WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet [Archive] - Page 14 - The Project Avalon Community Forum

Wade Frazier

14th December 2013, 16:02

Hi:

In writing about the Age of Dinosaurs, I am also getting into the Age of Oil, as most of the world’s oil was formed during the Mesozoic:

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

A unique set of circumstances led to the oil formations of today’s Middle East.

http://www.geoexpro.com/article/Why_So_Much_Oil_in_the_Middle_East/58d94fc1.aspx

When readers finish my essay, I hope that none of them entertain the abiotic oil fantasy:

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

Even if there is some abiotic oil, none is commercially exploitable. Although nearly 80% of current production (that peaked several years ago – we have already reached Peak Oil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Peak_oil ) is conventional oil (the high EROI stuff), it is only 30% of current “reserves” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#Unconventional_sources ).

Again, the goal of my work is to help develop comprehensive thinkers, and here are areas where various groups have failed to develop comprehensive thinking.

1. Joe and Jane Average. Joe and Jane Average have the furthest to go, because they have virtually no idea where their energy comes from, how it works, and the like. The Average Family is not only scientifically illiterate, but is also trapped within the hall of mirrors that has been erected to capture their awareness. They think that retail politicians really matter, that sports (or soap operas) is the meaning of life, and so on. They can be counted on to salute the flag and cheer on their team or the latest war (providing that we easily win it, so we prefer small, weak "enemies" since World War II), buy the tabloids at the checkout counter, be about fifty-to-eighty pounds overweight, smoke, and regularly drink themselves into a stupor. I can only knowledgably speak about Americans because I am one, but from what I see and hear, it is really not that different anywhere in the world. The masses stumble through their lives, conditioned by scarcity and unrealistic dreams sold them by the social managers. Many of them know they are being screwed somehow, but they have very primitive ideas about it, and conspiracism is their favorite alternative ideology, as it is simple and easy to understand (and fits right in with their tabloid-orientation), and reinforces their victim mindset. They are Orwell’s proles. Nationalism, celebrity-worship, sports, soap operas, and reality shows have largely supplanted religion as their source of solace, along with alcohol, drugs, and fattening comfort foods. My work does not seek to reach the Average Family, but any member among them is welcome to study my work. But if they share it with family members, they should prepare to be ostracized.

2. Those trained in the political and social sciences. This includes those of economic and business training. Usually, those that pursued that path could not cut it in the hard sciences, so they went that route. I saw this all the time in college (they flunked out of math and science, and then studied the relatively easy stuff), and in the business world I encounter it all the time, but also, I saw many talented people who could have been scientists, but the blood was in the water in the business world, so they pursued business and economics instead. Heavy indoctrination into capitalism attends the business and economics path. I am still about the only business school graduate I ever met who is not of the Republican persuasion, and even the Democrats in it are far to the right of where Nixon was, as the USA has taken a huge goose step to the right in my lifetime. The other social sciences are less beholden to capitalistic indoctrination, but they suffer from an excess of reliance on structuralism and other materialistic approaches. Godzilla’s existence is something that they dismiss as conspiracism. I have found that those in the political and social sciences are really ignorant of real economics, being seduced by the financial economy, which is a fiction. As we have reached Peak Oil and those people begin to engage it, I almost always see them express energy in terms of money. They have it exactly backwards. Money and all other economic measures should be used in terms of energy. Mainstream economists are almost hopelessly deluded on these issues, and I have not seen many in the social sciences able to see beyond it. And almost all in that realm are quite naïve about how the world really works, which is reflected in their denial of Godzilla and other high-level predators. Why they are that way is a big subject that I have touched on some in my work ( http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#conspiracism ), and I will do it more in the near future. They usually have succumbed to nationalistic ideology (all except the radicals), and often try to ape the hard sciences in their approach. Environmentalists (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/purpose.htm#environmentalists) tend to fall into this camp and the next one, which is…

3. Scientists and inventors. This group can readily see that the financial economy is a fiction, and the real economy is the only one that matters, and that one runs on energy and always has. But, as Fuller noted (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/roots.htm#naive ), they are hopelessly naïve about the real world of humanity in other ways. Like the social scientists, they generally dismiss Godzilla’s reality, and they usually have submitted to a subtler kind of indoctrination (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/conun.htm#subtle ), and what their indoctrination does is denigrate consciousness in all aspects, except for what is called “intelligence,” which scientists excel at, so their ideology, as with the others, is egocentric for them. Almost none of them have any understanding or appreciation of what it takes to start and run a business, for instance, because it has to navigate the human animal, and that is something that the nerds of science have a difficult time comprehending. The awesome brilliance of Dennis’s methods (SFS http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#sfs ), and industrialization of processes that were stuck at the craftsman level ( http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#develop ) have surprisingly gone right over the heads of almost everybody I ever encountered, especially scientists and inventors. Their blindness was real hard for me to understand at first. I eventually came to believe that it was rooted in their non-comprehension of how the business world works. How the business world really works was a foreign subject to them, and they usually had amazingly naïve ideas about it, even those who were big names in industrialization, such as Mr. Engineer, who once ran the world’s biggest factory (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=305681&viewfull=1#post305681 ).

4. New Agers and mystics. It might be seen as unfair to lump those two together, but I found that they are closely-related. The New Age is a kind of Joe Average mysticism, with egocentric works such as The Secret ( http://www.ahealedplanet.net/purpose.htm#newage ) becoming hugely popular. Being raised in the Southern California mystical scene gave me a close view of that mess. For every real person, there were a hundred (thousand?) pretenders. As I think of it, that was one of my early inklings that personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#burn ). The mystical path can lead to Level 19 ( http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level19 ), but there are only a handful of them on the planet, if any, and none of them are showing the world how to do it, as they hide out. The primary hazard of the mystical path is becoming so heavenly bound that you are no earthly good. Mystics tend to be ungrounded, in a different but surprisingly similar way that scientists can be.

I don’t make that list to pick on any of them, but to show where the pitfalls are in their orientation, which has prevented them from comprehending practical abundance. To one degree or another, the members of the above groups are all addicted to scarcity, or perhaps to say it more accurately, they are addicted to the mindset and tricks they learned to survive in a world of scarcity.

The entire point of my work is getting people to comprehend not only how energy runs the world and always has, but what the potential of FE is: it is the very engine of abundance and heaven on Earth. Without energy abundance, all the abundance ideas that you hear from various corners are simply impossible. You hear people say that if we just share, that there is enough for everybody. What a delusion! We are burning up our primary resource a million times as fast as it was created, and no amount of sharing is going to solve that fundamental problem. There simply has never been enough hydrocarbon fuel to industrialize the entire world, hence the resource wars that the West has waged against the world’s poor nations that happen to sit on key resources, oil above all, preventing them from industrializing and needing it, etc. And even if there was enough, the environmental problems with burning it are immense and increasing. Thinking that we can keep squeezing the last remaining hydrocarbons out of shale, tar sands, deep ocean, and the Arctic is a huge, egocentric delusion, and just amounts to a self-satisfied “business as usual,” which has been the case with every energy resource ever exploited and exhausted, whether it was megafauna, forests, soils, fur, or whale oil.

Anybody who aspires to be in the choir has likely been conditioned as a member of one of those groups listed above, and has their work cut out for them to overcome it. But first they have to want to, and I have almost never met anybody willing to, as they found their tricks of survival and dug in. Again, it took a lifetime to reach these understandings, of being on the high road and surviving the shark tank of capitalism, to only have Godzilla step on us when we began to become successful. Trading notes with people such as Brian O:

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

helped round out my understanding of how the land lies. The current situation is just what it is, and wishing or thinking it is different is an exercise in futility and can lead to delusional (even fatal) approaches to the key issues, particularly how to make FE happen. But imaging how it can be is important, and vitally so. Those who can imagine a world like this ( http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748 ) and can keep their eye on the ball long enough to help its manifestation, which is entirely dependent on real-world activities of making it happen, are those whom I seek. I came to realize long ago that they were needles in haystacks, but they exist. I found a few at Avalon, and after I publish the essay, the search will begin in earnest.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

14th December 2013, 17:59

Hi:

As an addendum to the previous post, here is a listing of the primary categories of civilization’s herd managers. Again, the focus will be on the USA because I know it best as an American, but from what I have seen, the rest of the world has similar enforcers.

1. Weekday School and Sunday School teachers. American schoolchildren are trained to worship a flag from the very beginning, a mindless catechism that continues to this very day (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#flag ), with school teachers leading the ceremony. In the USA, mass murdering thieves have been elevated into becoming national heroes and saints, usually with the full complicity of professional historians and academics:

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

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#blueprint

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

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

This is all designed to make unthinking automatons who will march off to war and become cogs in the national/corporate machine, but the system also uses it to deadly effect before the pawns have any notions of their mortality:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#business

The fairy tales of organized religion are also fed to the impressionable young, which is also designed to get them to mindlessly submit to authority, and impress symbols on their young minds that can be used to control them:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/intro.htm#paradigms

2. The mainstream media is all about indoctrination and mind control, and the rare journalist who steps out of line is dealt with very harshly, even fatally:

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

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&highlight=suicide#post652292

3. Scientists are supposedly too smart for the above to work, but vestiges of it do (they usually become part of the military-industrial complex, with all of the nationalistic conditioning that attends it, or the commercial complex, with all of its capitalistic indoctrination), and there is a politically-active arm of establishment science that ensures that everybody toes the line. They are called “skeptics,” but that is an Orwellism, as they never challenge the primary assumptions of their materialistic ideology. I have also been slimed by them, and they just might be the most dishonest group that I have yet encountered, and that is saying something:

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

But I have regularly seen mainstream scientists rely on the pronouncements of “skeptics” to tell them all they need to know about psychic phenomena, UFOs, and the fringes of scientific investigation. It is the scientific equivalent of saluting the flag and believing that Christopher Columbus was some kind of hero.

And for the vanishingly few scientists who stray beyond the fence, their treatment can be rather harsh, even fatal:

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

4. When an effort actually makes it past the immense structural hurdles that help prevent any significant change in our systems, then the big guns of the establishment are brought to bear. They include lying and dishonest cops, lawyers, and prosecutors:

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

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

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

judges on the take:

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

and so on. And when that sledgehammer comes down, the most dismaying part is how your friends, family, and colleagues will betray you:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=400492&viewfull=1#post400492

Today, almost all that the FE community does about Dennis is lie about him:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=771063&viewfull=1#post771063

5. The official hit men are perhaps the most handsomely compensated (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=400493&viewfull=1#post400493 ), but the bloody dirty work is usually done by contract agents:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=768396&viewfull=1#post768396

who are part of the spook world. Many are assets that Godzilla uses when he needs them, and the assets generally do not know whom they really work for or care, as long as the pay is good.

6. If you survive to reach the high levels of the game, the players in that rarefied air can be pretty sophisticated, and the person offering you a billion dollars to go away is wearing a thousand-dollar suit and has an Ivy League background:

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

but their initial entreaties are made to seem innocuous, and not part of Godzilla’s operation:

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

That is a sampling of the social managers, who work at different levels of intervention. Training children to salute a flag and believe in the literal truth of Bible stories works for most of them, but for the few who still stray, then increasing punishment attends the process, up to and including murder. It is just how our world works today, I am sorry to say.

Best,

Wade

sdv

14th December 2013, 19:28

All are welcome to ignore this blip on this thread.

We have already discovered the means for free energy (will research the references if you want, but it has already been proved that we can generate energy personally, i.e. there are devices that we can personally use our energy to generate and store energy).

Godzilla (read what Wade has written to understand this fascist cabal that rules at every level) and a failure of imagination prevents us from using what has already been revealed. Most of humanity does not believe what has already been discovered and revealed and thus we, collectively, are sheeple who are controlled by a self-serving, self-enriching cabal. The inventions of new energy devices are just replications of what we already have and thus maintain the status quo for the cabal, for Godzilla. But the knowledge and means (I stumbled across it in a forgotten book) of how we as individuals can create, generate, store energy individually is already there, yet human beings ignore it.

Wade is trying to build a choir of those who embrace that giant leap and there are not enough to change the sheeple mentality. Forget all these inventive devices and embrace the rejected truth that free energy is something within every individual and the means of generating, storing and using this has already been discovered, over and over again in human history, and is being suppressed, or denied because of supreme ignorance.

Perhaps in the distant future, humanity will cross over to the enlightenment and the dark ages of fossil fuels and capitalist motives will be left behind. Please Wade, record your vision in a way that will become an inspiration for those who want to bring about this change in the generation, use and storage of energy on our planet. Please publish in a way that will be preserved and that will be spread to awaken the age of free generation, control, storage and use of energy as a capacity for each human being (the knowledge has been uncovered but humanity does not recognise and accept it, and I have proof of this ...newly discovered).

Wade, I understand why you want to build a choir, because if we do not accept and believe the truth that has already been revealed, then we cannot move into a new age of free energy, and I finally understand why all these inventions (though I applaud the innovation) are just different versions of the status quo and not true free energy, and have a very dim understanding of how Godzilla acts ruthlessly to protect and preserve control and dominance and self-enrichment (switching to alternative forms of energy is not embracing free energy but just changing the product of Godzilla).

How we can generate, control, store and use energy, personally, each of us as a human being, has already been discovered but is suppressed, not only by Godzilla, but also by our collective refusal to embrace the creative and imaginative leap.

I hope that Wade Frazier will not become a forgotten footnote in history but will awaken enough of humanity for us all to take a great leap out of the dark ages (we are not an advanced society but collectively a society living through the dark ages of ignorance and fascism ... we who boast about being so advanced technologically are actually living in a dark age of ignorance).

Free energy is what each human being has the capacity to generate, store, control and use, and the means has already been discovered (as I discovered recently), and all these innovative inventions of alternate energy are repetitions of the status quo that the cabal will capture and control for power and self enrichment.

I am too flawed and messed up and failed and inadequate as a human being to generate and use free energy, but I am grateful that I have discovered that this is possible and has been scientifically proved to be possible.

I agree with Wade (apologies if I am misrepresenting him) that unless we believe, we will remain slaves to the power cabal (Godzilla) and that the innovative inventions are simply new devices for Godzilla to use (and in arrogance choose those that will be accepted and those that will be annihilated). Real free energy comes from within each individual human being, and it has been scientifically proved that this is possible and real. We have the capacity within us to generate energy; we have the means to direct and store this energy and then to use it when we need to (the scientific proof is there but ignored and suppressed).

I think that the greatest challenge is the leap of imagination and that if humanity can do that, Godzilla will inevitably be defeated because if we do not need Godzilla (and we really do not) to generate and store and control and release energy for us, Godzilla is not needed in our lives. As long as we believe the lies of Godzilla, we serve Godzilla and deny the truth.

It has already been proved that each human being has the capacity to generate, store, control and use energy, but most of humanity goes along with ignoring the evidence and bowing to the control of Godzilla.

I do not want to be reborn on this Earth (which I love so much) and I am so sorry that I made no difference in any way at all in the times that I was here. But, I am grateful for the truths that have been revealed to me.

Do you want light or heat ... you can create it, as an individual human being. This proven truth is ignored and suppressed because humanity does not want to know or believe but would rather keep feeding Godzilla. Our choices, as collective humanity, create the experience of humanity and free energy is not what humanity as a whole chooses even alternative energy choices that are kinder to the environment are rejected as Godzilla triumphs.

I admire Wade for trying to get a choir to take that leap of imagination to embrace the truth, but know that I cannot do what he does, and, I am so sorry, doubt that he will make a difference, cause that tipping point. But, someone, everyone, has to try, and I admire him for doing so.

sdv

14th December 2013, 19:43

PS No, this does not come from airy fairy new age stuff that I can create my own reality, but scientific proof of the capacity of each human being to create energy and to have a device that can store and control that energy. It will be given to us when Godzilla finds a way to profit from it!

... unless we take that leap of imagination and free ourselves.

Wade Frazier

14th December 2013, 22:13

Hi sdv:

Thanks. Anybody alive on the planet today is damaged goods, being subjected to the “scathing” of merely drawing a breath in a body in physical reality, so you don’t need to be too hard on yourself. There is the “I can create my own FE” phenomenon that I call Level 19:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level19

which is what life on the astral plane is like. In physical reality, however, the energy that has powered this planet’s ecosystems has come primarily, if not exclusively, from the nuclear fusion in the star that we call the Sun. Michio Kaku has framed this energy issue on a scale designed by a Soviet scientist:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Current_status_of_human_civilization

where humanity might reach Level 1 in a century or two, if we do not wipe ourselves out first. Of course, that scale does not even contemplate ZPE, which I know already exists on the planet.

Many people have the misconception that I am not about “doing anything.” I am into “action,” believe me, but I found that if people were yoked into their particular flavor of egocentric, scarcity-based awareness, they were putty in the hands of the predators, of which Godzilla is merely the apex predator. Delusional people who fall prey to the first Pied Pipers that come along are whom I am doing my best to not attract. Those two posts that I made earlier today would explode the heads of about 99+% of Americans who might read them, and those with exploded heads are not in my target audience. If I made posts like that in all-comers’ forums, the trolls would swarm. I have already played those games before (such as at ATS http://www.ahealedplanet.net/critics.htm#_edn1 ), and learned some good lessons. But I realized that there are not enough people on Earth with the right stuff to go the hero’s route:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

because in order to even begin down that road, you have to consider your life forfeit, and almost nobody on Earth can do that. Most can talk a good game, but when it comes time to stand up and be counted, they scatter like cockroaches when the kitchen light goes on. I learned those lessons the hard way:

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

Level 19 is in no way practical on Earth today, or even three hundred years from now:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

but the transformation of human civilization by industrialization was dramatic, incredibly so. Industrialization meant a dramatic increase in human life expectancy, the liberation of women, and the end of chattel slavery. However, there was still not enough to go around with a fossil-fuel-based economy, and the wars of the industrial age have all been resource wars at their bottoms; either directly plundering a resource (see: Iraq), or vying with other imperial powers over rights of global plunder (the so-called world wars, even going back to the 1700s http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#seven ).

If we are currently a zero on that scale that Kaku promotes, becoming a Level 16 civilization is what my work is about:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level16

but I won’t ask anybody to be heroes. A bunch of lambs could get it done too, I think, which is what I am trying to find out. They will be sentient and loving, and will not seek to destroy Godzilla or hide from him, but will take an independent path in broad daylight. Godzilla is really a coward, and a stampede of sentient lambs would see him turn tail.

As far as making a statement that can be used by future generations, my upcoming essay will likely be my best attempt at that, but I truly hope that it is used by the current generation! :) But overcoming their scarcity-based conditioning would be only the first step toward manifesting an abundance-based mentality that could support a nuts-and-bolts FE effort. I am more optimistic than you are, obviously. If I end up finding a thousand like Ilie, it would be game over for Godzilla, and he knows it, or five thousand people who would play more in the back of the orchestra rather than first chair. Nobody has tried it before, and I am interested and optimistic about my chances, but I am also doing this in a way where people are not risking their lives. Godzilla is far from the only predator to dine on FE aspirants; they are usually eaten by their "allies."

More to write, but time for a nap, and then it is honey-do stuff for the rest of the day.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

15th December 2013, 17:01

Hi:

I have recently been reminded of how much chaff exists on the fringes. There is certainly some wheat there, but it is almost always buried in chaff. When Brian O had his remote viewing and NDE-like experience:

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

he began his exit from orthodoxy, and with his astronaut and Ivy League cachet, he was immediately besieged by the fringes. While his work with Marcel Vogel:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=545477&viewfull=1#post545477

and others was good work, he also got sucked into the Face on Mars controversy:

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

the moon landings:

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

and other fringe areas. Brian found where Hoagland was stretching the Cydonia data, and had pretty much disassociated himself from the Face controversy before the second flyby in 1998, and he regretted being sucked into the moon landings debate.

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

But that did not mean that Brian’s buddy Carl Sagan was playing it straight with his criticisms, either:

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

When Brian snooped into the UFO issue, it nearly cost him his life:

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

And above all else, when he began to poke his nose into FE, it consumed the rest of his life, for good reason. When I told him about the underground technology show that my friend got:

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

Brian received it almost like I was telling him about the weather, it was so unremarkable to him.

Navigating the fringes and winnowing the genuine from the bogus can be a huge chore, where finding the good stuff is like finding a diamond in a mountain of coal. Brian was a big advocate of using the scientific method on the paranormal, particularly psychic phenomena. But navigating the fringes can be a maddening and bewildering task. I constantly see people disappearing down rabbit holes, holes that I knew were dead ends, or had all the earmarks of them. Many rabbit holes are really pretty worthless, as far as even if there was something genuine down there and was found, it would be a big “So what?”

I have examined a great deal of “evidence” of technologically-advanced ancient civilizations, and I have not seen anything yet that was really impressive. An alleged huge “footprint” in granite is a dog that won’t hunt. Granite is igneous rock (formed from lava), and is not formed from mud:

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

Some “anomalies” are really embarrassing, in that big fringe names take them seriously. How many outright hoaxes have we seen over the years? I lost track of how many have come and gone in just the last twenty years. There is an entire cottage industry of hoaxers, fabricating “anomalies,” evidence of aliens, and the like. Sure, there are still plenty of mysteries, and scientists still struggle to resolve mysteries of how ancient stone masons made some of the elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture, but it is like many areas of science, where they approach a problem by using the scientific method, deriving hypotheses to explain the data, hypotheses that can be tested, and then they find ways to test them.

So far, there is nothing I have seen relating to monumental architecture, DNA studies, and the like, where ET intervention needs to be invoked, or advanced and disappeared technology, etc. Sure, there are plenty of stories, but they rarely survive scrutiny and scientific testing. Invoking the ET and advanced technology angle should be the last hypothesis used to explain the anomalies, not the first. And even if they did, they are usually along the lines of “So what?” Literalist interpretations of ancient texts, including Sumerian cuneiform, to invoke ETs, ancient celestial catastrophes, and the like, is really stretching the data, not to mention all the phony evidence that abounds. But there is an industry that does that, and it is lapped up by undiscerning fringe enthusiasts.

FE is the Big One, and has been that way for the past century. That one may well be connected to the ET situation, and it is far more than “So what?” It would be humanity’s fifth epochal event. As I have stated many times, simply making FE and abundance imaginable is my primary goal.

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

If I can accomplish that in my lifetime, it will be mission accomplished. I am already seeing success when people such as Ilie sing like this:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?29372-What-technologies-activities-or-concepts-will-be-made-obsolete-by-Free-Energy&p=770998&viewfull=1#post770998

and it was exactly what I hoped my work would inspire, so I am already most of the way to my goal. Anything beyond that is gravy for me.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

17th December 2013, 04:55

Hi:

For non-Americans, and even Americans living in the media bubble, it can be surprising how fast and far the USA is declining. I just read this:

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/camden-new-jersey-one-of-hundreds-of-u-s-cities-that-are-turning-into-rotting-decaying-hellholes

But I have also seen this happening in my life, although I live in the Bill Gates bubble these days:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#gates

In the city where my wife grew up, Stockton, California, it is islands of “normalcy” in a sea of crime and decline:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockton,_California#Social_Science_Statistics

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/19/us/years-of-unraveling-then-bankruptcy-for-a-city.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://subversify.com/2013/05/09/america-in-decline-stockton/

with the Beaver Cleaver suburban neighborhood where my wife was born and raised turned into a gang-infested war zone. My wife’s sister lives in a gated community in a town near Stockton. The well-off are holing up in their fortresses, while the rest try to survive.

I have been writing about the decline and coming fall of the American Empire for some time:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#invading

and, believe me, it does not feel good to be right about this. If we pulled our heads out of our collective backsides, we could turn it all around, for the entire planet, in almost no time. The USA is my home and I don’t plan to leave, but long ago I gave up on Americans waking up anytime soon. The choir will not be based in the USA, and I doubt that many Americans will be part of it.

America’s relative prosperity was due to its energy consumption, and when energy per capita consumption peaked during the 1970s energy crises, the stagnation and decline in the American standard of living was right behind it. Although we have slaughtered several million people in Asia to keep our grip on the world’s energy supplies:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

it is only an act of imperial desperation. Godzilla is planning to terraform Mars as his “ace in the hole” survival enclave in case it all goes down the tubes on Earth. The USA is not going down alone, and the end of fossil fuels means that everybody gets to live some kind of austere, quasi-agrarian life, at least for those who survive the transition.

