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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 just finished reading Matthew White’s book on the 100 greatest atrocities in history, and my take is that it was not too bad, for a white guy. Like imperial apologist Steven Pinker, who wrote the book’s foreword, White’s biases were evident, as he took it kind of easy on the West, and reproduced the propaganda versions of recent atrocities, while washing the West’s hands of the blood. One of the more telling was Rwanda, in which he blamed the Hutus, and cast Kagame as the hero of Rwanda. But the very next chapter casts Kagame, and Uganda’s dictator, Museveni, as the villains of the Second Congo War, which killed several million people. White’s explanation of that hero/villain flip was that “History is complicated.” Actually, as Ed and David Peterson persuasively made the case, there was no flip, as Kagame was the villain of Rwanda, too. Kagame has dwarfed the death toll of Idi Amin, but is feted as some kind of hero in the West. White made a few blunders like that, being a white American man who has not quite escaped the West’s propaganda orbit. I can tell that he tried, but fell short on the West’s atrocities, like Pinker did.

    Another bias/flaw in his work is this statement:


    “War kills more civilians than soldiers and more people than oppressive governments do. This last point will not please libertarians.”


    All of his 100 atrocities add up to less than 500 million deaths, but India under British rule had nearly two billion shortened lives. So, tyranny dwarfs the wars, in one nation alone, compared to the 100 other “greatest atrocities.” While reading his book was worthwhile, it pays to be aware of his biases and limitations as an atrocity chronicler. I have seen Queen Victoria called history’s greatest mass murderer, with what she oversaw in the British Empire, and I see the point, but she does not make any “atrocity” lists made by white people. That is typical, even for Westerners who fancy themselves to be free of bias.

    Best,

    Wade
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 5th January 2024 at 00:54.
    My big essay, published in 2014, is here.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    I have been quiet for too long, and it is time to post something. As usual, my tales grow with the telling, and that post that I originally hoped would be 20 pages, then less than 50, is likely going to weigh in at over 60 pages. I am early in the Fourth Epoch, and am at 42 pages. I hope that it will be less than 70 pages!

    Not much of it will be new to my readers, but I am putting it altogether, and I plan for it to serve as the summary of my work until I can get those writing projects done over the next several years. It is a relatively informal summary of my work, with no notes, as I intended to make it a post, and it will obviously stretch over several posts. It will have links aplenty, and I am going to do my best to publish it this month.

    Then, I will catch up on several posting topics, and get back to working on my current essay. Busy busy, but exciting.

    Best,

    Wade
    My big essay, published in 2014, is here.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    I am banging along and made the below today, as a kind of table of contents for the coming essay, which will be an informal preview of what I plan to produce in the coming years. No links in this version. The final will have many links, but not the footnotes that accompany my essays. It will be kind of a Wade-lite exercise, but I hope that it will help the readers I seek to ease into my work. This month is running out, but I really want to publish that essay next month, and then get back to essay work.

    A Summary of This Summary of My Work

    Late last year, I decided to provide a brief summary of my work, to provide a preview of what I will be working on for the next several years. Little of it will be new to my readers, but I have been trying to make my work easier to digest since 1996, when I first published my work. The biggest event in the human journey deserves all of the effort that I can bring to it, so I do not feel that I am wasting my time in making it more accessible. What I hoped would be a relatively short essay has grown with the telling, as usual, and I decided to put the key ideas into bullet-point form, listed below:
    • Science has little or nothing to say about where consciousness arose from, and I’ll agree with mystics that everything, in this universe and everywhere else in creation, is comprised of consciousness; we all live in the Creator’s mind, and none of us can lose the Creator’s love and grace, no matter how evil-minded some of us may seem; we all live forever, and all roads lead home;
    • Energy is all that scientists “know” exists, and everything in our universe arises from energy (which arose from consciousness);
    • Other than its hydrogen and a little helium, Earth’s elements were formed by the fusion processes in stars and through the collisions of stars; Earth represents a stupendous amount of embodied fusion energy;
    • Life on Earth is several billion years old, and life has always been about energy and reproduction, as those are biological imperatives, and acquiring energy (survival) even outranks reproduction;
    • Earth shaped life and life shaped Earth, as well as shaping other life;
    • Cyanobacteria, through oxygenic photosynthesis (splitting water to get its electrons), saved our ocean from being blasted into space and Earth would have lost nearly all of its water and hydrogen, which would have spelled the end of life on Earth;
    • Over the eons, life on Earth became increasingly energy-intensive, and complex life is a relatively recent innovation, particularly multicellular life, which is less than a billion years old;
    • Animals have been particularly vulnerable to extinction events, as they are the greatest energy-using life on Earth; disruptions in energy generation have caused ecosystem collapses, and animals, which cannot generate their own energy, as photosynthesizers do, have always been the most vulnerable to those disruptions;
    • If not for a bolide event 66 million years ago, dinosaurs would likely still rule the world, and we might have had space-faring dinosaurs long ago, as some grew larger brains and even had hands; the rise of humanity was dependent on those features, and some dinosaurs evolved them before that bolide hit;
    • Earth has been cooling for the past 50 million years, related to declining carbon dioxide levels; we entered today’s ice age more than two million years ago, and humans appeared on the evolutionary scene around the same time;
    • Like all social mammals are, the human line has always been violent, as people vied with each other to survive and reproduce;
    • Like all social animals do, humans form societies that compete with neighboring societies, often to the extinction of the losers, and ingroup/outgroup dynamics dominate human relations, as people try to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity and fear;
    • Because humans are allegedly sentient, their methods of developing and maintaining ingroup cohesion involved new techniques, with various carrots and sticks, including the myths, legends, and other comforting lies that all societies tell themselves; my society is no exception, but my society’s deceptions are perhaps the world’s most sophisticated, and few even suspect how deeply the lies go;
    • As the human line tapped new energy sources, using increasingly sophisticated tools and enhanced individual and collective intelligence, which reinforced each other, the need for violence began to decline, and psychopaths may have been largely culled from the gene pool long ago;
    • Humans have been windfall energy opportunists for their entire journey on Earth, and they have yet to sustainably manage any energy source for long, as they plundered one after the other to exhaustion, beginning with Earth’s larger animals, then Earth’s forests, then Earth’s soils, and we are presently burning up Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits a million times faster than they were formed;
    • In the early days of exploiting each new energy source (large animals, domesticated plants), there were brief golden ages of peace and plenty, until humanity bred to the new energetic limits, and then it was back to fierce competition and violence (and warfare, which goes back to chimps);
    • We are only a few centuries into the fossil fuel age, which made the Industrial Revolution possible, and we are rapidly depleting that new energy source; by the end of this century, at current trajectories, those energy resources, particularly oil, will be largely depleted;
    • Each new energy source allowed for increased energy consumption per person, often by multiples of previous rates, and with each new level of energy consumption, rising living standards made those societies less violent and more humane;
    • The rise of European peoples arguably began with ancient Greece and Rome, but that rise began in earnest during the Medieval Warm Period and the proliferation of watermills, as part of what has been called the Medieval Industrial Revolution;
    • When Europe learned to turn Earth’s entire ocean into a low-energy transportation lane, it began to conquer Earth, which is the biggest demographic catastrophe in the human journey;
    • In the midst of that global conquest and partly due to it, England industrialized on the energy of coal;
    • The Industrial Revolution in particular was a dramatic break with the past, and the most important outcome was the disappearance of childhood death; before industrialization, half of all children died, in a trend going back to gorillas; it is the biggest event in the human journey so far;
    • The Industrial Revolution was all about energy-driven machines, which replaced muscle and dexterity (and recently, thinking); although there is still drudgery among the lower and working classes, it is far less onerous than it used to be;
    • While elites appeared with the first civilizations, they could not begin to think globally until Europe began conquering the world;
    • Before industrialization, the main path to riches was stealing it from conquered peoples, but with industrialization, spheres of economic interest became the surest path to wealth, and a new kind of elite arose;
    • My fellow travelers and I discovered the hard way that global elites (particularly psychopathic ones, and you have never heard their names) control the world economy; they have turned industries and professions into rackets, and preventing technological progress may be their defining characteristic, as hard as that may be to believe in our seemingly technologically advanced times;
    • First and foremost, those elites control energy technologies that would make energy abundant and clean for all peoples, but they are sequestered from public awareness and use by history’s greatest coverup, which is related to the coverup of extraterrestrial visitors; those elites also possess antigravity technology, among numerous other mind-boggling technologies, which a close friend had demonstrated to him by a dissident faction of that global elite;
    • My fellow travelers and I all had our lives ruined, shortened, or both, as we pursued those technologies; I survived my adventures because of my youth and idealism, and I am not yet finished trying, old man that I am;
    • Humanity is on the brink of either largely destroying ourselves, primarily over the energy issue, or we can employ those sequestered technologies, which will end scarcity (and its attendant fear) for all time, and something like heaven on Earth will become feasible;
    • My particular effort requires people who have grown beyond ingroup/outgroup thinking, and who care for the welfare of all people and even all life on Earth; there are not many of them on Earth, but I believe that there are enough of them for my approach or a similar one to succeed;
    • Those people that I seek also need to develop a comprehensive awareness and see the biggest picture that they can (which my work is all about helping them attain), as it will help guide our efforts; otherwise they go down the well-worn paths of disaster that so many have traveled; I am doing something different.

    That is the bare bones of it, and this essay will put more meat on those bones.

    Best,

    Wade
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 27th January 2024 at 23:40.
    My big essay, published in 2014, is here.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    Working hard on that essay, but there have been many distractions, and I read fun stuff to stay balanced (including a fantasy trilogy in recent weeks, and, of course, Nazi stuff). I have also been reading this book, about a Jewish woman from New York City, Elizabeth, who was inconsolable after her father died, and she began going to psychics and mediums. But she approached it as a “skeptic,” in a good sense. She went to elaborate gyrations to hide her identity from the mediums and psychics, whom she suspected would immediately perform research on her to perform their bogus readings. She really went to absurd lengths to hide her identity.

    Elizabeth brought her psychiatrist mother to her first session. She went expecting scarves and crystal balls, but got a suburban-housewife type. Her mother waited in the living room of the medium’s home while the medium worked at the kitchen table with Elizabeth. Elizabeth inexplicably put her hands palm-down over the table, about an inch into the air, and felt a buzzy energy. Elizabeth did not know why she did that.

    Her father immediately came through (which the medium identified by the first letter of his name, “K” for Kenneth), and the first thing that he did was give the address number of the building where they lived for many years, until his death. The medium initially interpreted it as March 10, but Elizabeth didn’t think that it meant anything. The medium was insistent, had Elizabeth’s mother come in, then the psychic got more literal and said that she was seeing the number 310, which she thought meant March 10, but it was really 310, the street address of the apartment where they lived, which they both immediately recognized. Her father called it “310” every day while he was dying in the hospital, saying that he wanted to “go back to 310.” He laughed from the hereafter that it took them so long to understand.

    Elizabeth’s mother was dazed, Elizabeth had the chills for the entire session, and it was the first WTF experience of her journey. WTF is in the book’s title, and the book is filled with expletives, in standard New York City style. The book is often funny. The medium relayed many other “hits” like 310, and Elizabeth staggered away from the session. I had a “hit” like that, ten seconds into my first session when I took Silva Mind Control, 50 years ago this year. It only took one of those for my worldview to be transformed, I never saw the world the same way again, and I knew that materialistic models of consciousness were false. Five years later, Brian had a similar experience while performing the same exercise, and that was the beginning of the end of his days as a mainstream scientist.

    It took Elizabeth about 100 such events before it began to sink in with her. On one hand, I can respect constant questing with a “skeptical” mind, but really, she needed that much evidence? She kept on with her skeptical stance, until she was at a meeting where she played the psychic, and everything she said was a hit. She had the strange energy effects in her body as she did it, which psychics regularly describe, but she was denying all of her hits even as she made them. But she finally came to accept the validity. When she did it, she finally began to understand.

    She did what “skeptics” are supposed to do, for all of her seeming obtuseness, which is pursuing evidence. She went to the scarves-and-crystal-ball storefront fakes and compared their scams to what real psychics do. She also approached a famous “skeptic” who specifically debunked psychics. She expected an experienced, informed, intelligent scientist, but what she got instead was a closed-minded jerk who was not interested in any evidence. That is standard “skeptical” behavior, but she was far more suspicious of the mediums and psychics than she was that bogus “skeptic.” But she finally realized that the debunkers were either idiots or dishonest, came to see the psychics as who they represented themselves to be, and she came to trust and admire them, even making friends with them. With that “skeptic” that she encountered, it was probably more like what McLuhan said: his ideological fervor blinded him to reality, and he simply could not see what was obvious to everybody else, as he abandoned any pretense of performing scientific investigation.

    In the end, she was not certain of life after death, but it was the likeliest explanation for what she encountered. All-in-all, it was a good read.

    Best,

    Wade
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 31st January 2024 at 22:28.
    My big essay, published in 2014, is here.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    As a little addendum to my previous post on that WTF book, more than once she did readings that were completely accurate, and she kept denying their validity. That “310” hit in the first few minutes of her first session bowled over her mother, and in the coming months, she got many amazing “messages” from her father, and I mean really crazy stuff, like everybody around her wore green, as she walked in New York City, which was her father’s favorite color, and green feathers inexplicably appeared in her apartment, which was a specific sign that she asked for. She had dozens of events like that, but she kept being “skeptical” that it was really from her deceased father. It only took one “hit” like that to permanently alter my worldview, but she had a kind of greed for more evidence, something that she could call “indisputable,” such as “having a pink and purple spotted 100 pound turtle walk in…now!” She was coming off like a spoiled brat, making her demands. She bent a spoon, did other psychic stuff during her adventures, and is a talented psychic who got all sorts of energetic effects during her psychic events.

    During a guided meditation, she kind of had a tantrum, talking at her deceased father, and mentally yelled, “F**king hell! Can you just give me real undisputable evidence?”

    Then she got a heat flash above her head, while this message hit her upside the head, as alien thoughts came in: “Jesus Christ! How much f**king evidence do you need?”

    It was just the kind of thing that her father would say. Right then, all of the previous signs barraged her, seemingly injected into her head, and she recalled that each sign was accompanied by an energetic feeling that was being amplified with that bombardment.

    At that moment, she finally got it, became stupefied by the messages that she had already been given, she burst out laughing at her father’s message, and couldn’t stop laughing. Some people really need to be hit over the head with the evidence before they understand.

    Best,

    Wade
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 3rd February 2024 at 06:38.
    My big essay, published in 2014, is here.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    I am going to throw out another little snippet from what is coming, a section that I drafted some weeks ago. We’ll see how closely the final version resembles this draft.

    Best,

    Wade

    The Rise of Global Elites

    So far in this essay, there is nothing that cannot be substantiated with a little scholarly effort. Surfing the Internet for a few minutes can support any of this essay’s points so far. Many points I have made so far can be debated, and I have come down on the side of the evidence that has persuaded me of these ideas, which include:
    • Language and the control of fire may well be over one million years old, and maybe even two million;
    • Violence and warfare has been a human-line constant, with variation based on relative scarcity or abundance, going back to chimps; proportionally, we are less violent than ever today;
    • Each instance of tapping a new energy source set in motion vast changes in human societies, so great that the coming changes were unimaginable;
    • Humanity has never sustainably managed any of those new energy sources, but plundered them to exhaustion; some arguments for exceptions can be made for some non-state agrarian people, but they are dubious ideas, IMO;
    • The Industrial Revolution and the attendant elimination of childhood death is the biggest event in the human journey so far;
    • We are quickly making Earth uninhabitable, have wiped out anything that does not serve our immediate self-interest, and the specter of nuclear war still hangs over us all.
    But I need to leave the academic reservation a little, to discuss issues that respectable “intellectuals” rarely touch. For the coming topic, I am primarily relying on my experiences and those of my fellow travelers, and a little bit on science and scholarship.

    Every civilization’s ruling class came to power violently, usually with spectacular displays to cow the populace into submission. Only later did priesthoods enter into Faustian deals to confer divine status or sanction to elites. There were obviously conspiracies and intrigue behind all such ascents to ruling status, the kind that have been portrayed in literature and plays for millennia and in Hollywood movies for the past century.

    Those East India companies marked the beginning of imperial stock companies and were forerunners of modern corporations. While there have been conspiring elites since the first civilizations, allied against the common good, my sense is that there was a break from the past with Europe’s conquest of Earth and industrialization – elites went through an Epochal transformation, too. A new kind of elite formed, with not only global ambitions, but empires began to be built on commercial/industrial enterprises, not just controlling land and its residents. The power-behind-the-throne game was taken to new levels. You have never heard of the people who really run the world today.

    Merchants had prospered from the first civilizations, but industrialization and Europe’s conquest of the world created unforeseen changes. There are many conspiratorial writings about such people, both real and imagined, such as the Illuminati. Hitler believed in a global Jewish conspiracy, and Americans like me were raised on the global communist conspiracy, which has a long history in the USA (1). The problem with conspiracies is that they rarely leave paper trails for scholars to peruse, so there is a lot of guesswork. What may have happened several centuries ago with changing elite strategies will likely always be obscure, but I can confidently write about what has happened in my lifetime, and armchair scholars might never understand the situation.

