Jacob Miller - Jamaica 1978 - You cannot more serious dub than this...

Public Enemy - The Greatest Hip Hop group of All Time...

Here's the proof

Agnostic Front, the inner-city summer anthem...

This should be the summer anthem of the city streets! Agnostic Front's first two albums should be blasting from the iPod of every pissed off kid walking down the street who feels a sense of indignation towards social injustice. It's funny saying this because AF were sometimes considered a right-wing band in the 80s, a rather dumb assumption in retrospect.

Too bad most "kids" now listen to pure shit like Wiz Khalifa or screamo. The only thing worse is the permament damage the oversized plugs in their earlobes will leave. 

3 Knights: Jarobi, Dres, and Sadat X have made the best hip hop single so far this year...

And the video is tight just like the classic videos that were playing on YoMtv raps and VideoBox between 91' and 93'.

All three of these men had something to do with the best hip hop record records that came out in the early 90s. Hearing Jarobi show his talents with evitAN is a testament that if he didn't leave Tribe Called Quest to become a chef as documented in Michael Rappaport's Tribe Called Quest documentary, then Tip and Phife wouldn't have ended everything so uninspired.

evitaN's single shares something Johan Santana pitching the Mets first no-hitter two weeks back. They both represent the ability to transcend mediocity and be as good as you were in your prime. And that's how you know you're relevant. Dres proves he still got that smooth and all over the place flow that made the first Black Sheep record such a classic. And Jarobi's verse is a chill down the spine of the listener who wondered what Jarobi would have been like on all those early Tribe Called Quest records. Needless to say, he could have easily spit rhymes just as good as any guest who appeared on The Low End Theory or the Midnight Marauder record. It's a shame, at least to a young man in his early thirties whose devotion to hip hop was solidified by in part to Tribe Called Quest's Low End Theory back in his junior high days, that Jarobi split. And that's why evitaN, when they put out something like "3 Kings" or their other video that dealt with the Occupy Wall Street movement, show us hip hop veterans can still make relavent music, reflecting why the hip hop being made now that gets downloaded or bought by kids now is shallow, corporate crap.

brooklyn is in the house, so muthafuck rico sauve

Das Efx - East Coast

Chomsky Comes to Harlem

Chomsky discusses the corporate attack on education, a pertinent subject for Harlem, as it becomes another urban laborotory for non-unionized charter schools that share the unspoken desire to dismantle traditional public education and replace it with a corporate model.

President Three Day Weekend

When you don't have to go work in the morning, Sunday night can be pretty sweet. If I was running for president I would have one platform, but a platform so near and dear to the American laborer's overworked inner-being that it naturally transcends rhetoric about saving the economy and national security. I'm talking about making into law three day weekend for everyone. Think of it, one more day of weekend boozing, catching up on sitcoms, laying on the beach, and not having to get the kids to the factory they call a school. 


I'm finally bringing a platform that can unite all Americans, the Three Day Weekend platform! The only political issue most people actually care about.


What we have now with the two day weekend has been a disaster for centuries. It's resulted in a workforce that is exhausted and cannot enjoy an evening PBS special past 10PM without worrying about not being able to get up in the morning. Sticking to Saturday and Sundays as the only two days of leisure isn't good for the soul. And it's not going to improve the economy. The three day weekend will...So turn on the public television, make a donation that costs you the same as it does buying chai lattes during the week. The tote bag you get in return will look pretty sharp when you use it to tote a few essentials at the beach this summer. It lets the world know you're an enlightened member of society who doesn't necessarily believe the hype of FOX or CNN. 



Why let France and Greece corner the market on leisure and time off from work? 

They never played this on Yo Mtv Raps

A short letter to Jay-Z

Dear Jay-Z, 

I'm sure you are well aware that before you become the biggest rapper on the planet, there was Big Daddy Kane, who you should respectfully hand over at least 5% of your royalties in order to pay homage. Big Daddy Kane's style you emulated. It's BIg Daddy Kane that gave Brooklyn cats like you and Biggie a career. Remember when you appeared in Kane's Show and Prove video with ODB? But Jay, you have paid mad dues. It's your best interest to do so in order to appear authentic. Still, I'm left with a sad taste in my mouth because your wealth is something that occupies your time and has allowed you to team up with the the same forces that are responsible for the worst excesses of the gentrification in Bed-sty.  How many families in Fort Green have the Brooklyn Nets displaced? Did you go down to Zucotti Park like Russell Simmons and represent those disenfranchised and neglected by corporate ubiquitousness that first goes after a person's creative need to be original?  

Only two good things came out of Houston: D.R.I. and Bill Hicks

And they both did, not only an excellent job at exposing American hypocrisy through their art, but made an everlasting impact. How many hardcore and thrash bands tried to sound like D.R.I. in the late 80s and into the 90s? How many stand-up comedians would sell their kids into slavery to have just a morsel of Bill Hick's talent?

Black Star - Respiration

This is what plays in my fancy Audio-Technica M50 headphones (http://www.audio-technica.com/cms/headphones/57a64f4a9fdbefd9/index.html) when I feel something redeeming about living at the moment history ends, capitalism fails, the most important truths become too hard ignore after  being repressed for far too long, and the dichotomy of human nature (barbaric agression vs. genuine altruism) makes itself lucid. During this time, I also forget that I'm not a fan of rapper Common because to me, he's Kayne West Lite.

