December 2021 – Like You've Got Something Better To Do

Covid and the Culture of Maximum Harm

As Southern Humboldt’s most intrepid writer, I understand that this does not constitute a high honor. Here in Humboldt County, where “positivity” trumps reality, and we spend more time cultivating flattering lies about ourselves than looking at the truth. We’ve become exceptionally good at ignoring things like dead bodies, huge ripoffs, and widespread environmental destruction as “business as usual.” But, when a brand new elephant shows up and makes itself comfortable on our sofa, and no one else seems to see it, I recognize my responsibility to my community. I mostly stopped writing about life in SoHum a couple of years ago to focus on music. I have a lot more to say beyond words than I do with words these days, but times like these demand more from us, and clearly, SoHum needs my perspective now more than ever.

In case you haven’t noticed, maybe because you were too busy compulsively washing your hands, that our constitutional democracy got overthrown by a public health dictatorship. Two years into this fiasco, the US has logged more Covid deaths, both in total, and per capita, than any other developed nation on Earth. Clearly, what we did in response to Covid, was wrong. Way wrong. Wronger than any other first-world nation on Earth. Why was that?

Besides that, the average American life expectancy dropped by 1.9 years during the pandemic, not because of Covid, most Covid deaths were among people who had already exceeded the average life expectancy. No, American life expectancy dropped because addiction, overdose, depression, alcoholism, suicide, anxiety, hunger, despair, unemployment, loneliness, isolation and fear all soared during the pandemic, greatly exacerbated by the draconian restrictions instituted in response to the pandemic. Those restrictions, and the social and economic consequences of them, killed millions of healthy Americans in the prime of their lives. We could hardly have done more damage to Americans’ health if we tried.

Again, why is that? Were these policies designed to harm us? I think that’s a fair question to ask, considering how successfully they disrupted our lives, ruined our businesses, overthrew our democracy and rescinded our civil rights, as opposed to how poorly their strategy worked to prevent deaths from Covid.

Here in Humboldt County we lost twice as many people to overdose in 2020 as we did to Covid, and I’ll bet that’s true in 2021 as well, but they don’t report about that epidemic anymore. Somehow they deem it appropriate to spare us that grim body count. Nor do we hear about the suicides, heart attacks, liver disease, etc. Unless you die of Covid, you don’t count. Our local media continues to ignore the damage wrought by draconian lockdown restrictions, but anyone who dares criticize these measures gets vilified mercilessly. What’s up with that?

During the War on Drugs, we used the term “Culture of Maximum Harm” to describe the perverse way in which efforts to curb drug abuse, by criminalizing drug users, caused far more harm than drug abuse itself. In fact, the War on Drugs strategy of arresting and incarcerating drug users and peddlers seems to have been devised so as to cause the maximum possible harm to society. When we saw how the culture of maximum harm used the pretense of addressing a public health crisis as cover for violence, human rights violations and political oppression, we saw the War on Drugs, not as an effort to curb drug use, but as a tool to invade privacy, incarcerate millions, and as a distraction from, and excuse for, crimes against humanity.

We see the same culture of maximum harm at work today in the Covid Pandemic, and the same idiotic enthusiasm for strategies with a proven track record of failure. Masking causes more infections than it prevents. Social isolation kills more Americans than Covid, and don’t even get me started on vaccines and vaccine injuries. If you took the ripoff death-jab, I’m sorry. I really am, but Covid vaccines don’t work, and besides that, they kill people. That’s just the truth.

Ten years and 666+ posts later, SoHum still needs someone who isn’t afraid to confront the obvious, no matter how unpopular or inconvenient, and the obvious has never been more unpopular or inconvenient than it is right now. I wish it weren’t so, and that I didn’t have to do it, but no one else around here will. Like it or not, you need me right now, because there’s something you need to know, and it’s staring you in the face, but for some reason you just don’t see it yet. So welcome back.

