write back soon

It gets better - it also gets worse for others

2011-12-21T12:03:00.000-05:00

Fucking brilliant.

Latterman reunions reviews - three shows

2011-12-06T15:15:00.001-05:00

This past weekend, I saw Latterman play three times. I'm usually not big on reunions, at all, but these dudes are legit and as much as I know them, are pretty much the same if not more punk than they were five years ago. I used to see them all the time and they and some of their future bands played my house several times when I used to do shows. These shows were ten dollars, with $1000 going to Queer Rock Camp in Olympia, so everything is good there as well.

Thursday, December 1st was at Maxwell's, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Maxwell's is a great venue for shows of the non-basement variety. It's really small, has been around forever and pretty much every band (including Nirvana and Fugazi) has played there. The sound is generally really good. No one who works there has ever hassled me, so I guess they are cool, ha. Anyway, some bands played before Latterman but I only saw a few songs of the one before them and that doesn't matter at all anyway. Latterman went on with really no fanfare around 10:30 and opened with "My Bedroom is Like for Artists Part 2," "Doom! Doom! Doom!" and "This Project Is Stagnant (Get It out of My Face)", as you can see above. They sounded as good as they ever did back in the day. Then they played a few songs from We Are Still Alive, I think five, which answered my questions about who would be playing the guitar that wasn't Phil's - Mike and Brian. Mike played most of the set, and Brian came out (after being paged for a minute) for four of the five We Are Still Alive songs. I think the songs they played from that record, not in order, were "Water Manes at the Block's End," "'I Decided Not to Do Them'," "If Batman Was Real, He Would Have Beaten the Crap out of My Friends," "This Basement Gives Me a Fucking Headache" and "We Work the Night Shift." Then Brian went away and that was the end of him. Following that, they played most of No Matter where We Go, as well as a "new" song, "Our Better Halves," which is the last song they recorded, but never got released until now on a one-song seven inch they were selling at the shows. As for No Matter where We Go, they played every song with words, with the exception of "We're Done For," which is a little perplexing, given the subject matter of the song - the social indoctrination of men into a sexist way of thinking, behaving and living - and that making men aware of this shit was always, at least to me, a big part of what Latterman was about. Oh, and there was only one song from Turn up the Punk, We'll Be Singing - "There's Never a Reason Not to Party." Bummer on that, but they weren't that comfortable playing songs/singing words that they wrote over ten years ago, which I guess I understand, but I promise there's nothing outwardly embarrassing on there! So yeah, they did their set, and included the "encore" song in the set instead of coming out and doing it, which is nice. Encores are pretty lame, unless you are legit about to fall over and need a minute.

The next night was at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Had to watch Yo Man Go, but we survived. I guess you could say we were still alive. Anyhow, Latterman played and that was all that mattered. They played the same set. Brian was again nowhere to be found initially. Jeff from Bridge and Tunnel came out and laid down some brutal vocals on "There's Never a Reason Not to Party," as he also did on Sunday, and I would assume Saturday, as he said he would also be at that show. Phil's head (a Peavey 5150 - I remember he used to play this Fender Rock Pro head, at least he's got all tubes now) broke and they switched it out for some Mesa. They were really good again. They had some problems with people stage diving and crowdsurfing. Matt and Phil were calling them out for it, with them being the staunchly anti-stage diving people they are. It was cool. No one was hostile toward the band for it, as least as far as I could tell. It stopped pretty quickly, until the last song, because really, what can they do at that point, stop playing? Probably not. People were definitely more wild than the night before, but no one was really out of hand, especially considering that it was a punk show with a few hundred people and I've seen some people do really, really stupid shit in similar circumstances. So yeah, overall, good time. They definitely played with more energy than the night before, which I suppose is to be expected. These were consecutively the largest shows they had every played, I believe. Oh right. There was some piece of shit with a Hot Topic embroidered patch vest of every band he listens to, as well as one reading "If it has wheels or tits, it's going to give me problems." After Yo Man Go was done, I'm pretty sure I watched a woman who had been standing behind him tell him off for it, at which point he sheepishly looked around and walked out. I didn't see him again.

Skipped Saturday's show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.

Sunday night was at the Bell House in Brooklyn. It was "sold out" but they definitely don't have a policy of packing the place, which I REALLY enjoy cause you can still move around quite freely at pretty much all times and no one has to be up your ass. So, Latterman played again...and it was the same set, but it was with the most energy I saw out of the three shows. If you closed your eyes and pretended you were in a basement, it was as though nothing had changed. Matt and Phil were still in great voice, Pat was playing hard as fuck, and the music was really tight. No one stagedove and maybe a handful of people crowdsurfed, but not to the extent that anything was said about it. This was the best night out of the three, as far as their performance. Really high energy and fucking spot on. They closed again with "My Bedroom Is Like for Artists," as you can see below. There are other videos of these shows, but I didn't take them, haha. They thanked everyone and each other and hugged and whatnot and that was that. They didn't practice any other songs, so they had nothing else to play, though I guess they could have played a song again, but that would be weird.

Final thoughts - it was good to see them all on stage again, pounding it out. They made the songs from We Are Still Alive sound a lot better to me, as I am not a huge fan of that record. I think the production is strangely stale and sterile sounding, the songs are not that upbeat and the lyrics are kind of bummed. It's just a different Latterman, and it doesn't really sound like Latterman live. There are definitely some great songs on there though, and I will be revisiting it for sure. The first two records sound like the band sounded when they played, and the songs from We Are Still Alive fit in much better live than they do on record. It would have been nice to see them play "The Biggest Sausage Party Ever" or "We're Done For," keeping with the band's decidedly pro-feminist stance. Whatever the case, they played really well and I was happy with the song selection, overall. Would have been nice to see them play some different songs from night to night. Where was Pat's Baltimore Orioles shirt? I definitely didn't feel like they were going through the motions. They all seemed genuinely into it and appreciative of people being there and being able to play again. It was also kind of reassuring and uplifting to see a bunch of people who had been friends for so long and who I know had some really serious issues for a while back together and putting things behind them. It makes me feel a little bit of hope in a world that rarely gives me hope for anything.

I can't believe the things we say - re: Michele Bachmann

2011-11-13T09:19:00.001-05:00

In a Republican debate last night, Michele Bachmann uttered the following:

"The table is being set for worldwide nuclear war against Israel."

Somewhere, someone believed her.

Breaking news: Americans are stupid assholes, re: Herman Cain

2011-11-11T17:12:00.001-05:00

The world now knows that Herman Cain is a habitual "sexual harasser," which really just means that he has no respect for women and thinks they should do whatever he wants and have no rights. The evidence is there, replete with multiple five-figure payouts to the unfortunate objects of his, um, affections.

Anyway, as so often comes with election season, Americans have once again demonstrated their breathtaking stupidity and militant ignorance/indignation. In this instance, donors have rewarded the man handsomely for his attacks:

The campaign said Thursday afternoon that it raised some $9 million since Oct. 1, 25% of which came in over the past 10 days — when the accusations of sexual harassment were first reported. That indicates Mr. Cain collected some $2.25 million over the 10 days – putting his fund-raising at the same rate as in October.

Thanks idiots.

All in all, I guess he's really getting that money because he deserves it for being such a great guy and so caring:

This week, Mr. Cain quipped on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live that his fund-raising has improved since he began facing accusations of improper behavior. When host Jimmy Kimmel asked if other candidates should hire people to charge them with sexual harassment, Mr. Cain, said, “If they’re smart they will.”

Review - Nirvana's Nevermind Super Deluxe

2011-11-11T15:35:00.001-05:00

I've been meaning to write this for a while but other things have been taking precedence. They still should, but I'm just gonna bust this out real quick so I can stop thinking about it.

So, Nirvana has been my favorite (favorite) band for twenty years at this point. I have everything (not the obsessive Kurt idolatry stuff or total bullshit releases like the self-titled best of or Icon). I own most of their records on vinyl, all original. No "Love Buzz" 7", of course, but you know how that goes. Nevermind is their, or anyone else's, greatest release. Of course, I was psyched out of my mind to hear that Geffen (Universal these days) was doing a four-disc reissue of the record. Well...

God, what a letdown this was. I was anticipating this release for months, looking for news online every day, every damn day, and then I saw the tracklisting - the original record, b-sides that every already has, the Smart Studios tape that EVERYONE already has (and isn't that good) and a live CD that everyone already has. People were hoping it was preliminary. It wasn't. Then I, along with anyone with ears, got REAL bummed when I heard it and realized it was "brickwalled" in the mastering stage, meaning, compressed to hell so everything is the same volume (loud) and it hurts your ears, getting rid of many aural details in the process. Bottom line - the whole thing sounds like shit and gives you a headache, the first two discs in particular.

No doubt, the boombox rehearsal tape and the "Devonshire Mixes" were tantalizing from a distance. The Devonshire Mixes are Butch Vig's early mixes of all the songs, sans "Polly," which was recorded at Smart Studios in 1990, during the session featured on Disc Two. I was really hoping for them to deliver, as Butch's mix of "Breed" on With the Lights Out is KILLER. However, they are kind of all over the place, which I suppose one should expect for rough mixes - some drums are too loud ("Lithium"), some too buried in the mix ("Breed," "Territorial Pissings"), etc. I wanted to love them, but overall I don't. I do prefer the vocals on there, as they actually sound like vocals and not wrapped in plastic, and the bass sounds like a bass. People who are seriously into engineering seem to have problems with the different sounds of the drums. It's nothing I notice though. Also, if you wanna see hardcore Nirvana fans get REALLY pissed off, Google "Sound City Sappy." A final note on this, the outro on Butch's version of "On a Plain" is so weird, in a way that makes me uncomfortable.

In the end, the Boombox tape is definitely the gem here. Much better quality than I was expecting and it has never been circulated in any form anywhere. Really interesting stuff to see the band developing these monster songs in a time that would, in retrospect, be the calm before the storm. It's that much-fabled "last innocence" period.

Now to get at what you receive in exchange for your money - four CDs, a DVD and a hardcover book for $109-$130+, depending where you got (get) it. With the Lights Out is currently around $40 and you get three CDs, a DVD and a softcover book. Both have substantial packaging. With the Lights Out had WAY more unreleased stuff on it, like most of it. All of Disc One and part of Disc Two on the other hand, has been released commercially. Disc Four replicates the DVD, which again, has been available as a high-quality audio bootleg since time immemorial. Plus, all the live b-sides are from this show, so those songs appear three times on the set - what? Anyway, you can buy the Deluxe for $20 and the DVD for $16 or so. What do you miss out on? Not much. Not much.

So what happened? I bought it and returned it without opening it. I stuck with the regular Deluxe and the DVD. I've probably listened to the Deluxe twice. I will never listen to the first disc again. What a profound disappointment. There are so many alternate takes/mixes/etc. they could have included. Even fucking studio banter. But they didn't. Just mostly a bunch of shit everyone already has, or if they don't, can get in much better quality, particularly the original record (although I have read that stores criminally pulled the original disc from the shelves and replaced it with a single-disc brickwalled shit sound remaster) and the b-sides (all of the singles are readily available online for a pittance - the original packaging and the sound are so much more worthwhile).

I also purchased and returned, unopened, the four-LP vinyl version of the regular deluxe after reading multiple times about how it, too, is brickwalled and sounds utterly horrific. What a shame.

Ah, almost forgot - many people report sync issues with the Blu-ray version of the live show, to the extent that Amazon has instructions up to help customers deal with it. I wouldn't know, as I don't have a Blu-ray player, but given the care Universal didn't put into the rest of it, I don't doubt it.

Fuck Joe Paterno, Gary Schultz, Tim Curley and Graham Spanier

2011-11-10T00:03:00.001-05:00

and every other piece of shit at Penn State who was involved with covering up Jerry Sandusky's devotion to sexually assaulting the kids who took part in his personal charity for disadvantaged kids. Send them off to a rape camp where they can get what they've earned.

Fuck them for sweeping this under the metaphorical rug so that their football program could soldier on untarnished. Fuck them for knowing that kids' lives were being ruined, kids who already had it bad, and not doing anything about it. He was raping 10 and 11 year olds. People knew this. They all fucking knew this and ignored it in the name of selfish glory.There's no afterlife, just life until they die. May it be a long series of miserable, agonizing days for all involved.

Addendum: fuck anyone who tries to say that it's not fair to "Joe Pa" for "all he's done for Penn State." IT WOULD NOT MATTER IF HE PAID TO HAVE THE SCHOOL DIPPED IN GOLD AND GAVE EVERY STUDENT A MILLION DOLLARS. He ignored what was going on for his own glory and that of the school. It was all that mattered to him, his staff, and evidently the school's administration.

Late Halloween treat - lost in a corn maze

2011-11-01T13:14:00.004-04:00

I've been meaning to post this for weeks, but keep forgetting. It's fine though, cause with the big storm and all the aftermath, many Halloween activities have been postponed until the weekend anyway.

Fuck. They were "found" twenty-five feet from the exit.

"My baby!"

American concepts of "resistance" - Occupy Wall Street is pretend, a non-movement

2011-10-03T23:37:00.004-04:00

I guess I don't really get the whole Occupy Wall Street thing. Nothing new has happened, nothing has changed. Still the same greedy pigs and their sycophants running it, still the same goals. America is still capitalist, just as it has been and will continue to be.

Anyway. I was reading about it today, and I saw this great statement someone gave about what Occupy Wall Street means as a "movement":

"The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%," the statement continues, referring to what it sees as a sharp divide between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of society.

Ha. American activists love talking about how they won't tolerate things any longer, or how this is the last time that something is going to happen, so on and so forth. Basically, that now that they have been awakened, suddenly whatever evil it is that they perceive will end because they will it so.

Now, of course, I have no problem, at least philosophically, with the idea of activism. I think a great deal of things are fucked and basically need to be burned to the ground, but that's another story. So yeah, I'm all for people trying to make positive changes and take back their lives and the land and whatnot, but it is so unrealistic to tell yourself or anyone else that there will be no more of anything. What these people really mean to say is that they wish for there to be no more of anything. But that doesn't change a damn thing except within you. People have to take real steps, collectively, to enact change, real, fundamental change. American activism, this kind of stuff, tends to be a lie. The lie is that you are doing something. Comparatively, yes, you are doing something if you hold it up to absolutely nothing, but on the grand spectrum, sitting on a sidewalk or holding a sign doesn't do shit. No one pays attention to you. They just walk around you. You choreograph everything with the police, nice and politely. And that's fine in and of itself, if that's what you like. The real problem is that you are telling yourself that you are in some kind of struggle, some "movement."

Look at other very recent examples - did the people of Egypt just say, "Hey Mubarak, time to go, we won't tolerate you any longer?" No, they went out in the streets and struggled. Fought and died. How about Syria, right now? People are dying in the streets every day because they are at the ends of their ropes. I would venture a guess that most of the people who participate in Occupy Wall Street and similar types of demonstrations cannot comprehend such a feeling. Not that I mean to valorize or romanticize the suffering of Syrians or Egyptians or anyone else, just that white middle class demonstrators in this country try to act like they know this brutal suffering. It's like the line in that Propagandhi song about "play acting anarchists." It is. It's a performance, and probably one that's pretty offensive to people who suffer on a fundamental level, people whose lives are profoundly based on struggle.

Just declaring something as over is delusional and terribly self-defeating. Cause you know what? You will stand by, you will compromise, you will tolerate these things. We all do every day. That's what this life is, at least here, now. Unless you go berserk and go shoot up the precinct or something like that, or say "fuck it" and take off for the woods like Thoreau or Ted Kaczynski (who also went the berserk route, but less intensely), you are tolerating these things. I mean, really, how are you not? You can oppose these things, but the economy, our political system and the very fibers of this social system are built on greed and corruption. They won't be going away anytime soon.

People are fucking greedy. History seems to bear that one out pretty well. Whether it's land, cows, power, money, etc, people are greedy. Sure, you can say only some people are greedy, or it's not innate, it's socialization, whatever. But then it's kind of the back side of the idea that no one is free as long as others are oppressed. How can people as a whole not be greedy when some of us are?

Hum on 120 Minutes

2011-09-29T15:44:00.000-04:00

I remember videotaping this when it was on when I was in high school, fifteen years old. It was during the summer, so my mom didn't yell at me to go to bed (it didn't come on until midnight). I went to the first Warped Tour three weeks later. They did "Stars" and "I'd Like Your Hair Long." I thought this was the coolest thing when I saw it, and I still do. I was so struck by everything about this band. First, fucking look at them. The bass player is going bald, the singer looks like he works at a gas station, the other guitar player is playing a fucking spraypainted guitar and the drummer is like just some dude. These guys, like you know how punk or hardcore or alternative bands or whatever often talk about themselves as "losers" or "rejects" or whatever? Well, most of the time they aren't. They are just saying that for cred. I am actually a loser and a reject. These dudes, they look like if we were in high school together, they wouldn't have been part of the cool "alternative" kids and we probably would have hung out. I mean they are seriously dorky, and I relate.

