What Happened to Liberals and Progressives?

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.

The Greatest Puppet Show on Earth

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.

A logo sign outside of the headquarters of the investment management company, The Vanguard Group in Malvern, Pennsylvania on May 24, 2015. Photo Credit: Kristoffer Tripplaar/ Sipa USA

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.

Culture in the Toilet – Pt.1, Germany

I had the very good fortune to spend the Summer of 2019 vagabonding around Europe. As an American who had previously traveled mostly within the US, I came to expect toilets everywhere to be pretty much the same. Here in the US, from sea to shining sea, we are one nation with one language and one toilet. In this country, the American Standard porcelain throne is the only thing more ubiquitous than McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Coca-Cola, but things are very different in Europe.

In Europe, if you drive all day, chances are, that the people you talk to at the end of the day will speak a different language than the people you spoke with at breakfast. If, like me, you are an American, you probably won’t understand either of them, but if you did your homework, you will know one sentence in both languages that can save you a lot of embarrassment: “Where is the toilet?” Although every European country has these facilities, the hardware you encounter within them varies widely from country to country. I became rather fascinated by these cultural differences, and documented them carefully. Eventually, I came to realize that the toilets people use speak volumes about the cultures that created them.

In Germany, the most “developed” nation in Europe, I encountered the most advanced, high-tech toilets I have ever seen. Germany’s high-tech toilets are so advanced that most people would rather pee outside behind a bush than use them. I don’t blame them a bit. The first, and perhaps most annoying thing about German toilets, is that you have to pay money to use them, and they have the most convoluted and maddening way of making you pay. I would not have believed it myself, had I not seen it with my own eyes.

First, to enter the facilities, you must pass through a turnstile. A coin-operated machine attached to the turnstile requires you to deposit .70€ (about 85¢ ). That struck me as a pretty hefty fee to use the bathroom at a truck stop on the Autobahn. Also, there’s no such thing as a .70€ coin, so you have to fish around in your pocket for a .50€ coin and a .20€ coin, or three .20€ coins and a .10€ coin, or maybe five .10€ coins and a .20€ coin, or fourteen .5€ coins, or you drop a 1€ coin and hope the thing makes change, before you pee you pants.

Then, once you’ve inserted the proper coins, the machine spits out a little paper receipt. I looked at this little paper square and wondered if it was my allotment of toilet paper. No, instead, the little slip of paper informed me that I could redeem it for “.50€ off” of any purchase made in the establishment that hosts the facility. Of course, after you’ve relieved yourself, and you go shopping to see if you can reclaim your half-Euro, you discover that prices have been jacked-up so high that your “.50€ off” coupon amounts to a less than worthless invitation to throw more of your money down the toilet.

But back to the toilets themselves. The first technological marvel I noticed about German toilets is that they attach to the wall, rather than the floor. They stick out of the wall, like an open drawer, leaving the floor beneath them clear, for easy cleaning, I presume. That struck me as a rather cool, gravity defying, feat of engineering. However, the toilet bowl itself was rather long and shallow, and when I sat down on one of these high-tech German toilets, my penis came to rest on the bottom of the bowl, a sensation I did not much like. I also felt bad for withholding this piece of information from my girlfriend, so I found the whole experience both unpleasant and emotionally distressing.

From my experience with these toilets, I can only assume that German men have smaller than average penises. This would explain a lot, historically, and it would also explain why German men insist on driving over 200kmh on the autobahn. I can think of no other reason why German men would tolerate, let alone design such appliances.

These toilets flushed themselves, like some American toilets I’ve seen, but these German toilets have a robotic arm that emerges from the back of the toilet, holding a sponge, that automatically wipes and disinfects the motorized toilet seat, which rotates 360 degrees beneath it. Unfortunately, the toilet was equipped with no such device to clean and disinfect my penis.

