires wanna remake and remodel the town, but if you are a middle class property owner, or genteel classed college educated capitalist, you probably think it’s all just golly gee willikers downright just okeydokey and fair is fair and by the textbook acceptable as long as they don’t say some kinda weekly updated “bad speech”. Or have a different diet, or like some comedian you were told is “objectionable”, all that matters to bipartisan haves is short term protecting their own professional class image, and eager-beaver reputation as go alongs, BUT if you are a member of a class that’s being pushed around with active violence and physical and legal intimidation and non stop class persecution, you would not find it oh so charming and progressive, that some fuckin’ token females are involved, with the push around, believe me. So what, big deal, there’s always been Uncle Tom tokens and high visibility status quo exploitation of brazen tokenism. Wrong is still wrong. The powers that be, scumbag billionaires and millionaires, have somehow rebranded their relentless nonstop worldwide war on the poor as somehow green, or LGBT friendly woke, or scientific, which is obviously nonsense. The shitlib booj people are all-in, though, for always more okey-dokey blame a boogeyman forever war bombings and inflated “defense budgets” and shady proxy war military contractors and total bullshit psy ops and black ops as long as media calls it “for democracy”–the usual, same ole same ole drones, plundering, mass murder and colonialism. Everyday booj safespace people wanna add more forbidden words to their naughty, naughty cancel culture list. Hey man, if you don’t wanna be called a groomer, don’t be creepy around kids, stop trying to help normalize the elite’s gross and inappropriate sexualization of children. Don’t like being called a Karen, you think that’s a mean ole hatespeech smear, well, imagine how poor people who you keep calling the cops on, for no reason, feel. Ya’all privileged people gotta cease with the fuckin double standards, and make-believe, SO & SO FIRST, protected class bullshit. The TV is not a gawd. (I know, I know). Gawdess. The TV is not a gawdess. Why would city hall dispatch 25 some city employees, sub-contractors, and police officers to spend 4 hours in the unforgiving hot sun, just removing some rock garden debris and old wood off a hill, next to a targeted geezers property? Because they can? I dunno, he musta pissed some insider off, there are cluttered properties on every street in this poor old town, but this guys’s gettin’ the business, and apparently the secretive developers think his property’s an eyesore and he’d built some rock steps up their embankment. Drunk on power bureaucrats are the worst. They defy all logic and they’re whole thing is punishing poor people. The way judges throw the book at poor people, that’s how voters should treat politicians, not all this worshipping and making excuses for ’em. I’ll tell ya, not just Obama, but Bernie and the Squad are all big betrayer, two faced, bullshit, lyin’ ass disappointments if you ask me. I was fooled by that bullshit AOC marketing. Bartender, working class, gonna make a ruckous, remember? But she did not force a vote on healthcare, she did not fight the real fight against the jet-set on behalf of us real life actual bartenders, and working class, she sat down when Pelosi told her to, makes excuses like all the rest, points her finger at Trump some more. Phony baloney, time wasting justice tweeters are meaningless controlled opposition.
REMEMBER THE LESSONS OF GANGSTA RAP AND THE GRUNGE/ALTERNATIVE HOAX?
Whenever I see old friends living out their Ultimate Cheers Fantasy where everybody knows their name and they’re always glad you came, ya know, it reminds me of all the times when I thought I’d also Arrived At Last. Every waitress waits for her chance to be discovered and even the ones who try to take the shortcuts to overnight celebrity, supermodel fame and fortune, on some level, gotta know deep down, that it’s a slippery slope, a devil’s bargain. The Smiths sang, “Fickle fame plays tricks on the brain” and I know that’s true, baby! Like all those Playboy chicks who write their me, too victim, tell all best sellers nowadays, when they were standing in line with hundreds of other topless g-stringed hopefuls and going though the bunny school orientations and creepy photographer groomer cult hazings and having to sleep with Hugh’s brother and told by the old secretaries they were gonna have to follow strict initiation rules and have curfews and sign non disclosure agreements and all that shit, weren’t they hip on some level that they weren’t really Marilyn Monroe? Even Marilyn found herself facedown on a dirty white bearskinned rug with a fat awful casting couch scumbag. More than twice. There is little in the way of authenticity, sincerity, redemption or real love in showbiz circles, it’s just horrible old men preying on young and desirable kid’s energy, creativity, vanity, a game of three card monte with the old shadow from the crossroads. My main man had his hour for magic, when he got to be smalltown famous and lord supreme over a white trash bar where he made the rules and got the girls and took all the glory, but ya know, what goes up must come down, those glory days really do zoom by in the blink of a young girl’s eye, leaving you with nothing. I think that’s what Sly was talkin’ bout when he said “Everybody’s A Star”. In a greedy, got mine, superstar celebrity V.I.P. culture, everybody thinks they are the one who deserves it, earned it, already paid their dues, it’s “because I’m WORTH IT!” Nobody thinks they just get to stay at the hotel with the creepy dayjob man ordering food service, and doing good drugs finally, for the weekend and then, they’ll have to return to their lowly stripper pole in Kentucky. A long long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, maybe somewhere on the East Coast, I knew a chick once who was smart and talented and she got alot of small pond overnight attention and celebrity and fanfare and TMZ tabloid paparazzi local Lindsey Lohan/Paris Hilton/Britney Spears special pass free drinks red carpet treatment, but if you watch how the cards all really fell, the vampire haves on the hill cut her off from her real friends, undermined her support systems, kept her away from her family of origin, exploited her ideas, sabotaged her art, used and abused her, filled her up with cupcakes and false praise, left her broken at a bar, fattened up, spat out, haggard. They Anna Nicole Smithed her! They can kill ya with Jagerbombs and on the house, insincere flattery bacon cheese potatos skins, too. One blearyeyed, brokenhearted morning, I came down to the dirty boulevard after sleeping over at a sadistic abuser dude’s photographer girlfriend’s house, she had pulled me up off the barroom floor the night before but gotten mad at me when I asked her if I could borrow some clean pants. I ran into a barefooted, shaven headed, beautiful Bambi eyed girl, ya know she had been taken home the night before and dumped off on the boulevard, our eyes met, she told me I was beautiful, we both recently shaved our heads as some kinda ridiculously misguided protest and were surprised to see someone else had also independently done that exact same thing, when we saw each other. I’m sure I was goin’ for a Richie Manic look but probably looked more like one of those crazy eyed Manson girls, now, I’d found a twin in Spacey Tracey! (RIP) She’s dead and gone now, killed herself in jail. She was a good chick but had been raised in a cult, had a mental illness, stole a car from my friend once, also robbed a bank. Some old man would pick her up from the bar, fill her head with big promises and ditch her in the morning. Happens everyday, they got a formula, a whole textbook for use and abuse and dangling false hope. Big Pimpin’, they call it. They find a runaway kid at the bus station and buy her some Denny’s. Ya gotta be careful with fame seeking and the ever promised illusions of arrival and belonging, highschool popularity, all too often, it’s fool’s gold. Just a handfull of pills and some fratboys and their groomer moms helping ’em, when they’re doing their dirty work. Nothing but a sign over a side door that says “V.I.P. ENTRANCE” and the local gentry rich as fuck junkie crackhead kids want you to wear this used thong for the night. You know how the Revolution only got like one or two lines a piece in “Purple Rain”? I’ve started to notice how everybody is Prince in their own Starring Role and people like me, we somehow gradually became, ya know, Bobby Z, one line sayers, background characters, distant echoes from a half forgotten rock dream, left in the dust, forgotten but not gone….But they kept the songs. Like Prince with Brown Mark’s “KISS”, actually.
