WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This will be a brief one on one of the surreal aspects of what I do. I am currently reading Howard Odum’s masterpiece, Richard Heinberg turned me onto the idea of Peak Oil, and Vaclav Smil is Bill Gates’s favorite energy author. All three of those authors were/are supposedly radical, comprehensive thinkers. Odum challenged the validity of the Big Bang hypothesis in his magnum opus, Heinberg at least mentioned the possibility of free energy in his work, and Smil argued for radical energy solutions in his work. It turned out that Heinberg only mentioned free energy so that he could semi-ridicule and dismiss it, and when I approached him with a very friendly invitation to get educated on the very situations in free energy that he wrote about, even introducing him to Brian O, Heinberg ran away as fast as he could and even treated free energy like the enemy. Heinberg was onboard with the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, but could not seem to imagine the organized suppression of free energy technology.

Odum challenged the Big Bang. I have no problem with an author challenging the Big Bang, and the “tired light” explanation for the redshift, which much of the Big Bang hypothesis rest on, was first proposed nearly a century ago, and if that ultimately proves to be true, it will be no big surprise to me. However, challenging the Big Bang is off the reservation of mainstream physics, a radical challenge to a hypothesis that nearly all scientists subscribe to today. Smil wrote about how unorthodox energy theories should not be dismissed, as no stone should be unturned in the search for an energy solution, an idea which Gates has publicly endorsed.

So, those are authors allegedly at the leading edge of thought on the energy issue, and comprehensive, radical thinkers. Odum never seemed to imagine the idea of free energy, and his prescription was a radical downsizing of humanity as it runs out of fossil fuel energy. I never saw Smil even hint at free energy’s possibility, and Heinberg only mentioned free energy to ridicule and dismiss it, and his “solution” is a 90% depopulation of Earth, to get in line with post-fossil-fuel energy levels. Their kinds of responses, or lack thereof, were partly why Brian O began openly wondering if humanity is a sentient species.

Among the so-called radical left, I at least heard back from Noam, back in 1992, before I got the polite brushoff. Uncle Ed once admitted to me that as an economist, he had neglected the energy issue (Ed was in good company), but I tried to introduce him to Brian several times, and Ed was never interested. The bizarre part is that those unimaginable technologies are older than I am. The solution that dwarfs everything else on Earth is treated with denial, fear, etc. It is truly surreal.

Those are supposedly humanity’s leading thinkers, on the energy issue, no less, and I never found anybody home. After receiving or encountering many of those kinds of reactions to the idea of free energy, I began writing about addictions to scarcity, being blinded by the paradigm, and I eventually made the case that free energy is so Epochal in its impact that people simply cannot imagine what it means, or they react in fear and denial, as all that they can see is their world ending, never mind that the end of their world can mean something like heaven on Earth.

And for the vanishingly few who get past denial and fear, they nearly invariably get stuck in inventor-itis, “sneak past them” delusions, Young Warrior delusions, megalomania, greed, and so on. Navigating past all of those pitfalls, to reach Level 12, is truly like walking the razor’s edge, and I encounter people who have accomplished it, or are even trying to, very rarely. Brian’s statement of how the free energy pursuit is like a walk through the desert was no exaggeration. Looking for needles…

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I think that I need to emphasize the Epochal nature of my work. My big essay is organized around the energy events of Earth’s, life’s, and humanity’s history. I do it for good reason: energy drove those events. The foundation of each Epoch of the human journey was the energy practices of each Epoch. The energy practices were the critical determinants of each Epoch, and my essay is intended to make energy’s role clear over the Epochs and eons. If life did not learn to split water for its electrons in photosynthesis, Earth would have lost its ocean long ago and there not would be life on Earth was we know it. If plants did not decide to feed animals from their photosynthetic bounty, instead of defend against them, primates would have never existed, including humans. The ultimate cause of our ice age was declining carbon dioxide levels, due to declining levels of volcanism, which is primarily due to declining levels of radioactivity in Earth’s interior. In a billion years or so, the radioactivity will decline to the level where plate tectonics will stop, Earth will become geologically inert, and life will begin to die off, and complex life will go first, basically by carbon starvation, which is already happening, as we can see with the rise of C4 plants. It will happen around the same time that the Sun, as it runs out of fuel, brightens by another 10%, which will boil off Earth’s oceans. So, choose your poison: plate tectonics dies off due to Earth’s interior running out of fuel, or the Sun expands as it runs out of fuel and wipes out Earth. They are currently predicted to happen around the same time, not that anybody today needs to worry about it.

The First Epoch of the human journey was an energy event above all else. Somehow, the human line was able to ingest enough energy to radically alter ape anatomy and grow the human brain to where it is today. Without the growth of that brain, the rise of humanity would not have happened, and the two greatest achievements of the First Epoch were the control of fire and the mastery of language. When the Founder Group, comprised of behaviorally modern humans, left Africa 50-60k years ago, humanity’s fellow species and the world’s easy meat were doomed.

The First Epoch saw the arrival of behaviorally modern humans on the evolutionary scene, and human anatomy has barely changed since then. We have the same cognitive toolset that the Founder Group left Africa with. We are all the Universal People. As far as humanity goes, the chief impact of the Second Epoch was a thousand-fold increase in humanity’s population, as our ancestors conquered all of Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems. Scientists such as Peter Ward don’t deny the megafauna holocaust, and he even argued that it was a good thing for humanity, as sabretooth tigers, for instance, would have eventually learned to hunt humans, and the universal elephants (except for Australia, which they could not swim to) and other huge mammals would have been hell on human settlements. So, ridding Earth of its megafauna was essential for the rise of civilization, in that regard. Ridding Earth of its megafauna also had a different reason for the rise of civilization: it led to the Third Epoch. As the easy meat became extinct, in a few places on Earth conducive to it, women began domestic plants, as an adjunct to their gathering duties, and the Third Epoch was born. In Australia, even with many candidates for plant domestication, the aborigines were never able to hunt the fleet-footed kangaroo to extinction, so big game hunting remained the primary subsistence practice, and the Australians never left the Second Epoch, at least until early Fourth Epoch Englishmen invaded, and the aborigines were quickly driven toward extinction.

The primary outcome of the Third Epoch was a 200-fold increase in humanity’s population. Farming was vastly superior to hunting and gathering, from an energetic perspective. The Neolithic and Bantu expansions were a time of easy living, at least for those doing the expanding, with their domestic plants, but it also wiped out the hunter-gatherers, or more precisely, it drove hunter-gatherer men from the gene pool. It may have been not all that coercive on the part of the women, as the spreading Neolithic societies were matrilocal, which had not been seen in the human line for ten million years or so, and those early horticulturists ate well. Women’s status in those societies was the highest ever seen in the human journey, until the Industrial Revolution (and those were also the most peaceful preindustrial societies), which was, as usual, primarily an energy event.

But as farming became intensive, a few dynamics once again reduced women’s status. One was that the dense human settlements that dense energy practices allowed led to energy surpluses that could be gathered and used for political purposes, and men found a way to exploit that, which led to chiefdoms and then states, in the four pristine instances of it. But even they were not all as pristine as it might seem. The South American rise of civilization was influenced by the key Mesoamerican domesticate, maize. So, while the Andean civilizations may have not been culturally influenced by Mesoamerican civilization, they were influenced by Mesoamerican energy practices. The same goes for North American civilization. The Mississippian culture appeared only after maize was introduced. And as with other horticultural societies, the societies of the Eastern Woodlands were matrilineal.

