Eleven People Who Didn't Suck In 2021

 Let's face it, dearest motherfuckers, this year sucked. From start to finish, 2021 was a hard year for hope. The Pandemic that never ends never ended. To the surprise of only the gullible, Joe Biden turned out to be every bit as violently corrupt and tragically inept as the orange circus clown he was foolishly voted in to replace. And Appalachia got December tornadoes this year instead of a white Christmas. Santa can take this year of coal and shove it up his fat white ass. At least 2020 had the riots to keep us warm. Pretty much the only thing even mildly cathartic to come out of this year was Biden's fumbled retreat from the imperial graveyard of Afghanistan and even that came with a war crime that no one paid a dime for.

It was a harsh year personally for your humble genderfuck muckraker as well. Like many pathologically uncooperative Americans, my mental health just wasn't built to withstand another year of plague and pestilence. I spent so much time and energy just trying to keep my head above the waves that I barely had anything left to write with. When I wasn't choking down Elvis-loads of mind-bending mood stabilizers, I was fighting off the writer's block they all too often caused while struggling to please the increasingly delicate sensibilities of my left-wing audience. Truth be told, I spent more time than I'm comfortable admitting just trying to come up with reasons not to hurt myself and all too often came up short. But even in the pits of existential despair, there exists hope, and even in a year as all fired wretched as 2021, there were at least a few people who inspired me to drop the razor blade. A dozen people who miraculously didn't suck. About eleven to be exact, and this is the time of year to celebrate them, just before we put a .22 to 2021's head and put it out of our misery once and for all.

Jo Firestone- A few years ago, Joe Pera Talks with You came out of the woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and somehow miraculously became one the best shows on television over the course of three seasons on Adult Swim with nothing but the pure weapons-grade, unironic sincerity of a dovish choir teacher embracing the simple magic of small-town life in tumultuous times. But in its third season it was Joe's pint-sized survivalist girlfriend, the appropriately named Sarah Conner, played by co-writer and executive producer Jo Firestone, who really got to me. As the world in 2021 continued to spin out of control, Sarah's survivalism slowly began to melt into the realm of mental illness, as she struggled to cope with a society determined to return to normal in deeply abnormal times. Jo, who's own stand-up work is notorious for its raw vulnerability, does a brilliant job of capturing just how lonely it can be to be a woman on the political fringe and just how heroic the unironically sincere normies in our lives can be just by sticking around. Someday, I know I'll find a soft-spoken lesbian to build me a cabin in the woods.

Scott Horton- Scott Horton hates me. He made that pretty painfully clear when he refused to publish my unconventional gonzo prose on his brilliant site, antiwar.com, for being "bad journalism." Needless to say, the barrage of F-bombs in my response to this slur probably didn't exactly endear me to the man either. But in 2021 it's never been clearer that that son of a bitch is one of the good guys. After Afghanistan ended precisely the way he predicted it would twenty years ago, before it even began, Scott wasn't stingy about handing out the proverbial crow to all the mainstream fuck-wads who labeled him a whack-job for warning them, whether it was on his podcast, The Scott Horton Show, or his refreshingly post-partisan End the Damn Wars Movement. But the finest moment of Scott's bittersweet victory lap was undeniably the now infamous debate he held with the neocon architect of forever war, Bill Kristol, on Reason TV, which will go down in history as the most delightfully savage beatdown a pacifist has ever given a warmonger. Thank you for that moment of pure sadistic joy, you peacemongering savage. Now get a grip and publish my shit, goddamn you.

Andrew Coffee IV- Back in 2017, the sheriff's department of Indian County, Florida, launched a disastrous no-knock raid on the residence of one Black ex-con named Andrew Coffee IV, looking for his father on drug charges. After coming in blasting without so much as identifying themselves, Andrew did what any sane American would under these circumstances and shot the motherfuckers. Tragically, upon injuring one of the swine, the pigs fired back, murdering Andrew's girlfriend, Alteria Woods, in the process and then charged Andrew not just with three counts of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, but with the second-degree murder of the girlfriend they killed when he attempted to defend her. Usually, in this racist police state we call America, this is where the story ends. 