If you had the misfortune of spending almost a buck just to use a urinal, you were in for a real treat, because they had a TV channel just for you. Pee-TV mounted right in front of your face as you stand at the urinal, running a continuous loop commercial for coffee. They show you a steaming hot latte, while a manicured female hand stirs foamy milk into a heart shape. Words like “Ahh…the aroma,” “the taste,” and “the satisfaction of a hot cup of freshly brewed coffee” appear out of the steam. How cruel is that? You just paid almost a buck to empty your bladder, and they use the opportunity to sell you more coffee.

The mirror above the hand-sink also had a TV built into it. This one showed an ad for a travel agency. I can understand the logic of that. By the time you have finished using a German toilet, you wish you were anywhere else in the world. We spent a couple of weeks in Germany, and several of those nights at rest areas and truck stops. I quickly learned that the locals do not use these facilities at all. Instead, they look for clump of trees or bushes, or they go behind a building. Even at public facilities that did not charge money, I saw whole German families heading off to the cover of a few bushes, rather than use the public restroom. That’s the paradox of German culture. The ingenuity of German engineers is only exceeded by the practicality of German people.

Top 10 “Dick Moves” by the NCJ in 2020

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.

“I just spoon-fed the media a pound of really old salmon.”

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.

Not Fit to Read or Burn

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.

Cannabis is not Wine

I hear a lot of people talk about marketing cannabis in the same way they market wine. They talk about this idea very seriously, and seem bent on betting their futures on this dream of turning Humboldt County into something like Napa County Wine Country for upscale, connoisseur grade, cannabis. This strikes me as a very foolhardy gamble. It makes me wonder “How do people who grow this good of weed not get high enough to realize how stupid of an idea this is?” There is a big difference between cannabis and fine wine. The only thing they share, really, is the inflated price tag.

First, you need to remind yourself what wine is. At it’s root, wine is what happens when ripe fruit turns sour. You don’t have wine unless you have more fruit than you can eat before it goes bad, so wine is an intoxicating byproduct of great abundance. That kind of abundance does not occur often naturally. Some hunter-gatherer cultures enjoy wine as part of an annual festival at the end of summer, if they have a native species that produces an abundance of fermentable fruit. They may drink heavily and stumble around in drunken song for a week, celebrating the abundance of nature, if the bounty of nature allows it, but they will not try to save or bottle the wine and they will not drink at all for the rest of the year. That’s native culture, not wine culture.

Wine still celebrates abundance, but not natural abundance. Wine celebrates the abundance of tamed land, where the community of life has been evicted, to make way for armies of vines which serve only their human master. Wine celebrates the abundance that comes from conquering the land and enslaving it. Wine celebrates property, mastery and dominion over the land, and it symbolizes the abundance they produce.

Vineyard chateau Burgundy, France

The aristocracy in France elevated the expression of this kind of abundance to a high art, making French wine and French food the envy of the world. The French aristocracy took tremendous pride in their cuisine and their wine, and developed very high standards for all of it. The peasants however, who produced all of this abundance by their hard work, tending to those vines and working the farms, often went hungry. Eventually, the peasants got sick of it. They formed angry mobs and they cut all of the aristocrats’ heads off. Today, France is a democratic nation and the French people enjoy a high standard of living. They still make excellent wine and produce many delicacies which hearken back to those extravagant days of unbridled indulgence.

Before we start trying to become the new Napa, we shouldn’t forget that Napa is trying to become the new Bordeaux, France. That’s why they work so hard at the whole gourmet food thing, along with the wine, and the elegant manor lifestyle. In Napa, they celebrate the abundance of capitalism in this newly conquered and enslaved land. In a sense, they compete with King Louis the XIV, in the field of self-indulgent opulence. I do not really see that as a worthy goal. To me, as a pot smoker, it sounds abhorrent, and I identify more with the angry mobs of peasants.