RIP Adam Yauch

A person like Adam Yauch only comes around maybe once during a lifetime. He leaves the world after giving it so much. The music his band made will always be an inspiration and his band introduced me, and I'm sure plenty of other people who spent their teenage years in the 90s, to countless other bands and musicians. His spirit was infectious; whether Yauch spoke on political issues, whether he embraced Tibetan Buddhism, made records, produced records, directed films, or went down snow-covered mountains on his snowboard, he had figured out life, if you had a clear mind, was a creative journey that had to be grabbed by the balls.


Beastie Boys - Namaste (1992)

http://www.jukebo.com/beastie-boys/music-clip,namaste,rrvqv.html (Better sounding link)

A butterfly floats on the breeze of a sun lit day
As I feel this reality gently fade away
Riding on a thought to see where it's from
Gliding through a memory of a time yet to come
Smoke paints the air Swirling images through my mind
Like a whirlpool spin beginning to unwind
And I stand at the edge cautiously awaiting
As time slips by
Carefully navigating by the stars in the sky
And I sit And I think to myself
And on the horizon the sun light begins to climb
And it seems like it's been so long since he shined
But I'm sure it was only yesterday


Namaste 

A cold chill of fear cut through me
I felt my heart contract
To my mind I brought the image of light
And I expanded out of it
My fear was just a shadow
And then a voice spoke in my head
And she said dark is not the opposite of light
It's the absence of light
And I thought to myself
She knows what she's talking about
And for a moment I know
What it was all about.

Those in the mainstream press who redundantly claim the Beasties and Adam Yauch brought hip hop to suburbia simply don't get what hip hop is about or what the Beastie Boys were actually doing...

To understand what the Beasties and Adam Yauch meant to hip hop, Pete Nice of 3rd Bass, the other white rap group that signed with Def Jam after the Beasties and who  questioned the legitimacy of the three white Beastie goofs even though they shared stages with Run DMC, Public Enemy, and Whoodini, not tomention the four legendary legendary black punk hardcore innovators known as  Bad Brains during the Rat Cage and A7 hardcore days, before they came out on the hip hop tip. 

3rd Bass may have vented their jealousy of the Beastie Boys with a classic hip hop diss, but there was also something else that consumed the psyches of MC Search and Pete Nice, something white rappers don't experience in today's consumer-based  hip hop culture, something that Yauch too was aware of which moved him and his two other Beastie bandmates into a direction that was concerned not with what the music industry had put in place, but making music that hip hop connoisseurs  could say was the good shit. Paul's Boutique stood the test of time. So has Check Your Head and Ill Communication. Unfortunately, Third Bass could never put anything out as good as their first record. Considering Pete Nice's testimony below, it's clear that he regrets ever dissing the Beasties though he the nostalgia of hip hop won't allow him to fully admit his regret. 

Yet, there's a saving grace for Pete Nice and it doesn't involve his shady dealings with baseball memorabilia because he concludes that for him and Yauch (and assumably the rest of the Beasties) it was not about reaching white kids in the suburbs. This wasn't the goal. It's always been about making the good shit, the kind of of shit that bumps from cars driven by native urban kids during the hot summer night. It's about music, nothing more, nothing less. 

peter 'pete nice' nash

Last week, after learning that Adam "MCA" Yauch of the Beastie Boys had died at 47, Gawker asked sometimes Deadspin contributor Peter Nash—also known as Prime Minister Pete Nice of 3rd Bass—to share his thoughts about MCA's legacy and being a white MC during the golden age of New York hip hop. He obliged.

Adam "MCA" Yauch and I had a few things in common. We shared a record label for a minute, along with some managers and a mess of mutual friends. We were also two white MCs in the ‘80s—Yauch with the Beastie Boys, and me with 3rd Bass—and that was enough to give way to beef between our crews.

The golden age of New York rap ended a long time ago, and with MCA's death I'm reminded of what's already been relegated to the milk crates—all those vinyl records in their distinct burgundy-and-black Def Jam 12-inch covers. I had never really known Yauch. When I heard that he passed last Friday, all I could really recall was having taken a picture of him and Flavor Flav (both wearing yarmulkes) at our manager Lyor Cohen's wedding in the Dominican Republic in 1988. Back in the day, I'd bumped into him at the Milky Way or Hotel Amazon on Rivington Street when Public Enemy was performing.

The rest was all on the mic. MC Serch and I had clashed with the Beastie Boys ever since Licensed To Ill was released on Def Jam. One thing about white MCs is that we all have chips on our shoulders bigger than Chubb Rock and Heavy D combined. No other white boy could have been the first to rhyme before you; no other white boy could have been nicer on the mic than you; no other white boy could have rocked fresher Nike kicks from Jew-Man than you. And no other white kid could have been the original b-boy to show his pale face at NorthMore to see the Funky Four or at the Latin Quarters later on to see Scott La Rock and KRS-One. Back then, seeing a white boy at a New York City nightspot was like a Sasquatch sighting. Saying you were in the spot was like a badge of honor. And as far as we were concerned, we were the only white boys in the room.