Also, listen to how LOUD it is! You can tell this because of the way the limiting kicks in as soon as they ring out on that distorted chord. The clean intro is pretty loud, but then the broadcast volume actually decreases once they get into it. Full stacks will do that, I guess. I saw them once. They were really loud. And really good. Glad I did that.

The guitar player's fingers just fly over that fretboard seemingly with no effort. It's like they're possessed.

And the drummer, wow. Look at all those cymbals. Five crashes/rides and a china. Holy shit. He uses them all, too. Rumor has it he is/was a Rush fan, so it makes sense. Dude plays so hard, and so well. Love it.

These are fucking great songs.

I'm very glad to have lived through a time of plentiful meaningful music.

U.S. Supreme Court - Go ahead and kill that nigger

2011-09-23T12:42:00.001-04:00

Yeah, so if you didn't know, the Supreme Court, after deliberating for four hours or so, told Georgia to kill Troy Davis. And they did, Wednesday night. They didn't waste much time after getting the order, of course.

The pig's family is psyched. Sick fucks.

Other pigs, on the other hand, specifically the one hundred or so of them in riot gear lined up outside the prison, are bummed, because they didn't get to beat the fuck out of Troy's supporters or even gas anyone.

Troy Davis' death schedule

2011-09-21T15:16:00.002-04:00

From CNN:

3 p.m.: Will undergo a physical.
4 p.m.: Last meal offered.
5 p.m.: Opportunity to record final statement.
6 p.m.: An optional sedative will be offered.

Cold. Mechanical. Robotic. Falsely detached. Inhuman. Chilling.

Georgia pardons board - "We're gonna kills us a nigger."

2011-09-20T12:56:00.002-04:00

Family of dead Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail - "Thank you for killing some nigger for us so we can feel better."

This is a sick world.

They're so bent on killing Troy Davis. They'd rather execute this guy than admit that they were wrong. Save face, dispense with a black man. It's an easy choice for those in power. Doesn't matter if a former FBI director, among many others, says, "Hey, you have the wrong man here. This guy didn't do it." THEY ARE GOING TO FUCKING KILL THIS GUY. Someone who didn't commit this crime will die tomorrow and short of armed conflict, likely nothing will stop it. Surely reason will not, and you KNOW compassion won't.

It's not like I'm surprised. I mean, come on, this is a black man, a dead cop and the death penalty we're discussing. Of COURSE he's gonna lose. Fuck this place.

I cannot imagine the anguish and powerlessness this would engender in one's self. It's like, there you are, the outside world is only a wall away, there a lot of people out there who want to help you and believe in you, and a few people are deciding to kill you. You have no say. You just have to die. You don't even get to fight. You just have to submit and take the needle. It's preordained. You know when you will die, where and how. A regimented, clinical death. It's so fucked and against all that is natural.

One of the fifty million things wrong with hardcore

2011-09-19T15:09:00.000-04:00

This really has nothing to do with the band Defeater or even the record label, Bridge 9. I do not know any of them, I know little about any of them, and I have never seen the band play. I have no interest in putting them down or any kind of such childish crap. This is a critique of ideas.

It's difficult to think of people in this country less deserving of aid than troops - cops, rich people, vivisectors, clergy, politicians...But here we have a month-long benefit for people in the military, with the help of Bridge 9 Records and the band Defeater, in honor of 9/11:

Boston, MA’s Defeater are no strangers to the themes of war with their conceptual albums Travels, Lost Ground and Empty Days and Sleepless Nights. All three albums tell the story of a family set in post-WW2 America and their trials and tribulations – from an alcoholic veteran father, his wife and their two sons. Consequently, Defeater has been well known for their support of US troops fighting for our country. With the ten-year anniversary of the September 11th tragedy just on the horizon, Defeater, along with Bridge Nine Records and All In Merch, will be donating proceeds from their merchandise sales to the soldiers returning home suffering from post traumatic stress disorder via the Wounded Warrior Project.

Starting today, $1.00 from every shirt sold on their webstores through September 30th will be donated to these soldiers that require assistance upon their return home. Additionally, Bridge Nine’s webstore will be carrying an exclusive t-shirt that will be sold for one time only this September, and 100% of the proceeds will also go to the Wounded Warrior Project. Defeater had this to say:

“As the 10 year anniversary of September 11 approaches, we want to recognize the soldiers who have been fighting in the wars that resulted from the tragedy. Between now and September 30, defeater, Bridge Nine and All-In Merch will donate a portion of our merch sales, including every exclusive shirt, to the Wounded Warrior Project -- an organization that helps war veterans recover from the physical, emotional and psychological scars left by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This organization allows these heroes to successfully return to the life they left behind to fight for our nation's freedom.
Whatever our political beliefs, each individual deserves to return home to a support structure that helps them heal from conflict. Every person we know and love that is willing to put their life on the line for the people they care about deserves our attention and what little we can give back in return. Thank you for your purchase, and to all of our deployed friends and family.”

Wow, no. So, so many things wrong with that. Why, oh why, should anyone aside from oil companies and weapons manufacturers be giving money to individual soldiers? Here are people who volunteered to join the military. That's what we're talking about. No one was drafted. A standard stint of enlistment is four years. Anyone who has joined the military in the last ten years had a pretty good idea what was going on - you're probably going to war. Pointless imperialist wars. Pointless. No glory. No defense of the country. Long-term occupation style wars. Invasions.

So there you were, kicking in people's doors, terrorizing kids, shooting camels for kicks. Harassing people on the street. Asking for ID. Making fun of them and their customs. Waving guns at them. Humiliating them. Screaming "orders" at them in a language they don't understand. You are their new gods. And now here you are, back in the country. And you deserve money? No. You don't deserve ANYTHING. What did Charles Manson's followers get? Jail.

"[E]ach individual deserves to return home to a support structure that helps them heal from conflict" - umm, what about the people who already were home (Afghanistan, Iraq) and never will be healed because now they are living in seemingly endless civil war, because they had their lives picked up and dumped on the ground? What about the people of Iraq who were living in a sovereign country that was no real threat to anyone, especially the United States, and now have had their infrastructure ruined, their past looted, and their future damn near stopped? And the people who did that deserve to "heal"? "Heal"? From the violence that THEY'VE done? From the misery that THEY brought? This is so deeply offensive to the annihilation that they have visited onto millions of people who had nothing to do with anything. This is a perversion of responsibility.

"[W]illing to put their life on the line"? For what? For whom? No one wants you there except people in business and government. You fools. Tools.

But they were just following orders, right? Ha. Classic defense. I'm sure people would respect that were this country invaded, by people just following orders.

I know I've said this before, but what's up with people not getting the idea that the troops ARE the war? They fight. They shoot. They invade. Rumsfeld ain't gonna crawl through the desert. You think Obama will? How about anyone on the board of General Electric? No. Put down your guns and the war is over. That's it. End of story. Troops made the invasion and keep it alive every day. They choose to do this.

Also, can I mention one more time that there is no relation whatsoever between 9/11 and Iraq? No one even claims that there is anymore. No one.

Even if you respect the concept of America having to invade Afghanistan and "go get em," which they really didn't, seeing as Bin Laden was alive until not so long ago, why are they still there, ten years later? What's going on?

All this shit is just nationalism. Blind patriotism. Giving money and "support" to people who've all engaged in horrible individual acts and one huge collective horrible act. Seriously, you look around, and when you think "Who could use some benefit money?", the answer you derive is the military? Fuck.

Scary stuff - re: chemical contamination of food

2011-08-27T11:35:00.000-04:00

I've been eating organic food on purpose for a long time. Didn't realize that conventional produce was also sprayed with defoliants.

People nitpick on things like this and try to tell you that if these chemicals weren't safe, farmers wouldn't use them or be allowed to use them. People tend to use extreme scales to decide if something is safe, such as if you get cancer or not. It's not like something makes you deathly ill or does no harm to you. Also, hardly anything gives you cancer right away...So shortsighted, willfully blind. Who would spray things like this on their meals after preparing them? Virtually no one. But as long as they don't see it, it's fine. Like it's any different.

Kim Thayil on being a band

2011-08-23T22:26:00.000-04:00

"I always imagined we were the band that made the party end. Like, ok guys it’s time to leave now, someone just put on Superunknown!"

Fucking brilliant.

Hunger Strike now

2011-08-23T16:31:00.001-04:00

This shit SUCKS. Fuck everyone who had any involvement with desecrating the song as such. These dudes are so cheesy and lame. Someone tell Chris to grow his fucking hair out again. Chester Bennington, ouch ouch ouch ouch. That's it.

Oh wait, there is also this, which is kind of worse, but not as bad at the same time cause no one from Linkin Park is involved:

Seriously, the guy doing Eddie, no.

Finally, WHERE ARE THE HIGH NOTES?

Hunger Strike then

2011-08-23T16:24:00.000-04:00

It rules. Everything about it. What they're all wearing, Eddie's leather vest or whatever over a flannel shirt, it fucking rules. The long hair, everything is sick. I'm gonna grow my hair out and dress like 1990. Chris' high notes. It all rules. This is pretty much as good as it gets.

Pigs - how far they've come

2011-07-13T17:21:00.000-04:00

Not very. At all. Fuck. It's from last month, but I've been busy.

It's truly disturbing to watch people choose to end someone's life. It's so arbitrary and final. Judge, jury and executioner all in one spot. In this case, it is particularly troubling, as those making the decision tend to be beyond the law. A bunch of them keep shooting after their clips are empty.

Here's the story as CNN tells it. I'll provide some highlights:

He said after the disturbance started he pulled over his truck and started recording with his cell phone camera, capturing the shooting.

"When he noticed me recording, one of the officers jumped in the truck, put a pistol to my head," he said. "My phone was smashed - he stepped on it, handcuffed me."

Juan Sanchez, a detective with the Miami Beach Police Department, said he could not comment on how officers that night handled eyewitnesses who may have filmed the incident, because the matter could become the subject of an internal investigation or a civil lawsuit....

Benoit's girlfriend, Ericka Davis, was also in the truck at the time.

"They handled us like we were criminals," she said. "The officer came over to the driver's side, on my left, and just put the gun to my head."

"They took everyone's phones and smashed them," she said.

Benoit says the only reason he still has the footage is because it was saved on a tiny memory card, which he removed and hid from the officers, despite being told to hand over his video.

"I took the chip out and put it in my mouth," he said, and kept it there the whole time he was interviewed by police at a nearby mobile command post.

His video shows an officer on a bike approaching his truck and pointing a gun directly into the camera, giving an indecipherable command, and then backing away.

Another officer orders them to stop filming and get out of the truck, and then the video ends....

Herisse was killed, and four bystanders were injured by gunfire, according to [Miami Beach Police Chief Carlos] Noriega.

Benoit and Davis criticized the police for the number of shots they fired, in the presence of numerous bystanders.

"We could have been killed," said Davis. "They were shooting so long, you could hear their guns clicking on empty, but they kept pulling the trigger," she said. "I think that's excessive."

Noriega said it was unclear whether the suspect shot at the officers, but police later recovered a gun from his car.

Here's the video from CNN that shows an overhead view of the pigs killing that man:

They can do whatever they want. What would happen to a civilian who rode up to someone's car and started waving a gun at people? What if that person was caught on video doing so?

We live under martial law. Some of us get by a lot better than others, cause of the color of our skin and where we live. But we all live it.

USA - USA - USA - USA - USA - USA - USA - USA

2011-05-27T15:10:00.001-04:00

Fucking idiots. Glad there are people out there looking out for me and my interests. We would all be in Saddam Gorbachev's iron fist were it not for these wonderful patriots, just in time for Memorial Day:

MANALAPAN — More than 20 people, some carrying American flags, showed up at the Turkish American Community Center Tuesday to protest that an American flag had been hung upside down in front of the site.

The flag hung upturned next to flags of Northern Cyprus and Turkey, a largely Muslim nation – an insult to America, protesters said. Center President Mehmet Reyhan said he did not know who had incorrectly hung the flag; he only learned of it when a member notified him of protesters outside the Route 33 building this morning.

“Livid – I was livid that (someone) desecrated our flag and hung it upside down,” said Betty Bailey, a Millstone farm owner who helped organize the protest.

“You need people out there to watch these things going on, because we can’t just stand by and let our country be put down…I just think people are getting lax about (patriotism and vigilance),” Bailey said. “We’re standing up for our country.”

The reason the flag had been hung upside down – and by whom – remains unclear: Some questioned whether recent headlines about the killing of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden triggered it, or whether it had simply been an incident of vandalism or an accident.

Protesters said they believed the flag had been hung outside the site since Sunday night or Monday morning. They said the flag also had been tattered and incorrectly displayed in relation to the other two flags.

Reyhan said he didn’t believe a center member would have turned the flag upside-down. Two current members have to vouch for new members in order for them to join, he said, “and I don’t think any of our members would do anything like that.”

“I think every nation is very proud of their flag; if someone puts it upside-down, I look at it as an insult to the nation,” Reyhan said. “We are Americans. We love this country. We are here for 25 years and those flags are always flying in the correct way. This is the first time I have seen something like this.”

According to federal statute, the American flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of distress. The flag has beenflown upside down as a form of protest in the United States, according to published reports.

Reyhan said he reported the incident to township police and the Turkish consulate. He said he had all the flags taken down Tuesday morning because he’s afraid they could be rearranged again and cause problems for the center.

Bailey said she still had concerns.

“It was in front of their building and I really think if it’s your building, you should really kind of notice that the flag was hanging wrong,” Bailey said. “People have to start taking a stand, so we did. Hopefully, it won’t happen again.”

Reyhan said the center, in the township for 25 years, serves as a celebration hall for Turkish, American and Muslim religious holidays. He said the center also hosts Turkish language classes for youths and provides networking, employment assistance, transportation and translation services for Turkish immigrants.

The center has about 350 members from as far as New York and Pennsylvania, but with many in Monmouth County from Manalapan, Englishtown and the surrounding area, Reyhan said. None reported noticing the flag, he said.

As for bin Laden, Reyhan said Turkey, too, has been living with the horrors of terrorist groups, “So we don’t want any terrorists in this world. We want nothing to do with them.”

I like how people just started "protesting" instead of making any attempt to contact someone in the building. There was no attempt at discussion. Just some patriotic circle jerk, stimulating one another's hatred for Muslims. I also like how this passes for "vigilance." The Turkish are known for nothing if not their deep anti-American views and radical Islamic philosophy. Someone has to keep tabs on them.

I'm going with the bin Laden suspicion. Everyone knows that Muslims are plotting a secret overthrow of the government, in the interest of establishing a Western Caliphate. This should definitely be viewed as nothing else than the second phase of what began on 9/11. Now that this flag has been flown upside down, there is no turning back. We will all be worshipping Allah in a matter of months, no doubt. Christmas is canceled.

Sickening - care packages for Troops

2011-05-26T10:24:00.000-04:00

Oh, how I loathe the cult of the American military.

Don't worry, there's "no political message, whatsoever." I guess "we love you, keep fighting, whatever you are doing is fine, we worship you, what you are doing is worthwhile and full of purpose" is not political.

Again, the troops ARE the war. They don't plan it, but they carry it out. They're the tools in the box. The people high above them are just the architects. You know that Obama wouldn't go shooting it out in Afghanistan. If it were really his war, it would be over immediately. So, yeah, fuck the troops. They do all the dirty work. Taking orders is not an excuse. Let us remember, no one is being drafted. If you don't realize that invading and occupying someone's country is wrong, then you should realize that kicking in their doors, blowing up their houses, creating a life of war for them and terrorizing their families is. And if you don't, fuck you. You've surrendered your right to live. I don't care what happens to you. You're being shot at because you are an invader. What would you do if Iran invaded the U.S.?

The American heroes in Iraq or Afghanistan are the ones who refuse to fight or turn their weapons on their commanders. Or someone like Bradley Manning. Taking it down from the inside. Resisters. They get put in jail and are remembered as traitors or enemy sympathizers. What else could they be when everything is so black and white? There is only right and wrong, with us or against us. What about "we don't want any part"? That is not an option.

Looking at Barry Goldwater forty-five years later

2011-05-25T21:07:00.001-04:00

Not a great guy. For example, he was brutally opposed to the Civil Rights Act.

Still, I would prefer this type of conservative greatly to those we have today.

At the time of the 1964 presidential campaign, people on the left, the entire range of the progressive/liberal/radical spectrum, viewed his potential election to office as some permutation of the second coming of Hitler. He was universally reviled, from people like Roy Wilkins, a man no one could ever argue was extreme, through the fledgling antiwar movement to radicals of all stripes, including Malcolm X, communists, socialists, anarchists and so on. Of course, this also includes Democrats.

What do we have now? A bunch of people who make him look like Bill Clinton - Bush. Bush II. Rumsfeld. Palin. Rand Paul and the entirety of the "Tea Party." These people fucking hate everything and everyone. At least Goldwater was readable. You know where he stood. This type of conservatism has largely died. I think people such as him are regarded as libertarians now, and substantially marginalized, fodder for late night talk show jokes. Conservatives vying for power now fashion themselves after Ronald Reagan, a man who was demonstrably and profoundly worse than Goldwater ever was. Goldwater reviled what conservatism had come to mean by the late 70s and early 80s. For the record, while not a supporter of gay rights, he also didn't oppose them - he thought it had nothing to do with the government. He hated the religious zealots who have become such a dominant force in our lives now.

