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

Anna Hamilton Reminds Me of My Grandmother

Anna Hamilton Reminds Me of My Grandmother

 

Listening to Anna Hamilton’s most recent Rant n’ Rave show on KMUD (Friday, Feb. 1, 7:00pm) reminded me of talking to my Grandmother. I love my Grandmother, God rest her soul. She was a great cook. She was full of love for her family and friends, of which she had many, but she made no secret of her bigoted, racist views, especially when she drank, which was continuously. My Grandmother’s views were extremely common among white people of her generation, and all of her friends, so far as I could tell, echoed her sentiments.

This woman is not my Grandmother and I have no reason to believe she harbors any ill will towards anyone,

These racist views were extremely common among white people, even well educated white people, before the Civil Rights Movement, but most people would find them offensive and embarrassing today. My Grandmother very much resented the Civil Rights Movement for the changes it brought to her world, and although this movement changed people’s attitudes on a broad cultural level, as a individual, my Grandmother took her bigoted, racist attitudes to the grave.

My Grandmother, a lifelong resident of South Philadelphia particularly resented the changes that the Civil Rights Movement brought to the Philadelphia Mummers Parade. The Mummers Parade, held every New Year’s Day in Philadelphia, is not unlike Mardi-Gras in New Orleans, except with less nudity, probably because it is very cold in Philadelphia in January.

The Mummers Parade features extravagant floats,

string bands in elaborate feathered, sequined and mirrored headdresses,

and brigades of clowns in brightly colored costumes carrying specially decorated, multi-tiered parasols.

People all over Philadelphia work all year on these costumes and floats to prepare for this one day of wild, drunken revelry that turns the streets of Philadelphia into a massive street party.

One major difference between Mardi-Gras and The Mummers Parade, is that Philadelphia’s Mummers are almost exclusively white, and traditionally, they would all wear black face makeup for the parade.

You can imagine how offensive Philadelphia’s Black Community found this. Thanks to the Civil Rights Movement, Philadelphia’s Mummers can no longer wear black face paint.

Many older Mummers, and white residents of Philadelphia, including my Grandmother, deeply resented the ban on black face paint in the Mummers Parade. For the first few years of the ban, people on floats refused to wave, clowns refused to dance, and string bands would play only Taps whenever the parade passed through a predominantly black neighborhood. For the Mummers, black face paint was not about racism, it was about tradition, but the ban on black face paint starkly revealed that racism was also a cherished tradition in Philadelphia.

According to my Grandmother, Caucasians were better than Black people, Hispanics and Native Americans because of civilization. White people deserved the privilege they enjoyed, not because of any genetic superiority, but because white people were more civilized than Blacks, Hispanics or Native Americans. She explained this to me many times as a child.

According to my Grandmother, Black people, Hispanics, and Native Americans all came from savage, brutal, backwards and uncivilized cultures. These people were just learning to behave in a civilized manner, and they still had a long way to go before they could be considered the equal of Whites. All of the racial violence, oppression and discrimination that non-white people faced was justified, in her eyes, because civilized people needed to beat the savagery out of them, so that they would learn their place in society. In other words, my Grandmother justified institutionalized racism on the same grounds that she justified beating her own kids.

As outrageous as this sounds today, these attitudes were extremely common 50 or 60 years ago. When Anna read the definition of “Civilization” from her 1947 dictionary, I could easily hear my Grandmother’s voice and attitudes channeled through it.

I don’t believe that Anna harbors the same kind of racist sentiment that my Grandmother did, far from it. I know that Anna is a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement and I know she believes in equal rights for everyone, but her attitudes and beliefs sound as dated and embarrassing to me today, as my Grandmother’s did in the 1970s.

Anna’s blindness to her own cultural prejudices about civilization allowed her to read that stunningly racist, and xenophobic definition of civilization without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, not unlike a Philadelphia Mummer strutting around in black face to the cheers of white onlookers lining the streets. The problem with the definition of civilization that Anna read, was that it defined civilization by who it excluded.

Anti-Japanese propaganda from WWII

According to the definition she read, civilization excludes savages, brutes, uneducated, unsophisticated, rude and unruly people, implying that only good, noble, sophisticated and well educated people could be counted among the ranks of the civilized. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Civilization is chock full of savages, brutes and rude unruly people. In fact, civilization produces them in greater numbers than any other culture in the history of humanity.

