Watch Out for that Left Hook

I always wondered how Hitler got the liberals and environmentalists of his time to support his genocidal agenda. I thought liberals were more broad-minded and high-minded than conservatives, and less gullible than evangelicals. I assumed fascism would come from the Right, and we on the Left would be there to fight it. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Today, I see two well-coordinated arms of a single fascist beast dividing people who just want a better world by selling them two opposing strategies for achieving similar goals and letting them fight with each other. Meanwhile they take our money, freedom and resources.

They built Trump. Then they turned him into the scariest boogieman on Earth, then used our fear and hatred of him to drive liberals and progressives into the open arms of the blandest puppet they had, Joe Biden. At the same time they used our fear of Covid-19 to scare us into surrendering our civil rights, and public identity for lockdown measures and mandatory injections. They used Trump to scare us away from Bernie and towards Biden, the same way they used Covid-19 to scare us into censorship, lockdowns, quarantines and mandatory injections.

This is not political discourse or public debate nor does it serve the public interest or the interests of public health. This is a hunting strategy, or perhaps more accurately, a pest extermination strategy. We thought we were voting for the lesser of two evils, and we felt righteous about it because we thought we had defeated a greater evil. In truth, we only defeated our own dreams. We defeated our dreams of universal health care and medical system reform.

As a result, we’ve become slaves of the medical system. The medical system decides whether we can go to a concert or show our face in public. They tell us which businesses can stay open and which can’t, and now they tell us that we have to let them inject us with experimental new drugs every six months. We all know these injections don’t stop disease and can kill you, but its not your choice to make. You understand. We have to think about the “most vulnerable.”

The “most vulnerable”, of course, are the billionaire plutocrats and technocrats who coordinated the entire operation: The billionaire “philanthropists” who remade the public health system in their own image. The technocrats who censor information and steer search results. The corrupt government bureaucrats who profit from the industry they are supposed to regulate, and of course, the billionaire investors who control capital. They are the “most vulnerable” right now because there are so many of us, and so few of them, and if we knew how badly they have fucked us over, we would kill them.

I already hear people talking about a new Nuremberg Trial to prosecute the perpetrators of this genocide, so it will never happen again. To me, however, it feels more like the Battle of Britain. We have to win the war before we can hold the generals and “doctors” to account. After two years of fear-mongering propaganda, draconian lockdown measures and the alienation of masking and social distancing, I see the toll this ordeal has taken on my community, and victory is far from assured.

What is clear, however, is how effectively their strategy of scaring us into their trap works on liberals and progressives. I saw how they cynically used people’s naturally cooperative nature and community spirit to convince them to make painful and unnecessary sacrifices in their quality of life, and then I watched those cooperative, self-sacrificing people turn against their neighbors who refused to comply. I saw how the support for the well-founded science behind global warming got grafted onto the sleazy science-fiction used to sell lockdown measures and vaccines. I watched them turn Progressive’s religious zeal for technological innovation into blind obedience to technocratic authoritarianism.

I watched doctors, journalists, public officials, publishers and media outlets throw their credibility away (along with their readers, supporters and audience) in slavish obedience to an authority that has lied to us from the beginning. I watched the internet, which initially promised to democratize information and protect free speech become a panopticon of high-tech surveillance and an echo chamber for authoritarian propaganda.

Now that I’ve seen it with my own eyes, I see how liberals, progressives, artists, gay people, environmentalists, activists, the kind of people I associate with, my friends, can get sucked into a fascist coup and become some of its most vociferous supporters. As painful as this is to watch, this experience has taught me that you don’t have to be evil to do great evil in this world. You just have to be frightened, gullible, and trust the wrong people.

P.S. Prof. Mattias Desmet explains the concept of Mass Formation and its function in a totalitarian state.

It’s Not About Science, It’s About Power and Control

My liberal friends think they are smart because they think they understand the science used to justify lockdown measures, masking ordinances and vaccine mandates. They send me vapid little articles that dress government propaganda up with liberal guilt-tripping, insultingly sleazy arguments, and slanderous vilification of the opposition. These articles only make me wonder why they found them convincing in the first place, but for some reason it makes some people feel better to pretend like they know what is going on, no matter how ridiculous the explanation they believe.

