Fenriz on selling out

Q: How many people have offered you lots of money to play live? And you always turn it down.
A: I could be a rich bitch if I said yes to all these things.
Q: Why don't you?
A: Because Darkthrone is my life's work. And it will be less if I do something I don't want to.

Republicans be like:

Oct 2008: "You'll never get elected and pass healthcare."

Nov 2008: "We'll never let you pass healthcare."
Jan 2009: "We're gonna shout you down every time you try to pass healthcare."
July 2009: "We'll fight to death every attempt you make to pass healthcare."
Dec 2009: "We will destroy you if you even consider passing healthcare."
March 2010: "We can't believe you just passed healthcare."
April 2010: "We are going to overturn healthcare."
Sept 2010: "We are going to repeal healthcare."
Jan 2011: "We are going to destroy healthcare."
Feb 2012: "We're gonna elect a candidate who'll revoke healthcare NOW."
June 2012: "We'll go to the Supreme Court, and they will overturn healthcare."
Aug 2012: "American people'll never re-elect you-they don't want healthcare."
Oct 2012: "We can't wait to win the election and explode healthcare."
Nov 2012: "We can't believe you got re-elected & we can't repeal healthcare."
Feb 2013: "We're still going to vote to obliterate healthcare."
June 2013: "We can't believe the Supreme Court just upheld healthcare."
July 2013: "We're going to vote like 35 more times to erase healthcare."
Sept 2013: "We are going to leverage a government shutdown into defunding healthcare."
Oct 2013: "WHY AREN'T YOU NEGOTIATING???"

Jeezus Christ almighty

Dead Pop Stars

Idiot America

The three Great Premises of Idiot America:

Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.

Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough.

Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.

PKD

"The anti-intellectualism of America — of Americans — prohibit their interest in imaginative ideas and intellectual concepts."

Now why can't I find a copy of High Rise at SFPL?

Tam

The internet simultaneously made all music accessible while taking away the necessity of listening to any of it.

Tell Uncle Sam I said

What a peach

Underwater Horizon

Fifteen years ago, all of us would have laughed at the notion that the government would assert the right to know about every phone call made by ordinary American citizens suspected of no crime—that's something that East Germany would do, not the American government. How have we gotten so comfortable with the panopticon state in little more than a decade?

y greatest fear is not that this surveillance will turn out to be more widespread.  My greatest fear is that we will find out they are spying on us, and the American public will yawn. And in some secret room, bureaucrats and politicians will note that the American public does not care, and turn to discussing how much more spying they can get away with.

Come here and work on hard problems… except the ones on our doorstep

Last night, someone told me “In California, there isn’t a conflict between being a Capitalist, and a Liberal”, with a wry grin on his face.

It is decidedly weird here. i’m staying in Castro, which is like travelling into the future. Not free from violence or persecution but a far safer and tolerant place than many I’ve encountered. Then off to downtown, stepping over the homeless, weaving between the street corner schizophrenics. After a while, you’ll encounter a faceless industrial building emblazoned with an all too familiar logo.

Inside, once you pass the checkpoint, free food, free beer on taps, somewhere between a coffeeshop and a hackerspace, a bunch of rich people on macbooks with the appropriate stickers. Then back outside to the street to watch people die on your way to a microbrewery. A long drawn out argument about scala as you avoid eye contact with the rest of the world.

Boner Zone

Head Like An Orange

Ians

Dog Man Star

Thatcher's War on Acid

When politicians act like they're morally outraged and ask questions in parliament, they get kudos by being seen to be ‘upholders of morals’. But the people that are breaking the morals, the youth cult, they also get kudos, because young people like to shock. Shock sells records and sells tickets to acid house parties. Youth culture is very symbiotic; the man and youth cult are two sides of the same coin, really.

Mike Riley

I've never understood being proud of where you're from. You had 0% control over that. Be proud of things you've done and who you are. You have 100% control over that.

Insert your preferred term here

I'm not anti-[    ], I'm just not pro-dumbass.

I will always be on Team Joey, and Team Dee Dee. I come from America, where Bo Diddley was born!

Hi Austin

Hi Austin. Fuck SXSW. There… I said it.

Here, the music comes last. 5 minute set-up, no sound check, 15 minute set.  The “music” element is all a front, it’s the first thing to be compromised. Corporate money everywhere but in the hands of the artists, at what is really just a glorified corporate networking party. Drunk corporate goons and other industry vampires and cocaine. Everyone is drunk, being cool. “Official” bureaucracy and all their mindless rules.  Branding, branding, branding. It’s bullshit… sorry. 

Adrift

Happy 30th

To the Nuclear Dawn!

Dependents of the State

But if the poor are dependent on the state, so, too, are America’s rich. The extraordinary accumulation of wealth enjoyed by the socioeconomic elite — in 2007, the richest 1 percent of Americans accounted for about 24 percent of all income — simply wouldn’t be possible if the United States weren’t organized as it is. Just about every aspect of America’s economic and legal infrastructure — the laissez-faire governance of the markets; a convoluted tax structure that has hedge fund managers paying less than their office cleaners; the promise of state intervention when banks go belly-up; the legal protections afforded to corporations as if they were people; the enormous subsidies given to corporations (in total, about 50 percent more than social services spending); electoral funding practices that allow the wealthy to buy influence in government — allows the rich to stay rich and get richer. In primitive societies, people can accumulate only as much stuff as they can physically gather and hold on to. It’s only in “advanced” societies that the state provides the means to socioeconomic domination by a tiny minority. “The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other,” the writer John Berger said about the 20th century, though he might equally have said it of this one: “It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.”

Goodbye SF

A good read on the ever-more-alienating city I've just left. 

 As the suburban pre-fab landscape encroached further toward the city centers, the diversity that had characterized the metropolitan center vanished, unable to resist the virulant weapons of wealth, conformity, and mediocrity. Soon, the city itself was extinct, enveloped completely by its imperialist neighbors.

--Ian Svenonius, "Seinfeld Syndrome." Psychic Soviet

Trash

Tonight we rocked out for Joe Smiths bday and it ruled. Population took me back to winter time at the Albion house...eyes closed, dancing my ass off, surrounded by loved ones. It left me feeling so good about punk and my friends. Ya'll....Dance like no one is watching....if I can take anything into my late 30's it's that. Dance like you're a fucking 2 1/2 year old....who gives a fuck....feel it....feel it, or you're dead. Peace and love. See you in the flesh. xoxoxoxoxo :) Let in the good, spread it around and live life like it's the only one you got....cause it is. :)