Here in California, Native Americans were deemed “savages”, and it was legal for civilized people to kill them, just a few generations ago. Elsewhere, civilized people kidnapped millions of Africans, to keep as slaves,

and just a few short years before the publication of Anna’s dictionary, civilized people exterminated seven million Jews, Blacks, Gays, Gypsies etc. in an extremely sophisticated national operation aimed at cleansing civilization of “mongrel races” and “degenerates”.

Even though we now recognize the American holocaust, the European Holocaust, the brutal history of slavery in the US, as well as thousands of other examples of institutionalized violence, as horrible atrocities, we still perceive civilization as superior to the cultures that those, oh so civilized people, so passionately and violently sought to exterminate. We somehow convince ourselves that all of these crimes against humanity were carried out by “bad apples” like Hitler, but that the core of civilization remains a paragon of high ideals, and represents the highest expression of our shared humanity.

Civilized people are like the mafia. They wear nice suits, keep their fingernails manicured, and behave like gentlemen, until they have business to attend to. Then, they become cold-blooded killers.

Here in Humboldt County, civilization looks more like the mafia than in many places, with so many greedy dope yuppies cynically using their civil and property rights to conceal their criminal activity from law enforcement and their obscene incomes from the IRS. They’ve gotten used to making a living from the violence of the drug war, and enjoy their privileged status, as white people with money, within civilization. Consequently, they remain unwilling to face the reality of their situation.

So let’s define civilization by what it is, rather than by what it calls its victims. Civilization is a way of life characterized by cities, hierarchy, division of labor, inequality, violence and environmental degradation (and writing incidentally). It’s high time that we stop pretending that civilization is something to celebrate and face the reality that civilization is an affront to indigenous cultures everywhere.

The Real Apocalypse Continues on KMUD, Sunday at 9:30am

The Real Apocalypse Continues on KMUD Sunday at 9:30am

 

I’ve heard it said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. Clearly, whoever said that has not spent much time around the mentally ill. No, doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results, is the definition of stupidity.

As we systematically wipe out the biodiversity of the planet, overheat the atmosphere, and pollute, poison and contaminate every ecosystem and organism on Earth, a wretched and miserable cast, more than seven-billion strong, reenacts, recreates and reinforces a ten-thousand-year-old pattern of stupidity that has brought us to the brink of global destruction.

For an exploration of the roots of this juggernaut of cultural stupidity that has given us tyranny, war, starvation and disease on a biblical scale, and lies at the heart of our current global environmental crisis, listen to (my partner) Amy Gustin’s radio show, The Living Earth Connection, on KMUD at 9:30 am this coming Sunday.

Amy has put together an exceptional program. You will find it eye-opening and entertaining. The show examines the agricultural revolution, which gave rise to Western Civilization, through the prism of the biblical story of Revelations. To represent Revelations, Amy has chosen selections from Aphrodite’s Child’s classic album, 666 (which I reviewed here about a year ago). Through an examination of historical records and archeological evidence, Amy reveals the tectonic shift in human consciousness that triggered the tsunami of stupidity that now threatens to drown us all. Tune in to The Living Earth Connection this Sunday, Dec, 30 at 9:30 am on KMUD.

The Limits of Objective Science

The Limits of Objective Science

The show happened a few months ago on KMUD, although it probably never should have happened at all. Really Eric, if you can’t be bothered to prepare a show, let someone else tickle the ether. Eric Kirk showed his respect for all of the grassroots organizers who did the work to put Proposition 37, the label GMOs proposition, on the ballot, not by inviting any of them onto his monthly talk show, not by bothering to research the issue himself, but instead, by asking listeners to call in with, and I quote “…the objective science that proves that genetically modified crops are safe.”

As you can imagine, the entire show was beneath contempt, and a tragic waste of the community’s airwaves, money, and time. Of course the election is long past, and Prop. 37 failed, but that insidious quote deserves closer scrutiny and discussion. Let’s look at it again:

“…the objective science that proves that genetically modified crops are safe.”

