Morgan from No Radio has a new side band called The Tinsels, it’s much more twee sounding than the stuff he does with his main band. Give it a listen!
Man Bites Dog is a Tucson hardcore band started last year by former members of The Tics and Truancy. They released a tape a few months ago and so far I’m excited to see where this band will go.
One of their most apparent influences is Void, to the point that they’re described as “Void-core” on an upcoming show flier. While this influence is very clear to fans of hardcore, they’re not a rip-off band in any way. In fact, the band I think they sound the most like is Drug Culture, a Tacoma band formed by past members of Bully and Busted Bearings. (If you haven’t heard the split between those two bands from 2011, check it out along with Man Bites Dog’s tape. Both of these are at Toxic Ranch records in Tucson.)
You can follow the band here, and I highly suggest you do so: http://manbitesdogaz.tumblr.com/
I know a lot of KONY 2012/Invisible Children supporters personally, and I can tell you right away they do mean well. The majority of them are Christians, liberals or both. From their perspective they’re supporting a cause to stop the murder of children on another continent.
While the supporters of Invisible Children Inc. are generally good people, I can’t say the same of Jason Russell, the filmmaker behind the KONY 2012 video. His insistence on making himself the centerpiece of the film for the first half rubbed me wrong, but the shock of the statistics on child soldiers was enough for me to overlook his ego-centrism.
The last post on the subject was written the day before the actual budget statistics for the “charity” showed up on the internet. I think everyone knows by now the heinously small amount that is actually going to help displaced Ugandan refugees. This fact has only strengthened my favorable view of Doctors Without Borders, a real charity whose members risk life and limb to accomplish their goals. I’ve noticed that the people who were most outraged by the fraudulent charity budget were people who were poised to be enthusiastic supporters of the KONY 2012 cause. No one likes being duped, especially when it comes to a charitable or moral cause. There’s something about a dishonest charity that makes even the worst scum on Wall Street and in Washington look like saints. At least Goldman Sachs and Rick Santorum are open about their complete lack of compassion and respect for their fellow human beings; crashing the economy then laughing about it, (this happened, and it’s on video) or telling rape victims that their pregnancies are a “gift from God.” (That one will never be lived down or forgiven, Sick Fuck Rick.)
But without straying too far from topic, a charity that lies to people who are inclined to give their hard earned money to saving the lives of strangers even in a terrible economy, then spends it all on expensive vacations for “charity” C.E.O.s is a disgusting betrayal of peoples’ trust. I’m glad that the budget hit the internet before I made any monetary donation. The money I wanted to give is now going to Doctors Without Borders. Jason Russell can take that fact and flaunt it the next time he plans on rampaging naked through the streets of Los Angeles. (Regardless of your stance on KONY 2012, that nude temper tantrum of his was undeniably hilarious.)
I don’t think the outrage over Invisible Children’s budget is back-pedaling. If new information comes to light that completely changes the situation, then a massive change in opinion is the next logical step, not a back-pedal.
There are some things from the last post I don’t take back at all though:
1) I still think the U.N. condones the exploitation of the African continent and many other nations around the world because it benefits the most powerful nations whose influence dwarfs theirs.
2) I don’t think Obama’s sending of military advisers to Uganda is a move for war. After all, Ugandan president Norbert Mao declared his support for this move while acknowledging that the situation in his country is much more complicated than the KONY 2012 video lets on. An unprovoked war in Uganda would utterly destroy President Obama’s presidency, reputation and legacy. If you want to worry about another terrible, Iraq/Vietnam-esque war in the near future, worry about Iran because if the Republicans win in November that’s exactly where we’re going.(And if you want to be mad at Obama for something legitimate, be mad at the “collateral damage” caused by drone strikes in Yemen. The blowback from that and the international outrage that has been under-reported in the U.S. is the worst since the Bush era.)
3) The “Ugandan oil” conspiracy is complete bullshit. Most oil in Africa is deposited in the north, more towards Libya and Egypt. Turn off Alex Jones and take five minutes to look up information on global oil deposits.
