Harrisburg:

The Mekons full throttle

Jon Langford and Eric Bellis

Mekons tour, 2015

Photos from Harrisburg, PA and Rehoboth Beach, DE engagements

The Mekons last toured the US in 2011, and returned for a very brief tour this summer in tandem with the release of Joe Angio's Revenge of the Mekons feature-length documentary. As is my custom, whenever the band is close enough to make the trip, I decided to drive from Richmond, VA to the shows closest to me: Harrisburg, PA and Rehoboth Beach, DE.

I believe these were the eighth and ninth shows of the tour, and it was obvious that it took little time for the Mekons to hit their stride. I discovered the band sometime in the late 1980s, about the time of the So Good It Hurts disc, by which time three of the band's milestone releases had already won them wide critical acclaim, if not a mass audience.

The band has soldiered on in the ensuing years, always advancing their art while staying true to the legacy they created as first-wave punks and alt-country pioneers. And their live shows have, if anything, stayed as raucous and vital as they always were.

/Tom Greenhalgh and Sally Timms

This is my third turn photographing the band, starting back in 2007. The 2011 show pics are further down in the blog, just for the sake of historical comparison...

The Mekons are:

Jon Langford, vocals, guitar
Tom Greenhalgh, vocals, guitar
Sally Timms, vocals
Eric Bellis, accordion, vocals
Lu Edmonds, saz
Susie Honeyman, violin
Steve Goulding, drums
Dave Trumfio, bass guitar


The entire show galleries are found here:

Mekons at Dogfish Head brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, DE 

Mekons at Herr Street Stage, Harrisburg PA

Jon Langford

Susie Honeyman

Lu Edmonds

Eric Bellis

Rehoboth Beach:

Dogfish Head Brewpub, Rehoboth Beach

Dave Trumfio

Steve Goulding

Lu Edmonds

Susie Honeyman

Tom Greenhalgh

Sally Timms

A ghost!

Where have I been, and why have I returned?

It was a long and brutal summer and fall. I simply allowed myself to be consumed by work and all the attendant demands -- which were ridiculous.

I think I speak for many when I say, we allow work to separate us from what really matters, and the things that make life worth living.

I'm not going for profundity here, as though we don't have enough deep thinkers available to tell us what's wrong with ourselves. After a billionaire-only election season where the world's most prolific killer regime has re-anointed it's preeminent murder, it's cozy and narcotizing to let oneself be swallowed whole by a regime of economy that drains all the dreams and energy of a soul for the benefit of a few.

I may resume my efforts here, although I'm by no means deceived about the worth or importance of anything that will emerge on these pages. I may find a photo or two in my portfolio that's worth a look, and I have a friend's audio tapes that are hidden wonders of a world enraptured by packaging and marketing glitz, and oblivious to other paths that resist the status quo and the per capita consumptive habits of a land of gluttony.

Geez, is the weekend here yet?

Plodding along is effortless, so long as one invests nothing of oneself in the journey.

Pentagon says whatever is convenient today

The US government isn't above a little lying from time to time, particularly when it advances the government's parochial interests. As such, the recent bus bombing of Israelis in Bulgaria gives the Pentagon an opportunity to implicate Hezbollah in Lebanon in the act:

Pentagon says Bulgaria bomb smacks of Hezbollah | Reuters: "(Reuters) - A suicide bombing that killed Israeli tourists in Bulgaria this week bore hallmarks of Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants but the U.S. Defense Department has not yet concluded who was behind it, a Pentagon spokesman said on Friday.
The attack on a bus carrying Israelis at a Bulgarian airport, "does bear the hallmarks of Hezbollah," George Little, the Pentagon press secretary, told reporters."

It bears remembering that the US currently keeps on the payroll an anti-Iranian group, the MEK, which is at the same time on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. When Iranian nuclear scientists are murdered, who would be up to that, besides the MEK (as proxy to the US and Israel)?

While the facts of the Bulgarian incident are still unknown, that doesn't prevent the US government from creating a story to advance its own interests and agenda in the region. Hezbollah, which is not known for being an international organization, is still a handy scapegoat. Even if the bombing turns out to be a false flag operation.

If and when the facts ARE known, the war that's coming will be well underway, and who then will care about such a small matter as a bus bombing? Compared with WWIII, it'll be a drop in the bucket...

