Like You've Got Something Better To Do
Filling your empty life with my pointless drivel for as long as it takes
Dr Mike Yeadon is a highly qualified medical professional with experience in respiratory viruses and new drug development. he’s been speaking out against Covid “vaccines” since they first rolled out. So far, his predictions about them have been prescient. In this latest interview, from the podcast series “Doctors and Scientists” he goes into detail about the dangers we face from these experimental gene therapies, and from proposed “vaccine passports.” I hope you will take the time to watch it.
Just so you know where I’m coming from: I was raised in a union family, and I served as a UAW shop steward for a time. My mother never let me forget the importance of a woman’s right to safe, legal access to reproductive medical care, including abortion. I’ve been politically active and outspoken most of my life, advocating for cannabis legalization and an end to the War on Drugs, saner environmental policies, and civil rights. I supported Bernie Sanders, and I think European style socialism, like you find in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, looks pretty good from my perspective.
I also despise Trump. I hate rich people on principle. People don’t get rich by accident, and it is neither a noble nor worthy goal. People get rich by making other people poor, and taking advantage of them, not necessarily in that order. They do it because money is how men with no talent get laid, and Trump is the perfect example of that. I find him obnoxious, boorish and dim-witted, and I would vote for an infectious disease before I would vote for him.
Really, I would vote for Covid-19 for President of the United States before I would vote for Trump. Considering the alternatives, why not? Covid-19 has great name recognition. Thanks to a hugely successful pandemic with numerous variant sequels, no one has wooed the media in the last two years more than that spikey little coronavirus. Of course all Covid-19 has done is kill people and make them sick, so Covid-19 has some image problems to work out. But, considering that both presumed candidates supported Operation Warp Speed and share responsibility for the Covid Vaccine Disaster that has already killed more people than Covid-19, and promises to keep killing Americans through the election cycle, I think Covid-19 can win the 2024 presidential election. But I digress.
My point is, that until the pandemic, I identified with liberals and progressive Democrats more than anyone else in the political spectrum. Today, however, when I hear liberals and progressives cheer vaccine mandates, censorship, lockdown measures, and medical tyranny, it turns my stomach. When liberals and progressives sneer at personal freedom and advocate authoritarianism in the name of “Public Health,” they cross a very bright line, and it should give them pause. When you throw civil rights under the bus in favor of public safety, you are asking for a very different kind of country. I know that I, and I suspect that you, really don’t want to live in in that kind of place.
When we forget the principles that unite us, despite our differences, only our differences remain. I will stand for personal freedom, bodily autonomy, privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of association for everyone, including myself. When we stand together on those uniting principles, we have the power to insure them for everyone. Without those uniting principles, the movement shatters into a jumble of militant minorities with narrowly-focused agendas and narrow-minded constituents.
If I have to roll up my sleeve to get a job, why should I care if you have to spread your legs to get one. If I can’t go to a restaurant, concert or bar because I’m unvaccinated, why should I care if you can’t get in because you are Black or Jewish. If my doctor is censored, vilified and driven underground because he practices alternative medicine, why should I care if you are censored, vilified and driven underground because of your alternative sexual practices. Without the overarching principles of personal freedom, bodily autonomy and human dignity, Progressives lack the vitality to inspire solidarity.
More starkly, by embracing media censorship over the principle of Free Speech, by trusting government spokesmen rather than investigating evidence of the illegal bio-weapons program that spawned Covid-19, by turning against your unvaccinated and mask-averse neighbors instead of condemning the criminality of lockdown measures that disrupted our lives and bankrupted over a million small businesses, and by buying into the corrupt Covid vaccine scheme which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and siphoned billions of tax-dollars into the coffers of Big Pharma, progressives helped facilitate a global fascist coup that annihilated our civil rights, free press, and national sovereignty in favor of global “Public Health” authoritarianism that serves the very narrow interests of a few technocratic billionaires.
These are not the “progressives” I remember. Progressives know better than to trust government, even when it’s run by Democrats. Progressives know that in politics, stated goals are never real goals, and real goals are usually nefarious. Progressives know that corporations lie to them and take advantage of them at every opportunity, and that disasters create opportunities. Progressives know that unless you keep a watchful and skeptical eye on your government, and keep it moored to the principles upon which it was founded, it won’t be long before the atrocities start, and once they start, those atrocities become very difficult to stop. That’s why Progressives need to come to their senses right now! It’s already too late.
