War Of The Warlords

The first two months of Trump have been defined almost exclusively by chaos. So much so that it's been damn near impossible for even the most astute tranny wonk to keep up with. Secret Russian agents. Fake news. Jammed up airports. Incoherent executive orders. Jackbooted ICE-men. Swarms of locusts. Witch trials. Human sacrifices. And, of coarse, lies, lies and more goddamn lies, coming from all directions. Much of this chaos has been chalked up to the utter ineptitude of Trump and his rogues gallery of bush league morons. There's a grain of truth to this. Others have chalked it up to that mad maestro of mania, Steven Ilyich Bannon. All part of some finely constructed campaign to bring on the apocalypse. And there's probably a grain of truth to that too. But mostly I see this madness as a toxic byproduct of Trump's war on the establishment and the establishment's war on Trump. A civil war between two tribes of bloodthirsty imperialists, grappling for the future of Manifest Destiny. On the one side is the old-school, neocon, chicken-hawks demanding total war with Putin's Russia. On the other is Trump's raft of "realist" malcontents calling for detente with Russia in order to focus on who they view as the real obstacle to American primacy, namely Islam and more importantly China. I shall here forth refer to these dueling cabals of warlords as the Russophobes (aka the establishment) and the Sinophobes (Trump).

Before I go any further into my armchair analysis, I feel it  important to remember that, in spite of their strategic differences, both of these sides have essentially the same goal- American global domination. They also have essentially the same foe, beneath their initial targets, and that foe is a united Eurasia. The full integration of the worlds greatest landmass spells out the end of American hegemony. If the rising dragons of the Orient can create a direct link to the Euro-zone then the Dollar is dead and the world is cursed to the peaceful coexistence of a multi-polar order. This harmony is what the Mandarins of Washington and Wall Street fear most and it is what motivates both sides of this war of the warlords. Where they differ is on who to shoot first.

The Russophobes represent the old school of American imperialism, which see's a united and independent Russia as the greatest threat to their dreams of world power, mostly do to its geographic position as the great land bridge connecting Europe to Asia. This was the true motivation behind the Cold War, which began when Lenin's Bolsheviks overthrew the Yankee puppet state of the Czar and attempted to forge their own bloody path forward, out of the Dark-Age feudalism of Kremlin serfdom and into the light of the Twentieth Century. This great leap towards modernism was what really terrified the western establishment, not communism. Wilson and his Atlanticists understood this threat to their international designs immediately and sent tens of thousands of dough-boys, fresh from the crimson trenches of the First World War, into the new Soviet experiment to supplement the Czar's disgruntled death squads in an epic bloodbath that came to be known as the White Terror. And it never really ended. The USSR developed into a frantic, violent and, above all else, paranoid warfare state under the unrelenting pressure of this siege, eventually cracking beneath its weight. Lenin's dream, however flawed it may have been, was finally snuffed out in 1991, after decades of sabotage and proxy wars, and a new puppet Czar was established. A vodka soaked buffoon named Boris Yeltsin, who gladly kept the Motherland good and backwards for his Washington handlers as long as he could fatten his wallet and fatten his ass while Russia was ripped inside out by crony shock capitalism and surrounded by the rapidly encroaching storm of NATO.

The Russophobes ultimate game plan was and still is to reduce Russia to Balkanized rubble, the same way they did to the former Yugoslavia. A dammed clusterfuck of impoverished ethno-states, too busy stabbing each other in the back to pose any viable threat to Dollar dominance. Vladimir Putin threw a wrench into these plans after he was chosen to replace Yeltsin by the power brokers of the deep Kremlin, who feared the further empowerment of Gennady Zyugnov's dogged Communists who would have easily defeated the increasingly despised Yeltsin in '96 if it wasn't for Clinton's flagrant meddling in that years presidential elections. Putin was originally Yeltsin's protege but once at the helm he quickly proved to be nearly as threatening to the Federation's status quo as Zyugnov. Reigning in the oligarchs, making peace with the Chechnyans and, most damningly, standing up to American meddling in Georgia and Ukraine. Naturally, Putin became persona non grata. The Russophobes, who by now, ruled not only Washington and Wall Street, but the mass media too, aimed all their guns at the Russian strongman's chrome dome and set their phasers to kill.

But not all the Mandarins of American power remained committed to this decades old plot to slay the Russian bear. Many came to see this policy as dated, wasteful and counterproductive. Among them, Donald J. Trump and a host of disgruntled veteran Cold Warriors who had grown impatient with the seemingly endless great chess game with the Kremlin. They rejected the old company line, proclaimed themselves "realists" and set their sights on the rising dragon of China as the real threat to American power. They boldly advocated collaboration with Putin's Russia in the eternally troublesome Middle East while they shifted their focus towards confronting China in the Pacific.

This deviation proved successful in the polls, helping Trump and his Sinaphobes to win the White House, but it proved toxic in the nostrils of the Russophobic old guard, some of whom even managed to infiltrate Trump's administration, including his fag-bashing zealot of a Vice President, Mike Pence. What has transpired is a tit for tat civil war, with both sides literally fighting over who to bomb first. Thus we see the intelligence leaks to the mainstream press, the sabotage of Trump's number one realist heavy, Michael Flynn, the banishment of certain "journalists" from the Press Corps. and a slew of disinformation coming from both sides.