Man, in the 90’s, Corporate Amurkkka made a billion by exploiting the Gangsta Rap movement, a buncha young rappers posed and flexed in front of their record executive’s mansions, flossing around like Diamond Jim, buying gold chains and quoting Scarface, Hootchie girls in the short shorts in their vice president’s hot tubs, rental cars. Most of ’em, the good ones usually, ended up dead after the record industry made money off ’em. Still happens thoday, these overnight face tattooed rappers all make their occult video and have a season of drugs and partying before they find ’em dead at 21. The list is long. A few convert to secret societies, capitalist hierarchies, are used to promote a diverse face of Corporate Honky Empire. Black Lives Matter slogan became a big money maker for two to three years, cover of every expensive coffeetable magazine and white pople media hook, two or three grifters at the top of a fake organization got overnight rich, live in mansions, but 100 real grass roots actual legit community organizers we all recall from iconic photos during the Baltimore and Ferguson uprisings ended up dead. Prince wrote a song called “Baltimore” and went on BET talking about Bill Gates geoengineering, had just finally got his publishing back under his own control, was supposedly found dead with his clothes on inside out, in an elevator at Paisley Park and no doctors or bodyguards were really held accountable like when Michael Jackson died, they just cremated Prince, made the estranged sister into a showboat for a couple weeks, tied his fortune up in lawsuits for awhile, then, whoever controls the estate now, started selling highpriced merchandise, flung open the doors of Paisley for high priced tours and concert goers were served alcohol, and they did these sorta bogus tributes to Prince with jive ass industry caricatures who are in no way heirs to his legacy, though I would have loved to have seen the Revolution play with Dez and Andre. The lawyers who own the estate were even giving Morris Duff about using the name THE TIME again. I love Morris, but was not into his Santa song, and the Rhino reissue that came out without the Time’s consultation shoulda been a big ta-do with photos and extra tracks, a live dvd and liner notes and shit.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO WATCH DYNASTY
You know I been thinkin’ alot about old Clash and Public Enemy songs, cause back then, those guys were really sayin’ somethin’, PRINCE (“When Will We Get Paid”, “Mister Man”, “Money Don’t Matter 2night”) and Michael (“They Don’t Care About Us”) were saying stuff, too. What do we got now? Buncha manufactured artificial hip-hop co-opted fakeass capitalist technopop bullshit, just a buncha fakes on puppet strings. Brothers and Sisters And Friends Of The Revolution, you gotta get extra attentive when The man starts telling you that you are the Bright Young Thing, Next Week’s Model, ya know? Since when have Black Lives Mattered to the racist kkkops or rich people running the show? They killed even MORE black folks since the George Floyd uprisings and all those sellout fraud squad celebrities send billions for guns to destabilize regions or start wars with Russia-China-Iran-Yemen-Palestine. Make laws against protest. I just don’t believe the media-whores or techlord secret police censors, red capet partisan celebrities, or anybody on television “represents” me, you, or our interests. Even the Gender Industry, after a lifetime of getting beaten in the streets, a lifetime of smear the queer, and countless horrible queer bashings, suddenly, EVERY macho hetero celebrity is in a dress and all the kids on Tik Tok are being peer pressured from the tower to be gender fluid this or somethin’ somethin’ that? Makes no sense to me, the corporate push for everybody to be on high alert extra extra pro noun fixated and in a dress. Like Chuck D. said, you “Can’t Truss It”. Why, after generations of churning out G.I. Joe armies of musclebound don’t ask/don’t tell arrow straight conformists have they suddenly switched the factory settings to making everybody into Gay Beachouse Malibu Kendolls? The social engineers do not love poor people, we know that much is true, and beyond a shadow of a doubt, so I fret for all my allies in every slice of the piechart, when they are suddenly invited to the head of the class and told that from now on they will be the teacher’s special privileges pets. I just don’t buy it, smells fishy to me. Gender is not an identity, my character is my identity, not my genitals or preferred sexual positions or partners parts, but yeah, I know, it’s become a gigantic INDUSTRY. Who are the major stockholders, moneymakers, qui bono? I remember the corporations just over saturating us with that garbage corporate punk in the nineties, they used it to kill off the real rebel underground. All the tiny radio stations, punk zines, college bars got Over Grunged and forcefed all that awful Blink 182 and Offspring and Green Day product until nobody wanted to ever hear anything like it again. They killed the real punks and gave you Avril Lavigne and Machinegun Kelly and Class Act. No thanks, ya know? You gotta think twice or fifty times before going mainstream, it’s a big mousetrap. The Capitalists just eat human beings and exploit rebellious subcultures, turn it all into advertisements for war and fascism. I loved RuPaul since early Wigstock and the Love Shack, but every show on Netflix or Hulu is suddenly drag obsessed? I dunno, man. can’t truss it. When there’s a sudden and unprecedented mandate to wear makeup and a dress, when it becomes compulsory, you ask questions. I would not WANT to sit with the jacks and fratboys at the lunchroom table, ya know what I’m sayin’? Don’t fall for it. Black comedians been complaining about it for years, how they can not get movie roles except as black men in a dress. What’s up with that? What happened at the end of the Alternative marketing hoax? Rich sado-preppies took over all the collegetown bar scenes and killed off live music. Turned it into gentrified cocaine crowd, Amurkkkan Psycho Urban Outfitters hipster posturing, backstab circle jerks and “me, first” rat race, ha ha we own all the shit culture. Some rich private school boys imitated Oasis poorly for a year. Kathleen Hannah married a Beastie Boy, they became mega rich for owning hip-hop and spinning off dumb white boyshit like Eminatti and richboy Beck. Kathleen always promoting imperialist war witch, Hillary Clinton. Just based on the new cult religion of Gender. Are you kidding me? Sonic Youth got rich, Courtney Love made a billion, and now we got Dave Grohl on every radio station, on every stage, by court order, forever. Makes me wonder. To me, Foo Fighters always felt like Mariah Carey, I know the Big Machine sez they’re “REALLY POPULAR”TM but they say that about GROPEY JOE and WAR WITH RUSSIA, and fourth booster for the Monkeypox making you sexy and popular forever, too.