As soon as the bombs started falling on Ukraine, the memes started dropping on Facebook. Suddenly, I’m getting bombed by blue and yellow Support Ukraine memes, followed by Boogieman Putin memes, Ukrainian refugees with their pets memes, and heroic Ukrainian freedom fighter memes. This is what a 21st Century propaganda war looks like. I don’t know where these memes come from, but they were clearly created by professionals, and released strategically.
Don’t get me wrong. I have only sympathy, compassion and concern for the people of Ukraine and my prayers go out to them. I also have sympathy, compassion and prayers for the Russian soldiers who have no desire to kill Ukrainian people or destroy their homes, but who have been sent on this tragic errand. I have no affection for Putin, and I condemn this invasion. However, the US invades sovereign nations all the time, with much less provocation. If we can’t control our own government’s military aggression, who are we to complain about Russia’s.
What is missing from this deluge of propaganda, is any acknowledgment of US culpability in this dreadful situation. There’s no mention of the long-term CIA operations to install pro-western governments all over Eastern Europe, especially the Ukraine, or of how those operations foment and finance Nazi movements that have persisted in Ukraine since WWII. Nor do they mention the business deals which insure that Ukrainian wealth, humanity and resources be exploited by oligarchs in Berlin, London, and New York, rather than those in Moscow.
On the ground, in that part of the world, there is great disagreement over which of those two “trading partners” offer a better deal, and more than a few idealistic Ukrainians would prefer to cultivate a free and independent nation without any unwelcome influence from abroad. Most, however, would prefer any of the above options, to war.
Considering US culpability as the driving force behind NATO’s eastward expansion, We the People, bear responsibility for this mess, even though most of us had no idea what our government was doing over there behind our backs. This is a problem. Our government represents us, and when our government commits really horrible, atrocious crimes against humanity, We the People are to blame. However, We the People are the most media-hypnotized people on Earth, and consequently, corporate interests can obtain our permission, through hypnosis, to use our government in any way they choose.
Let me say that again. We are the most media-hypnotized people on Earth, and corporate interests use media hypnosis to get our permission to use our government to do their dirty work. It’s called “Manufactured Consent.” We get bombarded with one-sided propaganda promoting an impossibly simple, unbelievably naive narrative about Ukraine, just at the moment that their impossibly simple, unbelievably naive narrative about Covid began to collapse.
Russia launched its invasion, just as 2021 US mortality rates revealed a shockingly high death toll. The US overall mortality rate, which remained unchanged through the 2020 Covid pandemic, shot up by 40% in 2021 following the roll-out of Covid vaccines. That’s an unprecedented spike in overall mortality. Researchers estimate that lockdown measures reduced the average American’s life expectancy by almost 2 years, another shocking impact, and a recent study by the Harvard School of Applied Economics revealed that lockdown measures did almost no good, for the enormous amount of harm they caused.
I’m just warning you that the people feeding you this bullshit about Ukraine are the same people who convinced you to needlessly live under house arrest for two years, take potentially lethal injections of experimental drugs that don’t work, and wear a mask that you know doesn’t stop the fine particulate matter associated with forest-fires, but somehow prevents the spread of a virus that is a hundred times smaller.
As I see it, there are four great tragedies playing out here:
1. The tragedy of war in Ukraine, for which we bear some responsibility.
2. The Tragedy of US Foreign Policy, driven by oligarchs, promoted through corporate media and drenched in the blood of humanity that stains the hands of every American. The crimes against humanity attributed to our out-of-control government’s policies would, in fact does, fill many volumes. For brevity’s sake only, let’s leave it at that.
3. The Tragedy of Media Monopoly, internet censorship, and the deluge of propaganda that manipulated Americans into doing far more harm, not only to millions of people all over the world, but to themselves, their fellow citizens and their own country, than any foreign power could dream of.
4. Finally, The Tragedy of the American People. Thousands of Americans died needlessly because they were denied early treatment to Covid. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people died, and continue to die, from adverse reactions to Covid vaccines, and thousands more people died deaths of despair as they watched their businesses, marriages, and/or careers collapse under lockdown measures. Perhaps worst of all, in the midst of this tragedy, a kind of insanity has taken hold.