In fact, none of the pandemic response measures make any sense from a scientific public health perspective. Quarantines, masking and social distancing have done orders of magnitude more harm than Covid-19. Covid vaccines kill far more people than they save, and the psychological harm of social isolation has driven people to the brink of madness. The “science” used to justify those measures was all bullshit. None of it ever made any sense from a public health perspective, and none of it calculated, let alone considered the side-effects.

On the other hand, from a global fascist coup perspective, the pandemic response was ruthlessly shrewd, and worked flawlessly to prevent people all over the world from opposing the overthrow of their elected governments and an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the middle-class, to the obscenely rich. From the perspective of a global technocratic takeover, the dissolution of representative democracy, and the abolition of civil rights, the pandemic response proved brilliant, perhaps the greatest single political achievement of any fascist regime ever.

Think about it. You just witnessed a global fascist coup, and instead of opposing it, you placed yourself under house arrest, did your level best to censor and bully your less gullible friends and neighbors, and then lined up for mass execution. They took over the whole world without firing a single bullet, and you cheered for them, took your shot, and turned on your friends who didn’t. That’s what just happened folks. None of it made sense, scientifically. None of it was necessary, and none of it was about protecting you. Quite the opposite.

So no, I’m not impressed by what you think you know about virology or medicine, even if you are a doctor. Most doctors don’t know much outside of their own narrow specialty, except that they will lose their license if they don’t repeat exactly what the AMA tells them to say. The doctors who specialize in treating people with Covid, and care more about their patients than their income, like Dr Peter McCollough, tell us that masks are useless, Covid vaccines kill people, and early treatment saves lives. Vaccine specialists like Dr. Robert Malone, who invented mRNA vaccines tell us these Covid shots are dangerous in both the short and long-term. Epidemiologists like Dr John Ioannidis tell us that quarantines killed far more people than the virus.

You don’t have to be a doctor to understand what just happened, because it was never about science, medicine or public health. This was all about stealth, deception and power. Billionaires used technology and information as weapons against the people of the world in a global fascist coup. As a result, the world’s power structure has changed, and the United States has been reduced to a banana republic. If you don’t recognize the political reality of what just happened, and you are not outraged, you an idiot, and if you don’t do something about it you are a coward. That’s my scientific analysis of our current predicament.

Nazi Collaborators Journal

Before the pandemic, the North Coast Journal and my liberal friends had a lot in common. They hated Trump, gave lip service to the environment and the rights of minorities, but put most of their energy into acting “cool.” Here on the North Coast, “liberal” is almost a default position. All you have to do to become a liberal in Arcata is be agreeable, but I’m surprised by the spinelessness and soft-headedness of too many of my liberal friends, and I’m even more stunned by the ruthlessness of the crew of the NCJ and their apparent eagerness to abandon their role of facilitating local debate in our community, for the opportunity to oppress us with authoritarian propaganda.

Two years into this global fascist coup, liberal journalists, including those at our own North Coast Journal continue to goose-step the hardest, with clueless liberals lining up behind them yelling “Hail Science, Hail Science” even though none of them have looked at the science. The data from the Phase 3 clinical trial of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine will not be released until 2025. Until independent scientists can see that data and analyze it themselves, any recommendation that anyone take that shot are not based on science, but on unsubstantiated claims made in press releases.

The NCJ deserves a special gold swastika for its efforts at driving the global fascist agenda here in Humboldt County. As our Pied Piper of pandemic panic, the NCJ has dutifully fueled the fear, pumped out the propaganda and vilified dissent. They failed to provide the information we needed to make an informed choice about Covid vaccines. Instead, they cajoled, humiliated, shamed and bullied readers into taking the jab. Practically every media outlet in the country did that, but the NCJ went above and beyond.

Not satisfied to simply ignore and belittle community concerns about vaccine safety, the necessity of masking, or the erosion of civil rights, the NCJ went out of its way to insult everyone who objects to this new authoritarian takeover with their recent “Dickmoves” column. Apparently, anyone who disagrees with them is a “dick” and anything we do to express our views, including taking them to our elected officials, constitutes a “dick move.” That’s some world-class Nazism if you ask me, and I think it deserves special recognition.