Prepping the public before dissent is crushed

The Bush administration knew a thing or two about selling a war, and it seems like the fine art of manipulating public opinion has found a new venue in the run-up to the GOP nominating convention coming up next month:

Tampa Police monitoring RNC protest chatter online - Florida Wires - MiamiHerald.com: "THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
TAMPA, Fla. -- Tampa police are monitoring Internet chatter and videos that may encourage protesters to cause problems and break laws during the Republican National Convention.
WTSP (http://on.wtsp.com/NA9xbD) reports protesters planning on coming to the convention are being egged on to "battle" authorities and "let nothing stop" them."

By the time the festivities begin n Tampa, the no-nothings sitting in front of their wide-screen hypnosis terminal will have been convinced that their fellow Americans who are simply exercising their constitutional right to protest for redress of grievances are nothing but parasitic worms to be eliminated by any means necessary.

We can  plainly see a case being made, using chimeras of the state's own devising, that malcontents and troublemakers are being dispatched to put the people in jeopardy, and make them feel less "safe." Hence, you will see any level of state power being deployed the squelch the protests, and being given cover for it's brutality on the nightly news.

Would Australia do as much for Julian Assange?

When one of their own gets caught up in some political intrigue in a foreign country, we expect a person's government to take steps to secure their release, just as the Aussies have done in the case of this woman in Libya:

Carr celebrates Aussie lawyer's release: "Australian lawyer Melinda Taylor has been reunited with her family in the Netherlands after being freed from detention in Libya.
Foreign Minister Bob Carr said on Tuesday that Ms Taylor's release after almost a month in custody in the Libyan city of Zintan was "heart-warming news".
"I'm especially thinking of the reception Melinda's going to get from a two-year old who'll be seeing her mother for the first time in three weeks," Senator Carr told AAP from New York."

At the same time, Julian Assange is the victim of political intrigue, and is being punished for the crime of embarrassing the leaders of the land of the slaves and home of the cowards: the USA.

Wikileaks does the work journalists used to do, by comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, but we don't see Bill Keller of the New York Times in the dock -- and his newspaper was among those who published the Wikileaks revelations.

For someone like Assange to be forsaken by the Australian government only goes to show that the spin on the news we get from corporate outlets gives a very lopsided and dishonest view of the way the system operates. It's happy time all the time in media spin land.

If US ever gets its hands on him, Assange is going down

It's kind of ludicrous to even pretend that the US government won't draw and quarter Julian Assange if it ever gets its hands on him. Ever since the right-wing Swedish government ran a setup on trumped-up sex charges, the wheels of injustice have been turning with grim inevitability against the Wikileaks founder.

So, one might wonder, what drives news agencies like AFP to broadcast such fanciful nonsense to the four winds?

AFP: Does the US have a case against Julian Assange?: "WASHINGTON — If WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ever ends up in a US courtroom, prosecutors could face an uphill struggle trying to convict him, given America's legal safeguards for publishers, analysts say."

Assange might be foolish and a typically dick-obsessed moron, but his behavior with the ladies hardly qualifies as criminal -- especially in this day and age, and particularly in the wide-open Scandinavian nations. The authorities' interest in Assange is not based on his sexual peccadilloes.

Nor is the US circumscribed in the manner in which it will dispense with the pest that has brought it great international embarrassment, and brought the government's flagrant disregard for civilized norms of behavior to a wider audience. For the crime of divulging the tawdry and dirty dealings of the government in Washington, there is no hiding, and no escape.

Bradley Manning, the other half of the saga of the demise of the whistleblowers, is but a sample of the tender mercies Assange will be shown when the US has finally put a bag over his head, wrapped him in shackles and ensconced him in Guantanamo or some other CIA black site.

There will be no process due, nor struggles on the part of prosecutors to gain a conviction -- legal "safeguards" be damned. It has already been well established -- thought it remains "classified" -- that the US government can dispense with its opponents by any means that seems convenient and less likely to draw the attention of potential critics. Assange is right to try to frustrate the plans of the US and its surrogates in this malignant crusade to eliminate its critics, and deter anyone bold enough to contemplate joining their ranks.

He may have the law on his side, but unfortunately the current atmosphere is one of extreme prejudice against truth-tellers and other government opponents, and the law is no impediment to the ability of the state to crush its critics.

SC Gov: Not only dumb, but inarticulate

The GOP's reliable stooges are lining up to take potshots at "Obamacare," after the Supreme Court's decision that the insurance mandate's penalty provision is a tax, and within the congress' legislative powers.

On the front line of the assault are luminaries of the right such as South Carolina's governor, Nikki Haley, who blathered as follows:

SC Gov: Health care ruling means huge tax increase - CBS News: "This decision concludes one thing and one thing only for me, and that is we need to have new leadership in Washington. We cannot continue to go down this path. We cannot continue to be dictated to on what kind of health care we need," the Republican governor said outside her office. "We've got a president who continues to want to put tax hikes on the American people."