It's no wonder that activism has died and drug use is high. What else could the people who fought against Goldwater in the 60s feel once they saw Reagan come into power and usher in a deep cultural conservatism that has been with us ever since? Talk about defeat.

One of the more offensive headlines I've read in quite some time

2011-05-20T15:03:00.001-04:00

Not because of the subject matter, but because of what it proposes:

Maid's lawyer: IMF sex assault case no setup

The fact that this woman has to deny that she is collaborating with others to destroy this man is fucking appalling. Why does she have to deny this?

Because everyone knows that men don't really ever rape women and that for sure, powerful men don't do it. They don't have to, cause they already have what they want - money, material things, hot wives, whatever. Let's just forget that men like that develop an insatiable sense of entitlement and can never feel like they are adequately in control. It's always more, more, more, just like the drug addict.

Stupid women lying to destroy men.

Poor, poor men. Always the victims. It's hard being man.

Stupid bands (Jesuit) have stupid cover art (their discography)

2011-05-18T15:48:00.006-04:00

Wow, so edgy. Women are evil and it's cool when they're dead. So original too. Let's go stab skinny bitches with big tits in the heart with knives and strip them except for high heels and some kind of lacy thing and wrap them in barbed wire and wait until they rot. It will be cool.

Here's their self-important description from ~~Deathwish~~ Magic Bullet:

JESUIT were an unrelenting, noisy hardcore band from Virginia Beach, VA. They existed from the mid-90′s up until the changing of the century. In their wake, they left a rather nice-sized dent in the intensely-PC witch-hunt/”safe space” era of DIY hardcore. Whereas events attributed to Charles Manson are often credited with bringing a savage and brutal end to the peace, love, and drug culture of the 60′s, events surrounding bands like JESUIT and GEHENNA not only elicited controversy at every tour stop, but pushed a movement toward hardcore finding its more violent, unpredictable, and entirely irreverent roots as the “Portlandia” cult of 90′s hardcore crashed to a halt.

Taking the old "controversy" route in an attempt to substitute for lack of substance. Style over substance, except I don't think Jesuit had that either. Zzzzzz....I like the part where they swipe at safe spaces (it's easy for men to not have to ever consider such a concept - what are those bitches crying about?) and refer to people trying to make their scene a better place, eradicating hateful manly shit as a "PC witch-hunt." Did Rush Limbaugh write this? Thanks to people like the men of Jesuit and their mentalities, hardcore is about as dumb as it ever was. ~~Jacob Bannon, you should be ashamed~~.

In reality, this band was bad. I don't know anyone who ever liked them. They recently played a pointless reunion show and no one gave a FUCK that they were playing. For the whole time. People left when they played, I'm assuming cause the band was just that breathtakingly original. People went off for the band before them and the bands after them, but the room stood still when the mighty Jesuit played. I guess they were just awestruck.

I'm not one to talk about what hardcore is "really about." However, at the very least, hardcore has historically been a rejection of "them" and "out there." It's a counterculture, or was. Shit like this is just aping the mainstream to the fullest. It's just one more round in the never-ending hail of bullets coming at women the world over. It's not that I hold out any hope, in the least, for hardcore or punk to become some revolutionary, redemptive or even benevolent force (more to come on that in a later post), but I do want to take the time to point out how fucking shitty this record cover and the concomitant (lack of) thought process are. This is worse than a Motley Crue record. At least those guys liked women (as well as looked like them). This is the kind of thing one should expect from Avenged Sevenfold or Buck Cherry. This has everything to do with the mainstream. This challenges nothing. Women are put down at every turn. Women are sexualized constantly. They are told they are not good enough. Let me help you with that. Their efforts are "cute." Their bodies are routinely violated with impunity. I'll kill you if you fight back. Daily media blitzkrieg sensory overload says you are fat. Don't try, because you will likely fail. Give it up. Just take it. Know your place. Slut. If that's what you're into, stay in the fucking bar where you and your numbingly mediocre band belong. Offending people is not hard. In this case, it was a replacement for having anything worthwhile or creative to say.

I guess this record cover is their last hurrah, their final go at those PC Police. WE'LL SHOW THEM. YOU CAN'T SILENCE JESUIT. Sorry I'm such a faggot guys. I bet you'd never call me a nigger though. Cause that's just not cool, right?

Aside from the thoroughly anti-woman, misogynistic theme and aesthetic, the "art" just sucks. It's fucking stupid. Super trashy. Who likes this shit? It's about as cool as this:

Edit: Oops on the Jacob Bannon tip. I saw this listed in the Deathwish store and assumed it was from them. Made sense, with Nate Newton and all. However, as a commenter pointed out, it's on Magic Bullet. In that case, Brent Eyestone should be ashamed.

Sons of Abraham

2011-05-12T00:37:00.000-04:00

About 126 people in the world would find this funny.

North Korea's "Massive and Growing" prison population is about the same, percentage-wise, as America's

2011-05-08T23:53:00.004-04:00

How about that. Amnesty International recently released a report that is supposed to be some kind of smashing expose on North Korea's prison system. The New York Times reported on it with a sensational headline that seems to ignore the problem at home. The thing is, their imprisonment rate of about 0.8 percent is pretty close to ours of about 0.8 percent (3 percent if you count people on probation or on parole). They have a population of about 24 million, with 200,000 in prison. We have a population of about 309 million, with 2.4 million in prison. Ours is the highest incarceration rate, by far, in the "developed" world. It too, is growing. I guess theirs is maybe the highest in the world, but only slightly. North Korea is not a place to which you want to be comparable. In any way. But here we are.

I guess the big difference is that our prisons are supposed to be civilized institutions. We tell ourselves that everything is very orderly, efficient and coldly impartial. At least some of us do. North Korea supposedly has people eating rats and worms, witnessing other inmates' executions. Maybe that is true, maybe it's not, maybe it's overstated.

Regardless, American prisons are not places you want to be. They are overcrowded by about 60 percent (The Economist says so, no liberal rag for sure). People with inappropriately long, mandatory sentences for non-violent crimes fill them. Prison is a place that can teach many how to be better criminals. This is what happens when you throw people in cells and make little effort to reform them, or give them sentences so long that they don't care what happens when they get out. There is not even a mask of reform in American prisons. Some can go to school, but nothing is required of anyone. Drugs are rampant. Violence is routine. Guards are often nasty and brutal. Sadists seek such positions. These are thankless jobs, to be sure. There is no argument analogous to the one that people sometimes use to justify being a police officer - "I want to help the community." Ha. You are surely helping no one in that prison. You just maintain control by varying degrees of coercion. That is the kind of job that rots you from the inside out, presuming that there was anything to rot initially.

Prisons in this country are often referred to as the new plantation. They are disproportionately black and brown, to the extent of 60 percent of the national prison population. Here, people can be coerced to work for as low as 5 cents an hour where they produce an astonishing array of goods, from meat to furniture to dentures and lingerie. They even come with their version of the Klan. No, not just guards, but the even more crude Aryan gangs. Race war behind bars. Talk about divide and conquer.

As for inhumanity, about 25,000 inmates at any given time are doing their bids in solitary confinement. They stay in their cells (which always have lights on) 23 hours per day; they are allowed one hour of solitary "exercise" on a small fenced in on all sides concrete slab. Their visiting privileges are severely curtailed and they interact with no one except guards, through a hole in the door. This is medieval, at best. In fact, the United States has entire prisons devoted to such conditions. Google "supermax." In North Korean camps, people seem to be able to interact with one another. As you may imagine, long-term solitary confinement has a great potential to break you down. Unfortunately, it often does. Which brutality would you choose, the silent controlled one that tells you it is not brutal or the blatant version?

Finally, to address the contention that North Korea's prisons are packed with political offenders, I am sure that in such a fucked up place, people commit a good number of social crimes as well. Beyond that, America certainly has its political prisoners as well. Several of them are or have been high-profile over the years - Huey Newton, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal - while many more languish in obscurity, cut off from friends and family, all but forgotten about. These are people like Herman Bell, Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa. Then there are the countless faceless individuals rounded up for peaceful mass protest at such events like national political conventions, World Bank meetings and antiwar demonstrations. No level of American government, local, state or national, will ever acknowledge this. The official American line is that we have no political prisoners here, only "bad guys." Though the $4.5 million that Los Angeles and the FBI had to pay out to Geronimo Pratt says otherwise.

University of Missouri - St. Louis reactionary firings

2011-05-04T21:16:00.003-04:00

There is a scandal a-brewin down in St. Louis. Basically, hyper-conservative "blogger" and regressive zealot Andrew Breitbart took some video footage of labor history lectures from an instructor there and his collaborator, an instructor at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, edited the crap out of it, and came up with some finished products that profess to show the lecturers gleefully advocating violence to their students. Shouldn't be a big deal, cause the guy is a lunatic, but instead, the guy at St. Louis, (a registered Communist, I guess it's the 1950s) has been fired. The chancellor of the school forced him to resign. I wrote the chancellor (chancellor@umsl.edu) an email, imploring him to reconsider his utter failure to support academic freedom:

Dear Chancellor George,

I am quite saddened and a bit scared by the fact that you are allowing a piece of shit like Andrew Breitbart to influence who is permitted to be on the faculty of your school. He has "exposed" nothing. This man is a nihilist whose mission is the destruction of all things "liberal." He is already facing one libel suit for getting a woman fired through his favorite tactic, selective video editing. I'm sure you realize that if you have enough words from someone's mouth, you can edit them to say just about whatever you like. He despises difference and demands that all heel to his ultraconservative line or else. Just look at the comments on his website in reaction to these videos - it is a bunch of people calling for the violent deaths of liberals and communists, attacking Muslims for no discernible reason and calling Obama a "National Socialist" and a "Fascist." In short, his followers are extremists. They are far, far right-wing radicals who fear everything they don't know. And they don't know much. They don't want to. He panders to these people, and to great success. When you bow to people like them, you give them strength and power. They are enemies of democracy, progress and freedom. They will come for us all one day, unless people in power demonstrate real leadership and courage and stand up to them. They need to be stopped in the interest of free speech and the exchange of ideas. They would dismantle higher education altogether if given the choice. Please do the right thing.

I doubt it will do much. He's already on the run, for no apparent reason. I guess a couple of governors going after unions and teachers (Google Scott Walker) have got him scared. Pretty unfortunate. To put things in perspective, Inside Higher Ed reports that

"Late Thursday afternoon, Gail Hackett, provost of the Kansas City campus, issued a statement that backed the instructors' description of the class, based on administrators' review so far of the 18 hours of available video (of which Breitbart's two excerpts are together under 15 minutes). "From the review completed to date, it is clear that edited videos posted on the Internet depict statements from the instructors in an inaccurate and distorted manner by taking their statements out of context and reordering the sequence in which those statements were actually made so as to change their meaning," Hackett said. "Such selective editing is disturbing and the release of students’ images without their permission is a violation of their privacy rights." (University officials assume that a student either gave Breitbart a copy of the video of the class or provided access.)"

Ms. Hackett seems to be much more reasonable than her counterpart at St. Louis, having actually reviewed the lectures in question and all. She wanted people on campus to examine what was going on, trying to determine the veracity of Breitbart's accusations, which should have been quite dubious from the start.

This guy Breitbart embraces the most base forms of hatred and anti-intellectualism, herding them up for his own power. The fools who follow him are just getting used and are totally oblivious. Reading the first page of the comments section on just the first video he posted is astonishing. It's all a bunch of people talking about guns, killing liberals, stocking up on ammunition, having gun avatars, hating Arabs/Muslims and one person who calls President Obama a "National Socialist." Insane. The internet is rife with them though, given its ability to empower anyone to display their breathtaking thoughtlessness for all to see. The problem here is that the Chancellor of the school is doing what they want. He is empowering them. I don't know if he thinks he will shut them up, or if he really cares. I guess he just wants it to go away. Now that they have one instructor's blood, they are hungry for more. I know this.

90s-influenced straight edge band

2011-05-04T18:22:00.002-04:00

The 90s were a great time for music. Why have straight edge musicians not embraced this period? There is a wealth of material here to mine. Here are some examples:

XI Don't Mind Stealin BreadX

XHe Ain't Gonna DieX

XFaster Than a CannonballX
XFound out about YouX
XDo You Have to Let It LingerX

On the other hand, these are not acceptable:

XTwo PrincesX
XRun-AroundX
XAnts MarchingX

However, XStayX would be cool.

Please let me know if you are interested in pursuing something along these lines. I would be up for multiple coterminous bands.

Ozzy-influenced edge band

2011-04-30T22:55:00.002-04:00

Straight edge metal is nothing new. It goes back to Judge and up through whatever garbage is around now. I heard a band yesterday that sounded like Pantera, and they weren't the first one.

Here's the thing: Pantera sucks.

Why is there no edge band that sounds like Ozzy? I want to fix that. I hereby announce my intention to form XBark at the MoonX.

If you or someone you know can sing like Ozzy or play guitar like Randy Rhoads, get at me. Lots of people can do those things, but I'm not sure that a single one Xes up.

I don't want to hear about what the rich are doing.

2011-04-30T22:45:00.000-04:00

I don't want to go to where, where the rich are going.

Thanks Joe.

Planned Parenthood

2011-04-09T17:09:00.002-04:00

Now, I know that no one reads this blog, and if anyone were to do so, it is highly unlikely that she or he would be of the conservative persuasion, but given the recent "controversy" over Planned Parenthood and abortion, which a bunch of regressive people are trying to make the same thing, and the fact that a woman has a right to do whatever she likes with her body, I do feel that it is necessary to disseminate the reality of the organization's actions as far and wide as possible.

Here is an image that I found in the Washington Post that breaks down its services by percentage in a friendly pie chart:

Abortion services, three percent. Not that it matters. It could be a hundred percent, and that would be fine. But it just gives the lie to all those woman haters and religious zealots out there, talking about how Planned Parenthood is this massive baby killing machine or whatever.

Also, let us never forget the fact that the federal funding that Planned Parenthood gets is barred from being used for abortions, as it has been since 1976.

Somebody set Donald Trump on fire please

2011-04-08T13:27:00.002-04:00

Even Bill O'Reilly thinks he's a jerkoff.

Fuck the both of them, really. Still, Donald Trump is just so offensive. Arrogant, ignorant rich piece of shit who lives in a gold house. Donate him to Japan to plug cracks in nuclear reactor housing.

G-slide

2011-04-04T13:21:00.001-04:00

Heard this on the radio the other night. Could not believe my ears. The magic of the internet allows me to relive the magic at will, and share with you.

If you cannot take it, just skip to 1:58.

Anyone got a way to make 2012 come sooner?

2011-02-19T00:23:00.000-05:00

Here is the newest "if there were a button I would be pounding on it with my head" story. It's not even the story. Just the first sentence:

"In rapid-fire action Friday, the Republican-controlled House voted to strip federal money from President Barack Obama's health care overhaul and from Planned Parenthood and to bar the EPA from issuing global warming regulations."

Yup. That's it. Goodbye. Kill us please.

Please end the world soon

2011-02-18T12:04:00.000-05:00

I can't take this shit. People accept this as reality. People allow this man to talk. He disseminates whatever he feels like saying to millions on a daily basis. And it's legitimate. It's all a bunch of insane bullshit, but it's legitimate because it's on a "respectable" television station. Therefore people believe it and worship him because he tells them that the problem is everyone else and doing/thinking whatever the fuck you feel like, hating everyone else and never having to change is fundamentally correct. It's like providing masturbation with poisoned lube.

Fuck this world/country/society/species/etc.

File under "things that should be on the internet but are not"

2011-02-09T11:59:00.002-05:00

The following statements do not come up when searched on Google, so I will change that - "Aerosmith is a Led Zeppelin rip off" and "Aerosmith is the shitty American version of Led Zeppelin".

Cop shot?

2011-02-04T12:08:00.004-05:00

A regular contributor to the letters section of a local newspaper doesn't think it matters. Fucking incredible. This dude, while I feel that he has written some pretty less than stellar pieces before, is pretty gutsy with this one. I can't recall anything specific, but I have a general memory of the guy being pretty conservative. People like that usually worship pigs, but not Raymond:

Proposed death penalty bill creates different classes of victims

In the eyes of state Sen. Robert Singer, (R-Monmouth, Ocean, Burlington, Mercer) your life is not as important as that of a cop. That is the bottom line of a bill that Singer is proposing (supported by Sen. Jennifer Beck) in a typical politician’s knee-jerk reaction to the murder of a (Lakewood) cop.

The bill could result in the death penalty for murderers of on-duty cops, and for good measure, childkillers and terrorists whose actions cause deaths. Singer does not seem to be aware of or care about the equal protection clause of the Constitution. His bill would use such sad events to justify creating different classes of society.

On-duty cops, like everyone else from the president to celebrities, to athletes, to the pope, are still just people doing jobs. We justify putting cops on pedestals by claiming they are putting their lives on the line every day. Commuters using high-speed highways are also putting their lives on the line every day getting to and from their jobs to support their families.

