“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”
– Doc Brown, Back to the Future

Perhaps it hit me when Time Magazine named their 2006 person of the year. You. It was so simple, so obvious. The decision must have been based largely on the runaway success of YouTube. By that time, many considered a night of watching “viral videos” and bootleg concert footage to be more rewarding than flipping channels on TV. Much else was changing about the ways we communicate and spend our free time and energy. But even that simple switch from passive to active media consumption was one that, I felt sure, would forever transform our society.

Since first getting an AOL account around 1995, I had – without conscious planning – been using computers to do an increasing amount of my interpersonal communication. Society generally lamented this phenomenon. “They won’t develop normal social skills,” we were told. “I used to just pick up the phone and call someone – or even go over to their house – if I wanted to talk to them.”

My personal favorites expressed concern about escapism. “How are they going to get by in the real world if they’re always avoiding reality.” In fact, if my generation shared anything collectively, it was a reluctance to embrace the version of reality presented to us by institutions, marketers, advertisers and editors. We couldn’t quite see the irony forest for the sarcasm trees when we were younger (e.g., “Beavis and Butt-head was making fun of us?”). But we knew something irreversible had happened when our comfy, cozy ‘90s world passed into a dismal post-9/11 era. We knew suddenly what before we had only felt vaguely: that there’s a horrible flaw with a human “reality” that can create such suffering and disaster. In short, we wanted to know why – all the whys: why 9/11 really happened, why we’d been brought up in a fabricated reality, why those who came before us were content to let their hearts turn to coal, etc.

Many of us began looking for answers and connections on the World Wide Web. While at first Facebook was designed only to unite students at the same college (groups and events were among the first features offered), MySpace’s main strengths were its blogging platform, music pages for bands, and the ability to search for people by geography and keywords. This allowed for all sorts of unprecedented connections, from pen pal-like friendships based on similar tastes in movies or music, to meet-ups with semi-strangers for casual sex (well… not all the connections were advances in human communication).

Meanwhile, back at the MySpace blog forum, people were pouring themselves out to total strangers. A certain amount of anonymity remained, but the openness and honesty in much of the writing was astonishing. During a difficult personal time, I found myself keeping a sort of journal on my MySpace blog and receiving regular support (via comments and messages) from people I had never met in “reality.”

That was in 2005, and then by 2006 we had entered the lo-fi world of chocolate rain and candy mountains. The media hailed it as the year of “You,” but that wasn’t the whole story. We had begun to discard “I” and “Me” for “You” and “We.”

Just before then, a site appeared under the name We Feel Fine. It searched the Web for recent use of the word “feel” in an attempt to gauge the current emotional state of the world (at least, the portion of the world with Internet access). Little colorful dots bounce around the flash application; click one and it brings up the sentence that contained “feel,” after which you can link to the original article. This led to a sort of epiphany for me. Whereas Descartes posed, “I think, therefore I am,” perhaps our generation would embrace a new definition of existence: I feel, therefore I am not alone.

However embarrassing it sounds now, I’ll never deny that my MySpace blog contributed to my self-realization as a writer. It wasn’t the same as typing in a Word doc, clicking save, and filing it away on my hard drive, not knowing if it would ever be seen by other eyes. It felt good to let people know what I was experiencing. It also felt good to read about their lives. I felt…less alone…and, maybe, more human. Because of technology. Because of computers and the Internet. Because the “real world” kept letting me down.

A personal milestone came in 2006, when I realized that a large portion of our culture had been totally invisible to me. I now know that it was due mostly to the aforementioned advertisers, marketers and editors, who hoped to keep the public reality tunnel pointed directly at buyable goods. I didn’t completely understand my gut feeling about it at the time. I just needed a career change, and, therefore, a second degree. After some career counseling, I decided to get a masters of journalism, return to Detroit and start an online music publication. Though before I finished my MA in 2008, ad revenue dropped so much that online entrepreneurship seemed nearly impossible.

Yet even now we are witnessing exponential growth in experimental publishing ventures, mostly of a journalistic nature. Reality Sandwich is just one example. The original social networks have either vanished or been ravaged by media conglomerates hoping to make the sites “profitable.” The newer publishing projects have trouble taking off unless they have significant funding or unusual luck in the URL lotto game of Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. And journalism experiments have faced the most attacks. Since the Year of You, every effort has been made to spin “civic journalism” and “citizen reporter” into dirty words. The journalism industry couldn’t diagnose its own cancer, and instead of getting innovative, they put on their editor caps and started pointing fingers.

In other words, the Ron Burgundys of the world rang their warning bells. “But… who’s gonna read the news if there are no professional journalists?! It is anchorman, not anchorblogger, and that is a scientific fact!” It didn’t stop there. Editors suggested that nothing short of mass chaos would ensue if their long-standing take on fact-based, “objective” journalism were to fail as a business model. Not one of them admitted or understood that a conflict of interest is inherent in a for-profit journalism organization – one that is automatically more committed to publishers, advertisers and stockholders than to the audience, the citizens who need information in order to uphold a democracy (nevermind that the U.S. is barely a semi-democracy). And their goal to this day has been to find a way to make us pay for content using traditional consumerist hierarchies, despite the glaring fact that our entire economic system must now endure a complete overhaul.

Information does have to be synthesized into “truth,” so the editors tried to convince us that they were the only ones capable of presenting the real truth. But blogs and journalism start-ups continued to flourish, sometimes gaining bigger online audiences than traditional media groups. After all, an independent website costs little to host, and contributors can still work a day job. The editors, running out of options, kept repeating that without newspapers there would be no watchdog to keep a public record of daily occurrences. “We know what information you need. We know how to get it to you. Trust us. You are safe in our hands.” Something about it seemed eerily familiar to government propaganda, which Bill Hicks used to mock in similar terms: “Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control again.”

We didn’t fall for the scam, and by 2008 it was obvious that Twitter alone could spread news updates worldwide without the help of professional reporters and editors. Though even by the end of 2006, thanks in part to an internship at a lifestyle magazine in Chicago, I had started to wonder, “Who the fuck are these editors, and why are we letting them control our cultural discourse? Is there a way we can eliminate them from the process altogether – not just in journalism, but in all of publishing?”

On the other side of the publishing fence, the book industry reps hid in the cellar while the storm tore through the journalists’ camp. And book publishers were running similar spin cycles at full capacity. “Self-published books will never be as good as those endorsed by a publishing house,” they said. “Trust us to present you with the best writing out there.” That is, the best writing that can be sold for a profit – using payola to get visible bookstore placement and high profile book reviews – by authors who are willing to wear a monkey suit and bang cymbals on Oprah’s stage.

A diminishing budget allowed book publishers to sign much fewer writers for expensive or long-term deals. And those struggling to publish a book started to wonder if it was worth the fight, given the bleak odds and generally stale nature of contemporary literature (not to mention all the paper resources wasted in their distribution model). In modern times, public recognition and artistic credibility have generally become mutually exclusive. Now the book industry is mobilizing to control the way e-readers are used. Kindle and iPad are both wet dreams for publishers who want to tyrannize digital distribution and pricing, despite the fact that certain peer-to-peer networks have appeared that feature e-book trading alone, and that these torrent networks are usually more comprehensive and efficient than any established commercial distribution system in history.

Periodically I’ve even submitted material to literary journals to be considered for publication. But admittedly, I can’t discern a purpose for those publications other than to dam up the river of human creativity. They are little more than MFA nurseries, intent on playing border guard for the land of literary respect. Every time I get a form letter rejection, I have to quell the urge inside me to locate the editors and choke the arrogance out of them. My sense is that hordes of other budding writers feel the same. We’re all wondering who admitted these bastards into the Editorial Knighthood and told them they could judge creative work with so little tact or transparency. Why would the opinion of one editor be more valuable than feedback from a group of peers? Has literature ever been so static that it could be weighed based on established criteria? (No, of course not!)

After all, there is great value in the personal creative struggle that constitutes the path of self-realization. But it seemed to me that the individual should have more control over that path, instead of falling victim to the powerful leaders of yet another institution. For too long the creative instinct has been bottled up to make human beings into consumer robots. I see now that I wanted to break the mold, while helping existing robots (myself included) regain the optimal path.

* * *

All of these subjects – social networking, creative expression, journalism, the search for truth, advertising, marketing, book publishing, literary journals, e-readers, etc – stirred in my mind during grad school. I reflected on the reasons that I started writing. Some strange balance of Freud and Kerouac had convinced me that writing was self-therapy and a way to better understand myself and the world. It followed that heightened understanding would result in a happier, more fulfilling life, which – if practiced on a wide scale – might increase the probability that the human race would achieve its full potential (i.e., would not self-terminate through atomic warfare or some less intentional means). So I took Freud’s suggestion to explore my subconscious mind. I studied Kerouac’s dedication to writing in a way that is simultaneously confessional, improvisational and musical. And I knew vaguely that I’d have to revive the concepts of honesty, openness and humility.

I drew from other visionary minds when building my personal philosophy. Hunter S. Thompson was largely responsible for breaking down the barrier between journalism and fiction. He demonstrated that truth is subjective, that this is the reason why we’ve always valued fiction, and that the writer is inextricably tied to the story being written. Even though I had essentially learned in Physics class that truth is relative to the perspective of observation (i.e., why Newtonian physics works at human scale, but not on the scale of the universe or an atom, which both require quantum mechanics), it took a while for me to understand the truly universal application of that concept. What I mean is, everything is relative – all truth, morals, ethics, etc – and that’s the primary reason why human society can be so hypocritical and paradoxical. Furthermore, it turned out that mass and energy are interchangeable. It seemed to me that we needed to make these truths part of our living philosophy, and not just a lesson in school.

A moment of providence came in early 2008 when I found a Henry Miller quote that solidified my resolve. In his 1959 Freudian study Life Against Death, Norman O. Brown quotes Miller (from his book Sunday After the War):

“The peoples of the earth will no longer be shut off from one another within states but will flow freely over the surface of the earth and intermingle. [...] Man will be forced to realize that power must be kept open, fluid and free. His aim will be not to possess power but to radiate it.” (1)

Suddenly Nietzsche’s concept of the Will to Power seemed a bit more clear. I wondered if that really was the only guiding principle in human history, the effort to dominate and subdue. I immediately applied this to my goal of online publishing and wondered if it would be possible for a magazine to function without any editors. (The United States was even founded with the goal of providing checks and balances on power, in order to prevent tyranny. Apparently the founders didn’t see that tyranny springs forth from the individual, with or without a government to enable it.)

I immediately read Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and learned that his goal had been to attain ultimate freedom of expression. That seemed crucial to me, because the concentration of power was antithetical to the pursuit of expression. I also took from Miller (and partly from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) the concept of rising above our terrestrial existence through a species-wide creative evolution. Soon I decided on a final project to complete my masters program. I would create an experimental online magazine for people to self-publish any type of creative work. I decided on the name Supraterranean to convey the idea of meeting on a metaphysical platform above the earth, and I created a starry website banner to reinforce the symbolism.

I launched Supraterranean.com on June 23, 2008 in Traverse City, Michigan, where I was spending the summer for an internship. A month later I devised the slogan “Freedom Is Expression” by twisting the First Amendment of the U.S. I hoped to arouse some speculation in the audience – e.g., “Is freedom really expression? What is freedom? What, for that matter, is expression?”

The site only had one absolute condition. Instead of using an editorial selection process, all submissions that met basic guidelines would be published. I knew from the start that the website would use a Creative Commons license, to protect the intellectual property of contributors while promoting creativity and rebuilding the public domain. At first I used a five-star rating system to feature “top rated” content on the home page. Now it’s a “recommend” button that generates a similar list in the sidebar, since I stopped feeling comfortable with the casual judging of creative work (even YouTube has made a similar switch now).

Like the site itself, I expect that the mission statement will be in a constant state of flux. But the list of goals I posted at the beginning remains basically unchanged to this day:

• To explore the artistic potential allowed by the Internet and associated technologies.
• To provide a “writers circle” type environment where aspiring and established artists of many disciplines can get constructive feedback on their work.
• To break down categorical barriers between journalism, literature, poetry, music, film and art.
• To emphasize the importance of personal experience and expression in all of these media.
• To showcase the artistic and cultural advancements taking place all over — from Michigan to California, from Germany to Australia — and transfer online interaction into real world networking.
• To connect creative minds around the world who were meant to live, work and play together, but who have been prevented by geography, language and other barriers.
• To encourage the excessive use of material in the public domain or partially protected under Creative Commons licenses.
• To promote fair use of copyrighted material to the extent that is legally allowed.
• To transform, remix and recreate culture in a way that suits the expressive needs and desires of modern society.
• To evade the pretentious nature of existing literary journals.
• To lessen the selective editor role in publishing (for journalism, literature, etc), and return control to those who create and consume culture.
• To undermine the power of major content corporations who distribute most of the media to which people are exposed.
• To fight the disease of anti-intellectualism rampant in the U.S. and around the world.