If there's one thing that's even more irritating than politicians who pander to their constituents' stupidity, it's them showing how intellectually deficient they themselves are. Haley's attack on Obama is not only nonsensical, it's barely coherent -- full of malapropisms and empty catchphrases written in consultation with pollsters and their focus groups.

Whatever one thinks of "Obamacare," it is a program that only a GOP stalwart could love -- which is why it has its roots in Mitt Romney's Massachusetts and the Heritage Foundation. Haley's rhetoric, stripped of its flourish, is nothing but an attack on Obama. The program is defective because Obama is a demonic and threatening caricature of a human being.

It has always been the GOP's knock against Obama -- that's he's foreign, the other. A black man with a Muslim middle name who threatens the established order -- and whatever privileges residually accrue to white people.

What they don't acknowledge is that the law was written by the insurance, healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, and so is exactly the kind of legislative stew that the GOP is normally enchanted by, and works so hard to implement in public policy. There's nothing the GOP loves better than giving their big business patrons a fat handout via the federal government -- wealth transfer from the lowly taxpayers to the obscenely wealthy.

Take TARP as the standout example of this sort of political paddy-cake.

Perhaps most galling from a longer historical perspective is the appearance of South Carolina in the current controversy. One of the most economically distressed and culturally backwards states of the union, South Carolina has always been, it seems, on the forefront of opposition to the federal government. It's not accident that Fort Sumpter, where the civil war began, is located there. Decades before, these people were agitating over tariffs and the anti-federal sentiment has not diminished.

Over time, it's clearly shown how the reddest states on the political map are, in spite of the resentments, by far the greatest beneficiaries of federal largess. They love the handouts, but can't stand anyone telling them how to run their affairs. It would lend much credibility to their professed convictions if they were to return the money that comes their way from an institution they hate so profoundly.

But don't count on it.

NBC/WSJ poll: Most Americans are stupid and uninformed

The latest flapdoodle on the so-called controversy over the so-called "Obamacare" boils down to this latest dispatch from the NBC/WSJ poll:

With the U.S. Supreme Court set to decide on President Obama's health-care law on Thursday, more Americans say they would be pleased if the law is ruled unconstitutional than constitutional, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
In the survey, 37 percent say they would be pleased if the Supreme Court finds the law unconstitutional, versus 22 percent who say they would be disappointed with that outcome.

While neither opponents nor proponents constitute an outright majority, a plurality opposes the law. This proves nothing so much as the effectiveness of the propaganda campaign against the law, and says nothing of principled opposition to its provisions.

Indeed, the public mostly doesn't know anything about anything any longer. They simply have impressions, based on media messages that they passively internalize after hearing them endlessly repeated on the paid-for corporate media.

Election time rolls around, and the same mechanism is in operation as we roll through the summer and into the post-labor-day blitz. Who applies the largest expenditures of cash to propagate a message, and does so using the best, most effective techniques, will in the end hold the levers of power.

It has nothing to do with any kind of reasoned analysis of issues, and a conscious decision based on facts. We're far, far beyond that now.

The health care law, which was originally propounded by the Heritage Foundation and enacted in Mitt Romney's term as Massachusetts governor, is now slated to be dismembered by a politicized supreme court dominated by Federalist Society neo-cons. It's all out warfare between wealthy political interests, and whoever is most subservient to the interests of corporate powers will prevail.

No one will weep if the individual mandate fails, except perhaps insurance companies who yearned for millions of new, coerced customers. Still, where there is a chance for massive profits, there's a will and a way will be found. This law, as the spawn of Obama, may have to be sacrificed, but in a Romney administration it will return, and when the corporate sponsors have the public where it wants them, their opinions will be molded into the exact opposite configuration, and they'll overwhelmingly support this obviously superior solution to the nation's healthcare woes.

Of course, the public be damned. It's a windfall for the corporations, and a more onerous burden for the mindless public.