Same for those working in dangerous jobs, like firemen, mine workers, construction workers. Will murderers of those while working in those jobs also face the death penalty? If not, why?

And why include kids? Before reaching adulthood, the vastmajority have not made any real major contribution to society. And the reality is that the majority of us never make major contributions throughout our entire lives.

Yet if a person with a track record of having made real contributions — created jobs, grown our food, built our homes, helped the poor (e.g., someone like Mother Teresa selflessly helping Camden’s poor), etc. — is murdered, that death would be treated more lightly by a “mere” lifetime of taxpayerpaid meals, lodging and medical care.

There is something hypocritical about the legal process by which a defendant, if found guilty, could be executed. It is nothing short of premeditated, first-degree murder, with the “players” (prosecutor, judge, jury, and the people who do the actual murder) all being willing coconspirators and accomplices. So some murders are bad, others are actually sanctioned.

Raymond Kostanty
Manalapan

_________________

I enjoy how he notes that "the reality is that the majority of us never make major contributions [to society] throughout our entire lives."

Quote of all time

2011-02-02T22:07:00.004-05:00

Lissie J, referring to those who have unrewarding, draining jobs yet carry on as though some higher up will notice their cheer and give them a raise/promotion on the spot:

"It's like getting raped and holding out for an orgasm."

Fox shoots man

2011-02-02T21:59:00.002-05:00

Not the TV empire, but the animal. This shit is real, and brilliant.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – A wounded fox shot its would be killer in Belarus by pulling the trigger on the hunter's gun as the pair scuffled after the man tried to finish the animal off with the butt of the rifle, media said Thursday.

The unnamed hunter, who had approached the fox after wounding it from a distance, was in hospital with a leg wound, while the fox made its escape, media said, citing prosecutors from the Grodno region.

"The animal fiercely resisted and in the struggle accidentally pulled the trigger with its paw," one prosecutor was quoted as saying.

Fox-hunting is popular in the picturesque farming region of northwestern Belarus which borders Poland.

Wow. Just wow.

Highlights from Egypt

2011-01-29T17:59:00.005-05:00

From today's New York Times:

A bonfire of office furniture from the ruling party headquarters was burning nearby, and the carcasses of police vehicles were still smoldering. The police appeared to have retreated from large parts of the city.

From an Associated Press story:

On Friday, 17 police stations throughout Cairo were torched, with protesters stealing firearms and ammunition and freeing some jailed suspects. They also burned dozens of police trucks in Cairo, Alexandria and Suez. On Saturday, protesters besieged a police station in the Giza neighborhood of Cairo, looted and pulled down Egyptian flags, then burned the building to the ground.

From another Associated Press story:

Before the army arrived, young Egyptians — some armed with truncheons grabbed off the police — created a human chain at the museum's front gate to prevent looters from making off with any of its priceless artifacts.

People taking back power, however fleetingly, makes for some crazy situations.

Helmet "cover"

2011-01-21T12:52:00.002-05:00

A fine display of the internet enabling us to see things that never needed to be seen.

More Helmet

2011-01-18T12:44:00.004-05:00

I seriously don't understand how these men kept their composure while performing this song. If I had written this song or played in the band that did, it is a fact that I would have injured myself or someone else every time I played it. So unfortunate that it gets cut off. Also, Page's voice is not in top shape. Still, brutal song and the only televised performance I can find.

Helmet

2011-01-18T12:04:00.006-05:00

So sick. The two best songs on the record. The drummer's hair rules and so do the wallet chains. Fucking 90s.

Misrepresenting King and watering down his message to an extent that approaches meaninglessness

2011-01-17T23:45:00.009-05:00

So here we are, observing Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. It seems that much of the mainstream press is discussing it in a context related to the shootings in Arizona last week, as though they are related in any way. The Associated Press published the following headline - "Ariz. rampage looms as King remembered in church." The Week offers this palliative - "Arizona shootings: How Martin Luther King's message can help America heal." Over at the Huffington Post, we hear this - "Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2011: Nation Ponders King In Wake Of Arizona Shootings." Finally, the Associated Press also tells us "Martin Luther King's Peace Legacy Praised After Arizona Shootings."

Now, I'm sure that many of these people mean well, but I can't help but feel that anyone who would talk about Dr. King like this doesn't get him. To be sure, there is a lot to get, and he was a complicated man, who like most of us, changed over time in profound ways. Still, I know that he has been one of the country's favorite sanitization targets. No one talks about his antiwar speeches, he is rarely remembered in public for developing beliefs openly critical of U.S. foreign policy and we don't hear about his evolution into someone who was fighting for economic as well as what we commonly understand as civil rights.

The difference between economic and traditional civil rights is huge. When we discuss the civil rights movement, which isn't very often, we tend to remember it as something based around access to lunch counters, buses, department stores and schools, and maybe true access to the voting booth. That makes for a simple moral decision - yes, it is wrong to prohibit anyone from eating, traveling, shopping or learning somewhere based on her or his skin color; or, no, there is no problem with such practices. There's not too much nebulous space here. No one advocated allowing some black people to do these things, or having a quota of how many could do so. These are basic civil rights - equal access to facilities. Once economic rights - principally equality in employment and housing - come into the picture, it becomes a fundamentally different discussion. These issues are no more resolved than they were when King was alive. Affirmative action is frowned upon and white people still ardently fight it to the highest courts they can. Housing in this country is deeply segregated today, especially in the North. These matters make for very ugly debate, especially when we live in these "post-racial" times. After all, black people had their civil rights movement, got some laws and court decisions, and there is even a black president now. And what about Oprah? See?

Anyway, yeah, the fact is that King was pursuing an agenda that advocated for poor people's economic rights - jobs and housing. He did this in the North and the South. This is not popular among anyone but poor people and some progressives. It was easy for people throughout the country to support integrated buses, but they didn't want anyone taking a Greyhound into Cleveland and moving in next door. Largely, they still don't.

As for King's message, it was more sophisticated than shooting people is wrong. Most people already thought that then, and it hasn't changed. No one needs a sermon on that topic. There is no divide in the country splitting those for and against random mass murder.

To bring King into what happened in Arizona last week does the man a disservice. It reduces his life to a general message of peace, which is essentially meaningless, and cheapens his death. The man was cut down for a very specific reason - he advocated too strongly for freedom. Whether you believe James Earl Ray killed him or not, his assassin was not a crazed maniac. He was murdered to silence him. Dr. King had survived numerous assassination attempts. One such event touched off the Birmingham Riot in May 1963, when Klansmen bombed the motel where Dr. King had been staying and his brother's house. The FBI, with John F. Kennedy's knowledge and approval, conducted a long campaign to discredit him, which included a letter encouraging him to commit suicide.

He knew he was a marked man:

I doubt he thought he would live as long as he did. That's the price you pay when you dedicate your life to freedom. Real freedom. Not this American military George Bush patriot Tea Party crap. You put your life up for grabs.

What happened in Arizona, tragic as it may be, had nothing to do with a freedom struggle. Dr. King was not the victim of a crazed killer shooting everyone in sight. No, a coward took him from afar and fled. That man knew just what he was doing and had planned well in advance.

We do Dr. King and ourselves an incredible disservice if we conflate his death with the killings in Arizona. They bear no similarity, whatsoever, aside from the most obvious fact that a gun was involved. He deserves to be remembered for who he was, what he fought for, what he accomplished and what he believed. And for our own good, we need to remember him and what he stood for. We need to reckon with that, in a serious way. To talk about him as a man of peace is fucking pointless. Everyone's a man of peace. That's nothing new and means nothing to anyone. We don't learn anything if that's all we take away.

CRYIN LIKE A BITCH

2011-01-06T16:49:00.003-05:00

Who can't relate to this??

Troops Oops

2010-11-24T10:42:00.003-05:00

An oldie but a goodie.

No One Wants an Alien

2010-11-24T10:14:00.002-05:00

Looking from the inside you feel nothing on the outside is real.
Does it really show?
All the other kids put you down.
No one ever wants you around.
No one wants an alien.
Never never thought you could feel cause everything around you stands still.
But will they ever know?
Dreaming of a place far away.
You know you were born here astray.
Does it really show?
Can't make it playing their game when everyone plays it the same.
No one wants an alien.
Never never thought you could feel cause everything around you stands still.
But will they ever know?
Looking from the inside you feel nothing on the outside is real.
Does it really show?
The vision keeps coming at you still cause something deep inside of you is real.
But will they ever know?
Never never thought you could feel cause everything around you stands still.
No one wants an alien.

American Jesus

2010-11-05T11:06:00.003-04:00

Great song, incredible lyrics. How do you come up with this shit?

Check out Greg Hetson's shirt. This is pre-Dookie, mind you. Look how long Jay Bentley's hair is.

Brett, not a great period for him.

Struck a Nerve

2010-11-05T10:35:00.005-04:00

Fucking brilliant.

Show review / "Do you listen to punk?"

2010-11-04T13:55:00.012-04:00

I went to see Bad Religion two weeks ago, no wait, last week, on October 26th. It was the second night of their "30 Years of Bad Religion" deal at Irving Plaza, where they broke up their career into three shows. The first was supposed to be How Could Hell Be Any Worse?, Suffer and No Control. I didn't go to that one because, while those records are great, and the last two are basically perfect, I was way more into the idea of the second night and I didn't have the money ($27.50 plus $12 in service charges) to spend on two shows. I guess it turns out for the better, as they played a boatload of new songs and some hits from the 90s, although I did miss "Billy Gnosis," which I suppose was not really Billy Gnosis, as they had no keyboard and how could it be Billy Gnosis without that Bruce Springsteen breakdown?

So the second night was Against the Grain, Generator, Recipe for Hate, Stranger than Fiction, The Gray Race and No Substance. People, including Bad Religion, called it 90s night, but thank fucking Jah they left out The New America. That means that they could only play really good to unbelievable songs. There are no bad songs on those records, at all. I was real psyched on the idea.

I got there shortly after eight PM, as I live anywhere from one to two or more hours away, depending on traffic. It only took me a little over an hour, so I was there a bit earlier. I knew the show was sold out and I wanted a good spot to watch from the balcony. I walked in just after Off with Their Heads went on. Boring as hell mid-tempo punk stuff that I've heard a thousand times. I thought maybe it would be something decent as they were recently on No Idea. They had nothing to say for themselves, with the exception of "I have bedbugs" and "So who's excited for Bad Religion?" Oh, and the head-shakingly pointless "How is everybody doing out there?" Boring boring boring. Four dudes in black t-shirts and jeans trying to look cool while they played. They don't seem to be all that into what they play, in their hearts.

After they finished, I very quickly realized that while I had an excellent vantage point from which to watch Bad Religion, I was stuck next to this witless dude pounding (what I found out were $11) beer after beer who felt the need to talk to everyone, yet paradoxically had nothing to say. His story will continue.

The Aggrolites were up next. Musically, they are fucking bad. Funk-ska. However, in spirit and energy, I enjoy them. Those dudes are real into what they are doing and play it cause that's exactly what they want to be doing. There is no funk-ska scene, and accordingly, they will not be able to capitalize on their popularity within it. They are also super tight and the singer can work a crowd. The keyboard player was so happy to be playing, smiling and bopping his head the whole time.

The drunk dude, the witless one from above, absolutely hated them. He made sure everyone around him knew, as he kept pretending to shoot himself. He bonded with the bro next to me over their distaste for the band. They both agreed that the Aggrolites really "suck." Yeah man, they sure suck. Then these men's respective girlfriends got in on the action, so that there were now four people reassuring one another that the Aggrolites suck. It was deep. The drunk man's girlfriend, in an act of extreme daring, yelled, from the balcony, while the band was playing, mind you, "You suck!" Well let me tell you, that went over extremely well within a one-foot radius. Her boyfriend damn near fell over with laughter. The other couple ate it up as well. You would think we were watching Sinatra in 1943 by the reaction they had. It was as though the woman had made an incredible breach of etiquette that had never been seen before. They acted as though it was so outrageous, and at least as creative.

The longer the Aggrolites played, the more joy I felt from watching the empty-eyed gang around me aggravate themselves. It was great. There was another "You suck!" from the girlfriend, and it had about the same effect. Hooray for the Aggrolites.

It was during this time that the drunk man and the bro really bonded. They talked about Pennywise. The drunkard (who also consumed a shot of Jaegermeister, which likely brought his alcohol bill upwards of $100 for the evening) informed the bro that he had recently seen them with their replacement singer, and it was good, "but it wasn't Jim." It sure wasn't. Then he asked the bro if he listened to punk. The bro indicated that he did. The thirsty man inquired as to whether or not he had ever heard of the band "Minor Threat." I haven't. Sounds dangerous. He said that, yes, he had heard of them. The guy with the big wallet took much delight in telling him that one of the guitar players used to be in that band. This, of course, is precious knowledge, limited to a select few from deep within the underground. During Bad Religion, he identified himself as being one of the lucky knowing ones by yelling "Minor Threat!" Wow. That guy was probably at the first show of every band.

After a while of listening to these people talk about nothing, Bad Religion came on. Finally. They opened with "The Gray Race." It was good. I was into their current drummer being able to play proper fast beats on the cymbals, instead of doing that cheat shit that Bobby Schayer became increasingly fond of over time, where he hits the cymbal and snare at the same time instead of double-timing the cymbal. However, I did not like Brooks' (the current drummer) changing of songs, which was pretty major in some cases. He changed a lot of fills, which is alright, I guess, but he just straight up changed beats in other songs. "Generator" was perhaps most demonstrative of this. "A Walk" was also notable. Fact of the matter is that Pete Finestone was the best drummer that band ever had. That dude was sick. If you doubt this, listen to Against the Grain once more.

Also, Brian Baker, who now looks like an older, more bloated version of this dude Matt I used to know, was pretty into inserting his own rock dude solos into songs, replete with wah pedal. Not cool. He put some solos where there weren't any and changed a bunch more. I'm just not into that. These songs were fucking fantastic when recorded. They really cannot be improved. It works in other situations, but not here. However shitty Brian Baker's life may or may not have been, there is absolutely no way he can channel the desperation that Brett expressed in the opening lead part to "Modern Man." Anyone other than Brett trying to play that song just cannot do it justice. Impossible.

Here are the songs they played, from memory, in chronological order, as recorded:

Modern Man
Turn On The Light
Anesthesia
Flat Earth Society
Generator
No Direction
Atomic Garden
Recipe for Hate
Struck a Nerve
My Poor Friend Me
Stranger than Fiction
Infected
Marked
What It Is
The Gray Race
A Walk
Come Join Us
Hear It
Sowing the Seeds of Utopia
The Resist Stance
Wrong Way Kids

Then they played a three-song encore:

American Jesus
Fuck Armageddon
Sorrow

If you want to find out the actual order, my housemate told me there is a setlist website. There may have been another new song in there, not sure. Maybe I forgot another song or two as well.

Yes, it's true, they played neither "Cease" nor "Skyscraper." Granted, they would have had to play a five hour set to sate my needs for this era of their existence, but fucking come on. Those are two brutal, devastating songs and they played neither. They know those are incredible songs. Fucking shit.

The entire set, the big guy with the appetite for consumption next to me did this really weird thing where for every song (except the couple he didn't know cause the words were sung too fast) he would lean forward, bend down, put his elbow on the balcony railing, and emphatically mouth the words into his girlfriend's ear. It was strange and distracting. I noticed at one point that she had her hand over her ear. Later, she just got out of the way and stood behind him for the rest of the set. Why didn't I move, right? Cause it really was the best spot I could get. I would have wound up standing behind people anywhere else. It was the only spot on the balcony that wasn't already obstructed when I got there.

Final random thoughts - not a huge fan of Brooks' style. He is an excellent drummer, but he plays around with the songs too much. I wish he would be more true to the originals. It's not like they had boring, shitty, incapable drummers before. I'm glad that Greg and Brian got off that Mesa kick. The guitars on The Process of Belief sounded not so good. Greg is using Mesa cabinets again, but both he and Brian are using Marshall heads and Jay has one of those reissue vintage SVT heads with matching 8x10. I approve.

Too heavy, too light

2010-10-31T17:23:00.001-04:00

Heroism - James Willie Jones

2010-10-01T22:25:00.003-04:00

I wish I had a father like this. My parents never really cared all that much. I wish a more people had parents like this. We would have a whole lot less bullying.

James Willie Jones went on the school bus to deal with asshole kids who were fucking with his thirteen-year-old daughter who has cerebral palsy. They were putting open condoms on her head, smacking her and yelling horrible shit at her. I don't care how old they were. It's never ok. Stop it by any means necessary. No one should have to live through that. It never ends when the words and actions do.

Unfortunately, the pig-fuck legal system forced him to supplicate himself before televised audiences and apologize, saying what he did was wrong. The hell it was.

Eight hundred thousand cheers for this man, and then some. This video brings tears to my eyes.

Tyler Clementi/Dharun Ravi/Molly Wei - people are garbage, part 900

2010-10-01T21:18:00.017-04:00

Yeah. Get us off the planet, please. All of us. As soon as possible. It's got to happen.

