Thanks to Tasha Barber @HollywoodDGirl for inspiring me to post these clips!

Link to Parts 1-5:

Cited in ‘Dick Gregory’s Uncanny Insight‘

Joe Holsinger, Congressman Leo J. Ryan’s Chief of Staff at the time of the Jonestown murders (text transcribes video):

“… I had appeared on a public television several months ago, with a group of Black professionals, mostly psychologists and doctors. They invited me to appear today, to provide information that they thought… I might be able to help with the forum today, with their research. I appeared in Washington in February before the International Relations Committee and they made some statements, some charges, and documentation, which resulted in the Foreign Relations —   Foreign Affairs Committee, or International Relations Committee whichever they call it today. They voted to ask the House Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate my charges. They are currently investigating those charges by the House Select Committee on Intelligence. 
 
Interviewer: Can you tell us what the charges are? 
 
Joe Holsinger: The charges basically amounted to CIA contact with both the Burnham government there and with the People’s Temple. That originally, it was my belief at the time I went to Washington that the purpose of our involvement there was to support the government of Burnham for commercial reasons and they use the People’s Temple almost as enforcers to help support an unpopular government there, to keep control of the government of Guyana.
 
There had been an article in the San Mateo Times in December of ’79, which indicated that the Deputy Chief of Mission there, Richard Dwyer, was in fact the CIA Station Chief. He was the one that went to Jonestown with Leo’s party, and he claimed to be slightly wounded, but there was a tape made at the time of the murders and suicides there with Jones yelling, “Get Dwyer out of here! Get Dwyer out of here!” And the indications are that with Dwyer went back into Jonestown after Leo was murdered and was there at the time. And there’s great question as to who shot Jim Jones and why, whether Jones was shot to shut him up. 
 
The question also as to how all these people died and just when they died, which is all documented here. But as soon as I came back from Washington because of my testimony, I started getting documentation from Berkeley psychologists called ‘The Penal Colony’ here. And from the Alliance for Preservation Religious Liberty in Washington, which indicated other things. One of which was that George Phillip Blakey, was a top Jones aid and he was the man who arranged the purchase or the lease of the land in Guyana, provided the money and arranged the lease down in 1974. He is also tracked now as being CIA operative in Angola in 1975 with UNITA. He’s also the same guy who was a top aide, who arranged all this purchasing and finances, is also the husband of Deborah Layton Blakey, who fled Jonestown and made those charges. 
 
He’s the brother in law of Larry Layton who was acquitted yesterday. And it is interesting to note that the Presidential Times Tribune says, yesterday, in an acquitting the jury appeared to have agreed with the defense contention that Layton was brainwashed and drugged at the time of the shootings and could not be held criminally responsible. 

But the gist to what I’m getting to is this: I received a lot of documentation, which I’ll provide you here today, that indicates the strong possibility that Jonestown and the People’s Temple, was in reality, a mass mind control experiment conducted by the CIA as a follow-up to something called MKULTRA which they conducted from the early 50s through 1974. They used to use the VA hospitals and state hospitals. They used the federal and state penitentiaries for their experiments. 
 
Interviewer: Do you think that Jim Jones was actively involved with the CIA? 
 
Joe Holsinger: I do now. 
 
Interviewer: Do you have any conclusions as to how the people died in Jonestown? 
 
Joe Holsinger: Yes, I have part of our documentation here is a report from – which is attached here. The Chief Medical Examiner in Guyana, Dr. Leslie Mootoo. He reported – and this is attached here – his opinion was that more than 700 of those bodies found in Jonestown were not suicide victims, but were murdered. They have based this on the injection marks in the upper arm. Page four of my statement here.  
 
Interviewer: By injection they died? 
 
Joe Holsinger: Yes, and by gunfire. There were a lot more people killed by gunfire than they’ve ever admitted so far. We even heard reports that there were about 50 men with guns ringing around there, so people couldn’t get out. And very few of them did get out. According to the Chief Medical Officer in Guyana, most the people down there were murdered rather than suicide. 
 
Interviewer: Who is suppressing all of this? Are you implying the CIA was active in this suppression? 
 
