That one hasn't been mastered and put out to streaming services yet. Working on a third album. Try opening it on a computer or in desktop mode. Should let you download too.
Hi Theseus, I found your YouTube channel. Going through the songs one by one, looking for the song with your lyrics, I’m assuming it’s on the album “Secrets of the Radicalization Machine.”
I had a feeling your group is British, I hear echoes of Supertramp and UB40 when I listen to Secrets of the Radicalization Machine. I am reminded of The Logical Song when I read your Mind Control lyrics. I hope none of these observations offend you, coming from me they’re high praise.
Yesterday, NPR documented the widespread refusal by Republicans to speak to media. Many have prohibited media from attending their press conferences and rallies, proclaiming that a rally with 30,000 people is a private event. Why, it’s almost as if they have something to hide. We are in the Orwellian dystopia, thanks in part to a Republican led effort to reduce public education to rote memorization at the expense of creativity and rationality. I blame that neofascist Newt Gingrich for destroying the collegiality of Congress and the false Texan Tom Delay for skewing redistricting nationwide, but the real fault lies with all those who go along, substituting lies for truth. Roar on brother. Liberty is always threatened by the privileged.
They don't speak to media or their constituents in many cases. It's fascist, pure and simple. And yes, Newt started it. Horrible, horrible, evil creature he is.
I was on a cruise with Newt and Calista. He and I are not friends but we share the experience of working on The Hullabaloo, the student newspaper at Tulane. We were both editors, and he was considerably more liberal and witty than I found him to be on that cruise forty five years later. When he discovered that the ship would stop at the Greek island of Lesbos, he and Calista hid in their stateroom until we set sail again. No way was he going to be caught taking his wife on a Lesbian holiday.
I also read the book “Nineteen Eighty-four” in the general vicinity of its namesake (eponymous?) year, maybe a bit earlier in college in the 1970s. Haven’t cracked it since, barely remember all the details that you mention.
As with most books I read in my youth, I had no idea at the time how valuable a lesson was being gifted.
My father’s first language is German, he didn’t learn English until he came to this country in the early 1950s, and like Donald Trump he was a little challenged in the reading department. So he didn’t read books, as a rule, probably because of the difficulty. He did read newspapers every single morning, and he certainly didn’t have any trouble with spoken English and English vocabulary.
However, curiously, this book was on his desk at the time of his stroke. It was the only book on his desk, so clearly he had been planning to make his way through it.
Greg, I find it intriguing that this book, of all books, captivated you early on. It’s revealing.
And yes, it certainly classifies as Sci-fi.
“ What Orwell’s book is really about is the destruction of the spirit— “
“…. The Nazis did that. The Soviets did that. The fascists in America are trying to do it right now.”
And let’s not forget Chinese society, one of those countries where political thought police will show up at your door to try to convince you that Big Brother is the right way and the only way.
Noticed that the Russian military targets civilians, especially large concentrations of civilians like refugees in museums and train stations. To be a member of the Russian military is to be a member of Big Brother’s police force. Completely immoral (amoral), completely ruthless coldhearted and brutal like Putin and pals. The worst of the worst.
Trump is a Putin wannabe, but he doesn’t have the same pure ruthlessness and brutality.
Lest we become enamored with our delusions of “other” (other societies, other cultures), we also must remind ourselves, as Greg has done, that the thought police is alive and well right here at home.
For-profit capitalism is one of America’s greatest thought crimes. Russia sees it clearly, but we don’t, like fish don’t see the water they swim in. The concept that a small number of people must be billionaires, and that the rest of us work as slaves for the billionaires, is an insidious 1984-worthy myth. We need a new paradigm of an economy, where all corporations are honest corporations, where worker-owned businesses and cooperatives are the norm, where the workers are equal to each other, whether they provide direct labor or drive a desk. Death to boardrooms, executive suites and corporate jets‼️ Down with billionaires‼️
>>We need a new paradigm of an economy, where all corporations are honest corporations, where worker-owned businesses and cooperatives are the norm<<
I'd even be okay with an evolved capitalism that considers the good of humanity into account even a little. Right now, coprorations just don't fucking care.