MC Serch and I had friends who'd grown up with and gone to school with Ad-Rock and Mike D at St. Ann's in the Heights. Mark Pearson, my college roommate at Columbia, and his boys John Merz (later known as the Reanimator) and Dan Kealy (later known as MC Disagree) had always considered themselves hip-hop connoisseurs way before Ad-Rock and Mike-D were down. Blake Lethem was another friend who'd grown up with Pearson and Merz, and was known in Fort Greene as Kid Benneton (and years later served as the inspiration for the protagonist in his brother Jonathan's Fortress of Solitude). Lethem was one of the original white MCs. He later went to Manhattan's High School of Music and Art with Serch, Slick Rick, and Dana Dane. Almost by osmosis, Serch and I absorbed the white b-boy angst of each of those characters, and when we joined forces working with producer Sam Sever and Def Jam and Rush rep Dante Ross — two more early pale-faced hip hop figures with ties to the Beastie Boys — we were primed to erupt. Ever since the Beastie Boys blew up in the summer of 1986, all we'd heard was that we weren't them. Record labels had no idea how to perceive our music on its own.


But it was also around this time that the Beasties and their producer, Rick Rubin, were falling out with Def Jam, and Russell Simmons had just put me and Serch on the Rush artist roster. In just a matter of time, we signed with Def Jam and recorded a Beastie Boys dis record called "Sons of 3rd Bass." "Counterfeit style, born sworn and sold out with high voice distorted," I rapped in the second verse, "If a Beast'll wish play fetus, I'd have him aborted." I saw Ad-Rock at a barbershop near Canal Street not long after and we didn't even exchange words.



Our mugs soon showed up on the cover of the Village Voice. "White Rappers," the headline read, "Beyond the Beastie Boys: 3rd Bass Breaks the Street Barrier." Soon after, the Beastie Boys released Paul's Boutique on their own label and to much lower sales than their Def Jam debut. People said they'd fallen off; others thought we were just a creation of Russell and Lyor to fill the void they'd left at Def Jam.

A few years later, MCA took his own shots at Serch on "Professor Booty." "You should have never started something that you couldn't finish," he wrapped, "'Cause writin' rhymes to me is like Popeye to spinach."

Through it all, though, I never had any beef with MCA as an artist, or as a person. Sam Sever had always told me he was cool people, and that was good enough for me. In fact, I always felt that MCA's grizzled voice and persona gave the Beastie Boys their real hip hop sensibility, which was something white MCs always had to fight for. This past weekend I listened to a 2008 interview MCA did with Serch in which he said a big influence on his rhyming was Spoonie G's 1979 record "Spoonin' Rap," and you can so clearly hear that influence in his early rhymes. In reality, and despite whatever the Voice cover said, the Beasties had already broken the perceived "street barrier" for white artists performing in a black medium: their 12-inch single off of Licensed in 1986, "Hold it Now, Hit It," had done the job. The record got major play on KISS-FM and WBLS with tons of spins by Red Alert, Chuck Chillout, Mr. Magic, and Marley Marl. For any MC at that time, white or black, recognition like that on the Friday or Saturday mix-shows was the epitome of success.

And for white MCs, it wasn't easy. Bill Adler, the publicist/in-house psychologist for Def Jam and Rush, was around to see us — along with other white MCs—struggle for radio play. He talked about Yauch over the weekend and nailed what I think is MCA's musical legacy:

Yauch was the best conventional rapper of the three guys, he's the one who sounded most like a "rapper" as far as I'm concerned but he was also a musician and he was a producer, so he always had a strong hand in the production of the band's recording and I think his personal journey must've had its affect on his two partners as well.

What Adler was really saying is that Yauch sounded black. He had a voice and cadence that made him sound like the other MCs on the scene. He could blend in. The Beasties could never have conquered the pop music scene without the quick wit and Jerry Lewis moves brought to the table by MCA's rhyming counterparts. What Mike D and Ad-Rock brought to the Beastie Boys shaped their identity, for sure but without MCA's authentic voice and sound, could they really have recorded a track like "Hold It Now, Hit It"?

After "Fight For Your Right to Party" blew up, every A&R rep was looking for something similar: White Boy Rap/Rock shit. To put it in perspective, the concept of a white kid rhyming—let alone making records—was nonexistent in the early '80s. And outside of a small group of people scattered throughout New York's five boroughs, the white audience for hip hop was similarly scarce. Serch and I both started out rhyming off a hammered-out beat on lunchroom tables. The kids we hung out with happened to be black. Eventually, we started writing rhymes, and it took some time before we had the swagger to actually perform them or even battle other MCs. If you were whack, you'd know soon enough from the response you got.

When the Beasties and Serch each dropped their first records, nobody was really making videos—so the kids listening would just assume the records were by black artists. My old manager, the late Lumumba Carson (also known as Professor X of X-Clan) and others often said that if you didn't have a visual on me and Serch—if you only heard us on the radio or in the club—you'd think we were black. Still, we had trouble evading the stigma our whiteness carried. It wasn't even until our record, Steppin' To The A.M., played on Video Music Box that people's heads got fucked up by the fact that we were white. No one could just try to sound black—you either had it or you didn't. You were nice or you were the proverbial sucker MC.

MCA was nice. In 1986, as Adler recognized, he and the Beastie Boys joined Run-DMC on the infamous Raising Hell tour. It was a seminal moment in their career:

I remember the Beastie Boys go out at the bottom of the bill on the Raising Hell Tour in 1986—It's Run-DMC, LL Cool J, and Whodini—and the Beastie Boys scampered out for 25 minutes at the beginning of the night every time. They were playing nothing but arenas and the crowd was about 95 percent black, so you'd imagine that that'd be a tough crowd for the Beastie Boys, but they went out and the music was strong and the performance was strong and they made friends every single night all summer long. It was not a problem, they were accepted because they were wonderful.