In this socially atomized, media-hypnotized, environment of fear and isolation, Americans are shell-shocked, confused and traumatized. They have no idea where to turn. Out of habit, they turn on the TV; they read the news; they scroll through their feed, because they don’t know what else to do. So, they still live in a virtual reality where Covid vaccines are “safe and effective” and the disease is worth sacrificing your quality of life to avoid. The media continues to ignore the mountain of Covid “vaccine” injuries, while Biden’s administration keeps pushing Americans into this new medical authoritarianism that censors the wails of grieving families while it floods cyberspace with electronic propaganda.
The schizophrenia has taken a toll on the American psyche, and understandably so. Without a firm grip on reality, we’re left rudderless in a shit-storm of sophisticated propaganda. Unfortunately, the technocrats spreading this propaganda know this, and they know how to capitalize on the injuries they’ve already inflicted. Thus far, they’ve played us like a fiddle, and they’re still calling the tune. Regardless of the situation in Ukraine, the tragedy of the American people strikes closest to home, and that’s the one I’m most concerned about.
I submitted this letter to the North Coast Journal after they announced that they were going to stop focusing on pandemic fearmongering. This is the letter they refused to print:
Dear Editor,
I’m so glad to hear that the NCJ will stop hyper-focusing on Covid. While I am most eager to get back to living a less severely restricted life, I know that a lot of us have questions about what we just went through. For instance: Why did following “Best Medical Practices” as ordered by our Public Health officials, lead to the worst case scenario for our community?
We in the US comprise 4% of the world’s human population, but we suffered 15% of the world’s Covid casualties, despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that Public Health authorities turned our lives upside-down in response. Why did all of the emergency measures, that disrupted our lives so dramatically, fail so spectacularly? Who is responsible, not only at the national level, but also here in Humboldt? How can we insure that nothing like this ever happens again?
And while we are on the subject of medical malfeasance. Why are the world’s most vaccinated nations, like Israel and the UK, seeing the biggest surges of Omicron? Why are so many people dying suddenly after vaccination? Why does anyone still recommend or require Covid vaccines given their complete failure to stop the disease, and their proven danger? Specifically, why didn’t the NCJ report on the spike in death and injury reports to CDC’s VAERS system following the Covid “vaccine” rollout?
Finally, why did the NCJ use such sleazy rhetoric, including scapegoating and dehumanizing epithets, to marginalize anyone who disagreed with those disastrous Public Health diktats? We deserve answers to these questions, and if you ever expect us to trust you again, you’ve got some explaining to do.
Sincerely,
John Hardin
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?
It is difficult to make an informed decision about Covid vaccines because so much of the important information about vaccines is censored. I like this series of documentaries and recommend them to everyone:
There are more documentaries in this series, you can find them at bitchute, a video platform that takes a stand for free speech.
I like this pair of documentaries too, and I encourage you to watch them:
Ordinarily, I express my opinion in my own words in this blog, but right now, with so much important information being censored from mainstream and social media, and so many people being pressured and coerced into medical decisions without adequate information, I feel obligated to share these sources of factual information from bona fide experts. I hope you find this information helpful in your research.
This pandemic is a lot like a Grateful Dead concert in the ‘90s. You know that large sums of cash will change hands, a lot of people will take drugs, and sooner or later it’s going to kill the fat guy you love. You know that a Grateful Dead show will be a huge event. You know who will be there, and you know exactly what they sound like when they play together, no matter what song they play. This pandemic is the same way. We’ve heard this band before, and we didn’t like it at all.
This pandemic was brought to you by the same band who gave you the War in Afghanistan, both wars in Iraq, The War on Drugs, the War in Vietnam, and both world wars. Let’s call them “The Vanguard Group” because Vanguard is the largest privately held investment firm in the world, and they own everything. I mean everything.
They own the media, all of it, including NPR and PBS, through their so-called “philanthropic foundations,” like The Ford Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They own Big Pharma, Big Oil, and Big Ag, and they buy up internet startups that serve their interests as soon as they look promising.
They’ve been around for a long time. Many generations of Rothschild, Rockefeller and DuPont have played in the Vanguard group, and Bill Gates is their new keyboard player. There are a few other players too, but they have a very distinctive sound that can instantly trigger PTSD reactions in millions of people all over the world who have experienced them before.
