Episodes
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UNICEF says 35 children per day on average have been killed by Israeli bombs, snipers, or other such means since October 2023. Now the numbers will grow exponentially in the ongoing famine Israeli forces are imposing.
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Kamala Emanuel and I -- aka the Ministry of Culture -- are off on another tour of parts of Europe and the US. Details about all the gigs can be found at davidrovics.com/tour.
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Missing episodes?
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With our spiffy new home internet connection, today's broadcast was not a disaster, for a change! I sang songs from the new album, Jabaliya, and other songs as well, mostly from the past year.
It was streamed live, this is what Streamyard calls the "Cloud recording," as opposed to the "Local recording," which is a WAV file that you can find on the Substack version of this podcast. For tech geeks out there, I'm singing through a Shure SM7B, and playing a Collings guitar with a K&K pickup, plugged into a Focusrite box, which then is connected to the laptop.
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On Day 21 in the genocidal siege of Jabaliya, as the hospital is being destroyed by tank fire and the children inside burned alive, here's a haunting, powerful remix of the song I just wrote, from Chet Gardiner's studio in Hawai'i.
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Another election, time to turn up the volume and shout at each other even more than usual again. -
Chet Gardiner in Hawai'i has provided a gorgeous backup band for "Jill Stein." Complete with drums -- appropriately enough, since Jill herself is a fine percussionist!So now if the song is so catchy that it causes a landslide vote for the Green Party, you can take your pick as to whether you want to blame me, Chet, or both of us.
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Everything is burning as I watch the video
She crawls out of the ruins, venturing to go
Out in search of water, the final human need
Although the consequences are almost guaranteed
As she goes out in the open, beneath the killer drones
Which aims its sights on her, then shreds her to her bones
Then waits for any people who might be fool enough to try
Come to fetch her body, beneath the smoke-filled sky
Two million people behind the ghetto wall
Wait for two-ton bombs to fall
To crush and burn the schools and tents
Where your whole extended family went
Scores more murdered with each passing day
With so many more on the edge of being taken away
Surrounded by tanks that fire at will
And the rest of the world stands by still
Completely surrounded with no food getting in
Ghost-like faces, impossibly thin
Kids that look like babies, babies born
Thirsty, starving, and forlorn
Men are being taken to who knows where
The elderly, the babies, the wounded in wheelchairs
With donkey carts and wagons, south on cue
As the drones above the rubble ordered them to do
They’re carrying out the Generals’ Plan
Which means kill all the kids that you possibly can
Anyone moving, soldiers take aim
Who they are doesn’t matter, they’re all the same
Make no distinctions, orders decree
Killing them all is just how it must be
And right now in New Jersey you can buy shares
In the resort Jared Kushner plans to build there -
From top to bottom, Americans can virtue-signal like nobody's business. But material conditions of most of society in the US indicate a total failure of governance.
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Bombing daily for well over a yearA death sentence for everyone hereThe Lancet said it's 200K killedBody parts strewn, mass graves filledShooting at families, then when medics arriveShoot again, leave no child aliveThey announced their intentions, to clear the northAnd they rolled in the tanks, firing forthHow many months now with nothing to eatA twenty-mile strip of rubble-strewn streetsWith no power, no water, schools destroyedAn occupying army completely devoidOf one little trace of moralityAfter totally demolishing Gaza CityBeit Hanoun, Zeitoun, JabaliyaKhan Yunis, Deir al Bala and Beit LahiaDestroying everything everywhereProducing their own footage as if to dareAnyone else to do anythingTo stop the destruction of everythingTo stop them from killing everyoneEvery daughter and every sonA zone of carnage, ruins and dronesThat won’t even leave a living child aloneTo starve them out is just what they sayAs the air strikes are called in day after dayAs the disembodied heads and handsScattered across this forsaken landGet bulldozed into the ground to hideThe holocaust where everyone diedKilled by Biden, by NetanyahuTo colonize for the chosen fewThe western media equivocatesAlong with the leaders of the western statesAre they really aiming to kill them all?Maybe we should do something to try to forestallThe end of this ancient civilizationBut they just stand alongside the genocide nationWho knew Jabaliya would end like thisThe ghost of another apocalypseThey’re calling it the Generals’ PlanLaying waste to whatever they canMechanized warfare run by AIWhere anyone living is subject to dieHigher-tech killing than ever beforeAcross the Atlantic, plans being made forCondos on the Mediterranean seaWhere the people of Gaza used to be
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The decline of the left in the US that I've been witnessing now for decades has been a process of exclusion that bears trying to describe. -
I'm not much for playing Charades, so I never actually got around to voting in an election until Ralph Nader ran for president in 2000. I also sang at various events with him, and at the Green Party national convention around that time, and at the last Green Party national convention online, and many other Green Party events in between.