Years later, Yauch and the Beastie Boys ended up reinventing themselves and became as much a part of the alternative rock landscape as full-fledged musicians who transcended their early roots in hip-hop. Still, they recognized their debt to black music and the audiences that welcomed them on that first Raising Hell tour. On those stages, MCA experienced what only a select few white MCs could ever lay claim to: he moved the crowd alongside the likes of Run, D and Jay, LL, Jalil, Ecstasy, and Grandmaster Dee. 'Nuf said.

MCA did it all in his career. Aside from the NYC radio play or the Run-DMC tour, the only marker that might have had similar career importance was having your own record jump off at the city clubs. One night, I remember, I went to the Latin Quarters with Lumumba to see Just-Ice perform his hits, "Latoya" and "Gangster of Hip-Hop." Before the show, "Hold It Now" blared on the house speakers, and DMX, Just-Ice's human beat-box, approached me. He gave me a pound and a hug and then complimented me on the song. He thought I was MCA, I realized.

At the time, I was still waiting on my own record; being mistaken for MCA was salt on a deep open wound. But now it feels different—like an induction into some obscure fraternal order of cracker MC's. An Elk's Club for white boys who rhymed on records for Def Jam.

Lumumba just laughed his ass off. "All of you white boys look alike."



Peter Nash, formerly Prime Minister Pete Nice of Def Jam's 3rd Bass, is the author of two baseball books and also writes for Haulsofshame.com. He is currently working on his upcoming book, Hauls of Shame: The Cooperstown Conspiracy and the Madoff of Memorabilia.

http://gawker.com/5908629/requiem-for-a-white-mc

NPR needs to replace that Windbag Terry Gross with Richard Belzer immediately

We all know Terry Gross sucks. The problem is we never complain about it and put up with phony crap every afternoon when we're driving home from work.

It would be in the best interest of NPR to fire Terry Gross and replace her with Richard Belzer. Below is the proof.

How Bush turned a projected 6 trillion dollars of surplus into 6 trillion of debt.

http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/how_george_bush_turned_a_projected_6_trillion_surplus_into_6_trillion_of_de

Add Idaho to the list of asshole states - Chuck Winder, Idaho Lawmaker, Suggests Women Use Rape As Excuse For Abortions.

   

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/03/20/chuck-winder-rape-abortions_n_1366994.html

Paul Krugman, the only thing worth reading in the New York Times

There's liberal points of view that blend rather nicely into the narrative offered by the political establishment. More often than not, this is what allows the right-wing and powerful democrats to cater to big business at the expense of the working-class.

And hen there's the liberal point of view, held occasionally by people like Paul Krugman that express true dissent


Plutocracy, Paralysis, Perplexity
By PAUL KRUGMAN 5/3/2012

Before the Great Recession, I would sometimes give public lectures in which I would talk about rising inequality, making the point that the concentration of income at the top had reached levels not seen since 1929. Often, someone in the audience would ask whether this meant that another depression was imminent.

Well, whaddya know?

Did the rise of the 1 percent (or, better yet, the 0.01 percent) cause the Lesser Depression we’re now living through? It probably contributed. But the more important point is that inequality is a major reason the economy is still so depressed and unemployment so high. For we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion — both of which have a lot to do with the distorting effects of great wealth on our society.

Put it this way: If something like the financial crisis of 2008 had occurred in, say, 1971 — the year Richard Nixon declared that “I am now a Keynesian in economic policy” — Washington would probably have responded fairly effectively. There would have been a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of strong action, and there would also have been wide agreement about what kind of action was needed.

But that was then. Today, Washington is marked by a combination of bitter partisanship and intellectual confusion — and both are, I would argue, largely the result of extreme income inequality.

On partisanship: The Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have been making waves with a new book acknowledging a truth that, until now, was unmentionable in polite circles. They say our political dysfunction is largely because of the transformation of the Republican Party into an extremist force that is “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” You can’t get cooperation to serve the national interest when one side of the divide sees no distinction between the national interest and its own partisan triumph.

So how did that happen? For the past century, political polarization has closely tracked income inequality, and there’s every reason to believe that the relationship is causal. Specifically, money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.

And the takeover of half our political spectrum by the 0.01 percent is, I’d argue, also responsible for the degradation of our economic discourse, which has made any sensible discussion of what we should be doing impossible.

Disputes in economics used to be bounded by a shared understanding of the evidence, creating a broad range of agreement about economic policy. To take the most prominent example, Milton Friedman may have opposed fiscal activism, but he very much supported monetary activism to fight deep economic slumps, to an extent that would have put him well to the left of center in many current debates.

Now, however, the Republican Party is dominated by doctrines formerly on the political fringe. Friedman called for monetary flexibility; today, much of the G.O.P. is fanatically devoted to the gold standard. N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University, a Romney economic adviser, once dismissed those claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves as “charlatans and cranks”; today, that notion is very close to being official Republican doctrine.

As it happens, these doctrines have overwhelmingly failed in practice. For example, conservative goldbugs have been predicting vast inflation and soaring interest rates for three years, and have been wrong every step of the way. But this failure has done nothing to dent their influence on a party that, as Mr. Mann and Mr. Ornstein note, is “unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.”

And why is the G.O.P. so devoted to these doctrines regardless of facts and evidence? It surely has a lot to do with the fact that billionaires have always loved the doctrines in question, which offer a rationale for policies that serve their interests. Indeed, support from billionaires has always been the main thing keeping those charlatans and cranks in business. And now the same people effectively own a whole political party.

Which brings us to the question of what it will take to end this depression we’re in.

