Hey Parents, get a Grip and Make Halloween Dangerous Again

To say that my childhood was less than idyllic would probably be an understatement. Growing up stuck between genders in a dreary small-town Catholic school would have been harsh enough if the priests would only keep their fucking hands to themselves. After eleven years of being told I was fucked to eternal hellfire by the same people who took my virginity in preschool, I was already at the end of a very short rope. Then they accused me of plotting a school shooting because I shopped at Hot Topic and refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, and I began to come up with some pretty creative uses for that rope. 

So, what little childhood I had was pretty much eviscerated by a mean cabal of pedophile priests and the despotic teachers and meddlesome parents who loved them, but somehow by some strange heathen miracle, Halloween remained sacred. The one night of the year that the adults couldn't put their hands on. 

One night of gloriously unfettered chaos where kids ran the streets, set free from the various stultifying codes of conformity inflicted upon us and encouraged to be anonymous freaks, scattering between the streetlights like dead leaves in a stiff breeze, dressed in any kind of drag we could get our hands on, forming fifteen-minute gangs to plot out which houses to harass for junk food first and carrying out petty acts of revenge against those who failed to give up the goods with cartons of eggs that seemed to appear out of nowhere.

There were no teachers to tell us to keep it down, there were no uniforms to strip us of our individuality and what few parents who attempted to accompany us quickly found themselves outnumbered and gloriously marginalized. You could be any gender or species you wanted to be that night and instead of being punished, ridiculed, or berated, you would be rewarded with as much fun-size chocolate as you could carry in a pillowcase. 

In many ways, Halloween was my first taste of Queer anarchism, so, it should probably shock no one that I treat it like a pagan holiday and sadly it should probably shock even fewer people that it has increasingly found itself under attack over the years.

What was once one crazy night of unhinged juvenile delinquency has increasingly found itself stifled beneath a petty police state of constant supervision. Cop cars patrol the streets like buzzards and growing hordes of gossiping helicopter parents seem to be hauled up on every corner like watch-tapping pimps in white khakis. It's a fucking bummer and this is if you're lucky enough not to be corralled into some trunk-or-treat rodeo in an over lit church parking lot.

Much of this heavy-handed purse string bondage is the byproduct of breathless and baseless tall tales about razor blades in cupcakes and fentanyl laced Sweet Tarts that get parroted with reckless abandon by self-proclaimed journalists in the mainstream media and neckless cops looking for any excuse they can find to justify pillaging our tax dollars to facilitate their ego trips.

Just add this to Big Tech's increasingly pervasive monopoly on all forms of basic human interaction and adults have essentially reduced childhood to an agoraphobic experience defined by constant surveillance. The sickest thing is that many parents seem to grasp that their irrational clinginess is choking their kids on a leash but they themselves feel bullied and peer-pressured by some kind of absurd groupthink into policing their own offspring.

A recent study by the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital found that only 17% of parents actually believe that they live in unsafe neighborhoods but only 15% of this same group would even consider allowing their preteen children to play in the park, walk to a friend's house, or go trick or treating without some form of adult supervision. Most of them cited being blackballed as 'bad parents' for motivating their admitted irrationality and it's not like I'm entirely unsympathetic.

I realize that most of these parents are likely just victims of state facilitated fearmongering who are terrified of their children being violated the way that I was, but they need to turn off the evening news and recognize that kids don't get abused by freedom. In fact, statistically speaking, they tend to get abused by trusted adult authority figures. The overwhelming majority of victims of childhood sexual abuse are actually exploited by parents, teachers, law enforcement, and clergy.

My parents sent me to that Catholic school specifically because of its small class sizes and the involvement of priests and teachers in the church that they considered to be a trusted extension of our own family. The result wasn't safety, it was a world in which there was no escaping the grasp and influence of my abusers. At just five-years-old, I was convinced that not only were these trusted adult supervisors allowed full access to my increasingly confusing body but that what they chose to do with it was likely in accordance with my parents' wishes. 

I honestly believed that they had approved the molestation as punishment for my refusal to be a boy. It turned out that they were nearly as confused as I was, but the resulting terror of feeling surrounded by people attempting to police every aspect of my biology left me with little choice but to enter a state of deep disassociation that left me with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and multiple personalities.

The harsh truth here that most parents don't want to face is that their kids are actually probably much healthier, not to mention happier, being left less supervised because adults will always be capable of harming them far worse than they could ever harm themselves or each other. So, just back the fuck off a little bit and give your children a little room to fuck up and find out.

Let them stay out all night and get sick on candy. Let them work through their body issues by playing doctor with the kid next door. Let them get stoned and skinny dip at the abandoned quarry. Let them watch bad movies that give them nightmares. Let them get even with their gym teacher with six rolls of double-ply and a dozen rotten eggs. 

You know that they're going to do this shit anyway, so, forget being a "good parent" for five goddamn minutes and let your kids be kids with other fucking kids and trust them to come to you for help when they take it too far.

I know, it's a lot of faith to put into a cruel world, but freedom always is, and freedom is the only thing that can make this world a little less cruel. Believe it or not anarchy is actually a lot of hard work, so, maybe you could just start by letting your kids beg for candy with their friends while dressed like a serial killer for one night a year. You know, get a grip and make Halloween dangerous again.

Just a thought from a survivor of constant adult supervision.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post 

* Surrender by Cheap Trick

* Much Ado About Nothing by Waxahatchee

* Halloween by the Misfits

* Hummer by Smashing Pumpkins

* Pinhead by the Ramones

* Tear In Your Hand by Tori Amos

* Golden Hair by Slowdive

* Sweetness by Jimmy Eat World

* Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth

* Debaser by the Pixies

Horror Movies Against War

 I am a lifelong antiwar activist and a diehard horror movie buff. A lot of people seem to find those two facts to be a contradiction, and I guess on the surface I can comprehend their confusion. Showing up to a Free Gaza rally in a Blood Feast t-shirt does seem to send some mixed messages. However, at their finest, horror films must be understood as unflinching investigations into what terrifies society most and nothing should be more terrifying to society than war. 

This is why some of the most influential movies of the genre, some of the movies that form the very foundation of what every day Americans think of when they think scary movies, are actually the byproduct of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement.

Vietnam was a real-life horror movie, the first modern war that America lost badly played out on live television too quickly to be censored for public consumption. The empire was stripped bare every evening at six for the hideous, brutish thing that it was, and this spectacle irreversibly altered the DNA of American culture on a very fundamental level. In many ways, it temporarily radicalized pop culture as we knew it and horror movies were far from an exception.

