I didn't believe anything at first. There was to much noise out there. It was confusing but addictive to gobble up the information. So, I stopped looking deep into it. And then, questions started to form that were not being asked by the experts.
That's when I felt horrified. How could we just go along with a huge farce with multiple holes in the story?
We went along to get along.
COVID scared the shit out of me. People did the same 911 unity type group think and questions were being ignored. I felt like we were done for.
But the hope came not from the resistance but in seeing that the followers of the bullshit were not doing the boosters despite thinking it's safe.
Humanity might be still asleep but the mammalian brain is still working.
The more the sociopaths try to scare us, the more we face the split between what we believe and what we truly sense.
Same here. I was in NY during 911, and remember a very clear change from a sort of bafflement and an almost immediate desire to help, to, within weeks, people being afraid to ask any questions about the anti-muslim trajectory things were taking, and the clear ramp up to war. I lost a job for printing out an article by Edward Said!
So when they started ramping up covid, I felt a very similar visceral fear, because there was that same level of everyone putting on blinders. I started monitoring the state health dept website and the HHS, and saw that hospitalizations were NOT through the roof, and people were NOT dying of "covid" unless they were over 80 and had 3+ comorbidities. Then the state health dept website got an overhaul so none of that info was available. That's when I got really scared, because I knew some shit was being perpetrated, and NO ONE, especially not colleagues in the performing arts, wanted to hear anything about how I was seeing discrepancies.
In retrospect it seems almost quaint, given what's happened since then. But, people are protesting Israel/US genocide in Gaza, even though they aren't connecting the dots to either Ukraine or Covid. (Or Yugoslavia for that matter, which, since I just started reading about that rather obsessively, strikes me as a good starting point for understanding the trajectory of the last 30 years.)
Now the JFK files. And, like John, I wonder what kind of effect the reveal will have.
if not the mamalian, then some advanced reptile brain. But i agree.....there is still a dim spark there to remind us......but it might also be getting dimmer. I dont know. And good points re: covid's sort of broad spectrum confusion of data. Which im sure was intentional
The COVID-19 pandemic scam could only have unfolded the way it did in 2020. Before then, the necessary technology wasn’t in place. Once the global digital grid was established, the media fully monopolized, and governments aligned (though I haven’t quite figured out how that coordination happened yet but I’m wary of jumping on the right’s “globalist” bandwagon, though there’s always some kernel of truth in these narratives), the conditions were set.
I see it much more simply than how Rob describes it in Occam's Razor substack. We have been conditioned our entire lives to accept a specific worldview of disease that most of us never questioned. The medical-industrial complex is fundamentally built on these highly profitable ideas, reinforced by culture, especially Hollywood, which churns out apocalyptic narratives, whether about climate disasters, alien invasions, or deadly viral pandemics. And, as in the movies, they keep us off balance and afraid.
But none of these fear-driven narratives could have shut down the world simultaneously without today’s digital infrastructure. I don’t think it was an accident that a viral pandemic was chosen as the spectacle of 2020 because it is the hardest to refute.
But refute it we can, especially since the burden of proof falls on those making the claims. And because the claim is rooted in “science,” we must examine the science used to justify it. Since it also rests on a scientific paradigm we’ve been taught all our lives, challenging it naturally meets resistance. Unfortunately, that resistance comes not only from the authorities but also from people who have been propagandized into believing this worldview of disease, who now frightened and alone after following the dictates to isolate for safety, look to the authorities to save them.
And now, thanks to human and AI think tanks, along with our own reliance on the internet, we have unknowingly trained the algorithms in how best to manipulate us.
After 9/11, I became one of the “conspiracy nuts” and my wife duly sneered at me. And then she bought me some “conspiracist” DVDs for my birthday or possibly Christmas, she watched them with me, admitted that there was something fishy going on ... and a couple of days later went back to calling me a “conspiracy nut”.
And the propagandists know this. They know that the important thing is to establish “the tone” i.e. the fundamental outlook WHICH NEVER CHANGES ONE IOTA FOREVER AFTER.
And Covid is a totally hopeless case because no-one is arguing over a specific incident but this general mass of claimed incidents that just goes on and on and on. You can say anything you want about it. Everyone has slipped into their psychological grooves from which they will never deviate. This is why the “shock and awe” moment is so important. That’s when the basic mind formation takes place. Perhaps there is indeed a parallel with traumatised children who never grow out of their mental deformation.
This would also account for the apparent autism of so many who are stuck in the cold war mentality. There is a kind of “groundhog decade” effect whereby the 1950s are eternally repeated.
