Category: Manilla
Censored by The Indie
I submitted this letter to the Humboldt Indie, my local paper, twice. I received no response from staff, nor was the letter printed in the paper. I don’t know why I even bother anymore.
Dear Editor,
I do appreciate that The Indie provides me with free dry kindling each week, however, your coverage of the pandemic really burns me up.
Once upon a time, Kelly Lincoln promised a report about the documents Pfizer was forced to release under a court order stemming from an FOIA request. That report never materialized, instead she gives us the same nonsensical fear-mongering spiel we get from corporate media. Worse are the editorials submitted on behalf of SoHum Health, written by people with no medical expertise, full of false claims and misleading statements with no sources sited at all. But SoHum Health’s recent ad really blew my mind.
In the ad, SoHum Health informs readers that “If you’re ages 12 and up and it’s been at least two months since you’ve had any Covid vaccine or booster, it’s time for a boost!” TWO MONTHS!
What happened to the original claim that the initial 2-jab vaccine was “absolutely safe and absolutely effective.” The original vaccine promised lifelong protection from disease and an end to the pandemic. Why didn’t it live up to those expectations? Why was no one held accountable for that? Why would we ever trust the people who told us that lie again?
By now many people in this community have taken three or four of these injections, and most of the people I know who took these injections, subsequently got sick from Covid. Some of them have gotten sick from Covid two or three times since they got “vaccinated.” If those people are not immune to Covid by now, I daresay they never will be.
A “vaccine” that requires a “booster” every two months is no vaccine at all. What the hell is it? Why does SoHum Health continue to recommend these shots even though they obviously do not prevent infection or stop the spread of disease? Most importantly, why don’t Indie reporters ever ask these questions?
Frankly, The Indie’s coverage of the pandemic has served only one purpose, and that is to undermine the credibility of both SoHum Health and The Indie. I used to respect The Indie as a reliable source of local news. I miss that. Now, I’m just thankful that it burns. As for SoHum Health, I’m simply disgusted.
Sincerely,
John Hardin
Censored by the NCJ
I submitted this Letter to the Editor to the North Coast Journal last week. They did not print it. I was not at all surprised by that.
Dear Editor,
What a surprise to find two thoughtful, perceptive and spot-on letters to the editor in the NCJ last week. Both D Lamar Hudson and Amy Gustin raise important points about the newly reignited abortion debate. For the last two years, the NCJ has endorsed vaccine mandates, vaccine apartheid, and even suggested that we embrace a policy of forcibly injecting vaccine-resistant citizens against their will, all the while disparaging and censoring anyone who opposed those gross violations of human and civil rights, so it was clever rhetoric, albeit inaccurate and misleading, to attempt to frame a woman’s right to abortion in other terms, terms like “reproductive rights.”
Hudson explains why the term “reproductive rights” does not apply to abortion. A woman’s right to abortion derives from the inalienable human right of bodily sovereignty and the constitutionally guaranteed right of privacy. Unless we uphold both of these principles as sacred inviolable human rights for everyone, a woman’s right to an abortion becomes tenuous. Here’s why:
The State has an obligation to punish the taking of human life. However, the State also has an obligation to respect the rights of the accused. A woman’s bodily sovereignty gives her the right to choose to abort. Her right to privacy deprives the State of evidence that a life has been taken. That’s why a woman’s right to choose is not contingent on whether life begins at conception or birth.
Unfortunately, Amy Gustin correctly observes that the NCJ and Democrats in general have thrown bodily sovereignty and privacy under the bus in their passion to embrace intrusive Covid policies. This embrace, to quote Hannah Arendt,* “was like a political demonstration… that no such thing as inalienable rights existed and that affirmations… to the contrary were mere prejudice, hypocrisy and cowardice.” God help us.
Sincerely,
John Hardin
rom: The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, Chapter 9- Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man, p. 269
This Saturday July 23 at the Mateel in Redway
I’ll play my first SoHum gig in years this Saturday at The Mateel Community Center on Rusk Ln in Redway as part of Steve’s Big Rock Show. The show starts at 3pm. See you there!
