On The Money; What’s My Objection To Objective Science?

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

The Method To My Madness pt 2

What’s My Objection To Objective Science?

For centuries now, objective science has ruled the world. About 500 years ago, objective science overthrew God, and replaced religion as the chief source of human knowledge about the world, during a period known as The Renaissance, or “The Enlightenment”. Sure, religion was ripe for an overthrow. Religion had become incredibly corrupt, violent and oppressive, and did little for the millions of poor people who served it so, well, religiously, but today, objective science has failed, and the seeds of it’s failure were there from the beginning.

For a while, objective science seemed like a wonderful thing. The freedom to study the world, and publish your findings without fear of being condemned to death as a heretic must have been quite refreshing. In its early years, objective science made great strides in understanding how the world worked, especially in the field of physics.

Sir Isaac Newton, besides earning himself a knighthood, and a distinguished place in history, remains a household word to this day for his groundbreaking work in describing the mathematical relationship between objects in motion. This was such a big deal, they even named a cookie after him. Newton’s way of looking at the world, as a collection of objects, in motion or at rest, falling and bumping into each other, became the foundation of “objective science”. Suddenly, science, specifically physics, was all about objects, and the transfer of energy between them.

Lots of people jumped on the “objective science” bandwagon, and soon, the “scientific method” was born. Science teachers all over the world, in all kinds of fields, from chemistry to sociology still teach this scientific method. The scientific method is a way of designing experiments, and scientists all over the world use it religiously.

Using the scientific method, the scientist tries to isolate one particular variable in a complex system, and then looks for something that determines change in that variable. For instance, a scientist might start a number of identical plants, raising them in exactly the same soil and nutrients, and then vary the amount of light the plants receive, to see how that effects the plant’s growth rate. Ideally, the scientist finds a cause and effect relationship, that can be expressed in the form of a mathematical equation, x hours of sunlight produces y amount of new growth, for instance.

While physical objects yield very easily to this kind of experiment, producing mathematically predictable results, complex systems, specifically organisms, like plants, animals, people, families, cities, or the economy, do not yield such cut and dried results. Organisms teem with variables, and scientists find it difficult, if not impossible, to control all of them, as well as they do the variables of objects, like chemicals, rocks, or metal parts.

Objective science taught us a lot about organisms, but never with the kind of mathematical accuracy and predictability of physics, and the more complex the organism, the less predictable the results, and the harder it was for scientists to find these mechanical cause and effect relationships. That didn’t stop them from trying, though. In the mean time, the objective science of physics really took off.

Thanks to “objective science”, physics gave birth to modern technology. From the steam locomotive and the cotton gin, to the ipad and the X-Box, the world of applied objective science, commonly called technology, transformed the world, and our lives. Not only did theses new things change our lives, objective science itself, made us feel smarter and more powerful.

We began to believe that through objective science, we could unlock all of the secrets of the universe and know the mind of God. This was the goal of “The Enlightenment”, to explain how the universe worked, in scientific equations, rather than religious terms. When we saw the first nuclear explosion, and learned the equation E=MCsquared, a lot of people thought we were getting close to that goal.

Despite the fact that physics had left biology, psychology, sociology, economics and other sciences that study organisms in the dust, many scientists in those fields, and most laypeople, still assume that objective science will eventually unlock all of the secrets of the universe, and so they continue to pursue objective science, believing that only the vast number of variables inherent in the study of organisms, prevents scientists from completely grasping the mechanics of life, but they think they are getting close too.

These scientists think that unraveling the mysteries of the universe is a good thing, in and of itself, but more importantly, they believe that we can use this knowledge to make the world a better place to live. This idea has guided our culture for the last 500 years. These were the assumptions behind the rise of objective science: That objective science would unlock the mysteries of the universe, and that we could use that knowledge to engineer a better world.

That’s why they overthrew God and religion to begin with. Not that God and religion didn’t deserve to be overthrown, but now objective science has led us into a system more corrupt, violent and oppressive than even the sickest ambitions of the most sadistic Cardinals of the Spanish Inquisition. Objective science has become a scam, a way to make money, and a political tool to bamboozle the public, and instead of helping us to engineer a better world, it has unleashed hell on Earth.