I admit that there’s a certain soapbox tone to the list. But I knew what I hoped to build would seem alien and confusing to many people, since I didn’t fully understand it myself. I could think of no other way to communicate my intentions.

* * *

Over the last two years, I’ve worked an average of about 30 hours a month to keep Supraterranean running, while paying for the web hosting costs myself and simultaneously working a part- or full-time job. I’ve also continued reading and learning to clarify the fuzzy notions in my head.

I set Freud aside when I found his veritable successor, Carl Jung, whose concept of the collective unconscious posed a valid argument for the underlying connection of all human beings. I felt that my own alienation from society must be related to mankind’s alienation from the collective unconscious. I began to see this after consuming psilocybin mushrooms in August of 2006. But later I turned to science and evolutionary psychology to avoid relying on a mystical viewpoint. I needed a functioning arsenal, not a new belief system. In short, I realized that forces hidden below the conscious level direct the human race to the same extent that the personal unconscious directs the individual.

A massive reintegration will be required to move beyond this state of mass schizophrenia. But Jung proposed that this all depends on the individual, who must doggedly explore the unconscious to reveal his or her own creative nature and true human potential. The quest is made more difficult because we’ve all been programmed to fear psychology. After all, psychological awareness is a direct threat to the current power construct of the “real world.” The entire fields of public relations, advertising and marketing were developed by using psychological awareness against us, and we now live in the most unreal world that has ever existed.

Reading Jung helped to explain my motivations in creating Supraterranean. I had envisioned a website – part magazine, part community – where contributors would leave a record of their creative path for others to study and learn from. If the experiment worked, editors would no longer be able to bleach out the true nature of existence and creative evolution. For so long we have been manipulated into playing the consumer role, to keep us kneeling submissively at the bottom of the power pyramid. Soon we will have to assume the roles of creator and self-editor, opting to reveal our true nature instead of hiding within injured (and injurious) social roles.

You can imagine my sense of glee, then, upon finding the following Timothy Leary quote – which speaks directly to the purpose of Supraterranean – after a few excruciating years of truth-seeking:

“Secrecy is the original sin. Fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love… The purpose of life is to receive, synthesize and transmit energy. Communication fusion is the goal of life. Any star can tell you that. Communication is love. Secrecy, withholding the signal, hoarding, covering up the light is motivated by shame and fear.” (2)

Despite the window of anonymity permitted by the Internet, people are generally still afraid to open themselves up. We remain convinced that human beings are absolutely incapable of relating their personal experiences or feelings through words, written or spoken. And thus we shy away from awareness of any kind, opting for a shallower kind of existence.

For society to move forward, we’re going to have to build better safeguards into our organizations to protect against authoritarianism, secrecy and decay. Otherwise even a somewhat progressive website like Supraterranean would eventually become a restrictive, conservative force. To me that means never denying anyone the ability to present creative work to the world, and preventing power from accumulating in any one position or person’s hands. I want to eradicate the entire tendency towards top-down, hierarchical control. Then the system will evolve at a natural (and ever-quickening) pace, instead of getting constipated in the tradition of all oligarchies.

In his book Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson helped explain these ideas through the work of Dr. Ilya Prigogine, who won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for physical chemistry:

“Any organized system, according to Prigogine, exists in dynamic tension between entropy and negentropy, between chaos and information. The more complex a system, the greater its instability. [...] …the more unstable, the more likely it is to change – to evolve.

“All dissipative structures are teetering, perpetually, between self-destruction and re-organization on a higher level of information (coherence).” (3)

I admit that, until early 2010, I could see only chaos in the universe, with “order” and “disorder” being no more than illusory labels that humans applied to the chaos. Now I’m convinced by this concept of negentropy. As Wilson explained earlier in the book: “In living systems…negentropy (information) steadily increases [...] Life is an ordering, selecting, coherence-making process.” (4)

I’ve started to feel like most human energy is currently spent in a way that is contradictory to evolution – to actively prevent evolution. Negentropy happens, and human beings try to stop it with all their power. It’s not really their fault though. They’re still dominated by more ancient evolutionary circuits that mistakenly see progress as a danger. They’re still entrenched in the materialism of Newtonian physics, even though relativity and quantum mechanics should have made that paradigm obsolete many decades ago.

There’s a related notion I keep coming across lately, which Wilson put this way: “Mind and its contents are functionally identical. …there is no division between ‘me’ and ‘my experience.’” (5) In other words, reality is not limited to or dictated by our physical bodies. It never has been; it just seemed that way. In fact, we can extend our reality beyond our bodies. It follows naturally that there is no division between ‘me’ and ‘my creative work.’ My attempts at creative expression are extensions of my mind propelled into the universe. Then the work exists just as much in the observer’s mind as in my own.

This lends another dimension to Supraterranean, and really any creative portal on the Internet. The Web allows people to project their mind in endless directions, at an unprecedented speed and distance. It’s a collective out-of-body experience that lets us share in each other’s daydreams – a new map of time-space to help to navigate the inner and outer cosmos. On Supraterranean, we are all connected by the creations that people share with the community.

According to Wilson, Alfred Korzybski suggested that “the passing of signals from generation to generation…was what distinguished us from the other primates.” (6) It occurred to me recently that we’ve been trying to perfect that signaling function for all recorded history. That’s why Henry Miller’s dedication to perfect expression seemed so captivating to me. That’s what I myself am seeking as I work out my own creative drive and progress towards self-realization. But there’s a difference between the passing of facts and the passing of truth – a difference between work we do for money (bio-survival) and work we do because of an irrepressible urge to create and share.

Thus far in the human story, I don’t think we’ve done a satisfactory job of passing on information, let alone creative signals. There’s no way to embark on an open and free future when the basic details of the past are still imprisoned, malleable, or open to argument. Computers and the Internet will allow us to collect information in a way that cannot be distorted by future agendas. It’s agonizing to be patient, or to consider the possibility that the human race still isn’t ready.

And regardless of what system we aim to build, it’ll always come back to the individual. Evolution doesn’t happen at the individual level, but it does depend on individual adaptation or mutation. The adaptation required now could involve a transformation from a preternatural howl to a superb elucidation of thought and feeling. The last hurdle may be the self-sacrifice required in true expression ­– the fact that the ego must be symbolically crucified, or at least reintegrated with the vast invisible realms of the human psyche, before we can collectively move on to the next stage of our evolution, propelled into a higher state of existence.

It seems immense and immeasurable, I’m aware. But above all else, that’s what I hope Supraterranean will foster for the world.

This essay was originally published on Reality Sandwich on 7/16/10.

NOTES
1. Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959. p. 305
2. Wilson, Robert Anton. Prometheus Rising. 2007. Tempe, AZ: New Falcon, 1983. p. 243.
3. Wilson, R.A. Ibid. p. 258.
4. Wilson, R.A. Ibid. p. 112.
5. Wilson, R.A. Ibid. p. 219.
6. Wilson, R.A. Ibid. p. 110.

View A Supraterranean Manifesto at Supraterranean

Essay by Rob Sheridan

For quite a long time I’ve been intending to post some sort of commentary on the music industry – piracy, distribution, morality, those types of things. I’ve thought about it many times, but never gone through with it, because the issue is such a broad, messy one – such a difficult thing to address fairly and compactly. I knew it would result in a rambly, unfocused commentary, and my exact opinion has teetered back and forth quite a bit over the years anyway. But on Monday, when I woke up to the news that Oink, the world famous torrent site and mecca for music-lovers everywhere, had been shut down by international police and various anti-piracy groups, I knew it was finally time to try and organize my thoughts on this huge, sticky, important issue.

For the past eight years, I’ve worked on and off with major record labels as a designer (“Major” is an important distinction here, because major labels are an entirely different beast than many indie labels – they’re the ones with the power, and they are the ones driving the industry-wide push against piracy). It was 1999 when I got my first taste of the inner-workings of a major record label – I was a young college student, and the inside of a New York label office seemed so vast and exciting. Dozens of worker bees hummed away at their desks on phones and computers. Music posters and stacks of CDs littered every surface. Everyone seemed to have an assistant, and the assistants had assistants, and you couldn’t help but wonder “what the hell do all these people do?” I tagged along on $1500 artist dinners paid for by the labels. Massive bar tabs were regularly signed away by record label employees with company cards. You got used to people billing as many expenses back to the record company as they could. I met the type of jive, middle-aged, blazer-wearing, coke-snorting, cartoon character label bigwigs who you’d think were too cliche to exist outside the confines of Spinal Tap. It was all strange and exciting, but one thing that always resonated with me was the sheer volume of money that seemed to be spent without any great deal of concern. Whether it was excessive production budgets or “business lunches” that had nothing to do with business, one of my first reactions to it all was, “so this is why CDs cost $18…” An industry of excess. But that’s kind of what you expected from the music business, right? It’s where rock stars are made. It’s where you get stretch limos with hot tubs in the back, where you get private jets and cocaine parties. Growing up in the ’80′s, with pop royalty and hair metal bands, you were kind of led to think, of course record labels blow money left and right – there’s just so much of it to go around! Well, you know what they say: The bigger they are…

In those days, “piracy” was barely even a word in the music world. My friends and I traded MP3s in college over the local network, but they were scattered and low-quality. It felt like a novelty – like a digital version of duping a cassette tape – hardly a replacement for CDs. CDs sounded good and you could bring them with you in your DiscMan, and the only digital music you could get was as good as your friends’ CD collections, anyway. It never occurred to any of us that digital files were the future. But as it turned out, lots of kids, in lots of colleges around the world, had the same idea of sharing MP3 files over their local networks, and eventually, someone paid attention to that idea and made Napster. Suddenly, it was like all those college networks were tied together, and you could find all this cool stuff online. It was easier and more efficient than record stores, it was powered by music fans, and, well, it was free. Suddenly you didn’t have to pay 15 to 18 bucks for an album and hope it was good, you could download some tracks off the internet and check it out first. But you still always bought the CD if you liked it – I mean, who wants all their music to be on the computer? I sure didn’t. But increasingly, more and more people did. For college kids, Napster was a Godsend, because you can all but guarantee two things about most college kids: They love music, and they’re dirt poor. So it grew, and it grew, and it started to grow into the mainstream, and that’s when the labels woke up and realized something important was happening. At that point they could have seen it as either a threat or an opportunity, and they, without hesitation, determined it to be a threat. It was a threat because essentially someone had come up with a better, free distribution method for the labels’ product. To be fair, you can imagine how confusing this must have been for them – is there even a historical precedent for an industry’s products suddenly being able to replicate and distribute on their own, without cost?

For quite a while – long after most tech-savvy music lovers – I resisted the idea of stealing music. Of course I would download MP3s – I downloaded a lot of stuff – but I would always make sure to buy the physical CD if it was something I liked. I knew a lot of musicians, a lot of them bewildered at what was happening to the industry they used to understand. People were downloading their music en masse, gorging on this new frontier like pigs at a troff – and worst of all, they felt entitled to do so. It was like it was okay simply because the technology existed that made it possible. But it wasn’t okay – I mean, let’s face it, no matter how you rationalized it, it was stealing, and because the technology existed to hotwire a car didn’t make that okay, either. The artists lost control of distribution: They couldn’t present albums the way they wanted to, in a package with nice artwork. They couldn’t reveal it the way they wanted to, because music pirates got the albums online well before the actual release date. Control had been taken away from everyone who used to have it. It was a scary time in unfamiliar territory, where suddenly music fans became enemies to the artists and companies they had supported for years. It led to laughable hyperbole from bands like Metallica, instantly the poster-children of cry-baby rich rock stars, and the beginning of the image problem the industry has faced in its handling of the piracy issue. But still, at the time, I understood where they were coming from. Most musicians weren’t rich like Metallica, and needed all the album sales they could get for both income and label support. Plus, it was their art, and they had created it – why shouldn’t they be able to control how it’s distributed, just because some snotty, acne-faced internet kids had found a way to cheat the system? And these entitled little internet brats, don’t they realize that albums cost money to create, and to produce, and to promote? How is there going to be any new music if no one’s paying for it?

On top of that, I couldn’t get into the idea of an invisible music library that lives on my computer. Where’s the artwork? Where’s my collection? I want the booklet, the packaging… I want shelves and shelves of albums that I’ve spent years collecting, that I can pore over and impress my friends with… I want to flip through the pages, and hold the CD in my hand… Being a kid who got into music well past the days of vinyl, CDs were all I had, and they still felt important to me.

