The 21st Century has devolved into a total mindfuck.
The schism between the mediated world and, for lack of a better term, the unmediated world continues to expand.
By “mediated world” I refer to the world as it appears in media. The “unmediated world” refers to the world that we use media to escape.
In the past, we recognized that the mediated world was simply an imitation, a fantasy for our entertainment.
Today, especially since the pandemic, people believe what they see on their screens more than the evidence of their own senses.
They trust the authorities in the media even when it stretches their own credulity and contradicts their personal experience.
Now that the mediated world has diverged so so profoundly from the unmediated world, a new phenomena emerges where people eagerly sacrifice their own unmediated reality in service of a media fiction completely lacking in credibility or consistency.
Paradoxically, the less consistent or credible the media fiction, the more people are willing to sacrifice to demonstrate their devotion to it.
This is neither healthy nor sustainable, but those concepts are of no concern to these devotees, because “health” and “sustainability” only apply to the unmediated world, which they all seem to eager to abandon.
It really disturbs me to watch my liberal and progressive friends goose-stepping into a digital concentration camp, while listening to them condemn and demonize anyone who doesn’t buy into the wholly fictitious narrative being crammed down their throats by every mainstream media outlet in the country, if not world.
Totalitarianism is a curious phenomena. I now understand why Hannah Arendt found it so fascinating.
It reveals something about the human character that we’d prefer not to see.
Mattias Desmet has an interesting perspective on the psychology of “mass formation” as it relates to the Covid-19 pandemic phenomena. By now, I’ve watched several interviews with him. This latest episode of the video series “Perspectives on the Pandemic” with John Kirby is the best yet. I highly recommend the whole series for enlightening and informative information about our current predicament. This episode is particularly good and timely. I hope you will take the time to watch it.
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.
Crisis in Ukraine
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.
Anne and her family were exterminated by Nazis. The best is yet to come!
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 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.
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.
My liberal friends think they are smart because they think they understand the science used to justify lockdown measures, masking ordinances and vaccine mandates. They send me vapid little articles that dress government propaganda up with liberal guilt-tripping, insultingly sleazy arguments, and slanderous vilification of the opposition. These articles only make me wonder why they found them convincing in the first place, but for some reason it makes some people feel better to pretend like they know what is going on, no matter how ridiculous the explanation they believe.
In fact, none of the pandemic response measures make any sense from a scientific public health perspective. Quarantines, masking and social distancing have done orders of magnitude more harm than Covid-19. Covid vaccines kill far more people than they save, and the psychological harm of social isolation has driven people to the brink of madness. The “science” used to justify those measures was all bullshit. None of it ever made any sense from a public health perspective, and none of it calculated, let alone considered the side-effects.
On the other hand, from a global fascist coup perspective, the pandemic response was ruthlessly shrewd, and worked flawlessly to prevent people all over the world from opposing the overthrow of their elected governments and an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the middle-class, to the obscenely rich. From the perspective of a global technocratic takeover, the dissolution of representative democracy, and the abolition of civil rights, the pandemic response proved brilliant, perhaps the greatest single political achievement of any fascist regime ever.
Think about it. You just witnessed a global fascist coup, and instead of opposing it, you placed yourself under house arrest, did your level best to censor and bully your less gullible friends and neighbors, and then lined up for mass execution. They took over the whole world without firing a single bullet, and you cheered for them, took your shot, and turned on your friends who didn’t. That’s what just happened folks. None of it made sense, scientifically. None of it was necessary, and none of it was about protecting you. Quite the opposite.
So no, I’m not impressed by what you think you know about virology or medicine, even if you are a doctor. Most doctors don’t know much outside of their own narrow specialty, except that they will lose their license if they don’t repeat exactly what the AMA tells them to say. The doctors who specialize in treating people with Covid, and care more about their patients than their income, like Dr Peter McCollough, tell us that masks are useless, Covid vaccines kill people, and early treatment saves lives. Vaccine specialists like Dr. Robert Malone, who invented mRNA vaccines tell us these Covid shots are dangerous in both the short and long-term. Epidemiologists like Dr John Ioannidis tell us that quarantines killed far more people than the virus.
You don’t have to be a doctor to understand what just happened, because it was never about science, medicine or public health. This was all about stealth, deception and power. Billionaires used technology and information as weapons against the people of the world in a global fascist coup. As a result, the world’s power structure has changed, and the United States has been reduced to a banana republic. If you don’t recognize the political reality of what just happened, and you are not outraged, you an idiot, and if you don’t do something about it you are a coward. That’s my scientific analysis of our current predicament.
Before the pandemic, the North Coast Journal and my liberal friends had a lot in common. They hated Trump, gave lip service to the environment and the rights of minorities, but put most of their energy into acting “cool.” Here on the North Coast, “liberal” is almost a default position. All you have to do to become a liberal in Arcata is be agreeable, but I’m surprised by the spinelessness and soft-headedness of too many of my liberal friends, and I’m even more stunned by the ruthlessness of the crew of the NCJ and their apparent eagerness to abandon their role of facilitating local debate in our community, for the opportunity to oppress us with authoritarian propaganda.
Two years into this global fascist coup, liberal journalists, including those at our own North Coast Journal continue to goose-step the hardest, with clueless liberals lining up behind them yelling “Hail Science, Hail Science” even though none of them have looked at the science. The data from the Phase 3 clinical trial of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine will not be released until 2025. Until independent scientists can see that data and analyze it themselves, any recommendation that anyone take that shot are not based on science, but on unsubstantiated claims made in press releases.