One of the least understood consequences of this cultural Vietnam syndrome was the invention of the modern-day slasher film. The first and debatably most influential picture of that grotesque oeuvre was the 1974 grindhouse classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Most of the oft repeated tropes were in place; five teenagers stranded in the middle of nowhere being stalked by a psychopath in a mask. But anyone who has actually seen this film can tell you that there is something unsettlingly different about its delivery. The entire thing feels raw and almost intimate in its depiction of young tourists at the mercy of a hostile and alien environment. The sticks and weeds of the unforgiving Texas scrublands seem to conspire with the killers and there is a pervasive feeling that we shouldn't be watching this even as we can't look away.

That's because director Tobe Hooper shot the film specifically to look like the war footage that kept him up at night. This is also what convinced the young director to cast the monsters of this movie as a perverted portrait of the average American family, literally clamoring for blood at the supper table from their deranged young son, armed to the teeth with a power tool and concealing himself beneath the flesh of his own victims.

But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre wasn't the first bloodbath with roots that reach from the My Lai Massacre to Elm Street. One of horror cinema's most influential auteurs and the man behind Freddy Krueger, Wes Craven, got his start shooting shocking and grotesquely misunderstood exploitation films that attempted to make sense of the horrors of Vietnam much the way that Tobe Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre did.

Craven's 1972 directorial debut, The Last House on the Left, was also deeply influenced by the horrors on the evening news with a story loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's Virgin Spring. A pair of teenage girls are kidnapped and brutalized by a gang of fugitive psychopaths who then unwittingly seek shelter in the nearby house of one of their slain victims' parents. When the parents discover the crime and the criminals in their midst, they prove themselves to be every bit as capable of savagery in the service of revenge.

There are two messages to be learned by this ugly story. The first is that a society defined by violence has no right to be shocked when that violence shows up unannounced on their doorsteps. In the early seventies, Wes Craven was baffled by a nation that had found itself in the midst of a gruesome crimewave but didn't seem capable of making the connection that perhaps this was merely a reflection of the violence that their own government was committing on a daily basis in the jungles of Indochina. 

The second uneasy lesson from this deeply uneasy picture is that anyone can become the monster in their own horror movie once they begin defending violence as a means justified by its ends.

Craven explored this theme further in his 1977 follow up to Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes. This time a normal suburban family find themselves stranded in the barren Nevada desert where they are preyed upon by savage mutants. But once again, this films power comes in the form of two revelations which come far too late. The first revelation being that the mutants these milquetoast Nixonites encounter are in fact the desperate and deranged byproduct of nuclear testing committed by their own nation's military. 

The second is that these upstanding Americans find themselves as capable of the same kind of savagery when they too are tormented by forces that defy their comprehension. By the final scene the lines between the good guys and the bad guys become so severely blurred that the film can only end in still shots that fade to red.

Sadly, like much of the American counterculture of that era, the slasher film found itself a victim of commercial assimilation and so did Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven for that matter. But the greatest contribution that the antiwar movement made to horror cinema has to be the zombie movie and this subgenre continues to serve as a pliable tool for social criticism on a shoestring budget. We have the late, great George Romero to thank for this.

While this Rust Belt cult icon made scores of terrifying pictures over the decades, he is most notorious for the original trilogy of his Living Dead series. The truly fascinating thing about these movies is that they are all monster movies in which the actual monsters serve largely as a faceless backdrop for the evils of average human beings who find themselves embattled, isolated, and surrounded by an unstoppable force. 

This template was set by 1968's Night of the Living Dead, in which seven strangers hold up in a vacant farmhouse when they find themselves inexplicably surrounded by man-eating corpses who have risen from their graves to lurk and feast. But it doesn't take long for those strangers to find greater conflict between each other than their shared enemy.

This scenario was inspired not only by the Vietnam War but by the fact that in the midst of this holocaust, America found itself hopelessly at war with itself with the violence that erupted across the country after the failures of the Civil Rights Movement. It is particularly telling that the closest thing to a hero that this movie has is a Black man named Ben (brilliantly played by Duane Johnson) who manages to survive the onslaught of the living dead only to be shot dead by the posse of heavily armed white men allegedly there to rescue him. 

Romero expands upon this theme with the sequels, 1978's Dawn of the Dead and 1985's Day of the Dead, each with a new batch of stranded survivalists attempting to make sense of an increasingly senseless apocalyptic American landscape. 

In Dawn of the Dead, the unlucky survivors manage to isolate themselves in the luxury of an abandoned shopping mall only to find themselves crippled and despondent by depression, agoraphobia, and nihilism. Day of the Dead shows a spark of hope in the fact that the undead appear to be evolving into something more human only to have the movie's hardened warriors double down on their forever war on these creatures that has come to define their existence.

All of these gore fests are really movies about empire, about the horrible things that society can consign itself too in an endless state of constant warfare. The war always comes home, even in a bunker designed to survive nuclear winter, and the zombies always come home to roost. As Nietzsche famously observed, those who fight monsters frequently find themselves reflecting that which they fight.

Many movies have continued to mine this unique post-apocalyptic scenario for gruesome lessons about the banality and inhumanity of western consumer culture today. The best, in my opinion, are Danny Boyle's 2002 masterpiece 28 Days Later and it's 2007 sequel by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 28 Weeks Later. Both of these movies involve everyday people attempting to survive an apocalyptic, rage-inducing virus by putting their faith and safety into the hands of modern-day standing armies only to find these soldiers to be far more likely to kill the innocent in a crisis than to save them.

This is the horrific world that we now find ourselves in and it's not just a movie anymore. The western world has found itself held captive by a military industrial behemoth that creates monsters simply to justify its own increasingly nihilistic existence. Francois Truffaut once said that "every film about war ends up being pro-war." My response is that Francois should have spent less time at Hollywood matinees and more time at the grungy grindhouses of Times Square. 

Working class directors slumming it in exploitation cinema new all too well that the only accurate way to capture the horrors of modern warfare is with a monster movie.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs influenced by this post

* Hybrid Moments by the Misfits

* Mandatory Suicide by Slayer

* Release the Bats by the Birthday Party

* For Whom the Bell Tolls by Metallica

* TV Set by the Cramps

* Let's Have a War by Fear

* Peace Sells by Megadeth

* Rooster by Alice in Chains

* There Won't Be Many Coming Home by Roy Orbison

* Too Many Puppies by Primus

* American Nightmare by the Misfits

Hezbollah is Not Hamas

Victory comes quick to cowards with superior firepower, but that victory is almost always short lived. You would think that Israel, or any other proxy student of western colonialism, would have learned this lesson by now but here comes Bibi, landing on an American battleship in his shiny new F-16, mugging it up for the cameras beneath a big banner that reads 'Mission Accomplished.'