As if one phone call from Eric Kirk to Monsanto’s Public Relations Department wouldn’t have yielded a Phd guest for his show, if he could have been bothered, but that’s not my point here. While a PR Phd from Monsanto full of BS about GMOs on KMUD might have made for better radio, even Monsanto’s Phd would be hard pressed to find objective science that proves that GMOs are safe… extremely hard pressed.

I’m sure Monsanto’s PR flack would blather on about this or that study, and about his credentials. He’d have piles of evidence, and a good story to go along with it, but he couldn’t prove that GMOs are safe with objective science. Really, Monsato’s PR guy could hardly have done better than Eric Kirk, who simply insinuated that such a thing existed, but even if GMOs were actually safe, you couldn’t prove it with objective science, because organisms are not objects.

We really like this word “objective”, especially in front of the word “science”. By God “objective science” is the only science we trust, and we trust “objective science” precisely because it is so… objective. I give credit where credit is due. Objective science told us that the Earth revolves around the sun. Objective science gave us the atom bomb, and objective science helped us put a man on the moon. All impressive feats, I completely agree, and I can understand why people might put a lot of stock in “objective science”, but it has limits.

Objective science leaves many important questions unanswered. For instance, objective science told us how much rocket fuel we would need, and when we would have to launch the rocket, in order to put a man on the moon, but objective science could not tell us if space travel was safe for humans. We still don’t know if space travel is safe for humans, and we certainly don’t have objective science that proves it. So far, space travel seems safe enough, for very healthy people, for limited amounts of time, but we really don’t know enough about human physiology to say with certainty that space travel has no long term deleterious effects.

On the other hand, any 12 year old has enough experience with objects that they have a pretty solid working understanding of physics. By the time a child turns twelve, he/she has dropped thing, thrown things, launched water rockets, exploded firecrackers and spun a bucket of water around upside down without spilling it. By age twelve, most children have such a solid understanding of physics that they can play baseball, ride a bicycle, jump rope or play jacks, and they rely on this understanding instinctively for the rest of their lives. Only later, when they go to school, do they learn that there’s math involved.

Even though most people have a pretty good working understanding of physics, all of that math discourages many people from studying theoretical physics, at least past high school. Yet, a statistically significant number of people do pursue their interest in theoretical physics, and these people do a hell of a lot of math.

In fact, theoretical physicists have found applications in real life for damn near every kind of math that mathematicians can dream up. Physics is like that. It’s very mathematical and precise. You do a few experiments, figure out a few equations, and Boom, you can use those equations to predict the motions of objects all over the universe. We can predict how fast an object will fall on any planet anywhere in the universe, how much force it will exert when it hits the ground, and how much force it will take to throw it across the room etc etc.

As a species, we demonstrate an extremely accurate, working understanding of physics, one that allows us to, for instance, throw a spear accurately enough to hit a moving animal, conceive and build a bow and arrow, or atlatl, and to use them effectively. We find this working understanding of physics very satisfying, and even though we no longer hunt wild game for sustenance, in leisure activities like golf, bowling, surfing and in all ball sports, the pleasure of learning to manipulate objects in space and time more accurately, makes these activities fun and enjoyable.

We really like theoretical physics too. It makes us feel powerful to know so much about how objects move in space and time, and we’ve learned to do some pretty impressive tricks. Using theoretical physics, NASA was able to send a rocket-ship all the way to the moon, and back, on the first try. That’s a pretty good stunt, even I admit. Our working understanding of physics, which has since become our theoretical understanding of physics has served us well in so many ways throughout our history.

From helping us develop the tools and skills necessary to hunt mastodons, to helping us develop the tools and skills necessary to launch thermonuclear Armageddon, it’s our understanding of how objects move in space and time that makes us a successful species on this green Earth. As long as we’re talking about objects in space and time, be they baseballs, rocket-ships, or Higgs-Boson particles, we can thank “objective science” for enlightening us, with such astounding accuracy, about how they behave. That’s why we call it “objective” science. Objective science is the science of objects, and objects reside in space and time. Now you know why we call objective science, “objective”.

Fortunately, I think, for all of us, organisms are not objects. Organisms do not behave like objects. Organisms do not function like objects, and organisms do not give up their secrets easily to objective science. That is why, when it comes to medicine, biology, sociology, economics, or psychology, all of the sciences that study organisms, objectively, you’ll find them doing lots, and lots of experiments, and no matter how much math they use, their predictions remain woefully imprecise.