But by some kind of early Christmas miracle in 2021 a Jury sided with common sense to find Andrew Coffee IV not guilty by reason of self-defense. But this is far bigger than one Black life mattering for a change. If a Black man in a redneck county can legally stand his ground against a police death squad, any of us can, meaning the pigs now have a 9mm reason to think twice before they play cowboy on someone else's private property. Sadly, for Andrew and America for that matter, he was still found guilty of being a felon practicing his Second Amendment rights and is now looking down the barrel of a thirty-year sentence from a vengeful court system. One step forward, thirty steps back.

Stella Morris- Few people suffered more this year than Julian Assange. Facing life in supermax hell after 11 brutal years of captivity for the high crime of being a goddamn journalist would give even a supine soul like Joe Pera a stroke. If it isn't agonizingly clear by now that the United States is using the corrupt international legal system to slowly murder Assange the way they did Milosevic, then you might be legally blind. The once resilient rebel with a cause has been reduced to a crumbling shell of his former glory, but his fiancé and the mother of his two young sons, Stella Morris, bravely keeps the fire alive and faces down the hoard of sycophantic tabloid scum who dare to call themselves journalists with the steely resolve of a provoked lioness. Her fight isn't just a fight for justice, it's a fight for love, and goddammit do we need that this year. Let's fight with her. We can't afford to let these fuckers win.

Magnus Panvidya- My friend Magnus shocked the self-righteous left to its very core this year when the unapologetic Boogaloo Boi came on Jimmy Dore's podcast and revealed that his supposedly right-wing extremist movement is actually an armed anti-racist militia reborn on the streets in the wake of the police lynching of George Floyd from the embryo of a tongue in cheek meme about a second American Revolution. Magnus has gone all in on bottom unity, starting the revolutionary Unity Coalition to bring together groups of rabble rousers as seemingly far-flung as Libertarians and Antifa, and providing a much-needed armed contingent to Scott Horton's End the Damn Wars rally. You will still find left-wing imbeciles willing to slur social justice militiamen like Magnus as white supremacists, but in 2021 I've never met a white hetero cis male more committed to stomping out the flames of institutional white supremacy than Magnus Panvidya and I'll gladly die on that hill any day of the goddamn week. Bottom unity or death.

Abby Martin- During a Q & A at the COP26 gala in Glasgow (You know, one of those globalist get togethers where the 1% of big government and big business gather to be photographed caring a lot about the environment they casually ravage) Democratic Speaker for life Nancy Pelosi was looking to virtue signal with another softball question from her adoring press, so she announced, "I need a woman" and goddammit if they didn't find her one. Abby Martin, the renegade journalist behind The Empire Files, lit Nancy up like a Christmas tree with the motherfucker of all gotcha journalism sucker punches. In so many words, she demanded to know where the hell the millionaire congresswoman got off pretending to give a shit about the environment when she approved a deficit quadrupling budget for planet earth's greatest polluters in the Pentagon. Nancy and company stammered a bit as they shit themselves on live television before Pelosi came up with the most ludicrous excuse to duck further inquiry since the-dog-at-my-homework by announcing that they couldn't take any more questions because, "They need to clean the room. I didn't even know they did that..." Sometimes it's the little moments of humiliation that make life worth clinging to. Thank you, Abby.

Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker & Lucy Dacus- This year, the soundtrack to my life in doom times comprised largely of three brilliant albums from the three brilliant members of the short lived but legendary indie rock band boygenius who also happen to be three best friends and three women who refuse to compete for the fickle attention of the chauvinistic record industry. The first, Phoebe Bridger's lush and sarcastic apocalyptic serenade, Punisher, actually came out at the tail end of 2020 but made waves big enough in 2021 for those twits at the Grammy's to give her a few nominations to save their non-existent street cred. Then came Julien Baker, my personal favorite of the three, who updated her naked sober Christian folk rock with the reverb drenched agnostic gospel of Little Oblivions in which she bravely mined her own relapse for a heartbreaking tale of redemption for a whole country in recovery. But it was Lucy Dacus who really stole the show with Home Video, a slide show time capsule of 11 stories about all the awful people who made her young life worth remembering.

In a year dangerously low on hope for heartbroken Queer women like myself, it was three breaths of fresh air in the mineshaft of 2021 to hear three brilliant heartbroken Queer women like Phoebe, Julien and Lucy humbly and eloquently admit that they're fucked up too and maybe that's OK. To quote Lucy's "Please Stay", a song that may have literally saved my life this year, "begin, be done, break a vow, make a new one, call me if you need a friend, or never speak to me again, but please stay." 

