The new Planet Waves FM is almost ready...
Before the program comes out and a new season begins, I offer a few thoughts for your consideration about shaking the world in a gentle way.
Dear Friend and Listener:
Planet Waves FM begins its autumn 2023 season tonight, with a program that asks honest questions about a world at war — questions I am sure we both share.
Additionally, my first guest is toxicologist Stefano Scoglio, talking about his new scientific paper (of which I am the publisher) arguing that “graphene” is a mythical substance that cannot exist as described, despite having won a Nobel Prize. We’ve been working on this segment and getting his paper ready for six months.
Jesse Zurawell from Perspective on TNT Radio joins me to discuss the sensitive, tender matter of what journalism is and is not. And for young men, I introduce a potentially helpful concept from Transactional Psychology.
More than I provide “information,” I offer a calm and thoughtful place, a voice that speaks gently and ideas that listen.
If You’re a Regular Listener…
If you come to Planet Waves FM seeking solace, kindness, refuge or a voice of sanity, I’m here to ask you to support the program as you can. More than I provide “information,” I offer a calm and thoughtful place, a voice that speaks gently and ideas that listen. However, I take the investigative aspect of the program rather seriously, as you know.
If you’re already a supporter (meaning paid subscriber to this Substack, or directly via the Chiron Return donation portal), thank you. You make a significant difference, as I have no “foundation funding” or corporate sponsors. It’s me and you, baby.
I’m concerned about the steely resistance to “paying for anything on the internet.” If I were a listener and encountered Planet Waves FM, I would become a supporter on the spot — especially if I heard about the chronology, my training of journalists, and my efforts to get other presenters to wake up about vetting their guests.
Then every now and then, I come down the tracks with a project like this. Does it get better?
Programming Not Designed to Give You Agita
People give money to a lot of Substacks, most of which seem intent on giving you agita. (That’s Italian for an upset stomach from anxiety and stress.) They press their readers’ buttons. They turn churn people up. They are good at it.
They twist the truth around like newsprint caught on Silly Putty. They play their audience like an accordion. They tell their listeners the world is flat over and over again till some are cheering, and you are gasping for air. They deliver the shocking news that vegetables are bad for you.
And people pay money for this! Voluntarily!
I am here to offer you some calm time; the company of someone friendly; a program you can safely fall asleep to and have happy or at least interesting dreams.
I realize not everyone can afford much. But plenty of people listening can swing nine bucks a month, or more. You’ll feel better for helping me. My program will sound even better to your ears.
It’s easy — just subscribe to this Substack before tonight’s program comes out. Or you may give a custom donation directly to Chiron Return, the nonprofit organization I founded as a structure to help me do all this good work. There are other ways to help, and I’ll get to those soon.
For today, I am here to ask those who can subscribe and who listen to take action. Go for it. Then tonight when the new program arrives in your inbox at about 6 pm Eastern Time, just in time for the weekend, you’ll know you made a difference.
Let’s shake the world in a gentle way.
Thank you so much.
with love,
PS — If you’re interested in having one of these Chiron Return medallions, reply to this email with a query and I’ll get back to you soon.
I fell asleep earlier with this piece on, and woke up dreaming I was looking for a guitar lead so I could play along (with the 4th movement, specifically). I got up, turned on my amp and discovered how easy it is to improvise over. Meet my old friend Brian…
I was looking for the guitar lead near the left side of the Wurts St. bridge…
VIA EMAIL
Hi Eric,
I want to thank you for defending the globe model of Earth. James Hillman said literalizations that bury the soul always need dissolving. It might be beneficial to recognize archetypal aspects of consensus reality, without immediately literalizing an archaic alternative. We are so deeply destabilized (digital conditions!), we are desperate for a sense of ground, but because the idea is archetypal it can possess the devotee, who is then immune to reason. I say this without having looked deeply into flat earth theory. There are so many immediately ridiculous assertions, such as that people on the bottom of a globe would fall off, that I’m not willing to spend time on the mathematical arguments, which seem elegant, and archetypal. Jung said the earth is flat in the unconscious.
Also thank you for insisting that, although a lot of people are doing it now, not everyone throughout history has been lying to us. I don’t know when intention to deceive stopped being part of the definition of a lie. No distinction is recognized between the intentions of those who would use ideas for control and those who actually had original ideas.
You may appreciate an incident in my life that came to mind as I was triggered by all this. Ultimately my degree was in biology, with a later degree in fiction, but before that I was a physics major with the goal of going into astronomy. I was in the hall at New Mexico State talking to Clyde Tombaugh, or rather he was talking to me, urgently describing canals and evidence of civilization on Mars. I think we can agree he was probably wrong, and I thought at the time he was wrong, but he was NOT LYING.
The bell rang, the hall cleared of other people, and he went on assuring me with guileless enthusiasm that he had seen all this through the telescope. I didn’t know what to say. I tried to reach a level of perception that would permit me to share his vision. Finally I just said I had to go to class. Many years later I was living in a trailer without plumbing, which is relevant because it was the setting in which I heard on the news that his ashes were passing Pluto. I had my own little celebration in the trailer and felt exalted for the rest of the day.
Keep up the resistance. Thank you for adding the Course in Miracles talks to your other transmissions, for which continuing thanks.
Elizabeth