The Living Earth Connection Airs Sunday at 9:30AM on KMUD

My partner, Amy Gustin has been up to her eyeballs in library books for weeks now, in preparation for her quarterly radio show, The Living Earth Connection, which airs this coming Sunday at 9:30 AM on KMUD Community Radio. Amy is the smartest and most interesting person I know, and her reading habits reflect that. Lately, it’s been books about ecosystem ecology, carnivore behavior and wolves.

Right now she’s in the middle of the final rewrite of her show, which means that I’ll spend the rest of the week recording, editing and assembling it in time to air this coming Sunday morning. We produce The Living Earth Connection, in it’s entirety, including the original theme music, at home, off-the-grid, using solar power and our own equipment.

If you haven’t heard The Living Earth Connection, you should check it out. If you have heard The Living Earth Connection before, you know that Amy always puts together a great show, and often finds very creative ways of conveying her message. I’m sure this episode will be no exception. I hope you’ll tune in.

The Living Earth Connection airs on the fifth Sunday of the month, in months that have five Sundays, at 9:30 AM on KMUD Redwood Community Radio. You can stream the program live or listen to an archived version at http://www.kmud.org and you can learn more about The Living Earth Connection at www.livingearthconnection.wordpress.com

Sometimes Recycling Pisses Me Off

We have a lot of free newspapers and magazines around here, and most of them are hardly worth the cover price. I pick up the North Coast Journal because they cover local arts, barely, but at least you can open the NCJ and read about a local artist, see who’s playing this week, and who is showing where for Arts Alive.

Lately, the NCJ seems to have undergone a complete talentectomy, and now appears to be written entirely by interns with the aid of the janitorial staff, so I find that fewer and fewer features in the NCJ get past my “dreck” filter.

I didn’t notice Thadeus Greenson’s piece until I was getting ready to recycle it, and I should have just sent it to the shredder, but it pissed me off that this guy would compare medical marijuana patients, sick people who need medicine, to oil company executives bent on destroying the earth to satisfy their pathological greed.

Anyway, the following letter appears in the latest edition of the NCJ

Dear Editor,

I just stumbled across Thadeus Greenson’s piece Behind the Brown Act in the May 8 edition of the NCJ. In that piece, Thadeus Greeenson compares local citizens, upset about a proposed ordinance that would prohibit them from growing their own medicine, to oil company executives bent on fracking.

In an effort to match this level of hyperbole I ask: “What If homeowners in Willow Creek were complaining about Jews, and the distinctive smell of gefilte fish, not to mention the impacts of visible Mezuzahs and Menorahs? Would the county be considering an ordinance to treat Jews like any other destructive, polluting and extractive industry?”

The ordinance in question would prohibit private citizens, living in residential neighborhoods, from producing the medicine they need. These people didn’t ask to get glaucoma, cancer, epilepsy or any number of other serious conditions. If the county won’t provide these people with free medical marijuana, the county should, at least, not bother patients who grow their own medicine, in their own yard, regardless of size.

Whether it’s lawn mower exhaust, toxic fumes from dryer vents, smoky barbecue grills, or trucks left idling in the driveway, suburban residents constantly assault each other with foul smelling clouds of toxic gas. If medical marijuana patients have to put up with their neighbor’s leaf blowers and dryer fumes, those neighbors can also tolerate the non-toxic smell of marijuana.

To stop medical marijuana patients from growing more than they need, and diverting the surplus into the black market, the obvious solution is complete legalization. Until then, we should understand why anyone involved with marijuana in any way, would be very cautious about revealing their identity, considering the long history of government persecution that marijuana users have endured, and the social prejudice against them that remains.

Forget Schools, Declare California “For Adults Only”

I was glad to learn that our local school bond, “Measure N” failed in our recent primary election. Schools seem like a lost cause to me. Really, why should taxpayers waste their money on subsidized daycare for the offspring of people who are too stupid and irresponsible to use birth control. With 7 billion+ people on the planet, I don’t think it makes sense to subsidize parenthood.