This Leftist “ultra-radicalism” seems identical to the non-Marxist “conspiratorial” angle in which there is a ferociously naïve idea that some are “outside” the system – the ones supposedly “outside” ironically being given a voice in the media i.e. this is a gullible approach that seemed to be spearheaded by the covid operation in which nobody on the Left seemed to realise that the dissidence that they think they embody was absorbed from the very media which has been selling them capitalist crap for their entire lives.
I wonder about AI generating some of the comments I respond to on Facebook. One such comment was disparaging a certain Mahler symphony in the usual mind numbing clichéd terms – but what was truly bizarre is that the comment didn’t relate to the work under consideration. And when I pointed this out, the commenter, instead of being annoyed, behaved with courtesy which I thought heartening until I started to wonder if this too might be an indication of AI. But the real problem is that it’s often hard to tell the difference between AI generated text and the stuff that’s written by people who just aren’t that bright.
I think it is, and I agree, it's terrifying. I tried asking it about its default programming. Not only was it evasive, it was extremely politely evasive.
A line in John's part 2 of The Return reminded me of a line in a Bob Dylan song, It’s doom alone that counts.
You touched on a lot of ineresting subjects in this podcast. Regarding the optimism of the generation that fought in WWII, I had a different experience.
My parents were New York Jews, raised during the 20s and 30s. My father fought and was wounded in Italy. I felt a lingering sense of paranoia from them, at least from my mother, that overshadowed any optimism about the postwar future. Being Jewish may have had something to do with it. I remember my mother would always say as part of her vague responses when I asked her about her youth, “From this you should never know,” as if keeping the actual history from her children offered us some protectiom.
You mentioned that capitalism needs and allows some opposition narrative and we see this in the manufactured conspiracy theories allowed and even floated around sars-co-v-2. The one that stands out is that the virus was manipulated in China or Ft Detrick gain-of-function labs and either purposely or accidentally escaped. This story not only upholds the lie that there was a health emergency, it keeps the fear alive that more deadly viruses could be lurking in labs and that wemust turn to the authorities to protect us by any means.
TDS is rampant…Liberals are deeply imprinted with anti Russian sentment. Regarding Zero Hedge---it used to be, maybe still is, a stock market analyst/commentator site , so we should expect it to be libertarian and anti-Russia.
So, cynicism--- I inhabit it without being nihilistic.
I didn’t read Chaos until this year. It built upon themes from decades earlier books I read like Acid Dreams by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, and Storming Heaven by Jay Stevens, but Chaos is far more investigative.
It also paralleled the book Weird Scenes inside the Canyon which posits that the entire counterculture was inorganic. I don’t think that is entirely the case, but there is far too much evidence of manipulation by the government secret agencies to ignore it.
We already know that every revolutionary and anti-war group of the time was infiltrated and brought down from within or through assassination when the former tactics failed. The Black Panthers, AIM, Weather Underground, Venceremos and the SLA, (at least a few of which evolved out of anti-war groups like VVAW, which split in two) were infiltrated disrupted and neutralized.
COINTELPRO and other programs used informants, manufactured crimes, false letters, and outright assassinations to take down these movements. They were either set up by informers, encouraged toward self-destruction, or manipulated into making moves that justified a heavy-handed crackdown and even assassintion.
It ties into the counterculture question, too—if political resistance was being systematically dismantled, then the push toward a more self-indulgent, passive “tune in, turn on, drop out” lifestyle looks less organic and more like redirection.
The same system that crushed militant resistance seemed to encourage the psychedelic, escapist version of “revolution.” Interesting to ponder that the CIA had a hand in driving kids away from the anti-war movement into the counterculture "hippie"movement and then, using Manson and Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter story, replete with a mind-control cult, to paint the drop-out hippies as drug-crazed LSD using murderers.
One interesting part brought out in Chaos that we can’t overlook is that LSD alone did not turn people violent. It was methamphetamine that induced violent behavior. And it was revealed that the murderers both nights had done speed and that Joly and Smith were also studying the effects of methamphetamine as well as LSD at teh SF free clinic in the Haight. Too many coincidences to ignore.
Hope you revisit this topic in light of the JFK file releases.
I really miss Dave McGowan, the Weird scenes in the canyon guy. He was astute AND hugely witty. It's a shame he got derailed by the moon landing thing towards the end. Not that I disagree with that but it doesn't seem relevant now.
I call this the Strawberry Fields effect—where now, nothing is real. I was initially incredulous of McGowan. While his book highlighted some interesting facts about the parentage of the Canyon artists, there was far too much missing to convincingly bridge that point to his broader conclusion. And the moon landing, even more, as John points outwith the debris. And then the idea that the artists didn't write theri own songs. If one is to believe McGowan than all the writers and musicians of the day--including the Beatles-- were nothing but a Tavistock creation. Good luck with that. I got to hear many of these musicians fromthe 60s perform, so I know they weren't lip-synching. But George, I can always be wrong.