These are the people who sold diesel fuel, from American refineries, to Nazi U-Boats, so they could attack Allied supply convoys as soon as they left the East Coast of the US. The same people who made poison gas for Nazi death chambers AND explosives for Allied bombs, and the same people who financed Hitler’s Third Reich, as well as the millions of Allied troops who died fighting them. They didn’t care much who won that war. The fact that millions of people died, at a time when people were becoming unruly, is all that really mattered to them. That’s how they work and nobody but them can put on a show like that.
That’s the kind of show you get from the Vanguard group. They also did the War on Drugs, and I remember that show well. I remember the lies and the bogus science, the fear campaign, the full-court press in the media to turn neighbor against neighbor, and to turn children against their own parents. I remember the huge budgets for cops and prisons while they cut social programs, and I remember that the CIA financed dirty wars in Central and South America while they fostered violent gang wars in neighborhoods all over the US by trafficking tons of cocaine into US Cities. If you lived through it, you’ll never forget it.
This pandemic is just like the War On Drugs if you just make some substitutions:
1. Substitute Tony Fauci for Drug Czar Bill Bennett as the Designated Liar. So we have a new guy who tells lies designed to scare the shit out of you. Back then they wanted you to be afraid of drugs, today they want you to be afraid of the virus.
2. Substitute “Cases” for “Arrests.” They quote this meaningless statistic endlessly, and use it to justify draconian new policies that limit our freedom. Undercover cops and sting operations have now been replaced by a PCR test that produces a lot of false positives, proving only that if you look for trouble hard enough, you are bound to find it.
3. Substitute Deaths and Hospitalizations for Overdoses, Gang Murders, Crack Babies etc. Dead people. Deaths, in a Vanguard Group production, are like the notes of a Jerry Garcia guitar solo at a Grateful Dead concert. Death is the essence, the character, and the defining quality of the Vanguard Group experience. Death is what makes the Vanguard Group who they are, and these periodic demonstrations of their unparalleled flair for killing large numbers of people dramatically, and with complete impunity, is why people listen to them.
4. Substitute Covid-19 for Crack Cocaine Both cooked-up in a lab and dumped on innocent civilians by the CIA.
5. Substitute Mandatory Vaccines in the Workplace for Mandatory Drug-Testing in the Workplace. Both aimed at producing a more compliant workforce and marginalizing free-thinkers. They established these mandates as an emergency measure, even though they are nonsensical and unnecessary, but they will try to make them stick, permanently. They sure got away with it in the War on Drugs.
Thanks to drug testing in the workplace it is still legal to discriminate against cannabis consumers, and now we are getting ready to fire our best nurses because they know better than to take the jab. The Vanguard Group doesn’t like America’s best and brightest, because we see right through them. The Vanguard Group wants only America’s most compliant and cowardly as their minions, and so you can expect that if they get away with this, they will continue to jab you with poison from time to time, partially to remind you of who is boss, but also to insure that you don’t burden the Social Security system for long after you cease to be productive.
Yes, this is definitely a Vanguard Group show, and when the Vanguard Group puts on a show like this, you get to see who works for them. Just watch the way they make Biden dance. They own him. They own the whole Democratic Party, and the WHO, as well as world leaders all over the globe. The Vanguard Group owns them, and they dance when the Vanguard Group pulls their strings. I remember being amazed at how well the Vanguard Group choreographed the War on Drugs, but this pandemic shows that they haven’t lost their touch. Quite the contrary. I think we’re watching the greatest puppet show on Earth.
Using the term “dick move” as a synonym for “an act of obnoxious behavior” seems to me as insensitive as using the term “pussy” as a synonym for “coward.” or “blonde” as a synonym for “dumb,” but as a “woke,” “new-age” guy, I understand that I am responsible for genocide, slavery and misogyny, as well as their aftermath, and that considering the millions of people I’ve personally killed, raped and tortured through the eons, it seems a bit petty of me to complain about the mere verbal denigration of my genitals, so I won’t. Besides, I know that a lot of you really love “dick” and some of you aren’t getting enough of it because of the lockdown, so no offense taken. However, in the recent piece titled “Top 10 Dick Moves of 2020” the North Coast Journal continued its own maddening pattern of obnoxiousness. You could say it “triggered” me. In response, I offer my own “Top 10 Dick Moves” list of small, vile things the NCJ did in 2020 that pissed me off.
