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Thread: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

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    United States Avalon Member Wade Frazier's Avatar
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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    I suspected that I might face the decision, and I have decided to break the Third Epochal Event into two pieces, with the Domestication Revolution to the rise of Europe one chapter, and the rise of Europe in a chapter titled: Epochal Event 3.5 – The Rise of Europe. That leaves the Domestication Revolution chapter at only 32 pages!

    I already was going to refer to the rise of Europe as event 3.5, as they rode energy technologies (sailing ships and watermills in particular) to world dominance.

    I won’t burden the forum with putting up that chapter draft again, as all the pieces previously published here are pretty much what the current draft looks like.

    Back to work.

    Best,

    Wade

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    I have been madly working on the essay, and editing all over the document, but a recent revision to the previous chapter is worth putting here:

    The human ability to think abstractly was exploited by social managers from civilization’s earliest days. Fixating people on irrational symbols, and then manipulating those symbols for elite benefit, is arguably a universal trait of civilized peoples. Even today, a great deal of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols where, as with the earliest religion, the neocortex is bypassed in favor of connecting with the limbic system, and people are easy prey to the cynical manipulation of emotionally-charged symbols, and the effects of childhood indoctrination and conditioning can last for the victim’s lifetime. The beginnings of large-scale ideological indoctrination probably began on a large scale in Sumer, with the priesthood concocting and promoting various beliefs, where symbology replaced reality, including accepting the secular elite as deific, getting slaves to accept their status, and getting commoners to give food to the priesthood to fulfil some divinely ordained obligation. Religion passed from experience to belief with the rise of civilization. I am not suggesting that pre-civilized religions were necessarily enlightened, and they had shamanic intermediaries, too, but with the rise of civilization, the professional priest class had to work hard to justify the obviously unjust social organization that accompanied stratified populations. Direct religious experience was disparaged and suppressed, while the priesthood’s religious indoctrination was promoted.


    Back to work.

    Best,

    Wade
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 18th March 2014 at 21:25.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    Mark’s story needs to be in more places than ATS, so I am putting it in this post (you can see the author giving away the rights to the story at ATS, and I have interacted with that author, and he pointed me to his post). I met Mark the day that Brian O and I were in the California governor’s office, just before they tried to run us out of town:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paths.htm#sacramento

    At Brian’s home during an NEM board meeting, I heard Mark tell an abbreviated version of his “awakening” experience that is produced below. I funded the NEM conference:

    http://www.pureenergysystems.com/eve...ent/index.html

    where Mark spoke:

    http://www.pureenergysystems.com/eve...ngs/index.html

    I took time off from working the registration desk to watch Greer’s presentation, where I first heard the “$100 billion in quiet money” statement:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/hooked.htm#payoff

    Several years earlier, I heard Bearden talk about the “game theory” strategies that Godzilla uses to take FE efforts out:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#bearden

    and ten years later, I realized that we were subjected to the same kind of sting operation that almost nabbed Bearden:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/other.htm#sting

    and I decided to live a quiet life from here on out, and here this fool is, in the spotlight again (but trying to stay low on Godzilla’s radar). It really is a pretty small cottage industry, as you can see by all the connections between us relatively few players. Not long after Brian and I did the Camelot interview:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/camelot.htm

    one of Brian’s colleagues from his asteroid-mining days contacted me, and he knew the scientist that Mark worked for during the events at Berkeley, and that scientist confirmed Mark’s story. I did not have any doubt about Mark’ story, not with what I lived through, but it was nice to see a scientist actually do a little homework and come away impressed.

    Best,

    Wade

    The Mark Comings Story


    Mark Comings had completed undergrad and graduate work at UC Berkeley and Caltech in physics. In 1984 he was working at Lawrence Berkeley labs, the various accelerator and other labs just up the road from downtown Berkeley in a small fold in the Berkeley hills called Strawberry Canyon. One day while working in an area just beneath one of the complex's accelerators, he put together a device using electrical materials stored in the room. His supervisor okayed his use of the materials.

    Mark is very bright and gentle (he later married noted physicist and PhD Russel Targ's daughter before she died of cancer). He speaks honestly and is the kind of person who inspires trust, being a man of new age, nonviolent nature. In the underground room he set up an apparatus using a piezoelectric crystal. The crystal was barium titanate, and he soldered a wire to each end of it (a.c. wires). He attached an oscilloscope plus an amp meter and a voltmeter. Then he worked to adjust the oscillating wave interference patterns. It was a simple design and he says other researchers fail in the same kind of effort because they didn't consider the basic cosine function, which he did. The crystal allows for a concentration of the electricity inside it, which caused the crystal to hum audibly. He says it was an "overunity" device that put out 2.5 times more energy than the amount of electricity put into it.

    He went home that night without telling anyone, even in his lab, about what he'd accomplished. The next day, when he got to work the Berkeley police were there, angry, and they grabbed him in front of his coworkers. He asked what he'd done and they said, "You know what you did," then handcuffed him and hauled him off while 11 coworkers gawked, wondering. The took him away, then handed him off to UC Berkeley police who put him in a holding cell down in the basement of Sproul Hall, the building at the end of Telegraph St. where the Student Union is, plus a plaza that has been site of important demonstrations. They tried to intimidate him and made him sign the same procedural document eight different times. He finally was allowed a phone call and his girlfriend came with bail money. He paid it but wouldn't leave until they told him why he'd been manhandled (he was only 24, optimistic but confused by the Orwellian treatment).

    Finally, one of the cops said okay, here's what you did: you fell asleep in the women's bathroom and were trespassing. He was aghast, as was his girlfriend. It was entirely false. He knew it was all about his overunity experiment, but how did they even know about his experiment?

    So he left, bewildered. The next day he went back to his workplace and told coworkers that he hadn't done anything wrong; he'd merely rigged up a piezoelectric barium titanate crystal that achieved overunity (put out more energy than was put into it). He asked his boss to vouch for him---his boss had okayed the use of the materials.

    Meanwhile, all of the materials had been removed from the room where he did his experiment, and his apparatus was gone, too. His boss cut him off and said, "We can't have people like you working here.” He was fired.

    A few days later, he decided that with his skills and background, he would apply for another position in the labs. As he approached the applications office, the UC Berkeley police ran a car up onto the sidewalk separating him from the front door and four cops jumped out, grabbed him. They threw him into the car and said there was a restraining order to keep him away from the university. They drove, high speed, up into Strawberry Canyon and turned left (beyond the old Bevatron accelerator but before the public museum up on top of the hill, there in Berkeley) into a driveway down to an accelerator. The car headed for a wall without slowing, which alarmed him, but the wall opened up (sliding electrical doors) and the car drove down several stories of circular ramp. There, also, was a larger holding cell/jail--possibly a remnant of Reagan's mass arrests as governor.

    It was an Orwellian scene. No specific charges, just intimidation while the desk cop pored over a large file about Mark Comings. Mark got out, later, and went into hiding for a couple of months, then went to live with research colleagues in southern California, where he used a fake name to remain inconspicuous. Together, they built a lab in a bedroom of their house, but a few days before he could test his new, improved piezoelectric crystal device, he arrived home to find the entire room cleaned out---everything was gone. He ran out looking for signs of the culprits. He'd only been gone two hours that night and he found only one of his file papers in the gutter down the street.

    Again, it was Orwellian. How did they know he was there? Maybe it was the fact that he'd ordered the piezoelectric crystal from a science supply co. He wasn't sure. Years later, he was hired by noted Silicon Valley company owner Joe Firmage to work on Firmage's ISSO co. research into overunity devices. Also working on the project was Kirk Hawkins, the man portrayed in the Robert Redford movie Sneakers, about a hacker who's hired by the NSA to teach them what he knows. The Firmage project had brilliant, inspired talent but may have been targeted by so-called men in black. Due to disconnects, seemingly untraceable snafus and more, the project didn't go as planned.

    Next, Comings worked for a corporation called the Sara Corp. There, he finally met other overunity researchers and people who talked about how they'd worked directly on "alien technology." There he was told the reason why he'd been arrested, Big Brother style, back at Berkeley labs. US black budget structures had a system of scalar energy detectors that, like the scene in recent movie The Last Mimzy, can immediately triangulate the location of anyone in the US (perhaps the world) who was tapping into scalar energy (i.e. with his overunity device). It may be fairly easy to do. Scientist and retired Navy Col. Tom Bearden writes about how electronic detectors pick up scalar energy signals and how they sometimes emit sounds like a woodpecker's tapping, hence the name "the woodpecker grid." You can hear the sound on Bearden's website.

    The news is important for two reasons. One, the US and possibly other industrialized nations now have a system to locate and conceivably disable any dangerous weapons use of scalar energy devices. They've had a system of the sort since 1984, perhaps earlier, given fears about Soviet scalar technology. In other words, if someone like the fabled Yakuza or the Japanese cult or an irresponsible government tries to do seismic or scalar damage, a global system of reverse-streaming scalar devices could locate it, blow out its circuitry and prevent damage to the planet by the new scalar technologies. In other words, we can now openly discuss and research such technologies, plus their origins and history, given that safeguards are in place. Although it was born in Big Brother fashion and is now partly under black budget mafia control, it shows that the necessary infrastructure for public disclosure about overunity devices and more is already in existence. But there's one very ugly catch.

    Mark Comings spoke with others who'd achieved overunity and they were met with that same brutal police tactic, a brutal repression of the best scientific minds in the US, and this continued until the end of the Cold War. Since then, or thereabouts, experimenters haven't been so brutally assaulted. But when they try to license and manufacture such devices, someone invariably shows up and worms into their finance, or ruins their effort's funding. It's nightmarish. One researcher tried, in earlier years, to do his experiments, but police arrived either in helicopters or in cars. On one occasion they broke through the windows of a house he'd rented far up in Alaska to escape detection and ground his face into the broken glass, cutting and scarring it. Is that how you treat the best minds of a nation?

    I've come to the conclusion that the structure that targeted Mark Comings for removal from early research is essentially a kind of operation COINTELPRO against scientists. (COINTELRPO was mob-controlled J. Edgar Hoover's FBI program to ruin the lives of anti-Vietnam War activists-I've met some of them personally.) The most disturbing aspect of the scientific version of a COINTELPRO-like program is that it attempted to hobble the lives of the best, independent human thinkers, apparently in order to prevent them from putting forth relatively harmless but trenchant, original human thought about new physics, the universe, and technology. The goons and cops no doubt thought it was all about security and dangers of weird technology. In a sense, they couldn't possibly have understood the creeping Big Brother implications of the black budget structures.
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 20th March 2014 at 19:24.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    Quickly, before I take a little hike... As I had hoped but dared not believe until I got there, so far it looks like I will be able to gallop through the rest of the essay, as I had already studied that material the most, with my original site hosting a great deal of the material that I have used before, which is germane to the past few centuries.

    I established the basic outline of my essay several years ago:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/upcoming.htm#revolutions

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/abund.htm

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/hooked.htm

    I have certainly developed the themes since then, but I always knew where the essay was heading. But the devil is in the details, and it has generally been a great deal of fun to write the essay to this point. The emotional heavy lifting began when the story got to my species, but I will not need to belabor our dark past and present, as I can refer to parts of my site for much of it, and have been doing so. That said, there will also be a great deal of new material in the coming chapters. I have been studying for this essay since about 2007, and while I cannot do justice to the material if I had a hundred lifetimes of “spare” time to do it, I dove into areas where I had questions about aspects of the human journey, the findings of some of which I have already posted at Avalon, but there will be plenty more. It is looking like the final essay will weigh in at somewhere around 400 pages, with nearly a thousand footnotes and several thousand links, with many to external sources, largely to Wikipedia (and I link to about a hundred scientific papers), especially to areas where its coverage seems pretty good.

    My experiment with Wikipedia several years ago:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/wikimass.htm

    showed me how far it has to go before it can adequately deal with controversial topics, particularly those that challenge Eurocentric conceits, the USA included. But Wikipedia has gotten a lot better over the past several years, and I have found that it usually at least mentions alternative (and heretical) points of view, even if it is only sometimes to unfairly attack them. The commissar class, especially regarding the big rackets such as medicine and energy, is highly active at Wikipedia, and I will avoid linking to their tripe when it gets too slanted. It gets worse as more current events are covered, and especially where the rackets are concerned.

    I see the essay becoming a textbook, and I doubt that I will be writing too many essays after this one, but I can see me updating the essay with revised editions, like textbooks, as the years go by. I will have a forum to get that choir going, and I may always have an Avalon presence, but time will tell.

    Off to go hiking. Somebody has to do it.

    Best,

    Wade
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 20th March 2014 at 19:19.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Well, that was just what the doctor ordered. What a spectacular little hike, on the “meat and potatoes” mountain in my back yard. No flowers yet, but everything is sprouting and as you can see, attached, the mushrooms are getting an early start. The other is playing with my macro lens and the moss. I will never get tired of living in a rainforest.
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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    Briefly, even back when I was in school, studying economics, something did not quite jibe with me, probably because I already had my energy dreams:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy.htm#glimpse

    When I got out of school, the cognitive dissonance between my business school indoctrination and the real world began almost immediately:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#believing

    and several years later, after being radicalized by my journey with Dennis, I realized that I was in a worthless profession. As I hit the books, I was still having a problem with economic theory, particularly after have a heaping dose of the real world jammed down my throat. Mainstream economics was obsessed with money, when it is only accounting. It seemed crazy to me, and after many years I decided that Smith, Marx, and company derived their theories before the science of energy was developed, and that is why they missed the boat, but to see economists still so blind to reality was puzzling.