It’s all changed.

In a few short years, the aggressive push of technology combined with the arrogant response from the record industry has rapidly worn away all of my noble intentions of clinging to the old system, and has now pushed me into full-on dissent. I find myself fully immersed in digital music, almost never buying CDs, and fully against the methods of the major record labels and the RIAA. And I think it would do the music industry a lot of good to pay attention to why – because I’m just one of millions, and there will be millions more in the years to come. And it could have happened very, very differently.

As the years have passed, and technology has made digital files the most convenient, efficient, and attractive method of listening to music for many people, the rules and cultural perceptions regarding music have changed drastically. We live in the iPod generation – where a “collection” of clunky CDs feels archaic – where the uniqueness of your music collection is limited only by how eclectic your taste is. Where it’s embraced and expected that if you like an album, you send it to your friend to listen to. Whether this guy likes it or not, iPods have become synonymous with music – and if I filled my shiny new 160gb iPod up legally, buying each track online at the 99 cents price that the industry has determined, it would cost me about $32,226. How does that make sense? It’s the ugly truth the record industry wants to ignore as they struggle to find ways to get people to pay for music in a culture that has already embraced the idea of music being something you collect in large volumes, and trade freely with your friends.

Already is the key word, because it didn’t have to be this way, and that’s become the main source of my utter lack of sympathy for the dying record industry: They had a chance to move forward, to evolve with technology and address the changing needs of consumers – and they didn’t. Instead, they panicked – they showed their hand as power-hungry dinosaurs, and they started to demonize their own customers, the people whose love of music had given them massive profits for decades. They used their unfair record contracts – the ones that allowed them to own all the music – and went after children, grandparents, single moms, even deceased great grandmothers – alongside many other common people who did nothing more than download some songs and leave them in a shared folder – something that has become the cultural norm to the iPod generation. Joining together in what has been referred to as an illegal cartel and using the RIAA as their attack dogs, the record labels have spent billions of dollars attempting to scare people away from downloading music. And it’s simply not working. The pirating community continues to out-smart and out-innovate the dated methods of the record companies, and CD sales continue to plummet while exchange of digital music on the internet continues to skyrocket. Why? Because freely-available music in large quantities is the new cultural norm, and the industry has given consumers no fair alternative. They didn’t jump in when the new technologies were emerging and think, “how can we capitalize on this to ensure that we’re able to stay afloat while providing the customer what they’ve come to expect?” They didn’t band together and create a flat monthly fee for downloading all the music you want. They didn’t respond by drastically lowering the prices of CDs (which have been ludicrously overpriced since day one, and actually increased in price during the ’90′s), or by offering low-cost DRM-free legal MP3 purchases. Their entry into the digital marketplace was too little too late – a precedent of free, high-quality, DRM-free music had already been set.

There seem to be a lot of reasons why the record companies blew it. One is that they’re really not very smart. They know how to do one thing, which is sell records in a traditional retail environment. From personal experience I can tell you that the big labels are beyond clueless in the digital world – their ideas are out-dated, their methods make no sense, and every decision is hampered by miles and miles of legal tape, copyright restrictions, and corporate interests. Trying to innovate with a major label is like trying to teach your Grandmother how to play Halo 3: frustrating and ultimately futile. The easiest example of this is how much of a fight it’s been to get record companies to sell MP3s DRM-free. You’re trying to explain a new technology to an old guy who made his fortune in the hair metal days. You’re trying to tell him that when someone buys a CD, it has no DRM – people can encode it into their computer as DRM-free MP3s within seconds, and send it to all their friends. So why insult the consumer by making them pay the same price for copy-protected MP3s? It doesn’t make any sense! It just frustrates people and drives them to piracy! They don’t get it: “It’s an MP3, you have to protect it or they’ll copy it.” But they can do the same thing with the CDs you already sell!! Legal tape and lots of corporate bullshit. If these people weren’t the ones who owned the music, it’d all be over already, and we’d be enjoying the real future of music. Because like with any new industry, it’s not the people from the previous generation who are going to step in and be the innovators. It’s a new batch.

Newspapers are a good example: It used to be that people read newspapers to get the news. That was the distribution method, and newspaper companies controlled it. You paid for a newspaper, and you got your news, that’s how it worked. Until the internet came along, and a new generation of innovative people created websites, and suddenly anyone could distribute information, and they could distribute it faster, better, more efficiently, and for free. Obviously this hurt the newspaper industry, but there was nothing they could do about it, because they didn’t own the information itself – only the distribution method. Their only choice was to innovate and find ways to compete in a new marketplace. And you know what? Now I can get live, up-to-the-minute news for free, on thousands of different sources across the internet – and The New York Times still exists. Free market capitalism at its finest. It’s not a perfect example, but it is a part of how the internet is changing every form of traditional media. It happened with newspapers, it’s happening now with music, and TV and cell phones are next on the chopping block. In all cases technology demands that change will happen, it’s just a matter of who will find ways to take advantage of it, and who won’t.

Unlike newspapers, record companies own the distribution and the product being distributed, so you can’t just start your own website where you give out music that they own – and that’s what this is all about: distribution. Lots of pro-piracy types argue that music can be free because people will always love music, and they’ll pay for concert tickets, and merchandise, and the marketplace will shift and artists will survive. Well, yes, that might be an option for some artists, but that does nothing to help the record labels, because they don’t make any money off of merchandise, or concert tickets. Distribution and ownership are what they control, and those are the two things piracy threatens. The few major labels left are parts of giant media conglomerations – owned by huge parent companies for whom artists and albums are just numbers on a piece of paper. It’s why record companies shove disposable pop crap down your throat instead of nurturing career artists: because they have CEOs and shareholders to answer to, and those people don’t give a shit if a really great band has the potential to get really successful, if given the right support over the next decade. They see that Gwen Stefani’s latest musical turd sold millions, because parents of twelve year old girls still buy music for their kids, and the parent company demands more easy-money pop garbage that will be forgotten about next month. The only thing that matters to these corporations is profit – period. Music isn’t thought of as an art form, as it was in the earlier days of the industry where labels were started by music-lovers – it’s a product, pure and simple. And many of these corporations also own the manufacturing plants that create the CDs, so they make money on all sides – and lose money even from legal MP3s.

At the top of all this is the rigged, outdated, and unfair structure of current intellectual property laws, all of them in need of massive reform in the wake of the digital era. These laws allow the labels to maintain their stranglehold on music copyrights, and they allow the RIAA to sue the pants off of any file-sharing grandmother they please. Since the labels are owned by giant corporations with a great deal of money, power, and political influence, the RIAA is able to lobby politicians and government agencies to manipulate copyright laws for their benefit. The result is absurdly disproportionate fines, and laws that in some cases make file sharing a heftier charge than armed robbery. This is yet another case of private, corporate interests using political influence to turn laws in the opposite direction of the changing values of the people. Or, as this very smart assessment from a record executive described it: “a clear case of a multinational conglomerate using its political muscle to the disadvantage of everyone but itself.” But shady political maneuvers and scare tactics are all the RIAA and other anti-piracy groups have left, because people who download music illegally now number in the hundreds of millions, and they can’t sue everyone. At this point they’re just trying to hold up what’s left of the dam before it bursts open. Their latest victim is Oink, a popular torrent site specializing in music.

If you’re not familiar with Oink, here’s a quick summary: Oink was was a free members-only site – to join it you had to be invited by a member. Members had access to an unprecedented community-driven database of music. Every album you could ever imagine was just one click away. Oink’s extremely strict quality standards ensured that everything on the site was at pristine quality – 192kbps MP3 was their bare minimum, and they championed much higher quality MP3s as well as FLAC lossless downloads. They encouraged logs to verify that the music had been ripped from the CD without any errors. Transcodes – files encoded from other encoded files, resulting in lower quality – were strictly forbidden. You were always guaranteed higher quality music than iTunes or any other legal MP3 store. Oink’s strict download/share ratio ensured that every album in their vast database was always well-seeded, resulting in downloads faster than anywhere else on the internet. A 100mb album would download in mere seconds on even an average broadband connection. Oink was known for getting pre-release albums before anyone else on the internet, often months before they hit retail – but they also had an extensive catalogue of music dating back decades, fueled by music lovers who took pride in uploading rare gems from their collection that other users were seeking out. If there was an album you couldn’t find on Oink, you only had to post a request for it, and wait for someone who had it to fill your request. Even if the request was extremely rare, Oink’s vast network of hundreds of thousands of music-lovers eager to contribute to the site usually ensured you wouldn’t have to wait long.

In this sense, Oink was not only an absolute paradise for music fans, but it was unquestionably the most complete and most efficient music distribution model the world has ever known. I say that safely without exaggeration. It was like the world’s largest music store, whose vastly superior selection and distribution was entirely stocked, supplied, organized, and expanded upon by its own consumers. If the music industry had found a way to capitalize on the power, devotion, and innovation of its own fans the way Oink did, it would be thriving right now instead of withering. If intellectual property laws didn’t make Oink illegal, the site’s creator would be the new Steve Jobs right now. He would have revolutionized music distribution. Instead, he’s a criminal, simply for finding the best way to fill rising consumer demand. I would have gladly paid a large monthly fee for a legal service as good as Oink – but none existed, because the music industry could never set aside their own greed and corporate bullshit to make it happen.

Here’s an interesting aside: The RIAA loves to complain about music pirates leaking albums onto the internet before they’re released in stores – painting the leakers as vicious pirates dead set on attacking their enemy, the music industry. But you know where music leaks from? From the fucking source, of course – the labels! At this point, most bands know that once their finished album is sent off to the label, the risk of it turning up online begins, because the labels are full of low-level workers who happen to be music fans who can’t wait to share the band’s new album with their friends. If the album manages to not leak directly from the label, it is guaranteed to leak once it heads off to manufacturing. Someone at the manufacturing plant is always happy to sneak off with a copy, and before long, it turns up online. Why? Because people love music, and they can’t wait to hear their favorite band’s new album! It’s not about profit, and it’s not about maliciousness. So record industry, maybe if you could protect your own assets a little better, shit wouldn’t leak – don’t blame the fans who flock to the leaked material online, blame the people who leak it out of your manufacturing plants in the first place! But assuming that’s a hole too difficult to plug, it begs the question, “why don’t labels adapt to the changing nature of distribution by selling new albums online as soon as they’re finished, before they have a chance to leak, and release the physical CDs a couple months later?” Well, for one, labels are still obsessed with Billboard chart numbers – they’re obsessed with determining the market value of their product by how well it fares in its opening week. Selling it online before the big retail debut, before they’ve had months to properly market the product to ensure success, would mess up those numbers (nevermind that those numbers mean absolutely nothing anymore). Additionally, selling an album online before it hits stores makes retail outlets (who are also suffering in all this) angry, and retail outlets have far more power than they should. For example, if a record company releases an album online but Wal-Mart won’t have the CD in their stores for another two months (because it needs to be manufactured), Wal-Mart gets mad. Who cares if Wal-Mart gets mad, you ask? Well, record companies do, because Wal-Mart is, both mysteriously and tragically, the largest music retailer in the world. That means they have power, and they can say “if you sell Britney Spears’ album online before we can sell it in our stores, we lose money. So if you do that, we’re not going to stock her album at all, and then you’ll lose a LOT of money.” That kind of greedy business bullshit happens all the time in the record industry, and the consistent result is a worse experience for consumers and music lovers.

Which is why Oink was so great – take away all the rules and legal ties, all the ownership and profit margins, and naturally, the result is something purely for, by, and in service of the music fan. And it actually helps musicians – file-sharing is “the greatest marketing tool ever to come along for the music industry.” One of Oink’s best features was how it allowed users to connect similar artists, and to see what people who liked a certain band also liked. Similar to Amazon’s recommendation system, it was possible to spend hours discovering new bands on Oink, and that’s what many of its users did. Through sites like Oink, the amount and variety of music I listen to has skyrocketed, opening me up to hundreds of artists I never would have experienced otherwise. I’m now fans of their music, and I may not have bought their CDs, but I would have never bought their CD anyway, because I would have never heard of them! And now that I have heard of them, I go to their concerts, and I talk them up to my friends, and give my friends the music to listen to for themselves, so they can go to the concerts, and tell their friends, and so on. Oink was a network of music lovers sharing and discovering music. And yes, it was all technically illegal, and destined to get shut down, I suppose. But it’s not so much that they shut Oink down that boils my blood, it’s the fucking bullshit propaganda they put out there. If the industry tried to have some kind of compassion – if they said, “we understand that these are just music fans trying to listen to as much music as they can, but we have to protect our assets, and we’re working on an industry-wide solution to accommodate the changing needs of music fans”… Well, it’s too late for that, but it would be encouraging. Instead, they make it sound like they busted a Columbian drug cartel or something. They describe it as a highly-organized piracy ring. Like Oink users were distributing kiddie porn or some shit. The press release says: “This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure.” Wh – what?? That’s EXACTLY what it was! No one made any money on that site – there were no ads, no registration fees. The only currency was ratio – the amount you shared with other users – a brilliant way of turning “free” into a sort of booming mini-economy. The anti-piracy groups have tried to spin the notion that you had to pay a fee to join Oink, which is NOT true – donations were voluntary, and went to support the hosting and maintenance of the site. If the donations spilled into profit for the guy who ran the site, well he damn well deserved it – he created something truly remarkable.