Let’s start with “dick move” number 10: Fear-Mongering, the NCJ continues to sensationalize this disease as a “killer virus” when the CDC’s own numbers tell us that, for the vast majority of us, Covid-19 is no more deadly than the flu. The NCJ has ramped up the fear so much that they can’t believe that the state would relax restrictions in the face of our current outbreak, but the graph in the article tells the whole story: While the number of positive tests continues to soar, almost no one dies of this disease except the very old and the very sick.
Even the state can’t deny it any longer, but the NCJ can, even though the picture does not lie. Suicides are up. Drug overdoses are up. Assaults, domestic violence and child abuse are all on the rise while poverty, homelessness, and unemployment have gone through the roof, but does the NCJ tell us those stories. No. Instead we get wall-to-wall, red-letter fear-mongering about the “killer virus.”
People dying in nursing homes is not front page news. People die in nursing homes all the time. The average life expectancy of a nursing home patient is about 11 months. There’s a place in a newspaper for people who die in nursing homes. It’s called “Obituaries.” The story about nursing home patients dying of a new form of viral pneumonia, rather than the more common, bacterial pneumonia, belongs in a medical journal, but there’s probably space for a synopsis in the “health and lifestyle” section. Turning an obituary into a cover story is distortion. Distortion: “dick move” number 9.
“Dick move” number 8: Hypocrisy. Remember how even handed the NCJ was when it came to the needle-exchange program. It didn’t matter that it has been scientifically proven that needle exchange programs save lives, and that all your best doctors strongly recommend these harm-reduction efforts. Any deranged alcoholic who staggered into a city council meeting to rant about “degenerate junkies” and complain about needle litter was described in the NCJ as a “community member” with “legitimate concerns” and quoted sympathetically. The NCJ didn’t run an editorial telling people to “Just pick up the damn needle and throw it away yourself, and while you are at it, why don’t you pick up the beer bottles and cigarette butts too.”
I would have thought that a courageous stand for a local paper, and I would have been proud of the NCJ for making it. Meanwhile, back in reality, I see no courage or even-handedness when it comes to Covid-19 coverage in the NCJ, just “dick move” number 7: Pushing Compliance Instead of Reporting the News. “Just wear the damn mask!” Unbelievable! We are not your children. Don’t condescend to us. If you don’t have the balls to cover a big story like this with some skepticism and objectivity, then don’t.
Really, please don’t bother covering this story because you aren’t helping matters any. Look, nobody expects you to be anything but a fluffy entertainment weekly, and you could do a lot of good as a fluffy entertainment weekly. Forget about news and use the column inches for lavish coverage of our local art scene. Art matters, especially at times like these, because art speaks to the heart, as well as the intellect, and it asks aesthetic questions, rather than logical ones. Art can change the way people see the world and every great movement of humanity, begins in an artistic expression, but art can only change the world if people experience it, which brings me to NCJ “dick move” number 6: Lame-ass Coverage of the Arts.
The NCJ discontinued Colin Yeo’s column “the Setlist,” the only column devoted to the local music scene, early in the pandemic. Musicians are among the hardest hit by the lockdown, and they need the attention of the press now more than ever, but in the NCJ, Theresa Frankovich, Ian Hoffman and Anthony Fauci are rock stars, so who needs noisy peasants or their arcane caterwauling.
The NCJ’s dismal coverage of the arts motivated me to write them a letter a couple of months ago after their annual “Best of” issue included eight categories for “Best Cannabis” but only one for “Best Artist,” which reminds me of NCJ “dick move” number 5: Pandering to Advertisers. I’m sure their “Best of” issue is not the only example of advertiser influence in editorial decisions and content. When you see all of those ads for cannabis dispensaries in the NCJ, you need to remember that Humboldt’s cannabis industry does not give money to anyone who doesn’t serve them.
The cannabis industry knows how to leverage the most out of their advertising dollar. They know that the more anxious people get about Covid-19, the more weed they smoke, and the less they worry about environmental destruction in the forest. Anti-drug propaganda used to tell us that marijuana causes laziness. I think there’s some truth in it so far as the NCJ is concerned. The steady flow of cannabis advertising dollars and the spectacle of Covid-19 allows the NCJ to print page after page of whatever is being spoon-fed to them by “official sources” without having to care about what’s going on in the rest of our local economy, let alone cover it.