I've also voted for lots of Greens over the years since I started voting more consistently, here in Oregon, where you're automatically registered to vote when you get a state ID or driver's license, the ballots arrive in the mail, making it all extremely easy, even for an anarchist to bother with.
I wrote this song, "Jill Stein," in 2016. I never got around to making a good recording of the song, but after seeing some particularly offensive posts about Jill on social media, I felt inspired to make a better recording of the song, after changing one word in it. See if you can guess which one!
With concern to the US political system, we can either keep on playing along with the "lesser evil" philosophy and hope to speed towards that proverbial wall more slowly, or we can turn the train around. Given those options, supporting Jill Stein seems like the right decision to me. I understand why other people disagree. It's a hard choice, between the near future and the further-off future. I've always been one for the long game myself, though I can also be very impatient.
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I had been thinking that maybe "The Ballad of Donald and Kamala" was all I was going to have to say about this election cycle, but apparently there's more. -
Episode 3 of 3 of my audio seminar on the Gaza genocide. All of the episodes can be found at davidrovics.com/palestine.
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Episode 2 of the Apocalypse in Review. You can listen to episode 1 at davidrovics.com/palestine.
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To mark a year of high-tech war being waged against the Palestinian people, there have been many different efforts at putting the past year into context, by many individuals and media outlets. Here's mine -- or the first of the three episodes in the series, anyway. The other two will soon follow.
This first episode is a crash course in the history of Zionism in Palestine, up until October 6th, 2023. The second episode is focused on the fall of 2023, and the third one on 2024.
Writing, recording, and putting together this sort of thing is very time-consuming. If people like it, it's worth it. Either way, it's a relatively new way of presenting things for me, and I'd appreciate your feedback, whether positive, negative, or in between.
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The first time I organized a show for someone, I think five people showed up.
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The Hawai'i department of the Ministry of Culture has given us a haunting remix of the song I wrote about those Iranian missiles that hit those Israeli military targets the other day.
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Everywhere the Al-Jazeera reporters were reporting from throughout the Middle East during and after Iran's October 1st ballistic missile attack on Israeli military targets, people could be heard cheering loudly. Most of the people I know across the world might not have been cheering, but their hearts were a little lighter, for a little while, at least. I know mine was.
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We interrupt these wars to bring you a Senate hearing with Bernie Sanders calling the shots. I'm still recovering from the shock of hearing a person with a Danish accent utter that much nonsense. Obviously they're not all fine upstanding radical leftists like almost everyone I know in Denmark!
If you've missed the proceedings, the upshot is that half of the expenditures for health care costs in the US these days goes for buying prescriptions of Ozempic, the new, extremely popular weight loss drug from Novo Nordisk. The reason it's so expensive is because the US government doesn't believe in regulating monopolies, and capitalism says charge whatever they'll pay -- it's basic supply and demand, after all.
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If there were any press outlets interested in covering the trials and tribulations of a little-known traveling musician trying to sing any songs about Palestine without having people try to cancel his gigs, what might that coverage look like?
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