The NCJ has become a poison in our community, just like the cigarettes they advertise. Could it be that global corporations buy more than ad space in the NCJ? Regardless, that ad should remind you that the NCJ works for global capitalist predators, not you and I.

Now that the terrible truth about Covid vaccines is coming to light, the thousands of deaths, the hundreds of thousands of debilitating and crippling vaccine-induced injuries, the dismal performance of the shots themselves and their complete failure to stop the disease, not to mention the long-term side-effects of the jabs which continue to emerge. All of these things are happening to real people in our community, but the North Coast Journal continues to ignore it. They ignore it because they are responsible for it.

The NCJ’s complicity in these crimes against humanity will prevent them from ever admitting the truth. Instead, they will say anything to cover up their guilt as long as they can. The local writers and editors at the NCJ are now wed to the beast with bonds steeped in the blood of this community. They have betrayed us, and we should never trust them again.

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.

Tiki Spoon Cello

A couple of weeks ago, I found this giant wooden spoon in an Arcata thrift store. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what to do with it. It’s practically a ready-made string instrument, so the question became: how many and what kind? I have quite a few string instruments in my “Orchestra of the Unwanted.” I’ve got harps, lyres, zithers, fiddles, guitars and basses, but I don’t have much that sounds like a cello.

I like the sound of a cello, so I strung this spoon with a pair of pretty beefy (1mm) stainless steel strings, mounted a piezoelectric pickup on the bridge and a quarter-inch jack on the bowl of the spoon, and now it does a pretty good impersonation of a cello. It has a ton of upper harmonic response, that can easily get out of hand, but if you can keep it from squealing, it sings with depth and clarity.

In this piece, you can hear how the deep cello voice anchors the quartet of recycled instruments.

You can find much more music by Tin Can Luminary and the Orchestra of the Unwanted at: http://www.johnhardin.bandcamp.com and you can find pictures of all of the instruments, along with demonstration videos at: http://www.electricearthmusic.wordpress.com

Sky Harp

One of my early musical influences, and one that ignited my interest in building unusual musical instruments was Francesco Lupico’s Cosmic Beam Experience. The Cosmic Beam was the first long-string instrument I had ever seen, and the sound it made blew my mind. The fact that he built it from the channel beam of a flat-bed semi truck trailer also appealed to me.

Ever since then, I’ve wanted to build a long-string instrument, but the logistics of such a thing proved challenging. Where would I put it? I don’t have room for anything ten feet long, anywhere indoors, regardless of its other dimensions.

A couple of weeks ago, I stood a fir pole on end, and tied it to the corner of my woodshed. I had used the top and bottom of the pole to make a small keyboard stand for my circuit-bent toy keyboards,

…but I had this piece of fir sapling, about 15 ft long, left over, so I stood it up on end, and tied it to the corner of my woodshed, like a flagpole. I stood there looking at it for a while, wondering what I could do with it, when an idea flashed in my mind, and I saw this fir pole in a whole new light: as the backbone of a vertical (at least for storage), outdoor, long-string instrument. Then it occurred to me that a vertical, outdoor, long-string instrument, just might function as a wind-harp too.

I love wind harps. You don’t see them very often. When you do, it is usually in the window sill of the home of someone with money and taste, an extremely rare combination these days. I’ve been meaning to build one of those too.

Suddenly, I had a vision of a vertical, outdoor, electro-acoustic, long-string wind harp with radio antenna aesthetics. Once I had that vision, even swarms of hungry mosquitoes couldn’t prevent me from building it.

Now that it exists, I get to hear exactly what it sounds like, and to find its voice. I played it a bit in the vertical position, and I got it to make some cool sounds, but I couldn’t reach very far up the strings, which I found limiting. However, when I let the wind play it, it sang! Beautifully! I may just let the wind play it from now on.

What does the Future Sound Like?