This is the kind of madness that could only exist in the dying days of history's greatest empire. This morbidly obese giant has become demented with rage as it slouches slowly to it's grave. Many of my fellow anti-imperialists and anti-interventionists have made the foolish mistake of choosing sides of this blood tainted pissing match, figuring, childishly, that the enemy of their enemy is their friend and since Trump is pissing off all the right cunts, he must be some kind allie to our cause. The reality couldn't be farther from the truth. Trump doesn't represent some new school of isolationism. He represents some new school of American Imperialism. Much as FDR tried to use the camouflage of socialism to save capitalism, Trump seeks to use the language of anti-interventionism to save the empire. We should not wish him luck in this endeavor, rather we should pray that both sides of this fight are to busy cutting each others throats to cut anyone else's.

So here's to the war of the warlords! May it last long and may it's casualties be many. May Michael Flynn's shit-canning be the first of many and may every putrid organ of the so called mainstream media discredit themselves in the process. I'm no fan of war. But when it comes to cunts burning cunts, I say let em burn and I'll get the marshmallows and the weenie-roasters.

Stay neutral, dearest motherfuckers. The Swiss inherit the earth and the only good warmonger is an impeached warmonger.



Peace, Love and Empathy- CH


Soundtrack; Some songs that influenced this post-

* My War By Black Flag
* The Wheel By P.J. Harvey
* I Against I By Bad Brains
* The Future By Leonard Cohen
* Home Again Garden Grove By The Mountain Goats
* Party At Ground Zero By Fishbone

I Suck At Love

To say I'm unlucky in love is probably as big of a fucking understatement as anyone will ever hear. Truth be told, strip this post bare of all its poetic pretensions and you can pretty much sum it up in a single solitary sentence. I suck at love. I suck at a lot of things, volleyball, algebra, emotional boundaries. But I suck at nothing as badly or as painfully as I suck at love. I'm a hopeless romantic with a capital H. I've never had a girlfriend. I've never even had a date. I'm a 28 year old virgin and this life I'm living is beginning to feel like the cruelest Woody Allen movie never made. This Valentines Day, like all Valentines Days, I'm alone and you, very dearest of motherfuckers, are my only company. So buckle-up for a heart-shredding bitch-fest, because I desperately need to vent.

I have been fascinated by the female species for as long as I've been aware of their existence. Needless to say, it's a rather complicated obsession, considering my own gender fluidity. My feelings towards the not-so-opposite sex have always been a rather dizzying cocktail of lust, adoration and green-eyed jealousy. I never went through a period of time in my childhood where I found girls to be gross. Even as a young boy who couldn't even pronounce gender dysphoria, let alone comprehend it, I looked upon my female classmates as enjoying a degree of simple intimacy between each other that frustrated me to no end. Mostly because, try as I might, I couldn't seem to reenact it with the male playmates I felt trapped with out of some kind of unspoken obligation to an interpretation of normal that felt anything but. I had plenty of male friends growing up. In fact I seemed to collect them in some doomed attempt to feel whole. But I would have gladly traded them all for just one girl who knew my name and spoke it like it brought her as much joy and peace as it brought to me. Childhood was nice, but it was also more than a little lonely for a boy who couldn't understand why he couldn't find sanctuary in scraped knee's and little league games.

High School was better. I found pieces of myself that I didn't know existed in the brief moments of emotional intimacy I shared with girls I felt honored to call my friends. I loved many of them, in ways that they sadly couldn't or wouldn't love me back. I never left that gilded cage known as the friend zone. I wanted desperately to make a break from this emotional prison, but fear became a strong and sly warden, too much so for me to overcome. A warden who knew that these long sought-after friendships were too precious for me to risk losing over the tension of unrequited love. So I stayed silent. I suffered quietly with a gentle smile on my face while I enjoyed a sense of solemn camaraderie that I wasn't yet prepared to fully comprehend. Deep down, I didn't just want to be with the girls. A deep, secret part of me wanted to be one of them. I was a secret girl, secretly in love with girls who I still love to this day. I can recite their names like Catholic saints- Sara, Alison, Dana, Jennifer, Kayleen- Their all still part of me. I miss them everyday.

College would be the traditional place for an nontraditional person such as myself to find them-self, sexually speaking. But the growing storm of my mental illness had other plans. Before I was ever given the opportunity to stumble through an awkward, drunken sexual encounter or a drug fueled transgression into smudged make-up and frilly lingerie, I pulled a full Tony Soprano and emotionally short-circuited, falling apart in an epic nervous breakdown brought on by my inability to grow up at the same pace as my piers. Dazed and confused, I tried in vain to reach my feet and face my demons but they were too strong. So I spent the next seven long years alone in my house trying gather the strength I needed to defeat them. Ultimately, it was the unbearable weight of my gut-wrenching loneliness that eventually forced me back out into the terror of the real world. After spending several consecutive months lying beneath a veil of tears, imagining a warm body in bed next to me just to get to sleep, I finally stepped outside of my house.

Not long after, I also stepped outside of the closet. After years of running and fooling myself, I finally embraced the fact that being male was one prison cell too many for my soul to bare occupying. I accepted the terrifying truth that an obsessive-compulsive agoraphobic like myself, who fears nothing more than change of any kind, had a gender too wild and free to fit under a single fixed label. I'm a man. I'm a woman. I'm one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand things in between. I'm gender fluid and perhaps more than anything else, I'm a lesbian. My sexuality is defined by my fluctuating femininity and it always has. It's the only label that makes any sense to me, even if it makes sense to no one else. I'm not pretty. I have a beard and I have a prick and I feel little incentive to get rid of either anytime soon. But none of those facts makes me feel like any less of a dyke, I've found a shaky peace in this complicated truth but I have yet to find love. I've yet to even come close and this fact burns me to the very core of my being.