    My journey of understanding began when my first professional mentor invented an engine hailed as the world’s best for powering an automobile. I was only 15 when it began making waves, and I got my energy dreams that year, 50 years ago this year. I remember thinking that certain interests might not welcome such an invention, but I had vague and inaccurate ideas of whom that might be. Many years later, my mentor told me that at a meeting of high-ranking officials, he was told that if he thought that his engine would make the internal combustion engine obsolete, he should make his funeral plans.

    I had my mystical awakening that year. A few years later, a desperate prayer was answered, and I changed my studies from science to business. Eight years of idealism and disillusionment later, I prayed again for guidance, for the second and so far last time in my life, and landed in the middle of the greatest attempt to bring alternative energy to the American marketplace. The lightning bolt that hit me then still reverberates today. The company sold the world’s best heating system and put it on customers’ homes for free, in the most brilliant and benevolent business strategy that I ever witnessed or heard of. It was essentially selling heat for less than half of the energetic cost that other providers did, and those providers could not honestly compete with less-than-half-price heat. Therefore, the energy interests called in their favors to wipe out the company. I came in on the tail end of that snuff job, but would not be denied my teenage dream, and soon became the partner of that company’s owner. Then my wild ride began, and three years after becoming his partner, my life was ruined, but I had the kind of education that cannot be bought. My youth and idealism are why I survived the experience with my sanity intact. Lives were shattered and shortened (1) in that ordeal.

    In my home town, we tried to marry my mentor’s engine with my partner’s heat pump, to produce no-operating-cost energy, and that was when we had the boom lowered on us. A few months after we were raided, a CIA official who represented European interests offered a billion dollars for my partner to close our business. After my partner refused, the nightmare began. A close relative was a CIA contract agent who worked for Henry Kissinger, so I was introduced to the spook world years before I met my partner, and I was fortunate that my relative did attempt to not recruit me into the “business.” The year before the CIA’s offer, we were offered $10 million, in what I now know was the “friendly buyout offer” that people with potentially disruptive energy technologies are given, and adding a couple of zeroes to the offer seems typical. I did not want to be in surreal situations such as those, but they came with the territory.

    Little did we know it when I became a partner in the business, but we were merely the latest in a long line of inventors and entrepreneurs whose technologies were wiped out (often by buying it out and sequestering it), as organized suppression of disruptive technologies like ours was a century old. A documentary on that “lost century” was released last year, and I can vouch for the methods of organized suppression that were mentioned in that documentary, as I experienced, witnessed, or heard about all of them from close personal associates who usually had direct experience of them.

    While my life was being ruined, I began hearing about some of those suppressed technologies from people close to me, from their direct personal experiences. One friend was kidnapped and given an underground exotic technology show by a dissident faction of the global elite, in which free energy and antigravity technologies, among many others, were demonstrated.

    None of that had anything to do with the crazed tabloid conspiracists that spin their wild yarns with no credible evidence, but were what I and my close associates experienced. Over 30 years ago, the star of that “lost century” documentary met with a faction of the people who run the world, and they told him that they had paid out $100 billion in quiet money to sequester disruptive technologies. That number may have doubled by now. When I heard that story 20 years ago, it made perfect sense, in light of what I knew.

    Who the heck throws around $100 billion to keep disruptive technologies under wraps? That is where those tales of elites bent on world domination began making sense. From what I have gathered over the years, the world’s power structure looks something like what I described here, and the sitting American president is far down that food chain, a disposable puppet, particularly after JFK’s murder in 1963. Several cartels dominate the world economy, and none of them really deserve to exist. All of them will vanish in what I call the Fifth Epoch, but we live in a world of artificially enforced scarcity, as those racketeers’ psychopathic games will only work in a world of scarcity and fear.

    I learned my life’s greatest lessons during those years of ruination. My primary lesson was that personal integrity is the world’s scarcest, and most precious, commodity. Long before I encountered structural analysis, such as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model, I realized that nearly all of the organized suppression was structural, not conspiratorial. The ranks of law enforcement and the judicial system are riddled with psychopaths eager to sell themselves to the highest bidder. We encountered many such elite assets as they attacked us, and a compliant media was their accomplice, as their articles were a libelous concoction of outright lies and half-truths. We also encountered bona fide corporate hit men, who infiltrated themselves into our efforts (1, 2), to strike when the government/media alliance did, and our assailants have a lot of blood on their hands.

    But those hit men and women did not hurt us as much as our allies did, as they piled on as we were attacked, to steal our businesses. After I witnessed several attempts to steal our companies, I told my partner how shocking it was to witness, and his reply was that he was shocked, too, the first 50 times that he experienced it.

    After those horrific experiences, I began my years of study and encountered bizarre polarities on this issue. The structuralists and political left completely denied that such elites existed, as their awareness was limited to what I call retail elites: those in the public eye. The conspiracists, on the other hand, had a paranoid and truly insane obsession with those elites, and they constructed lurid fantasies, usually based on no credible evidence whatsoever. What both camps had in common was thinking like victims instead of creators, which was their greatest weakness, and I never saw any of them do anything proactive (protest does not count for much, as it is just complaining). None of them ever tried to bring disruptive technologies to market.

    I eventually concluded that these situations are 1% conspiracy and 99% complicity, as nearly everybody does the bidding of evil-minded elites, gratis, with their lack of integrity and sentience. In taking in the long view of the human journey, all of those behaviors are very understandable, even if few want to admit the degenerate ethics of our species, which seems little different from how chimps operate, from elite enclaves to street corners to jungles.

    As my astronaut colleague once wrote, the key is combined positive intention, not focusing on elites and other bad actors. Focusing on elite machinations is just another tribalism, to make them into an outgroup. A successful effort will need to aim far higher than that.
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 6th February 2024 at 20:50.
    My big essay, published in 2014, is here.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    I just finished drafting this section of my upcoming essay.

    Best,

    Wade


    Western Medicine: The Short Version

    While Europe was conquering the world and the British began to industrialize, Europe’s richest man was Louis XIV. Louis lived to be 76, but of the six children that he fathered with his wife, only one survived to adulthood. Louis outlived all of his immediate family members (at least the “legitimate” ones), and his great grandson succeeded him as king. Would you want to be the richest person in Europe, but you watched nearly all of your family members die, mostly as children? There were no “good old days.”

    The greatest benefit of the Industrial Revolution, and the biggest event in the human journey so far, which is largely overlooked and its cause is lied about, is the end of childhood death. There is no way that any society in which half of its children died can credibly be romanticized; no hunter-gather societies, no agrarian societies, and not even those relatively peaceful matrilocal horticultural villages. The biggest part of that vanishing of childhood death in industrial societies was the conquest of infectious disease, and it had nothing to do with medical interventions such as vaccines and antibiotics. Infectious diseases were conquered in the West before there were vaccines or antibiotics for them. Improvements in sanitation (don’t put the outhouse next to the well), nutrition (no longer eating rotting food in the winters), and hygiene (regular bathing, clean clothes, underwear, teeth-cleaning, etc.) conquered infectious disease, but the medical racket and its servile intellectuals rewrote the history to provide the illusion that medical interventions get credit for it.

    My father was born on a farm in 1936, as one of six children. All six children lived until at least age 80, and my grandmother marveled that none of her children died. My studies gave me an appreciation of why she thought that it was a miracle: that was the first generation for which childhood death had largely been conquered. About a dozen years after my father was born, legislation was introduced to the USA’s Congress to close the Centers for Disease Control (“CDC”), because the war against infectious disease had been won. But we just had a global “pandemic,” with unprecedented and draconian responses, which served a global racket and various elite agendas. So, I need to digress a little and go back to the beginning.

    Around 1999, I wrote my medical racket essay, updated it in 2014, and in the coming years, that essay will be substantially revised, largely to update it with the infectious disease racket. This will be a very brief summary of today’s medical racket and how it came to be. What we call medical care began with mothers that treated their children for various maladies, so that they might survive to successfully reproduce and fulfil that biological imperative. There is skeletal evidence of disabled people that were cared for by their societies long ago, even Neanderthals, and even chimps have been observed to help the infirm. The rise of civilization saw the rise of medical professionals, and the civilizations in Sumer and ancient Egypt left behind medical writings. As with nearly everything else in early civilization, men dominated professional medical practice, although the Greek mythical figures of Hygeia and Panacea demonstrate that women played a role. In brief, women emphasized gentle prevention and healing. Men emphasized violent intervention, as they waged war against the body, with surgeries and the like (which has been called “torture as treatment”). That dichotomy lasts to this day.

    After Rome fell and the Catholic Church burned Greek works as pagan, that knowledge was lost to Europe, and Galen’s work guided Western medicine for a millennium. Women healers worked in medieval times, with gentle treatments such as herbs, but the witch-burning centuries largely wiped them out. What we call modern Western medicine today began its rise with Vesalius’s work, which is one of the first examples of modern science. Vesalius was so viciously attacked by his peers that he tried to destroy his work. A decade later, the first person to correctly describe pulmonary circulation was burned at the stake, so the rise of medical science was a fitful process. One of Vesalius’s contemporaries began a revolution in battlefield medicine.

    Western medicine is good at emergency medicine, which was developed in battlefield conditions, but it is a miserable failure for almost everything else, especially in treating degenerative and infectious diseases, but that is where the big money is, and we just saw the medical racket greatly damage the world economy and kill millions, in its quest for wealth and power.

    The Scientific Revolution was dominated by men, as early medical science was, and in the late 1700s, there was the phenomenon of “heroic” medicine, with bloodletting and mercury “medicine.” Heroic medicine harmed and killed more people than it helped (such as George Washington, who was nearly bled dry, which killed him). Mercury was used as “medicine” until my lifetime, and as I write this, mercury is still put in vaccines used in poor nations (Americans are no longer injected with mercury). Mercury is highly neurotoxic (1, 2, 3). That kind of practice still dominates Western medicine.

    In the early 1800s, surgery was considered the height of barbarity. If the patients did not die from the surgery, in agonizing pain, they often died from post-operative infection. Surgery’s reputation began to change with anesthesia, which began use in the 1840s, initially in dentistry. The battles over precedent and recognition for inventing anesthesia were ugly. The pioneers of anesthesia did not benefit at all, and even had their lives ruined.

    The fate of the man who pioneered sanitary medical practiced is a good example of how the medical profession operated. Ignaz Semmelweis was a Hungarian obstetrician working in a Vienna hospital who noticed in 1847 that poor women begged to be admitted to the midwives-in-training-run maternity ward rather than the one run by MDs-in-training. Those women would even give birth in an alley rather than be admitted to the MD-run ward. Semmelweis discovered what those poor women knew: an MD-in-training-assisted delivery had ten times the puerperal fever death rate as the midwifed one (about 20% of the mothers died from it). Semmelweis noticed that the MDs-in-training would come straight from dissecting cadavers to assist in births, and their hands had a “cadaverous” smell. This was before the rise of the germ theory of disease, and Semmelweis had those MD-trainees wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution before working in the maternity ward, which conquered the cadaverous smell. In the first month of his program, the puerperal fever death rate declined by 90%.

    Semmelweis wrote up his findings, and was eventually attacked by the medical profession. To suggest that doctors were killing their patients was beyond the pale. Semmelweis’s career was ruined, and his health failed during that vicious treatment. He was involuntarily committed to an insane asylum, where he soon died from the beatings that he received from the staff. A generation after his death, when sanitary practices became the norm, he became a Hungarian national hero.

    In the early 1800s there were not really professional scientists, but gentlemen scientists who pursued science in their leisure time, and were called “natural philosophers.” During Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, when he first proposed relativity theory, he was employed as a clerk in the Swiss patent office, and those papers were initially obscure. The next year, he managed to get a promotion and raise from the patent office and was finally awarded his doctorate. Such were the lives of scientists long ago.

    In 1854, while Semmelweis languished in obscurity, a physician noted that a deadly cholera outbreak in London could be traced to one well. Public sanitation then became a priority in Western cities, and thus began the conquest of infectious diseases in the West. More than anything else, the rise in public sanitation ended childhood death in the West.

    In 1859, Darwin published his On the Origin of Species, which was a major event in life sciences. At the same time, there was great debate on spontaneous generation. In microbiology textbooks today, Louis Pasteur is given full credit for overturning spontaneous generation theory, but that idea is a fairy tale. The history I was taught is full of lies, and scientific history seems little different. Pasteur is a towering figure in the history of science, but he was a publicity-seeking scoundrel who might have marched the biosciences off in the wrong direction, which they have yet to recover from. His proposals for human experiments foreshadowed the Nazis. He seems to have serially plagiarized a rival in developing his theories, and his revered germ theory of disease is flawed, perhaps greatly so. Pasteur was the first great commercializer of vaccines, and therein lies a tale with great pertinence to today.

    Western vaccination began with Jenner, and smallpox was the initial disease that was vaccinated for, but there was never really any success with it. England, which first industrialized, had the best early public health statistics, but even those could be rigged. In London in 1750, just as the Industrial Revolution began to take off, two-thirds of all children, rich and poor, died by age five. By 1840, that number had dropped by about half, with the rising standards of living, which was also generally true for the entire UK. In 1840, England passed its first law for compulsory smallpox vaccination, and the laws became increasingly harsh in the 1850s and 1860s, including imprisonment and fines for failing to get vaccinated (or parents’ children). Perversely, after each compulsory vaccine campaign, smallpox would break out, with high mortality rates, particularly in the 1870s, of about 20% of those infected, and children were obviously being maimed and killed by the vaccines. I have read many books that challenge the entire vaccine paradigm (1, 2, 3), by MDs and scientists, and the best account that I have seen on smallpox is in Dissolving Illusions.

    See these charts from the site based on Dissolving Illusions, and the authors have responded to a critique by an anonymous assailant, whose attack strategy is typical of Big Pharma shills. The analysis gets into detail on measles and vaccines, to accuse the authors of Dissolving Illusions of being liars, without ever mentioning that the death rate from measles had declined by over 99% (by 99.96% in England, from its peak in 1840) before the vaccine was introduced, which makes lauding the measles vaccine ludicrous on its face, like giving full credit to a new weapon when the war was already over. Such attacks are dishonest or idiotic or both, only dupe the ignorant and gullible, and those attackers may suffer from what could be called Debunker’s Disease.

    After compulsory vaccine campaigns that killed and maimed children, followed by deadly epidemics, in 1885, the people of Leicester had finally had enough. They rejected vaccination campaigns and adopted a practice of quarantining smallpox victims and disinfecting their homes. Leicester never again had significant smallpox mortality, while their heavily vaccinated neighboring cities were repeatedly scourged with deadly outbreaks. The medical authorities kept predicting a smallpox catastrophe for Leicester that never happened. I won’t be referring to Wikipedia much when it comes to modern Western medicine, as Wikipedia is a medical racket mouthpiece.

    Smallpox was the only vanquished infectious disease for which a case could be made for vaccination, as none of the other killer diseases were vaccinated for before they virtually disappeared from Western nations. But the data does not demonstrate that vaccination made any difference with smallpox, and likely killed far more people than were “helped.” If we compare smallpox deaths with all of the other killer diseases, they all went down at the same time, and all of the others nearly vanished before there were vaccines or antibiotics for them (see the graphics attached to this post, for instance).

    The data demonstrates that improvements in public sanitation, hygiene, and nutrition get all of the credit for conquering infectious disease, and medical interventions had almost nothing to do with it. They were Hygeia’s feminine principles at work, not the warfare tactics of male-run Western medicine. Western MDs in the first half of the 20th century, thoroughly steeped in warfare ideology, literally saw their patients as battlefields in the war against disease, and viewed their treatments as the equivalent of strafing runs on their patients’ bodies.

    Those killer diseases became milder or vanished. Smallpox had a killer version and a mild version that was like chickenpox. By the late 1890s, the killer version of smallpox had disappeared from the USA. Smallpox vaccination rates declined as the smallpox deaths did, which is the opposite of what would have been the case if smallpox vaccines really worked.

    The biggest killer in 1800s England was scarlet fever, which is bacterial, there was never a successful vaccine for it, and before antibiotics made their appearance, scarlet fever had vanished with the rest of those diseases. The medical racket invented a ruse, calling already vanquished diseases “vaccine preventable,” but they disappeared without vaccines just like the others. Today, about 15-20% of children have scarlet fever bacteria, but they don’t get sick from it. There are many instances in which the germ = disease equation obviously does not work.

    Somewhat paradoxically, just as those killer infectious diseases began disappearing, a new one appeared: polio. However, polio is primarily caused by pesticide poisoning, not the polio virus, just like AIDS is primarily caused by chemical poisoning, mostly through recreational drugs, not the HIV retrovirus (the first “harmful” retrovirus ever recorded) but the infectious disease racket turned those diseases into bonanzas of lucrative medical treatment that often killed more people than the diseases did. Both polio and AIDS have many cases in which the virus that allegedly caused the diseases could not be found in the patients, and millions of people have the viruses that supposedly cause polio and AIDS, but they do not get the diseases.

