Total Mindfuck!

The 21st Century has devolved into a total mindfuck.

The schism between the mediated world and, for lack of a better term, the unmediated world continues to expand.

By “mediated world” I refer to the world as it appears in media. The “unmediated world” refers to the world that we use media to escape.

In the past, we recognized that the mediated world was simply an imitation, a fantasy for our entertainment.

Today, especially since the pandemic, people believe what they see on their screens more than the evidence of their own senses.

They trust the authorities in the media even when it stretches their own credulity and contradicts their personal experience.

Now that the mediated world has diverged so so profoundly from the unmediated world, a new phenomena emerges where people eagerly sacrifice their own unmediated reality in service of a media fiction completely lacking in credibility or consistency.

Paradoxically, the less consistent or credible the media fiction, the more people are willing to sacrifice to demonstrate their devotion to it.

This is neither healthy nor sustainable, but those concepts are of no concern to these devotees, because “health” and “sustainability” only apply to the unmediated world, which they all seem to eager to abandon.

It really disturbs me to watch my liberal and progressive friends goose-stepping into a digital concentration camp, while listening to them condemn and demonize anyone who doesn’t buy into the wholly fictitious narrative being crammed down their throats by every mainstream media outlet in the country, if not world.

Totalitarianism is a curious phenomena. I now understand why Hannah Arendt found it so fascinating.

It reveals something about the human character that we’d prefer not to see.

But here we are.

Read it!

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.

3 Things You Need to Know About Science

I love science and have tremendous respect for scientific inquiry. I have studied science. I know a few scientists, and I generally like them. However, I know a few things about science, and scientists, that more people need to know, especially now. So today, I offer you a few really important things you need to know about science and scientists.

1. Scientists know almost everything about physics, and almost nothing about life. That’s why physicists can build a reliable nuclear weapon but doctors can’t cure the common cold. Objective science works well for calculating the trajectories and velocities of objects in space and time. Organisms, however, are not objects, and so objective science is completely inadequate for studying them.

Most scientists don’t know this, but it is true. Sadly, many scientists, especially in the US continue to study human beings as though we were objects, or piles of objects called atoms. This has led to a medical system that dehumanizes and objectifies us more effectively than it treats disease or promotes health. It also means that there’s a hell of a lot that doctors don’t know. One thing doctors do know, however, is how to talk down to you in such a way that you won’t question their bullshit.

Physicists know how to blow shit up, and they don’t argue about it. Physicians, on the other hand, barely know what they are looking at, and there’s a lot of disagreement among them about practically everything. Doctors don’t like to let on that they really don’t know what they are doing, so they formed the American Medical Association in order to put up a consistent front that makes it look like they have everything figured out and know what to do in every situation. They do this so that people will trust them, and unfortunately, it works entirely too well. The AMA works very hard to quell dissent within its ranks, and banishes doctors who refuse to tow the party line, but renegade doctors persist, and many of them have better success treating patients than doctors who follow AMA guidelines.

2. Almost everything we know about science, we learned from the pursuit of war. We learned physics in the development of ever more lethal weapons, and we learned medicine from patching up the survivors. Today our weapons kill people far more effectively than our doctors cure disease, and much of the advance in modern medicine has been in improving survival rates of people who suffer the kinds of traumatic injury that only technology can inflict.

3. Plebes worship “Science,” while scientists worship money. You can’t do science without money, and finding money to do science isn’t easy. Unless somebody thinks they can make a lot of money on it, or the military thinks they can kill people with it, you are probably going to have a hard time finding money to study it. On the other hand, if you don’t really care what you work on, as long as it pays well, your opportunities as a scientist multiply. Scientists spend a lot on their education, and they expect to be rewarded for that, so many scientists look for the higher paying jobs.

That’s why, when you need a scientist to do something really terrible, like design a nuclear weapon that kills all of the people in a city, but leaves the buildings standing, or turn a minor statistical anomaly into a smoke-screen argument against global warming, or bio-engineer a bat corona-virus so that it infects humans, you can always find a meek and obedient scientist who is happy to do it for you so long as you have the money.