“What Orwell’s book is really about is the destruction of the spirit—“
Tyranny destroys the soul, as Greg says.
Think about animals in the wild. There are animals that ruthlessly attack and kill each other for power, for territory, for ownership of female animals and therefore breeding rights, all of it ultimately for survival.
Survival.
Dictators are fearful of their own survival, and their early history and early experiences in life often reflect this.
Once a person is initiated into love and light, they are motivated by morality. I know that the term “love and light” sounds sappy because of its 1960s and New Age connotations, but I include it deliberately.
Love is what motivates a person with morality. Light is the life flame which infuses each of you reading these words with knowledge and understanding. Before the oprichnik O’Brien corrupts Winston and Julia, they are “alive” in the sense of love infusing the heart center and light infusing the mind (knowledge center). After corruption, those centers have been closed. They are “dead,” to the spirit at least. They are now the walking dead.
Being moral is being alive.
Be grateful that you are “alive.” The last thing in the world we would want for ourselves is to return to the ignorant, intellectually dead, emotionally bankrupt world of the humans who are still stuck in survival mode. Be grateful that we are not billionaires and ideological hacks and deadbeat functionaries in the system. Think Neo breaking out of The Matrix. We are all Neo.
Lovely observations, true & undeniable. But let's not forget that life on Earth has been terrible to huge numbers forever and that progress is measured in centuries.
True, true. The 20th century brought the greatest good, with medicine and democratic governments and all that, and also the most death and destruction. Kind of crazy, when you think about it.
Faustian, if you have no problem stopping at evil when trying to understand all those bizarre behaviors. Where's Norman Mailer (as full of Norman as he could be) when we could use his 20th Century talents to describe them at every turn.
So many writers and journalists attempt to be impersonal in their writing. The science texts I had to read in my engineering program in college might be the worst of the breed. By using the passive voice, by sounding sterile and bland and neutral and dead, somehow a book or an article is supposed to convey something of value.
Yech. Double yech. 🤮
In my opinion, writing is supposed to imitate life. Writing is supposed to be alive. If a writer is trying to deaden their thoughts, whether on paper or on a computer screen, then that person is reducing their value.
The most alive and passionate story is your own personal story. Those experiences that have changed your life, blown your mind, and rocked your world, are the experiences to be writing about.
Although the causation of decline of the Roman Empire was multi-factorial, and more complicated than Edward Gibbon postulated, a number of contributing factors are ones we’re grappling with in our time. Climate change, pandemics, and government officials only interested in their own self interest were clearly part of the reason the Western Roman Empire was effectively ended in 476, even as some of its precepts persisted for centuries.
Romans probably thought their empire would last forever and couldn’t see the end coming by multiple paper cuts. My fear is that Americans are in the same place. Last night at CPAC, the attendees gave Trump enthusiastic applause (and 69% of the vote in the straw poll) when he said America is being destroyed from within. What is so concerning is that the people clapping and hooting and hollering fail to recognize they are supporting the destroyer-in-chief.
The irony of the Supreme Court and the Republicans implementing tyranny of the minority is that at some point the majority will say enough is enough and the United States will fall apart, unless their regressive policies are abrogated. California, Oregon and Washington State possibly with Nevada could easily form a new country (Cascadia?). These states have a combined population of 54 million and the 5th largest economic output in the world. In having achieved the logical end point to their so-called conservatism, the court would no longer be the Supreme Court of the United States. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
I'm not even sure when I read 1984 for the first time, but I do know that it was probably at a time that I was so self-absorbed that it failed to penetrate, so, probably my 20s, a century or so ago. I just re-read it last year and had to keep firmly in my mind that it had been published in 1949. I started thinking about reading it during the Trump years, but stopped myself because that felt too much like a cliché. It is a powerful book, especially for our current situation.
