Why You Can’t Find the Truth Online

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Do you remember the world before the internet? I do, and the people in it were smarter than they are today. Considerably. When the internet was a brand new thing, and we all rushed to check it out with our dial-up connection and 56k modem, it promised to make us smarter. Remember that? The internet was going to make us all smarter, make our democracy more responsive to the will of the people, and bring us together to help us understand each other’s differences while we unraveled the mysteries of the universe together with science and technology. Do you remember that bullshit?

In reality, people started getting dumber right away. By the turn of the century the process was well underway. Today, well, look around. To call it “idiocy” would insult honest idiots everywhere. It’s more like an explosion of pernicious depravity and small-mindedness of every kind. The internet did…

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Shamanic Trance Groove

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Photon Transport Theory from Shamanic Trance Groove by John Hardin

Our ancestors practiced Shamanism. Before Christ, Mohamed, Buddha or L. Ron Hubbard, humanity was guided, for tens of thousands of years, by the prophetic visions of certain, “touched” individuals. Some shamans experienced visions involuntarily, others sought these visions, sometimes through feats of extreme endurance, often by ingesting specific plant or fungal allies. In these altered states of consciousness, shamans communed with the gods directly, and they viewed these visions as their sacred guiding light, which they, literally, carved into stone.

Civilized people did their level best to exterminate shamans and shamanic people wherever they encountered them, and civilized people encountered shamanic cultures everywhere they went looking for new resources to exploit. Those efforts were largely successful. Today, laws prohibit most plant and fungal allies and the visions they induce are derided as “hallucinations,” “psychotic delusions,” and “madness.” Many people who…

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Saving Santa Claus

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My partner, Amy Gustin had a great idea the other day. This is not at all unusual for her. A lot of my columns begin with one of her great ideas. The other day, Amy was perusing some books about the cave paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet while contemplating the flora and fauna of Ice Age Europe, and speculating about the Paleolithic origins of certain pagan European Christmas symbols, when she said this: “Environmentalists should take over Christmas.”

“What?” I replied.

She explained that a lot of European pagan Christmas symbols celebrate the Boreal Forest and an arctic climate. We have Christmas trees. Christmas is the only time of year when snow is popular, and Santa lives at the North Pole and gets around on a sled pulled by caribou. All of these things remind us of the arctic, and they should remind us that the arctic is undergoing dramatic…

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