Humpjones

Posted Nov 30, 2011

When my friend told me that the sperm bank rejected him because he was a redhead, I’ll admit it, I laughed at him. Of course, that’s when I still thought he was kidding...once I realized he was serious, I nearly had a cardiac event because I was howling so hard.

The business in question was Cryos International, one of the largest Spooge Repositories in the privatized world. Their founder and media man, who has the curious name Ole Schou, claims that they’re currently sitting on a stock of redhead donors and the only demand for that product comes from Ireland. “There are too many redheads in relation to demand,” says Schou—a quote heard round the world.

Like any catchy story, once you examine the details it all falls apart. Debunking is cheap, though, and my interests lie elsewhere, as always. So let’s get the objectivity out of the way quick: like most news stories in 2011, The Great Ginger Sperm Scandal is 100% bullshit. Despite being picked up by every major news service, there’s basically nothing to it. Everything we read and talk about is cheap lies from dumb publicists, though...hopefully that’s not news to you.

As it turns out Cryos International does want redheads, especially in their United States division—Schou was merely talking about his native Denmark. Naturally, he was quoted out of context by a lazy writer and the claim was sensationalized into catchy headline by a lazy editor, and the fabricated story was repeated, thousands of times over, by lazy websites and newspapers. As Cryos New York spokesmammal Ty Kaliski enthuses: “We want diversity. I want redheads, I want Asians, Hispanics, African Americans, Caucasians...” You can almost hear Kaliski trailing off and half-heartedly adding the afterthought of “Caucasians” even though he knew nobody would believe him.

From the global empire of Cryos to the darkly hilarious scam known as Sperm Direct Limited, one thing that nobody in the sperm business wants at this point is more Caucasian juice. There’s a universal shortage of black and asian donors, and although Uncle Hump is far too wise to stoop to trying to analyze that, feel free to take that little factoid and go hog wild, kids. I present it simply as business advice: whoever figures out how to change that is gonna get rich.

You see, “Fertility Industry” is one of the last Wild West autonomous zones in American capitalism and it has been evolving with terrifying speed. The sheer free market momentum of it all is about to carry us from consumer wonderland straight into sci-fi dystopia territory. In all likelihood, we are already there.

Infinitely Weird

Let’s start with one of the most interesting numbers, the foundational fact that keeps all this money changing hands: 15% of all couples under 50 are infertile. Almost 50 years after the publication of Silent Spring, it’s no secret that this is thanks to processed foods, industrial pollution and environmental toxins. (Feel free to argue otherwise in the comments section.) When you look at world population through this lens, you might realize that we’re actually quite lucky that our current numbers are hovering at only seven billion. There is a certain terrible beauty to the self-regulating nature of Nature, even when the blade is aimed directly at you and me.

Why dwell on the past, though? Given the accelerating pace and density of our technological suicide, a 15% infertility rate will be the Good Old Days in a single generation’s time. This is a growth market in the worst possible sense, but make no mistake, the Fertility Industry is strictly catering to the high-end customers. Technically speaking, this shit is expensive. The problem of poverty will be solved by the problem of infertility...call me a heretic or a quack, but them’s the facts, Pilgrims. Better yet, there’s not a single fucking thing you can do about it.

So, on to the Capitalism part. You may not be able to have kids without birth defects, but you can certainly make money in the meantime. The Fertility Industry is wide open...just don’t dwell on that visual too long. As per Naomi Cahn and Wendy Kramer:

“The United States has almost no rules when it comes to buying or selling sperm. In fact, no one keeps records on how much sperm is bought or sold, so we don’t even know how big the sperm market really is, or how many babies are born each year through donor sperm.”

Cryos International, the Denmark company who can’t get their policy on redheads straight, claims to have been responsible for 18,878 pregnancies since opening their doors back in 1991. Disturbingly, despite have a strict testing and screening process and almost bizarrely high standards, Cryos doesn’t bowl a perfect game. They report a running “Malformation Rate” of 4%, and I hope you’re not visualizing what that euphemism means right now, because that would be gross.

Not nearly as gross as this, though: accidental incest. No, that does not involve tripping and falling...it’s far worse. As headlines go, this one is miracle of story-telling and brevity: One Sperm Donor, 150 Offspring. Yup. Naturally, professional commentators were simply shocked but this is about as inevitable as McDonalds offering salads or S&M porn going mainstream.