So the next question is, what now?

For the major labels, it’s over. It’s fucking over. You’re going to burn to the fucking ground, and we’re all going to dance around the fire. And it’s your own fault. Surely, somewhere deep inside, you had to know this day was coming, right? Your very industry is founded on an unfair business model of owning art you didn’t create in exchange for the services you provide. It’s rigged so that you win every time – even if the artist does well, you do ten times better. It was able to exist because you controlled the distribution, but now that’s back in the hands of the people, and you let the ball drop when you could have evolved.

None of this is to say that there’s no way for artists to make money anymore, or even that it’s the end of record labels. It’s just the end of record labels as we know them. A lot of people point to the Radiohead model as the future, but Radiohead is only dipping its toe into the future to test the waters. What at first seemed like a rainbow-colored revolution has now been openly revealed as a marketing gimmick: Radiohead was “experimenting,” releasing a low-quality MP3 version of an album only to punish the fans who paid for it by later releasing a full-quality CD version with extra tracks. According to Radiohead’s manager: “If we didn’t believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD then we wouldn’t do what we are doing.” Ouch. Radiohead was moving in the right direction, but if they really want to start a revolution, they need to place the “pay-what-you-want” digital album on the same content and quality level as the “pay-what-we-want” physical album.

Ultimately, I don’t know what the future model is going to be – I think all the current pieces of the puzzle will still be there, but they need to be re-ordered, and the rules need to be changed. Maybe record labels of the future exist to help front recording costs and promote artists, but they don’t own the music. Maybe music is free, and musicians make their money from touring and merchandise, and if they need a label, the label takes a percentage of their tour and merch profits. Maybe all-digital record companies give bands all the tools they need to sell their music directly to their fans, taking a small percentage for their services. In any case, the artists own their own music.

I used to reject the wishy-washy “music should be free!” mantra of online music thieves. I knew too much about the intricacies and economics of it, of the rock-and-a-hard-place situation many artists were in with their labels. I thought there were plenty of new ways to sell music that would be fair to all parties involved. But I no longer believe that, because the squabbling, backwards, greedy, ownership-obsessed major labels will never let it happen, and that’s more clear to me now than ever. So maybe music has to be free. Maybe taking the money out of music is the only way to get money back into it. Maybe it’s time to abandon the notion of the rock star – of music as a route to fame and fortune. The best music was always made by people who weren’t in it for the money, anyway. Maybe smart, talented musicians will find ways to make a good living with or without CD sales. Maybe the record industry execs who made their fortunes off of unfair contracts and distribution monopolies should just walk away, confident that they milked a limited opportunity for all it was worth, and that it’s time to find fortune somewhere else. Maybe in the hands of consumers, the music marketplace will expand in new and lucrative ways no one can even dream of yet. We won’t know until music is free, and eventually it’s going to be. Technological innovation destroys old industries, but it creates new ones. You can’t fight it forever.

Until the walls finally come down, we’re in what will inevitably be looked back on as a very awkward, chaotic period in music history – fans are being arrested for sharing the music they love, and many artists are left helpless, unable to experiment with new business models because they’re locked into record contracts with backwards-thinking labels.

So what can you and I do to help usher in the brave new world? The beauty of Oink was how fans willingly and hyper-efficiently took on distribution roles that traditionally have cost labels millions of dollars. Music lovers have shown that they’re much more willing to put time and effort into music than they are money. It’s time to show artists that there’s no limit to what an energized online fanbase can accomplish, and all they’ll ever ask for in return is more music. And it’s time to show the labels that they missed a huge opportunity by not embracing these opportunities when they had the chance.

1. Stop buying music from major labels. Period. The only way to force change is to hit the labels where it hurts – their profits. The major labels are like Terry Schiavo right now – they’re on life support, drooling in a coma, while white-haired guys in suits try and change the laws to keep them alive. But any rational person can see that it’s too late, and it’s time to pull out the feeding tube. In this case, the feeding tube is your money. Find out which labels are members/supporters of the RIAA and similar copyright enforcement groups, and don’t support them in any way. The RIAA Radar is a great tool to help you with this. Don’t buy CDs, don’t buy iTunes downloads, don’t buy from Amazon, etc. Steal the music you want that’s on the major labels. It’s easy, and despite the RIAA’s scare tactics, it can be done safely – especially if more and more people are doing it. Send letters to those labels, and to the RIAA, explaining very calmly and professionally that you will no longer be supporting their business, because of their bullish scare tactics towards music fans, and their inability to present a forward-thinking digital distribution solution. Tell them you believe their business model is outdated and the days of companies owning artists’ music are over. Make it very clear that you will continue to support the artists directly in other ways, and make it VERY clear that your decision has come about as a direct result of the record company’s actions and inactions regarding digital music.

2. Support artists directly. If a band you like is stuck on a major label, there are tons of ways you can support them without actually buying their CD. Tell everyone you know about them – start a fansite if you’re really passionate. Go to their shows when they’re in town, and buy t-shirts and other merchandise. Here’s a little secret: Anything a band sells that does not have music on it is outside the reach of the record label, and monetarily supports the artist more than buying a CD ever would. T-shirts, posters, hats, keychains, stickers, etc. Send the band a letter telling them that you’re no longer going to be purchasing their music, but you will be listening to it, and you will be spreading the word and supporting them in other ways. Tell them you’ve made this decision because you’re trying to force change within the industry, and you no longer support record labels with RIAA affiliations who own the music of their artists.

If you like bands who are releasing music on open, non-RIAA indie labels, buy their albums! You’ll support the band you like, and you’ll support hard-working, passionate people at small, forward-thinking music labels. If you like bands who are completely independent and are releasing music on their own, support them as much as possible! Pay for their music, buy their merchandise, tell all your friends about them and help promote them online – prove that a network of passionate fans is the best promotion a band can ask for.

3. Get the message out. Get this message out to as many people as you can – spread the word on your blog or your MySpace, and more importantly, tell your friends at work, or your family members, people who might not be as tuned into the internet as you are. Teach them how to use torrents, show them where to go to get music for free. Show them how to support artists while starving the labels, and who they should and shouldn’t be supporting.

4. Get political. The fast-track to ending all this nonsense is changing intellectual property laws. The RIAA lobbies politicians to manipulate copyright laws for their own interests, so voters need to lobby politicians for the peoples’ interests. Contact your local representatives and senators. Tell them politely and articulately that you believe copyright laws no longer reflect the interests of the people, and you will not vote for them if they support the interests of the RIAA. Encourage them to draft legislation that helps change the outdated laws and disproportionate penalties the RIAA champions. Contact information for state representatives can be found here, and contact information for senators can be found here. You can email them, but calling on the phone or writing them actual letters is always more effective.

Tonight, with Oink gone, I find myself wondering where I’ll go now to discover new music. All the other options – particularly the legal ones – seem depressing by comparison. I wonder how long it will be before everyone can legally experience the type of music nirvana Oink users became accustomed to? I’m not too worried – something even better will rise out of Oink’s ashes, and the RIAA will respond with more lawsuits, and the cycle will repeat itself over and over until the industry has finally bled itself to death. And then everything will be able to change, and it will be in the hands of musicians and fans and a new generation of entrepreneurs to decide how the new record business is going to work. Whether you agree with it or not, it’s fact. It’s inevitable – because the determination of fans to share music is much, much stronger than the determination of corporations to stop it.

This essay was originally published on Demonbaby on 10/24/2007.

View When Pigs Fly at Supraterranean

Religious fundamentalists who still espouse belief in a geocentric Universe are now met with ridicule and scorn; not due to discrimination but a lack of evidence for their cause. Unfortunately, the same can not be said about the 40-50% of Americans who, despite a near unanimous consensus among scientists, refuse to accept the theory of evolution. Ever since Darwin published The Origin of the Species in 1859, the idea of common descent has been hard for many religious individuals to swallow. The refusal to accept anything as truth that contradicts the Biblical account of creation has resulted in a massive war of misinformation waged by anti-evolutionists in our courts, schools, and places of worship. Operating under the banners of Creation Science and Intelligent Design, religious individuals have managed to confuse the public about evolution and its supporting evidence while sneaking theology into science classrooms. By educating ourselves about the truth behind evolution, we can put a stop to this degenerative sleight of hand.

Claim: Evolution is only a theory, and therefore uncertain.

In the context of science, the word theory does not imply uncertainty. It is basically defined as a set of general propositions used to explain a class of phenomena. If the fact that evolution is “only a theory” is objectionable, then creationists should be calling into doubt the theory of gravity, atomic theory, and the germ theory of disease — to name a few. The theory of evolution is a package of ideas used to describe how the observable fact of evolution functions, much as the theory of gravity describes how the observable fact of gravity functions. The fact that evolution occurs was recognized well before Darwin’s time. Darwin’s theory only sought to explain that fact. Today less than 0.15 percent of American scientists working in fields relevant to evolution are creationists. In other industrialized nations, that number drops to less than one tenth of one percent.

Claim: Evolution cannot be directly observed and therefore cannot be proven.

While it is impossible to prove anything with absolute certainty, high degrees of certainty can be reached. Evolution has reached a position of near-certainty among scientists because of vast amounts of data from a diversity of fields supporting it. While listing all of the observable evidence of evolution would take volumes, we can briefly document some of the most compelling supportive evidence. All life shows a fundamental unity in the mechanisms of replication, heredity, and metabolism. The fossil record shows species appearing in a chronological order, demonstrating change consistent with common descent over hundreds of millions of years and inconsistent with sudden creation. Evolution predicts that new biological structures adapt from existing structures, thus the similarity between structures should fall along the lines of evolutionary history and not function. This is precisely what has been observed. For example, human hands, bat wings, horse legs, whale flippers, and mole forelimbs all have similar bone structures despite their different functions. The wings of birds, bats, pterosaurs, and insects all have different structures but similar functions. Many organisms even possess rudimentary, vestigial characteristics, such as sightless eyes or wings useless for flight. Microevolution within species is virtually undeniable and thoroughly documented (Darwin’s finches, etc.), however, even macroevolution or speciation has been observed in isolated ecosystems. If you are interested in learning about more about the extensive factual backup for evolution, please visit your local library.

Claim: Transitional forms are missing from the fossil record.

As good fossilization requires a number of very precise environmental factors, it makes sense that finding a fossil of any specific species, especially a short-lived species, should be extremely rare. Evolution is often misconceived as a constant, slow and gradual process, but this is far from what’s been observed. When a species migrates into a new geographic location, evolutionary changes can take place relatively rapidly and then stabilize once an optimal adaptation has been achieved. As such, transitions do not often show up in the fossil record. Sudden appearances in the fossil record simply indicate that an existing species moved into a new region. Other gaps are due to environmental factors, such as erosion and periods unfavorable to fossil preservation. Nonetheless, there are still many fossilized transitional forms that clearly demonstrate the evolution of one species into another over time. These include: Fossils demonstrating human ancestry; transitions between species of Phacops (a type of trilobite); appearance of the horns of titanotheres (extinct Cenozoic mammals) in progressively larger sizes, from nothing to prominence; fossils of the diatom Rhizosolenia that show a continuous record of almost two million years which includes a speciation event; Gryphaea (coiled oysters), which become larger and broader but thinner and flatter during the Early Jurassic; dinosaur-bird transitions; transitions between fish and tetrapods (vertebrates with four limbs); transitions from condylarths (land mammal) to fully aquatic modern manatees; Haasiophis terrasanctus (a primitive marine snake with well-developed hind limbs); and the list goes on and on.

Claim: The second law of thermodynamics says that everything tends toward disorder, making evolution impossible.