Do you hear crickets? I guess it has been pretty quiet here recently, but not in my studio. I’ve made a ton of new music recently. I realize that a lot of people still read my blog for my acerbic wit and astute social commentary, but today, Democrats lie about the “pandemic” and the “vaccine” as much as Republicans lie about the “stolen election” and “massive voter fraud.” Nobody lives in reality any more, so what’s the point in writing about it.

Frankly, I think it is too late for social criticism. Our culture is dead. We are all grieving, in denial, or both. Either way it makes no sense to speak ill of the dead. Instead, I think we should call on the spirits of our ancestors to guide us into the future. That’s where music comes in. Our ancestors communicated through music for hundreds of generations before the invention of language, and music still speaks to us with more clarity, eloquence, and emotion, than words can ever express. Unfortunately, we live in a society with a very limited musical vocabulary, and as a result, a very narrow mindset.

My music accepts the death of this culture. I am not inspired by our culture’s great technological achievements, and you won’t find a lot of high-tech synthesizers and music equipment in my studio. Instead, you will find a lot crudely homemade instruments assembled from recycled materials and found objects. My music grows out of the wreckage of our failed colonial empire.

At this unique point in history, the whole world is littered with vast quantities of exotic high-tech synthetic polymers and metals in a whole variety of alloys and in myriad shapes. We are not the first empire to produce grand, impressive sounding music to inspire us with a vision of a glorious future. We are the first to try to survive in a world so profoundly transformed by an expired culture. This is what it sounds like.

The Inside Scoop from Outer Roominations

God it felt good to play out! For my first gig in more than a year, Outer Roominations couldn’t have been better; beautiful location, relaxed environment with cool people, and a great event that brought artists together to create installations and performance spaces in natural settings along an art walk that threaded through the forested bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean near Lolita. It was a total gas!

I played as part of Medicine Baul, as a solo performer, and as part of the improvised accompaniment to the dance/movement/performance art ensemble: Feral Feral. Medicine Baul played long sets on all three days, I played solo sets on Saturday and Sunday, and with Feral Feral on Sunday and Monday, so I got to play a lot, and enjoyed camping-out there all weekend. For Medicine Baul, it was the first time we had gotten together in about 16 months. For me, it was a chance to unleash a sound that I’ve been waiting over a year to debut in front of a live audience, and an opportunity to play as part of an avant-garde improvisational ensemble, in real time, in the real world, with real people. Like I said, it was an amazing event. I even managed to record a little of it.

My solo performance on Saturday the 29^th, although far from flawless, still shows the power and originality of my live sound. When I have the opportunity to play my didgeridoo and effects rig through an adequate sound system, it sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before, but it totally fucking rocks! If you don’t believe me, just listen!

Beware of Skeptics

(Introduction: I wrote this piece more than two years ago, before anyone ever heard of Covid-19. I didn’t publish it then because I didn’t want to broach the vaccine issue. I just didn’t have a dog in that race. Funny how some things change. Skeptics haven’t changed though. This loose association of intellectual bullies still spews the same pin-headed reductionist thinking laced with the same prejudices and privileged perspective that they’ve been spewing for years, so the piece remains relevant, regardless of how you feel about vaccines in general or the experimental new Covid-19 “vaccine.”)

Be careful of people who identify themselves as “Skeptics.” In the same way that the long history of religious violence spawned atheism, a movement which killed God in reaction to the undeniable corruption of the Church. The explosion of online disinformation has given rise to a reactionary movement known as “Skepticism” which views objective science as the ultimate authority on everything, including all of the stuff scientists know nothing about. The Skeptics movement presumes that objective science can, and will, lead to our complete understanding of the Universe, not to mention a technological utopia for all humanity. For all that scientists, especially biologists and ecologists refute this, “Skeptics” have bought into the “logic” of objective science and the predictability of physics and extrapolated them into a universal belief system.

Our culture reveres science and technology because of the everyday miracles they perform in our lives. From microwave ovens to smart phones, we give science and technology credit for all of the toys and tools that we use everyday, but have no idea how they work. Ever since Einstein foretold the invention of the nuclear bomb, we treat scientists, especially physicists (aka “rocket scientists”), as the ultimate authority on everything from the origin of the Universe to the mysteries of perception and the human mind. Many scientists eagerly embrace this view as well, which is why we see so many physicists, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Michio Kaku getting into showbiz to propagate this notion among people who would never take, let alone pass, the science courses they teach. As a result, we have elevated objective science from a method of inquiry, to a kind of religion.