Five thousand people with enough integrity to simply leave aside their egocentric ideologies long enough to imagine abundance might be all that it would take to turn the tide. That is what I will be trying to help manifest, and we will see how it goes. I may finish drafting my Mesozoic era chapter this week, and I will likely put it up at Avalon when I finish it. Readers will see, as the other chapter drafts have, that it is all about energy, and always has been.

Time for bed.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

18th December 2013, 13:52

Hi:

Over the years, I have consistently fielded observations about my work, where people were trying to be helpful, but they did not understand. As I have stated before, my “peers” – white, educated, American men – can rarely read more than a few pages of my work before blowing a fuse, such as this section of my site:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/intro.htm#progress

An American college professor pal has read that section to his class, with the students looking poleaxed when he finishes (he has tenure :) ). Another teacher has his students read my Columbus essay:

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

with similar results. Even today, about 99% of all American students think that Columbus was some kind of hero. People trying to be helpful have suggested that I try to parlay my site into an advanced degree or other payoff. Not only is that a loser from the beginning (see how Ward Churchill got railroaded for writings similar to mine http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=637484&highlight=churchill#post637484), but my work is something different, radically so.

I have already lived through what happens to commercial FE ventures. What they always nail you on are “consumer protection” laws (at least when they do it "legally"), and the only way they can do that is if you have paying customers or investors (but with Dennis, even when he was putting his equipment on people’s homes for free http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#sfs , or even when one of the “victims” actually never paid a dime and even stole from us – http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#victims - they still got Dennis).

The “flavor of the day” New Age author is not risking jail, murder, a billion dollar bribe, and the like. I regularly get people suggesting that I publish a book or create a blog where people have to pay to read it. I intend for my work to always be free and publicly available. The only way that I see myself asking for money is if my site and upcoming forum gets so much traffic that the host fees become exorbitant and I ask readers to help defray those fees, but if that happens, I am doing something wrong. I am not aiming for the mass market, so that traffic should never get that high. I am aiming for quality, not quantity. I have passed up at least a million dollars on five different occasions now, and only by bypassing those “opportunities” did I get to where I am today with my work. In a sane world, I would be a billionaire, but our world is far from sane.

Also, seeking personal gain with my work would be missing the mark on several levels. It would compromise the integrity of the work, for starters. I would not be free to write what I do if I was trying to please a “master” of some sort, and there is something to gore everybody’s favorite ox in my work, as I take on the scarcity-based teddy bears of modern civilization, particularly the USA’s, largely because I know them best, being an American.

People who urge me to publish books, get an advanced degree, charge for site access, and the like are stuck in scarcity-based modes of thinking and do not begin to comprehend that nature of what I do: I am going after the fifth epochal event, which would be the biggest event in the human journey, by far:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=674575&viewfull=1#post674575

Everything else happening on the planet today is noise, compared to helping the fifth epochal event manifest (and simultaneously avoid the sixth mass extinction). Godzilla is very real, but people won’t encounter him unless they are on the high road to FE or involved with similar pursuits. I treat him like I do the weather. When a thunderstorm comes through, I try to stay off the high ground, but I don’t lie awake at night, fearing the next storm. The general public denies that Godzilla exists, and conspiracists (almost always of the armchair variety) fixate on him. Godzilla is only a symptom of our collective malaise, not a cause.

Another big misperception comes from people fancying themselves as would-be heroes. If somebody really wants to be a hero, they have disqualified themselves. Wanting to be a hero is a Young Warrior delusion:

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

I have known and encountered some of the most heroic people of all time, but they were not trying to be heroes, but just doing the right thing when almost nobody around them would:

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

In a world of universal cowardice and turning vices into virtues:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/intro.htm#vices

just doing the decent and honorable thing becomes “heroic.” When Mr. Professor and I rescued Dennis from spending the rest of his life behind bars:

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

we were not doing it to be heroes, but because somebody needed to stand up for what was right, when everybody else became cowards and thieves. Doing so wrecked our lives. It shortened Mr. Professor’s life:

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

and I will always be recovering from the experience (actually, mortgaging my life after it was already wrecked was a minor aspect of events back then). We would have done it again, but it was not something that we were eager to do. We only did it when the rest of the world failed.

My upcoming essay, like my other writings, is partly intended to winnow out the dabblers. While I am doing my best to make it accessible to non-scientists, the material is going to be highly challenging, on several levels. It is not going to be something that can be skimmed, but only people who study it deeply are going to have what I am looking for. If they really understand and do the work, they should be able to at least sing a few notes of the abundance song when they are finished, and the choir will be intended to sing a song that has never been heard in chorus on Earth before. There will be needles in haystacks, scattered across the world, who have been pining for that song their entire lives, and they are my ultimate target audience. Only when I have about 100K people gathered around the cyber-campfire will we be able to think about “doing something.”

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

19th December 2013, 01:56

Hi:

Oh boy, some days I finish the day’s study and writing in a kind of daze, and today is one of those days. I have been writing about the Triassic period and the rise of dinosaurs. We will see what my readers think, but to me, it is all pretty fascinating stuff, and a comprehensive picture begins to emerge as the essay moves along.

For instance, I have been writing about the Triassic extinction, which is one of the Big Five:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#Major_extinction_events

There is current debate whether it was caused by global warming, and whether the Permian extinction was similar:

http://www.reportingclimatescience.com/news-stories/article/does-global-warming-cause-mass-extinctions.html

The end-Triassic event was accompanied by ocean anoxia, which is how oil deposits are made. The end-Triassic anoxic event was the first of many during the Mesozoic, which ended up making most of the Middle East’s oil. The end-Triassic event made the oil in Southern Iraq:

http://www.geoexpro.com/article/Why_So_Much_Oil_in_the_Middle_East/58d94fc1.aspx

which the USA militarily seized and privatized.

Although I won’t expect my readers to become expert on papers such as this:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pala.12034/full

it will be among my references, although I refer far more to books largely written for the lay audience than I do scientific papers, but plenty are in there, too.

Best,

Wade

Robert J. Niewiadomski

20th December 2013, 13:13

Another example of Nature's hint for humans: coconut crabs
Energy extraction taken to the extreme... They can eat almost anything and most of their brainpower is directed at seeking out energy sources aka food. Can live for 120 years (without a close encounter of the 4th kind with a human :( )
WiReD: Absurd Creature of the Week: Enormous Hermit Crab Tears Through Coconuts, Eats Kittens (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/12/absurd-creature-of-the-week-2/?viewall=true)
Please forgive the title... It's the msm's absurd way of disguising the truth ;)

Fun fact, the word "energy" appears not a single time through out the entire article... Instead it's disguised as "available resources"... I wonder if editorial software is tuned to weed out that "e-word" from msm :p If not it just gives an impression of how energy-blind we collectively are...

This must definitely change :)

Wade Frazier

20th December 2013, 15:08

Hi Robert:

Just about all brainpower for all animals is used for finding food, or avoiding becoming food. The primary preoccupation of all civilizations for all time before industrialization was getting enough food to eat. It is only with industrialization that people can devote their attention to reality shows, sports programs, and other lofty pursuits. :)

Food is almost all about energy. For a human, about 80% of food value is energy. So, calling it “resources” is not too far from the mark and arguably accurate, but yes, people are not really trained to think in terms of energy. Scientists are, however, and virtually all biological and evolutionary issues that scientists tackle are within an energy framework, such as how organisms acquire it, how they preserve it, and how they use it. Metabolism, AKA how fast an organism burns its energy, is a central concern for biologists.

Encephalization is about increasing brain size:

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

and predators generally have the largest brains, and this is thought to be because predators had to think the most in order to find and kill their prey.

I was already planning to write a scientist post today, so here goes. What is called pure science (AKA fundamental science) is devoted to understanding phenomena and how things work:

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

Applied science is concerned with practical applications. Engineers are applied scientists:

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

Since I was a child, I heard about the distinction between physicists and engineers. If an engineer builds a bridge, he will roughly calculate the load strength needed for a steel beam, and then require a beam twice that strong. The physicist would calculate the needed strength to five decimal places. That is an example of a practical distinction between pure and applied scientists. Engineers are the inventors, not the physicists. However, both are naïve as a rule, as Fuller mentioned:

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

and that is largely because scientists are involved with things, not people. Being a semi-nerd myself, I can relate to how scientists do not pick up on social cues or understand the dynamics of human interactions. When Mr. Texas made his move, for instance:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=585787&viewfull=1#post585787

what horrified me the most was how effortlessly he duped our scientists and engineers. For him, duping those guys was like taking candy from a baby, and I initially could not believe how stupid those scientists and engineers were to be duped like that. But that kind of naïveté would express itself many times in the future. When Brian O banged on all of those doors:

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

it was the crazed reactions of scientists and inventors that caused Brian to wonder if humans are really sentient:

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

When people think of scientists, they usually think of pure scientists such as Einstein, Heisenberg, Carl Sagan, and the like, not Tesla, Edison, and the Wright brothers. As I resumed my science studies in the past fifteen years or so, I have come to better understand why scientists are useless on the FE front. It is why they are also useless on the UFO front, and it is not just because they have their heads in the sand, but because of the nature of what they do. Scientifically studying UFOs would be to perform repeatable experiments, or to dissect one on a test bench. Since UFOs are not like that (other than those that Godzilla has sequestered), then mainstream scientists can’t study them. That sure does not mean that they don’t exist, but that their study is beyond the purview of mainstream scientists. When Brian poked his nose into UFOs, it almost cost him his life, and it shortened his life:

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

and Brian eventually admitted his naïveté in his last book’s prologue, when he began navigating the fringes:

http://www.brianoleary.info/Synopsis.html

When I had a series of exchanges with a big name in high tech, it was the final straw for me writing this little ditty:

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

The great fallacy in that kind of logic is to totally deny that organized suppression exists. In fact, when my background with Dennis began to come clear to that figure, particularly the tactics used to wipe us and other FE pioneers out:

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

he stated something like, “that sounds like a conspiracy theory” to me.” He stated it like it meant “case closed,” in that I was some kind of nut. And it took me many years to finally understand that kind of irrational response. Consciousness is dismissed as some kind of epiphenomenon of brain activity by materialists, and it is a founding assumption of establishment science today, so the idea of conscious manipulation of the world’s political-economy conflicts with the assumptions of materialistic science (and it challenges many comforting fictions of how the world really works):

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

The greatest physicists were a bunch of mystics, and people such as Schroedinger, Einstein, and Heisenberg were keenly aware of science’s limits:

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

but hacks such as Carl Sagan and the “skeptics” have turned the methods of science into a religion called materialism:

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

It is just another egocentric, scarcity-based ideology:

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

but to the adherents of all such ideologies, they fail to see that they have concocted an artificial way of viewing the world that is not necessarily valid. When they discard their skepticism toward their worldview, particularly its assumptions, then they can become dogmatists and can form the priesthood of their ideology. If you read Sheldrake’s The Science Delusion, it is simply a challenge to materialism, coming from a scientist. An honest scientist would really have little to quibble with in addressing Sheldrake’s work, but that did not prevent the “skeptics” from bullying TED into banning Sheldrake’s talk:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=740177&highlight=sheldrake#post740177

And if you hear Sheldrake’s talk or read his work, and see the “skeptical” complaints, it is hard to not conclude that the “skeptics” are idiots. But they are about the most dishonest bunch I have yet encountered:

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

and stupidity and dishonesty can look the same at first. It has consistently amazed me how naïve scientists have been regarding the “skeptics,” particularly people who should know better, such as prominent members of the FE field:

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

The naïveté and egocentrism of scientists keeps the entire FE field in a state of arrested development, as they think that tinkering, applying for patents, and raising money is the path to FE. I rarely seen a scientist not stuck in that rut, but for the few who advocate giving it away, open-sourcing it, and the like, my interactions with those scientists have exposed their naïveté and dishonesty, in spades. This criminal attacker of Dennis:

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

who gets promoted by people like Foster and other newbies because he is a scientist and writes cleverly, exhorts the public to manifest some integrity and advocates giving away FE. Those kinds of disconnects are rampant in the FE field (“Do as I say, not as I do,” AKA hypocrisy), which is why I won’t have anything to do with it anymore, and why Brian said that the people who will make FE happen are not the people in the field today:

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

If a scientist wants to say that he cannot profitably study UFOs or FE because nobody is laying the technology in his lap so he can study it, I am OK with that. But to turn around and say that they therefore don’t exist is stupid, but that kind of irrationality and naïve positivism dominates establishment science. And that is why seeking mainstream scientific interest or approval of FE is a waste of time. They can’t weigh in on something they can’t study, and far too often, they can’t be bothered to leave their labs and armchairs to go chasing after it, and they then irrationally deny the fact of organized suppression as a “conspiracy theory,” when reporting one’s experiences has nothing whatsoever to do with any theory. Data and theory are not the same thing, which every scientist should know. There are also many other irrationalities in these areas. I have seen scientists dismiss experience of organized suppression as "anecdotal," as if they can test organized suppression in a lab.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

20th December 2013, 23:16

Hi:

To take a little break, when people like Brian and I have received all the crazy FE denial, coming from all corners in many different flavors, some of the most common reactions are level five fear responses:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level5

which are all variations on people not being able to adapt to abundance. I admit that abundance has never been seen before, and it is currently unimaginable to the vast majority of humanity, and that is just how Godzilla likes it. But to think that when people actually get to experience abundance, that they will not begin to think and act abundantly, is a pretty shaky assumption, IMO. Just in my lifetime, I have watched people adapt to dire situations pretty easily, so to think that they can’t adapt to the good stuff, when they actually have it delivered to them, is a stretch, and IMO, is merely a projection of scarcity and fear onto a situation of love and abundance.

Just in my lifetime, Detroit has gone from one of Earth’s greatest industrial cities to ruins. When I lived in Ohio, I lived in Springfield for a year:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield,_Ohio

Springfield nearly became the motor capital instead of Detroit, a hundred years ago, but Detroit won. When I lived there, the locals told me that Springfield was actually doing OK until the oil crisis of 1973-1974, when all construction stopped and the city began going into decline. The rust belt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt ) recession of 1980-1982 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1980s_recession_in_the_United_States ), brought on by the second oil crisis, steepened its decline. In 2011, Springfield was named the USA’s unhappiest city.

Detroit becoming a sinkhole ( http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/cities/news-decline-detroit-brings-nature-back-once-thriving-city ) is nothing new, as this article from 1995 shows:

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/10/us/a-tribute-to-ruin-irks-detroit.html

My recent post about the USA’s cities becoming hellholes is nothing new or radical:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=773202&viewfull=1#post773202

but what has been somewhat amazing to me is how the public has normalized the USA’s swift decline. It has all tracked energy consumption, which was what it all rides on, but the many trappings of the USA’s decline have been accepted and hardly even questioned by people.

I got free college in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when California had the highest spending per capita on education in the USA. It has ranked near the bottom for many years now, and it all began with Ronald Reagan ( http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=599559&highlight=reagan#post599559 ), as he attacked the school system when he was governor and began defunding it, along with mental health and other social services. Earlier this year, California ranked 49th out of 50 states:

http://edsource.org/today/2013/california-drops-to-49th-in-school-spending-in-annual-ed-week-report/25379#.UrTJ9-J0m1g

From first to worst in my lifetime. Part of the reason for that decline is paying heroes like Mr. Deputy about $250K per year in his well-earned retirement:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=604711&highlight=pension#post604711

I knew that Detroit was an evil place long ago:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#carb1

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

and Dennis recently discovered that nothing has changed:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=694872&highlight=wirec#post694872

so it could be said that California, Detroit, and the USA are merely reaping their karma, like a fast version of Rome’s collapse, and I cannot argue much against it, but it has been amazing how Americans have adapted to nearly having body-cavity searches to get on airplanes:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=508935&highlight=cavity#post508935

paying outrageous sums for college (the student loan bubble will be one of the next ones to burst in the USA http://www.cnbc.com/id/101012270 ), and other evidence of the dramatic decline in the USA’s standard of living. If they can get used to all of that, why would they not get used to abundance? I have had times of financial windfalls, and I got used to it easily. :) I recall when I saw it coming, and just imagined what it would feel like, and what would change, and I have to admit that a lot did change. Abundance will be a fun place to be, and I think that people will pretty easily adapt to it. Some may want to keep flagellating themselves and playing dark path games, but they will be the extreme minority and under the “siege” of abundance, not the people running the show.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

22nd December 2013, 15:13

Hi:

One of the hardest things about trying to make a dent is staying away from panic mode, staying away from depression and hopelessness, staying away from trying the quick and easy answers, the hopelessly naïve “bright ideas” that abound (which are rife in Levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11 http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6 ), and the like. As Dennis once said, to walk the FE path and stay sober is not easy. Brian, Dennis, and I all had drinking problems, and we all had to overcome them. Those who did not drink sometimes went insane, or stayed in some kind of obliviousness. Often enough, it was a kind of naïve infantilism, which often characterizes lambs to the slaughter. The lambs needed for my task are sentient and worldly.

I woke up to this story this morning:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-21/us-sailors-assisting-fukushima-clean-crippled-cancer

I live in the fallout zone, and I know people who are terrified of it. While I understand the fear, it can be debilitating. Love is the answer, not fear.

I am an artisan soul:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#reading

and creativity is the best of what we have to offer, but it only comes when we are coming from a place of love, not fear, and only older souls can really make a dent. We are idea people, coming up with new ways of thinking and developing new paradigms. Artisans probably initiated all of the epochal events:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=674575&viewfull=1#post674575

Einstein was an artisan, as were many on the leading edge of science and technology. I am also an artisan who was in the trenches, and I saw plenty of what does not work for bringing FE and abundance to the world. I have an idea of what might, but the idea has obviously not really taken seed very much, with only a few people humming the tune at Avalon after three years. Building the choir will be a long, slow process, primarily because almost nobody can even imagine the tune, much less sing it. The idea will need to take root, and I mean really take root, before priests, sages, kings, warriors, and scholars will come to the party (and only older souls will really be helpful; this is not a child's game, or one that adolescents can play). There is a lot of hard work ahead for the choir, but it may help humanity turn the corner, and just might be the critical missing piece.

Going hiking now…

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

23rd December 2013, 03:09

Hi:

As an addendum to my previous post, today I was thinking about being an artisan. With creativity being the artisan’s positive pole, that may have been partly why it took so long to shed my final delusion on the FE front (or what I hope was my final delusion! :) ): that inventors, due to their creativity, got an extra helping of integrity:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=512250&highlight=creativity#post512250

That was the delusion that it took me the longest to shed, and it may have been partly due to being captive to my own point of view, as an artisan. I never met an altruistic inventor, although I have heard the rumor of one or two, now dead. I never met or heard of the FE inventor with the goods willing to give it away. They all tried to cash in, and that was their downfall.

It really took me a long time for that to finally sink in. My first hints were my experiences with Mr. Inventor:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#inventor

but I got to see it over and over in subsequent years, and when I watched Dennis get screwed over by inventors that he lionized in the 1990s (Brown, among others), it finally became clear. Years later, when I kind of got back in the game, even if rather peripherally with Brian O, the tales could become monotonous. Again, I have plenty of sympathy for the hapless FE inventor, but their approach is doomed to failure, which can also mean a wrecked and prematurely ended life, and Godzilla does not even need to be involved, as his “allies” do him in before Godzilla needs to lift a claw.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

23rd December 2013, 15:42

Hi:

As I write the essay, more and more comprehensive understandings become feasible to introduce, and one is what I just finished drafting this morning:

Calcium carbonate, the primary constituent of limestone, comes in two forms: calcite and aragonite. The magnesium content in the oceans, as well as the ocean temperature and level, determines which form of calcium carbonate will dominate. The Permian extinction also marked the end of a hundred million year ice age. During the eon of complex life, Earth has vacillated between icehouse and greenhouse conditions, with ice ages separated by hot periods. It also seems to be related to supercontinent dynamics. Hot seas are generally calcite seas, and cold seas are usually aragonite seas. Calcite seas create carbonate hardgrounds, which influence what kind of biome forms. The Ordovician and Silurian periods had vast carbonate hardgrounds, which disappeared during the Karoo ice age and returned in the hothouse age of dinosaurs, becoming common in the Jurassic. Today’s ice age has aragonite seas, so organisms that form calcium carbonate shells use aragonite, which is less stable than calcite and its formation is sensitive to temperature and acidity. Coral reefs, key phytoplankton (which help produce Earth’s oxygen), and shellfish use aragonite today to form their shells. There is already strong evidence that the acidification of the oceans, due to humanity’s burning of fossil hydrocarbon deposits to power the industrial age, is interfering with the ability of coral, carbonate-forming phytoplankton, and shellfish to form their shells. That is only one of the industrial age’s many deleterious ecosystem impacts. This aragonite situation is not a theoretical construct of fearful environmentalists, but an impact that is measurable today.

And that text above has about a dozen links, both within the essay and to outside sources, such as here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification#Acidification

That is an example of the interconnected nature of the essay. Of course, FE makes that problem disappear almost instantly. :)

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

25th December 2013, 00:04

Hi:

I am working hard on the essay, about to get to the extinction of dinosaurs, and the dinosaur chapter will be my biggest one yet. I’ll put up the chapter draft one day soon. There was a lot happening in those times, on land and sea, with plants and animals, with celestial, atmospheric, terrestrial, and oceanic events. Each chapter builds on the previous ones, and a comprehensive framework is beginning to take shape. In some ways, what I hope to help my readers understand is pretty simple, and in others it isn’t. I hope they come away from the essay understanding that energy has always been front and center, from the beginning of the galaxy to today. Again, there are only two basic ingredients to the universe: energy and consciousness. And energy is probably a manifestation of consciousness.

And while people like Sheldrake heroically try to get scientists to think outside the box of materialism:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=740177&viewfull=1#post740177

for those who have done the work and performed undeniable remote viewings, mummified fruit with their minds:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=496281&viewfull=1#post496281

gotten hot hands while performing psychic healings and the like, they know that materialism is a religion based on false assumptions. Materialism is one of the mind-trapping scarcity-based ideologies:

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

used to ensnare the minds of the “smart,” as are rationalism and scientism. And for those who have witnessed FE, antigravity, and other exotic technologies in action:

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

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

they know that the kinds of “smart” denial that Level 3 represents:

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

is pipe-smoking, armchair rubbish. For those on the fringes for long, it is also evident that there is a boxcar-load of chaff for every kernel of wheat, and most fringe enthusiasts eat chaff every day, which fringe hucksters serve up with gusto, which is really not much different than people believing what is on the news each day:

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

except maybe a little more tabloid at times.

As Chomsky once said, if people want to learn, they have to do the work. Nobody is going to open the top of somebody’s head and pour in knowledge. Knowledge comes from the hard work of gaining experience.

There are a million temptations and hazards off the beaten path, particularly where FE is concerned, and I am going to do my best so that everybody that I invite into the choir is past at least the elementary pitfalls. They have done what work they can, and have relinquished the need to come up with bright ideas and the like, on the FE front. Much of my work is to help disabuse people of those “bright idea” notions that are constantly bandied about (which I call Levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11 http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6 ).

There is a long, long road of learning and unlearning that needs to happen before anybody can productively think in terms of FE and how to help make it happen. In a way, my ideal target audience has never even heard of FE, so they are not beholden to the many misconceptions that abound in the field.

If a person understands that energy is front and center, then they will achieve Godzilla’s understanding. He know that everything else is noise, but if he can keep everybody mesmerized by the million distractions, hacking at branches and the like, with only stray pioneers needing to be dealt with, then he has the game well in hand.

One of the key understandings that my essay will attempt to make clear is that human consciousness has always been dependent on the energy levels enjoyed. The increase in calories that fire and tools provided led to the human brain, and every major change since then has been entirely dependent on the energy situation. Without the energy provided by domesticating plants and animals, civilization would have never appeared, and if not for the energy provided by fossil fuels, slavery and barefoot and pregnant women would still be the norm, and the industrialized world would have never happened. Today, my fellow Americans kill off millions of people to steal their energy supplies:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

and they don’t even acknowledge that they did it. They can’t afford to become sentient, or else their consciences could not handle it, so their ignorance and stupidity is intentional. Once again, consciousness is dependent on the energy situation. Every single epochal breakthrough, which was about energy every time:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=674575&viewfull=1#post674575

was initiated by a small group of people who cracked the nut, and it was only after the new energy regime took hold that people rode the increased energy levels to new levels of awareness. With the rise of Europe and industrialization, chattel slaves and enslaved women became an abhorrent idea, but it was not abhorrent when the situation’s economics “needed” slaves and barefoot and pregnant women. Only as standards of living rose could people develop a conscience that made those hallowed institutions obsolete. It will be the same with FE. A relatively small group of truly sentient people are going to make the breakthrough, and once FE becomes a daily reality, people will develop consciences that abhor wars to plunder energy resources, and the scarcity-based ideologies that people worship today will become obsolete, just as they always have, when the economic situation allowed for a higher level of awareness. And when abundance-based awareness is reached, there may be no going back, and a world like this may beckon:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

for those who can attain the requisite sentience, and it all begins in the heart.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

gripreaper

25th December 2013, 00:37

Hi:

Again, there are only two basic ingredients to the universe: energy and consciousness. And energy is probably a manifestation of consciousness.