Spooks in SoHum

I thoroughly enjoyed Robert F Kennedy Jr’s new book, “The Real Anthony Fauci.” It’s a real page-turner that exposes rampant corruption at Fauci’s NIAID, and reveals how he used his power, as head of that agency, to funnel taxpayers’ money into pharmaceutical company coffers, as well as his own pocket, for lethally toxic drugs that don’t work, and how he covered up the trail of death that has followed Fauci faithfully since the ‘80s, with phony, unethical science, often using vulnerable populations, including AIDS orphans, and rural African villagers as lab rats without their informed consent, or that of a guardian or advocate.

Every American needs to read this book right now, but for folks here in Southern Humboldt, the book holds special interest because it mentions a Thanksgiving gathering in Harris in the early ‘90s. At that gathering, one Peter Schwartz attempted to recruit a young Princeton Graduate with a degree in Anthropology named Ken McCarthy into working with him in an “unnamed West African country” in a job aimed at “weakening tribal and family structures on behalf of a federal government.” McCarthy found the proposal “intensely disturbing” and declined the opportunity.

However, according to this well-researched and foot-noted volume, Peter Schwartz once worked at the Sanford Research Institute, and ran their Strategic Environment Center, at the time when the Strategic Environment Center hosted the CIA’s MKUltra mind-control experiments. Later, Schwartz went to work for Shell Oil Co, to help soften up indigenous Ogoni resistance to the Oil giant’s plans to exploit their ancestral homeland, the fertile Niger River Delta in Nigeria, for oil development. Presumably, this was the job he hoped McCarthy might help him with when the two spoke at that Thanksgiving gathering in Harris.

Schwartz earns a place in the book because he authored one of a series of pandemic simulations that all involved establishing authoritarian control over society through quarantines, strict control of the media, and forced vaccinations. Schwartz “authored” the “Lockstep” simulation in 2010 which described how nations around the world, in response to a global flu pandemic, “flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restriction, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks…leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.” according to Schwartz.

So why were CIA spooks so heavily involved in these pandemic preparedness exercises? As RFKJr points out, “the CIA doesn’t do public health: the CIA does Coup d’e-tat.” Perhaps as intriguing for SoHum locals is this question: Why did a spook like Schwartz come to a Thanksgiving gathering in Harris, of all places? And why did he think it was a good place to recruit mercenaries to commit genocide in Africa? Or perhaps more relevantly, who in SoHum, besides the CIA, would invite a spook like Schwartz to Thanksgiving? Or does Peter Schwartz himself live here in SoHum?

I’ve long suspected CIA involvement in Humboldt’s cannabis industry. They can’t resist any opportunity to make a lot of untraceable cash. I wouldn’t be surprised if they use some of that cash to control and manipulate our local community radio station as well. Someone certainly is. I can’t imagine any other reason to explain why KMUD has shut out community dialogue and become so authoritarian and one-sided lately. It seems spooky to me. What do you think?

Beyond Words

Solstice Greetings,

At the conclusion of another cataclysmic year I’m very grateful to share this beam of sunshine:

This music has inspired me and kept me sane through these trying times. I don’t know where this music comes from, why it has called me to it, or why it feels so good, but it does. It just does. Beyond Words is hot, throbbing, organic EDM like you’ve never heard before, but it is also a collection of didgeridoo solos rich with healing infra-sound vibrations, recorded live with no accompaniment or overdubs. You have to hear it for yourself.

Right now, on the darkest night of this dark year, there has never been a better time to shake off the fear, shake off the anxiety and shake off the trauma of this whole crazy mind-fuck and shake your booty to these energizing ecstatic dance rhythms. Just crank it up and let it move you. I dare you.

I feel this music has more power than anything I can say with words, and everyone seems to understand it at some level. All I care about right now is sharing this music with as many people as possible. If you like this album, You have really got to hear me play live. Live music matters. We need to come together again to make music and dance. It is absolutely critical to the functioning of culture. There is so much more that happens when we come together to make music and dance than we can ever describe in words, and it is essential that we revive that vital organ immediately.

Wherever you are, I want to play for you. Let’s make the arrangements. Covid restrictions be damned, this show is going on the road in 2022! Fuck the variants! The curve is as flat as its going to get. It’s time to dance!