While we may calculate with accuracy the age and origin of the universe in space and time, life remains mostly a mystery. Sure, biologist, biochemists, and doctors now understand, on some level, the mechanics and the chemistry of some biological systems, but they do this by objectifying the organism. In other words, they kill it, and look at it under a microscope.

Organisms become objects to us, when they are dead. For most of our history, that was the whole point of understanding physics. We used physics to kill. We used it to hunt wild animals to feed ourselves. Our understanding of physics fed us, kept us dry and warm, but it didn’t tell us much about ourselves, except the limits of our own strength, and it still doesn’t.

Unfortunately, objective science doesn’t tell us much about ourselves, or any of the other organisms with which we share this planet. While physicists can tell us, with great confidence, about the origins of the universe, and routinely put machines on distant planets that send us pictures at the speed of light, medicine has wiped out what? One, almost two, diseases, mainly on a lucky shot.

If objective science is so great, why aren’t doctors explaining their grand theory of life, explaining its origin, and predicting its future, while they hunt down cures for the last few rare diseases. Really, we spend way, way, way, more money on medical research than we do unlocking the riddles of the cosmos. After all, people’s lives are at stake. Alas, cancer, AIDS, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, schizophrenia, autism and a host of other diseases continue to afflict people around the world. Even the commonest of diseases, the common cold, continues to mock all of our best efforts to tame its virulence.

No, organisms are not objects. Organisms are a different animal all together, and objective science really doesn’t tell us much about them. The organism keeps its secrets and life remains mysterious. Still, we’re so impressed with atom bombs, moonwalks and microcomputers that we’d like to believe that objective science can cure cancer, or open a window into the world of autism, but really, we’re out of luck.

Maybe a genetically modified organism looks like an impressive feat of objective science to you, but it’s not really. At best, a GMO represents a feat of objectified science. Geneticists have isolated a particular mechanism of life, and learned how to manipulate it, to produce modified organisms that lawyers can patent, and capitalists can then legally exploit.

Objective science tells us a lot about objects in space and time, but objectifying organisms does not enlighten us much at all, because organisms do not live in space and time. Space and time only exists within organisms. This is the crux of Einstein’s theory of relativity. It’s also the crux of Emmanuel Kant’s, The Critique of Pure Reason, written about a century and a half before Einstein.

As incomprehensible as it seems, space and time only exist within organisms (or, perhaps more accurately, within an organism). In fact, as incomprehensible as it is, this is the only thing that objective science has ever proven about organisms. Think about this for a while. Objective science helps us survive in this beautiful world, not understand it. Not only are we far, far, far away from unlocking the secrets of life, we’re not even capable of comprehending them. That’s what objective science has proven.

So, when someone in a white lab coat tells you that “objective science has proven its safe”, while they try to sell you some new technology, don’t buy it, figuratively, or literally. Whether it’s GMOs, wireless smart meters, cell phone towers, food additives, flame retardants, vaccines, or TV, objective science can help us develop these things, but it doesn’t tell us much about how or if they effect us, because we are not objects. That is the limit of objective science.

If Eric wanted to do a good show about how “safe” GMOs are, he could have interviewed a corporate attorney who knew something about product liability law. They could have talked about what exactly constitutes a “safe” product, from a legal perspective. I would find it interesting to hear two lawyers explain how corporations can produce inherently dangerous products, like automobiles, motorcycles, firearms, addictive psychoactive drugs, and thousands of other products that kill people directly, sicken and kill others through pollution or contamination, and also contribute to global climate change, ocean acidification, and sea level rise, problems that negatively effect everyone, and yet avoid liability for any of the damage these products cause. I think Eric could do a good job with that topic, because he knows the law. On the other hand, Eric doesn’t know enough about science to fill a gnats navel, and he should shut up about it.

Oh Joy, Another F*cking Election

Oh Joy, Another F*cking Election

 

Thus far, I haven’t said anything about this upcoming presidential election, and frankly, I don’t see much point, …of the election, or of commenting about it. I did actually cast a ballot, primarily to honor the hard work of grassroots organizers who put Prop. 37 on the ballot. I think that one deserves to pass, so I voted for it.