And there is no denying that this has been a pretty sweet Indian summer for Zionist terrorism in Southern Lebanon. After obliterating several international laws and several children with thousands of exploding handheld devices, Israel kicked off its new offensive against Hezbollah by assassinating the organization's mercurial Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah, and about 300 other people including a senior commander for Iran's Revolutionary Guard with a massive 2,000-pound bomb with the American gift card still attached. According to western sources, these attacks and others like them have left the plucky Shia militia in shambles with a large portion of their leadership decapitated.

True or false, this is all a part of a much larger plan, as Benjamin Netanyahu established with the public relations choreography surrounding Nasrallah's murder. The bombing took place a day after Bibi had very publicly rejected the latest in a long line of half-assed, western-backed ceasefire proposals and only an hour after he berated the United Nations General Assembly on live television, calling the body a "swamp of antisemitic bile" for politely suggesting that maybe he should tone it down with all the genocide and then declaring a "seven-front war" that can only end in "total victory" over the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and of course Iran. Bibi then retired to a five-star hotel room and personally flipped the kill-switch on an entire neighborhood in Beirut.

But in all his brazen bravado, Netanyahu has actually exposed his cowardice and the delusional hubris which will inevitably damn his conspiracy to tame the Middle East with American ordinances to failure. While all the braindead talking heads in the English-speaking world ooh and awe over the Wagnerian theatrics of Israel's bombastic fireworks display, none of them really seem to grasp the big picture beneath the mushroom cloud.

Israel had to drop an American-made doomsday device the size of an elephant and reduce six apartment blocks to rubble just to kill one man. Had the IDF attempted to enter the suburban Hezbollah stronghold known as Haret Hreik on the ground they would still be attempting to bushwack their way to a retreat through a concrete jungle of hardened Shia guerrillas as we speak.

You see, dearest motherfuckers, Israel is terrified of Hezbollah, and they should be. They have never won a single ground campaign against the outfit even though they have consistently outgunned them, and the reason why should be painfully clear to any casual student of recent Middle Eastern history. To put it simply, Hezbollah is not Hamas. 

Hamas is a grubby, thuggish little Frankenstein that never would have even escaped the laboratory without Israel's support. Bibi and his bros in the Likud intelligentsia have openly bragged about this, their smug conspiracy to arm, fund, and support a two-bit Salafi charity affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood during the First Intifada in order to sabotage the Two-State Solution by confining the PLO's influence to the West Bank. It worked but it also led to October 7.

Hezbollah however is no Zionist Frankenstein monster. If anything, they are much more like an anti-colonialist Van Helsing, born in the fires of Israel's vampiric foreign policy and hardened by every new bomb they've thrown their way. Hezbollah was formed in 1985 by South Lebanese Shia clerics in order to fight off Israel's occupation of the region using the lessons of Iran's uniquely indigenous revolution as a blueprint. Hassan Nasrallah himself was only elected to lead the organization after its previous Secretary-General had been assassinated by Israel in 1992 and he would lead the organization from the ashes to fight Israel to a standstill during two separate military operations designed to eliminate them in 1993 and 1996.

Ultimately, it was Hezbollah, the scrappy Shia militia that should have died with its leader in 1992, that would finally rid Lebanon of its Zionist occupiers in 2000 before going on to become the world's most heavily armed non-state fighting force, with a paramilitary wing surpassing Lebanon's own army in strength. Hezbollah would best Israel once again in 2006 and then play a pivotal role in razing the Islamic State to the ground by building the Axis of Resistance with a legion of other Shiite militias formed in the craters of western munitions in places like Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

It was on those desert battlefields that the model for Bibi's seven-front strategy to Zionize the Middle East was born. America referred to it as 'Shock and Awe' but it really just amounts to a post-Cold War remake of Nazi Germany's Blitzkrieg in which overwhelming displays of industrial-grade terrorism are used to demoralize and paralyze an adversary. 

As we saw during both the Second World War and the War on Terrorism, this works like a charm at crushing states, but it also rapidly radicalizes civilian populations, creating a virulent breeding ground for partisan militias who end up overwhelming the victorious conquering armies and purging them violently from the host.

In the Middle East, a land totally alien to the Westphalian Nation State foisted upon its sands by generations of western colonialism, Shock and Awe resulted in the birth of a whole new generation of warfare, Fourth Generation Warfare, as it's been coined by paleoconservative cold warriors who became critics of empire during the neocon era. This theory essentially amounts to warfare's return to its decentralized tribal state in which the sainted nation state no longer commands a monopoly over the battlefield, but I personally think that it reaches much deeper than this.

Hezbollah didn't just replace the Lebanese Military in its region, it replaced the state itself with a successful network of welfare and infrastructure projects that have made that state virtually irrelevant and ingrained Hezbollah into the very fabric of South Lebanese society. Yemen's Houthi rebels and Iraq's Sadrists have similarly followed suit, and I believe that this is what Israel and its western sponsors are truly afraid of, a No-State Solution.

Israel only exists at the mercy of completely facetious borders that divide a Palestinian population that dwarfs their occupiers in size, four to one. If physical boundaries were abandoned entirely and Arabs returned to their previous state of stateless kinship societies, Israel would disintegrate, and the west would lose its imperial beachhead at the gates of the Eurasian Century.

This isn't just a theory either; it becomes a reality every time western forces attempt to confront the enemy on the ground in Lebanon. Within days of Israel's spectacular bombardment of Haret Hreik, its first ground operations in the region were met with the quick death of half a dozen commandos from Israel's supposedly elite Egoz Unit at the hands of Hezbollah militiamen literally fighting without a leader. The dead included the squad's decorated commander and was followed shortly by the destruction of three Israeli tanks in a separate ambush.

This is why cowards fight from the sky, raining down thousands of pounds of modern machinery upon civilian populations and starving children by manipulating globalist trade regulations. But as the Nazis learned the hard way at Stalingrad, modern technology alone cannot save an invader surrounded by a decentralized population. Hitler wasn't defeated by the United States or even the Soviet Union. He had his ass kicked by starving Jewish girls with bolt-action rifles built before he was born.

This same fate will fall upon Benjamin Netanyahu and his stormtroopers who seem to have learned nothing from the Holocaust other than how to exploit its memory in order to repeat its crimes. 