Joe Holsinger: Yes. I am suggesting to you that a lot of things that don’t make sense here — I’m suggesting that the long delay in anyone getting in, the press getting in there, or anyone at all getting in there for several days, was caused by a deliberate attempt to manufacture the story, which has now been accepted and sold successfully to the American people.  

Interviewer: What is that story do you think the people are falsely accepting? 
 
Joe Holsinger: That in effect, this was a large group of disillusioned – or rather, disoriented Black people who went down to Guyana and who turned their backs on this country, snd committed suicide, and we might as well be rid of them. It’s an aberration type of thing. I think that’s the story that’s been peddled. When you see the documentation here, you’ll begin to wonder yourselves why the first reports report are 350 people died or 400 people died, and for several days that was report and then they started finding of more bodies when the first reports were that 500 fled in the jungle. The people examined the bodies the first time and counted them. Counted them by name, the types of people, men, women, and children. Turned them over.  
 
Then a few days in they claimed to have found two or three stacks of bodies underneath those. You know, it boggles the mind, the stories that were passed out. But they have apparently gotten away with, I think, with one of the greatest fabrications of recent years. 
 
Interviewer: What significance do you attach to the fact that the leadership of the Temple was largely white and the membership of the temple was largely black? 
 
Joe Holsinger: I mentioned that in here. I think that that’s in part and parcel for the whole thing. I think it’s what got me very suspicious about this whole experiment about the possibilities here — the cadre was all white. And yet, we think of Jonestown as a bunch of Black people who were committing suicide without mentioning that white cadre and that doesn’t quite add up. I think there are racist overtones to the whole thing.
 
Interviewer: What kind of racist overtones? What are you exactly alleging? 
 
Joe Holsinger: I’m alleging that the media picture that was printed, or was painted rather. Then brought out in print and so on, was that you have to worry about these people because they’re crazy, they’ll do anything, they’re not like us.

It’s my impression at this time that they were conducting some sort of mind control experiment. For example, they had a very modern hospital down there, which they bragged about. So modern that net population, they had medical checkups for everyone, every day. There’s no need for that unless you’re conducting experiments where you having control groups and you’re giving people their “vitamins” every day.  
 
It’s my guess that they were just using them as guinea pigs to see what they could do under isolated circumstances. They’d take them off to a jungle some place far away from everybody and get them there somehow. Then they were able to see how these various drugs worked on different groups.” 

By Shawn Hamilton

Reprinted from LA Progressive, Nov 11, 2016

Lately I’ve encountered a surprising number of people in public who seemed to be talking to themselves. Often when this happens, I assume these folks are talking to me, so I respond in some way as polite custom dictates, only to be ignored–or to receive a disapproving glance for having invaded someone’s privacy bubble. Usually by this point I would realize the person was talking on a cell phone or similar electronic device, and I would feel like a fool.

I first apprehended the potentially adverse social consequences of personal electronic devices in, appropriately, 1984. I was attending Humboldt State University, and I noticed a classmate wearing Walkman headphones day after day and commented in class that he seemed to be using them to tune the rest of us out. For me this was the beginning of what I now see as a deleterious trend that is getting so much worse than I initially anticipated.

In the 1990s I boarded a train in Taiwan and got a preview of the cell phone madness that would soon afflict the States. Bizarre sounds began to erupt all over the car—ringing, buzzing, beeping, Beethoven. These noises would happen, and there would be several people engaging in solo conversation, often in loud and sometimes angry voices. Acknowledging cultural relativity, I unsuccessfully resisted the feeling that imposing one’s personal conversation on others is a bit churlish.

Within a year after my return from Taiwan, these gadgets began showing up in California, and soon they were everywhere. I started teaching at a high school near Sacramento in 1999, and back then school officials still fantasized that they could control cell phone use. The administration at the school where I taught prohibited students from having their phones out and would confiscate them. On this particular campus cell phones had been used by gang members to stir up blue/red rivalries and organize brawls (as do other demographics). It was a sensitive issue. Parents at this school and all over the state complained, however, demanding convenient contact with their kids, so schools eventually caved, and now the devices’ presence on campuses is ubiquitous. The damage to students’ educations is already apparent. In my last ten years of teaching I have seen students’ attention spans steadily decline as their interest, presence and focus are increasingly lured from the “real” world of physical human interaction to the strange new dimension called “cyberspace”.