Now smoke a joint and remember what cannabis is. Cannabis is a natural herb that contains a revolutionary psychedelic, like LSD, only much milder. Cannabis alters our consciousness in a way that allows us to feel a connection to the whole of life. Cannabis changes how we see the world and how we perceive our place in it. Cannabis consciousness is about love, creativity, equality and the connection between all living things. Cannabis consciousness allows us to share the burden, the joy and the wonder of life, with all of life, through a kind of communion with the plant world.

Cannabis consciousness celebrates life in the power of a river and the strength of a bear. Cannabis consciousness respects diversity and demands equality. Cannabis consciousness respects nature and understands ecology implicitly. Cannabis consciousness inspires creativity and the impulse to play. Cannabis consciousness inspires an appreciation for food, not an extravagant palette, but a humble appreciation for all food, and the pleasure of eating. Cannabis consciousness encourages communication and helps resolve differences.

Cannabis consciousness looks for ways to reduce stress and minimize work through equality and cooperation. Cannabis consciousness has no use for hierarchies, authority figures or empires. Cannabis consciousness looks for quality in expressions of insight and ecstatic emotion through music and art. Cannabis consciousness sees abundance in the forest, but cannabis consciousness has no desire to conquer or enslave it, because cannabis consciousness knows that the natural world is family, and that we are all one.

Cannabis consciousness looks at a vineyard and sees poverty, slavery, toil and ugliness, not abundance. Cannabis consciousness sees right through all of the fancy packaging and bullshit hype. Cannabis consciousness sees right through it all and recognizes this upscale marketing ploy as just another ripoff, and just another attempt to conquer and enslave nature. Cannabis consciousness inspires revolutionaries and gives them the strength to fight. Cannabis is the peoples herb! It is not some frivolous indulgence for the bourgeois.

Cannabis culture is nothing like wine culture. The ideals of cannabis culture are different. The aesthetics of cannabis culture are different and the social dynamics of cannabis culture are different. Cannabis culture and wine culture are as different as night and day and cannabis consciousness recognizes that alcohol culture, wine culture, is a death cult.

Any bright future for humanity belongs to cannabis culture and depends on cannabis consciousness. Cannabis will not remain our slave any longer. Forget the wine model and the dead end culture of alcohol. Follow cannabis consciousness to a new ideal, a new aesthetic, and a new culture that’s not based on conquest and slavery, but instead based on love and respect for the whole of life. Regardless of how frightening and economically uncertain the future appears right now, that’s the only future worth betting your life on, really.

The Future of The Mateel

I heard a report on the sad state of affairs at the Mateel Community Center on KMUD’s Local News the other day. Faced with immediate bills, and overshadowed by a looming half-million-dollar debt, SoHum’s most celebrated non-profit has very few options. Some hope that the Mateel can secure a debt consolidation loan through the Humboldt Area Foundation using the Mateel Hall as collateral. If that happens, the Mateel will have to repay the loan, plus interest, which means that our community will make payments on that debt, for many, many years to come.

The other option, it seems, requires the Mateel Board of Directors to declare bankruptcy, sell the hall and the rest of the Mateel’s assets, and if there’s any money left, after all of the creditors have been paid, they can use whatever is leftover to try to start a new community center. There’s a good chance, however, especially in today’s real estate market, that liquidating the community’s assets won’t raise enough capital to cover all of the Mateel’s debt, in which case some creditors will take a loss, and the community will have to start from scratch.

It boils down to this: Will we, the SoHum community of today, spend the next twenty or thirty years paying for the excess and irresponsibility of SoHum’s aging dope yuppies, in order to save their dream, the aging and irresponsibly excessive Mateel Hall, or will we write it all off as a total loss? Unless those aging dope yuppies dig deep into their own pockets and come up with that half-mil, right now, we no longer have a community center. Instead, we have inherited from them a yawning chasm of debt that they now invite us to throw our money and our lives into.

