Tag: SoHum
See Hemp Disconnected, A Psychological War for American Dependence Today at www.hotboxfilms.com
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!
But Their Name is Already Mud
I wish I didn’t have to do this. I definitely have better things to do, but our local media outlets have turned against us, and somebody needs to call them on it. With a noted exception, “journalists” around here no longer consider it their job to provide us with the information we need to make informed decisions. Instead, they regurgitate focus-grouped propaganda, devoid of useful information, designed to induce compliance. I’m sure it’s easier than researching medical science, but don’t think we haven’t noticed. Journalists rarely cover science well, however, the utter failure of local media to even ask meaningful questions of our new overlords in the Public Health Department, demonstrates their complicity in this coup.
I include our local so-called “community” radio station among those traitors. I stopped volunteering at KMUD before the pandemic began, but recently, I got sucked back into KMUD’s orbit just long enough to see that things have gone from bad to much, much, worse. First, two people who live in SoHum told me that they were “banned” from KMUD for talking about Covid. They asked me to write letters on their behalf.
Second, as a result of those letters, I got invited to one of KMUD’s Program Selection and Review Committee meetings, which shocked me. At that meeting I learned that KMUD censors programmers and guests who questions vaccine safety, lockdown measures, or Covid treatment options. Many people in the community, including many volunteers, find this very disturbing.
Third, KMUD host Nikki Norris asked me to cover a few episodes of her show, my old show, Monday Morning Magazine. When I talked to staff at KMUD about this, they made it clear that I would not be allowed on the air unless my topics and guests were pre-approved by staff. I have never before been asked to submit a list of guests to staff for approval. That’s censorship. There is no other word for it. My topics and guests were disapproved so I did not host the shows.
Fourth, a group of local vax-free, mask-free folks gathered on the Garberville town square for a party with music and dancing. Kymkemp.com, to give credit where credit is due, sent a reporter, Lisa Music, who covered the event fairly, including a local couple’s story about how they beat Covid with Ivermectin, Vitamin C and zinc. That’s what local news reporters are supposed to do, and it seems like Kym Kemp’s operation is the only local news outlet that still remembers how. I applaud them for that. On the other hand, Lauren Schmidt of KMUD News attended the event, and recorded plenty of audio for a story, but it never materialized on KMUD’s Local News.
Finally, I sent this editorial to KMUD in response to a long, chilling, unattributed monologue delivered at the end of the local news (probably in place of the aforementioned story). The unattributed soliloquy it turns out, was extracted from the “Surgeon General’s Advisory on Building a Healthy Information Environment.” This ghastly piece of propaganda contains plenty of disinformation itself, but Stella Gherkin read it at the end of the local news without attributing it to anyone. I found it shocking. In response, I submitted this editorial to the station’s community editorial feature, called “All Sides Now.”
“Hello, This is John Hardin for ‘All Sides Now.’
KMUD’s Wednesday Dec 8 Local News sounded like something you might hear in North Korea. Stella Gherkin’s long, unattributed, vaguely threatening monologue at the end of the broadcast chilled me to the bone. Whatever that was, it was not news, and therefore had no place in our local newscast.
I want to remind everyone that free speech, as guaranteed under the First Amendment to the Constitution, has always produced the healthiest information environment, and that is especially true in the fields of science and medicine. The free flow of information, shielded from government censorship by the First Amendment, made the United states a leader in science, technology, and medicine.
Moreover, KMUD is built on, by, and for this community’s commitment to free speech and the idea that we make better decisions when we hear all sides of the story. KMUD exists to insure that we as members of this community have a voice in the debates that drive policy in this community and beyond.
When we stand accused of a crime in this country, we are judged by a jury of our peers, not a panel of experts, the WHO, or Pope Fauci, but by a jury of our peers. that’s because this country is built on the understanding that “We The People” have the capacity, and the responsibility to parse the evidence and determine the facts for ourselves, in every case, regardless of the complexity of the issue or the magnitude of the consequences, and the Covid Pandemic is no exception.
History teaches that regimes censor information, not to protect citizens from misleading falsehoods, but to cover-up their own crimes against humanity. I suspect that is what is happening now, and KMUD should have no part in it.”
KMUD refused to air this editorial. When I uploaded the audio of this “All Sides Now” to Spotify, and shared it on Facebook, someone on KMUD staff called it “libel.”