    When I encountered the Peak Oilers:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/scarcity.htm

    I saw that at least somebody understood how energy ran the real economy, even if they treated FE like the devil. I have recently been reading an economics textbook that focuses as energy as the foundation of all economic activity, and it repeats what I had independently come to understand, that economics was a social science that really did not understand how the world works as scientists do, so they just kind of assumed away or ignored energy, when it was the root of it all. Nice to see an economist actually understanding the problem with his profession that does not deal with reality.

    To be a little fairer, the very earliest economists realized that wealth came from land, but they really did not understand that wealth came from the biological productivity of land, which was powered by sunlight. Again, because it was before the science of energy, they did not really understand what was really driving the process, but they at least had a dim idea. And then when the Industrial Revolution changed so much, economists began to focus on money and social dynamics, and assumed away the physical basis of the economy, and then played math games. It was a form of intellectual masturbation that economics still has not recovered from. However, what I doubt the textbook is going to cover is that there has also been purposeful misdirection, maybe even by Godzilla, to have entire professions focus on meaningless trappings while the big game is completely invisible to them.

    Of course, the textbook does not deal with FE or admit its possibility, and has a disconcerting way of discussing the “laws” of physics. I am reading it to see if I missed something, but it is nice to see somebody else on a similar wavelength.

    Time for bed.

    Best,

    Wade
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 21st March 2014 at 03:54.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    I may go quiet for a few days, doing chores after finishing the latest chapter draft. Again, we will see what the final produce is, but here is what I just finished drafting.

    Best,

    Wade

    Epochal Event 3.5 – The Rise of Europe


    As the Roman Empire suffered from the devastation it inflicted on Europe and the Mediterranean’s periphery, as its ERIO steadily declined, Emperor Constantine tried some gambits. One was moving the capital from Rome, and the Greek city Byzantium became Constantinople and remained the imperial capital for more than a millennium, falling to pastoral invaders, the Turks, in 1453. The other ploy was uniting the fragmenting empire under one religion, and Christianity became the Roman Empire’s state religion. Christianity by 300 would have likely been largely unrecognizable to Jesus, and especially after it became a state religion a generation later. By 476, Rome had officially fallen, with Emperor Romulus Augustulus deposed by Italy’s first king, Odoacer. Germanic tribes conquered Europe’s Roman lands, and in the Near East, Islam began its rise in the late 600s. In 711, Moors invaded the Iberian Peninsula, overthrowing Visigothic rule, and Islamic Iberia became Europe’s most civilized location for centuries. While the Roman Catholic Church specialized in burning libraries and “pagan” literature, Islamic culture preserved it. The Church completely eradicated Classic Greek writings in western Europe, and while there is vociferous debate on the issue, in many ways medieval Europe was in a dark age for centuries. The Dark Ages were related to Rome’s devastation inflicted on its subject peoples and environments. After centuries of recovery, around 800 Europe’s Medieval Warm Period began, and Frankish king Charlemagne tried reviving the Western Roman Empire. While the Medieval Warm Period was a time of unprecedented prosperity and progress in northern Europe, and led to widespread Viking invasions among other usually violent migrations, the climate that made northern Europe amenable to civilization-building caused epic droughts around the world and helped lead to the fall of the Classic Mayans, Anasazi, the decline of Angkor Wat, and may have been responsible for initiating the devastating Mongol invasions.

    The Medieval Warming Period led to the High Middle Ages, which began around 1000. It quickly became a time of great city-building in northern Europe and, naturally, about 75% of northern and central Europe’s forests were razed and put under the plow. The success of northern Europe partly had to thank its heavy ice age soils, which did not erode as rapidly as the thinner southern soils of the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean regions. Not until adopting the horse-pulled heavy plow did northern Europe’s soils became sufficiently arable to feed Europe’s High Middle Age peoples. The teams pulling heavy plows were more than a single farmer could afford, so communal financing of horse teams for heavy plows is often considered to be a proto-capitalistic development. Even so, rivers filled with the mud of erosion and the same process happened in northern Europe, but arguably slower than in those earlier civilizations.

    Even though the Church eradicated “pagan” teachings, they did not eradicate pagan technology, with the Chinese horse collar making it Europe by 1000, which quickly became the standard. As the Roman Empire became depopulated, the Greek watermill compensated for labor shortages. Watermills were active across Italy in the Roman Empire’s early days, running hammers, and were heavily used in Rome’s mines. Constantine’s predecessor Diocletian made an edict about watermills, as the advantages of motive power not produced by muscles was obvious. The thick forests of northern Europe had steady Atlantic precipitation to thank (and the warm Gulf Stream), and Central and Western Europe was blessed with streams and rivers in abundance. The spread of the watermill is the first time that humanity harnessed widespread non-animal energy, and it helped propel Europe’s rise. Humanity learned how to exploit the hydrological cycle’s energy in an unprecedented way, but not everybody embraced it like Europe did. In eighth-century China, using water for irrigation and transportation had higher priority than mills, and they were regularly dismantled.

    But in medieval Europe, the watermill reached its peak use in the pre-industrial world, beginning with Germanic lords as Rome was falling. Not only did the watermill spread throughout Europe, but new mills such as the ship mill and tide mill appeared. Today’s France is where most medieval mill innovations appeared, but watermills became universal on the streams and rivers of Europe. In 800, only a few watermills existed in western Europe, and by 1000 there were hundreds. The Domesday Survey of 1086 recorded nearly six thousand watermills in England alone, and the true number was some thousands more. The Kingdom of France had 10,000 watermills at that time, and their number doubled in the next two centuries, as did England’s. Each mill produced at least two-to-three horsepower, or the equivalent labor of about fifty men. In 11th-century France, its mills produced the labor of a quarter of its population. Medieval European watermills produced the work of millions of people and reduced the need for slaves. It was arguably a prelude to the Industrial Revolution. By the time Columbus sailed in 1492, watermills performed the work of at least 10 million people in Europe, which had a population of about 75 million. When watermill sites became filled, Europeans began using windmills, which first appeared in France in 1080, although the first undisputed European windmill appeared in Yorkshire in 1185. The social organization of medieval Europe was feudal, where peasants labored for landowners in return for a portion of the harvest. The watermill became the center of a struggle between feudal and Church authorities and the peasantry, and the windmill was established partly to circumvent lordly claims on waters that passed over their lands, as nobody yet owned the air.

    A seminal event was the reintroduction of Classic Greek writings into Europe. It happened during the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by Christian armies in what is today called the Reconquest. Islamic libraries housed Greek writings, and when the library at Toledo was captured in 1085, Christian scholars from across Europe traveled to that library, where those works were being translated, and Europe was never the same. The rise of science and reason in medieval Europe thus began.

    When that australopithecine Tesla made the first stone tool, his/her invention was transmitted via culture, likely by demonstration. When Homo erecti made Acheulean hand axes, they were engaging in a craft that lasted more than a million years, and it was obviously was a standardized training, as all axes looked similar. When that founder group left Africa, they had full command of language, a sophisticated toolset, and ideas were readily communicated, although it would be interesting to wonder what their beliefs were, if they had many. Those indoctrinating priests concocted complex thought forms that they then seduced the masses with. Monumental structures in early civilizations were often architectural and engineering marvels, and the ancient Greeks began thinking in ways that could be called scientific. When that approach took root in Europe, which was already using Greek technology to great benefit, it led to the Scientific Revolution, which accompanied and mutually stimulated the Industrial Revolution. In short, along with greater energy usage, mental feats also increased and were usually required for the next epochal event to manifest. While the Teslas and Einsteins of their day initiated the breakthroughs, the masses took the ride in the subsequent epoch, raising their level of mental prowess. Calculus was only invented once (twice, really, as Leibniz and Newton did it independently), but it has been taught to students ever since as part of the mathematics curriculum. Each energy epoch was initiated by and accompanied by increased mental accomplishment, with each breakthrough helping form the foundation of the next one, which Newton stated most famously.

    The medieval Catholic Church owned about a quarter of Europe’s land and constantly vied for power with secular rulers, became infamously corrupt, called Crusades that helped thin out the ranks of its ecstatic members, and even called Crusades onto its subjects when they strayed from the flock. In the 1200s, Thomas Aquinas attempted to reconcile Church dogma with rediscovered Greek teachings, as did many others. High Middle Age Europe also saw the troubadour phenomenon, with its themes of chivalry and courtly love.

    Islamic culture had humanity’s highest standard of living about 1200, and while Europe was rising in that period, it was also seen as backward compared to the refined cultures of the Eastern Roman Empire (which never lost the ancient Greek teachings) and Islamic lands, but droughts of the late Medieval Warm Period seem to have unleashed a scourge that would be unsurpassed in ferocious destruction until the Nazis in the 20th century: the Mongol invasions initiated by Genghis Khan. Islam never recovered from the Mongol invasions. Persia’s population declined by about 90%, and Baghdad was Islam’s leading city before its virtually complete destruction and wholesale slaughter of its residents. Places such as China, Russia, and Hungary lost up to half of their populations. A recent study infers that the tens of millions of deaths at the hands of Mongols may have initiated reforestation that absorbed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to such a degree that it helped end the Medieval Warm Period. The impact was only about 1 PPM, and the coming Little Ice Age has several proposed causes, including the Western Hemisphere’s depopulation and reforestation due to the Spanish invasions of the 1500s.

    By 1300, Earth was cooling down, High Middle Ages Europe was largely deforested, and nearly all arable land was under the plow. Europe had reached the Malthusian limit of its means of pre-industrial production. The 1300s were a century of unending calamity for Europe, beginning with famines in 1304, 1305, and 1310, and a major famine began in 1315 that lasted three years. Famines visited Europe at least once a generation in the 1300s. In 1337, England and France began a series of wars that lasted more than a century. Those events were only a preview. Plagues and famines tend to be conjoined, where weakened bodies are susceptible to disease, and the Black Death pandemic began as early as 1338, and likely in war-torn and famine-plagued China. In 1346 it reached Europe, and by 1350 around half of Europe had died, and the plague kept reappearing. War, famine, and epidemics were so prevalent in the 1300s that the Danse Macabre became an art form in the 1400s and 1500s, after the troubadour profession died out with the Black Death. Europe became a hell on Earth. But the work that watermills performed was not subject to famine and disease, and the work of millions of “energy slaves” surely helped hold Europe together. Labor was in such shortage after the catastrophes that worker wages rose dramatically.

    In the late 1300s, in northern Italy’s city-states, the ferment initiated by the rediscovery of ancient Greek teachings flowered in the Renaissance, when humanism began its rise in Europe. Constantinople, which helped preserve ancient Greek teachings instead of destroying them, never fully recovered from the sacking that its “allies” gave it during the Fourth Crusade, which led to Venice’s lucrative dominance of Europe’s spice trade. In 1453, Constantinople fell to Ottoman Turks, ending the Roman Empire’s last vestige (other than the Roman Catholic Church), and humanist scholars fled to Europe, further reinforcing Renaissance humanism.

    When Turks conquered Constantinople, Venice lost its spice monopoly and perhaps the seminal event of Europe’s rise happened: attempts to find another route to spices. Spices are often made of defensive chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves from animals, and many have antibacterial properties, which were important for preserving food, particularly animal products (mainly meat), in warm climates before the advent of refrigeration, but the antibacterial properties of spices are important even today in warm-climate nations. Spices essentially preserved food energy so that humans could consume it rather than microbes.

    The Iberian Peninsula had been the site of wars for several centuries by the Fall of Constantinople, and the Christian/Islamic animosity there was pronounced, with enslaving captured opponents being standard practice. Portugal began the maritime innovations that would see them seize the spice trade from their Islamic rivals. A Portuguese prince today called Henry the Navigator is closely associated with the rise of Portuguese maritime knowledge and practice. How responsible Henry was for Portugal’s maritime prowess has been debated for centuries, but what is not debatable is that Portugal began developing the necessary knowledge and skills for accomplishing an unprecedented feat: sailing the world’s oceans. Until that time, only the Indian Ocean was regularly traveled, because of its relatively gentle and predictable nature. Not until Europe’s rise were the Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic, and Antarctic oceans regularly traveled. Genoese sailors had sought India via the Atlantic since the 1200s, unsuccessfully, and even settled some Atlantic islands, but Portugal was humanity’s first successful practitioner of transoceanic navigation. Many technical issues were resolved, and Portuguese sailors with Henry’s patronage sailed down the Atlantic Coast of Africa and across the Atlantic. The Portuguese began colonizing the Madeira Islands in 1420, the Azores in 1433, and in 1434, Portugal became the first European power to sail south of Cape Bojador on the African coast.

    Serfdom largely replaced slavery in Europe by about 1000, but serfdom was still a form of forced servitude. By 1434, the first boatload of captured Africans to use as slaves was delivered to Lisbon. The sitting pope officially approved of enslaving non-Christians in 1452, and one of humanity’s greatest disasters began. Portugal dominated the transatlantic slave trade for more than three centuries. The other Portuguese commercial obsession, before they seized the spice trade, was gold. African gold began pouring into Lisbon when the slaves did, and the Portuguese began minting gold coins in 1452. The pursuit of slaves and gold characterized Portuguese and Spanish efforts in the Western Hemisphere in the 16th century, which caused history’s greatest demographic catastrophe, where most of a hemisphere’s population died off within a century.

    Europe’s rise was made possible when it turned the global ocean into a low-energy transportation lane. Portugal was in the early lead, but Spain was close behind, and within a century they were caught and surpassed by English, Dutch, and French efforts. To that time, the oceanic sailing ship was by far the greatest energy-capturing technology in world history, and remained that way until the steam engine appeared. Europe’s watermills achieved an average of three horsepower per mill by the 17th century’s end. When Columbus stumbled into the New World in 1492, the day’s 100-ton sailing ships generated between 500 and 700 horsepower when traveling at 10 knots, which was more than 50 times the power that the muscles of the 80-man crew could generate. Using bodies of water as low-energy transportation lanes was one of civilization’s most important inventions, from Sumer to Rome to Tenochtitlán to Europe’s global dominance.