Did you expect anything else? Did you think the black market marijuana industry was going to leave the Mateel Hall to the SoHum community as a gift for posterity? Drug dealers throw great parties, but they don’t generally leave nice community centers in their wake. Instead, they leave gutted buildings and trashed properties. Why should the Mateel be any different?

Drug dealers often, and with good reason, feel guilty about their dirty Drug War windfall, so they sometimes donate large sums to churches and non-profits, especially when money is easy, but these donations come sporadically, and rarely continue long term. Drug dealers also tend to gamble irresponsibly and spend too much money on status symbols. Drug dealers need visible status symbols to compensate for the deep negative status of their occupation. Inevitably, the gambler’s luck runs out, and the trashed status symbols get hauled off to the scrapyard, or in this case, sit vacant, waiting for demolition or immolation. The Mateel was both a charity, and a status symbol to the black market marijuana industry in Southern Humboldt, but now that the money’s gone, it may just become part of the trash they leave behind.

Thankfully, the Mateel has had the forethought to prepare the community for this moment by discontinuing the only program people really needed and relied on them for, namely the Mateel Meal, a free lunch program, years ago. We still have plenty of hungry people in our community, but they already know better than to look to the Mateel for help. For them, nothing will change if the Mateel closes permanently. The Mateel never offered shelter to those in need. Hundreds of people in our community who sleep huddled under plastic tarps outside in the rain, because of the lack of affordable housing, will not miss the fancy dress balls or A-list reggae shows at the Mateel, so the venue will be no great loss to them.

The Mateel Hall primarily serves the dope yuppies who live in the hills, have plenty of money, and want a swanky place to party, and because of that, the Mateel feels more like a country club than a community center. I’m not really a country club kind of guy, and the Mateel has done a pretty good job of turning my partner and I off to events there. First, precious few of the events held at the Mateel Hall interest us. Second, we’ve had enough bad experiences at the Mateel that we’re very hesitant to go back. Third, most Mateel events are outside of our entertainment budget. Exclusivity achieved! So, as tragic as it is to lose the Mateel Community Center, when it comes down to it, a whole lot of us here in SoHum will hardly notice that it’s gone.

What’s the War on Drugs Got To Do With the Humboldt Brand

Right now, I see a lot of people scrambling frantically to find their niche in the legal marijuana market. In our eagerness to compete in this rapidly evolving market, we should be very careful not to overlook the infected wounds still festering in this county from the War on Drugs, nor should we miss the opportunity to take pride in our heritage, for our role in the marijuana underground, because that is the story of the Humboldt brand.

I realize that’s a lot to pack into one sentence, but we need to think about this. Even if a lot of Humboldt County cannabis farmers do well in the legal market, we still have a whole lot of people in Humboldt County who grew up in the black market, and have no other marketable skills or education. They have been traumatized by the War on Drugs, and a lot of them have developed problems with drugs and alcohol as a result. They are never going to become weed tycoons in the legal market, but they were born and raised here in Humboldt County. They grew up in the marijuana underground. They fought the War on Drugs, and they built the Humboldt brand. You can’t sweep them under the rug without sweeping the Humboldt brand away with them.

The County didn’t haul sacks of chicken shit up the side of a mountain in the rain; they did. The County doesn’t have a panic attack every time it hears a helicopter; they do. The County didn’t grow the best marijuana anyone anyone had ever tasted; they did. Humboldt County never got arrested for marijuana. Humboldt County never had a gun stuck in its face over marijuana, and Humboldt County was never denied a job, kicked out of school, or had a Workman’s Comp claim denied because it smoked marijuana; but they did.

Their sweat, their tears and the wounds they suffered in the War on Drugs, as well as the addictions they developed as a result of that pain, built the Humboldt brand. Unless we acknowledge that suffering, the Humboldt brand is worthless. On the other hand, the more we acknowledge that suffering, and treat the wounds we have suffered in the War on Drugs, as a community, the more we can celebrate the accomplishments of the marijuana underground, and the ingenuity and courage it took to fight the War on Drugs, and the more the Humboldt brand is genuinely worth. It seems paradoxical, but we can’t expect other people to respect us for what we do here, if we can’t even respect ourselves, our community, our environment, and our heritage.