Fans of objective science, and there are many, usually see the mysteries of the universe as falling into two broad categories: The stuff we already understand, and the stuff scientists are studying right now, so that we will understand it pretty soon. Most of them still believe that we will someday unravel the mysteries of the universe through objective science, and that we will use that knowledge to make the world a better place to live, but they couldn’t be more wrong, and the further we pursue objective science, the more obvious that fact becomes.

The truth is, We don’t have a freakin’ clue! We are no closer to unraveling the mysteries of the universe that we have ever been. The mythology of the Big Bang has no more truth in it than the story of Adam’s rib, or the story that the whole world sits on the back of a turtle. These stories all provide convenient ways to explain what we see around us, but I wouldn’t take any of them too seriously. Before you call me a heretic for renouncing the Big Bang, you should consider a few things.

First, almost all of the scientists in the world are working on projects aimed at developing new products. They’re developing new drugs to treat depression, finding ways to make weapons more lethal, figuring out how to make computers smaller and faster. Sure, some of them are staring out at the universe and trying to make sense of it, but more of them are creating dangerous new life forms that they can patent and unleash on the world, to make money.

They aren’t unraveling the mysteries of the universe, so much as they are unraveling the fabric of life itself, because that’s where the research funds come from. The companies that fund science, expect to turn a profit from it. The same people who drive scientific research, also drive our economy, the scientists working for them care more about their paycheck, than uncovering the ultimate truth of the universe. The Big Bang is not really a big deal to most of them, it is just how the universe looks to them.

Second, and this is the important part. Even though the world looks to us like its made of objects, some living, like plants and animals, some not, like rocks and ice cubes, the world only looks this way to us because this is what we need to see in order to survive. Our brains don’t have anywhere near the capacity to understand the universe. We only see what we need to know to get ourselves fed and laid. In other words, how the universe looks to us, has almost nothing to do with how the universe is. What we don’t comprehend, and doesn’t help us survive, we simply don’t see at all.

Objective scientists themselves have provided plenty of evidence to prove it. According to astrophysicists, everything we have managed to detect in the universe, only accounts for about 2% of what they suspect is really there. They don’t mean that beyond the reach of our telescopes there is more stuff, they mean that all around us, there is more stuff, like dark matter, dark energy etc. We simply have no way of detecting it.

Einstein’s theory of relativity showed us, quite dramatically, with the first nuclear explosion, that the world is not made of objects, however tiny. Instead, the universe is made of energy, and that space and time aren’t nearly as real as we, or Newton, imagined, at least not outside of the observer who experiences them.

Even though the universe appears as though it sprang into existence out of nothingness, from one single point, no one was outside of the universe to observe it. There is no such thing as absolute space and time. Instead, space and time only exist in relation to an observer, that’s what Einstein meant by relativity. Since there were no observers, outside of the universe, before the big bang, there wasn’t any space or time in which that mythical event took place. What would the Big Bang be without any time to expand, or any space to expand into?

I know its hard to imagine anything outside of space and time. It’s impossible really. That’s what I mean by incomprehensible. Looking at the universe as something that exists in space and time is kind of like looking at a pie chart. When you see data expressed in a pie chart, you can make some sense of it, but when you only see pages and pages of raw data, it doesn’t make any sense at all, so you don’t bother. Everyone knows that a pie chart is not a real pie, and that data does not become sweet gooey filling when you make one. This is not a perfect analogy, but nothing is, really. It’s incomprehensible, that’s the whole problem, and that’s my point.

Does all of that seem incomprehensible to you? Good! It should, because it is. It’s time we faced that fact. The universe is simply beyond our comprehension. We don’t really know any more about the universe than an orangutan, or a chimp or a hamster for that matter. None of us in this world really knows any more than we really need to know to get ourselves fed and to get ourselves laid, and some of us don’t even know that much.

By the way, what I’m telling you here, is called a phenomenological analysis of objective science. Phenomenologists don’t make discoveries that capitalists can turn into products, and so they don’t make much money, outside of the philosophy departments of some colleges and universities, where they occasionally find work as professors. If this stuff sounds interesting to you, I suggest you find a college or university who employs one, and take a few classes in phenomenology.

Alright, now that we’ve gone over the deep end, you are probably asking yourself, “What’s all of this got to do with economics?” The short answer is that while objective science taught us a lot about objects in space and time, it never really told us much about organisms. Phenomenology, on the other hand, can tell us a lot about organisms, not everything, but more than objective science. Again, if phenomenology sounds interesting to you, find yourself a good phenomenologist, and take a few classes.