Wade

So simple, so succinct.

Wade Frazier

25th December 2013, 01:05

Hi Gripreaper:

I might be able to save myself a lot of time and money if I shortened the essay up a little, such as edit it down to something like this:

Energy: Think about it.

But will that get it done? :)

Ho, ho, ho,

Wade

Wade Frazier

25th December 2013, 21:01

Peace on Earth

Abundance for All

Dennis Leahy

26th December 2013, 04:13

Peace on Earth

Abundance for All
Right back to you, bro.

Thank you for the compassion that drives you.

Dennis

Wade Frazier

26th December 2013, 05:49

Hi:

I just received the latest book review from Edward Herman (AKA Uncle Ed):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_S._Herman

on the war in Rwanda and the West’s complicity, and how the governments and Western media turned the situation on its head. That Wikipedia article on Ed is far worse than what has been done to Brian O’s article. The imperial hacks abound on that article. To see Ed's work misrepresented that way is almost an honor, I am sorry to say. The email I got from Ed was reviewing this book:

http://www.barakabooks.com/catalogue/rwanda-and-the-new-scramble-for-africa/

Ed has done the same thing with Yugoslavia, Israel and Palestine, the USA and Southeast Asia, and Central America in the 1980s:

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

Ed is nearly 90 years old and still at it. Awe-inspiring work like his is partly what keeps me at it. I am working on what will likely be considered my magnum opus at 55, so I have all my marbles left while I can still write it. How Uncles Noam and Ed can still do it in their eighties is incredible. If I can write anything of substance in my 80s, if I make it that far, it will be gravy.

Wade Frazier

marlowe

26th December 2013, 06:39

The Pacific Ocean and every living thing in it will be dead in 15 years.....

How is THAT going to be "healed "?

We are talking about the eventual extinction of all the whales, dolphins , seals, and salt water fish on Planet Earth.....It's time to get REALISTIC IMHO...

Ilie Pandia

26th December 2013, 07:06

Hi Marlowe,

It looks like you've read only the title on this thread :).

The quick answer to your question would be: waking up to the reality of Free Energy and implementing its usage from a heart centered perspective.

The theme of this thread is to bring to the readers awareness that Energy is really the issue on this planet right now, or to be more specific the artificially enforced Energy scarcity.

The longs posts that Wade is making here describe in a "birds eye" view how energy runs the show (and always has) and how radical solutions and changes can be implemented once the Energy problem has been solved.

Unfortunately many people look at various problems going on around us, but they rarely go at the root cause of it. Solving the Pacific problem will not actually address the fact that we are on the edge of the abyss and we are not slowing down.

With Free Energy the cause of the pollution of the ocean (and the other systems as well) would disappear. We would enter in an abundant world where human would not have to live at the expense of other creatures here on the planet.

This is a very short summary, just to describe what this thread is about, and you can browse it or Wade's site (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm) to learn why this is called "A healed planet" and why Free Energy is the way to do it.

Wade Frazier

26th December 2013, 13:29

Hi:

Well put, Ilie. My site is about nothing but reality: the one we had, the one we have, and the one we can have, if a tiny fraction of us wakes up in time.

I suppose that the Pacific threat that marlowe refers to is the radiation from Fukushima. I live in its fallout, so I am keenly aware of the situation:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=775464&viewfull=1#post775464

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=770701&highlight=fukushima#post770701

and have been writing about Fukushima almost since it happened:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=220252&viewfull=1#post220252

I have been trying to make nuclear power obsolete since 1987:

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

and was presenting a solution for nuclear waste to the DOE in 1997:

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

If a tiny fraction of humanity had woken up by now, these problems would already be solved, and many others, such as global warming and the acidification of the oceans (and other big threats to the world’s oceans). The oceans, like the land-based ecosystems, would no longer be plundered by humanity for food and other resources. Most people would become vegetarians, and the perfect diet would be developed and universally available (mostly live food, and mostly fruit), and Earth’s ecosystems would never be plundered again for human benefit. The human standard living would increase by a few orders of magnitude for starters:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#advanced

Earth’s ecosystems would heal, and humans would assist the healing process, helping to balance the dark and heavy karma that our species has created for itself, especially Europeans and their descendants, such as Americans:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#first

This kind of world would then become feasible:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

But it won’t happen when 99.99% of humanity is asleep and easily manipulated by the social managers, while those who are “doing something” meaninglessly hack at branches. Energy runs the show on Earth and always has, and each epoch of the human journey was spurred and sustained by an energy event that radically transformed the human journey:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=674575&viewfull=1#post674575

So-called “free energy” would initiate the fifth epochal event, and the human journey would quickly resemble Star Trek, less the Klingons, Cardassians, and other galactic miscreants. While miscreants still exist, they don’t have empires with rivalries and wars in this corner of the galaxy. Humans are under quarantine by something resembling the Federation, because of our warlike and primitive nature, and the Federation does not directly interfere, because something very similar to the Prime Directive guides them. Star Trek is not all that fictional, but I am not waiting for the “Space Brothers” to save us from ourselves. We have to do the work to wake up, and the global elites that I call Godzilla are simply a symptom of our slumber, not a cause. Love is the answer and has always been, but scarcity and fear are joined at the hip, as are love and abundance:

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

26th December 2013, 18:07

Hi:

As writing my essay winds down in the coming months and I form my own forum and try to get a choir assembled, the conversations will be at far higher levels than have been seen at Avalon so far, and everybody involved, including me, is going to have to raise their games if the choir is going to make a dent.

I am attempting to form a new paradigm, basically one based on abundance, before the means to it have been delivered to the public. That is a very tall task, but should be harmless enough to those involved (although relinquishing self-serving beliefs can be a very painful experience). Almost nobody has proven willing or able to relinquish their scarcity-based teddy bears:

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

and letting go of them is the first stage of the process, and probably the hardest. Also, one of the most common aspects of people learning new ways of being is proselytizing with their half-cocked new "understanding." FE newbies almost always want to rush out and proselytize. I always discourage it, and those activities can end up with destroyed family relationships, friendships, and even careers, but newbies seem to have to always try it out. The perceptive ones usually come back to me before long and tell me that they learned that lesson and will no longer proselytize. The choir is not going to be about proselytizing.

The people that I hope to attract are not the kind that respond to proselytizing, but are students of the truth and actively quest after it, not have somebody hit them over the head with it. And again, those people are exceedingly rare, but I am going to be using this new technology, the Internet, to try to find them. Virtually nobody in the choir will bring any of their family, friends, and colleagues with them. They will be freaks among those in their daily lives, as they do not march with the herd. And not because they are “rebellious,” but because they are sentient and have left herd thinking and herd behaviors behind.

Almost everybody who has ever been exposed to FE and gotten past denial that it exists or is possible (Levels 1 to 3 http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level1 ) thinks that they have some bright idea that nobody ever thought of before, and after five minutes of FE aspirants trying out the newbie’s bright idea, then it is the race to the finish line of FE and a healed planet. That is the ego talking, and anybody that I invite into the choir will be past those juvenile ideas. The best of the best have spent their lives in this problem, and many have had their lives wrecked or prematurely ended, for those who did not end up wearing Golden Handcuffs:

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

There are no easy answers. Even so, I expect some brilliance by youngsters in the choir, even stuff that really will be a bright new idea that will turn out to be vital. The greatest breakthroughs in physics, math, and science were generally made by youngsters, such as Einstein, Newton, Heisenberg, and the like, and they were a bunch of mystics, to one degree or another:

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

But none of them made their breakthroughs after five minutes of studying the problem, but only after years and years of hard work. Einstein did not publish his seminal papers of 1905 until about a decade after the idea of relativity first came to him, and it was only a dream that removed his final hurdles to the theory.

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

So, while they will be young, they will not be newbies who first heard of FE five minutes before they proposed their “brilliant” solution.

Somebody like Ilie, after several years of hard work, may come up with some new angle on the FE conundrum, but it will be years downstream.

My greatest hope for the choir is to help them quickly get past all the newbie delusions that I call Levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11 http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6 ), as I have watched countless aspirants disappear down those rabbit holes:

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

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

never to be seen again.

I already have an approach in mind for at least forming a fertile environment where FE can manifest. It can only help, and might be the critical missing ingredient, and I did not come up with it because I am so smart. It came to me only after many years of trying or witnessing many approaches, and seeing how each failed, and seeing how deadly the failures could be, that I came to the approach that I am about to try. And I won’t have people stumbling into the conversation who heard of FE five minutes before they sallied forth. The conversation that I will mount will only be engaged by initiates who have done their homework. A scientific background will be helpful but not required, and a little naïveté will be no great crime, as everybody I respect in these fields began their journeys naïvely:

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

especially me. :)

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

But choir members will generally have to have some kind of real-world experience that helped their awareness reach past the herd assumptions, and one term for that is called thinking comprehensively:

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

but it is also one that left naïveté behind, and that usually only happens via experience.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

sdv

27th December 2013, 18:29

Thanks Wade. When I first came across your work, and this thread, I was gung ho about alternative energy that is kinder to the environment and enthusiastic about alternative energy inventors (my dream is wealth that will enable me to buy land, build my dream home and establish solar power, perhaps also wind power, rainwater capture, recycling, a fruit and nut orchard, grow vegetables, herbs and spices and get eggs from chickens, plus establish a reserve for indigenous vegetation) . Godzilla hijacks such initiatives (alternative energy devices) to increase power, wealth and control (see how the solar energy revolution in Germany has been hijacked by the profit motive). Most of humanity wait for energy to be delivered rather than become personally empowered to create and control energy in alignment with the natural rhythms of the universe.

I think I finally understand why you are trying to build a choir (awakening by informing and challenging), because we can only have free energy if we can believe it and dream it and choose it. You are trying to build a choir to sing that song.

I am so sorry if I have misunderstood you, and I am so sorry that I am so skeptical (I cannot even get my community to recycle or produce compost for the gardens ... the recycling depot is right next door to us, but no one wants to recycle ... they just keep throwing everything away to be taken to some exponentially growing waste dump that they do not have to see and can pretend does not exist, and the excuses for not producing compost from waste are so darn pathetic!).

But, I want to find a way to be a part of your choir and to sing the song that will transform the life of humans on this awesomely beautiful and wondrous planet.

Each and every human being has the capacity, the ability, to generate energy, and the 'device' (perhaps one of many) that is needed to store and control the use of this energy has already been discovered. But, Godzilla is well placed to control this for self interest (patents are supposed to protect the rights of the individual, as are copyright laws and treaties, but ... the benefit from copyright protection has been hijacked to serve elites). I have a fantasy, a dream, that such information (about free energy, real, practical, unrestricted free energy) will be shared among the forgotten, lost poor. Imagine empowering remote communities and spreading the revolution beyond the reaches of Godzilla ...!

Perhaps Gaia will do something unpredictable and create the very conditions needed for the choir you are creating to be heard!

Wade Frazier

27th December 2013, 20:14

Hi:

OK, taking a little break after drafting the dinosaur chapter. It is too big to put into one Avalon post, so I am breaking it in two. I am sympathetic to readers who feel overwhelmed by the information, but there is a method to my madness. I hope that several ideas will become “seated” with my readers (particularly those whom I plan to invite into the choir) after they finish the “pre-human” part of my essay, and some are:

1. Energy has always run the show ( :) );

2. Earth’s geophysical development has directly-impacted the evolution of life, and vice versa;

3. Sh*t happens, where the success of a new life form (such as trees), set dynamics in motion that spelled the end for many other creatures, or everybody may have been fat and happy, and along comes an asteroid and ends the party;

4. All creatures that dominated various ecosystems over the eons were originally marginal organisms, and while their eventual dominance could be due to their superior biological processes (always energy-related), quite often their dominance was because the field was cleared via a catastrophe, and the previously marginal players rose to dominance when the rock stars left the stage via extinction (Yes, mammals, I am looking at you. :) );

5. When the eon of complex life began, food chains appeared, and they are inherently more complex than simple ecosystems, and their organisms are also more complex. That complexity can confer great advantages, but also create great risks, the greatest of which is when the energy chain is disrupted, anywhere along the way, the entire ecosystem can collapse.

And as readers make their way through the age of humans, the above dynamics will become evident in the epochs of the human journey and the rise and fall of civilizations. While humanity is reliant on an energy source that is being depleted a million times as fast as it was created, we are on our way to a collapse of epic proportions, and may take most complex life with us. With FE, many radical changes will happen in the human journey. Not only will it be the first time that humanity has truly experienced abundance, but humans will no longer need to exploit and destroy ecosystems for short-term human benefit. Not only will the ecosphere begin to recover, and humans can greatly accelerate that process by helping, but humans will no longer be subject to the vagaries of climate, resource depletion, and the like.

I can see some readers thinking, “Hey Wade, you just said it in one page, so why do you need to use two hundred pages and a friggin’ 1300-page website? My head hurts.” I do it because unless people really do the work and develop comprehensive perspectives, what I wrote above will not really “seat” in their awareness, but will be seen as another flavor of the day, and the reader then trots off to listen to the next New Age talking head, watch the latest YouTube viral hit, or god forbid, they get the idea that they can help make FE happen by supporting the tinkering inventor of the hour who is getting patents and raising money, etc., thinking that Godzilla is a conspiracist myth, he died in his sleep, the White Hats put him in a cage, or we can somehow sneak past him.

The fifth epochal event is no small beer:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=674575&viewfull=1#post674575

and the people who can help it manifest will not be doing it as a lunch hour diversion, but will need to go deep, and they will need to keep their eye on the ball, and that requires discipline and a comprehensive perspective, not tunnel vision.

Time for chores as I recover from drafting that chapter. Again, as I steam along, prior chapters are being revised, and when the entire monster gets drafted, the editor’s hat will go on in a big way, and not just with me, but my professional editor, scientist pals, and others. We will see what the final product looks like.

So, here is my chapter draft on the Mesozoic Era, AKA, The Reign of Dinosaurs.

Best,

Wade

The Reign of Dinosaurs – Part 1

The period following the greatest extinction ever is called the Triassic, which ran from about 252 mya to 201 mya. The Triassic also was the Mesozoic era’s first period (the other two periods were the Jurassic and Cretaceous), with the Mesozoic also known as the Golden Age of Reptiles, but most people think of it as the reign of dinosaurs. However, dinosaurs did not yet exist when the Triassic began.

There was a “coal gap” in the early Triassic, and depending on the framework and which scientist is asked, it took Earth’s ecosystems ten million years (when the environment became normal enough to sustain normal ecosystems), thirty million (when terrestrial ecosystem diversity recovered), or a hundred million years (when marine ecosystem diversity recovered) to recover from the Permian extinction. On land, the forests slowly recovered, with the disaster-taxa lycophytes dominating the early Triassic. Seed ferns came to dominate the Southern Hemisphere, and palm-tree-resembling cycads and ginkgo trees (which first appeared in the late Permian, of which the living fossil Ginkgo biloba is the only surviving member) also thrived. In the Triassic’s Northern Hemisphere, on what became North America, Europe, and Siberia, conifer forests recovered and blanketed the land.

From the Permian extinction’s devastation arose a reptilian sheep called Lystrosaurus. Fossil hunters of early Triassic sediments have been frustrated for many years, as nearly 95% of preserved early Triassic land animal remains are Lystrosaurus fossils, because it was about the Permian extinction’s only land animal survivor. There has been debate for many years about why it survived when almost nothing else did. No single animal ever dominated Earth’s land masses as thoroughly as Lystrosaurus did during the early Triassic. Lystrosaurus was likely a burrower (many have likened Lystrosaurus to a pig because of that burrowing), which may have provided the shelter needed to survive the Permian holocaust. It may also have been a generalist herbivore and could eat most surviving plants. But some think that its survival, when almost every other species died, was due to luck. Luck is a surprisingly common scientific explanation for evolutionary events, with some creatures seeming to be in the right place at the right time, and others being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The spread of Lystrosaurus was also aided by two other dynamics; the land masses formed one continent, so Lystrosaurus could simply walk to dominance of Earth, and few predators capable of eating a Lystrosaurus survived. One swamp denizen ate Lystrosaurus (being semi-aquatic may have also helped species survive the Permian extinction), as did another carnivore, but not much else did. Lystrosaurus was a therapsid, as were the dominant land animals before the Permian extinction.

The Golden Age of Lystrosaurus lasted only about a million years before it was displaced by much larger herbivorous reptiles, and diapsids, particularly archosaurs, began displacing therapsids early in the Triassic. A cynodont descendant, Thrinaxodon, burrowed and was possibly a direct ancestor of mammals. If it was not our direct ancestor, it was a close cousin to it. Proto-mammals were displaced and largely driven underground during the Triassic, with many of them resembling rats and other rodents. About halfway through the Triassic, early mammals first appeared, although there is plenty of fierce controversy over exactly which animal could be called a mammal. But reptiles starred in the Mesozoic’s tale, dinosaurs in particular, with mammals being small, marginal creatures, and until the late Mesozoic, they only emerged from their burrows at night to feed.

In Triassic seas, ammonoids recovered from brink of extinction at the Permian’s end to live in their Golden Age, while still periodically booming and busting. It took ten million years after the Permian’s end for reefs to begin to recover, and when they did, they were formed by stony corals, which evolved from their tabulate and rugose ghost ancestors, and stony corals also built today’s reefs. Bivalves dominated biomes where brachiopods once flourished, and never relinquished their dominance. Before the Permian extinction, about two-thirds of marine animals were immobile. That number dropped to half during the Triassic, but ecosystems became far more diverse, and a marine “arms race” began in the late Triassic. New shell cracking and piercing strategies were invented by predators, and the prey had to adapt or go extinct. The few surviving brachiopods and crinoids were driven to ecosystem margins, and the Jurassic and Cretaceous would see the appearance of shell-cracking crabs and lobsters.

The Tethys Ocean grew during the Triassic, and in the Jurassic, there were no more island barriers on the Tethys’s east end. The Paleo-Tethys was finally squeezed out of existence by islands that became part of Eurasia. The shallow margins of the Tethys became the greatest oil source in Earth’s history. The Proto-Tethys and Paleo-Tethys oceans also formed oil deposits, but about 70% of the world’s oil supply initially formed during the Mesozoic’s numerous anoxic events, primarily along the Tethys’s margins. From the Middle East, Caspian Sea, and Western Russia to North Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and Venezuela, virtually all of their oil deposits were laid down by dying and preserved organisms along Tethyan shores. In the early Triassic, along the west end of what became North America, oceanic plate subduction under continental plates initiated a series of volcanic and mountain-building events that continue to this day. The foundations of the Sierra Nevada mountain range were formed then, which I have spent my fair share of time hiking through.

Low-oxygen Mesozoic oceans saw the rise of unusual biomes. In methane seeps in the Mesozoic ocean floor, bivalves and brachiopods formed symbiotic relationships with chemosynthetic organisms that digested methane. All over the world, scientists have been amazed to find rock layers almost entirely comprised of shells of those innovative, low-oxygen surviving shelled animals.

Similar to cliché images of Carboniferous rainforests depicting a giant dragonfly, the cliché dinosaur image has volcanoes in the background (1, 2, 3). The Mesozoic began and ended with tremendous volcanic eruptions, and major eruptions dotted the Mesozoic. Those eruptions vented vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and were responsible for the high carbon dioxide levels that dominated the Mesozoic, according to GEOCARBSULF and its later corrections, which made it such a hot era. Hot seas also do not hold as much oxygen as cold seas, which contributed to the anoxic events that continually visited Mesozoic oceans, particularly the Tethys. Hot, low-oxygen air is hostile to animal life, and during the Triassic, many reptiles beat the heat by migrating back to the oceans where their ancestors hailed from. Those seagoing reptiles soon dominated Earth’s oceans, in Earth’s greatest migration from land to sea. Ichthyosaurs, which looked like reptilian dolphins, first appeared about 245 mya and survived for about 150 million years. The ancestors of plesiosaurs also appeared when ichthyosaurs did. By 215 mya, some ichthyosaurs became gigantic, with one species reaching more than twenty meters in length, and it had Earth’s largest eyes ever, at about the size of a dinner plate. Ichthyosaurs hunted the squid’s ancestors (which could get pretty large), Earth’s other big-eyed animals, but feasted on a wide variety of prey as the late Triassic oceans’ apex predators. Also a shellfish-eating cousin of plesiosaurs lived in the Triassic. Aquatic reptiles overcame Carrier’s Constraint, and many aquatic reptiles of the Mesozoic seem to have become warm-blooded, as well as give live birth.

So far, this essay has dealt lightly with regional differences, largely confining the discussion to polar, temperate, and tropical conditions in the seas, and rainforest versus dryer conditions on land. While Pangaea existed, barriers to species diffusion on land were relatively modest, hence Lystrosaurus dominance. But Pangaea began to break up at the Triassic’s end, and continental differences in plants and animals often became significant in later times. While the formation of Pangaea had profound impacts, because land life was relatively young, the differences and resultant changes due to oceanic barriers being removed were far less than would happen in the distant future, such as when South America connected to North America.

For an example of how geography impacted early animal evolution, therapsids are thought to have evolved in non-tropical Permian climates. That non-tropical beginning influenced therapsid evolution, particularly strategies for regulating body temperature. Therapsids were rather stocky, with short limbs and tails, which is a cold-weather adaptation seen in mammals today. There is plenty of speculation and research on the issue of therapsid thermoregulation, because mammals are the therapsid line’s last survivors. Diapsids, on the other hand, evolved in warmer climates and were relatively gracile, with particularly long tails. That long tail was critical for the appearance of bipedal reptiles, as it shifted their center of gravity over their hips.

Until my lifetime, scientists thought of dinosaurs as slow and stupid, but that view has changed. In the 1970s, scientists realized that prior depictions of bipedal dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus Rex erroneously presented them with upright postures. Their actual posture had the tail, spine, and head all on a line largely parallel with the ground. Not until the release of Jurassic Park did the public begin to see more realistic portrayals of bipedal dinosaur posture. That posture may have been critical for the success of dinosaurs, as becoming bipedal, with their legs in an upright position under their bodies, allowed them to overcome Carrier’s Constraint. Also, the notion of overcoming Carrier’s Constraint transformed the view of dinosaurs from lumbering, slow creatures to nimble runners. The dinosaur line is considered monophyletic, and the first dinosaurs were bipeds. All quadrupedal dinosaurs likely re-evolved their four-legged stances from the original bipedal posture, which is obvious in that nearly all quadrupedal dinosaurs had rear legs longer than their front ones.

The view on dinosaur intelligence has also changed radically in the past generation, as evidence has been adduced that some dinosaurs were significantly encephalized (particularly the line that led to birds), as well as evidence for parenting and herd behaviors, and pack hunting. Dinosaurs had the first hands, even with opposable thumbs. Recent work on encephalization suggests that animals were well on their way toward human-level encephalization hundreds of millions of years ago, and were prevented from attaining it far earlier, such as 70 mya, due to the Permian extinction. The world might be populated with sentient, civilized, and even space-traveling reptiles today if events had played out slightly differently, such as that asteroid missing Earth 66 mya (or technologically-advanced dinosaurs preventing its impact).

The direct ancestors of dinosaurs, archosauromorphs, first appeared in the late Permian, and some bedraggled specimens survived into the Triassic as ghost ancestors. But the first true dinosaurs did not appear until about twenty million years into the Triassic, with Eoraptor being about the first recognized dinosaur and best known early example. Eoraptor looks like a miniature Tyrannosaurus Rex, and in fact began a terrestrial dinosaur line that ended with the Lizard King, called theropods. Birds are also likely part of the theropod clade, as the only survivor of that line and the only surviving dinosaurs. Eoraptor was about a meter long and weighed ten kilograms. The time from the first diapsids to the first dinosaurs spanned nearly a hundred million years, but there was nothing spectacular about them then, as their early years were dominated by amphibians, then synapsids, then therapsids. Why dinosaurs rose to prominence has been a source of controversy and debate, but the contending answers are energy-based.