So do you know this story yet? Probably. It seems to be much larger than just around here. Well, here is the short version. Two college freshmen, Dharun Ravi and Tyler Clementi, shared a dorm at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. They do not seem to have been friends, and they did not know one another before September. Tyler was gay, but not out about it. Dharun found out about it, apparently through spying on him, when Tyler asked him to have the room to himself for a few hours, with his webcam and watching it in his friend's room. Her name is Molly Wei. She also goes to Rutgers. Or went. If she didn't stop going, I'm sure she'll be expelled with Dharun, or at least physically prohibited from going when they are in jail. So anyway, he was spying on him. He posted a message to Twitter about it on September 19th that read as such:

Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.

So the next time, he thought it would be funny, I guess, if he showed other people. Tyler again asked for the room, September 21st, and this was Dharun's reaction, again via Twitter:

Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it's happening again.

Tyler found out that this had happened (by reading Dharun's Twitter) and jumped off the George Washington Bridge the next day. They found his body yesterday or the day before, I don't know. He left shit on the bridge to identify him - his wallet, with ID inside. He posted this on his Facebook:

jumping off the gw bridge, sorry.

The day he killed himself, Tyler reported Dharun to the person in charge of his floor, as well as two of his superiors. The campus police got involved. Dharun and Molly were arrested and released. They are, for the time being, pre-body being found, facing up to five years for invasion of privacy.

So.

We have a lot of things here. The collision of technology and the ancient intolerance that seems to be endemic to our species, as far as recorded history tells it. The standard "homophobia." It still being largely acceptable to mock gay people, being gay, or having "gay" qualities.

Here are some stupid things people will/have said:

Dharun and Molly didn't mean for him to kill himself. Yeah, well, he jumped, didn't he?

He took it the wrong way. He took having his sexuality, of which he is supposed to be ashamed and for which he is generally reckoned to be going to hell, which is never looked upon by the world as a positive thing, that he had not told his parents (cause you have to tell people that you are gay, but not that you aren't gay) or anyone else, except the guy on the webcam with him, broadcast across the internet to anyone Dharun knew, and in turn anyone they knew and so forth, the wrong way? Yeah, I guess you're right.

It's not their fault he was ashamed of who he was. Well, yeah, it actually is. I doubt he was ashamed though, just made to feel that he should be. I know about that. They made him into a spectacle. What a freak, right?

It was a prank. Not really. I think what people mean by this, if they had the depth of intelligence to consider it, is that being a gay person is funny - it's a novelty. They are characters for us to laugh at, to observe.

He would have done it if Tyler were with a woman, too. Probably not, but I don't think too many people would be questioning if it were wrong if that were the case.

Dharun is open minded/has gay friends. All but the most ardent racists have black friends (especially the kind who say that there are black people and then there are niggers). You'll never meet them though.

They didn't realize what they are doing. If he didn't kill himself, would they ever have realized it? No, it would have kept being funny. Fact. They are fucking 18 years old. Adults. Gotta learn sometime, right? I was raised in the same shitty fucking society as they were, but I got the fucking message early on that it's not fucking ok to hate gay people or make anyone feel like shit for being born. They, apparently, did not get that message. Doesn't matter. You cannot excuse yourself from the grave consequences of actions you deliberately choose by saying "Oh, I didn't realize it." I don't fucking care what you did or didn't realize. Too late, huh? Here are some good examples of this reasoning that fall way short:

"I only had five beers. I'm usually good like that. I must have fallen asleep."
"Fuck, I didn't realize it was loaded."
"I didn't mean to hit you that hard, I was angry."
"I had no idea the knife was that sharp."
"I didn't think it would actually hit you, I have bad aim."
"Shit, I guess it will stain after all. Come on, it was a joke."

I know kids like this. Fucking assholes. I spent much of my life going to school with them. They are probably rich, given where they went to high school, or if not rich themselves, surrounded by a bunch of rich fucks with whom they had to keep up. I went to high school, and elementary, and middle school with a lot of rich kids and middle class kids whose parents pretended they were rich. I hate them. There are kids I knew then, ten, twenty years ago, who I still hope get in car accidents. There are armies of these assholes all over the place, and they often wind up running things. That's a big part of why shit sucks.

Fuck anyone who tells you to take it with a grain of salt, talks of not letting it affect you. I live with the mental and emotional marks those people inflicted on me from the time I was five years old. You try getting ripped down every day for over ten years and coming out on top.

My partner was watching this very nice video that Ellen DeGeneres made about her reaction to Tyler's suicide. It's also a message to kids like him. In it, she says, "I want anyone out there who feels different and alone to know that I know how you feel." My partner stopped it and started crying. She said that she wished she had someone to tell her that when she was younger. Me too.

And you know what else? I guarantee you that a ton of people who will say, "Oh, that's so terrible, such a tragedy..." will turn around and call someone a faggot five minutes later, or a fucking homo, or say "No homo" or tell someone how "gay" something is. FUCK ALL OF YOU.

Fucking assholes don't get it.

Let's start saying that things we don't like are not just gay, but Puerto Rican, fat, female, black, Chinese, cancerous, have Alzheimer's, fetal alcohol syndrome-ish, autistic, African, poor, Native American, schizophrenic, have eating disorders, Arab, paralyzed, amputated or rape victims.

Koran burner Derek Fenton booted from his job at NJ Transit

2010-09-15T11:48:00.005-04:00

Good. Fuck this guy and his "First Amendment rights." He's just a hateful piece of shit who would probably pull the fucking switch on anyone who is Muslim. Thoughtless reactionary fuck, running around screaming about 9/11 with no consideration given to what he says, means or does. Please, do not let reality get in your way, sir.

I would like to point out that his protest site, the "Ground Zero" mosque isn't a mosque and it's not at "Ground Zero." I quote from Frank Rich:

THE “ground zero mosque,” as you may well know by now, is not at ground zero. It’s not a mosque but an Islamic cultural center containing a prayer room....Still, the battle that has broken out over this project in Lower Manhattan — on the “hallowed ground” of a shuttered Burlington Coat Factory store one block from the New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club — will prove eventful all the same.

And here we have some basically brilliant commentary from Gawker (the post is worth reading in its entirety):

While you spent your Sunday trying to teach your cat to go to the bathroom on a human toilet, a group of brave, freedom-loving Americans gathered in New York City to express their extreme disapproval with the Park 51 project, an al-Qaeda plot to build a community center featuring a swimming pool and auditorium on the very site where a Burlington Coat Factory once stood.

I love how his neighbors are all defending him. I'm sure they wouldn't be talking about any rights if he were burning such things as a bible, an American flag or pictures of their children. It's so cool to hate Muslims right now.

How fucking shortsighted are people? "Muslims killed Americans! Muslim bad! Islam no good, bad bad! I wanna fuck Sarah Palin!!!"

Please don't misunderstand me as defending religion. It's all profoundly stupid and silly, no matter what god you worship. It all saps your energy, will, and faith in the self. Fuck it all. But the thing is, you can't just pick one religion and say "Oh, this is the bad one. I hate it so much, because, you know, it's just so bad. And mine is so great. It's very, very different. Just so different." It's all the fucking same.

Fuck this place.

True words

2010-09-05T23:47:00.005-04:00

Brilliant insight.

"Racism continues to reflect a disparity of power and it is as egregious today as it was in the eighteenth century because the advent of less dramatic forms of dominance is not progress. More insidious in modern social relations is the fact that white people do not have to expressly target black people in order to exploit them. They only have to locate their interests in private and public policies that have disparate impact. Freed from involvement in color-specific political decisions and specific acts of racial oppression, white Americans can more easily imagine the injustices of their society to be natural or irrational."

- Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn, p. 241.

Leadership

2010-09-03T11:17:00.004-04:00

Here is Jan Brewer, governor of Arizona and the country's leading anti-immigration politician, giving a public address on television as to why people should reelect her:

Yup.

I guess her groomers/coaches tell her to never stop smiling, no matter what.

The only people who have justification to act like this are the senile and the very high.

Smart people

2010-09-02T21:55:00.009-04:00

Have smart things to say. Finally, the real Americans emerged from Wal-Mart and their PT Cruisers or whatever.

It's nice to see a group of people who really "get it," whatever "it" may be. But let me tell you, they get it. I hope they are able to stop Saddam.

I must say, I am disappointed to not have seen Hulk Hogan getting in on this, though the man directly above may be related to him.

In case you have forgotten:

How the Mighty Have Fallen, Part 1

2010-09-01T14:41:00.005-04:00

Rancid. What a great band. A lot of people I know are real into the first self-titled record, but I am not one of them. After that, however, it's hit after hit - Let's Go, And out Come the Wolves, Life Won't Wait, and the second self-titled, or "Rancid 2000" as it's often known. Everything else after that sucked. Still, four (by my estimation) great, and I mean great, records is really something. There are no bad songs on those records (well, there is one, but I will get to it, and it's only lyrically bad). Fucking gold.

I was listening to Let's Go this morning and reveled in Tim's hatred of the police, listening to him singing in "Harry Bridges" about how "Bloody Thursday was July 5th, the pigs killed 3 workers, Harry Bridges grabbed the mic," and certainly best of all, when "every single cop got a bullet in the head" in "Sidekick." Even Lars gets in on the action, telling us about Mary being "out the door with a loaded .44 in her hand, shooting down the law that shot down her dear departed man." Fuck pigs, yes, fuck them all to hell.

It was bad enough to find out the man is a Christian (that's the one bad song I was referencing above, "Who Would've Thought" from Life Won't Wait - it's about him "finding god" or whatever bullshit. Unfortunately, I am not able to locate the interview in which I read that at this time.) but now he fucking writes songs about the troops. And not in the good way. No no, Tim unequivocally praises them. He's one of those all-too-common people who somehow views soldiers in a morality vacuum, seeing them as simply "doing their job," no questions of wrong or right being asked, never mind answered. Why, here he is, quoted recently in the Navy Times (not kidding):

“Whatever you think of the war — everyone has their own opinions — you’ve got to give respect to the soldiers,” Armstrong says. “I do, big time.”

No, actually, I need give no respect to the soldiers. You see, the reality that no one wants to admit is that THEY ARE THE FUCKING WAR. Yes, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama could have all the plans they want, the Pentagon could draw up all the strategies it could muster and Lockheed Martin could stockpile millions of tons of weapons and munitions, but if no one actually went to fight the war, then there couldn't be one, could there? And seeing that there hasn't been a draft in decades, there is no excuse there. It's a volunteer military. Sure, people get conned into joining. But then they get enthusiastic about shooting whomever crosses their paths and kicking in strangers' doors and screaming at them in a language they do not understand. So, once you've gone and invaded someone's sovereignty for no reason at all, aside from because you elected to do so/were ordered to, you've forfeited all rights to life. As much as I hate to use the war makers' terms, you are then a thief of freedom and liberty and the people whose land you are invading and occupying, the ones whom you are terrorizing, they have a right to resist and expel you by any means available to them. Especially now! There is NO MISUNDERSTANDING about what is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are not popular wars. All that shit about 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden and whatever else is a bunch of garbage. None of that has anything to do with what's going on in those countries and no one even bothers to claim it does any longer.

Simply put, you are no hero while you are there unless you turn your weapons back on your own side, absolutely refuse to participate regardless of the consequences to yourself or somehow manage to perform a substantial subversive function, like the tragically foolish traitor to the imperialist cause, Bradley Manning.

Praise Pastor Terry Jones

2010-08-30T15:01:00.005-04:00

Of course the man is a beyond reprehensible piece of shit who will hopefully fall into his bonfire, but hooray for him for being stupid enough to do the things necessary to speed us towards the ultimate goal of getting the fuck off the planet.

Mr. Jones, 58, a former hotel manager with a red face and a white handlebar mustache, argues that as an American Christian he has a right to burn Islam’s sacred book because “it’s full of lies.” And in another era, he might have been easily ignored, as he was last year when he posted a sign at his church declaring “Islam is of the devil.”
But now the global spotlight has shifted. With the debate in New York putting religious tensions front and center, Mr. Jones has suddenly attracted thousands of fans and critics on Facebook, while around the world he is being presented as a symbol of American anti-Islamic sentiment...
Mr. Jones who seems to spend much of his time inside a dank, dark office with a poster from the movie “Braveheart” and a picture of former President George W. Bush, appears to be largely oblivious to the potential consequences of his plans. Speaking in short sentences with a matter-of-fact drawl, he said that he could not understand why other Christians, including the nation’s largest evangelical association, had called for him to cancel “International Burn a Koran Day..."
He acknowledged that it had brought in at least $1,000 in donations. But he said that the interviews he had done with around 150 news outlets all over the world were useful mainly because they had helped him “send a message to Islam and the pushers of Shariah law: that it is not what we want.”
Mr. Jones said that nothing in particular had set him off. Asked about his knowledge of the Koran, he said plainly: “I have no experience with it whatsoever. I only know what the Bible says.”

Fuck all religions. They are all wrong and stupid. Nothing but old stories and morals, threats to keep in line. All gods are myths. There are no prophets. We have no saviors.

Bull jumps the fence, fucks up a bunch of people at a bullfight

2010-08-21T10:53:00.003-04:00

This is great. In Spain, of course.

Fuck all these people. What a shame the bull couldn't have done more.

Crimethinc. sucks

2010-08-17T23:08:00.008-04:00

This is the final entry regarding my thoughts on Gabriel Kuhn's Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge and Radical Politics.

For a while, I was pretty sympathetic to a lot of Crimethinc. stuff. The more I hung around people who are into it and a part of it, the less I was into it. I could never get into most of their writings. It's a lot of super-verbose, dense, dry articles that don't relate in the least to the reality the overwhelming majority of people on this planet face. Which is fine, of course, but please do not position yourself as any type of revolutionary organization, much less one that has the faintest hope of winning favor with anyone outside of a nearly infinitely small group of people who essentially do nothing productive toward actually making a revolution.

I was really into Evasion when it came out. I related to a lot of it - the hardcore, the veganism, the shoplifting, the dumpstering bagels. Some of it was a bit much (positing anything related in the book as revolutionary outside of a selfish dimension, a tendency to over-romanticize some of his experiences), and I realized it was kind of a "best of" account of the guy's life. Truth be told, I likely wouldn't have dug it nearly so much were the guy not vegan and edge. But that's not a Crimethinc. publication. They just published it. Someone who had nothing to do with them wrote it.

Crimethinc. advocates a lot of ridiculous "lifestyle anarchism" positions, from dropping out of school at sixteen years old with no plans except traveling and shoplifting (I have no philosophical problem with shoplifting in many circumstances, but please understand that there is absolutely nothing inherently revolutionary or radical about it whatsoever) to the concept that one must abandon life within "the system" or whatever to actually be a revolutionary, at least by their terms:

It's the same with talking about quitting one's job and changing one's lifestyle - people who are currently trying to do that have much more useful perspectives on it than full-time anarchists who dropped out ten years ago. (172)

Breathtaking, to be sure. Let's meditate on that for a minute. "Full-time anarchists." What could that possibly mean, especially with regard to the United States. First, it must be stated that there is no legitimate, viable anarchist movement in this country. That is a fact. There has not been for close to one hundred years. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional, by my estimation. No doubt there are lots of people who define themselves as anarchists, and also a number of groups specifically dedicated to anarchist struggle, but I am unaware of any real "full-time anarchists." Especially ones without jobs. I know people who are pretty serious anarchists (adults, over forty) and have been involved with anarchist groups and organizations for sizable portions of their lives. If they are not in prison, though, they have jobs. You can't tell that they are anarchists by looking at them. They look like real people. Cause they are. The reality is that if you are a "full-time anarchist," which I take to mean dedicating your life to making revolution (like Lenin, Mao or Castro did for communism), you are either gonna be in jail (not for shoplifting or spray painting, or even cause you threw a rock at a pig), are out of jail after a long stint, in exile, in hiding, or dead. These Crimethinc. people fit none of those profiles. Likely, they never will.

You see, and again, this is only my estimation, Crimethinc. is the privileged person's anarchism (has anarchism been much else in this country for decades?). This is for people who can run back to mom and dad when things get rough. And they do. Rich kids living "the dream." It's for people who can choose "homelessness" and "poverty." It's hard for people of color to lead the Crimethinc. life. Shoplifting from a supermarket while traveling through Iowa ain't gonna go too smoothly, likely. You know what I mean?

If you've been poor, and I mean real poverty, not the kind that you choose and out of which you can move again at will, it fucking sucks. Being on food stamps because otherwise you don't eat unless your aunt brings your family food, sucks. Getting welfare because otherwise you are (literally, not "traveling") homeless, as a family, sucks. Not having a job because you have no car and you cannot afford a taxi to get to a potential job, sucks. The fetishization of poverty is offensive to those who live it with no choice. Only rich white kids choose "poverty." Fuck all these people on poverty vacations. Your existence grates on those with whom you claim solidarity.

But I know, you've really got one over on everybody cause you don't work. Someone has to, otherwise there would be no one from whom you could mooch.