When the invading English encountered the matrilineal societies of the Eastern Woodlands, they witnessed something not seen in Old World civilizations for thousands of years, and they witnessed functioning democratic societies, in which even the children got to vote (their mothers voted for them). An epidemic problem for the invading English was the “settlers” running off and “going native,” as the superiority of native societies was evident, especially as the early invaders starved. It is very legitimate to wonder how influential the societies of the Eastern Woodlands were on a European development called the Enlightenment today (the French, unlike the English, had a high appreciation of Native American cultures, and the Enlightenment began there, and I doubt that it was a coincidence), but it may never get a fair hearing, with the ingrained racism and bigotry in Western academia. Such “savages” could not influence the high civilization of Western Europe.

Learning to sail the oceans increased Western Europe’s effective hinterland, which enhanced their energy supplies and allowed them to conquer humanity. Without the invention of that low-energy transportation lane, Europeans would not have conquered humanity. Europe had been riding an energy wave for centuries before its conquest, beginning with its High Middle Ages, which was driven by a warming trend, with the explosion of watermills, the expansion of agriculture and deforestation, and using them to fuel a great period of city-building. Urbanization finally came to northwest Europe, several thousand years after Sumer invented it. Sumer became the first civilization and its first literate one, too (and Sumer also invented the sailing ship), and watermills were invented by the Ancient Greeks. During those High Middle Ages, captured Islamic libraries reintroduced the Ancient Greek teachings to Europe, centuries after the Catholic Church had completely eradicated such “pagan” teachings, and the rise of humanism began, which led to the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. Almost none of the developments of that rising Europe were invented by them.

The modern state got its start in what are called the Low Countries, as the Dutch began their rise to world domination. Similar to how Rome was influenced by Eastern Mediterranean polities, Alexander the Great’s empire most of all, England was a backwoods realm in 1500, but the Dutch inspired it to its rise, and the Germanic invention of the printing press a few generations earlier led to the proto-industrial development of the spread of literacy, which Luther’s little revolt took advantage of, not much different from how I am using the Internet in a novel way. As the Dutch threw off Spanish rule, the Dutch and English invented the forerunners of modern corporations, to complement their nascent imperial efforts.

So, many factors led to Europe’s rise, but it was an energy event above all else. The Dutch did not initially have coal to exploit, so they burned peat (and exploited the windmill in unprecedented fashion), but deforested England had turned to coal during the High Middle Ages, and although none of them realized it yet, that was the key to the Industrial Revolution. There was not much peat to exploit on Earth, but there was plenty of coal. The Romans mined English coal, so the English certainly did not invent coal mining, but they exploited coal on an unprecedented basis, and that formed the backbone of the Industrial Revolution, as one Epoch of the human journey passed to another, which brings me to the demographic transition.

Ever since my radicalization in the 1980s, during my first stint with Dennis, I have looked at Western scholarship with a very critical eye. I don’t have much respect for economists, who are basically intellectual warriors for whoever feeds them. In my opinion, they are largely lost in the weeds, focusing on exchange, as if it was some kind of magic potion, when it is only a peripheral issue. Money is only an accounting mechanism. I am a professional accountant, and am decidedly unimpressed with a lot of the number-crunching that I see performed in academia and elsewhere. Without a scientific understanding of the issues, it is easy to get carried away with minor aspects of the events, seeing them as primary causal, when they are only side effects.

The Industrial Revolution was more than a century old before anybody suspected that it was a revolution, as scholars such as Marx began to write about it, but even he wrote before the science of energy rose, so classical and neoclassical economists have largely ignored energy in favor of social theories, when all social changes of note rode atop the energy issue.

Tim Dyson wrote a book on the demographic transition, which surveyed the related scholarship, and like the Industrial Revolution, the pristine instance of the demographic transition was more than a century old before it began to be studied.

Science is concerned with finding causes, not effects. It is easy to confuse them, and the history of science and scholarship is full of the debate between correlation and causation. I found plenty to disagree with in Dyson’s book, but what I found rather amazing was that he put the demographic transition on the shoulders of the Enlightenment, and stated that the Industrial Revolution had little to do with it. The Industrial Revolution was a side-effect of the Enlightenment! I am not the only reader who questioned Dyson’s Enlightenment explanation of the demographic transition. What Dyson got right, IMO, is that demographers generally agree that the decline in infant mortality came first, and then came the decline in fertility.

As far as the cause of the decline in infant mortality, Dyson credited the decline in infectious disease, which he almost completely credited to vaccination, and I have strong doubts about that. Improvements in sanitation, hygiene, and nutrition get the nod in my book, not vaccination. It is like crediting the decline in tooth decay to fluoridation, IMO. For the pristine instance, the idea that women’s education had much to do with it is very marginal, and I don’t buy it myself. For the subsequent transitions, I’ll agree that education played a key role, but that is just to plug peasant societies into an already industrialized world. It happens far faster today, as poor nations can cheaply reproduce key features of the pristine instance, such as sanitation and hygiene, the so-called Green Revolution has played a key part, and education plays a key role today. In the pristine instance, not so much, but it is far more important today, for those poor nations.

The pristine instances influenced all that came behind them, whether it was the rise of civilization, industrialization, or the demographic transition, which I consider a byproduct of the Epochal change wrought by industrialization, and the so-called Enlightenment did not begin until the processes of industrialization were quite far along, even though nobody recognized it at the time. Adam Smith was an Enlightenment philosopher, writing as England’s Industrial Revolution was really gaining steam (pun intended ), but if you had asked him what he thought about the Industrial Revolution, he would have had no idea what you were talking about.

Enough said for now. It is off to other tasks, including Ed’s bio update, and then I will return to industrialization, the demographic transition, and Krishna’s posts on it.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Been reading Squid Empire, it is a fun casual read without a good flow. Also skimmed through Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers, there is only so much pain I can take, returning it back to library speedily
Short summary is that under demographic pressure, which in turns leads to resource pressure violence increases and men do most of the killing. Women choose less aggressive men when and if circumstances allow, thereby domesticating men.

What Dyson got right, IMO, is that demographers generally agree that the decline in infant mortality came first, and then came the decline in fertility.

Have to disagree here. Decline in infant mortality led to decline in fertility at the same time, however the decline was not to replacement levels. the decline was enough to keep the number of children who survived to 5 years (and to adulthood) relatively constant over a period of the 1800's, then in the late 1800's the modern decline of fertility started in USA and UK. Birth rates are the wrong measure when thinking about demographic transition, because it incorporates the age structure of the population and skews understanding of the demographic transition. Much better indicators are TFR (Total Fertility rate), number of kids surviving to adulthood.

I ordered the books of demographic transition, but I am unlikely to change my opinion. Wolfgang Lutz got it right

The cognitive revolution brought about by education went hand in hand with the energy revolution of the Fourth Epoch, and each reinforced the other. Without energy there is nothing to reinforce, however the spread of knowledge had a major role to play.


=== added later ===
Here is a graphic showing relationship between birth rates and fertility rate

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The study never stops. I am about halfway through that book on the Propaganda Model, then I will be going through the stacks of Z Magazines on my office floor, and then I’ll do my update of Ed’s bio. Of course, I play husband, have a demanding day job, and have other demands on my time. It is looking like I won’t get Ed’s bio update done in January, but I still plan to have it done soon. Then I will get back to Epochs, the demographic transition, and related topics, and working on my big essay update, which is likely going to take a year or more. I have also been reading up on “intelligence,” Epochs, and the like. There are arguments that human “intelligence” kept rising with the Epochs (even as our brains shrank – a Cro-Magnon brain was about 10% larger than ours), and there may be something to that, but in the West, people get plenty of brainwashing with their “education.” The nature/nurture debate is alive and well. In this world, children learn more than 100 times as fast as today’s do, and their IQs probably average 200 or so, and it was because the people in that world chose love. To me, that only highlights the kind of realization of the human potential that can be had in the Fifth Epoch. But I can’t overemphasize that without the energy event, the rest can’t happen.