That’s NCJ “dick move” number 4: Journalistic Laziness, and NCJ “dick move” number 3: Failure to Cover Impacts of the Lockdown on Our Local Community. It gladdened my heart to read that Siren’s Song had the courage to defy lockdown orders and host live entertainment. I think they could have had a lot of good reasons to do that, and I would have appreciated it if the NCJ would have helped us understand theirs, rather than denigrate them as they did in their own “dick moves” column.
Which brings us to “dick move” number 2: Dehumanize Anyone Who Disagrees With You. By dismissing a local business owner’s courageous attempt to save his business, the livelihoods of his employees, and the very foundation of democracy, as a “dick move,” and disparaging every side of the story except the official one as “conspiracy theories” the NCJ has forsaken any illusions they may hold about themselves (or that we may hold about them), as “Guardians of Democracy.” Instead, In this year of “dick moves” their crowning achievement of transforming a liberal entertainment weekly into a mouthpiece for authoritarian propaganda, practically overnight, tops my list as the NCJ’s number 1 “dick move” of 2020.
I am not afraid of Covid-19. Either I will catch it, or I won’t. If I catch it, I will either die, or I won’t. That’s life. I do fear, however, that that we will look back at this pandemic, the way Germans look back on the Reichstag fire of 1933. It was a bad thing, but the response to it unleashed something so much worse. At this critical juncture in history we need courageous hard-nosed journalists who aren’t afraid to challenge the voice of authority. I guess we won’t have any of that from the NCJ.
I don’t think anyone denies that we find ourselves in the midst of a great tragedy. The great tragedy of our time, however, will not just be the death toll from Covid-19. The great tragedy of our time will be that we abandoned our neighbors, our principles and our civil liberties, for an empty promise of security, because we are a nation of blonde pussies.
I appreciate free newspapers. I pick them up religiously, regardless of the subject matter because I need kindling. I need to find three or four papers every week, just to have enough dry tinder to get through the rainy season, and it’s getting harder to find enough now that the Redwood Times has ceased publication, and the NCJ has gotten so much thinner.
I read them too. If I can find anything remotely interesting in them. I also look at the ads, and I feel a warm sense of appreciation for the companies that help me get my wood-stove going on a cold rainy morning.
Lately, I have found a lot of new publications about cannabis, and the lameness of these publications amazes me. Sensi, Emerald, Skunk, Leaf, the list goes on, I’ve picked up dozens of these rags by now and found nothing redeeming about any of them. I love cannabis. I’m a lifelong fan, a true enthusiast, a connoisseur even, but I have found nothing worth reading in any of these publications. Since they are all printed on glossy paper, they don’t even make good kindling.
All of these magazines have the same format: big color ads for cannabis products, interspersed with profiles of people in the industry and one-sided reviews of the advertised products. Could this industry possibly get any more self-absorbed? Could they possibly show more indifference to the interests of their customers? When these people brag about their idyllic little farm in the forest, or show off their their fancy new dispensary, they seem to forget who pays for it all.
Cannabis entrepreneurs should remember that the people who buy their products mostly live in rented apartments and work at high-stress, low-paying jobs, yet still pay ridiculously high prices for cannabis, especially if they buy at a dispensary. Do you think they really care that they are supporting “small family farms,” “community values” or “stoner owners.” Listen, we have enough trouble supporting ourselves these days, and we’re tired of watching other people get rich off of the money we spend on weed.
There are really only two reactions a cannabis consumer will have when they see page after page of stories about unremarkable white people enjoying relative affluence through their cannabis business:
1. “Wow, these people all seem to be making pretty good money, maybe I should get into the cannabis industry.” or
2. “Fuck these people! How much longer do we have to wait for Walmart, Inbev, or RJR to figure out how to grow pot efficiently and sell it at a low enough price that they will put these bloodsuckers out of business for good?”
Neither of these reactions, it seems to me, really helps your brand. Showing off your wealth and ego in a glossy color magazine, that doesn’t even make good kindling, let alone reading material, doesn’t make me want to buy your products.
Lets face facts: Farming is boring. Farming is literally as boring as watching grass grow. Sure, there’s an art to growing good weed, and farmers love to talk about it endlessly, but the rest of us, not so much. I can tell the quality of the product in one toke. I don’t need to read about who made it or how. I know how you made it. I know that producing marijuana is dull work. That’s why I pay you to do it for me. Magazines like these just remind me that I still pay too much.
