Let me say at the beginning here that I do not care that Facebook cancelled me. It is as if I was going with a girl and tired of her, but before I could dump her, she dumped me! I put myself in that position, however. Let me explain.
Prior to 2020, I was into Facebook, having reacquainted with many of my high school classmates. We had a class reunion in 2018, and I discovered, with only a maybe four exceptions, that I did not care for these people! I rather abruptly unfriended most of them, leaving me with only a handful of “friends,” including a former television journalist in Billings, Montana. I thought him very nice and patient with people, even if typical of journalists, quite shallow. I also had a few cousins online. That’s how I entered the year 2020.
Deep down, I did not like the approval-seeking I was doing on Facebook, putting up a post and then checking back to see if it got “likes”. I would occasionally put up something that would not garner approval:
- Columbine – I noted online that witnesses and victims of that event shared one trait … they did not cry. I was immediately informed by a classmate that people in grief often run out of tears. That’s bullshit, of course, and she had never had that thought before that time.
- The McCartney twins … I showed comparative photos of both. By this I learned that people do not see with their own eyes, but rather through those of authority figures.
- The disappearance of a young girl on the Crow Reservation in Hardin, Montana, near Billings. I did a Truepeople search on her, and found a person by that identical (and unusual) name to be alive and well and of a slightly different age, living in Billings. I decided online that the event was fake. A classmate, let’s call him Mick,** did not just disagree, but unfriended me. I was cancelled in his very shallow eyes.
- Elon Musk supposedly put a spacecraft in orbit, and circulated a picture of a motor vehicle up there with a fake astronaut at the wheel. I put the photo, seen above, on FB, with the caption (something like) “This, because you will believe anything.” Oddly, I got no “likes” that I recall.
I think it was during this time that our friend and former writer, Steve Kelly, told us that he was quitting Facebook, with reasons similar to those that were making me uncomfortable. I realized that I should follow suit, but was hesitant. Had I become addicted to Facebook? Mildly, I suppose.
2020 came along, and I learned that even before 3/11, the day the fake pandemic was declared by WHO, that Facebook and YouTube and other social media outlets had staffed up, and were prepared to do heavy censorship. Somewhere recently I have read that a federal agency, most likely spook, and a private company, had partnered to be sure that Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Google, Instagram, Twitter and God only knows what else, and were in cahoots to control flow of information on social media. I do not recall what I might have posted on FB during that time about Covid, but knew even in March of 2020 that it was all fake. So it had to be self-incriminating, whatever I said.
I was toast. I knew I would be one of the first victims, so I did a preemptive dump, and in early 2020 closed my Facebook account. It took time, and Facebook is tight-lipped about what information about us they retain permanently. (Answer: All of it. FB is a spy agency, and we voluntarily give them our private information. Mark Zuckerberg is a fake billionaire, and did not invent the software in use.)
It’s 2024 now, and I have lived happily ever after without Facebook (and have never “tweeted”), even after signing up, merely letting that stuff go dormant. I’ve lost touch with my high school classmates, most of whom had not matured intellectually since graduation, even through college. That, and man were they overweight!
It’s a good life I am having post-Facebook, as Steve Kelly knew before me.
We live in a neighborhood on a mountainside above Denver, and there is a large property below us that has sat vacant now for months. We learned through an active and alert neighbor that there was a proposal afoot to buy that property, eight acres, and make it into a public campground. We are a street above, but know the people down below who would live adjacent to the campground. That cannot go forward, I thought, and my wife agreed. Campgrounds are noisy, and campfires and traffic and portable livingrooms with attached satellite dishes, complete with generators, are a nuisance both to people and wildlife. Thanks to our alert neighbor, who is also a Steve, we have met to organize in opposition. Fifty neighbors came together at a recent meeting.
I learned that there are two neighborhood associations where all of us can communicate, and both are accessible only via Facebook. So I reluctantly decided to rejoin Facebook, but on these conditions:
- I would only use it as an information tool, a way of staying in touch with neighbors on mutually important issues.
- I would not seek to “friend” anyone, nor would I put up any comments in hopes of seeking “likes”. That’s undignified.
I reopened my Facebook account, and surprisingly, my regular email address I had used before was still available as if for a new account. I signed up and then attempted to join two neighborhood groups. One accepted me. It appeared as though Facebook had abandoned its censorious fascist counterparts.
I received notification last week that Facebook was banning me for 180 days as punishment for violating its “community standards”, even as, oddly, it does not hold itself to such illusive standards. The decision was final, they said, but I could appeal it by following through with some steps, like supplying a photo and other crap. Since I had done no posting, did not have friends or belong to groups, it could only be that my violation of their fake-f****** “standards” have to had taken place in 2020, as the dark clouds of Covid settled in.