    Joseph Lister made the final improvement that rescued surgery from its barbaric reputation with sterile surgery, but it took a generation for Western doctors to finally accept his findings. The MD W.W. Keen, who brought Lister’s practices to the USA, was repeatedly denied the opportunity to practice medicine and was attacked by the medical establishment when his sterile surgical practices worked. That is the norm for innovation, not an aberration. Of course, there is not one word about Keen’s pioneering of sterile surgery in the USA in his Wikipedia bio.

    In the 1890s, when surgery finally became “respectable,” surgeons went wild and saw surgery as a cure-all, especially for cancer. Attacking the tumor became the dogma. The folly of that approach was known as far back as Hippocrates, but it remains the dogma today. With the lone exception of Rife’s treatment, every alternative cancer treatment that I know of does not attack the tumor but rehabilitates the patients’ immune systems to deal with the cancer. But the big money is not in that, and people are addicted to their processed food diets and other pleasures that gave them the cancer in the first place, refuse to change, even when facing certain death, so the medical racket’s cash registers continue to sing and the cemeteries have booming business, especially these days.

    Founding Father Benjamin Rush personified heroic medicine, with bloodletting and mercury, but he warned against the formation of a medical racket in the USA, and he was prophetic. In the early 1800s, orthodox MDs competed against herbalists, homeopaths, and midwives. The AMA was formed in 1845, and its first order of business was campaigning to make abortion illegal, in order to put midwives out of business. Big Pharma got its start by providing mercury “medicine” to soldiers in the USA’s Civil War, and just like industrialization and global conquest led to new kinds of elites, industrialization led to new rackets, and the rise of the USA’s medical racket, which is increasingly a global racket, really began with industrialization. The Gilded Age was also an age of “proprietary medicine,” in which the ingredients of the “medicines” were trade secrets. It was all high quackery, but that was how Big Pharma got its start.

    In 1899 the AMA hired an abortionist (who literally had no medical training), George Simmons, to become the editor for its journal. Simmons soon turned the Journal of the American Medical Association (“JAMA”) into a lucrative publication with a drug approval racket. Simmons became rich from the racket, for which no drug testing was ever performed, and he hired an assistant, Morris Fishbein, who flunked anatomy and never practiced medicine for a day in his life. Simmons drugged his wife and tried to have her involuntarily committed to an insane asylum, but she fought back, Simmons’s image was ruined (the 1924 trial inspired movies such as Gaslight), and Fishbein took over. Fishbein extended the approval racket to food, and in one of the most infamous acts in the history of medicine, Fishbein made JAMA into a vehicle for cigarette ads that made health claims! Fishbein even helped structure “research” so that the cigarette companies could make health claims in their ads. Wikipedia does not have a word about that in its hagiographic bio of Fishbein.

    Not only did Fishbein promote cigarettes, he attacked all alternative cancer treatments, although he tried to buy some out to monopolize them, and then attacked when they did not sell out to him (1, 2). One of his victims fought back, Fishbein was in his turn disgraced, when his abysmal credentials were exposed at the trial, and Fishbein was finally deposed as the dictator of American medicine in 1949, the same year that legislation was introduced to abolish the CDC, as the war on infectious disease had been won, no thanks to Western medicine.

    Only after Fishbein had been deposed did JAMA begin to publish studies on the link between smoking and lung cancer. But Fishbein went to work for a cigarette company and designed their “research” to support health claims for its new “mineral” filter, which was made of asbestos, of all things. That company is being sued to this day from customers who got asbestos lung disease from those cigarettes. You could not make this up. When the “research” was completed on the asbestos cigarette filter, then came the ad blitz, especially in JAMA’s pages. Finally, there was a complaint; from the drug companies that advertised in JAMA. Their drugs ads appeared alongside cigarette ads that made cigarettes look like wonder drugs, and it made the drug companies look bad. Finally, in 1954, JAMA discontinued running tobacco ads (which made Fishbein a rich man), but the AMA was in bed with the tobacco interests clear into the 1980s, when it was finally shamed enough to remove the cigarette vending machines from its lobby and stopped investing in tobacco companies, believe it or not.

    When the political climate finally turned against tobacco in the 1980s, the tobacco companies used the Reagan administration to threaten trade sanctions against Asian nations that would not open their doors to American tobacco companies. The threats were successful, ad campaigns in those Asian nations specifically targeted women and children, and smoking rates skyrocketed in those nations. I used the tobacco situation in Edward Herman’s biography as an example of the advertising filter in the Propaganda Model, and how it even corrupted a medical journal. Little did I know what a gentle preview that would be, of the corruption of Western medicine.

    Fishbein was “America’s Doctor” before Anthony Fauci acquired that appellation, and Fauci was worse than Fishbein, but that comes later. For all of the evil activities of people such as Simmons and Fishbein who, along with Fauci, are arguably the three greatest quacks of the past century, it was more important when robber barons joined the party, especially John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller lived to be 97 and his physician was a homeopath, so Rockefeller never took the drugs that his empire produced, for one of the many ironies of my studies. Rockefeller and Carnegie diversified their blood-soaked fortunes into medicine, beginning with the Flexner Report in 1910 (funded by Carnegie) which was the beginning of the end of medical schools that did not adhere to the surgery-and-drugs paradigm. It was the death knell for medical schools for women, blacks, and homeopaths.

    In 1914, Rockefeller had his striking coal miners machine gunned, and his public image in the aftermath was similar to Genghis Khan’s. He then hired J.P. Morgan’s publicist, Ivy Lee, and Rockefeller began the effort to repair his public image, which included the charade of giving a dime to everybody that he met. Lee is considered the father of public relations, and one of his disciples was Edward Bernays. Among Bernays’s “accomplishments” were helping addict American women to cigarettes, promoting fluoridation, as an industrial waste was rebranded into compulsory “medicine,” and helping overthrow Guatemala’s government on behalf of Rockefeller interests.

    The alliance of robber baron “philanthropists,” the AMA, and Big Pharma established the medical racket as it stands today, and it long ago captured the government agencies that supposedly regulate Western medicine, turning them from public watchdogs to corporate lap dogs and attack dogs. The corruption is surreal, and was in full view in recent years to anybody paying attention, which I will soon discuss.

    In the 1920s, Rockefeller began getting into the cancer racket, and he sent Lee to Germany in 1934, to help burnish Hitler’s image. Rockefeller’s empire was in bed with Hitler, whose invasion of the Soviet Union was not feasible without Rockefeller oil. The Rockefeller Empire narrowly escaped prosecution and seizure of its assets for treason for its support of Hitler, while the Bush family, who were Rockefeller lackeys, were not as fortunate. I.G. Farben was the biggest cartel in Europe, they had a facility at Auschwitz, and invented the gas chamber gas and other nerve gases, and the Rockefeller Empire worked closely with Farben during the war.

    When I wrote the original version of my medical racket essay, it focused on the cancer racket more than anything else. While I covered Pasteur and Béchamp, vaccination, and Duesberg’s fate for challenging AIDS dogma, I did not know who Fauci was and did not pay attention to the rising infectious disease racket. Microscopes nearly a century old, with “impossible” resolutions (1, 2), have pointed to a different paradigm of microbiological reality, but orthodoxy pretends that those microscopes and the findings derived from them don’t even exist.

    To be fair, in the late 1990s, the infectious disease racket was nowhere near its dominance today. I studied it more for my 2014 update and began a vaccination thread in 2015. But my big wakeup call was the COVID pandemic, and it took me some time to begin to understand what happened. On one hand, I could not have been too surprised, but on the other, even I was astounded at the medical racket’s global reach, which danced the world’s politicians like puppets. What follows will be a very brief account of the events and my studies over the past several years.

    Mainstream science has very little understanding of how immune systems work, and it certainly had no idea at all in Pasteur’s day. The idea of injecting disease organisms into people to prevent disease is a highly dubious idea. With our primitive understanding of immunity today, some obvious dynamics have been identified, and specifically cellular and humoral immunity, which is also called innate and acquired. We are born with cellular immunity, and white blood cells are the exemplar of cellular immunity, as specialized cells defend the organism from hostile microbes. When anybody encounters new kinds of hostile microbes, their body’s only line of defense is cellular immunity. Once the infection is fought off (fever is a defense mechanisms that means that your immune system is working), then humoral immunity kicks in, as antibodies are developed to recognize those hostile microbes and make short work of them if they reappear. Bouts with mild childhood diseases seem to train immune systems for a lifetime of robust health, which I have enjoyed.

    That is the basic functioning, and vaccination attempts to bypass cellular immunity to artificially induce antibodies, without generating them normally. It puts the cart before the horse. Vaccines shock the immune system with their adjuvants, to generate antibodies for a threat that does not yet exist. There is a great deal of evidence that such artificial manipulation wrecks immune systems. All those artificially induced antibodies are like soldiers without a war to fight, and they eventually attack healthy tissue, not the microbes that they were designed for. Attacking healthy tissue is an autoimmune reaction, and autoimmune reactions are how vaccines work. That is how autoimmune disease arises from vaccination.

    Also, those disease organisms that are vaccinated for usually enter the body through the nose and mouth, not injected into the skin, which also has a questionable immune system effect, as it bypasses the body’s normal defenses. Astoundingly, exactly how vaccines work are carefully guarded trade secrets, in a repeat of the proprietary medicine days. Why on Earth would anybody submit to medical procedures when how they work is a secret?

    As I will get to, through legal chicanery, vaccine manufacturers are legally shielded from prosecution for the harm that their vaccines cause, and once they got that legal immunity (in 1986, at the same that that the same business-friendly presidential administration was forcibly breaking open Asian markets for American cigarettes), then began the era of pincushioning American children with mandatory vaccines. The Mafia never had a sweeter deal.

    When Fauci rose to power, just before this new era of forcible vaccinations, about 13% of American children had chronic illnesses, allergies, and autoimmune diseases. Today, over half of them do. Fauci was ordered by Congress to investigate the skyrocketing chronic diseases in children, and Fauci never complied, as he does Big Pharma’s bidding. They know all too well what is causing it (processed food, vaccines, fluoridation, and other industrial insults, and we are history’s fattest and most sedentary humans), but Big Pharma makes even more money by selling drugs to manage the symptoms of those chronic diseases and conditions. When Fauci rose to power, the USA’s life expectancy was close to what other comparable industrialized nations had, but today, it is six years shorter, even with the highest medical bills on Earth. What a vicious circle of suffering and death, in the name of health!

    Because our understanding of immune systems is so primitive, and of the human body in general, the gold standard for testing medical interventions is to compare populations who received the intervention versus those that did not, on the full spectrum of health outcomes. Vaccines have hundreds of recorded side-effects, which even the vaccine-makers admit, and the first place to look for those effects is by comparing those populations. The gold standard for medical intervention safety testing (such as for drugs and vaccines) is called the double-blind study, in which neither the patients nor the people administering the treatment know which is the treatment and which is the harmless placebo. Such a study has yet to be performed for any of the 69 mandatory vaccines administered to American children today. When pressed on that issue, Fauci lied about it, as usual, when he is not saying that he can’t remember anything, like Reagan did. Fauci’s entire career was based on habitual lying, like a standard politician in his tailored suits.

    There is no credible safety testing for American vaccines, but the problem is far worse in poor nations that are “helped” by “philanthropists such as Bill Gates. I have lived across the street from Microsoft’s headquarters since 2012, and I have heard many Bill Gates stories over the years, enough to know that I would not want him over for dinner. Back in the 1980s, I heard of his visits to strip clubs in the Seattle area, and his wife was his employee that he seduced. When he traveled, before he was married, he had a woman in every town. I heard that through his administrative assistant, and I heard many stories of his boorish behavior. He sure was not Saint Bill.

    I knew long ago that Gates was no moral leader, but I kind of gave him the benefit of the doubt on his “philanthropy,” although I did not know much about it. It was not until the COVID pandemic hit, and Gates was all over the media in the spring of 2020 as some kind of medical expert, that I really began paying attention to him. I was immediately struck by the fact that some of his pals were among the greatest war criminals and mass murderers on Earth (1). I was kind of surprised by that. I had been hearing conspiracist yarns about Gates for many years, but did not take them very seriously.

    Back in 2013, I was amazed when RFK, Jr., came forward and stated that his father never believed the Warren Commission’s findings. At that time, I knew for a fact for nearly 25 years that JFK was not killed by Oswald, but it was the first time that I heard any Kennedy publicly say it. I was impressed, but did not know anything about RFK, Jr., other than that he had a heroin addiction while young.

    I did not hear about Kennedy again until early 2020, when he began challenging the official pandemic story and criticizing Gates. When I wrote my first Gates post in early 2021, I still kind of gave him a pass, but not for much longer. A few months later, his wife divorced him, primarily over his philandering and his relationship with Epstein. Before long, I was finding it hard to be very skeptical of any allegations about Gates, and then I read Kennedy’s book on Fauci.

    Gates and Fauci were literally partners in crime. What they have done to American health is bad enough, but I have the hardest time forgiving what they have done to poor nations, and African ones in particular. Their efforts were genocidal, and the one that really stuck with me was a Gates vaccine campaign in Africa for which Gates boasted that it saved the lives of millions of girls, but the opposite was true. For poor nations such as those in Africa, there is often not even a pretense of vaccine safety testing, and when one of the world’s most renowned experts performed a retrospective study on that population that received Gates’s vaccine, it turned out that the death rate of vaccinated girls was ten times the rate of the unvaccinated ones. Gates seems to be a eugenicist, like his father was. That Gates modeled his “philanthropy” on John D. Rockefeller’s kind of “philanthropy” is significant. There is no humanitarian impulse there that I can see.

    I almost don’t want to pick on vaccines that much, because almost no Western medical interventions work, if by working we mean making the patients healthier and living longer. For all of those interventions that I listed here, there is really not much to debate, as the data is usually unequivocal, and is usually produced by the medical establishment itself, even when it is legendary for fraudulently manipulating data and hiding data from the public.

    I need to at least sketch the rise of the infectious disease racket, with Fauci and Gates at the helm. To begin with, for those Industrial Revolution improvements that conquered infectious disease in the West before the rise of vaccines and antibiotics, Gates is very hostile to those measures for poor nations. It is all about vaccines and drugs for Gates. I eventually learned that in order to qualify for Gates Foundation “donations,” the applicants need to show how their efforts can be turned into intellectual property that Gates can profit from. No intellectual property profit can be generated by providing clean drinking water to poor nations.

    In the late 1940s, legislation began to be introduced in the USA’s Congress to abolish the CDC, because the war against infectious disease had been won. Between 1900 and 1948, infant (less than one year old) mortality in the USA declined by 75%, from 16% to 4%, and vaccines and antibiotics had nothing to do with it. What made the CDC relevant again was the first mass vaccination campaign, for polio, which was a catastrophe. Again, polio is primarily caused by insecticide poisoning, and the rise and fall of polio perfectly mirrors the rise and fall of the indiscriminate use of pesticides, beginning with arsenic-and-lead-based pesticides in the late 1800s, to DDT after World War II. By the 1970s, according to the CDC, nearly 90% of polio cases in the USA were caused by the vaccine.

    Polio came and went, and mass vaccination began in the 1960s for mild childhood diseases such as measles. They were completely unnecessary and helped wreck the health of children. By the 1970s, the CDC was once again looking for ways to stay relevant, and their godsend that time was the swine flu “pandemic” of 1976, in which 50 million Americans were vaccinated for a disease that killed a grand total of one person (at most!), while the vaccine killed dozens of people and injured many thousands. Fauci was early his career, and watched how his boss managed the scare. The federal government stepped in and indemnified the vaccine makers for the avalanche of lawsuits that followed that fraudulent scare. For the next 40 years, there was one phony “pandemic” scare after another, until Fauci finally hit pay dirt with COVID.

    The biggest phony scare was for AIDS. When gay men began getting AIDS, it was initially considered to be from drug use. San Francisco was the epicenter of AIDS. I lived in California at the time and heard the wild stories, and not just about gay men, as drug use was rampant. 100% of the early AIDS victims in San Francisco did poppers, which is the anal sex drug. Bob Gallo was cut from the same cloth as Pasteur, craving wealth and fame. In the 1970s, Gallo became a laughingstock when he misidentified a contaminated sample as the leukemia virus, which he hoped would earn him the Nobel Prize. Several years later, he unethically announced in a press conference that he had isolated the AIDS virus. When the paper supporting the announcement was finally published, less than half of Gallo’s AIDS subjects even had the HIV virus. Gallo could not even establish correlation, much less causation. But by that time Fauci ran the NIAID, and Gallo’s meaningless press conference was all that Fauci needed to build his infectious disease empire.