The second law of thermodynamics says no such thing. It says that heat can not spontaneously flow from a colder body to a warmer one, or that the total entropy (a measure of useful energy) in a closed system will not decrease. This doesn’t prohibit evolution because the Earth is not a closed system, meaning entropy can decrease within it. Further, entropy is not the same thing as disorder. Sometimes they correspond, but sometimes order increases with entropy. Entropy can even be used to produce order, such as in the sorting of molecules by size. As the only physical processes necessary for evolution to occur are reproduction, heritable variation, and selection — all of which are seen to occur constantly — obviously no physical laws are preventing evolution from occurring. You can see examples of increasing order occurring in nature all the time. Snowflakes, cloud formations, dust devils, ripples in sand dunes, and eddies or whirlpools in streams are some of these.

Claim: The Universe/Earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old, so there hasn’t been enough time for evolution to occur.

Measurements based on the brightness of supernovae and galaxies indicate distances of up to billions of light-years, which means the Universe must be at least billions of years old for the light to have reached us. Some white dwarf stars have been found to be twelve to thirteen billion years old, based on their cooling rate. In the case of the Earth, radiometric dating shows it to be 4.5 billion years old. (Despite claims to the contrary, radiometric dating has been consistently proven to be reliable — unless misused by creationists to intentionally yield bad results.) Radiometric dating is consistent with the length of time geologists give for the formation of the geological column. Geological formations also indicate an old Earth. For example, Loess deposits (wind-blown silt) in China are 300 m thick and give a continuous climate record for 7.2 million years. Varves (annual sediment layers that occur in large lakes) are simple to measure, account for millions of years, and correlate well with other forms of dating. Some formations contain millions of annual layers, such as the five million layers found in Lake Baikal and the 20 million layers in the Green River. Known climate cycles occurring at 400,000-, 600,000-, and 1,000,000-year intervals are accounted for in geological strata. Creationists who argue that the Universe and Earth were created with an “apparent age” are basically asking us to believe that God intentionally deceives us.

Claim: (Fill in the blank) is too complex to have occurred naturally, and therefore must have been designed/created.

This argument, also referred to as the “god of the gaps,” is implicit in many different creationist arguments, particularly today’s claims of intelligent design. What is being claimed is “I can’t conceive that blank happened, therefore God did it.” In reality, others might be able to find a natural explanation. Because nobody knows everything, it is unreasonable to conclude that something is impossible just because you do not know it. Gods were responsible for lightning until we determined natural causes, for infectious diseases until we found bacteria and viruses, and for mental illness until we found biochemical causes. The “god of the gaps” is confined to those parts of the Universe we do not know about, and that keeps shrinking. Complexity is poorly defined by creationists, and occurs in natural systems all the time without the need for an “intelligent designer.” In the sort of design we know about, simplicity is the end goal. Complexity arises through carelessness or necessity, and this is very different from what we see in biology.

For more information on debunking the claims of creationists, please visit the extensive index of creationist claims at www.talkorigins.org.

This essay was originally published in Thirdeye Magazine on 9/4/07, and was reprinted here with permission. The essay originally appeared on Supraterranean in June 2009.

Jason Glover is a native of Traverse City, MI, and a resident of Portland, OR. He is a co-founder of Thirdeye Magazine and the owner of Thirdeye Publications. Glover can be contacted at info [at] thirdeyepublications.com.

View Confronting Creationism at Supraterranean

It’s a familiar scene: Four hyenas have separated a sickly, young zebra from the protection of its herd, sending it into a panic. Giving chase, the predators run their prey into utter exhaustion. When its defense gives out, they begin feeding excitedly on its crippled form — tearing away chunks of striped meat while it’s still alive. The young zebra’s disembowelment and ensuing death finally ends its torment.

This is by no means the most brutal act found in the natural world. Scavengers prey on newborns and the unborn. Carnivores suffocate their meals into submission. Parasites destroy their hosts from the inside out, causing unspeakable pain. Cannibalism is a common occurrence for more than 1500 species.

That said, when extremist animal-rights organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) demand, in the words of PETA president Ingrid Newkirk, “total animal liberation” (i.e. no pets, no seeing-eye dogs, no animals used for AIDS research, no zoos, no animals used for food, clothing, or basically any human-related purpose whatsoever) what utopian world do these folks think spawned us? A glance at PETA’s website suggests that it must have been a cutesy one without any slimy insects or reptiles. Or hyenas.

PETA has become the worst kind of “environmental” activist group – one whose decrees are blindly followed by its members without any attempt to understand basic ecology.

PETA has become the worst kind of “environmental” activist group — one whose decrees are blindly followed by its members without any attempt to understand basic ecology. As a result, more rationally-minded animal rights proponents and vegetarians have received a bad rap. Much of the general public now assumes that vegetarians are naïve treehuggers who simply can’t stomach devouring anything with eyes, and that animal rights activists run around willy-nilly pelting fur garments with paint. Such fallout has inspired the ire of fellow animal rights campaigners.

“Ingrid Newkirk runs PETA like a guru cult,” said Merritt Clifton, founder and editor of the national animal protection newspaper Animal People. “Sooner or later, everyone who questions her or upstages her in any way, no matter how unintentionally, ends up getting shafted in the most humiliating manner Newkirk can think of.”

It’s true that PETA has done a lot of good since its founding in 1980. They’ve shut down squalid animal testing facilities, strengthened animal cruelty laws, and launched successful campaigns against the likes of KFC and McDonald’s. However, most of their philosophical underpinning remains irrevocably skewed.

Let’s start with hunting. Sure, most people with a conscience condemn poaching, hunting for pure sport, and those who get their rocks off by guzzling beer and killing stuff. But let’s not forget that hunting for sustenance — a practice utilized by most surviving indigenous people — is an ecologically sound and completely natural endeavor. In fact, more ecologically sound than, say, eating some highly processed meat replacement produced in a large-scale industrial facility and shipped halfway across the country to your plate. As an added bonus, the production of the soy used in such highly processed products is now competing with cattle grazing as one of the main causes of rainforest destruction.

PETA even goes so far as to tell children their fathers are murderers for engaging in any type of fishing. Fishing! Are pelicans murderers? How about sharks? The cover of one cartoonish PETA brochure features a maniacal fisherman with crazy-eyes violently gutting his catch beneath the words “Your Daddy Kills Animals!” Within, it warns children to keep the family pets away from psychotic animal-hating daddy because “they could be next.”

And what about fur, leather, and other animal-derived products? Again, our hunting and gathering ancestors utilized nearly every part of the animals they killed — creating tools, clothing, and shelter — without producing the type of waste and devastation created by even one industrial plant cranking out carcinogenic synthetic fibers. Of course, eating meat excessively and imprisoning and slaughtering animals on a massive scale for nothing more than one desirable product is a travesty, but that’s the real issue here.

The problem isn’t that human beings shouldn’t ever incorporate meat — loaded with a wide array of essential proteins and complex fatty acids — into their diets, or use any products or innovations derived from animals in their daily lives. The problem is that we’ve extracted ourselves from the basic checks and balances of the ecological world and declared dominion over it — the net result of this being industrialized agriculture and factory farming. These processes serve to disassociate individuals from the procurement of their food, enabling society to lose the respect it once had for the species (including plants) that give their lives so we might continue to exist.

PETA’s underlying Disneyfied vision of nature is merely the laughable icing on the deeper cake of hypocrisy and extremism.

PETA’s underlying Disneyfied vision of nature — where everything coexists peacefully without suffering, pain, or death — is merely the laughable icing on the deeper cake of hypocrisy and extremism. The group funds the ALF — an organization that firebombs laboratories conducting experiments with animals — and decries any and all animal testing, while simultaneously benefiting from its results. Case in point: PETA’s Senior Vice President, MaryBeth Sweetland, is a type A diabetic kept alive with synthetic insulin. She apparently doesn’t see this as a moral quandary.

“I’m not going to take the chance of killing myself by not taking insulin,” she said. “I don’t see myself as a hypocrite. I need my life to fight for the rights of animals.”

What’s more, PETA’s definition of ethical treatment includes the euthanizing of nearly two-thirds of the unwanted domesticated animals that come into their care. From July 1998 through December 2005, the group killed over 14,400 dogs, cats, and other “companion animals.” In 2005, 31 felony counts of animal cruelty were brought against two PETA employees for the unlawful disposal of animal carcasses in North Carolina dumpsters. According to veterinarian Patrick Proctor, PETA told North Carolina shelters they would try to find the dogs and cats homes. He handed over two adoptable kittens and their mother, only to learn later that they had been swiftly euthanized.

Finally, there are the over-the-top ad campaigns. Some highlights include: The “Holocaust on Your Plate,” a campaign which juxtaposed images of factory farms with images of holocaust prisoners and expectedly enraged the Jewish community. The “Are Animals the New Slaves?” exhibit, which displayed images of noosed black men hanging from trees alongside photos of slaughtered cows and was suspended after outcry from the NAACP. And last but not least, there’s the infamous “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” campaign, which utilized nude models to demonize fur. Hey, sex sells.

Rather than making ridiculous demands such as “total animal liberation,” activists looking to better the Earth should turn their attention to building local, eco-friendly methods of food and clothing production — animals and all. Because if the mere act of one species feeding on or utilizing another in pursuit of its own survival is unethical, PETA better move to another planet.

This essay was originally published in Thirdeye Magazine on 5/3/07, and was reprinted here with permission. The essay first appeared on Supraterranean in May 2009.

Jason Glover is a native of Traverse City, MI, and a resident of Portland, OR. He is a co-founder of Thirdeye Magazine and the owner of Thirdeye Publications. Glover can be contacted at info [at] thirdeyepublications.com.

View Stuck in Disneyland at Supraterranean

Imagine regaining consciousness after some no-holds-barred, drink-yourself-into-a-coma, fall-asleep-in-your-own-fluids kind of party. It was fun while it lasted, but now your head aches as you surveil the dilapidated remains of last night’s hoopla. Sunday-afternoon doldrums dissolve any remembrance of dopamine-driven delight.

Picture that hollow, morning-after aftertaste. The realization that maybe, just maybe, you took things too far.

If you’ve ever seen what Traverse City looks like after the Cherry Festival – rancorous remnants of delight clinging to the edges of beaches and the shores of rivers – then you know the feeling I’m talking about.

Now extrapolate with me. Multiply that nagging feeling of foreboding in your gut by six billion. Imagine that the staging ground for this excessive indulgence was the entire planet. The party-goers: crowds of consumers consummating their every desire via shopping satisfaction. Each and every one so secure in the surety of entitlement. But now, picture the participants in this monstrous masturbatory orgy finally waking up.

Facing the fact that the party is officially over.

In the not-so-distant future, this collective double-take may be the only thing capable of preventing a global O.D. Freed from the fog of religion and commercialized modern-living, our species will gaze with a newfound clarity on the havoc wreaked by our celebratory destruction.

After sending thousands of young people to their deaths to secure access to resources in the Middle East, will we finally have had our fill?

What will be the catalyst for this planetary intervention? Will it be the recent U.N. report concluding, with over ninety-percent certainty, that human-activity is the main cause of global warming? Perhaps it’ll be the prediction by the journal Science that Earth’s seafood stocks will collapse by 2048 if current overfishing and pollution trends continue. Or how about the discovery that a “Trash Vortex” the size of Texas – mainly composed of small, indestructible particles of plastic – is slowly rotating in the Pacific, nestled between Hawaii and the West Coast? If we learned that one half of all species on Earth will be extinct in less than 100 years as a result of habitat destruction, pollution, invasive species, and climate change, would that do the trick?

After sending thousands of young people to their deaths to secure access to resources in the Middle East, will we finally have had our fill?

It is my sincere hope that after being startled awake from this long night of decadence, we won’t merely shrug our shoulders at the filth we find ourselves wallowing in, squeeze shut our eyes against the harsh light of an unwelcome sun, and snuggle back to sleep in the crooks of our couches. Only to be found years later, dead and decomposing, wrapped in crusted-vomit shrouds and clutching remote controls in rigor mortis claws like teddy bears.

This essay was originally published (without the image) by Thirdeye Magazine on 3/3/07.

View Frat House Planet Earth at Supraterranean

The following essay is the introduction to the first Supraterranean e-book, “Seeking the Upward Spiral” – a collection of early works by Nick Meador. The e-book will be available as a PDF on the Books page via a “pay what you want” system beginning on Tuesday, July 6, 2010.

No one has ever really asked me why I write, yet I constantly find myself attempting to answer that question. Every time it happens I inevitably start talking about certain authors or books that have inspired me. Anyone who has read an article on my Refractor blog is probably very familiar with this trend. Maybe it was a symptom of my not being able to answer that question ­– the one that was never posed to me. A part of me must have felt like I’d need to answer it before becoming a “real” writer.

Of course, no other author (or group of authors) is the only reason that I write. A few lit firecrackers under my feet until I danced wildly enough for their tastes. But they were only slightly more effective in that regard than film directors and musicians. The creative drive is translated into myriad different forms of human expression, which are not as divided as it often seems. And nothing created by others can generate the sustained energy required to detangle one’s own creative urges.

