When I was 8 years old, I discovered my parents’ record collection. It had all of the boomer classics.
This was the first time I listened to David Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” I wasn’t quite ready to understand Pink Floyd’s The Wall or The Who’s Tommy (or Quadrophenia), let alone Alan Parsons or Gary Numan, but with Ziggy, I fell in love with the concept of a concept album. I still view Ziggy as one of the single best concept albums, despite the homosexual undertones (which Bowie later apologized for profusely, by the way).
I would have loved if the world was normal, and I could have made a feature film of Ziggy Stardust. The story of an alien coming to earth and becoming a rock star only to be destroyed by decadent Western culture is a story with a lot of room for meaningful examination of the rise and fall of the West.
I think in a normal world, my childhood would have developed very differently, and it would have been quite possible that I could have ended up working with Bowie on this film I imagined at 8 years old. Of course, if you go down that road, the fact is that something like the Ziggy album could only have existed on the same timeline that led to the troubles of the Millennial generation. The peaceful conclusion to come to there is that there is always good within the bad – for all we can complain about the boomers, they left us some very good music.
Although it was never a single, I went through a phase back then when I would play the opening song “Five Years” on repeat, pulling the needle back to that track over and over again.
The song, like the entire album, is cryptic. But listening to it, I imagined that the five years being spoken of was the length of time Ziggy and his Spiders were on earth before imploding under the weight of the sex and drugs culture.
At the age of 8, five years seemed like a very long time. Frankly, five years still seems like a very long time. I think objectively, for a human being, five years is a very long time.
But you know what is longer than five years?
Twenty two and a half years.
RT:
Former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin, convicted in April on three charges related to the murder of 46-year-old black man George Floyd, has been sentenced to 22.5 years in prison, minus time served.
Pushing for the harshest possible sentence on Friday afternoon, prosecutor Matthew Frank told the Minneapolis court that this was “not the typical second degree unintentional murder.” Chauvin’s attorney Eric Nelson urged that justice should not be served according to “public opinion.”
In accordance with Minnesota law, Chauvin was sentenced only on the most serious of his crimes, rather than on all three related to the same incident.
Hennepin County District Judge Peter Cahill acknowledged the suffering felt not only by Floyd himself, but on the families of both men and the wider Hennepin County. He insisted he did not base his sentence on public opinion, sympathy, or the ongoing eruptions of protesters in an attempt to send any “message.”
“The job of a trial court judge is to apply the law to specific facts and to deal with individual cases.”
This is insane and it is going to affect your life.
We now live in a country that no longer has a concept of blind justice.
It may sound corny to talk about such things, but it probably is the single most serious issue a country can deal with (aside from free speech, as free speech is the prerequisite of every other issue).
Although I have supported revisionism on the issue of lynchings, pointing out that only 72% of lynching victims were black (meaning 28% were white, because there were only two races in America at the time), and that virtually everyone lynched was either convicted and proved guilty or almost certainly guilty, I have maintained that lynchings were indeed wrong, and that if we are going to have blacks in the country, they have to have the same legal rights as everyone else when it comes to criminal courts and execution (not when it comes to seating on buses or use of drinking fountains, which is something completely different).
In order to have a civilization, criminal justice has to be completely blind. Again – 28% of lynching victims were white. So it isn’t possible to just say “oh, well, we will just use this extrajudicial execution system on this specific group.” Any attack on the order of the justice system is an attack on the whole society.
What has been done to Derek Chauvin is an attack on the entire criminal justice system. George Floyd died of a drug overdose, and everyone knows that. But he is being lynched by the system for political reasons.
Of course, there is precedent: in 2018, James Fields was sentenced to prison for murder because a fat woman had a heart attack when he had a car accident while being chased by Antifa terrorists with guns and bats.
The Fields conviction began the road to the end of justice in America, and the Chauvin conviction sealed the deal. No American can have a reasonable belief that they are going to get a free and fair trial in this country anymore. In fact, if you are a politically persecuted person, there is effectively no chance of being treated fairly by this system.
This more or less means our country has officially ended, and we are now living in the ruins of a dead civilization.
It’s been five years since Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. In that time, which now feels so short, everything that we believed was immutable has dissolved like smoke.
In one of his more powerful monologues of recent memory, Tucker Carlson said “you are witnessing the death of the future of your country.”
This is truly an understatement.
The country is already dead. A country that institutionalizes injustice, that locks men up for crimes that everyone knows they didn’t commit, is no longer a country. The foundations have rotted, and it is only a matter of time before the entire structure collapses.
The only thing I can advise you now is this:
Run.
Run for your life.
Because they are coming for you.
And the only thing that is going to keep you alive is if you can get out in front of them, far enough that they don’t manage to close the distance before they begin eating themselves.
They will eat themselves, and some of you will make it out alive.
Some of you won’t.
I want to be clear: any dreams we had of saving this country are now dead.
This is real life now and things are going to get very, very dark.
But there is a light at the end of this age.
Your sole mission now is to make it there alive.
Godspeed.