And finally, you know what? I don't work either. I haven't had a "job" in over five years. But I don't fucking care. I don't go around telling people about it. And I certainly don't think that it puts me on some road to nirvana or whatever. I've long (always?) recognized that people have to survive, and in this world, it largely means working for someone else.

If this man were Muslim (or just non-Israeli Arab)...

2010-08-16T22:42:00.005-04:00

what would the people say?

ATLANTA – Elias Abuelazam was about to board a plane for Israel when police arrested him in connection with a three-month stabbing spree that left five men dead, 13 others wounded and a Michigan city in terror. In the moments before the bald, pudgy man in flip-flops and shorts was handcuffed, passengers saw him nervously talking on his cell phone, insisting he wasn't violent.

The Israeli citizen and legal U.S. resident was charged Thursday in just one case out of Flint, Mich., the battered industrial city where most of the stabbings occurred, but authorities said more charges are expected there and in Ohio and Virginia. At least 15 of the 18 victims were black but it was unclear whether the attacks were racially motivated.

Flint residents hope the arrest ends their summer of fear. Roughly every four days since late May on average, the killer approached men on lonely roads at night, asking for directions or help with a broken-down car. Then he'd pull out a knife, plunge it into his victim and speed away; in one case he used a hammer. The youngest victim was 15; the oldest 67.

Nothing good, I can assure you. He's Christian, by the way. Or at least his family is.

Still hate this place

2010-08-04T23:25:00.004-04:00

Fuck these people. Holy shit, I cannot emphasize "fuck them" enough. Were there a god, or if I had the slightest delusion that there were one, I swear I would dedicate entire days to praying for the extermination of such people:

Protect Marriage, the coalition of religious and conservative groups that sponsored the ban, said it would immediately appeal the ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"In America, we should uphold and respect the right of people to make policy changes through the democratic process, especially changes that do nothing more than uphold the definition of marriage that has existed since the founding of this country and beyond," said Jim Campbell, a lawyer on the defense team.

Fuck.

Get me the fuck out.

Ian Mackaye is very insightful

2010-08-03T21:26:00.005-04:00

Next in the series of responses to Gabriel Kuhn's Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge and Radical Politics.

Reading/listening to Ian Mackaye can teach you a lot about life. It has me. This is a guy who has really thought about shit his whole life and ACTUALLY FIGURED SOME THINGS OUT. That's the big deal. Lots of people think about stuff, but this guy got somewhere. It's really something. That's what it means to be wise, to actually reach conclusions that can help people, to which people can relate.

I don't know how many times I would have a car go by and someone would scream, "Fuck you, you fucking punk faggot!" But then I realized that if you do not speak that language, you recognize that they are not talking to you. Let's say that I'm in Sweden, and a carload with a bunch of guys goes by and they yell something at me in Swedish. I don't know what they're saying. As far as I know, they are saying, "I love basketball!" Who knows? So when I'm walking along the street here and some guys go by in a car, and they don't know me, I don't know them, but they say, "You're a fucking punk faggot, fuck you!" then it should have the same effect. They are not talking to me, they don't know me, and I'm not what they say I am, so they must have me confused with someone else. In short, if you don't speak the language of violence, you are released from violence. This was a very powerful discovery for me.

It's a discovery on which I'm still working, but at least I've got some directions on how to get there.

Here is the other quote that really struck me in his exchange with Gabriel Kuhn:

There was a certain period in my life when I was very angry, when I was really agonizing over things. It made me feel miserable, and I began to question everything: What is the point of all this punk rock? What is the point of me singing? What am I trying to do? Eventually, I realized that the reason I was so angry was because I want people in the world to be well. And I realized that it was a worthwhile project to pursue in my lifetime. But I also understood that I myself needed to be well to do that. So I figured that I would do my best to live a life of wellness. This doesn't mean that I'm trying to bask in my riches. It means that I'm trying to release myself from the anger and agony. Remember what I said earlier about someone going by in a car and calling me a "fucking asshole?" They are not talking to me - 'cause I'm not a fucking asshole.

Brilliant, just fucking brilliant. I cannot explain how deeply I relate to that. I burn for people, animals and the planet to be well and the ensuing certain frustrations make me so angry and hateful towards the bulk of the human population. I feel this every day. It is constant. I just don't feel that there is really anything I can do to make anyone or anything well. It's all a series of frustrating, crashing defeats. Over and over.

Releasing oneself from the anger and agony, that is the challenge of my life. If nothing else, it's very comforting to read this and only further cements the idea that Ian Mackaye is an exceptional thinker.

It's so important to realize that Ian did this stuff, this letting go and moving ahead, without giving up. He didn't get a stupid haircut and snazzy new jeans. He didn't lose himself in some empty fashion, he didn't immerse himself in an indulgent, vapid, solipsistic music scene. No. He has been vegan forever, he is still straight edge and punk as fuck. He still cares about people and animals in a serious way, but figured out how to do it without destroying himself. I need to figure that out cause you better believe I'm not going to go out like the rest of those pieces of shit. I'll die alone and in misery before that happens.

Dennis Lyxzén - what is he talking about?

2010-08-01T22:36:00.010-04:00

Here's the next installment of my thoughts on what I read in Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge and Radical Politics. I read Dennis' interview with great enthusiasm. Some of it was pretty rad, but overall, I was not that into it. He's really image-oriented, which I am just so not about. He talks about how the Noise Conspiracy change their sound and their aesthetic every time they put out a record, saying crap like this:

I mean, we've been playing for ten years now with Noise Conspiracy, and you can look at our outfits throughout the years, and they've changed a lot, and so did the whole aesthetics. With every new record, we try something new - not only with the aesthetics, but with the politics and the music too. We maintain our ideas and our musical foundation, but we kind of switch and twist them a little bit every time and try to spice them up with something new.

You know, a lot of people try to decide what exactly it is that people should like about their band. We just figure that people can dig the politics, they can dig the snazzy outfits, they can dig the music, they can dig whatever - it's up to them to decide what to take with them when they leave our show or listen to our record. So while many bands are like, "This is what we are and this is what you should like about us," we just say, "Whatever you like is cool with us. If you don't like the politics, we're sure you find something else that you like."

I am just so turned off by that. It's like a fucking stage show. Politics is fun everybody. Whoo whoo, revolution rules! Slogans and marketing, fashion and image. Fuck all of that. Empty shit. Judging by people's responses to the last nine Noise Conspiracy full-lengths, I would say that lots of people realized that they are full of shit. Then he goes on to say something that made me like the dudes in Refused a whole lot:

I was always into this concept [changing images and ideologies], so with Noise Conspiracy I got a chance to realize it. Actually, when we did the last batch of touring with Refused, I tried to get the band to wear matching outfits, but the guitar players just happened to "lose" them. After a week of shows they were just like, "Eh, these jackets that we had tailor-made are gone..."

Good, fuck those jackets. What a bunch of boy band crap. Fuck.

Speaking of changing images, up top is a very recent picture of Dennis. He's punk as fuck these days, looking like it's 82. I guess it's appropriate, now that he's got his matching band.

So anyway, this is what Dennis has to say about his ideological and philosophical inspirations:

Personally, I like to mix different sources and hope that something cool will come out of it. Anarchism and socialism I've always been into. Situationism - which is as much an art movement as it is a political movement with an amazing critique of capitalist society, right at the breaking point of modernism and postmodernism - is just really well suited for lyrics, especially if you look at Raoul Vaneigem. And poststructuralism helps you understand how the world works today. Then you throw in some surrealism and some dada, and everything becomes even more interesting.

Interesting indeed. What a fun political collage life is. Anarchism and socialism? Situationism is not just well suited for lyrics, but also verbose, dense and largely irrelevant to those who aren't highly educated or pseudo-intellectual.

I guess he really does want revolution with a catchy phrase. What's after that? A bunch of well-dressed revolutionaries speaking to one another about a bunch of esoteric ideas? Way to be practical. So intensely privileged.

It's not like there's really any hope in anarchism (or socialism, or anything else he references), but come on, this guy is just making a mockery of it all and yet somehow has stood as an icon for radical music for years. People who are so into crafting their public self image really bum me the fuck out.

Murder - the logical end of anti-immigrant xenophobia

2010-07-29T22:57:00.005-04:00

Some kids not too far from here beat a forty-seven-year-old man to death, preserving it for their children via cell phone video, strictly and solely because Abelino Mazaniego, father of four, was not born in the United States. There was no provocation. There was no conflict other than the one the kids made. There was no history of bad blood. He was a stranger to them. They saw him sitting on a bench after he got off work and decided to have fun, because they learned that American lesson that immigrants from south of the border are not people - they are problems, they are criminals, they are welfare-sappers, parasites and at best, landscapers. Racist demagogue politicians and talk radio garbage love to ride that crap to power. See the "Tea Party Movement," Sheriff Joe Arpaio, or the most recent Arizona Hispanic/Latina/o racial profiling legislation for current reference points.

He's fucking dead. Some kids beat him for kicks. Now he's gone, and his family is left with no father, no husband, and no source of income. He was their sole provider.

The kids who killed him weren't even interested in robbery, as a nurse at the hospital did that:

But it apparently wasn't an attempt to get the $640 in cash that Mazaniego was carrying.

Police found the victim after the beating and took him to the hospital, where, officials say, nurse Stephan Randolph, 39, of Flemington, took the money out of the unconscious victim's wallet.

Family members noticed the missing money and told authorities, who charged Randolph with third-degree theft Monday, six days after Mazaniego died.

Pure fun, they wanted. And they got it.

The racial aspects of this are pretty interesting. At least two of the teenagers who killed him are African-American. It took prosecutors about a week to upgrade the charges against them from manslaughter to murder. If they were white, I think it would still be manslaughter, at the most. If Abelino were white, they would all be up on the highest murder charge possible. The fact that prosecutors didn't put them up on murder right away reinforces the idea that Abelino and people like him are not people. Their office had to get pressured to act.

Fuck this place.

Andy Hurley is an idiot

2010-07-24T16:31:00.015-04:00

Duh. But this is for a reason other than being in Fall Out Boy. I finished reading this really interesting book a few weeks back, Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge and Radical Politics. It's an anthology of interviews and writings, as the title says, on straight edge and the ways in which people have politicized it, through connections with such (not necessarily) disparate ideas as feminism, veganism, radical queer analysis, anarchism, and communism. The book is international in perspective, including people from Brazil, Israel, Poland, Sweden, Holland, the U.K. and of course the United States. Some of the interviews are great (Ian, the two people from Poland and one of the dudes from Point of No Return), some are really good and some are pathetic for what they reveal about the interviewees.

In the midst of all this is Andy Hurley, whose interview is entitled "Straight Edge, Anarcho-Primitivism and the Collapse." Yup. I guess it's to present the ideas of primitivism through the mouth of someone a bit more recognizable than anyone from Gather or Peregrine. Andy doesn't seem to be too into his own ideas and just kind of regurgitates stuff from Derrick Jensen and the great Klan sympathizer/apologist (he writes that "Nonetheless, the loathsome nature of the KKK of today should not blind us to what took place within the Klan 70 years ago, in various places and against the wishes and ideology of the Klan itself.), John Zerzan.

First, take a look at Andy's ultraprimitive 6,000+ square foot lakefront home, with its five bedrooms, four bathrooms and multiple BMWs in the driveway

Nice house. So in the interview, on page 254, he talks about how veganism is only relevant in our modern industrial world:

I always understood that in a better way of living, in the way of living that humanity is supposed to live [what the fuck does this mean?], I wouldn't be vegan. There is just a different connection, a different relationship. There's a relationship between predator and prey that has nothing to do with the relationship that civilization has to the animals it uses in the meat and dairy industry, in factory farming etc. So I definitely don't agree with the analysis that veganism saves the world. Not at all, because the whole question is still about civilization, and about farming and agriculture.

Of course veganism doesn't save the world. But it does more than you talking on your fucking iPhone and taking orders for your "Fuck City" shirts while fishing "naturally" on land you bought cause you're fucking rich. I'm super tired of this "relationship between predator and prey" bullshit that Derrick Jensen loves to propagate through his fetishized ideas of "the" Native American and how he/she honored the kill. Yeah, as though something is right because Native Americans did it. The Mayan people (in their civilization, which is really inconvenient for primitivists who idealize Native Americans, considering that they were Native Americans who built a pretty serious civilization long before they had most unfortunate contact with European death bringer parasites) performed human sacrifices, which seems like not a good idea. All that relationship shit is an excuse. Just admit that you are killing and that's it. The relationship is that you kill something and eat it. Whatever animal you are killing has no relationship with you, other than the one of great fear that you give it when you take its life. Like a deer is coming to offer itself to you, knowing that it's the right thing to do, living in this newly re-wilded natural world again.

So then why bother being vegan at all? Don't worry, Andy (by way of his friend Kevin Tucker) has got that one all figured out:

Besides, within civilization veganism is important to me because, again, I'm against oppression and this applies to the meat and dairy industry and all that, and so that's another thing I just can't support. But I've been planning on buying some land up north in Wisconsin, to at least have something that can never be clear-cut and used for timber, and to have a place that's wild, a place that I can utilize natural survival skills on. And then maybe one day I'll start looking for roadkill, start fishing in natural ways and stuff. I don't know when I'll get to that bridge and when I'll cross it, but I assume it will happen. As I said, I've been struggling with this for a while now and have had lots of talks with [Kevin] Tucker about it. It's become kind of a running joke.

There you have it, veganism and vegetarianism are merely protests against civilization. They don't deserve consideration once we switch back to living like we're "supposed to," as though anyone can know what that means. People have lived so differently over so many centuries, and here we see people claiming THE TRUTH, going back to that original moment, where everything was great. Then what happened, aliens came down and gave us bad ideas, or those creatures who live at the center of the earth crawled out and showed someone advanced technology? No. We happened. People. Or rather, we kept happening. The same fucking species, year after year, has continually fucked things up more and more. I'll write another post about this later.

What's the running joke? "LOL, I'm gonna eat meat soon!!" "Yeah right, non-primitivist, privileged industrialist!! LOL LOL LOL!" So funny right now.

Perhaps you wonder why I care. It's not really anything about Andy Hurley. Certainly, I do not look to him for ideas on anything. Before this interview and doing some subsequent perfunctory research (which turned up the episode of Cribs), I only knew that he played in Fall Out Boy and used to be in Racetraitor and Vegan Reich. Some people I know who think that anyone who is vegan and straight edge rules told me that he is a primitivist. So yeah, Andy Hurley is not an important part of my thoughts.

The issue is that his notion of veganism is just so offensive to my own. Sure, it's good that the dude is vegan for the time being (if he even still is at this point) and has (had?) been for a long time. It's way more than I could say for most people. I guess he promoted it, somehow. Maybe not, I don't know. Fall Out Boy is a pretty stupid, meaningless band, after all. But to just say that, "Hey, when it comes down to it, animals really are here for us to eat," that fucking SUCKS. What the fuck? Seriously. That is anthropocentrism at its core. It's like that food chain chart from the "Lisa the Vegetarian" episode of The Simpsons - we are the center, everything goes to us.

I've never viewed veganism as a relativist concept, that it's only desirable under industrial conditions. It's like saying that racism was only bad as long as black people were slaves or that dumping a little raw sewage in the ocean is ok, as long as too many people aren't doing it.

And what's up with this dichotomy that we either hunt animals or have industrialized agriculture? Why can't we plant for ourselves and work little plots of land? Sustenance is not exploitation. Stupid, shortsighted shit.

At the end of the day, I find it sad that Andy Hurley has this internal dissonance where he feels that he has to beat back his compassionate desires and kill. He refers to it as a "struggle." I would imagine it causes a good deal of anxiety. It's like he can't be a good primitivist if he doesn't eat meat. I guess that's what you get when your only thoughts on primitivism/how to live life come from reading Derrick Jensen, John Zerzan and hanging hard with Kevin Tucker. It's like he has to turn himself into some kind of robot, some idealized version of primitive man that is not likely based on much research. And he's choosing food as the primary method of that. I don't get it. If someone were of the opinion that hunting and killing is the absolute only method of survival post-collapse, and that person were also heavily disposed to veganism, why not train yourself to do the necessary killing and trapping and whatever and then leave it at that? It ain't like the collapse is imminent. Really. I don't see what the imperative is to abandon veganism at this point, if its something you still believe in.

We have obviously better ideas than killing to survive, but we're supposed to abandon them because we think that our ancestors behaved in certain ways. They also attacked one another with axes and lived in caves, wiping their asses with leaves at best. I wonder which "wild" version of humanity is most popular.

What's new

2010-07-14T20:51:00.003-04:00

I'm (we're) back, sort of. I had to take a break from the "news" for a while. It was kind of killing me. I hate everything enough as it is, and reading about the Gulf of Mexico several times a day was not helping the situation. As much as I wish for every piece of shit at BP to catch on fire, it will not happen and it was making my life worse. I have enough problems as it is; I don't need to give myself more. I also really don't have the time to keep doing that. It's unsustainable (ha, lolf). Really though.

But, I will start posting again, although it will be the occasional "news" story that makes me want to stab people interspersed with things I'm thinking about, like this book I just finished called Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge and Radical Politics. It made me think about a bunch of new things, and I plan on putting them up here soon.