The NCJ deserves a special gold swastika for its efforts at driving the global fascist agenda here in Humboldt County. As our Pied Piper of pandemic panic, the NCJ has dutifully fueled the fear, pumped out the propaganda and vilified dissent. They failed to provide the information we needed to make an informed choice about Covid vaccines. Instead, they cajoled, humiliated, shamed and bullied readers into taking the jab. Practically every media outlet in the country did that, but the NCJ went above and beyond.
Not satisfied to simply ignore and belittle community concerns about vaccine safety, the necessity of masking, or the erosion of civil rights, the NCJ went out of its way to insult everyone who objects to this new authoritarian takeover with their recent “Dickmoves” column. Apparently, anyone who disagrees with them is a “dick” and anything we do to express our views, including taking them to our elected officials, constitutes a “dick move.” That’s some world-class Nazism if you ask me, and I think it deserves special recognition.
The NCJ has become a poison in our community, just like the cigarettes they advertise. Could it be that global corporations buy more than ad space in the NCJ? Regardless, that ad should remind you that the NCJ works for global capitalist predators, not you and I.
The NCJ’s complicity in these crimes against humanity will prevent them from ever admitting the truth. Instead, they will say anything to cover up their guilt as long as they can. The local writers and editors at the NCJ are now wed to the beast with bonds steeped in the blood of this community. They have betrayed us, and we should never trust them again.
As Southern Humboldt’s most intrepid writer, I understand that this does not constitute a high honor. Here in Humboldt County, where “positivity” trumps reality, and we spend more time cultivating flattering lies about ourselves than looking at the truth. We’ve become exceptionally good at ignoring things like dead bodies, huge ripoffs, and widespread environmental destruction as “business as usual.” But, when a brand new elephant shows up and makes itself comfortable on our sofa, and no one else seems to see it, I recognize my responsibility to my community. I mostly stopped writing about life in SoHum a couple of years ago to focus on music. I have a lot more to say beyond words than I do with words these days, but times like these demand more from us, and clearly, SoHum needs my perspective now more than ever.
Besides that, the average American life expectancy dropped by 1.9 years during the pandemic, not because of Covid, most Covid deaths were among people who had already exceeded the average life expectancy. No, American life expectancy dropped because addiction, overdose, depression, alcoholism, suicide, anxiety, hunger, despair, unemployment, loneliness, isolation and fear all soared during the pandemic, greatly exacerbated by the draconian restrictions instituted in response to the pandemic. Those restrictions, and the social and economic consequences of them, killed millions of healthy Americans in the prime of their lives. We could hardly have done more damage to Americans’ health if we tried.
Again, why is that? Were these policies designed to harm us? I think that’s a fair question to ask, considering how successfully they disrupted our lives, ruined our businesses, overthrew our democracy and rescinded our civil rights, as opposed to how poorly their strategy worked to prevent deaths from Covid.
Here in Humboldt County we lost twice as many people to overdose in 2020 as we did to Covid, and I’ll bet that’s true in 2021 as well, but they don’t report about that epidemic anymore. Somehow they deem it appropriate to spare us that grim body count. Nor do we hear about the suicides, heart attacks, liver disease, etc. Unless you die of Covid, you don’t count. Our local media continues to ignore the damage wrought by draconian lockdown restrictions, but anyone who dares criticize these measures gets vilified mercilessly. What’s up with that?
During the War on Drugs, we used the term “Culture of Maximum Harm” to describe the perverse way in which efforts to curb drug abuse, by criminalizing drug users, caused far more harm than drug abuse itself. In fact, the War on Drugs strategy of arresting and incarcerating drug users and peddlers seems to have been devised so as to cause the maximum possible harm to society. When we saw how the culture of maximum harm used the pretense of addressing a public health crisis as cover for violence, human rights violations and political oppression, we saw the War on Drugs, not as an effort to curb drug use, but as a tool to invade privacy, incarcerate millions, and as a distraction from, and excuse for, crimes against humanity.
Ten years and 666+ posts later, SoHum still needs someone who isn’t afraid to confront the obvious, no matter how unpopular or inconvenient, and the obvious has never been more unpopular or inconvenient than it is right now. I wish it weren’t so, and that I didn’t have to do it, but no one else around here will. Like it or not, you need me right now, because there’s something you need to know, and it’s staring you in the face, but for some reason you just don’t see it yet. So welcome back.
I’m not wearing a mask because I’m not sick. If I were sick, I would have stayed home, but I’m not sick. I am, however, sick and tired of being treated like a disease vector.
I am no longer willing to humor people who still believe that masking orders and other pandemic lockdown measures ever made sense or that they haven’t done far more harm than good. I am no longer willing to humor these people because I can no longer ignore or abide the harm these measures have caused me, my family and friends, or the toll they have taken on my community.
Times like these demand civil disobedience. I will not shrink from my responsibility, as a free human being in a free society, to my community and to posterity, to defy, ignore and oppose, unjust, unnecessary, and harmful restrictions on our civil liberties and human dignity.
I ask you to remove your mask as well, and join me in the Garberville Town Square at 1pm this Friday December 3 at 1pm, for smiles, handshakes, hugs, and all of the other benefits of real human interaction that you cannot get online. I hope to see you there!
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.
Like You've Got Something Better To Do 