Carrier’s Constraint and the first dinosaurs’ bipedal posture is currently an issue of great interest, as it may explain why dinosaurs prevailed over therapsids. According to GEOCARBSULF and COPSE, the early Triassic was a period of low oxygen following the Permian crash, down to 15% or so from the early Permian’s 25-35%. Peter Ward’s hypothesis is that dinosaur ancestors evolved their bipedal posture to overcome Carrier’s Constraint in the Triassic’s low-oxygen environment. With running no longer interfering with breathing, quick dinosaurs displaced lethargic therapsids in the Triassic. Even quadrupedal dinosaurs had postures with their legs directly under them, which overcame Carrier’s Constraint. The standard hypothesis is that speed and stamina allowed dinosaurs to prevail, but they also first appeared and began their spread after another mass extinction event about 230 mya, which may have resulted from volcanism and/or mountain-building in Alaska and along the west coast of Canada, with their attendant climatic effects. Today, two competing hypotheses explain the rise of dinosaurs: their superior respiration and speed, or their opportunism when a mass extinction at 230 mya eliminated therapsid herbivores and left the biomes open for herbivore dinosaurs, called Sauropodomorpha, to appear and dominate by the Triassic’s end. Their probable descendants, the sauropods, are Earth’s largest land animals ever, and the question of why dinosaurs became so large is a central issue today, and may well be related to another hot topic: the development of endothermy in dinosaurs.

Birds are warm-blooded, and today’s reptiles are cold-blooded. Thermoregulation is a vast, complex issue, and being warm-blooded or cold-blooded appeared to be a result of evolutionary cost-benefit outcomes. The first vertebrates that left Earth’s waters often basked, the first dominant reptiles had energy-regulating sails, and therapsids may have at least dabbled in chemical means of internal temperature regulation, although the evidence is thin. But the evidence for dinosaurian internal temperature regulation is strong, and the surviving therapsid line, the mammals, also developed internal temperature regulation.

The Triassic began hot and ended hot, and the Jurassic and Cretaceous were also hot, so staying warm was not a significant issue for dinosaurs. Marine reptiles stayed cool by becoming aquatic, and for land-based dinosaurs, features such as Stegosaurus plates apparently replaced the sails of synapsids for both heating and cooling, and like the synapsid sail, those Stegosaurus plates may have also been used for display. And like the cliché, many large herbivorous dinosaurs lived near cooling swamps, although the issue has been controversial. Cooling swamps and protective water holes that we see in the tropics today were a major aspect of Mesozoic landscapes. But the thermoregulatory aspect that most work is directed toward today is how dinosaurs kept warm. There is compelling evidence that dinosaurs regulated their body temperature in myriads ways, including internal chemistry. All bipedal animals today are endotherms, and they all have four-chambered hearts, as dinosaurs did. Feathers, dinosaurs living near the poles (1, 2), and oxygen-isotope studies of dinosaur bones all support the idea that dinosaurs engaged in internal temperature regulation, but one of the more intriguing areas is that of dinosaur growth. Like tree rings, bones have seasonal growth rings, and they have been read for many dinosaur fossils. They have been used to determine dinosaur life expectancies. Tyrannosaurus Rex could live to be about thirty, while the giant sauropods could live to be fifty, and smaller dinosaurs, as with smaller mammals, lived shorter lives, with the tiny ones only living three-to-four years, and the mid-sized ones living seven-to-fifteen years. Growth rates also provide thermoregulation evidence. Tyrannosaurs had juvenile growth spurts and largely stopped growing as adults, and sauropods had growth rates equivalent to today’s whales, which are Earth’s fastest growing animals. But there is also evidence of ectothermic dynamics. The great size of dinosaurs would have led to relatively easy ways to stay warm, as large animals have a greater mass-to-surface area ratio, similar to how complex cells overcame the energy generation issue. Also, in the generally hot Mesozoic times, staying warm would have been fairly easy, particularly for huge dinosaurs.

As we know with mammals, while optimal performance can be attained with endothermy, it comes with a great energetic cost. As with plants, an animal can spend its energy budget on consumption (metabolism) or investment (growth). An intriguing hypothesis is that growing large was part of an energy strategy, as the benefits of size (reduced risk of predation, ease of conserving body heat and consequently less need for a high metabolism, ability to access new food sources, such as foliage high above the ground) outweighed their costs (energy devoted to growth instead of metabolism, the need to constantly feed). Their size and the warm climate meant that large dinosaurs did not need as intense internal energy generation as mammals do, for instance, and dinosaurs may have been mesotherms, with internal energy regulation greater than ectotherms, but not as great as endotherms (mammals and birds).

With GEOCARBSULF’s depiction of low Mesozoic oxygen levels, Peter Ward has addressed a controversial issue regarding how dinosaurs breathed. Birds have an air sac breathing system with an inflexible septate lung, which is highly superior to the mammalian alveolar bellows lung. At 1600 meters elevation, today’s birds are about twice as efficient at extracting atmospheric oxygen as mammals are. Flying is the most aerobically-demanding activity on Earth, and a bird’s air-sac breathing system is a primary reason why they can fly, and flying over the Himalayas is an energetic feat far beyond what any mammal can accomplish. The high-performance respiration that birds have is also why they live far longer than similarly-sized mammals, but is likely related to their efficient mitochondria. When a mammal breathes, it inhales oxygenated air and exhales carbon dioxide. But is not a very efficient system, as fresh and depleted air mix in the lungs. The air sac system, on the other hand, passes fresh oxygenated air along the lungs with each breath. One might say that birds constantly inhale. Animations of the air sac system can help understand it. Since birds evolved from dinosaurs, and indeed are dinosaurs, just when this innovation developed is of great interest to paleobiologists. If the Mesozoic was the low-oxygen era that GEOCARBSULF depicts, then the air sac system would have been a logical adaptation to oxygen-poor air.

The issue of avian and dinosaurian air sacs and when they evolved has been the focus of a rancorous dispute which was only recently resolved and hinged on the hollow parts of bones, which is a phenomenon called skeletal pneumaticity. The controversy involved dinosaur bone pneumaticity and how it may have been related to birds. In a landmark paper in 2005, it was shown that birds have their most important air sacs where nobody thought they were, near a bird’s tail, not its head. Not only that, pneumatic bones are all related to the air sac system, and birds have the same pneumatic bones as saurischian dinosaurs did. The obvious implication is that the air sac system evolved in theropods and sauropods when dinosaurs first appeared. If the air sac system appeared with the first dinosaurs, it is one more big reason why dinosaurs prevailed over the less respiratorily gifted therapsids. That such a highly effective respiration system would have evolved in a low-oxygen environment makes a great deal of sense.

Ornithischians, a great clade of herbivorous dinosaurs, appeared soon after theropods did, but were initially marginal dinosaurs and did not begin becoming abundant until the late Jurassic. If dinosaurs all have the same common ancestor, ornithischian dinosaurs quickly diverged, with their different hips, and so far, there is no good evidence that ornithischians breathed with the air sac system, and they became the dominant herbivores in the relatively high-oxygen Cretaceous. What ornithischians particularly had going for them was a superior eating system. Ornithischians were the only dinosaurs that chewed their food. Chewing squeezes more calories from plant matter, and may be why ornithischians surpassed sauropods in the Cretaceous. Sauropods did not chew their food, but had rock-filled gizzards, like birds and reptiles do today. Sauropods began becoming gigantic in the late Triassic. Only rare ornithischians without chewing teeth had gizzards. Sauropods also had the smallest proportional brains of any dinosaur. Ornithopods were in second place only to theropods in brain size, and were among the most successful Cretaceous herbivores. A fascinating aspect of some ornithopods was their seeming ability to communicate by bugling with a horn in their head’s crest. This kind of evidence strongly supports the idea of herd behavior in herbivorous dinosaurs. There is also evidence of a dinosaur stampede, which is keenly contested (1, 2) these days.

Long before birds learned to fly, non-dinosaurian reptiles did, with the first pterosaurs flying about 220 mya. They also had an air sac respiration system. While they obviously flew, just how they flew has been controversial. They were likely warm-blooded, and by the late Cretaceous, pterosaurs became Earth’s largest flying animals ever, with ten-meter wingspans. Pterosaurs may have been the dinosaurs’ closest relatives.

The mass extinction at 230 mya coincided with a volcanic event and the initial building of mountains in what became Central Asia. Ammonoids, bivalves, and other marine denizens were hit hard, and on land it was nearly the final exit for therapsids (cynodonts and dicynodonts), and what would have been the chief diapsid competitor to early sauropods, rhynchosaurs, suddenly went extinct, possibly by losing their food source. Extinction specialist Michael Benton argues that the mass extinction at 230 mya was greater in ways than the end-Triassic extinction, which is considered one of the Big Five extinctions. The first appearance of dinosaurs coincided with the mid-Triassic mass extinction, and mammals first appeared a few million years later. While the “slate being cleared” by a mass extinction may well have given dinosaurs their opportunity, they also left many contemporaries far behind. Mammals would be rat-like fringe dwellers for 160 million years after they first appeared, while dinosaurs ruled Earth. Stony corals also first appeared after the mid-Triassic extinction, and turtles first appeared about 220 mya.

Although the Triassic was a period of great evolutionary novelty, even called an “explosion” in some corners, where air sac lungs, dinosaurs, mammals, modern corals, and flying and marine reptiles appeared, it was not nearly the boom when mammals rose after the Cretaceous extinction. GEOCARBSULF shows that oxygen levels were low during the Triassic, rebounding a little from the Permian extinction, and then collapsing to perhaps their lowest level of the entire eon of complex life. Peter Ward posited that the low oxygen levels during the Triassic and Jurassic kept dinosaurs from “exploding” like mammals did after the Cretaceous extinction. GEOCARBSULF’s crash of oxygen levels coincides with the end-Triassic extinction, about 201 mya. The cause of the end-Triassic mass extinction, as with all other extinction events, is debated today, with climate change and volcanic eruptions among the primary suspects (with the volcanic eruptions spewing “only” hundreds of thousands of cubic kilometers of lava, compared to the Permian’s millions), along with rising and falling sea levels. GEOCARBSULF’s carbon dioxide values show a carbon dioxide spike, which would have caused global warming, as happened in the Permian extinction, and could have triggered the same dynamics of methane hydrate vaporization and hydrogen sulfide events. A recent study makes the similarity explicit between the end-Permian and end-Triassic extinction events, with ominous parallels to current events. Vented carbon dioxide from volcanic events also made the oceans near shore acidic. Extensive anoxic events visited the oceans in the late Triassic, particularly along the Tethys’s periphery, and Triassic anoxia formed Southern Iraq’s oldest oil deposits, which the USA militarily seized and privatized during the past generation.

The breakup of Pangaea at the Triassic’s end not only likely initiated volcanic events right in the heart of Pangaea, but the weather systems would have been altered. In general, the Triassic was a dry period on Pangaea (with some mid-Triassic extinctions possibly related to it becoming wetter on land), and the Jurassic was wetter, with the ubiquitous Mesozoic jungles depicted by Hollywood thriving.

The end-Triassic extinction once again nearly drove ammonoids to extinction, with perhaps only one genus surviving. The reefs that began to recover in the late Triassic were again eradicated, not reappearing until more than ten million years later. Bivalves, brachiopods, and gastropods lost about half of their genera. The marine reptile placodonts, which specialized in eating mollusks, went extinct, and plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were the marine apex predators to begin the Jurassic. On land, it was nearly the end for therapsids; afterward, until their final extinction in the early Cretaceous, they would be marginal fringe dwellers. All large terrestrial non-dinosaur archosaurs went extinct, leaving dinosaurs unchallenged for terrestrial dominance during the Jurassic.

Similar to reptiles finding refuge in the oceans, the crocodile’s ancestors were originally terrestrial archosaurs and found their cooling niche in swampy margins and still do today, even though their cousins (1, 2) went extinct in the end-Triassic event. Crocodiles have four-chambered hearts like dinosaurs, which suggests that they may have been endotherms/mesotherms that re-evolved ectothermy to better adapt to swamp life. Only one superfamily of primitive amphibians survived the end-Triassic event for long, and its last surviving member lasted into the Cretaceous in survival enclaves. It was a giant, at five meters long and five hundred kilograms. Primitive amphibians could not abide the reign of crocodiles, and since the end-Triassic event, amphibians have been almost exclusively modern varieties. The first salamanders appeared in the late Jurassic, and frogs may have first appeared a hundred million years earlier, in the late Permian. Similar to dinosaurs and probably spurred by their size in an arms race, crocodiles became huge, with a Cretaceous species reaching twelve meters and eight metric tons (and this one). Ambushing drinking sauropods, and holding their heads under until they drowned, was a likely specialty of those huge crocodiles.

With all the mass death of the end-Triassic extinction, dinosaurs emerged virtually unscathed. Why? It may have been due to their superior air sac breathing system, which could survive the hot times and record-low oxygen levels of the end-Triassic. The mammalian lung is pretty good, too, but not nearly as efficient as the saurischian dinosaurs’ air sac system. Crocodiles have a piston-lung similar to mammals, so they also had a superior respiration system. Mammals were able to ride out the storm in their burrows, while crocodile ancestors cooled in the swamps, and marine reptiles cooled in the oceans. Living in burrows, swamps, and other refugia is probably how mammals, crocodiles, and birds survived the end-Cretaceous extinction when non-avian dinosaurs did not.

The end-Triassic event’s final tally was more than 20% of all families, nearly half of all genera, and between 70% and 75% of all species. Afterward, marine reptiles dominated the oceans, flying reptiles dominated the air, crocodile ancestors were the freshwater environment’s apex predators, and dinosaurs reigned in terrestrial environments.

The Jurassic (c. 201-145 mya) and Cretaceous (c. 145-66 mya) periods spanned the Golden Age of dinosaurs. The human fascination with dinosaurs is primarily due to their great size. They were Earth’s largest land animals ever, by far. Huge predators hunted even larger herbivores. Prosauropods, or plateosaurs, were largely bipedal and were the early Jurassic’s dominant herbivorous dinosaurs, but their four-legged descendants, the sauropods, supplanted them by the mid-Jurassic and sauropods became Earth’s largest land animals ever. Some species may have weighed up to 200 metric tons, which would have made them heavier than the blue whale, which is generally considered to be the largest animal that ever lived. While the blue whale may retain its weight primacy, the sauropods’ vast dimensions are awe-inspiring. Some were up to sixty meters in length and could reach seventeen meters tall. Some of the largest sauropods ever lived in the late Jurassic, when they were most numerous, but huge sauropods were plentiful until the Cretaceous extinction. Unlike the swamp denizens that brachiosaurs and their cousins were depicted as long ago, they primarily lived in semi-arid environments, similar to the savannas where giraffes and elephants live today. A prominent hypothesis is that their tremendous size was a strategy for digesting lower-quality food sources; they could digest food for a longer period as it wound its way through their digestive systems. Their size also discouraged predation and conserved heat. But their highly efficient air sac breathing system may have been the main reason why they could get so large, particularly in the record-low oxygen Jurassic period, at least according to GEOCARBSULF.

Jurassic sauropods likely subsisted on ferns and the foliage of cycads and conifers, which almost no vertebrates do today, and few animals. Sauropods likely had huge guts to ferment those plants. It would not have been an energy-rich diet. There has been controversy whether sauropods could rear up on their hind legs, and how they held their heads on their long necks, but the idea that they were primarily swamp-dwellers has gone the way of other early notions. Sauropods apparently lived in herds and tended their young. Until relatively recently, animals as agents of ecosystem change and maintenance was a marginal idea. But today, sediment burrowing is thought to be a seminal geophysical event in the Cambrian, and those huge sauropods likely had an ecosystem impact similar to what elephants do today in Africa. Elephants today break up woods as they feed, as they knock over trees and uproot them. That damage transforms the biome and provides opportunities for other kinds of herbivores and their predators. Elephants also create and enlarge water holes, and are considered keystone species, with an outsized impact on their environment. Today, there is a “loyal opposition” to the overkill hypothesis regarding megafauna extinctions soon after humans appeared, where such people minimize the impact of humans (their position has an inherent conflict of interest, as those scholars and scientists are all humans) and attribute the extinction of all elephants of the Western Hemisphere (north, south) to climate change and resulting changes in vegetation. If the current situation with African elephants is instructive, it is legitimate to wonder if those vegetation changes were a result of elephant extinction, not a cause. The elephant extinctions would have affected many other kinds of plants and animals, and could have precipitated trophic cascades. Similarly, those huge sauropods would likely not just have nibbled at vegetation and been relatively harmless browsers, but their vast bulk would have been ideal for pushing over trees to get at their foliage and other devastations of trees in particular, which would have dramatically impacted biomes. Giant dinosaurs likely had keystone species impacts on their environments, particularly the vegetation.

Wade Frazier

27th December 2013, 20:15

The Reign of Dinosaurs – Part 2

Ornithischians started slowly, beginning to become common in the late Jurassic, just when the greatest biological innovation in the past 300 million years began: the appearance of flowering plants, which first bloomed about 160 mya. Until that time, plant strategies involved avoiding being eaten by animals, whether it was bark, height, poisonous foliage, etc. Flowering plants adopted a different strategy: laying out a banquet for animals. The primary benefit for plants was spending less energy to reproduce, as well as attracting animals that did not seek to eat the plants and even ended up protecting them. The advantage for animals was an easily acquired tasty meal. It was the greatest direct symbiosis between plants and animals ever, other than plants providing the oxygen that animals breathe, which is inadvertent. The two primary aspirations that seed plants achieve for successful reproduction are becoming fertilized via pollination and placing seeds were they can become viable offspring (and feces fertilizer could only help). Flowering plants, also called angiosperms, did not invent animal assistance from whole cloth. Some Jurassic insects have been found in association with gymnosperm (conifer) cones, and were likely doing the work that the wind previously performed. Similar to the enzyme example of a key rattling around in a room, attracting animals to plants, to eat the pollen and nectar, was like a reproductive enzyme, where animals carried the key to the lock to initiate reproduction. Other animals ate the fruit and thereby spread the seeds. That relationship did not become significant until the mid-Cretaceous. Angiosperms mature faster and produce more seeds than gymnosperms do. By the Cretaceous’s end, angiosperms dominated tropical biomes where ferns and cycads used to thrive, and they pushed conifers to the high latitudes, just as they have today. That tropical dominance is likely related to the insect population, which prefers warm climates. Angiosperms became Earth’s dominant plants after the end-Cretaceous extinction, and comprise more than 90% of plant species today.

There is speculation that dinosaurs invented flowering plants in a coevolutionary dance, as low-browsing ornithischians put pressure on plants to grow and reproduce quickly, and angiosperms are far more effective at those activities than all plants preceding them. The spread of angiosperms in the mid-Cretaceous coincided with the ornithischians’ rising dominance, and by the end-Cretaceous extinction, they were the most numerous herbivores by far. Stegosaurs appeared in the late Jurassic and went extinct by the late Cretaceous.

In the late Jurassic, as ornithischians began to become plentiful, a theropod innovation would lead to the only dinosaurs to survive the end-Cretaceous extinction: birds. As with synapsid sails, stegosaur plates, and a Triceratops’s horns and frill, feathers had a display function as well as thermoregulation, long before they were used to fly. Ever since scientists realized that dinosaurs were closely related to birds, they have watched for feathers, and have found more than 20 genera of dinosaurs that sported feathers. That famous Archaeopteryx fossil discovered in 1860-1861 began the speculation that birds evolved from dinosaurs, and was considered one of the first confirmations of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Today, scientists are far from certain that Archaeopteryx flew, and it is not considered a direct ancestor of today’s birds. Feathered dinosaurs existed before Archaeopteryx’s 155 mya appearance, and they are in the clade that led to today’s birds. Birds probably did not fly much, if at all, until the Cretaceous, and the first beaked birds appeared in the early Cretaceous.

When birds began to fly, their energy requirements skyrocketed. Today’s bats, for instance, burn several times as many calories as similarly-sized non-flying mammals, and live several times longer than similarly-sized mammals, just as birds live far longer than similarly-sized mammals. Mammalian life-expectancy follows a curve where size, metabolism, and longevity are all closely related. The general rule is that all mammals have about the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime. A mouse’s heart beats about 20 times as fast as an elephant’s, and an elephant lives about 20 times as long as a mouse. Larger bodies mean slower metabolisms, or less energy burned per unit of time per cell. Birds have the same kind of size/metabolism/life-expectancy curve, but it sits on a higher level than mammals. A pigeon lives for about 35 years, or ten times as long as a similarly-sized rat. On average, birds live three-to-four times as long as similarly-sized mammals.

Because of the stupendous energy demands of flight, birds not only have the superior air sac system for breathing, but their mitochondria, the cell’s energy-generation centers, are far more efficient than mammalian mitochondria. Avian mitochondria are also probably the leading reason why birds live so long. Parrots in captivity can live to be 80, and scientists have noted an albatross in the wild reproducing at more than 60, and scientists may discover that wild albatrosses live to be a hundred or more, when their tagging programs get that old. The mitochondrial theory of aging likely explains bird longevity, with the efficient mitochondria of birds producing fewer free radicals. While the theory is controversial and will be for many years, I think that an engine analogy can help. A bird is a piece of high-performance biological technology, and when operating at peak output it puts all land-bound animals to shame. But a bird’s metabolism is usually in its slack state, only maximized during flight. Simply put, a bird has a great energy capacity that is rarely used to its fullest. It is like a high-performance engine that rarely runs near its redline. Such engines will last far longer than those regularly running near redline. High performance technology that usually “loafs” in its slack state and is rarely taxed is expensive and long-lasting. The investment in superior technology allows for high performance and long life. High quality technology is more economical in the long run, if the initial investment can be afforded.

Recognizably modern birds existed by the end-Cretaceous, and modern birds were the only dinosaurs to survive the end-Cretaceous extinction. Small pterosaurs called pterodactyls today first flew about 150 mya, about the time that birds appeared. The skies were getting crowded by the late-Cretaceous, although birds and pterosaurs seem to have inhabited different niches. Modern birds likely survived the end-Cretaceous extinction because they found refugia, likely in swampy margins, burrows, and holes in trees, such as those that woodpeckers can create.

Another energy-related activity likely first appeared on a large scale during the reign of dinosaurs: territoriality. While territoriality can be observed in insects, fish, amphibians, and reptiles today, it is most common among birds and mammals. Territoriality is primarily about preserving an animal’s energy base against competitors, and it is usually a behavior oriented toward others of the same species, which would eat the same food resources and mate with the same potential partners. Just as what seems to be consciousness appeared with the earliest animals, territorial behavior may go all the way back to the Cambrian Explosion. But the social behaviors apparent in dinosaurs likely also meant territorial behavior, and likely on a scale never experienced before on Earth. Even the suspected display function of synapsid sails implies territorial behavior. All great apes are territorial, and human political units such as nations are nothing more than ape territoriality writ large, as peoples protect their energy and mating bases. With display being common in today’s birds (with its apotheosis in the peacock, although, as usual, there are competing hypotheses), with the phenomenon likely going all the way back to synapsids, with dinosaurian mass nesting sites, herd behaviors, and the like being discovered, many dinosaurs were likely territorial.

In the late Jurassic, armored stegosaurs and ankylosaurs first appeared, using an ornithischian defensive strategy that ceratopsians also developed in the early Cretaceous, which reached its peak with Triceratops in the late Cretaceous. Today’s rhinoceros is the mammalian equivalent of Triceratops, but today’s rhinos don’t have to face anything as fearsome as Tyrannosaurus Rex, although the most successful predators in Earth’s history, humans, are driving rhinos to extinction.

The Tethys Ocean was fully formed in the Jurassic, and the continents began to break up in earnest, which led to rising sea levels. The shallow seas that began to reappear in the Triassic became widespread in the Jurassic as continental shelves were submerged. The Atlantic Ocean began forming in the Jurassic, as South America and Africa split, and the world-circling Panthalassic Ocean became the Pacific Ocean about the same time, although it is more of a convention among geologists than any dramatic change. Australia began to split from Antarctica during the Jurassic. Mountain-building events along the west coast of North America continued unabated, and the Andes Mountains, which began forming in the Triassic, continued developing in the Jurassic.