I am also reading Ian Morris’s book on his attempt to quantify the problem-solving ability of societies, which he calls social development. Many have tried their hand at it, and what I will say is that his scale showed the energy wave that Europe rode up to the brink of the Industrial Revolution. Energy capture in the West was about 50% higher in 1800 than in 1000, but even that understates the issue. When energy is used to run machines rather than fuel bodies, ten times as much work can be generated, and more. When Columbus sailed in 1492, European watermills performed the labor of about 10 million people. It was a huge boost to the economy, which had never before been seen in the human journey. When Columbus sailed, it was the early days of Europe’s learning how to turn the global ocean into a low-energy transportation lane, and Europeans used it to conquer humanity. Wind and water power were competitive with coal until about 1850, when the Industrial Revolution was galloping along. At about the same time, a discovery by a London physician helped cities discover the virtues of sanitation. The demographic transition began long before that, but the discovery of the virtues of sanitation was a huge boost to it, and arguably the key one. The ballyhooed germ theory of disease had not even been developed yet, although Semmelweis had already discovered what was killing mothers in maternity wards, and for that, he was hounded into an insane asylum, where he died from the beatings that he received. Typical pioneer treatment.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I plan to slow down my posts while I work on Ed’s bio update, then the big essay update, and I doubt that I will be finished in 2019. The more posts, the slower that progress will be, and I am not getting any younger. We’ll see what cadence I arrive at. I have been very busy lately, too busy to write much on the Fourth Epoch, demographic transitions, and the like, but I will make a post that will be a prelude to upcoming posts.

I have written plenty about my treatment as a prodigy as a child, and don’t need to cover it much again. Johnson’s Great Society programs began withering away in 1969, and the gifted programs of my grade school ended. A couple of years later, I opened the door at my house when the doorbell rang, and there was my gifted program teacher from grade school, soliciting something door-to-door. That was how far he fell in a couple of years.

In junior high school, which were grades seven to nine for me, there were a couple of gifted classes, called “teamed” classes, which by my ninth grade were on their way out. I recently learned that “gifted” is no longer politically correct, so now the programs for formerly “gifted” students are “discovery” and the like. To me, much of the political correctness trend is a smokescreen, to get people focusing on the trappings instead of the reality. American presidents can lead genocidal invasions completely based on lies, but don’t utter a racial or ethnic epithet about the people being slaughtered. The American invasion of Iraq is the greatest crime of the 21^st century so far, and if there are future historians, our invasion of Iraq might well be seen as the opening salvo of World War III, but hardly a word about it can be heard in the halls of America, as people get all worked up about terminology that seems to slight somebody (or “unfairly” exalts others). Slaughtering them is fine, under the flimsiest of pretexts, but don’t call them an epithet.

My science classes in junior high school through college were never “gifted” classes, but we were all thrown in together, and I was always recognized as the prodigy. In 1971, I was in eighth grade and the recognized prodigy in my science class, and the recognized science prodigy at my school. As I recall, it was some kind of generalized science class. That year there were national science competitions, and when the invitations arrived, the school’s primary science teacher handed me the applications, so that I could represent the school in the contest. One was to think up experiments for the soon-to-be-launched Skylab, and another was for environmental innovations. I was not really very interested. I really was more into playing with my friends and watching TV during my off-time in those days of adolescence, not entering into national contests. However, I was sent home with the application for environmental innovations, and Mr. Mentor got wind of it. The Clean Air Act of 1970 had been passed the year before, and Mr. Mentor suggested that I enter the contest with an idea for a smokestack scrubber for coal-fired electric plants. The first one was only a few years old, he had an idea of how to improve them, and it would be classified as a wet scrubber today.

I was only 13 years old at the time, and was not interested in entering a contest. After my notorious winning of the school spelling bee at age nine, in which a fourth grader beat the fifth and sixth graders, I soon lost interest in all academic competitions. Since I graduated from college, I have avoided competitive anything. The only “sport” that I engage in is hiking, and I refuse to play any and all games with people. But, as I look back, that smokestack scrubber was the beginning of my energy journey. Mr. Mentor was at the height of his creative powers in those days, a few years later, his engine made big waves, and my energy dreams began in earnest then.

It is hard to recall the exact series of events from so long ago, but as a teenager, I realized that not only was there not enough energy for all of humanity to industrialize, but that burning fossil fuels was incredibly environmentally damaging. About that same year, my family went to the museum in downtown Los Angeles. The air pollution was awesome, and I had a headache all day that did not end until we left the LA Basin as we returned home. My post-graduate years in the urban hell of LA beat my nascent environmental sensibilities into me in no uncertain terms, and definitely had a bearing on my journey with Dennis.

As I think back to those early days, in my late teens and early 20s, I was not aware of Peak Oil theory, as such, but I had been in gas lines, I knew that Arabs sat on most of the world’s oil, and that there was not enough to go around. Most of humanity lived in agrarian societies, and only a tiny fraction was industrialized. Even in my early 20s, it was evident that China would one day industrialize (a cousin began learning Chinese then, as she also saw the writing on the wall), and I knew back then that China sat on one of the world’s largest coal reserves (and India was right behind them). A significant aspect of my free energy dreams was preventing the world’s poor nations from industrializing with coal. I knew that it would be an environmental nightmare, and it is happening before my eyes. Nearly a third of San Francisco’s air pollution comes from China. There will be much more on this subject in coming posts.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

A few odds and ends….

On MLK Day, there is a call to reopen the assassination investigations of the 1960s, beginning with JFK’s. I am not holding my breath on anything coming from it, but it was nice to see.

I have read Scientific American magazine for years, just to keep up on new findings and trends. Last month’s issue was the last in its former format, as they cancelled several columns. I was interested in what the new format would be, and this month’s issue had a big chunk of it devoted to a special section on genetic engineering, sponsored by Pfizer! Earlier in the issue was an interview of a pharmaceutical CEO. My God, it was Ed’s second filter of his propaganda model, on full display. I have written before on the many biases that I saw in that magazine, and we’ll see if I buy many more issues when I do my grocery shopping. That said, there was a good article on how the melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica can happen far faster than previously supposed. Here is a similar article by the same author.

I am only partway through my stack of Z Magazines, and I doubt that I will be able to use all of what I wrote below, much less what I’ll likely add to it, but below gives a taste of the vast range of Ed’s writings. I may put them in an addendum essay.

Best,

Wade

General political analysis and commentary

Herman’s political-economic writings, both in collaboration with other authors as well as individually, covered a wide array of topics that were far from confined to media analysis, although most of Herman’s books and articles were primarily concerned with media analysis. Herman’s articles in Z Magazine and Monthly Review provide a sampling of Herman’s range of topics over his 50-year-plus political-economic writing career.

In 1992, Herman wrote about how the imperial powers dominated formerly colonized peoples or weaker nations with “free trade” agreements that heavily favored the imperial powers, which was one of the British Empire’s favorite tactics. In the years after World War II, the institutions of imperial domination included the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (“IMF”), both of which have been controlled by the USA. Herman wrote that imperially subservient nations that neglected the needs of their domestic populations while serving foreign interests could count on generous support, while nations that did not cooperate with corporate-imperial strategies would be subjected to various forms of financial discipline, which ranged from cutting off World Bank and IMF aid to tariffs, boycotts, and seizures of imports to the USA, before the CIA’s methods of subversion needed to be applied, or outright invasion with “Techno-War,” as the USA had recently done to Panama and Iraq. Herman wrote that World Bank and IMF assistance often took the form of Structural Adjustment Programs (“SAPs)”, in which recipient nations were required to curtail spending for the welfare of their domestic populations in favor of imported elite prestige goods and other arrangements favorable to foreign capital. Herman wrote that the SAPs directed the privatization of a nation’s resources, generally under foreign investors, to then be exported to the imperial nations instead of being used for national development. Herman noted that Japan resisted such “denationalization” of its domestic economy, which led to its rise as an industrial power, while the recently collapsed Soviet Empire had Boris Yeltsin as the IMF’s “hit man,” just as Marcos of the Philippines and Pinochet of Chile had functioned.