Having Too Much Fun IRL
It’s been kind of a while since I’ve posted anything here. I guess I’ve just been having too much fun in real life to worry about what’s going on in VR. Also, most of my inspiration has been musical lately. Music is so much bigger than words, and any musical project demands much more energy than a simple essay. I’ve got a lot of musical projects in the works right now, so it’s a little overwhelming.
I’ve been brushing up my bass chops and learning a bunch of songs by Teri Smolens and Seabury Gould of The Control Group. We played out together for the first time last month at Siren’s Song, and we got a great response. We have another gig coming up Friday July 29th at the Mad River Brewery in Blue Lake. The Control Group plays topical songs that address current events. The show is called “The Pandemic Newsical” and includes songs like “Lockdown Blues,” “Walking Biohazard,” and “Fauci, He’s No Hero.” The Pandemic Newsical offers an entertaining, humorous, and educational take on the events that changed our lives so dramatically in the last couple of years.
Teri writes terrific songs in the tradition of classic Americana. She’s like the Tom Lehrer of Covid. Seabury Gould is a masterful multi-instrumentalist and it is a great pleasure to play with them. The music is so friendly, and these tunes so cleverly crafted and full of biting humor that it really feels great to be laying down basslines for them.
Of course I still play my didgeridoo, both as a solo artist, and with Sean Powers as the Hardin-Powers Act. Sean and I will play a SoHum gig on Saturday July 23rd at the Mateel Community Center in Redway. It’s the first time I’ve played in SoHum for many years, so I’m looking forward to playing for my neighbors.
Music has a power that transcends mere words, and live music in the real world has a magic that you will never find online. The online world is controlled, monitored and manipulated, but the real world is still free and life can still happen there, if you have the courage and make the effort to show up. I think live music matters now more than ever. If we are going to survive as a nation, as a culture, and as a community, it will only be because we got offline and started living in the real world again.
Played Like a Fiddle
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.
Censored
It used to be that all you had to do to find this site was look for John Hardin’s blog, or even John Hardin’s Humboldt blog, and a link to this blog would come up at the top of the page. Today, that search will lead you to hundreds of articles by me, published anywhere but here, but right now, this is where the action is. So, thanks for reading regularly and staying in touch.
It’s nice to know who my real friends are. If you can still find this blog, you either subscribe, or you know where to find me, because search engines have censored this site from search results. Unless you type “LYGSBTD” into the search window, and tell them that you don’t mean Lyngsat, they will not send you here.
That said, there are a lot of other censored voices who have a lot to say about our current situation, and this week, I just want to share a few of those with you:
Let’s start with Mattias Desmet. In this interview with Robert F Kennedy Jr Desmet discusses the psychology of Mass Formation under authoritarianism. He offers a lot of insight into our current situation:
Catherine Austin Fitts used to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. She now runs the Solari Institute which tracks the machinations of of high finance for the benefit of working people and the middle-class:
The most knowledgeable doctors in America on Covid-19, Dr Peter McCullough and Dr Vladimir Zelenko join South African cartoonist and podcaster Jerm for this interview. Jerm does a good interview and gets very good guests on his podcast. Every few months, I look up Dr Peter McCullough, and or Dr Vladimir Zelenko just to keep up on the science behind this pandemic. I recommend you do the same:
In this restricted information environment, it is important to know where to find the information you need to make clear decisions in these uncertain times. I don’t even bother looking for information at youtube anymore. I found all of these resources at bitchute. Thanks for coming here. I hope you find these resources helpful, and I’ll continue to try to help you make sense of the madness we find ourselves surrounded by these days.
Watch Out for that Left Hook
I always wondered how Hitler got the liberals and environmentalists of his time to support his genocidal agenda. I thought liberals were more broad-minded and high-minded than conservatives, and less gullible than evangelicals. I assumed fascism would come from the Right, and we on the Left would be there to fight it. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Today, I see two well-coordinated arms of a single fascist beast dividing people who just want a better world by selling them two opposing strategies for achieving similar goals and letting them fight with each other. Meanwhile they take our money, freedom and resources.
They built Trump. Then they turned him into the scariest boogieman on Earth, then used our fear and hatred of him to drive liberals and progressives into the open arms of the blandest puppet they had, Joe Biden. At the same time they used our fear of Covid-19 to scare us into surrendering our civil rights, and public identity for lockdown measures and mandatory injections. They used Trump to scare us away from Bernie and towards Biden, the same way they used Covid-19 to scare us into censorship, lockdowns, quarantines and mandatory injections.