    When the world’s foremost virologist, Peter Duesberg, dissented from the Fauci/Gallo AIDS dogma, Duesberg’s career was over, in an early example of the coming Cancel Culture, in which dissent is severely punished, with ruined careers and lives. Not only was there no persuasive evidence that the HIV virus caused AIDS (no retrovirus, Duesberg’s specialty, had ever before been shown to induce disease), but a deadly chemotherapy drug that had been abandoned over its deadliness, AZT, was suddenly rehabilitated in a blatantly fraudulent trial and became the exclusive AIDS treatment. It was like pouring gasoline on a fire, and it killed over 300,000 gay men, most of whom were HIV-positive but healthy before the AIDS scare. Fauci promoted the idea that AIDS could be spread by casual contact, which was a Big Lie that had pundits predicting the extinction of humans. Fauci developed his playbook for COVID with his AIDS scam.

    Maybe the biggest media scandal in my lifetime, and that is saying something, is how any suggestion that COVID may have come out of a lab was censored from the Internet, while clearly fraudulent papers were published in scientific and medical journals to deny it. With what is being increasingly revealed by lawsuits that have made American government documents publicly available (1, 2, 3), the great burden of proof has shifted to anybody making the case that COVID didn’t come out of a lab. The media is trying to make it go away, of course, but the evidence has increasingly been made public.

    The scandal around COVID origins was only the beginning. As with AIDS, Fauci made it up as he went along. Epidemic responses until COVID only quarantined the sick, not the healthy. The global lockdowns were one of many unprecedented responses to COVID, enforced by draconian measures. Sweden made the mistake of overreacting to the AIDS scare, did not have COVID lockdowns, and had the lowest mortality rate among Western nations, although the pundits predicted doom for Sweden. One of the first lines of defense for epidemics is repurposing existing drugs. The medical establishment waged war against all repurposed drugs, with the exception of worthless ones that could be patented, such as Remdesivir, which Fauci and Gates had a financial stake in, which was hurriedly approved with the standard fraudulent trial. Remdesivir killed many thousands of American patients.

    Two drugs that were repurposed with great success, HCQ and ivermectin, were banned in the West, to make way for Remdesivir and the vaccines. The Western medical establishment literally had no early treatment protocol for COVID (and attacked those that were developed), which killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. By the time somebody was hospitalized, it was usually too late. These actions by the American medical racket ensured that Americans had the highest number of COVID deaths on Earth, as American life expectancy plunged.

    Of course, the “warp speed” trials for the COVID vaccine were fraudulently performed. Many analyses have confirmed that the COVID vaccine killed about one person for every 800-to-1,000 shots, for several hundred thousand dead Americans. I knew somebody who was healthy when she got the vaccine, got sick the next day and was dead three weeks later. Several of my friends were injured by the vaccine, one is crippled, and one is dying of sudden cancer (called turbo-cancer these days). Vaccinated athletes are keeling over and dying from heart failure at a rate ten times higher than normal. Here is one summary of the COVID vaccine’s “success.” I read material like this almost daily: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.

    The American medical bureaucracy is owned by gigantic medical corporations, and even among the defenders of science, medical science is seen as its flimsiest and most corrupt branch, riddled with conflicts of interest, with up to half of its scientific papers worthless. Capitalism, national security states, billionaire “philanthropists,” and medicine make very poor bedfellows, as medicine becomes an arena of male-driven violence, greed, and empire-building.

    Since Bill Gates essentially owns the WHO these days, which is trying to ram through even more draconian global powers, I am far less skeptical of the conspiracy theories, of a coming one-world-dictatorship, erected under a technocratic biosecurity agenda, than I used to be. It certainly fits with that I am seeing, but Bill Gates is a member of the retail elite, so he is nowhere near the top of the global power structure. He may be doing their bidding, witting or otherwise, but again, I think that too much focus on their machinations is counterproductive and gets in the way of amassing combined positive intention, which is the only way that I see out of this planet-threatening mess. That ends my summary of Western medicine for this essay.

    If we make it to the Fifth Epoch, all of the rackets will collapse, and nobody will miss them. In the Fifth Epoch, everybody will live to be 100 and be healthy the entire way. People will hardly ever get cancer, and it will be easily treated.
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 12th February 2024 at 17:04.
    My big essay, published in 2014, is here.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    That post that I started to write last year, which was going to summarize my work in ten pages or so, is going to be over 100 pages. This kind of foolishness is not new for me. When I began writing what became my big essay, I originally thought that I could get it done in 50 pages. But, I have been writing this in post-style, not the more scholarly versions that become essays. Too late to go back now, and it was intended to be a preview of my coming years of writing. Right now, it is a big, sprawling mess that I need to try to reorganize and edit down, and I have a lot more writing to go. I hope to publish it in a month. Below are two chapters that I drafted some weeks ago, so they are in decent shape. We’ll see what the final versions look like, but they give another peek at what I am working on.

    This will be the first significant essay in almost four years, and might be the only essay that I publish this year, but I hope that I can also complete my epochal transitions essay this year. We’ll see, and as I threatened, my public posts will become rarer as I do this work, and might become the new normal for the next several years, although when I get this essay published, I’ll be doing some catching up on posts before I dive back into essay work.

    Best,

    Wade



    Epoch 3.1: Civilization

    In several places on Earth, people independently domesticated plants (and usually animals, too), including New Guinea. In four of those domestication centers, about five thousand years after farming began, another seminal human invention appeared: civilization. The Indus (AKA Harappan) and Egyptian civilizations rose later than Fertile Crescent civilization did and were influenced by them, so are not as “pristine” as the other four. Why those places and not others has been controversial, but what those civilizations had in common were seed crops that could form a tax base for a new kind of human: elites. The forerunners of elites were evident with chiefs and “big men,” but the seminal event was the rise of civilization. Many of humanity’s greatest blessings and evils came with the rise of civilization.

    Until the rise of civilization, almost nobody in the human journey was exempt from subsistence activities. The energy (AKA food, in the early days) surplus was just not large enough to sustain people who did not literally work for their food, be it hunting, gathering, planting, harvesting, herding, etc. The early days of plant domestication are called horticulture, and farming is simply a more intense and sophisticated version of it. Instead of a village in a forest clearing, with crops here and there, farmers leveled the forest, often planted monocrops, and used the trees for fuel and building materials. In Eurasia, large domestic animals were used to pull plows, to wring more crops from the soils. Because of men’s physical strength, the often female-run horticulture was supplanted by men that handled draft animals, and growing food became masculinized. Herding societies were also patrilocal, as men’s physical strength helped handle domestic animals. That brief period of rising women’s status ended, and everywhere that civilization appeared, women’s status commensurately declined.

    But on the positive side, the primary upshot of civilization was the development of professions. No longer devoted to subsistence activities, professionals put our big brains and tool-making/using skills to new uses. Previously unimagined activities and tools were invented by civilized people, which increased humanity’s collective intelligence and toolset. In the Fertile Crescent, where the first civilization appeared, it was not long before smelting metallurgy (first copper, then bronze, then iron, as higher smelting temperatures were achieved), writing, the wheel, and many other unprecedented innovations appeared. A hunter-gatherer of 15 kya could not imagine civilization, but nobody ever imagined the next Epoch before it arrived, until now. But the energy surplus was still thin, and could only support an elite and professional class of 10-20% of the civilized population. The rest farmed, and the oppressed agrarian peasant typified the Third Epoch, taxed, often ruthlessly, to support cities, with their elites and professions.

    On the negative side came warfare on an immense scale, often instigated by elites, which were new, like professions. Hunter-gatherer religions were wiped out by new professional priesthoods, religion became a method of social control, elites claimed divine status or sanction, and the corrupt priesthood abetted that charade. Slavery also reached new levels, so much so that the first known written laws were significantly concerned with slave treatment. The primary use of slaves was in agriculture, mining, and other brute labor (women often became household slaves and sex slaves). Those early days of civilization, in Asia particularly, have also been called the golden age of barbarians, as marauding bands, often on horseback, would raid societies, deliver their captives to those civilizations for a fee, and the slave trade was established.

    Also, the domestication of animals, and their living in close proximity to their owners, led to diseases that humans contracted from their animals, and epidemics accompanied those early civilizations. Also, sanitation became an issue, which contributed to the epidemics arguably more than the pathogens. Sewage flowed to downstream societies. The first known writings were significantly devoted to medicine. The filthiness, casual brutality, and other aspects of early civilizations would shock today’s Westerners, similar to how they often react when visiting agrarian nations.

    The first civilizations were established in river valleys, as the Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, and Nile rivers provided low-energy transportation lanes (and water for irrigation and other uses), as upriver food and goods flowed to the cities, including trees, as upriver deforestation was standard. They also began harnessing a new energy source early on: wind, as sailboats, invented in Sumer, which is the first civilization, plied civilized rivers and the nearby seas.

    A city is essentially a collection of tools and their human users, often on a grand scale, situated on low-energy transportation lanes, so that resources are efficiently delivered, to overcome the “tyranny of distance.” Transportation over water was around 100 times more energy efficient than overland transportation, which was why all early cities were built on water-transportation lanes (rivers, lakes, seas), to expand their effective hinterland. Otherwise, those cities could not have existed.

    Houses are tools (to keep their residents warm, dry, safe, etc.) that are filled with tools. Virtually everything in a house except food and drink is a tool. Early tools were nearly exclusively about acquiring or using energy, from the first stone tools onward. On a per-capita basis, cities are more efficient users of energy, which was another reason for them. Acquiring energy, primarily in the form of food, was the preoccupation of all people until the rise of civilization. The tools of civilization often took great amounts of energy to produce, or used energy on unprecedented levels, and early on, with religious and artistic artifacts, tools had a cognitive function, which reached new levels with the invention of writing. Elite-aggrandizing architecture was epic toolmaking. The structures at Giza embodied all of Egyptian civilization’s surplus energy for a century, in a colossal act of elite display that has rarely been surpassed to this day.

    Gold was the original bright shiny object of the human journey. It was intrinsically worthless, as it was too soft to use in tools, as copper, bronze, and iron eventually were. Its only early use was decorative, but elites killed to get it. King Tut’s resplendent golden grave goods were bought with the lives of thousands of slaves, who were worked to death in the mines. Although gold was debased in the earliest civilizations with copper, it was easily separated. Gold cannot be counterfeited, and a gold coin represents the embodied energy of the effort to obtain it, so it became “precious” in that way and became money, as silver also did. Copper, silver, and gold are in the same elemental family, and their relative non-reactivity led to their being discovered as nuggets.

    Civilization has never been sustainable, as it has always been dependent on quickly depleted energy sources, from forests to soils to the hydrocarbon fuels that industrial civilization runs on. All early civilizations collapsed as they ran out of energy. A civilization is functionally similar to complex life or ecosystems, with their voracious energy needs, specialized cells, specialized organisms, and specialized people. Once the energy begins running out, it all collapses. Arguably all degenerative human diseases arise from mitochondria dysfunction, primarily caused by eating dead, preserved food, in another energy dynamic, as poor-quality nutritional calories bring the entire organism down. Nothing can effectively compensate for a lack of high-quality energy.

    The collapse dynamic was partly created by the civilizations themselves. Sumer was eventually abandoned as the fields turned white and infertile from salt; their irrigation and farming methods were not sustainable. Also, all agrarian civilizations relied on wood as their primary non-food energy source, and upriver deforestation not only caused downstream siltation as the denuded soils washed away, but deforestation also aridifies local climates. The proximate causes for most civilization collapses were droughts, which were exacerbated by deforestation, and led to wars and starvation (and related epidemics) as the civilizations collapsed. Before civilizations arose in the Fertile Crescent, a forest ran from Morocco to Afghanistan. By 2000 BCE, that forest had already been depleted. Only 10% of that already depleted forest exists today, and much has turned to desert.

    One of the earliest written stories is the Epic of Gilgamesh, who was a king of Sumerian Uruk. In the Epic, Gilgamesh specifically waged war against the forest, rafting its logs back to Uruk, and the Epic’s authors knew that deforestation led to droughts. Earth has lost a third of its terrestrial biomass since the beginning of domestication, primarily forest biomass. The forest-to-farm-to-desert dynamic began with domestication.

    In Steven LeBlanc’s Constant Battles, he discussed his fieldwork in Turkey, which excavated an early farming village. LeBlanc presented a picture of a camel train moving through the desert-like environment, similar to this picture from the same region (and that is comparatively lush land, in the Euphrates’s river valley that you can see here, surrounded by desert). Here is an image of the region where LeBlanc worked, with some mountain lakes surrounded by desert. That land was forested with oaks and pistachios 10 kya, but scarcely a tree can be seen today. Those images are from upriver on the Tigris and Euphrates, and those forests supplied Sumer. Now, when it rains, it floods, as those river valleys no longer hold water in the “sponge” of forested ecosystems. Deforestation means floods and droughts. Arguably as damaging as the deforesters were the domestic herds that came along behind them, especially goats, as they ate the regenerating forest. Pastoralists helped turn the Sahara into desert.

    The world’s first city was built on the shore of the Persian Gulf, at the Euphrates’s mouth. Today, the ruins of that city are buried in silt, well over 100 miles inland. All of that lost topsoil meant the eventual desertification of those denuded lands. All early cities on those rivers met similar fates. The seaside city of Troy, immortalized in Homer’s epics, is on the Mediterranean side of Turkey. Troy was thought to be mythical in the West, until it was finally found two centuries ago. It was buried under more than 20 feet of silt, and its ruins sit several miles inland today. That happened all around the Mediterranean’s periphery, as upriver deforestation buried those seaside cities in silt.

    The first civilizations also gave rise to the first empires, as civilizations conquered each other to expand their resource bases and exploit the conquered. Egypt’s civilization was kind of an empire, preceding the first recognized empire in today’s Iraq by several centuries, as a king from Upper Egypt defeated Lower Egypt, and what we know as Egyptian civilization began with that union. Upriver deforestation and its resultant silt made the Nile’s valley and delta the most reliable farmland among early Old World civilizations, as the farmlands were flooded each year and the silt was fertilizer. Empires fought over the Nile’s farmland for millennia.

    Akkad conquered Sumer and became the first empire over four kya (although there are arguably earlier Sumerian claimants to the “empire” designation), and that part of the world has seen rising and falling empires ever since. This is a wonderful little cartoon on the fighting over the land that is today’s Israel that has taken place over the millennia, to this very day, with the genocide in Gaza. As Sumerian civilization failed, refugees migrated to the Levant and Egypt, and stimulated those regions.

    The biblical Abraham came from Sumer. Judaism was something different. Its stories had beginnings and ends, instead of the endless cycles of other religions, which scholars have argued was the beginning of the idea of progress and the ultimate rise of the West. The biblical “thou shalt not kill” commandment only applied to the ingroup. Outgroups were always fair game, as the serial genocides in the Old Testament attested to, often cheered on by the Judaic “god.”

    Since we know the history of that part of the world the best, partly because Sumer had the first literate societies, it has been the primary academic focus of the trajectory of agrarian civilizations, although studies of the others have been slowly catching up. All Third Epoch civilizations were similar, with their unsustainable agriculture and forestry practices, elites, professions, forced servitude, monumental architecture, warfare on a grand scale, some kind of record-keeping (always originally for elite accounting of its tribute/plunder), etc. Because their ancestors drove most candidates for domestication to extinction, the Western Hemisphere’s civilizations, with the exception of the llama in Andean civilizations, did not have draft animals, and the entire trajectory of increasing energy and motive power, from draft animals to watermills (sailboats were used relatively sparingly and never close to Europe’s scale), and metal ages that resulted in iron smelting, never happened before Europeans invaded and made short work of those civilizations.

    The horse was the domesticated animal with the greatest impact on Old World empires, as it became a military advantage like no other, especially for the nomadic herders of the Eurasian steppe. Horses were essentially the first land vehicles, which greatly reduced the energetic cost of overland human transportation. Eurasian river valley civilizations represented an unprecedented energy bonanza, with vast amounts of food and embodied energy, so they were constantly harried and invaded by horse-borne raiders. Sometimes they conquered, but more often they simply milked the targeted civilizations with extortion, in an early protection racket; for enough “tribute,” they would refrain from attacking those civilizations.

    A distressing aspect of studying those times was how those societies that murdered, raped, and plundered their way across Eurasia invoked ornate ideologies that justified their crimes, as they saw themselves doing the bidding of this or that deity. All societies have their self-serving mythologies, but those rape-and-plunder societies really had to reach to portray their prodigious crimes as heroic deeds.

    DNA studies have identified three different populations in Europe during the Holocene. First on the scene were hunter-gatherers who followed the retreating ice sheets (whose ancestors drove Neanderthals to extinction), and they were in their turn displaced by farmers, and early farmers were largely displaced by invading herder societies. The Kurgan hypothesis is not so farfetched.

    Many Sumerian refugees made it to the Mediterranean, and Crete, Greece, and the like, and they established civilizations. There was plenty of warfare, and around 1200 BCE, all of the Bronze Age civilizations in the region collapsed. It has been blamed on invaders, but the invaders were likely refugees from their societal collapses. If the earlier events were germane, droughts likely played their role, maybe the key role, in those collapses. Those Bronze Age civilizations engaged in dramatic deforestation of the Eastern Mediterranean’s periphery.