Far from solely focusing on the USA’s imperial behavior, Herman often wrote about the attacks by corporate America on the USA’s welfare state, such as its initiatives to undermine Social Security while boosting military spending and corporate and upper-income welfare, while opposing any kind of national medical insurance system. In 1995, Herman summarized a 20-volume study prepared by the USA’s State Department, which chronicled the crimes committed by the USA against various groups, beginning with the dispossession of American Indians and use of enslaved Africans to international activities in the Philippines, Indonesia, China, Indochina, Latin America, Zaire, Greece, Iran, and the Middle East. The study concluded that fair American reparations to those aggrieved parties would exceed the USA’s total wealth. Herman wrote that the study was released with a sensational press conference that was well-attended by the media, but that no media reported on the study.

Herman argued that the “immiserating” effects of the global class warfare waged by the West against weaker nations were human rights violations, but the high-profile human rights organizations adhered to a “liberal” definition of human rights that only considered political and personal rights, such as the right to vote, free speech, and freedom from direct state violence, while completely ignoring corporate-imperial assaults on “rights to subsistence, education, health care, housing and employment.” Herman wrote that human rights organizations that strictly focused on liberal notions of human rights were becoming increasingly irrelevant and even “misleading” in a world in which the world’s poor were economically undermined and deprived, particularly in the 1990s, during capitalism’s triumphant period in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. In 1996, Herman wrote that the actual goals of the Republican push for a Congressional “balanced budget,” contrary to media propaganda about them, were:

“[…] to constrain macro-policy and prevent its use in ways that would increase pressure on the labor market and threaten inflation, and to scale back the welfare state.”

Herman often wrote that “war criminal” was a Western appellation reserved for the losers of imperial battles, while there never seemed to be any war criminals among the winners. In 1996, Herman added a new category of war criminal, which he termed the economic division (“ED”), in addition to military division (“MD”) war criminals. Herman published an initial list of 20 ED war criminals, and Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin, and Suharto led the list of government leaders (Suharto was also a major MD, arguably Earth’s greatest at that time), and had a division for “middle managers,” such as the heads of the IMF, Federal Reserve, and World Bank, to corporate executives such as the chairman of a transnational mining company that committed crimes in Papua New Guinea in cooperation with the Indonesian invasion, the managing director of Royal Dutch-Shell and its collaboration with the Nigerian dictatorship, and the union-busting CEO of Caterpillar. Herman’s list ended with economists and intellectuals such as neoliberal advocate Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard, Arnold Harberger, who led the Chicago School’s activities in Pinochet’s Chile, and Robert Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, with his fervent support for supply-side economics and the “death squads necessary to bring it to fruition here and abroad.”

Herman regularly wrote about racism in the USA, such as Z Magazine articles in 1994 and 1996 on the mainstream media’s embracement of The Bell Curve, which argued for the inferior intelligence of American blacks. Herman discussed The Bell Curve’s pseudoscientific predecessors, going back to the Antebellum South, and wrote at length on racist “code language and framing of issues,” racist writings and talk shows, and how racism manifested in all aspects of the lives of American blacks, including hiring, housing, lending, church arson, police behavior and incarceration rates, representation in congress, and even the right to recall such treatment. Herman and Peterson wrote on the media’s demonization of Reverend Jeremiah Wright because of his relationship with Barack Obama, while Obama was running for the Democratic Party nomination in the spring of 2008.

Herman wrote on the selective support of free speech in the West, noting that the media lauded the “I am Charlie” rally in Paris following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, for which the killers were a “solo effort” and “hardly a threat to free speech,” while France had laws that “permit arrests and imprisonment for political speech insulting Israel and questioning the Holocaust, and for giving verbal support for ‘terrorism’ (i.e., what the French state identifies as terrorism).” Herman noted about 70 arrests in the weeks following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and that, “unsurprisingly, none of the arrests were reported to have been for verbal attacks on Muslim individuals or religious symbols, although attacks on Muslim individuals increased after January 7.”

Herman wrote about how liberal-left dissent was under steady attack by the “market,” in a wide array of strategies and tactics, including flak, often led by AIM, on PBS and community radio such as Pacifica, legal assaults on non-governmental organizations (“NGOs”), such as proposed legislation to prevent NGOs from engaging in any “advocacy” work if they got federal funding of more than 5% of their revenues, while huge corporations receiving vast federal funds were exempted, corporate-funded ideological warfare against academia, Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (“SLAPP”), in which citizens were sued by SLAPPS for attending public meetings and circulating petitions, and assaults on the UN and its agencies, as exemplified by the USA’s withdrawal from UNESCO in 1984.

In 1996, Herman wrote about the postmodernist trends in social analysis. Herman argued that postmodernist analyses ignored the forces behind the creation of media content and instead focused on the ability of the consumers to decide what to digest and how, while ignoring the possible impact of the limited menu offered by the media. Herman wrote:


“Viewers may resist and some may be hard to manage, but some will be confused, and still more will be depoliticized by the barrage of entertainment and replacement of the public sphere of debate with propaganda. Media commercialization and concentration entails serious ‘disempowerment,’ which has to be fought by means beyond individual resistance.”


In 1998, Herman wrote about the myth of consumer sovereignty and the reality of corporate sovereignty regarding the chemical industry and its pollutants. Herman surveyed the growth of the American chemical industry after World War II, with “miracle” products such as DDT and vinyl chloride-based plastics, and noted that before the side effects of those chemicals became publicly visible, the chemical industry had developed huge vested interests in selling those chemicals. Herman listed the tactics that the chemical industry used to prevent infringements on their sovereignty:

• Restricting information;
• Using science as a public relations (”PR”) tool;
• Undermining the regulatory process with its influence;
• Lawsuits;
• Using the media to “normalize” the right to pollute.

Herman argued that the term “junk science” had been coopted by corporate polluters to describe the scientific findings used in lawsuits against corporate products and pollution, instead of what Herman wrote was the real junk science: the “political, opportunistic, and PR use of science.” Herman wrote that under that definition of junk science, corporations were far and away the dominant practitioners of it.


Best,

Wade

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
Hi:

A few odds and ends….

On MLK Day, there is a call to reopen the assassination investigations of the 1960s, beginning with JFK’s. I am not holding my breath on anything coming from it, but it was nice to see.

My guess is that this call to reopen investigations into the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, and Malcolm X is connected, somehow, with Donna Brazile's tweat regarding Pelosi becoming President and MLKWeekend: Qanon Post #8312.

However that is a matter perhaps better discussed over on the Q thread ... so I posted this guess of mine over there as well: Qanon Post #8320

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Paul:

I don’t know much about the machinations around Trump and the so-called Deep State. I will agree that he is decidedly a reluctant imperialist, as JFK was (Hillary might have started World War III by now). But if Trump and Pence were taken out that way, then I would not be surprised if there was a revolution in the USA over it. However, I would be very surprised if Trump was taken out that way. For one thing, nobody would think that two lone nuts did it, unless they portrayed it as a conspiracy of two. But assassinating presidents seemed to go out of style after the Reagan shooting. There is a lot of writing these days on the Deep State and how Trump is cleaning house, but I think that it is largely wishful thinking. The GCs play at a few levels above Trump, and I doubt that they are too interested in the current nationalist saga. I think that JFK was taken out by domestic interests, not global ones, and the same would go for Trump, if that happened.