Most Americans know absolutely nothing about...well, anything, really...but in particular, the Sperm Business. Men don’t just go in, make a deposit and walk out with a check. They get screened and commit to a long-term program, usually weekly deposits for a full year. Only a dipshit could act shocked that a business is monetizing their existing inventory: it’s what they do. So it’s only natural that in California, which has always been ahead of the American curve, children of donor sperm are starting to connect on the internet. That’s kind of heartwarming, but it gets disturbing when they keep connecting and connecting and connecting and you realize you have over 50 half-brothers and half-sisters living in the same state as you. The biggest single group was the source of the headline: exactly 150 actual human beings from a single storage unit of manjuice. Which brings us back to two words that should stay far away from each other: “Accidental Incest.”

As one anonymous Mom put it: “My daughter knows her donor’s number for this very reason. She’s been in school with numerous kids who were born through donors. She’s had crushes on boys who are donor children. It’s become part of sex education.”

The Genghis Khan Effect.

Maybe you don’t see it yet. This should help: in 2011, 0.5% of the world’s entire population can be traced directly back to the loins of Genghis Khan. That’s a little over 35 million people, most of them in China.

This is for horrible reasons, of course. There was not a lot of consensual sex behind the Khan dynasty. Regardless of circumstances, though, reproduction is genetic warfare...the messy reality behind the “fitness landscape” the biologists love to wax poetic about. Having 150 offspring is such a massive tactical advantage it’s hard to wrap your head around it, but that anonymous donor has done more to shape the future of California than any Governor or Billionaire fascist in the past century.

And that’s just a glimmer of the insanity that’s on our horizon now. 150 will be small potatoes very shortly. What happens when celebrities start getting in on this action? Imagine the kind of prices that a Brazilian soccer god like Ronaldinho could get for his, uh, product. Imagine the demand/price curve for someone like Ryan Reynolds or Jude Law and you’re starting to see it.

Now, the notion of sexual competition is nothing new. We’re all trying to make ourselves more wealthy and attractive and blah blah blah, but what’s new here is the scale and the technology available. It’s certainly not like human beings are any smarter. Women shop for attractive and physically fit sperm donors, but it’s not like their kids are automatically going to have chiseled abs or some shit: that comes from working out. There’s also the gender crapshoot factor—sure, sperm comes out of a guy, but it produces both sons and daughters. That fact is sadly lost on a lot of people. Then again, their ignorance is your potential profit center. Nothing cuts into your bottom line quite like informed consumers, right?

See, your average Adonis with a genius IQ and clean bill of health can generate a solid load of merchandise every single day. If he makes it out of Harvard by 22, that’s a potential career of 15 to 20 years. Bear that in mind as you read this outstanding Atlantic article, ”All the Single Ladies,” which documents how the economic devastation of the United States has completely changed the sexual politics of both marriage and conception. These trends will converge into something unprecedented: the most dramatic change in human reproduction since our species first emerged from Africa. This shift is going to be far more profound than birth control, because it will involve more children being born by vastly fewer men, a narrowing down of the gene pool that will hit our DNA like a mass extinction, despite the fact we’re slouching towards the 10 billion mark, population-wise.

Keep thinking I’m wrong, by all means. I have no illusions about convincing you. There’s no solace in truth, especially if you’re older than 21 and worth less than a million dollars. Just keep it in the back of your mind, eat more veggies & fish oil and work out a little bit harder. And oh yeah...stay away from wi-fi signals, too.

Filed in: Sex Science

Posted Nov 25, 2011

As I slowly finish off my epic manuscript Human Sexuality for Filthy Apes, I have been given a newfound appreciation for how fundamentally science has failed our species. While most writing on the human brain touts our wetware as a miracle machine, that’s just breathless ad copy for highbrow suckers...a cheap emotional high. Did you know you have more connections in your brain then there are stars in the Universe? Nevermind the fact there’s no way to quantify “stars in the Universe,” the real question is: how many of those connections are you going to use in a few hours when you’re masturbating to some Hentai while instant messaging your friends about the TV show that’s on in the background? At least a couple thousand, right?

The reality, of course, is too grim to be stated plainly. Your brain is a barely functional piece of shit, a lump of cellular improv and genetic duct tape. As a navigational tool, it creates a remarkably adequate simulation of external reality—at least good enough to keep you alive until you can reproduce with someone you shouldn’t. That much is undeniably impressive, but it’s all downhill from there. As a sense organ, it mostly tunes out every single piece of data your billions of sensory cells try to send you.  Worst of all, as a “mind” it behaves like a deranged parasite, alternating between self-deception and self-destruction and leaving even the best of us baffled by our own actions, daily.

So there’s that. Entire books have been written on the “neuroscience” of sex, and they are front to back fiction. There’s great demand for “popular science” books about the amazing brain but that’s because there’s a great deal of stupid people. Fortunately, I don’t write for them...I write for you, the spooky brilliant and dangerously sexy future mutants of tomorrow.