Erick & Jade Jordan- When I said that 2021 was a hard year for hope, I meant that 2021 was a hard year for bottom unity. I have devoted my short career as a muckraking armchair revolutionary fighting to bring the fringes of this country together to rip out the dark heart at the center of its evil empire. Whether you're Queer or straight, Black or white, left or right, it is the people on top that enslave us all and only a united front of the freaks on the bottom can overthrow them. This romantic notion of stateless post-partisan solidarity really took a beating this year and nothing beat it worse than Kyle Rittenhouse: a bougie, wannabe cop, militia imposter, who came to Kenosha looking for action and ended up blowing holes in more than just people. That case tore everything I spent years slaving over to shreds, pitting allies against each other in what the media turned into a senseless culture war courtroom drama that made my brain want to vomit.

But it was in the wake of that sensationalized circus that I found a shard of hope in Erick and Jade Jordan, a Black father-daughter team armed with AR-15's who were invited to protect the protests following Rittenhouse's acquittal from police state reprisals. Erick, 50, and Jade, only 16, were in Kenosha themselves the night of the bloodbath, defending a local restaurant, and like every other armed person there that night but Kyle, they managed not to shoot anybody by standing their ground at their posts and leaving the protesters be. They brought that same level-headed sincerity to defending many of those same protesters after the trial, showing a world gone mad with division what real solidarity looks like. There are quite simply too many rich gangsters out there killing poor people. We can't afford to be killing each other too. If we're ever going to survive another year of this imperial collapse, we're going to need to stick together to keep warm.

Increase the peace, dearest motherfuckers. But keep swinging until we bring this motherfucker down. Together. Together. Together.

Peace, Love & Solidarity- Nicky/CH

A Queer Anarcho-Christmas Carol

 The following is the Gospel according to Nicky Reid, a ranting, genderfuck, lesbian, Christopagan anarchist from the 21st Century. Like all religious propaganda, it is loosely based on a hot mess of new age folklore, revisionist history, pharmacological hallucinations and psychotic episodes. Take it with a grain of any spice you like, but please remember that it is no less fantastic or plausible than your own preferred Christmas fairytales. Let's face it, we're all swinging in the dark here folks....

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there lived a teenage hermaphrodite by the name of Mary whom God chose to be the virgin mother of the greatest revolutionary who would ever live due to the beauty of her unique chromosomal make-up. Upon making herself pregnant to save mankind from its own bullshit, Mary and her husband, a super chill carpenter with rumored connections to old money named Joseph, left their hick town of Nazareth and traveled to Joseph's familial home of Bethlehem in the suburbs of Jerusalem for tax dodge reasons. Unable to snag a cheap motel room, the two ended up giving birth to Jesus Christ, king of Queers, in a barn surrounded by animals and migrant farmworkers. King Herod, the local Roman puppet caudillo, caught wind from a few travelling groupies of the birth of a child who would one day threaten his fragile grip on power and did what petty tyrants do best, he flipped the fuck out and started killing babies. After being tipped off about Herod's homicidal hissy fit, Mary, Joseph and the wee baby Jesus chose to go underground in Egypt.

A few decades later, Jesus Christ reemerged on the spiritual scene in ancient Palestine and immediately started shaking shit up. He travelled from town to town, skipping the local temples and country clubs in favor of the seediest dives he could find where he hung down with the freaks and ghouls, your prostitutes, your lepers, your hustlers, your Queers and your eunuchs, not so he could speak down to them and tell them to change their wicked ways, but to embrace them with open arms and inform them that they were the true chosen people of God. Society had fucked up and these outlaws weren't a part of it. Jesus railed against the beautiful people, condemning the colonialist Roman Empire and the temples that did it's bidding and preached that man required no church or state to be in harmony with God.

Unlike most rabbis of his era, Jesus rejected traditional marriage and chose instead to embrace a polyamorous relationship with a dozen or so of his closest followers who he called Disciples, mostly hunky dudes who he picked up at the docks, but also an ex-hooker and noted foot fetishist named Mary Magdelene who would become his most devoted confidante. When they weren't raising hell in the local villages and vandalizing the temples, Jesus' crew would hang out in the surrounding deserts where they would trip on shrooms and watch their messiah perform crazy magic tricks. Naturally, as Jesus built up a devoted cult following, the temples and imperial Roman overlords whom he condemned for being the fraudulent tyrants they were, caught wind of the freaky young renegade and conspired with one of his disgruntled groupies to have him killed. After a brief show trial, Jesus was given the death penalty for being a dangerous heretic and crucified on the cross.