The mid-Jurassic marked the beginning of a 140-million-year period of anoxic events that produced most of Earth’s oil deposits, with them finally ending in the Eocene. The anoxia of post-Triassic Mesozoic oceans seems to be at least partly the result of increased runoff from land spurred by volcanic events, combined with warm, stagnant, stratified surface waters. Low atmospheric oxygen, combined with high nutrient runoff and warm waters that absorb less oxygen than cold water, provided the conditions for those anoxic events, with atmospheric oxygen levels only increasing toward modern levels in the Cretaceous. Also, changing currents (including upwelling, which usually brings nutrients to the surface) and rising sea levels (which can make the seafloor anoxic) may have contributed to the unprecedented and never reproduced anoxia of those times. Until the current low-oxygen events that humans are inducing, anoxic events, and hence oil formation, have not occurred much in the past 40 million years.

About 183 mya, an extinction event linked to anoxic and volcanic events hit ammonoids hard, as usual. The extinction seems to have been confined to the oceans. Along with the appearance of carbonate hardgrounds, reefs slowly recovered in the Jurassic, and by the Jurassic’s end, coral reefs lined Tethyan shores. Low-oxygen tolerating marine animals proliferated in the Jurassic. Ammonoids, with their superior respirational equipment, developed large, thin-shelled varieties that likely housed their large gills, required to navigate the Jurassic’s low-oxygen waters. Also, a different kind of cephalopod, the ancestor of squids, became plentiful in the Jurassic. The first crabs appeared in the Jurassic, and they also developed a superior respiration system, where they put their gills within their armor and developed a pump gill. As most seashore visitors know, crabs are quite tolerant of being exposed to air, much as nautiloids suffer no ill effects when exposed to air for a short time. Crabs proliferated with the late Jurassic’s reefs, to only collapse with the end-Jurassic reef collapse (called the Tithonian event, or end-Jurassic extinction), which was caused by a sudden drop in sea levels, and the extinction again appeared to be restricted to marine biomes.

The sea level drop quickly reversed in the early Cretaceous, and the Cretaceous (c. 145-66 mya) saw the most dramatic rise in ocean levels during the eon of complex life. At the sea level’s peak, the land’s surface area during the Cretaceous was about two-thirds of today’s (18% versus today’s 29% of surface coverage). By the early Cretaceous, today’s continents were recognizable, and for the first time ever, marked regional differences appeared among the terrestrial animals that inhabited continental biomes. The sauropods generally stayed south, and ornithischians came to dominate the northern continents, and theropods also became quite diverse in the late Cretaceous. The iconic theropod and most famous dinosaur, T-rex, appears to have solely been a North American resident. Earth’s fossil record for dinosaurs is richest in North America (with China and Mongolia coming in second), so the fossil record may be biased toward northern dinosaurs. Today, there are only about one hundred professional dinosaur paleontologists on Earth; not a very large community. To most six-year old boys, those scientists won the lottery, being paid to study dinosaurs and dig their fossils from the ground. One of the uglier disputes in paleontology’s history was a race in the late nineteenth century between two Americans bent on outcompeting each other in finding and describing dinosaur fossils. In T-rex’s northern range, Triceratops was the dominant herbivore, and its confrontations with T-rex may have been Earth’s greatest land battles ever, at least until humans appeared. In T-rex’s southern range, North America’s largest dinosaur, a gigantic sauropod, lived.

As land’s surface area shrank, the continents became wetter, as all land became closer to the oceans. In the late Jurassic, there was a cooling period, the coldest time of the entire Mesozoic, with even some mountainous and polar glaciation, but end-Jurassic volcanism kept carbon dioxide levels high and the climate warmed. Warm-climate plants lived within 15 degrees of the South Pole during the Cretaceous, and forest went all the way within five degrees of the poles, which has fascinated scientists as they try to envision a biome where it was dark for nearly half the year. The Cretaceous was generally a hot, wet time on Earth.

India broke away from Gondwana in the early Cretaceous, and the Gondwana breakup beginning about 150 mya is generally considered the birth of the Indian Ocean. By the Cretaceous’s end, India was alone and swiftly moving toward Southern Asia and a prodigious collision that formed the Himalayan Mountains and Tibetan Plateau. The Andes were uplifted during the Cretaceous, and mountain-building events (1, 2) continued in western North America, and in the late Cretaceous, the Rocky Mountains began their rise and the volcanic hotspot that created the volcanic mountain chain that is currently represented by the Hawaiian Islands first appeared. In the late Cretaceous, the Tethys Ocean connected with the Pacific and created a world-circling tropical current, which helped gentle and warm Earth’s weather systems, which contributed to the anoxic events. The North America’s Great Plains were under a shallow sea in the Cretaceous.

Calcareous plankton appeared in the Mesozoic, and required oxygen to form calcium carbonate. They became so abundant in the high oxygen of the late Cretaceous that the rain of their bodies on ocean floors gave the Cretaceous its name: chalk (the Latin name). Calcium carbonate, the primary constituent of limestone, comes in two forms: calcite and aragonite. The magnesium content in the oceans, as well as the ocean temperature and level, determines which form of calcium carbonate will dominate. The Permian extinction also marked the end of a hundred million year ice age, giving way to about 200 million years of hot times. During the eon of complex life, Earth has vacillated between icehouse and greenhouse conditions, with ice ages separated by hot periods. It also seems to be related to supercontinent dynamics. Hot seas are generally calcite seas, and cold seas are usually aragonite seas. Calcite seas create carbonate hardgrounds, which influence what kind of biome forms. The Ordovician and Silurian periods had vast carbonate hardgrounds, which disappeared during the Karoo Ice Age and returned in the hothouse age of dinosaurs, becoming common in the Jurassic. Today’s ice age has aragonite seas, so organisms that form calcium carbonate shells use aragonite, which is less stable than calcite and its formation is sensitive to temperature and acidity. Coral reefs, key phytoplankton (which help produce Earth’s oxygen), and shellfish use aragonite today to form their shells. There is already strong evidence that the acidification of the oceans, due to humanity’s burning of fossil hydrocarbon deposits to power the industrial age, is interfering with the ability of coral, carbonate-forming phytoplankton, and shellfish to form their shells. That is only one of the industrial age’s many deleterious ecosystem impacts. The current aragonite situation is not a theoretical construct of fearful environmentalists, but an impact that is measurable today.

According to GEOCARBSULF, oxygen levels rose in the Cretaceous and nearly reached modern levels by the end. But anoxic events also dotted the Cretaceous, likely related to rising sea levels. The largest bivalve ever lived in the Cretaceous, reaching three meters in length, but it was not a fearsome predator. It was a deep-water species that probably formed symbiotic relationships with chemosynthetic organisms, along with those other low-oxygen Mesozoic bivalves, and it went extinct as oxygen levels rose in the atmosphere and likely also in the seas.

When sea levels rise dramatically, as they did in the Cretaceous, coral reefs will be buried under rising waters, and the ideal position, for both photosynthesis and oxygenation, is lost, and reefs can die, similar to burying a tree’s roots. About 125 mya, reefs made by rudist bivalves, which thrived on carbonate hardgrounds, began to displace reefs made by stony corals. They may have prevailed because they could tolerate hotter and more saline waters than stony corals could. About 116 mya, an extinction event happened, likely caused by volcanism, which temporarily halted rudist domination, but rudists thrived until the late Cretaceous, when they went extinct, probably due to changing climate. Carbon dioxide levels steadily fell from the early Cretaceous until today, with temperatures falling during the Cretaceous, and hot-climate organisms gradually became extinct during the Cretaceous. Around 93 mya, another anoxic event happened, perhaps caused by underwater volcanism, which again seems to have been confined to marine biomes. It was much more devastating than the previous one, with rudists hit hard, although it was a more regional event. Biomes beyond 60 degrees latitude were barely impacted, while those close to the equator were devastated. Ammonoids seem to have been brought to the brink with nearly all marine mass extinctions during their tenure on Earth, and it was no different with that late Cretaceous extinction. Ammonoids recovered once again, with their largest species ever living in the late Cretaceous, but the end-Cretaceous extinction marked their final appearance, as they went the way of trilobites and other iconic animals.

Sauropods were high grazers, eating tree ferns, cycads, and conifers as their staple, and the dramatic radiation of ornithischians in the late Cretaceous coincided with the spread of angiosperms, and their chewing ability continually improved. Insects also dramatically diversified, as did birds and mammals, in an epochal instance of coevolution between plants and animals. Hive insects (bees, wasps, termites, ants) began their rise when flowering plants did.

Shell-cracking lobsters first appeared in the early Cretaceous, and by the late Cretaceous, mosasaurs became the dominant marine predators, with ichthyosaurs going extinct after 150 million years of existence and plesiosaurs declining. Those apex predators preyed on squids as large as today’s, and sharks and ray-finned fish always seemed to do well, with some substantial sharks appearing in the mid-Cretaceous that even preyed on mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. The largest sea turtles yet recorded lived in the late Cretaceous, at four meters long and two metric tons.

In the nineteenth century, the Jurassic was called the Golden Age of Dinosaurs, but that moniker is arguably most applicable to the late Cretaceous, and was a Golden Age clear up until a bolide impact brought it all to an end. The dinosaur extinction is likely the largest and most contentious controversy in the history of paleontology. Again, the subject of mass extinction was taboo, due to Lyell’s and Darwin’s prevailing uniformitarianism, until my lifetime. The hypothesized bolide event, first proposed in 1980, was a kind of a bolide event inflicted on paleontology, with acrimonious disputes ignited that still burn, but it made studying mass extinctions respectable. Initially attacked and dismissed, the bolide impact hypothesis is by far today’s leading hypothesis for explaining the end-Cretaceous extinction. However, at the same time, India was speeding toward its date with destiny, and it movement is associated with a huge volcanic event that created the Deccan Traps. Also, sea levels seesawed at the end-Cretaceous, so the bolide event has some theoretical competition as the causative agent.

It is probably safe to say that if the end-Cretaceous extinction had multiple causes, none of the ancient mass extinctions can be attributed to just one cause. However, the sudden disappearance of all non-avian dinosaurs, and what survived, casts a heavy vote for the bolide hypothesis. Also, there may have been multiple impacts, similar to how the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet fragmented before it plowed into Jupiter. Dinosaurs were all terrestrial and were either herbivores or ate herbivores. The largest bolide impact obviously hit North America the hardest, T-rex would have been among the first casualties, and it would have created an artificial “winter” lasting at least a few months, which might have followed the greatest fires in Earth’s history. All photosynthetic organisms would have been devastated, as well as the food chains that relied on them. That alone can explain the end of non-avian dinosaurs, but it also helps explain what survived. Ammonoids were lightweight versions of nautiloids, living near the ocean’s surface. Nautiloids had retreated to deep waters hundreds of millions of years earlier, and they lay eggs that take a year to hatch, and they lay them in deep water. All ammonoids went extinct in the end-Cretaceous event, ending a 300-million-year-plus tenure on Earth, and all the marine reptiles disappeared, too. Rudist bivalves were in decline before the extinction, likely related to the sea level changes, but it is looking like they lasted until the bolide event. They were all dependent on primary-production food chains that would have been interrupted by the “bolide winter,” for those that survived the initial conflagration, and they all went extinct. However, a year after the disaster, when the smoke and dust had cleared, out hatched nautiloids that had been safe in their shells the entire time, and nautiloids are still with us. Sharks would have feasted on dead beasts; both aquatic animals and carcasses washed into the oceans by tsunamis.

Most plants produce seeds, and seeds would have largely survived the catastrophe, and began growing when conditions improved. Ferns came back first, in what is called a fern spike, as ferns are one of the disaster-taxa. Crocodiles, modern birds (which included ducks at the time), mammals, and amphibians also survived, and all could have found refuge in burrows, swamps, and shoreline havens, lived in tree holes and other crevices that they were small enough to hide in, and all could have eaten the catastrophe’s detritus. In general, freshwater species fared fairly well, especially those that could live on detritus. Also, the low-energy requirements of ectothermic crocodiles would have seen them survive when the mesothermic/endothermic dinosaurs could not hold out. The primary determinants seem to have been what could survive on detritus or energy reserves, and what could not, and what could find refuge from the initial conflagration. While there may have been some evidence of dinosaur decline before the end-Cretaceous extinction (it was gradually growing colder), and the Deccan Traps may have caused at least some local devastation, the complete extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, ammonites, marine reptiles, and others that would have been particularly vulnerable to the bolide event’s aftermath has convinced most dinosaur specialists that the bolide impact alone was sufficient to explain the extinction, and no other hypothesis can seem to explain the pattern of extinction and survival that the bolide hypothesis can. In general, the key to surviving the end-Cretaceous extinction was being a marginal species, and all of those on center-stage paid the ultimate price. The end-Cretaceous toll was nearly 20% of all families, half of all genera, and about 75% of all species, and marked the end of an era, with the Mesozoic ending and making way for the Age of Mammals, also called the Cenozoic, and used to have the Biblically-inspired title of the Tertiary.

In the wake of the success of the end-Cretaceous bolide hypothesis, there was a movement in some circles to explain all mass extinctions with bolide events, particularly the Permian extinction. If bolide events were responsible for all mass extinctions, then the periodic, galactic explanation might still have relevance. Even though an end-Permian bolide event was unveiled with great fanfare and media attention in 2001, it does not appear to be a valid extinction hypothesis today, and invoking bolide impacts to explain every mass extinction seems to have been a passing trend that has seen its best days. The oxygen hypothesis for explaining extinctions, evolutionary novelty, and radiations is similarly being called a current fashion in some circles, and time will tell how the hypothesis fares, although it seems to have a great deal in its favor.

Wade Frazier

28th December 2013, 00:32

Hi sdv:

That was a beautiful post. It is very understandable to wonder what the heck I think I am going to accomplish. I hear you very loudly and clearly on how those around you sleepwalk through life. That is the human condition these days. They won’t awaken on their own, and only something that literally changes their reality can begin to awaken them. Talk won’t do it. Being an example of a life well-lived won’t do it. Not for the masses.

I think that most FE activists learn pretty early on that the masses are a dead end as far as initiating or helping along any meaningful change. They stampede wherever the social managers send them, as the managers play the masses’ strings like a virtuoso violinist. Godzilla is really only the conductor who operates off-stage, and only intervenes when the rhythm is in danger of changing, or some of the notes seem too sentient.

After brutally learning the primary lesson of my journey, and one that will likely never be surpassed:

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

I spent several years trying to understand why the world was like it was, but I also began trying to find allies and the awake. That damned voice sent me to Mr. Professor:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice3

and Dennis:

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

and even though it is a small FE world, I can tell that my “friends” also guided me to Brian O:

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

I cannot recommend that “path” as any kind of strategy that can be reproduced, but we all tried what we could, and sought potential allies; if not the fully awake, at least the awakening or those who might want to. And what a desert of apathy and indifference we got to walk in, and the biggest enemies of FE seem to be many of its advocates:

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

or the “smart” and those who say they really seek energy solutions:

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

Brian’s eventual reaction was wondering if humanity is really a sentient species:

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

and I got the point. I call humanity semi-sentient. The potential is there, but almost never realized or even sought. Almost everybody abdicates their sentience for the promise of a full belly and the temporary satiation of their addictions. But it took many years to finally accept the reality, and virtually all of us had drinking problems as part of the price of admission of seeing where humanity really is.

But, IMO, humanity’s sorry state is all based on fear, which is based on scarcity. And the “system” gets ‘em while they are young, bludgeoning their hearts and minds:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/intro.htm#blinded

and giving them egocentric games to play to get their goodies:

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

instead of encouraging heart-centered sentience. But, for every epochal event, the masses had no idea what was coming:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=674575&viewfull=1#post674575

so the state of affairs is actually normal. What I am attempting, helping some tiny fraction of humanity just imagine the next epoch before it comes into being, has never been done before in the history of Earth, and the crazy part is that the technology to kick it off is already here:

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

Some like Ilie will definitely be in the choir, as he is singing without even having a hymnal in his hands. But being in the choir is going to be very hard work. I expect that extremely few who encounter my work and even like it will be able to sing, and that is OK. If they can just imagine abundance in the quiet of their hearts, it is going to help. The singers will be making a sound that has never been heard before, and my hope is that it attracts the attention of the still extremely few people on Earth who are going to do something about it. But even with them, I am going to be discouraging the hero’s route for something more in alignment with what kind of world can beckon:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

I have seen the best of the best go the hero’s route:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

and I don’t want to be responsible for any more fates like theirs, not in this life. My goal is to make it so that heroes are not needed. A thousand like Ilie and it is game over for Godzilla, and FE and a healed humanity and planet would not be far behind. Am I asking too much? We will see. For those who aspire to be in the choir, I will be asking a lot, but it will be confined to just shedding their scarcity-based baggage and imagining abundance, and then learning to sing it. How hard can that be? :)

Time to go play with my wife.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

30th December 2013, 16:32

Hi:

I am working hard on the rise of mammals, and dealing with “the climate did" it explanation by some scientists regarding the demise of Earth’s megafauna. I recently wrote that all such efforts should be accompanied by disclaimers:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=771113&highlight=disclaimer#post771113

Uncle Howard wrote about how dangerous the feigned objectivity of scholars can be:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm#zinn

and I think that the same applies to scientists, in spades. As I get to the rise of mammals and the sudden extinction of all the large ones when humans arrived, it really stretches the credibility of scientists that advocate climactic reasons, when the big picture is viewed. For more than 300 million years, ever since the first amphibians flopped out of the water for a try at land life, animals always reached for maximum size, just like they already had in the oceans for hundreds of millions of years before that. Size confers great advantages, in metabolism, in winning the “arms race” between predator and prey, in reaching niches that other animals cannot exploit, etc. Whenever a mass extinction came along and wiped the slate clean, as it were, the next generation of animals got big as fast as they could, and the winners in the size war would dominate the next phase.

When dinosaurs died off, there was a race for size, and since the mammals started out so small, as they were marginal creatures, literally living underfoot to the dinosaurian overlords, they were a little behind at first. Birds, snakes, and crocodiles actually had the early lead, with “terror birds”:

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

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

being apex predators, and the biggest snakes of all time thriving:

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

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

It took mammals 25 million years to reach their maximum size, and they stayed that way for the next forty million years, until humans arrived.

http://www.academia.edu/622144/The_evolution_of_maximum_body_size_of_terrestrial_mammals

So, more than 500 million years of animals always striving to be big, and then the big ones all go extinct just when humans show up, by coincidence. Would you like to buy a bridge?

And there is a very active cadre of scientists who take on all the continental megafaunal mass extinctions and try to explain them away via climate change. Earth’s climate has changed one hell of a lot in 300 million years, and while climate change has been implicated in some mass extinctions, nothing has really happened for 65 million years that should have made virtually all the continental megafauna go extinct, except the arrival of the greatest predator in Earth’s history, as they killed off all the easy meat to fuel their expansion.

Those scientists who argue for climactic causes have conceded human-caused island extinctions, because they have been so recent and blatant. Everywhere that humans have intruded into during the past several thousand years (all island environments, including the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and Arctic islands where the last mammoths lived http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafauna#Megafaunal_mass_extinctions ) meant the immediate extinction of all megafauna. In New Zealand, the invading Maoris wiped out all the amazing large birds within a century, which had New Zealand to themselves for 65 million years. The “climate did it scientists” make the arguments that continents are vastly different entities than islands, even huge ones like Madagascar and New Zealand, so what was so easy and obvious for humans to do on those islands was impossible to accomplish on continents. I really have to fight my anger when dealing with such scientific theorizing. It is almost identical to white anthropologists and scholars who make the case that the near total extermination of the natives of the Western Hemisphere and Australia was some kind of inadvertent side effect of the “settlers” from Europe, when the genocidal attitudes were evident from the very beginning of the invasions, and continued right up to the end, when there was nobody left to kill:

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

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#wounded

All of those scientists and scholars, who have prostituted themselves, both consciously and unconsciously, to defend their race/species/nation/patrons, are just more examples of the primary lesson of my journey:

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

This kind of behavior of the “smart” and learned goes way back, to the first civilizations where the religions of the day portrayed the elites as divine, to justify their status, which continued until very recently, with the Divine Right of Kings, court historians, and other rubbish. And when a new class of thief arose, the capitalists, the classical economists fell all over themselves to portray the capitalists as some kind of saints of cleverness and efficiency, when we can read in their private correspondence that they knew what they were doing, flacking for their greedy and violent masters while trying to appear impartial. In today’s endless lies in the media:

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

what is always the most telling are the conflicts of interest that are either hidden or glossed over. So it is, in a world of scarcity, where winning is everything, and appearing to play fairly is the game.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

30th December 2013, 19:26

Hi:

As an addendum to my previous post, there is good news, at least on the subject of the megafaunal extinctions: I have yet to see a scientist or scholar that was not part of the two camps come away without saying something along the lines of: “It sure looks like humans did it.”

Jared Diamond, Joachim Radkau, Sharon Levy, Peter Ward, Richard Cowen, Hallam and Wignall, and others – when they all finish looking at the evidence, they lean very heavily towards the “humans did it” hypothesis. There is a scientific “skeptic” for every hypothesis and theory, and it is arguably just the nature of the beast. But that egocentric bias, whether it is conscious or unconscious, is rife in all areas of human endeavor, where people defend or deny the crimes of their group, whether it is their species, race, religion, nation, and so on. So, scientists should be commended for largely avoiding the egocentric bias that is more blatant in other areas.

Global warming is another area. For many years, the “debate” was between climate scientists without a pronounced conflict of interest and a handful of scientists who sold their souls to the hydrocarbon lobby, and the media whores concocted an illusion, making it look like a legitimate debate, when there really wasn’t one. I saw Brian O’s rage at a colleague who sold his soul to the hydrocarbon lobby, who is still one of the leading Global Warming “skeptics”:

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

And the scientifically-illiterate public thinks that there is a genuine controversy. And, of course, the Global Warming “skeptics” make the seductive case for business as usual, and I have seen them even applaud what is happening (even so-called progressives and FE advocates, believe it or not), because it is reversing the slow carbon-starvation of Earth. Drowning a thirsty man in a thousand gallons of water is not exactly a solution.

It is Science 101 that atmospheric carbon dioxide traps Earth's radiation (solar-based) and warms Earth. In all of the paleoclimate studies I have ever seen, the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide levels are the primary variable studied for determining Earth’s temperature. Climates are highly complex systems. For my entire lifetime, as computers have become more powerful, the ultimate use for the most powerful computers has always been trying to model and predict climate and weather. But that has nothing to do with denying that Global Warming is real. All that I have ever seen the Global Warming “skeptics” do is play the regional variation or climate oscillation cards. Neither one has anything to do whatsoever with the overall warming of Earth’s atmosphere, but is just looking at the minor fluctuations that always accompany climate trends. Whether one region of Earth has a cold or wet winter, or hot and dry summer, has little to do with whether Earth is warming or not.

I am not saying that scientists don’t have their own indoctrination and blind spots, as anybody familiar with my work knows:

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

but the good news is that they have standards of evidence and logic that they usually adhere to, and even sometimes when their paradigm is challenged! :)

So far, science as a whole has been useless on the FE front, which I discussed recently:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=774788&viewfull=1#post774788

but it does not mean that I don't hope, just a little, that some of them and some rad lefties will one day open their eyes to the new reality that beckons but has been actively hidden from them. Maybe some of them will leave their armchairs and actually check some of this FE stuff out.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

31st December 2013, 05:19

Hi:

This is going to be one of those “process” posts. While I have greatly enjoyed the science studies that have gone into writing the upcoming essay, it can also be like walking in a minefield sometimes. For instance, I have been writing about mass extinctions, and I have been writing lately on the megafaunal extinctions. The megafauna can also include other human species, and I think it should, but you will find scientists arguing for climate change for the Neanderthal extinction, for instance, and there is a running battle today between studies on the demise of Neanderthals:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=718536&viewfull=1#post718536

And there can be high emotions and bickering on the evidence and interpretation. One of the great fallacies about science is thinking that scientists are open-minded seekers of the truth. While the process of science ideally gets at the truth (and that is very debatable, too), individual scientists often go to their graves clinging to their theories. That has been the case from the very beginning:

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

I have read quite a few books by scientists and science writers lately where they try to disabuse the public of those ideal notions about science and scientists. Science itself is taking directions that have everything to do with its history and political-economic concerns, not some ideal pursuit of the truth.

And then you find scientists who have taken blatantly political and popularizing stands, and you see that their colleagues don’t trust them to be impartial, and then you see who they align with, and then you begin to poke into their work, and you see how they are playing sloppy or fast and loose with the facts, and then you have to abandon their work as untrustworthy. I’ll give an example. I have read about ten books by Peter Ward, and even though he went on TED and has played popularizer, and has been pretty heavily criticized by some of his peers, I usually want to know what Ward has to say.

