Welcome to the all-new Red Star Times. Not much will change around here. You’ll still be getting the same political analysis and cultural commentary. However, I think the site redesign, done by old friend Eric Lander, is a vast improvement over the former layout. A big thank you to him and to my girlfriend who helps me with back-end stuff. I also wanted to thank Jeff Tiedrich of Smirking Chimp as I neglected to mention him in my last post. I’m working on some minor changes here in terms of content, but nothing major. If anything, the changes I am mulling over will just mean more Red Star Times for all.

I had originally planned for something different for today’s relaunch, but the untimely death of Ronnie James Dio makes it necessary for me to address his life and work.

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The Black Sun Gazette site design makeover is nearly done and ready to go live. Tomorrow at this time, Black Sun Gazette will likely be a whole new site. Fear not, my faithful readers–the site will re-direct to the new location. For my farewell post to the old format I’d like to give a few thanks to the people who helped make the site what it is. Specifically, I’d like to extend my thanks to Danny Chaoflux, Joseph Metheny, Tate Engstrand, Ralph Bernardo and Raymond Wiley. Thanks to everyone who commented, reposted, told their friends about me and discussed things that I wrote in their real lives.

For my parting post, I would like to talk about a band that I consider to be one of the most important bands of the last half of the 20th Century, Bad Brains. Rock and roll has always been multi-racial music, with black men standing at the vanguard of every musical development from Little Richard to Jimi Hendrix. Bad Brains not only invented hardcore (simultaneously with Black Flag) they also provided the impetus for the entire D.C. hardcore scene, teaching the MacKaye boys among others to play their instruments.

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I don’t like what the ruling class of this country do. They lead oppressive, imperialist wars while driving down the living standards of an increasingly disenfranchised working class. However, nothing quite gets my goat like the nouveau riche elements that make up the upper middle class. If you’ve ever heard me talk about it, or are just curious why anytime a well-to-do celeb chimes in on some topic they’ve gleaned illumination from atop their penthouse apartment it makes me rage hard, this recent article at HuffPo will explain it.

UPDATE: HuffPo removed this article. Luckily Google cached it. Link at beginning of article goes to the cache.

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Before I launch into an extended rant about the recent BP exploision, I wanted to highlight something that I thought was very important.

At a recent Washington Correspondents Association, President Barack Obama made an off-handed joke about using predator drones to keep the Jonas Brothers off his daughters. I know that this is one of those many times where I’m going to be told that I’m overreacting. But let’s think for a second about the record of Barack Obama. A man who ran for office on promises of “hope and change” quickly proved that he was the same type of establishment hack as the man who sat in the chair before him. This was proven, above all, by maintaining the status quo in the Department of Defense, despite being elected in large part due to a massive backlash against American involvement in two imperialist wars.

There are real victims of American attacks on Pakistan with predator drones, many of them children. Over a thousand civilians are known to have been killed by predator drone attacks since they began in Pakistan. Further, Barack Obama has ordered not just predator drone attacks that kill civilians in Afghanistan. He is also the first President in world history to order an assassination against an American citizen.

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On April 5 it was the Massey mine disaster. Then there was the massive BP accident and resulting oil spill, perhaps the biggest environmental disaster in world history. Today there has been another massive accident in the energy production industry, this time in Kentucky. One thing underscores each of these incidents–the Obama Administration does not consider the lives of miners and oil riggers worth the value of the energy they pull out of the Earth, to say nothing of the damage done to the planet.

No one is really sure why the BP rig exploded yet. However, BP is under investigation for safety violations at another rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Further, BP has a long record of not caring about the environment or the safety of its employees. None of this should be terribly surprising, as the profit system puts massive and definitive pressure on selecting the most ruthless capitalist practices possible. American mines and rigs have to compete with the Chinese, who use slave labor and have a total lack of regulation. Barring things like world environmental regulations or a global living wage capital will always be able to pick and move to wherever labor is cheapest and regulations are scant.

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