I don’t know if D McGowan went the whole hog with the Beatles/Tavistock thing. As usually happens, a decent enough observation can be taken too far e.g. one Mark Crispin Miller has been heroically counting up the suspicious deaths over the “covid years” and there have been huge numbers of them. But he’ll sometimes point to some celeb succumbing to ill health and the celeb in question will be in their 80s and I’ll think, well it’s not THAT odd!
I think DMcG has a good point in highlighting the surprising number of 60s music celebs with connections to the military. And how a lot of them hailed from Laurel Canyon BEFORE the big pop explosion. Imagine if it came out that The Beatles, Stones, Kinks and The Who all came from the same school!
But you’d have to be extremely naïve NOT to suspect that the ruling class took a deep interest in the tastes of the masses, especially in a nominal democracy.
But you can get too immersed in futile speculation. That’s what seems to be the basis of this seemingly endless production line of books obsessing over symbols in various pop cultural products. Name any singer at all and you’re bound to get at least one site “deconstructing” the singer’s “sinister associations with the Masons” or whatever.
I agree that the Canyon artists connections to the military were provocative and I think we all agree that the CIA, against its own charter, was deeply involved in manipulating culture and perception as as well as experimentation on citizens on its own soil. The first Canyon musician inhabitant, Frank Zappa, was never into drugs, so while one could make a case the others might have been what is today called celebrity "influencers," Zappa wasan outlier, although he seemed very much anti-authoritarian. Were the Laurel Canyon artists unknowing participants in a cultural experiment or agenda or willing players? And were these children of intelligent agency parents sacrifical lambs, since many died of overdose and their lives became deeply entwined in drugs? Now, if we compare the rise of the British Invasion bands with the Laurel canyon artists, the main difference I can see is what was happening in the individual countries that influenced the youth --- the American war against Vietnam and the draft in the U.S. was a huge factor, but not in the U.K.
The assumption that the pop scene is “controlled” doesn’t mean it is COMPLETELY controlled. This is where conspiracy and the trends of capitalism overlap. Part of the process obviously involved making loads of money. And ever since the rise of “youth culture” in the 50s, the big attraction was hitting the kids in their wallets – these kids being naturally impressionable. As somebody once said (can’t recall who), the old jazz band musicians, being for the most part family people, would scrupulously study their contracts whereas the rising bands of youngsters tended to be more hasty and often “easy meat”.
(Thomas Frank has a scary chapter in his book “Commodify Your Dissent” in which he takes us through the steps involved in getting a young band signed up. He takes us through all the calculations and reveals that the outcome is that, after all the starry visions of fame and fortune, the young musicians end up with less money than they would have made stacking shelves in a supermarket for the same time period.)
So the exploitation is already there. And the “big interests” can easily influence matters through their money.
I’d guess that in the 60s the aim was to defang the protest movement by derailing it towards such harmless (to the system) matters as drug use and promiscuous sex.
And your mention of Zappa brings up an important point. Zappa was by all accounts an odd figure in being devoted to his work in his studio. If he himself was a big “psy-op” there would be no need for all that output. Or – to put it another way – even if he had been initially some kind of intelligence stooge, it doesn’t mean that that is ALL he was or that he remained that. It’s a dialectical thing e.g. I am convinced that the World Socialist Web Site is a spook centre but in order to hoodwink Marxists, they have to provide a degree of genuine – and even sometimes valuable – Marxist research. So up to a point, they are genuinely Marxist.
The point you make about the music "business" reminds me of a line in a Paul Simon song, "the music suffers, the music business thrives," or that description from Hunter S. Thompson, “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”
The music industry is a prime example of the predatory nature of capitalism, where contracts are structured to trap musicians in perpetual debt.
And Frank’s book, The Conquest of Cool is a compelling exploration of how my generation, the post-WWII baby boomers, was targeted with a new kind of marketing that not only packaged and commodified our rebellion, but attempted to shape the attitudes and desires of the counterculture, and probably had a hand in creating it.
Also, good point about the World Socialist Web Site.
oh geez, i guess i missed the moon landing stuff. I do disagree by the by. WHen they can explain third party satellite photos of left behind debris, then we will discuss it. But i knnow this holds a huge pull for people, for reasons I still cant quite pin down.
The depressing thing is when one of those matters gets to the point where you know the whole thing is futile. I had that feeling when the 9/11 matter started to talk about the melting point of steel. It’s a fair enough point but I just knew that this topic could be spun out anyway you want. With all the evidence gone, you can say anything.