When the bolide hypothesis was posited in 1980 for the end-Cretaceous extinction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Tertiary_extinction_event#Chicxulub_asteroid_impact

Ward, like many other paleontologists, went looking for the evidence. Ward is one of the world’s foremost nautilus specialists, and he went looking for their extinct offspring, the ammonites, in the layers just below the impact event, and his initial finding was that it seemed that the ammonites did die out gradually, not all at once at the impact, and he was fervently embraced by the gradualist camp (AKA non-bolide camp). But he went out years later and dug in another place, and found ammonites thick to the boundary layer. The evidence then supported the sudden death scenario. Ward wrote about this in scientific papers and books long ago. Heck, Gould wrote about it twenty years ago:

http://www.sjgarchive.org/library/text/b16/p0398.htm

So, anybody in the field who uses Ward’s ammonite work to make a point about the end-Cretaceous extinction had better say that it supported the sudden death scenario. Well, in a book that I am currently reading, I was already wary of the author, and he made the gradualist argument, and kind of made fun of the bolide people. He cited Ward’s ammonite work, but only for the first finding, not the second, and this is a book written within the past decade. I had already seen that author get politically active with a well-known “skeptic” that I don’t have much respect for, and when I saw him cite Ward’s ammonite work like that, I almost wanted to throw the book away, but it is one the few resources known for one of the subjects that I am writing about. So, I am reading it very warily and independently verifying as much of what he asserts as I can.

I’ll give another example. About ten years ago, a challenge to the bolide impact hypothesis was a paper that made the case that since a bee that did not make honey survived the end-Cretaceous extinction, it would have had to live off flowers, which would not have survived the “bolide winter” that the bolide hypothesis calls for, so the bolide hypothesis could not be correct:

http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Honeybees_Defy_DinoKilling_Nuclear_Winter.html

The paper was released with great fanfare in the press. I looked into the issue a little, and found that the entire “Cretaceous bee” evidence was a single bee in amber, found nearly a century ago in New Jersey:

http://fossilworks.org/cgi-bin/bridge.pl?a=collectionSearch&collection_no=109025&is_real_user=1

http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/bitstream/handle/2246/2087/N3296.pdf?sequence=1

and it is dated to almost exactly the end-Cretaceous event. I am sorry, but one bee in amber, with a guess at its age, and one million years this way invalidates the Cretaceous dating, supposedly undermines the entire bolide hypothesis. That is pretty shaky evidence, and is why I read scientific papers and books warily.

And this is in supposedly rock-solid, sober science. Conspiratorial topics are way, way more circus-like. I was just having an exchange the other day about some of the JFK evidence that keeps coming out. Again, there is plenty to throw doubt on the Warren Commission findings, but magazines such as Skeptic:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=767044&viewfull=1#post767044

toe the party line. A prominent academic has had his toe in the JFK waters for a generation, but he also supports the wackiest and way out conspiracist theories out there, turning what could be good work into disinformation.

Those are just some of the hazards out there.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

2nd January 2014, 05:38

Happy New Year to all. I am working like a madman on the essay, and recent writings and exchanges have inspired this post, which was inspired by thinking about the essay as it really starts coming together.

A hundred thousand years ago, just as humans were beginning to expand across the world, Earth’s ecosystems had created several great energy reservoirs, and they were:

1. Earth’s large animals. On land, they were called megafauna, and in the oceans, they were the whales.

2. Forests, and the fertile soils that the forests created.

3. Coal and oil, which were the remnants of ancient life that geological processes concentrated and preserved.

Humans have plundered all of them to exhaustion (the oil will be gone in this century, and the coal in the next, at the current trajectories, if we survive that long). It also went in phases, where humans had to reach new levels of technological sophistication and social organization to exploit them. The megafauna were the first to suffer the rise of energy-hungry humans, and humans quickly drove all the large land animals to extinction, wherever they appeared except for Africa and Asia, where the megafauna evolved with humans and learned to survive them.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/upcoming.htm#_edn5

After all the killable megafauna was gone, humans then domesticated plants and animals, and soon were deforesting the land and exploiting the remnant soils, and early civilizations all collapsed, generally because they wiped out their energy supplies (forests and soils). But it paled to what happened when humans began to smelt metals. Then they could rapidly deforest land and exploit the soils, especially if they had draft animals.

There were also minor energy events that were interludes, and also helped the next energy exploitation happen. When Europe developed the greatest energy technology in history to that time, the ocean-going sailing ship, they not only conquered the world, but they also drove the oceanic megafauna, whales, to the brink of extinction, and they did it in two phases: a pre-industrial phase:

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

and an industrial one:

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

Whaling only stopped when nearly all whales had been exterminated.

Not long after learning to sail the high seas, Europe learned to industrially exploit coal, and oil a couple of centuries later, and the Industrial Revolution was off and running.

There is no evidence that prehistoric hunters had any notion of conservation, and they hunted until all the big animals were gone. They did it to the marvelous bird-based ecosystem in New Zealand in only about a century:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_New_Zealand#Polynesian_foundation

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

This has been the human way from the beginning, and it continues today. FE can end all of that, for the first time. Anybody interested in helping it happen? :)

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

2nd January 2014, 21:52

Hi:

I hope that 2014 is a productive year for what I plan to do. I have done something like this before, but will make a post to begin the year which presents why I am trying this approach.

First of all, energy runs the world and always has, and every epochal change in the human journey was initiated and sustained by tapping a new energy source:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=674575&viewfull=1#post674575

Humanity rode that new energy source to new ways of being and thinking. There are no exceptions to that dynamic. Because of my preposterous journey and those of my few fellow travelers, I came to understand that the energy source that dwarfs all others, and is also environmentally harmless, has been around for longer than I have been alive:

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

But the global oligarchy put a very tight lid on it long ago. Any effort toward putting that energy source to public use has been systematically suppressed, and their bag of tricks is impressive:

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

and I have experienced or witnessed most of them. During my adventures, the primary and most painful lesson I learned is that personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity:

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

The global oligarchy is only the master of a game that nearly all humans play. The vast majority of the public refuses to believe that the oligarchy exists or is mischievous, while the fringes obsess on their machinations, thinking that the oligarchy is really important or some kind of aberration of human nature. They have only made self-service into a science:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#serving

Both camps that deny or obsess over “Godzilla” (Greer’s term, and it is apt http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#gc ) play the victim game, which is governed by fear, and they consequently do not act with integrity:

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

When we either blame or deny, we do not accept responsibility for the state of affairs. Accepting responsibility is acting like a creator, and only those who accept responsibility are able to make the needed changes. Everybody is responsible for how it is on Earth today:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#responsibility

so everybody can help change it, but not while we think and act like victims. Playing the victim has led to the strange contours of the human condition. After Brian O spent years snooping into FE (and nearly losing his life poking into the fringes http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#attack ), he played the Paul Revere of FE:

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

and after several years of that journey (and I was his biggest fan in those days), he openly wondered if humans were a sentient species:

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

I knew exactly what he was talking about, and he found out the same awful truth that I did: that almost nobody cares enough to shed their indoctrination and become sentient, or at least something approaching it. That lack of personal integrity manifests in many ways, but that is always the root of it. It is the fear/love dichotomy in action, and the many ways it plays out. All of those scientists and “environmentalists” who either freaked out or gave Brian the finger when he mentioned FE:

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

abdicated their sentience, and they were supposedly “smart” people. The intentional ignorance and brain-deadedness of my fellow Americans was never more apparent to me than in the wake of 9/11:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#wtc

Some of the stupidest things I ever heard came from some of the smartest people I ever knew in those days. An American really has to work hard to stay stupid enough to deny that the primary reason that the USA invaded Iraq was to seize and privatize its oil fields:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

The lies coming out of Bush and Company’s mouths should not have fooled a five-year-old, but all there was in the USA, with pitifully few exceptions, was nodding and cheering the upcoming invasion. It was the greatest sustained emotional agony of my life, and that is saying something. The USA is the new Nazi Germany, running roughshod over the world, and that the Nazis tried recapturing the “greatness of Rome,” and the USA has largely followed suit, speaks volumes about such peoples.

Are Americans the most evil people of all time? The Nazis? The Mongols? The Romans? The English? They were all just people, herded along by the carrots and sticks that their “leaders” used, stampeded this way and that, and over the cliff often enough. Watching people being forced to murder each other was the Roman Empire’s primary “entertainment”:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=769646&viewfull=1#post769646

It was a sign of the times, as were the Nazis’ excesses, as are the Americans’. The Romans were not too proud of their “entertainment” and the Nazis tried to hide their Final Solution, while the USA cheered its Final Solution to clearing desirable lands of subhumans, so the “settlers” could take it:

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

When I staggered out of Ventura in 1990, radicalized, the numerous Big Lies of American history were still something that I had yet to discover:

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

But when I did, part of me was amazed that the lies were so blatant and easily discovered. Even though George Washington’s standard biographies don’t mention it, the documentation of his plan to swindle all of the Native Americans out of their land is easily located:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#blueprint

Likewise, the documents that tarnish Columbus’s heroic image are his own writings:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm#first

and those of his fellow conquerors. It does not take any revisionist history to see that they were mass-murdering thieves whom the social managers made into heroic icons. Similarly, although it was never mentioned in my childhood, it is easy to obtain the documents, again written in the hands of the perpetrators, which show that Junípero Serra was another genocidist:

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

and he is incredibly up for sainthood today:

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

as was Columbus in the nineteenth century, as is Mother Teresa today:

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

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=667785&highlight=teresa#post667785

Damn! A five-year-old can see through those lies, but not the adults. As Chomsky once said, it takes hard work to deny reality and instead believe the fairy tales.

And those dynamics have everything to do with the FE conundrum. Similarly, there is a mountain of easily adduced evidence that calls into question the materialistic fables of mainstream science, but when somebody like Sheldrake calls them into question, he is banned from the podium:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=774788&highlight=sheldrake#post774788

and achieving direct personal experiences that show without any doubt that the materialistic models of consciousness rest on false assumptions are available to anybody who takes the time to have them:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#how

When Brian began poking into the fringes, after having his own mystical awakening:

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

he found himself gradually forced to the margins, and he lived the last years of his life in exile in South America:

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

Brian’s fate is typical for those who wake up. Dennis almost did not survive his awakening experience (the first of many):

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

as was the case with Ralph McGehee:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/mcgehee.htm#saigon

That is part of the price of being awake, and we all had drinking problems. It comes with the territory. What made Dennis, Brian, and Ralph so heroic is that none of them were “rebellious.” They all began as true believers, overgrown Boy Scouts:

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

and their honest need to believe is what led them to their awakening. Even though they were sold lies, they eventually learned that they were, and they did not stay quiet about it. And this has everything to do with the FE conundrum.

After I staggered out of Ventura and began my education into the lies I had been raised with:

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

I began reaching out to potential allies. I have no doubt that my “friends” led me to Brian the next year:

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

and to this day, Dennis and Brian are the only two people in the FE field with my highest respect. Everybody else, in one way or another, did not quite measure up. I count some in the field as my friends today, and I love them, but I neither knew nor heard of anybody like Dennis and Brian, and carrying their spears are among my life's greatest honors.

Brian had a lot of class, and I watched him weather personal attacks with great equanimity, but in our Camelot interview, he said that new people would make FE happen, not the people in the field today:

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

All I can say to that is amen. Dennis should be the patron saint of FE, but instead those in the field lie about him endlessly:

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

and it amazed me how people in the field instead embraced the scoundrels. Brian and Dennis both found themselves on the outside looking in, several times, as they were kicked out of organizations that they founded. I witnessed a few of those instances, and after a while it no longer shocked me:

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

The FE field today is dominated by scoundrels, the naïve, and the greedy, with liberal helpings of professional saboteurs:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=768396&viewfull=1#post768396

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

and all manner of public official eager to do the bidding of the forces of darkness, as long as the pay is good:

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

This is all simply the reality of the world we live in. It took me many years to figure it out. I was able to finally see that all of that brain-dead allegiance to the flag, to religion, to the “laws of physics,” and the like was simply a generalized addiction to the tricks people learned to survive in a world of scarcity:

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

And in order to “buy in,” the adherents had to relinquish some part of their sentience. They all had to salute something. It was all about social control. All of us not only had our initial moments of awakening, but the learning never ends. In 1986, Dennis really had a belief in the good intentions of his fellow Americans. The next few years finally beat it out of him, and he admitted to me ten years later that he is sifting through the mine tailings of humanity, looking for nuggets:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=461803&highlight=tailings#post461803

He is a better man than I am, playing that game. But I also saw the utter futility in the game, and I no longer believe in it, not like Dennis or Brian did. They both began to come around to my way of thinking late in their lives, but I am doing something very different than they did. They tried to get Level 10 efforts going:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level10

and I faithfully carried their spears. What I saw on that battlefield likely cannot be taught, but I am going to try. Basically, when you appeal to a person’s self-interest for them to become involved, you have essentially hired a mercenary. I was there beside Dennis, with the army at our back, and then I watched our troops shoot the arrows at Dennis, because along came somebody who bid more for their services, or at least the promise of more. I have watched Dennis appeal to all three of the major population management ideologies used in the USA:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/conun.htm#crutch1

and every time, what he ended up amassing was a mercenary army that either scattered when the going got hard, or they turned on him when somebody offered a sweeter deal. The “sweeter” deal was rarely a good one:

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

I may never be able to publicly discuss whom I saw run off to the highest bidder, not only abandoning Dennis but helping to stick the daggers in his back, but I initially could not believe what I was seeing. What I call Levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6

are just the many deluded approaches to the FE conundrum that I have seen over the past 28 years, and most of it is like watching a broken record play over and over; I got sick of watching people advocate the inventor-of-the-hour, going after patents and money, the hero’s approach, the “let’s sneak past them” approach, the “let’s beat Godzilla at his own game” approach, and the many variations that are little more than adolescent fantasies.

And I can write about this stuff until my fingers wear out, but it usually takes a moment or two on the battlefield before the gung-hoers begin to understand:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#business

and they get their shiny armor dented. Ilie has repeatedly stated that he is no hero, and that is one of the wisest statements that I have seen at Avalon. I am not looking for heroes. If there were more like this:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

then the hero’s journey might have a prayer, but those people do not exist, and anybody who thinks they do, or that they are one of them, have never been on the battlefield, but are like eighteen-year-old boys pining to prove their manhood. Killing “bad guys” does not make heroes. I have known people who killed people for a living. While some drank themselves to death to deal with the cognitive dissonance:

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

probably never really waking up to the evil they were involved with, none of them were proud of what they did, and the honest ones readily admitted it.

I will likely write a little more on this topic in the next few days, but in short, I am going for the heart-centered sentience route to FE. I am not going to try to sneak past a person’s ego mechanisms, to entice them to be involved. What I have to offer most people cannot imagine let alone pursue: relinquishing their comforting illusions. I know that almost nobody can do that, or is willing to. Heck, Dennis will never give up his religion, and I don’t try to shake his faith, but I am playing a very different game. IMO, it is the path to imagining abundance, and almost nobody on Earth can do that today. It will take a whole heart and a strong mind to do that. My upcoming essay is chock-full of scientific information, and it will tax all but the brightest minds, but that work needs to be done if people are going to develop comprehensive perspectives. Everybody on Earth is singing the song of scarcity. The song of abundance had really never been heard before, especially in chorus. Energy will be the new paradigm’s root, as it has been for all epochal phases of the human journey.

In many ways, I am a battered solder who is damaged goods, and I truly look to “fresh meat” like Ilie, who has not seen the blood and guts, to achieve higher levels than I will attain in this lifetime. Karl Marx thought that the communists would have to grow and learn through their trial by fire before they could effectively lead humanity past its greedy stage, but Marx harbored Young Warrior delusions, thinking that the elites could be coerced into giving up their power:

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

He began to realize his folly late in life, after seeing how the Paris Commune turned out:

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

and Engels later stated that peaceful methods were preferred.

If the only people to move FE forward had to go through what Dennis, Brian, and I did, it would never happen. My quest is seeing if enough people can be found who have the courage to at least relinquish their scarcity-based conditioning long enough so they can imagine abundance. While that may seem tame and useless, it has never been done before, not for any sizeable group. And if it can sing…. If I could ever hear that chorus, it would be far more than “mission accomplished” for me in this life. But it takes keen discernment to relinquish the baggage. I have constantly been compared to people preaching scarcity, because energy is in their message. They usually argue for austerity (Level 3 http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level3 ), or say that humanity is not ready for FE (level 5 http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level5 ), or they lie about Dennis, and so on.

Again, I have been given that libel tract, both by email and in person:

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

about a dozen times, by people trying to be helpful, even people in the FE field! I was stupefied when that happened. Discernment in this field requires a sharp mind and a whole heart.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

3rd January 2014, 14:41

Hi:

As an addendum to the prior post, I am attempting something that has not been tried before, partly because I have seen that the other approaches have not worked, are not likely to, and are insanely risky. Dennis is the best there ever was at what he attempted. He has had a sitting USA president’s eyes bugging out:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=694872&highlight=wirec#post694872

He has caused Godzilla some sleepless nights, the White Hats have cheered him on, he should have died more than twenty times over, and he has basically been run out of the USA. Brian was also chased out of the USA:

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

I am an American and don’t plan to leave my home, but I also know that my nation is dead, and Americans are not my target audience. Americans have abdicated their sentience for security:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#wtc

Watching my nation’s descent into insanity likely looked similar to a perceptive German in the 1930s, who watched his/her nation go down the tubes while taking a bunch of nations with it. Pursuing FE in today’s world can be a surreal experience, and I have seen many casualties, from harassed and dead inventors to people thinking they are The Second Coming:

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

and other delusions. I have watched people lose their sanity, both those who could not handle the pressure and even simple bystanders. I have been attacked by friends and family, and have been disowned, bankrupted, and so on, because of my FE quest. Some people fixated on me, as they got a whiff of the quest’s magnitude, and that always turned out badly. I have been stalked on the Internet by trolls:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/critics.htm#troll

I have watched leading names in the FE field shamelessly lie about Dennis:

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

and been given the finger when I pointed out the lies, and so on.

I was only 29 when we were raided:

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

and I am now 55, and starting to look like how I remember my beloved grandfather:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#kansas

We each only have one life to live here on Earth, and I am trying to make the most of my remaining productive years, which could end at any time. I am now at the age where my peers are dropping like flies, where heart attacks and cancer have shortened or wrecked their lives. I figure that if I take care of myself, I may be able to get fifteen more good years out of this body, and then we will see. The advent of FE would be the biggest paradigm shift in the human journey so far.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#advanced

It would dwarf everything that came before it, and a world like this could begin to come into view:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

It is not easy to grasp the situation without flying off the handle in many directions. How many inventor-of-the-hour posts have been made on this thread? How many other Level 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11 posts have been made here?

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6

And this is the thread where those posters should know that this is not the place to play those games, and this is thankfully a sheltered forum. In every other FE forum and discussion on Earth, those elementary and useless Levels dominate, as people natter away.

I feel plenty of pressure to make what could be my final attempt at making a dent a good one, not only because this what I have poured my life into, but also because humanity and Earth hang in the balance. FE is the lynchpin and Godzilla knows it, even if virtually all of humanity is oblivious. While I don’t want to hear from the voice anymore:

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

I know that I am on some kind of special assignment, and I am trying to make the best of it, while juggling the pieces of my life.

I plan to get that essay published, begin my own forum, and start looking for those needles in haystacks that can start what I call a choir. Will it help? I don’t know. It can’t hurt, and it may be the critical missing ingredient. It also could merely assist the overall level of sentience and spiritual vibration, although there is no “merely” where FE is concerned. It is the Big One, and everything else is noise.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

4th January 2014, 23:23

Hi:

I am taking a little break from writing about the Age of Mammals. When seeing the many kinds of responses to my work over the years, including at Avalon, I have been thinking of useful analogies for what I am about to attempt, and what will be needed for those in the choir. Again, the choir will be comprised of people that I invite, and their primary qualification is that they will be already singing the abundance song, publicly, or something very close to it, and after studying the hymnal I am writing (it won’t be a quick and easy study), they will begin to hit the notes. The choir is going to be tiny at first. Ilie has been singing. His has not been scholarly singing, but it does not have to be. The singing that I am shooting for will have its fair share of scholarliness, scientific nature, and the like, and it will be biased in that direction, because that is where comprehensive perspectives come from.

It is not easy to develop a comprehensive and abundant perspective. It will take a lot of hard work and self-discipline. The singers will also need to graduate beyond naïveté and paranoia, as both are counterproductive and even dangerous qualities for choir work. One of the hardest things for the choir is going to be resisting “bright idea-ism,” not only with their own thinking, but from the people around them, trying to pull the effort in their direction. I have written many times that trying to interest one’s friends, families, and colleagues in FE and abundance is a time-waster and can even be dangerous. I have about zero support for what I am doing in my daily life, and have been attacked for it often enough. The same is true of nearly all FE pioneers that I have respected. It just comes with the territory.

One way to look at the choir’s singing is that it is going to be a global broadcast, aiming for the very few on Earth who can recognize the song. It will be something they have been waiting for their entire lives, and they will be needles in haystacks, scattered across the planet, and this new technology with a global reach will attempt to reach them. And they will listen. The standard Level 10 approach, of chatting up people, running ads, holding conferences and the like, will not be appropriate tactics, because they don’t work. They never have and never will, not for making FE and abundance happen. Someday, physical meetings will happen and even technology will be developed, but those activities are not necessary and are even dangerous at this stage, even fatally so. I have watched the best of the best go those routes, and threw my life away helping, but those approaches do not work, and for anything that gets going, in comes the air strike:

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

There is currently no group on Earth with the right stuff to help make FE happen, so I am going to have to try to roll my own. How much will it help? I don’t know. It won’t hurt, and nobody is going to have to roll big dice in their lives to be in the choir. But gaining a comprehensive perspective will threaten the comforting illusions that we are all fed, and it is no small feat to do that. I have almost never met anybody who was able or willing to. So, the choir alone will be something that has never been seen or heard before, and we will see what kind of noise it can make.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

6th January 2014, 19:00

Hi:

I am about to spend the rest of the day on chores, but wanted to make a little post related to what I am writing on at the moment. When readers finish my essay, one of the ideas that I hope they walk away with is the idea of ultimate and proximate causes, and the levels of phenomena that are investigated and how they are ranked. I am currently writing about the gradual formation of the Icehouse Earth phase that we are currently in, and have been since about 40 million years ago, when the Antarctic icecap began forming.

The ultimate cause of life on Earth is the Sun. Without the Sun’s energy, the life game would have never begun on Earth, with Earth’s surface temperature near absolute zero. With the Sun’s energy, and the minor physical events among the developing planets, such as planetesimals providing the “volatiles” that gave Earth its water, among other key materials, life could develop.

On Earth, the radioactivity of decaying uranium, potassium, and thorium have provided the energy that drives Earth’s plate tectonics. Without that radioactive energy, it would also be game over on Earth, as the moving plates drive various elemental processes on Earth, such as the carbon cycle. Similarly, when oxygenic photosynthesis began, it not only oxidized Earth’s surface, it created the ozone layer, and atmospheric oxygen and the ozone layer prevented Earth’s water from being lost to space, as happened on Venus and Mars. Again, if oxygenic photosynthesis had not developed, it would be have been game over on Earth billions of years ago. To go further, without oxygen in the atmosphere, most of Earth’s minerals would not exist, and complex life may have never arisen, and would have certainly never left aquatic environments, at least while the water lasted. I could keep going on, and I do in my essay, but that is enough to make my point that it is like a pyramid, with the Sun’s energy sitting at the bottom, and the other dynamics sitting atop that foundation, in layers. The proximate causes sit atop the ultimate ones. And when phenomena are explored in the higher layers, the lower ones are usually assumed, and it can become easy to lose sight of them and get tunnel vision.

It works the same way with human civilization. Energy forms the foundation of all geophysical processes, all ecosystems, and all economic systems. Human civilization rides up a few levels on the pyramid, but when its very practices threaten to take out its foundation, what is happening at those “higher” levels are meaningless. That is why I say that until humanity solves the energy issue, once and for all (probably only FE can do that, IMO, and it is the only thing that will make energy abundant), the rest does not matter.

Aside from the Sun’s energy (and the Sun is in a class of highly stable stars, with its output fluctuating negligibly over the eons, and slowly getting brighter as it burns its fuel), Earth’s greenhouse gases are the primary determinant of Earth’s surface temperature, and the most important of those is water:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Impacts_on_the_overall_greenhouse_effect

with carbon dioxide in second place. However, because of its high melting point, water is a very fickle gas, constantly evaporating and precipitating, and it has a highly uneven distribution on Earth because of that fickle nature, so we have rainforests and deserts. Carbon dioxide’s low melting and boiling point means that it is always a gas on Earth, so its impact is steadier and more predictable.

