So it’s that time again.  I don’t mean the awesome time where friday the 13th comes on tv everyday, or where ghouls and ghosts wander down your street in search of their sweet fix.  I mean election time.  We are at the final week where it gets ugly.  He said, she said, “I can see Russia from my house” yadda yadda ya.  These are supposed to be the leaders of our “free” world.  Really!?!

According to the Campaign Finance Institute (www.cfinst.org) almost $1.5 billion dollars has been spent on financing this election’s two campaigns, as of Aug. 08.  $1.5 billion!  and we can’t figure out how to feed that starving family in inner city Memphis.  Something is not right.  Sarah Palin’s clothing and maintenance cost $150,000 for just 2 months.  According to feed my starving children.org (www.fmsc.org) it cost only 17 cents to produce one meal for a child in their program.  So if we do the math Sarah Palin’s clothes for only 2 months alone could have produced 882,352 meals, or enough to feed 11 children for the rest of their lives.  But yet we have no solution for the economic “crisis” or how to help the starving and needy.  This just doesn’t make sense.  We are being lied to.  We need to get the facts, not just from fox news or some bobble headed reporter that is trying to help his acting career.  Independent media and open source coding (wikipedia.org, etc) is an amazing key that we have to this.  We have the opportunity to have the information we need at our finger tips (literally) and instead we would rather read blog’s about who is sleeping with who in the celebrity world that isn’t even real.  This is our opportunity to take it back.  

I’ve recently had the following said to me, “Your idealism is a wonderful thing, but it’s much easier said than done.  Radical thought is great in theory, but it can’t really happen”.  This is the problem my friends.  This statement has been said for far too long.   People have seen this problem on the horizon for quite a while.  Check out this exert from Anarchism In America, you can view the whole movie in my interests section. 

We can’t let ourselves be oppressed by mundane thoughts of not being able to change anything.  These thoughts are what is used to hold down change.  The Roman Empire fell, monarchs have fallen, why can’t we make a change?  We can, and we will.  

I was visiting with my mother and step father the other day.  My mother had just had a difficult chemo treatment and was in her bed resting.  My step father and I stayed out in the living room, talking about alot of topics that were frightening to talk about.  Preparing for death was a large part of our conversation.  My step father, Jack, is 85, so this is a real topic for us.  At one point he looked over and said to me, “You know, we take advantage of so much.  We have to be always learning, always looking, always seeking.  Ya gotta learn til ya die son.  I try to walk a different way to the mailbox to see something new, something that was always there, but I didn’t notice it.  A different angle of a tree, a different yard, something new.  That’s what life is about, never taking for granted all that is around you and everything you have.  Always learning, never giving up.”   Jack is a little, classic looking old man.  He’s small, with a slight hunch.  He’s got more hair than most people could dream of, and it’s all bright white.  He’s got the look of the grandfather in every movie you’ve ever seen.  A sweet disposition, but when he speaks with passion, it’s enough to stop you in your tracks and make you pay attention to every word that is coming out.  And I did.

The reason why I tell that story is because those who fear change want us to be like the man taking the same path to the mail box everyday.  Never noticing anything going on around them, and taking every breath for granted.  “Don’t fight the revolution now, for there is nothing to fight.”  “There is nothing you can do, so you might as well not try.”  All of these are lies fed to us by the powers that fear us.  We won’t be those that walk idly by, taking for granted everything that is truly in front of us.  We will be Jack.  Everyday we will learn, and everyday we will say that we lived it to the fullest.  “Everyday is beautiful because we question you”.

So at this election year, the final week drawing to a close, let us truly exercise our rights and stand up and fight back.  We have all the information we need at our finger tips.   There are links in the interest section of this site that can give you ideas on taking action.  Check out democracy now, indymedia.org, and submedia.tv.  Let us emancipate our selves from this state of apathy that we are in and create a new one.  I’m not here to tell you what you should be doing to make this happen, in your heart you know what that is, I’m just telling you that you can do it.  WE can do it.

Here’s more about Emma Goldman for you to watch if your interested my friends.

So I do this alot.  I wrote an entire long blog about the economic crisis and what is really going on.  I researched this great article that noam chomsky wrote regarding the crisis, I researched more and more.  It took forever.  I stood back, read it and hated it.  It was stale, and said nothing.  I did the same thing the other day.  I worked on drawing up a back piece for a guy.  I drew this huge, intricate piece, spent all day on it.  Then I stepped back, took a look at it, and hated it.  Right away I knew what I needed to draw wasn’t the huge piece I was just working on.  I needed to draw something simple and huge.   This blog went the same way.   

“An out-of-work money manager in California loses a fortune and wipes out his family in a murder-suicide. A 90-year-old Ohio widow shoots herself in the chest as authorities arrive to evict her from the modest house she called home for 38 years.” 

This was the head line that I read the other morning on the AP website.   So I continued further.