    Other traits that led to European dominance were their violence and greed. Europe’s 16th century in the New World was essentially a century-long gold rush. Europe’s incessant wars and technological advances devoted to inventing ever-deadlier weaponry, as well as its group fighting tactics and Europe’s insatiable greed, made it an irresistible force that swept over the world’s peoples. Greed was transformed from a vice into a virtue by Europe’s economic ideologists, which will be explored in the next chapter.

    Rome was a huge parasite, with its citizens not understanding that their methods were unsustainable, not to mention evil, and would lead to their civilization’s collapse. Similarly, the Spaniards’ obsession with gold, which was responsible for exterminating a hemisphere, suffered from a similar blindness. Although warned by Spanish scholars that importing mountains of gold and silver to Spain would do little economically for Spain other than create inflation, the Spanish sovereigns did not heed the advice. The first bankruptcy that marked the effective end of Spain’s imperial aspirations was in 1557, a mere generation after the initial Incan plunder arrived in Spain. Crown bankruptcies continued, and in 1600 Spain was arguably worse off than in 1500. Spain became the first imperial also-ran during Europe’s rise, along with Portugal. Portugal’s violent seizure of the spice trade acquired some real wealth during its century of dominance. Portugal also imperially overreached, but closer to home. When its ruling class was decimated by an ill-advised invasion of Northern Africa, Spain annexed Portugal. With their imperial fortunes thus conjoined, they declined at the same time.

    The English and Dutch dominated the high seas during the 1600s. The Dutch declined in the late 1600s, with the French replacing them as England’s rival in the 1700s. The French lost their wars against the English/British, and got vengeance by helping Britain’s most successful colonies become independent in the American Revolution. After the humiliation of the War of 1812, the USA engaged in a friendlier rivalry with Britain in the late 1800s, to take the imperial crown in the early 20th century as it became history’s richest and most powerful nation. When imperial latecomers arrived (primarily Germany and Japan), other imperial nations had already laid claim to nearly the entire planet. Earth’s industrialized nations then had two devastating wars that determined global plunder rights, and the USA emerged with unprecedented dominance. The USA was really an empire by the early 20th century, but its social managers always promoted the fiction that America was not playing Europe’s imperial games, even though they were obvious to everybody on Earth, except perhaps the empire’s equivalent of plebeians and naïve patricians who actually believed the propaganda.

    While European powers plundered the planet, something happened in one that led to its dominance and eventually transformed the world with the Fourth Epochal Event: harnessing the energy of hydrocarbon fuels. It began with mining coal laid down in the Carboniferous Period, and after a couple of centuries of rising industrialization, oil deposits were mined. Oil has been the primary focus of geopolitical conflict for the past century, ever since the British Navy adopted oil as its primary fuel in 1911, on Winston Churchill’s initiative. The imperial powers have not allowed Middle East peoples their de facto independence ever since. The rest of this chapter will survey the path that led to England’s initiating the Industrial Revolution.

    The developments that led to England’s use of coal in industry arguably began when the first sailboats plied Mesopotamian rivers, as it was the first time that non-muscle power was significantly used. When Hellenic innovators developed the watermill, windmill, and the first steam engine, it became the path to the Industrial Revolution. The rise of waterpower and wind power in medieval Europe, first with windmills and then with oceangoing sailing ships, already had Europe riding an obvious energy wave, even if thermodynamics and other energy sciences were not yet invented.

    The Domesday Survey of 1086 showed that 85% of the English countryside was deforested, as well as 90% of England’s arable land, with the remaining forest already largely reserved for royalty and nobility for hunting. But studies of lake and river sediments show that most of England’s deforestation had been accomplished by the time Rome invaded two millennia ago. By 900, the brown bear was nearly extinct on the British Isles, and the wolf was not far behind. While English coal had been mined by Romans, and China also mined some coal, deforested England became the world’s first nation to rely on coal. As the High Middle Ages were ending in the 1200s, deforested and cooling England began turning to coal. As previously discussed, most of Earth’s coal came from a brief geological period before life forms learned to digest lignin, and geological processes made trees into today’s coal deposits. The level of geological “processing” determines the grade of coal, and the typical progression is from peat to lignite to bituminous coal to anthracite, with anthracite being like a rock and the cleanest burning. Pennsylvania’s anthracite deposits were long the most desirable coal in the USA, and Wales has anthracite deposits. But England generally burned bituminous coal, and pollution issues were obvious from the beginning. In 1257, Queen Eleanor visited Nottingham and the coal smoke used in local industry drove her away, as she could not stand the smell and feared for her health. In 1285, a commission was established in London, led by Eleanor’s son Edward I, to address the coal smoke problem. In 1306, coal was banned in London, to little practical effect. Coal smoke was so noxious that it was not yet used in homes. Fuel-hungry operations, such as blacksmiths and brewers, are where England’s early coal pollution originated. As with the “green effect” of the Mongol hordes, the Black Death gave England’s forests a brief reprieve when half of England died. England’s population did not begin to grow again until the 1500s, when it was in the Little Ice Age’s grip, which lasted until the 20th century.

    The Catholic Church owned England’s coal mines until Henry VIII kicked out the Catholic Church, partly because it would not give him an annulment, and he appropriated its English assets, including its mines. During Elizabeth I’s reign, England began its ascent to industrialization and England’s woods were once again decimated. Elizabeth established commissions to investigate the dire state of England’s woods, and the results were unanimous: they were largely gone. Until Elizabeth I’s reign, England was relatively backward, with the Netherlands far ahead in economic development. The geographic isolation of the British Isles made them culturally backward compared to their continental neighbors, which can still be seen today with the British reverence for its royalty. The Netherlands was Europe’s most urbanized place, and it was resource-poor and began intensive agricultural efforts to reduce its dependence on imported food, grain in particular. The land-poor Dutch even began to claim land from the North Sea, in history’s greatest effort of oceanic land reclamation. During Henry VIII’s reign, England had a primitive economy that provided raw materials to the Low Countries, where they dyed English cloth and sent it back to them, and southern England exported wood to deforested France.

    England imported its munitions from the Low Countries, and with the Continental wars beginning that would culminate in the devastating Thirty Years’ War, Henry noted England’s vulnerability and began developing England’s arms industry, and England’s iron industry began in 1543. When Romans invaded, they established iron operations in what became Sussex, which deforested the area within a century. In the same place, more than a millennium later, Henry revived England’s iron industry. Sussex was quickly deforested, with hearings held only five years later, in 1548, regarding the deforestation and ruination of the commoners by the new iron industry, as the price of wood skyrocketed. While the commission was concerned, the Crown did nothing about the situation, as an important industry could not be stymied. Sussex’s residents took matters into their own hands and attacked a local forge, which coincided with rebellions in other counties, which were brutally suppressed by the lords and Crown.

    While Spain and Portugal were busy plundering humanity, England was still getting its domestic house in order and began emulating Dutch practices. During the last half of the 1500s, England’s “contribution” to the world’s rape was largely limited to harrying the Spanish. England’s richest private citizen was the pirate Francis Drake, whose claim to fame was stealing Spanish silver by surprise raids of its Pacific ports and circumnavigating Earth as the only way to return home with the loot. The year before Drake’s success, Martin Frobisher hauled back thousands of tons of fool’s gold to England from a bay named after him. England’s first colony in the Western Hemisphere disappeared without a trace. Such were the follies of England’s early imperial efforts. Before England became an imperial aspirant it conquered its neighbors. Roman Emperor Hadrian built a wall to keep out the “barbarians” of what became Scotland. A second wall was built further north a generation later. England first invaded Scotland in 1296, and that region’s Scots were subjected to incessant warfare. The Scots fought alongside France in the Hundred Years’ War, and my family name reflects that heritage; I have a surname with French roots and spelling, but my direct ancestor came from Scotland. Scotland formally united with England in 1707, becoming Great Britain, but warred with England until 1745. A period of Scottish peace with England began in 1560. As England ran out of wood it invaded Ireland, with the conquest not complete until 1603. An English businessman first suggested moving wood-hungry English glassworks to Ireland in 1589, and after the conquest was complete in 1603, the rapid decimation of Ireland’s remaining forests commenced. Ireland has yet to recover its forests. The English established a colony in Ireland at Ulster, and used Borderer Scots and other lower-class subjects to populate the colony as a kind of cannon fodder who were promised land for “settling” where the fiercest resistance to the English invasion had been. That colony formed the toehold that became Northern Ireland, and post-colonial strife with Ireland lasts to this day.

    England began invading North America with the fort at Jamestown in 1607, and wayward religious fanatics got lost on the way to Jamestown in 1620 and stumbled into today’s Massachusetts, where they became the “pilgrims” of American lore. They brought the witch-hunting craze with them, and witches were executed in trumped-up trials until 1693. North America was “settled” in similar fashion to Ireland’s invasion, where the English gentry got the best land in the valleys while the Scots-Irish “settlers” populated the hills as a buffer people. If they could violently wrest land from the rapidly dispossessed Indians, they were welcome to it, until they lost it to arriving gentry once the frontier was settled. That is where America’s “hillbillies” came from, and the borderer culture of the British Isles, with its constant warring, created the USA’s preferred infantryman. That is part of my family’s heritage and that of the USA’s white underclass. Often-pejorative terms such as “redneck,” “cracker,” and “Hoosier,” originated in Britain to describe resident of the borders and highlands. The word “lynching” came from the vigilante “justice” that those border and backwoods peoples engaged in. The western USA was largely settled by them, as they sought free land and gold and performed some of the greatest atrocities against Indians in the final days of the Western Hemisphere’s conquest. The genocide of inland tribes in California was inflicted by poor rural whites with dreams of easy gold. Even though it is part of my heritage, I bore the brunt of Appalachian xenophobia when they tried to get me fired from a temporary job I had at a bank in southern Ohio (by lying to my supervisor about my actions) before I secured permanent employment at a trucking company. Most of our drivers were from Appalachia; I understood their miserable existences and longed to fix it.

    By the early 1600s, coal was England’s primary fuel, and “coal towns” formed where workforces for new mines lived. Mining towns were ramshackle affairs, populated by migrant workers, and the English class system became pronounced due to the gulf between coal miners and the rest of English society. That ghetto-like existence was new in Britain. In Scotland, coal miners were actually slaves, even wearing collars that identified their owners. Coal mining was hellish work, particularly in underground mines, which were dominant in Britain. Miners were killed by mine gas (methane) explosions, asphyxiated by mine gas (carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, which is why they used canaries in coal mines), died in cave-ins, and suffered myriad other horrific fates. Drowning not only became a common way to die as mines began digging below the water table, but solving the water problem became a key event in the Industrial Revolution, arguably the key event, which will be explored in the next chapter. Coal miners eventually organized to get better working conditions, and coal miners were prominent in the USA’s labor movement.

    From civilization’s earliest days, the sailing ship was humanity’s greatest energy technology. Today, the term “prime mover” refers to an engine’s component that transforms one kind of energy into another, usually converting heat energy into mechanical energy (but is the energy of motion in both instances). But it can also mean where environmental energy is captured and turned into mechanical energy. In that regard, a water wheel and crankshaft is a watermill’s prime mover, and a windmill’s sail and crankshaft is its prime mover. The prime mover is the machinery’s most important component and its heart, where the most advanced technology and materials are brought to bear, as that part endures the greatest stresses. In an automobile, for instance, the prime mover is the combination of combustion cylinders and their attached crankshaft. Chemical energy in gasoline is thereby transformed into mechanical energy via the controlled explosions of rapid fuel combustion, liberating that solar energy captured so long ago. In a sailing ship, the prime mover is the sail and mast, where wind energy is transferred to the ship. The mast is a sailing ship’s most important component, similar to an engine’s crankshaft.

    The two primary uses of wood in civilizations have always been fuel and making structures. Just as 90% of Rome’s wood was used for fuel, burning wood has always been its greatest use on Earth, even to the present day. Firewood does not need to be long and straight, and coppice and “waste” wood has long been used for firewood and in pulp mills. Other stands of trees were allowed to grow for a century and more to provide long, straight wood for making structures. For seafaring nations that always meant ships, and securing wood for shipbuilding was a major goal in the earliest seafaring civilizations, and became an obsession during the rise of Mediterranean civilizations; the war between Athens and Sparta largely centered over wood to build navies.

    As Europe learned to sail the high seas, ships became larger and so did the masts. The naval ship was humanity’s highest-performance equipment well into the industrial age, and technological innovations were first used in Europe’s navies if they could be, as they were the key equipment in vying for imperial dominance. Military ships were the largest ones on the high seas, and their masts needed to be the largest. A military ship’s mainmast was the greatest energy-generating technology on Earth, and research showed that single-tree masts were superior for military ships, partly because they held together better when hit by a cannonball and weathered storms better. Although the English began deforesting Ireland as soon as they could, mast wood was largely supplied by Scandinavian polities (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, etc.). By the late 1600s, after centuries of providing most of Europe’s mast wood, Baltic nations not only refused to sell England trees greater than about a half meter in diameter (22 inches), they no longer had trees greater than 0.7 meter (28 inches). Europe could not provide mast wood large enough to meet England’s needs in its imperial arms races. While the Dutch and English were both fighting Spain, they were friendly, by the middle of the 17th century they became bitter rivals, with their first war beginning in 1652. The day’s naval ships carried up to 100 guns, and England’s “ships of the line,” needed to be increasingly large to defeat its rivals, and ever-larger masts were critical to their success. By 1900, masts for merchant ships reached sixty meters tall, while the British Navy adopted steam power in the 19th century’s last half.