One big problem in seeing real life, on the ground, actual reality, versus the big bamboozle manufactured tv, fear based, divisive, unreality, is how the PARTISAN PROGRAMMING and corporate media preferred tv channel-identifying, has become so powerful and effective, that you never can have a peaceful encounter or brief conversation with a Democrat, ever, without them going into a big tv narrative, official sounding, authoritarian rap about how Trump is Hitler, or Putin is Hitler, everybody’s apparently, a nazi, except, of course, the white nationalist Azov Battalion in the Ukraine…or the kkkops all those middle class Karens call to push poor people outta view and neatly, without ever acknowledging ANY complicity on the part of their blue no matter who Democrat enablers, who basically co sign every bad thing the Republicans do, that adversely affects the poor-ya know? The rank n file Rachel Maddow Russiagate Dems can not even hear anything about how Biden, Hillary or Obama are directly first hand responsible for wars or warrantless mass surveillance of fracking, or that AOC and the Squad helped fund the police and the overthrow of other countries everyday, they just don’t want to know, all they care about is blaming some Republican patriarchal figurehead, “uneducated” voter, or foreign, external boogeyman scapegoat. www.opensecrets.org I just have to walk away, kick the dust off my winklepickers, and not even try to communicate with them, they really have become like impossible to reach-their whole social justice thing was just a big front, a parade float, a hollow sham. A bumper sticker on a Tesla. They care about their own position/property/prestige or political party, their precious preferred millionaire grifter celebrities, and do nothing red carpet tweeters, but millions of people being displaced by the bankers, murdered by cops, or military, or proxy mercenary armies? People going broke from Wall Street greedy ripoffs and rent gouging? They do not give a rat’s ass, they can just blame somebody, Putin, McConell, Bin Ladin, whoever-“The Parliamentarian”, the bucks stops nowhere, so that’s why we on THE REAL LEFT say there is no real difference between Republicans who hate the poor, and Democrats who pretend to not hate the poor, but then always vote to help fund the Republican’s police state, military expansionism, Nato overthrows and the mass incarceration and mass warrantless techlord secret surveillance of the Murkkkan slave class. ‘Long as they get to keep their private pension, mimosa, and VIP backstage pass, ya know? I can’t even fathom any atrocity the shitlibs would stand up and fight for, or really legit stand in opposition to, s’long as they get to keep their red velvet ropes, scraps of privilege, and special V.I.P. class protections. And some bogus justifications were drummed up by marketing people and sold to them in soothing NPR dayspa tones. All they gotta do is tell ’em that defending Gitmo torture culture will make them sexy, scientific, genderfluid, and most importantly, POPULAR!
Right now as I type this on a Wednesday morning, ’bout nine o ‘clock, four cop vehicles plus two or three code enforcement vehicles, plus city trucks, plus big machine bulldozers have all descended on my dead end street to earth move hermit neighbor’s eccentric rock garden and found object collections off the city property so called easement, to make way for creepy developer to build a big road to a new cul de sac the city hopes will attract some as yet unseen out of state people who want to reside across the street from the stinky waste disposal treatment center among a smattering of elderly loners and embittered, “don’t tread on me” hermits in disintegrating trailer homes, and small brick n mortar houses owned by snowbirds who are only here two months a year. It is an overwhelming show of force and it’s hard not to have contempt for the yuppie rich people, city lawyers, tourist gouging hipster coffeeshop and fake art gallery owners and second hand ripoff boutiques and stepford wives of city hall who gave the big okeydokey to all this negative destruction in the name of one dubious investor’s profits. My neighbors are all outside moving found objects and garden rock stuff from yard to yard, around in circles with wheel barrels, but I’m not doing that with them. I gotta teenager with autism I’m trying to protect from the confrontation seekers. It’s already in the high nineties and it aint gonna make a difference if we’re out there getting beaten, the man has decided the home owners on this street and their preferences are not as significant as the shady developer’s who is obviously in bed with some shadowy kahuna. I don’t wanna be involved with these show of force cops-one of ’em ya see around town, is always spoiling for a fight, she’s got that machismo provocateur swagger. You know the way a hateful redneck looks at a gay person? That’s her same energy. You should see how furious she gets about having to wait in line, like everybody else at the dollar store. She’s got that occupying army marine type of gun ho aggression just rollin’ off her. Can’t wait to nightstick or taser somebody for freedom or feminism or WHATEVER IT IS THAT MOTIVATES PEOPLE TO WANNA BECOME UNIFORMED THUGS FOR CAPITALISM, THAT “I’LL SHOW YOU” CHIP ON THEIR SHOULDER THING. Half the time they are on the job, they don’t even know what’s going on. They’re just sent to “protect” the agendas of the rich from the poor, or even just less rich. Guardians Of Property. Brutes, bullies, gangbangers, cops n robbers, military enforcers, rent a cops, even though they’re all seemingly former abused children, I never liked ’em. Bullies and goose-stepper not-sees have always sucked.