Many pundits assert that the U.S. economy has big structural problems that will prevent any quick recovery. All the evidence, however, points to a simple lack of demand, which could and should be cured very quickly through a combination of fiscal and monetary stimulus.

No, the real structural problem is in our political system, which has been warped and paralyzed by the power of a small, wealthy minority. And the key to economic recovery lies in finding a way to get past that minority’s malign influence.

CPAC - An Event to Support Racism. Here's the proof:

With white pro-Republican rappers throwing around the N word and white nationalists invited to speak, it's obvious the GOP has never taken into consideration people of color.

http://gawker.com/5884224/awful-white-rappers-drop-the-n-word-at-cpac-receive-standing-ovation

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/white-nationalist-leader-peter-brimelow-am

As much as the Committee likes to think Gawker sucks and is centered around sensational bullshit, redeemation occurs when they post such things as above.

Noam Chomsky on why American libertarianism means the advocacy of extreme tyranny

“The US stance on libertarianism is quite different. It means extreme advocacy of total tyranny, and private unaccountable tyranny is worse than state tyranny because the public has some control over state tyranny.  The corporate system, as it has evolved in the twentieth century, is pure tyranny, completely unaccountable.  You are inside one of these institutions and you take orders from above and hand it down below [this is hierarchy].”

David Foster Wallace and what a liberal arts education means in our age of multicultural corporate totalatarianism

In 2005, David Foster Wallace gave the commencement speech at Kenyon College.


In the beginning, DFW tells the graduates the standard commencement speeches given by individuals who attempt to show the value of a liberal arts education is not a passé attempt to justify four years of paying college tuition, but something deeper than what appears on the surface, something about how to choose how you construct meaning from experience.


Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.


To most critical observers, higher education in America is in a pretty bad place at the moment. Tuition at state universities continues to raise while programs in the arts and humanities suffer a fate that resembles death due to being underfunded. For-profit schools like the University of Phoenix have made astronomical profits through exploitation by marketing their vocational-based educational programs to society's least educated. The fraud of for-profit colleges starts with grandiose promises of employment in profitable and emerging industries after graduation. The television commercials for these schools feature bright eyed people of all races, genders, and ages who want to get on the fastback and move ahead with a promising career. The worst part is whether or not a student at these diploma mills graduates they are still stuck with paying back student huge loans, meaning your federal tax dollars are subsidizing the profits of the University of Phoenix every time it snatches either a Pell Grant or Federal Direct Loan from a single mother with a GED and three kids to support who is tired of being poor or some stupid schmuck who thought his 40,000 dollar associates degree in computer networking would make him a millionaire. And as long as employment continues to be a dismal prospect, the education ponzi scheme committed by these for-profit education S&P 500 companies like the Apollo Group, who own the University of Phoenix will continue to flourish. The narrative that continues to be replayed involves a depressed economy that has no bearing on the record profits made by the elites who run the biggest banks and own the companies that outsourced American jobs overseas, in the process threatening the cultural life and environment that is not our own. Our system is totalatarian in nature because resistance to what is unjust is met with acts of violence and police brutality. Take the Occupy Wall Street protests across the country as evidence of this repression of democracy.


There is no clear correlation between a doomed economy created by malfaseance and the points DFW makes in his commencement speech about the purpose of a liberal arts education, however, if the liberal arts tradition DFW rightly defends is replaced by a curriculum whose aim is to find employment in an already rotten industry, where class discussions about what it means to be a human being are phased out to make room for business classes, with business ethics only offered on Friday nights, our culture is one railroad stop away from Shithead City, a place where Michelle Bachman is the mayor and Bernie Madoff does your taxes.


Education, formal or informal, is what allows to the social change caused by popular indignation that stemmed from just actions to happen. This is always a rare occurrence. As Noam Chomsky pointed out once, "education is a period of regimentation and control, part of which involves direct indoctrination, providing a system of false beliefs." And this has been largely true ever since the industrial revolution in some capacity. The huge increase of high stake standardized testing in elementary and secondary schools and the noticeable presence of for-profit colleges that advertise in the middle of the work selling the idea that a better life is possible when you get certification in some vocation that you took tens of thousands of dollars in loans to cover tuition should not be a shocking surprise. If education is to be a means of social control, social marginalization, and cherry picking future middle-managers, accountants, and other white-collar cogs that carry out a corporate agendas, the traditional universities, funded by both public and private endowments, has a role to play when making sure the economic system continues to benefit the wealthy corporate elite by providing a place where in between learning some kind of academic discipline that you may or may not base a career, you take can do keg stands and take plenty of bong hits to sow a few wild oats as the cliche goes, because real soon you may be part of the professional or managerial class, no longer concerned about what you think, how you think, and how you construct meaning. 


And at this point, after you've graduated from a four college or even stayed around an extra year or two to get a masters degree, after you took all those cool classes about Greek philosophy and the history of Asia and take bong hits with your buddies as you played Xbox, what DFW said during his commencement speech at Kenyon College is more relevant now than before. 

In whatever position you have as a college educated professional, there may come a time when you have a moment to reflect about the world and how it works, not a conservation about politics with a co-worker about why or why not you're going to vote for Obama this coming November, nor is the conversation of about the economy and how it can get better...No, this moment of reflection goes beyond ideology and has a universal face of human suffering, leading you to think for just a few more moments you live and breathe not with autonomy but by the pulse of something so rotten, so pervasive and controlling, that the only ones who deserve your respect are those who actively oppose the stink and stand up for the interests of those who cannot. Your education has brought you to this fleeting moment, similar to the moment when the prisoner leaves Plato's cave and experiences the clarity of reality where truth is not political but an expression of human nature and its relation to the earth. 

