October 28, 2013

[music] Butcher Boy

I love Butcher Boy with all my heart and soul.
It's not just because I like them as people.
They truly have something amazing going on.
Listen, and you will see what I'm talking about.

[music] The Waldos

So sometimes half of The Waldos play with me in my jazz group "Pastel Sound Explosion."
Sometimes Mark Dennis doesn't play with us, and it's just me, Elliot McInnes, and my bandmate from "Theodore Treehouse" Sam Chandler.

The Waldos are amazing. I'm so fucking pissed this band broke up. It's been like a year. I should be over it. But I'm not.

October 27, 2013

RIP Lou Reed

Rest in Power.

Here's Lou Reed speaking at Occupy Wall Street's "Occupy Lincoln Center" action, which I was lucky enough to be there for.

I need to wipe my ass. Do you have any Slavery Flags?

Via Religious Ghostbuster:

Me: Hey I need some toilet paper, where are your slavery flags?

Store owner: You mean "Confederate Flags" and you aren't wiping yourself with one.

Me: No, I mean "slavery flags". It was flown for slavery and I need to wipe my ass after I shit so....

Store owner: I'm not kidding you will NOT wipe your ass with the Confederate flag!

Me: I'm not kidding I need to shit and afterward I need to wipe on something soft and useless.

Store owner: Get the fuck out of my store!

Me:! suppose toilet paper at McMurder's will have to do.

Seriously I'm referring to those things as slavery flags. It is more accurate than any other name.

October 22, 2013

[music] Lisa/Liza

Lisa/Liza happens to be a friend of mine. Okay, so most of the bands I post about here happen to be friends of mine.

Her album "Ancient Edge" is amazing whether she is your friend or not. Take a listen, I'm sure you'll agree.

October 18, 2013

ideal vs reality



I disagree with this video poo-pooing on socialism. clearly they misunderstand the term. But the point is still good, overall.

October 15, 2013

[music] SWAATH

This is one of my favourite bands in Portland Maine. These recordings don't really do the band justice unless you listen to it with full-body headphones.

You might recognized the tune "Vile" as the intro music to my videos.

Anyways, for your enjoyment, I present, SWAATH.

October 9, 2013

Has your mind been colonized?

Has your mind been colonized?

Now this might conjure of the image of a brain riddled with parasites like Toxoplasma, or the tiny worms that infect Fry from Futurama, but I'm actually talking about your brain being colonized by memetics-- by ideas.



That a mind can be colonized by an idea was introduced to me by the Slovenian political/art/music/theater movement called “Neue Slovinch Kunst.” The Neue Slovinch Kunst claims to be a 100% voluntary fascist empire, which doesn't have borders, but instead exists throughout all of time and space in the minds of its citizens. Those who are made aware of the NSK have been colonized-- the NSK State lives in your head.



Now, what I love about the NSK is that while it seems silly, our very serious and "real" national borders are actually arbitrary lines that people made up-- our nations, including the United States, are actually equally fictional as the NSK State. Both the NSK State and the United States of America, or the Country of Yugoslavia, they only truly exist in our own minds. Especially Yugoslavia, which ceased to exist in 1992.



But Yugoslavia was where the NSK were living, making art, performing music, and doing really cool/weird philosophical protest stuff. So in 1992, where did Yugoslavia go? Well nowhere. It never actually existed to start with. But the idea of Yugoslavia was compelling enough that we all believed that it actually existed. So it did. Our minds were colonized by the idea of Yugoslavia.

So has your mind been colonized?

It's hard to know to what extent your own mind has been colonized, because the colonial mindset infects everything within a colonial culture, and it normalizes itself. When things are normal, they are not noticed-- because they are normal.

Take the origin story of the United States of America. The version you've likely heard in school is something like this, “Two hundred years ago, pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Later the colonists were upset at the British Empire, and they broke off and formed the United States of America.”

The origin story of the planet Earth, our Solar System, and our Sun, sounds similar. Even while the origin stories for our sun are factually accurate, most stories about how our solar system formed omit huge swaths of the story, and lie by omission. If you look at the first ten results of “sun origin” in google, each version of the story goes something like this,

“Billions of years ago, in one arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, a cloud of dust and gas started to condense. Hydrogen and Helium collected together and became more and more dense, until our star, Solar, was born. Thankfully, not all of the cloud was used up to make our sun, and the leftovers spun off into a disk that eventually formed our planets.”

Both of those origin stories are riddled with a colonial mindset. How so? They ignore the complexity of history, and focus only on what is familiar to us today, not on what used to be.

Now, in the story of America, the glaringly obvious fault with this story is that first nation people were living here for thousands of years prior to the arrival of white people. And they have their own history, their own sagas of conquest, political struggles, the rise and fall of nations and peoples. But we ignore all the vast richness of that history and condense it to this uninteresting pastiche of a native person, who exists outside of time, preserved in history as though they were waiting around all those thousands of years for us to arrive and start wrecking the place. Only then, in this narrative we tell ourselves, does history move forwards for the Native Person. In this story we tell ourselves, First Nation people fall out of history after colonization and genocide is nearly complete, and remain frozen in time, as that same pastiche of an “Injun,” being extinguished from history under the heel of military boots, like a smoldering cigarette butt. And this is complete and utter bullshit. First nation people are still living, still struggling, still working, still persisting, and are still part of our history as a planet as we advance through time together. But our myopic colonialist mindset pretends that history in North America started with the white man's arrival, as though America formed out of nothing.