This is not political discourse or public debate nor does it serve the public interest or the interests of public health. This is a hunting strategy, or perhaps more accurately, a pest extermination strategy. We thought we were voting for the lesser of two evils, and we felt righteous about it because we thought we had defeated a greater evil. In truth, we only defeated our own dreams. We defeated our dreams of universal health care and medical system reform.
As a result, we’ve become slaves of the medical system. The medical system decides whether we can go to a concert or show our face in public. They tell us which businesses can stay open and which can’t, and now they tell us that we have to let them inject us with experimental new drugs every six months. We all know these injections don’t stop disease and can kill you, but its not your choice to make. You understand. We have to think about the “most vulnerable.”
The “most vulnerable”, of course, are the billionaire plutocrats and technocrats who coordinated the entire operation: The billionaire “philanthropists” who remade the public health system in their own image. The technocrats who censor information and steer search results. The corrupt government bureaucrats who profit from the industry they are supposed to regulate, and of course, the billionaire investors who control capital. They are the “most vulnerable” right now because there are so many of us, and so few of them, and if we knew how badly they have fucked us over, we would kill them.
I already hear people talking about a new Nuremberg Trial to prosecute the perpetrators of this genocide, so it will never happen again. To me, however, it feels more like the Battle of Britain. We have to win the war before we can hold the generals and “doctors” to account. After two years of fear-mongering propaganda, draconian lockdown measures and the alienation of masking and social distancing, I see the toll this ordeal has taken on my community, and victory is far from assured.
What is clear, however, is how effectively their strategy of scaring us into their trap works on liberals and progressives. I saw how they cynically used people’s naturally cooperative nature and community spirit to convince them to make painful and unnecessary sacrifices in their quality of life, and then I watched those cooperative, self-sacrificing people turn against their neighbors who refused to comply. I saw how the support for the well-founded science behind global warming got grafted onto the sleazy science-fiction used to sell lockdown measures and vaccines. I watched them turn Progressive’s religious zeal for technological innovation into blind obedience to technocratic authoritarianism.
I watched doctors, journalists, public officials, publishers and media outlets throw their credibility away (along with their readers, supporters and audience) in slavish obedience to an authority that has lied to us from the beginning. I watched the internet, which initially promised to democratize information and protect free speech become a panopticon of high-tech surveillance and an echo chamber for authoritarian propaganda.
Now that I’ve seen it with my own eyes, I see how liberals, progressives, artists, gay people, environmentalists, activists, the kind of people I associate with, my friends, can get sucked into a fascist coup and become some of its most vociferous supporters. As painful as this is to watch, this experience has taught me that you don’t have to be evil to do great evil in this world. You just have to be frightened, gullible, and trust the wrong people.
P.S. Prof. Mattias Desmet explains the concept of Mass Formation and its function in a totalitarian state.
It’s Time to Party!
The party is the root of all human culture. At the core of politics lies “party affiliation.” A worship service is just a party that’s been sanctified. The party is so central to our culture that pretty much any time two or more people get together, no matter how mundane the circumstances, we call it a “party.” Whether you are having dinner at a restaurant or staying overnight at a hotel, they’ll ask, “How many in your party?” If you run with a bad crowd you could be convicted of being a party to a crime, and there’s so many parties involved in any lawsuit that you’d think it should be a good time, but it isn’t.
A lot more happens at parties than meets the eye. What appears chaotic at a party actually serves important functions essential for social cohesion and the sustainability of community and society. For the past two years, pandemic lockdown measures made partying illegal. By stopping us from coming together in groups, they crippled our ability to respond politically to the suspension of our civil rights and constitutional democracy. Of course, that was the purpose of the lockdown, and the only thing lockdown measures did effectively. A recent study out of John Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics revealed that pandemic lockdown measure did little or no good in preventing the spread of Covid or in saving lives.