I decided to appeal, as I wanted to know WTF I had posted that triggered their computer to ban me. I went through the steps to appeal.
Here is what I learned: An appeal to being banned does not result in any forthcoming information. It’s a one-step process: After banning, you appeal. If they decide in your favor, you are reinstated. If they do not, you are banned for life. No discussion or defense is allowed. I have no idea what postings I had done in 2020 that got their attention.
I never followed through on the appeal, as I know I am now banned for life. And I can only think of Groucho Marx, who said that he would never join a group that would have him as a member.
_____________
*Mick is living testimony to Jerry Seinfeld’s assertion that most guys think they are funny, even though they are not. Mick, at the reunion, would say something in a loud voice, and then fake-laugh to follow, as if he had been clever and funny.
Piece of Mindful 
Mark, like you, I used to have a Facebook account to stay in touch with friends and family from the old country, the UK, and I cancelled it in 2016 because of all the craziness people were posting surrounding the US presidential election that year.
I’ve had no cause to regret that decision. And I would never register for a new account with Facebook. But sadly, most of the friends and family can’t be bothered to communicate via phone, letter or email. It’s either Facebook, LinkedIn, or nothing.
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You’re right about people not calling, texting or emailing especially regarding important family news. I found out, two months late, via FB and by accident, that my middle brother was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and passed away, all
of two months from diagnosis to death. No one told me. They all have my vital info. Needless to say I missed his funeral.
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I saw this facebook twitter tiktok velvet handcuffs about 10 years a go. don’t even have a real name account on there. It’s very dangerous what they are doing. More people are going to the gulag if we don’t stop this thing now.
HOW LONG UNTIL PEOPLE STAND UP? how long?
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Facebook jail I think is only for 6 months but most people make a new profile. Didn’t know they had a lifetime ban, probably by IP address. Scary how much info and detailed photos that people post on there. I was on myspace and remember when everyone left and went to FB. Now it’s instagram, tik tok, snapchat..One website nextdoor . com is a good forum if you are wanting something for local events and to the point. And there is still craigslist that hasn’t died yet.
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I’m not on any social media at all but I use Craigslist to post curb alerts for useable items left on the sidewalk in SoCal. I just take a photo, add a description, street and cross street and heigh-ho, most stuff is gone the same day I post.
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I get nicked by Fakebook now and then, usually getting snarky in a group suggested for me. The worst was a four day ban from commenting on any group thread because I had a strong opinion to share with some hunters who were geeking out over which was the best rifle to kill moose with. They called me a ‘hater’. I guess they only murder animals they don’t hate. (I have no idea why FB would suggest a hunter’s group to me. Maybe the boys in the basement wanted to trigger🤣 me so sent that group my way. It’s their version of pulling wings off flies.)
During the scamdemic, I dropped a few friends who were being hysterical about it (all women, for the record) These days my feed is clogged with old baseball sites, people falling into water videos, and meat-centric food porn.
Off topic: Halfway down the page at this link, there is a PDF of a most interesting book titled “Dope, Inc.” https://stolenhistory.net/threads/the-drug-dealers-as-founders-of-the-us-universities.6290/
This is apparently the original version before some powers got a hold of it for censored reissues.
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392 pages … have you read it? Can you hit the high points for us?
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The authors site bloodline connections as the organizing principle of the global drug trade, though they start with Robert the Bruce for some reason. There is a lot of banking genealogies which they seem to present as the admissible evidence of opium/heroin hegemony leading ultimately to the British crown. China is owned by Britain. Mao was a product of Yale University which they target, along with Harvard, as being built on drug money. Britain was behind the influx of drugs into America during the 60’s. They refer to that as Britain’s opium war against the US. They think JFK was killed- internal strife within the crime families- but, they soft pedal it. They back the “assassination” to a degree by claiming Joe sr. had it in for the royals, playacting that he was an anglophile. I buy some of these arguments, though Joe sr. was whatever he needed to be at any given time, and obviously new information has come to light since the late 70’s when this was published. But it fills in some blanks for me and digs into how and where the money gets washed. Sports is all dirty, as we know, but who was aware that the Jacobs family is the primary corruptors in the sports world? Then there is the Bronfman family. Canada’s top crime family is detailed as servants to higher ups, though favorites of the Crown itself. Rewards for service include being allowed to marry into royal lines. The Kennedys, for example, married into the Cavendish line as reward for services rendered. There is also some sorting out of the 20’s bootlegger gangsters which I certainly needed. They refer to the dozens of colorful Hollywood fantasies as misdirection to make criminals appear to be gutter snipes, not peerage. They also throw in that these inbreds have carried their weird ancient beliefs with them through the generations. Freemasonry is part of that continuity. For me, they check a lot of boxes even if they don’t go as far as we have- they still believed that law and the courts were effective weapons to turn back the criminals. They got pretty far with no internet.