Even still, right behind the armed aggressors are the etiquette oriented, always offended, cancel culture P.C., winebox Karens and smiley faced indie-martyr owner-operators downtown. Yuppies, lawyers, gentrification coffeehouse owners, moneymakers in solidarity with banks and developers are behind this big invasion. I’m laying low, they already don’t like the looks of me. They’d love to handcuff somebody, I’ll let the entitled, booj property owners deal with the city government clampdown. Rich college people like to pivot from every topic and change the discussion to talk more about my pale hue and penis having privilege or “heteronormative pass privilege”, but I am first and foremost predominantly perceived by most as a poor person, and that is how the always more powerful forces of capitalist hierarchy gentrification class preference people treat me. As someone to be stomped on, removed, exterminated, silenced and censored so the posh people on the legal white people reefer and big pharma happy pills who are all loving the removal of the poor from entire communities and profiteering from the overpriced hotels and airbandb’s and mass evil landlord evictions and prison profiteering and war machine investments don’t have to see my objectionable presence or hear my offensive anti imperialist ideologies. All that intimidation cause the rich wanna get the poor to leave town and apparently a grouchy hermit complained about some politician’s daughter’s barky FIVE DOGS. A big part of being a middle class shitlib is believing your middleclass shitlib dog’s feelings are more important than some lower class neighbors human rights.
The class police in my town, are all working for some McMansion builder who is coincidentally a repeat registered sex offender, who is remaking our humble neighborhood in his McMansion building sex offender image, he’s gonna put like 100 new houses across the swamp trail which means 200 cars and probably dogs and kids, and it’s very creepy,..how the cops and city hall are all in bed with this guy and his agenda of pushing the poor and old people off the street, cops with low i.q.’s and forearms like Popeye can be really menacing in groups. Packs of enforcers ready to inflict violence on any low rent hippies or hermit trailer dwellers who ask too many questions, or stand in their front yards watching the big machines, or who might be accused of signing some petition that might somehow interfere with the business of clearing the street for “progress and development”. The suckup gentrifiers on the main strip would not like this kindof intimidation being deployed towards themselves, or their elite loved ones-the goon squad giving us the stink eye, but they secretly self-identify as rich people, so they cheerfully look the other way, when it happens to some elderly eccentrics and low wage earners, “over there”. They tell themselves us unsightly poors deserve the push out, we got it comin’, the being bulldozed out of our neighborhood business-they all agree we shoulda gone to college and married up, then, we would deserve some kinda rights that only belong to Specials and a couple pet preferred minority group tokens. They do not have any compassion toward “THE OTHERS”. The yuppies are so baffled by Obama, “The Squad”TM, Capital Hill maga tantrum HYSTERIA, relentless next New Plague wave update Pfizer advertisements, NWO Forever-War Propaganda, and Netflix identity politics trickery, they foolishly PRESUME that all blue collar folks are “Trump Voters”, and therefore, deserve no quarter or mercy, or human rights. See-they’re the SMART, EDUCATED ONES(!!?) with the Tibetan prayer flags and OM mosaics and correct lexicon and obedience signals. The pro war feminist, Hillary Voters. In their middle class bubbles, the police men (and much more always most importantly) police women(!!!) are their SpecialsTM friends and protectors. I kinda get it. Ya see ’em leaning against their vehicles and talking on their cellphones and initially, they seem almost normal, human being like, but then, when they start to assertively move in as a pack, and kinda loom threateningly over the elderly property owners, or give the hostile staredown to us no real rights having, coffee sipping neighbors who should (theoretically) have a legal right to be outside, but don’t in real life, without risking harm or arrest to ourselves or vulnerable family members cause we aint got no Saul To Call, they all look like hulks or great apes. I have some kinda begrudging sympathy for the devils, they are all blue collar enforcers, from dumbfuck backgrounds of multi-generational abuse, probably can’t help it, don’t know better, but the smugly smirking, diabolical predator class gentrifiers over on Main Street and Broadway, I got a lot of resentment towards them…Those fakes and frauds, elitists and college manners shitlibs are only out for themselves, they stand for nothing but their own privilege, these new age selfish and greedy airbandb divorcee make a bucks, cause they decorate their tourist trap businesses with all the affectations of arty hipster bohemia-John Lennon psychedelic posters and reggae flags and shit while all 100% behind the creepy developers and in bed with the Mr. Burns shadowy financier forces that own the dimwitted winebox ladies of just for show city hall. They line these women up behind some table and make it look like the soccer moms are in charge, but nothing they do ever benefits the everyday people, the poor families from this side of the tracks–they are just teleprompter reciters, puppets, models of the honky old Mister-Man establishment, same as it ever was, and here come the armed goons and bulldozers. Only now in the bullshit fiction age of the BIG WOKEWASH some of the bruisers identify as female or blue no matter who Democrats, so that’s supposed to make some low information, gender identifying, college grad tv watcher feel better. Whatever, man. Sometimes THE MAN is just a collaborating WHOA-Man. People who just want a license to do violence and take up arms against the poor to please the rich are just gangsters for capitalism, him/her/they/them/anybody. I wanna ask my trans friends who’ve endured lifetimes of abuse, from the very same exact intolerant military culture and permanently entrenched corporate elite, why they think they are suddenly so obligatory en vogue among the oppressor classes. My theory is “vibrant and diverse” is just pie chart pinkwash/whitewash/wokewash/greenwash/gentrification real estate code for “have money”. You can self identify as whatever you want and own tiny increments of privilege, as long as you have money. The gougers and brunchers downtown all got rainbow flags and pink triangles out front like they are liberal and progressive, but they wanna get rid of the poor. I think it’s fuckin’ crazy. Ya know Malcolm X talked about the race hustlers, I think now they just market-weaponize everything, we got gender hustlers, still wolves. Capitalism even co-opted hippie movement’s paisley shirts and headbands, bellbottoms and acid as an advertising sales pitch in the sixties, don’t get too excited with the fake wokeness cults, they just use and abuse subcultures for evil marketing purposes. They don’t really love any of us.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene captures perfectly the question of our times- what if only the rude untutored characters express sane beliefs, and all the well schooled and well behaved people latch onto abusive, deranged insanity?”