That said, I think that the call for a new investigation is well-meaning but is not going to make a dent.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have written about the life reviews that I have had lately. Going through my stack of Z Magazines was an Ed review. The range of Ed’s thought is awe-inspiring. I’ll put up drafts of the sections that are receiving the biggest changes in Ed’s bio, particularly this one and this one. I have a ways to go on that recent book devoted to the PM, and will produce that section as it stands at the moment. I am also adding some external links to Ed’s bio. Making external links is kind of a perilous process, as links go dead all the time. So, I only made links that will likely be live for a while. So, here is that section draft. Actually, it is two sections now, one for assessments by Ed and Noam, and one for others.


In The Propaganda Model Today, it reproduced an interview from the last year of Herman’s life, in which he discussed the PM and its continued relevance, including how it applied to Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign. Herman reviewed the rise of the Internet, and specifically Facebook and Google, stating:


“These are not news organizations, and how their monopoly power will eventually work out as regards the journalism function is unclear, but they are very much advertising based, and they have already shown great deference to the wishes of power entities like the CIA, NSA, FBI, and State Department. Thus, the likelihood that they will serve the public interest seems extremely slim.”

…

Subsequent academic assessments and proposed revisions

In October 2018, The Propaganda Model Today was published, which was dedicated to Herman’s memory. The Propaganda Model Today is a compendium of essays on the PM that dealt with its diverse aspects, from its “theoretical and methodological considerations” to the Internet and digital media to movie and TV entertainment to several case studies regarding applying the PM to international events.

The Propaganda Model Today began with an overview of the historical roots of public persuasion and propaganda, going back to Aristotle and Machiavelli, through early industrial writers such as Auguste Comte to 20^th-century writers such as Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann, which helped form the foundation of the PM. In the book’s introduction, the authors made the case that a media function is normalizing the prevailing economic and social structures so that alternatives to them cannot even be imagined by the public.

A chapter of The Propaganda Model Today dealt with the sociology of journalism, in which its author argued that it needed to be considered in the PM, which Herman and Chomsky explicitly did not do when formulating the PM. The author concluded his essay with:


“Unlike others’ critiques of the PM, examining the discourse of journalists themselves does not refute the PM; in fact, it can more fully explain media performance. Journalists have to adhere to professional standards and face secondary socialisation when they enter the workplace. This, perhaps, gives the appearance of an ugly and anti-normative ‘conspiracy,’ yet from many different angles, this is the basic institutional functioning of the news media.”


The author of a chapter of The Propaganda Model Today argued that prominent modes of inquiry that social scientists often use in analyzing the media completely evade the issue of its structural constraints, which rendered their research irrelevant in helping explain how the media functioned.

A chapter of The Propaganda Model Today dealt with the complete marginalization of the PM in mainstream academic literature, to the extent that academics were advised to remove all references to Chomsky from their work, so that the academics would not risk the “costs” that would come with publicly agreeing with Chomsky’s positions. That chapter stated what Chomsky also stated: the PM can be applied to academia and other intellectual pursuits. The chapter’s author noted, however, that the PM has entered public consciousness, and that:


“The model and their work has been a major service to critical thinking and, ultimately, democracy. It is the experience of this author, with 20 years of teaching in higher education, that many more students today are aware of the structural failings of mainstream media than was the case in the 1990s. Referencing and talking about the Propaganda Model seems to elicit fewer smirks and knee jerk reactions than was the case 20 years ago. Progress has been made.”


A chapter of The Propaganda Model Today presented the case that another filter of the PM could be the USA’s national security state, particularly the activities of the National Security Agency (“NSA”), as recently exposed by Edward Snowden, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, and Julian Assange’s Wikileaks. The chapter’s authors argued that such citizen surveillance and related abuses of civil liberties contributed to the information management function of the American propaganda system, and emphasized the flak that those whistleblowers received, as Snowden lives in asylum in Russia, Assange lives in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and Manning was imprisoned.

In December 2018, a section of Media Theory was devoted to Herman’s memory and the PM. The wide-ranging retrospective included several essays and discussions of Herman and Chomsky’s PM, in which the retrospective’s authors assessed the PM and dealt with its criticisms in the academic literature. The retrospective noted that Herman and Chomsky were open to critiques of the PM and tests of its validity, and that they had modified it somewhat over the years since it was first published, such as adding free-market and anti-terrorism ideologies to the anticommunist filter, to make it more generalized. The discussion noted that academic critiques often emphasized ancillary factors and minor outcomes in attempts to invalidate the PM, but one retrospective author wrote:


“[…] the authors’ broad claims about patterns of reporting are nevertheless well supported by the evidence they present, of which I am not aware of any convincing refutation.”


One subject of discussion was whether the lack of detailed examination of each media filter in action had a bearing on the PM’s validity. The conclusion was that it did not, while noting that such detailed work was welcome, and when it had been done, it confirmed the PM. The discussion concluded that such work, or a lack of it, could not be logically used to dismiss the PM, as has largely been done in academia and in the media in general. One author wrote:


“The late Edward Herman pointed out long ago that critics of the PM failed to demonstrate that it violated the principle of logical consistency; namely, that they haven’t shown in their critiques that the PM would explain opposites. Herman further pointed out that the critics failed to explain by means of some alternative explanation why the contents of the American elite media came out in the way that they did in Herman and Chomsky’s study of the media (recall Daniel Hallin’s attempt to explain Herman and Chomsky’s and his own findings through the vague notion of ‘professionalism,’ which itself is quite logically inconsistent); […] For this reason, one awaits a serious critique of the model, and not one which sets an arbitrary precondition for its validity.”


An essay in the retrospective presented a detailed analysis of the PM’s filters regarding the 2018 elections in Colombia and Venezuela. It concluded that the American media’s treatment of those elections not only confirmed Herman’s writings about the disparity of how the media treated elections in client and enemy regimes, but that detailed research of the media’s coverage of those elections demonstrated that the filters of ownership, sources, and flak were still very much operational.

An essay in the retrospective dealt with Herman's writings on racism, and the author began her essay with a racism encounter during her media career, before she had heard of Herman. When she later discovered Herman’s work, her prior experiences with racism made Herman’s work far more relevant, and she wrote:


[…] Herman’s insights become most keen at the points in which they meet my own experience, study, and engagement with the media. It means almost nothing to state repeatedly that the media function as complements and conduits of a capitalist regime without a personal history and context through which one can fully understand the everyday mire of journalism’s entanglements. It is through the mire, I think, that Herman’s theories are most clear.


The final essay in the retrospective stated:


“The Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model constitutes the leading analytical tool to theorize and investigate media bias.”


Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am nearing the end of my Ed bio project for now. The revised bio should be published in a couple of weeks, and then it will be off to my essay update, which I doubt will be completed this year.

Here is a little current events item, to show how relevant Ed’s work continues to be.

From my upcoming bio update:

An essay in the retrospective presented a detailed analysis of the PM’s filters regarding the 2018 elections in Colombia and Venezuela. The essay’s author, Alan MacLeod, concluded that the American media’s treatment of those elections not only confirmed Herman’s writings about the disparity of how the media treated elections in client and enemy regimes, but that detailed research of the media’s coverage of those elections demonstrated that the filters of ownership, sources, and flak were still very much operational.

Here is a report on how CNN, one of Ed’s media targets, is attempting to “manufacture consent” for a coup in Venezuela.

I have published how great the wealth disparity is in the world, and a recent report from Oxfam has upped the disparity once again: Earth’s richest people command as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity does. A generation ago, I wrote that the disparity was 10-million-to-one, and it is now more than 100-million-to-one. Of course, the GCs are not even on that radar.