One basic principle of phenomenology is that organisms are always more than the sum of their parts, unlike machines, which are simply the sum of their parts. Plants, animals and people are organisms, and they are also part of a larger organism called the ecosystem, which is part of a larger organism called the world, which is undoubtedly part of a larger organism we call “The Universe”. . There’s much more to us than meets the eye, and that’s why objective science never really told us as much about us, as it did about objects. The economy is also an organism, and it’s part of a larger organism called “society” which is also part of the ecosystem, etc. This means that there is more to how we feed each other, trade with each other, and compete with each other than meets the eye.

On The Money, Economics for the 99% offers a phenomenological analysis of economics. You’ll notice that I include my personal perspective, as well as an environmental perspective, a workers perspective, a consumers perspective, a political perspective and a social perspective on the subject of economics, instead of just looking at the mechanical flow of money around the globe.

The phenomenological method of study, involves observing phenomena from many perspectives, rather than trying to describe it as an object or a machine. The world is more than resources, people are more than consumers and the economy is more than a machine that feeds one to the other. I also include a bit of humor, because readers are more than just digesters of information. Call me crazy, but there’s a phenomenological critique of objective science that’s On The Money.

On The Money; The Method To My Madness pt 1

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

The Method to My Madness pt 1

The Black Hole Swallowing The Earth

Every year economists write more fat impenetrable books, and every year their theories get further and further from reality. Money itself has become completely unhinged from the real world, as increasingly abstract mathematical concepts get transformed into incomprehensible financial instruments. Derivatives, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, high-frequency trading algorithms, etc have so little to do with real economics that I won’t even dignify them with discussion, except to say that they have become a huge part of the financial services sector of the economy, and financial services have become a huge part of total global economic activity. Financial services, now account for about 1% of our national GDP, even though this gigantic industry makes nothing at all.

The Financial Services Sector has become a black hole, from which nothing escapes, and into which everything is drawn and destroyed in the process. This black hole has become the central focus of the science of economics. In this rarefied world, money masturbates, knocks itself up, and multiplies without any contact with the real world at all. The more this happens, the more central the Financial Services Sector becomes to the global economy, and the less everything that really does happen in the real world matters to economists. The Financial Services Sector spawned the recent housing bubble, and economists all over the world praised its transcendent genius, even though any idiot, and I’m talking about myself here, could see that it would inevitably collapse.

Economists find all of this monetary masturbation incredibly fascinating. They find the process of making money out of nothing irresistible, and they seek ways to understand and perpetuate it, much the way theoretical physicists feel about their equally insane quest to discover the Higgs-Boson particle, the so-called “God Particle”.

No doubt you’ve heard of the recently built, 17mile wide, Large Hadron Super-Collider that straddles the border between France and Switzerland, designed largely to search for this astoundingly tiny particle. Perhaps you even heard the warnings of some physicists, that this enormous device just might, accidentally, produce a black hole, that might then proceed to swallow the entire Earth, destroying the planet and every living thing that inhabits it. On the other hand, there’s an equally small chance that we might learn something useful from the experiments at the large Hadron Super-Collider.

Similarly, economists concoct increasingly dangerous, and pointless ways to study the behavior of pure greed, in a vacuum at very near the speed of light. These experiments require enormous amounts of resources and energy. The Financial Services Sector sucks these resources and energy from the real world, threatening whole stock exchanges, global markets and national currencies with instantaneous collapse.

Accelerating purified greed to near-light velocity within the vacuum of the Financial Services Sector generates enormous heat. This heat triggers expansion. As the Financial Services Sector expands, it draws the real world into the direct path of this superheated high-velocity greed, with which, it inevitably collides, as happened most recently in 2008.

In this collision, we saw greed shatter into its constituent components: dishonesty, fraud, violence, error and theft, which we can then trace by examining the damage they inflict on community, culture, and environment. However, as the Financial Services Sector becomes more central to the economy, economists study these high-velocity, purified greed experiments with little regard for their effects on the real world, our lives or the environment. They simply seek to understand how a system based on unbridled greed, functions at its highest level. That’s their job. That’s what they get paid to do.