    In 1602, the first Englishmen set foot in what became New England, and the expedition’s primary finding was that the gigantic trees they found, particularly the tall, straight white pine, would provide England an independent source of mast wood. By 1634, mast wood was shipped to England from New England, and within a generation, several hundred masts a year were shipped. The Netherlands tried to deny England access to Baltic mast wood in 1658, between their first two wars, and seized some of New England’s first mast wood shipments. Eventually, like the Spanish silver fleet, which was an armada designed to fend off piracy of Spain’s New World plunder, England developed its mast fleet, which was anticipated with nearly as much anxiety as Rome’s wheat fleet from Africa was. By 1700, with the Dutch defeated and on their way to becoming another imperial also-ran, all English “ships of the line” were masted with New English timber. France then became England’s primary imperial rival.

    No historian has argued that England had a grand plan of industrialization, but the Epochal Event was the culmination of several trends. While the science of energy had yet to be invented, the obvious advantages of watermills, windmills, and sailing ships were not lost on people, and the control of arable land, forests, low-energy transportation lanes, workforces, and markets was always the road to riches from Sumer onward. People knew what they were doing.

    A key trend for England’s industrialization was removing peasants from the land so they could no longer feed themselves. Those dispossessed peasants became the Industrial Revolution’s workforce, and it began in England with the forest laws enacted by William the Conqueror, where deer were reserved for royal hunting, not commoners. The legendary Sherwood Forest was one of many royal forests, where “criminals” such as Robin Hood hunted the King’s deer. Modern English Game Laws began in 1671, and in 1723 the infamous Black Act was passed, making “poaching” a capital crime. Europe’s feudal era was anything but halcyonic, but slaves became serfs, and as bad as serfdom was, they still had some rights, and provisioning themselves from the “commons” in the open field system was a universal right in feudal Europe. As England began its rise to dominance, English landowners began to kick peasants off the land via Enclosure Laws, beginning in the 1200s, usually to establish “deer parks” for elite hunting grounds. In the late 1400s, Enclosure measures were stepped up, leading to anti-Enclosure laws being passed, and the first anti-Enclosure rebellion began in 1549, with revolts continuing into the 1600s. But the landowners won and became England’s first capitalists, raising food for sale in the markets. The mechanization of farming began in earnest with the lands cleared of peasants, and Britain’s agricultural revolution began.

    Agricultural output increased, England’s population rose, and those dispossessed peasants toiled in Britain’s mines and mills. One common misconception regarding the Industrial Revolution is that it was an urban phenomenon, but it actually began in the countryside, where the energy was. England’s watermills, necessarily located along rural rivers and streams, powered the cotton-spinning machines tended by dispossessed peasants, which turned England into the world’s workshop well before 1800. England had nearly a century’s lead on its rivals, and was eventually supplanted atop the global imperial hierarchy by its descendent and rival, the USA. London played little role in early industrialization, similar to a parasite like Rome. While the cotton spinning machine was the iconic technology of the early Industrial Revolution, two events in the early 1700s had greater ultimate importance: using coal to smelt iron in 1709, and creating the first commercial steam engine in 1710. The stage was thus set for machines that could be built and powered by hydrocarbon energy, which is still the foundation of today’s industrial economy, three centuries later. Then the Industrial Revolution began.
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 22nd March 2014 at 01:46.

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    United States Avalon Member Wade Frazier's Avatar
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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    I thought I would take a break, but I am barreling along. Boy, this is heavy emotional lifting. I am covering one catastrophe after another, almost all human-created, as people evilly exterminated and exploited each other. It is not like there was ever a peaceful portion of the human journey, but the rise of civilization was a means of slaughtering and exploiting others above all else. It was truly a zero-sum-game world, and only the vast energy surplus of the industrial era has made it relatively peaceful, but ogres like the USA still rampage across the planet, seizing what they want, and it seems like China is just patiently waiting its turn.

    In my morning’s reading of a reflection on past imperial glory, from Rome to Great Britain, the author said that at least today the outright invasion, conquest, and genocide of peoples being plundered for their wealth is at least not universally celebrated anymore, sanctioned by “god,” and the like. At least they have to use the cover story of “defense,” spreading “freedom,” and other fictions, as the USA did recently in Iraq:

    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post652292

    The author was a silver-lining kind of guy. But I don’t know…it seems like they were more honest back then, invading, plundering, and exterminating because they could, and they did not really invoke many lofty rationales. What is more reprehensible, annihilating millions to “liberate” them, or annihilating them because they are “subhuman” and because we can? I will pose that question in the essay.

    Of course, with economic abundance, that entire motivation disappears. Sure, the sociopaths will still exist, but they will no longer easily dupe others into doing their bidding, such as going off to war, if everybody lives in abundance. Believe me, Godzilla knows this better than anybody, which is primarily why he has put the lid so tightly on FE and the like. But what will certainly not work is playing his game. He cannot be beaten at it, and Young Warriors who think they can defeat him are the most deluded of all, and a great danger to themselves and others.

    The lamb’s path is the only one with a prayer, as far as I have seen, but they need to be fully-sentient lambs.

    Back to work.

    Best,

    Wade

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    United States Avalon Member Wade Frazier's Avatar
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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    When I worked the front desk at the NEM conference in 2004 (how did ten years go by so fast?), I only took a break to listen to Greer, and I quit NEM the next day, as I was only there because Brian begged me to stay. I did not hear Mark’s talk, but when I read this summary this past week:

    http://www.pureenergysystems.com/eve...ngs/index.html

    I saw again why I respected somebody who had been there on the high road. Like me, Mark’s initial orientation was the inventor’s route, and his statement:

    “Let's take the focus off of the inventor, let's give it away if we have to. We need a diffusion strategy. We will have these resonant field technologies among us when our primary allegiance is to humanity as a whole and not just to some nation.”

    showed that we were definitely singing a similar tune, and at least the non-inventor-centric and non-profit approach is out there. Open source, non-profit, even giving it away…those approaches may have a prayer. Nothing else has come close, but people who can get within hailing distance of FE and its quadrillion dollar potential, for starters, and being willing to give it away – well, I have virtually never seen that, but only people who think they can do that (you never know until you are there) are fit to even try, and anybody who becomes visible will be risking their lives in a number of ways. That just comes with the territory. And as Brian O said, it will take hundreds of millions of dollars to even get to the stage where the technology is viable for mass production. That is all part of the conundrum, but getting that nugget of heart-centered sentience going is step one.

    Back to work.

    Best,

    Wade

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    For those reading along, this paper will be germane to my essay:

    http://www.wtf.tw/ref/tainter_2006.pdf

    While insightful in ways, the author also operates from assumptions of scarcity, just as all academics do. If energy was truly abundant (and did not wreck Earth) for the first time ever, meaning that all people had access to whatever they needed, and did not need to go through society’s gatekeepers to get it, then we would have the Fifth Epochal Event, and what is ahead would be as unrecognizable as today’s world would be to an English peasant of 1500, and how unrecognizable the world would be to the residents who lived immediately before each epochal event.

    The world after the Fifth Epochal Event could easily look like this:

    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post672748

    Going to go play now.

    Best,

    Wade

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    To that paper above, here is another one along similar lines:

    http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/...n-your-choice/

    http://www.scribd.com/doc/212697658/...r-Submission-2

    I have seen the graphs in that paper while studying for the essay. I want to briefly address some of Tainter’s approach. You will see the energy issue throughout the paper, and Tainter’s basic thrust is that energy funds complexity, and tapping into new energy sources is usually the result of problem-solving. He has always relegated ecological concerns as secondary, but I consider it rather misleading, as do others in his field. Until the advent of the hydrocarbon energy economy (AKA the Industrial Revolution), the ecology was the basis for virtually all of a civilization’s energy. Since the Sumerians invented the sailboat, nearly all civilizations have taken advantage of wind power, and they also took advantage of water power, even if it was nothing more than having its water supply brought downhill to it. But with the advent of the watermill, humanity was able to tap water energy to help run their civilizations, and it reached its apotheosis with Western Europe, beginning around 1000 CE. Basically, watermills were a way to farm energy from the solar-energy-driven hydrological cycle, and Europe was able to play that game after ancient Greeks invented the watermill.

    But when the issue is framed like Tainter has, where it is all about human problem-solving, where the energy delivered by the ecosystem is only regarded as an input for a civilization’s health, that view tends to treat nature as expendable, which is where it is a short step from justifying all manner of offense against nature and humanity. However subtly Tainter may frame his argument, it reeks of the zero-sum-game approach to the human journey that has always dominated it. It assumes energy scarcity, and if that assumption vanished, so would Tainter’s entire argument, and it does so in ways that are not initially obvious. For instance, Tainter made the observation that the primary problem that all institutions face is that of their own survival. In a world of scarcity, getting enough economic goodies to survive becomes the primary obsession of all organizations and institutions, which is why they always degenerate into rackets:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/racket.htm

    and the biggest rackets on Earth are the biggest industries, with Godzilla being the head of them. If humanity had economic abundance, which can only happen with energy abundance, then people would not belong to such institutions for survival or “power” reasons, and the racketeering and survival impulses, based on scarcity, would go away. Virtually the entire energy, medical, banking, and military industries would disappear if FE made its appearance, and racketeers the world over will be frustrated, but they also would get to live in something like heaven on Earth as their compensation.

    Tainter has engaged in semi-ridicule of his “opponents,” and other aspects of his work make him seem unlikable. He also takes an almost Julian-Simon-like:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/simon.htm

    approach to the environment. In that paper, he points out that as the hills of the Mediterranean’s periphery were turned into lifeless moonscapes, that humanity and their domesticates received short-term benefits by mining the ruins as the soils slowly made their way to sea, that it makes the “collapse” question more complex. Again, what kind of problem is he trying to solve for? The “marginal utility” of analyses like his become pretty meaningless in a world of abundance. I will use his work, but make very different points. A strictly anthropocentric view of the situation is very short-sighted, in my opinion, and few if any worthy solutions will come from work like that, IMO. But digesting works like that are helpful intellectual exercises, even if only to highlight their framing assumptions and biases.

    Time to run.

    Best,

    Wade
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 23rd March 2014 at 23:11.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    I just saw these, this morning:

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...nt-chart-world

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...-story-not-two

    I don’t want to beat dead horses, but the choir will need to become familiar with those kinds of analyses and arguments. To call the nations mining more oil than they need in their current economy “self-sufficient” is crazy. Mining a resource a million times as fast as it was created, and it being the economy’s most important resource, makes any kind of “self-sufficient” analysis nonsensical.

    Readers can tell that I read Zero Hedge, but not for many articles. They have their own biases, some of which are too far out there for me to take seriously. Here is an example article:

    http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed...-death-or-jail

    and if you take some of the links, you find the arguments different than that article presents. That one scientist who proposed jail for “dissidents” was actually proposing jail for the hydrocarbon lobby and its well-funded climate warming “skeptics,” which is a different issue than silencing genuine “dissent.” It is similar to the argument in the USA that corporations are people with “free speech” rights. Corporate propaganda is a far cry from “free speech.”

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lies.htm#big

    Of course, FE makes the entire global warming issue go away, in several ways. The “debate” and “uncertainty” that that article cites is a red herring, IMO. This really should not be hard to understand. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps infrared radiation heading from Earth’s surface to space, and warms Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is the key greenhouse gas after water, and carbon dioxide concentrations are the ultimate cause for our current ice age. Until human activities began to raise the carbon dioxide levels several thousand years ago with the advent of deforestation and agriculture, carbon dioxide levels had been falling rather consistently for 150 million years. But the icehouse Earth conditions of the past 35 million years had their first proximate cause being the isolation of Antarctica over the South Pole, which has caused ice ages before, with the second proximate cause being closing the gap between the Americas three million years ago, and the last proximate cause being the change in Earth’s orientation to the Sun, called Milankovitch cycles:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

    We are currently in an ice age, in a brief interglacial interval, and Earth should have already begun tipping back into a glacial period, except that global warming is delaying it, maybe by tens of thousands of years. I can see people liking global warming, as it makes much of the northern hemisphere inhabitable for longer, but there is no denying that human activities, especially burning hydrocarbons to fuel the industrial era, is warming the atmosphere. That dynamic is denied by no credible scientist that I ever saw, and the “scientists” disputing any of it are making largely bogus arguments, and most of them work for the hydrocarbon lobby:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#sold

    Soul-sold “scientists,” and those they have duped, should not be part of a scientific debate. If you study their arguments, they are all using local and seasonal oscillation data to make their arguments, which really are bogus. If you increase a primary greenhouse gas, which will also cause positive feedback effects on the primary greenhouse gas, water, Earth is going to get warmer, plain and simple. The so-called “scientists” who also make arguments such as delaying the coming ice sheet period, and making places like Siberia and Canada arable, is a good thing for humanity, are talking their pocket-book with the bribes coming from their hydrocarbon lobby patrons. That crap is not really “science,” but can be made to look like it. And similar to Tainter’s arguments that I reviewed in my previous post, what kinds of problems are those “scientists” trying to solve? Making Siberia and Canada arable with global warming will also create huge catastrophes for humanity, such as sinking shorelines below the rising global ocean where more than a billion people currently live, which includes some of the world’s poorest people, such as those of Bangladesh.