As far as the presidential race goes, I cast my vote for Roseanne Barre, not that I think she has a chance, or that she would do any good even if she somehow managed to win. I voted for Roseanne because she’s funny. Funny counts in my book! Don’t tell me about your leadership, your grand plan, your first 100 days or any of that BS. If you expect me to listen to you, you’d better make it funny.

If you can make it funny, I don’t even care if you lie to me, just don’t expect me believe you when you tell me that a strong third party, or anything else for that matter, will save democracy, and turn this country around. Not Jill Stein, not Rocky Anderson, not Roseanne Barre, no one is going to turn this country around. Putting a new captain on the Titanic will not help it change course. We’ve already hit the iceberg, and this nation is headed straight for the bottom of the ocean.

The longer we pretend that we can solve real problems with elections, the worse all of those problems become. Most of the real problems we face as a nation, stem from, and would not exist without, the centralized national government. We wouldn’t have a massive military, which would severely limit the expansion of global capital which would in turn, reign in environmental degradation, inequality, homelessness and poverty. Our nation exists to create, maintain and exacerbate those problems, and to prevent anyone from taking effective action to stop them. So, stop pretending that we can turn this killing machine into something good, just by casting a ballot.

Of course, it might take a while to hit bottom, mainly because so many people continue to invest in “the system”. I have a hard time respecting anyone born after WWII who invests in “the system”. We grew up knowing about DDT and Silent Spring. We saw photographs of the Earth from space. We saw the “Crying Indian Commercial”.

We remember Vietnam, the King/X/Kennedy assassinations, Wounded Knee, Kent State and Watergate. We dropped acid. We heard Timothy Leary tell us to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” and for a brief moment, we understood what he meant, and knew he was right.

All of that happened before we turned 21, and most of it happened before we were 12. Today, no one in the entire work force, from the President of the U.S. on down, has any excuse for believing in the system. We knew about the corruption, lies and propaganda. We knew it killed innocent people indiscriminately, and we saw how it treated the planet. We knew. We knew what we were getting into. We didn’t know better, I’ll grant you that, but we knew. We knew that what we knew, was rotten to the core.

Anyone of average intelligence or above should have put two and two together by the time they reached the age that they started making their own decisions. If you were too dimwitted, to figure it out, or too deep in denial to face it, you have a pitiable brain dysfunction. These feeble-minded people are not really capable of making decisions for themselves, let alone the rest of us.

Others however, saw the corruption, the oppression, the violence and the destruction, held their nose, and dove in, feeding the system with their efforts, talent and time. They indulge themselves in consumer goods, and fill their lives with shiny hi-tech distractions. These people suck!

It’s these people, these cynical cowards who know that “the system” is killing the planet, but hope it lasts long enough to indulge their pathetic middle-class expectations, who pretend that voting matters. They make-believe that things will get better if they just vote for the right person. Then, they get right back to work building attack helicopters, mining uranium, or selling us crap we don’t need. Speaking of crap we don’t need, lets add democracy, the federal government, and the cynical cowards who still pretend that democracy might work someday, to the list.

On The Money; What’s Wrong With Economists

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

What’s Wrong With Economists

Most economists write for policy wonks, not regular people. While they study consumer behavior and worker productivity, they have little, if anything, to say to consumers or workers. They might have something to say to voters, but only because they endorse a policy favored by a particular candidate. Economists write their books for the candidates, the political think-tanks, the rich and powerful and their advisers, but not for us, the 99%.

 

While economists may have some respect for you as a voter, as a worker, producer and consumer, you are simply a pawn to them. Something to be pushed around by fiscal policy, corporate coercion, and government taxation. Your life, energy, time, creativity and spirit mean no more to them than so many barrels of oil, tons of molybdenum or bushels of corn, and they don’t write economics books for bushels of corn.

 

To economists you are just a commodity to be bought and sold, consumed and discarded, just another anonymous drone, toiling away at meaningless work, in an empty life that you fill with pointless consumption. They don’t want you to read their books. They want you to go shopping, and let them, along with Americas smartest and greediest, worry about what’s best for the economy.