But what can I do? I leave my house now but I don't drink, I don't dance, I don't go to church (the only thing more obnoxious than a dancing drunk is a dancing preacher.) I still lack the emotional fitness to handle school or even part-time work. Where do I go? What do I do? Online dating? I'm a little bit of a tough sell on paper, to say the least- Charming, unemployed, bearded bull-dyke with a dick seeks lipstick lesbian, manic-pixie-dream-girl to share make-up and get stoned with- Yeah! That one pretty much sells itself. I could lie, but, in case you haven't noticed, that's not exactly my thing. So for the 28th Valentines Day running I am bitterly and unhappily alone. My only hope is that some you out there can find some kind of comfort in my pain. Your hearts may be broken, but none are as broken as mine. And if you do have someone? Stop bitching about the price of flowers, grab them, hold them tight, fuck them crazy, tell them you love them and, above all else, be thankful. You have no idea how fucking lucky you are.

Be good to each other, dearest motherfuckers, and take care of yourselves, cause you're all this loveless loser's got to keep shimself warm tonight.



Peace, Love and Empathy- CH


Soundtrack; Some songs that influenced this post-

* Crazy For You By Slowdive
* Dance Music By The Mountain Goats
* Just Like Heaven By Dinosaur Jr.
* About A Girl By Nirvana
* Something I Can Never Have By The Jesus & Mary Chain
* Chick Habit By April March

The Emerald Belt Project (Dreaming Is Free)

I get a lot of flack for being a pretty negative prick, and rightly so. I could probably sniff out a conspiracy at a goddamn Easter egg hunt. If you read my last three posts in a row, you'd probably think I wrote them with a loaded revolver in my mouth. If you read the last six, you'd probably fight me for the piece so you could put it in yours. What can I say? What do you want from me? I'm an obese, fluid, basket case who cant even take his own junk for granite. So, yeah, I'm a bit edgy. You try being fucking chipper under those circumstances.

But it is important, even for a genderfucked, post-goth, drama-queen like myself, to at least make an attempt to look on the bright side. The best way I know how to do this is to dream. After all, as Debbie Harry once mused, dreaming is free. Only, as an unrepentant Marxist and anarcho-syndicalist, my dreams are a little bit different, to say the least, and my favorite dream is what I like to call the Emerald Belt Project. Now, I'm not exactly a political scientist, so don't give me shit about the logistics, after all this is dream, not a goddamn manifesto. Manifesto's are for people without ADD.

It all starts with the collapse of the American Empire, which, lets face it, is an inevitability. All capitalist societies are built to self-destruct. It's a system built on the naive premise of never ending expansion on a planet with a finite amount of space and resources to expand upon. A capitalist state has know choice but to become an empire in order to feed it's perpetual fix for growth. And all empires inevitably collapse beneath their own weight, just like Chris Christie. No one can eat the entire worlds supply of cannolis and live to tell about it.

Signs of this collapse are everywhere, from the Great Recession to our loss of influence on the global stage to the fact that even the most ignorant of American's doesn't take our three ring circus of a plutocracy seriously anymore, I mean, shit, they even elected one of the clowns to be the ringleader. The cracks are all there and growing larger day by day. It's simply a matter of time before those cracks become breaks and those broken pieces disintegrate like sand between Uncle Sams bloody finger tips. To most people this all probably sounds pretty terrifying. But to a degenerate like myself, it sounds better than Christmas fucking morning. It's what I've been waiting half my life for.

My dream is to take advantage of this chaotic opportunity and gather the continents leftist malcontents, be they communist, anarchist, socialist or libertarian, provided that they're all anti-statist in nature, and unite them under one banner. Then, together, we repatriate my local Rustbelt ruins along the Great Lakes, forgotten cities like Erie, Cleveland and Detroit, with nothing to offer but abandoned land and untapped opportunity. Here we make our stand and create a confederacy of stateless artist colonies with the backbone of a new post-capitalist economy built on an industry I can only describe as AgriPunk.

With literally thousands of square miles of unused indoor factory space we could create the worlds largest hydroponic grow operation on the planet with the Great Lakes serving as a near bottomless source of irrigation. With this we can provide ourselves and a hungry globe with a huge cache of organic fruits and vegetables, and naturally enough cannabis and opium to put those sheep-shagging warlords in Central Asia out of business for good, thus turning the Rustbelt into the Emerald Belt.  All governed democratically through an interwoven network of grass roots syndicates and workers councils, making leaders as obsolete as the empire they once served. Income taxes will be replaced with union dues, standing armies and police forces will be replaced by local civilian militias and apartment complexes will become autonomous communes for the workers.

The profits made from herbs and narcotics alone would provide more than enough capital finance for a vibrant network of free autonomous social welfare programs like schools, clinics, hospitals and nursing homes as well as public transportation and infrastructure projects, centrally funded through the councils and syndicates but independently and democratically run by the communities that utilize these services.