DEATH TO NEURO-REALISM

To be clear, don’t think I’m hating on science. No, homey, never that. I have footnotes and studies backing up every single page of my forthcoming book, believe me, I love science. My beef is all these poodles using it wrong. Let me recap for the slowfaces who may lurk among us: The purpose of Science is to belittle the human ego, confound easy understanding and obliterate every hypothesis that it touches. There is no solace in science...if there is, you are most assuredly Doing It Wrong.

This is especially true when chimp “journalists” turn their anemic attention towards the human brain. I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that literally everything that’s been published in the past decade on that subject is pure horseshit. Again, I’m not talking about the precise experimental language of the actual studies getting published in Nature—although plenty of those are horseshit, too. I’m talking about a modern mythology based on such fragile data that it essentially amounts to a secular religious belief. Today there is a pervasive myth that the human brain has hardwired areas for specific purposes, which is built on the larger myth that we understand fuck all about our brains in the first place. I will unpack that sentence in detail, starting immediately.

There’s a lot of data about the human brain. Neurology is advancing by leaps and bounds, don’t misconstrue me. Scientists speak precisely because once you generalize results, you lose any value that your findings have. Today, the most that can be said about current neuroscience is scientists have observed correlations between a specific stimulus and specific measurements of human brain activity. This is not “Semantics.” This is discernment. There are fundamental problems with this shallow puddle of a worldview, and they’re clear enough to become obvious to Non-Nerd types once you lay them out.

Irrational Faith. Despite advances in neuroscience testing and measurement technology, we still have no proof that our instrumentation is actually showing us something important. To abuse a metaphor, pop sci neurojournalism is about how the human computer system works but the assumption is that we have access to what’s really going on. Even if we did, we don’t know how to confirm that. Brain readings are new and visually compelling but they’re not answers. An fMRI scan doesn’t mean we can fathom the operating system of consciousness. For all we know, we’re measuring the exhaust system of the computer.

Retroactive Mechanics. Stimulus, Response...it’s only simple in theory. Despite all their own breathless poetry about how complex the human brain is, curiously, most theories of consciousness still boil down to ”When we do this, a light goes on over here.” Thus, Broca’s area becomes “the language center of the brain,” despite dozens of cases where patients without that area could speak and read just fine in their native tongues. The conceit here, stated clinically, is that the specific stimulus in our experiment was the source of the EM activity being measured. Again, this sounds like nit-picking but it’s critically important to honest science. Correlation does not imply causality. Nearly all written work about the neuroscience not only reverses that, but takes it one step further: correlation, they glibly assert, is proof unto itself.

Neuro-Fundamentalism. The biggest unspoken assumption, of course, is that the human brain is us—that you, me and everybody we know is driven and dominated by that single organ. If only it was that simple.

GETTING USED TO NO ANSWERS

Journalists latch on to narratives, not actual findings, which are too subtle for headlines and too complex for their readership. Subsequently, scientists use these popular narratives to explain their work and seek more funding, and thus do lazy mistakes become institutionalized problems. I’m sure many of you reading this have noticed the tonal similarities between coverage of neuroscence and genetics—just like every Time headline in the 90’s was about how “Who You Are” is determined mechanically by Gene X, Y and Z, the past decade of neurofads have been about the brain controlling us mechanically thanks to area X, Y and Z. We have a lot more similar mistakes in our future, assuming we survive another two generations of over seven billion hungry omnivore killing machines.

There is no working model of the human brain. That’s what real scientists mean when they talk about Neurology being in a “pre-paradigm state.” Until that gets fixed, the science will have nothing to offer us but surprising results and bad metaphors.

More on the way...meanwhile, be good to each other.

Filed in: Sex Science

Posted Nov 23, 2011

thanks to f. stokes for the nudge

I’m not going to complain—that’s too easy. No need for a laundry list of details or worse, some disgruntled manifesto: underground hip hop is broken as fuck, I know it, you know it, no further explanation needed. This is not about what’s wrong, this is about dreaming something better.

But First: When you’re a part of the problem, you rationalize what you’re doing as necessary, practical, “just business.” It’s dumb business. Failing business. Getting opening acts to sell tickets, printing up flyers that look like promo for porno flicks...people pretend this is all necessary but it’s not. That corpse you’re milking yields less and less blood every week, and eventually it’s going to run dry. Meanwhile...