Like the unbelievably expensive and inordinately risky experiments at the Large Hadron Super-Collider, designed to answer misdirected questions about the imperceptibly tiny, economic experiments involving purified high-speed greed do nothing to make the world a better place, or help us make sense of our lives. Instead, these experiments simply seek to expand the emptiness of finance, until it swallows the real world whole. These experiments exemplify our cultural insanity.

They have not solved humanity’s problems. They have only created more of them. They have not unraveled the mysteries of the universe. They have driven themselves insane, and taken a lot of us with them. They do not bring us closer to understanding the mind of God. They have created hell on Earth, while they try to tell us how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Economists, like those nuclear physicists at the Large Hadron Super-Collider, have lost their minds. They’ve lost their grip on reality as they reach further and further into nothingness. They have reached the limits of objective science, and economists have seen the end of capitalism, but they refuse to admit to themselves that it is over.

They have failed. Their endeavors were doomed from the start, and now, they have proven it. They failed because of flawed assumptions, which date back 500 years to “The Enlightenment”. These flawed assumptions led them to adopt a flawed methodology.. We call that flawed methodology, “objective science”. Mark it well. While objective science produced great leaps forward in the science of physics, it never did much for the science of economics, and it never delivered on its original promise to unlock the mysteries of the universe. The time has come to face the real limitations of objective science.

Next week, part two

On The Money; What is Money, and Where Did It Come From?

 

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

What is Money, and Where Did It Come From?

Money is a pretty weird thing if you think about it. Money can level forests and move mountains. Money can drill for oil on the bottom of the ocean, land a nuclear powered car on Mars or hunt people down and kill them with remote controlled aircraft. Money can turn your life upside down, make your tap-water catch fire and drive you out of your home. When people talk about their problems, money, or lack thereof, is usually at the top of the list. So, what is money, and where did it come from?

For most of human history, people had no money. People still had to work to get the things they needed, but the work was much more direct. If you wanted meat, you had to hunt and kill an animal. If you wanted a home, you had to build it from whatever you could find around you. All of this stuff was just hard enough to do that you wouldn’t want to do any more of it than you needed to, but easy enough that most of us could accomplish what we needed to do to survive.

Before money, trade was a much smaller part of people’s lives. If you wanted to trade, you had to find someone who had what you wanted, and you had to have something that they wanted. This might happen once or twice a year. The rest of the time, you made do with what you could find around you, all of which was free for the taking.

Before money, nature was “the bank”. People made withdrawals, in the form of the plants and animals they ate and made their clothing from, the trees they made their homes from and the stones from which they crafted tools and weapons, and they made deposits in the form of shit, piss, food waste and eventually, their own bodies, which nature would rapidly recycle into more plants animals and minerals. The system was so well balanced that no one needed accountants, tax preparers or lawyers, and so stable that it lasted for hundreds of millions of years, including over a million years of human habitation, without outside intervention or regulation.

If the natural system worked so well, why was money invented in the first place? The answer is beer. Sure, you can find plenty of food, water and stuff to build a house from in nature, but beer is pretty hard to come by. Occasionally, people could collect enough grass seeds, soak them in water for long enough to produce prehistoric beer, but not nearly often enough to satisfy the thirsts of the ancient Sumerians, who lived in the Middle-East, where it gets mighty hot in the summertime.

The ancient Sumerians were the first people in the world to domesticate wild grasses, and begin farming. They burned huge tracts of forest land that had sustained them for eons, in order to grow wheat and barley. This took an enormous amount of work, and led to major headaches, like plagues of frogs, locusts, and flies, as well as turning a lot of habitable forest land into barren desert, but it did give them beer, and beer was very precious to them. It must have been, or why else would they have worked so hard and sacrificed so much in order to make it?

So it should not surprise you that the first unit of money was the price of a beer, the Shekel. A shekel is equal to 180 grains of barley, roughly the amount needed to produce one beer. While everything else in the natural world was free, beer was expensive. So people counted their shekels, traded shekels and bought things with shekels of barley. Making shekels was no fun at all, but everyone liked beer, so shekels became the currency of the Sumerians, and that is how money was born.

In economics classes they will tell you that money is a medium of exchange that facilitates trade. They’ll tell you that money is a technological advance that made trade more efficient, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, money was invented to facilitate alcoholism.