But although the greenhouse gases form the “lid” that determines Earth’s overall surface temperature, the oceans hold most of that heat, and the changes in Earth’s currents, from how they move from the equator to the poles, from how they circulate between the ocean floor and its surface, creates both regional fluctuations and slight variations over time. From a geophysical perspective, from relative to absolute measures such as temperature and time, such as the geological time scale, the variations are small. But those small fluctuations can have major ramifications for that delicate phenomenon called life. Complex ecosystems are inherently unstable, as each level of a food chain is an energy level that depends on those below it. That inherent instability is likely why there have been mass extinctions, as relatively small changes can cause the whole edifice to topple.

In the big picture, carbon dioxide levels have been falling for the past 150 million years, due to geophysical processes, and scientists think that carbon starvation will mean the end of complex life in several hundred million years. It is nothing that we need to worry about right now, much as we do not have to worry about the Sun turning into a red giant in several billion years. About 45 million years ago, Earth began going into an Icehouse Earth phase, ending a 200 million year Greenhouse Earth phase:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_earth#Greenhouse_earth

Earth has been fluctuating from Icehouse to Greenhouse conditions for billions of years. And when the previous ice ages have been studied, positive and negative feedbacks could create wild swings, such as the Snowball Earth episodes of long ago:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=755863&viewfull=1#post755863

During this Icehouse Earth phase, there have been fluctuations, likely related to geophysical processes, such as the dramatic changes in the currents of Earth’s oceans over the past 50 million years. Antarctica separated from Australia and South America about 40 million years ago, and it became isolated at the South Pole. The Southern Ocean acted like a refrigerator door and prevented the tropical currents from reaching Antarctica. But it was far from the only big current change. The northward trajectories of the African, Arabian, and Indian plates caused epic collisions that not only formed all the mountains between the Alps and Indonesia, including the Himalayas, but it also closed off the Tethys Ocean and killed a current that circled Earth near the equator. About three million years ago, South America finally ran into North America, and cutting the currents between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had more dramatic effects on Earth’s currents, and was likely the final blow for bringing on the current ice age.

But Antarctica is the Big One, with Antarctic Bottom Water:

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

comprising more than half of the water in Earth’s oceans, and making them as relatively cold as they are, particularly below the surface. The fluctuation of the depth of the thermocline between the surface waters heated by the atmosphere and the bottom water which Antarctica has kept cold has likely been a key variable in the fluctuating climate of Earth over the past forty million years. At the end of the Oligocene, which was really the first Icehouse Earth epoch:

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

it warmed up and the incipient Antarctic icecap melted off, and England had palm trees. It was still a lot colder than the halcyonic Eocene, when alligators lived in Greenland, but it was relatively warm. And it looks like the carbon dioxide levels were not elevated. This has created a mystery for climate scientists that they are hard at work studying, as well as other fluctuations in the times before the current ice age:

http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/current/research-pg/presentations-2010/2010_Fox_Lyndsey.pdf

http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/9/3489/2013/cpd-9-3489-2013.pdf

http://people.earth.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2009%20Pagani_NatureGeosci.pdf

http://www.science20.com/news_articles/early_pliocene_warming_shows_how_little_co2_can_have_major_impact

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120606164940.htm

What they are finding, just as has been found in studying the other ice ages, is that there can be dramatic fluctuations in surface temperatures caused by continental positions, changing currents, and positive and negative feedbacks. Modeling climates has always been the Holy Grail of climate scientists, but they are so complex that the data and computer horsepower has never been adequate to predict even next week’s weather. But that does not mean that scientists have no idea what drives the climate. Again, it is that hierarchy, of the Sun, the greenhouse gases, the continental movements and their interplay with the ocean’s currents. In the past generation, scientists have realized that the El Nino effect is the most important one on Earth, after the seasons and day and night, for driving Earth’s climate.

But no climate scientist with any credibility is going to say that carbon dioxide levels do not matter. It is closer to being an ultimate cause then oceanic currents are, and changing a more ultimate cause, especially one that humans are influencing, is going to trump more proximal causes. So while interacting dynamics create regional variations and even some fluctuation in time, increasing carbon dioxide is going to mean a warmer planet. But the recent findings have been pounced on by the Global Warming “skeptics.” Brian O was a planetary atmospheric scientist, which was why he was picked to go to Mars:

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

In 2001, we talked about Global Warming “skeptics” and Brian informed me of his anger and dismay toward one of his erstwhile colleagues who sold his soul to the hydrocarbon lobby and became about the most famous Global Warming “skeptic”:

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

The hydrocarbon lobby is almost solely responsible for the apparent “controversy” over carbon dioxide and Global Warming. And when those recent studies were published, showing that other dynamics were likely involved with the slight warming episodes in the past 25 million years, the Global Warming “skeptics” were all over it, declaring that it is obvious that carbon dioxide and Global Warming have nothing to do with each other. Sometimes they were so brazen that it was breathtaking, such as this one that practically gives a shout out to the hydrocarbon lobby at the end (the organization that published that article linked below has always been primarily funded by the hydrocarbon lobby):

http://nipccreport.org/articles/2010/jul/08jul2010a1.html

The word “malaria” is Italian for “bad air,”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria#History

as it was recognized long ago that swamps, marshes, and malaria were related. But the early scientists could not identify the actual cause, so malaria “skeptics” were against measures to drain swamps. Because scientists could not absolutely identify the cause of malaria, even though they knew it was somehow related to swamps, the malaria “skeptics” prevailed for centuries (see Radkau’s Power and Nature, pp. 127-131), and nothing was done about draining swamps, which would have been very expensive projects. The Global Warming “skeptics” are the professional descendants of the malaria skeptics, with the most vociferous of them literally on the hydrocarbon lobby’s payroll.

As you can imagine, the entire situation is surreal to me, as FE instantly solves the near-term and long-term problem, and with FE, whatever Earth’s climate does becomes irrelevant to human welfare. Humanity would no longer be at the mercy of the elements. But the entire human species is in denial right now, enabled by Godzilla and his minions.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

6th January 2014, 19:04

Hi:

Just as I was about to sign off, I realized that today is my third anniversary at Avalon. 498,000 page views on this thread, and I have made more than 1,700 posts to it. There is a lot of water under that bridge. :)

We will see how this all goes.

Best,

Wade

Robert J. Niewiadomski

6th January 2014, 23:02

Happy Anniversary Wade :)

I think there are also solar cycles that should be included in weather models. We are at the maximum of the solar cycle. There were no spotless days for the entire 2013 year. And we had almost entire December with temperatures above freezing point and no snow for Xmass and New Year here in most of the Poland. The same for the first week of January. By this time of the 2013 we were covered with snow... I remember the previous solar maximum was warm as well. With trees sprouting leaves in December and Crocuses blooming :)

Wade Frazier

6th January 2014, 23:51

Hi Robert:

Solar cycles and Milankovitch cycles:

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

are in the models. The Maunder Minimum is a well-known instance of solar activity having an influence:

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

but they really are small influences, compared to doubling carbon dioxide concentrations in a couple of centuries. On the geological time scale and the kinds of variables that are known to affect climate, that measurable increase in carbon dioxide levels, which is all human-caused, is mind-bogglingly fast.

While doing the study for the essay, I was surprised to see Milankovitch cycles cited as possible influences for climate events that happened hundreds of millions of years ago, such as here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Devonian_extinction#Effect_on_CO2

Solar activity has been invoked, but usually on the long-scale, such as the Sun slowly brightening over the billions of years during its main sequence burning. Stars like the Sun burn pretty steadily. They measure our Sun’s variation, but even when you think of the sunspot cycles, the variation in output is less than one tenth of one percent.

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

That is not much, but there is certainly some impact.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

7th January 2014, 03:37

Hi:

Here is a brief revisit of a common theme of mine. The Peak Oilers at least understand that energy runs the show. However, they are some of the most entrenched Level 3s:

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

and it took me a while to figure them out. Encountering Heinberg and his stuff:

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

was really a key aspect of me seeing the generalized addiction to scarcity that pervades all perspectives. I just read this:

http://kunstler.com/cluster****-nation/forecast-2014-burning-down-the-house/

by one of Heinberg’s fellow Peak Oilers. They are highly intelligent, but totally boxed in by their scarcity-based paradigm.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

8th January 2014, 01:46

Hi:

I am writing the part of my essay when animals recognizable to us today begin to appear. While mammals are about 225 million years old, it was not until the beginning of this Icehouse Earth phase:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth#Icehouse_earth

when animals adapted to the new conditions appeared, about thirty million years ago, that we started seeing animals that would look familiar in today’s world. It gets a little disconcerting to study animal lines, noting that their heritage stretches back into the dinosaur days, and see how they adapted to Icehouse Earth conditions, and grew large and thrived for tens of millions of years and 2.6 million years of an ice age, to suddenly go extinct when humans first arrived. And there is a clique of scientists who faithfully argue that climate did it. (!)

After the demise of the dinosaurs, it took mammals 25 million years to reach their maximal size:

http://www.academia.edu/622144/The_evolution_of_maximum_body_size_of_terrestrial_mammals

and then it remained the same for forty million years, until humans arrived. There are environmental reasons for that size, and big mammalian herbivores reached the size of the typical ornithischian dinosaurs, in the three-to-five ton range. If you squinted your eyes, you could hardly tell the difference between an ankylosaur:

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

and a glyptodont:

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

and the biggest glyptodonts were actually as big as typical ankylosaurs, about the size of a car.

The human journey has been one continual process of achieving the ability to tap a new energy source, exploit it to exhaustion, and then look for the new energy source to exploit. The large animals were simply the first easy energy sources, when humans developed the means to exploit them, and they drove everything to extinction that they could. In the historical era, it was simply more of the same. Huge islands such as Madagascar and New Zealand did not have humans invade until recently, and they did just what most scientists think happened in prehistory: they killed off the easy meat as fast as they could.

When Europeans became the first to learn how to harness the winds of the big oceans (Atlantic and Pacific – the Indian Ocean was small, gentle, and predictable, so was sailed, but Europeans learned how to sail the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which is what allowed them to conquer the world), the first thing they did was kick the world’s butt, enslaving the entire planet, and at the same time, they began to slaughter the ocean’s megafauna, the whales:

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

Slaughtering and dispossessing the world’s peoples became a white man’s specialty, and it amazingly continues today, with the USA’s genocides in Afghanistan and Iraq:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

to plunder the world’s last easy energy resources. When studying the history of life on Earth, humans are just acting like any other animal that developed new ways to wrest more energy from the environment, and it outcompeted its rivals to extinction. Hunting prey to extinction may have happened in Earth’s history before humans, but it was rare. Competitive extinction usually was related to a more energy efficient version of an animal migrating into new lands, and its superior “carrying capacity” saw it displace the less energy efficient animals.

So, on one hand, what humanity is doing today is the same old, same old. But aren’t we different? I have seen Peak Oilers compare humanity to algae that blooms when the spring nutrients arrive, and reproduce like crazy until the resources are used up, to then die off until the next influx. Heinberg even sympathetically made that analogy.

But aren’t we different? Aren’t we sentient? The more that I go deep on this stuff, the more I think that either making FE happen or running out of fossil fuels and collapsing global civilization is the ultimate test of our sentience. Like Brian said:

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

are we a sentient species? I think that we are about to find out once and for all. I have long called humanity semi-sentient, where we have the potential to be sentient, but it is rarely achieved. And the kicker is that it starts in the heart. Humans have the ability to be the first organism that does not dominate and drive others to extinction just because we can. When I look at it that way, I really think that this is our big test. We either graduate to true sentience, or it is back to the bottom of the ladder, but it may be a far longer fall than anybody wants to imagine.

Animals were beginning to go up the encephalization curve before the Permian extinction, and the Permian extinction set that process back by 70 million years or so. The way humans are going, this mass extinction that is already happening could reach Permian levels. If that happens, we likely won’t be around for what happens afterward, but the level of encephalization to reach potentially sentient organisms might not be reached again on this planet before it can no longer host complex life, which may only be a few hundred million years out. This might be the only chance life on Earth gets to become truly sentient (although cetaceans may have already achieved it).

When I look at it that way, it adds a little pressure to what I am attempting. :)

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

9th January 2014, 17:22

Hi:

I’ll make a substantial post soon, once I finish drafting my mammals chapter, which I am nearly finished with. But I could not pass this up, which is the business press’s reaction to this winter’s cold in the USA. Here is an energy and environmental writer for Forbes ridiculing climate scientists:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/01/08/embarrassed-global-warming-alarmists-sink-to-comedic-lows-with-polar-vortex-excuse/

when any climate scientists knows that one winter (or a cold two weeks!) is meaningless when discussing the climate change that humans are inducing. But there is this crazy attention brought onto any weather event, and how it plays into the Global Warming hypothesis. Damn, but one data point is meaningless, and is no way contrary to the models that have been developed. Data with meaning is showing how the Arctic ice pack volume has been steadily declining over the past thirty years (the maximum has shrunk by a third since 1980, and the minimum by three-quarters!):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_of_sea_ice#Sea_ice_volume

In the mid-1980s, it expanded a little, interrupting the declining trend for a few years, and I am sure that if Rush Limbaugh had been on the national scene then, that he would have made the blip the focus of his show for the entire time.

These kinds of orchestrated attacks on climate scientists are pretty disgusting, but are standard for all manner of playing rhetorical and even scientific games that seek to undermine the notion of responsibility for our actions. I have seen it with the megafauna extinctions, with the extermination of “primitive” peoples as Europe conquered the world, and I have seen it in my nation in spades, and it can be seen in the treatment of the USA’s Founding Fathers:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#fathers

How America’s century of genocide and land theft has been covered up:

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

and up to the present day, where the obvious genocide of the Iraqi and Afghani people is covered up so totally that almost no Americans have the slightest idea that it happened and is ongoing:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

and as some astute observers have commented:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/07/15/considering-the-obvious/

Americans just don’t want to know. And I am not unnecessarily picking on Americans. It is just that I am one, so can write most knowledgably about my nation, and we are also history’s richest and most powerful nation, riding the gravy train of a stolen continent and what will prove to be the very short-lived hydrocarbon fuel era.

Other peoples have their myths and legends that revere the elite, downplay their crimes, etc. It could be argued that this kind of behavior is human nature, but I think it has a lot more to do with the human condition, where the zero-sum-game has nearly been baked into our DNA over the millennia, where the game is us or them. More civilized peoples know it is impolite to state the game that baldly, so all manner of social managers make livings dressing up genocides and awesome crimes as either noble deeds or something that goes straight down the Memory Hole. Orwell may have said it best:

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#orwell

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Ilie Pandia

9th January 2014, 18:31

Here in Romania: "temperatures have been high for this period of the year (December) based on data from the last decade" (This is a translation from a local paper).

And in Bucharest was the first Christmas that I remember that did not have any kind of snow.

So there you have it: half the planet is in Global Warming while half is not :).

Do read the article (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/01/08/embarrassed-global-warming-alarmists-sink-to-comedic-lows-with-polar-vortex-excuse/) that Wade linked to, the writing style is pretty educative and I did not expect to read a piece like that in Forbes.

Robert J. Niewiadomski

9th January 2014, 23:49

Here is a link to one page from larger IPCC report on global warming dated 2001. Discussed is polar vortex influence on weather system and influence of global warming factors on polar vortex itself:
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/302.htm
Contains several references to scientific papers...

Took me 20 minutes to find via google search: site:ipcc.ch polar vortex

Also no snow in Poland yet as well...
Expected snowfall of 1kg/m2/h in two days... Starting on border with Germany and moving eastward... Temperature will rise above freezing point afterward and snow will be gone again...

Wade Frazier

10th January 2014, 00:48

Hi:

Throwing up the chapter draft on mammals. As usual no links or references, which will be critical features of the finished essay. It is too big for one post, so I am breaking it in two. The next chapter is the path to humanity.

Time for overdue chores.

Best,

Wade

The Age of Mammals – Part 1
As smoke cleared and dust settled, literally, from the cataclysm that ended the dinosaurs’ reign, the few surviving mammals and birds crept from their refuges, seeds and spores grew into plants, and the Cenozoic Era began, which is also called the Age of Mammals, as they have uniquely dominated the era. The Cenozoic’s first period is the Paleogene, which ran from about 66 mya to 23 mya. As this essay enters the era of most interest to humans, I will slice the timeline a little finer and use the geological time scale concept of epochs. The Paleogene’s first epoch is called the Paleocene (c. 66 mya to 56 mya).

Compared to the recovery from the mass extinctions that ended the Devonian, Permian, and Triassic periods, the recovery from the end-Cretaceous extinction was relatively swift. The seafloor ecosystem was fully reestablished within two million years. But the story on land was spectacularly different. By the Paleocene’s end, ten million years after the end-Cretaceous event, all mammalian orders had appeared in what I will call the “Mammalian Explosion.” While the fossil record for Paleocene mammals is relatively thin, the Mammalian Explosion is one of the most spectacular evolutionary radiations on record. Because of its younger age, the Cenozoic Era’s fossil record is generally better than previous eras.

So far in this essay, mammals have received scant attention, but the mammals’ development before the Cenozoic is important for understanding their rise to dominance. The therapsids that led to mammals, called cynodonts, first appeared in the late Permian, about 260 mya, and they had key mammalian characteristics. Their jaws and teeth were markedly different from other reptiles; their teeth were specialized for more thorough chewing, which extracts more energy from food, which was likely a key aspect of ornithischian success more than one hundred million years later. Cynodonts also developed a secondary palate so they could chew and breathe at the same time, which was more energy efficient. Cynodonts eventually ceased the reptilian practice of continually growing and shedding teeth, and their specialized and precisely-fitted teeth rarely changed. Mammals replace their teeth a maximum of once. Along with tooth changes, jawbones changed roles. Fewer and stronger bones anchored the jaw, allowing for stronger jaw musculature, which led to the mammalian masseter muscle (clench your teeth and you can feel your masseter muscle). Bones previously anchoring the jaw were no longer needed, and eventually became bones of the mammalian middle ear. The jaw’s rearrangement led to the most auspicious proto-mammalian development: it allowed the braincase to expand. Mammals had relatively large brains from the very beginning, and it was likely initially related to developing a keen sense of smell. Mammals are the only animals with a neocortex, which eventually led to human intelligence. As dinosaurian dominance drove mammals to the margins, where they lived underground and emerged to feed at night, mammals needed improved senses to survive, and auditory and olfactory senses heightened, as did the mammalian sense of touch. Increased processing of stimuli required a larger brain, and brains have extraordinarily high energy requirements. Cynodonts also had turbinal bones, which suggest that they were warm-blooded. Soon after the Permian extinction, a cynodont appeared which may have had a diaphragm, which was another respiratory innovation that served it well in those low-oxygen times.

Further along the evolutionary path, here are two animals (1, 2) that may be direct ancestors of mammals; one herbivorous and one carnivorous/insectivorous, and they both resembled rats and likely lived in that niche, being burrowing, nocturnal feeders. Mammaliaformes included animals that were likely warm-blooded, had fur, and nursed their young, but laid eggs, like today’s platypus. Nursing one’s offspring is the defining mammalian trait today, but there has been great controversy over just which mammaliaformes are mammals’ direct ancestors, and which one can be called the first mammal. According to the most commonly-accepted definition of a mammal, the first ones appeared in the mid-Triassic, about 225 mya, several million years after dinosaurs first appeared. The only remaining therapsids after a mass extinction at 230 mya were small (the largest was dog-sized), including the mammalian clade, and archosaurs dominated all Earthly biomes from that extinction event until the end-Cretaceous extinction.

Dinosaurs fortunately never got as small as typical Mesozoic mammals, or else mammals might have been out-competed into extinction. Mammals stayed small in the Mesozoic, with the largest Mesozoic mammal yet known being about the size of a raccoon, and its diet included baby dinosaurs.

The issue of early mammalian thermoregulation is controversial and unsettled; even today, mammals engage in a wide array of thermoregulatory practices. Today’s primitive mammals have lower metabolic levels than modern ones. Therapsids did not overcome Carrier’s Constraint like dinosaurs did, and were not high-performance animals. However, early mammals did not see the sun and their larger brains required more energy. Early mammals likely were endothermic, but the condition may have included regular torpor, where they went into a brief “hibernation” phase, and their active body temperature may have been several degrees Celsius lower than today’s modern mammals. Birds and mammals are often born without endothermy, but develop it as they grow.

Mammalian reproductive practices separate them into their primary categories. Some “primitive” mammals still lay eggs. Marsupial-like birth and development likely first appeared in the Jurassic, and the divergence of the marsupial and placental lines appears to have happened in the late Jurassic, about 160 mya. The marsupial/placental “decision,” as with many other lines of evolution, seems to have been a cost-benefit one rooted in energy. Marsupials have far less energy invested in their young at birth than placentals do. Marsupials and birds readily abandon their offspring when hardship strikes. Placentals have a great deal more invested in giving birth to offspring, and are therefore less likely to “cut their losses” as easily as birds and marsupials do. In certain environments, marsupials can have the advantage over placentals. The earliest known marsupial appeared in China 125 mya, and marsupials and placentals co-existed on the fringes. From there they migrated to North America, and then South America. About when the end-Cretaceous holocaust happened, South America separated from North America, but South America was still connected to Antarctica. About 50 mya, marsupials crossed from Antarctica to Australia, perhaps by crossing a narrow sea, and placental mammals died out in Australia, probably outcompeted by marsupials. Earth’s only egg-laying mammals today live in New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania. An entire line of early mammals, that were like marsupial and monotreme rodents, thrived for more than one hundred million years, longer than any other mammalian lineage, to only go extinct in the Oligocene, probably outcompeted by rodents. All living marsupials have ancestors from South America. In North America and Eurasia, marsupials died out, probably outcompeted by placentals, while Africa was not connected to any of those landmasses during those times and thus never hosted marsupials. In South America, marsupials and birds were apex predators (1, 2), but a diverse and unique assemblage of placental ungulates thrived in South America during about 60 million years of relative isolation from all other landmasses.

As with the origins of animals, the molecular evidence shows that virtually all major orders of mammals existed before the end-Cretaceous extinction, and the Paleocene ‘s Mammalian Explosion appears to have not been a genetic event, but an ecological one, where mammals quickly adapted to empty niches that non-avian dinosaurs left behind. The kinds of mammals that appeared in the Paleocene and afterward illustrate the idea that body features and size are conditioned by their environment, which includes other organisms. With the end of sauropods, high grazers of conifers never reappeared, but many mammals developed ornithischian eating habits, and many attained a similar size. That phenomenon illustrates the ecological concept of guilds, where assemblages of vastly different animals can inhabit similar ecological niches. The guild concept is obvious with the many kinds of animals that formed reefs in the past, where the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous reefs all had similarities, particularly in their shape and location, but the organisms comprising them, from reef-forming organisms to reef denizens and the apex predators patrolling them, had radical changes during the eon of complex life. If you squinted and blurred your vision, most of those reefs from different periods would appear strikingly similar, but when you focused, the variation in organisms could be astounding. The woodpecker guild is comprised of animals that eat insects living under tree bark. But in Madagascar, where no woodpeckers live, a lemur fills that niche, with a middle finger that acts as the woodpecker’s bill. In New Guinea, a marsupial fills that role. In the Galapagos Islands, a finch uses cactus needles to acquire those insects. In Australia, cockatoos have filled the niche, but unlike the others, they have not developed a probing body part or use tools, but just rip off the bark with the brute force of their beaks.

After the dinosaurs, newly empty niches eventually filled with animals that looked remarkably similar to dinosaurs, if we squinted. Most large browsing ornithischians weighed in the five-to-seven metric ton range, and by the late Paleocene, uintatheres appeared in North America and China, and attained about rhinoceros size, to be supplanted in the Eocene by larger titanotheres, and by the Oligocene, in Eurasia lived the largest land mammals of all time, including the truly dinosaur-sized Paraceratherium, with the largest yet found weighing 16 metric tons, about five meters tall at the shoulders and eight meters in length. Even a T-rex might have thought twice before attacking one of those. It took about 25 million years for land mammals to reach their maximum size, and for the succeeding 40 million years, maximum size remained fairly constant. Scientists hypothesize that mammalian growth to dinosaurian size is dependent on energy parameters, including continent size and climate, with cooler climates encouraging larger bodies.