4) The condescension and snobbery about all this is still stupid. After the budget was revealed, the initial nay-sayers directed their criticism at the former supporters of Invisible Children instead of at the charity itself. Instead of “What the fuck? This isn’t a charity at all!” it was “Ha ha! You’re such dumb plebians for supporting them at all! I’m so above that shit, brah. I’m too smart to ever support something you would support.” The smug, jaded assholes can still fuck off.
5) I’d still like to see Joseph Kony in a body-bag or a court room in The Hague in the near future. However, a full-scale invasion of Uganda is not the way to accomplish this. Granted, the Ugandan government is very corrupt and has passed draconian homophobic laws in their country. At this point it’s a lesser of two evils situation. I don’t think Norbert Mao is a bad individual necessarily, but in a way you could see the support of the Ugandan army as exacerbating a civil war we have no business interfering in. I think they’re far better than the opposing Lord’s Resistance Army, but they’re no angels either.
I thought of a brilliant way of taking him out without making a complex civil war even worse. It sounds ridiculous but it may work. Central Africa has a terrible problem with poachers. These poachers work for pay, and they supply ivory to places where ivory harvesting is illegal. Not too long ago I saw a picture of an elephant with the entire front of it’s head hacked off, the handy work of these scumbag animal-hit men. Hit-men is exactly what they are. Because they are after all international criminals, they must be armed and ruthless. I figure if they can kill animals much bigger than people for pay, what’s to stop them from killing one man for a bigger sum?
Hire the poachers to train their guns on Kony, fight scumbags with scumbags. That way he will be under attack from all sides without any U.S. intervention, the civil war won’t be made worse, the poachers won’t be killing as many endangered species, and maybe it’ll work. I know this plan will never be implemented because of how absurd it sounds, but does anyone have a better solution? I know Jason Russell doesn’t.
I’d heard of Joesph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army a few times over the years, but not nearly as often as I’ve heard him mentioned in the past few days. I think a lot of people knew what he was and what he did, but not who he was or why he did it. You might have gone up to someone and described vaguely what he did to further his goals and heard, “Oh yeah, the child soldier guy. What a fuckstick he is.”
After finding out the Lord’s Resistance Army was a group of religious terrorists, charged with horrifying atrocities that have been going on since 1987, it makes you wonder why the U.N. and international community has selective outrage about human rights violations. So, Saddam Hussein was worth going to war for 8+ years over but Joesph Kony is hardly worth looking into? Maybe if Uganda had rich oil reserves or provided us with a strategic position in the multifaceted cold war that’s replaced the original Cold War, we might have had a full-scale invasion sometime around 2002. Maybe if the Lord’s Resistance Army used a perversion of Islamic beliefs instead of a perversion of Christian beliefs to justify their violence, they would be easier to rally people against. Just the other day, terrestrial radio turd/slug hybrid Rush Limbaugh went on a rant against President Obama for “starting a war” with people “most Americans don’t even know about.” First of all, we’re not at war, nor will we be, nor should we be. What Obama did was send around 100 military advisers to train the under-trained and under-equipped Ugandan army. That’s a reasonable, justified and non-warmongering use of our military strength. Second of all, the fact that most people didn’t know about Kony is part of the problem.
That’s why the fact that people are jumping on the “Kony bandwagon” is a good thing. This isn’t like the Facebook slacktivism “change your picture to a cartoon character to fight child abuse” bullshit that was all the rage in 2010. Petitions, public protests, making fliers, stickers, street art and such is much closer to either the Occupy/99% movement (which the KONY 2012 video quotes in the opening) or to the petition that anti-SOPA congress members read from barely two months ago. While petitions can be ignored by politicians, they’ve worked in the past. In 1807 when the anti-slavery movement in England was about to win, what struck the death blow to chattel slavery in the British court? A petition, signed by ordinary Britons and presented by William Wilberforce. Two centuries later, the anti-SOPA petitions signed by millions of people around the world definitely tipped the argument in favor of the people.
So of course, once the KONY 2012 video blew up on Facebook and Twitter, there was the inevitable backlash. “Oh, you’re just pretending to care, shut up.” “Yeah, as if there’s anything we can do, so who gives a shit?” Then there’s the thing that amazes me the most about how fucking cynical our generation can be, the fact that the jaded assholes are almost smug in a morally superior way for brushing off the movement to arrest or kill Joseph Kony. It’s as though they’re saying, “I’m better than you because I don’t care about anything. I’m too fucking cool to take anything like this seriously for even 15 minutes. Yeah, and that means I get to be smug.”