(-Spotted Toad on twitter)
“Friendly reminder that the prospect of revolution will become far more remote once there are bulletproof AI-guided robot armies who will fire upon locals without a moment’s hesitation. Revolution has a pretty definitive use-by date.”
(-Caitlin Johnstone)
“Look at what these criminals are preparing for you. Don’t think this is just about “foreign” wars. The rulers are more concerned about domestic opposition as it becomes clear capitalism is untenable & has to be replaced.” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Double boosted Biden announced he has Covid one day after announcing he has cancer.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“American weapons of war kill far more people overseas than they do domestically, and those killings are done in wars of aggression for power and profit which are sold to the public with lies and propaganda. Every AR-15 mass shooting you get a bunch of Democrats falling all over themselves to say those weapons should only ever be used on impoverished foreigners. That unique brand of psychopathy that can posture and preen as a compassionate voice of sanity before the voting public, turn around and help gun down everyone in the Global South for crude oil and Raytheon profit margins, and then go to bed and not lose a wink’s sleep over it” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
Our civilization is built upon lies and obfuscation to such an extent that advocating for transparency and the democratization of information can be a complete political position, all by itself.
Rather than claiming to know what’s best for society (whether we should move left or right, whether we should espouse this model or that model), it is perfectly legitimate to simply support giving humanity the information tools necessary to know the truth about what’s happening so that they can collectively determine for themselves what direction to take.
This would mean supporting the end of the mass-scale manipulations and obfuscations used by the powerful to influence the way the public thinks, acts and votes, and it would mean giving them the democratic infrastructure to steer their civilization in response to the true information they’ve got access to.
It would mean supporting the end of government secrecy and advocating transparency for any institution with any degree of power over the people. The more power and influence they have, the more transparency should be required of them, whether they be governmental, corporate, or financial institutions.
It would mean supporting the democratization of information and the end of mass media propaganda. It would mean breaking up institutions which have too much information-sharing ability and giving more information-sharing ability to those who don’t have enough. Rather than a few plutocrats influencing the public, the public influences the public. The public can collectively uplift individual voices and ideas that they like, but no voice is given an unfair advantage in whether or not that will happen.
Imperial Narrative Control Has Five Distinct Elements
“The powerful manipulate the dominant narratives of our society in five major ways: propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy, and the war on journalism.”https://t.co/ojJdjAJ11Z
It would mean supporting the end of internet censorship and algorithm manipulation, so the information the public sees is determined not by billionaire megacorporations in Silicon Valley but by what’s in the zeitgeist and what the public finds interesting.
It would mean calling for an end to the war on journalism and opposing the persecution of publishers like Julian Assange and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden for exposing inconvenient truths about the powerful. All efforts to increase transparency for the powerful and share information in the public interest would be praised, not punished.
In my personal opinion it would also mean supporting the legalization of psychedelics, because giving people the tools to gain information about their inner dimensions is as important for helping them understand the direction society should take as giving them the tools to gain information about their external world.
It would mean the complete absence of any authority controlling people’s access to information or ideas in any way. Call it information anarchism, if you like.
Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.
Life in our society is like the movie The Matrix, except instead of AI keeping us asleep in an illusory world, it’s psychopathic oligarchs. And instead of code, it’s narrative.https://t.co/mkk41xhtZK
Information anarchism is just as radical a goal as any other revolutionary ideology, because information control is so important to the continued existence of our status quo systems that it could never be achieved without drastic measures taken by the collective. The difference is that rather than claiming to know whether ideological models like communism or anarcho-capitalism would be better, for example, one only supports giving the people the means to collectively decide for themselves.
The idea of true information anarchy can be as frightening to the ego as the idea of total societal anarchy, because nobody being in control means there’s nobody to stop it from going in a frightening direction. What if ideas I don’t like gain popularity? What if people start thinking wrong thoughts and believing wrong beliefs?
But that’s kind of the appeal, in my opinion. Really taking the brakes off of the way information moves through our world and letting humanity take full unbridaled advantage of the interconnectedness of our brains at this unprecedented juncture in terrestrial history could lead somewhere very bad, but it could also lead somewhere very good. And whatever ends up happening would be because of our own decisions instead of the decisions of a few powerful manipulators.
And right now the latter is what’s happening. We’re on a collision course with extinction via environmental catastrophe or nuclear war, and it’s because of the decisions made by powerful people who are continuously working to control what ideas and information we consume. If information was really freed up, along with our ability to collectively control the direction humanity takes going forward, it’s hard to imagine we’d mess it up any worse than they have.
Ten Times Empire Managers Showed Us That They Want To Control Our Thoughts
The single most under-appreciated aspect of our society is the fact that immensely powerful people are continuously working to manipulate the thoughts we think about our world.https://t.co/s9gIfQGb39
And whatever world we built together will have been by our own informed consent, instead of the manufactured consent of elite manipulators. If we’ve seen it all and we still choose our own destruction, then that will have been our choice. Whatever happens will be humanity showing the universe what it’s really made of. What we really are as a species.
And in my opinion, that’s what real freedom looks like. Giving humanity the tools to go whatever way it wants to go, even if it’s the way of the dinosaur. If you really, truly value freedom, in my opinion that’s the wisest place to take your stand.
Wanting the truth to be known whatever it may be is a standalone ideology, and it’s also a standalone personal philosophy. Wanting the truth to be known not just in the world but in your own life, even if it’s uncomfortable or embarrassing. Wanting unhealthy dynamics in your interpersonal relationships to come into awareness. Wanting your unhealed traumas to come into the light of consciousness where they can be healed. Wanting your delusions to be seen so they can be dispelled by truth. Wanting it all to come out into the light: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
It’s possible for an individual to live an entire life that is guided by truth and by the desire for truth, and I’m fairly certain it’s possible for all of humanity to live that way as well. We can all push for that, if we decide we want it. We can all decide that we’re sick of being lied to, sick of being manipulated, sick of the completely backward status quo of secrecy for the powerful and surveillance for everyone else, and we can use the power of our numbers to force it to change.