Many people, economists especially, overlook the central role of alcoholism in civilization. Archeologists have discovered ancient Mesopotamian recipes for beer, and friezes depicting beer drinking on Egyptian pyramids. It was only after beer-making had evolved to a high art, that people began eating the yeast-risen loaves of grain, what we now call “bread”, that were originally used to make to make individual batches of beer.

People eat cereal grains, sure, but compared to a fat steak from a wild antelope, a bowl of cream of wheat is nothing to get excited about. On the other hand, you can’t make beer out of a deer. The psychoactive effects of alcohol, no doubt, made cereal grains especially prized, and as people became habituated to alcohol intoxication, their craving for it grew.

As is the case with alcoholism, the more you drink, the less you care about anything else, until the quest for alcohol becomes the central focus of the alcoholic’s life. The more focused you become on alcohol, the more the rest of your life tends to fall apart. In order to feed their craving for alcohol, people worked long hours to cultivate grains. As grain farming expanded, farmed fields replaced natural habitat, and wild game became more scarce. With less wild game available, grain farmers increasingly traded with traditional hunter-gatherers, who themselves fell under the spell of alcoholism, making them dependent on the grain farmers for their beer. Thus, grain became a precious commodity. People who had a lot of grain, grew more powerful, and those with the most shekels, ruled.

So we see that money is, quite literally, a drug, and addiction to it has shaped, and continues to shape, the course of civilization.

The Humboldt Broadbandit

 

The Humboldt Broadbandit

Five times in recent months, someone has cut the fiber-optic cable that brings the internet and phone service to thousands of Suddenlink subscribers in Humboldt County. Currently, the company is offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the joker responsible for this vandalism. Every time he, or she I suppose, snips the light pipe, it costs Suddenlink at least $10, 000 to repair it, so the Humboldt Broadbandit has set the company back at least $50,000 so far, and they’re willing to put up half again that much just to put him, or her, out of commission for a while.

Reward has since been raised to $25,000

Considering how full our jail system is these days, however, it’s kind of doubtful that the Humboldt Broadbandit would do much time. We have too many murderers, wife beaters, and armed robbers here in Humboldt County, and thanks to prison overcrowding at the state level, the county jail is too full of them to keep someone locked up for some late night cable pruning. Be that as it may, Suddenlink wants the Humboldt Broadbandit stopped.

Fixing a fiber-optic cable is a major headache. It takes a lot of specialized equipment, and the whole operation takes place in a dust-free “clean room”. Basically, they have to take something like a mobile operating room out to the site, and it takes hours of “surgery” in that super-clean environment to repair the cable. Apparently, there’s only one of these mobile light-pipe repair trucks in our area, and the Humboldt Broadbandit has kept it pretty busy this year.

At first, the cops thought the Humboldt Broadbandit wanted copper wire, an easily marketed commodity, but picked the wrong cable to cut. After the second or third attack, however, it became pretty obvious that the Humboldt Broadbandit was targeting light-pipe specifically. Today, after five attacks, and with a $25,000 price on his head, the Humboldt Broadbandit remains at large, and who knows when or where he, or she, will strike again.

So I wonder who the Humboldt Broadbandit really is, and what is his or her motivation. What do they get out of it? Why Suddenlink? Why Humboldt County? Why not cut a light-pipe that will cause millions of customers to lose their connection, instead of just a couple thousand?

Is it a disgruntled employee? I don’t know what it’s like to work for Suddenlink, but I know that most jobs suck and most bosses are assholes. I doubt it’s any different at Suddenlink. Suddenlink employees probably lack union representation, don’t get paid nearly enough, and have to put up with a lot of bullshit from customers, as well as supervisors, so I wouldn’t blame them for getting a little snippy, if you catch my drift.

Maybe cutting the cable disables some web-based security system that allows the Humboldt Broadbandit unfettered access to some other facility, so cutting the light-pipe is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Maybe they cut the fiber-optic cable, to disarm the alarm system at the Ferndale CalTrans yard so they can steal gasoline during the outage.

Maybe the folks who run the light-pipe repair business just needed some more work. Every year, it seems, we get a few intentionally set wildfires. Often we find out that the fires were deliberately set by firefighters hoping to pick up some extra hours. Maybe things are a little slow in the fiber-optic cable repair business these days and they need the money, or maybe they need an excuse to come to Humboldt to pick up some weed.