Pigs are garbage

2010-07-14T20:27:00.004-04:00

Not a new idea, I know. But really, this is just so egregious. Fuck.

Three police officers charged in the killing of two unarmed residents on a New Orleans bridge after Hurricane Katrina and a cover-up that followed pleaded not guilty on Wednesday.

Sgts. Robert Gisevius and Kenneth Bowen and Officer Anthony Villavaso stood before a federal magistrate in green prison garb, shackled at the waist and ankles. They will remain jailed at least until a hearing Friday. A tentative trial date is set for Sept. 13...

Five former officers already have pleaded guilty to charges they helped cover up the shootings. Prosecutors have said police fabricated witnesses, falsified reports and plotted to plant a gun to make it appear that the shootings were justified.

The shootings at the Danziger Bridge happened Sept. 4, 2005, six days after Hurricane Katrina smashed levees and left the city flooded and in chaos. Bodies floated in filthy flood waters. There were reports of looting and gunshots rang out throughout the blacked-out city.

It was in this backdrop that police, desperate to regain control, were called about 9 a.m. that morning after reports of gunfire at the bridge.

Seven heavily armed New Orleans police officers stormed the bridge. Prosecutors said they shot at the first people they saw, people they say were crossing the bridge to find food.

When it was over, two men were dead and four others lay wounded on the hot concrete.

The indictment claims Faulcon shot mentally disabled Ronald Madison, 40, in the back as he ran away on the west side of the bridge. Bowen is charged with stomping and kicking Madison while he was lying on the ground, wounded but still alive.

Stomped him to death. After shooting him in the back. Stomped.

Here's a related story that details the pigs shooting at the aforementioned unarmed family:

The indictment alleges that officers Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon and Villavaso open fired on an unarmed family on the east side of the bridge, killing 17-year- old James Brissette, and wounding Susan Bartholomew, 38; Leonard Bartholomew III, 44; the Bartholomew's daughter, Lesha, 17; and the Bartholomew's nephew, Jose Holmes, 19. The Bartholomews' 14-year-old son ran away from the shooting and was fired at, but was not injured.

Here we see a perfect example of the classic police lie, as Paul Chevigny so eloquently pointed out nearly forty-five years ago:

Madison's brother, Lance, was arrested and charged with trying to kill police officers. He was jailed for three weeks before being released without indictment.

They tried to cover their filthy pig asses by charging the dead man's brother with trying to kill them. They say, "Well, when you have people who are trying to kill the police, we have the right to use any violence available to us in order to defend our lives." Yeah.

These are some standup pigs:

Bowen, Gisevius, Faulcon and Villavaso also are accused of shooting at an unarmed family on the east side of the bridge, killing 17-year-old James Brissette and wounding four others.

Sgt. Arthur Kaufman and retired Sgt. Gerard Dugue, who helped investigate the shootings, were charged with participating in the alleged cover-up. Charges against them include obstruction of justice.

Kaufman and Bowen "specifically discussed using Hurricane Katrina to excuse failures in the investigation, and thereby to help make any inquiry into the shooting go away," the indictment states.

Kaufman allegedly took a gun from his home and claimed to have found it at the crime scene a day after the shootings, then lied about that gun under oath and in reports, prosecutors said.

This part actually made me laugh:

Gisevius cried quietly as he stood with his lawyer.

I would legitimately pay money to watch a pig cry in court. Coward piece of shit.

Also, they're potentially facing the death penalty. Yes, please.

Kansas - Carry on My Wayward Son

2010-07-13T17:07:00.004-04:00

Yeah, that's right. This song's kind of good and kind of terrible. This video, though, is the shit. The song is fairly irrelevant. Pretty much everything rules about it, from the very beginning. Crazy-ass mountain man singer, guitar player in a white suit, bored as FUCK drummer, mountain man singer going off, the mustaches, the singing keyboard player's kidtoucher stache and wonderful hair, so on and so forth. Just watch, we'll talk more after:

Ok, so how about that keyboard player singer guy getting fresh with the bongos? Sometimes you see the white suit guitar player guy off in the background with an acoustic guitar. He looks like he is being punished. Then in the middle of the first keyboard solo, the keyboard-playing singer slaps the mic stand out of his way, goes back to the bongos, gets crazy with the cheeze whiz, and then the mountain man comes over to support him in his struggle against the mic stand, by enthusiastically tambourining at him, so much so that his mouth opens. That man's hair, when viewed straight-on, is simply incredible. Shit is that drummer bummed.

Then the mountain man goes over to the other guitar player to support him while soloing. He's a really good guy, that mountain man. He serves a vital role. If you've ever seen Avail, you will see that Beau clearly took great inspiration from him. I would say that mountain man is a dirty rock and roll precursor to Beau, but thinking a bit more on it, they really are not very different, aside from hair length and Beau's higher energy level.

Failing (flailing) police state in Brownsville, Brooklyn

2010-07-12T15:14:00.002-04:00

93 stop and frisks per 100 residents. Yikes. Make sure you don't spit on the sidewalk next time you are in Brownsville. They'll probably let you go though. Check the video. The fat white pig is my favorite. You can tell he's new.

The Problem Is Still Here

2010-06-28T20:45:00.001-04:00

Communist trash in Mississippi win the right to free oil

2010-06-26T16:57:00.004-04:00

First Louisiana, then Alabama, Florida, now Mississippi. Who's next? Georgia? South Carolina? Will it never end?

Mississippi’s lucky streak appears to have ended, with oil from the BP disaster washing into the Mississippi Sound and likely to make landfall on mainland beaches within the next few days, said Trudy Fisher, director of the state Department of Environmental Quality.

And to think of the proud history the South has of anticommunism and pretty much antieverythingism. What a disgrace. They're stealing what lots of people worked hard for and what we have to pay for. I don't see Obama Hitler lifting a finger.

Report: Toxins found in whales bode ill for humans

2010-06-26T11:37:00.003-04:00

Oh, but much worse for whales and anything else that lives in/off of the sea, I can assure you. We're all that really matters though.

Sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, according to American scientists who say the findings spell danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood.

A report released Thursday noted high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium in tissue samples taken by dart gun from nearly 1,000 whales over five years. From polar areas to equatorial waters, the whales ingested pollutants that may have been produced by humans thousands of miles away, the researchers said.

Whoops. Wonder what new technology they will invent to attempt to clean up what the old technology left behind.

The researchers found mercury as high as 16 parts per million in the whales. Fish high in mercury such as shark and swordfish — the types health experts warn children and pregnant women to avoid — typically have levels of about 1 part per million.

The whales studied averaged 2.4 parts of mercury per million, but the report's authors said their internal organs probably had much higher levels than the skin samples contained.

"The entire ocean life is just loaded with a series of contaminants, most of which have been released by human beings," Payne said in an interview on the sidelines of the International Whaling Commission's annual meeting.

Payne said sperm whales, which occupy the top of the food chain, absorb the contaminants and pass them on to the next generation when a female nurses her calf. "What she's actually doing is dumping her lifetime accumulation of that fat-soluble stuff into her baby," he said, and each generation passes on more to the next.

We've been doing a good job, these last few hundred years. Look at how quickly we can devastate millions of years of slow, beautiful development.

I guess this is the article's main point:

"You could make a fairly tight argument to say that it is the single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species. I suspect this will shorten lives, if it turns out that this is what's going on," he said.

As if we deserve any less than a slow death of new, untreatable diseases from new forms of pollution.

Finally, down at the bottom, the author gets to what really matters in the overall non-anthropocentric picture:

The consequences of the metals could be horrific for both whale and man, he said.
"I don't see any future for whale species except extinction," Payne said. "This is not on anybody's radar, no government's radar anywhere, and I think it should be."

Cause no government cares. Those of Japan, Norway and Iceland are trying to empty the oceans of whales and there are lots of other piece of shit governments lining up behind them, awaiting the chance to engage in "scientific" whaling or whatever they try to call it. Filthy murder pirates. Fuck them all.

Floridians getting more free oil than ever

2010-06-23T19:37:00.003-04:00

And COMPLAINING about it. Well doesn't that figure? I bet a lot of us would like to get free oil like they are! Ingrates.

Look at the public spectacle they make, crying and whatnot:

In Florida, thick pools of oil washed up along miles of national park and Pensacola Beach shoreline as health advisories against swimming and fishing in the once-pristine waters were extended for 33 miles east from the Alabama/Florida border.

"It's pretty ugly, there's no question about it," Gov. Charlie Crist said.
The oil had a chemical stench as it baked in the afternoon heat. The beach looked as if it had been paved with a 6-foot-wide ribbon of asphalt, much different from the tar balls that washed up two weeks earlier.
"This used to be a place where you could come and forget about all your cares in the world," said Nancy Berry, who fought back tears as she watched her two grandsons play in the sand far from the shore.

Disgusting. Not only are they getting (a very important) something for nothing, but they are acting outraged by it. Everyone knows it's really just an act they're putting on to mock the rest of us.

104,000 gallons an hour

2010-06-23T19:31:00.002-04:00

That's how much oil is once again blowing out of BP's broken pipe five thousand feet under the ocean. And it looks like this:

BP's oil catastrophe is now back IN FULL MUTHAFUCKIN EFFIZZECT

2010-06-23T13:16:00.003-04:00

Alright! We have now finally returned to blowing out several million gallons of crude oil a day!

Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen says an underwater robot bumped into the venting system. That sent gas rising through vent that carries warm water down to prevent ice-like crystals from forming in the cap.

Allen says the cap has been removed and crews are checking to see if crystals have formed before putting it back on. In the meantime, a different system is still burning oil on the surface.

Before the problem with the containment cap, it had collected about 700,000 gallons of oil in the previous 24 hours. Another 438,000 gallons was burned.

The current worst-case estimate of what's spewing into the Gulf is about 2.5 million gallons a day.

I knew BP could make good things happen.

Israel making Palestine better than ever

2010-06-21T11:35:00.005-04:00

Israel, in its never-ending quest to improve Palestine (showing us all how to truly leave things better than you found them, just like signs at campgrounds tell you), is treating the Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem to an Israeli tourist center:

A Jerusalem planning body on Monday approved a plan to raze 22 Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem to make room for an Israeli tourist center, a decision that could raise tensions in the divided city and deepen the conflict with the Obama administration...

The plan calls for the construction of shops, restaurants, art galleries and a large community center on the site where some say the biblical King David wrote his psalms. The 22 displaced families would be allowed to build homes elsewhere in the neighborhood, though it is not clear who would pay for them...
Barkat says the plan gives a much-needed facelift to Jerusalem's decaying al-Bustan neighborhood, which Israel calls Gan Hamelech, or the King's Garden.

The contested site is a section of a larger neighborhood called Silwan, which is home to some 50,000 Palestinians and 70 Jewish families. Demolitions elsewhere in Silwan have made the neighborhood a hub of tension between Palestinians and Jews.

Israel, generous as ever, is giving Palestinians a direly necessary community center at which they will not be welcome, in a section of the city that is barely occupied by Israeli Jews. That's a lot of spending.

This makes those stupid Palestinians who say they are oppressed or live under apartheid or whatever look dumber than ever.

Zionists hijacking a plane is somehow not terrorism

2010-06-19T15:41:00.008-04:00

In yesterday's New York Times, the newspaper published an Op-Ed piece, entitled "Hijacking Their Way Out of Tyranny," heaping praise upon a group of Soviet citizens, mostly Jews, who attempted to hijack a plane and make their way to sweet Israel, where they could then join in the tyranny.

I could get into a lot of details, but I will keep it fairly short. My main point is this: if you replace "Jew" with "black" and "Soviet Union" with "United States of America" in the article, there is no way that the Times or any other mainstream paper would ever touch such a writing. Instead, we see the lionization of these beacons of freedom.

The article leaves out the part where they planned to take the plane by deadly force and had a bunch of weapons on them, as I found in December 18th, 1970's Times:

Subdue the pilot, nice. The author, and the editors at the Times, portray the attempted hijacking as not only harmless but absolutely morally right. There are no questions here; these people were deeply oppressed and had no choice but to hijack a plane at gunpoint. Beyond these barely implied exaltations of the hijacking, the Op-Ed makes no analysis of the event, focusing instead on the road to liberty and freedom the failed hijackers paved for Soviet Jews and other disgruntled anonymous citizens. I bet Palestinians wish they would at least put a couple of toll plazas on that road.

Finally, the author seems to glibly proffer the idea that the would-be hijackers were only going to take a twelve-seat plane, so what's the big deal? It seems that this isn't entirely accurate, as according to an interview with two of the then-recently freed hijackers in April 30th, 1979's Times, there were sixteen of them, not twelve:

It's not so much the devout Zionism that gets me here; it's much more the hypocrisy and inconsistency of what is terrorism and what is not. Generally, Zionists cannot be terrorists, according to the mainstream Western, and particularly American, media. They do whatever they want, with very minimal constraints. They can take over and kill a bunch of people on a ship in international waters that was to be delivering humanitarian aid to oppressed people, they can blithely kill countless innocent people (including those hot-button women and children) and they can run an apartheid-style occupation for decades. Do they get sanctions? No, they get rewarded like no other, calling anyone who acts to oppose any of this a terrorist. And here we see them still glorified for it all in the country's most revered and supposedly "liberal" newspaper.

New official estimates for oil hemorrhage are 60 times what they were

2010-06-15T21:49:00.005-04:00

Yes, now the federal government says that BP's hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is blowing out up to 2.52 million (2,520,000) gallons of oil per day. That is now sixty thousand (60,000) barrels, compared to the initial figure of one thousand (1,000) barrels.

BP is well on its way to claiming the world's largest oil catastrophe (with the exception of the daily annihilation that is human industrial existence), already easily claiming number three, and perhaps number two.

Way to go. People are awesome.

Random rich people fucking BP's victims for profit

2010-06-12T15:48:00.005-04:00

How fun. A perfect illustration of capitalism, rendering the abstract in high relief:

As the black tide of BP crude oil moves toward the Florida Panhandle, thousands of fishermen are trying to salvage a way of life. BP's lifeline: Vessels of Opportunity, a program designed to hire the fallow charter and commercial fishing boats to clean up the very mess that has caused untold numbers to lose their livelihood. But a Daily Beast investigation reveals that this much-touted program is far more effective as a PR stunt than a financial savior. Specifically, a large number of the 1,900 contracts BP has issued across the Gulf have gone to the owners of pleasure boats: doctors, lawyers, and the like, who use their vessels for Saturday fishing trips or family outings, rather than the decimated commercial fishermen.

Look, I don't have a lot of love for professional fisherman, people who are working real hard to empty the oceans. But in this situation, my hatred for the rich/upper class wins out, easily. And I fucking HATE rich people. Look at these assholes in action:

"We have these weekend warriors taking away jobs from those who fish for a living," says Biloxi boat captain Tom Becker, an officer of the National Association of the Charterboat Operators, who estimates that as much as 90 percent of the BP contracts in his Mississippi harbor had gone to pleasure boats. "Every day I see the boat trailers fill the parking lot as the pleasure boats get their assignments for day while the commercial fleet sits idle. This is like stealing. These jokers are taking money away from those who are trying to feed their families."

As I sit among one of the largest charter boat fleets on the Gulf Coast, in Destin, Florida, Scott Robson, president of the Destin Charter Boat Association, echoes the same message. "Vessels of Opportunity is a fiasco," he says. "We have nearly 100 charter boats in Destin, only 13 boats are on contract. The rest are pleasure boats—people being paid for their boats who don't make their livings on the water..."

Real money is at stake: Vessels of Opportunity pays the boat captains $1,200 to $3,000 per day depending on the size of the vessel—their deckhands are paid $200 each per day while they are under contract.

"We've got guys trying to make payments on their boats, tackle, and dock spaces who could use the $2,000 a day BP is paying," says Robson. "Instead, it's going to these private boats."

This shit, to me, is such a sadly wonderful example of what capitalism really is. People who already have money will do anything to get more and don't give a FUCK about anyone else. More more more. Stockpile that money just so you can look at your balance sheet and jerk off.

Best part - BP is fully aware of it. But, they don't care. That's how the rich do. The rich help the rich, and fuck everyone else. And people say there's no class solidarity these days:

So what's going on? BP spokesman Graham MacEwen acknowledges the complaints, and says that changes have been made to the program to favor fishermen over weekend warriors.

But my sources say their interactions with BP haven't been so amicable. "When I tried to point this out at the meetings, BP shut me up," says Zales. "In my mind, one pleasure boat is too many."

"We've suggested an easy fix to this problem," adds Becker. "There are several federal and state databases available that identify who the licenses commercial fishing and charter boats are."

In Pensacola, emotions are running high as bank accounts are drained. One wife of a charter boat captain, with two boats carrying a mortgage of $500,000, describes how BP hired a boat owned by a chiropractor, with purple and yellow flames on its hull. "They have activated freaking ski boats," she cries, "while my husband, who has been in the charter business for two decades, sits idle."