Skeptics have become the Spanish Inquisition of this new Church of Sciencism, a religion that worships technology. In general, Skeptics believe in science more than they understand science, so they assume that scientists know more than they do, and they assume that what scientists believe, is true, even though most of what scientists believe, is their own assumptions. Skeptics believe they know more than they do, and of course, they always think they know more than you.

Skeptics used to tell us that environmentalists were just being emotional and alarmist when they warned of the consequences of climate disruption, not because they doubted the science of global warming, but because of their blind faith in, and love of, technology. As it turns out, climate disruption is even worse, and happening faster, than even those environmentalists predicted, driven by the technological innovations that Skeptics are so enamored with.

Now Skeptics tell us that if it weren’t for those emotional and alarmist environmentalists, we could build safe, new, nuclear power plants that would solve our carbon emission problem. Isn’t it funny how the same people who call you an idiot for visiting an acupuncturist, taking a homeopathic remedy, or reading a horoscope, somehow believe in the magic of a foolproof nuclear power plant, with immunity to natural disaster and impenetrable defenses against military attack, and have complete faith in our ability to safely store tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste for at least a quarter-of-a-million years, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.

Skeptics love science, except when it reminds them that in our militaristic culture, we use science and technology to kill people, enslave them and make the planet uninhabitable. To Skeptics, this is a small price to pay in their ever-elusive quest for the complete understanding of the universe. They think it’s great to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for bigger and better atom-smashers, but scoff at mega-churches and their super-rich preachers. They revere people in lab-coats rather than clerical robes and say their prayers to Elon Musk’s rocket in lieu of a deity, but think you quaint for your archaic religious beliefs.

As an innocent word in the English language, “skepticism” denotes a good thing. Everyone says “Never look a gift horse in the mouth,” but if anyone ever gives you a horse, say “thank you,” lead it away to someplace private, and take a damn good look inside that horses mouth before you take it back to the farm. That’s a healthy kind of skepticism. The Skeptics Movement on the other hand, promotes a very misguided brand of fundamentalism quite at odds with the evidence and the best science. As a movement, Skeptics differ little from flat-earthers in their zeal to oversimplify the universe.

In the same way that the Catholic Church empowered small vile men to indulge their sadistic tendencies on poor peasant women who practiced herbal medicine, showed a reverence for nature, or rejected church doctrine, the Skeptics movement empowers eggheads with a superiority complex to bully women who reject western medicine and ridicule them for refusing to vaccinate their children. Skeptics don’t lead the charge to stop the excessive use of antibiotics on livestock, which scientists tell us, breeds drug-resistant super-bugs that threaten us all, nor do Skeptics make noise about corporate ag practices that lead to widespread food contamination. In reality, kids today face a greater threat from their school lunches than they do from their unvaccinated classmates, but Skeptics, like the Inquisition, choose their victims for their vulnerability.

Whether it’s high-level nuclear waste, persistent bio-accumulative pesticides, microplastics or fracking fluids, Skeptics have never met a toxic pollutant they didn’t like, as long as it is “safely contained” or “below a certain threshold.” They are perfectly willing to accept human casualties, lots of them, in the pursuit of technological innovation, or as an “unexpected consequence” of it, but something must be done about these heretical women who refuse to submit to the authority of Science.

Beware of Skeptics. Skeptics believe themselves wise and capable of navigating our technological society through the current climate crisis, or any other cataclysm their unbridled technocracy may unleash, were they not hindered in their efforts by the large number of superstitious savages who surround them. In reality, that unfounded, and unwarranted belief in their own wisdom created the climate crisis, and the extinction crisis, not to mention the gross inequality we see in our technological society.

For Skeptics, human casualties are just statistics, and your life, merely anecdotal evidence. Skeptics enjoy this kind of separation from the hazards of a technological society, primarily by virtue of their privileged position within it. Skeptics are mostly white, middle-class, college-educated people, and as such, can use their economic clout to limit their exposure to environmental toxins and avoid the worst industrial hazards, while they marvel at the achievements of unbridled human ingenuity and enjoy all of the new toys technology has made available.