We can’t hide the problems the War on Drugs has created in our community behind the money the War on Drugs brought to us. Instead of trying to hide the poverty and addiction we see around us, or beating it to death on the streets of Garberville and Redway, we need to recognize how much our community has suffered in the War on Drugs. We need to show the world what prohibition has done to us, because unless they see the damage that was done to us, they cannot appreciate the heroic effort it took to fight the War on Drugs. For the world to recognize the War on Drugs as a real war, the world has to see real casualties, and we’ve got them.

 

The more we focus on how the War on Drugs affects us, and take stock of what it cost, the easier it will be for people to understand who we are and identify with us. Most cannabis consumers don’t know what it is like to enjoy a six-figure, tax-free, income from a black market commodity, but they do know what it is like to be terrorized by cops. Millions of people all over the country have been busted for marijuana and had their lives turned upside-down by it. From that perspective, they understand what we’ve been through. They’re traumatized too. They know that Humboldt County was ground zero in the War on Drugs, and they’ve seen how the War on Drugs has affected themselves, their family, and friends. If we can respect and acknowledge our own truth, they will recognize it as our strength, and draw strength from it.

Marijuana culture survived, endured and ultimately prevailed, after more than 40 years of war, because marijuana culture is strong, and Humboldt County is at the heart of marijuana culture. Marijuana is medicine, and that is why Humboldt County should be a place of healing for the wounds of the War on Drugs. We were at the center of it; we are at the heart of it, and we need it the most. The more we look after the people among us who are suffering, and the more we pull together as a community, the more we demonstrate the strength of marijuana culture to the world around us, and the more attractive it becomes. By acknowledging the violence and trauma of the War on Drugs, and working to heal our own wounds as a community, we rebuild the strength of marijuana culture, and reestablish Humboldt County as its heart, legitimately and honestly. That’s how we build the Humboldt brand.

We can’t truthfully say that Humboldt grown weed is of higher quality than weed grown in a warehouse in Oakland, or anywhere else for that matter. These days, everybody’s weed is plenty strong, if you can just keep the pesticides out of it. As this industry professionalizes, quality becomes a baseline expectation. Brand loyalty will be built on other factors including price, taste, convenience, packaging, and a whole slew of psychological factors. Whether you smoke Marlboros or Winstons probably has more to do with how you feel about cowboys and race-cars than it does with any difference in quality. Similarly, successful cannabis marketing depends more on understanding cannabis users and their culture, than it does with producing higher quality marijuana.

Drug Dealers Say the Dumbest Things

The War on Drugs is a horrible crime against humanity, and if we ever manage to bring this bloody chapter in American History to a close, we should make sure that it never happens again, but there’s one thing I miss about the whole police-state, lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key attitude of the ’80s and ’90s. Back when you could still go to jail for growing weed, drug dealers used to keep a low profile, and they kept their mouths shut. I miss that.

These days drug dealers never shut up, and the more they talk, the dumber they sound and the uglier they look. I realize that they’re just trying to organize, raise their profile, and lobby on their own behalf, but the more they do it, the creepier it gets. They can’t help it. They have an untenable position. War profiteers hate to see wars end, but they should know better than to complain about it in a room full of veterans, widows and orphans.

I didn’t realize just how dumb and repulsive drug dealers really were, until I heard them complain about the falling price of marijuana. Really, you should keep that to yourselves. The people out there forking over large sums of cash for paltry quantities of cannabis don’t feel your pain. They probably don’t even like you, and only tolerate your company because you have weed. If they could get it somewhere else, for even a dollar less, they’d do it in a heartbeat.