    Greece was thrust into a “Dark Age” for centuries with the Bronze Age collapse, and the Iron Age soon arrived. Greek civilization rose, and there were endless battles between Greeks and their neighbors. The Persians invaded and were eventually defeated. This was an age of great naval battles, and the forests were razed to provide ships. Athens lived in a brief “Classic” age. During its war with Sparta and friends, Athens tried to conquer Sicily, whose forests were largely intact. Athens never recovered from the disaster of the Sicilian Expedition, and the Athenian hinterland became a deforested wasteland.

    It was not long afterward that Alexander the Great tried to conquer the entire known world. Alexander inspired the next imperial aspirant, Rome. Rome eventually became the Third Epoch’s greatest empire, although China and the Incas also built huge empires. Mesoamerica also had millennia of rising and collapsing civilizations, from the Olmecs to the Mayans to Teotihuacan, and the Spaniards intruded on the latest empire in the region, recently built by the Aztecs. Similarly, the Incas were only the latest in a string of rising and falling civilizations along the Andes.

    All agrarian civilizations had their differences, but they were essentially the same, limited by the thin energy surpluses that peasant-farming produced. They all had elites, who came to power violently, with their attendant monumental architecture, a small professional class, including a corrupt priesthood, forced servitude, in varying forms, subjugated women, and warfare on a previously unknown scale. None of them survived very long, rising and collapsing, here and there across those regions of domestication, usually battling neighboring civilizations over resources and subjects.

    As previously noted, horse-borne nomads of Eurasia’s grasslands harried and invaded settled civilizations, the worst of which were the Mongols, initially led by Genghis Khan. His hordes killed around 10% of humanity, which proportionally dwarfed modern genocidists such as Hitler. Chinese civilization was devastated by the Mongol invasions, and steppe raiders and conquerors thrived until the rise of firearms finally put an end to horseback empires by 1750 CE. Like male chimps do, agrarian potentates indulged in maximizing their reproductive success via harems.

    There was a push-pull dynamic of civilization. Civilization provided unprecedented benefits for the fortunate residents, so cities attracted many from the hinterlands, and slaves were delivered to them. But cities were death traps. Urban life expectancy did not exceed rural life expectancy until the Industrial Revolution. For the slaves, life was obviously terrible, and a slave’s life expectancy could be far shorter than the master class, as they were often considered expendable and worked to death.

    All ruling classes were robbers above all else, and entire societies could essentially become thieving operations. When Plutarch wrote about the great lives of his day, he especially praised those who plundered other societies. Stealing the embodied energy of other societies was the noblest of professions in those times. Hobbes wrote Leviathan over a millennium after Plutarch lived, and made the case that strong government was the only effective deterrent from people’s constantly fighting each other.

    In Gat’s book he did not use the term, but Morris’s book on war (which is basically a popularization of Gat’s work) framed war as productive and unproductive (1, 2). The basic idea is that when empires formed by subduing all other polities, those conquered peoples, under the monopoly of violence that the empire exerted, no longer “wasted” energy and effort fighting each other, so they all enjoyed a “peace dividend,” at least if it was not entirely taxed away by the imperial overlords. Such war was “productive.” Unproductive war was of the Pyrrhic variety, in that even the winners are losers, as war destroys more than what could be amassed under peacetime conditions.

    Many empires had relative internal peace for a time, such as Pax Romana, Pax Mongolica, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana, etc. Those so-called “peaces” were faint consolation to the victims of those empires, such as Dacia, the 10% of humanity that died during the Mongol conquests, the nearly two billion excess Indian deaths, or the long tally of the American Empire’s victims since World War II. Domestic rulers have been called “stationary bandits,” as they are not invading and plundering other societies, but skimming the surplus and embodied energy from their own.

    I will briefly revisit consciousness, cognition, and the human journey. Gat’s summary of the root of all violence – surviving and reproducing in a world of scarcity – identified the biological imperatives that shape human societies to this day, even in relatively abundant industrial societies. The denizens of those societies are generally oblivious to that compulsion, at least consciously, as they go about their lives. But I learned in my journey that very few people care about anything that does not serve their immediate self-interest or that of their ingroups. If there is truly a human universal today, it is that, which is understandable in a world of scarcity and fear. I seek people who have escaped that stunted perspective. Not many have, but I think that there are enough so that my strategy or a similar one can succeed.

    Earl Cook, Gat, Morris, Jared Diamond, and others have long argued that societies are founded on their economies, which provide both benefits and constraints. Less available energy means greater constraints. The reason why all agrarian societies and civilizations look similar is that the human animal with the energetic framework of muscle-based farming could produce only so much variation within those limits. Draft animals provided non-human muscle power, and watermills provided non-muscle power, which provided great benefits to societies that used them. Bodies of water lowered energetic transportation costs by 99% and more, and harnessing wind power was another boost. Societies that tapped those energy and power sources had great advantages over those that didn’t. But all early civilizations had similar agricultural surpluses, from backbreaking farmer labor, which supported a small elite and professional class, as 80-90% of productive workers had to produce the food for those societies.

    Evolution has had modest impact on the human journey since the arrival of behaviorally modern humans, but the nature-nurture debate continues. Anthropologists who study human conditions (including health) and behaviors often say that genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger. A long-term fad in science has been the idea that DNA holds the secrets of life. DNA obviously plays a significant role in evolution, but the rising science of epigenetics and studying the whole cell and its subcellular processes, as well as how those processes interact in complex life, have gradually dethroned DNA from that overburdened theoretical role. However, DNA studies have shed important light on the relationship between environment, genetics, and evolution.

    Scientists are discovering many genetic adaptations with behavioral impacts. The political-economic constraints of societies founded on wet-farming of rice seem to have led to the near-disappearance (1% of the population) of a gene variant (called an allele) associated with novelty seeking, and the people that migrated the farthest on Earth, to the Amazonian rainforest, have the highest incidence (70%) of that gene among humans. Societies that herded animals often developed the gene variant that allows adults to digest milk, which is unique among mammals. Few members of societies that did not historically herd animals, such as southern and southeastern Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, aboriginal Australians, and Native Americans can digest the lactose in milk, while nearly all northwest Europeans and their descendants can do so.

    Ashkenazi Jews were subjected to selective pressures for what we call intelligence in medieval times, they dominate Nobel Prize recipients in physics and chemistry, and that ethnic group has the highest IQ on Earth. Religious and business-career particularities form the most prominent hypotheses for that phenomenon. Jews are descended from herder societies, and lonely herders fostered an individualist mindset, as contrasted with the collectivist mentalities of wet-rice farmers. Monotheistic religions disproportionality developed among steppe and desert herder societies, which also bred warriors, which is how those herder societies on horseback were the scourge of Eurasia’s agrarian civilizations.

    Anthropologists have identified four primary reasons for why societies have war: defense/revenge, plunder, control, and prestige. Hunter-gatherer warriors could only plunder territory and women, as hunter-gatherers had few possessions to speak of. Control was something that only agrarian and industrial societies could engage in, as they subjugated the conquered societies and skimmed the surplus-and-embodied energy. Prestige leads to enhanced economic and reproductive opportunities. Activities to gain prestige are only more complex methods of vying for rank among social mammals, and the human version resembles how chimps do it. Prestige was a typical motivation for hunter-gatherers onward. In warrior-dominated societies, their religions promised that death in battle was rewarded with wonderful afterlives, and war trophies (skulls and shrunken heads were prized) led to increased status. The most successful men in those societies had multiple wives, women were regularly mistreated (raped, skulls broken, killed, etc.), and parenting was authoritative. Those were the violent, patrilocal societies (Type A) that Otterbein wrote of.

    With the thin-and-fragile energy surpluses of those societies, prestige (reputation) could be a man’s primary asset, and that quest to attain and protect one’s reputation is the foundation of what have been called “cultures of honor” (see chapter 9 of Robert Sapolsky’s Behave and chapter 5 of Gat’s book). Perceived affronts to somebody’s reputation were often the basis of retributive violence, and that included insults to individuals, families, and larger kin groups. The Sicilian Mafia, rural Ireland in the 1800s, today’s inner-city gangs, and perhaps most famously, the American South, are examples of cultures of honor. Sapolsky presented the results of a study in which Southern men reacted to insults with skyrocketing testosterone and cortisol levels, while Northern men did not, as Southern bodies prepared them to fight. Cultures of honor existed where central authority was weak or non-existent, so that the affronted had to take matters into their own hands, as an unanswered transgression generally led to more. The Christian turn-the-other-cheek strategy (or loving the enemy) was not popular in such societies (if in any society).

    In cultures of honor, people can perform acts that are incomprehensible to members of industrial societies, such as if a woman is raped in some honor cultures, the remedy is for her family to murder her, which somehow restores the family’s honor. That practice beggars modern imaginations, but it makes cruel sense in such cultures. Not only could people not imagine the coming Epochs, but people have had a hard time understanding the previous Epochs.

    So, survival and reproductive prospects were at stake in such preindustrial cultures. Some of this may be baked into their genes, as nurture can become nature, but I suspect that most of it is just a person’s conditioning in the current lifetime.

    An important point in Sapolsky’s work is that if children are raised in “adversity” (poverty, hunger, unstable home, violence, societal disasters, etc.), their brains will be damaged for life. Such damage is not generally visible, but it can be measured in brain scans, with swollen amygdalas (which is our emotion and fear center) and shrunken prefrontal cortexes (where we “think”). That childhood adversity lowers IQs, leads to depression, substance abuse, antisocial behavior, seeking adult relationships that reproduce that trauma (such as “abusive” ones), poor impulse and emotional control, and violence, which is often inflicted on their offspring, in a vicious cycle.

    Epoch 3.2: The Second Conquest of Earth

    The rise of the West arguably began with Classic Greece, but Rome’s trajectory was the major event. Rome eventually conquered the entire Mediterranean and most of Western Europe. Nearly everything about Rome was on an unprecedented scale in what became the West. Contemporary with the Han dynasty in China of two millennia ago, those empires were of similar size, population-wise, and their aggregated subjects comprised more than half of humanity.

    Roman copper and lead mining reached levels not surpassed on Earth until the Industrial Revolution. A key event in the rise of Europe was harnessing a new energy source: water power, which was ultimately based on sunshine, as it drives the hydrological cycle. Greek engineers accomplished it about 200 BCE, and Rome adopted it, as it did many aspects of Greek civilization. Over a millennium later, Western Europe used waterpower in what has been called the Medieval Industrial Revolution.

    I have written about Rome at length, and there is no need to belabor it, but Rome’s dominance, violence, environmental devastation, and genocidal activities were staggering. During its rise, Rome razed Carthage and Corinth to the ground and completely wiped out those societies. The debates over the fall of Rome have lasted centuries, but I favor the idea that agrarian empires had energetic limits that industrial empires didn’t.

    Once Rome turned the entire Mediterranean into a low-energy transportation lane to supply its imperial capital, so that the Mediterranean‘s entire periphery became Rome’s hinterland, the city grew to a million people. Rome got much of its grain from conquered Egypt, and the only time in the human journey that firewood was seagoing freight, to my knowledge, was Rome’s bath fleet, which scoured the Mediterranean’s shores for wood, especially Africa. Once Rome dominated the entire Mediterranean periphery, any further expansion would be energetically costly like never before, and the stage was soon set for its decline and collapse. Its last major conquest was Dacia, which was accomplished overland. The Mediterranean’s periphery had been devastated when Rome finally fell, the region was moribund for centuries, and made it ripe for the rise of Islam.

    Glacier-carved Europe north of the Alps had heavier and more resilient soils than the Fertile Crescent’s and Mediterranean’s, and agriculture came to northern Europe far later, so it has not turned into desert yet, and the exploitation of fossil fuels is largely why Europe is not completely deforested today, as trees became a “primitive” fuel source. Also, northwest Europe received its precipitation from the Atlantic Ocean, which was more abundant and reliable than what the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean received. Today’s Italy, Spain, and France were deforested by Rome, they were starting on the forests of today’s Germany when Rome collapsed, and the forests recovered. Rome fell in a period of declining temperatures and declining precipitation.

    After Rome fell, there was a gradual warming of northwestern Europe, which is called the Medieval Warm Period today. The watermill, which the Greeks invented and Rome used, was adopted by northwestern Europeans, with their many reliable streams and rivers, on an unprecedented scale. The invention of the watermill was the first time in the human journey that non-muscle power was generated on land. The explosion of European watermills during the Medieval Warm Period was the key development in what has been called the Medieval Industrial Revolution. In 1086, when the Domesday Survey was undertaken, watermills had already produced the work of one quarter of France’s workforce. Watermills proliferated in Europe exponentially up to the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of European watermills can be called the rise of energy slaves, as machines began replacing people. Slavery was outlawed in England and France at around the same time, and it was no coincidence. Machines began replacing brute human labor.

    Many innovations that Northern Europe and England in particular rode to world dominance were not invented there. Inventions from China include the compass, gunpowder, the modern horse collar (which made plowing Northern Europe’s heavy soils far easier), paper, and printing. China had huge, oceangoing fleets long before Europe did, and smelted iron with coal several centuries before England rode coal to the Industrial Revolution. Innovations made their way across the Eurasian landmass, and some got into sub-Saharan Africa. It is thought that because North and South America are isolated from each other, innovations could not readily pass between civilizations on those continents, so there was not the “ratchet effect” of innovation between those cultures. However, maize became a staple crop throughout the Americas, and more than half the crops grown globally today originated in the Western Hemisphere, including root crops such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, and cassava, which quickly became Eurasian and African staples.

    Western Europe also received a cognitive boost from Greek writings that were introduced when Christian armies “reconquered” Spain. The Catholic Church eradicated Greek writings because they predated Christianity, so were “pagan.” Islamic cultures valued learning more highly and preserved those Greek writings. The capture of Islamic libraries in what became Spain helped lead to the rise of humanism and the Scientific Revolution, which helped spur the Industrial Revolution.

    The West had a lot of help in its rise, transitioning from a Eurasian backwater to world conquest within a millennium. Why Europe conquered the world has been the subject of great debate over the centuries, but it would not have been possible without the greatest energy technology in world history to its time: the oceangoing sailing ship. A watermill generated a few horsepower at most, but an oceangoing sailing ship generated several hundred horsepower. There was nothing remotely as powerful in world history to that time, and Europe’s greatest technical achievement was turning the world’s entire ocean into a low-energy transportation lane. Once they accomplished that, the peoples of several continents were easy prey.

    The High Middle Ages coincided with the Medieval Warm Period and the Medieval Industrial Revolution, and standards of living were relatively high when compared with antiquity. But Earth began cooling off into the Little Ice Age, as Europe had reached its Malthusian limit after warm centuries. The medieval Crusades killed millions of people, accompanied by inquisitions, but Europe’s devastation really began with a multi-year famine in the early 1300s, a generation before the Black Death swept off at least a quarter of the remaining population. European wages were relatively high for the next two centuries from the shortage of able-bodied workers. A series of wars lasting over a century began the decade before the Black Death, between England and France, and Europe became a hell on Earth in the 1300s. For centuries, European cities and nations rarely went a generation without experiencing famine, epidemics, warfare, or all three. The Danse Macabre was an artistic sign of the times, which was a far cry from the courtly love that troubadours sang about in the High Middle Ages. Over a few centuries, tens of millions of lives were swept away in Europe from famine, epidemics, and warfare, and witches and heretics burned across Europe.

    The Renaissance began on the tail-end of the pandemic deaths, humanism began loosening the Catholic Church’s grip on Europe, and a series of religious wars were fought in Northwestern Europe, first in France, then Germany, and then England (which also devastated Ireland). Warfare became a constant in Europe, and partly explains why Europe so easily conquered the world. But in the middle of all that, rising humanism and the printing press helped lead to the Scientific Revolution, which arguably began in 1543 with Vesalius and Copernicus, was furthered by Bacon, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and others, and culminated with Newton’s works, which ended the revolution. Newton lost his fortune in perhaps capitalism’s first speculative frenzy (tulips aside), and he died just as the Industrial Revolution was beginning. Newton may have gone insane at his life’s end from metallic poisoning that he got from his alchemical experiments.

    When Europe began conquering the world, they encountered peoples who were a long way from Europe’s protoindustrial level of political-economy. There were some “undiscovered” agrarian empires in the Americas and substantial hunter-gatherer lands, but most of the Americas were populated by subsistence farmers. Subsistence farmers and fisherman lived on tropical islands. Sub-Saharan Africa was isolated from Eurasia and was mostly subsistence farmers and herders, with some cities and larger polities, and hunter-gatherers still lived on marginal lands. Australia was solely a continent of hunter-gatherers, as was Tasmania. In all agrarian civilizations, the standard worker was the peasant farmer.