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To reiterate, I was punished by a six month ban in 2024 for undisclosed things I had written in 2020. In 2020 I closed down my Facebook account, and recall something to the effect that in due time all my posts would disappear. But I think it clear Facebook is a repository for everything we have written there, ever, and that the repository is guarded and selectively used to punish miscreants, people who say things that are true but officially false. The scale of lying that went on during Covid, to me impressive even by the standards of the AIDS hoax, is historically a blip on a timeline where lying is going on in all ways and all the time.
That Facebook is a permanent repository, and that Facebook is deeply embedded in LOOT, The Lies of Our Time, shreds this notion that the enterprise rose up organically in the dormitories of Harvard. MySpace might have been organic, and was destroyed. Facebook is an Intel project, beginning to end, Zuckerberg a hired actor, a fake genius, a fake billionaire. He ain’t alone.
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That is fascinating, thanks for summarizing. What sort of sources or inside information do they claim to base it on, or have access to? Or is it openly speculative?
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There are many footnotes and references to interviews with knowledgeable sources.
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Damn you Tyrone! It feels like something I need to read. Fortunately I am half a book away from the end of reading material. I think I can get this digitally while we travel in the next ten days. Unfortunately, I cannot clip or flag digitally, as I am basically a moron. My iPad will be covered on the side with 3M flags.
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Mark,
Did you ever read John Taylor Gatto – The Underground History of American Education? I read it a few years after my partial college stint. Really helped for getting a perspective on the institution I’d been in for my whole life, and answered a lot of questions I vaguely had, or wasn’t even aware I had. Really helped clear my head about a lot of it. Of course that was before reading Mathis and much else, so I was extremely blind about everything – today I would probably read Gatto with more skepticism about his own possible mission or agenda, of a controlled op sort. Nevertheless, very provocative book that answers many questions and raises many more. Also a compelling writer in terms of how he relates his research to his personal life experience and family history.
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I believe I did read Gatto, though it was a long time ago. Honestly, I did not harmonize with his writer’s voice, as I thought him too sentimental and soft. Just me.
It seems to me that he spent a great deal of time overanalyzing Tragedy and Hope, by Carroll Quigley, which I also read. I could be just mixed up, but T&H lost it on me when I was told that Quigley was allowed access to a secret trove of information, but was not given permission to write about it and published it without the permission of the people owning the trove.
That does not fly. That’s just a way, like the Pentagon Papers Caper, to make it appear that information is going public against the wishes of the powerful classes. That way, it takes on more credibility than it deserves. It’s a con game.
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Yeah, that business with the plates to the first edition being broken up always seemed like some kind of promotional hijinks. Still, it’s a dense difficult book.. how many people would ever actually read it no matter what the gimmick? Was Quigley not a genuine scholar who might want to leave a legacy, a contribution to letters etc? Just a total BS artist? Hmm.
Was his book not actually meant to be of some use to, eg, “CIA station chiefs” or diplomats and ensigns of empire? He taught actual foreign affairs functionaries at Georgetown, no?
Yes, it was picked up and glossed by the Birch society, and what’s his name… Another “alt right” from that era, name escapes me. At least certain sections were highlighted. But.. maybe Quigley, in scholar mode, did have a genuine compunction to include these things as part of the scholarly record and truth, even though they could be used by some groups he didn’t approve of. And maybe that compunction clashed a little with real power not wanting him to, but it didn’t matter much because so few read, let alone a book like that.
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In 2013 we went to Nepal to hike the Annapurna Circuit, not the whole thing, of course. I took Tragedy and Hope with me, carried it in my pack and read it at every opportunity. It was extra weight, but rules required that we use a Sherpa to carry our stuff. We only had maybe twenty pounds each, so the book was no trouble for a guy used to carrying eighty pounds (maximum allowed).
We came to Nepal after visiting our daughter who was stationed in India. To get to India, we flew from Denver to Geneva, and from there to New Delhi. We then flew to Katmandu and started the circuit after a long bus trip. After that we met our daughter in Bangkok and stayed on an island, Koh Tao, in the Gulf of Thailand for a few days, and then flew home by way of Bangkok/Tokyo. In Tokyo we merely deplaned and reboarded another flight, so I cannot say we’ve been to Tokyo. Then we flew home to Denver from Tokyo.
I had Tragedy and Hope with me the entire time. I took it around the world.