Since this moment is fleeting, your professional responsibilities quickly, much like before, is what consumes. You're the one-dimensional man Marcuse talked about. 

If those people, the ones running the banks and major companies, the ones the Occupy Wall Street protesters stand in opposition to and the ones through a few degrees of separation you work for had actually stuck to the principals that were a part of their fancy elite university provided liberal arts education, our next stop on this train journey might not be Shithead City.

The Dead Kennedys "Kill the Poor" reaches Number One on the Tea Party Pop Singles Chart

Whitesville, Indiana - Having already reached success as a number one single in Czechoslovakia back in 1981, "Kill the Poor" by the Dead Kennedys has taken on a second wind as it reached that magic number one spot this week on the Tea Party Pop Singles chart and has given the people of this small community in the Midwestern heartland a sense of hope and vision. Having once sustained on the light manufacturing and nearby farming that has been replaced by the results of the free market, evident by the franchise restaurants and the chain stores such as Best Buy and Home Depot that line up on the town's main commercial thorough-fare, things have changed in Whitesville since the days of Elvis Presley. However, the unexpected explosion of the song "Kill the Poor" as it blasts from pickup trucks owned and driven by contractors who hire Mexicans for day labor jobs. It also plays a reduced volume at Bell's dinette, the last remaining independently owned eatery in town where you can get a burger and a Budweiser has rejuvenated the spirit of the town.

One person who has seen this rejuvenation first hand is Whitesville Mayor Herb Scott.

"I have never seen any community motivated by a rock and roll song to get patriotic and get back to the old fashioned way of doing things where people took pride in their work and kids were taught the value of a dollar. A lot has changed since I was a boy growing up here. The shoe factory and the bottling plant that employed most of the town for decades is gone, but we have Wal-Mart and Best Buy now. Things don't change for the better all the time, but the change here in Whitesville isn't so bad. As as I said to the kid behind the counter at Burger King the other day when having lunch, no matter how much things change, you always have to be willing to work and do what's right. And that's the message I've witnessed the "Kill the Poor" song have on this community. It's no longer time to be lazy. With the poor gone, it will be time to capture the American spirit that's in our blood. We can finally live up to our potential as Americans now that all the undesirables are gone. My hat goes off to Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys for helping spread such a vision"

While it might be surprising to see a song which topped the charts in a country that was once behind the Iron Curtain, the message of the "Kill the Poor" has genuine relevance to music fans in the Tea Party whose tastes are usually not of the punk rock genre.

Buying the compact disc version of the "Kill the Poor" single for his grandchild at his local Whitesville Wal-Mart instead of downloading it on iTunes because he hates computers and claims he doesn't understand how to use such machines, William Brannon, believes "Kill the Poor" promotes a good message for America's young people. He speaks avidly of lead singer Jello Biafra's vision of a world without the poor.

"I think it's high time that we do something about all these freeloaders those liberals in Washington keep supporting. If we just kill the poor all our problems will be solved. As Jello says, no more welfare tax, the crime rate no more, and all those heathens living in those slums in the cities gone, it will definitely be a new day in America. My family never drove the latest car and dressed in the fanciest clothes, but we worked hard for what had and those virtues of hard work that we followed is why my family and those in our community are separate from the lazy poor, especially those illegal immigrants who collect welfare and get a free education."

The message Brannon is referring come from the explicitness of the lyrics in "Kill the Poor".

The sun beams down on a brand new day/No more welfare tax to pay/Unsightly slums go up in a flashing light/Jobless millions whisked away/At least we have more room to play/All systems go to kill the poor tonight

Tom Stevens, a senior at Whitesville High School and youth minister at his church, has recently become a loyal Dead Kennedys fan and as a result learned how to play guitar. He has recently started his own rock band, The Fuzz. Before he got into the Dead Kennedys, with the exception of his favorite bands Korn and Metallica, Stevens listened to just rap music. Hearing the Dead Kennedys for Stevens had become a defining moment of his youth. As Stevens waxes poetically, it is clear he is a passionate young adult who wants to clean up his country.

"Before the Dead Kennedys, I had no desire to start a band, become famous, and be a true patriot. My band has really been inspired the message of the Dead Kennedys. I never listen to rap anymore. It came to a point where I got sick of these city gangsters talking about shooting rival drug dealers and how much they loved their bling and big booty hoes. I asked myself who am I fooling? I live in Whitesville, Indiana. There's no big booty hoes here and all the drug dealers sell meth. They don't make crack dealer money. They just put everybody around them in danger with their meth labs. All the people who buy their drugs are poor and have been a real eye sore on my community for far too long. The meth dealers here are just like the enabling liberals in office who just want to give these scum more foodstamps and health care. And all those Meth listen to Lil Wayne, Tupac, and Biggie. So I ask what kind of message is this hip hop sending to me and me friends. It's time we ditch the rap crap, stop wearing oversized plain t-shirts that come down to our knees and our hats backwards so we can become the kinds of real Americans that our grandparents would be proud of. Next year I'm going way to college to play football. I also plan to join the Reserves. I have to be a leader on and off the football field and one day maybe on the battlefield. I can't do that if people think I'm some white hip hop gangster acting black. When I started listening to the Dead Kennedys, I realized I needed to start being a real American. And as a matter of fact, me and my bandmates use our music to get out the message that America is the greatest country in the world and if you'd rather sit at home collect welfare, keep having kids while you drink 40s and smoke crack all day, then you're gonna shall I say face the music or be killed. I believe in the message that it's time for all these welfare cheats all around America to start acting like the real patriotic Americans our grandparents were and still are today."