Had they paid better attention to the wisdom of their ancestors, they might know that Hell hath no fury like a stateless people scorned. But that's ok, I know a few fellow travelers in the local gentile community willing to remind them.

Peace, Love, and Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Blinded By the Light by Manfred Mann

* Golden Hair by Slowdive

* Kim's Watermelon Gun by Flaming Lips

* Frankenstein by New York Dolls

* Glory by the Airborne Toxic Event

* Divine Hammer by the Breeders

* Bright Lights by the Killers

* The House That Heaven Built by Japandroids

* Impressively Average by Brigitte Calls Me Baby

* Punching Bag by the Front Bottoms

Could Orange-Man-Stupid Be the Lesser Evil?

 I despised Donald Trump long before he became a lumpy soapbox for self-congratulating neoliberals to virtue signal on. In fact, I hated that miserable cunt back when he was still financing the campaigns of said self-congratulating neoliberals. 

Long before Donald Trump became billed as the perennial threat to liberal democracy, he was a race bating slumlord, gentrifying New York into a Disneyfied yuppie playground then parlaying the relationships he built with DNC swamp monsters at Jeffrey Eppstein's underage orgies into an even more lucrative career as a Chapter 11 flaunting corporate welfare queen, dismembering Atlantic City with eminent domain and grotesque casinos too big to fail. 

Far from being the antithesis of liberal democracy, this lecherous scum puddle packed into a suit is the byproduct of its pollution and I have a bit of a hard time listening to its scions bitching because he bit the hand that feeds. 

It's not that I don't recognize the threat that beast poses to anything remotely resembling individual liberty, it's just that I fail to see what makes his brand of blunt force fascism any more destructive than what his opponents wield behind a rainbow curtain. 

After all, last time I checked, Barack Obama deported more migrants, built more prisons, and shredded more pages of the Constitution than two Trumps sown together, and he did it all with a benevolent poker face that earned him a Nobel Peace Prize while he murdered brown babies with drone strikes in Pakistan. But, somehow, none of that was an existential threat to democracy.

That's because Democrats and neocons don't give a flying fuck about democracy. What they care about is empire or more specifically, dressing empire in the festive drag of democracy. And it is this carefully choreographed charade that Trump is a threat to because his pathological pomposity pushes him to lead this death star we call a republic like Caligula in bronzer. The only thing particularly exceptional about Trump's last four-year tirade in the White House was the messy ineptitude that defined it. This is the only reason why Washington insiders cringe at the possibility of a second term for Orange-Man-Stupid.

While the deep state uses its economic clout to quietly harass the European members of NATO into allowing tanks in the Louvre parking lot, Trump crashes into Brussels with his fly down and his filthy little hand out, barking "Where's the money, Frenchy!" 

While the deep state prefers to discreetly shuffle migrant children from one police state depot to another in the dead of night, Trump screams racist obscenities and turns Obama-built concentration camps into highly publicized human zoos. 

While the deep state uses the fine print on peace deals to carefully police the half-hearted nuclear ambitions of Israel's rivals, Trump unilaterally rips them up and offers up Jerusalem like a pudding while the rest of the neighborhood plots revenge.

This is the real reason why the Donald is so despised by his fellow swamp critters, he's a pathologically unhinged glutton who makes the most exceptional empire in the history of mankind look like a grubby crew cut from The Sopranos for wearing too many gold medallions over their blood-soaked tracksuits. This is also the reason why this Gambino clown show actually frightens me less than most of his rivals and I'm a goddamn genderqueer rape survivor living on the rural fringe of a fucking swing state. 

However, after four years of the Democratic Party's grand restoration of imperial order, I remain as endangered and marginalized as I did under Orange-Man-Stupid, and I'm supposed to vote for a tranny bashing cop like Kamala to save me from the knuckle-draggers at MAGA inc. Kiss my Queer ass.

And I know what you're going to say to scare the living vote out of me. "Project 2025 is coming! Project 2025 is coming!" Let me tell you something about Project 2025. The Big Bad Wolf in this admittedly nefarious plot by the Heritage Foundation to "institutionalize Trumpism" is Schedule F, an executive order that could hypothetically allow the president to fire as many as 50,000 members of the federal bureaucracy and replace them with Bible flinging zealots. But presidents already have the ability to make 4,000 political appointments and Donald Trump couldn't even do that in four years.

In fact, Orange-Man-Stupid couldn't seem to stop firing his own pea-brained flunkies for not licking his unwashed taint in the style he had become accustomed to. If this motherfucker ever actually got his shit together long enough to restaff the federal government, that racist colossus would become so clogged with pro-wrestlers and Proud Boys that it would cease to function, which means the FBI might miss its quota for framing Muslim kids online and demonizing sex workers as human traffickers. 

Oh, the humanity, someone please send me a savior! I'll vote for anything to save me from the threat of a government that hates me in chaos!

Of course, there are still plenty of good reasons to be terrified of Donald Trump. His plans to further militarize ICE and the Border Patrol to carry out the largest mass deportation since Josef Stalin is a massive injection of steroids to the police state's buttocks that could easily threaten all of us and God knows if Tom Cotton gets within arm's reach of the Button, we're all as good as vapor. 

However, in accordance with America's national sickness known as the lesser of two evils, Donald Trump, in all his grotesque glory, still looks like a lesser to me when compared to his prim and proper alternative. I made a similarly sacrilegious argument way back in 2016 when it was Donald V. Hillary with something that I like to call the Multiple Miggs Defense in reference to the horror classic, Silence of the Lambs. 

Upon her arrival to Dr. Frederick Chilton's insane asylum in Baltimore, Special Agent Clarice Starling found herself face to face with a bevy of monsters but two stood out from the rest. The first, Multiple Miggs, a semen flinging madman climbing the bars and belching crude expletives. The second, Hannibal Lecter, a neat, polite, and almost impossibly still gentleman with something terrifying sparkling just behind his glassy eyes.

If you were to ask Clarice upon her first encounter with these creatures, she would likely declare Hannibal to be the lesser evil, especially after he gently convinces Miggs to swallow his own tongue after becoming insulted by his lack of decorum towards their guest. But Clarice would be dead wrong. The question here isn't which candidate is less gross than the other, it's who you would rather have manning a fucking battleship, an unhinged rapist like Multiple Miggs or a formidable sociopath with elaborate elocution like Doctor Lecter. 