And from there we can sort out together what kind of world we want to live in, guided by the light of truth, whether toward harmony or oblivion, come what may.”
“Police in Ohio shot an unarmed man who was fleeing 60 times. US police kill over 1,000 ppl a year. Many countries in Europe for example average under 20 deaths a year (some average 0). The US is uniquely brutal.” (-Lee Camp)
“The tragedy of Uvalde is a microcosm of the US empire. Precious humanity is bleeding out while militarism – at home & abroad – consumes our resources & fails spectacularly in meeting our most dire needs.” (-Dr. Jill Stein)
“Hey Biden, if you are opposed to gun violence why are you sending guns to Ukraine? Look, if you can culturally accommodate the kind of warmongering that has gripped this country you are immersed in normalized violence so stop playing surprised when it blows back. No honest person really believes this is only about the availability of guns? People are not being honest. It is too much to admit the society is sick & produces sick individuals. Anger, alienation & violence is the “American” ethos & how they sell war. I guess they are catching on that the only place Europeans are winning the propaganda war against Russia is in the U.S. & Europe! Everyone not subjected to Western other-worldly propaganda knows sanctions are responsible for energy & food crisis!” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Following a decree by Volodymyr Zelensky, the Communist Party of Ukraine was permanently banned by a Lviv court. As the party’s assets, buildings and funds were forcibly transferred to the state, Zelensky appealed for more weapons to defend democracy.” (-Max Blumenthal)
“Mexican President AMLO says he will raise the issue of the prosecution of journalist Julian Assange during his meeting with Joe Biden and campaign to have the Statue of Liberty dismantled if Assange is not freed.” (-Alex Rubeinstein)
“DEMOCRACY: Government is responsive to the people and adheres to a ‘rule of law.’ US GOVERNMENT: Government is responsive to the wealthy and “arbitrarily applies the law” on behalf of political allies.”
(-Garland Nixon)
“A major reason why mass shootings like Highland are happening so frequently is because the United States is at war with itself. And the United States is at war with itself because it is at war with the world.
MAGA: Democrats are agents of CHINA! Democrats: MAGA are agents of RUSSIA! Reality: Democrats and MAGA GOP are agents of CAPITALISTS and their monopolies.
Mexico has offered asylum to Julian Assange. Russia gave asylum to Edward Snowden. The United States hunts whistleblowers and refuses to free political prisoners such as Leonard Peltier until they are on their death bed.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“I save my empathy and love for my fellow working class, marginalized and oppressed communities. The ruling class, the bourgeoisie who fund them and the pigs who protect them get nothing from me. They are what’s standing between us and liberation.” (-MozFrame)
“Most Americans don’t realize that we live in the heart of the cruelest empire on earth because we are kept distracted with a heavy dose of mindless entertainment and fabricated tales of a democracy that has never existed here.” (-Ryan Knight)
“The stock market is a Ponzi scheme used to enrich the few at the expense of everyone else. 80% of stocks are owned by 10% of Americans.” (-Lee Camp)
“This is a day of mourning for the captors of this settler-colonial state. When the U.S. is freed from control of the white-male, colonial/capitalist 1% & finally de-colonized, July 4th will be a day of infamy. Do you not understand why non-European, colonized people historically subjected to the madness of violent white power would find the rehabilitation in the U.S. & Europe of crazed ultranationalist white supremacists & neo-Nazi’s in Ukraine an existential threat?” (-Ajamu Baraka)
“Akron Police just released the body camera footage of the killing of Jayland Walker. Jayland was unarmed and running away when police opened fire, firing 90 shots, hitting him 60. The Department of Justice needs to step in to investigate immediately. This is like Cleveland all over again, with the 137 shots fired at Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams. Jayland’s family is urging protestors to remain peaceful. Something has to change.” (-Nina Turner)
“Stranger Things added a dull, lifeless, and unnecessary storyline set in the Soviet Union just so they could get some propaganda slights off against a republic that no longer exists.” (-Jody Roumain)
“If you buy the idea that we need to stop the flow of “misinformation”, you are a sucker of the highest order Who is the biggest spreader of Misinformation? –> Corporate Media = CNN MSNBC FOX NYT Bloomberg WashPo” (-Compton Jay)
“NATO is a legalized terrorist organization led by the empire of lies. U.S Americans must be the first to oppose its existence. Lovely how every U.S beltway politician & propagandist will celebrate July 4th, boasting of the “freedoms” they’ve increasingly robbed their people of, while Julian Assange spends his birthday in prison for exposing their war crimes against the world. The U.S American people are merely victims of their own government. The world, even those their government sanctions, coups & vilifies know this. But it is time to do more than just be complicit. You will have to help get rid of the imperialist predator class more than anyone.” (-Fiorella Isabel)
“The ruling class has mastered giving us shit to fight each other about, and ignoring the reasons we should be uniting to fight them.” (-Black In The Empire)
“July 4th is supposedly a celebration of “freedom.” Yet I see no freedom for Julian Assange or Jayland Walker. Yemen and millions more in nations terrorized by U.S. imperialism know nothing of this “freedom” either. The United States is a big lie. July 4th is a celebration of the fact that the United States is the most propagandized and historically illiterate country in the world.” (-Danny Haiphong)
“Calling it “defense” spending is propaganda. It’s wage endless wars to enrich the U.S. oligarchy spending.”
(-Ryan Knight)
“The US is the only nation on earth whose entire economy is built on arms manufacturing and security guarantees to tyrannical Gulf states. It’s not just correct to call the US empire a uniquely evil power structure, it’s correct to say it’s impossible for it not to be.
Saudi Arabia’s destruction of Yemen and proxy warfare in Syria are many thousands of times more evil and horrific than the assassination of one Washington Post columnist, but because the empire is built on that kind of bloodshed it gets far less attention.
Biden continuing the unbroken presidential tradition of courting the Saudis is not a betrayal of US values but a very normal expression of them. You either want the complete dismantlement of the US empire or you don’t. If you don’t, quit bitching about how the sausage gets made.