I suppose the work you’re about to read is a survey of my subconscious attempt to answer the questions of why I write, how I want to write, and what I want to write about. On the other hand, maybe I never had a choice in the matter. I often think of the creative process like the old game Battle Tops. All the tops have different kinds of potential energy – from external inspirations or internal drives – and the kinetic energy is unleashed when the tops collide and interact. Both my laptop and my notepad have become battlegrounds for ideas, styles and experiments.

Really the theory was an altered version of a broader belief: we all have an enormous amount of unused creative energy, and that energy is finally starting to boil over on a mass scale.

As for choices, I guess I did choose to let it flow naturally, instead of continually stifling the urge to express myself. Even so, I had to figure out how to express myself. I hated the feeling that I didn’t understand myself, why I acted certain ways or said certain things. I felt that there were forces at work in my life over which I had little to no control. While that was undoubtedly a factor, my attempts at writing came in response to a very mysterious calling, one that to this day I don’t fully understand.

Until 22 years of age, I considered both reading and writing to be abhorrent activities. As far as school went, I always considered myself first and foremost a student of science. And after school I was content to repress my budding need for a personal mythology, and surrender my psyche to movies and the increasingly fascinating world of video games.

I remember my 12th grade AP English teacher asking us to compile a list of everything we’ve ever read, in preparation for the college application process. She scolded me after seeing that my list contained almost nothing but required reading from classes. I thought, “Well, what the fuck do you expect? If those last 12 years of English, literature and composition courses were designed to make me like reading and writing, that comes as a total surprise to me!”

And I did try to make the best of it… at least, I’ve convinced myself that I tried. I stuck it out through five years of advanced English classes before that 12 AP class. I even enrolled in a private reading program in 10th grade to try to build my reading speed and comprehension.

My mom tried as well. I know I used to enjoy our trips to the youth wing of the Troy Public Library, even if, after playing that old floppy disk computer game that let users create a face, I usually came home with only a Reading Rainbow-approved book and a hand puppet (we were really into puppets). And my mom tells me that, as a child, she couldn’t stop me from reading. I just read and read and read. I even read to my little brothers. Hearing that lends a near-tragic air to the present story of my life.

Scattered throughout my memories of English class are stale composition formulas, tiresome busywork exercises, and forced observation of symbolism without any meaningful interpretation. In elementary school we studied grammar and syntax like it would someday save our lives. In sixth grade I was asked to write a story about the future, and all I could think of (all that seemed relevant) was a Christmas list of futuristic toys. In seventh grade I was told that a paragraph starts with a topic sentence, continues with three to five related sentences, ends with a summarizing sentence, and transitions well to the next paragraph. In high school I learned how to compose a variety of verses, yet gained no commanding sense of what made something poetic. And in 12 AP I read Dante’s Inferno without ever getting the impression that it was a reflection of individual psychology. It seemed to be an outdated description of the horrific place to which naughty little Catholics would surely be delivered (so much for separation of church and state…).

The first dim beacon of light came in middle school, when we started the nationwide program known as Wordmasters. It was some kind of sadistic system designed to prepare us for the S.A.T. test. We literally studied lists of words, looked up definitions in clunky dictionaries, and then worked through analogy sets. And while that sounds painful (it…was…very…painful), I somehow came out of the experience with a newfound love of words – mostly long, complicated words that I hadn’t heard people use in conversation. Of course, when we were told to look for those special words out in real life and then report them to the teacher, I first found “imminent” in the film Return of the Jedi. (The Emperor says something about the “imminent demise” of Luke’s rebel friends.)

After that it was clear that words – certain words, arranged in a certain way – do have a power and music that were previously hidden from me. Through all the textbook bullshit I endured, the power and music were revealed only a handful of times, in The Call of the Wild by Jack London, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Those aren’t the authors or books I’ve credited repeatedly for fueling my inspiration, and they certainly weren’t present in my conscious mind when I started to write. But they were the only evidence I had until the age of 18 that writing and reading could be worthwhile – that there was some purpose to “literature and composition” other than to provide boring schoolwork.

In other words, the institutionalized public school system had allowed no way for me to develop my right brain – the more innovative, “artistic” side of the brain. The schools do cultivate in us a hunger for creative development, for the first six years anyways. Kindergarten through 5th grade are chock full of crayons and Elmer’s glue, cotton balls and popsicle sticks, story time and sing-alongs, and recess, recess, recess. Then you arrive in 6th grade and they start the process of specialization, of robotization, of personal industrialization. Students aren’t allowed outside to run on the playground; they remove the playground altogether! You have to go to six different classes per day instead of remaining in a single room with a surrogate mother. Music, art and foreign language classes become “electives” which are not required curriculum. Even my family’s trips to the youth wing of the public library stopped around that time.

It hit me recently that this education method creates a fractured psyche in the individual. We experience creative bliss – organized at school, spontaneous at home; indoors with video games, outdoors with nature; sometimes by ourselves, other times with friends or family – but then it is forcefully removed. In this way society is designed to withhold a great resource from us, akin to the removal of foreskin in circumcision. The tribe gains power by taking joy from new recruits, shoving them into pre-designed roles, and convincing them that suffering is the path of the righteous. This makes the individual more vulnerable to manipulation as an adult, and more likely to believe that the creative bliss can come from an external source. Hence, why so many people try to buy the bliss, steal the bliss, pray for the bliss, gamble for the bliss, etc. All the while we have an aching feeling that we’ve been duped.

By the mid-2000s more and more people were spending their spare time producing creative work using computers and the Internet. Traditional media organizations saw this and asked, “Where do they get the time?” Well, the average American still watches six hours of TV per day. Chipping away even one or two of those creates a lot of time for spontaneous daily productivity. It seemed that this boom of blogs, YouTube videos and even Facebook applications coincided with an increase in concern over what was happening in the world and how that affected people at individual level. Maybe that was why I wrote a research paper in grad school based on the theory that creating anything online would lead to greater social participation or civic efficacy.

Really the theory was an altered version of a broader belief (later rounded out by the ideas of Clay Shirky, who has now written two books on the subject): we all have an enormous amount of unused creative energy, and that energy is finally starting to boil over on a mass scale.

These early works are the result of just such a boiling over. In 2005 I kept a consistent online journal on a MySpace blog. In 2006 I started a music blog at Blogger.com and wrote album and concert reviews. In 2007, upon arriving at MSU’s School of Journalism, I started the MusicEdge section at Spartanedge.com and tried my hand at being a music reporter. I attempted to freelance write for magazines and alternative weeklies in Michigan and Chicago. Behind the scenes I worked on fiction, since that was always my long-term goal in writing. I’ve included two fictional stories in this collection which were previously unpublished (they were rejected by various literary journals). The first part here, entitled “Sowing Supra Seeds,” is comprised of those early sputters of creativity.

The questions and yearnings left unanswered by an institutionalized science education have lingered with me far longer than my one-time desire to become a doctor.

That part is so named because I felt like I was tending a creative garden, patiently watering saplings and pulling weeds. And then in June of 2008 the giant beanstalk took to the sky when I launched the experimental self-publishing magazine Supraterranean.com. The second part, “A Prolonged Case of Indigestion,” begins there and runs until December of 2009. It contains stories, essays and poems that I self-published on Supraterranean, and also articles from my Refractor blog (originally called the Supraterranean Admin blog) and MusicEdge blog. This phase was essentially a test of what I had been telling myself since 2005 – that it was worthwhile to write no matter what came of it. Of course, it wasn’t until recently that I realized nothing can come of writing unless it’s a byproduct of some other development – a means to the ends of expression and development. Those seeking to “be a writer” as an end in itself seem to be swerving headlong into a brick wall. It’s the whole career mentality that we’ve been brainwashed to endorse. It’s hurting our artistic potential!

The second section also represents my battle to quell the gastric acid accumulating from constant immersion in an absurd world. By 2008 I found that my four basic food groups had become Prilosec, Zantac, Pepto Bismol and Metamucil. I might have called the section “A Prolonged Case of Depression,” but depression isn’t something that happens to your mind and your gastrointestinal tract. (I also could have used the title “A Prolonged Case of Residing in Ann Arbor” – but that didn’t have the same ring to it.)

* * *

While this collection embodies my attempt to figure out why I am compelled to write, it also marks my process of catching up. In order to write or speak, one requires an adequate grasp on vocabulary, grammar and syntax. If one lacks these skills, one is also severely limited in thought. Considering that the school system directly contributed to my ignorance and poor vocabulary, I had quite simply been kept in a state of mental retardation. They killed the will in me to learn and create, and it took a long fucking time for me to resuscitate it.

Whereas I had read four books for pleasure before turning 22 in December of 2004, I’ve read about sixty books in the time since. (I realize that’s still slow by most standards. I now read more quickly, but I’ve developed the time-consuming habit of underlining and taking notes with pencil). And while I had focused on science, Spanish language and psychology in school and college, my independent studying has consisted largely of Existentialism and the fictional work of American iconoclasts. Each year I’ve worked to build up my reading speed and comprehension, not to mention my vocabulary – because doing so allows me to work faster and gather more information. These pursuits also make the writing process more efficient, and advances in thought flow from there.

A third way to describe the period these writings come from is that it was like an alternate dimension into which I had accidentally slipped. In 2005 I had just taken a senior seminar class to finish my Zoology program at the Lyman Briggs School of Michigan State University. The seminar topic was “Nature vs. Nurture,” and we discussed concepts as various as intelligence, language, race and religion – each time trying to discern whether genes or “environmental factors” play a bigger role. I wrote my final research paper on the potential influence of facial imprinting and odor preference in human mating. That same semester I was rejected from veterinary school for the first of two times.

And thus began a long, difficult process of figuring out who I am, what my greater purpose is, and what I intend to do with the ever-shrinking amount of time I have in life. The questions and yearnings left unanswered by an institutionalized science education have lingered with me far longer than my one-time desire to become a doctor. After college I spoke with a “life coach” who explained his belief in an underlying order to the flow of the universe, which I could only interpret as some watered-down ode to a singular, omnipotent god. But he also stated that human beings can gradually ascend into an upward spiral. Only recently have I begun to understand that concept. Currently I think of it as the deconstruction of instinctual life patterns, which result in so much needless suffering. That helps explain the title of this collection, Seeking the Upward Spiral. It’s been a long, painful search that more often felt like navigating a dark tunnel on hands and knees, with an occasional mudslide of despair.

In the process of piecing together the various puzzles, I eventually found myself returning to the study of science. Or more precisely, I stopped letting myself think my background in science was a disadvantage – as if I should have devoted myself to a single field in order to be more successful. It’s now clear that the problem was not mine but society’s, for relying on rigid over-specialization when human beings are capable of so much more. I could no longer afford to stifle my creative potential, and the same will soon be true for people worldwide. On the horizon there are no boundaries between science, culture, technology, history, psychology and philosophy. Those are the topics that have dominated my writing over the past few years, and those are likely the sources I’ll draw upon when synthesizing information in future works.

I realize it must seem a strange idea to self-publish a collection of early works before releasing any primary works. But that is one of many ways in which the realm of publishing will likely change in the coming years. Previously most books weren’t just written; they were molded from a manuscript by a gaggle of editors and literary agents. It seems that this trend worsened in the second half of the 20th century – one of the primary reasons for the withering of literary prowess in the English-speaking world. There’s far too much power concentrated in the publishing institution, most notably in the great fortress of the American Empire: New York City. Now we must once again take full responsibility for our writing. Now we can edit ourselves, if the editing is indeed necessary in the first place. Now we will get to take full creative control over our own creative works.

Still, an early works collection is customarily released later, often only to accentuate whatever the author has done later in life. It’s almost a pat on the back that says, “You’ve improved – good job!” Mine may someday demonstrate how I have transformed as a writer or as an artist. I certainly included some pieces that are far from what I consider to be my best work. My real goal here is to provide an open and honest account of my personal creative evolution. For now it also stands as a challenge to myself to keep learning, changing, growing – and then to watch in wonder as new and unexpected developments arise, perhaps in the form of words.

I myself have thoroughly enjoyed gathering and sculpting the work for this collection. And I expect that it will say much about the path I am going to plot in the years to come.

For more information on the e-book “Seeking the Upward Spiral,” please visit the new Books page.

*Graphic created using the image “Realization of Mind” by GollyGforce on Flickr.)