That should have been the end of it, but a diehard crew of Jesus' closest followers kept his message alive in stateless underground communes where everything was shared and nudism, psychedelic rituals and free love was practiced openly. Slowly their numbers grew. At first, the Romans persecuted these spiritual outlaws violently, having them stoned to death and fed to the lions. But as the Roman Empire's own imperial cult began to lose popularity with their jaded citizenry and Gnostic mystery religions from the Orient became all the rage, Emperor Constantine committed the worst atrocity the world would ever know and hijacked Christianity's cult of peace, love and understanding and perverted it to save the very empire that murdered its founder and namesake.

With help from the self-proclaimed Church Fathers, the Roman Empire buried Jesus' revolutionary gospels in a leather-bound hunk of violent, bigoted bullshit called the Bible and the good name of Christ was used in vain to promote everything he despised. First it was used to slaughter Europe's rural heathens who were guilty of the same crimes as Christ, practicing a communal lifestyle that didn't rely on the state for its relationship with a higher power. Eventually Christianity became a tool for international imperialism used to justify everything from the Crusades to the Inquisition to the genocidal colonization of Africa and the New World. Even after Rome fell, this mutated creed was passed on from one brutal empire to the next until it finally reached the empire that would span the entirety of the globe and become the Antichrist known as America.

But the Queer word of Christ did not die with the birth of the Church. True Christian outlaws fought on valiantly throughout the ages. Righteous temple shaking motherfuckers like Francis of Assisi, the genderqueer Joan of Arc, Oscar Wilde, William Blake, Leo Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, Jacques Ellul, Ammon Hennacy, Ivan Illich and the Berrigan Brothers. They would lead peasant revolts, expose the thieves who run the Church and sabotage the empire's wars. A pair of revolutionary theologians, in the 16th and 17th Century respectively, named Thomas Muntzer and Gerrard Winstanely of the Diggers would give birth to what Pierre-Joseph Proudhon would later call anarchism, a rejection of all earthly hierarchy as blasphemy against mankind and a call to live as Christ did, in Queer harmony with the universe sometimes referred to as God.

We here Christians living in the belly of the Antichrist in America, find ourselves this Christmas in the year of our lord Twenty-Twenty-One at a great crossroads. We live in the Ebenezer Scrooge era of the American Empire, confronted by three ghosts. The Ghost of Christmas Past, which confronts us with the heinous deeds that our empire has done in the name of Christ, from Manifest Destiny to the War on Terror. The Ghost of Christmas Present, which confronts us with a great fearsome mirror showing us the reflection of a greedy, fallen people, praying to false idols in stadium churches and voting booths, and ethnically cleansing Christ's ancestral home of Palestine on the orders of Evangelical Zionists. And finally, the Ghost of Christmas Future, which confronts us with the inevitable results of our imperial deviation from Christ's true path; climate change, famine, nuclear holocaust, the annihilation of all that God has bestowed upon us to cherish and keep holy.

But it's not too late, dearest motherfuckers. These visions are but the shadows of things that may be, not the shadows of things that will be. It is Christmas morn and that means that it's not too late. There is still time. If America truly is a Christian nation, then America truly is a Queer anarchist nation and where better to begin a revolution to take back our spiritual destiny and crush the Evil Empire which murdered the wild faggot who set us free from our own bullshit, not with guns and bombs and violence, well, maybe a little bit of that, but mostly with peace and love and secession and agorism. We, the freaks and ghouls, the chosen people, can defeat the Antichrist by doing little more than rejecting his poison fruit of statism and growing a new stateless kingdom of God in the shell of the old. 

Be merry, Queer Christian soldiers, for it is Christmas and we have a whole world to win!