It is a novel about giving up, giving in, taking whatever scraps you are allowed to have. Trump supporters did that early on. I have had enough engagement with them through the years to know that, like Trump, they could never take responsibility for their own lives and were looking for an easy scapegoat. Trump led them right to it -- "radical leftist socialist Democrats," the "poors", the Blacks, the gays, the Mexicans, WOMEN -- basically anyone who didn't buy the canned bullshit he was selling. Some have fallen away, but there is still a core group that will never fall away. Before Trump, they probably used to be "regular Americans." After Trump, they became subjects of Big Brother.
Then there are the resistors. Those who DON'T accept the idea that everything needs to be done for them. Those who will resist tyranny in the US. They will resist the fascism that's apparently on the menu for the future. We are the people that are actually DOING what Trump supporters SAY they're doing. Trump is an expert in double-speak. He has taught his all too willing cult to become experts in it too. In this form, of course, it becomes a playground taunt: whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you. It's breathtaking how many examples of "things the Left says about the Trumplicans," that a week or so later becomes, "things Trumplicans say about the Left." It's insidious, and many fall for it every time. Goebbels would be proud.
Nineteen Eighty-Four turned out to be not a warning, but a prediction. As exhausted as we all are at this point, it's only going to get worse as 2024 approaches. The 2024 election will be a bloodbath, no matter what happens. Trump is in a bind right now. The RNC say they will stop paying his legal bills when he announces his candidacy for '24, but he also thinks that the DOJ wouldn't indict him while he's a Presidential candidate. Oh, what to do? My answer is, and remains, "fuck you, die."
Ditto! Retraumatized by memories best left on the shelf, my physical health doesn't allow my words to keep up . Wish I could talk with LB at 4 am since I have plenty of juicy fodder.
Down with Facebook! Down with Palantir! Fuck Putin and his global 5th column!
👌👌👌
Mind Control
Underage sex tape, bribery, brain rape, death threats, starvation, sleep deprivation, eternal damnation
Subconscious invasion, uncomfortable confusion, microwave weaponry
Constant contradiction, reality is fiction, contrarian barbarian, toxic inhumanity, cold selfish greedy
Rejection of science, experts, truth, vampires long in the tooth
Mind control baby!
Mind control baby!
Witnessing the Putinization of our nation, controlled opposition, time we are wastin
Traumaganda, dissociation, indoctrination, radicalization, cult identity, give your last dime to me
Hypnosis, Neuro-linguistic Programming, half our news is Kremlin infused
Mind control baby!
Mind control baby!
Mind control baby!
Conspiracy theories, alternative facts, gaslighting
Lies, Armageddon, double binds
Religions, cults, pyramid schemes
Gimme your seed money
Mind control baby!
Mind control baby!
Mind control baby!
Mind control baby!
Mind control!
It says king on the bible for a reason
It's your soul the emperor is seizin
Money power control
Filling your void with paranoid delusions
Telling you what your brainfucked mind wants to hear
Wrong side of history, magic, mythology
But we're to blame you see
Can't believe your lying eyes
Don't know the definition of words you despise
Pissing away our rights to own the other side
Enslavement of women, killin moms, planting bombs
Crypto and it's gone
Gold bug both a con
Welcome to the hybrid war
Welcome to the hybrid war!
Telephonic - Mind Control - MP3:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uEA3sBpIiKoSX0jBQ9p21hIPzLa9MDdw/view?usp=drivesdk
Sing it!
It played on repeat in my sleep last night and it won't stop. The link to the song is above free download, music for the people!
Can someone send me the artist and song title?
The link refuses to play on my iPhone.
I tried doing a search on the lyrics, and that attempt failed to produce any song title in three different browsers.
https://music.apple.com/us/artist/telephonic/1509775110?ls
Thank you so much‼️
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6ETtHMrkzT9NCKgCIzDI58?si=xmCA5Q7DR8651YmNq1n-ug&utm_source=copy-link
That one hasn't been mastered and put out to streaming services yet. Working on a third album. Try opening it on a computer or in desktop mode. Should let you download too.