    Some Peak Oilers say that the “good news” is that we will run out of hydrocarbons, first oil, then coal and gas, before we can really warm the Earth all that much, and the other “good news” in their scenarios is that in the absence of fossil fuels, Earth’s carrying capacity is less than a billion people, so six billion or more will have to die off anyway, so that is a good thing for Earth that we are quickly running out of hydrocarbons:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/hooked.htm#austerity

    Of course, FE makes all of those arguments and “analyses” totally invalid and obsolete, but all of those parties are grinding their particular brand of scarcity-based ax, and what they are all united on is dismissing even the possibility of FE. All of those scientists and academics are Level 3s:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level3

    as people such as Brian O discovered the hard way:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#sentience

    That is the surreal part of this whole situation. The owners of the hydrocarbon lobby are among the most vicious suppressors of FE:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#make

    On one hand, they hire hit men, corrupt public officials, and other sociopaths to keep FE at bay, while simultaneously hiring “scientists” who happily sell their souls to become global warming “skeptics,” while the scientists who are not in somebody’s hip pocket are totally taken in by the organized suppression and their indoctrination into the “laws of physics,” and irrationally deny the experiences of somebody like Mark:

    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post811647

    as a “conspiracy theory.” What a minefield to navigate. I have been on that battlefield for many years now, and it really can be a surreal experience. Again, I have found almost nobody who possesses the integrity, discernment, and scientific acumen to winnow through that bewildering crap to get at the truth, what will be helpful, and the like, as everybody finds some safe harbor for their awareness, some comforting way to think and believe where they no longer need to pursue the truth. I have called those the gravity wells of scarcity-based ideologies and other terms, and what they all have in common is trapping their adherents into beliefs that prevent them from pursuing the truth and any kind of positive action. Pursuing the truth in today’s world can be frightening, and almost none are fit for it, but those are the people I seek. The choir cannot be made up of people who gave up and settled for comforting beliefs.

    To briefly return to global warming, there are many bogus arguments out there that suck in the scientifically illiterate, and one of the ones I regularly see is examining the ice core data and temperature swings to deny that carbon dioxide has anything to do with warming Earth. As noted above, carbon dioxide is the ultimate cause (after the Sun’s output, but that barely fluctuates, and no credible scientists are arguing for solar output being a variable in the current ice age, at most, minor variation may have played a part in the Little Ice Age, for instance), and the “tipping point” variable has been the Milankovitch cycles. So, looking at the Milankovitch-cycle-related glacial and interglacial period oscillations, and making the argument that carbon dioxide has no part to play in global warming, is a pretty crazy kind of analysis that confuses causes. But I have been bombarded with those kinds of “analyses” over the years, as they suck in the scientifically illiterate. Of course, those kinds of arguments are endorsed by the hydrocarbon lobby’s “skeptics,” and often concocted by them. Those various kinds of global warming deniers make for some very strange bedfellows. Another variation on the scientifically illiterate themes that get promoted is the abiotic oil hypothesis. That hypothesis was promoted in earnest by Stalinist scientists before plate tectonics became accepted:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin

    and is no longer taken seriously by any scientists of note. It is one of the many scientific hypotheses in the dustbin of history. Even if it had merit, and it very likely does not, it does not mean that we can blithely keep drilling oil to our heart’s content, knowing that there is more where that came from and that it has no environmental effects. That kind of “business as usual” confluence of scientific rubbish regularly makes the rounds among the scientifically illiterate, and it makes its way to me far too often, where I am asked what I think about it. Geez, FE makes it all go away, all of it and much more. That is where my primary focus is, not a bunch of interest-conflicted “science,” hypotheses that were disproven long ago, and outright disinformation designed to gull the scientifically illiterate, as a way to attack Al Gore and others. We had dealings with Gore:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#yull

    and know that he is just another useless politician. He may be overplaying his hand with his global warming campaign, but no climate scientist with a clue is not terrified by what is happening. The same goes for biologists, as the Sixth Mass Extinction:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

    is galloping along and increasing exponentially. Again, people like Julian Simon:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/simon.htm

    and the interest-conflicted “scientists” in his stable deny that there is a mass extinction happening, too. It is all prostitution, selling one’s soul to the corporate order, so the masses stay asleep or hack at branches if they do anything at all. And all the while, the solution that makes all of those overwhelming problems, and far more, go away almost overnight is ignored when it is not being attacked, and people like Mark, Brian, Dennis, and I are voices in the wilderness, if we don’t get silenced by Godzilla’s minions, while the masses sleep, and those who wake up to some degree get sucked into all the bogus stuff. And when I saw Infinite Energy magazine parroting the garbage that there is no mass extinction happening and that burning all the hydrocarbons of the industrial age was ultimately a good thing:

    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post803353

    it was one of the loneliest feelings in the world, where Mallove’s successors were in the hip pockets of the hydrocarbon lobby, like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where even my allies had turned into pod people.

    Again, those in the choir will have avoided all of those traps that await the unwary, naïve, and scientifically illiterate. They will have some fringe experience, enough to know that there is definitely valid stuff on the fringes, but also with enough experience to know that the fringe stuff is bogus and a huge time-waster about 99% of the time. Winnowing the chaff from the wheat can be quite a chore, and doing it a few times can be very educational, and I even recommend doing it a few times, to get the hang of the process. The truth is not something that rears up and bites you, not for such monumental subjects such as FE, the hydrocarbon situation, the Sixth Mass Extinction, climate change, and the like. These are realms that require intelligence, diligence, integrity, and other traits to navigate, because there all sorts of dark alleys, rabbit holes, dead ends, and gravity wells on the paths to the truth that newbies disappear into all the time, never to be seen again. I have seen that over and over during my journey. Brian O allowed himself to be sucked into the Face on Mars and moon landings issues by bogus data and arguments. I regard that as being similar to Einstein’s engagement with Velikovsky. It is one thing to be willing to entertain the offbeat stuff, and getting to the bottom of any of it can be very time-consuming and maddening, but that is the price of entertaining it.

    If Einstein was alive today, he would not take Velikovsky’s stuff seriously, and he told Velikovsky that his wandering planets scenario did not hold water. Similarly, Brian eventually saw where Hoagland was stretching his Cydonia data and had largely disassociated himself from the Face on Mars issue before that photo from 1998 came back:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#new

    But the moon landings issue dogged him to his death and beyond:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#moon

    and I am still trying to get his final statement on the issue:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianbio.htm#statement

    published someplace where Wikipedia’s “editors” won’t keep erasing it, as nobody on any side of the debate is willing to help, because Brian shows how he is not in either camp, in another example of personal integrity being the world’s scarcest commodity:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#burn

    Back to work.

    Best,

    Wade
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 24th March 2014 at 12:00.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    Here is a brief snippet of my Industrial Revolution chapter. There is a lot of ground to cover, and I can see the chapter being split in two like the Domestication Revolution chapter was, but we will see. I am going to try to keep is short as a cover some pretty huge territory.

    Back to work.

    Best,

    Wade

    Humanity’s Fourth Epochal Event: The Industrial Revolution


    The previous chapter surveyed some English trends that led to industrialization, and one disputed subject is whether England turned to coal because of deforestation. However, the argument that they were unrelated has weaknesses; also, plenty of opposing views exist and are the mainstream opinion. The first ironworks in England almost immediately caused protest and rebellion because they led to rapid deforestation and rising wood prices. Metal smelting is very energy-intensive, as Cyprus and many other places learned the hard way, but coal could not be used for metal smelting because of its impurities, primarily sulfur, which also produced the noxious stench that made it such an infamous fuel, producing acid rain among other effects. London in the mid-1600s had Earth’s worst air quality, by far, due to coal smoke. In 1661, in one of the earliest works on air pollution, John Evelyn wrote that Londoners had more lung disease than the rest of humanity put together. London Fog was coal smoke, and until the mid-20th century, London was legendary for its coal pollution, with 4,000 people dying in a few days during a pollution event in 1952. Many years ago, when I first viewed casual photographs of residents of early 20th century European cities, I was struck by how everybody was covered in soot.

    In 1600, England produced about 18,000 tons of pig iron, and a century later, it produced only a little more, while importing nearly 10,000 tons, especially from Sweden, which still had plentiful forests if not much mast wood. Swedish iron was competitive with English iron, even with a stiff tariff imposed on it. English ironworks had to compete for wood with breweries and cider and cheese producers, as well as textile manufacturers and related businesses. Also, canal builders and wagonway builders (building low-energy transportation lanes, and wagonways were railroad predecessors) competed for wood in a rapidly industrializing England.

    Coke is coal with its impurities, mainly sulfur, “baked” out, and burns like charcoal. There is record of coke being made in China in the fourth century, but that practice did not migrate to Europe. In 1589, a patent was granted in England for using coal to smelt iron, and there is other evidence of coke’s use in 1600s England, but by brewers. In the 1600s, coal became a near-universal industrial fuel while wood was still used in homes. In 1709, Abraham Darby built the first commercially successful coke-fueled blast furnace. Until that time, not only was wood expensive, charcoal was so fragile that it could not be shipped far. Coalbrookdale, where Darby’s furnace resided, had England’s greatest density of ironworks. Darby combined his knowledge of using coke in brewing, the low-sulfur coal in Coalbrookdale, and his newcomer status, where he had limited access to charcoal and its price was exorbitant, to give coke a try. As usual, necessity was the mother of invention. Others had tried coke-fueled smelting before, but nobody had lasted long. Darby’s furnace, however, became so successful that he could sell his iron much cheaper than his competitors. For the first time ever, cast iron became a household consumer item, for items such as kettles, stoves, and pots. In the 1740s, Darby’s son helped invent a method of using coal to further refine pig iron into wrought iron, and his grandson built the world’s first iron bridge in 1779.

    In 1750, only 5% of England’s pig iron was produced with coke, but by 1800, with new processes used and the continuing rising price of charcoal, Britain’s pig iron production was 150,000-200,000 tons annually, almost all coke-smelted. It was ten times as much as annual production as in the 18th century’s first half, with the steep ascent beginning in the 1770s. In the first decade of the 19th century, it doubled again. During the 18th century, British coal production increased by a factor of five, to more than 15 million metric tons, and it doubled again by 1830. It took ten times its weight in fuel to produce ten tons of iron, and twenty times for copper. In 1900, Great Britain produced five million tons of pig iron annually, the USA produced twice as much, and Germany produced more than six million tons. In 2011, the United Kingdom (Great Britain’s name today) produced only seven million tons of pig iron, China produced nearly a hundred times as much, and global production was 1.1 billion tons, or several thousand times what England, the early leader in industrialization, produced two centuries earlier. In 2008, global coal production was estimated at 5.8 billion tons, or nearly 400 times what Great Britain mined in 1800.

    A careful estimate as of 2013 is that humanity has reduced Earth’s biomass by more than a third since the beginnings of agriculture. Humanity certainly could not have industrialized by using wood, and Britain could not have industrialized with wood. Arguments making the case that deforestation was not why coal was adopted in England are irrelevant to the fact that England could not have industrialized without coal. The economics of coal were evident to even imperial Romans, but nobody would use coal if they could avoid it. Some ironworking operations used wood clear until the late 19th century. But using sunlight captured during the tree’s life could not long compete with mining ancient sunlight trapped in coal that was collected over tens of millions of years, even if nobody initially knew how coal was formed. Even today, the British Isles’ grassy hills provide stark evidence of the rampant deforestation that those lands have yet to recover from. That they have any woods at all is a testament to using fossil fuels to power the Industrial Revolution.

    The other critical innovation was the modern steam engine, which was intimately entwined with coal. The burgeoning coal mines quickly exhausted deposits above the water table and began digging deeply into the earth, and water in the mines became a great problem. Not only were floods killing miners, but standing water made mines inoperable. Romans pumped water from their mines (water pumps may have been another Hellenic invention). So did British mining operations, but around 1710, Thomas Newcomen combined the ideas of a French inventor and an English inventor to make the first industrial steam engine, to pump water from coal mines. Similar to using coal for smelting, the Newcomen engine was successful and common in mining by 1725, but was the first of its kind, primitive compared to later engines, and its spread was gradual. James Watt was asked to fix a Newcomen engine in 1763. He eventually invented an improved version with a separate condenser that was first commercially installed in 1776. The steam engine that powered the Industrial Revolution was thus born, although, as with coal, its spread was gradual and it had to compete with wind and water power for nearly a century. The hydrocarbon-fueled steam engine was the key to the Industrial Revolution, where ancient sunlight was exploited to generate previously unimaginable power. A steam locomotive of 1850 roaring through the English countryside would have been inconceivable to an English peasant of 1500. From a half million years to fifty thousand years to ten thousand years to less than five hundred years, the timeframe between epochal events continued to shrink as levels of energy use increased nearly geometrically with each event.

    As with previous epochal events, the change in levels of mental achievement was as dramatic as the material changes. However, other than the First Epochal Event, humans largely possessed the same cognitive equipment. If an infant girl from the founder group that left Africa could have been placed in a home in an industrialized nation today, there is little reason to believe that she would not live a normal life. The changes in mental achievement during the journeys of Homo sapiens have had little or nothing to do with changes in biology, and, in fact, human brains have shrunk by about 10% in the past 30,000 years. Humanity’s material and mental changes were deeply interrelated, and this chapter will explore some of those connections. The human world became vastly more complex with the rise of industrialization, so much so that most humans have very little understanding of how their world actually works. It usually takes systems thinkers with scientific training to begin to understand the modern world’s complexities. About 95% of Americans, for instance, are scientifically illiterate and have little idea where their energy comes from or how the myriad moving parts of their civilizations operate and interact. Americans are good at consuming, being history’s fattest people, with the rest of the industrialized world close behind, but they have little idea where any of it comes from or how it was produced and delivered to them.

