Hi friends,
It's tough times. We hope you and your families are in good health. We know you know what's going on, and you have probably heard a lot of takes on it from a lot of companies so we're going to keep this to the point.
Just over a week ago, Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, the latest in a long history of unjust Black deaths at the hands of law enforcement. Since then, the outcry has been ringing out in protests all across our country. The violent suppression of these protests by police has resulted in more injuries and deaths. We stand in solidarity with the protesters and with the Black community.
How can a music software company contribute positively and constructively in this moment? For us, the answer is: by sending funds to those doing front line work. We're writing to ask for your support.
The Black Youth Project is an organization that both provides emergency funds to Black community members in need, and invests long-term in the future of Black leadership. They have chapters in many U.S. cities including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, DC and Detroit. From their website: "Our work is generally centered on ending systems of anti-Blackness and emphasizing the urgency of protecting folks living on the margins of the margins, including women, girls, femmes, and the gamut of LGBTQ folk." To find out more, please visit https://www.byp100.org/about.
From now until the end of Friday, June 5 (Pacific Time) we'll be donating 100% of our sales to BYP100. As a family business, our pockets are not deep enough for an impressive direct donation right now, but this way we can leverage the software we've made to direct some funds where they are sorely needed. We hope you'll help.
We and some folks we know have been contributing individually to community bail funds around the country and that is another way to help right now. If you are interested in contributing to these efforts, here’s a link to donate to many community bail funds at one time: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd
There will be a time soon to get back to music, which is more important to us than ever as a force for change, as meaning and community and connection. But this week is not that time. If it were not for the inspiration of great Black music, Madrona Labs would not exist. We owe the Black community our help.
with all best wishes,
Randy Jones
Madrona Labs
photo: Nathalie Graham
Randy thank you for posting this, for making these donations, and for encouraging others to do the same.
Knowledge Is Power: The Superpower 'X-Ray Vision' Of Anarchism
Apparently-- that's apparently (take most everything you read with a grain of salt)-- a Black Lives Matter person-in-charge ran off with some of the funds (10 million?) for their own personal advantage or something like that. (But of course there are other related organizations and forms of help that may have better 'accounting systems').
In any case, I want to offer those readers here who do not have it, what is viewed as a kind of superpower; namely an anarchistic lens through which to peer at the world.
Look up its proper definition if you're unsure and then don the lens and find, too, how it will likely change your perspective and therefore in a sense change your reality.
"The police have always been thugs, but they have traditionally been thugs in the service of elites. The crises of the 1960s produced an outbreak of police hooliganism directed against the citizenry... and a revolt against their own commanders and the civil authorities.
The police, in short, became self-conscious political actors seeking to defend their own interests, advance their own agenda, act under their own authority, and increase their already substantial power. Such a development is very dangerous for a wavering democracy like that of the United States." ~ Kristian Williams, 'Our Enemies In Blue'"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." ~ Malcolm X
"It is useless and... futile for us to continue talking peace and non-violence against a government whose reply is only savage attacks on an unarmed and defenseless people..." ~ Nelson Mandela
"The philosophy is basically what we call intercommunalism-- we're not nationalists, we don't believe in nationalism. Nationalism or nationhood is... akin to superiority, is akin to racism..." ~ Bobby Seale
"Patriotism is, as we know, the last refuge of a scoundrel. Now we're talking about real scoundrels, like Nixon." ~ Gore Vidal
" 'I am a former Los Angeles Police narcotics detective. I worked South Central Los Angeles and I can tell you, Director Deutch, emphatically and without equivocation, that the [Central Intelligence] Agency has dealt drugs in this country for a long time.' (He then referred Deutch to three specific CIA agency operations known as Amadeus, Pegasus and Watchtower... Ruppert... [said] that in his experience as an LAPD narcotics officer, he has seen evidence of CIA complicity in drug dealing for a long time.)." ~ Michael Ruppert, documentary film, 'Collapse'
"The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation." ~ Emma Goldman
Lot's more but you get the idea.
Of course, the superpower is also good for music, incidentally, such as lyrics.