Hi Theseus, I found your YouTube channel. Going through the songs one by one, looking for the song with your lyrics, I’m assuming it’s on the album “Secrets of the Radicalization Machine.”
Telephonic needs a wiki page. Internet searches bring up practically nothing.
Mind Control is not on Secrets of the Radicalization Machine, it's coming out on the next album still working on it.
Thanks for this! I have to play this in my car so I can turn it up as loud as possible!
Couldn't have done it without you buddy!
“Witnessing the Putinization of our nation, …”
I had a feeling your group is British, I hear echoes of Supertramp and UB40 when I listen to Secrets of the Radicalization Machine. I am reminded of The Logical Song when I read your Mind Control lyrics. I hope none of these observations offend you, coming from me they’re high praise.
"Traumaganda" needs to be the Word of the Year. Great song!
Whoa! "Sadists in Statehouses." That fits.
Yesterday, NPR documented the widespread refusal by Republicans to speak to media. Many have prohibited media from attending their press conferences and rallies, proclaiming that a rally with 30,000 people is a private event. Why, it’s almost as if they have something to hide. We are in the Orwellian dystopia, thanks in part to a Republican led effort to reduce public education to rote memorization at the expense of creativity and rationality. I blame that neofascist Newt Gingrich for destroying the collegiality of Congress and the false Texan Tom Delay for skewing redistricting nationwide, but the real fault lies with all those who go along, substituting lies for truth. Roar on brother. Liberty is always threatened by the privileged.
They don't speak to media or their constituents in many cases. It's fascist, pure and simple. And yes, Newt started it. Horrible, horrible, evil creature he is.
I was on a cruise with Newt and Calista. He and I are not friends but we share the experience of working on The Hullabaloo, the student newspaper at Tulane. We were both editors, and he was considerably more liberal and witty than I found him to be on that cruise forty five years later. When he discovered that the ship would stop at the Greek island of Lesbos, he and Calista hid in their stateroom until we set sail again. No way was he going to be caught taking his wife on a Lesbian holiday.
Dangerous jerk not matter how you spin it, that lyin’ cheatin’ Newt!
Intelligence is the most hated thing by fascists.
Intelligence/expertise, and also kindness, and also talent.
Most definitely- These people are raised by soulless machines not even humans tormented by their own existence.
These are times that show us what we're made of.
That's what we're afraid of...
Outstanding. Brilliant. *Again*
I also read the book “Nineteen Eighty-four” in the general vicinity of its namesake (eponymous?) year, maybe a bit earlier in college in the 1970s. Haven’t cracked it since, barely remember all the details that you mention.
As with most books I read in my youth, I had no idea at the time how valuable a lesson was being gifted.
My father’s first language is German, he didn’t learn English until he came to this country in the early 1950s, and like Donald Trump he was a little challenged in the reading department. So he didn’t read books, as a rule, probably because of the difficulty. He did read newspapers every single morning, and he certainly didn’t have any trouble with spoken English and English vocabulary.
However, curiously, this book was on his desk at the time of his stroke. It was the only book on his desk, so clearly he had been planning to make his way through it.
Greg, I find it intriguing that this book, of all books, captivated you early on. It’s revealing.
And yes, it certainly classifies as Sci-fi.
“ What Orwell’s book is really about is the destruction of the spirit— “
“…. The Nazis did that. The Soviets did that. The fascists in America are trying to do it right now.”
And let’s not forget Chinese society, one of those countries where political thought police will show up at your door to try to convince you that Big Brother is the right way and the only way.
Noticed that the Russian military targets civilians, especially large concentrations of civilians like refugees in museums and train stations. To be a member of the Russian military is to be a member of Big Brother’s police force. Completely immoral (amoral), completely ruthless coldhearted and brutal like Putin and pals. The worst of the worst.
Trump is a Putin wannabe, but he doesn’t have the same pure ruthlessness and brutality.