The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Republicans say they will do evil things and then do evil things, while Democrats say they will not do evil things and then do evil things.
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On one hand polls say Americans don’t want Biden to run again, but on the other hand there’s zero chance Democrats put forward a different candidate who’s better than the rotbrained empire mummy.
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Friendly reminder that Russiagate was a psyop which had its origins in the US intelligence cartel, was used to facilitate longstanding agendas of the US intelligence cartel, is the reason liberals are now cheerleading the US proxy war in Ukraine, and that only an idiot would call this a coincidence.
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Anyone who still buys this schtick is a fucking moron:
19 year old “Zaporizhzhia Avenger” took down a Russian Su-25 plane with an Igla (Needle) man-portable-defense-system.
This is his sixth plane, and he also took down a cruise missile.
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) July 17, 2022
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Current proxy warfare tactics in Ukraine have no chance of delivering a swift defeat to Russia. What they do have is a pretty good chance of creating a costly military quagmire for Russia and a 100 percent certainty of creating massive profits for the arms industry.
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The biggest lie the hawks ever sold was that their militaristic policies prevent the problems they actually create. Militarizing against Russia caused this war. The war on terror created terror groups. Continuing the encirclement of China will likely lead to a nasty confrontation there. Etc.
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Working to bring down Moscow and Beijing would be a great way to move toward securing unipolar planetary hegemony while simultaneously unleashing the kind of worldwide economic chaos and desperation that shock doctrine capitalism engineers have heretofore only ever dreamed of.
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At the end of this clip Bolton cites “classified information” as the reason he won’t name the other US coups he’s helped orchestrate, calling to mind when Assange said “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security”:
John Bolton was asked to elaborate on his comment last weekend that he “planned coup d’etats” when in the WH: “This is something some of the snowflakes on the Left really were kind of shocked at, but when you’re looking out for America’s best interests, you do what’s necessary.” pic.twitter.com/7XC7xvRVuR
The most important job of the western media right now is convincing the public that the world’s major powers splitting into two increasingly hostile alliances is probably nothing to worry about.
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Celebrities “getting political” is not a problem in itself. The problem is that most of them don’t start growing their political awareness until they’re already famous, when they’re informing their worldview from inside an elite echo chamber that has a vested interest in preserving the status quo.
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Believing there are good billionaires is even dumber than believing there are good US presidents, and believing there are good mainstream media pundits is even dumber than believing there are good billionaires.
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The Guardian is the nastiest war propaganda rag in the world, and Simon Tisdall is the nastiest war propagandist at The Guardian.
No one ever espouses a mainstream political worldview because they have thoroughly examined all the options and sincerely believe that one’s the best. It’s always because they don’t know other political worldviews exist, or aren’t sufficiently familiar with them, or have been propagandized into believing false things about them, or because they work in a career that is advanced by adhering to mainstream political perspectives.
This is true because mainstream political worldviews do not exist to help people and make good things happen, they exist to facilitate plutocracy and empire. Nobody who deeply investigates their nature and contrasts them with alternatives comes away thinking they’re the best, whether they’re someone with left-wing or right-wing sympathies or anywhere in between.
The only reason mainstream politics are mainstream is because powerful manipulators pour a tremendous amount of wealth and energy into making them mainstream. If there were actually a “marketplace of ideas” on that front, mainstream politics would die.
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The empire still fears the public. If it didn’t it wouldn’t bother rolling out so much propaganda ahead of all its depraved actions — it would just act. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because they’re still afraid of what we’ll do to them if we decide we don’t consent.
Just something I think is worth calling to mind once in a while.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
Covering the Waterfront with Randy Credico – Ray McGovernRecent Posts. Covering the Waterfront with Randy Credico July 15, 2022; The Imaginary War in Ukraine July 14, 2022; Ray McGovern on John Bolton’s Bragging About Coups July 14, 2022; James Clapper Gets a Mulligan at Carnegie July 13, 2022; Blinken Leading the Blind Into the Mideast Desert July 13, 2022raymcgovern.com
A super hip school teacher from Missouri named Phil who was into Husker Du and The Replacements when I first met him turned me on to Public Enemy. I did not get it, at first, cause they were so noisy and shit and being hyped by Spin Magazine which I’ve always been distrustful of. Manic Street Preachers and Sinead kept pushing them, Sinead even shaved their logo onto the side of her head. Now I think they are one of the most important bands that ever came along and I spent a lot of time on social media fighting stupid boomers who wouldn’t shutup about how PUBLIC ENEMY did not belong in that sham Rocknroll Hall Of fame but I think they are way way way more important than Billy Joel, James Taylor, McDonna or a million other mean nothing mediocrity unit shifters.
Most self proclaimed rocknroll people I know never done one thing in their whole lives even like one tenth as rocknroll as FIGHT THE POWER!
RESIST RESIST RESIST RESIST
“No one ever espouses a mainstream political worldview because they thoroughly examined all the options and sincerely believe that one’s the best. It’s always because they aren’t familiar with other worldviews or because they know a mainstream worldview will advance their career. The only reason mainstream politics are mainstream is because a tremendous amount of wealth and energy are poured into MAKING them mainstream by power structures which benefit from them. If there were actually a “marketplace of ideas” on that front mainstream politics would die. This is true because mainstream political worldviews do not exist to help people and make good things happen, they exist to facilitate plutocracy and empire. Nobody who deeply investigates their nature and contrasts them with alternatives comes away thinking they’re the best.” (-Caitlin Johnstone)
“I’d like to see them all run to the hills.” (-Singer-songwriter, guitarist. Co-host of the ‘Discontented’ and ‘Deep Politics and Rock ‘n’ Roll’ podcasts)
It’s incredible to see Western media suddenly pretend to support “anti-war” journalists. These same outlets spent years viciously demonizing real anti-war journalists who exposed US/NATO wars on Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc., smearing us as “conspiracy theorists” spreading “disinfo” (-Benjamin Norton)
The rocknroll underground is still in mourning, with a host of constellations paying homage to so many fallen stars-like Bootsey X, Scott Ashton, Leee Black Childers and the inspired glitter-doll Ultras poet, Alice Starr. We attempted to interview his former guitarslinger, Brian Butler–who also played with Rozz Williams in Daucus Karota and Kenneth Anger, via e-mail last year, but he never finished his reply, meanwhile, our best efforts to track down the enigmatic androgyne, Alistarr, had similarly proven ineffective. As many of you remember, the gloriously glam Ultras had been on Triple XXX records and were poised to carry on in the shadowy tradition of the Nymphs and Jane’s Addiction and 45 Grave with their spooky, spacey, death-punk vibes, Sabbath crunch, Bowie spectacle and Alistarr‘s unique charisma and star power. He had first gained recognition in the Sunset Strip faves, Stars From Mars, who Fred Berger made so famous in the pages of his glossy “Propaganda” goth boutique magazine. The Ultras saw Alistarr developing his highly potent wordplay and pop songcraft. They were one of those bands with a magical musical chemistry, like Hello Disaster, who just broke up too soon due to pointless personality conflicts. The Ultras were exciting and surreal, artistic, and fun. Alistarr briefly resurfaced in some bands few of us heard like the ill fated Dali Gaggers, and the Coils, he had many fans hoping to cheer his return to splendor, but it was not to be. The Galactic Kid has indeed gone sailing.
