Chumped

I used to think that liberals and progressives were smarter than Trump supporters. Not anymore. Today, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, everyone looks like a chump to me, because we got chumped big-time. Today, Trump and his little insurrection just looks like a diversion, while liberals, progressives, and Democrats in general now look like the American equivalent of “Good Germans.”

I realize that to most of you, civil rights means you can fuck whoever you want, use whichever restroom you want, and get an abortion whenever you need one, but civil rights, like the right to freely assemble, practice your religion, enjoy privacy in your own person and home, travel freely, and speak freely in public, these rights aren’t just nice to have, they are essential if “We the People” are to have agency over our own lives, or any influence over how we are governed. As long as those rights remain abridged or revoked, “We the People” are locked-out of our own government, and our lives are not our own.

I know they have couched this coup in medical bullshit, but we got chumped. Masks and social distancing don’t really do that much to stop the spread of virus, as we’ve seen, but they stop democracy dead in its tracks. Most of us are really not that vulnerable to the Covid virus, but the measures we have taken to avoid the virus have crippled us, and made us extremely vulnerable to fascism, which is terminal for a nation.

Frankly, I’m no fan of our democracy. It has never worked, and I don’t expect it to start working any time soon, but I do love my freedom, and I believe in the power of people coming together, forming groups, and working together in groups. Personal freedom, and the freedom to interact with whom you choose wherever you choose are essential to the function of any civil society, and they are our birthright. Giving these rights away, for a false promise of deliverance from an exaggerated threat is shameful, and if we fail to reclaim those rights immediately, history, not to mention our own children, will forever brand us with this shame.

I have learned in my life, that there are two ways of securing your freedom:

1. You can be quiet and sneaky, and probably get away with what you want to do, even though it is prohibited, while your neighbors suffer the oppression.

2. You can stand with your neighbor against the oppressor so that you can all enjoy the freedom you deserve and need.

The problem with Option 2 is that your neighbor has to stand with you. Most people will not make a stand like that unless they know they have their back against the wall, and they can find no other escape. I don’t think my neighbors realize just how badly we’ve been chumped, or how grave our situation really is. We’re still congratulating ourselves for keeping Trump from a second term, but things are so much worse now. I wish Trump were the problem, or that it was just a virus, I really do.

I don’t care which pole you gravitate to. We all got chumped, and unless we understand what really happened, we cannot respond to it effectively. So before you start talking down to me, and reciting the same lies we’ve all heard a million times from every single corporately owned media outlet in America as well as NPR and PBS, just check out these documentaries.

Lets start with Catherine Austin Fitts. I used to really enjoy hearing her when she was a guest on Harry Shearer’s LeShow. He had her on to explain the Mortgage Meltdown and Bank Bailout of 2008-9. She knows banking and financial markets and she is really good at explaining them to lay people. This has nothing to do with medicine and no one disputes any of this information, but it has everything to do with what happened to our country, and the world.

https://media.livecast365.com/highwire/thehighwire/content/1629406378690.mp4?fbclid=IwAR1P3ttRj-jztKw6GqZ5liRRdopzpmiI4U9BVd_GILXenm1PZjbQinhDbe8

I first heard media critic Marc Crispin Miller on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! In this interview, he explains how the media polarized the electorate and used this polarization to manipulate Americans into abandoning their civil rights and complying with strict authoritarian social controls.

https://off-guardian.org/2021/08/20/watch-perspectives-on-the-pandemic-18/

Dr Michael Yeadon used to be VP in charge of research into new drugs at Pfizer. He has a long professional history in new drug development. He has very grave concerns about these new “vaccines” as well as the pandemic response measures. You should consider them carefully.

PFIZER VP: “THE THING TO BE TERRIFIED OF IS YOUR GOVERNMENT”

Finally, If you’ve read my recent posts, you may recall that I told you a little about Tony “Lab Leak” Fauci. Well, Robert F Kennedy Jr has a new book about Fauci coming out in a couple of months. In this speech he talks about his new book, and how we got to where we are now. I hope you’ll watch it.

Ok, if you’ve watched all of those, and you still want to talk down to me and recite the popular lies, go ahead, but I assure you, I’ve heard them all before. Honestly, do you think I have difficulty following the official narrative? Or that if I didn’t believe it when I heard it on NPR, it will sound more convincing coming out of your mouth, or in your comment? My question to you is: Do you really believe that story? Because if you do, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. On the other hand if the gravity of this situation disturbs you, and you want to talk about it, I’d love to hear from you.