People tend to get fanatical over stuff that’s unprovable one way or the other. I think that’s a different thing than arguing over blatant contradictions and incoherencies in e.g. the transgender thing. Or realising that the logical outcome of covid paranoia is to frankly hide under the bed and never come out again. I see folk still masking up even on a windy day outside and I know these people will be masking up until the day they die.
I’ve got a theory that there is a more fundamental aspect to these sceptical notions i.e. more fundamental than the issue as to whether a cover up is possible. The latter amounts to the thought: “Oh they couldn’t do that!” But a deeper thought is, “They just WOULDN’T do that!” This is the voice of trust which everyone starts with. But when this voice changes to “You know, I think they actually WOULD do that!” then that changes everything.
I think history will bear out that imperial powers will do anything to maintain hegemony, including dropping two nuclear bombs on civilians, lying about WMDs, and killing 1 million Iraqis, among many others. But when it comes to the COVID spectacle, there is a way to logically assess the scam or its legitimacy....basically, whether there was an actual novel virus or if it was an orchestrated spectacle with an agenda.
This assessment hinges on the science used to legitimize the pandemic. If one can demonstrate through the science that there was no novel virus discovered, then that significantly undermines the pandemic narrative. The next step is to ascertain the modus operandi of how the scam was carried out.
Again, the COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to critically analyze the claims made about the virus and the measures implemented in response. The key lies in examining the actual published scientific evidence presented to support the narrative of a novel virus pandemic--was this accomplished according to the standards established by teh scientific community? If it can be shown that this evidence is lacking or insufficient, it raises significant questions about the legitimacy of the pandemic narrative.
The only way to establish this is by examining the data and methodologies used in the studies claiming the existence and impact of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This includes looking at how the research was conducted, the controls (if any) that were in place, and whether there were any conflicts of interest or biases that could affect the findings, basically the scientific method itself.
Once people acknowledge that the powers that be actually would pull the wool over our eyes for an agenda, they must be prepared to delve into the details rather than brushing off investigations into the science as mere conspiracy theory. Compared to something like the moon landing or even 9/11, this is much easier to investigate.
I recall that quote from the Bush aid about how they can “create reality” and, though that may have been a deliberate ploy to sow despair, it had a germ of truth in that all the propagandists are concerned with is creating the “right mood” in the present and then moving on, after which, and bearing in mind their control over the media, they can say whatever they want and keep everyone’s head spinning. Sealing the initial impression is what counts.
So when it came to covid, my own “method” was much simpler than ascertaining evidence – though I also paid attention to the statistics and noted that they didn’t bear out what was claimed. My method is that the media ALWAYS lies or at least MISLEADS and the more they drone on about something the less likely it is to be true. And if that sounds a bit knee-jerk, the WAY that the media reports can often be a giveaway. So much of the reporting was clearly designed to create maximum panic through adopting the tropes of a dismal low budget disaster movie script.
And one undeniable fact is that the official takes on both 9/11 and the moon landings are pretty much sealed into public consciousness. Even the sceptical approach has been “normalised” as “crazy conspiracy theory” and thus effectively neutered.
And as for the question of how long a dubious proposition can be kept going, I think of the gunpowder plot from no less than four centuries ago. But that also involved the brilliant strategy of concocting a public ceremony to shore up the official account i.e. Bonfire Night with the burning of the Guy (Fawkes). Get the people physically involved in some ritual and you’re well on the way to controlling their thinking habits. That’s why the masking and distancing over covid was absolutely essential to the psychological operation.
It was just those observations you mention (and the understanding that the media always lies) that aroused my suspicions early on that the pandemic was a psyop. But, I spent a lot more time trying to understand how science was used to accomplish it, especially since I was called a “science denier” among all the other nasty pejoratives. I'll also admit that COVID was a defining moment for me, after which I at least considered (for the first time) the moon landing and just about every other crisis we have been bombarded with during my lifetime as a hoax.
Slate online mag had a story with the head and sub head: Errol Morris’ New Netflix Documentary Takes On Manson, Mind Control, and the CIA; It’s such a wild theory, even he’s not sure he believes it. BY SAM ADAMS.Except it's not such a wild theory. Bugliosi's story, the official JFK narrative and the 911 tale of hi-jacking terrorists sent by Osama bin Ladin (proven by the passport found in the debris of the world trade towers that fell in their own footprint)...now those a hypotheses too wild to believe. And I agree with you that the documentary was such a watered down version of O'Neil's excellent work in the book that I tuned out.
911 prepared me for COVID.
I didn't believe anything at first. There was to much noise out there. It was confusing but addictive to gobble up the information. So, I stopped looking deep into it. And then, questions started to form that were not being asked by the experts.