Seriously, what are the chances that anyone stupid enough to bring children into a grossly overpopulated world, in the midst of the greatest extinction event in 65 million years, at a time of unprecedented government surveillance and economic oppression, has enough brain power to participate in a meaningful way in their child’s education? No amount of school funding will ever help stupid, selfish, irresponsible people raise smart, generous pillars of the community. Besides, public school is what made their parents into the dimwitted monsters of capitalist conformity that they’ve become.

We should remember that, just like short people, who have kids solely to make themselves look taller, stupid people have kids specifically so that they will have someone dumber than them around, to make them feel smart. As long as we continue to subsidize moron and midget reproduction through taxpayer funded public schools, we’ll remain locked in a race to the bottom, both in altitude and intelligence.

What do we think we have to teach kids anyway? We should know by now that our way of life is destroying the planet, and that we have no freaking clue how to live sustainably. Children raised by wolves would have more survival skills than today’s high school graduates, but of course, there are no wolves around here anymore.

I think we should put a “wolf bond” on the ballot. If it passes, the school board will spend $10 million to reintroduce wolves into Humboldt County. Then parents could tie a pork chop around their kid’s neck, send him out to stand in the woods and tell them to wait for the school bus. Let the wolves decide who’s worth educating. Problem solved.

School bonds are such a ripoff anyway. It makes no sense to borrow money from a bank, and then have the taxpayers pay it back with interest. Taxpayers end up spending two, three or five times as much money as they get value, while bankers make a fortune from these low-risk investments.

It makes much more sense to pass a school levy. In a school levy, the taxpayers finance the schools directly and cut the bloodsucking banksters out of the equation, but thanks to Prop. 13, no one can muster the votes necessary to pass a school levy. Prop. 13 has turned California from the best state in the nation for public education into the worst.

Really, if you want decent public education, move to Mississippi or Alabama.

People come to California for the sunshine, the surf, the gay sex and the drugs, not because they want to get smarter. If we were smarter, we’d declare California an “Adults Only” state.

Think about it: Surfers don’t have the time, or sense of responsibility, to raise kids. Gay people have a foolproof method of birth control and drug addicts make terrible parents. In short, nobody in California should be having kids.

If we made California “Adults Only,” we’d never have to spend another dime on public schools. We’d never get stuck behind slow school buses that stop every 300 feet. They could sell cigarettes and candy from the same display rack, and put porno magazines out with the comic books. We could leave loaded guns, Draino and dangerous pesticides anywhere we felt like, and we wouldn’t continue to ignore homeless adults while we built more playgrounds and ball-fields for kids with no future.

Instead of listening to parents whine about their kid having to walk past a homeless adult, who might be smoking or drinking, homeless adults could report any children they see to the proper authorities, and a cop would pick up the kid and put him on a bus to Alabama. Pregnant women would still have a choice: abortion or deportation.

I am so sick of irresponsible parents thinking that they have a right to tell grown adults what they can and can’t do, because of how it will affect their children. The time to change the world is BEFORE you have kids, not after. If you didn’t want your kid to see a naked schizophrenic humping a stuffed giraffe on the sidewalk maybe you shouldn’t have gotten knocked-up in a world as crazy as this one.

If you can submit your kid to the horrors of this sick world, then your kid should also see what this sick world does to people. If you aren’t willing to do anything to make the world better for the people who are already here, then you shouldn’t bring any new people into the world, at least not until we pass the wolf bond.

I Entertain Children

I hope you caught my performance in the belly dance tent on Saturday night at the Mateel’s Summer Arts and Music Festival, the weekend before last. With my partner Amy Gustin on Theremin, Patrick, who I just met earlier that day, and don’t even know his last name yet, on Djembe, and Yours Truly on electric didgeridoo, we rocked that belly dance tent! Didn’t we?

As a didgeridoo player, I often find myself playing at herb shops, tea houses and yoga retreats. I don’t get to play through a bumpin’ stereo PA, for drunk people who want to dance, nearly often enough. That was a real treat. I am grateful to the Mateel Community Center for giving me that opportunity.

The Mateel treated us really well, all weekend. The Mateel knows how to treat musicians, and they treated us right. We had a great time at the event. I especially appreciate the talent coordinator, who booked us to play both in the belly dance tent, after dark, and on the kids stage, early in the day. It’s hard to know what to do with a didgeridoo player, but they gave us a broad opportunity to connect with an audience.

We were a little surprised to discover that we were booked to perform The Big Picture on The Youth Stage, sandwiched between two clowns, and a puppet show. I’m not complaining, or even poking fun here. I appreciate the gig. It’s just that we never thought of The Big Picture as children’s entertainment.

We don’t have children ourselves, or even like them much. Entertaining children is just not something we think about. I enjoy living an R rated life. I prefer not to check my language, limit the scope of my humor, or refrain from abusing drugs, so most people know better than to let their kids anywhere near me.

As a musician, I consider it my role in life to encourage people to ingest mind-altering substances, and then to make them glad they did. I consider it noble work and I take it seriously, but even I understand that recreational drug use is not appropriate for small children.

Amy conceived of The Big Picture for her Sunday morning radio show, The Living Earth Connection which airs on KMUD at 9:30 AM on the fifth Sunday of the month. Amy’s show is usually quite intellectual, and requires a bit of concentration. It’s probably over the heads of half of the adults around here, let alone the children.

We got the idea of blending my psychedelic druggie space noise didgeridoo music, with her thought provoking ideas, after listening to one of our favorite albums: Albedo 0.39 by Vangelis. Specifically the final song on the album, coincidentally also titled Albedo 0.39.

For this song, Vangelis found a clever way of adding a vocal track to his, otherwise instrumental, synthesizer music, without having to write lyrics. On Albedo 0.39, we hear a soft spoken English gentleman, with a sonorous voice and excellent diction, recite a list of statistics about Planet Earth. These include the length of the day and year according to two different measurements, the Earth’s mass, density, diameter, distance from the sun, speed, escape velocity, etc, concluding with “Albedo 0.39.”

Albedo is the percentage of light striking a non-luminous object that gets reflected back out into space. The Earth’s albedo is 0.39, or at least it was in 1973, when Albedo 0.39 came out. In other words, 39% of the sunlight that strikes the Earth, gets reflected back out into space. With the poles melting, and the Asian Brown Cloud spreading, the Earth’s albedo may have changed in the intervening years.

Swirling around this vocal track, we hear one of Vangelis’ trippiest analog synthesizer soundscapes. I always liked that piece because it makes you glad that you got good and high before you listened to it, and even though you were totally wasted, you still learned something.

We assume that most KMUD listeners are already baked at 9:30AM on Sunday morning. We thought we might try the same approach with the radio show. We would combine something over your head, with something for your head. That was the inspiration for The Big Picture.

We thought it came out pretty well, and the audience let us know that they liked it, so we decided to take it on the road, and to perform it live. That’s how we found ourselves on The Youth Stage at Summer Arts and Music Festival, performing a piece designed for KMUD’s wake-and-bake listeners, to small children who were not stoned. I learned a lot about children’s entertainment that weekend, and I got to witness some great performances by some really talented artists:

A OK The Clown devised a great interactive game that illustrates the problem of Global Climate Change. Riding a very tall unicycle, AOK pretended to be the atmosphere, while a circle of eager children surrounding him, pelted him with rubber balls, pompoms and hula hoops that symbolized the smoke, smog, and other airborne pollution that contribute to Global Climate Change. Frantically pedaling his unicycle, A OK endured a relentless shitstorm of hurled objects that brilliantly symbolized the assault on nature waged by industrial society.

Following A OK, came Mickey The Clown, an old school circus clown who was as kindly and gentle as he was entertaining. Mickey had a great song about suburban sprawl and habitat loss, told from the perspective of a frog named Freako. Freako the Frog was so catchy that I still can’t get it our of my head.

Then came our drugged out head trip, The Big Picture, with Theremin solos. After us, the Kinetic Paranormal Society Puppet Troupe took the stage. This very talented puppet troupe included a band, great puppets and terrific voice actors. Their, very funny, production also had an environmental message as well, but we never heard the end of it because we had to go get lunch before they shut down the kitchen.

Environmental education seemed to be the overarching theme of all of the acts that performed on The Youth Stage, including The Big Picture. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I think it’s great that clowns and puppets are educating children about environmental issues while their parents are getting smashed on overpriced beer.

On the other hand, I think, “Can’t a kid throw stuff at a clown without turning it into some kind of learning experience?” Today’s children are going to have to deal with the consequences of environmental crises, that they had no part in creating, for the rest of their lives. Do they really need to be lectured about it by a sock puppet when they are four years old? The parents need lectures not the kids.

That’s why we created The Big Picture, to lecture adults about what a fucking mess they’ve made of the planet, and where we went wrong as a society. It’s a tough message, but it’s easier to take when you’re stoned. I don’t know what the kids thought of us.

I don’t really see how you can educate kids about the environment without implicating their parents. If kids today knew how stupid, crazy and wrong their parents were, and how much damage they’ve already done to the planet, those kids would run screaming back to their mother, claw their way back up her vagina and into the womb with the admonition “Fuck you! You stupid, selfish, irresponsible idiot! Now quit fucking around and clean up this mess, and I am not coming out until you do!”

That’s what happens to kids who spend any time at all around me, before long they cuss like sailors and hate their parents. We’re happy to perform The Big Picture for birthday parties, and children’s events of all kinds, for children of all ages. You provide the drugs.

You Don’t Have to Call It God, but Don’t Pretend It Doesn’t Exist

As you may have guessed, I’m not a religious man. I think about religion the way I think about classical music, only more so. That is: I’ve heard it. I’ve played it. I know what it’s all about, but it’s been done to death. I know some people still love it, but to me it seems antiquated and irrelevant.

I don’t worship a God of any sort, but nor would I call myself an Atheist. Atheism is a reaction to religion. Atheists renounce religion, and with good reason, I think, but I’m not about to deny the existence of a force greater than myself in the Universe when science makes it so plainly evident.

Anyone who accepts Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, buys the basic premise of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and can agree on a definition of “organism” would have a hard time arguing against the existence of, if not God, then at least something like God, or something that might have been called God for a very long time, for lack of a better word. I don’t have a better word either, but if you have a moment, and don’t mind stretching your mind a bit, I’ll introduce you, and you can decide for yourself what to call it.

We’ll start with the hardest thing to get your mind around: Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Everyone recognizes the formula E=MCsquared, and knows that atoms are packed with energy, and that’s why we can build nuclear bombs.

That’s not the really interesting thing about relativity. The really interesting thing about General Relativity is that it demonstrated that space and time only exist in relation to an observer.

Einstein wasn’t the first person to figure this out, by the way, the first physicist, perhaps, but not the first person. Immanuel Kant deduced the same thing, about 200yrs ago, logically, based on the a-priori nature of math and geometry. Einstein did the math and geometry and arrived at the same conclusion.

If you want to check Einstein’s math on this, you are welcome to do so. I know I’m not up to it, but I have read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and it seems like an airtight case to me.

This is a very different way to think about space and time than we are used to. To us, space and time appear unified, inexorable and absolute. We think of ourselves as inhabiting space, and passing through time.

For example:

I live in Ettersburg, East of Shelter Cove, South of Eureka and West of Garberville, I’ve lived here since the turn of the 21st Century. That is how I would ordinarily orient myself in space and time. Abe Lincoln, on the other hand, lived in Washington, DC during the 1860’s. So, it appears as though Abe Lincoln and I are separated by space, some 3,000 miles, give or take, and by time, 150 years or so.

General Relativity tells us that we don’t inhabit space and time so much as space and time inhabit us. In other words, I live in a very special place called “here” at a time called “now”, and in my experience, Abe Lincoln is a character from the distant past. During his life, Abe Lincoln also lived in a place called “here” at a time called “now”, but in his experience, I did not exist at all.

Abe Lincoln and I both perceive space and time, as the central character in our own experience of here and now, but the idea of a larger space and time in which we both exist at different times, and in different places, is just that, an idea. Ideas, like space and time themselves, do not exist outside of our perception of them. That’s what Kant and Einstein told us.

Space and time only exist within observers. That’s not how the world looks to us, and we cannot even imagine what existence outside of space and time is like, but that’s how it is, and that’s where we live. Still don’t believe me, take it up with Einstein or Kant. I recommend Kant’s The Prolegamena to Any Future Metaphysics for a good first step. If you’re still with me, try to stretch your mind around that for a moment.

You can’t really comprehend anything outside of space and time, but that is where you live, weird as it seems. You secrete space and time in order to make sense of your experience, and you build a concept of the world based on what you experience. So, space and time, as well as a concept of the world, in which you, and every other creature on Earth, inhabit space and time, only exist in relation to the observer who experiences them, namely, you.

OK, that’s the hard part. Let’s take the definition of “organism” next:

An organism is a complex system of interdependent parts, such that the structure and function of each part is determined by it’s function within the whole, and the whole of an organism is always greater than the sum of its parts.

That seems pretty straight forward to me. A cell is made of many parts, but they all function together as one organism. Many cells can function together to form a larger organism, like a plant or an animal. Many organisms can function together to form a still larger organism, such as an ecosystem. Organisms are not objects, nor are they machines. Organisms are alive. Organisms live.

And finally, What’s the gist of Darwin’s Origin of Species?

In the tiniest nutshell, I would say that the crux of Darwin’s biscuit is that all of the organisms that have ever existed on Planet Earth, are related to each other. Does that sound right? There’s a lot more to biological evolution than that, but for our purposes, that’s enough.

Now, imagine all of the organisms that exist on Earth now, and have ever existed in all of history. Imagine the 7 Billion+ humans living now, plus every human who has ever lived, all of their pets, all of their livestock, all of their ancestors, all of the wild animals that have ever lived, all of the dinosaurs, every fish, bird, insect, plant, and mushroom, and don’t forget all of the tiny microscopic organisms like yeast, protozoa, and bacterium. Don’t leave anyone out.

All of those organisms, Darwin would expect us to believe, are related, by birth, to every other organism, including those of you now reading this essay. Now go ahead and throw in all of the organisms that will exist in the future, even though we have no idea what they will look like or how many of them to expect. We’re talking about a lot of organisms now.

What separates this collection of individual organisms from each other? The answer is space and time, of course. Some of these organisms come from the past, others from the present, still others from the future. Some come from Africa, others from Asia and still others from Australia, and so on. No two organisms can occupy the same space and time. This you remember from geometry, and it corresponds to your experience of space and time in the real world. So, all of these organisms, though related, remain separated by their positions in space and time.

What were we just saying about space and time? We went over how Einstein demonstrated that Kant was right when he deduced that space and time do not exist outside of the observer who perceives them. What does that mean for all of those organisms? It means that outside of our perceptions, all of those organisms are not separated. Outside of space and time, where perceiving organisms actually exist, all life on Earth remains undivided. In other words, every organism on Earth, past, present and future, are, in some incomprehensible, but very real way, parts of a single organism, that exists outside of space and time.

What did we just say about organisms? “An organism is a complex system of interdependent parts, such that the structure and function of each part is determined by it’s function within the whole, and the whole of an organism is always greater than the sum of its parts.”

So I ask you, “What would you call an organism made up of every single organism on Earth, such that the structure and function of every single organism on Earth was determined by it’s function within the whole, and the whole of that organism was even greater than the sum of its parts?”

Thanks to Kant, Darwin and Einstein, we know this organism exists. Without it, we wouldn’t exist. We know that we are a part of it, but what should we call it? Gaia?, The Big Organism?, God?, Bruce? Does it matter what we call it? You are never going to mistake it for anything else, and you’re never going to be able to talk about it any more coherently than this, so maybe it’s best not to call it anything. Still, I don’t think it makes sense to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

In fact, I don’t understand why we don’t teach this in schools. The Critique of Pure Reason has been around for over 200 years. General Relativity has been around for most of a century. We teach evolution, and we teach relativity, at least to the degree that most teachers understand it, but but they never quite put it together. Instead, they teach that civilization, the economy and the “rule of law” is what unites us …against the rest of nature.