As for all the empty lots, warehouses and abandoned homes, these will be forfeited to any rugged settler or collective with the balls and brains to rebuild them and create mutualist homesteads. Living off the land and devoting themselves to the creation of life and art, rather than the soulless management of pointless government bureaucracy and multi-national corporate servitude. The result? Something like L.A.'s fateful South Central Farm or Copenhagen's Freetown Christiania times a million. Miles and miles and miles of gigantic social art projects with their artists living inside them, all governed cooperatively without a single banker or IRS man breathing down their necks.

There would be a central, gold-backed, currency, mostly for trade purposes, but people would be free to make their own money and decide what it's worth. Or they can simply barter and trade goods for services. And this would be just one of many utopias stretching across the post-American Western Hemisphere. Classic Liberals and more market oriented anarchists may set up their own independent projects in New England or Alaska. Primitivists might do the same in the Pacific Northwest. More traditionalist paleoconservative minded folks could set up their own colonies in Utah or Montana. And so it goes. Libertarian communist campesinos in El Salvador. Black nationalists in Mississippi. Indigenous tribalists in the Badlands. A colorful collage of radical experiments in direct democracy competing peacefully for the favor of a populace free to pick and choose which society makes sense to them.

What's missing from this picture?  Give up? War. With no more standing armies and stateless nations to small and decentralized to dominate even their own populaces let alone anyone else's, wars will be rendered to relatively minor skirmishes between tribes and militias. There would still be violence. There will always be violence. But without the apparatus of a centralized state and with communities busy with the joyful work of their own self determination, war as we know it may simply cease to exist.

I know, I know, it sounds nuts right? But why not? Why not dream big and swing for the fucking fences. Everything new started out as something "crazy", from Maknovia and Catalonia to Chiapas and Rojava. I'll fully admit to not having all the kinks worked if you'll admit to being at least a little intrigued by my wild dream. And by all means, feel free to punch wholes in it. But the Emerald Belt Project is what I dream about when I grow weary of dead girls and bad leaders and, like I said, dreaming is free.

Dream big, dearest motherfuckers. Only dreamers can change the world.


Peace, Love, Empathy and Anarchy- CH

Her Name Was Nora

Her name was Nora. She was an 8 year old American girl. And she was murdered last Sunday. I wish I could tell you more about her. I wish I could tell you her favorite color and the songs she liked to sing on her way to school. I wish I could tell you that she loved horses and lilacs and dreamed of being a doctor when she grew up. But I cant. All I can tell you is that her name was Nora. She was an 8 year old American girl. And our new president, Donald J. Trump decided that she had to die. Just the latest in a seemingly endless procession of innocent victims of our seemingly endless war on terror.

Nawar al-Awlaki, affectionately known to family and loved ones as Nora, was the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American born cleric murdered in an Obama ordered drone strike in 2011 for the crime of using his freedom of speech to advocate violence against the United States, which, in my mind, made his assassination about as justified as Charlie Hebdo. What's even worse is that his 16 year old son, Nora's older brother, was murdered in a similar strike just weeks later. Which makes the idea of Nora's own tragic demise being just a horrific coincidence more than a little hard to swallow. Nora was one of as many as 57 people slaughtered, most of them also relatives of al-Awlaki, on the morning of January 29th by a Seal Team 6 death squad in an operation planned under the presidency of Barack Obama and approved by his successor, Donald J. Trump. The objective of the strike was supposedly to attain important information on Al-Qaeda but after an alleged firefight, the Seals, our heroes, apparently found it necessary to kill everything that fucking moved. Of the 57 killed only 14 have been confirmed as enemy combatants by the Pentagon. Even if you believe that to be true, that still leaves another 43 innocents, mostly women and children. Nora was one of the first to be shot but one of the last to die. Suffering from a bullet wound to her neck, Nora spent the last two hours of her tragically short life bleeding to death in her wounded mothers arms.

The braying parasites of the evening news could care less about any of these ugly details. The only part of the story that they found worthy of their fleeting attention was the single solitary death of one of their beloved Seals, which, considering their Wild Bunch approach to warfare, was more than likely a case of friendly fire. My late grandfather was a career officer in the Marine Corps. A commitment I didn't agree with but respected regardless. I have a full respect for the fact that there are a good many righteous men and women serving at all levels and branches of the American military machine, however foul it may be. But these men were not soldiers. They were terrorists who clearly came to Yemen to kill anything that got in their way. I have a hard time feeling remorse for a slain terrorist, especially while the bullet riddled corpses of their victims remain callously ignored. One has to wonder if Saudi Arabia reported on the tragic death of a dozen or so amateur pilots on September 12th.

I won't lie to you, dearest motherfuckers, this story got to me on a very deep personal level. When I first read about it I cried and I've been writing Nora's name on my right hand ever sense in tribute. I don't know why the death of that little girl feels so damn personal. She wasn't the first child to fall victim to America's never-ending terrorist war on terror and sadly she won't be the last. But something about her still haunts me. Maybe it's just the Winter depression. I've even gone so far as to chalk it up to my gender dysphoria. As far fetched as it may seem, something deep inside tells me that in another life I could have been a Khanith and me and Nora could have been childhood friends. But more than anything, I think what bothers me most is the unbearable fact that no one but me seems to really fucking care. 57 people are dead. 57 people will never breath again. 57 people will never sing another song on their way to school. 57 people will never spend another Sunday afternoon with their loved ones. And no one fucking cares. When did life become so goddamn cheap. Even on many of my favorite alternative news sites, people seem more concerned with partisan bullshit than the 57 caskets being laid to rest in war-torn Yemen. Including one very small box reserved for a little girl who's only crime was standing in the way of American bullets.