That's when I felt horrified. How could we just go along with a huge farce with multiple holes in the story?
We went along to get along.
COVID scared the shit out of me. People did the same 911 unity type group think and questions were being ignored. I felt like we were done for.
But the hope came not from the resistance but in seeing that the followers of the bullshit were not doing the boosters despite thinking it's safe.
Humanity might be still asleep but the mammalian brain is still working.
The more the sociopaths try to scare us, the more we face the split between what we believe and what we truly sense.
They almost had us.
https://robc137.substack.com/p/covid
Same here. I was in NY during 911, and remember a very clear change from a sort of bafflement and an almost immediate desire to help, to, within weeks, people being afraid to ask any questions about the anti-muslim trajectory things were taking, and the clear ramp up to war. I lost a job for printing out an article by Edward Said!
So when they started ramping up covid, I felt a very similar visceral fear, because there was that same level of everyone putting on blinders. I started monitoring the state health dept website and the HHS, and saw that hospitalizations were NOT through the roof, and people were NOT dying of "covid" unless they were over 80 and had 3+ comorbidities. Then the state health dept website got an overhaul so none of that info was available. That's when I got really scared, because I knew some shit was being perpetrated, and NO ONE, especially not colleagues in the performing arts, wanted to hear anything about how I was seeing discrepancies.
In retrospect it seems almost quaint, given what's happened since then. But, people are protesting Israel/US genocide in Gaza, even though they aren't connecting the dots to either Ukraine or Covid. (Or Yugoslavia for that matter, which, since I just started reading about that rather obsessively, strikes me as a good starting point for understanding the trajectory of the last 30 years.)
Now the JFK files. And, like John, I wonder what kind of effect the reveal will have.
if not the mamalian, then some advanced reptile brain. But i agree.....there is still a dim spark there to remind us......but it might also be getting dimmer. I dont know. And good points re: covid's sort of broad spectrum confusion of data. Which im sure was intentional
Yes, the fog of war!
The COVID-19 pandemic scam could only have unfolded the way it did in 2020. Before then, the necessary technology wasn’t in place. Once the global digital grid was established, the media fully monopolized, and governments aligned (though I haven’t quite figured out how that coordination happened yet but I’m wary of jumping on the right’s “globalist” bandwagon, though there’s always some kernel of truth in these narratives), the conditions were set.
I see it much more simply than how Rob describes it in Occam's Razor substack. We have been conditioned our entire lives to accept a specific worldview of disease that most of us never questioned. The medical-industrial complex is fundamentally built on these highly profitable ideas, reinforced by culture, especially Hollywood, which churns out apocalyptic narratives, whether about climate disasters, alien invasions, or deadly viral pandemics. And, as in the movies, they keep us off balance and afraid.
But none of these fear-driven narratives could have shut down the world simultaneously without today’s digital infrastructure. I don’t think it was an accident that a viral pandemic was chosen as the spectacle of 2020 because it is the hardest to refute.
But refute it we can, especially since the burden of proof falls on those making the claims. And because the claim is rooted in “science,” we must examine the science used to justify it. Since it also rests on a scientific paradigm we’ve been taught all our lives, challenging it naturally meets resistance. Unfortunately, that resistance comes not only from the authorities but also from people who have been propagandized into believing this worldview of disease, who now frightened and alone after following the dictates to isolate for safety, look to the authorities to save them.
And now, thanks to human and AI think tanks, along with our own reliance on the internet, we have unknowingly trained the algorithms in how best to manipulate us.
After 9/11, I became one of the “conspiracy nuts” and my wife duly sneered at me. And then she bought me some “conspiracist” DVDs for my birthday or possibly Christmas, she watched them with me, admitted that there was something fishy going on ... and a couple of days later went back to calling me a “conspiracy nut”.
And the propagandists know this. They know that the important thing is to establish “the tone” i.e. the fundamental outlook WHICH NEVER CHANGES ONE IOTA FOREVER AFTER.
And Covid is a totally hopeless case because no-one is arguing over a specific incident but this general mass of claimed incidents that just goes on and on and on. You can say anything you want about it. Everyone has slipped into their psychological grooves from which they will never deviate. This is why the “shock and awe” moment is so important. That’s when the basic mind formation takes place. Perhaps there is indeed a parallel with traumatised children who never grow out of their mental deformation.
This would also account for the apparent autism of so many who are stuck in the cold war mentality. There is a kind of “groundhog decade” effect whereby the 1950s are eternally repeated.