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I left FB at the start of the scamdemic as there WERE so many hysterical women, furiously sewing cloth masks or posting themselves wearing masks, etc., that it turned my stomach. Vote blue no matter who crap. But I was put off previously by two true life stories.
The first story: friend’s son comes home from college at christmas, freshman year. Goes on FB and sees his local friends getting together without him. He becomes very unhappy and takes “more” of his anti-depressants. To feel better? Consequently, he runs into his parents room in the middle of the night throwing up and telling then what he did. They call 911 and he gets put under an induced coma to rid his body of the almost fatal drugs.
The second story: well-off friend goes to Italy with her husband, with a group. During their travels she would post many photos. Everything looked great, smiling happy faces abound. She calls me when she gets home, sobbing because her husband was aloof and disinterested in her the entire time.
FB is nothing but a vehicle for bragging or virtue signaling. I haven’t looked back. And with the prevalence of AI, I can only imagine how bad it will get.
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I agree, it is bragging and virtue signaling, but don’t leave out pictures of lunch. Gotta have that.
Once in place, giving us things we like, playing to our weaknesses (approval seeking but one), Facebook clamped down and became a massive censorship force, a thought control center. MM claims that FB got a $3 million cash influx from CIA to get off the ground, with Zuckerberg mere window dressing, along with that stupid movie that people liked so much.
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I advised my remaining plandemic friends to get off FB as FB loses money when they lose viewers/posters. These addicts couldn’t do it. Claimed they were still able to get alternate ideas/views posted. Hoping, I guess, to change people’s minds. Unfortunately, in my experience, the only time that happens is when something bad happens (say, jab injury) and then they, the sheeple, realize it’s too late.
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“MM claims that FB got a $3 million cash influx from CIA to get off the ground..”
It’s $2 million actually, according to Whitney Webb:
“Soon after Palantir’s incorporation, though the exact timing and details of the investment remain hidden from the public, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel became the company’s first backer, aside from Thiel himself, giving it an estimated $2 million.”
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/04/investigative-reports/the-military-origins-of-facebook/
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I don’t disagree about the negatives with fb, but I will say I follow some people who are into “truth seeking” or what have you, and they constantly post their thoughts plus memes or links and so on, that give me a different angle or I see what’s in the zeitgeist of other parts of this sphere.. doesn’t seem monolithically bad. Then too I see a little of what’s up with locals I know or semi-know.. Some people actually share their sad/ awful news as well, or more than bragging.. for better or worse. I guess that’s attention seeking as well, in part, but, eh.. many share their art/ hobby stuff which I like to see. Mixed bag I guess.
Ps. Mark, I enjoy the anecdote about your trip, but not sure if I’m missing a subtle point..? 😅 Your daughter was stationed in India.. what, as a super spook station chief? So what’s her take on T&H? 🧐
Kidding, of course.. I just kept expecting it to tie in to my comment at the end..
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You expected my comment to tie into yours rather than to be a self-involved trip down memory lane? Hmmm. What’s your deal?
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I guess it is asking too much to see the points I raised addressed by anyone.. ha. And I said I enjoyed the anecdote, so no “deal” here, although I’m sure I’ve got issues, who doesn’t..
In other news, the “next pandemic” “disease X” is out there waiting in the wings..
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/04/h5n1-happily-mutates-away-while-public-health-establishment-plods-along-treating-the-virus-as-a-food-supply-issue-and-not-a-potential-pandemic.html
As a reminder, NC are true believers. In their world though, it’s also all about eugenics, depopulation, dystopia.. however, because of government and elite laxity. Because they’ll “let it rip” for the sake of profit, rather than having harsh lockdowns “with teeth,” and track and trace..
It’s “fun” to read the comments.. I think they’re eager for another pandemic, they miss the drama of the last one, the OCD rituals to be performed, the hand-wringing about official response, etc.
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Our daughter at that time worked for Red Cross International (or International Committee of the Red Cross – I get them mixed up), a group for which I suspect helping out in crisis like floods and earthquakes is done, but is not a priority. I think flying around the world for meetings and handing out huge salaries to executives tops their list.
In the last few years they let go like 18% of mid-to-low lever staffers, our daughter a victim of that purge. She got a nice parachute, however.
And I agree, Facebook has uses, and it was for those uses that I got back in … to stay in touch with neighbors and organize resistance to a campground right next to our quiet neighborhood. Also, people are free to spout conventional politics there. That’s where I learned that people who voted for Obama felt morally superior to the rest of us because they voted for a black man. That was an amazing campaign strategy and a great payoff for liberal Democrats, not that votes are actually counted. They got to strut their stuff for eight years.
Rather than a Nobel Peace Prize, given him for no good reason, he should have been nominated and won for Best Actor eight years running.
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