In 2012, Hillary felt like a clear stand-in for Lecter with her long record of manipulating rapacious imbeciles like her own husband into destabilizing the planet with massive war crimes. In 2024, Donald Trump is still very much Multiple Miggs, but Kamala Harris is much more like the snide and sinister Dr. Frederick Chilton, a vain and transparent civil servant with delusions of grandeur who has no lasting values and is completely unburdened by what has been.

Under these circumstances, who do you honestly think is more capable of navigating the Byzantinesque architecture of American power? Who do you think is more likely to allow themselves to be used as a glorified vessel by the fascist bureaucrats who actually know how to run this thing designed to compartmentalize a superstate built for genocide and slavery? 

I'm sorry, dearest motherfuckers, but everything that I have learned from Antonio Gramsci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Critical Race Theory tells me that Kamala is more dangerous to humanity than Trump.

I can just hear my progressive colleagues shouting from their peanut galleries with blood vessels bursting in their eyes, "She's mad! She's sick!" And I would readily concur with this conclusion if I actually bought into the Faustian cabaret that is the lesser of two evils. Only in a system this morally depraved would a semen slinging Nazi orangutan become a moral option for validation. 

Which is the other reason why I don't tremble in fear before the looming shadow of Orange-Man-Stupid. Because I tremble in fear before the looming shadow of the fraudulent democracy we are being compelled to protect from him.

Any system that could produce a creature as foul as Donald Trump and then allow just one lunatic the ability to abuse so many people for four years straight is not a democracy, and I refuse to vote for anyone who does not explicitly promise to dismantle such a machine.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon

* Up the Wolves by the Mountain Goats

* The Denial Twist by the White Stripes

* Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

* Mistress by Red House Painters

* Goodbye Horses by Lazarus Q

* I Wanna Be Your Dog by the Stooges

* Drain You by Nirvana

* Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Marilyn Manson

* Excitable Boy by Warren Zevon

Blowback Comes to Mar-a-Lago

 Once upon a time there was this place called Afghanistan, a mysterious, mountainous and magical land of endless poppy fields and warlords with beards thick enough to stop bullets. A place where white men feared to tread, and empires went to die. 

In fact, no white man would likely have ever even heard of this hole in the Hindu Kush if it wasn't for the fact that every pale faced vainglorious crusader going back to Alexander the Great had chosen these valleys to fall on their swords, making it the perfect setting for a fantastic geostrategic conspiracy. And so, it was here in the year of our lord nineteen-hundred-and-seventy-eight that one empire conspired to bleed another one dry by turning this mystical graveyard into one great big trap.

It was the heat of the Cold War and America was still licking its wounds after a humiliating defeat at the hands of a bunch of starving rice farmers in the jungles of Vietnam. Washington needed a win, so then-President Jimmy Carter and his Machiavellian National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brezenski, cooked up a plot too despicable to fail. Why not, they queried mischievously, give their rivals in the Soviet Union their own Vietnam? 

A tumultuous series of events had recently put a left-wing government in charge of Afghanistan, a nation nestled right in the crook of the Soviet Union's contentious Central Asian borderlands. This new secular government's reforms were actually quite popular in the cities but had stirred up conflict in the rural countryside where tribal warlords were not fond of handing over their opium plantations and women to a pack of European educated atheists. 

So, Jimmy used this opportunity to arm these fundamentalist gangsters to the teeth with a little help from Pakistan's American-trained intelligence outfit, the ISI, while also securing them a steady flow of Salafi psychopath recruits from our friends in Saudi Arabia.

The idea, which both Jimmy and Zbigniew have shamelessly admitted to over the years, was to create a bubbling cauldron of Islamic extremism right next door to the Soviet Union's disgruntled Muslim republics, believing that the Kremlin's quite legitimate fear of the tumult spreading would lure them into a bloody and unwinnable quagmire. It worked. 

Within six months of the CIA launching this conspiracy, which would come to be known as Operation Cyclone, the Russians invaded Afghanistan and the US spent the eighties dispensing some $3 billion dollars of military aid to the warlords who killed them, a ragtag coalition of fearsome zealots who would become renowned internationally as the Mujahideen. 

After a decade of bleeding like stuffed pigs in those mountains, the Soviets finally fucked off in 1989 and that left-wing government in Kabul collapsed three years later shortly after their Kremlin sponsors imploded.

Empowered by their victory over the infidels in Moscow, the now hardened warriors of the Mujahideen quickly turned on their former sponsors in Washington for their own crimes in the region. Former "freedom fighters" like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar formed new organizations from the ashes of Operation Cyclone like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban and within a year of America's Afghan trap snapping shut, its much-vaunted alumni began launching attacks on our shores. 

In 1993 alone, Mir Aimal Kansi assassinated two CIA agents in Langley and Ramzi Yousef bombed the World Trade Center. Both of these gentlemen were veterans of the Mujahideen, and they weren't the last to haunt their former sponsors. By September 11th these motherfuckers were hijacking commercial airliners and ramming them into skyscrapers.

This disturbing phenomenon: when sponsoring, arming, and training dangerous people attracts them directly to your doorstep, is known as blowback. Any sensible human being would take this bitter medicine and learn a hard lesson about the dangers of starting fires in other people's neighborhoods. 

But neither Washington nor Moscow is run by sensible human beings, so no one learned a goddamn thing from Jimmy Carter's catastrophic Afghan trap and in 2014, we started the same fucking process all over again in Ukraine with results that only seem to shock the people intimately involved with both episodes.

When a democratically elected thug in Kiev named Viktor Yanukovych chose a Russian economic package over one presented to him by America's flunkies in the European Union, the US used open neo-fascist hooligans in organizations like Right Sector to hijack a protest movement and use it to overthrow the Ukrainian government. The puppets we put in power then wasted little time antagonizing their neighbors to the east by terrorizing Ukraine's ethnic Russian population in the Donbas region.

America further baited this trap by sending literal shiploads of weaponry to neo-Nazi mujahideen like the Azov Battalion while dangling NATO membership over Kiev like a matador with a red flag. After eight years of this game, Putin fell for it and launched a full-scale invasion into another neighboring nation that America had rigged up like the cottage in Straw Dogs. 

The results were heinous and still ongoing. Gruesome war crimes have been committed by both sides and both Russia and the United States have armed and trained foreign extremists to commit the worst of these acts. This time however the target demographic is something far closer to home; pissed-off, jobless, white bros who were promised the world from their nation's respective elites and chose to take white supremacy into their own hands when their masters failed to follow through.