This Leftist “ultra-radicalism” seems identical to the non-Marxist “conspiratorial” angle in which there is a ferociously naïve idea that some are “outside” the system – the ones supposedly “outside” ironically being given a voice in the media i.e. this is a gullible approach that seemed to be spearheaded by the covid operation in which nobody on the Left seemed to realise that the dissidence that they think they embody was absorbed from the very media which has been selling them capitalist crap for their entire lives.
I wonder about AI generating some of the comments I respond to on Facebook. One such comment was disparaging a certain Mahler symphony in the usual mind numbing clichéd terms – but what was truly bizarre is that the comment didn’t relate to the work under consideration. And when I pointed this out, the commenter, instead of being annoyed, behaved with courtesy which I thought heartening until I started to wonder if this too might be an indication of AI. But the real problem is that it’s often hard to tell the difference between AI generated text and the stuff that’s written by people who just aren’t that bright.
the fact that AI might be programmed for a certain banal politeness is the scariest thing ever.
I think it is, and I agree, it's terrifying. I tried asking it about its default programming. Not only was it evasive, it was extremely politely evasive.
Loved the potatoe peel story and the man who lived in your house.
A line in John's part 2 of The Return reminded me of a line in a Bob Dylan song, It’s doom alone that counts.
You touched on a lot of ineresting subjects in this podcast. Regarding the optimism of the generation that fought in WWII, I had a different experience.
My parents were New York Jews, raised during the 20s and 30s. My father fought and was wounded in Italy. I felt a lingering sense of paranoia from them, at least from my mother, that overshadowed any optimism about the postwar future. Being Jewish may have had something to do with it. I remember my mother would always say as part of her vague responses when I asked her about her youth, “From this you should never know,” as if keeping the actual history from her children offered us some protectiom.
You mentioned that capitalism needs and allows some opposition narrative and we see this in the manufactured conspiracy theories allowed and even floated around sars-co-v-2. The one that stands out is that the virus was manipulated in China or Ft Detrick gain-of-function labs and either purposely or accidentally escaped. This story not only upholds the lie that there was a health emergency, it keeps the fear alive that more deadly viruses could be lurking in labs and that wemust turn to the authorities to protect us by any means.
TDS is rampant…Liberals are deeply imprinted with anti Russian sentment. Regarding Zero Hedge---it used to be, maybe still is, a stock market analyst/commentator site , so we should expect it to be libertarian and anti-Russia.
So, cynicism--- I inhabit it without being nihilistic.
I didn’t read Chaos until this year. It built upon themes from decades earlier books I read like Acid Dreams by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, and Storming Heaven by Jay Stevens, but Chaos is far more investigative.
It also paralleled the book Weird Scenes inside the Canyon which posits that the entire counterculture was inorganic. I don’t think that is entirely the case, but there is far too much evidence of manipulation by the government secret agencies to ignore it.
We already know that every revolutionary and anti-war group of the time was infiltrated and brought down from within or through assassination when the former tactics failed. The Black Panthers, AIM, Weather Underground, Venceremos and the SLA, (at least a few of which evolved out of anti-war groups like VVAW, which split in two) were infiltrated disrupted and neutralized.
COINTELPRO and other programs used informants, manufactured crimes, false letters, and outright assassinations to take down these movements. They were either set up by informers, encouraged toward self-destruction, or manipulated into making moves that justified a heavy-handed crackdown and even assassintion.
It ties into the counterculture question, too—if political resistance was being systematically dismantled, then the push toward a more self-indulgent, passive “tune in, turn on, drop out” lifestyle looks less organic and more like redirection.
The same system that crushed militant resistance seemed to encourage the psychedelic, escapist version of “revolution.” Interesting to ponder that the CIA had a hand in driving kids away from the anti-war movement into the counterculture "hippie"movement and then, using Manson and Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter story, replete with a mind-control cult, to paint the drop-out hippies as drug-crazed LSD using murderers.
One interesting part brought out in Chaos that we can’t overlook is that LSD alone did not turn people violent. It was methamphetamine that induced violent behavior. And it was revealed that the murderers both nights had done speed and that Joly and Smith were also studying the effects of methamphetamine as well as LSD at teh SF free clinic in the Haight. Too many coincidences to ignore.
Hope you revisit this topic in light of the JFK file releases.
I really miss Dave McGowan, the Weird scenes in the canyon guy. He was astute AND hugely witty. It's a shame he got derailed by the moon landing thing towards the end. Not that I disagree with that but it doesn't seem relevant now.