I don't know what motivated Barack Obama to plan this raid and I don't know what motivated Donald Trump to make himself the 45th war criminal to occupy the Oval Office by approving it and, quite frankly, I don't fucking care. The only thing I know, the only thing that I care about this week, is that her name was Nora. She was an 8 year old girl slain by her own country. And sometimes I really hate to call myself an American.


Peace, Love and Empathy- CH

Obama: Illusion V. Reality

I never bought into the whole Obama hysteria thing. I probably should have. I was his target demographic back in 2008. A naive, idealistic, first time voter who despised Bush and was totally in love with some version of the 1960's that only really exists in the hearts and minds of the very young. Obama's whole song and dance seemed to be designed with me in mind but I just wasn't buying it. Something just didn't quite smell right. Maybe it was the way he could say so much, so beautifully, without really saying anything at all. Maybe it was the fact that his voting record as a first term senator was suspiciously non-existent. But mostly I think it was the way he used antiwar rhetoric to condemn Iraq while simultaneously pushing for intensified involvement in Afghanistan, as if a "good war" could somehow cancel out the acidic karma of a bad one. I tried explaining these things to others on the left to no avail. I vividly remember trying to convince my 12th grade journalism teacher, one of the smartest men I've ever known, that voting for this smooth talking used war salesman would blow up in his face like a firecracker and I remember the totally blank look on his face, as if I was speaking to him in Swahili.

I dearly wish I could tell you I was proven wrong but not nearly as dearly as I wish I could tell you that my generation of left-wing voters realized that they were. But people only see what they want to see and presidential legacies are a lot like presidential campaigns, all smoke and mirrors and malignant mythology. A great example of this phenomenon is the collective memory of former president Jimmy Carter. Regardless of whether you consider yourself left or right or somewhere in between, you likely see old Jimmy the way most of the rest of the country does- as a soft-spoken, ill-equipped but well-intentioned peacenik. The facts however don't represent this illusion.

While Jimmy made a few peace deals to fill his otherwise bleak presidential library, his most lasting impact can be felt from his decision to back Zbigniew Brzezinski's plot to send Islamic mercenaries into into the newly secular republic of Afghanistan in order to suck the Soviet Union into a brutal and unwinnable quagmire. This plot became the still ongoing Afghan war and these mercenaries, dubbed Mujaheddin, would become the founding fathers of the Islamic terrorist menace that haunts us to this day. This was hardly an isolated misstep for President Carter either. He also OK'd the use of American Army hardware for South Korea's Kwangju Massacre, which gave Tienanmen a run for its money, resulting in the deaths of as many as 2000 peaceful student protesters and similarly kept weapons flowing to Suharto's Indonesia during the height of the East Timorese Genocide which cost the tiny island nation nearly a third of it's population. But this isn't how America remembers Jimmy Carter. Instead he's nearly universally revered as a Nobel Peace Prize winning elder-statesman. I fear this wholly undeserved fate of illusion is also what awaits soon to be former president Barack Obama as well.

Much like Mr. Carter, Mr. Obama is responsible for a couple of outstanding peace deals, namely with Iran and Cuba, but those achievements are largely legacy projects designed to boost the president's flagging international PR. They stand alone as exceptions to a very violent rule. Also like Jimmy, Obama's largest impact will undoubtedly be his contribution to the proliferation of international terror. Aside from his promised bloodbath in Afghanistan (ironically the one promise he kept), the Nobel Laureate vastly expanded the playground of head-chopping Salafist psychopaths with his gruesome regime change experiments in Libya and Syria, the ripples from which are only beginning to expand, from the empowerment of Boko Haram to the European Refugee Crisis. All over gold-backed Dinars and strategic oil pipelines.

Obama has also built on the Bush legacy of constitutional degradation and executive authoritarianism by awarding the presidency all the powers of judge, jury and executioner with his grossly expanded use of homicidal drone warfare, checking off the names of civilians to be slaughtered one by one from a list delivered to him by the CIA weekly like the Sunday paper. He's also approved the expansion of the surveillance state to damn near Orwellian proportions and hunted down any soldier or civil servant brave enough to expose these crimes against democracy like dogs, even if he did decide to let a couple of them go. All this from a man who promised my generation a new era of transparency. It almost sounds like a sick joke in retrospect.

But this isn't how the 44th President of the United States of America will be remembered. Just turn on CNN and listen to an endless procession of putrid homilies to the historic legacy of America's first black president, as if his race automatically transforms the man from LBJ to MLK. And the saddest thing about this whole gross spectacle is that I still feel like the only leftist of my generation who's not fucking buying it. Seemingly righteous kids from Occupy to Black Lives Matter gather in mourning of the election of Donald Trump as if it were the end of a second Camelot rather than a simple changing of the guard. But people only see what they want to see and until children grow up, they'll always prefer the comfort of illusion to the sobering harshness of reality.


Peace, Love and Empathy- CH

Sure, Fine, Fuck-It, Whatever

2016 was a harsh year. The weather sucked and everyone who mattered died. But mostly it sucked because of the election. A dizzying circus of whole-sale horse-shit that felt like it would never fucking end until, finally, it did. A grabby, race-baiting, reality TV personality somehow managed to beat a seasoned, Wall-Street, murder machine. Sure, fine, cool, fuck-it, whatever. I was just glad it was fucking over and I'd never have to right about the goddamn thing again. I could go back to writing about obscure foreign conflicts and gender dysphoria. You know, easy shit. But to quote Al Pacino in the worst Godfather movie- "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!". You see, dearest motherfuckers, the 2016 Presidential Election is the Christmas gift from hell. It just keeps giving all bloody century long. 2016 never fucking ends.