Of course, they’d have to come here anyway, to cut the cable in the first place, so that doesn’t make much sense, unless they have a local accomplice who cuts the cable, and then sells them weed when they arrive to fix it. I guess that kind of borders on a “conspiracy theory”, but it’s pretty odd behavior, however you look at it.

Unless of course, it’s a radical Luddite. Personally, I hope it really is a radical Luddite. I don’t really want to know for sure, because that would mean the Humboldt Broadbandit got caught. I suppose he or she could deliver a manifesto to the press, but that’s how the Unibomber got caught, so that seems unnecessarily risky.

No, I don’t want the Humboldt Broadbandit to get caught. I want him or her to inspire copycats. I hope chopping light-pipe becomes as popular as graffiti, and every kid in America starts doing it. They could turn the World Wide Web into a pile of useless glass spaghetti if they set their minds to it, and I hope they do.

Besides, you can have a lot of fun with a two or three foot length of fiber-optic cable. If you duct tape one end to a flashlight, and then peel back the jacket from the other end to reveal all of the glass fibers, you’ve got yourself a really trippy light toy that will last a long time and make glow-sticks look totally lame, which they are.

I can’t believe that so many people like to play with those stupid disposable glow sticks when they trip. I mean, I understand the appeal of things that glow in the dark, but glow-sticks are the light-toy equivalent of Wonder Bread. I don’t understand why people who eat organic food, wear natural fibers and support environmental causes during the day, become infatuated with plastic disposable non-biodegradable corporate death toys after dark, especially when they are really high on mushrooms or LSD.

Don’t get me wrong. I like mushrooms and LSD, and I like light-toys, but seeing hippie kids play with disposable plastic tubes filled with a chemical named after the devil (luciferine), made by one of the biggest producers of poison in the world (American Cyanamid) kind of bums my trip.

I still like black lights and florescent posters. I think EL (electro-luminescent) wire is pretty cool, and I love LEDs, especially when I can recycle them from dead electronic devices. I’ve made pretty cool light-toys out of all of them, and for a while I made my living by turning recycled tin cans into very trippy candle holders.

Despite the fire hazard, I still think my candle holders are pretty awesome, but I had to stop making them because my partner suffers from Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, and the scent of smoke that clung to me when I made them caused her a lot of distress. MCS is really a drag. We can’t attend most festivals anymore because of cigarette smoke. We can’t even do our laundry at the laundromat because the smell of other people’s dryer sheets clings to everything, and then our clothes make her sick, but that’s another story.

I guess no light-toy is completely environmentally benign, but I think a fountain of glowing optical fiber liberated from the World Wide Web would be hella cool, even if it caused phone and internet outages all over the state. In fact, that would make it even cooler in my book, so I encourage everyone to forget all about the $25,000 reward, and instead, join the Humboldt Broadbandit, and liberate some light-pipe for your own Luddite light-toy this festival season.

Take Your Kids to the Beach

Take Your Kids to the Beach

In recent weeks, beach-goers from Santa Barbara to San Diego have discovered over 1,000 dead and dying sea lion pups on the beach. Apparently undernourished from birth, these pups did not put on enough blubber from mother’s milk, and once weaned, failed to find enough to eat on their own.

Without an adequate layer of blubber, sea lions cannot maintain the body temperature that a warm blooded mammal needs to survive in the cold water, so they come up on the beach to sun themselves, and warm up. Unfortunately they don’t find anything to eat on the beach either, and eventually they expire from starvation.

Wildlife rescuers in Southern CA have been overwhelmed with calls about these poor pups, but there’s little they can do. No one has the facilities to care for hundreds of starving sea lion pups. Everyone equipped to handle sea lions, has their hands full right now. Sometimes they relocate the pups to more secluded beaches, in hopes that they will find more food. Sometimes they euthanize the animals.

Last year, persistent readers will recall, I wrote about starving pelicans here on the Northern CA coast. Pelicans and sea lions both eat fish, or at least they would, if they could find them. These deaths are not the result of some exotic new disease spreading through the ecosystem. These deaths indicate a precipitous drop in the ocean’s fecundity. It’s a very bad sign. I don’t want to call it a “wake-up call”, because so many so called “wake-up calls” have gone unheeded, so I’ll simply call it another ghastly, heartbreaking consequence of deliberate human indifference to the natural world.