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Carols that influence this post

*  Happy Xmas (War Is Over) by The Plastic Ono Band

*  1979 by the Smashing Pumpkins

*  Walk On the Wild Side by Lou Reed

*  In Case You're Feeling Sinister by Belle & Sebastian

*  Life On Mars by David Bowie

*  Rejoice by Julien Baker

*  Raw Power by the Stooges

*  Come As You Are by Nirvana

*  Lola by the Raincoats

*  The Ballad of Jim Jones by the Brian Jonestown Massacre

*  Androgynous by the Replacements

*  Celebrity Skin by Hole

*  (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding by Elvis Costello 

The School Shooting as Blowback from Authoritarianism

 It happens over and over again. Another day, another shooting. Another day, another nightmare. Another sleepy small-town community put on the map for all the most horrifying of reasons. Another school shattered by unspeakable violence. Another lonely pissed off kid who needed a gun just to be heard. Another four young lives extinguished, guilty of nothing but standing in his way. Another host of adults who couldn't be bothered to give a shit until blood stained their spotless floors. Another national tragedy for our vaunted tabloids in the Fourth Estate to shamelessly sensationalize and mine for ratings gold while simultaneously virtue signaling over the carnage. 

But the sickest thing about the latest school shooting to rock the nation is just how eerily normal it all feels. Four dead and seven wounded at a high school in tiny Oxford, Michigan, just feels like another Monday in 2021. But for the vultures of cable news, it's something far worse. It's just another juicy headline to gorge themselves on, and they've been circling with their cameras drawn to catch every traumatizing minute long before those bodies were even cold. Weeks later, and they're still circling. It happens over and over again, and it's just going to keep happening.

The anchors of cable news pout and put on a good show about how tragic this all is to them. They'll even bring up their own children in a crass attempt to humanize their craven scavenging, but those parasites live for this kind of thing. Exploiting dead (mostly)white kids is one of the few times when they get to plausibly pretend to be actual journalists anymore, covering something that actually fucking happened for a change. For them every tragedy is just another opportunity for spectacle, and it doesn't take them very long to turn that spectacle into their favorite game, the blame game. Sure, a bunch of innocent kids are dead but who gives a fuck about that when there are fingers to point. After all, the most important question to answer here is who do we have to blame?

Do we blame mental illness or the shooters shitbird parents? Boring! We can do better than that. Let's blame heavy metal music. Let's blame Quintin Tarantino. Let's blame violent video games. Let's blame antidepressants. Let's blame anything fun or anything that makes adolescence in this shell of a decaying empire even mildly tolerable. But most of all, let's blame guns. Let's blame the shit out of guns. That's every news creep opportunist's and Democratic presidential hopeful's favorite scapegoat, and in spite of all the sensationalist rhetoric and breathless hyperbole, it's actually not a target without merit for once. Even an unapologetic lefty gun nut like me can begrudgingly admit that the ready access to firearms in this country is certainly a factor in tragedies like these, but a closer look at the statistics adds up to a much more complicated narrative than guns-bad-guns-kill. 

Violent crime statistics in this country are notoriously subjective and inconclusive, especially considering that we rely mostly on the less than reputable word of local police and the federal government to track them. A couple things that we do know for sure however is that, with the exception of the last few years of COVID induced poverty and upheaval, violent crime of almost any kind, including gun violence, has been steadily declining for the last forty years, regardless of shifting gun laws. The only exception to this rule has been the uniquely American pastime of the mass shooting which just keeps on climbing. School shootings are particularly vexing considering that they increased exponentially during the Clinton era Assault Weapons Ban and exploded right around the time that the press turned Columbine into a three-ring circus, and that's the thing that the media blame game always seems to conveniently overlook.

The rise in school shootings shows very little correlation with gun control, but it's meteoric trajectory perfectly mirrors the rise of the 24/7 news cycle, where a once rare class of novel tragedies became transformed into a week of around the clock coverage that gave any lonely and ignored disaffected youth a platform to finally be heard, loud and clear. But this still fails to explain why these kids are so desperate for undivided attention that they're willing to destroy themselves and so many others just to get it. The real question that everyone should be asking isn't who do we blame but what are these children trying to tell us? I believe in order to understand this, the root cause of this violent and uniquely American phenomenon, we have to look no further than the actual target of these attacks, another culprit that always seems to escape the media's blame game, the schools themselves. 

The compulsory school system in this country, be it public or parochial, is not designed to educate. It is designed to subjugate and control through a strict regimen of fear, shame, repetition and competition. Children are forced to compete against their peers in a contest to obey orders. They are afforded the rights of prisoners at the mercy of poorly trained adult authority figures who are awarded complete control over every aspect of their charges 12-year sentence, from when they get to eat to whether they get to use the bathroom. Those who conform, excel to please. Individuals who cannot or simply will not follow orders are frequently labeled as disabled or mentally ill and are further isolated from their peers in remedial programs. And the system is getting worse.