And it is precisely because of this proxy intimacy that the blowback has come to both sides before the war has even ended, with the fascists in the Wagner Group launching a short-lived but humiliating putsch against their sponsors in Moscow and one career loser with connections to the Azov Battalion attempting to take potshots at former President Donald J. Trump at one of his ritzy golf courses in West Palm Beach.

Ryan Wesley Routh is no fascist. He's a 58-year-old petty criminal whose political compass seems to shift with the dial of the clock. But Routh is a veteran of America's fascist proxy war in Ukraine, spending time in Kiev attending neo-Nazi rallies in the name of humanitarian interventionism and trolling the dark web for recruits on behalf of Ukraine's International Legion. 

After being rejected by the Legion himself do to his age in 2022, Routh started up an organization known as the International Volunteer Center which attempted and failed to gain Visas for lunatics from Iran to Pakistan. Routh also appeared in a propaganda film made by the aforementioned Azov Battalion, posing next to boot boys with Wolfsangel flags. 

While both Azov and the International Legion have worked hard to distance themselves from this globetrotting fabulist in the weeks following his aborted assassination attempt of a former American president, none other than Semafor cited Ukrainian intelligence sources in a 2023 article confirming begrudgingly that Routh was indeed authentically involved in their recruiting efforts. 

Naturally, MAGA types have gone berserk trying to paint Donald Trump as an innocent isolationist victimized for his mealy-mouthed criticism of the Ukrainian crusade but they're only half right at best. It does appear that, like many Democrats and neocons, Mr. Routh blames the former president for Volodymyr Zelensky's mounting failures on the battlefield, but Trump is about as innocent of Ukrainian skullduggery as most of his critics. Truth be told, Ryan Wesley Routh is essentially just another in a long line of disgruntled employees of the Donald.

After all, it was Trump who approved the first shipment of Javelin missiles to Ukraine in 2017. It was also Trump who sent the first American naval vessels to buzz the Russian coasts of the Black Sea through his Free Transfer Program. In fact, around $850 million dollars of US military aid made its way to Ukraine under Trump's watch and the only time he even attempted to interfere with it was to get dirt on Joe Biden and his crackhead son before the 2020 election. 

The only thing that Donald Trump is a victim of beyond his own pathological delusions of grandeur is the same kind of blowback that befalls all warmongers who outlive their usefulness to the extremists they arm, and he won't be the last. 

Neo-Nazis with connections to Azov have already been busted smuggling weapons from the Ukrainian battlefield into both France and Italy, and that same battalion has also hosted get-togethers with America's Atomwaffen Division, a White Power outfit recently caught plotting attacks on the power grid. And with every tirade that Donald Trump launches against pet-devouring Haitian migrants, he only hands another bucket of fuel to this fire.

You see dearest motherfuckers, America loves convoluted conspiracy theories, which I guess is the privilege of people throwing stones in iron domes, but we really don't need Manchurian candidates or inside jobs to explain why our elected psychopaths keep getting shot at. America is a nation that ships war to every corner of the globe and every once in a while, that war follows us home and cracks the shell of our iron domes. And someday, maybe someday soon, those domes are going to shatter just like they did in Moscow in 1992.

Wake up and smell the napalm people, it's coming back around again.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that influenced this post

* Baby Blue by Badfinger

* Provisional by Fugazi

* The Pretender by Foo Fighters

* White Minority by Black Flag

* Dirty Boots by Sonic Youth

* Sacrilege by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

* Back In the USSR by the Beatles

* Runner by Alex G

* Triptych by Samia

* All Tomorrow's Parties by the Velvet Underground

Only the Mullahs Can Save Us from Samson Now

 Israel is fucking crazy, and they have nukes. I honestly don't have a more tactful way to start this diatribe, I am legitimately terrified, and you should be too. While the world teeters perilously close to the brink of a Cuban Missile-style crisis in the haunted bloodlands of Ukraine, there is another geostrategic clusterfuck unfolding in the Holy Land that could just as easily go nuclear and the danger has very little to do with Iran. The danger is Israel, an increasingly unhinged rogue state with an illegal and unregulated nuclear stockpile who is at war with itself and losing badly.

Based on the towering body count alone, even a well-informed war nerd could be forgiven for believing that Israel's crusade against Hamas is a smashing success, but you would be sorely mistaken. Commander Yahya Sinwar, the big cheese in Gaza, isn't being glib or delusional when he brags about having Israel "right where we want them." Israel's war against the children of Gaza may be the most hideously successful holocaust since Hitler but the actual war against Hamas has been a disastrous failure and the people of Israel know it.

In a vile attempt to save his own ass from facing the divine retribution of his own people after failing to keep them safe on October 7, Benjamin Netanyahu has locked his nation into a totally unwinnable quagmire on its own soil. But this entire adventure actually began when Bibi basically handed a bunch of Zionist terrorists in the West Bank the keys to the IDF in exchange for them agreeing to keep him out of prison for a downright dizzying tower of corruption charges. 

While Israel's more than capable gestapo were busy stoking the Muslim world's rage by repeatedly raiding the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque, Hamas were busy plotting their revenge. They got more than they bargained for when their own raid turned into a tumultuous free-for-all at the poorly guarded border of a badly traumatized prison colony, but they didn't have to wait long for Bibi to bite off more than he could chew.

Though the civilian death toll in Gaza has been an unmitigated catastrophe with estimates placing the dead as high as over half a million, Netanyahu has achieved nothing but the ire of his own people for this holy war. Polls show that the only thing the Israeli people hate more than Hamas is Bibi, with many holding their fearless leader responsible for the disaster on October 7 while quickly losing patience with the war being waged in its name. 

Sickeningly, 56% of Israeli's still support this slaughter, but only 15% believe that Bibi should remain in power once it's over, giving that sociopathic gangster all the incentive he needs to make sure that the slaughter never ends. This is why Netanyahu is opening a second front in the West Bank and this is why he's launching increasingly provocative terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. I shouldn't have to tell anyone with an IQ over 20 that this is a heinously dangerous game he's playing and not just because it has dragged Israel's western sponsors to the brink of World War 3.

Israel has a massive and well-armed fighting force, but the IDF is also a mobilization army, meaning that keeping a large number of men and women in uniform indefinitely also means keeping a large percentage of the nation's entire workforce in uniform indefinitely. This has already inflicted severe economic devastation on the Israeli economy with some estimates putting the cost as high as 30% of the nation's GDP. 