 

As a result, we now have an economy engineered entirely to help the richest and greediest acquire more. This economy demands that the rest of us sacrifice more and more of our lives, and our planet, every year, for their benefit. No, economists don’t want us to read their books, they want us to spend more time at work, more money for housing, and more money for health care. They want us to accept lower wages, give up job security, and to get used to being disposable.

That’s how they save “the economy”. As soon as we get used to working longer and harder for less, accept the destruction of the environment as a necessary evil, and learn to step around the human garbage left in their wake, the economy will be fine. Isn’t that great! As long as we’re willing to sacrifice our lives for it, the economy will be just fine.

Yet, too many of us still worry about “the economy”. Is it growing? How fast is it growing? Are prices rising? How’s the stock market? Who worries about us?

Why does it cost so much, just to have a place to live? How do the long hours I spend at work affect my family? How much of my current lifestyle would I choose, were I not economically coerced into working full time? How will global climate change affect my quality of life, or my children’s? Mightn’t I appreciate a clean environment more, if I had more time to enjoy it? Should I participate in a system in which I have no value, except as an exploitable resource? Why should economic growth trump all of these real human concerns? Whose job is it to think about these things? Not economists, that’s for sure.

How can you leverage maximum productivity from employees? How will environmental regulation effect energy prices? How does depression and suicide effect corporate earnings? That’s how economists look at these problems, and that’s why economists suck.

In On The Money, Economics For the 99%, I take the radical position that economics is about people, and how they interact with each other and the environment. Instead of simply looking for ways to help the rich and powerful increase, and accelerate the flow of money into their own bank accounts, On The Money; Economics for the 99% exposes the fundamental flaws in the capitalist system that have led to the gross inequality, and catastrophic environmental destruction that define our time. On the Money; Economics for the 99% shows you how to reclaim your life and liberate the world from the greedy clutches of the 1%, one step at a time.

On The Money, The View From the Top

On The Money;

Economic Advice for the 99%

The View From the Top

 

So who are the 1%, and why do they want all of your money? Don’t they have enough already? Why do they always want more, and why don’t they do something about global climate change or the rest of the environmental crisis? The fact is, the world looks very different from the top of the economy, than it does from the bottom, or even the middle, so let’s try to see it from their perspective.

 

The 1% take opulence for granted. Their consumption is limited only by their own imagination, not lack of resources. These people all have way more money than they can spend, and most of what they own, makes money, so they keep getting richer, no matter how much they spend. Still, they need a robust economy way more than you do. They need the economy, because the economy protects them from us. They use it to keep the riffraff in line. At the top of the economy, profit has less to do with making money, than it does with maintaining order, stability, and growth.

 

Order matters at the top. As solid, and resilient as our economic system seems, the 1% knows that without strict discipline, the capitalist system would collapse like a house of cards. Those 1%ers, who have become accustomed to opulence, know that the rest of us would lynch them if we knew how bad they were fucking us. So we must have cops, and standing armies, who will shoot to kill anyone who steps out of line. That’s what “order” means.

 

That’s why the military industrial complex, and the prison industrial complex form such a large part of our economy. Even though these endless stupid wars we get into, and the money we spend keeping millions of people in prison for drugs, seems like a tremendous waste of resources to the rest of us, to the 1% who control this economy, it is more important to punish disobedience, no matter how pointless and arbitrary the rule, than it is to reward obedience. The 1% never skimp on the guns, bombs, soldiers or cops.

 

All of those cops and soldiers need to get paid. That gets expensive, even for the 1%, so they make sure that we pay them. When the government has enough money from taxing working people to pay for enough cops, guns and soldiers to keep everyone in line, they call that “stability”. When we pay for our own oppression, and their protection, “order” becomes profitable, and self-sustaining, resulting in “stability”.

 

Even though we, the 99%, pay for those cops, soldiers and armaments, they invariably serve the interests of the 1%, and the 1% always find something for them to do. It’s not pretty, but it keeps them busy. The 1% likes to keep the rest of us busy too, and that isn’t pretty either. Whether its drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, contaminating groundwater in rural PA with fracking chemicals, or removing mountaintops in WV, its all ugly work, and doing it doesn’t make us any more attractive.