Fuck these rich assholes. They should all be barred from the goddamn water. Some lawyer scumfuck does not need another three grand. Don't care what the situation is. You need money that bad? Sell your fucking boat. Best case scenario - guerilla war on the seas where these money-loving pieces of shit get thrown into the water, to watch their boats burn while they drown.

A fervent love based on a deep fear

2010-06-12T15:22:00.003-04:00

Seems some people in Britain are unhappy with Americans' public views of BP. Aww.

“When you consider the huge exposure of British pension funds to BP, it starts to become a matter of national concern if a great British company is being continually beaten up on the airwaves,” Mr. [Boris] Johnson [the Conservative mayor of London] told BBC radio’s Today program.
Prime Minister David Cameron refused to criticize the United States, however, saying he sympathized with its “frustration” in dealing with its worst environmental disaster in memory. But the chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, signaled careful support for BP, saying that he had spoken to its chief executive, Tony Hayward, and that it was important to remember “the economic value BP brings to people in Britain and America.”
BP is the third largest oil company in the world, after ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, with 80,000 employees worldwide as of last December, sales of $239 billion in 2009 and a market value — even after the recent losses — of more than $100 billion. At a time when Britain is desperate to reduce its deficit, BP is a huge contributor to British tax revenue, paying nearly $1.4 billion in taxes on its profits last year.
Its reputation for reliability and its generous dividends have long made it a favorite of British pension funds. The company’s dividend payments accounted for about 13 percent of the dividends handed out by British companies last year, according to FairPensions, a London-based charity.

The message - BP can do whatever it wants, just don't do anything in response that might hurt anyone else financially. It's like having a crackhouse in your neighborhood and everyone agreeing that is indeed thoroughly a detriment, but hey, don't get rid of it, cause it keeps up foot traffic for the corner store.

This reminds me of people saying how you shouldn't boycott BP stations because the ballyhooed small businessman will get hurt, not BP. That's unfortunate, but the reality of the situation is that when you deal with the devil, you should expect some negative consequences. It's that same mentality - coercing people to still buy from BP.

Here's some "vicious" criticism from some bank fuck:

Iain Armstrong, an analyst at Brewin Dolphin, an investment manager here [in the UK], said that the situation had become “overpoliticized” and had confused the markets about BP’s actual strength.
“It’s gotten completely out of hand,” he said. “Ironically, by being extremely strong financially, BP has become a target.”

Well, no, it's more that they have a big pipe on the ocean floor that is shitting oil and gas into the water at the rate of well over one million gallons per day since April 20th (4/20 bro). It is now June 12th. Long time, yeah? And you see, even though it is a big body of water, like CEO Tony Hayward has said, it's a whole lot of oil. It really is. And the problem with all that is that oil and water still don't mix. I don't know why, I guess oil is stubborn, or maybe water is racist. Then you wind up killing lots of birds, dolphins, fish (I wish Phish as well) and many smaller organisms (though not walruses, seals or sea lions) that are essential for the ocean to function as a source of life, not to mention all those jobs you wipe out. You could put those people to work cleaning up your big mess, but you generally don't, you give those jobs to rich people instead. To conclude, Iain Armstrong has no fucking point. At all.

Finally, we see the most ostentatious and offensive manifestation of this attitude, casting BP as the victim:

Writing on his Web site, a Conservative peer, Lord Tebbit, called the American response “a crude, bigoted, xenophobic display of partisan, political, presidential petulance against a multinational company.”

Yes, Americans are crude, bigoted, xenophobic and partisan, not to mention racist, homophobic, sexist, rude, hostile, selfish and destructive, but they are mostly not political. Poor multinational company with $100 billion value with a $17 billion profit last year. Stop kicking it around, America! It's from another country, so you have to accept it, no matter what! Otherwise you are an asshole! You can't criticize!! Fuck, this sounds like Zionism. Financial Zionism. Capitalist Zionism.

On the use of oil dispersants

2010-06-11T11:06:00.005-04:00

From the EPA's site on the BP disaster:

Are any human health effects expected as a result of using the dispersants?
People working with dispersants are strongly advised to use a half face filter mask or an air-supplied breathing apparatus to protect their noses, throats, and lungs, and they should wear nitrile or PVC gloves, coveralls, boots, and chemical splash goggles to keep dispersants off skin and out of their eyes. CDC provides more information on reducing occupational exposures while working with dispersants during the Gulf Oil Spill Response.

Ha. Tragically funny, given BP's insistence that there is no danger to people working with dispersants, to the extent that they are not permitted to wear masks.

The EPA freely admits that BP is using, and being allowed to use, this shit underwater with no advanced knowledge of what will happen:

What effects could the use of dispersants have on marine life?
It’s important to understand that the use of dispersants is an environmental trade-off. We know dispersants are generally less toxic than the oils they breakdown. We know that surface use of dispersants decreases the environmental risks to shorelines and organisms at the surface and when used this way, dispersants breakdown over several days. However the long term effects on aquatic life are unknown, which is why EPA and the Coast Guard are requiring BP to implement a robust sampling and monitoring plan.

Perhaps more accurate is the idea that they are saying that they don't know what the long-term effects are, when in reality a bunch of marine biologists and assorted scientists have pretty good ideas of what will happen. However, they are able to get by with saying that "the long term effects on aquatic life are unknown," because it is true, in a technical sense, since no one has ever applied dispersants like this before.

Here you can see them telling you that things are gonna be real bad, but what are you gonna do?

How will we know the future and total effects on marine life of dispersant use?
It is too early in the process to know what the scope of the natural resource damage will be. Look to federal partners such as NOAA and DOI for information on impacts to fish, shellfish, marine mammals, turtles, birds and other sensitive resources as well as their habitats, including wetlands, beaches, mudflats, bottom sediments, corals and the water column.

Apart from marine life, has the Unified Command been able to make an assessment on the effects of the dispersant on the environment?
The harm or toxicity of dispersed oil in the environment is generally associated with the oil rather than with the dispersant alone. However, use of dispersants breaks up a slick of oil on the surface into smaller droplets that can go beneath the surface. When applied on the surface before spills reach the coastline, dispersants will potentially decrease exposure for surface-dwelling organisms (such as sea birds) and intertidal species (such as mangroves and salt marshes), while increasing exposure to a smaller population of aquatic life found deeper in the water. It is unknown if dispersed oil has toxic implications to the human population because bioaccumulation through the food chain has not been evaluated.

All that stuff about "not been evaluated" and "too early in the process to know" is coded language for "we're fucked but don't want to tell you."

Finally, the agency states very clearly that there are plumes of oil beneath the surface and tells the reader exactly why:

How do dispersants work on the water's surface?
Oil spill dispersants are chemicals applied directly to the spilled oil in order to break it into small droplets that fall below the surface. Dispersants are usually applied to the oil slick with specialized equipment mounted on an airplane, helicopter or ship. Once applied, dispersants help break up oil into tiny micron-sized droplets which mix into the upper layer of the ocean. Dispersed oil forms a "plume" or "cloud" of oil droplets just below the water surface. The dispersed oil mixes vertically and horizontally into the water column and is rapidly diluted. Bacteria and other microscopic organisms are then able to act more quickly than they otherwise would to degrade the oil within the droplets.

These few paragraphs are a great read, as they directly contradict so much of what BP has been saying and show them to be the liars that they are.

Shitty time to be black in Memphis

2010-06-10T17:23:00.010-04:00

Those banks and realtors have kept shifting their games to easily outmaneuver fair housing laws, making sure that housing in this country is still largely segregated and black people pay much higher prices to buy homes or rent apartments. And they've managed to do this while removing all explicit references to segregation (redlining), blockbusting and price gouging (high-interest/risk mortgages) from their rules, regulations and written guidelines for doing business. Memphis seems to be getting it about the worst right now. It's an old story, but it looks a little different these days, with black people actually having had some real money over the last couple of decades and being able to buy houses and keep them. The recession hurricane is taking care of that though:

For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African-Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city.

A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college.
Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure.
“I’m going to tell you the deal, plain-spoken: I’m a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living,” said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. “I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring.”

Tyrone Banks is fucked, and a lot of other people like him in Memphis are, too. They are experiencing serious downward class motion, completely against their will and largely not a product of their own doing:

The median income of black homeowners in Memphis rose steadily until five or six years ago. Now it has receded to a level below that of 1990 — and roughly half that of white Memphis homeowners...

Black middle-class neighborhoods are hollowed out, with prices plummeting and homes standing vacant in places like Orange Mound, Whitehaven and Cordova. As job losses mount — black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites — many blacks speak of draining savings and retirement accounts in an effort to hold onto their homes. The overall local foreclosure rate is roughly twice the national average.

Fucked, fucked, fucked. And look how little they have to fall back on:

For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, a black or Latino family owns just 16 cents, according to a recent Federal Reserve study...As of December 2009, median white wealth dipped 34 percent, to $94,600; median black wealth dropped 77 percent, to $2,100. So the chasm widens, and Memphis is left to deal with the consequences.

As usual, there are some dirty banking criminals to be had, the types who will bleed people of everything they own and then lots more with no compunction:

The mayor and former bank loan officers point a finger of blame at large national banks — in particular, Wells Fargo. During the last decade, they say, these banks singled out blacks in Memphis to sell them risky high-cost mortgages and consumer loans.

The City of Memphis and Shelby County sued Wells Fargo late last year, asserting that the bank’s foreclosure rate in predominantly black neighborhoods was nearly seven times that of the foreclosure rate in predominantly white neighborhoods. Other banks, including Citibank and Countrywide, foreclosed in more equal measure...
Camille Thomas, a 40-year-old African-American, loved working for Wells Fargo. “I felt like I could help people,” she recalled over coffee.
As the subprime market heated up, she said, the bank pressure to move more loans — for autos, for furniture, for houses — edged into mania. “It was all about selling your units and getting your bonus,” she said.
Ms. Thomas and three other Wells Fargo employees have given affidavits for the city’s lawsuit against the bank, and their statements about bank practices reinforce one another.
“Your manager would say, ‘Let me see your cold-call list. I want you to concentrate on these ZIP codes,’ and you knew those were African-American neighborhoods,” she recalled. “We were told, ‘Oh, they aren’t so savvy.’ ”
She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went “fishing” for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high-interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral.

Yes yes, dirty banks playing dirty, complex tricks on people. Also an old story. Such is capitalism, social Darwinism at its best:

Former employees say Wells Fargo loan officers marketed the most expensive loans to black applicants, even when they should have qualified for prime loans. This practice is known as reverse redlining.
Webb A. Brewer, a Memphis lawyer, recalls poring through piles of loan papers and coming across name after name of blacks with subprime mortgages. “This is money out of their pockets lining the purses of the banks,” he said.
For a $150,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points — the typical spread between a conventional and subprime loan — tacks on $90,000 in interest payments over its 30-year life.

That's a lot of money. Banks love money, or more accurately, the people who run them do. They also seem to love white people:

A study by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and six nonprofit groups found that the nation’s four largest banks, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase, had cut their prime mortgage refinancing 33 percent in predominantly minority communities, even as prime refinancing in white neighborhoods rose 32 percent from 2006 to 2008.

Sure, some black people bought big houses that they could obviously not afford because they were being greedy and materialistic and the bank would give them a loan, just like a bunch of Americans did, especially over the last decade or so. I don't believe that to be the case in much of what's going on in Memphis, or anywhere else across the country. Looking at Wells Fargo's foreclosure rates in Memphis' black neighborhoods (again, seven times higher than white neighborhoods), it's just not possible to say that black people made those kinds of really bad purchases at seven times the rate of white Memphis residents, and only with one bank.

It's easy to blame people for taking on these loans that they ultimately couldn't afford. Even if we put aside the charges of banks altering applications without applicants' knowledge and refusing to disclose all details of a loan, the fact of the matter is that many black people in this country, historically, have not had and still do not have substantial choice of where to live. Their choices are deeply circumscribed by banks and realtors, who literally determine, to a great extent, the ethnic makeup of neighborhoods. Black people were and are denied mortgages in many parts of town, or entire towns, and common racial hostility takes care of the rest.

For the greater part of the last century, racial discrimination crippled black efforts to buy homes and accumulate wealth. During the post-World War II boom years, banks and real estate agents steered blacks to segregated neighborhoods, where home appreciation lagged far behind that of white neighborhoods.

Blacks only recently began to close the home ownership gap with whites, and thus accumulate wealth — progress that now is being erased. In practical terms, this means black families have less money to pay for college tuition, invest in businesses or sustain them through hard times.
“We’re wiping out whatever wealth blacks have accumulated — it assures racial economic inequality for the next generation,” said Thomas M. Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.

What it really comes down to is that, for many black people, if you want to own a home, a high-interest/risk mortgage is basically your only option:

“The more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities,” Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, told a Congressional committee.

Imagine there being only certain places you could realistically live, regardless of how much money you have? It's an unstated apartheid, and it's entirely a product of banking, realty and federal policy. This stuff is all laid out very well in a whole host of books, such as When Affirmative Action Was White, American Apartheid, Family Properties, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, and American Babylon, among many.

Video to prove that there are oil plumes under water

2010-06-09T16:28:00.004-04:00

and that they are killing everything. And that the wild usage of dispersants is wrecking the water in new ways. Here's an accompanying story:

I make my way to the back of the boat unaware of just how covered I am. To be honest, I look a little like one of those poor pelicans we've all been seeing for days now. The oil is so thick and sticky, almost like a cake batter. It does not wipe off. You have to scrape it off, in layers until you finally get close to the skin. Then you pour on some Dawn dishwashing soap and scrub. I think to myself: No fish, no bird, no turtle would ever be able to clean this off of themselves. If any animal, any were to end up in this same puddle there is almost no way they could escape.

The cleaning process goes on for half an hour before the captain will even think about letting me back in the boat. I'm clean, so I stand up. But the bottoms of my feet still had oil, and I fall back in the water. The process starts again. Another 30 minutes of cleaning and finally I'm ready to step into the boat.

BP says they aren't there.

In a shocking development, BP is still lying about how much oil is shooting out of their hole in ocean floor

2010-06-09T15:33:00.006-04:00

BP refuses to provide any estimate aside from that old 210,000 gallons a day bullshit scenario that the government put forth way back when. Why? They say something to the effect of "it does not matter how much oil is coming out. All that matters is that we stop it." Actually, it matters quite a bit how much oil is coming out, and not just for the obvious environmental holocaust reason. They get fined on every barrel (42 gallons) of oil that comes out of that hole, and will likely be charged royalties on each barrel as well. Of course they are not going to help dig that part of their grave:

Some scientists involved in the Flow Rate Technical Group say that they would like to produce a better estimate, but that they are frustrated by what they view as stonewalling on BP’s part, including tardiness in producing high-resolution video that could be subjected to computer analysis, as well as the company’s reluctance to permit a direct measurement of the flow rate. They said the installation of the new device and the rising flow of oil to the surface had only reinforced their conviction that they did not have enough information.
“It’s apparent that BP is playing games with us, presumably under the advice of their legal team,” Dr. Leifer said. “It’s six weeks that it’s been dumping into the gulf, and still no measurements..."
The company, which for several weeks had publicly rejected the idea of using subsea equipment to measure the flow rate, now says it is up to the flow-rate group itself to decide whether to undertake such a step.

The government doesn't seem to be willing to do it either. They really need to do what it takes and put some kind of measurement device down there.

Anyway, despite their assurances that they are capturing most of the oil, or as big lying piece of shit CEO Tony Hayward has said, "the majority, probably the vast majority," the reality is that they aren't. They are probably not even getting half of it, and since removing any hindrances from the mangled pipe last week in their preparations to lower the containment dome over it, are releasing way more oil into the water than they originally were:

[Ira] Leifer [a researcher in the Marine Science Institute at the University of California Santa Barbara who is also a member of the government's flow-rate panel, tasked with determining the size of the oil spill] said based on the data he's seen so far, the rate of flow from the broken well has increase since the initial April 20 explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 workers. He believes BP's decision last week to sever the well's damaged riser pipe in order to install the containment cap has increased the flow by far more than the 20 percent BP and government officials had predicted.
In fact, Leifer says, the well may be spewing what BP had called before the spill its worst-case scenario — as much as 100,000 barrels a day from a freely flowing pipe.
He said he's seen no evidence from BP to date that would be inconsistent from that dire scenario.
Judging by live undersea videos, "it looks like a freely flowing pipe," Leifer said. "From what it looks like right now it suggests to me they’re capturing a negligible fraction."
It's unclear how much oil is still escaping because scientists don't have access to enough data and the video feeds show a "disorganized cloud" of oil shooting out of open vents in the containment cap and between the riser and the cap, Wereley said.
"It’s very difficult to judge flow rates from these multiple sources," he said. "My position is that the claims (of capturing the 'vast majority' of oil) cannot be made because the flow is too complicated."

100,000 barrels is four million, two hundred thousand. 4,200,000. People have been estimating this number all along, but the government has been blowing them off, and the newspapers have all been reporting the pathetically low number of 12,000 to 19,000 barrels, which is shit.

Today is day 51 of this. Anywhere from 51,000,000 to 200,000,000 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic death dispersants.