Facts don’t make writing good, and facts don’t make a story true. Mostly, facts provide an excuse for bad writing, and distract us from the truth about our own lives. Media outlets like to hype the factuality of their news reports, as incentive for you to ingest their bland, decontextualized descriptions of the day’s most violent events, but facts, by themselves, mean nothing. Divorced from perspective, facts have no power.
We tend to overemphasize the importance of facts in our culture, in the same way we over-value material objects. In reality, facts don’t lead to the truth any more than buying a Bowflex machine leads to the perfect physique. Nothing prevented you from exercising your muscles before you bought the machine. The machine just offers you a specific way to do something that you obviously prefer to avoid. Similarly, nothing prevented you from thinking deeply about your existential condition before The News started feeding you “the facts you need to understand your world.” Watching the News feels like you are doing something edifying, but really, it takes up way too much space for something we’re just not that involved with.
Journalists meticulously strip perspective out of their stories, leaving nothing but impotent rubbish to take up all of the space between the ads. “Unbiased and impartial” really means “disinterested and uncaring.” That’s how corporate advertisers like it, and that’s how corporate domination becomes the predominant perspective of all media. Advertisers pay for the right to present their perspective in their own words, against a neutral background of disconnected, irrelevant and objectified facts. That’s why “fact based journalism” is so popular in modern media.
For some reason, we believe in this myth about facts. We believe that exposing them and broadcasting them to every corner of the world will somehow make things better. We say: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” but today we see how the worst kind of scum thrives in bright light, so long as nothing taller or stronger can take root. Scum thrives because The News scorches the Earth with irrelevant, disembodied facts.
The News fills your head with irrelevancies that distract, subvert and belittle your own thought process, while it consumes all of the space where you might actually talk to your peers. Watching The News is not how you become an informed citizen; watching The News is how you become a brainwashed drone, and that’s not what anyone really aspires to become.
Information can be inspiring, relevant and powerful, but rarely is it so. Mostly, especially today, information distracts us, saps our energy, and wastes our time. The News becomes addictive, not because it provides an essential nutrient to intellectual and civic life, but because it masks the angst, confusion and general unease of alienation. Facts, as they come from to us from the media, amount to little more than an endless trail of breadcrumbs leading us nowhere except toward obesity, malnutrition and death.
To find the very worst fact-based writing, however, you have to read science. Science, as a whole, amounts to an immense edifice of the worst published writing in the history of human language, which unscrupulous men use in their quest to dominate the Earth. In that way, modern science is very much like the medieval Catholic Church.
Few of us read much real science. Mostly, this indecipherable gobbledygook gets filed away in back rooms of libraries or in ungoogleable internet servers, where no one ever reads it, but it becomes part of this enormous edifice of sacred texts into which all learned people have invested large portions of their lives, with the promise that if they did, they would earn more money than the rest of us.
In reality, nothing in that edifice of so-called knowledge helps us, or them, understand the world we live in. Instead, it amounts to an encyclopedia of violence and a compendium of oppression. The edifice we call “Science” contains the formula for every toxic chemical on Earth. It tells you everything you need to know to build a thermonuclear weapon, and it contains every study ever conducted for the purpose of learning how to influence consumer behavior and effectively brainwash a population. The truth of the matter is that the only thing educated people really learn, in all their years of study, is the dynamics of civilized political power, and by the time they understand that, they’re already too deeply invested in it to quit.
Scientists further deny the basic truth of our lived experience by telling us that the only facts that matter, have to be carefully chosen according to complex statistical algorithms that only scientists understand, or they have to be gathered in a laboratory setting. Scientists will be the first to dismiss the facts of your life as irrelevant, anecdotal and statistically insignificant. They’ll tell you to base your decisions on the proven probabilities of verifiable science, and to calculate, rather than feel your way through life. That’s how scientists tell you that they think they should make your decisions for you, and that’s another way that modern science resembles the Catholic Church.
All of the facts in the world don’t make bad writing worth reading. Facts are just a sleazy tool to sell empty words, and too many empty words can bury you. On the other hand, writing that speaks to you, has truth in it, and you will find the facts that support it because there is more truth in the facts of your life, than you will ever find in all of the news media and science writing on Earth.
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