Now to many viewers this may be obvious, we get things wrong on purpose when we tell our history to ourselves, to protect ideas of Nationality, of Morality, of how we are on the right side of history.
That tendency to lie, to fictionalize our history, as though us, the ones telling the story are the most important, glorious, amazing things in the entire universe, is a natural consequence of Empire. If we don't use a fictionalized history to lie to ourselves about how we got here, we cannot morally justify our existence to our children, an existence which is built on bloodshed, oppression, and subjugation.



But that tendency becomes such a habit that in infects every aspect of our lives. Let's go back to the origin story of the sun.

Our earth contains dense atomic structures. Uranium. Plutonium. Lead. However, to find evidence that we existed as a star previous to our current iteration we only need to find elements more dense than lithium. Carbon will do. Yet our planetary core is made mostly of iron, an element far more heavy atomically than lithium or even carbon. We are nearly certain that the first atoms to form in the vacuum of space were hydrogen, helium, and lithium, and that these elements formed the first stars of the universe. Anything heavier than that on the periodic table of elements, and you need fusion. And fusion happens in stars. So where did the Carbon, Iron, Uranium, Cesium and all the rest come from? The center of a star. Our sun, all our planets, and quite possibly a good number of other stars as well, were all contained within the mass of a greater star, which exploded into a cloud of dust and gas.

But our origin story doesn't start with that star. Just like our origin story of the Americas doesn't really start with White Man landing on Plymouth Rock. When we tell the story of our solar system, we start with our own star, as though it formed out of nothing.

When we tell our origin stories, we ignore the reality of history. The Colonial mindset is totally normal. Nobody sees it, because it's normal, but it's everywhere, because colonialism is our true origin story. So we are blind to it.

So decolonize your mind.

October 8, 2013

[music] Explosions In The Sky: "be comfortable, creature"

Be Comfortable, Creature from Explosions in the Sky on Vimeo.


This is a really cute story of a fuzzy orange creature that lives in the wilderness, but lives among mankind as part of an attempt to find something he lost. But he begins to change...

October 7, 2013

Financial Literacy? How About Poverty Literacy.

Quite frankly, I'm sick of hearing about how the poor need to take fiscal literacy courses-- as though low-income people must be poor, not because Capitalism is fundamentally unsustainable and requires persistent poverty to function, but because low-income people must have made "bad financial decisions" at some point (like being born to the wrong family, or going to an underfunded school?)

I think well-to-do people need to take a class in poverty literacy. Thankfully, something like that exists online.

So you think you don't need government assistance to survive. Can you survive a month while living through what I can only describe as "daily life?"

http://playspent.org/

October 5, 2013

Dear Anarcho-Capitalists

First, Capitalism has hierarchy inherent within it, so your ideology is an oxymoron.

But let's totally ignore that for a moment. You like to mock the case for government by saying things like, "but who will build the roads?! OH NOES!" as if that question was an illegitimate one to be asked.

SO HERE'S THE THING

Roads are built without government funds all the time. And they are generally really shitty roads. Most roads around the world are shitty dirt roads that people die on all the time, due to things like mudslides, being knocked off of the road by other drivers, getting your vehicle stuck in massive ruts, etc.

Before governments got involved in the business of building roads, roads were pretty shitty. I know this first hand. I have lived in the backwoods of Maine, where there are lots of roads that are built without government regulations, funds, or workers.



SOME BASE-LEVEL MARXIST ANALYSIS FOR A SECOND

Here's another thing: Government, when working in the best interests of the public, steals back the surplus value from the rich (taxes) --which the rich accrued through theft of surplus value from workers via wage slavery-- and the Gov't uses that money to pay working people to build things that everybody can use for free.

I like that arrangement very much.

I already volunteer all the time outside of my various random jobs that I do to stay fed and housed.

And I'm scraping by, landless (and therefore unable to grow any meaningful amount of food), and barely able to feed myself (insert shameless plug to donate here). There's no way I would EVER volunteer to do jack shit for public works unless I was getting something like rent reduction or food in return (or maybe MONEY which I could then use to pay rent or buy food). I know most people in my situation ALSO wouldn't.

It's hard enough to get people to get the energy up to go to a rally for things they support, let alone build a goddamned bridge with a 1 ton-per-foot carrying capacity-- oh and since we'd be "anarcho-capitalst" or "voluntary society" it would be for free, on time that people donated. Which means you'll probably get people with energy to kill, but not engineering skills.



I'm currently car-free. I ride a bike to get pretty much everywhere I go. And I'm glad workers get paid by the government to build things like roads, so I can ride my bike quickly without breaking spokes.

Because doing this might be a fun leisure activity...


...but I don't want it to be my daily commute to the grocery store.

Even WITH government, we still end up with income-based disparity.

For some reason, AnCaps seem to think that government is to blame for everything wrong in the world, so I'd like to point out that income disparity is DESPITE government redistribution of wealth, not BECAUSE of it.

Those who live in rich areas have better-maintained roads. Because they have a tax base that can support repaving every 5 years. For me, the line between government and the kind of anarchy that AnCaps talk about is a blurry one. The universe already exists without government. That's the default state. When we get together and form governments, it's a collectivist effort, to empower the many who are disempowered by Capitalism.

We used to have rail systems in our cities that allowed low-income people and rich alike to move about freely. And they were largely subsidized by municipal government so that they can keep fares incredibly cheap.

And so yeah, unless the capitalist class decides to spend all the money they extract from working people out of the "goodness of their hearts" you would still have roads without government. But they'd be

Capitalism Kills. KillCapitalism | Resistance Report 009 #KillCap


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