As quick as "Kill the Poor" has climbed up the Tea Party charts, the Dead Kennedy's music has definitely experienced a revival even amongst traditional conservative politicians. On the presidential campaign trail in Des Moine, speaking at a rally sponsored by the local Tea Party chapter, Newt Gingrich walked out to the podium to address two thousand people while the Dead Kennedy's "Holiday in Cambodia" blasted through the PA.

Without question, the appeal of the Dead Kennedy's have had on the Tea Party and the conservative ideals it holds is indicative that the purging of the poor throughout the country will be done with good old fashion American rock and roll as the soundtrack. Ted Nugent's vision is finally coming to fruition.

Login below to Tea Party Patriot Radio to hear "Kill the Poor" and "Holiday in Cambodia"

From S. Korea with love: Warm socks sent to North by balloon Each pair could be traded for a month's supply of food, activists say

It's 2012 and South Koreans are sending warm socks inside balloons to North Korea? Is this a joke?

During the Cold War, there was Radio Free Europe to spread the word about the evils of totalitarian dictatorship of communist regimes, maximizing technology to the fullest with radio signals. Now, South Korea is not a country of neophytes. Those precious high def Samsung or LG TVs you stare at when walking through BestBuy are made by South Korean companies. Your friend swears the new Hyundai car he recently bought is just as good as a Honda is made in Korea. Apparently South Korean aerospace research is pretty up to par as well.

So why Balloons? It must be a symbolic gesture and sometimes symbolism is what springs humanitarian deeds.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46172516/ns/world_news-asia_pacific/#.TyS_mJhI70A

This guy must be in cahoots with Gingrich - South African doctor accused of creating viruses that would only attack black people.

The BBC has reported on 27 January 2012  South African doctor, Wouter Basson's application to drop charges of unprofessional misconduct due to  producing illegal drugs during the apartheid era and creating viruses that would only kill black people has been rejected.

Now if a doctor prescribes oxycontin to a kid in college who just wants to get high, that's professional misconduct. In the enlightened world, a world that any decent person wants to live, creating viruses that would only kill black people would be called genocide.

Yet, nobody should be surprised by this: we're talking SOUTH AFRICA!

Compared to Gingrich's racist desire to have black kids work as janitors because it builds the character needed to assimilate into the great white world, Basson is the late 20th century version of Josef Mengele.

BBC:South Africa: Wouter Basson to answer misconduct case

AMY GOODMAN IS MY HOMEGIRL

Apple's new executive is a bigger piece of scum than Steve Jobs...At least Steve Jobs did acid and was a bohemian in the beginning.

Tim Cook wants you to believe that Chinese slave labor is something Apple is concerned about. 

Another thing, it's about time the New York Times has decided to do some reporting on the exploitation Apple is guilty in China. 

Apple's Tim Cook responds to accounts of poor factory conditions - LA Times

January 27, 2012 |  4:38 pm

Apple Inc.'s chief executive responded to a wave of negative attention to conditions at overseas factories that make its products, saying the insinuation that Apple doesn't care about the welfare of its workers is "offensive."

"Unfortunately, some people are questioning Apple’s values today," Tim Cook wrote in an e-mail to Apple employees. "Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern."

A series of articles in the New York Times has brought new focus on Apple's highly profitable production strategy, which relies heavily on Chinese workers who live in dormlike factories and spend many hours assembling devices. The safety records and working conditions in those factories have been questioned, and Apple's labor practices received intense scrutiny in 2010, when more than a dozen workers at  Chinese iPhone plants committed suicide. 

The later New York Times article quoted former Apple and Foxconn employees saying that Apple prioritized profit and production speed above worker welfare. 

The company was trying to address problems in its factories, one of the sources said, “but most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”

In Cook's note, first published by 9to5Mac, he said that Apple was a world leader in improving overseas working conditions, and will continue to work hard to find and fix problems.

"We will continue to dig deeper, and we will undoubtedly find more issues," Cook wrote.  "What we will not do — and never have done — is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain. On this you have my word."

Whenever I think about how JP Morgan donated 4.6 million to the NYPD, I start humming Junior Murvin's Police and Thieves

JP Morgan Hearts the NYPD - Thinkprogress.org

Arizona, proving it's the top asshole state in America, is becoming the number one hotspot to start your career as a Nazi!

UNLESS YOU SPEAK SPANISH AND HAVE DARK SKIN

With such kick ass legislation as SB 1070, also know as state sanctioned racism, awesome county sheriffs like Joe Arpaio (Sheriff Arpaio's Office Targeted Latinos Says Justice Department - NYT ) and a statewide ban on all ethnic studies programs in public schools, Arizona is quickly becoming America's number one hotspot for young Nazis. 


Nazism has become so popular in Arizona that the statewide ethnic book ban has forced the Tuscan Unified School district to pull even Shakespeare's Tempest from the shelves of school libraries. This is good news for all Nazis in Arizona. 


Editor of the commonly taught book in Tuscan schools, Rethinking Columbus, Bill Bigelow (no relation Duece Bigelow or wrestler Bam Bam Bigelow) tells the New York Daily News, “By ordering teachers to remove ‘Rethinking Columbus,’ the Tucson school district has shown tremendous disrespect for teachers and students”. - http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ethnic-studies-book-ban-arizona-include-shakespeare-tempest-article-1.1007105


If Bigelow is correct, it is prime time for Nazism in Arizona!  