View The Self-Directed Initiation of a Writer at Supraterranean

(photo by van_mij on Flickr*)

As the country continues to battle the Great Repression in hopes of reinvigorating the economy, the most enlightening recovery efforts could come in very unexpected forms. And Michigan, the country’s “poster boy” for economic failure and civic chaos, may be more open than some states to experimentation. In November 2008, 63 percent of Michigan citizens voted in favor of allowing the use of medical marijuana by patients who have been approved by a doctor and registered with the state. Eighteen months later, the Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH) has approved more than 17,000 patients and 7,500 caregivers for registration cards.¹

There’s still a notable taboo to overcome, but the speed at which medical marijuana is becoming a normal, accepted treatment is thrilling to me, a baby of the War on Drugs (a “war” that has actually been going on for 95 years, since the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914). The sudden overturn of mass opinion is, I think, the most interesting thing about this development. It seems to be the first instance in my lifetime when so many people have decided for themselves, disregarding mandates and overcoming brainwashing long dished out by the federal government.

The notion that the government can and should take care of everything might finally be losing its longtime dominance.

Perhaps we as citizens started to recognize too many parallels between the drug war and the ongoing “War on Terror.” Both are absurd political measures intended more to control a population than to achieve any social goal. These “wars” create far too much collateral damage, make criminals out of innocent people, and compromise the rights we are supposedly guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.

What’s even more notable is the indication that people don’t believe the federal government will get us out of this mess. The notion that the government can and should take care of everything might finally be losing its longtime dominance. As the eminent psychologist C.G. Jung explained in his 1957 book The Undiscovered Self, in a culture of mass opinion,

“…individual judgment grows increasingly uncertain of itself and that responsibility is collectivized as much as possible… The State in particular has turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it. Thus the constitutional State drifts into the situation of a primitive form of society, namely the communism of a primitive tribe where everybody is subject to the autocratic rule of a chief or an oligarchy.” ²

The irony in that statement is that communism has now been made into a dirty word, when in fact the psychological effect of the American executive mandate is little different than what occurred in the failed communist states. What we assume to be a free society, the celebrated home the “free market,” is actually a highly controlled system run by politicians, religious leaders and corporations – with advertisers, marketers and lobbyists playing supporting roles.

What’s Changing

In January I attended the first ever Caregiver’s Cup at a hotel and conference center in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The “medicine judging” contest was canceled due to legal concerns, but the two days of seminars were carried out rather successfully.  For a mere $25, anyone could hear lectures by lawyers, MDCH representatives, professors and activists; one could sit in on classes with master growers, hydroponics experts and electrical engineers. I was blown away by the willingness of attendees to exercise their right to gather peacefully, educate themselves, contribute to the discussion, and help one another. In fact, it was the exact kind of thing that, a few decades back, would have given nightmares to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

The fact that we live in a post-ideological world has not yet made itself known to all, but it’s telling that so many people are beginning to use their own power of reflection and choice. Many individuals at the January conference had a fresh clarity in their eyes – as if they had just shed years’ worth of propaganda from their lives, like layers of fur not shaken off after many winters. It reminded me of the documentary Jesus Camp, which follows Christian children on their parent-enforced path of indoctrination. Throughout the process, one can witness a flicker of incredulity in their eyes, an undeniable gut feeling that they’re being fed pure bullshit – that each is being molded into a clockwork orange.

Once again, this follows from phenomena recognized decades ago by Jung (among others in psychology and literature). “The individual is increasingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed and educated as a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit, and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleasure and satisfaction to the masses.” ³ Of course, if you tell people they should do something, that they must fulfill their personal responsibility, what happens? Well… Rage Against the Machine is what happens.

But with this medical marijuana law, the people of Michigan have a chance to do something because they decided it isn’t wrong, and it could actually be a positive contribution to society and a way to help neighbors and communities. Michigan hasn’t yet seen the opening of dispensaries, and that possibility has created concern among those who hope to work independently as patient caregivers. After all, part of the excitement behind this law is the potential to turn around the state’s dour economy by decreasing unemployment.

The people of Michigan have a chance to do something because they decided it isn’t wrong, and it could actually be a positive contribution to society and a way to help neighbors and communities.

Yet non-profit dispensaries – which would allow patients safe access to medicine and provide tax money to communities – might be a more stable option overall. As prominent Detroit lawyer and medical marijuana specialist Matthew Abel suggested at the Caregiver’s Cup, we have the choice to either follow Los Angeles, which has no system of organization or regulation for its hundreds of dispensaries, or Oakland, which has an established district that contributes to the betterment of the surrounding neighborhood and the city as a whole through taxes.

Furthermore, in November the citizens of California will vote on a ballot that could legalize cannabis possession and cultivation for adults over 21. If that passes, commercial sales could provide the state with tax revenues in the range of $1 billion.⁴

This movement suggests that much more of what happens in this country should be decided at the local level. Regular people – some with very little education and most of whom previously felt a lack of social efficacy – are realizing how much they can do as individuals. The “cannabis colleges” offer short programs in the ballpark of $500, but most people can get by with advice from a grow supply store and The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower’s Bible by Jorge Cervantes.

Through this process, many will become fluent in hydroponic growing techniques, a current focus of NASA and others who recognize the terrible inadequacy of our agricultural system. The very same methods for growing medical marijuana in one’s basement will likely be used in the future for growing food crops year-round, instead of just as a backyard summer hobby. Throughout American history, this kind of self-reliance has been celebrated in theory but not often practiced. The cheapest setups require little more than pots, soil and a high-pressure sodium light fixture. And all the detrimental effects of mass-scale agriculture (i.e. animal waste, overuse of fertilizers) and food transportation (i.e. air pollution, costly middlemen) are completely removed. The next step could be an aquaculture system where the plants clean water for fish, which in turn provide nutrients (as bio-waste) for the plants – all happening within your own home.

Additionally, this shift coincides with a growing distrust in the medical institution and pharmaceutical industry. Year after year, these companies pawn off dangerous substances on an unsuspecting public (after testing them out on people in third-world countries) because they have a proprietary monopoly on the socially acceptable drugs. But cannabis is a natural substance that can be grown at home, is often more effective than the pharmaceutical option, and has zero adverse side effects or possibility of overdose. Whereas prescription drugs are implicated in approximately 32,000 deaths in the U.S. every year, marijuana has never been the primary cause of a single mortality.⁵

Actually the one known side effect is uncontrollable gut laughter, which is appropriate if one considers the implications of this movement. Here we have a way to fight against the invisible power structures in our society – a tactic that many desperately search for day in and day out. Yet it’s not a resort to some worn-out or violent concept of revolution (like jihad, for example); it’s a consummation of our American freedom and the duty of individual responsibility that was always supposed to accompany it. (It makes me laugh, at least.)

And Michigan isn’t alone here; 13 other states have passed some kind of medical marijuana law. As the middle class lifestyle quickly vanishes and no sign of relief appears on the horizon, we will all gain a new sense of what role the individual plays in society. The old conception of top-down Capitalism as the guiding force, the best possible economic system, is irreconcilably dead.

How wonderfully appropriate that one of the first manifestations of this burgeoning New Way is based around an ancient plant – the natural embodiment of growth and productivity – which for so long has represented a rejection of that cold, rotten system, a system which implicitly denies the very ideas of the individual freedom, responsibility and growth.

In short, we asked for medicine. Nature has provided it. We would do well to follow her lead.

NOTES:
¹ “Medical Marihuana Program.” Michigan Department of Community Health. Accessed on 6/6/10. http://www.michigan.gov/mdch/0,1607,7-132-27417_51869—,00.html
² Jung, C.G. The Undiscovered Self. 1957. Signet: New York, 2006. pp. 15-16.
³ Jung, C.G. The Undiscovered Self. p. 12.
⁴ Gonzales, Richard. “California Voters Could Legalize Pot in November.” NPR. Accessed on 6/6/10. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125184608
⁵ “Annual Causes of Death in the U.S.” Drug War Facts. Accessed on 6/6/10. http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/node/30

*Click here to see original photo.

View Medical Marijuana as a Force for Individual Responsibility at Supraterranean

When George W. Bush hitched a ride on a Navy S-3B Viking and landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare an end to major combat operations in Iraq, there was more at work than just slick PR. Bush, who was visibly thrilled by the experience, enabled the American public to vicariously share in the excitement of an aircraft carrier landing. All around the country, viewing audiences reveled in his machismo display of technology.

This worship of militarism has become such an integral part of pop culture that even the occasional peacenik can’t help but ohh and ahh at air shows and flyovers. When those pinnacles of technological prowess zoom past faster than the speed of sound, the victims of their weaponry are instantly forgotten. This shouldn’t surprise us. Ever since recognizing the danger of so-called “Vietnam Syndrome,” the military-industrial complex, with the help of the entertainment industry, has been sanitizing and glorifying weapons of war. And with today’s coalescence of cutting-edge toys, video games, movies, and reality TV, warfare has never been so enthralling.

All I Want for Christmas

The wargasms start young. Many of us have fond memories of those little green army men or afternoons spent playing with G.I. Joes. But with the advent of the “war on terror,” demand for militarized toys reached a fevered pitch that bordered on absurdity. For the first time, playthings were being designed to fit within the backdrop of current conflicts. One of the most notorious examples of this involved the “Forward Command Post.” Released in time for Christmas 2002, the toy was a bombed-out dollhouse transformed into a makeshift base. Consumer outcry soon led to its discontinuance, but the rollout of similar ultra-realistic toys continued undaunted.

These toys completely obliterated the line between make-believe and reality.

There was the “Battle Command Post Two-Story Headquarters” — another civilian home turned battle station — and action figures modeled after military units serving in Afghanistan or Iraq. Militarized teddy-bears became popular, including the “Shock and Awe” twin bear set. And to top it off, September 2003 saw the release of “Elite Force Aviator: George W. Bush” — a 12″ tall poseable “recreation of the Commander-in-Chief’s appearance during his historic Aircraft Carrier landing” — allowing kids to act out the publicity stunt at home. Not to be outdone, in 2006 the Army released it’s own custom line of “Real Heroes” figurines. These toys completely obliterated the line between make-believe and reality by depicting actual soldiers that had served in the occupation of Iraq.

The Military-Nintendo Complex

Action figures are all well and good, but they don’t come close to the thrill of a shoot ‘em up video game. While electronic games based around modern military conflict, such as 2003′s Conflict Desert Storm II: Back to Baghdad, seem inevitable, now a revolutionary online game called Kuma/War allows participants to play out televised war events just days after they air. Highlights include missions that recreated the killing of Saddam Hussein’s sons and the U.S. raid on Fallujah. Before indulging in fantasies of gunning down insurgents in Iraq, players are briefed with news clippings and the advice of real military officers.

“Kuma/War enables consumers to experience actual missions of real soldiers in the war on terror,” said Keith Halper, CEO of Kuma Reality Games. “Players have to devise the tactics and make the hard choices in some of the most important events of our time. For our subscribers, we make the headlines real.”

Perhaps more insidious than this complete merger of current events and virtual warfare is the burgeoning relationship between game designers and the military itself. This reciprocal interchange came to a head in 1999 with the founding of the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). The ICT, launched in California with a $50 million budget donated by the U.S. Army, was designed to link up the military with the entertainment and videogame industries. The result was whirlwind of projects intended to be commercially viable while dually serving as combat simulators for soldiers. Titles developed with the ICT include Rainbow 6: Rogue Spear and Full Spectrum Warrior (the Army’s version is called Full Spectrum Command), both of which went on to become major financial successes. The Marines followed suit with the commercial release of one of their simulators under the moniker Close Combat: First to Fight. But the ultimate manifestation of this war game revolution came in the form of America’s Army. Developed with $5 million in U.S. tax dollars, America’s Army was released by the U.S. Army in 2002 as a completely free, interactive recruiting tool — marketing war as the perfect leisure time activity.

From Silver Screen to Glowing Box

Putting a pretty face on global conflict can’t be fully realized without the help of “liberal” Hollywood. In November of 2001, presidential advisor Karl Rove led a series of closed door meetings with executives and directors from Tinseltown in order to ensure that any depictions of the “war on terror” would be adequately patriotic. There was really nothing new here — ever since WWII, Hollywood has allowed the military to modify its scripts in order to gain access to expertise and equipment, and films like Top Gun (1986) and Behind Enemy Lines (2001) have served as overt recruitment commercials.

“The former head of the Marine Corps film office, Matt Morgan, he told me he joined the military after seeing Top Gun,” said David Robb, author of Operation Hollywood, in an interview with Mother Jones. “People are going off to war and getting killed, in part because of some movie that they saw that was adjusted by the military.”

“People are going off to war and getting killed, in part because of some movie that they saw that was adjusted by the military.”