If you accept it, use your new power responsibly.
And, lastly, I'll wrap this fine comment up with one of my faves:
"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself... Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable..." ~ H.L. Mencken
We're All In This Together; Soylent Green Is People
Randy, here is my hypothesis regarding why the whole mainstreamization of LGBTQ+ and BLM now and not before ('Why now?'). (It's not like Floyd was a novel, isolated situation)...
It wasn't grassroots.
It was State-engineered-- top-down, mainstreamed, status-quoed, agitpropped... infiltrating our institutions, like the legacy media, university/colleges and sports.
It was a color revolution, but redirected toward our own backyards as the target.
'We got fooled again.'
It was like a USAid-type endeavor like those made, in part, to attempt to topple governments, like Chavez'/Maduro's for example, including an attempt to install that Guaido guy.
Like China's Red Guard.
Tapping/Leveraging/Taking advantage of and redirecting often already-simmering minority, etc., issues within the culture, the target.
That is and was the problem.
So why now?
Maybe those minorities, among others, and policies like 'DEI' and rainbow paint and flags suddenly everywhere were used to help enable/lubricate the State governments' overimmigration policies in recent years ('pump-and-dump'), and maybe to slow down potential protests as a result, and stuff like that.
Who really expressed concern about some minorities disproportionately targeted by status-quo coercive forces like police? Not many really. Only until it became mainstreamed did others jump on the bandwagon and virtue-signal.
Nevertheless, minorities had made good headway and progress by the bottom-up/grassroots. They didn't need the State.
If anything, the State's over-involvement/social-engineering may prove to have set progress back for many through, in part, blowback that comes from resentment, such as from losing one's job prospects due to reverse-discriminatory DEI policies.
Recently, over here in so-called Canada, a local bank removed its rainbow design off the outside of its buildings. Just like that.
Why did they put it up in the first place? Who directed them? The State (government)?
Well who directed them to freeze the bank accounts of the truckers during the trucker protest?
Trudeau's mafia?
Banks shouldn't be in the business of aiding State social engineering. No one should. That's nature's job. But of course they are and have been-- used and abused like people of LGBTQ+, etc., and people in general. Brainwashed.
Like children in the State government school system. 'The Pied Piper'.
And of course Trump has now entered the fray and we've already seen pushback on minorities-- the very people that often need the most protection. That's what happens when 'reality' is dictated from the top-down, not from the grassroots, organically.
It's State government: Like the notion of 'follow the money', in this case, follow the brainwashing/coercion/control.
At the risk of mansplaining, again, anarchism is a perceptual superpower. Take it if you haven't already.
Maybe talk to John Zerzan in your neck of the woods if you already haven't. He's not getting any younger.
BTW, Israel is yet another kind of non-grassroots, glorified color revolution (beginning 1948) and USAid-like beneficiary on steroids. It's getting away with murder-- by 'law'-- so-called, as if that sort of 'law' is immutable, like the laws of physics.
They are just elite's rules, imposed upon the general populations. Imposed upon our children, by mandatory so-called education in State education-mills we call 'schools'.
We have our own rights, by nature, by the cosmos, or if you're religious, sure, by God, why not.
(Jesus was probably an anarchist anyway. I looked it up and was pleasantly surprised that I'm not the only one who suspects so.)
We don't need no stinking oligopoly, plutarchy, neo-feudal lords or otherwise coercive groups' laws, constitutions, bills, decrees or treaties to dictate their notions on us...
We are our own sovereign authorities.
'There is no authority but your own.'
The sooner we can teach our children these kinds of things-- not just the 3 Rs-- and to think critically and for themselves and/or we can figure those kinds of crucial things out for ourselves soon enough, the sooner we can truly care for our (and bring about) real communities (not the fake ones we currently have) that include all so-called minorities-- so-called because we're all unique individuals who fundamentally cannot operate under the cookie-cutter, monocultures that coercive States' elites want to impose on us.
"Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear." ~ Alan Coren
"The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not." ~ Joseph Sobran
"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others." ~ Edward Abbey