I will write about many subjects in my essay update, and one of the more fascinating debates is just when oxygen became important to complex life. A recent paper makes the case that there may have been relatively low oxygen levels early in the eon of complex life, which revises the original model. The new paper’s authors argue that oxygen levels may not have begun their rise to modern levels until the appearance of land plants. As usual, the paper concludes with calling for more data collection.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Before Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) there was Alexander Gordon (1752-1799) and Oliver Wendell-Holmes (1809-1894) both of them said came to same conclusions earlier and were ostracized.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

My heavy lifting on Ed’s bio update is finished, and now I will just play editor on it, before publishing it soon. Here is a draft of my new section, which I finished a minute ago, some of which I have published before:

Academic assessments and proposed revisions

In 2005, Filtering the News was published, edited by Jeffery Klaehn, which was a series of essays on the PM. In the introductory essay’s conclusion, Klaehn wrote:


“Herman and Chomsky’s institutional critique of media behavior is forceful and convincing, as is their analysis of the ideological formation of public opinion and the ‘Orwellian’ abuse of language in western democracies. […] If there was ever a time for Herman and Chomsky’s ‘propaganda model’ to be included in scholarly debates on patterns of media performance, it is now.”


The essays in Filtering the News examined the George W. Bush administration’s war propaganda, Israeli propaganda, the Globe and Mail‘s coverage of the tribulations in El Salvador and East Timor, newspaper discussions on the environment, and other topics covered in the American and British media.

In October 2018, The Propaganda Model Today (“TPMT”) was published, which was dedicated to Herman’s memory. TPMT is a compendium of essays on the PM that dealt with its diverse aspects, from its “theoretical and methodological considerations” to the Internet and digital media to movie and TV entertainment to several case studies regarding applying the PM to international events.

TPMT began with an overview of the historical roots of public persuasion and propaganda, going back to Aristotle and Machiavelli, through early industrial writers such as Auguste Comte to 20^th-century writers such as Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann, which helped form the PM’s foundation. The authors of TPMT’s introduction made the case that a key media function is normalizing the prevailing economic and social structures so that alternatives to them cannot even be imagined by the public.

A chapter of TPMT dealt with the sociology of journalism, in which Jesse Owen Hearns-Branaman argued that it needed to be considered in the PM, which Herman and Chomsky explicitly did not do when formulating the PM. The author concluded his essay with:


“Unlike others’ critiques of the PM, examining the discourse of journalists themselves does not refute the PM; in fact, it can more fully explain media performance. Journalists have to adhere to professional standards and face secondary socialisation when they enter the workplace. This, perhaps, gives the appearance of an ugly and anti-normative ‘conspiracy,’ yet from many different angles, this is the basic institutional functioning of the news media.”


In a chapter of TPMT, Yigal Godler asserted that prominent modes of inquiry that social scientists often use in analyzing the media completely evade the issue of its structural constraints, which rendered their research largely irrelevant in helping explain how the media functioned.

A chapter of TPMT dealt with the marginalization of the PM in mainstream academic literature, to the extent that academics were advised to remove all references to Chomsky from their work, so that they would not risk the “costs” that they would bear for publicly agreeing with Chomsky’s positions. That chapter’s author, Piers Robinson, stated what Chomsky also did: the PM can be applied to academia and other intellectual pursuits. Robinson noted, however, that the PM has entered public consciousness, and that:


“The model and their work has been a major service to critical thinking and, ultimately, democracy. It is the experience of this author, with 20 years of teaching in higher education, that many more students today are aware of the structural failings of mainstream media than was the case in the 1990s. Referencing and talking about the Propaganda Model seems to elicit fewer smirks and knee jerk reactions than was the case 20 years ago. Progress has been made.”


The authors of a chapter of TPMT presented the case that another filter of the PM could be the USA’s national security state, particularly the activities of the National Security Agency, as recently exposed by Edward Snowden, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, and Julian Assange’s Wikileaks. The chapter’s authors, Daniel Broudy and Miyume Tanji, argued that such citizen surveillance and related abuses of civil liberties contributed to the information management function of the American propaganda system, and emphasized the flak that those whistleblowers received: as of 2019, Snowden lived in asylum in Russia, Assange lived in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and Manning spent seven years in incarceration.

Two chapters of TPMT analyzed the PM’s applicability to the media in Spain. One chapter’s author, Miguel Álvarez-Peralta, wrote that the dynamics that led to the Spanish Revolution in 1936 were still evident in Spanish society, so that Spain’s corporate influence was relatively muted for the West, and that the PM did not seem as applicable in Spain as in other Western societies. In the other chapter, its author, Aurora Labio-Bernal, wrote that Spain also saw the rise of anticommunist propaganda in the 21^st century, as a reaction to progressive efforts, which helped revive the relevance of the PM’s anticommunism filter.

A section of TPMT discussed entertainment in the media. Matthew Alford discussed the PM and screen entertainment, and concluded that while the same filters were evident in entertainment, the PM was designed for and fit better with the news than entertainment. Tabe Bergman created a PM for American television, which varied from the PM in that the third filter was the processes of show production, the fourth filter was the influence of government entities such as the CIA and Department of Defense, as well as independent pressure groups that policed entertainment content, and the ideological filter was neoliberalism. Barry Pollick applied the PM to media coverage of the National Football League, and his study concluded that it favored owners over players, which was consistent with the PM’s predictions.

In the final section of TPMT, its authors presented case studies of the PM, relating to:

• The financial crisis of 2008 in the UK;
• The continuing relevance of the PM, 30 years after its initial publication;
• The Latin American media;
• Barack Obama’s 2016 trip to Cuba and the media’s skewed depiction of it; and
• Discussions in the UK on using nuclear weapons, and how the British media normalized the idea of offensively using nuclear weapons on nations such as Iraq, contrary to the prevailing belief in the UK that it would use nuclear weapons only for defense.

In the chapter on the continuing relevance of the PM, its author, Florian Zollmann, discussed the rise of the Internet and its commercial bias, which mirrored the establishment media’s bias. Zollmann quoted Google’s founders, who warned back in 1998:


“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”


Zollmann also noted the rise of “humanitarian” intervention, of which the Western intervention in the former Yugoslavia was an early example, which was not humanitarian at all, but was merely imperialism under a novel rubric, when the Cold War rationale fell apart after the Soviet Union’s demise. Zollmann quoted an informed estimate that NATO’s “humanitarian” intervention in Libya increased the death toll by “seven to ten times”.

In the chapter on the Latin American media, its author, Francisco Sierra Caballero, discussed the Pentagon’s “unrestricted warfare” against Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, and one front of that Orwellian “permanent war” has been a propaganda barrage against Venezuela’s government, to help enact regime change. As this section is being written in early February 2019, the Trump administration is advocating “humanitarian” military intervention in Venezuela. Sierra Caballero also discussed a concurrent campaign against Bolivia’s “communist” government and noted its similarities to the American campaign against Chile in the 1970s. Sierra Caballero discussed the elite-dominated media in Mexico and its extreme double standards of reporting, particularly regarding the Herman-Chomsky dichotomy of “worthy” and “unworthy” victims, as Mexican society has been unraveling in recent years, accompanied by an increase in state violence against its domestic population, guided by the Pentagon and CIA, under a legal façade which has criminalized protest and progressive efforts.