Careful With that Vax Eugene

It’s been funny to watch the mainstream media downplay the “lab leak” theory of the origin of Covid-19. I mean, to me, this seems like a big story, right? “Sloppy Scientists Unleash Global Pandemic” I think that would sell some papers, or bait some clicks, or whatever it is people do to find out what someone else knows that they don’t these days, especially since Tony Fauci’s fingerprints are all over the crime scene, with the NIH funding some of the most dangerous (not to mention illegal, insane, and prohibited by international treaty) work with bat corona viruses remarkably similar to the one wrecking havoc all over the world right now.

Pretty much everyone has now admitted that the “lab leak” theory is at least plausibly, if not likely responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic. It certainly makes sense to me. “Lab Leak” should be Tony Fauci’s middle name. Tony “Lab Leak” Fauci oversaw the bio-defense lab at Ft Detrick that leaked bio-hazards into the Frederick, MD water supply over one-hundred times between 2004 and 2012.

Fauci earned his reputation for doing very risky science, sloppily, at Ft Detrick, but even then, many questioned whether all of those releases were accidental. Many wondered whether Fauci’s crew at Ft Detrick were intentionally experimenting with bio-weapons on unsuspecting American civilians. Instead of getting to the bottom of of those questions, congress prohibited, so called, “gain of function” research, and closed the lab at Ft. Detrick.

Flash forward to today: What does it mean that Tony “Lab Leak” Fauci worked with the Chinese Communist Party, the Department of Defense, and the CIA, among others, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to genetically engineer bat corona viruses to infect humans? That seems like a pretty big story on its own, don’t you think? Don’t you want to know what’s up with that?

There’s something unreal about this whole pandemic. I’m not saying that the virus isn’t real, or that it isn’t killing people. I think the virus is real, I just don’t believe the story we are being told about it is true. I completely understand that they want me to be frightened of the virus. They want me to be so frightened of the virus that I run to the clinic for the experimental “vaccine.”

I also know that they want me to believe that the “vaccine” is “absolutely safe and effective.” I heard my County Health Officer say exactly that, and I practically choked. Nothing is absolutely safe and effective, nothing, so I knew that was a lie. It is certainly not true of these experimental new “vaccines,” which have already killed thousands of Americans, and crippled thousands more, but no one wants to cover that story either. Instead, they ask, “What do we have to say to get you to take the shot?”

Clearly, they’ll say anything, whether it is true or not, to get their poison in our arms. But some of us remain unconvinced. So, now the government has stepped-up the pressure with mandates for government workers to get “vaccinated”, and they’re encouraging all employers to follow suit. From now on, you will surrender sovereignty over your own body chemistry as a condition of employment. A lot of Americans will do it too, not because they think the vaccine will protect them, or because they think getting the shot is a good idea, but because the only thing that scares Americans more than Covid or the creepy new “vaccine” is unemployment.

I don’t pretend to know more than I do. I don’t know where Covid came from, but I know where Fauci came from. I know where Pfizer came from. I know where Biden came from, and I don’t like where they are taking us, and I sure the fuck don’t trust them enough to let them stick a needle in my arm.

I’m plenty frightened by what I see right now, but I think we should all be very careful about what we think we know, what is possible, and who we trust, because the stakes are very high for all of us, and the decisions we make right now, under duress, will set the course of history.

This old Pink Floyd song really captures the angst that I’m feeling at the moment. I remade Careful With That Axe Eugene with some of the instruments from the Orchestra of the Unwanted. This track features the Spring Bass, Tin Can Fiddle, and $20 Vocoder as well as Talking Drum and voice. I hope you like it.

The $20 Vocoder

I bought this old Casiotone CT-360 keyboard at a yard sale in Garberville, for $5, with the express purpose of bending it. That is, hacking the circuit-board to exploit whatever glitches, distortion and weirdness I could coax out of it. So, the first thing I did when I got it home was take the back off of it, exposing the circuit-board, turned it on, and started one of those cheesy rhythms playing while I probed the circuit. All weekend I kept playing those incessant mechanical rhythms. I even put a block of wood under one of the keys, so notes kept bleating for hours. I found quite a few interesting short-circuits on the board, but the noise almost drove me crazy.