Plebes, on the other hand, have disavowed the creation myth of their Judaeo-Christian heritage in favor of an even bigger pile of bullshit called the Big Bang Theory, and they now embrace “Science” the great spirit from whom all new technology flows, as a religion. They traded the clerical collar for the white lab-coat of scientific authority. Now they believe anything the doctor tells them, just like they used to believe the priest, and of course they take their vaccines as a sacrament to their faith in “Science.” I hope they’ve at least learned not to leave their kids alone with a scientist either.

People have always believed a lot of stupid stuff. As I’ve so eloquently said before, “Stupid and wrong is the natural human condition, and it has never stopped us before.” That said, the human body is smarter than science can comprehend, and its natural tendency to heal, especially when supported by good nutrition, proper exercise and a non-toxic environment, tends to make doctors look good, if they can somehow take credit for it, but the miracle is you, not the medicine, and your body knows more than your doctor.

That’s why you should be very careful about messing with that miracle, or trusting “Science.” Science is not some noble pursuit of the truth. Science is about warfare, money, power and greed, and any scraps of truth that emerge from it are purely coincidental. Science is a tool of exploitation and control. In fact, psychologists are studying you right now, and the people paying those psychologists intend to use the knowledge they gain to control and exploit you. That’s what you need to know about science.

Gain of Function Research in Wuhan and Here at Home

Senator Rand Paul filed a criminal report with the US Justice Department last week, accusing Dr Anthony Fauci of lying to Congress about US taxpayer funded “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Here’s what it looked like:

It sure looks to me like Fauci lied to Congress. And I’m guessing he lied because “gain of function” research on pathogenic viruses is not only insanely foolhardy, and extremely dangerous, it is a violation of federal law and international treaty. It also appears that Fauci, whether or not he funded the invention of this particular pandemic with our money, could have created a similar global pandemic, by accident, if some of the man-made viruses they created there in Wuhan, ever escaped. Incidentally, it also appears that this pandemic, that has so impacted all of us for the last 16 months or so, may have originated in that very lab.

I hope the Justice Department takes up this case and gets to the bottom of it, because we deserve to know the truth, but I think it informative to see how Fauci responded under pressure. “You don’t know what you are talking about… and I want to say that officially. You don’t know what you are talking about.” That’s how Fauci handles anyone who questions his judgment. He’s the Scientist, after all. How could we lay-people possibly fathom the infinite secrets of Science? See, when you are a Scientist you can revoke peoples civil rights, usurp their democracy, destroy their economy and order them around like children, because you are the only one who understands Science. Essentially, Fauci has declared himself the Pope of Science.

I know he looked smart next to Trump, but Paris Hilton’s dog looks smarter than Trump. Fauci lies. One week he says masks are useless, the next week he makes them mandatory. That’s not science, that’s Simon Says. The more you know about Fauci, the less you like him, and the less you trust him. He’s lead our germ-warfare program for as long as I can remember, and his top-secret lab at Ft Detrick leaked biohazards into the Frederick, MD water supply more than 100 times. When that information hit the papers, the public outrage got the lab closed down, but Fauci took the work over to Wuhan. It is also very curious how Fauci got the funding for the lab at Ft Detrick. That funding was prompted by the as yet unsolved Anthrax Letters Case. Someone should be looking for Fauci’s fingerprints there too. And I don’t think this woman is wrong about Fauci either:

EX-NIH WHISTLEBLOWER EXPOSES FAUCI

Frankly, I pegged Fauci as the inventor of this disease from the beginning, and I don’t know why you didn’t too. I can’t understand why more people don’t see through the fear-mongering and purple rhetoric to the fact that we are being lied to. Covid is a lot more like the flu than it is like ebola, and we should treat it that way. The response to covid has done far more harm than the disease ever will. Yes, they lied to you about the pandemic, and they are lying to you about the vaccine. You don’t need to be a genius to figure that out. Hell, Rand Paul figured it out. The single most frightening thing about this whole experience, to me, is how few of the people I used to see as my political allies, can see it.

The real test of critical thinking is not whether or not you can see the little inconsistencies in new information that you are skeptical about. The real test of critical thinking lies in how well you see the big lies coming from respected authorities that are infinitely echoed in the culture and media. It takes more than reason and logic to see those lies; it also takes courage and conviction. Entirely too many people have failed that test, and I find that very discouraging.