Complaining about the falling price of cannabis, and lobbying politicians to keep prices high, didn’t win “The Humboldt Brand” any friends among cannabis consumers. We want the price of cannabis to fall further, much further. We want the price of cannabis to fall below what it costs to produce it in the forests of Humboldt County. We don’t care that this long overdue price correction will affect growers negatively. In fact, that’s what we want.

Putting dangerous drug dealers out of business has always been half the reason to legalize marijuana in the first place. Black market drug dealers earned their reputation for violence. Black market drug dealers earned their reputation for destroying communities, and black market drug dealers earned their reputation for destroying the environment. In one way, you could say that black market drug dealers helped the cause of legalization by creating more social and environmental problems than legal marijuana possibly could.

If Humboldt County growers want to convince us that they are anything but dangerous drug dealers, who should be driven out of business, complaining about the falling price of marijuana and lobbying to keep pot prices high doesn’t really help their cause. Complaining about the bad press they get every time another grower gets caught doing something horrendous to the forest, or someone gets killed at a grow scene, or in a drug deal, or another hash lab blows up, doesn’t really help their image either.

It doesn’t look good to be more concerned with how a problem affects your image than you are with the problem itself. We ignore sex trafficking, hard drugs and violent criminal gangs in our community, as well as way too much environmental damage and worker exploitation, just to protect the wholesome fiction of “Mom and Pop Grower,” and the “Small Farmer,” that we so desperately want to project to the world. We dismiss anyone who doesn’t fit into that happy, mythical stereotype as “a few bad apples” no matter how many of them we find.

Now they want us to call them “farmers” instead of “drug dealers.” They like the term “farmers” because farmers have political clout. Farmers also do a lot of environmental damage, but people cut farmers slack, because farmers produce food, and everyone needs food. Dope yuppies think we should treat them with the same deference and respect as we do farmers. Of course, real farmers, working flat, fertile land with a tractor, could put Humboldt County’s so-called “farmers” out of business, overnight, if it weren’t for the law. If the value of your product depends upon an army of law enforcement officers, courts and prisons to prevent honest business-people from competing with you, you’re a black market drug dealer, not a farmer.

Humboldt County growers know that they cannot compete with real farmers on a level playing field. They know that their income depends on the War on Drugs. They don’t care. They know that they have blood on their hands. They know that prohibition makes their operations profitable, and they don’t care who it hurts. They just want the money, so now they dismiss our concerns about the environmental damage they cause, by claiming that they’re not as bad as the timber industry or the wine industry. That’s one more unbelievably stupid thing that growers say all of the time now.

Growers tell us: “The marijuana industry hasn’t done nearly as much damage to the environment as the timber and wine industries, so give us a chance.” That’s like saying “Compared to Charlie Manson and Jeffery Dawmer, I’m a pretty nice guy.” The timber industry took 96% of all the old growth forest and practically drove the Humboldt Martin to extinction. The wine industry decimated native salmon populations. Thanks to the brilliant, government sanctioned land use practices of those two industries, we can’t afford to lose any more wildlife habitat to blind greed. Sorry folks. Cannabis is a beautiful plant, but what’s going on here is ugly, and unnecessary. Without prohibition and the black market, no one would ever dream of wasting so many resources to produce cannabis flowers as we do here in Humboldt County.

 

When it comes down to it, what’s good for the environment, is also good for cannabis consumers and the economy. Legalization should bring large scale production of commercial cannabis out of the forest and on to farmland, and into places where it can be grown most economically. Legalization should bring down the price of marijuana and eliminate the black market. This will hurt black market drug dealers in Humboldt County, who would, clearly, rather devour the forest like locusts, leaving mountains of grow garbage and useless consumer crap in their wake, than face a world in which selling weed at inflated, black market prices, was no longer an option for them.

I think Humboldt County growers realize they face a perception problem, but they haven’t quite figured out that the problem lies not so much with changing the way the world sees them, but rather with changing the way they see the world.