As those canned rhythms churned on and on and random notes screamed away for hours on end, the internal speaker impressed me with its brightness, and overall volume. In other words, it was F-ing loud. The speaker made bending convenient, but I didn’t imagine I would use it much, since I usually plug electronic instruments directly into a mixer or recorder, and listen to it on my studio monitors. In fact, when I needed a place to mount the knobs and switches that trigger the glitches and malfunctions I found on the circuit-board, the speaker grill, located directly to the left of the keys seemed the perfect location.

I removed the speaker, cut a hole in the speaker grill, and mounted all of the switches and knobs on a wooden disc I recycled from a round box that originally contained a small wheel of goat-milk brie cheese. It fit perfectly. I added a quarter-inch phone jack, and a switch that allows you to turn the internal speaker, a smaller, quieter speaker that I added, and placed elsewhere in the device. When I finally put the whole thing back together, it all malfunctioned perfectly.

But I had this speaker left over, this loud, bright, 3W 4Ohm 5” Samsung driver. Then I had an idea. It wasn’t an original idea, and it wasn’t the first time I’d thought of it, but clearly its time had come. Joe Walsh and Bob Heil put this idea in my head a long time ago with the guitar solo to “Rocky Mountain Way.” I loved that song when I was a kid. Heil and Walsh worked together to build a device that works on this principle for the vocalized guitar solo in that song. Heil went into production with the device, dubbing it the “Talk Box” and gave one of the very first production models to Peter Frampton who famously used it on “Do You Feel Like We Do?” David Guilmore used one on “Pigs” on the Pink Floyd album “Animals” and many other artists found use for this device as well.

I believe Heil still makes some version of the Talk Box. Craig Anderton, in his book “Electronic Projects for Musicians” tells you how to build something like Heil’s Talk Box, but he recommends using the driver from a horn speaker, so his design requires no funnel. However, I once interviewed Bob Heil for my radio show, and I asked him about the Talk Box and how they created that sound. In that interview, Bob Heil told me that they set out to recreate an old blues trick of putting a funnel with a piece of hose attached to it, over the speaker of a guitar amplifier. By putting the other end of the hose in his mouth, a player could appear to “sing” guitar notes by silently moving his mouth.

None of the modern designs for this kind of effect use a funnel with a conventional paper cone driver. Instead, they all use a more specialized driver, but I knew about the funnel from talking to Bob Heil, and it works well. I’m sure it helps that it is such a loud and bright little speaker, and such a loud and bright little synthesizer. They work marvelously together, but the device will work with any audio source loud enough to drive the speaker without burning it out. I really love the way this device allows you to sculpt sound, turning relatively flat electronic signals into full bodied musical expressions. I’m completely hooked on it and I expect to use it quite a bit in the future. I’m sure a lot of musicians would have use for a device like this, and I hope this encourages some of them to build one for themselves.

Vax Nazis Suck, but Pink Floyd Rocks

Really, I don’t like to be the guy with the obtuse opinion, and I’ve got better things to do than spend my time explaining the obvious to a hostile audience in deep denial, but push has come to shove, and the vax nazis have gone on the offensive. Vaccine mandates and vaccine passports must be stopped. I cannot believe how many Democrats and liberals have fallen for the bullshit rhetoric about this pandemic and these experimental new drugs, and are willing to trade their own, and their neighbors, rights as citizens, and as sovereign human beings, for the life of livestock and lab rats. When I think of how many Americans died to secure and protect those rights through the years, just to watch you throw them away, for the false promise of protection from a disease that kills less than 1% of the people who catch it, I can’t just sit back and watch it happen. I have to say something.

When I see the media working diligently to turn neighbor against neighbor, as they tell us lies like: “This new wave of infection is driven by the unvaccinated.” and “the vaccine-hesitant are causing the virus to mutate” even though they have no science to back it up, and all common sense contradicts them, reminds me of the War on Drugs. Drug war lies ranged from: “marijuana makes colored men violent and rape white women.” and “marijuana makes Mexicans lazy and stupid.” to “crack cocaine is 100 times more addictive than powdered cocaine” and “the new marijuana is 40 times more dangerous than the old marijuana.”

This vaccine obsession should remind you of the War on Drugs too. The government lies. Don’t ever forget that, and when the government lies big like this, and the media falls in line, lock step, like they are now, you can bet it is a war, and you can bet that this war is not about what they tell you it is about. In all my life, I have never seen the government mobilize this kind of media dominance for anything except war (and those wars have never been about what they said they were about): The War on Drugs (protect Americas youth), the first Persian Gulf Way (liberating Kuwait from a bloodthirsty Saddam),9/11 and the War on Terror (Find Osama bin Laden), and the Invasion of Iraq (Saddam’s WMDs).