Even though people continue to disappoint me, music never has. Music continues to sustain me through this entire ordeal. In fact I’ve been involved with my own “gain of function” research here in the solar-powered off-grid studios of Catlandia. Like Dr Fauci and his colleagues working in Wuhan, I think most people, if they saw what I was doing, would think me insane. Unlike Fauci, however, I’m not going to lie about it.

I found this toy drum machine in a thrift store in Arcata. I want you to know that I would never buy something like this new. I don’t want to support the mass produced electronic toy market in any way. These things are an affront to nature. They are full of toxins and heavy metals, they’ll never biodegrade, and they sound awful. In other words, they embody our modern, post-industrial high-tech culture perfectly. Like Fauci, when confronted with the perfection of life on Earth, I thought I could make some improvements.

As is often the case with thrift store electronics, this toy didn’t work when I bought it. I found the battery box full of leaking batteries and corroded contacts, so I had to clean up that mess before I got it to power up, and then discovered an intermittent short that caused the speaker volume to change dramatically and unpredictably. I traced the short to loose capacitor on the circuit board. When I re-soldered that, it worked like new.

Then, like Fauci, I went looking for trouble, and started messing with stuff I didn’t understand. I found a few spots on the circuit-board that, when connected with a bit of resistance, could speed-up, or slow-down the processor speed of the rhythm sample player. This allowed me to control the pitch and tempo of the rhythm patterns both more precisely, and over a much wider range than the manufacturer ever intended, by just adding a couple of knobs and switches. Like Fauci, I have no idea what I’ve done. I just know that it works differently now, and it can do more than it used to. Here’s a demonstration:

Fortunately for me, gain of function research on discarded electronic toys is not banned by an international treaty which the US has ratified, so I don’t have any reason to lie to congress about it. Unlike Fauci, my gain of function research hasn’t started a global pandemic or made me rich and famous, but hey, anything is possible. Here is a piece of music I composed for this modified drum toy, overtone flute, tin can violin and voice. You might not like it, but at least it won’t kill you.

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.

The Lonely Pseudo-Scorpion

 

 

 

Biologists have found 27 different species of pseudo-scorpion living in the twiggy mounds which dusky-footed wood-rats build to raise their young. 27 different species of pseudoscorpion!

That just boggles my mind. First off, a pseudoscorpion is a tiny little arachnid, about the size of a tick, but a pseudoscorpion is not a parasite. Pseudoscorpions hunt and eat small parasites and mites that the rats attract. That explains why scientists find so many pseudo-scorpions in a rat’s nest, but it doesn’t explain why they find 27 distinct species of pseudo-scorpion in rats’ nests.

All pseudo-scorpions look pretty much the same. They look a little bit like ticks, except that instead of the long pointed mouth parts, a pseudoscorpion has a pair of large pincers on it’s foremost appendages, like a scorpion.

In fact, a pseudoscorpion looks just like a scorpion, except for its tiny size, and the fact that pseudo-scorpions have no tail, and no venomous sting. They are harmless little creatures who spend their time in dark shadowy places, like rats’ nests. Besides that, they can barely see with their very tiny eyes.

When two pseudoscorpions meet, they do a sort of dance where they face each other and engage each other’s large front claws.

If the dance goes well, they might mate.

If the dance does not go well, one pseudoscorpion, the larger, usually, will drive the other away. Most of the time, the dance does not go well, and this amazes me. How did pseudo-scorpions get to be so particular about who they fuck?

What makes one pseudoscorpion clasp claws with another, gender-compatible, pseudoscorpion, and go “Eewwww, yuck, gross! I wouldn’t fuck you in a hundred-million years!”? I don’t understand that at all. I’m like, “Come on, it’s dark. We’re both pseudoscorpions, We’re both horny. Let’s do it!”

To get 27 species of pseudoscorpion, the female pseudo-scorpion, and you know it’s the female pseudoscorpion, has to say, “You’re not my type.” categorically, at least 26 out of 27 times.

That tells me that female pseudoscorpions strongly disagree with each other about what they find attractive in a male pseudoscorpion.

Apparently, these strong preferences have almost no effect on the species’ ability to survive, since they all continue to thrive together, as they’ve done, through multiple extinction events, changes in the composition of the earth’s atmosphere, and climatic shifts, for something like 400 million years.

Pseudoscorpions can be counted as some of the earliest known terrestrial animals on Planet Earth and their descendants have changed very little in the ensuing eons.