It all should have ended on November 8th. When the American electorate defied the Washington/Wall-Street establishment and their dickless harpies in the mainstream media by voting down their precious Lord Killary in favor of an unsanctioned ass named Donald Trump. It wasn't a clean win. The Donald took the Electoral College, while the queen of war took the Popular. But the Donald beat Killary fair and square by the establishments own stupid fucking rules. Needless to say, the establishment was not pleased. In fact, they were downright apoplectic. Watching the idiots on MSDNC squirm in their shit-caked britches as they realized how clueless they were is probably one of the few truly happy moments I experienced during the election. It wasn't supposed to go this way. The media elite and their DNC puppet masters had only egged Trump on in the first place because he was the only creature on earth more repulsive than the Clintons. Donald was a candidate designed to lose. But they had underestimated how truly disgusted the American people had become, not just with Teflon oligarchs like the Clintons but with the crooked media who exalted them. Trump was a fuck-up. He got 1.5 million fewer votes than that country-club Ken doll, Mitt Romney did. But Killary fucked up way worse. Pulling in a whopping 5.4 million fewer votes than Obama did in 2012, getting shellacked the worst in Rust-Belt states like my native Pennsylvania, where Trump took nearly every county (I voted for Stein).

To put it simply, the establishment fucked up. They had taken working folks for a ride one too many times. This should have been clear during the primaries, when Killary had to cheat just to beat a Fabian fossil like Bernie Sanders, who got zero press time and went out of his way to shoot himself in the fucking foot. All the polls showed old Bernie massacring Trump in a regular election but the establishment didn't listen. They just kept pushing their rotten candidate down peoples throats. Never mind that Killary had become a symbol of everything that was wrong with Washington. A trigger happy, globalist, Wall-Street shill that never stepped foot on a country she wasn't willing to bomb and never flew over an American factory she wasn't willing to outsource. She was the home-team fave and Trump was a grabby jackass who pretended to be a billionaire. He was the guy the cool kids invited to their parties just so they could get him drunk and bet him to bark like a seal. But Trump didn't matter. They could have put Seymour Butts on the ticket and he would have won. People had just had enough. They didn't vote for Trump. They voted against the establishment.

The Democrats and the media could have learned an important lesson here. They could have took this sobering moment to learn a lesson about taking advantage of the people you depend on. But that's not their style. So they decided instead to piss on these people and call them all dupes of the Kremlin. They went back to that tired, old warhorse that failed to get their lazy asses across the finish line during the election and blamed all their own failings on the Russians. According to them, Killary didn't lose because she's a repulsive excuse for a candidate. She lost because of a massive, convoluted conspiracy involving FSB hackers, Wikileaks and "fake news" sites like this one with the dastardly Vladimir Putin playing the part of the man behind the curtain, pulling all our levers. Never mind that they don't have a lick of verifiable proof to support this preposterous farce. And never mind that even according to their own hopped up conspiracy, the worst the Russians are guilty of is educating the American public about the Democrats own dreadful behavior behind closed doors. The establishment is pissed and their gonna have their fucking hissy-fit even if it means starting World War 3. After all, if Killary couldn't give them their precious nuclear holocaust they would just have to get it themselves.

So here we are. It's 2017, Donald Trump is my president and McCarthyism is alive and well. Sure, fine, fuck-it, whatever. Can I go back to writing about Rojava and vagina envy now? Because if I have to write one more article about this stupid, goddamn election, I swear to Kropotkin's ghost, I will literally die. Fuck 2016 and give it back to the Russians. I've had enough.


Peace, Love and Begrudging Empathy- CH


P.S. This post is dedicated to the two trolls on YouTube who threatened to rape me yesterday for being a mouthy genderqueer feminist. The rage they provided me with was the fuel I needed to tare through my seasonal depression and finish this piece. Keep it up, you malignant cunts. Your stupidity gives me wings.

16 More People Who Don't Suck!

It's hard to believe that it's already been a year since my first annual List of People Who Don't Suck! A lot has happened since then. I may still be an agoraphobic hermit but I can no longer call myself a shut-in. I leave my house every week to commune with other charmingly damaged souls at my local psych-rehab, many of whom I've come to see as friends. I've come out of the closet with my long, silent struggle with gender dysphoria and I've found a sense of community within the queer movement that I've been searching for my whole life. I still don't technically have a job, unless you count being an unapologetic well-fare-queen (better my toilet paper than another smart bomb), but I am looking into volunteering at a local radio station, so Radio Free Happy Valley could be in my crystal ball. I've also managed to get a lot more people to this sight. Not nearly as many as I'd like but I've made a few tiny earthquakes out there in cyberspace and I promise you, dearest motherfuckers, it's only the beginning.

My original idea for this list came from the fact that the few people closest to me often complained about my widespread pessimism and general negativity. They would often ask me things like, "Is there anything you do like?" So I decided to devote an entire post at the end of the year to 16 people who actually don't suck. People seemed to dig it so I decided to make it an annual thing. So here I am  a year later with 16 more people who don't suck. There are renegades, visionaries, iconoclasts and even a few people who I've come to consider friends. They're a tight minority of people who can actually manage to illicit something resembling hope from a wretch like me. I love them all and you should too.