One of Alistarr‘s longtime friends and colleagues, Evad Fromme, has an underground cult band in Hollywood called Moonchasers, who will remind gutter punk and goth enthusiasts of all their favorite Hollywood noir punk bands. Live, they even sometimes throw-in a Coma-Tones cover! Great band, great songs! Look for them! They had some tunes up on Youtube and Reverb Nation that positively smoke, reminding me variously of Stiv Bators, Nick Cave, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Tom Waits. “Lazy Eye Blue” is a little reminiscent of the Ultras with the bratty vocal, but it has a real pleasing, Jim Morrison quality that fans of sixties psychedelics, like the Doors and Zombies will naturally gravitate towards. Their guitarist is amazing, they should play shows with Captain Zapped! “Billie For My Blues” is catchy, singalong genius that evokes all the skid row dives and sleazy strip joints of L.A. and will remind anyone who ever lived in the down and out gutters of deadend Tinsel Town of their own personal booze fuelled misadventures.
“Lunchbox Girl” is yet another pop hit, all retro bubblegum and starkly lit storytelling showcasing Evad’s fine vocals and literate sensibility. A modern-day “Hello I Love You”. It’s kind of like Iggy Pop, out on a weekend pass from the Kill City looney bin with Alice Cooper and Captain Beefheart on a stumbling pub-crawl between the Rainbow, Cathouse, English Acid, and Raji’s, in rumpled hats, stained shirts, bad shoes, with empty flasks. I love a band that is this cinematic. Their songs will remind you of Jim Jarmusch. Evad‘s on the ouji board summoning back the ghosts of Jim Morrison and Jim Carroll and Gio Vitanza. If you live in Los Angeles, this is your new favorite group. If you live elsewhere, they are worth seeking out on-line, because this band is the intelligent, visceral rocknroll experience you’ve been missing, since the media monopolies took down all the cool indie labels in the nineties. Startlingly vivid guitars, a top-notch rhythm section, and a creepy, charismatic frontman with an unnerving, provocative presence, a totally unique voice all his own, and serious songwriting ability. Hollywood vampires rejoice, rocknroll is still undead in the city of fallen angels. The Moonchasers—Evad Fromme, Gabriel Hammond,Anthony Gezalyan, and Tom Sanford are stone killers. See their lonely minds explode.
(@minds) August 25, 2022In addition to being censored across social media platforms, the Hunter Biden laptop story was first ignored and dismissed by the mainstream news media, then spun as a Russian disinfo operation. Those media outlets eventually came around to admitting that the leaked emails were probably authentic, and Hunter Biden tacitly authenticated them himself when he acknowledged that the information “could” have come from his laptop. Nothing that came from that laptop was anywhere near as scandalous as the unified front presented by the news media and Silicon Valley in reducing the political impact of an October surprise before a presidential election.And now we know that the reason the world’s largest social media platform censored that particular story was because they were cautioned by the FBI against allowing such information to circulate. How many of those other institutions suppressed that news story because they were told to by the FBI or other government agencies? How often are US government agencies involving themselves in the act of censorship? What other information is being suppressed in this or similar ways? What other information will be suppressed in the future?Because of the veils of government and corporate secrecy which obscure our view of the behaviors of power, we don’t get to have answers to these questions. All we get to have is what oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg choose to tell us, in whatever way and to whatever extent they choose to tell us about them.But even what we’ve been told is pretty ugly. A government agency and a social media platform of unprecedented influence teaming up together to silence impactful political speech is censorship by any sane definition. Mainstream liberals can come up with all kinds of arguments for why the continually expanding justifications for online censorship are fine and normal and not really censorship, but are they able to maintain those justifications when government agencies are actively involved? Is it really better when political speech is being censored by a collaboration of government operatives and billionaires than censored directly by the government alone?Thread
Twitter is hiring a TON of FBI agents. Searching employment websites, it is clear Twitter has been extensively recruiting from the FBI, employing a dozen former feds.My new @mintpressnews investigation explores why and what this means for us.https://t.co/15hZwFz8X8— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) June 21, 2022Alan MacLeod has been putting out a number of reports with Mintpress News documenting the way many veterans from the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have been recruited to work for tech companies like Google/YouTube, Facebook/Meta, and Twitter. The intimacy with which these government and corporate entities are working together is growing closer and closer, and they’re making less and less effort to conceal it.In a power structure without clear boundaries separating corporations from the government, corporate censorship is state censorship. The mightiest power structure on earth is growing more and more brazen and shameless about this reality.You know you are living in an oligarchy when Mark Zuckerberg has more political influence over your country than any elected official. Democracy is an illusion. Those who live under the US empire are a propagandized and politically impotent population who only think they are free because they’ve been given the illusion of freedom, and less and less effort is being made to sustain that illusion.We are ruled by unelected sociopaths who have no wisdom, no compassion, and no intention of ever relinquishing their rule. This will continue unless and until enough of us wake up to what’s going on to stop them.
Passed biggest military budget in history of $840 billion/year 
Veglam 