 

Probably only a female pseudoscorpion or a knowledgeable aracnologist would recognize the difference between a 400 million year old fossilized pseudoscorpion and a modern living specimen. To the rest of us, they’re just another bug.

What could a pseudoscorpion possibly be so picky about?

It’s not like one of them has a nicer pad, or takes them to better restaurants. They all live in the same rat’s nest, and they all eat the same mites and parasites. They’ve lived together, side by side, for eons, and endured many global changes, but they’ve never learned to find each other any more attractive, so each species continues to pursue it’s own aesthetic, it’s own habits and it’s own proclivities, and each individual pseudoscorpion selectively chooses from individuals of the same species, even if that means a pseudoscorpion has to endure 27 categorical rejections, just to get one real rejection.

That’s got to be rough on those little guys, who already kind of look like ticks, which can’t help their self-esteem any. You might even say that pseudoscorpions kind of look like ticks who work out too much to compensate for how little they are.

By being so particular, they practically guarantee themselves a lifetime of loneliness and I suppose that’s why, when you see a pseudoscorpion, say in the bathroom, behind the toilet tank, they are usually alone. If you do see a pseudoscorpion, however, take a close look, because they are really quite cute, and you should tell them so, because I’m sure they don’t hear it enough.

Post-Apocalyptic Music Appreciation

(This post concludes a trilogy which began with:

A Brief History of Music pt 1

and includes:

A Brief History of Music pt 2

but it is not necessary to read parts 1 and 2 first)

Music is a strange thing. I don’t understand it and I don’t pretend to understand it, I simply recognize it as an interesting characteristic of human life. I don’t rationalize it or objectify it. Instead, I explore it for the mystery it presents, and as a means of learning about myself, my relationship with my community, and our relationship with the world we inhabit. For me, the exploration of music is a way of studying the world aesthetically.

When you study something aesthetically, you acquire an appreciation for the beauty of it. It is not enough to understand the science of physics to make music. That knowledge must be incorporated into practice and presented in a form that makes it irresistible to the ear. Music makes the science of physics real, in a way that math never will, and reducing physics to math, strips our world of its natural beauty and aesthetic appeal. Aesthetically, we have the capacity to appreciate the beauty of things we do not completely understand, like music, while music itself teaches us directly, what we can understand about physics, and the physical world around us.

Science, on the other hand, ignores aesthetics, and strives for emotional disconnectedness. That’s how scientists are able to dispassionately conduct all kinds of cruel experiments on animals and brew up persistently toxic chemicals without regard for their long term impacts on the ecosystem. Science has no appreciation for beauty, nor does it feel any connectedness with the rest of life on Earth. Science is essentially psychopathic and tone deaf, which is why so little of what it tells us about the world really means anything to us, and why science mostly enables the development of deadly weapons, toxic pollution, and high-tech surveillance systems.

Music can teach us a lot about the world around us, ourselves and each other, without killing anyone, or poisoning a single stream, and our aesthetic sensitivities, when sufficiently developed, make much better guides as to how to live in the world than does our, so called, “scientific understanding.” Our failure, as a culture, to recognize this basic fact of life is the primary reason our society has gotten so ugly, crass and dysfunctional, and why we have no idea what to do about it. The more ugly, crass and dysfunctional our society gets, the less real beauty we see around us, and the less aesthetically sensitive we become. The internet has only magnified and accelerated the process.

We explore music to develop our aesthetic sensitivities, and to find out what we really like. I kinda liked “Country and Western” music when my dad played it on the radio in the car when I was 12, but I don’t care much for it now that I choose the music. In fact, I’m kinda tired of guitar music altogether. If you’ve read my last post, you know that I’m pretty well done with classical music too. Honestly, we’ve all heard it all before, haven’t we? I’m as sick of it as you are.

I still feel nostalgic for a lot of early electronic music, but modern EDM mostly leaves me cold. I heard Paul Oakenfold live at Burning Man in 2000. To me, his set sounded oppressive, impersonal and empty. A lot of people will say that Paul Oakenfold no longer counts as modern EDM, but he was the last EDM artist I heard that stood out enough to make an impression on me. Back in the ’70s, synthesizers were brand new, the future looked bright, and technology held so much promise. Today, technology dominates our lives, and it spits music at us in a million different flavors 24-7-365. To me, it all sounds oppressive, impersonal and empty.