I have learned, in my many years of volunteering at KMUD, that the most reliable thing about KMUD is “The Unbelievables.” “The Unbelievables” are a phenomena that happens, on-air or off, when someone connected to KMUD says or does something so wrong, so totally inappropriate, completely off-base, and breathtakingly insensitive, that you just can’t believe it really happened. In this case, the idea that KMUD, a listener-supported community radio station, refused to air an editorial in support of free speech, and threatened legal action in response to it being shared elsewhere, is the kind of “Unbelievable” that is not just embarrassing, stupid and sad, but that deeply undermines the credibility and the integrity of our community radio station. I wish it weren’t true, and that someone besides me would say it, but that’s the truth, and you deserve to know.
Covid and the Culture of Maximum Harm
As Southern Humboldt’s most intrepid writer, I understand that this does not constitute a high honor. Here in Humboldt County, where “positivity” trumps reality, and we spend more time cultivating flattering lies about ourselves than looking at the truth. We’ve become exceptionally good at ignoring things like dead bodies, huge ripoffs, and widespread environmental destruction as “business as usual.” But, when a brand new elephant shows up and makes itself comfortable on our sofa, and no one else seems to see it, I recognize my responsibility to my community. I mostly stopped writing about life in SoHum a couple of years ago to focus on music. I have a lot more to say beyond words than I do with words these days, but times like these demand more from us, and clearly, SoHum needs my perspective now more than ever.
In case you haven’t noticed, maybe because you were too busy compulsively washing your hands, that our constitutional democracy got overthrown by a public health dictatorship. Two years into this fiasco, the US has logged more Covid deaths, both in total, and per capita, than any other developed nation on Earth. Clearly, what we did in response to Covid, was wrong. Way wrong. Wronger than any other first-world nation on Earth. Why was that?
Besides that, the average American life expectancy dropped by 1.9 years during the pandemic, not because of Covid, most Covid deaths were among people who had already exceeded the average life expectancy. No, American life expectancy dropped because addiction, overdose, depression, alcoholism, suicide, anxiety, hunger, despair, unemployment, loneliness, isolation and fear all soared during the pandemic, greatly exacerbated by the draconian restrictions instituted in response to the pandemic. Those restrictions, and the social and economic consequences of them, killed millions of healthy Americans in the prime of their lives. We could hardly have done more damage to Americans’ health if we tried.
Again, why is that? Were these policies designed to harm us? I think that’s a fair question to ask, considering how successfully they disrupted our lives, ruined our businesses, overthrew our democracy and rescinded our civil rights, as opposed to how poorly their strategy worked to prevent deaths from Covid.
Here in Humboldt County we lost twice as many people to overdose in 2020 as we did to Covid, and I’ll bet that’s true in 2021 as well, but they don’t report about that epidemic anymore. Somehow they deem it appropriate to spare us that grim body count. Nor do we hear about the suicides, heart attacks, liver disease, etc. Unless you die of Covid, you don’t count. Our local media continues to ignore the damage wrought by draconian lockdown restrictions, but anyone who dares criticize these measures gets vilified mercilessly. What’s up with that?
During the War on Drugs, we used the term “Culture of Maximum Harm” to describe the perverse way in which efforts to curb drug abuse, by criminalizing drug users, caused far more harm than drug abuse itself. In fact, the War on Drugs strategy of arresting and incarcerating drug users and peddlers seems to have been devised so as to cause the maximum possible harm to society. When we saw how the culture of maximum harm used the pretense of addressing a public health crisis as cover for violence, human rights violations and political oppression, we saw the War on Drugs, not as an effort to curb drug use, but as a tool to invade privacy, incarcerate millions, and as a distraction from, and excuse for, crimes against humanity.
We see the same culture of maximum harm at work today in the Covid Pandemic, and the same idiotic enthusiasm for strategies with a proven track record of failure. Masking causes more infections than it prevents. Social isolation kills more Americans than Covid, and don’t even get me started on vaccines and vaccine injuries. If you took the ripoff death-jab, I’m sorry. I really am, but Covid vaccines don’t work, and besides that, they kill people. That’s just the truth.
Ten years and 666+ posts later, SoHum still needs someone who isn’t afraid to confront the obvious, no matter how unpopular or inconvenient, and the obvious has never been more unpopular or inconvenient than it is right now. I wish it weren’t so, and that I didn’t have to do it, but no one else around here will. Like it or not, you need me right now, because there’s something you need to know, and it’s staring you in the face, but for some reason you just don’t see it yet. So welcome back.