This is part of the reason why Israel's largest labor union, the Histadrut, has threatened Bibi with what could easily be crippling general strikes if he doesn't stop sabotaging the hostage deals that should have ended this thing month ago. This is also why the Israeli Supreme Court has taken the unprecedented measure of ordering the drafting of men from their nation's quietist Ultra-Orthodox community. A move that Bibi's own government lawyers argued against, predicting it could literally tear Israeli society apart at the seams.

What all this adds up to is a nation on the brink of implosion. The growing protests calling bullshit on Bibi's endless stalling of another ceasefire have erupted into massive street battles with the nation's police state. Meanwhile, Hamas remains the only viable source of leadership for a Palestinian population too massive to erase completely without incurring the wrath of the various militias of the Middle East, militias that have already successfully locked down the Suez Canal and large swaths of the western economy along with it. 

On top of all this, while the US and its Atlantic flunkies continue to ship Israel the hardware they require to keep the region burning, popular opinion among the western citizenry of Babylon regarding America's 51st state has never been lower. Long story short, after 80 years of raping and pillaging the Levant, Israel's military elites have been painted into a corner by a single crook. What's even worse is that these goons have a long-established plan B for just such a scenario and it's one that could easily fuck us all straight to hell.

Over the last half century, Israel has established a massive stockpile of hundreds of nuclear weapons complete with their own reactor in the Negev Desert and missile sites in Galilee and on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy both made attempts to convince Israel to disarm but for the most part America's power elite have decided to look the other way on this illegal stockpile with a policy of "nuclear ambiguity" which essentially amounts to an absurd game of don't-ask-don't-tell. 

If Israel agrees not to openly tell the world that they are armed to the fucking teeth with doomsday devices, America won't tell them to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty like they do every other nation with a stockpile. But Israel hasn't exactly been shy about using this stockpile to coerce their sugar daddies back in Washington into giving up the candy. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War they even blackmailed Nixon into airlifting them military supplies by threatening to nuke their Arab neighbors on day three of the battle.

It's this kind of kamikaze brinksmanship that has allowed Israel to occasionally call the shots on the foreign policy of the empire they are largely dependent on even when these shots have blown off Uncle Sam's toes and it's this kind of reckless all-or-nothing philosophy that informs what is known as the Samson Option, an Israeli nuclear strategy which essentially amounts to atomic mass suicide.

In reference to the biblical figure of Samson who would rather push down the pillars of his own temple than be humiliated by Philistines, it is a part of Israeli military policy that if the Zionist State finds itself overrun, it will launch a massive retaliatory strike to take us all down with them Skynet style, or as then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon once so eloquently put it, "We can take the Middle East with us whenever we go." 

So, are you scared yet? I am and that's why I'm about to suggest something likely to get my Queer ass drummed out of the antiwar movement for good this time. Iran should have nukes. Just hear me out! 

America is never going to reign these lunatics in even if we could find someone in the Pentagon with the ovaries to fucking try. Quite frankly, most of our military brass are at least as crazy as Israel's Old Testament Zionist lunatics which is probably why they've never really made much of an effort to stop them. This leaves the fate of humanity in the unsavory hands of rival rogue states and the only one left with any nuclear capabilities who isn't already in bed with Israel or the United States is Iran. 

This isn't to say that Iran is a nuclear power. Not even close. America's own intelligence puts the Mullah's enrichment capabilities at just over 60% on a good day, far below the 90% needed for weapons grade uranium, and even if Iran managed this feat they would still need to produce, test, and miniaturize a deliverable nuclear warhead which, once again, all available American intelligence suggests they haven't even attempted to do in decades. 

As if their own illegal stockpile weren't infuriating enough, Israel has a long and storied history of crying nuke to give their western sponsors the propaganda they need to obliterate their rivals. It worked with Iraq, and they would very much like it to work with Iran too. But America wasn't engaged in a nuclear Mexican stand-off with the Kremlin in 2003...

If Vladimir Putin really wants to put his rival war mongers' balls in a vice, he should consider handing over some of his Cold War army surplus to the Mullahs. Or maybe the Mullahs should just make that the price of the next shipment of drones that Russia needs to take back Kursk.

Don't get me wrong, in a perfect world we would have no nukes and all of those motherfuckers above from the Mullahs to the Mossad would be locked in the same bunker somewhere in the desert with two chains and one rusty saw. But we don't live in a perfect world. We live in some place just north of hell where a bunch of macho imbeciles with small dicks and even smaller brains have us all held hostage by their states and the stockpiles they've compiled to keep them relevant.

The best I can hope for under these circumstances is a stalemate that can even the playing field for just long enough before the clock runs out and this sick civilization collapses beneath the weight of the egos that run it like a satanic carnival ride. Call me a dreamer, but I still believe in weird miracles and that may be what it takes for a few bold Mullahs to save us Philistines from the wrath of Samson.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Song that influenced this post

* War Pigs by Black Sabbath

* Shine On Sweet Jesus by Flamming Lips

* My War by Black Flag

* Pepper by Butthole Surfers

* Run for the Hills by Iron Maiden

* Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden

* Ever by Flipper

* Disarm by Smashing Pumpkins

* Raining Blood by Slayer

* Pilot Can at the Queer God by Flaming Lips

Why I Refuse to Vote Anymore

 America is an imperial slaughterhouse and every four years that bloody kill room floor hosts a jingle-brained three-ring-circus that the men with hammers call a presidential election season. A ghastly, multibillion dollar display of buggery, cuckery, pomp and circumstance in which spineless sociopaths without a gag reflex are pitted against each other in a shit eating contest while we the people are all shamed into picking sides by pitiless wonks who won't stop shouting that this glorified reality television abortion is the most important democratic happening in recorded history and that we won't have the right to complain about getting raped for the next four years unless we choose our rapist.

Fuck you, I ain't voting. After Satan knows how many cycles of this shit, I'm through. I won't do it anymore and you can all go ahead and burn me at the stake so long as you use ballot boxes for kindling and put the latest debate on mute while my eyeballs melt. Anything is better than spending ten months straight pretending that choosing my least least-favorite millionaire to be the Pentagon's mouthpiece for the next four years is a fucking democracy because it's not. 

This doesn't fucking matter, and we all know it. Even if a few good radicals managed to find a way to shut down the corporate tractor beam of the two-party system long enough to get a half-decent son of a bitch into the White House he would still just be little more than the nicest guy at the concentration camp. America is a plutocratic dictatorship, and these elections are little more than pet fashion shows for their poodles.

I used to vote. I used to be pretty goddamn passionate about it too and not because I bought into that holier-than-thou lesser-of-two-evils bullshit either. I was a diehard protest voter who realized that this thing was a show but tried to hijack it anyway in hopes of using the platform it provided to further a populist movement against empire. 