Besides that, there’s been an explosion in the number, and variety, of high-tech gadgets for making music, and for making new music out of old music. High-tech machines don’t interest me as much as they once did. Machines have let me down too many times already. I know that “Intuitive user interface” means the designer thinks they know how I intend to make music, and that those machines will be full of sounds that instrument designers think I want to hear, based on what is popular in music today. That’s not what I want to hear, and I don’t want to “interface” with my music.

I don’t want to sit at a computer and assemble my music graphically with a mouse or from a panel of illuminated buttons; I want to play music directly, in real time, in real life. I think that’s important. I don’t think music is a purely conceptual thing. It’s not something you dream up in your head, and transfer to the real world by means of technology. Music comes from that physical relationship between the musician and the instrument, the subject, to the object. Music is about how we relate to the real world. Working in a DAW and composing music graphically is one particular way of relating to the world, but that is not how I relate to it.

It’s also about economics and the environment. I love my high-tech, digital, multi-track recorder, but I can’t really justify spending a lot of money on electronic gadgets that just make noise. Besides that, I live off grid, so any electricity I use, I have to make out of sunlight, which I don’t see much of, especially in the Winter, when I have the most time to make music. Besides that, the thought of spending a bunch of money on another electronic gadget that’s just going to end up in the e-waste pile just makes me sick.

I say it’s about economics and environment, but really, it’s about aesthetics. I went off grid because I thought it more beautiful and elegant to make a little bit of electricity from sunlight, and use it efficiently, rather than have an unlimited supply of high-voltage juice delivered to my home by wires connected to nuclear power plants. I don’t find most of those new machines attractive because I know that they contain toxic compounds and heavy metals that cause a lot of environmental destruction that destroys rural communities and kills people, in their manufacture, and that those machines create further environmental problems when they stop working. It’s hard for me to imagine, and it seems a burdensome responsibility to me, to attempt to make enough beautiful music with one of these machines, to compensate for all of the ugliness involved in producing, distributing and disposing of it.

My music is about my relationship with the world, so increasingly, I incorporate things I find in the real world into my music, especially the oddball detritus of our industrial society that I find scattered across the landscape. Geologically we live at a very unique time for the kind of things you are likely to find in the world around you. Even deep in the woods where I live, the bizarre collection of exotic man-made materials I find out here would surprise you.

Where the piano demonstrates the power of empire, with elegance, the ubiquity of manufactured garbage shows off the inelegant side of empire, but making musical instruments out of recycled materials is not a political statement about empire, so much as it is the reality of my time and place in history. I make music from the stuff I find around me because I want to cultivate my relationship with the real world and the unique sonic palette it makes available to me, rather than use the power of empire to take from the world whatever new gizmos I can afford.

I discovered a primal link to music, that bypassed a lot of cultural conditioning for me, about 15 years ago, when I learned to play the didgeridoo. The didgeridoo short-circuited my musical relationship with civilization and empire and completely changed the way I think about music The didgeridoo is a very simple instrument that produces a very complex sound. While the didgeridoo only plays one fundamental note, the player can vary the timbre of the sound fluidly, and in a number of dimensions, much like an analog synthesizer.

Learning to play the didgeridoo opened my mind to a very different approach to music. Playing the didgeridoo feels good, and it changed the way I experience music. Playing didgeridoo made me realize that music is not about melody and harmony and notes and keys, but that music is about sound and our direct connection to the Earth. I realized that music is not about precision crafted musical instruments or brilliant compositions. Music is about listening to the Earth directly, which is essential to finding an elegant and beautiful way of inhabiting it.

Facts Don’t Make Bad Writing Good

Facts don’t make writing good, and facts don’t make a story true. Mostly, facts provide an excuse for bad writing, and distract us from the truth about our own lives. Media outlets like to hype the factuality of their news reports, as incentive for you to ingest their bland, decontextualized descriptions of the day’s most violent events, but facts, by themselves, mean nothing. Divorced from perspective, facts have no power.