 

The 1% need to keep this economy growing, because that’s how they keep us busy. They give us jobs and incomes to keep us from killing them, and turn us into obedient servants. As the population grows, as unrest grows, as dissatisfaction grows, as anger grows, so too must the economy. Every year the pressure to earn money must increase, because that pressure, more so than the cops and soldiers, serves to maintain order and stability, by keeping us busy. As more people compete for fewer resources, the amount of resources necessary to maintain order and stability increases as well, so growth insures stability.

 

You see, to the 1%, the rest of us just look like so many goats and sheep. We are just livestock to them. For them, the economy acts as a domestication program. As long as they can keep the economy rolling along, we will do whatever they want. We’ll go to school to learn the material, at our own cost, then take an unpaid internship to acquire the skills, and then beg them to hire us, and accept whatever they offer. It took no small amount of effort to reduce us to this level of submissiveness and obedience, and they’ve been at it for some time.

 

“Flexibility” they call it. We have a very “flexible” workforce here in the US. We’ll do pretty much anything for a job. Relocate? No problem, Pay cut? Sure, I’m a team player. No benefits? OK, I’m healthy enough. Unpaid overtime? Yeah, I always give 110%, just because I love my job, no matter how bad it sucks. How did it come to this? When did Americans turn into such pathetic little boot-licks, and why?

 

The economy did this to us. The 1% uses the global economy to make us more obedient, docile, and trusting, all of the traits you might look for in a dog. The 1% has exploited the resources of the world, laid waste to the global ecosystem, and expropriated the content of our lives, for the primary purpose of domesticating the human race, to make us into obedient servants. The 1% uses the economy to turn us, the wolf at their door, into the dog tied up in their yard..

 

It takes a lot of energy to keep us all busy, and we destroy a lot of the environment in the process, but to the 1%, that is a small price to pay for the order, stability and security that a robust economy provides them. That’s why the 1% completely fails to address global climate change. We don’t burn so much energy because we need it to live decent lives, we burn so much energy because they need it, to control our lives. To the 1%, the 99% represents a much more immediate threat than global climate change. So, for the 1%, order, stability, and growth will always take precedence over the environment.

 

Despite the fact that all money flows toward the 1%, we must understand that the vast majority of economic activity in the world is not about making the 1% richer, the purpose of most economic activity is to keep us all too busy, and too dependent, to challenge or even question their power. As long as we stay focused on money, and will settle for a paycheck, we remain loyal servants of the 1%.

 

That’s why the 1% get so concerned about the unemployment rate. None of them work at jobs, but for them, full employment means order, stability, and growth. Order, stability and growth may sound like good things, but you should always remember what they mean. “Order” means everyone does what they are told, and almost nobody dares to step out of line. “Stability” means that tomorrow, everyone will get up in the morning and do it again, just like today, yesterday, last week, last month or last year, even though we all hate doing it and its destroying the planet. “Growth” means that every year you will pay more, and work harder for less.

 

This human domestication program they call “the economy” produces order, stability and growth, for the 1%, at the expense of the environment, our quality of life, and our humanity. Neither our lives nor our environment will improve as long as we continue to serve their interests. That’s a view of the economy, from the perspective of the 1%, that’s On The Money.

On The Money, Unemployment, Revised

I received an email recently from an editor at Fifth Estate magazine. They asked me to revise this piece and update the statistics for publication in their Summer, 2012 edition. I think it improved the piece quite a bit. I encourage all of you to subscribe, or at least pick up the new Summer 2012 edition of Fifth Estate, which should be on newsstands any day now.

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working Class

Unemployment

You can’t turn on the news these days without hearing about unemployment. The national unemployment rate hovers at about 8.3%, although experts agree that the number of people out-of-work far exceeds that figure. The 8.3% figure only reflects the number of people actually looking for work. It does not count the growing number of people who have stopped looking for work.

This “not working, not looking for work” segment of the population might really be on to something. Jobs don’t pay like they used to. Fewer jobs than ever actually provide a living wage. Housing costs came unhinged from wages years ago. Affordable housing used to mean that you had a decent place to live that cost no more than one-quarter of your monthly wage. How many of you can say you have affordable housing by that standard?