Disguised as common sense, neo-fascist venom makes its rounds on the internet. Represented and supported by the Dissemination Committee, Jesus of Nazareth son of God, hopes to become US president and stop such disguised neo-fascism.

If you copy and paste the following the following into a Google search, you will see a prime example of propaganda that is spread all over the internet and attempts to manifest itself in the consciousness of any American who has access to the internet, which in our current age is most of us: 


If you cross the North Korean border illegally, you get 12 yrs. hard labor. If you cross the Afghanistan border illegally, you get shot. Two Americans just got eight years for crossing the Iranian border. If you cross the U. S. border illegally you get a job, a drivers license, food stamps, a place to live, health care, housing & child benefits, education, & a tax free business for 7 yrs ...No wonder we are a country in debt. Re-post if you agree..


How the Dissemination Committee responds to such contemporary right-wing propaganda: 


We do not agree, therefore we will certainly not repost nor will we take part in this right-wing charade of blaming the most powerless among us for our tanked economy. What makes the above rhetoric does is similar to blaming a person hit by a bus driven by a drunk driver on the fact a person wanted to do was cross the street.  

Let Jesus of Nazareth son of God further explain our position: 

The borders of this great American nation of ours should be open to anyone from any country and those who turn up on our soil, rich in the blood of massacred Indians (the feather Indians not the Dot Indians that make kick ass curry) be granted full citizenship and be given the same perks we Americans only sometimes cherish.

This is one of the few decent things we can do as proud Americans who are lucky enough to have been born in the greatest country in the world. For far too long have our awesome corporate way of life left its detrimental footprint on the natural resources possessed by other countries who are all too often defenseless. While wrecking environmental havoc in these countries, we also committing grave human rights abuses in the process. Look at Dow Chemical in India, Coca-Cola in Columbia, and United Fruit in Latin American. Furthermore, and make no mistake about it, NAFTA - the North American Free Trade Agreement - signed into effect by that great liberal Bill Clinton - has been an economic and environmental nightmare for much of the Mexican population. What these totally awesome overseas business ventures have done is shine a light upon and exemplify how much better our ways of free market capitalism is to any other alternative that that would put people over profit. 


Every time us Americans start dropping bombs in the name of democracy and security on innocent civilians far away in places with strange names most Americans are too busy playing Angry Birds to learn how to pronounce correctly, it's obviously America that's doing the fucking. And what good sweet fuckers we are...Everybody around the world wants to fuck like us, especially the UK whose banking and financial malfeasance makes our own American banking thieves like Goldman Sachs, MF Global, and Country-Wide envious. China wants to be like us too. They even have their own version of Google, although our Google is way better because nobody censors us...Those Chinese bastards will have to learn that if you want to be the best fucker on the block, you have to give your citizens a little freedom every now and then to criticize the government. Luckily what the Chinese have learned from our best corporations is how to disregard labor and environmental laws, which is a very good thing because it allows our favorite companies like Wal-Mart and Apple to come in, set up shop and reek huge profits. And we all know in the new century we've embarked upon not much as changed except decades ago the saying what was good for General Motors was good for America has changed to what's good for Wal-Mart and Haliburton is good for America!

So I, Jesus Of Nazareth son of God, in my campaign to become President of the United States am running under the platform that we as Americans continue the good fuck, but let's give some other people a turn in the fucking. If we don't allow the Mexicans who come fleeing into our country feeling from the savage drug cartel violence that has a little something to do with our love of cocaine and heroin, or the Mexican farmers who can no longer survive due to the cimmerian consequences of NAFTA,  after overcoming dangerous and life threatening challenges, and give them such human rights as health care and education, then we as Americans have no lived up to our end of the bargain. It's these human rights rich Republicans believe are luxuries. Those in the GOP have duped the average Tea Party slug into believing illegal immigrants are given the key to the city once they arrive, or should I say key to the country?

Because I am the son of God, I can tell you with 100% accuracy, those so-called "illegals", a dehumanizing term, have a lot more in common with an unemployed Tea Partier whose job was outsourced to some developing third world country. Both groups are victims of the totalitarian nature that is global capitalism. It grinds Jesus' gears that Republicans and Tea Party poltroons backed by the John Birch Society ideological beliefs and wealth held by the Koch Brothers, have done everything in its power to legitimize malfeasance. They will stoop so low as to use the classic method and cliche of scapegoating, as demonstrated by the countless examples throughout history, some not well know and some very well know - hello, Germany 1933, are you there?

But I, Jesus of Nazareth son of God, have an even bigger problem than that of the far-right. The ultimate in gear grindage are those liberal and moderate Democrats who just stand by and let what is now popularly referred to as the "one percent" do exactly the opposite of what I preached 2000 years ago before I was executed by the Romans.

With all that being said, vote for me, Jesus of Nazareth son of God, come this November. My campaign slogan is a simple one, give somebody else a chance to do some fucking for once. If elected president, I promise to give every illegal immigrant family an unlimited lifetime gift card to Wal-Mart courtesy of Wal-Mart. How could Wal-Mart say no to my plan? After all, I am the the son of God. 

So after you read this, please begin chanting, the Son of God for President!

*This message has been brought to you and paid for by the Committee to Make Jesus of Nazareth America's President. All rights reserved 2012.