“In Los Angeles last week, a former money manager fatally shot his wife, three sons and his mother-in-law before killing himself. Karthik Rajaram, 45, left a suicide note saying he was in financial trouble and contemplated killing just himself. But he said he decided to kill his entire family because that was more honorable, police said. Rajaram once worked for a major accounting firm and for Sony Pictures, and he had been part-owner of a financial holding company. But he had been out of work for several months, police said.”

and so I continued.

“Pamela Ross, 57, and her husband were fighting foreclosure on their home when sheriff’s deputies in Sevierville came to serve an eviction notice. They were across the street when they heard a gunshot and found Ross dead from a wound to the chest. The case was even more tragic because the couple had recently been granted an extra 10 days to appeal.”

and I continued reading.

“In Ocala, Fla., Roland Gore shot his wife and dog in March and then set fire to the couple’s home, which had been in foreclosure, before killing himself. His case was one of several in which people killed spouses or pets, destroyed property or attacked police before taking their own lives.”

I was honestly in a state of shock.  This made the “economic crisis” that the world is going through much more personal.  All of a sudden it wasn’t just a blurb on CNN while I’m using the coffee shop’s free wireless, it became my neighbor, my family, me.  Something is fundamentally wrong with this situation.  This is not the life that we are supposed to have.  Capitalism is a machine that is falling apart, and it’s throwing pieces at the factory workers, maiming and destroying them.  

State Capitalism is like a machine.  Machines work with tiny parts, cogs that connect perfectly to other cogs as the wheel turns.   Gears grabbing the teeth of other gears.  Every piece has a specific place that it has to be put for it to work properly.  When the teeth of the cog wear, the connections are harder to make, and the cog starts skipping, missing steps and the machine starts to fail.  The way capitalism has been set up is much the same.  With every transaction that is made, the effects of said transaction aren’t considered, and the machine starts to wear.  When you buy a car, your transaction is through, right?  Not at all, because now you have to consider the gas you will buy, the pollution your car creates, the parts you will need, the money your car will now be taking from the economy.  It’s an endless cycle of cause and effects, with the effects never really being considered.  Banks operate in much the same way, giving out loans, and then borrowing against those loans, and then borrowing again and again and again, until finally all of the money out in the world is just imaginary.  You can no longer trace back transaction, or even say how much money your company has because of the fact that it is all imaginary.  It would be like if I borrowed a dollar from you.  But Steve already owed me a dollar, so I just move the transaction to Steve owing you a dollar.  Now Josh owed Steve a dollar, so now Steve moved the transaction to where Josh owes you the dollar.  With every transaction move though, everyone has to pay the other person fifty cents.  So we don’t have any clue how much anyone really has in their pockets.  And so the crisis begins.  How silly is all of this?   

Unfortunately this silly situation leads to every horrible situation you can imagine.  To make it more personal, let me tell you a story.  I’ve mentioned before about working in the inner city of memphis when I was younger.  I worked with some pretty amazing kids in horrible circumstances.  When we’d come by the house to pick them up, you would walk in to a house with dirt floors.  No hard wood, carpet, linoleum, nothing.  Dirt floors.   A family of 6 living on dirt floors, with nothing to eat.  We provided the one meal a day that alot of these kids would eat.  I had one kid I loved named Bam Bam.  The kid was cute, and strong for a 3 year old.  He would run around at lunch time, stealing every kid’s lunch.  It didn’t matter how big they were, the kid was determined.  I watched him go after 10 years olds, making them run and cry.  He was like Indiana Jones trying to get the holy grail.  He couldn’t believe that he would have any other chance to eat because of how rarely he was able to.  Trying to explain to a hungry 3 year old that they don’t need to steal all the food from everyone’s lunches because we will be back tomorrow with more food for them really affects you.  How is this fair?  How is this a working economic structure.  The rich get richer, the poor get poorer and gap between gets larger, but now the gap is swallowing families, children.  Something is wrong.

So this is always where the same question comes up.  “So this situation might be bad, but what’s the other options?  If you can’t present me with something better, then I’m gonna stick with it.”  There is no reason to continue living our lives like this.  If something is destroying our families, our lives, it needs to end.  If you asked anyone in this country they will agree that something needs to change, so why hasn’t it changed?  The power and answer is in  your hands, not mine, not anyone else’s.  It is no one else’s job to present you with an answer, you are the only one with that answer.  Revolution starts with one.  One person who is fed up, sick and tired of watching people dying around them.  Revolution begins with understanding that every action you do will in turn create other reactions.  WE can’t live like the banks, spending imaginary money, living imaginary lives, killing ourselves for imaginary ideas.  Embrace what is real.  Embrace reality.  Next time you walk down the street, smile at every person that walks by.  Next time you go to spend your imaginary monopoly money, think about the effect your purchase will have on the world around you.  The next time you spend a day doing nothing, sitting on a couch watching television personalities talk about imaginary worlds that they have created, go out and do something.  Start a community garden, clean up your local park, volunteer at a nursing home.  Volunteer at a shelter, work at a boys and girls club, hell, spend time with your family, hug your friends.  Do something!  We can’t sit back and be controlled by the imaginary life that has been created for us by the powers that be.  Reality is here and now, and it will never come back.  This is your life, good to the last drop.