At least people see them. People should have to see this kind of thing. Take your kids to the beach. Show them a dying sea lion pup, starving to death on the sand. Explain to them that because we’ve replaced most of the phytoplankton in the ocean with pulverized plastic from soda bottles, shrink wrap, plastic bags, toys, medical equipment, electronic gadgets, car parts etc etc, the ocean can’t provide enough oxygen or food to support as much life as it did fifty years ago, or even ten years ago.

Remember that famous scene in The Graduate, where the older businessman whispers to Dustin Hoffman one word of advice for his future? “Plastics”, he says. Around the same time Andy Warhol predicted “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable”. With the ubiquity of plastic today, it’s hard to remember a time when soda came in returnable, not recyclable, glass bottles, when they made car bumpers out of chrome plated steel instead of easily shattered plastic, and when electronic devices had metal or wood cabinets, and lasted for decades.

Fifty years later, an island the size of Texas, newly recognized by the United Nations as “Garbage Island”, composed almost entirely of plastic, has formed in the Pacific Ocean. Today, plastic has its own homeland, and it grows every day. Every day, tons of plastic debris finds its way into the Pacific Ocean to make the pilgrimage to Garbage Island. Over the course of decades, endless churning, salt water and sunlight slowly pulverize it into microscopic bits.

These microscopic bits of inorganic, non-biodegradable plastic absorb sunlight, preventing it from penetrating the ocean’s depths and choke off phytoplankton, the foundation of the ocean food chain, and the source of most of the world’s atmospheric oxygen. In less than half a century, about half of all the phytoplankton in the Pacific Ocean has been replaced by these microscopic bits of plastic.

Oddly, considering how long plastic lasts, plastic has become the foundation of our disposable economy. Almost nothing lasts longer than plastic, and almost nothing can digest it. Yet, we produce billions of one-time-use products from it, every year. When burned, plastic produces deadly bio-accumulative carcinogenic poison, in landfills it lasts almost forever, and in the ocean, it gets ground into fine floating particles that choke out life.

No, it’s not a wake-up call. It’s too late for that. Go to the beach. Look those pups in the eye as they die of starvation, and explain to your children what has happened in your lifetime. Tell your kids that fifty years ago, they would have seen thousands of healthy sea lions, as well as seals and otters, and that there was plenty of fish for all of them to eat. Tell them that for every bird they see, there were once twenty or forty, but that they all died so that you could live a high-consumption, middle-class fantasy, and now, even that fantasy is dying.

A “Crude Device” My Ass

A “Crude Device” My Ass

Just let me say, right up front, that I feel for the people of Boston. I lived there myself for a while, and used to jog along the Charles River every day. I never attended The Boston Marathon, but did run a marathon once. Had I been running in the race that day, I probably would have crossed the finish line just in time to have my legs blown off. My heart goes out to all of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. The bombing was a terrible thing, a terrible despicable act, and the people responsible should be punished severely.

However, the media, rather unfairly I think, kept describing the bombs themselves as “crude devices” or “crude explosive devices” or even “generic explosives”. The best they could manage was “crude, but effective”. I take exception to this characterization. How many broadcast journalists have the technical skills to test and fix a faulty microphone cable, let alone build a bomb?

Now, if I had heard Steve Inskeep say, “Compared to this great sounding condenser microphone I made out of a nine-volt battery, a piece of wire and some tape, or this mixing desk I designed and built, or the nice FM stereo multiplex transmitter I put together, that brings you this broadcast, the Boston Marathon bomb seems like a pretty crude device.”, I wouldn’t have any beef with his description, but I’ll bet Steve Inskeep never built anything more sophisticated than a compound, complex sentence.

Listening to journalists, English majors, poo-poo someones handiwork, by calling it a “crude device” really galls me. Writing and talking into a microphone is child’s play, compared to building a bomb and carrying out a terrorist attack. It takes nerves of steel to build a bomb. It takes skill, creativity, and brains to plan and execute an attack, and the Boston Marathon bombers proved that they had what it took to pull it off.

Everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but it figures that the Boston Marathon bombers were foreigners, because most Americans simply lack the skills, know-how or imagination to build an effective explosive. It’s not that Americans don’t want to kill large numbers of people indiscriminately; we have more mass shootings in this country than anywhere on Earth, but Americans use guns when they want to kill people. Do you know why?