* Ajamu Baraka-  I had every intention of putting Jill Stein on this list. She ran a decent campaign as 2016's only pacifist choice for president. Sadly, however, since the election Jill has chosen to allow herself to become a pawn of the DNC's latest Russophobic witch hunt, calling for a Rust-Belt recount that could only benefit the queen of chaos, Killary Clinton. So, since I can no longer in good conscience say that Jill doesn't suck, I gave her spot to someone who actually fucking deserves it. Her VP, Ajamu Baraka. A legit black radical in the tradition of dudes like Stokely Carmichael and W.E.B. Dubois, who had the balls to call his former running mates recount bullshit and hopefully, just maybe, will have the balls to deny her the Green Party nomination in 2020. Come on Ajamu, we're counting on you.

* Angela Keaton-  Since childhood, I've always secretly wanted a sister. Chalk it up to being a genderqueer child in a mostly cis-male household. But for whatever reason, I've spent most of my life collecting sister figures. None have been finer than Angela Keaton, antiwar.com's dangerously overworked executive director and all around libertarian riot grrrl. Bikini Kill's classic "Rebel Girl" could have easily been written about her. No one online has been more helpful, more giving, more patient or more kind to me personally than AK. In fact, there is probably about a 90% chance that if your looking at this site right now, it's probably largely thanks to her. I'm proud to call her a friend, an allie and a mentor. Angela Keaton is who I want to be when I grow up.

* Colin Kaepernik-  I hate football but Colin Kaepernik is my favorite football player. Mostly because he seems to have devoted himself entirely to pissing off the average jock. I can't tell you dick about his stats or skills or weapons or whatever the fuck sports people care about. I can tell you, however, that whenever he makes the news, whether it's for protesting the National Anthem, calling out the American police state, defending the late Fidel Castro or refusing to throw his vote away on a sick fuck like Trump or Clinton, it puts a big shit-eating grin on my face. Keep up the good work Colin. It's nice to see an athlete in the news for something other than knocking his wife's teeth out. Steven A. Smith can eat my hairy asshole.

* Adam Reed and Matt Thompson-  The mad genius' behind treasured TV cult classics like Sealab 2021 and Frisky Dingo, not to mention the best animated show on television, Archer. Adam and Matt have been making brilliantly sick cartoons since the turn of the Millennium and they have yet to disappoint me once. Absurd, vulgar, literate, profane and above all endlessly quotable- "Phrasing, boom!" "Slideshow! she's in it." "Chinatown's got something for errvrybody." -Their work has served as the airbag for the endless car crash that is my life.

* Tulsi Gabbard-  Slideshow! she's in it....  Sorry, hard to turn off, but aside from being in my own personal slideshow (if you have to ask, don't), the Representative for Hawaii's 2nd Congressional District is also probably Washington's most consistent voice for peace since Ron Paul's retirement. Showing an endearing, Kucinich-esque willingness to piss off the cruise-missile progressives in her own party, the Iraq war vet and current Army National Guard MP has, in only the past few weeks, broke party protocol by becoming the first Democrat in Congress to meet with he who shall not be named at Trump Tower (wait, oops) in an attempt to convince the President Elect to stand by his word (or one of them at least) and fuck off out of Syria, then punctuated the point by introducing the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, which would finally block tax payer dollars from flowing to ISIS, Al-Nusra or their derelict sponsors in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. If Tulsi keeps this up, I might have to rejoin the Democratic Party to vote for her in 2020. Not sure if I should thank or curse her for that predicament but she's definitely earned her place on this list.

* Thomas L. Knapp-  Though he'll always be Tom the moderator from antiwar.com to me, Mr. Knapp has spent a lifetime righteously raging against the machine. From Act-Up to A.N.S.W.E.R. to his unofficial role as the Don Quixote of doomed third party candidacies, including his own, Tom is a tireless crusader for all the right things in a world too mad to appreciate it. He's also a friend who never stops teaching me new things, whether I want to learn them or not. He's made me a better writer and a better revolutionary and I thank him for this. You can find his work on his blog Kn@ppster and the Garrison Center where he serves as director and senior new analyst.

* Mitski-  Mitski Miyawaki was already the best thing to happen to alternative rock in ages before she released her fourth album, Puberty 2, this year. A reverb drenched, heart breaking and fearlessly naked self-portrait of a biracial twenty-something woman trying to figure herself out in an increasingly xenophobic and chauvinistic nation. Puberty 2 is far and above the greatest album of the year, plunging Mitski into the realm of feminist rock visionaries like Patti Smith, P.J. Harvey and Courtney Love.

* Beppe Grillo-  Beppe Grillo is insane. He also might be the best thing to happen to Italy since Antonio Negri (Google it, you rube). The politically incorrect, Ferrari driving, stand-up turned blogger turned cyber-anarchist anti-hero is kind of like a perverse mix of Ralph Nader, Abbie Hoffman, Willy Wonka and Tyler Durdin. At the helm of his equally idiosyncratic Five Star Movement, Beppe has repeatedly taken on the notoriously corrupt Italian establishment and won, most recently with his triumph over Italian Prime Minister and NATO play-thing Matteo Renzi's attempt to castrate Italian democracy via referendum which ended with Renzi's resignation after the Five Star lead "Vote No" movement left his dreams of Duce-dom in tatters. What's next for Beppe's radicals? Hopefully an even bigger victory in 2018 then their 2013 general election upset, which may see Italy join it's northern neighbors, Switzerland, in embracing direct democracy and rejecting the EU. Fingers Crossed.