My strategy was pretty simple, I would pick whichever candidate was the most aggressively antiwar and do everything I could to keep the censors from yanking them off the stage for as long as humanly possible in the hopes of waking just a few zombies from their military-industrial slumber. During my first election I campaigned like a motherfucker on fire for Dennis Kucinich and then voted for Ralph Nader when they tried to package a sweet-talking bologna salesman named Barack Obama as a pacifist based largely on the color of his skin. 

In 2012, I put my proletarian pride aside to support Ron Paul when I was still a Guevara-quoting communist because I saw the way that this plainspoken free-market peacenik galvanized an antiwar movement in freefall after the Bush Junta finally fucked off. I voted for Jill Stein twice before supporting Jo Jorgensen in 2020. I switched parties from Green to Independent to Libertarian as I abandoned Marxism for a more free-market oriented hybrid of post-left anarchism and Queer libertine socialism, all while maintaining the same goal of smashing the war machine by any means necessary and those means included manipulating the empire's own circus as a zoonotic tool for agitprop. 

So, what happened? 2020 happened and then a savage midterm followed like Rosemary's afterbirth. In an age of Trump and anti-Trump hysteria, the election cycle itself became an increasingly violent tool for division and its effects on the people around me became increasingly horrifying. As a muckraking anarcho-populist, bottom unity is my bread and butter, the basic notion that left and right and conservative and liberal are totally irrelevant labels in the face of the fact that everyone outside of the country club is getting fucked by the same greedy elites in both major parties. 

I had worked my ass off for years reaching out to antiwar conservatives and convincing them that Queer people like me were not the enemy and in a single election season I saw all of this hard work washed away when the Christian Right turned my gender identity into their latest electoral boogeyman and other trans people responded by seeking shelter behind the strong arms of progressive warmongers while MAGA "isolationists" decided to put America first by going after our kids.

It got worse. It spread. People stopped having positions anymore, they just had enemies. Even sensible radicals like Noam Chomsky had to vote for a white power warmonger like Joe Biden in order to stop a white power warmonger like Donald Trump from doing all the horrible shit that Joe had already spent the eighties and nineties doing. The MeToo Movement devoured itself when they refused to stand with one of that jackal's victims and Black Lives Matter followed suit. Then January 6 came, and pissed-off people finally rose up in anger against power, but only in defense of more power, wasting legitimate revolutionary momentum on throwing a hissy fit for the other rapist on the ticket.

The elections themselves have become a device for lower class division in ways never seen before. This is no longer simply a tool to distract a nation from the monster behind the curtain. As the American Empire begins to collapse beneath the rust of its sins and rapidly disintegrates into just another failed state it is turning the two-party system into camps of rival apocalyptic suicide cults who have been convinced that the fate of humanity rests on the whims of a single reality television rodeo clown named Donald J. Trump. 

If he gets elected democracy is over or if he doesn't get elected democracy is over. And even third parties have been infected by this partisan contagion, with my own adopted Libertarian Party collapsing into a petty bitch fight between antiwar voters who hate Trump and antiwar voters who hate trans kids enough to let him speak at our convention. 

You stupid motherfuckers don't seem to realize that democracy is already over in this country and Donald Trump is nothing but a symptom of the final stages of this electoral cancer. When Donald Trump was president, the same bullshit wars rolled on towards oblivion. All of his Putin ass kissing didn't stop him from eviscerating nearly every Cold War treaty we had left with the Kremlin. And since Trump has been chucked from the White House, the same bubbling cauldron of chaos continues to permeate throughout Babylon while the same concentration camps remain packed to the gills on our prolapsed border. 

The system has already collapsed. Only the illusions remain but the illusions have become existential, something falsely tribal for people to cling to for warmth while the mandarins prepare for a final kamikaze assault on the inevitable Eurasian Century in Ukraine and Taiwan.

Well, I'll say it again, just one more time, I'm done. American "democracy" has somehow become even worse than an illusion. It has become a full-blown mental illness, and I have enough of those already. There is nothing remotely revolutionary to be done with this circus ride anymore if there ever was to begin with. I will no longer validate a flunked empire with my vote. 

But that doesn't mean that I'm finished waging war against war. I have simply altered my tactics to something more realistic than hijacking the Hindenburg and I seriously suggest that anyone serious about opposing empire do the same. We must do the polar opposite of engaging this systemic sickness. We must actively disengage. We must drop out.

With the empire twisting and flailing in the wind like a scarecrow, now is the time to build something new to survive the collapse of the old. We can do this by using the new tools of distraction like social media to create a thriving counter-economy in which all goods and services can be exchanged free from taxation or corporate interference on the dark web, or you can kick it old school and just start a farm. Either way, the idea of this tactic, known in left libertarian circles as agorism, is to starve the powerful of the resources of our labor while fostering self-sufficient voluntary societies that don't require a managerial class to function.

From there we secede from the state and create a vast panarchy of many stateless societies. Every self-sufficient voluntary community divorces itself from an increasingly illegitimate union and declares themselves to be a sovereign nation existing totally free from borders wherever its citizen's roam. Each of these polities would come with its own government, its own schools, its own militias, its own medical services, but all of which would be completely voluntary and completely un-dependent on physical territory. 

My Queer Hillbilly Autonomous Zone could exist in the same goddamn apartment complex as the Rastafarian Republic and the Mormon Fundamentalist Dutchie of Deseret. We could borrow sugar and make peace deals over Friday night poker. America could become a bit more like it was before the white man and his electoral circus fucked it up, a disorganized tribal hodgepodge of competing governments without a monopoly on the use of force. It wasn't perfect but nobody got nuked because there was nothing big enough to be worth destroying the world to evaporate.

Maybe it'll fail. Maybe humans really are fucked. But if that's the case, I would much rather go down building something than standing in line to vote for some asshole who represents a system defined by tearing people down. You can do whatever the fuck you want this November. I'm through telling other people how to live. Just don't expect me to feel guilty for not indulging your electoral fetish because I've got better shit to do with my time.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs influenced by this post

* Behind the Wheel by Depeche Mode

* Driver by Soccer Mommy

* Shine On Sweet Jesus by the Flaming Lips

* Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots

* The Concept by Teenage Fanclub

* Quarry by Wednesday

* Buildings by Regina Spektor

* Lessons Learned by Matt & Kim

* Some Candy Talking by the Jesus & Mary Chain

* Seattle by Public Image Ltd.