Americans use guns because any idiot can go to Walmart and buy a gun and ammunition; you don’t have to build them yourself. I guarantee that if Walmart sold bombs, we’d have a hell of a lot more bombings in America. We have no shortage of hate-filled lunatics in this country, but when it comes to practical knowledge, skills, and creativity, that’s where we come up short.

So cut the “crude device” crap. A Molotov Cocktail is a crude device. You fill a beer bottle with gasoline and cork it with a tampon. If you’re a pro, you add some bits of Styrofoam to make it stick. A pipe bomb, with a fuse that you light with a match could be called a “crude device”. The Boston Marathon bombs had electronic detonators that were remotely controlled, possibly by cell-phone. That’s sophisticated. The bombs contained nails, from which the heads had been painstakingly removed. That shows attention to detail and craftsmanship. Both of the bombs worked. That shows competence.

The accused kids lived in Boston. It wouldn’t have been easy to test their design without attracting a lot of attention. Thinking back to the Judi Bari bombing. That bomber was only 1 for 2, with one bomb that just fizzled. Out here in the sticks of northern California, it wouldn’t be that hard to test out a few bomb designs. With all of the gunfire around here, no one would notice a few muffled explosions in the distance.

Besides, there’s a pretty good chance that whoever bombed Judi Bari, attended, or led, the FBI bomb workshop held on land owned by Louisiana Pacific Lumber Company in the weeks prior to the bombings. Even with FBI training, and a big piece of private land to practice on, whoever bombed Judi Bari, wasn’t nearly as competent as the Boston Marathon bombers.

So give credit where credit is due. The Boston Marathon bombs were ingenious, well crafted and diabolically effective devices, and the people who made them, and carried out the attack were smart, resourceful and competent. It figures that they weren’t born and raised here.

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? CD Release Party in Garberville this Friday

Tin Can Luminary’s New Album, Um… Uh… Gum Eh?

CD Release Party in Garberville this Friday

This Friday, May 3 at the Hemp Connection in Garberville, I’ll debut my new album of Circuit-bent music titled Um… Uh… Gum Eh?

For younger readers, and others who might miss the rather obscure musical reference, the title and cover parody what is widely regarded as the worst (at least excluding the post-Roger dreck) Pink Floyd album, titled Ummagumma, a double album originally released in 1970.

A careful observer, or anyone with nothing better to do, can spot many parallels between Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma and my new album Um… Uh… Gum Eh? For instance:

Both albums contain a song about a guy who cuts people up with a sharp object:

Ummagumma has Careful With That Axe, Eugene

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has Mr. Whisker.

Both albums include songs about outer space:

Ummagumma has Astronomy Domine

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has The Saucer People Speak

Both albums have songs about knowledgeable beings:

Ummagumma has The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has The Orb of Omniscience

Both albums have long, spacy pieces where the only lyrics are “Oooh, Aaahh, and Ohhh”

Ummagumma has A Saucerful of Secrets

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has Interzone Transit Authority

Both albums have collections of unrecognizable sounds, combined with spoken words:

Ummagumma has Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has I Made A Collage

Both albums have song titles that reference Greek mythology

Ummagumma has Sysyphus

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has Sirens of Space, and here’s what it sounds like:

While Pink Floyd is famous for using gobs of state-of-the-art music equipment, I recorded Um… Uh… Gum Eh? With instruments I made out of tin cans, cigar boxes and second-hand childrens toys. That’s the state of my art, extremely low-budget and uniquely homemade. Even though Ummagumma is probably the worst Pink Floyd album, Um… Uh… Gum Eh? is undoubtedly my best album to date.  Um… Uh… Gum Eh? is my seventh solo album, btw.

Does Um… Uh… Gum Eh? sound better than Pink Floyd at their worst? Yeah, I think so. Does Um… Uh… Gum Eh? Sound like Pink Floyd? Not really, but like Pink Floyd, Um… Uh… Gum Eh? sounds great when you are really high. It’s a trip!

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? will make you smile, take you on a tour of the cosmos and bring you to the brink of insanity, before safely returning you to Earth.  Here’s the first video single from Um… Uh… Gum Eh? titled: Falling

So come out to The Hemp Connection in Garberville

on Friday, May 3rd to hear more from Um… Uh… Gum Eh?, see and hear my homemade circuit-bent instruments, and to hear me play electric didgeridoo, for free, as part of Arts Alive.  Also on the bill will be Patchy Fogg, playing musical saw.