* Matt Stone and Trey Parker-  In 2012, Matt and Trey, the cheeky bastards behind America's most beloved, foul mouthed, animated social satire, South Park, found themselves at a creative in-pass. After over a dozen seasons and the surprise success of their Broadway musical, The Book of Mormon, they were bored with their meal-ticket but trapped in a long-term contract with Comedy Central. Most animators would have simply sucked it up and phoned it in. But Matt and Trey aren't most animators. They decided that if they were stuck in South Park then South Park would have to change. The results of this gamble? Miraculously, the show got even better. Stretching their brutally honest and poignant brand of satire into story-lines that lasted entire seasons and diving deeper into the development of their characters, Matt and Trey built on their already near flawless legacy and made the last several seasons of South Park, the best seasons of South Park, with this years twentieth season, an epic exploration of the nature of Trolling, sexism, anti-trolling and anti-sexism, brash and brilliant enough to enlighten and enrage everyone, myself included. Bravo.

* Birgitta Jonsdottir-  I love Iceland. The Volcanoes. The black sand beaches. The quirky art rock bands. It's little wonder that the island is my go to destination whenever I threaten to leave this goddamn country for one reason or another. And, in spite of global warming, Iceland's actually getting cooler, thanks largely to the rise of Wikileaks vet Birgitta Jonsdottir and her Pirate Party, who threaten to return the island to it's anarchist roots, with their recent electoral gains based on their promise of direct democracy, net neutrality and the worlds first crowd-sourced constitution. They are also pushing to offer full refuge and citizenship for Edward Snowden. Save a cottage for me Birgitta. I should be along shortly.

* Mariela Castro-  There's a new revolution going on in Cuba and it's better than radical, it's queer. After decades of stagnant Soviet era homophobia, Cuba has jumped to the forefront of LGBT rights in the global south and it's largely thanks to Mariela Castro, the daughter of current president Raul Castro and late feminist revolutionary Vilma Espin. As director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education, Mariela has nearly single-handedly made queer liberation an integral part of the Cuban Revolution, even going so far as to pass a measure that provides sex-change surgery free of charge as part of Cuba's National Healthcare Program. Mariela has added to the already legendary revolutionary legacy of the Castro's and seems poised to bring that legacy into the Twenty-First Century.

* St. Vincent-  There are far too few truly unique voices in music today and you would be hard pressed to find one more unique than Annie Clark's who has set college radio on fire as St. Vincent. Her music is undefinable. A veritable genre upon itself, shape shifting seamlessly between pop and avante garde, digital and analogue, overt and subliminal, until the borders evaporate entirely, the distinctions are non-existent and what your left with is something akin to a new language. One no one can speak but her. But one we somehow all understand regardless. St. Vincent isn't an artist. She's an alchemist, a magician, a witch. And I can hardly wait to hear her next spell.

* Adam Kokesh-  I was born in 1988 but I miss the Sixties. I'm not talking about Woodstock, the Kennedy's and all that Tom Hanks approved, limousine-liberal bullshit. The hippies can eat their flowers. I wanna know where did all the flaming dollars go. The Sixties I miss were defined by Malcolm X, the MC5 and Karl Hess. And that's why I love Adam Kokesh. The one modern-day activist who truly embodies that renegade spirit of yesteryear. Whether he's shouting down war pigs like like Alberto Gonzales and John McCain or loading a twelve gauge on Freedom Plaza, the decorated Iraq War veteran is the living embodiment of the Second American Revolution he has promised to peacefully ignite. And Adam has saved his greatest stunt for 2020, when he aims to mount a campaign for the presidency on the platform of liquidating the Federal Government entirely. Don't get me wrong, that's one revolution that this mutualist well-fare-queen isn't quite ready for yet. But that doesn't mean that the very thought of it doesn't put a great big smile on my bearded face and a great big hard-on in my panties. Mmmmmm! You smell that? Smells like flaming dollar bills. Smells like 1969.

* Lisa Reid-  They say that behind every great man is a great woman. Well, behind every great gendequeer there's a great mother. After all, they made us this way, didn't they? Regardless, they don't make them any greater than mine. Lisa Turner Reid is more than just my mother. She's my best friend. And if that makes me a fag, then I'll wear that slur with pride. Our relationship is kind of like the Gilmore Girls, only Lorelei is a Catholic zealot and Rory is a 300 pound, bearded, anarchist with gender issues. Through everything, through the blasphemy and the mental illness and the Lyme disease and the gender dysphoria and the foul language and the prescription drugs and the blatant anti-Americanism, my mother, the conservative daughter of a Marine Corps. officer has stood defiantly by my side and I couldn't possibly thank her enough, so this spot on my blog will have to do. Mom, you're politically and spiritually nuts but you definitely don't suck. To quote Neko Case- This tornado loves you.

Well that's it folks. That's my fucking list. Sixteen people who matter. Sixteen people who make this fucked up planet worth fighting for. Sixteen people who don't suck! Since this will probably be the last post I write this year, I wish you all a happy holiday, regardless of whatever that fucking holiday is. And if you don't have one, make one. If you've taken the time to read my latest ramblings, you more than deserve it.

As always,


Peace, Love and Empathy- CH