Eric Holder and the fast and furious fake-out

There's nothing more disgusting or inductive to vomiting that observing the jackasses in the congress throwing brickbats at the dipshits in the executive branch of the US government. Today's headlines thunder about the attorney general being held in contempt of congress for failing to provide embarrassing documents to his political enemies, as if anyone would happily acquiesce to being flayed alive in public:

Eric Holder found in contempt of Congress by House committee - latimes.com: "WASHINGTON -- The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform voted to find Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress for failing to provide subpoenaed documents in the flawed Fast and Furious gun-tracking case, just hours after President Obama asserted executive privilege and backed the attorney general’s refusal to release the material.
The vote for contempt and the White House insertion into the growing Southwest border “gun-walking” scandal set up a significant constitutional clash between the two branches of the federal government, one that ultimately may not be resolved until it reaches the courts.
The Republican-led committee, headed by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), voted strictly along party lines in finding Holder in contempt"

Eric Holder may hold certain venerable institutions in contempt -- like the constitution and bill of rights -- but thumbing his nose at the hyper-partisans of the majority in the congress is simply the game as it's played in DC in these times. It isn't as though the administration of Dubya was any more compliant in the same circumstances.

This all will amount to a mountain full of nothing. If subjected to mountaintop removal, at the bottom of it all they'd come up with a jewel-encrusted turd that represents their collective exertions on behalf of their constituents.

What really rankles here, however, is the un-subpoenaed documents, investigations not conducted, and mostly the utterly contemptuous disregard for the rule of law that defines Obama term as president.

While it was cast as a noble gesture, a desire to look forward and not back, the complete abdication of responsibility on the part of messers Obama and Holder to pursue the crimes of the Bush administration in a court of law makes these silly persecutions by the House GOP look all the more pathetic. Holder may have been inept, but his behavior hardly reaches the threshold of crimes against the peace, and crimes against humanity -- both of which fairly describe the activities of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the assorted neo-con  hangers on who made the Bush years the lamentable, inexcusable travesty they were.

Of course, it must've been clear to Obama's handlers that when all was said and done, the new,  improved commander-in-chief would sully himself and his office in an identical manner, hence the aversion to look back seems to be a self-serving exercise in pro-active ass-covering. With acts of war on Obama's resume in violation of international law, as well as a very robust witch hunt against whistle blowers and truth-tellers, the new boss has proven himself to be sickeningly like the old boss.

Those of us who voted for this changeling sack of shit got fooled again -- but good!

Let the Republicans posture and rail against the fuck-ups of the current regime. It's a powerful distraction from their own lack of accountability for the equally depraved indifference to the law and constitution that they claim to venerate and honor in their petty persecutions.

We'll not be free of the quackery of these fake-ass, lying prostitutes until we purge the government of their ilk, and make it impossible for them and their patrons to ever obtain and wield power again. Theirs is not contempt for an institution, but for the public at large, on whose behalf they allegedly serve.

Clinton accuses Russia of doing what Washington does for Israel

Hillary Clinton can get up in front of any audience, and with a completely straight face accuse people of wrongdoing, when the government she plays a key role in is doing things equally, if not more, reprehensible. For US diplomats, it comes with the territory:

Clinton accuses Russia of delivering attack helicopters to Syrian regime | World news | guardian.co.uk: "The US has accused Russia of risking a dramatic escalation of the conflict in Syria by shipping attack helicopters to the regime in Damascus.
Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, went on to allege that Moscow is lying about weapons deliveries to Syria by falsely claiming they are not being used to suppress the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad."

Now, no one denounces Washington for supplying the weaponry that Israel uses to suppress its native Arabs, or to ethnically cleanse the West Bank and Gaza. Not a peep is heard over the bunker-busting bombs given the Zionist fanatics with which to bomb the Iranians.

Indeed, the armaments trade is one of the few areas in which the US has a sizable trade surplus, and the weapons business is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise abysmal economy. Military keynesianism is what Chalmers Johnson called the effects of this global trade in death and destruction, which is tirelessly promoted by neocons like Hillary Clinton.

It's always interesting to contrast these folks' professions of religious belief with their more belligerent actions, as they tend to be observant Christians on Sunday and on the campaign stump, while at other times making war, not love.

The relevant biblical admonition would probably be that those who live by the sword shall thereby perish, but just like the myth behind Christian Zionism, that's simply window dressing behind which to hide one's innate misanthropy.

Or, put another way, first you must learn to smile as you kill.

Hillary and her cohorts will be smiling all the way to the bank, of course, while filling the airwaves with this kind of self-serving blather about how nefarious other countries are, should their game plan run contrary to that of the US-Zionist axis of weasels.

Cyber-criminals, who's your daddy?

Being the naive and trusting sort, when stories about the exploits of Chinese-government-sponsored hacking attacks on US government and corporate computer installations, and how pervasive and sophisticated they were, we were given to feelings of both awe and insecurity.