The problem is not only evident on high school campuses. I was teaching classes of primarily first-year international students on the U.C. Davis campus, and the problem there seemed worse. I passed a bus enclosure near the campus one day and saw five people, presumably students, all perched like birds on a wire, uniformly staring at a fixed point near their knees as they cradled their cherished screens.

The influence of these devices is showing up in formal essays too. College students are now unthinkingly inserting texting shorthand into their academic papers. A student, for example, might quote G.K. Chesterton writing, “I would maintain that thx are the highest form of thought.” When I asked students to explain, they invariably said they had done it unconsciously. I believed them. This isolated example may seem trivial, but it points to a larger pattern of communication decay. Communications are increasingly characterized by textual “soundbites”—fragments of ideas rather than more developed ones. Unfortunately, when one reads and writes in fragments and is exposed to fragmented images and messages in advertising through whatever medium, one also tends to think (or suspend thinking) in like manner. It’s contrary to the academic notion that one’s cognitive abilities can be developed, resulting in improved comprehension and communication.

Again I think of George Orwell, who imagined that Big Brother would impose the means of intrusive thought monitoring and control. He would be amazed to know that people would stand in long lines voluntarily in the freezing rain to buy such equipment at high prices, providing at their own expense the means of their own surveillance.

I would like parents to understand that teachers now are competing for students’ attention with electronic devices to which your kids are addicted. If “addicted” is too raw, substitute “compulsively habituated”. Only recently I saw an article on MSN called, “Are you addicted to your Smartphone?”, and the answer was pretty clear. If parents can’t recognize what’s happening, perhaps the inability stems from their own habitual reliance on the same devices, and “addiction” and “compulsion” really are appropriate terms. I’ve seen many students deprived of their devices by school officials, often eliciting reactions of agitation and panic. Responses are little different for adults, and a recently minted term expresses this pathological condition: “nomophobia,” which indicates a fear of being without a mobile device, or beyond mobile phone contact. It’s already affecting your families. Experts are arguing back and forth now about the existence or extent of device addictions, compulsive behaviors and related pathologies, but the observations I’m reporting, anecdotally, suggest that such addiction/compulsion is real and pervasive.

I’m sufficiently convinced by my observations to have acted on them. I had a cell phone for a short time in the 1990s when I was covering the California capitol, but it didn’t work very well. I couldn’t hear adequately to report outdoor rallies or protests to the news anchors, so I got rid of it.

Thereafter I saw companies continually rolling out product after product that the public swarmed to buy, and I realized that trying to keep up with the latest technology in terms of consumerism is a fool’s game, so I resolved to quit playing it. Most of these devices are just toys really–comforting diversions and distractions if we’re honest with ourselves. I acknowledge that some of these devices have utilitarian value, but that value is overrated, and considering the obsessive and unhealthy manner in which people generally are using these technologies, I suspect that their adverse effects far exceed the benefits.

We have only begun to learn about these devices’ ill effects on personal and public health along with a range of cognitive and social consequences. Change is not necessarily progress. We don’t need to accept every new technological fad that comes along, and the ones we do accept, we should approach with prudence and caution as we would any habituating influence. At the more extreme end of the spectrum, some people are becoming so enchanted with electronic gizmos that they are killing themselves (and others). The dangers and results of texting while driving are well known, but there are stranger cases of people dying after walking off of cliffs and into traffic while preoccupied with the objects of their obsession.

As I suggested previously, certain technology related trends appear in Asia well before they show up widely in the United States. The “into traffic” [Warning: Graphic Video] hyperlink leads to a clip that attests to what I fervently hope does not become a trend in the US or anywhere else. It’s graphic and disturbing, so I caution readers although it needs to be seen. I showed it to my son who will be driving soon. The roughly two-minute video was compiled from surveillance cameras in various Asian cities. It shows what can happen in the blink of an eye when one’s awareness and attention are hijacked by captivating electronic distractions.

–end