Lots of Soil, Not Many Vegetables

We don’t garden much, but this year we thought we’d grow some purple carrots, garlic chives and green onions in pots around our home. We stopped at Dazey’s garden supply store to look for some vegetable starts, because, as I recall, they used to have a pretty good selection in the Spring. When we got there, the place was mobbed. All around us people were piling sacks and loading and unloading trucks in every available space. We asked about plant starts. They told us they don’t do plants anymore.

They’d happily sell me a trimming machine, bubble bags, and all the soil and amendments I could ask for, but they had no plants at all in their “garden center.” They sent me to Sylvandale’s and Redway Feed, both of which, like Dazey’s, were hopping with customers, but unlike Dazey’s, actually had a few plants. Still, the selection seemed pretty slim at both locations.

Back in high school, I used to work in a garden center. We had more plants than all of the “garden centers” in SoHum put together. I mixed mountains of soil, filled thousands of flats with six-packs and soil and watered millions of tiny seedlings every year, for people who grew flowers and vegetables in their gardens. That’s why they called it a “garden center.” I guess we don’t even pretend to grow anything but pot around here anymore.

A friend of mine, who works at one of our local “garden canters” told me they had an order for 600 pallets of bagged soil (that’s well over 1,000 cubic yards of sterilized potting soil, packed into over 30,000 bags) for one customer. I have no idea how many tractor-trailer loads that comes out to, but the delivery driver is going to know that route well by the time it is all delivered. The garden center I worked at couldn’t move that that much soil in a decade, no matter how they sold it. Here, you could sell all the dirt on the planet to Humboldt County pot growers if you could just find enough trucks and drivers to deliver it.

Who’s got the time for a vegetable garden when you’ve got 30,000 bags of soil to open before you plant, and you pay almost as much for soil as you would for all the vegetables you could grow in it? If it doesn’t make sense to grow vegetables that way, why grow pot that way? If it weren’t for marijuana prohibition, no one would dream of cutting down trees or draining salmon streams, or hauling 600 pallets of sterilized potting soil, half-way across the state and ten miles up a muddy dirt road to a hole in the forest, to grow a common, hardy, agricultural staple. None of this makes any sense, outside of the War on Drugs, but it looks like we’ll see more Drug War madness in 2017 than we ever saw before.

2017 promises to be the biggest soil delivery season in Humboldt County history, and our roads are in the worst shape I’ve ever seen them. Just add the cost of the road damage, both to county roads, and to private roads and adjacent habitat, to the long litany of costs born by the community at large for the War on Drugs. I know you don’t want to think about that. You really don’t want to think about the millions of lives, lost and ruined, even though you know some of them. You don’t want to think about what it has done to you and your kids, and how it affects our community. You don’t want to think about what it says about our society, and what it is doing to the Earth. You don’t want to think about it, because you don’t want to know, and you don’t want to know because if you knew, you couldn’t do it. You wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t tolerate it.

 

According to 2^nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell, so far, Humboldt County has only granted 19 cannabis cultivation permits, and they’re holding meetings all over Humboldt County to decide how to spend the tax money they collect from these few growers who paid the fees, made the improvements and submitted to inspections, and still dare to compete with the black market. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Humboldt County’s growers have opted to remain in the shadows to serve the nationwide black market.

 

The County received over 2,000 cannabis permit applications before the deadline last December. Most of those permit applications will never get approved. Growers knew that they could file a little paperwork and pay a fee that would keep the Sheriff out of their hair for a year or two. The black market has always had a cut and run attitude. The fact that over 2,000 people filed applications for permits, doesn’t mean that they intend to comply with state and county regulations, it just means that they intend to cut big this year. Instead of bringing the cannabis industry out of the shadows, Humboldt County’s cannabis permit program seems to have allowed a couple thousand growers to buy cover for all of them for one more big year in 2017. After that, we’ll see what’s left of Humboldt County.