Then, of course, the attribution of Stuxnet and Flame, along with the revelation about this "crypto breakthrough" and the world-class brains behind their creation, came into public view:

Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists | Ars Technica: "Flame is the first known example of an MD5 collision attack being used maliciously in a real-world environment. It wielded the esoteric technique to digitally sign malicious code with a fraudulent certificate that appeared to originate with Microsoft. By deploying fake servers on networks that hosted machines already infected by Flame—and using the certificates to sign Flame modules—the malware was able to hijack the Windows Update mechanism Microsoft uses to distribute patches to hundreds of millions of customers."

What are we to make of this?

First, whatever technical prowess and government sponsorship the Chinese or other foreign powers might have at their disposal, it's clear from this that they're simply tyros in the world of cyber warfare. The real pros are in Tel Aviv and Washington, DC., where it so happens that most of the slimy doings of the world are centered.

No surprise there, right?

Well, consider for a moment: these so-called "zero day" exploits are known to the US and Israeli government-sponsored criminal organizations (they might consider themselves freedom fighters, or something, but that's a discussion for another time) before they are known by anyone else. Long before, in fact. And as we saw in the case of the phone companies in collusion with the government in the US, they were not only allowed, but coerced, to perform surveillance on US persons in contravention of the US Bill of Rights, and were granted retroactive immunity for so doing. We can be sure the spying continues.

Indeed, we can be sure that the government is not only involved in such matters as this, but others far more sinister and threatening to our freedoms and privacy. We're hardly able to fathom the extent to which the powers behind the all-powerful "war presidents" we're had since 9/11 have got our numbers -- and in effect have a lever over which they can shut down dissent and any person or state or institution that stands in its way.

It would not be hard to imagine that these exploits are not "discovered," but created to be exploited by the government and its stooges to enact the oligarchy's agenda. That would be quite within the realm of possibility for people without any moral boundaries, whose only purpose is to accumulate power and wealth.

The cyber war is but another front in the twilight struggle of evil against the rest of humanity.

And this time, we're on the losing side.

World's leaders in peace and freedom are is preeminent scumbags

If you needed proof that the US and Israel are both seriously challenged in the scruples department, you would need look no further than the latest findings from the computer lab that identified the "Flame" virus recently:

Researchers find direct link between Flame, Stuxnet malware - Computerworld: "Computerworld - Security researchers today said that they have found a direct link between the notorious Stuxnet worm and the more-recently-discovered Flame espionage malware, indicating that the two teams cooperated and collaborated.
The news ties Flame to the U.S. and Israeli governments, which reportedly designed and launched Stuxnet in an attempt to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.
"We're very confident that the Flame team shared some of their source code with the Stuxnet group," Roel Schouwenberg, a senior researcher with Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, said in an online presentation early Monday about the company's findings. "It's conclusive proof that the two worked together, at least once.""

To posture as moral beacons for the rest of humanity, and be found out as impostors who flagrantly flout the very international norms they purport to uphold, is the very essence of hypocrisy. We have no clearer example of  the defective character of these actors upon the world stage than the lawless and aggressive behavior they unleash upon others -- all the while broadcasting platitudes about their love of law and justice and peace and love and understanding between people.

What an outrageous pile of elephant turds, from two pachyderms known to be destructive rogues rampaging through the world in pursuit of their very narrow imperial interests. At the same time, these two renegades waste no effort in issuing pronouncements and ultimatums on what constitute "civilized norms" of behavior -- while reserving the right to ignore these self-same edicts when it's convenient or profitable.

The US military, ever on the lookout for new frontiers to dominate, has long had its eye on "cyberspace" as a new "battle space," and their ever-solicitous Israeli allies are world leaders in the arts of electronic treachery. Together, they unite in common cause to deny other countries the benefits of technology that they themselves use to manipulate and subjugate.

Business and national security have morphed into one single, more nefarious entity that enslaves others so that the few may acquire the planets wealth.

The promise of computers and then the Internet has been so completely betrayed by these maniacal actors, that there is no place that's safe from their depredations, it seems. Where once the boundaries of human knowledge seemed to come unraveled, we're watching it become the playground of a new breed of bullies intent of sabotaging everything they can't control outright.

Jamfest 2012!

I'm late as heck this year, and there's no excuse for it. Especially since the photos from last year's even have been by far the most popular post on this blog. Go figure!

So here they are. I have to say that this was my first go at shooting cheering with my D800 camera. I had no idea how it would do, given that everyone says it's not a "sports" or "action" camera. I found that the 4 frames per second speed was perfectly adequate. Could I have used the 8 fps of my D700? Sure, but on the other hand, the D800 handles this kind of lighting with ease, and the auto-focus was truly on point here.

Let's let the photos speak now...

Love the symmetry of the legs extended...