    Portugal had the early lead in Europe’s global imperial sweepstakes, soon followed by Spain, but the Low Countries were ahead on the protoindustrial curve, particularly the Dutch, especially after they threw off Spanish rule. England played catchup. Lacking trees for fuel, the Dutch burned peat, and deforested England turned to coal, in a way that no other people ever had, and that, more than anything else, led to the Fourth Epoch.

    Portugal began the imperial slaves-and-gold theme as it worked its way down Africa’s Atlantic coast, seeking a route to the spice trade, to outflank the Ottomans after Constantinople fell to them. A generation later, Columbus tried an ill-advised backdoor route to the spice trade and stumbled into the Western Hemisphere. Columbus was all about slaves and gold, he initiated history’s greatest crime, and we have a national holiday to celebrate that feat. The Bahamas, where Columbus first made landfall, was completely depopulated within a generation, to supply Española (where the Dominican Republic and Haiti are today) with slaves. That happened only a little over five centuries ago, and I have seen scientific estimates of Española’s 1492 population that range from 8,000 to 8,000,000, which makes me wonder about science. Is it all just a big political football? Whatever the real numbers were, today it is widely accepted that the Western Hemisphere’s indigenous population declined between 75% and 95% from 1492 to 1650.

    Europe’s conquest of Earth is the greatest demographic catastrophe in the history of Homo sapiens. The Americas and Australia were quickly shorn of their indigenous populations, just as those continents were quickly shorn of their megafauna in the previous global conquest. Virtually all native societies of the Americas and Australia suffered population collapses, and many went extinct. The British conquest of India led to nearly two billion shortened lives, and Africa became a slave resource for Europe, as slavery reached new, gigantic intercontinental levels.

    A great deal of racism accompanied those conquests and subjugations, which was frequently an exercise in extermination and “settlement” by the invaders, particularly the British, who were the first to industrialize, which enabled their “achievements.” Those imperial expansions coincided with the rise of science, which was wedded with technological advancement, and early anthropologists, almost all white men, projected a great deal of racism and bigotry onto their scientific efforts, which marred the discipline. It is still recovering from that, and the situation has something to do with those wildly divergent Españolan population estimates for 1492.

    Spain had the Western Hemisphere largely to itself for a century, and they were responsible for most of that disaster. European-introduced disease did most of the work, but millions also died in the mines and plantations, spurred by the “insatiable greed” of the Spaniards. When Spanish freebooters invaded the Mesoamerican mainland, they “discovered” the Aztec Empire, and its capital city may have had the best markets on Earth (as well as constant human sacrifices and maybe even some cannibalism). The Spanish quickly destroyed the Aztec Empire, helped by a smallpox epidemic that they brought with them, and the depopulation of the Americas accelerated. Within a few generations, the stratified urban native societies of Mesoamerica were gone, replaced with a general peasantry that Spaniards lorded over.

    The Spanish conquest provided some windows into the Old World’s past, such as how the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean became aridified. A valley north of the Valley of Mexico had forest and farmland before the Spanish conquest. Within a century of the conquest, the deforestation and sheep grazing turned that valley into a semi-desert called the Mezquital Valley, as the desert shrub mesquite was all that could grow there after a century of devastation. The indigenous population collapsed during the century after conquest, and even Spain’s native allies against the Aztecs slit their throats in the end by allying with the invaders, as their cities and populations collapsed into a thin peasantry.

    Attractive women became concubines of the conquerors, which is where the huge mestizo class came from. Raping native women was a Spanish pastime for centuries. The British quickly aridified southeastern Australia, where they first invaded, and turned it into semi-desert in only 50 years. But the Spaniards and Portuguese had already done it to islands in the Atlantic Ocean, also in mere generations. When the English invaded North America a century later, there was a similar contrast to how the deforestation from Morocco to Afghanistan was different from northern Europe’s deforestation. By the American Revolution, the British had almost completely deforested New England, but while it became warmer and dryer, it did not become the semi-desert that the Mezquital Valley is.

    Spaniards soon “discovered,” conquered, and plundered the Inca Empire along the Andes. One Spanish chronicler likened the Spanish intrusion to a catastrophic fire that destroyed everything. Millions of natives died in the gold and silver mining operations of Spanish America, from Española onward, particularly at Potosí in what became Bolivia, which is mined to this day. A native’s life expectancy in the mines and plantations was measured in months, and the vultures literally circled when Spaniards opened a new mine.

    Although the Spanish hoped that they would find gold-plated cities in North America, their predatory invasions (1, 2) did not yield the fabled cities of gold, although the diseases they brought with them depopulated entire regions, especially in what became the southeastern USA. The Portuguese got what became Brazil as their New World imperial romping grounds, courtesy of the Pope. They hoped to reproduce the Spanish “success,” and numerous gold-seeking expeditions disappeared into the Amazon basin (which also had cities). When no Inca-level plunder was forthcoming, along the coast of what became Brazil the Portuguese reproduced the sugar operations that had been established on Atlantic islands. They worked the natives to death in a generation, which led to the transatlantic slave trade.

    Since North America had no easy gold, Spain’s rivals eventually conquered North America, especially the English. The English originally sought slaves and gold, too, but the North America’s real wealth was its temperate climate, vast forests, and intact soils (and later, enormous coal and oil deposits), as the natives had not amassed much plunderable embodied energy, such as in gold. The Spaniards treated the natives as expendable slaves and concubines, but they did not intentionally inflict that unprecedented genocide onto the natives, as dead slaves can’t get any work done, which Columbus first observed. Spanish priests protested the evil treatment inflicted on the natives, to no avail. Spaniards saw the natives as human, but natural slaves, and invoked numerous racial distinctions. The English, however, saw the natives as subhumans sitting on coveted land, English intentions were genocidal from the beginning, and their political descendants, the Americans, were even worse. There were almost no native advocates among the English, and the few that existed were attacked.

    The English invasion also provided a window into the Old World’s past. The Eastern Woodlands of North America were inhabited by matrilineal horticultural societies, similar to matrilocal societies of Eurasia’s Neolithic Revolution. Those societies were the relatively peaceful Type B societies that Otterbein wrote of, in which the gangs of related males were broken up. From the very beginning of the British invasion, many interlopers saw those native cultures as superior to their own, and they ran off and “went native,” which British officials treated as a betrayal punishable by death. During the genocidal British invasion, when those Eastern Woodland societies captured women, they never raped them, which amazed the English. Rape is never a “respected” practice in matrilocal societies, as it was in many patrilocal ones, but an unpardonable crime.

    Many economists and historians of Europe’s rise not only lauded the “simulative” effects of plundering humanity to benefit Europe’s economy, but have also credited it with the Industrial Revolution. If that reconstruction is valid (and I have my doubts), what a terrible example of “progress.”

    Coal was first burned by humanity in China nearly six kya, during its Stone Age. Coal has various grades (lignite, bituminous, and anthracite, depending on how geologically “worked” it is – anthracite is the most energy-dense and valuable), and impurities made coal burn very toxically. Raw lignite and bituminous coal cannot be easily used to smelt metal because of those impurities, sulfur and phosphorous in particular. The impurities of already-low-impurity bituminous coal could be “baked” to remove them, and coke was invented in China before 400 CE. Soon after 1000 CE, the Chinese began smelting metal with coke.

    The first coal-burning of significance in the British Isles was by the invading Romans, who used it extensively before 200 CE. After Rome collapsed, the natives did not seem to use coal much, until England was deforested in the Medieval Warm Period. By the 1200s, coal smoke became a serious pollution issue in London. The Black Death was a boon to forests, which regenerated throughout Europe, but as Henry VIII played catchup with the Low Countries, he not only seized the Catholic Church’s coal mines, but revived the ironmaking industry that died with Rome’s collapse. The area was quickly deforested to meet smelting needs, and a tree-hungry forge was attacked by the commoners, as the price of wood skyrocketed.

    It was not until Elizabeth I’s reign that England began its rise to empire. England was rapidly deforested with rising English industry. England invaded Ireland in the late 1500s and razed its remaining forests. Under Elizabeth, Francis Drake, Humphrey Gilbert, Martin Frobisher, Walter Raleigh, James Lancaster, and other official pirates took England’s first imperial steps, murdering and thieving for the crown. England’s East India Company was founded in 1600 to attack Portugal’s spice route. The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602, partly to take vengeance on their Iberian oppressors.

    Portugal and Spain soon became imperial has-beens. All the gold and silver that poured into Spain from the Americas left just as fast, to its proto-industrial creditors, and the Spanish crown had a series of bankruptcies, beginning in 1557, less than 40 years after the huge haul from the Americas began rolling in. It was an example of how gold and silver are not wealth, and millions of indigenous American lives were sacrificed in that worthless activity.

    England’s imperial ascent progressed under James I, and the establishment of Jamestown in 1607 was England’s first permanent intrusion into North America. Not long afterward, the Dutch and English established their genocidal presence in New England. The devastating wars over religion that consumed what became today’s France and Germany eventually visited the British Isles, and James’s son literally lost his head in the mayhem. By that time, London had the most polluted air on Earth, by far, from the coal smoke, with more lung disease than the rest of the world combined. Air pollution disasters plagued London until the 1950s. But that hellish coal smoke was a price of the Industrial Revolution. In the early 1600s, two-thirds of English children died before age four, so there was little to cheer about in those early proto-industrial days. Rising standards of living meant little when most of the children still died.

    Thomas Malthus influenced Darwin. Darwin noted that life was excellent at reproducing, and that all species bred to the available ecological limits. When Darwin formed his theories, energy science was still in its infancy, so he, Marx, and others did not couch their theories in energy, but they likely would have if the science existed. Malthus observed that human populations would always increase to the limits of the food (energy) supply, so that the masses would always be on the brink of starvation. Any energy windfall would be used to produce more people, and when humans bred beyond the land’s carrying capacity, then some kind of disaster – famine, epidemic, war – would bring the population back within the land’s carrying capacity. This is called the Malthusian trap, and until the Industrial Revolution, it was an immutable law that governed humanity. The technological improvements in the human journey before the Industrial Revolution were always tempered by the Malthusian trap. With hunter-gatherers, every able body was involved with procuring food. In agrarian societies, it was over 80%, so few people were freed to pursue cognitive and technological progress.

    The only escape from the Malthusian trap was two-fold: the rise of machines that could replace human drudgery (and produce previously unimagined feats, such as landing humans on the Moon), and the energy to run them.

    I have written about Gat’s imperial biases, which few white men ever escape. That bias pervades Western scholarship. We all see through the glass dimly, but at least we can try. But Gat’s multidisciplinary approach is commendable, and allows for realizations that elude most scholars. Gat deserves credit for recognizing that first and foremost, the Industrial Revolution was an energy revolution, as humanity tapped an energy source like never before, and the Industrial Revolution was all about energy-driven machines.

    Global empires and industrialization went hand-in-hand, as the great leverage of energy-run machines easily conquered and subjugated non-industrial peoples.
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 20th February 2024 at 16:17.
    My big essay, published in 2014, is here.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    Over the years, I have found Mercola’s work to really be a mixed bag. When he stays on nutrition and medical racket matters, his stuff is usually pretty good. He really overdoes supplements (because he sells them! ), and a few weeks ago he published a global warming denial article, which kind of amazed me. He definitely gets in over his head on issues, when he strays from medicine.

    This morning, I got his interview with Dr. Suzanne Humphries, who is one of my favorite vaccine authors. I am also attaching his article and the interview transcript. I am working like a madman on my essay, and there is so much to write about that I see daily, but I need to keep my head down and get my work done. But Humphries can interrupt me anytime.

    Best,

    Wade


    Below is an excerpt from my upcoming essay, which covers historical vaccination. Humphries discussed the COVID vaccines in her interview, and it is more of the same.


    Western vaccination began with Jenner, and smallpox was the initial disease that was vaccinated for, but there was never really any success with it. England, which first industrialized, had the best early public health statistics, but even those could be rigged. In London in 1750, just as the Industrial Revolution began to take off, two-thirds of all children, rich and poor, died by age five. By 1840, that number had dropped by about half, with the rising standards of living, which was also generally true for the entire UK. In 1840, England passed its first law for compulsory smallpox vaccination, and the laws became increasingly harsh in the 1850s and 1860s, including imprisonment and fines for failing to get vaccinated (or the parents’ children). Perversely, after each compulsory vaccine campaign, smallpox would break out, with high mortality rates, particularly in the 1870s, of about 20% of those infected, and children were obviously being maimed and killed by the vaccines. I have read many books that challenge the entire vaccine paradigm (1, 2, 3), by MDs and scientists, and the best account that I have seen on smallpox is in Dissolving Illusions.

    See these charts from the site based on Dissolving Illusions, and the authors have responded to a critique by an anonymous assailant, whose attack strategy is typical of Big Pharma shills. The analysis gets into detail on measles and vaccines, to accuse the authors of Dissolving Illusions of being liars, without ever mentioning that the death rate from measles had declined by over 99% (by 99.96% in England, from its peak in 1840) before the vaccine was introduced, which makes lauding the measles vaccine ludicrous, like giving full credit to a new weapon when the war was already over. Such attacks only dupe the ignorant and gullible, and those attackers may suffer from Debunker’s Disease.

    After compulsory vaccine campaigns that killed and maimed children, followed by deadly epidemics, in 1885, the people of Leicester had finally had enough. They rejected vaccination campaigns and adopted a practice of quarantining smallpox victims and disinfecting their homes. Leicester never again had significant smallpox mortality, while their heavily vaccinated neighboring cities were repeatedly scourged with deadly outbreaks. The medical authorities kept predicting a smallpox catastrophe for Leicester that never happened. I won’t be referring to Wikipedia much when it comes to modern Western medicine, as Wikipedia is a medical racket mouthpiece.

    Smallpox was the only vanquished infectious disease for which a case could be made for vaccination, as none of the other killer diseases were vaccinated for before they virtually disappeared from Western nations. But the data does not demonstrate that vaccination made any difference with smallpox, and likely killed far more people than were “helped.” If smallpox deaths are compared to all of the other killer diseases, they all went down at the same time, and all of the others nearly vanished before there were vaccines or antibiotics for them (see the graphics attached to this post, for instance).

    The data demonstrates that improvements in public sanitation, hygiene, and nutrition get all of the credit for conquering infectious disease, and medical interventions had almost nothing to do with it. They were Hygeia’s feminine principles at work, not the warfare tactics of male-dominated Western medicine. Western MDs in the first half of the 20th century, thoroughly steeped in warfare ideology, literally saw their patients as battlefields in the war against disease, and viewed their treatments as the equivalent of strafing runs on their patients’ bodies.

    Those killer diseases became milder or vanished. Smallpox had a killer version and a mild version that was like chickenpox. By the late 1890s, the killer version of smallpox had disappeared from the USA. Smallpox vaccination rates declined as the smallpox deaths did, which is the opposite of what would have been the case if smallpox vaccines really worked.

    The biggest killer in 1800s England was scarlet fever, which is bacterial, there was never a successful vaccine for it, and before antibiotics made their appearance, scarlet fever had vanished with the rest of those diseases. The medical racket invented a ruse, calling already vanquished diseases “vaccine preventable,” but they disappeared without vaccines just like the others. Today, about 15-20% of children have scarlet fever bacteria, but they don’t get sick from it. There are many instances in which the germ = disease equation obviously does not work.

    Somewhat paradoxically, just as those killer infectious diseases began disappearing, a new one appeared: polio. However, polio is primarily caused by pesticide poisoning, not the polio virus, just like AIDS is primarily caused by chemical poisoning, mostly through recreational drugs, not the HIV retrovirus (the first “harmful” retrovirus ever recorded) but the infectious disease racket turned those diseases into bonanzas of lucrative medical treatment that often killed more people than the diseases did. Both polio and AIDS have many cases in which the virus that allegedly caused the diseases could not be found in the patients, and millions of people have the viruses that supposedly cause polio and AIDS, but they do not get the diseases.
    Attached Files
    My big essay, published in 2014, is here.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Hi:

    Oh boy, this essay will weigh in at over 100 pages. I plan to finish drafting it in a week, and then spend two weeks editing, going over my notes to see what I need to add, etc. Here are a couple more chapters that I drafted some weeks ago.

    Best,

    Wade

    Fourth Epoch: Industrialization

    For the other Epochal transitions, we do not have any written history to consult, so it has been the province of scientists to piece together what they could, from artifacts, bones, DNA, and the like. The Industrial Revolution was exceedingly well documented. It would have been be nice if the Industrial Revolution had been motivated by foresight and improving everybody’s lives, but it didn’t work that way. Only in hindsight can the changes be discerned that led to today’s industrialized world. The ruthlessness of elites had a lot to do with how the Industrial Revolution began.

    European industrialization really began with the Dutch, starting around 1500. The Dutch had the first capitalist (AKA “modern”) economy. When Spanish freebooters began hauling boatloads of gold and silver to Spain, the royal advisers warned that simply importing money into Spain would not make it any richer. It actually made Spain poorer, as lives were wasted in pursuit of something that was intrinsically worthless. Money is only a cognitive tool, a fiction, really, which is primarily a claim on embodied energy. As Adam Smith wrote, gold and silver only had value because they were scarce, and making them relatively abundant degraded their perceived value. But ignorant Spaniards literally thought that it was the ticket to heaven.