The powers that be fear the power WE have.  They have created a world that we are all sucked into.  No longer do we care about what is going on around us, we have to know if brad and angelina’s 15th kid is gonna be as pretty as them.   We have to know if a hollywood starlet gained 5lbs, and judge them for it.  We have to know who is getting divorced or on drugs or going broke.  This isn’t life.  This imaginary world of monopoly money, screens, smoke, and mirrors is not reality!  REALITY is the family that can’t afford to eat that live down the street from where you are throwing away your half eaten burger.  REALITY is the fact that your mom wants you to call her and give her a hug.  REALITY is that the wool is being pulled over your eyes.  REALITY is the fact that you can make a difference on your own.  The revolution begins with ONE.  There was only ONE Martin Luther King Jr., ONE Pancho Villa, ONE Fred Hampton, ONE Emma Goldman, embrace that!  Be that ONE.

WE can change the world, WE can be revolutionaries, WE can make this nightmare end, we just have to do it.  WE have to stand up.  

“If you stand up, and I stand up, and we all stand up, it’ll be anarchy!”

-bender, the breakfast club.

Capitalism Stole My Virginity, The (international) Noise Conspiracy 

ok, so here is the longer post from the last one I did.

So what’s been going on with you Sean, you might ask.  Well, I’ve been traveling alot.  I stayed out for the past 9 months.  I went from mexico, to sweden, to canada, to New york city.  I had alot of amazing experiences, and lived my crazy gypsy life.  I loved it.  Honestly, it changed me alot.  Seeing so much of the world and so many different people and ideas opens your eyes to how your personally living your life everyday.  I’ve always been a huge advocate for social change in the world, but I think that any change begins first in YOUR back yard.  Your the only one in control of anything that might happen.  We can’t rely of a leader or group to swoop down and save us, we have to save ourselves.

I found that it was the same everywhere.  We are all in this perile that is happening now.  You always here people saying, “well, looks like i’m moving to canada after the election”.  I’ve got news for you, this problem is global.  We are living in a day when the world’s government are buying the major banks and starting to control a majority of financial interests.  There has never been a better time to act than now.

Here’s a story for you kiddos, gather around.  

At one point in my life I worked in downtown Memphis, TN working with children and the homeless.  I worked with one guy named Ray.  Ray was awesome.  He had lost both his legs in Vietnam and spent most of his days wheeling around the city, trying to get spare change.  He was a huge, happy guy, always grinning from ear to ear.  His attitude would seriously make you laugh for hours.  He knew his life was difficult, and he just didn’t care.  He was just stoked on life. One day I came down to the river front where he stayed alot and was intent on having some good conversation and laugh a bit.  I walk up and Ray has a huge watermelon in his lap.  He’s smiling ear to ear.  I start laughing and I say, “Ray, where’d ya get the melon?”  He’s says that a church group brought it down to him and left on their merry way.  He looked at me and said “I ain’t got no knife to cut the melon, they didn’t give me that, but I do have a melon.  I guess that’s pretty good.”  Ray kept that watermelon in his lap for a few days until it began to rot.  The next time I saw him I asked what happened to his holy melon, he said he never got a knife, so it just rotted away, unused.   

I think this is a great analogy for social change.  We all want it.  We all know that there is something fundamentally wrong with what is going on in the world.  We know the wool is being pulled over our eyes, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer.  Children are starving, and nations are dying.  Understanding that something needs to be done is like getting that holy melon Ray had, but we need something to cut it open.  

Knowledge is key to making this happen.  We have to be educated on our past, present, and future.  We need to know what’s going on around us, we need to know what has come before us, so that we can change what’s ahead of us.   I’m amazed that you guys want to check out my website, so I want to be providing you with something worthwhile that will hopefully be the knife for you.  I will be continually updating with more information, articles, links, etc.  So check back often, hopefully there will always be something new for you.  And since my tattoos are the primary reason you guys are checking this out, I will be updating those often too.

Here’s a video by one of my favorite bands, Strike Anywhere.

enjoy, and i’ll be writing more soon.

So welcome to my new website, it’s been a long time coming.

The goal of this website is to provide information to the public on many topics.

I’ll be updating alot with news articles, videos, music and more.   I’m really fortunate that you guys want to check out anything I do, so I want to provide you with the most information I possibly can.  Check out the interest section for more links to topics to research.  

We are in a time in this world where we need to know what is going on around us, and no longer let the wool be pulled over our eyes.  It is up to us to truly be free, and education is the first step.  

I’m now tattooing at Royal Street Tattoo in mobile alabama. Check us out at www.myspace.com/royalstreettattoo

Sorry to make this post short, but i’ll be updating this constantly, so you’ll hear more from me. Here’s one of my favorite videos to tide you over.

It’s the international noise conspiracy, and the video is black mask.