Being proud of your own cynicism and apathy, then acting morally superior in the same way that PetA and the Evangelists do, is really pretty stupid. They should start a movement of their own, the Proud to be a Douchebag movement. Even in the era when you don’t even have to leave your desk, hell you don’t even have to close your torrents or porn tabs for that matter, to contribute to something bigger than yourself, they’re just too cool to give a shit. On a larger scale, the same kind of apathy that causes cynical douches to criticize the “Kony bandwagon” is what caused the international community to allow Kony to get away with doing what he did for decades. You know those “Apathy Kills” stickers that are all over downtown? Case in point.
Final point: if Joseph Kony’s victims were white, he would have been taken out sometime around 1995. If the Lord’s Resistance army were Muslim instead of Christian, they would have been met with full military force sometime around 2003. The reasons behind that are simple: the U.N. is fine with global North exploiting global South; and a group of religious terrorists is more likely to spark outrage when they are a different religion than the majority of Americans. (The KKK was/is supposedly a Christian group, and look how long it took for us to do something about them.) And despite the encouraging fact that outright racism is falling out of favor with mainstream society, there is still a sick part of our psyche that finds it harder to empathize with people who don’t look like us. Obama being elected president didn’t end racism because real life isn’t a fucking movie.
TL;DR: So by all means, jump on the Kony bandwagon. You’ll be contributing to a tyrant’s downfall and pissing off jaded, self-righteous douchebags while you do it. It’s a win-win.
I was sitting outside my dad’s house on the porch, listening to music with my dog and watching the sun set, waiting for some of the many musicians I play with to show up, thinking about Ozymandias. For some reason, that poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley always resonated with me. I first read it in high school when I was too angry, horny, bored and distracted to really get what it meant, but even then it stayed with me.
“Look upon my works, ye mighty and despair,” reads the placard on an ancient, destroyed statue of a centuries-dead emperor. there is no work to look upon, because the ravages of time have gradually worn it down to rubble. This happens to everything, regardless of what it might be.
Four jets from the base just roared overhead. They represent the intellect of several generations of engineers and scientists. They are also weapons of mass destruction. They represent the best and the worst of human potential, our massive capacity for creation and destruction.
The huge black pit-bull at my feet, myself, and everyone else around us are products of millions of years of evolution. Never perfect, always flawed, but getting better with every passing generation. The building behind me used to be a crack den, now it’s a mansion.
The band I’ve put hours, days, blood and sweat into just recorded some pretty good riffs on a demo. That demo will eventually be an album, and hopefully people will like it. Eventually that album will cease to exist. So will every album by the Beatles, Black Flag, Jimi Hendrix, Fugazi, all the classic musicians whose music lives on long after the band. Eventually Shakespeare, all words written by people, and the poem that inspired this post will cease to exist.
Permanence and perfection are words that have a clear meaning, but that really don’t exist in the real world. They are both things that are beyond our reach. Nothing is permanent or perfect, nothing ever will be.
The most plausible theory on the end of the Universe, much more plausible than the apocalypse that gullible people are predicting in December, is called heat death. This, according to the current theory, will happen in 10 x 100 to a power of 100 billion years, a length of time so massive that our brains can’t really comprehend it. The number written out wouldn’t fit on this page. Eventually, everything that exists or ever did exist will break down to the sub-atomic level at a temperature of absolute zero.
If all of this seems depressing, that’s really not the point. I just turned 20, I’ll probably live another five to seven decades. I’m okay with this. Heat death isn’t something I have to worry about.
Lately a few people I know have died, and death is one of those things that gets you thinking about life, along with love and music. If there’s any point to life I’d say it’s, “Look on everyone’s works and never despair.” be as smart, as strong and as ethical as you can be. Enjoy life to the fullest and all those other cliche coffee mug sayings. Accomplish as much as possible and try not to hurt others.
Read a lot, exercise, party hard, work harder, and try not to fuck it up. I can’t speak for anyone else and wouldn’t want to, but that’s my plan so far.