Spooks in SoHum
I thoroughly enjoyed Robert F Kennedy Jr’s new book, “The Real Anthony Fauci.” It’s a real page-turner that exposes rampant corruption at Fauci’s NIAID, and reveals how he used his power, as head of that agency, to funnel taxpayers’ money into pharmaceutical company coffers, as well as his own pocket, for lethally toxic drugs that don’t work, and how he covered up the trail of death that has followed Fauci faithfully since the ‘80s, with phony, unethical science, often using vulnerable populations, including AIDS orphans, and rural African villagers as lab rats without their informed consent, or that of a guardian or advocate.
Every American needs to read this book right now, but for folks here in Southern Humboldt, the book holds special interest because it mentions a Thanksgiving gathering in Harris in the early ‘90s. At that gathering, one Peter Schwartz attempted to recruit a young Princeton Graduate with a degree in Anthropology named Ken McCarthy into working with him in an “unnamed West African country” in a job aimed at “weakening tribal and family structures on behalf of a federal government.” McCarthy found the proposal “intensely disturbing” and declined the opportunity.
However, according to this well-researched and foot-noted volume, Peter Schwartz once worked at the Sanford Research Institute, and ran their Strategic Environment Center, at the time when the Strategic Environment Center hosted the CIA’s MKUltra mind-control experiments. Later, Schwartz went to work for Shell Oil Co, to help soften up indigenous Ogoni resistance to the Oil giant’s plans to exploit their ancestral homeland, the fertile Niger River Delta in Nigeria, for oil development. Presumably, this was the job he hoped McCarthy might help him with when the two spoke at that Thanksgiving gathering in Harris.
Schwartz earns a place in the book because he authored one of a series of pandemic simulations that all involved establishing authoritarian control over society through quarantines, strict control of the media, and forced vaccinations. Schwartz “authored” the “Lockstep” simulation in 2010 which described how nations around the world, in response to a global flu pandemic, “flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restriction, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks…leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.” according to Schwartz.
So why were CIA spooks so heavily involved in these pandemic preparedness exercises? As RFKJr points out, “the CIA doesn’t do public health: the CIA does Coup d’e-tat.” Perhaps as intriguing for SoHum locals is this question: Why did a spook like Schwartz come to a Thanksgiving gathering in Harris, of all places? And why did he think it was a good place to recruit mercenaries to commit genocide in Africa? Or perhaps more relevantly, who in SoHum, besides the CIA, would invite a spook like Schwartz to Thanksgiving? Or does Peter Schwartz himself live here in SoHum?
I’ve long suspected CIA involvement in Humboldt’s cannabis industry. They can’t resist any opportunity to make a lot of untraceable cash. I wouldn’t be surprised if they use some of that cash to control and manipulate our local community radio station as well. Someone certainly is. I can’t imagine any other reason to explain why KMUD has shut out community dialogue and become so authoritarian and one-sided lately. It seems spooky to me. What do you think?
It’s OK; I’m Not Sick
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!
Kristallnacht in SoHum
At the time when we need them most, we stand to lose some of our best nurses and medical staff at the SHCHCD because of Vaccine Mandates. I know that these employees have good reason to to refuse to allow their bodies to be used in this global experiment, and I think it criminal that so many people have already been coerced into taking a dangerous and potentially lethal injection that they neither need nor want, but now the injustice of Vaccine Mandates has been laid at our doorstep.
We cannot escape responsibility for this crime. We, as a community are about to fire highly qualified health-care professionals who have loyally served our community for years because they chose to exercise their right to decide what is best for their own health. These are the people in our community who are most qualified to understand the risks of the disease. They’ve seen Covid up close and personal, and watched people die from it. They are also well qualified to analyze the risks of the so-called “vaccine” for themselves. Everyone has the right to make up their own mind about any medical procedure they may or may not undergo. Those decisions are not always easy, and this one is especially fraught. I don’t think we have any business second-guessing them
We can either respect their integrity, and their decision, and continue to value them as members of our community, or we can passively watch our right to make our own medical decisions flutter away forever, as we inflict tremendous financial hardship on our friends and neighbors who have served us so faithfully in time of need. This is our Kristallnacht. This is where we decide to stand with our friends, or to bully them, take away their income and probably force them to relocate. These are our people, and this will be our crime against them, if we let it happen.