With the rise of standardized testing and tightly scripted lesson plans, more and more kids are falling between the cracks while the few decent teachers who fail to fulfill their roles as dictators are being bullied themselves and run out of an increasingly militant system where critical thinking is discouraged and much needed free time is disappearing. This is what often separates America's educational prison camps from those in other countries with equal disdain for youth rights. By 2006, nearly 40% of schools in this country had either eliminated recess or considered doing so, a trend that experts have linked to increasing rates of anger, aggression and severe behavior. Even in school systems as martial and competitive as Japan's, children are given enough free time between morning and afternoon classes to walk home and have lunch with their families. In American schools there is no time to breath and nowhere to hide and those who crack beneath the pressure have to look no further than their own history books for lessons on constructive problem solving. 

Timothy McVeigh, another highly intelligent but ruthlessly bullied pupil, summed up the lessons learned from American history books when he excused his own act of terrorism by pointing to the common American narrative for our nation's terrorist bombing of Hiroshima. He was simply committing an act of heinous violence against the federal government in order to achieve a mythical greater peace. These are the lessons taught to our children in our history books, that constant warfare is a legitimate mode of problem solving. These same lessons are regurgitated verbatim by the blame game playing vultures of the mainstream media, who gush over how presidential their leaders are when they bomb first and ask questions later. 

In a society that discourages free thinking and individuality and valorizes the sanctity of state violence, it's really a miracle that more children aren't arming themselves with AR-15's and coming to school dressed like soldiers to settle the score with their tax funded abuse. It's this authoritarian combination of institutionalized bullying and pro-war propaganda that makes children desperate enough to even pick up their parent's firearms in the first place. The biggest tragedy of school shootings is that they are essentially blowback from a system that simply doesn't value children as individuals. It's really little wonder that those who don't murder their classmates often grow up to become successful adults who ignore their own children and vote for leaders who simply bomb schools instead.

I learned these lessons firsthand as an outcast born between genders who had trouble standing in a straight line and following orders. They called me disabled because their books didn't challenge me enough to want to finish them. They called me crazy for preferring my own imaginative dream world to the structured games the other children were encouraged to play on the playground. I grew up feeling stupid and ugly, but I never once considered violence until my teachers began to accuse me of being a monster like Harris and Klebold for failing to fit in. It was only then that my fantasies became consumed with vengeance and violent retribution. I had vivid extended fantasies about being the little girl they wouldn't let me be and skipping off to school in pigtails to burn it to the fucking ground. But after discovering the ideas of wild free thinkers like Mikhail Bakunin, Che Guevara and Edward Abbey, I decided that revenge was letting these bullies off too easy. So, I committed myself to revolution instead. After all, why burn down one school when you can burn down them all?

And this is what we need to save our children from the institutionalized isolation that leads to senseless bloodshed. We need a revolution. We need to start looking at schools the same way the far left looks at other authoritarian institutions like the police and the prison system. We need to encourage our children to rebel and challenge authority. We need to emancipate childhood from the state through unschooling and the creation of mutual aid funded free schools in which students are treated as equals and encouraged to create their own curriculum in an environment where there exists no authority other than that granted by the consent of the governed. If we really want to save our kids, we need to set them free from adult tyranny, and gun control will never achieve that outcome.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH 

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

*  The Day After Tomorrow by Phoebe Bridgers

*  Hate My Way by Throwing Muses

*  Zombie by the Cranberries

*  School by Nirvana

*  Get Your Gunn by Marilyn Manson

*  Teenage Whore by Hole

*  Kerosene by Big Black

*  I Found a Reason by the Velvet Underground 

Suicide of the Elites: It's the End of the World as We Know it (And They Feel Fine)

 It's the end of the world as we know it and the rich feel fine. In fact, those greedy motherfuckers have never seemed better. The ozone layer is evaporating, the oceans are rising, and the plague just keeps on raging, but you would never know it by looking at all the beautiful people in the global power elite. They just keep on shining like diamonds in all their opulence; jet-setting from coast to receding coast, dancing the night away maskless by the light of the not-so-distant wildfires in exclusive galas devoted to saving the very planet they pillaged. Together they shimmer, CEOs, senators, tech giants, generals, movie stars, lobbyists, heads of federal agencies and captains of industry, dressed to the nines in gowns and tuxedos that cost more than your mortgage and your college debts combined. 