In the chapter on Obama and Cuba, its author, James Winter, wrote about the media’s highly biased account of Obama’s 2016 trip to Cuba, how Cuba was a “playground” for the American Mafia until the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and how the American establishment, including its media, had treated Cuba with unremitting hostility ever since, under the publicly stated rationale of Cuba’s human rights violations. Winter wrote that the real reason for the unremitting assaults on Cuba since 1959 was Chomsky’s “threat of a good example” effect of a prosperous and independent Cuba, which would no longer be an American playground, which could inspire other nations subservient to the USA to gain their de facto independence.

In the chapter on the UK’s discussions of nuclear weapons, its author, Milan Rai, wrote that the UK was just like the USA, in that the propaganda regarding nuclear weapons was that the USA and UK would only use them for defensive purposes. But Rai argued that, in fact, the USA and UK regularly threatened nuclear attack on neocolonial obstacles such as Iraq, and that the UK had frequently and provocatively deployed its nuclear air fleet (called “V bombers”) to neocolonial hotspots such as Africa and the Middle East.

TPMT’s concluding chapter assessed the PM in 2018, found that it continued to be highly relevant, and that key Herman-and-Chomsky hypotheses had been repeatedly confirmed, which included:

• When political and economic elites are united in their interests, the media will uniformly echo their consensus and support consequent efforts for domestic and international domination;
• In capitalist economies, the PM’s five filters have far stronger influence over media content than governmental intervention does;
• Critical studies of the media, which consider structural constraints, will be ignored and marginalized, while orthodox academic studies will avoid acknowledging those constraints.

In December 2018, a section of Media Theory was devoted to Herman’s memory and the PM. The wide-ranging retrospective included several essays and discussions of Herman and Chomsky’s PM, in which the authors assessed the PM and dealt with its criticisms in the academic literature. The retrospective noted that Herman and Chomsky were open to critiques of the PM and tests of its validity, and that they had modified it somewhat over the years since it was first published, such as adding free-market and anti-terrorism ideologies to the anticommunist filter, to update and generalize it. The discussion noted that academic critiques often emphasized ancillary factors and minor outcomes in attempts to invalidate the PM, but one author, Tom Mills, wrote:


“[…] the authors’ broad claims about patterns of reporting are nevertheless well supported by the evidence they present, of which I am not aware of any convincing refutation.”


One subject of discussion was whether the lack of detailed examination of each media filter in action had a bearing on the PM’s validity. The conclusion was that it did not, while noting that such detailed work was welcome, and when it had been done, it confirmed the PM. The discussion concluded that such work, or a lack of it, could not be logically used to dismiss the PM, as has largely been done in academia and in the media in general. Yigal Godler wrote:


“The late Edward Herman pointed out long ago that critics of the PM failed to demonstrate that it violated the principle of logical consistency; namely, that they haven’t shown in their critiques that the PM would explain opposites. Herman further pointed out that the critics failed to explain by means of some alternative explanation why the contents of the American elite media came out in the way that they did in Herman and Chomsky’s study of the media (recall Daniel Hallin’s attempt to explain Herman and Chomsky’s and his own findings through the vague notion of ‘professionalism,’ which itself is quite logically inconsistent); […] For this reason, one awaits a serious critique of the model, and not one which sets an arbitrary precondition for its validity.”


An essay in the retrospective presented a detailed analysis of the PM’s filters regarding the 2018 elections in Colombia and Venezuela. The essay’s author, Alan MacLeod, concluded that the American media’s treatment of those elections not only confirmed Herman’s writings about the disparity of how the media treated elections in client and enemy regimes, but that detailed research of the media’s coverage of those elections demonstrated that the filters of ownership, sources, and flak were still very much operational.

An essay in the retrospective dealt with Herman’s writings on racism, and the author, Khadijah Costley White, began by describing an encounter with racism during her media career, before she had heard of Herman. When she later discovered Herman’s work, her prior experiences with racism made Herman’s work more relevant, and she wrote:


[…] Herman’s insights become most keen at the points in which they meet my own experience, study, and engagement with the media. It means almost nothing to state repeatedly that the media function as complements and conduits of a capitalist regime without a personal history and context through which one can fully understand the everyday mire of journalism’s entanglements. It is through the mire, I think, that Herman’s theories are most clear.


The final essay in the retrospective stated:


“The Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model constitutes the leading analytical tool to theorize and investigate media bias.”


Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492 Authors: Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark M.Maslin, Simon L. Lewis

Highlights
• Combines multiple methods estimating pre-Columbian population numbers.
• Estimates European arrival in 1492 lead to 56 million deaths by 1600.
• Large population reduction led to reforestation of 55.8 Mha and 7.4 Pg C uptake.
• 1610 atmospheric CO2 drop partly caused by indigenous depopulation of the Americas.
• Humans contributed to Earth System changes before the Industrial Revolution.

[Wade Frazier]

Thanks Krishna:

I read that yesterday myself, and will comment about it one day. Genghis Kahn was similarly “credited” with his slaughters for helping cool the climate.

I have been doing plenty of reading on the demographic transition, and does the academic fur ever fly. Some call the demographic transition a mere coincidence, in that it happened when the Industrial Revolution did. Here is a paper that argues that no demographic transition theory holds up. Here is one that says that the Industrial Revolution and demographic transition seem independent, but that there must be some connection. Here is one that credits the demand for human capital, as industrialization required skilled workers, not strong backs and nimble fingers, as the driving force, which included educating the children. That is the same argument for why slavery ended, in that in a world of machines, unskilled labor became obsolete, and I’ll buy that, and is the dynamic that I have in my big essay today. I doubt that my summary will change much, but I’ll move it to the Industrial Revolution chapter. I’ll get to your posts after I publish Ed’s revised bio.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

After reading a bunch of books and papers on Demographic Transition I think

• Adult and child mortality rates fell to some extent during industrialization (child mortality falls from 30+% to 25+% by 1860 over a hundred years of industrial revolution)
• No dramatic shift is seen in fertility it is high and fairly constant
• Post 1860 universal education for whites begins in USA and Britain (itself an effect of energy surplus)
• Mortality rates of children starts to fall dramatically from 25+% child mortality to 10% by 1928, 3 times reduction in 70% of time.
• Fertility rate starts to fall dramatically, to replacement rate falling from 5 children per woman to around 2
• Both an effect of education.

In short the path of demographic transition goes through universal basic education in all cases.

The Demographic Transition, England and Wales
Child Mortality UK and USA
Primary school enrollment UK and USA

HUMAN CAPITAL, FERTILITY AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Gregory Clark
"A striking feature of figure 2, however, is the coincidence of the rise in the
literacy of women in England and the onset of the demographic transition."


Demographic Transition and Industrial Revolution: A Coincidence?
By Michael Bar and Oksana Leukhina
"We find that mortality decline significantly influences birth rates."
"Increased productivity has a negligible effect on birth rates"

[Wade Frazier]

Thanks Krishna:

My take is going to be that without industrialization, the rest would not have happened. The rest could not have happened. Northwest Europe had been riding an energy wave since the High Middle Ages, and proto-industrialization was necessary for many events, such as the rise in literacy. Without the printing press, there was not going to be a rise in literacy, and the industrializing economy created a need for more skilled labor, and the energy surplus of industrialization allowed for those changes. The most dramatic event in the human journey so far rode on the back of the energy issue, and everything else was ancillary. The demographic transition was a side-effect of industrialization. I agree that education played its role, but it was enabled by, and caused by, industrialization. There are pull-push dynamics for events like that. English peasants were pushed off of the land by Game Laws and Enclosure, and they ended up in the coal mines and became the workforce of the Industrial Revolution. By 1800, less than 40% of the English workforce was involved in agriculture, which was the mark of a new Epoch, unprecedented in the human journey. The peasants were pushed off the land, but they also had opportunities in industrialization and the rising living standards. The rise in literacy, decline in infant mortality, and subsequent decline in fertility were all side-effects of industrialization, as well as the end of slavery as an institution.