If You Can’t Find It, Found It

Bars are, for the most part, terrible places to be. Obnoxiously crowded and stupid expensive. The sound system has never been set up right and it’s always too loud. So why do artists keep presenting their blood and guts in these fast food environments? I’ve played shows in beauty salons, backyards and basements and had a great time doing it—there’s not a “tour circuit” for this yet, but there will be soon.

How many shows can you play for a room full of dudes before it’s time to kill yourself in a hotel room? Why don’t more women come to rap shows? That one is easy: because they don’t want to be there. They don’t enjoy themselves, they don’t feel safe and they don’t have fun.

We need more than “Alternative Hip Hop,” and definitely more than another coffee shop for spoken word navel-gazing. We need an alternate Universe, a great & secret show, a Truth & Beauty circuit full of fresh fruit, fine foods and exotic tea from fictional continents. We need daytime shows, midnight gigs on anonymous rooftops, costume concerts and a nationwide revival of Acid Tests from coast to burning coast. We need all four alleged “Elements of Hip Hop” in the same building again—most of all, we need parties worth going to, parties worth putting down your fucking phones for and actually living.

We’re taking all the wrong concepts for granted. Are battles really helping anyone aside from battle promoters? If hip hop is about communication, why do so many sets seem like some guy practicing his rhymes in his room? Why are we still doing “A&R Showcases” in 2011 when everyone knows that labels stopped doing artist development in the 1980s? If you pause to introduce “a song for the ladies” what are you saying about the rest of your catalog?

Rather than even pretending to deal with the perceived problems in rap - the pervasive and contagious mental illness of homophobia, misogyny & causal violence - maybe the trick is simply designing performance spaces that render all that impossible. It’s easy to talk about shooting faggots in a bar, but in a public park, surrounded by art and nature, that same emcee is reduced to his true form: a scared child having a small tantrum. Zoning laws prohibit letting animals loose in public spaces, but as the poet Richard Bruce Cheney famously observed, laws are made to be broken.

Ideas are made to be stolen, too. Can we take toga parties back from fraternities if we let them keep the Ritalin snorting and shitty beer? Can we make speed dating into something inspirational and good? Can we create a Speakeasy system for stoners and perform hip hop for hashish heads on comfortable couches? Does rap sound better in venues with a strict No Shoes policy? Can we convert mere stages into Sacred Space?

There is a huge audience for what I’m babbling about here. I’m not saying hip hop needs more Art, but I am saying Art needs more hip hop. I’m also saying our lives are starved for surrealism. The human soul, no matter how numbed up and weighed down, craves magic. It’s not hip hop’s job to provide that...but it could be. The power of language is infinite and there’s a whole generation of emcees with open minds ready to reclaim that ocean. It’s always been yours and you’ve always been free.

And oh yeah: stop cuffing the mic.

Tell me how right/wrong/awesome I am:

Filed in: Zeitgeist

Posted Nov 23, 2011

BEAT, RECORDING, MIXING by Louis Mackey
RAPPAGE courtesy of Humpasaur Jones
ARTWORK by Memetic Supply Co

hump jones, back to scoop more fries
and get paid like the liars at the new york times
which is every single writer for the new york times
but hey, we all shovel shit in the food court line, right?
white collar, blue collar, two dollar confidence jobs
...nobody stays honest for long
it’s not a concept when your wallet is gone
then it’s promises, pawn shops and property laws
hump jones, politics, press the flesh
drunk shows, college kids, fresh connects
front row awesomeness, wrecked the set
and you cut throats copied quick to get respect
your act is hurting, you lack a certain edge
all you got is average zombie rapping for the working dead
yeah kid, I can see that you think you’re the shit
I just happen to disagree with every inch of my dick

world around sound, and we build to suit
skills and truth, the foundation that fills the room
world around sound, we build and we break
cuz we’re still willing to make all the illest mistakes

yeah, I got a couple million names to kill the game with
so I can fail a hundred thousand times and still be famous
for my skills, my commitment, and my innovation
plus my psychedelic fully illustrated filthy statements
you make threats, I make bets, that makes sense
I see people waste breath and it’s cheap as hate sex
...but me? nah, me, I’d rather sleep with great friends
and take some pain meds, been a freak since grade ten
hump jones, time to define my goals
and unfold the finest in mind control
on a budget plan...I’m just doing it because I can
I love my fans more than any fan can understand
...do I even need to explain
that repetition is the rhythm of the media game?
and that’s the main reason that I keep repeating my name?
and I place so much faith in my team, it’s insane…

world around sound, and we build to suit
skills and truth, the foundation that fills the room
world around sound, we build and we break
cuz we’re still willing to make all the illest mistakes

Filed in: The Music

Posted Nov 16, 2011

“Where you been, Uncle Hump?” For once, the answer is simple: waking up.