    The Netherlands was land-poor and battled flooding from the North Sea for millennia. In the 1400s, there were severe floods, which drove many peasants from the land, and they looked for work in the cities. As noted earlier, the printing press raised literacy, and the Dutch had a high literacy rate. Literacy was required for highly skilled jobs. But increases in agricultural productivity were required for industrialization to become feasible, so that less people were needed to provide food. The Dutch improved the Chinese plow, for instance, which made plowing more energy efficient (fewer oxen and horses were needed), and by 1650, the Dutch had less than 40% of their workforce in agriculture.

    In medieval English societies, commoners at least had a right to live on the land, and there were “commons” that everybody could use. With the Norman Conquest in 1066, that began to change, first with forest laws, which made it illegal for commoners to hunt in forests preserved for nobility. That led to the legend of Robin Hood. Before 1200, English landowners began fencing off their lands and kicking the peasants off of it. The Black Death drove up wages, so there was incentive to get more productivity per man-hour, and it became more “efficient” to kick the peasants off the land with enclosure laws.

    The English were already on the way to their agricultural revolution with Enclosure. The English emulated the Dutch and had their agricultural revolution. By 1800, less than 40% of the English workforce was involved in agriculture. There was no grand plan for industrialization, and the Industrial Revolution was a century old before anybody realized that it was a revolution. But those dispossessed English peasants soon found work in the rising factories, and relatively high industrial wages attracted dispossessed peasants, so that they became more pulled to the cities by opportunity than pushed by the land barons.

    In England and Wales in 1560, residents consumed in total energy a little more than four times the calories that comprised their diets. About 80% of that energy consumption beyond their dietary calories consisted of the energy provided by firewood and the food consumed by draft animals. Those people had nearly 1.5 times their dietary calories feeding draft animals – so draft animals ate more than humans did. Coal was about 10% of their total energy consumption.

    By 1860, the United Kingdom (“UK”) used nearly 30 times as much energy as it did in 1560, about 25 times their dietary calories, and more energy came from coal than was captured by all of the UK’s plants by photosynthesis. Today’s Americans burn three times as much as that per capita (about 80 times the energy that goes into their diets). In 1860, more than 90% of all energy consumed in England and Wales (including food for humans and draft animals, firewood, watermills, and wind by sailing ships) was provided by coal. British citizens were consuming several times as much energy per capita than had ever been consumed before by any humans. Those numbers had nothing in world history to compare them to, even remotely, as they were so extraordinary. It was another Epochal leap to new energy sources.

    When humans became farmers, it made 100 times as much dietary energy available for humans than hunter-gatherers enjoyed, but we mostly just increased our population by 100 times. The “output” was largely more mouths to feed. With industrialization, populations such as England’s rose by several times, but output rose by a hundred times, so the standard of living rose by an order of magnitude. There were a number of critical moments of the Industrial Revolution, and they were roughly:
    • Smelting iron with coal;
    • Using coal to power steam engines (Denis Papin consulted with leading scientists when designing his steam digester, which inspired Newcomen’s steam engine, for an example of how the Scientific and Industrial revolutions were related);
    • Building machines to replace muscles and dexterity.
    The steam engine was not feasible without plentiful coal, and the first steam engines drew water from coal mines (so that the mines could be dug deeper). Everything since then has followed from that, and eventually machines to replace human thinking were invented, which I am using to write this (but I won’t be using “AI” anytime soon, as this is creative work).

    Iron has overwhelmingly been industrialized societies’ primary metal, and the iron, oil, and coal deposits that made the Industrial Revolution possible were all provided by ancient life processes.

    There was another important boost from industrialization. If we took maize, for instance, and made ethanol from it and put it in an automobile’s gas tank (American gasoline is about 10% ethanol) instead of feeding a person with that maize, we would get about ten times as much work (the physics definition) out of the car as we would the person. That is partly because a car does not “waste” energy sleeping, eating, socializing, etc. The concept of an energy slave (an equivalent human) equates machine versus human effort, and average Americans get the benefit of several hundred energy slaves as they go through their days. Machines can also perform feats far beyond a human’s ability. A slave-borne palanquin never traveled 60 miles per hour down a road or sailed to the Moon.

    Behaviorally modern humans began conquering Earth during a glacial interval, battled Neanderthals and Denisovans, invaded “virgin” continents full of easy meat, and during that 50,000-year conquest, the population of behaviorally modern humans grew by a factor of 1,000. There may not have been anything as dramatic in the history of life on Earth as that population explosion, which resulted in the dominance of all inhabitable lands. But the annual growth rate of our ancestors in the Second Epoch averaged about 0.014% per year, which sure does not seem dramatic (at that rate, it took 5,000 years for the population to double). But in the Third Epoch, when the human population grew by about 200 times in 12,000 years, the growth rate was three times that of the Second Epoch (it took only 1,500 years to double). Between 1560 and 1860 in England and Wales, the population grew by five times (it doubled in only 150 years), or 10 times as fast as in the Third Epoch, and about 35 times as fast as in the Second Epoch, which a graph such as this makes clear. Animal populations have boomed and busted over the eon of complex life, but humans are doing something unprecedented.

    Self-serving delusions are as old as humanity. The singing and dancing rituals of hunter-gatherers, to form the social cohesion to prevail in wars against their neighbors, is an early example of that, as well as deifying elites in the Third Epoch. The Fourth Epoch has its fair share of delusional ideologies, from nationalism to capitalism and even branches of science. One of most deluded “sciences” that I have encountered is modern economics. The only school of economic thought that dealt with the real world was the first, the Physiocrats, who also lived before the rise of energy science. They understood that land was the basis of all wealth, which was rooted in the photosynthesis of its plants.

    After robber baron John D. Rockefeller made a fortune by dominating the nascent oil industry, he diversified into other industries and became a “philanthropist.” One of his “philanthropic” activities was funding the rise of neoclassical economics, which ignores energy’s role in our world. I have to wonder if that was intentional, as history’s greatest energy mogul funded a school of thought that made energy invisible in economic theory. Neoclassical economics, which dominates today, is perhaps the most illusory school of thought that I ever encountered. It is so far out there that some academics wrote a paper that argued that coal had nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution, with the fancy math that economists, with their “physics envy,” are known for. I hardly know where to start, but when boiled down to plain English, their idea was that deforested England could have just kept importing wood from around the Baltic and fueled the Industrial Revolution.

    In 1860, in England and Wales, coal provided 750 times as much energy as firewood did, and by 1850, Sweden had been completely deforested and its people were starving, after supplying its neighbors with wood for centuries. That human-inflicted disaster spurred migration to the USA, which is part of my heritage. The idea that the British could endlessly scour Europe for wood to fuel its industrialization does not seem to have any basis in the reality of the times.

    Those kinds of fantasies concocted by economists are endless, and I regard them as intellectual warriors for the capital class, just like most historians and journalists are warriors for their ruling classes. They have all prostituted themselves to the prevailing winds of wealth and power, and largely unconsciously. The British magazine the Economist is a shameless imperial cheerleader, especially for wars against unconquered oil-rich nations.

    Economists like the idea of “comparative advantage,” which means that one polity has an advantage over another polity in producing something. For instance, Brazil has a comparative advantage in producing sugar over Siberia. All such “comparative advantages" become meaningless when comparing agrarian to industrial civilizations, and to understand that, we need to think about what is really happening. Energy makes and runs organisms. The energy needed to grow, move, and think is essential for all animals. Those first crafted stone tools began a trajectory of amplifying muscle energy, as bones, claws, and teeth do for animals. In the 1740s, the English invented spinning machines, originally run by watermills, and by the 1790s, a spinning machine did the work of 150 people. That is an increase in real wealth, as less than 1% of the formerly expended human effort produced the same output. India would have gladly traded its “comparative advantage” in growing cotton for being able to industrialize, which it would have accomplished long ago if the British had not conquered it.

    Another prominent idea of economists is the miracle of trade and “exchange,” which complements that idea of comparative advantage. The reality is that there have never been free markets, and so-called “trade” more often than not in Europe’s imperial age was raping and pillaging non-industrial peoples, enslaving them to produce cotton, for instance (India and America’s Antebellum South), to be processed in those efficient English spinning mills. Only the low-energy transportation lane of the world’s ocean made it possible. In a world of scarcity and oppression, those ideas make a certain obscene sense, but by the end of this essay, it will become obvious that exchange and comparative advantage will become meaningless concepts in the Fifth Epoch, but all scarcity-based ideologies will, too, which all of the dominant ones are. I don’t want to take economists to task too much, as nearly all intellectuals play similar games, which will all end in the Fifth Epoch.

    All of those crimes aside, the Industrial Revolution was a dramatic break with the past (an Epochal break ), in many ways, and the European standard of living skyrocketed. There was some benefit to Europe from its enslavement and pillage of peoples on other continents, but there was far more detriment to those colonized peoples. Similar to Mesoamerica, which was quickly ground down into a general peasantry with Spanish overlords, India had a vibrant proto-industrial economy before the British conquest. British visitors to Dacca in 1757 called it every bit as wealthy as London, and India was better at making steel than England was.

    The British conquest meant an exponential rise of famines in India, and within two generations, India was ground down into a general peasantry that starved as it raised cotton, food, and opium for export to their British overlords. The British invaded China, to subjugate and addict it to Indian-grown opium, while citing “free trade” principles as its justification. During Indian famines in the late 19th century, Indian food exports to the UK reached their highest levels, and Europe enjoyed the Belle Époque and a period of relative peace, at least between the imperial players. At the same time, rubber became a coveted commodity with the West’s demand for rubber tires, and more than ten million Africans died in the “rubber boom” to satisfy that “market.” Rainforest Africans had a comparative advantage in producing rubber, but it was not very advantageous for them.

    During the golden age of early industrialization in Europe, British rule in India led to tens of millions of deaths from starvation, as starving Indians exported food to the increasingly corpulent British. Jawaharlal Nehru noted from his British prison cell that the longer the British ruled a province in India, the poorer it became. India is still recovering from that two-century-long raping by the industrializing British (which is why they were able to conquer India and become the first global empire), and nearly two billion lives were shortened by British rule in India. Queen Victoria has been credibly described as history’s greatest mass murderer, although a lauded book on history’s greatest atrocities covers it lightly, as it only dealt with three famines in the late 1800s, which killed nearly 30 million people. That was a tiny fraction of what the British inflicted on India. In the two thousand years before the British conquest, India had about one famine per century. Under British rule, India had a famine about every four years. The author of that atrocity book claimed to look at all causes of death inflicted by a warring/conquering power, but he ignored what two centuries of British rule did to India. That estimate of nearly two billion excess deaths during British rule in India has been computed only once, to my knowledge, and remains an obscure statistic, although it is by far the largest death toll, in absolute terms, in the human journey. That is how Western scholarship works.

    Before industrialization, the only path to riches was raping and plundering others, which was why Plutarch celebrated the most successful thieves. With industrialization, that was no longer the case. Gat wrote on this issue at length. Europe really did not need to rape the world to industrialize; it did it because it could, as externally aggressive societies have usually done. Enslaving Indians (both Western Hemispheric and Asian Indians) and Africans certainly brought benefits to Europe, but almost none of it produced any real wealth. The transatlantic triangular trade of sugar, slaves, and rum was largely worthless, from a real-wealth perspective.

    The greatest contributions from the Americas were their crops, which feed most of humanity today, and largely “virgin” continents that could be “settled” by Europeans, in history’s greatest crime. Just like with other civilizations, the USA was founded by mass-murdering thieves, and George Washington was chief among them. George Washington was a great Indian killer, the USA’s richest citizen, and he crafted the strategy to swindle the Indians out of their land, which Wikipedia still cannot bring itself to mention, as it acts as a 21st-century Plutarch. It is history’s greatest theft. Washington called the USA an infant empire. I live in the Seattle area, am a beneficiary of that crime, and it is no mystery to me why Europeans and Americans could commit history’s greatest crime and celebrate it as a heroic deed. It was normal.

    The early days of industrialization were brutal, with the British “satanic mills” that authors such as Charles Dickens wrote about. Even though industrialization greatly leveraged human effort with energy-run machines, the workers labored and lived in horrific conditions, and the exploitation of child labor in early industrialization was terrible. Over my years of study, I have come to conclude that no matter how ugly they were, I doubt that anybody should have expected anything much different, with the brutalities of Third Epoch civilizations – all of them. That Europe used its advantage to conquer the world is also not surprising. The Luddites saw that industrial technology in capitalist hands would be used to exploit them, so they attacked early mills and destroyed the equipment. The predatory excesses of early industrialization are what angered and inspired figures such as Karl Marx.

    Workers revolted, but for all of the bloodiness of strikes and revolutions, working conditions and standards of living improved, partly because capitalists were making so much money (from the real wealth that industrialization produced) that they could afford to meet many worker demands. But capitalism is far from some kind of structure that honors “human nature,” as capitalist propagandists have long maintained. Scholars such as Ellen Meiskins Wood clearly described the particular conditions that gave rise to capitalism. Capitalism is no magic system or some natural outgrowth of human nature, and there have never been free markets, which I learned the hard way. By the end of this essay, I will make it clear that capitalist technology suppression and exploitation is destroying the planet, and in ways that almost nobody can even imagine. In the Fifth Epoch, capitalism will be one of the first things to go, and the people who run the world know it, which leads to the next section.

    Epoch 4.1: Oil and Electricity

    It was not until about 1850 that hydrocarbon power finally overtook wind and water power in the UK and USA. The UK had a century’s head start with industrialization, and the Industrial Revolution was at least a century old before anybody realized that it was a revolution. It was up to writers such as Marx to recognize the Epochal significance of what had happened. Classical economists such as Adam Smith never saw it coming, even as it was happening. The rest of Europe began to catch up, but the USA soon became the UK’s biggest rival, with a virgin continent to expand its civilization across, once the natives were eliminated.

    The first commercial use of electricity was the telegraph, beginning in the 1830s. The Chinese drilled the first oil wells nearly two millennia ago, but the first modern oil well was drilled in the 1840s by Russians in Baku, and in the 1850s, the oil industry began, with oil wells drilled throughout Eurasia and North America, and the first offshore well was drilled a few miles from where I grew up. But most importantly, the American oil boom began in 1859 with Drake’s well.

    Between 1840 and 1900, the USA quickly grew to become the world’s largest economy, as it conquered the rest of the continent, completing a genocide that lasted for four centuries. My ancestors eagerly occupied the lands newly wrested from the Indians. By the eve of World War I, the USA dwarfed the UK’s economy, at nearly three times as large, and during World War II, the USA’s industrial output was nearly as large as the rest of the world’s combined.

    Before the rise of oil and electricity, there were great limits to what coal power could do. It could be used to power locomotives and steam boats, but it was a brutal business. Winston Churchill finally saw the light in 1911 when he watched the British Navy load coal for a week before an imperial cruise, which wore out the crews before they even disembarked. Churchill then converted the British Navy from coal to oil, and the Middle East’s fate was sealed. All Western meddling and invasions in the Middle East and North Africa since then were primarily about the oil, and everything else was trivial or a smokescreen to hide the real motivation. Oil is a vastly superior fuel to coal, as liquid fuel has important advantages over solid fuel. The rise of automobiles and especially airplanes could not have happened with coal. Middle East oil is considered to be history’s greatest material prize, which the West has tried to control for over a century.

    For many innovations by life and humans, what was initially developed for one reason was eventually repurposed for other uses. The USA’s oil boom was spurred by another energy-source-depletion event. Whales were quickly being hunted to extinction, which precipitated a “whale oil crisis.” Whale oil was used to light lamps. The combination of declining whales and the first American oil wells quickly ended the USA’s whaling industry, which was the world’s largest at the time, with a fleet of several hundred ships that circled the world, as depicted in Moby Dick. So, fuel for engines was not why the USA got into oil, as coal had only recently overtaken wind and water power.

    This story naturally turns to John D. Rockefeller, who quickly came to dominate the American oil industry. He bought his way out of service in the USA’s Civil War and studied the new oil industry. He decided that if he could control refining, which was a bottleneck that all oil had to pass through, then he could control the entire industry. He ruthlessly pursued his plan, and 20 years after Drake drilled the first American oil well, Rockefeller controlled 95% of American refining, for the greatest monopoly of early American industry and arguably history’s most significant monopoly.

    The USA’s Civil War is a classic contrast of competing Epochs, and I do not know of a better example. The South had an agrarian economy based on slave labor, while the North had a rapidly industrializing economy which made slave labor economically obsolete. The South really never had a chance, as an agrarian economy was no match for an industrial one, and the North ground down the South in a war of attrition, which was a preview of how industrial capacity won the World Wars. For all of its fantasies of inventing freedom, the USA still has slavery, but it is not officially called that, as slavery can still be profitable with captive workforces, and that the USA has the world’s largest prison population is no coincidence. American freedom is far more theoretical than real, as will be shown in this essay, but Americans have largely enslaved themselves.