The War on Drugs. Do you remember that bullshit? Mandatory minimum sentences, drug testing in the workplace, zero tolerance, paraquat, CAMP, DARE, gang warfare, prison overcrowding, crack babies, millions dead, tens of millions arrested, millions more lives ruined, and three generations of activists had to devote their lives to walking this insanity back, and we are not even close yet. I want to remind you of the War on Drugs so that you remember just how out-of-hand things can get, if you let yourself believe that the government has your best interest at heart when it pulls shit like this.

This vaccine hysteria has gotten way out of hand. If you are one of those people who is beginning to turn on your jab-resistant peers, you really need to check yourself. I know that you hear the same story from every single trusted media outlet you turn to, and the story they tell is very simple: “Everyone must get vaccinated or we’ll never be able to take our masks off, or go to a concert or have a party again.” You can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t take a couple of jabs in the arm to make everything all better again, especially since everyone says the vaccines are “safe and effective.”

I’m sorry folks, but when was the last time you heard a drug commercial in the media that didn’t have a long list of side-effects read at auctioneer speed at the end of it. What makes you think these “vaccines” are any different? The CDC’s VAERS program reports over 10,000 deaths following the vaccine, and hundreds of thousands of severe reactions, some with long-term, disabling conditions like paralysis. I would feel awful if that happened to someone I had encouraged to take the jab over their own reservations, and so would you. The media, on the other hand, doesn’t mind lying to you at all, and doesn’t care whether you live or die. They are just weapons in a war, and this is another war against us all, just like the War on Drugs, only in reverse.

The CDC recorded more vaccine related deaths in the first five months of 2021 than in the previous 20 years combined.

In the War on Drugs, they lied to us about drugs to get us to stop taking them; today they’re lying to us about drugs to get us to take them, and if that doesn’t work they’ll make it hard to get a job, go to school, get a license, travel, and they will do their level best to stigmatize you and turn your friends and family against you. Since the truth is not on their side, these coercive measures are the only way to get people to comply, but it will breed resentments. These lies will break-up families, destroy friendships, and tear at the fabric of our society, and those are intentional objectives in this kind of war.

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time, not that long ago, when most Americans had no experience with cannabis, let alone LSD. Back then, people believed whatever bullshit the government told them about these drugs because neither they, nor anyone they knew, had ever seen, let alone tried them. After this indoctrination, however, they sure didn’t want their kids getting involved in anything so sordid as illegal drugs, and they were on the lookout for signs of drug use in their neighborhood.

When they finally did catch their own kids with cannabis, they did just what the government told them to do. They called the cops, on their own kids. Later, in the DARE program, they got kids to rat on their parents and friends, for smoking weed, and then the government destroyed their lives. Millions of lives were lost or destroyed because gullible Americans believed the bullshit they saw on TV. They turned on people in their own community. They turned on their friends, and they turned on family, because they believed what they saw on TV.

This lead to bitter resentments, estrangement, and rebellion. Families suffered, communities foundered, and a counter-culture emerged that rejected this intolerant mainstream ideology, and proudly celebrated cannabis and psychedelics. Within that counter-culture that celebrated cannabis and psychedelics, there emerged a new kind of music that defied all the accepted norms of pop music. This music just didn’t make sense unless you were high on drugs, Hendrix’s feedback, the Dead’s Space, and Zappa’s Freak Out immediately come to mind. On the other side of the world, Syd Barrett’s notorious consumption habits and subsequent collapse, as well as his Zippo-lighter slide-guitar on Astronomy Domini forever marked Pink Floyd as counter-cultural celebrants of psychedelics.

Pink Floyd has several “songs” that really don’t make much sense unless you are really high, and I love them for that. I feel that this kind of music connects to something primal within us. There are no lyrics that you can write that can liberate us from this culture, but there’s a feeling in this music that is deeper than words, and when you tap into that feeling, it tells a whole other story. Roger Waters once described this song as “a poignant appraisal of the contemporary social situation” I’d say that’s more true now than ever. Here’s my cover of the Pink Floyd song “One of These Days” played on electric bass, tin can violin, Omnichord and voice. I hope you like it!