From the standpoint of human lives, the demographic transition was a huge boon, and many lessons learned from that experience were cheaply reproduced in poor nations, such as literacy, sanitation, and hygiene, and the industrial nations largely fed the cities of poor nations, with their energy surplus. But without industrialization, which rode above all else on that energy wave, and from fossil fuels with a bullet, the rest would not have happened. Deforested England would have collapsed after it hit its agrarian energy ceiling, as had so many other agrarian civilizations. Tapping the energy of coal allowed England to industrialize, and the rest was noise.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am done with Ed’s bio for now, other than finding the stray typo or formatting error, nearly two years after I offered to revise his Wikipedia bio. Some fun that has been. On to my updating my big essay, and I’ll publish section drafts as I finish them, as I did for the original drafts.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have many posts running around in my head. I could literally never run out of topics to write about, but I try to focus on the ones that will make it into my big essay. I am currently reading The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory. It was the state-of-the-art summary, back in 2006. However, I was surprised to find no mention of the megafauna extinctions, or really, much about the differences between matrilocal and patrilocal societies, so, no mention of Otterbein’s hypothesis, of course, even in a book that mentioned the supposed ET influence on the origins of farming. Kind of like how Ed and Noam’s propaganda model has been so studiously ignored by academia, it looks like Otterbein was an “outsider” who came at the issue from the warfare angle.

I want to write a little on consciousness and intentionality. I know that the materialistic models of consciousness are false. Materialism is just another religion on a shaky foundation. Today’s mainstream science does not even hint at the role that consciousness plays in the universe. Seth said that the bedrock of our reality is a Unit of Consciousness, and I’ll buy that. Mainstream science says that our reality seems to be made of fields, but as a wonderful recent book that I bought ended, if our universe is made of fields, what are the fields made of? The greatest physicists thought that science could not answer that question. They don’t know what the universe is made of: they can only describe what it does. What is light? What is gravity? Scientists do not know the answers. There are plenty of hypotheses and speculation, but no knowledge.

What comes through in studies of evolution or anthropology is that even though consciousness plays a role, it is generally only focused on an organism’s survival. Expanding it beyond survival issues is rare, even for humans. No life form ever consciously thought, “I think that I will speciate today.” Similarly, no human thought, “Today I will invent controlled fire.” Or “plant domestication,” or “civilization” or the “Industrial Revolution” or the “demographic transition.” The origins of plant domestication and civilization are prehistoric developments, and their investigation is necessarily limited to scientists. Even recent and well-documented events such as the Industrial Revolution and demographic transition have a great deal of controversy over how and why they happened. But one thing is clear: both the Industrial Revolution and demographic transition were both more than a century old before anybody suspected that they even happened. Certainly, nobody planned either event, which are the most dramatic in the human journey, happening in a few scant centuries. Domestication and its spread happened over millennia, as did the rise of civilization. The First Epoch, from the first stone tools to the arrival of the world-conquering behaviorally modern humans on the evolutionary scene, transpired over millions of years. Nobody planned any of those events: they were just the natural outcomes of people pursuing their self-interest. In that regard, Ed and Noam’s propaganda model makes sense. There did not need to be any planning of how Western propaganda saturates our lives; it is just a natural outcome of how capitalistic societies operate.

That said, I also know that the GCs have very consciously managed the global economy, as they attended to their extreme self-interest. They don’t need to micromanage it; they just control the leverage points, and the energy issue most of all. Even if 99.999% of humanity is oblivious, living in ignorance, fear, or denial, the GCs aren’t. Also, what I am attempting is unprecedented: the conscious manifestation of humanity’s next Epoch. Nobody has ever tried such a thing before, and it requires very rare people to even attempt it. Even imagining the next Epoch has proven to be virtually impossible for people to do, and it took me many years to finally realize why that is so. In a world of scarcity and fear, people only care about survival. Lifting their minds and hearts past daily survival concerns virtually never happens. People who do that are needles in haystacks, and I learned to relinquish judgment of that situation long ago. It is just where humanity is these days, and the Fifth Epoch will be about people lifting their eyes past survival for the first time, caring about something other than egocentric pursuits. But without abundant and harmless energy, the rest can’t happen. It is just like the Third Epoch could not have happened without plant domestication, and the Fourth Epoch could not have happened without fossil fuels, and even the First and Second Epochs were energy events above all else. Without the new energy levels, the rest could not happen. That is Job Number One, and the rest is noise.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have a little time, as I am being snowed in today and tomorrow. Time to reply to posts made while I was working on Ed’s bio, and other correspondence. But first, a little preamble. While I respect proximate causes for events, ultimate causes always trump them. Over my scholarly career, I have seen innumerable instances when analysts get stuck in debating proximate causes while ignoring the elephant in the room of the ultimate cause. It is stunningly evident in the retrospectives by Western, particularly American, scholars, on the issue of the American invasion of Iraq. It was all about the oil. Period. Everything else was noise, but all of the analyses that I saw in recent years completely ignored the oil issue or minimized it, and as Ed and Noam noted, several years after the invasion of Iraq, not a pundit could be found at the New York Times that could call what the USA did in truthful terms, which was a crime. That subterfuge has many rich precedents. In fact, the American invasion of Iraq is humanity’s greatest crime of the 21^st century so far. Nothing else comes close. That scholarly blindness is often of the unconscious variety, as pundits are incapable of seeing what is so obvious to people without the conflicts of interest that the pundits suffer from. It took me many years to finally understand what I was seeing in the free energy milieu, and Ed’s work helped me see it. While some know exactly what they are doing as they dupe the gullible, most simply act in knee-jerk fashion, unable to see obvious realities, as that blindness helps feed them. My favorite Upton Sinclair quote is, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

It is painfully evident in the Global Warming debate, as people get all worked up debating proximal causes as they try to deny the ultimate one: the rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, courtesy of humanity’s prodigious burning of fossil fuels. That is the entire ballgame, but “skeptics” and deniers just can’t go there, as they argue for business as usual. I have never seen any major event in the journey of life on Earth in which the energy issue was not paramount. Similarly, I have never seen any major event in the human journey that was not primarily an economic event, which always rode on the energy issue. I know of no significant exception. Each Epoch was founded on energy dynamics, of learning to exploit a new energy resource, and all else followed from that. Without the new energy source, the rest could not have happened. Humanity’s first two Epochs happened so long ago that only scientists can piece together the puzzle, and it is also largely that way for the Third, as the domestication of plants and animals happened before recorded history.

All of humanity’s closest cousins were driven to extinction long ago, coincident with the rise of behaviorally modern humans, and it was no coincidence. Nothing has survived, going back up our evolutionary tree, all the way to chimps. So, piecing together that story has been quite a chore, but, as always, the energy issue reigns supreme, from the energy-fueled growth of the human-line brain to Ice Age climate dynamics to exploiting new food sources with the human line’s expanding toolset to the control of fire, which civilization still rides atop today.

So, while I acknowledge the importance of proximate causes, they always take a back seat to ultimate ones. I always try to distinguish them, and not get too worked up debating proximate causes. The Fifth Epoch will primarily be an energy event, as usual, as humanity becomes a Type 1 civilization, if we can survive the transition to it.

Time to prepare for the storm, which will likely make the “permanent” record at my favorite resource, Wikipedia.

Best,

Wade

[Dennis Leahy]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
Hi:

I have a little time, as I am being snowed in today and tomorrow. ...

Time to prepare for the storm, ...

Winter storm "Maya." Wow, the ancient Mayans were right, but their calendar was off by 7 years! Hope you have hoarded some cocoa! Jammies and a bathrobe for the next 2 days!

Love you, my free energy warrior brother!