Most employers expect workers to have a phone, reliable transportation, and a presentable wardrobe whether or not the job pays enough to cover those costs. Workers often make these expenses a priority over their physical needs, sacrificing their own health for their employers profit. A full time job scarcely leaves workers enough time or energy to prepare healthy meals, further compromising health. For this meager existence, workers trade roughly half of their waking hours, and 60-80% of their life energy.

When you think about it that way, its a wonder anyone wants a job. So, lets look at these people who have stopped looking for work. How do they do it? How do they get by? What are they doing that’s working for them? Are they dealing drugs, robbing banks or hacking computers? They can’t all have the talent to deal, rob and hack profitably.

Half of the world’s population lives on less than $1 a day. Why can’t we? If living in a storm sewer and eating spit-roasted rat isn’t better than working for a living, its gotta be close. Life is too short to spend it in self-imposed slavery chasing an allusive, and mostly extinct middle-class illusion.

Most of us already know that we’re never going to be “super-rich”, but if you no longer aspire to be middle-class, a job no longer seems like such a necessary evil, and evil it is. If you can get out from under your job, you can reclaim your time, your energy, and your freedom. Three things working people have sold too cheaply for too long, all of them more valuable than money.

Face it, the biggest problem the world faces right now is too much money. Too much money caused the housing meltdown. Too much money caused the Fukushima meltdown and too much money caused the polar ice-cap meltdown. We’ve really got to stop thinking about how to make more money, and figure out how to live without it.

See, we’ve got about 7 billion people on the planet, and right now, damn near every one of them wants to make money. So they all start making stuff out of the rocks, trees, and animals they find around them, to sell for money. People who do well at this soon have more money that they need, but they don’t stop making stuff, instead, they expand. They buy machines that help them make more stuff faster and cheaper.

Soon, they have even more money, so they loan it to other people to expand their businesses, so they can make more stuff faster and cheaper. That way, they make even more money, but nobody wants their money just sitting around doing nothing. No, everyone wants their extra money to make even more money, and most people don’t care how it happens, as long as it happens.

So, all of this money really, really, wants make even more money out of whatever rocks, plants and animals that are still left on the planet, creating our present situation: We have rapidly increasing amounts of money chasing dwindling numbers of rocks, plants and animals, all over the world.

Today, this money exerts tremendous pressure on all of us. It constantly works to find new ways to extract more from us, and the planet, every day. It never rests and does not care about anything else but making more of itself. Money has become a monster. Stay away from it.

From this perspective, unemployment is not our most serious economic problem. Unemployment is the solution to our most serious economic problem. Don’t try to make money, that just exacerbates our global problems. Just find someplace to live and something to eat. If you can’t find a better way to do something than with money, consider that a failure of imagination.

We cannot afford to be productive workers any longer. Our own industriousness got us into this mess. The more productive we become as workers, the faster capitalists extract resources from the commons, and the more pollution the whole process creates. As a result, the whole world becomes impoverished, polluted and enslaved while a few people live ridiculously opulent lifestyles. Been there, done that.

We deserve a planet full of trees, rocks and animals, and we deserve the time and energy to enjoy them. Let them keep their soul-sucking, planet-raping, low-wage, no-benefit, endless grind of a job to themselves. Do something different with your life. Spit roasted rat is not half bad. There’s a view of the unemployment problem that’s On The Money.

Introducing: The Living Earth Connection

Introducing: The Living Earth Connection

 

Maybe you don’t get my perspective. Maybe you think I’m just a knee jerk reactionary, or maybe you just think I’m a jerk, but if you want to know why I see the world the way I do, you should listen to my partner, Amy Gustin’s radio show, this coming Sunday April 29 at 9:30 AM on KMUD (or you can download an mp3 file of it here, to listen to at your leisure). I cannot recommend this show highly enough.

Her program, The Living Earth Connection draws from the writings of Daniel Quinn. The show takes a long view of human history, instead of dividing the story of our species into “history” and “prehistory”. From this perspective, the program examines the success of our species as well as the success of our culture, drawing conclusions that shatter the dominant paradigm.

Amy did a great job of putting this material together. She’s put together a program that can change the way you see the world forever, but just because its profound, that doesn’t mean its going to get religious. Our problems run deeper than religion, and so does this show. You should listen.  (This link takes you to the Living Earth Connection blog)