Rubbing shoulders, shaking hands and posing for the cameras. They drink and laugh and schmooze, then meet up at even more exclusive and decadent afterparties where they snort their weight in cocaine served up on gilded mirrors by half-naked servants younger than their grandchildren and fuck each other's addled brains out. You would never think in a thousand years that all these beautiful people were in the midst of committing mass suicide and taking the rest of us lowly plebians in flyover country with them, but that's what got them invited to this party in the first place. After all, they only got so sickeningly rich and powerful by destroying the world around them and bringing all its shrinking inhabitants to the brink of the apocalypse. You see, dearest motherfuckers, this revolving door of incestuous big business oligarchs and big government plutocrats are in the doomsday business and in this, the year of their lord Satan, twenty-hundred-and- twenty-one, business is good. It's damn good.

Nobody saw COVID coming. The pandemic seemed to come out of nowhere two February's ago to smash the world beneath its massive tires like a groundhog beneath a goddamn Mack Truck. One day you're bouncing back on the rebound from a decade long mental collapse, preparing to run a walk-in center for your local AIDS resource center and the next- Bam! Your life has been obliterated in a bloody mess by the side of the road and you're reduced to hiding in your house again like the agoraphobic shut-in you worked your fucking ass off to leave behind, popping Ativans like Tic-Tacs and counting the spiders on the walls while you try not to swallow your own tongue. But mentally ill savants like me got off easy, well, at least the ones who didn't blow our fucking brains out or switch from benzos to fentanyl.

This plague that seems to have no end in sight has murdered over 5 million people worldwide and nearly 800,000 and counting in the United States alone, most of them, naturally, have been poor people. It's obliterated the economy, ransacked Main Street and given the police state a license to quadruple in size in the name of public health. But scientists have been warning us frantically for years about the plausibly catastrophic risks of playing God with gain of function research, genetically modifying zoonotic pathogens to make them deadlier and more transmissible to humans so Frankenstein virologists can get rich curing what they caused. 

We've been told repeatedly that this kind of reckless behavior could lead to horrific lab accidents and even global pandemics, and now we have one that just so happened to spring from a city hosting two major labs known to be engaged in that precise kind of research with coronavirus infected bats. The totally sensible theory of an accidental lab leak was given the rank of conspiracy when then President Donald Trump accused China of producing the virus as part of some kind of Bond-villain-esque plot to take over the world with an army of diseased bats or some such nonsense. But this accusation was a bit like blaming the dog for farting when you consider that Trump is the imbecile who lifted the Obama era ban on gain of function research and that it was our government that financed these labs in Wuhan.

The National Institute of Health provided the funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the nearby Wuhan University for Animal Experiments to carry out this research, funneling the money through an increasingly shady looking New York based non-profit called the EcoHealth Alliance, run by a creep named Dr. Peter Daszak. It was none other than the good Doctor Daszak who organized a group of top scientists to write an open letter in The Lancet disparaging the lab leak hypothesis as a crank theory before it could even be properly investigated, less than a month after COVID hit the US. He also served on the World Health Organization joint team that concluded that the lab leak was "extremely unlikely." A conclusion that has since come under question from the WHO itself. Daszak made all these claims without even bothering to reveal that his organization had been involved in since leaked research creating infectious clones of MERS and bat SARS related coronavirus' that even DARPA wouldn't touch.

It should be noted that the EcoHealth Alliance is a multibillion-dollar operation and that people like Dr. Daszak get very rich in the so-called non-profit industrial complex. It should also be noted that EcoHealth's biggest funders aren't the NIH but the State Department and the Pentagon, and that they gainfully employ one Dr. David Franz, formerly Colonel Franz, who served as the commander of Fort Detrick, the American Military's premier biowarfare facility. The same place that anthrax once mysteriously escaped from. That's kind of a lot of fucked up coincidences to overlook and a lot of the people overlooking them have a lot of money riding on the continuation of this sort of reckless research. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to know which way the wind blows but go ahead and call me a weatherman if that makes you feel safer about the world's top virologists hopping in bed with the same fine folks who brought us Gulf War Syndrome and Agent Orange.