I hope you will join me in writing (or calling) your supervisors and your representatives on the SHCHCD. Tell them that we need the nurses and medical staff that we have, and that you respect those employees’ decisions. Please tell them that you oppose vaccine mandates, and you value our hospital staff, and then go find out what those nurses know that you don’t.
I Make News
The “Impacts” of Murder Mountain
I see that the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research will hold a conference to discuss the “impacts” of the Netflix mini-series Murder Mountain on Humboldt County. If you didn’t already know that the HIIMR exists purely to white-wash the marijuana industry, this should convince you. The six-part docudrama, Murder Mountain tells the story of Garrett Rodriquez, who’s young life was snuffed-out on a marijuana farm in the Rancho Sequoia subdivision near Alder Point, and the remarkable recovery of his body by the, now infamous, “Alder Point 8.”
Locals have called the Rancho Sequoia subdivision “Murder Mountain” for as long as I’ve lived here. That maze of ten-acre parcels, littered with burned out cars, ramshackle shacks, and bullet riddled “No Trespassing” signs held became known as “Murder Mountain” because the only time you heard about Rancho Sequoia was on the news, when someone got killed there, and it happened often enough that you couldn’t help but notice.
I enjoyed the TV series, Murder Mountain. I’m sure I never would have watched it, except for the fact that I played one of the “Alder Point 8” in the fuzzy recreation scenes. Still, I live here in SoHum, and I think they portrayed our community pretty fairly, even sympathetically. I thought the filmmakers gave our community the benefit of the doubt whenever they could, but now we step forward, ourselves, to remove the last veil.
The fact that people here, especially people in the marijuana industry, have gotten much more upset about the TV series, Murder Mountain, than they ever did about the disappearance and murder of Garrett Rodriquez, speaks volumes about the marijuana industry, and our community. The very fact that the HIIMR will hold a conference to discuss the impacts of the TV series, instead of a conference on the impacts of the ongoing legacy of violence within the marijuana industry, plainly and chillingly demonstrates the callous narcissism of Humboldt’s marijuana industry, reflected in the HIIMR.
Garrett Rodriquez was neither the first, nor the last, worker murdered on a Southern Humboldt pot farm. At least four people, reported to have been working in the marijuana industry, were murdered in Southern Humboldt in 2018 alone. None of those murders have been solved. That doesn’t count the missing persons cases, solved SoHum murders, murders in other parts of the county, or murders that happened before or since 2018. There are a lot of Garrett Rodriquezes out there, and potentially many more Murder Mountains to come.
The HIIMR should take note: Dead people count as measurable impacts. So do bereaved families, widows, and orphans. Murderers that walk our streets with impunity impact our community. The poisonous relationship between our community and law enforcement impacts our community. A culture that treats Drug War refugees and honest working people as disposable, impacts our community. Trauma, desensitization and learned indifference to violence resulting from overexposure, impacts our community. Those are just a few of the ways that violence within the marijuana industry impacts our community.
By comparison, no one died making Murder Mountain, and nobody killed anyone to see it. I can attest to the fact that everyone who worked on Murder Mountain got paid promptly and fairly. That’s more than I can say about the marijuana industry. How can we possibly measure the minuscule impacts of a TV show, against the unstudied background of marijuana related violence in our community.
Studying the real violence and murder in the marijuana industry might help us put Murder Mountain into perspective. TV shows like Murder Mountain amount to little more than a sidebar in the long story of how the marijuana industry made murder commonplace in our community and fueled our notoriety for it.
Studying the impacts of real violence and murder within the marijuana industry could greatly benefit our community. We might even find a way to protect workers, save lives and rehabilitate the industry. Any cultural change begins with awareness, and making our community aware of the real impacts of the violence that we have come to accept as normal, just might shock us enough to bring us to our senses.
As a community, we have brushed too many Garrett Rodriquezes under the rug. Instead, we save our indignation for anyone who dares to criticize the marijuana industry, regardless of how accurately. Somehow, in our community, we have come to care more about venerating the mythology of Humboldt County’s marijuana industry than we do about the lives of its victims, or the violence it brings to our community. The high rate of violence in this community, and the indifference we show to it, still amazes me, and it’s uglier than anything we see in Murder Mountain.
Instead of whining about what those mean filmmakers did to us with their TV show, perhaps we should recognize Murder Mountain as the wake-up call we needed.
Like You've Got Something Better To Do 