But a new medium is capable of making militarism seem even more enticing: reality TV. The patriotic fervor of the post-9/11 environment led to collaborations between numerous TV channels, Hollywood directors, and the entertainment liaisons (yes, they actually have these) of each branch of the armed forces. TBS produced War Games, Fox produced Bootcamp, USA produced Combat Missions, and CBS produced American Fighter Pilot. In 2002, ABC upped the ante by teaming up with the Pentagon, producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun, Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor), and reality TV guru Bertram Van Munster (Cops, The Amazing Race) to create Profiles From the Front Line — a sanitized reality soap that followed soldiers in Afghanistan with cameras. The show, which Bruckheimer described as “a salute to our military,” aired from February to March of 2003 and became the basis of the phenomenon called “embedded reporting.”

War and Entertainment, Synthesized

Thanks to the embedding of journalists within military units, the invasion of Iraq played out like a scripted, edge-of-your-seat action movie. Americans were treated to planned spectacles such as the “rescue” of Jessica Lynch (which later spawned the made-for-TV drama Saving Private Lynch) and the “spontaneous” toppling of Saddam’s statue — events that were nothing more than masterful manipulations of the media by the U.S military. Any reports of the real costs of war were glossed over in favor of statistical breakdowns on the armaments used by Coalition Forces. Anchors like NBC’s John Elliot would gleefully show off the latest bombs and fighting vehicles, complete with CG animations of the weapons in action. It seemed war had simply become a testing ground for our favorite testosterone-inducing toys.

The mass-media has replaced the brutality of humanity’s most gruesome endeavor with unadulterated techno-fetishism. Military recruitment ads have latched onto this obsession and now focus almost exclusively on the gadgets and gizmos of war — appealing to the child within. But how are potential recruits going to make an informed choice when the war they’re familiar with is nothing more than a game without any real life consequences? It’s time to remember that even if make-believe war can be fun as hell, real war is anything but.

This essay appeared previously on Supraterranean in July 2009 and was originally published by Thirdeye Magazine on 7/4/07.

View Techno-fetishism at Supraterranean

I grew up under the impression that there are a select few people – or even a “one and only” person – to whom anyone could surrender their romantic sensibilities. It turns out that’s not true. Most people will have sex with, date, or even marry someone without being very attracted to them, interested in their personality, impressed by their ambitions and priorities, or connected on some deeper level.

While I came of age under the influence of Catholicism, animated Disney films, and warm-and-fuzzy sitcoms, the rest of Western civilization apparently had different forces acting upon it, leading people to function by codes that I often find bizarre and alienating. To me it always seemed that there was some meaning to the way things happened – not necessarily that everything was predetermined, but that everything undoubtedly happened for a reason. I entertained a certain element of fate or destiny, based largely on the idea that there’s a perfect someone “out there” for all of us, and finding (or holding onto) the person would ensure lifelong happiness.

I now realize that this is one of the major internal battles I’ve been fighting over the past four to five years – ever since my first long-term relationship ended. If there is no “one and only,” then there is no meaning. If there is no fate, there is only chaos and disorder – in other words, the inescapability of the bar scene, the meat market… my worst nightmare.

Marc Webb’s film (500) Days of Summer got me thinking about this again, because it reminded me of some of my own experiences. The character Summer shares a number of eerie similarities with girls I’ve known over the years. Certain moments seem torn from my own memory, which I think I can relay here without spoiling much because, as the filmmakers announce at the start, “this is not a love story.”

Watching (500) Days made me think, more than anything, that I’ve been very closed-off to life over the past two years or so. But my “coming of age” process involved the ceremonial killing of nearly every dream I had espoused since childhood.

At the end of the film, the characters Summer and Tom are talking about how she met a new guy soon after the end of their relationship. He says, “You could have told me,” as if he would have tried to divert her. She says not to think of it that way because “it was meant to be” – she was supposed to end up with the new guy. She doesn’t extend it to fate or God or anything like that. She simply says that she could have been at a different place that day, or chosen not to leave home – but she went to a specific restaurant or store, and met the new romantic interest. Ultimately she had never felt sure about Tom, so there was no way it could have worked out. That doesn’t mean she wanted to hurt him, or that what they experienced together was meaningless to her.

*     *     *

I’m torn on this analysis and its broader implications. Part of my recent thoughts on the topic of suicide stem from a feeling that there is no order, purpose, or meaning to life at all. This was the culmination of a few years spent privately studying Existentialism. But the only place that leads is a dead end – a grim, hopeless vacuum, in which even the idea that our actions can provide meaning seems to be a lie. We have to die eventually – we don’t have to live. We didn’t chose to be brought here, but we do, in a sense, have the choice to stay or leave.

But another part of me feels that life’s a privilege, and, as Camus relayed from Nietzsche in The Myth of Sisyphus, it does seem to be worthwhile in spite of the fundamental absurdity. It’s just much harder to transfer that word – “absurd” – into the context of the real world and still be able to accept that statement.

What I mean is that there’s very little margin between the notion that things happen as they were meant to, and a belief in fate or a higher power. When I survey our society, I find very little evidence for things happening in a meaningful or just way. But I find millions of people devoted to mass creeds (i.e. monotheistic religions), people who insist that things happen according to God’s plan. I don’t intend to enter upon a religious discussion, only to point out that it might be impossible to lay claim to any meaning without going all the way.

Yet I feel conflicted. Watching (500) Days made me think, more than anything, that I’ve been very closed-off to life over the past two years or so. My “coming of age” process involved the ceremonial killing of nearly every dream I had espoused since childhood. I tried to re-focus my career path, but knew all along that it would be a compromise – that the budding urge to write, to dedicate my life to creative work, expression and truth would eventually consume my entire being. As I progress through my twenties, I become more isolated, dejected and lonely. But I am progressing down that creative path – I can’t deny that. And I found love again, though I’ve struggled to convince myself that someone could actually put up with my quirks indefinitely.

Despite my cold and bitter aura of late, (500) Days stoked a dull cinder inside me that I thought had most certainly been extinguished. Tom’s jaw-dropped expression when Summer says she likes the Smiths, his celebratory (choreographed) dance scene out by the fountain, the cityscape he designs as a monument to his lost love – all of that made me tingle, whether the moment was delightful or bittersweet. I cried repeatedly throughout the latter half of the film. The first time was when Feist’s “Mushaboom” finally made its way into an indie romance flick (her album Let It Die miraculously held my spirits afloat during troubled times in 2006). But my tear ducts weren’t emptying just because I related to Tom’s romantic yearnings and broken-hearted desperation. Nor was I bawling simply because Summer reminded me of females I’ve had feelings for who, to varying extents, were guarded or hesitant.

In short, this film made me miss feeling completely and utterly alive. I think the sensation is usually described as the loss of innocence, but somehow that doesn’t fit here. I don’t think innocence is necessarily lacking in the many adults (at least, other than by extrapolation to society as a whole) who have retreated from the outer world, safeguarded by their beliefs, their televisions, and the locks on their door. In the zombie-fied glare that dominates most of our so-called activity, I don’t see a gap of innocence; I see the slow victory of death, mashed together with untended guilt and regret. The other popular explanation most would offer is that this is what it means to “grow up.” I’m not convinced by that either, mostly because of the persisting juvenile state in which the human race has currently settled.

* * *

Certain visionary writers and spiritual leaders have suggested that it’s possible to reinvigorate that state of heightened awareness and persist in an appreciation for the privilege of life. (500) Days forced me, through pure emotional assault, to consider that prospect in my own life. Yes, the hardships are ridiculous, the world does seem to be getting worse instead of steadily progressing, and some days I’m glad I don’t have a loaded gun in my home. But there’s still love, there’s still music, babies still laugh, daffodils still sprout early each spring, and Orion still dons his diamond-studded belt each clear winter night.

Romanticism doesn’t work as an ideology, a paradigm to understand all the workings of our civilization. Furthermore, our culture has lost most of its faith in the romantic pursuit, cordoning it off to mass-marketed movies, sitcoms and paperback books. Perhaps this is just my way of not ruling out something that felt so true earlier in my life. Though I can’t deny that it’s been present all along, albeit in a subdued, damaged form. And in a way all the strife, loathing and bloodshed seem to happen in response to our romantic ideals not manifesting themselves automatically.

Maybe the romantic spirit is still a worthwhile aspect of Western culture (or of human nature) – maybe we’ve just lost track of it. It could be that the last decade was a painful but necessary transitioning period, a pessimistic winter extending from the nuclear winter that was never consummated by the Cold War. It seems every day there are signs of a greater awareness of humanity, fostered largely by the Internet and, to a lesser extent, by psychoactive drugs. People seem to have a sturdier conviction that we are here for good and there will be no exit, nor any sanctuary.

Now our only task it to build the garden that’s been stuck in our collective dreams, the one that has always seemed to be our lost place of origin, not our imminent destination. That nagging sense of guilt we’ve felt for millennia – that is surmountable. Just as Tom longs to regain his love with Summer, we lament the loss of the summers of our youth, the season wholly representative of innocence. But like Tom did, we’ll inevitably see that the innocence was never gone, that its loss was an illusion – a temporary injury, perhaps one that encourages adaptivity in us. That insight is how Tom opens his heart to a woman named Autumn – a simple enough plot device, but one that’s all too relevant. After all, to see the purity of human life once summer has passed it to recognize that the purity is an inextricable part of what it means to be alive.

* * *

I’m still not convinced that any of this is preordained. I think of it more in terms of a natural progression. It’s the way of our evolution. If not, we would have blown each other up by now. What I’m suggesting is the possibility that Summer was right, that the outcome of their love was meant to be. Even the most secular of scientists could admit that natural processes happen in the world with total disregard as to our foresight or comprehension. What’s required is a willingness to open oneself up, time and time again, in the face of disaster and adversity. Then maybe our notion of the romantic will be transformed from a joke to an actual possibility, with all the layers of false beliefs stripped away to expose the core aspect of humanity that lies therein.

That thought is best represented in the film by a classic Smiths’ song – the one playing on Tom’s headphones when the main characters first connect. Since it was written in 1986, the song has revived an endless number of shriveled hearts, thanks largely to Morrissey’s calming British croon and his repeated declaration: “There is a light that never goes out.”

So here’s hoping it never does.

View The Light That Never Goes Out at Supraterranean

After further investigation and research, I realized that all of the events I had witnessed amounted to nothing more than a systematic human rights violation and a financial scam of monumental and criminal proportions.

Workers washing needles under tap water only to be reused again. Medicine and other vital items being store for months on end, expiring and eventually still applied sporadically to patients. Volunteers with little or no training carrying out dangerous work on patients with highly contagious cases of Tuberculosis, leprosy and other life threatening illnesses, while the workers of the charity patently refuse to accept and implement machinery and equipment that would safely automate processes and save lives.

In short, they are there to move people to their deaths rather than actually looking for ways to fix the problem that is poverty.

It was Mother Teresa’s own admission during an interview that more than 23,000 people had died in the halls of one of the missions home; boasting at the number if you will and missing entirely the point of the enormous compilation of unnecessary deaths.

Not once in its sixty year history, have the Missionaries of Charity reported the money they’ve taken in donations, what percentage they use for administration and where the rest has been applied and how. Since its inception, defectors of the organization and other journalists have placed the figure upwards of one billion dollars and counting. The mission currently operates 450 plus homes and maintains an average of 4,000 workers.

If any other organization did this systematically for six decades, there would be arrests and criminal charges; so why the exception here?

Many followers of Mother Teresa and her charity have irrationally argued in her defense while completely ignoring the ACTUAL deaths caused by the organization which in it of itself is quite troubling. While I agree that poverty is ugly, grueling and heartbreaking and it won’t go away in two months or a year I have also seen how easy it is for many to swipe a credit card or send a check and in return spend hours claiming the good that’s done with it but in this case, it couldn’t be more inaccurate.

Mother Teresa herself had also repeatedly admitted that she was not a social worker, and her followers continue to assert the same. So under what motives do they tend to the poor you may ask? The mantra of the operation rests solely on the belief that suffering and poverty are ways of loving god, something that when explained to even people of faith makes no sense at all! In short, they are there to move people to their deaths rather than actually looking for ways to fix the problem that is poverty.

I have started a group on Facebook and I am also currently working on other projects to denounce the Missionaries of Charity and their work and bring worldwide attention to the acts committed by them on daily basis. I strongly believe that as humans we most help our fellow humans in need with 100% transparency and not in return of those we help having to agree with whatever spiritual path we may choose.

Continuing to air these facts about Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity and organizations like hers bring attention to the fraud and manipulation that exists and helps point good people everywhere to other charities that work to empower men, women and children in need the world over.

View The Real Work of Mother Teresa and Her Followers at Supraterranean