    Several interacting trends created the phenomenon called the Industrial Revolution, but as with the previous epochal events, it all rode on the back of the energy practices. Without that foundation of energy generation, the rest could not have happened. Cognitive and social changes were predicated on the economic situation, which was always based on the level of energy consumption. Since the beginnings of civilization, the level of energy surplus, meaning the produced energy not devoted to agriculture, including feeding its workforce, has always been the determinant of how a civilization could develop and if it would survive.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    I am rolling along on the Industrial Revolution, and getting to a new kind of elite, the capitalist. They were different in ways from earlier elite versions, but not all that much. Again, the focus of my work is not Godzilla, but retail elites that you have heard of are likely not them. We had dealings with Rockefellers, Rothschilds, and the like, where they either contacted us directly or through their agents, and while we were definitely a fly in the ointment, we also had dealings with Godzilla, and he operated differently. At those levels, their agents were good at what they did, being true professionals, even if they worked for the forces of darkness. Basically, if you have heard of them, they are not members of Godzilla’s hierarchy. And we never contacted them; they contacted us, and those are not moments that I want to relive. When Godzilla comes to dinner, or invites you to dinner, you might be the dinner.

    People like Greer probably know at least some of the names in Godzilla’s ranks, and he plays a very dangerous game of threatening to expose some of them in the event of his untimely demise. I do not want to come anywhere near games like that, but I also understand the impulse.

    I will have to cover some of that territory in the essay, but more to try to convince my readers that trying to defeat Godzilla in combat, sneak past him, expose him and the like are doomed strategies and highly counterproductive.

    I am seeking a middle ground that almost nobody has ever tried to stand on, which is knowing that you may be shot at, but you just know that it comes with the territory, and you also know that if you get shot at, the shots most likely come from your allies, not Godzilla and friends or the lower level predators. As Dennis told me that last time I saw him, his allies have hurt him more than his enemies. Even today, people whom I have already had to remove from my life still hurl daggers at me, and they were all people who sponged off of me. It is truly insane, but comes with the territory. Most people lose their minds when around FE as the immensity of the situation seduces them, where they get delusions of grandeur, paranoid, and the like:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/risk.htm#quadrillion

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/conun.htm#pitfalls

    The other hazard is if you are one of the overgrown Boy Scouts that is really trying:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paths.htm#scouts

    you are also usually highly capable and giving, and those around you tend to become parasites. They really don’t care if you are trying to prevent a global meltdown; all they can see is that you are capable, big hearted, and somebody to sponge off of. Of if they say they want to help, it is a bizarre “help” that is a far greater hindrance than genuine help in the long run, because they think they are somehow entitled to cash in on the quadrillions they hope you will make before you ever see any of it, and as can be seen with the approach I advocate, people like me will never see it. We know that giving it away is the only approach with a prayer.

    Because that was our motivation, we were seen as a curiosity/threat by Godzilla and company, and a significant one. We were not trying to be like them, replace them, cash in, and so on, but eliminate a world where beings like Godzilla even “need” to exist. That gets their attention and even scares them. Inventors trying to get rich and the like pose no threat at all, or at least their “threat” is easily dealt with, and the “lucky” ones get the Golden Handcuffs. That is why I have said that when FE inventors apply for patents, they are already done but don’t know it yet.

    What I am doing is likely not seen as much of a threat, but it is also along lines that can make them nervous. People motivated by greed, delusions of grandeur, anger, vengeance, and the like are easy for them to understand and defeat. People motivated by love are something that they really can’t understand. And again, Godzilla and company is really not my focus, but one of the big problems that people like me has to deal with are humanity’s universal victim perspectives. People either deny his existence or obsess about him, and neither are healthy reactions:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#weakness

    I will cover Godzilla just enough so that the people that I seek realize that he is real and cannot be defeated by Young Warrior means:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/camelot.htm#warriors

    and other delusional approaches. Godzilla is best treated as a force of nature that will go away if enough people achieve true sentience. That is my game, and we will see how it goes.

    Back to work.

    Best,

    Wade
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 26th March 2014 at 00:51.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    Briefly, one of the mind-bogglers about engaging scientists and the “smart” on FE, and their Level 3 arguments:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level3

    is that the person who invented alternating current technology, Nikola Tesla, was pursuing FE when J.P. Morgan pulled the rug from underneath him, and Einstein’s protégé David Bohm calculated that there was more potential energy in a cubic centimeter of “empty space” than is calculated to be in all the mass in the known universe, and Einstein himself said that “empty” space was not empty. Scientists really have to have their heads in the sand to not know that stuff, especially those who invoke “laws of physics” objections to the idea of FE.

    What is equally irrational is dismissing experiences such as Mark’s (and others like him):

    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post811647

    as a “conspiracy theory.” Experiences are not theories. Such responses are every bit as irrational as equating materialism with rationalism. Those aspects of establishment science and the scientists who worship at those altars are why Brian wondered if humanity was really a sentient species:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#sentience

    There is nothing about FE that is “way out” except for those with puny conceptions, projecting their limited understandings on all they see and falling prey to their scarcity-based conditioning. Again, before every epochal event, what came after the event, and even how it came about, was unimaginable to those people who lived just before the event. It will likely be no different with the advent of FE. It is going to be up to relatively few people to make it happen, as usual.

    Back to work.

    Best,

    Wade
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 26th March 2014 at 20:11.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    I read this little ditty just now:

    http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-Ge...s-and-Gas.html

    Boy, that song sure seems familiar. Let’s see, how does it go? Ah yes:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_war

    The 160th anniversary of the world’s first industrial war was last October. I’ll be damned if the players are nearly the same ones.

    Of course, not too far away, in Afghanistan, the Brits are still there, just as they were nearly two centuries ago:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Anglo-Afghan_War

    About the only difference is that the imperial interventions are all about hydrocarbons, and the latest imperial king of the hill, the USA, is now involved, but the Empire is fading fast. The year before the Crimean War began, the USA was busy with its first foray into Asia:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew...n.2C_1852-1854

    In the book I am currently reading, Energy and the Wealth of Nations, which is a long overdue college textbook that puts energy at the heart of all economic activity, one of the authors related an anecdote about reading a book on Peter the Great, who waged war in Crimea in the late 1600s:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_t...at#Early_reign

    and he then read about Napoleon’s Russian Campaign:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia

    and then read about the Nazis’ invasion of The Soviet Union:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_in...e_Soviet_Union

    and he realized that he was looking at the same maps each time. In the end, just a lot of blood spilled in failed attempts to gain the economic upper hand.

    In surveys of the history of the economics profession in Energy and the Wealth of Nations and how economists developed their theories, it is evident that economic theory was largely something that largely justified the position of the current elite, with the economists all kind of like court historians, except for Karl Marx. Michael Perelman’s The Invention of Capitalism is good on that score regarding the classical economists, where they were all largely apologists for greed.

    And when they were not justifying the status quo, their theories were all around the distribution of scarce resources. That was really what it was all about, but they came up with all manner of fancy “law” and the like. Their basic “law” of economics was that people have unlimited wants, but there are scarce resources. With FE, economics is one of many professions that will go the way of the dinosaurs. In a world of abundance, almost nothing in the current corpus of economic theory would survive.

    Bucky Fuller said that all political systems were all about who gets the scarce resources:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/roots.htm#scarcity

    With abundance, that all goes away.

    Time for bed.

    Best,

    Wade
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 28th March 2014 at 17:33.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    As I write about the Industrial Revolution, it becomes more and more obvious why FE has been suppressed for the past century and how almost everybody plays along with the game. Fear and greed; these are humanity’s operant principles, not love and abundance. That truly is the crux of the conundrum. The people running the show have taken power and control concepts to their logical conclusion, at least as far as their megalomania can do so on this planet. But they only mastered a game that most will play if they get a chance. The only solution is to play a different game.

    If anybody could have run the gauntlet to FE, it was Dennis, and he never had a chance, and, again, his allies hurt him more than the predators defending their turf. The enemy truly is us, and if a tiny fraction of us overcame enough of the fear-and-scarcity conditioning that comes at us from the cradle, from all directions, we may be able to change the paradigm. But we definitely won’t get there by playing the usual games of inventors, patents, raising money, seeking some lowest-common-denominator “bait” to get people involved, and the like. An approach using heart-centered sentience is the only one I am interested in, and may well be the only one that has a chance. We can’t pour the new wine into the old skins.

    Dennis’s journey should be the definitive case of why that entire approach will not work. Dennis is the best I ever saw or heard of for the businessman/inventors’ approach, and instead of people studying what he tried, what he succeeded with, what failed, and what happened when the predators arrived, nearly everybody lies about him, from the media:

    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post412338

    to the “skeptics”:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/dennis.htm#libel

    to Dennis’s “allies”:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#libel

    They eagerly repeat each other’s lies and gull naïve newbies:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/skeptic.htm

    https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post621892

    So, the lessons of his preposterous journey are not even being considered, while the next inventor-of-the-hour sallies forth. It is like that definition of insanity, of doing the same thing over and expecting a different outcome each time.

    What I am trying is anything but easy, and the challenges, perils, and temptations will eliminate more than 99.9% of the general population from trying my route. It is definitely something different, and I doubt it will hurt, but it is all about hitting the notes, not gathering a crowd. I expect what I am trying to start small, maybe very small.

    Back to work.

    Best,

    Wade
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 27th March 2014 at 15:57.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    One of the amazing things about surveying the rise of industrialization and especially the robber baron industries, energy in particular, is that academics point out very clearly the conspiratorial nature of the trusts, and why they needed to manage competition and innovation in order to maintain their profit margins. Historians are very frank about their ruthlessness and motivation, and surreptitiously managing the situation would have come very naturally to them. They had the means, motive, and opportunity to suppress FE and other disruptive technologies. I even saw the so-called radical left laud an effort that portrayed Rockefeller energy technology suppression a century ago:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/radleft.htm#rockefeller

    But nobody in their ranks wants to admit the possibility that the game has been refined to scientific levels since then. Why? Well, the rad lefties admitted why: to even admit that such “evil” exists on Earth is to give up all hope:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/radleft.htm#religion

    That is like a boy pulling the covers over his head so the monsters can’t get him. That is a big reason for the “conspiracy-phobia” of the Left:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/cover-up.htm#parenti

    But another aspect took me a long time to figure out. The Left likes to think of its methods as scientific, and the mainstream scientific worldview has nothing in the universe happening by design, but it is all a big accident. It took me nearly twenty years to finally figure it out:

    http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#conspiracism

    I can understand their disdain for conspiracists, who see a conspiracy behind every bush, but to blindly adhere to an ideological position, when the evidence clearly points to its invalidity, is not a scientific approach.

    Again, walking the line between denial and obsession is the key to understanding how the world really works, not how we wished it worked.

    Back to work.

    Best,

    Wade

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    Just throwing up what I have so far on the Industrial Revolution chapter. I am sure I will change it plenty by the published version, but just putting it out there. I can see this chapter getting broken in two before I am finished. If I break it, it likely will get broken in two around the rise of oil and the robber barons, Tesla, and electrification. But as with the previous epochal events, it was really only a refinement. Tapping the energy of fossil fuels made the Industrial Revolution happen, although even the people of the day did not really understand, being that the science of energy had not yet been invented.

    The Industrial Revolution really kicked into high gear with oil and electricity, which were vastly superior to coal, gas, and the ways power was transmitted before electricity.

    Back to work.

    Best,

    Wade

    Humanity’s Fourth Epochal Event: The Industrial Revolution


    The previous chapter surveyed some English trends that led to industrialization, and one controversial subject is whether England turned to coal because of deforestation. The mainstream view is that they were directly related, and I tend to agree. The first ironworks in England almost immediately caused protest and rebellion because they led to rapid deforestation and rising wood prices. Metal smelting is very energy-intensive, as Cyprus and many other places learned the hard way, but coal could not be used for metal smelting because of its impurities, primarily sulfur, which also produced the noxious stench that made it so infamous, producing acid rain among other effects. London in the mid-1600s had Earth’s worst air quality, by far. In 1661, in one of the earliest works on air pollution, John Evelyn wrote that Londoners had more lung disease than the rest of humanity put together. London Fog was coal smoke, and until the mid-20th century London was legendary for its coal pollution, with 4,000 people dying in a few days during a pollution event in 1952. Many years ago, when I first viewed casual photographs of residents of early 20th century European cities, I was struck by how everybody was covered in soot.

    In 1600, England produced about 18,000 tons of pig iron, and a century later, it produced only a little more, while importing nearly 10,000 tons, mainly from Sweden, which still had plentiful forests if not much mast wood. Swedish iron was price competitive with English iron, even with a stiff tariff imposed on it. English ironworks competed for wood with breweries and cider and cheese producers, as well as textile manufacturers and related businesses. Also, canal builders and wagonway builders (building low-energy transportation lanes, and wagonways were railroad predecessors) competed for wood in a rapidly industrializing England.

    Coke is coal with its impurities, mainly sulfur, “baked” out, and burns like charcoal. Coke was made in China in the fourth century, but that practice did not migrate to Europe. In 1589, a patent was granted in England for using coal to smelt iron, and there is other evidence of coke’s use in 1600s England, but by brewers. In the 1600s, coal became a near-universal industrial fuel while wood was still used in homes. In 1709, Abraham Darby built the first commercially successful coke-fueled blast furnace. Until that time, not only was wood expensive, charcoal was so fragile that it could not be shipped far. Coalbrookdale, where Darby’s furnace resided, had England’s greatest ironworks density. Darby combined his knowledge of using coke in brewing, the low-sulfur coal in Coalbrookdale, and his newcomer status, where he had limited access to exorbitantly priced charcoal, to give coke a try. As usual, necessity was the mother of invention. Others had tried coke-fueled smelting before, but nobody had lasted long. Darby’s furnace, however, became so successful that he could sell his iron much cheaper than his competitors. For the first time ever, cast iron became a household consumer item, for items such as kettles, stoves, and pots. In the 1740s, Darby’s son helped invent a method of using coal to further refine pig iron into wrought iron, and his grandson built the world’s first iron bridge in 1779, which still stands.