Lest we become enamored with our delusions of “other” (other societies, other cultures), we also must remind ourselves, as Greg has done, that the thought police is alive and well right here at home.
For-profit capitalism is one of America’s greatest thought crimes. Russia sees it clearly, but we don’t, like fish don’t see the water they swim in. The concept that a small number of people must be billionaires, and that the rest of us work as slaves for the billionaires, is an insidious 1984-worthy myth. We need a new paradigm of an economy, where all corporations are honest corporations, where worker-owned businesses and cooperatives are the norm, where the workers are equal to each other, whether they provide direct labor or drive a desk. Death to boardrooms, executive suites and corporate jets‼️ Down with billionaires‼️
Thanks, Roland.
>>We need a new paradigm of an economy, where all corporations are honest corporations, where worker-owned businesses and cooperatives are the norm<<
I'd even be okay with an evolved capitalism that considers the good of humanity into account even a little. Right now, coprorations just don't fucking care.
“What Orwell’s book is really about is the destruction of the spirit—“
Tyranny destroys the soul, as Greg says.
Think about animals in the wild. There are animals that ruthlessly attack and kill each other for power, for territory, for ownership of female animals and therefore breeding rights, all of it ultimately for survival.
Survival.
Dictators are fearful of their own survival, and their early history and early experiences in life often reflect this.
Once a person is initiated into love and light, they are motivated by morality. I know that the term “love and light” sounds sappy because of its 1960s and New Age connotations, but I include it deliberately.
Love is what motivates a person with morality. Light is the life flame which infuses each of you reading these words with knowledge and understanding. Before the oprichnik O’Brien corrupts Winston and Julia, they are “alive” in the sense of love infusing the heart center and light infusing the mind (knowledge center). After corruption, those centers have been closed. They are “dead,” to the spirit at least. They are now the walking dead.
Being moral is being alive.
Be grateful that you are “alive.” The last thing in the world we would want for ourselves is to return to the ignorant, intellectually dead, emotionally bankrupt world of the humans who are still stuck in survival mode. Be grateful that we are not billionaires and ideological hacks and deadbeat functionaries in the system. Think Neo breaking out of The Matrix. We are all Neo.
As Elvis Costello sang, "What's so funny 'about peace, love, and understanding?"
Lovely observations, true & undeniable. But let's not forget that life on Earth has been terrible to huge numbers forever and that progress is measured in centuries.
True, true. The 20th century brought the greatest good, with medicine and democratic governments and all that, and also the most death and destruction. Kind of crazy, when you think about it.
Faustian, if you have no problem stopping at evil when trying to understand all those bizarre behaviors. Where's Norman Mailer (as full of Norman as he could be) when we could use his 20th Century talents to describe them at every turn.
Life is personal.
So many writers and journalists attempt to be impersonal in their writing. The science texts I had to read in my engineering program in college might be the worst of the breed. By using the passive voice, by sounding sterile and bland and neutral and dead, somehow a book or an article is supposed to convey something of value.
Yech. Double yech. 🤮
In my opinion, writing is supposed to imitate life. Writing is supposed to be alive. If a writer is trying to deaden their thoughts, whether on paper or on a computer screen, then that person is reducing their value.
The most alive and passionate story is your own personal story. Those experiences that have changed your life, blown your mind, and rocked your world, are the experiences to be writing about.
Life is personal. So write like it is.
Thank you, Greg. You’ve done it. A total delight.
Although the causation of decline of the Roman Empire was multi-factorial, and more complicated than Edward Gibbon postulated, a number of contributing factors are ones we’re grappling with in our time. Climate change, pandemics, and government officials only interested in their own self interest were clearly part of the reason the Western Roman Empire was effectively ended in 476, even as some of its precepts persisted for centuries.
Romans probably thought their empire would last forever and couldn’t see the end coming by multiple paper cuts. My fear is that Americans are in the same place. Last night at CPAC, the attendees gave Trump enthusiastic applause (and 69% of the vote in the straw poll) when he said America is being destroyed from within. What is so concerning is that the people clapping and hooting and hollering fail to recognize they are supporting the destroyer-in-chief.