By preventing us from getting together to party, however, Public Health authorities began the unraveling of the social bonds that hold our community together. They destroyed a million small businesses, especially bars, nightclubs and party spots. They turned us into a nation of isolated, screen-addicted obsessive-compulsives who view each other as potential disease vectors rather than as potential friends, lovers and comrades. This lockdown has taken an enormous toll on our community, and on the mental health of the people around us. We cannot go on like this. We need to party.
To me, a party really isn’t a party unless there’s live music and dancing. Live music and dancing animate the spirit, and are critical to human health in ways that scientists don’t understand. Rhythmic shaking releases tension stored in the nervous system after a traumatic experience, every mammal on Earth does it. Humans do it when we dance. We’ve all been traumatized by what we’ve just been through, and the healing process requires a good strong dose of PARTY!
Please come on out and shake off some of that tension. Get together with old friends, and make some new friends, lovers and comrades. We’ve never needed it more! Come to The Jam in Arcata on Friday February 18! DJ Tim Stubbs and I will rock the house all night long starting at 9:00pm. I haven’t played in a nightclub since 2019 and I am so ready for this. The Jam is a great venue. They have a dynamite sound system and its going to sound amazing. I hope I see you there.
Beyond Words, Saturday Feb 12 @ Papa and Barkley in Eureka
My lifelong dream comes true at the Papa and Barkley Social Club at the South End of Eureka on Broadway on Saturday February 12. I have dreamed, since I was very young, of playing music in a comfortable public space that encouraged people to consume cannabis rather than alcohol.
I love cannabis, and have always preferred cannabis to alcohol. I think alcohol has had a negative influence on our culture, but I strongly believe that if we gather together in an environment that celebrates the symbiosis between music and cannabis, it will transform our culture in profound and positive ways.
This free event, sponsored by Papa and Barkley, called “Puffs for Non-Profits,” benefits the Ink People Center for the Arts. The cannabis dispensary will donate 10% of their total sales for the day to The Ink People Center for the Arts. I cannot say enough about the Ink People. When you find anything really cool going on in Humboldt County that showcases local artists, you can bet the Ink People are behind it. Besides that, the Ink People have helped me tremendously and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude. I love them, and I want them to keep doing what they do, so I hope you will come out and enjoy some of Humboldt’s finest with me.
I believe in the power of music to transform culture, and I believe in the power of the music I’m making now more than at any time in my life.
At Papa and Barkley’s Social Club I’ll be throwing down hot didgeridoo dance grooves with DJ Tim Stubbs,
Together we will levitate even the most couch-locked cannabis consumers into soaring rhythmic spasms of ecstasy.
Papa and Barkley has a nice outdoor space, with heaters, awnings, tables with umbrellas and heaters in the center, and plenty of seating.
Of course, they also have a terrific assortment of fine Humboldt County grown cannabis.
They don’t have a stage, but there’s wall to set up in front of, and some space to dance, and that’s all we need really, and we’ve never needed it more.
We need this now more than ever because we stand at a critical juncture in human history. We need a new vision of the world we want to live in, because our old world is gone. It’s been destroyed by the pandemic lockdown. Media hysteria is leading us down a blind alley. We need a new vision of a bright future where freedom, beauty and our boundless love for each other and all of nature shapes the future of humanity. To inspire that new vision, we need art, and that includes music. We need creativity of all kind, but before that, we need to shake off the fear.
We have all been traumatized, shell-shocked, and terrorized by the events of the last two years. We need to shake off that trauma. Natures way to relieve the residual stress, anxiety and tension stored in the nervous system after a traumatic experience, is to dance. Dancing helps your immune system fight off pathogens and coming together in groups helps our bodies maintain good immune defenses. Ecstatic dance feels good. We need to remember what it feels like to feel good, because we need a vision of the future inspired by what makes us feel good, rather than what scares us.
So please, come out to Papa and Barkley in Eureka on Saturday February 12. Get really high on top-flight herb, soak-in some dance beats infused with healing infrasound vibrations and do what feels good. We’ve been denied this basic necessity of life for too long. A lot of us have nearly forgotten how exhilarating a great party can be, and there is a whole lot of young people who have never experienced the magic that happens when live musicians connect with a live audience in a real place in real time. Please come out to help us bring that magic back to life for now and for the future.
Like You've Got Something Better To Do 