    In 1750, only 5% of England’s pig iron was produced with coke, but by 1800, with new processes and the continuing rising price of charcoal, Britain’s pig iron production was 150,000-200,000 tons annually, almost all coke-smelted. It was ten times greater than annual production in the 18th century’s first half, with the steep ascent beginning in the 1770s. In the first decade of the 19th century, it doubled again. During the 18th century, British coal production increased by a factor of five, to more than 15 million metric tons, and it doubled again by 1830. It took ten times its weight in fuel to produce ten tons of iron, and twenty times for copper. One reason for iron’s relative “cheapness,” energy-wise, is that life processes likely already partially refined the ore into oxides. In 1900, Great Britain produced five million tons of pig iron annually, the USA produced twice as much, and Germany produced more than six million tons. In 2011, the United Kingdom (Great Britain’s name today) produced only seven million tons of pig iron, China produced nearly a hundred times as much, and global production was 1.1 billion tons, several thousand times what England, the early leader in industrialization, produced two centuries earlier. In 2008, global coal production was estimated at 5.8 billion metric tons, nearly 400 times what Great Britain mined in 1800.

    A careful estimate as of 2013 is that humanity has reduced Earth’s biomass by more than a third since the beginnings of agriculture. Humanity certainly could not have industrialized by using wood. Arguments making the case that deforestation was not why coal was adopted in England are irrelevant to the fact that England could not have industrialized with wood. Iron operations shut regularly down during England’s early industrial history due to a lack of wood. The economics of coal were evident to even imperial Romans, but nobody would use coal if they could avoid it. Some ironworking operations used wood until the late 19th century. But using sunlight captured during the tree’s life could not compete for long with mining ancient sunlight trapped in coal that was collected over tens of millions of years, even if nobody initially knew how coal was formed. Even today, the British Isles’ grassy hills provide stark evidence of the rampant deforestation that those lands have yet to recover from. That they have any woods at all is a testament to using fossil fuels to power the Industrial Revolution.

    The other critical innovation was the modern steam engine, which was intimately related to coal. Burgeoning coal mines quickly exhausted deposits above the water table and began digging deeply into the earth, and water in the mines became a great problem. Not only were floods killing miners, but standing water made mines inoperable. Romans pumped water from their mines (water pumps may have been another Hellenic invention). So did British mining operations, and around 1710, Thomas Newcomen combined the ideas of a French inventor and an English inventor to make the first industrial steam engine, to pump water from coal mines. Similar to using coal for smelting, the Newcomen engine was common in mining by 1725, but was the first of its kind, primitive compared to later engines, and its spread was gradual. James Watt was asked to fix a Newcomen engine in 1763. He eventually invented an improved version with a separate condenser that was first commercially installed in 1776. The steam engine that powered the Industrial Revolution was thus born, although, as with coal, its spread was gradual and wind and water power were competitive with coal for nearly a century. The hydrocarbon-fueled steam engine was the key to the Industrial Revolution, where ancient sunlight was exploited to generate previously unimaginable power. A steam locomotive of 1850 roaring through the English countryside would have been inconceivable to an English peasant of 1500. From a half million years to fifty thousand years to ten thousand years to less than five hundred years, the timeframe between epochal events continued to shrink as levels of energy use increased nearly geometrically with each event.

    As with previous epochal events, the advances in mental achievement were as dramatic as material changes. However, other than the First Epochal Event, humans largely possessed the same cognitive equipment. If an infant girl from the founder group that left Africa could have been placed in a home in an industrialized nation today, there is little reason to believe that she would not live a normal life. The changes in mental achievement during the journeys of Homo sapiens have had little to do with changes in biology, and, in fact, human brains have shrunk by about 10% in the past 30,000 years. Humanity’s material and mental changes were deeply interrelated. The human world became vastly more complex with the rise of industrialization, so much so that most people have very little understanding of how their world actually works. It usually takes systems thinkers with scientific training to begin to understand the modern world’s complexities. For instance, about 95% of Americans are scientifically illiterate and have little idea where their energy comes from or how the myriad moving parts of their civilizations operate and interact. Americans are effective consumers, being history’s fattest people, with the rest of the industrialized world close behind, but they have little idea where any of it comes from or how it was produced and delivered to them.

    Several interacting trends created the phenomenon called the Industrial Revolution, but as with the previous epochal events, it all rode atop the energy practices. Cognitive and social changes were predicated on the economic situation, which was always based on the level of energy consumption. Without that foundation of increased energy generation, the rest could not have happened. Since the beginnings of civilization, the level of energy surplus, meaning the produced energy not devoted to agriculture, including feeding its workforce, has always been the primary determinant of how a civilization could develop and if it would survive.

    As discussed previously, when Greek teachings were reintroduced to Europe, Europe was already greatly benefitting from that banned culture’s technologies, and the rise of science in Europe began, but it was a fitful triumph. Powerful interests direct mainstream science’s development even today, and make it largely irrelevant to solving the greatest problems that humanity faces. Early on, the greatest enemy of Europe’s rise of science was the Catholic Church, which ironically was the same institution that initially translated those Greek works. Although those introduced Greeks teachings began the ferment that led to the Renaissance and humanism, the Inquisition began not long after the introduction of those Greek teachings, to wipe out a side-effect of the Crusades: bringing the teachings of “heretical” Christian sects back to Europe with returning soldiers. After annihilating the Cathars and concocting an ersatz version of their “product” with the mendicant orders, the Church maintained its religious monopoly for a few more centuries, when another one of its strategies backfired: embracing the printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany around 1439. Instead of expanding its influence by having literate subjects reading the Bible, it helped ignite the Reformation, which led to the bloodiest period of Europe’s history to that time, with perhaps the exception of Rome. Martin Luther’s seemingly innocuous declaration in 1517 led to a series of wars that engulfed Europe, climaxing with the Thirty Years’ War that killed several million people. Late in that series of conflicts, England had religious wars that ultimately ended the absolute rule of its royalty. In northern Europe, the Church never recovered.

    In 1543, two works widely considered to be modern science’s first were published. One pertained to astronomy, where Nicolaus Copernicus, a devout Catholic, revived the Greek teaching that Earth orbited the Sun. The other was the first great work on anatomy, by Andreas Vesalius, which overturned more than a millennium of Galenic dogma. In a preview of how the West’s practice of science would progress, the dogmatists that Vesalius offended were not Church officials but his peers, who attacked him so viciously that he eventually burned his notes and retired from the field. Most notable pioneers of medicine received similar treatment from their peers, which harkens back to that “shark tank” observation.

    Copernicus died as his book was being published and apparently did not suspect that his work would cause a backlash. However, the path that heliocentric theory took to overcoming dogma, both from the Church and the day’s scientists, is one of the great, cautionary tales in science’s history, and shows how science took misdirections that it has yet to recover from.

    In 1553, the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus was burned at the stake in Calvin’s Geneva after being denounced in Spain and fleeing to “safety” in a Protestant region. He was the first European to correctly describe pulmonary circulation. In 1600, Giordano Bruno, a friar, was burned at the stake in Rome for heresies that he refused to recant, the most famous of which being that the universe was boundless, held many planets besides Earth, and Earth was in no way the center of Creation. A decade later, Galileo Galilei used a new technology, the telescope, to see moons orbiting Jupiter. It clearly demonstrated that Earth was not the center of the universe that everything revolved around. As with Vesalius, the dogmatic resistance that Galileo initially encountered did not come from the Church, but his “peers” who refused to look through the telescope and see with their own eyes what Galileo was referring to. However, the Church initiated a series of actions that led to Galileo being brought to his knees and forced to recant in 1633 to avoid Bruno’s fate, and he remained under house arrest for the rest of his life. In his battles with the Church, Galileo took a strategic stand that has been argued to have sent science awry ever since; he couched his theories in math as a way to defeat the Church’s theologians. Isaac Newton did something similar a generation later. Math was a realm of pure logic, and Galileo‘s couching his theories in math instead of observation was a strategic decision that arguably sent science in the direction of becoming its own arcane priesthood, using math to help make it unintelligible to outsiders. Today’s popularizers, such as Stephen Hawking, try to write without using much math, such as in his A Brief History of Time. Albert Einstein was one of history’s greatest scientific popularizers, and tried to make his theories understandable to the general public.

    Galileo’s using the telescope to overthrow scientific theories is an important example of how scientific and technological advances spurred each other. Many times technological advances were derided as “impossible” by the scientific establishment’s leaders, where those authorities had abandoned the principle of observation, relying on their theories and “laws of science” to tell them what was possible. Two infamous examples were the initial derision that Edison’s light bulb received and how the Wright brothers were ignored and ridiculed by mainstream science for five years after they first flew. In both instances, the public watched the “impossible” happen, but leading scientists could not be bothered to leave their armchairs and go have a look for themselves, and the situation is arguably worse today than back then.

    Science thus made its erratic rise, battling both the Church and the pioneers’ “peers,” and shocking battles for “precedence” and outright theft of theories and technologies has marred the milieu of science and technology for the past several centuries. Organized suppression of disruptive technologies has become a science today, as the global racketeers maintain their fiefs, with mainstream scientists blithely unaware of the activity or they irrationally dismiss evidence of organized suppression as a conspiracy theory. Every one of my first professional mentor’s inventions was either stolen or suppressed. That is how the real world of science and technology operates, particularly in areas that can dethrone the world’s power structure. Until now, this essay has largely dealt with areas where organized suppression was rare, but those relatively innocent subjects will gradually be left behind as this essay progresses toward its conclusion. The answer to the question of whether dinosaurs had feathers does not threaten global rackets.

    From the very first civilization in Sumer, the priesthood conferred deific status or divine sanction to elites, and that unholy union still exists today in many places, including England. As other professions arose, they also groveled before political-economic power, and historians have repeatedly prostituted themselves. They did it from the beginnings of their profession, do it to this very day, and historians selling their souls early on became known as court historians. They concocted history that portrayed the elite path to dominance as a valiant quest, when reality was almost always the opposite. That issue led to the cynical but true observation that history is written by the winners.

    In the totalitarian society that George Orwell presciently wrote about in 1984, there were three basic classes: lows, middles, and highs, with the middles continually attempting to overthrow the highs. Orwell was alluding to a historical phenomenon, where economic and political revolutions became controlled by a new class that displaced the previous one.

    By the late 1700s, another profession appeared; a new variety of court historian known today as the classical economist. From civilization’s earliest days, controlling markets has been the primary method by which elites arose. Essentially, it became a place to skim energy flows, which has been a feature of life since the very beginning. When a brown bear wades into a stream to catch migrating salmon, it skims off the results of hard work that salmon performed to live long enough to return home to spawn. When Gravettian mammoth hunters established villages along mammoth migration routes, they were harvesting the energy flow of passing mammoths pursuing their own energy resources. In those instances, elites did not dictate how peasants should farm, nor did bears tell salmon how to live, nor did Gravettians help mammoths learn subsistence practices; they all intervened at an advantageous moment, usually near the end of the energy production process, to plunder somebody else’s hard work. Skimming rather than plundering is more sustainable, and was a lesson that elites learned early on. Skim too much and the system collapses, but skim the right amount and skimming can continue almost indefinitely. But no human civilization has ever truly been sustainable, so elites usually skimmed while they could, and if they were fortunate and had sufficient foresight, they could abandon one collapsing system and skim from another.

    When the Spanish conquered the Aztecs and Incas and engaged in mining operations with native labor, they redirected the labor itself, as somebody had to mine the gold. It was not sustainable by any means, as the operations treated workers as expendable, and unlike ancient Egyptians with their easily replenished supply, Spaniards killed off their workforce during history’s greatest demographic catastrophe. That plunder operation is not very useful for analyzing the development of new economic institutions that accompanied Europe’s rise. Adam Smith called gold rushes humanity’s most unproductive activity, essentially a counterfeiting operation. He stopped short of calling the Spanish experience in the New World “stupid,” but other scholars did not avoid that adjective.

    When Portugal conquered the spice trade in the early 1500s, there was real economic benefit from their activities, with their mercantilism more sustainable. While Venetians and Genoese engaged in early instances of a similar process, it began ascending in earnest when Europe began conquering the world. The basic tenet of mercantilism was the acquisition of “treasure” by the mother nation via “trade.” The classic mercantile situation was forcing subjugated people to produce raw material for shipment to the imperial nation for processing. The finished goods would be shipped back to the subjugated people at an inflated price; the imperial nation thereby slowly milked the subject nation by unfair terms of exchange that they controlled. In mercantilist practice, they did not dictate how the workforce was organized or how they worked. The intervention was at the market level, interposing themselves into the process where producers were enslaved and bled dry by unfair pricing going for both the price paid for raw goods and the price paid for finished goods. The imperial power had both captive producers and markets for finished goods. Early colonial efforts were largely mercantilist in nature when they were not simply gold rushes.

    The earliest economic school of thought was French, with its practitioners called Physiocrats. They formed the first and so-far only economic theorists who rooted economic activity and wealth in energy terms. Physiocrats worked before the science of energy was invented, so they did not couch their work in terms familiar to scientists, but they understood that land was the basis of wealth, or more specifically, the crops, timber, metals, and other resources that could be wrested from them by using labor. The Physiocrats were opportunists who developed economic theories that they planned to profit from, to climb into the aristocracy. The first English economist of what later became the classical school of economics was arguably William Petty who, like his successors, derived theories that he planned to benefit from. They either tried to join the rising rich classes themselves, or performed ideological services on their behalf as a way to curry favor. There was nothing of the disinterested scientist in their work, but they became ideological warriors of the rising capitalist class, and it became Karl Marx’s task to place the name them, which he called the bourgeoisie. Preceding the nominal classical economists was James Steaurt, called a mercantilist philosopher today, but he was really one of the most honest classical economists in describing the early forces of capitalism, of forcing peasants off the land and enslaving them to market forces.

    Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is widely considered the first work of classical economics. Smith was more of a court historian than scientist, and in a trend highly germane to this essay’s thrust, he and his successors, such as Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, provided ideological service to capitalists by making their crimes and even themselves invisible. The dispossession of English and Scottish peasantry by Game Laws and Enclosure is virtually nowhere to be found in the work of classical economists, and never identified as the primary way that early capitalists amassed their fortunes. The huge accumulations of wealth by capitalists were only obtained by “efficiency” and clever organization of the workforces, according to the public writings of classical economists. Elites of pristine civilizations prevailed via ruthlessness and violence and, after their control was established, they skimmed the economic cream of those civilizations they controlled. Capitalists did the same thing, becoming elites in a pristine system, and once they controlled the economic system’s foundation (the land that provided food, coal, running water for mills, and wood), they then let the “market” dominate, which might appear “free” to the casual observer. As dispossessed peasants began their virtual enslavement in the “satanic mills” of William Blake’s poetry, including the new institution of child labor, writers who opposed such evils were silenced and imprisoned, such as Thomas Spence.

    Classical economists portrayed greedy and violent acts as a noble pursuit of innovation and efficiency that somehow served the common good. To call it a conspiracy might be too dramatic, but it was essentially no different than the deification and heroification of early elites. Only when Britain violently acquired control of markets did it call for “free trade.” It was a fantasy that served the capital class, providing the illusion of freedom far more than its substance. In private correspondence, classical economists could be very frank about the real game being played, where actual free markets were a threat to capitalist interests. The British invaded China under the principles of “free trade,” which was the right to addict China to opium grown by British-enslaved peoples in India. In moments of candor, British statesmen could be quite frank about the true nature of their success, and but such honest moments could be censored. Nehru noted that the longer that Britain controlled an Indian province, the poorer it became. There has never been a free market in world history, or if there was, it was not for long. The closest thing may have been markets that arose in pristine states, but what became the first elites quickly conquered them and began exploiting them. In new, arguably “pristine” industries that were not seen as immediate threats to established interests, such as oil and personal computers, there was initially something resembling an open market, but in those two instances, organizations founded by John Rockefeller and Bill Gates quickly conquered and controlled them, and they officially became the richest people on Earth and later became “philanthropists.”

    Ben Franklin was the capitalist epitome in North America’s British colonies, but his fortune was significantly amassed by running ads to capture runaway slaves and by wiping out competitors. When the Constitutional Convention began its power play, the local newspaper reporting on the illegal proceedings was bought out and silenced by the Founding Fathers, in a classic instance of capitalist censorship of the “free press.” Private “free market” censorship has always been the preferred method of capitalists, not governmental intervention, such as how George Orwell’s’ work was censored.

    While there was early dissent to the classical economists’ concocted ideology, it was largely consigned to oblivion. It was not until Karl Marx that an economist honestly described the accumulation of capitalist wealth. Marx even coined the term “capitalist.” Marx pointed out that capitalist accumulation was accomplished by bloodshed, coercion, slavery, and the standard tools of despots, not a courageous feat of innovation and efficiency. As this essay will make the case, capitalism may well be the most inefficient system yet developed, with its apparent “efficiency” only maintained by wiping out alternative systems and innovations that could unseat the capitalists. Today’s global political economy as popularly presented is an elaborate fiction, with all important decisions made in unaccountable privacy by largely invisible hyper-capitalist interests. Private interests run the world, not governments, and they are helping to make Earth uninhabitable. They have mostly achieved the true invisibility that classical economists enabled. Bill Gates is a member of what I call the “retail elite,” whom the true global elite view as a boy playing with his toys and a useful figurehead, not somebody really influential on the world scene. Similarly, I call public officials, particularly elected ones, “retail politicians,” as they are the face the public sees, but have little real power, particularly the kind that will impact important issues. R. Buckminster Fuller called political actors “stooges” of economic interests, and from what I have seen, he is right.

    By the early 1700s, Voltaire and other writers began openly challenging the Church and began arguing for freedom being everybody’s right, and the Enlightenment began, with Voltaire spending his first stint behind bars in 1717 for his satirical writings. Some have placed the Enlightenment’s beginning in the 1600s, with the feats of Descartes and Newton, but as with many other movements, their beginnings were modest. It was not until about 1750 that the institution of slavery, hallowed for several thousand years by that time, was challenged for the first time on universal grounds. In 1315, France’s Louis X abolished slavery, but as France joined the colonial competition, it relied on slave labor for its Caribbean plantations. Ironically, history’s only successful slave revolt happened in a French colony, although the victory was pyrrhic in ways, as that former colony is the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.

    Although Enlightenment philosophers acknowledged their debt to Newton, the world’s most towering intellectual of his time and one of history’s greatest scientists and mathematicians saw nothing improper with the slave trade, and lost his life’s fortune speculating in it in 1720. When machines began reproducing human labor, the abolition of slavery began. Slavery, particularly the genocidal forms inflicted by Europe, were viable only where little professional skill was needed. Slavery worked best in mine and plantation work, with illiterate, often-expendable people. What became the USA was unique in the European age of slavery, in that tobacco operations, unlike sugar plantations, had more seasonal labor demands, and the environment of southeast North America was conducive to long-lived and fertile slaves, so they could reproduce. Consequently, what became the USA was a minor recipient of the transatlantic slave trade, and its large slave population was largely bred, not captured. People born into slavery are easier to keep enslaved than those born free, but they had to be kept illiterate and at low skill levels or else they would desire freedom and might obtain it. Late in the American era of slavery, some slaves were taught to read, but generally only one book, which justified slavery: the Bible. All the way to America’s Civil War, apologists for slavery used Biblical passages to justify it. Many also justified antebellum slavery with economic arguments, stating that somebody took better care of something they owned rather than something they rented.

    I know of no more informative contrast between industrial and pre-industrial economies than comparing the USA’s North and South on the eve of its Civil War, where the North had a vibrant, industrializing economy which quickly became history’s greatest, with its labor nominally free, to the South, which had a relatively moribund economy based on slave labor. The North used its industrial capacity to grind down the South in war of attrition, just as the USA later did to its opponents in World War II. Superior industrial capacity has won all major wars during the past two centuries, which is rooted in energy supplies. World War I ended when the Allies cut off German access to oil, and much of the war was devoted to cutting off the other belligerents’ oil supply. When Germany surrendered, they had one day’s worth of fuel. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 only after the Allies cut off its access to oil, and Germany lost World War II after its access to oil was again cut off, and the Nazis simply ran out of fuel. Cutting off access to hydrocarbons, oil in particular, was the industrial equivalent of starving out the enemy. As previously noted, oil has been humanity’s primary geopolitical prize for the past century, and completely explains imperial meddling and warfare in the Middle East; all other factors are irrelevant or of extremely minor importance, often promoted in an attempt to deceive uninformed observers such as the American public.

    Rising standards of living ended slavery, and nothing elevated it like industrialization did. When slavery became uneconomical, people developed consciences, not the other way around. Wealth is freedom, and has always been based on a society’s energy surplus. The innate human desire for freedom became more trouble than it was worth to suppress when large energy surpluses existed. Slavery began with civilization and ended with industrialization. There was little “natural” about it, but in that phase of human economic development the institution made sense, if horrific sense.

    The rise of science, industry, capitalism, and the Enlightenment cannot be effectively separated from Europe’s conquest of the world. They were deeply interrelated and began with the rise of Greek technology and teachings, but its ascent became steep when Europeans turned the global ocean into a low-energy transportation lane. Europe’s incessant wars, with technological advances usually first devoted to warfare, made Europeans an irresistible force. When they rode low-energy transportation lanes to distant lands, humanity never had a chance. Europe raped and plundered humanity on an unprecedented scale, and as with Roman imperial ideology, there was little consideration shown to the world’s peoples, in practice or theory, by Europeans. They ravaged humanity because they could.

    The deep connection of mercantilism and imperialism became evident with the Spanish efforts, where expeditions were privately financed with royal sanction, with the Crown getting a cut of the loot. The Spanish effort was far cruder than what its rivals and successors devised, which became capitalist in its orientation. The forerunner to the modern corporation was formed by the English and Dutch at the beginning of their imperial rise, with trading companies. The English East India Company, founded in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, were corporations acting on behalf of their sponsoring states, designed to wrest the spice trade from Portugal along with other imperial opportunities. The French were always bringing up the rear, empire-wise, and did not charter their East India Company until 1664. In the early 1800s, in the wake of classical economics, corporations became private enterprises, and soon were granted limited shareholder liability, unlimited life, and even the rights of people. Greed was not only enshrined in modern economic ideology as a virtue, but corporations are legally compelled to seek profits above all else.

    While European rivals were fighting over plunder rights, the imperial venture with the greatest global impact was the English invasion of North America. The Western Hemisphere had been in its Stone Age until Europe arrived, with its lands in far better shape than Europe’s. Earth’s greatest temperate forest was North America’s Eastern Woodlands, and it was likely no exaggeration when a European observer noted that a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River and never touch the ground. The Eastern Woodlands’ peoples were largely spared violent invasion and conquest in the 1500s because they had no immediately evident gold or silver to steal. But when the English finally arrived, after determining that there was no gold to be had, they just wanted the land. Thus began one of history’s better-documented genocides. The Eastern Woodlands’ natives mostly had those relatively gentle matrilineal societies (including the first two the English met, in Massachusetts and Virginia), living in what seemed a paradise to early invaders, once they learned to farm the native way. A continual problem among English invaders was “settlers” running off and “going native,” which the English made a capital crime. While Classic Athens invented democracy in the West, their slaves outnumbered citizens, and European invaders of North America discovered native societies with functioning democracies. While racist and imperial scholars have long dismissed the evidence, it is very arguable that the European experience in the New World helped ignite the Enlightenment, where Europeans encountered people freer than previously thought possible. The evidence is strong that the USA’s Constitution, the Enlightenment’s ultimate political document, was deeply influenced by the Founding Fathers’ experience with the Iroquois Confederation, Ben Franklin in particular, who first proposed an Iroquoian form of colonial government in 1754.

    But what led to English success in North America, more than anything else, was the energy-rich continent that they stumbled into. Intact forests and soils were long gone in Europe, and land was there for the taking, as long as the natives were removed. Soon after the USA achieved its independence from Great Britain, during a meeting of English and American diplomats, a British diplomat noted that despite their many similarities, among them their common heritage, the Americans at that meeting were all about a foot taller than their British counterparts. The rich soils of North America grew larger people than Europe’s depleted soils, and Americans long had humanity’s longest life expectancy. That was a big reason why they could breed slaves.

    Colonial commerce was never sustainable, and based on fashion such as furs and dyes, mast wood for warships, substance addiction such as sugar and tobacco, or genocide, such as transatlantic slavery and wiping out natives to either take their land or working them to death in mining and plantation operations. It was arguably all evil. The classic triangular trade of slaves, sugar, and rum had not one redeeming quality or any economic necessity. The rise of Europe was an unprecedented evil inflicted on the world’s peoples, and any analysis of the economic benefits of colonialism and global conquest has to weigh those unparalleled crimes on its scales, which economists from Physiocrats onward have rarely performed, with Marx being one of the few exceptions.

    England had nearly a century’s head start on the competition with its Industrial Revolution, which is why it became the world’s triumphal imperial power, later supplanted by its offspring and rival, the USA. Turning coal into an industrial fuel, for smelting iron and powering machines, initiated the Industrial Revolution, and the next big innovation was making machines to replace hands. English inventors began making spinning machines in the 1740s, and the 1760s and 1770s were the Golden Age of spinning innovation, with the spinning jenny, water frame, and spinning mule all invented. By the 1790s, people using such machines spun cotton more than 150 times faster than in 1740. I call a worker with a machine outperforming 150 people without one an energy-leveraged human. Energy-powered technology allowed a person to vastly outperform humans without it. Was that person 150 times more dexterous? Smarter? Faster? Stronger? The machine did the work, not the person, and energy made it all happen, not the equipment. Without energy to run it, machinery is useless. Such machines would have never been conceived without the available energy to run them. Those early spinning machines ran on water power from the British countryside’s mills.

    To an overwhelming extent, energy powering machines was the Industrial Revolution, and remains so this day, whether it is computers, the Internet, airplanes, rockets, factories, electric plants – either hydrocarbon-, hydroelectric-, or fission-powered – automobiles, trains, mining and oilfield equipment, farming equipment, household appliances, and so on. Even the industrial world’s materials are energy-intensive, with materials becoming more expensive the more energy-intensive they are to produce.

    Capitalism radically changed how people worked. While court historians for capitalism glossed over the awesome human toll of industrialization, some dissent came from ignored corners until Marx. In the 20th century, histories that focused on working class struggles against the capitalists were in the great minority and never promoted by capitalist-controlled presses. Britain had a working-class press before it was driven out of existence by market forces, after governmental efforts failed to destroy it. The USA has never had a working-class press, and works such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States only appeared late in the 20th century. Charles Dickens drew on his life’s experiences, including factory work as a boy and his father’s incarceration in a debtor’s prison, to write his great works. Early industrial Britain was hellish.
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 27th March 2014 at 20:32.

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    Ilie Pandia
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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    After reading's Wade's essay I think we will need to replace "follow the money!" with "follow the Energy!"

  40. The Following 4 Users Say Thank You to Ilie Pandia For This Post:

    Joseph McAree (1st April 2014), Robert J. Niewiadomski (27th March 2014), sandy (29th March 2014), ThePythonicCow (28th March 2014)

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