We tend to overemphasize the importance of facts in our culture, in the same way we over-value material objects. In reality, facts don’t lead to the truth any more than buying a Bowflex machine leads to the perfect physique. Nothing prevented you from exercising your muscles before you bought the machine. The machine just offers you a specific way to do something that you obviously prefer to avoid. Similarly, nothing prevented you from thinking deeply about your existential condition before The News started feeding you “the facts you need to understand your world.” Watching the News feels like you are doing something edifying, but really, it takes up way too much space for something we’re just not that involved with.

Journalists meticulously strip perspective out of their stories, leaving nothing but impotent rubbish to take up all of the space between the ads. “Unbiased and impartial” really means “disinterested and uncaring.” That’s how corporate advertisers like it, and that’s how corporate domination becomes the predominant perspective of all media. Advertisers pay for the right to present their perspective in their own words, against a neutral background of disconnected, irrelevant and objectified facts. That’s why “fact based journalism” is so popular in modern media.

For some reason, we believe in this myth about facts. We believe that exposing them and broadcasting them to every corner of the world will somehow make things better. We say: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” but today we see how the worst kind of scum thrives in bright light, so long as nothing taller or stronger can take root. Scum thrives because The News scorches the Earth with irrelevant, disembodied facts.

The News fills your head with irrelevancies that distract, subvert and belittle your own thought process, while it consumes all of the space where you might actually talk to your peers. Watching The News is not how you become an informed citizen; watching The News is how you become a brainwashed drone, and that’s not what anyone really aspires to become.

Information can be inspiring, relevant and powerful, but rarely is it so. Mostly, especially today, information distracts us, saps our energy, and wastes our time. The News becomes addictive, not because it provides an essential nutrient to intellectual and civic life, but because it masks the angst, confusion and general unease of alienation. Facts, as they come from to us from the media, amount to little more than an endless trail of breadcrumbs leading us nowhere except toward obesity, malnutrition and death.

To find the very worst fact-based writing, however, you have to read science. Science, as a whole, amounts to an immense edifice of the worst published writing in the history of human language, which unscrupulous men use in their quest to dominate the Earth. In that way, modern science is very much like the medieval Catholic Church.

Few of us read much real science. Mostly, this indecipherable gobbledygook gets filed away in back rooms of libraries or in ungoogleable internet servers, where no one ever reads it, but it becomes part of this enormous edifice of sacred texts into which all learned people have invested large portions of their lives, with the promise that if they did, they would earn more money than the rest of us.

In reality, nothing in that edifice of so-called knowledge helps us, or them, understand the world we live in. Instead, it amounts to an encyclopedia of violence and a compendium of oppression. The edifice we call “Science” contains the formula for every toxic chemical on Earth. It tells you everything you need to know to build a thermonuclear weapon, and it contains every study ever conducted for the purpose of learning how to influence consumer behavior and effectively brainwash a population. The truth of the matter is that the only thing educated people really learn, in all their years of study, is the dynamics of civilized political power, and by the time they understand that, they’re already too deeply invested in it to quit.

Scientists further deny the basic truth of our lived experience by telling us that the only facts that matter, have to be carefully chosen according to complex statistical algorithms that only scientists understand, or they have to be gathered in a laboratory setting. Scientists will be the first to dismiss the facts of your life as irrelevant, anecdotal and statistically insignificant. They’ll tell you to base your decisions on the proven probabilities of verifiable science, and to calculate, rather than feel your way through life. That’s how scientists tell you that they think they should make your decisions for you, and that’s another way that modern science resembles the Catholic Church.

All of the facts in the world don’t make bad writing worth reading. Facts are just a sleazy tool to sell empty words, and too many empty words can bury you. On the other hand, writing that speaks to you, has truth in it, and you will find the facts that support it because there is more truth in the facts of your life, than you will ever find in all of the news media and science writing on Earth.

A New Brand of Stupid, and a New Way to be Wrong

They say “You can’t fix stupid.” and “You can’t help being wrong once in a while.” Truer words have probably never been spoken. On the other hand, one of the dumbest things that human beings have ever said is: “Human intelligence, backed by sound objective science, allows us to understand the universe.” I know that sounds like a smarter thing to say, and educated people say crap like that all the time, but that doesn’t make it any less wrong.