I call this the Strawberry Fields effect—where now, nothing is real. I was initially incredulous of McGowan. While his book highlighted some interesting facts about the parentage of the Canyon artists, there was far too much missing to convincingly bridge that point to his broader conclusion. And the moon landing, even more, as John points outwith the debris. And then the idea that the artists didn't write theri own songs. If one is to believe McGowan than all the writers and musicians of the day--including the Beatles-- were nothing but a Tavistock creation. Good luck with that. I got to hear many of these musicians fromthe 60s perform, so I know they weren't lip-synching. But George, I can always be wrong.
I don’t know if D McGowan went the whole hog with the Beatles/Tavistock thing. As usually happens, a decent enough observation can be taken too far e.g. one Mark Crispin Miller has been heroically counting up the suspicious deaths over the “covid years” and there have been huge numbers of them. But he’ll sometimes point to some celeb succumbing to ill health and the celeb in question will be in their 80s and I’ll think, well it’s not THAT odd!
I think DMcG has a good point in highlighting the surprising number of 60s music celebs with connections to the military. And how a lot of them hailed from Laurel Canyon BEFORE the big pop explosion. Imagine if it came out that The Beatles, Stones, Kinks and The Who all came from the same school!
But you’d have to be extremely naïve NOT to suspect that the ruling class took a deep interest in the tastes of the masses, especially in a nominal democracy.
But you can get too immersed in futile speculation. That’s what seems to be the basis of this seemingly endless production line of books obsessing over symbols in various pop cultural products. Name any singer at all and you’re bound to get at least one site “deconstructing” the singer’s “sinister associations with the Masons” or whatever.
I agree that the Canyon artists connections to the military were provocative and I think we all agree that the CIA, against its own charter, was deeply involved in manipulating culture and perception as as well as experimentation on citizens on its own soil. The first Canyon musician inhabitant, Frank Zappa, was never into drugs, so while one could make a case the others might have been what is today called celebrity "influencers," Zappa wasan outlier, although he seemed very much anti-authoritarian. Were the Laurel Canyon artists unknowing participants in a cultural experiment or agenda or willing players? And were these children of intelligent agency parents sacrifical lambs, since many died of overdose and their lives became deeply entwined in drugs? Now, if we compare the rise of the British Invasion bands with the Laurel canyon artists, the main difference I can see is what was happening in the individual countries that influenced the youth --- the American war against Vietnam and the draft in the U.S. was a huge factor, but not in the U.K.
The assumption that the pop scene is “controlled” doesn’t mean it is COMPLETELY controlled. This is where conspiracy and the trends of capitalism overlap. Part of the process obviously involved making loads of money. And ever since the rise of “youth culture” in the 50s, the big attraction was hitting the kids in their wallets – these kids being naturally impressionable. As somebody once said (can’t recall who), the old jazz band musicians, being for the most part family people, would scrupulously study their contracts whereas the rising bands of youngsters tended to be more hasty and often “easy meat”.
(Thomas Frank has a scary chapter in his book “Commodify Your Dissent” in which he takes us through the steps involved in getting a young band signed up. He takes us through all the calculations and reveals that the outcome is that, after all the starry visions of fame and fortune, the young musicians end up with less money than they would have made stacking shelves in a supermarket for the same time period.)
So the exploitation is already there. And the “big interests” can easily influence matters through their money.
I’d guess that in the 60s the aim was to defang the protest movement by derailing it towards such harmless (to the system) matters as drug use and promiscuous sex.
And your mention of Zappa brings up an important point. Zappa was by all accounts an odd figure in being devoted to his work in his studio. If he himself was a big “psy-op” there would be no need for all that output. Or – to put it another way – even if he had been initially some kind of intelligence stooge, it doesn’t mean that that is ALL he was or that he remained that. It’s a dialectical thing e.g. I am convinced that the World Socialist Web Site is a spook centre but in order to hoodwink Marxists, they have to provide a degree of genuine – and even sometimes valuable – Marxist research. So up to a point, they are genuinely Marxist.
The point you make about the music "business" reminds me of a line in a Paul Simon song, "the music suffers, the music business thrives," or that description from Hunter S. Thompson, “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”
The music industry is a prime example of the predatory nature of capitalism, where contracts are structured to trap musicians in perpetual debt.
And Frank’s book, The Conquest of Cool is a compelling exploration of how my generation, the post-WWII baby boomers, was targeted with a new kind of marketing that not only packaged and commodified our rebellion, but attempted to shape the attitudes and desires of the counterculture, and probably had a hand in creating it.
Also, good point about the World Socialist Web Site.
oh geez, i guess i missed the moon landing stuff. I do disagree by the by. WHen they can explain third party satellite photos of left behind debris, then we will discuss it. But i knnow this holds a huge pull for people, for reasons I still cant quite pin down.