    The Civil War was a great industrial stimulus, which the USA rode to global industrial dominance in less than 50 years, particularly with its huge coal and oil deposits. Without those deposits, the USA would not have had its unprecedented growth. The Dutch were the first to begin industrializing, but could not do it on peat. The British had vast coal deposits and rode them to industrialization. The USA rode coal and oil to quickly become history’s richest and most powerful nation. Incidentally, the USA initially industrialized off of the Eastern Woodlands’ intact forests and watermills on its rivers and streams. Only when it had been deforested did the USA turn to coal, and then oil. It was history’s most dramatic deforestation, which led to history’s most spectacular extinction so far. Such short-sightedness was a human universal, which persists to this day, as immediate self-interest trumps everything else.

    Not only was oil a superior fuel that soon found application in transportation, but electricity made its rise. The first consumer application of electricity was lighting. Before the rise of the lightbulb, natural gas was used for lighting, which was a petroleum byproduct. Coal, oil, and gas comprise over 80% of global energy production today. For all of the media hysteria over solar-and-wind power’s potential, today they provide about 1% of global energy consumption. The stats that dominate the media I consider fraudulent, as they always depict solar and wind as a percent of electricity production, when electricity is only 18% of global energy consumption, so they inflate their impact by several times to uninformed readers.

    The rise of electric lighting is a classic example of how blind scientists can be. Numerous scientists pronounced Edison’s lightbulb as impossible and “idiotic,” even as Edison lit up Menlo Park with them, and Edison was the world’s most famous scientist at that time. A generation later, the Wright brothers flew for five years, in front of thousands of spectators, while the media ignored them and prominent scientists called it “impossible.” The Wright brothers had to go to France and become famous there, first, before the USA’s establishment acknowledged what happened literally in its backyard, and Smithsonian Magazine engaged in a grotesque effort for a generation to deny the Wright brothers precedence for their feat.

    Edison then began an effort to electrify American cities, but it was not feasible with the direct current that he used, as resistance sapped the power from the electric lines, so that a power station would be needed for every neighborhood. Edison’s former employee Nikola Tesla invented the technology to use alternating current, which could step-up voltages and overcome the resistance issue. Thus began the “War of Currents,” and robber baron J.P. Morgan financed both sides, so he would win no matter who prevailed. Edison engaged in his own disgraceful campaign, and killed animals and people with alternating current, to make the case for how dangerous it was. Edison invented the electric chair as part of his campaign.

    Tesla is the first major figure who pursued free energy. He tried to deliver it in the early 20th century, to only have the rug pulled from under him by the robber barons. Thus began the “lost century,” when the suppression of alternative energy technologies became a science. Tesla should have been one of the world’s richest men from his inventions, but died in obscurity, and the American government seized his papers upon his death.

    The rise of oil and electricity has been called the Second Industrial Revolution. It was still powered by fossil fuels that were formed over hundreds of millions of years, and we will burn them all up in mere hundreds of years. So, the Second Industrial Revolution was really in the same Epoch as the first one, as I define it, as the energy sources were the same (fuels created by life and geological processes). We still live in the Fourth Epoch.
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 7th March 2024 at 16:08.
    My big essay, published in 2014, is here.

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    Default Re: WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

    Quote Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
    In 1860, more than 90% of all energy consumed in England and Wales (including food for humans and draft animals, firewood, watermills, and wind by sailing ships) was provided by coal.
    Hi Wade,

    If you could clarify the above sentence for me. The energy sourced and utilised from the list in parenthesis could now (1860) be 90% covered by the energy from coal - which would lead to a huge reduction in the use of former resources (not food), yes? The point being coal rapidly replaced the need for the former sources of energy?

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

    Hi Ewan:

    Coal energy primarily replaced firewood and food for draft animals. But that was the small stuff. Far more important was that coal was used for many purposes that did not formerly exist or exist on the scale of industrialization, such as running steam engines, smelting iron at unprecedented scales (no longer limited by firewood availability), and making heated buildings standard. As I stated, the UK used 30 times as much energy in 1860 as it did in 1560. Food consumption rose several times, but only because the UK’s population rose several times.

    What coal mainly did was make iron plentiful, replace muscle power (and greatly expand what power did), and heat buildings. Locomotives roared through the English countryside, steamships were overtaking sailing ships, metals became consumer goods, food was much more plentiful, fresher, and took fewer people to produce. That was early industrialization in a nutshell. The rise of oil and electricity was also a major change, but, as I stated, still powered by fossil fuel.

    As I have written, the biggest outcome of all of that was the end of childhood death. Between 1560 and 1960, childhood death went from more than half of all English children to essentially none of them. That is the biggest event in the human journey so far. The only place on Earth with significant childhood death today is Africa, but no nation has over a 20% rate. India still has a 3% child mortality rate (under five), but 30 years ago, it was four times as high. In industrialized nations, it is less than 1%. In Iceland, it is 0.3%, and it is even lower in Japan. The USA’s rate is nearly three times Japan’s, for one of the many damning statistics for history’s richest and most powerful nation. But life expectancy at all ages rose after 1850, with improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene. And as I have written plenty, all of that happened before the rise of vaccines and antibiotics.

    Does that answer your question?

    Best,

    Wade
    My big essay, published in 2014, is here.

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

    Hi:

    One subject that I tackle is in this chapter draft, and you can see that I was “efficient” in using part of yesterday’s post in this chapter.

    Best,

    Wade

    The Decline in Violence and Warfare

    I plan to write another essay on war in the coming years. I do not yet know how I will integrate it into my standing war essay, or if I will. That original essay was primarily about challenging American myths and lies about World War II. The coming war essay will be about warfare over the ages, going back to chimps and earlier, to the first social animals. But the primary focus will be on humanity. I cannot improve on Gat’s statement on the root of violence: surviving and reproducing in a world of scarcity. It is also the root of all warfare. As Tony Bennett said, after having a “front-row seat in hell” in World War II, “war is the lowest form of human behavior.” I discussed how a third of male chimps died violently, how “only” a quarter of hunter-gatherer men did, and how warfare in the Third Epoch took on a new scale and character, because of increases in population density, the rise of professions with civilization, and having new things to steal.

    Chimps slaughter their neighbors, take their territory and fertile females, and hunter-gatherer men did the same thing. Fertile females (or those who soon would be fertile) represented a valuable store of embodied energy for reproductive uses (and sexual slavery), and the violently acquired territory provided resources - food above all. In Third Epoch societies, they had possessions that embodied far more energy than hunter-gatherers could amass. While the roots of slavery are in the practice of stealing women from neighboring hunter-gatherer societies, it reached new levels with sedentary societies. Raids of distant societies, to enslave them (so they were far enough away from home to discourage attempts to return), was made possible by sedentism. When civilization arose, as with other aspects of human societies, slavery became big business, and was arguably the first one.

    There is a paradox about violence and war, which began in the Third Epoch and continues to this day. That book on history’s greatest atrocities had the usual biases that white male scholars suffer from. On an absolute level, those 100 atrocities were up there for the absolute numbers killed, but on a relative level, those were more modest than hunter-gatherer exterminations of their neighbors in raids. Over a quarter of aboriginal Australians had their skulls broken from violence, but that is a very rare event in my society, or for any Third Epoch society, unless it was subjected to great atrocities, which was numbingly common. The technology for killing is obviously far more sophisticated today than it was in aboriginal Australia, or even Hitler’s Germany, with our nuclear weapons and other horrors.

    Those 100 greatest atrocities killed 100 times as many people as existed on Earth 10 kya (500 million versus five million). But they were spread over thousands of years. Genghis Khan’s hordes killed maybe 10% of humanity at the time, but it was “only” 40 million people, which is far less than World War II’s toll of at least 50 million (and maybe 100 million). On a relative scale, Genghis Khan contends for history’s greatest genocide award. The Spanish intrusions into the Americas may have killed off 20% of humanity in a century, for 100 million people (but maybe it was half that or less). World War II killed “only” a few percent of humanity; maybe less than 3%, but did it in only six years. Which was the worst?

    The morning as I wrote this paragraph, the news featured a speech by Vladimir Putin, in which he said that the West is risking nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine, which could kill billions of people. Although I am not likely to die in battle, a nuclear weapon may end my life. The risk is not negligible.

    Even though my life is pretty free of violence (although somebody was murdered in my neighborhood last year, as crime skyrockets in my disintegrating society), I live under the specter of nuclear annihilation. While interpersonal violence has declined, at least within Western societies, we also threaten to kill everybody in a spasm of high-tech violence. Are we more violent today or less? Are we just smarter chimps with deadlier tools?

    Even though American murders have skyrocketed in recent years, an American man has less than a 1% chance of being murdered, and if we consider my affluent neighbors, the probability of any of them experiencing a violent death is far less than 1%, which is miniscule compared to the risks that hunter-gatherers faced.

    John Foster Dulles’s brinksmanship helped lead to the spectacle of Strangelovian Pentagon officials, whom JFK had to fight for his entire presidency, as he narrowly averted a nuclear war. John Dower specialized in Japan and World War II, and his latest book is on American imperial violence. He wrote at length on the enthusiasm for nuclear war among the Pentagon’s war hawks. Dr. Strangelove characters were based on such officials, particularly Curtis LeMay.

    In Gat’s masterpiece, the human predilection for war was framed as a weighing of risk and opportunity. Gat explored the factors that underlaid the human passion for war. In Plutarch’s time, plundering the embodied energy of conquered societies was the noblest of professions, as it was for all imperial and warrior societies. Gat discussed the psychology of soldiers, particularly from the early Third Epoch to the World Wars and even postwar American wars.

    To begin with, the ideal soldier was a farmer, mostly because the hard lives of farmers suited them for the rigors of war campaigning. Also, in agrarian societies, sexual opportunity was limited, so one of the “perks” of warfare was sexual adventurism, not only raping the women of conquered societies (or having sex with camp-followers, “Victory Girls,” and the like), but bringing home brides from distant wars was common. I have war brides in my family, from World War II and its aftermath. One war bride had a father who was in the SS in Poland (where she lived as a child), and she thought that Hitler was a great leader to work for. To be in the SS in Poland in World War II was to participate in one of history’s greatest crimes, but that woman’s primary memory was how nice it was for her father to work for Hitler. Hitler was a “good boss” to his subordinates, which was one reason for all of that loyalty to the end by his assistants.

    The pertinent question is how many deaths the invading power is responsible for, whether it is from direct violence or the more indirect violence of conquest and subjugation, in which the victims die of starvation, disease, and other privations, maintained through violence or its threat. Conquest can also produce secondary violence as the conquered society disintegrates, which happened to Iraq in the aftermath of the USA’s invasion and occupation, which has led to escalating violence in the region, in what has been described as World War 2.5, and may be seen as the beginning of World War III, if any historians will be around to discuss it. An honest accounting of the toll of warfare, conquest, and subjugation measures how many lives were shortened, from all effects of the conflict, conquest, and subjugation. It also must consider the quality of life of the survivors.

    Gat discussed that with the miserable lives in Third Epoch civilizations, the primary route to wealth was to plunder it from others. The risk/reward ratio favored devotion to war in Third Epoch societies, as short, grim lives of farmers, with few sexual opportunities, paled beside the lure of riches, glory, and sexual escapades that farmers rarely dreamed of. With industrialization, that began to change. With rising standards of living and increasing life expectancies, why risk it all for violent conquest? As Goering said, it does not matter what kind of government is in power, as political leaders can always get the masses to march to war by invoking a threat to their societies. That dynamic is far from dead, as the USA’s “war on terror” made clear.

    Urban men were considered inferior soldiers to farmers, and Western factory workers, with their continuing battles with capitalist management, would not readily follow orders the way that farmers did. Another factor was the demographic transition, which meant fewer young people in society, on a relative basis, including young men to be cannon fodder in wars.

    Since contraception became widespread in Western societies, sexual adventure became relatively normal for young people, of both sexes. In my lifetime, attitudes toward premarital sex have changed dramatically, and it was vastly more restrictive in the Third Epoch. My grandparents could not accept that I lived with my wife before I married her.

    Gat discussed the idea of a “democratic peace” that various scholars have promoted, and how so-called liberal democracies did not wage war against each other. There are many problems with that so-called democratic peace. One is that our societies are not all that democratic, especially the plutocratic USA. Another is that freer societies are more of a consequence of industrialization than a cause, with the rising standards of living that industrialization made possible.

    An Epochal perspective of events helps illuminate the folly of arguing that political-economic forms played a large causative role. Capitalists industrialized, communists industrialized, kingdoms industrialized. The First Epoch lasted millions of years, the Second for tens of thousands, the Third for 10,000 years, the Fourth Epoch still has not come to most of humanity, and is less than two centuries old for nearly all of humanity. Even today, all industrial civilizations resemble each other, just as all agrarian civilizations did. If all of humanity could join the Fourth Epoch (there is not enough fossil fuel for that, and the environmental damage would be dreadful to even contemplate), in only a few centuries, all human societies would look almost identical. The variation that we see is just what a transition to a new Epoch looks like: uneven and somewhat diverse at first, given their histories. To give political-economic institutions much credit for the Fourth Epoch’s arrival seems like a confusion of causes and effects.

    For instance, the average British women before industrialization had several children so that two could survive. As childhood death rates declined, the birth rate initially did not, leading to large families and a population explosion. It took generations for the culture to adapt to the decline in childhood death, and for birth rates to decline. In the long view of the human journey, these changes have happened in the historical blink of an eye, and making generalizations about the role of political-economic structures as some kind of causative effect is a dubious undertaking. There is certainly interplay of economic, social, and political dynamics, but energy-powered machines made it all possible, and I think that most societal changes that we see with industrialization are adaptations to them, which has been the case with all Epochs, as the energetic-economic reality was the foundation that the societies adapted to.

    Chattel slavery did not end through a bout of conscience, but because it became economically obsolete in a world of energy-powered machines. People no longer slaughter each other like they used to because it no longer makes economic sense like it used to. Stealing women no longer makes economic sense in industrial societies. A woman’s spending her life being pregnant and caring for children no longer makes economic sense. Large families became “the peasant’s route to wealth,” and make no economic sense in the Fourth Epoch. Warfare and violence will make no economic sense in the Fifth Epoch.

    Today, the only place on Earth with agrarian birth rates is Africa, as it is still largely agrarian and Africa’s childhood death rates are the highest on Earth, by far (along with some of the USA’s imperial targets such as Afghanistan and Yemen), but no nation has over a 20% rate. If the West can cease bludgeoning Africa, it will have a demographic transition like the rest of the world, and it is having one, but Africa is the last place on Earth to have one. India still has a 3% child mortality rate (under five), but 30 years ago, it was four times as high. In industrialized nations, it is less than 1%. In Iceland, it is 0.3%, and it is even lower in Japan. The USA’s rate is nearly three times Japan’s, for one of the many damning statistics for history’s richest and most powerful nation. But life expectancy at all ages rose after 1850 in England, with improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene. And as I have written plenty, all of that happened before the rise of vaccines and antibiotics.

    Today’s American soldiers rarely engage their targets in trench warfare or on battlefields, as they did in the World Wars. They kill from afar today, by operating drones, firing missiles, dropping bombs, and almost never getting their hands actually bloody. Today’s American military recruits from the ranks of videogame players.

    Another factor in declining violence that Gat addressed was the involvement of women in economic and political life. Women just are not as bloodthirsty as men, and not as insanely risk-taking as men. Women are about 10% less enthusiastic about war as men are. That is not a huge gap between the sexes, but it is significant and helps explain the West’s increasing aversion to war.

    Gat also discussed the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons. Everybody will lose in a nuclear war, and the threat of nuclear war has definitely motivated many peace initiatives.

    Poverty and violence go hand-in-hand. In my affluent neighborhood, residents’ engaging in violence against their neighbors is unthinkable. Nearly all crime and violence is imported from poor areas of the Seattle area, as they rob and even murder the affluent.

    When our societies ride on a resource that is being burned up a million times as fast as it was created, it is a very ephemeral relative abundance that industrial societies enjoy. Elites such as Bill Gates advocate a new era of austerity, even deindustrialization, as we run out of fossil fuels. As austerity rises, so will violence and warfare.

    Gat finished his book with the observation that as long as people competed over “scarce objects of desire,” there would continue to be violence and war. Gat, like virtually every intellectual that I ever encountered, cannot seem to imagine the end of scarcity. When there is no more scarcity, why on Earth would anybody resort to violence? It would become freakishly rare, and warfare would become completely suicidal and nonsensical, like playing Russian roulette. I believe that humanity is sensible enough to cease continuing down that path when it no longer makes any economic sense. We have already seen the trend to non-violence and peace, and I see no credible reason to think that it would not accelerate in the absence of scarcity.
    Last edited by Wade Frazier; 8th March 2024 at 20:39.
    My big essay, published in 2014, is here.

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