OMG...where did all those hundreds of cool links go?
Well...I have changed my policy on promoting other people's sites. It is now on a quid pro quo basis...sort of:
I now have 2 links pages on this site: the public links page, which is this one, and the "hidden" one.
The "hidden" links page has a huge amount of links to various sites, most of which have a couple things in common: they don't link back to my site and/or they have never really shown any support for my efforts as an artist or activist. It still exists mainly because I use it myself, but there is no link in to it on this site that any random stranger can click on to find it.
To explain (assuming you did not read my rant on the INDEX page): For most of my life and musical career, I felt that it was imperative to get as much "higher order" information out to the world as possible, as we seemed to be at a crossroads where the choices we made as a civilization would determine our future viability as a species. I tried to do this through my songs, my writings, my activism, volunteering, personal contacts, blogging, posting on forums, donating to causes I believed in, and annoying my friends and coworkers...pretty much every way imaginable.
I have just retired from all of this.
At this point I think it is obvious that we have made those choices. The die is cast. What was once preventable is now inevitable...and if you are like most people out there, thoughtlessly consuming away in the last death throes of the consumer-culture that has infected almost the entire planet like a global case of syphilis, you have only yourself to blame for what you will experience in the next few years. Congratulations. Happy birthday.
The world has increasingly embraced a model of exponential growth of population and consumption. This will end badly as it is a model that neither works "on paper" or in reality. The planet is not capable of sustaining 6.7 billion people, no matter how clever we are at dumping petrochemicals in the ground in increase crop yields or how much water we divert from it's natural source so idiots who chose to live in deserts can have a suburban lawn to mow. Because humanity has proven to be incapable of moderating it's own behavior to accommodate the long term interests of both itself and nature, nature will be doing the moderating for us...and nature, in its pure form, has no sentiment, no ethics, no sense of fair play, and does not recognize "universal human rights".
Nature owes you nothing.
Until recently, I felt that it was important to share the hundreds of sites that used to have a little home on this part of my own site, despite the fact that 95% of them never returned the favor of my promotion of their own sites and work by even linking back to me. That was OK as long as I still had some hope that our collective choices could change our outcome. I now think it is too late, so my attempts to inform and enlighten "the masses" are over. Now, the only people I care to share information with are the people who are evolved enough to proactively seek it out for themselves, and this I now do privately and out of the public eye.
To belabor the point (and to whine a bit more), one of the biggest letdowns of my career has been how so many "luminaries" in various "movements" have given my artistic work and activism so little consideration. For an artist who has been trying to spread the word on Resource Depletion, Climate Change, Civil Rights, the Environment, etc., for 30 years, most of the time that I've tried to network with these people and make them aware of my own efforts in these areas I have run up against a big brick wall. It is easy to understand why my work never became wildly popular with "the masses": I offer the opposite of escapism. What took me a while to understand was why I got so much resistance from people who also claimed to be "fighting the good fight" of trying to raise consciousness of various issues of global importance.
Over the past decade or so it finally sank in to my resistant little brain just how much our biological programming dictates the majority of our behaviors, even in those "culturally-enlightened" people and groups allegedly dedicated to making the world a better place. As it turns out, even people seemingly devoted to altruism are held sway by the biological imperative of claiming and maintaining their "alpha-status"...generally to the determent of whatever amount of "good work" they might do between creating factions and divisions, forming temporary allegiances, and finding disparaging things to say and write about their rivals.
You see this behavior in all movements from Environmentalism to frigging Ufology. It is ridiculous...and it is perfectly natural. (And it is yet another reason I have given up hope. Despite centuries of art, music, philosophy and all the other lofty outcroppings of civilization, we are really still only feces-flinging monkeys...even the best and brightest of us. How will we ever prevail against this march to our own extinction if so much of our behavior is motivated by the primal drive to prove which monkey in the crowd has the largest penis? )
So it became apparent to me that
it was the exceptionally rare selfless individual who was interested in truly
being of service to the world, and that even the majority of people involved in
the various movements I have been philosophically aligned with were more
concerned about selling books or asserting their position in the pecking order
then REALLY coming together (despite differences of nuance and detail) to make a
difference. And with that understanding came a new level of despair: I
realized that I had to either become a "minion" of some "alpha" or develop an
"alpha-status" myself to become a "voice that is heard"...and in the end it
means that I either serve to bolster someone else's ego-based sham or fabricate
my own fortress of self-aggrandizing bulls**t and find my own mindless flock of
"sheeple" to follow me...
and I refuse to do either!
I refuse to be
anyone's follower (if their REAL cause is to elevate themselves) and I refuse to
create my OWN cult of personality either. Because neither path will
ultimately make a difference in the way that I want to make a difference: to
help prevent humanity from destroying the planet and themselves.
So I give up, basically, as human nature seems to dictate that there is no third path available. If I am not part of the coming "die-off", I will watch it from afar with a keening sadness...because I will know that we have reached this point not just because of what we have DONE, but also because of what we ARE.
Anyway...
The sites below have either been helpful to me as an artist, host my songs, have shown their personal friendship and encouragement, or were actually motivated enough to take the 2-3 minutes it takes to add a link back to this site. This is my way of thanking them. If I find more, I'll add them.