This ^
Destroyer in chief. Excellent phrase.
Rome broke up a few times, during that run. I wonder if that's the future for the United States as well...
The irony of the Supreme Court and the Republicans implementing tyranny of the minority is that at some point the majority will say enough is enough and the United States will fall apart, unless their regressive policies are abrogated. California, Oregon and Washington State possibly with Nevada could easily form a new country (Cascadia?). These states have a combined population of 54 million and the 5th largest economic output in the world. In having achieved the logical end point to their so-called conservatism, the court would no longer be the Supreme Court of the United States. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
The Five 8 is always so great, Greg! Keep up the brilliant work but DO UNPLUG and have a safe, sane and healthy hiatus! 🥂
Agree, gwyn, on all counts!
Thanks!
Thank you! One more week to go. : )
I'm not even sure when I read 1984 for the first time, but I do know that it was probably at a time that I was so self-absorbed that it failed to penetrate, so, probably my 20s, a century or so ago. I just re-read it last year and had to keep firmly in my mind that it had been published in 1949. I started thinking about reading it during the Trump years, but stopped myself because that felt too much like a cliché. It is a powerful book, especially for our current situation.
It is a novel about giving up, giving in, taking whatever scraps you are allowed to have. Trump supporters did that early on. I have had enough engagement with them through the years to know that, like Trump, they could never take responsibility for their own lives and were looking for an easy scapegoat. Trump led them right to it -- "radical leftist socialist Democrats," the "poors", the Blacks, the gays, the Mexicans, WOMEN -- basically anyone who didn't buy the canned bullshit he was selling. Some have fallen away, but there is still a core group that will never fall away. Before Trump, they probably used to be "regular Americans." After Trump, they became subjects of Big Brother.
Then there are the resistors. Those who DON'T accept the idea that everything needs to be done for them. Those who will resist tyranny in the US. They will resist the fascism that's apparently on the menu for the future. We are the people that are actually DOING what Trump supporters SAY they're doing. Trump is an expert in double-speak. He has taught his all too willing cult to become experts in it too. In this form, of course, it becomes a playground taunt: whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you. It's breathtaking how many examples of "things the Left says about the Trumplicans," that a week or so later becomes, "things Trumplicans say about the Left." It's insidious, and many fall for it every time. Goebbels would be proud.
Nineteen Eighty-Four turned out to be not a warning, but a prediction. As exhausted as we all are at this point, it's only going to get worse as 2024 approaches. The 2024 election will be a bloodbath, no matter what happens. Trump is in a bind right now. The RNC say they will stop paying his legal bills when he announces his candidacy for '24, but he also thinks that the DOJ wouldn't indict him while he's a Presidential candidate. Oh, what to do? My answer is, and remains, "fuck you, die."
Thanks for this, Steve.
Every day I wake up and I think to myself, "I can't believe this is our world. I just can't believe it." It's madness.
Ditto! Retraumatized by memories best left on the shelf, my physical health doesn't allow my words to keep up . Wish I could talk with LB at 4 am since I have plenty of juicy fodder.
Orwell wasn't just an artist; he was a prophet
Oh yes.
Will the current waring conglomerates of atoms come together or continue to diverge?
Ending in firey destruction?
Can Nations continue to go their separate ways?
I supect the sword will only be retired when the last man holding it finds he is the last one of his species.
I saw Orwell not as a prophet but as a visionary.
(My semantics)
For 60 plus years i have failing defended Thomas Malthus as a visionary. While technocrats and economists attempted to make him irrelevant.
Today at 82. i re read my deceased friend,Charles Bowden. Definitely a man with eyes wide open.
A visionary who noted that the "future was past" and had "memories of the Future."
Greg, great scribbling.
It’s unimaginable to think we are here…it unraveled slow, then, it became fast.