The depressing thing is when one of those matters gets to the point where you know the whole thing is futile. I had that feeling when the 9/11 matter started to talk about the melting point of steel. It’s a fair enough point but I just knew that this topic could be spun out anyway you want. With all the evidence gone, you can say anything.
People tend to get fanatical over stuff that’s unprovable one way or the other. I think that’s a different thing than arguing over blatant contradictions and incoherencies in e.g. the transgender thing. Or realising that the logical outcome of covid paranoia is to frankly hide under the bed and never come out again. I see folk still masking up even on a windy day outside and I know these people will be masking up until the day they die.
I’ve got a theory that there is a more fundamental aspect to these sceptical notions i.e. more fundamental than the issue as to whether a cover up is possible. The latter amounts to the thought: “Oh they couldn’t do that!” But a deeper thought is, “They just WOULDN’T do that!” This is the voice of trust which everyone starts with. But when this voice changes to “You know, I think they actually WOULD do that!” then that changes everything.
I think history will bear out that imperial powers will do anything to maintain hegemony, including dropping two nuclear bombs on civilians, lying about WMDs, and killing 1 million Iraqis, among many others. But when it comes to the COVID spectacle, there is a way to logically assess the scam or its legitimacy....basically, whether there was an actual novel virus or if it was an orchestrated spectacle with an agenda.
This assessment hinges on the science used to legitimize the pandemic. If one can demonstrate through the science that there was no novel virus discovered, then that significantly undermines the pandemic narrative. The next step is to ascertain the modus operandi of how the scam was carried out.
Again, the COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to critically analyze the claims made about the virus and the measures implemented in response. The key lies in examining the actual published scientific evidence presented to support the narrative of a novel virus pandemic--was this accomplished according to the standards established by teh scientific community? If it can be shown that this evidence is lacking or insufficient, it raises significant questions about the legitimacy of the pandemic narrative.
The only way to establish this is by examining the data and methodologies used in the studies claiming the existence and impact of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This includes looking at how the research was conducted, the controls (if any) that were in place, and whether there were any conflicts of interest or biases that could affect the findings, basically the scientific method itself.
Once people acknowledge that the powers that be actually would pull the wool over our eyes for an agenda, they must be prepared to delve into the details rather than brushing off investigations into the science as mere conspiracy theory. Compared to something like the moon landing or even 9/11, this is much easier to investigate.
I recall that quote from the Bush aid about how they can “create reality” and, though that may have been a deliberate ploy to sow despair, it had a germ of truth in that all the propagandists are concerned with is creating the “right mood” in the present and then moving on, after which, and bearing in mind their control over the media, they can say whatever they want and keep everyone’s head spinning. Sealing the initial impression is what counts.
So when it came to covid, my own “method” was much simpler than ascertaining evidence – though I also paid attention to the statistics and noted that they didn’t bear out what was claimed. My method is that the media ALWAYS lies or at least MISLEADS and the more they drone on about something the less likely it is to be true. And if that sounds a bit knee-jerk, the WAY that the media reports can often be a giveaway. So much of the reporting was clearly designed to create maximum panic through adopting the tropes of a dismal low budget disaster movie script.
And one undeniable fact is that the official takes on both 9/11 and the moon landings are pretty much sealed into public consciousness. Even the sceptical approach has been “normalised” as “crazy conspiracy theory” and thus effectively neutered.
And as for the question of how long a dubious proposition can be kept going, I think of the gunpowder plot from no less than four centuries ago. But that also involved the brilliant strategy of concocting a public ceremony to shore up the official account i.e. Bonfire Night with the burning of the Guy (Fawkes). Get the people physically involved in some ritual and you’re well on the way to controlling their thinking habits. That’s why the masking and distancing over covid was absolutely essential to the psychological operation.
It was just those observations you mention (and the understanding that the media always lies) that aroused my suspicions early on that the pandemic was a psyop. But, I spent a lot more time trying to understand how science was used to accomplish it, especially since I was called a “science denier” among all the other nasty pejoratives. I'll also admit that COVID was a defining moment for me, after which I at least considered (for the first time) the moon landing and just about every other crisis we have been bombarded with during my lifetime as a hoax.
Slate online mag had a story with the head and sub head: Errol Morris’ New Netflix Documentary Takes On Manson, Mind Control, and the CIA; It’s such a wild theory, even he’s not sure he believes it. BY SAM ADAMS.Except it's not such a wild theory. Bugliosi's story, the official JFK narrative and the 911 tale of hi-jacking terrorists sent by Osama bin Ladin (proven by the passport found in the debris of the world trade towers that fell in their own footprint)...now those a hypotheses too wild to believe. And I agree with you that the documentary was such a watered down version of O'Neil's excellent work in the book that I tuned out.