We live at a time where we worship objective science as our new religion. We believe that we understand the universe and have the intelligence to reshape it in such a way that it will serve us better. That idea has become the foundation of our culture. We’ve ditched the whole mythology of original sin, miracles and virgin birth, and ordained theoretical physicists like Niel DeGrasse-Tyson and Stephen Hawking and their equally ridiculous story of the Big Bang, quantum mechanics and string theory. In truth, we’re no closer to understanding how the universe works than we were three million years ago. We just have a new story that everyone believes, but no one understands.

E=MC² is a very useful equation. It helped us build nuclear bombs and land men on the moon, among other things. We know how to use it, but we don’t really comprehend it. Everyone thinks they understand it. Everyone thinks they understand relativity, but then they talk about squishy space and tell us how gravity bends light as it travels through space. In fact, relativity tells us that light doesn’t travel through space, and that space is never squishy.

Even physicists don’t understand relativity. The best physicists understand that squishy space and the Big Bang form part of a model of the objective universe that allows us to make predictions about how things in it will behave. The best physicists understand that the model is not the universe, because relativity reminds them that the universe is put together in a fundamentally different way than it appears to us.

Relativity tells us that space and time originate with the perceiver, and that there is no scientific reason to believe that space and time exist anywhere else in the universe except within the perceptions of the perceivers who perceive that way. This is where it gets incomprehensible. If anything exists outside of our perceptions, it must therefore exist outside of space and time. What would that look like? How would you describe it? How can you even imagine something without dimension or duration, let alone study it?

It’s impossible to even imagine, because it is beyond comprehension. Relativity drops us at the edge of the incomprehensible, and the best physicists stop there, peer over the edge a moment, then turn around, and get back to work on that model of an objective universe, even though they realize that the universe is not put together that way at all.

Human beings were not meant to understand how the universe works. Our intelligence was not shaped by a driving thirst to understand metaphysics, or by an innate drive to penetrate the cosmos. Human intelligence was shaped by our constant interactions with other humans. Our intelligence was shaped by constantly trying to outsmart and take advantage of each other. We became the cleverest animal on the globe because we challenge each other, intellectually, in a way that no other animal does, and we do that by being sneaky and dishonest with each other.

Human beings constantly deceive each other. It takes a keen intelligence to find flaws in an argument or tell when someone is lying, but it takes an even keener intelligence to concoct a convincing deception and pull it off effectively. We got to be this smart, not because of our driving curiosity to understand the cosmos, but because of our propensity to lie, cheat and steal from each other, and our need to unravel these deceptions to survive and thrive socially. That’s a lot more complicated than rocket science, and rocket science doesn’t explain the universe.

We might as well face the fact that stupid and wrong is the natural human condition. We have always been stupid and wrong about how the universe works, and we will never get any closer to understanding it than we are right now. Being stupid and wrong about how the universe works didn’t stop us from becoming the most successful predator on Planet Earth, and being stupid and wrong about how the universe works isn’t what’s causing us to overheat the planet or driving the extinction crisis, and being stupid and wrong about how the universe works doesn’t stop us from changing the way that we live and responding to the planetary crisis we face.

Quite the opposite: Our whole culture is built on the belief that in just a matter of days, we will unravel the universe’s few remaining secrets, and create an artificial intelligence that is incapable of error. Armed with this knowledge and technology we will remake every atom of the universe to serve us and our limitless understanding, and it will all work flawlessly. This global idea that we must be on the right track in our quest to remake the whole world in our image is so stupid and wrong, and so widely held by so many people despite so much evidence to the contrary, that this toxic stupidity and stubbornly held wrongness now imminently threatens our very survival as a species.

We don’t need more science; we need a new way to be stupid and wrong. Maybe we need 10,000 new ways to be stupid and wrong, because nothing has ever been so convincingly proven, with science, as the wrongness of our current brand of stupid. Forget about objective science, and forget about knowledge and understanding. We’re not built to understand the universe. We just need a new, more functional, brand of stupid and wrong.

We’re looking for a new way to be stupid and wrong that doesn’t obliterate all of the other intelligence on the planet. We need a new brand of stupid and wrong if we want to survive on planet Earth, and we need it yesterday. We don’t need the Large Hadron Collider, and we don’t need to understand gravitational waves. We need a new kind of stupid that hasn’t already been proven so fatally and disastrously wrong that it threatens our very survival as a species, and I’m just the idiot to bring it to you.