Capital “S” Skepticism reeks of chauvinism and white supremacy. Skeptics dismiss the collective wisdom of indigenous humanity as “superstition and folklore,” but they share the blind arrogance of privilege ,and the prejudices of a culture that denigrates nature, and they mistake that belligerent blindness, for intelligence. They ignore the grim consequences of our high-tech civilization, while they embrace a completely imaginary, sci-fi vision of a future technological utopia. Capital “S” Skepticism simply cloaks the overt racism of white supremacy behind a thin veil of “nature and nurture” intellectualism.

There’s no horror they can’t justify and no atrocity they can’t rationalize in their misguided quest to misunderstand the universe, because understanding nature was never the intention of science. The intention of science has always been to rule nature, including human nature, with technology. Skeptics expect to have power over others, and they expect to have a very abstract relationship to the consequences of their decisions. That’s why Skeptics feel so comfortable making decisions for other people based on their own, emotionally detached, logic. Skeptics expect to rule the world by virtue of their intellectual superiority, which, in their minds, is always beyond question. We need to be very careful of people who think like that.

White People are Crazy

I’m very white. Both of my parents are white, and I got a good white education, went to white college, studied science, and learned to think like a serious white man. I’m pretty good at it too, especially in writing, but I also sound white and act white. I’ve got the whole white shtick down pat, but I’m not proud of it, and I don’t think it healthy. In fact, I recognize it as a mental illness, and I am doing my best to recover from it.

You don’t need to go to college to learn to think like a white person. Spending time online will do it, even if the people you communicate with are not white. The internet itself is a white-man’s invention, and it shows. There’s no physical contact; it’s completely detached from reality, and everyone is trying to sell you something. How much whiter could it be?

When you look at the history of white colonization in America, unless you are white, you see cold-blooded murder and plunder for profit. You see genocide, slavery, poverty, exploitation, environmental devastation and unspeakable violence giving rise to an empire of unprecedented power and influence. Unless you are white, the colonization of North America looks like a terrible thing, if not the most terrible thing to ever happen. It was the world’s worst holocaust, but if you are white, you gloss over the genocide, slavery and other bad stuff as “unfortunate chapters” in a whole other story.

If you are white you see things completely differently. We don’t see ourselves as violent and greedy. Instead, we see ourselves as intellectually sophisticated and technologically advanced. For white people, it is the story of “the Enlightenment” (literally “whitening”), the rise of objective science, and our relentless search for truth, that led to certain technological innovations that made our rise to power inevitable. White people think that we built this empire because we are smart people, not because of the ruthless greed that drove colonial expansion. White people believe that we run the world because we’re smart.

When white people look at something like the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance, they’ll marvel at the engineering, and think, “Isn’t it amazing what smart people can do when they work together for the good of everyone.” White people forget the genocide that made that bridge conceivable, the gold rush that made it possible, and the sprawl that made it necessary. White people somehow forget that 100 million people died, wolves and grizzlies were extirpated, millions of acres of the world’s tallest trees leveled, wiping out an abundance of salmon that people today can scarcely imagine, let alone believe, in order to make that bridge a reality. When you look at it from a wider perspective, smart people would have had nothing to do with that project, nor is it anything to be proud of.

White people somehow manage to take pride in the monumental achievements of empire, but largely overlook it’s crimes against humanity and nature. We white people take collective pride in things like the lunar landing, the ability to split the atom, and this new information wonderland we call the internet. We think these things demonstrate the superiority of our way of doing things. And by “our way of doing things” we don’t mean our habit of spending more on military programs than the rest of the world combined, while millions of our own people go hungry and sleep outside in the cold. No, we don’t mean that at all. Why would you think that?