Few things are more dangerous than believing your own hype, especially when you lack any of the real-world skills required to actually live up to the legend. I can rap, write and fuck, and up until 2011, that was really about it. Not much of a resume, you know what I mean?

So what changed? Well, here’s a thousand words, for starters…

I would be hard pressed to say if my heart was broken open, or my head. Based on my experience, though, it definitely felt like everything began and ended in my chest. Heartache is certainly nothing new to me, but the intensity of it was. Smug neurologist types discount the very existence of heartache—Carl Zimmer dismisses it as “brainache.” Despite my disagreement, he might easily be right, and it doesn’t matter either way. I don’t need to convince anyone reading this that kind of pain is real. You know.

So: It began as a heartache without apparent cause and deepened and persisted until I fell asleep exhausted. When I woke up the next morning feeling exactly the same, I realized something was up. What followed is something I am still at a loss to describe. I was definitely in states I can only compare to bad trips and insanely powerful drugs. I consistently had the sense that my experience was being guided by Something Else, yet I cannot recall ever actually interacting with the Other.

Incoherent story short, I was basically forced to confront myself as I actually am...for six days.

In the bewilderment after all this finally subsided, I was reminded of a cold December morning in St. Johnsbury, Vermont back when I was in the third grade. Some enterprising Evangelist had dumped hundreds, maybe even thousands, of those little Jack T. Chick comic books. I remember them being scattered all over the place, and I remember sitting down and reading THIS WAS YOUR LIFE from cover to cover. Even then, it was absurd to me that God would individually watch movies of every human being’s life, but the imagery was powerfully simple enough to stick with me ever since.

That comic, ridiculous as it all was, is basically what happened to me. I have never been through anything remotely like it.

As I’ve covered before here, science is brutal stuff. Men and women in starchy white coats will do things like torture mice in order to observe whether or not other mice have a physical reaction to seeing the agony of their fellow prisoners. (They do, of course...yet another experiment that could have been avoided altogether by simply asking any child.)

Since that experiment was initially performed in 2006, it’s been replicated in nearly a hundred metal rooms around the world...you know, just to be sure. Just to be thorough, just to be objective, and just to fine tune the findings and figure out what the physical mechanisms at work were. The answers led to mirror neurons, vagus nerves, and the puzzle pieces that make up the Science of Heartache. And it’s not much.

Latin is a dead language in every possible sense. Rome burned to the ground like it deserved to and the great Empire tongue became the secret code of celibates and pedophiles for a thousand years...today, it’s deader still, weaponized by the grim cult of Science into a system for rendering our common sense experience into unreadable jargon. Thus does “heartache” become “stress cardiomyopathy,” for instance.

Modern superstitious primitives are given magic formulas to ward away the terror of the unknown: as lots of “rational” guys have explained to me over the years, love is just a matter of chemicals, see, and...well, you may already know, all too well, where that empty line of thinking leads young men. So I question the wisdom in laying out the chain of causality here, especially when it’s built on such fragile and fleeting data points. Whether you believe in cortisol or oxytocin, Artemis or Isis, the throbbing physical pain of heartache burns the brain empty. When you’re sobbing on a sofa, Science does you about as much good as one of your parents giving you an awkward speech over the phone about “other fish in the sea.”

I’m fortunate to have a large and strange international network, and I’ve been told this experience is nothing new. I have been given detailed, eloquent explanations of what happened as a Kundalini event, as a Saturn Return phenomena, and a miraculously simple matter of bioelectricity and some disputed properties of my DNA. My critical and cynical brain will only accept all this as mere primate guesswork, Anthropology at best. I’m a dick like that...and thank Ganesh for that much.

Skeptic I may be, but the rawness of it all left me shaken. It feels like a giant punctuation mark separating my life before and...well, whatever the hell is going on in my head now. I joke about being a Recovering Asshole but the fact is, I’ve been fairly lost since this occurred. I don’t know what happened to me. I also don’t know how to honor what I was given and I don’t know how to integrate what I learned. I can at least promise to keep y’all posted.

I do know that I was living inside my head altogether too much. In breaking open my heart, I felt firsthand how much information is swimming through my veins. I was tuning out most of my body and I suspect I’m hard at work forging those same shackles again. My ego has an immune system of its own, and it has been raging to regain control of the circus. 2012 will be, as promised by every charlatan I’ve spat in the lying face of, a powerfully strange year of personal transformation. Amen.

Pema Chodron: ‎"Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you’re sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all of that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up against these things.”

Contacticus Rex:

Filed in: