I spent my childhood in the English countryside over 70 years ago where we lived a simple life without telephones or electricity. Horses were still a normal source of power and we hardly imagined radio and television. One thing I remember well was how superstitious we all were. Men and women who in other ways were intelligent, fearfully avoided places said to be haunted. They would suffer inconvenience rather than travel on Fridays that were the 13th day of the month.
Their irrational fears fed on ignorance and were quite common. I cannot help thinking that they persist, but now these fears are about the products of science. This is particularly true of nuclear power plants that seem to stir the dread that in the past was felt about a moonlit graveyard thought to be infested with werewolves and vampires.
The fear of nuclear energy is understandable through its association in the mind with the horrors of nuclear warfare, but it is unjustified; nuclear power plants are not bombs. They are, in fact, built solidly enough to withstand even a direct hit by a plane in a terrorist attack, according to industry experts.
What at first was a proper concern for safety has become a near-pathological anxiety. Much of the blame for this goes to the news media, the television and film industries, and fiction writers. All these have used the fear of things nuclear as a reliable prop to sell their wares. They, and the political disinformers who sought to discredit the nuclear industry as potential enemies, have been so successful at frightening the public that it is now impossible in many nations to propose a new nuclear power plant.
No source of power is entirely safe, even windmills are not free of fatal accidents, but compared to nuclear power, the dangers of continuing to burn fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) as our main energy source are far greater and they threaten not just individuals but civilisation itself. Much of the First World behaves like an addicted smoker: we are so used to burning fossil fuels for our needs that we ignore their long-term risks.
Polluting the air with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has no immediate consequences, but continued pollution leads to climate changes whose effects are only apparent when it is almost too late for a cure. Carbon dioxide poisons the environment just as salt can poison us. No harm comes from a modest intake, but a daily diet with too much salt can cause a lethal quantity to accumulate in the body.
Although nothing we do will destroy life on Earth, we could change the environment to a point where civilisation is threatened. Sometime in this or the next century we may see this happen because of climate change and a rise in the level of the sea. If we go on burning fossil fuel at the present rate it is probable that all of the cities of the world now at sea level will be flooded.
Try to imagine the social consequences of hundreds of millions of homeless refugees seeking dry land on which to live. In the turmoil, they may look back and minder how humans could have been so foolish as to bring so much misery upon themselves,, by the thoughtless burning of carbon fuels. They may then reflect regretfully that they could have avoided their miseries by the safe use of nuclear energy.
Nuclear power, although potentially harmful to people, is a negligible danger to the planet. Natural ecosystems can stand levels of continuous radiation that would be intolerable in a city. The land around Chernobyl was evacuated because its high radiation intensity made it unsafe for people, but this radioactive land is now rich in wildlife, much more so than neighbouring areas.
Even scientists seem to forget our planet's radioactive history When a star ends as a supernova, the nuclear explosive material, which includes uranium and plutonium, together with large amounts ofiron and other burnt-out elements, scatters in space, as does the dust cloud of a hydrogen bomb test.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the Earth is that it formed from lumps of fall-out from a star-sized nuclear bomb. This is why, even today, the Earth's crust has enough uranium left to reconstitute the original event on a minute scale.
There is no other credible explanation for the great quantity of unstable elements still present. The most primitive and old-fashioned Geiger counter will indicate that we stand on the fall-out of a vast ancient nuclear explosion. Within our bodies, hallo million atoms, rendered unstable in that event, still erupt every minute, releasing a tiny fraction of the energy stored from that fierce fire of long ago.
Life began nearly four billion years ago under conditions of radioactivity far more intense than those that trouble the minds of certain present-day environmentalists. Moreover, the air had neither oxygen nor ozone so that the fierce unfiltered ultra-violet radiation of the sun irradiated the surface of the Earth. We need to keep in mind the thought that these fierce energies flooded the very womb of life.
At least in the short term, alternative sources of energy remain wildly uneconomical. A recent report by the Royal Academy of Engineering showed that the nuclear option was the second cheapest means of generating electricity, at 2.3p per kilowatt hour, after gas at 2.2p (gas prices have since shot up), while wind power costs more than 5p per kWH.
I hope that it is not too late for the world to emulate France and make nuclear power our principal source of energy. At present we have no other viable alternative.
From early 1997 to sometime mid-1999 I had a talkshow called The Infinity Factory that was produced at Pseudo.com, the increasingly legendary “Internet TV Network,” creative madhouse and party central of downtown New York during the high-flying Silicon Alley dotcom years. (Ondi TImoner’s new Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary, We Live in Public chronicles the rise and fall of Pseudo founder Josh Harris and it’s a fascinating film, a movie well worth going out of your way to catch. Watch my interview with Ondi here).
The Infinity Factory was taped every Sunday evening at 8pm with a few exceptions. It was produced by Vanessa Weinberg who also DJ’d and mixed the show live. Vanessa was extraordinarily in tune with how the conversations were flowing and added an intricate bed of trippy music, samples and sound loops under what were often extremely psychedelic conversations to begin with—like this episode, with Robert Anton Wilson and Genesis P-Orridge. This show dates, I think, from Fall of 1997. When it was originally netcast it was when most people still had 56k modems and the video quality was fairly awful. Don’t get me wrong, it was pretty cool to be able to do something like this back then and there was a real “pirate radio” aspect to it as well that greatly appealed to me, but in truth it looked more like flickery animation than it did actual video. And it was the size of a postage stamp. There were probably well over 100 shows, each of them around 50 minutes, but I really can’t say for sure how many there were. Most of them are probably lost.
Pseudo had several floors, first two then three, in the no-frills building where Jeff Koons and Mark Kostabi still have their art studios, on the corner of Houston and Broadway. One floor had the business people and the producer’s offices and on the floor with the studio—which is where all the parties were—Josh Harris had his own apartment in the back. Each Sunday night, I’d usually I’d see him, cigar in hand, either leaving or returning from a poker game. It was, if memory serves on the 12th floor and this building had the scariest elevator I have, ever, ever used. It was super slow and extremely rickety. If I made it up and down in one piece each week, I breathed a sigh of relief, let me tell you. When someone especially heavy was waiting for the elevator, I’d opt to use the steps, even if it was twelve long flights. Seriously, you took your life into your own hand with this elevator. I don’t know why Jeff Koons puts up with it. (Composer Gershon Kingsley, who was a guest on the show once, told me that taking that elevator and getting off at Pseudo was like entering Dante’s Inferno except that you went up instead of down. I don’t think he was joking)
The studio itself was basically set up like a radio station but with these cheapo cameras that were the size of cigarette packs on pivots that were cut with this jerry-rigged Radio Shack thumb switch with three clunky buttons. The hosts had to do this themselves—cut between cameras—in the beginning. It was really distracting when you were trying to concentrate on what someone was saying (I might be doing it here, but I don think I was). I had some fun guests on the Infinity Factory including a pre-Boing Boing David Pescovitz, Adam Parfrey of Feral House infamy, painter Paul Laffoley, my late and very missed friend Dr. Mario Pazzaglini, R.U. Sirius, Grant Morrison, Joe Coleman and Bob Wilson, who was on a couple of times. Genesis P-Orridge, Douglas Rushkoff, Howard Bloom and conspiracy theory writers Kenn Thomas and Robert Sterling were all frequent guests.
It’s nice to see these shows popping again now, after so many years, as larger HD YouTube files. These shows were taped off Manhattan Cable and probably represent the best versions around. If the master tapes do still exist, they’d be in Josh’s storage space amongst 10,000 hours of other Pseudo programming and I doubt very much they have been cataloged! On television only in New York City (and maybe later in Brooklyn) The Infinity Factory was on a fairly low number on the Time-Warner cable box, so if you were flipping channels at 10:30 on Thursday night and you lived in Manhattan, you were going to see me. This was at the time George Clooney was still on E.R. and it amused me to no end that people watching that show or MTV’s The Real World and channel surfing would—inevitably—find themselves looking at my freaky show.
The morning after it was on the Manhattan Cable for first time I was asked “What do you do for a living? I saw you on TV last night” or some variation on that theme by four people in my apartment building who had never spoken to me before. Overnight I had become as famous as… Robin Byrd or Al Goldstein!
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THERE DO EXIST ENQUIRING MINDS, which long for the truth of the heart, seek it, strive to solve the problems set by life, try to penetrate to the essence of things and phenomena and to penetrate into themselves. If a man reasons and thinks soundly, no matter which path he follows in solving these problems, he must inevitably arrive back at himself, and begin with the solution of the problem of what he is himself and what his place is in the world around him. For without this knowledge, he will have no focal point in his search. Socrates’ words, “Know thyself” remain for all those who seek true knowledge and being.
VIEWS FROM THE REAL WORLD, p. 43 [pb]
VIEWS FROM THE REAL WORLD, p. 266
WILL IS A SIGN OF A BEING OF A VERY HIGH ORDER OF EXISTENCE as compared with the being of an ordinary man. Only men who are in possession of such a being can do. All other men are merely automata, put into action by external forces like machines or clockwork toys, acting as much and as long as the wound-up spring within them acts, and not capable of adding anything to its force.
VIEWS FROM THE REAL WORLD, p. 71
BEELZEBUB’S TALES, p. 361
According to the legend, Lord Shiva, the Hindu God of resolution, was away at a war. His wife Parvati, wanted to bathe and having no-one to guard the door to her house, conceived of the idea of creating a son who could guard her. Parvati created Ganesha out of the sandalwood paste that she used for her bath and breathed life into the figure. She then set him to stand guard at her door and instructed him not to let anyone enter.
In the meantime, Lord Shiva returned from the battle but as Ganesha did not know him, stopped Shiva from entering Parvati's chamber. Shiva, enraged by Ganesh’s impudence, drew his trident and cut off Ganesha's head. Parvati emerged to find Ganesha decapitated and flew into a rage. She took on the form of the Goddess Kali and threatened destruction to the three worlds of Heaven, Earth and the subterranean earth.
Parvati was still in a dangerous mood. Seeing her in this mood, the other Gods were afraid and Shiva, in an attempt to pacify Parvati, sent out his ganas, or hordes, to find a child whose mother is facing another direction in negligence, cut off his head and bring it quickly. The first living thing they came across was an elephant. That elephant was facing north (the auspicious direction associated with wisdom). So they brought the head of this elephant and Shiva placed it on the trunk of Parvati's son and breathed life into him. Parvati was overjoyed and embraced her son, the elephant-headed boy whom Shiva named Ganesha, the lord of his ganas. Parvati was still upset so Lord Shiva announced that everyone who worships Ganesha before any other form of God is favoured. So Ganesh is worshipped first in all Hindu occasions and festivals.