No, we mean something else entirely. White people really believe that it was our relentless pursuit of the truth, that led us to a superior understanding of the world. That scientific understanding of the world gave rise to our great power, and that wisdom now necessitates the inevitable subjugation and assimilation of all other cultures. You see, we’re just smarter, that’s all. (I told you we were crazy)

I don’t just mean that White Supremacists believe this, of course they do, but liberal PC white people believe this too, deep down. White people can’t imagine that it could be any other way, and that’s especially true of “smart” liberal, PC white people. When you press them on it, white people all believe that our modern white dominated society constitutes an evolutionary advance over indigenous tribal cultures, and that our science is the ultimate authority on everything. That’s what white liberals mean when they say “we are evolving as a species.”

Being smart really matters to white people, and by “smart” I don’t mean “make intelligent decisions that lead to a rich and fulfilling life.” Smart means something else entirely to white people. Smart, to white people, means knowing stuff that nobody in their right mind would ever want to know, and knowing how to make money from it. Being smart is so important to us that we find a way to think of everything we do as “smart,” as in the previous example of the colonization of North America.

You see, when you are white, anything you do can be “smart.” Sometimes it’s “smart” to be cowardly. Sometimes it’s “smart” to attack unarmed people without provocation. “Smart” has no morals. If the outcome was favorable, it was a “smart” move. If the outcome was a disaster, we ask ourselves, “What can we learn from this?” and it makes us feel even “smarter.” We have “smart” bombs and “smart” phones and we want everyone and everything to be “smart” like us.

White people consider “smart” our great gift to humanity. White people know that there is a thin line between genius and insanity, but we don’t realize that we already crossed the line with “smart.” That’s why “smart” white people tend to be the craziest. In reality, our real skill, our unparalleled cultural achievement, as well as the key to our insanity, is our salesmanship.

White people are the best salesmen to ever walk the Earth. We can sell anything to anyone, including ourselves. Selling makes us feel smart. Of course, the first part of selling stuff is convincing people that you are smart, and that you know what you are selling. The second part of selling stuff is convincing the buyer that they are smart for buying your product. The more stuff you sell, the smarter people think you are, and the more stuff you buy, the smarter you think you are. Buying and selling stuff makes us feel smart, no matter how stupid the products, and sometimes, the dumber the product, the smarter we feel about buying and selling it.

In order to be a truly great salesman, however, you need to believe in what you sell. If you are black, native or latinex, you don’t have to believe in, approve of, or condone white culture, you just have to survive in it. White people, on the other hand, feel a strong need to believe in our way of doing things, so we constantly sell it to ourselves, each other, and anyone who survives their encounter with us.

White culture’s dark and violent history makes it hard to see our way of life as a good and benevolent thing. It’s what we call a “hard sell.” So, we don’t sell the past. We sell the future. We sell every new technological innovation as the key to an idyllic future utopia, that never materializes, because it was never more than a fantasy, but white people really believe in a future in which technology has solved all of our earthly problems and we’re all “smart”, good-looking, and rich.

By now, most white people have replaced “heaven,” the postmortem paradise of Christian lore, with Star Trek, the high-tech paradise of the future, a future so dazzlingly bright that it justifies, nullifies, and more than compensates for all of the crimes of the past. Secular white liberals believe as deeply in this future, as Christian conservatives believe in heaven, and like Christians, they will do anything to get there.

White people worship technology as our savior, but no matter how many times it fails to deliver, and no matter how many intractable problems technology creates, we still believe that the technology to make it all better is right around the corner. We avoid learning from the past, by focusing on the future. Isn’t that smart? You see, white people really are crazy. Unless you are white, of course, you already knew that.

That’s enough thinking like a white man for today. At the bottom of this essay, you’ll find a piece of music I recorded coincidentally, during the period I was thinking about and writing this essay. It began as a piano-like accompaniment to another piece of music for a string quartet, but eventually grew into something else. I composed this piece on just one instrument, my diminutive circuit-bent Casio Magic Light ML1 keyboard.

Thinking about my condition, our condition, and the condition of the world, reminded me of what I love about circuit-bending, and especially the spectacular, dynamic, cyclical, yet unpredictable ways that this little keyboard malfunctions, glitches-out and loses its mind when you short-circuit its tiny electronic brain in certain ways. I think it kind of parallels what’s happening to us, our society and the world around us. I hope you enjoy it.