Speaking of homicidal weather, climate change is another disaster that supposedly nobody but a bunch of hippie eggheads saw coming. But now, with the Sahara expanding, the Great Barrier Reef shrinking and the Amazon in flames, even the ghost of dear Alexander Cockburn is calling this beast an apocalypse. People are getting slaughtered across the globe. Wildfires are tearing Western North America six hundred new flaming assholes a second, from Lake Tahoe to Fairbanks, Alaska. Biblical floods are drowning major cities across Western Europe and China, and the Atlantic Ocean is spitting out hurricanes the size of small countries like fucking buzzsaws in a Mortal Kombat game. But somebody did see all this carnage coming, over a decade before the hippie eggheads did. As early as the mid-seventies, none other than Exxon Mobile had a crack task force of top tier scientists looking into the effects of carbon dioxide on the globe. The conclusion of this rigorous and innovative research was essentially identical to today's scientific consensus. 

Exxon Mobile's response to their own irrefutable proof that they were bringing on an apocalypse was to double down and chuck millions into promoting misinformation while they continued their very profitable rape of Mother Earth. But this evolving tragedy cannot be pinned on corporate greed alone. Exxon Mobile may be a death factory, but the Pentagon consumes more petroleum than any multi-national corporation on earth and is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and many other toxic pollutants, all just to keep the lights on for the military industrial complex. Yet America's Death Star has been mysteriously granted blanket immunity from every international climate agreement on the books, including the Kyoto Protocall. The reason for such rampant hypocrisy can probably be partially explained by the international hostage crisis created by the only threat to human life greater than climate change.

Nobody seems to see the nuclear holocaust coming. Most Americans have foolishly assumed that we already dodged that bullet with the collapse of communism. As usual, most Americans are dead wrong. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, set up in 1947 by many of the same great minds who created the atom bomb after they realized what they had done, has the Doomsday Clock set at 100 seconds before midnight, closer to extinction than it has ever been, including during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That's because the Cold War never really ended because the Cold War never really had anything to do communism. 

It had to do with the global hegemony of that Atlantist multinational conglomeration known collectively as the West and preventing Eurasia from ever contesting its total dominance over the globe. This is why NATO continues to lurch ever closer to Russia's borders, this is why Obama, Biden and Trump have all declared total war on China, this is why American battleships continue to provocatively cruise the Black Sea and the Straight of Taiwan, this is why the Pentagon continues to tempt humanity with weapons grade pathogens and toxic army bases, and this is why the US is currently engaged in a trillion-dollar campaign to upgrade and enhance its nuclear arsenal, because the beautiful people want it all baby, and they'll gladly blow the world to kingdom come if they can't have it.

Never in the history of mankind have we ever seen anything like this. Empire's collapse, that's what they do, but this one is threatening to literally take down the whole damn world with it and I don't think they're bluffing. This is the kind of collective madness that only unprecedented levels of greed can bring on and we're running out of ways to contain it. I know what some of you are thinking, that we need a colossal government to solve this colossal crisis, but that's a trap. The people who run the federal government and the UN are the same people who created these apocalyptic catastrophes. Giving them more money and more power will only make them worse. In fact, it already has. The response by world leaders to COVID, climate change and the nuclear threat has been to grant even more funding to the same forces who made them possible. Peter Daszak has never been richer, fighting the plague he likely caused, and the peace-loving climate evangelists in the Democratic Party have approved the biggest defense budget the Pentagon has ever seen. 

The only viable solution to the omnicide of the elites is to find a way to dismantle the powers that make this hideous outcome possible. Greta Thuneberg needs to put down the megaphone and pick up a shotgun. Lock and load is the only language the doomsday industry is fluent in. I'm talking revolution here folks, hopefully nonviolent. Barring that, dearest motherfuckers, we're fucked.

Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post

*  Steal My Sunshine by LEN

*  Panic by the Smiths

*  I Know the End by Phoebe Bridgers

*  Shine On by John Lennon

*  Wild Horses by the Sundays

*  Desolation Road by Bob Dylan

*  Beginning To See the Light by the Velvet Underground

*  November Spawned a Monster by Morrissey 

*  It's the End of the World as We Know it (And I Feel Fine) by REM

*  Baby Don't Cry by Sunflower Bean