Huge mammals persist to this day, although the spread of humans was coincident with the immediate extinction of virtually all large animals with the exception of those in Africa and Asia. The five-to-seven-metric-ton browser formed a guild common to dinosaurs and mammals, and is likely related to metabolic limits and the relatively-low calorie density that browsing and foraging affords. Sometimes, the similarity between dinosaurs and mammals could be eerie, such as ankylosaurs and glyptodonts, which is a startling example of convergent evolution, where distantly-related organisms develop similar features to solve similar problems. They were even about the same size, at least for the most common ankylosaurs, which were about the size of a car. Ankylosaurs appeared in the early Cretaceous and thrived all the way to the Cretaceous’s end. Glyptodonts appeared in the Miocene and thrived for millions of years.

The Cenozoic equivalent of a bolide impact was the arrival humans, as glyptodonts went extinct with all other South American megafauna upon human arrival. The largest endemic South American animals to survive the Great American Interchange of three mya, when North American placentals prevailed over South American marsupials, and the arrival of humans to the Western Hemisphere beginning less than 15 kya, are the capybara and giant anteater, which are tiny compared to their ancient South American brethren. The giant anteater is classified as a sloth, and sloths were a particularly South American animal, with the largest sloths bigger than bull African bush elephants, which are Earth’s largest land animals today. After car-sized glyptodonts went extinct, dog-sized giant armadillos became the line’s largest remaining representative.

Among herbivores, their mode of digestion was important. Hindgut fermenters attained the largest size among land mammals, and elephants, rhinos, and horses have that digestive process. Cattle, camels, deer, giraffes, and many other herbivorous mammals are ruminants, also called foregut fermenters. While foregut fermenters are more energy efficient, hindgut fermenters can ingest more food. With low-quality forage, hindgut fermenters can gain an advantage. What they lack in efficiency they more than make up for in volume. There are drawbacks to that advantage, however, such as when there is not much forage or its quality is poor, such as dead vegetation. A cow, for instance, digests as much as 75% of the protein that it eats, while a horse digests around 25%. Live grass contains about four times the protein as dead grass. Cattle can subsist on the dead grass of droughts or hard winters, and horses cannot, which was a tradeoff in pastoral societies.

Angiosperms began overtaking gymnosperms in the early Cenozoic, but it did not immediately happen. In Paleocene coal beds laid down in today’s Wyoming, gymnosperms still dominated the swamps, and the undergrowth was mainly made of ferns and horsetails. But angiosperms were on their way to dominance, and mammals, birds, and insects began major adaptations to them.

Primates likely began developing in the late Cretaceous around 85 mya, perhaps in China, but the earliest known primate fossils are from the late Paleocene and were found in Northern Africa. The first primates were likely tree-dwellers that ate insects, nectar, seeds, and fruit. They have relatively flat faces with their eyes pointing forward (they rely on sight more than other senses), and most have opposable digits on their hands/feet, which are ideal for canopy living. Primates generally have larger brains than other mammals, which may have developed to rely more on eyesight and process the stimuli of binocular vision, and primates rely less on the olfactory sense. That change assisted the primate increase in intelligence. Lemurs diverged early in the primate line, rafting over to the newly isolated Madagascar in the early Paleocene, and lemurs were Madagascar’s only primates until humans arrived about two thousand years ago (and the largest lemurs, which were gorilla-sized, immediately went extinct). A rodent-like sister group to primates that lived in North America and Europe went extinct in the Paleocene, as did many early mammalian lines. In general, Paleocene mammals had relatively small brains, and many from that epoch are called “primitive,” although it did not necessarily mean functionally primitive when compared to modern mammals. However, evolutionary “progress” is a legitimate concept. The energy efficiency of ray-finned fish is likely responsible for their success, and the change from “primitive” to “modern” was usually related to the energy issue. Evolutionary progress is an unfashionable concept in some scientific circles, but it is a clear trend over life’s history on Earth, and can be quite obvious during the eon of complex life.

Paleocene mammals were not usually apex predators. Crocodilians survived the end-Cretaceous extinction and remained dominant in freshwater environments, although turtles lived in their Golden Age in the Americas in the Paleocene, and might have even become apex predators for a brief time. The largest snakes ever recorded (1, 2) lived in the Paleocene, and could swallow crocodiles whole. In addition to birds being among South America’s apex predators, a huge flightless bird in Europe was also likely a Paleocene apex predator, although the herbivore hypothesis regarding it is currently debated. When the Great American Interchange occurred three mya, one of those flightless South American birds quickly became a successful North American predator.

Most people are surprised to hear that grass is a relatively recent plant innovation. Grasses are angiosperms, and only began becoming common in the late Cretaceous, along with the spread of flowering plants. With grass, some dinosaurs learned to graze, and grazers have been plentiful Cenozoic herbivores. According to GEOCARBFSULF, carbon dioxide levels have been falling nearly continuously for the past 150 million years, since the Cretaceous’s beginning. Not only has that decline progressively cooled Earth to the point where we live in an ice age today, but carbon starvation is currently considered the key reason why complex life may become extinct on Earth in several hundred million years. In the Oligocene, between 32 mya and 25 mya some plants developed a new form of carbon fixation during photosynthesis known as C4 carbon fixation. It allowed plants to adapt to lowering atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. C4 plants became ecologically prevalent about 6-7 mya in the Miocene, and grasses are today’s most common C4 plants, comprising more than 60% of all C4 species. The rest of Earth’s photosynthesizers use C3 carbon fixation.

In Paleocene oceans, sharks filled the empty niches left by aquatic reptiles, but it took coral reefs ten million years to begin to recover, as usual. As Africa and India moved northward, the Tethys Ocean shrank, and in the late Paleocene and early Eocene, the last Tethyan anoxic events laid down Middle East oil, with the last Paleocene event called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (“PETM”). The PETM has been the focus of a great deal of recent research because of its parallels to today’s industrial era, when carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are massively vented to the atmosphere, causing a warming atmosphere and acidifying oceans. The seafloor communities suffered a mass extinction, and the PETM’s causes are uncertain, but the release of methane hydrates when the ocean warmed enough is a prominent hypothesis, but scientists also look to the usual suspects of volcanism, changes in oceanic circulation, and a bolide impact.

The PETM, according to carbon isotope excursions, “only” lasted about 120-to-170 thousand years. The early Eocene (c. 56 to 34 mya), which followed the PETM, is also known as one of Earth’s Golden Ages of Life. It has also been called a Golden Age of Mammals, but all life on Earth thrived then. In 1912, the doomed Scott Expedition spent a day collecting Antarctic fossils, and still had them a month later when the entire team died in a blizzard. The fossils were recovered and examined in London, and surprisingly yielded evidence that tropical forests once existed near the South Pole. They were Permian plants. That was not long after Wegener first proposed his continental drift theory, and was generations before orthodoxy accepted Wegener’s hypothesis. Antarctica has rarely strayed far from the South Pole in the past 500 million years, so the fossils really represented tropical polar forests. A generation before the Scott Expedition’s Antarctic fossils were discovered, scientists had been finding similar evidence of polar forests in the Arctic, within a several hundred kilometers of the North Pole, on Ellesmere Island and Greenland. Scientists were finding Cretaceous plants in the Arctic, which were much younger than Permian plants.

Polar forests reappeared in the Eocene after the PETM, and the Eocene’s first ten million years was the Cenozoic’s warmest time, even warmer than the dinosaurian heyday. Not only did alligators live near the North Pole, but the continents and oceans hosted an abundance and diversity of life that Earth may have not seen before or since. The time when that ten million year period ended, as Earth began cooling off and heading toward the current ice age, has been called the original Paradise Lost. One way that methane has been implicated in those hot times is that leaves have stomata, which regulate the air they take in to obtain carbon dioxide and oxygen, needed for photosynthesis and respiration. Plants also lose water vapor through their stomata, so balancing gas input needs against water losses are key stomata functions, and it is thought that in periods of high carbon dioxide concentration plants will have fewer stomata. Scientists can count stomata density in fossil leaves, and which led some scientists to conclude that carbon dioxide levels were not high enough to produce the PETM, so methane became a candidate greenhouse gas that produced the PETM and Eocene Optimum, and the controversy and research continues.

However the hot times were created and sustained, Earth’s life reveled in the conditions. Similar to reptiles beating the heat and migrating into the oceans, some mammals did the same thing nearly 200 million years later, and cetaceans appeared. Scientists were very surprised when molecular studies found that whales share a common ancestor with even-toed ungulates, and the hippopotamus in particular. Whales evolved in and near India, beginning about 50 mya, where the earliest “whale” surely did not resemble one and lived near water. By 49 mya, whales could walk or swim. A few million years later they resembled amphibians, and by 40 mya they became fully aquatic, for a transition from land to sea that “only” took ten million years. Whales quickly became the dominant marine predators. However, sharks did not go quietly and began an arms war with whales, culminating 28 mya in C. megalodon, the most fearsome marine predator ever, a shark nearly reaching 20 meters in length and weighing 50 metric tons. It could have swallowed a great white shark whole. C. megalodon preyed on whales and had the greatest bite force in Earth’s history (although some estimates of T-rex bite strength equal it). C. megalodon went extinct less than two mya, due to the current ice age’s vagaries.

Because of early Eocene Arctic forests, animals moved freely between Asia, Europe, Greenland, and North America, which were all nearly connected around the North Pole, so great mammalian radiations occurred in the early Eocene, and many mammals familiar to us today first appeared by the mid-Eocene, such as modern rodents, elephants, bats, horses, and the earliest monkeys may have first appeared in Asia and migrated to India, Africa, and the Americas. Europe was not yet connected with Asia, however, as the Turgai Strait separated them. Modern observers might be startled to know where many animals originated. Camels evolved in North America and lived there for more than 40 million years, until humans arrived. Their only surviving camel descendants in the Western Hemisphere are llamas. As with lemurs migrating to Madagascar from Africa, or marsupials to Australia via Antarctica, or monkeys migrating from Africa to the Americas, or Eocene mammalian migrations via polar routes, the migrants often involuntarily “sailed” on vegetation mats that crossed the relatively short gaps between the continents. Such a migration depended on fortuitous prevailing currents and other factors, but it happened often enough.

Several Eocene geologic events had long-lasting impact. About 50 mya, the plates under India and Southern Asia began their epic collision, beginning the uplift of the Himalayas, and Australia split from Antarctica. The collisions of the African, Arabian, and Indian plates with the Eurasian plate created the mountain ranges that stretch from Western Europe to New Guinea. After the Pacific Ring of Fire, it is the world’s most seismically active region. Those colliding plates further shrank and eventually eliminated the Tethys Ocean. More than 500 million of years of sedimentation, beginning with the Proto-Tethys Ocean in the Ediacaran, continuing with the Paleo-Tethys Ocean in the Ordovician, and the Tethys Ocean appeared in the late Permian. The Tethys Ocean’s existence spanned the entire Mesozoic and finally vanished less than six mya, at the Miocene’s end. Most of the world’s oil ended up in those squeezed oceans, and very little has been formed since the Eocene.

The process of transforming anoxic sediments into oil requires millions of years. When organic sediments are buried, most of the oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur of dead organisms is released, leaving behind carbon and some hydrogen in a substance called kerogen, in a process that is like photosynthesis but reversed. Plate tectonics can subduct sediments, particularly where oceanic plates meet continental plates. There is an “oil window” roughly between 2,000 and 5,000 meters deep, where if kerogen-rich sediments are buried at those depths for long enough (millions of years), geological processes (which produce high temperature and pressure) break down complex organic molecules, resulting in the hydrocarbons that comprise petroleum. If organic sediments never get that deep, they remain kerogen. If they are subducted deeper than that for long enough, all carbon-carbon bonds are broken and the result is methane, which is also called natural gas. Today, the geological processes that make oil can be reproduced in industrial settings that can turn organic matter into oil in a matter of hours. Many hydrocarbon sources touted today as replacements for conventional oil were never in the oil window, so were not “refined” into oil and remain kerogen. The so-called oil shales and oil sands are made of kerogen (bitumen is soluble kerogen). It takes a great deal of energy to refine kerogen into oil, which is why kerogen is an inferior energy source. A hundred years ago, in East Texas oil fields, it took less than one barrel of oil to produce one hundred barrels, for an energy return on energy invested (“EROEI” or “EROI”) of more than 100-to-1. Today, the USA’s EROI may be as low as 3-to-1, and globally it is declining fast and will fall to about 10-to-1 by 2020. Exploiting inferior energy sources is a classic resource depletion scenario that has played out numerous times during the human journey, as each energy resource was plundered to exhaustion, where it was terrestrial megafauna, forests, soils, or whales.

During the early Eocene’s Golden Age of Life, forests blanketed virtually all lands all the way to the poles, modern orders of most mammals appeared, today’s largest order of sharks appeared, and coral reefs again appeared beyond 50 degrees latitude. Many animals would also appear bizarre today. One crocodile developed hooves, and an order of hooved mammalian predators lived, including the largest terrestrial mammalian predator/scavenger ever, which probably looked like a giant wolf with hooves. The ancestors of modern carnivores began to displace those “primitive” predatory mammals in the Eocene, after starting out small. A family of predatory placentals called bear dogs lived from the mid-Eocene to less than two mya. Rhino-sized uintatheres and their bigger cousins the brontotheres were the Eocene’s dominant herbivores in North America and Asia. Deserts are largely an ice age phenomenon, and during the past Greenhouse Earths virtually all lands were warm and moist. Australia was not a desert in the early Eocene, but was largely covered by rainforests. It must have been marsupial paradise, as it would have been in Antarctica and South America, but the fossil record is currently thin.

Wade Frazier

10th January 2014, 00:49

The Age of Mammals – Part 2

In the late Cretaceous, about 75 mya, New Zealand split from Gondwana, and by the end-Cretaceous event it, Madagascar, and India were alone in the oceans. While Madagascar was close enough to Africa for lemurs to migrate to it, the only animals that repopulated New Zealand’s lands after the holocaust were those that flew. From the end-Cretaceous event until the Maoris arrived around 1250-1300 CE (CE stands for “Common Era,” formerly called AD), birds were New Zealand’s dominant animals, with no rivals. The only mammals were a few species of bat that migrated there in the Oligocene. A recent finding of a mouse-sized mammal fossil shows that some land mammals lived in New Zealand long ago, possibly Mesozoic survivors and unrelated to any living mammals, but they died out many millions of years ago. A few small reptiles and amphibians also lived there, and even a crocodile that died out in the Miocene, but New Zealand, unlike any other land in Earth’s history, was the realm of birds. The Maoris encountered giant birds, and ecological niches filled with mammals elsewhere were filled by birds, and gigantic moas were the equivalent of mammalian browsers. Before the arrival of humans, moas were only preyed upon by the largest eagle ever. Of all ecosystems that would have appeared strange to modern eyes, New Zealand’s pre-human ecosystem has been about the most intriguing to me, perhaps because it still existed less than a thousand years ago. It seemed like something that sprang out of Dr. Seuss’s imagination. The Seuss-like kiwi is one of the few surviving specialized birds of that time. The Maoris drove all moas to extinction in less than a century, and quickly destroyed about half of New Zealand’s forests via burning.

For several million years, life in the Eocene was halcyonic, and at 50 mya, the Greenhouse Earth state had prevailed for two hundred million years, ever since the end-Permian extinction. But just as whales began invading the oceans 49 mya, Earth began cooling off. The ultimate reason was atmospheric carbon dioxide levels that had been steadily declining for a hundred million years. The intense volcanism of the previous hundred million years waned, and the carbon cycle inexorably sequestered carbon into Earth’s crust and mantle. While falling carbon dioxide levels were the ultimate cause, the proximate cause may have been the isolation of Antarctica at the South Pole and change in ocean currents. During the early Eocene, the ocean floor’s water temperature was about 13oC. (55oF.), warm enough to swim in, which was a far cry from today’s near-freezing and below-freezing temperatures. The North Sea was warm as bathwater. Radical current changes accompanied the PETM of about 56 mya, warming the ocean floor, and perhaps that boiled off the methane hydrates. Whatever the causes were, the oceans were warm from top to bottom, from pole to pole. But between 50 to 45 mya, Australia made its final split from Antarctica and moved north, India began crashing into Asia and cut off the Tethys Ocean and the global tropical circulation, and South America also moved north, away from Antarctica. Although the debate is still fierce over the cooling’s exact causes, the evidence (much is from oxygen isotope analyses) is that the oceans cooled off over the next twelve million years, very consistently, with a brief small reversal at about 40 mya. By about 37-38 mya, the 200-million-year-plus Greenhouse Earth phase was over and the transition into today’s ice age was underway. In the late Eocene, as the trend toward Icehouse Earth conditions began, deserts such as the Saharan, South African, and Australian formed.

That cooling caused the greatest mass extinction of the entire Cenozoic Era, at least until today’s incipient Sixth Mass Extinction. With continents now scattered across Earth’s surface, there was no event that wiped nearly everything out like the end-Permian extinction did, nor were bolide events convincingly implicated. But mass extinctions punctuated a twelve-million-year period when Earth’s ocean and surface temperatures steadily declined. When it was finished, there were no more polar forests, no more alligators in Greenland and palm trees in Alaska, and Antarctica was developing its ice sheets. A few million years later, another mass extinction event in Europe marked the Eocene’s end and the Oligocene’s beginning, but the middle-Eocene extinctions were more significant. All in all, there was about a 14-million-year period of cooling and extinction, which encompassed the mid-Eocene to early Oligocene, and Icehouse Earth reappeared after a 200 million year hiatus.

The Oligocene Epoch (c. 34 to 23 mya) was cold. In the 1960s, a global effort was launched to drill deep sea cores, the Glomar Challenger recovered nearly 20 thousand cores from Earth’s oceans, and scientists had paradigm-shift learning experiences from studying those cores. One finding was that Antarctica developed its ice sheets far earlier than previously supposed, with the cores pushing back the initial ice sheet formation by 20 million years, to about 34-35 mya, with the first Antarctic glaciers forming as early as 49 mya. The evidence included dropstones in Southern Ocean sediments, which meant icebergs. The event that led to the Antarctic ice sheets was the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which began to form about 40 mya and was well established by 34 mya, when the Antarctic ice sheets grew in earnest. The current’s formation was caused by Antarctica’s increasing isolation from Australia and South America, which gradually allowed an uninterrupted current to form which circled Antarctica and isolated it so that it no longer received tropical currents. That situation eventually turned Antarctica into the big sheet of ice that it is today. It also radically changed global oceanic currents. Antarctic Bottom Water formed, which cooled the oceans, as well as oxygenated its depths, and comprises more than half of the water in today’s oceans. The North Atlantic Deep Water formed around the same time.

Those oceanic changes profoundly impacted Earth’s ecosystems. Not only did most warm-climate species go extinct, at least locally, but new species appeared, adapted to the new environment. The early whales all died out, replaced by whales adapted to the new oceanic ecosystems that are still with us today: toothed whales, which include dolphins, orcas and porpoises; and baleen whales, which adapted to the rich plankton blooms caused by upwellings of the new circulation, in the Southern Ocean in particular. Sharks adapted to the new whales, culminating in C. megalodon in the Oligocene. With the land bridges and small seas between the northern continents unavailable in colder times, the easy travel between those continents that characterized the Eocene’s warm times ended, and the continents began developing endemic ecosystems. Europe became isolated from all other continents by the mid-Eocene, and developed its own peculiar fauna. At the Oligocene’s beginning, the Turgai Strait was no longer a barrier between Europe and Asia, and the more cosmopolitan Asian mammals replaced the provincial European mammals, although from competition, an extinction event, or other causes is still debated, although competition is favored. About half of European mammalian genera went extinct, replaced by immigrants from Asia, and some from North America via Asia.

Africa was also isolated from other continents during those times, and developed its own unique fauna. The first proboscideans evolved in Africa, and Africa remained their evolutionary home, with the one leading to today’s elephants living in Africa in the mid-Oligocene. Hyraxes are relatives of elephants, they have never strayed far from their initial home in Africa, and they were Africa’s dominant herbivore for many millions of years, beginning in the Oligocene. Some reached rhino size, and a close relative looked very much like a rhino. The rhinoceros line itself likely began in North America in the early Eocene, and rhinos did not reach Africa until the Miocene.

But the African Oligocene event likely of most interest to humans was African primate evolution. By the Eocene’s end, primates were extinct in Europe and North America, and largely gone in Asia. Africa became the Oligocene refuge of primates, living in the remaining rainforest. The first animals that we would likely call monkeys evolved in the late Eocene, and what appears to be a direct ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes appeared in Africa at the Oligocene’s beginning, about 35-33 mya. But ancestral to that creature was one that led to those that migrated to South America, probably via vegetation rafts (with perhaps a land bridge helping), around the same time. Those South American monkeys are known as New World monkeys today, and they evolved in isolation for more than 30 million years. For those who stayed behind in Africa, what became apes first appeared around the same time as those New World monkeys migrated, diverging from Old World monkeys. Scientists today think that somewhere between about 35 mya and 29 mya the splits between those three lineages happened. Old World and New World monkeys have not changed much in the intervening years, but apes sure have.

The size issue is dominant in evolutionary inquiries, and scientists have found that in Greenhouse Earth conditions, animal size is relatively evenly distributed, with all niches taken. When Icehouse Earth conditions prevail, the cooling and drying encourages some animal sizes and not others, with mid-sized animals suffering, such as those early primates. That is likely why primates went extinct outside the tropics in the late Eocene. Tropical canopies are rich in leaves, nectar, flowers, fruit, seeds, and insects, while temperate canopies are not, particularly in winter. Large herbivores lost a great deal of diversity in late Eocene cooling, but the survivors were gigantic, with the largest land mammal ever thundering across Eurasia in the Oligocene. Mid-sized species were rare in that guild.

The earliest bears appeared in North America in the late Eocene and early Oligocene, and raccoons first appeared in Europe in the late Oligocene. It might be amusing to consider, but cats and dogs are close cousins, having a common ancestor about 50 mya. Canines first appeared in the early Oligocene in North America, and felines first appeared in Eurasia in the late Oligocene. Beavers appeared in North America and Europe in the late Eocene and early Oligocene, and the first deer in Europe in the Oligocene. The common ancestor of today’s sloths lived in the late Eocene, with the South American giant ground sloths appearing in the late Oligocene, and the kangaroo family may have begun in the Oligocene. The horse was adapting and growing in North America in the Oligocene. By the late Eocene, the pig and cattle suborders had appeared.

In summary, numerous mammals appeared by the Oligocene that resemble their modern descendants, and they were all adapted to the colder, dryer Icehouse Earth conditions and the poorer quality forage and the food chains that depended on them. In subsequent epochs, conditions warmed and cooled, ice sheets advanced and retreated, and deserts, grasslands, woodlands, rainforests, and tundra grew and shrank, but with a few notable exceptions, Earth’s basic flora and fauna has not significantly changed in the past 30 million years.

The Oligocene ended with a sudden global warming, which continued into the Miocene Epoch (c. 23 to 5.3 mya). The Miocene was also the first epoch of the Neogene Period (c. 23 to 2.6 mya). While nowhere near as warm as the Eocene Optimum, England had palm trees again, Antarctic ice sheets melted, and oceans rose. Scientists still wrestle with why Earth’s temperature increased in the late Oligocene, but there is no doubt that it did. As the study of ice ages has demonstrated, many dynamics impact Earth’s climate, and positive and negative feedbacks can produce dramatic changes. For the several million year warm period, carbon dioxide levels do not appear to have been elevated. That data has been seized on by Global Warming skeptics as evidence that carbon dioxide levels have nothing to do with Earth’s temperature, but climate scientists not funded by the hydrocarbon lobby rarely think that way. Carbon dioxide is only one greenhouse gas, with water being more important. But as clouds demonstrate, water is a notoriously ephemeral gas, constantly evaporating and precipitating, and some land can get a lot (rainforests), and some can get very little (deserts). Icehouse Earth temperatures are more variable than Greenhouse Earth temperatures, particularly during the transitions between states, and an Icehouse Earth atmosphere has less water vapor in it than a Greenhouse Earth atmosphere.

In recent years, Neogene temperatures have been the focus of intensive research. What appears to be the proximate cause of elevated temperatures were dramatic changes in ocean currents. The final closing of the Tethys Ocean, the isolation of Antarctica, the creation of that vast arc of Eurasian mountains, and the opening and closing of land bridges, such as in the Bering Sea and ultimately the land bridge between North and South America, created dramatic changes in ocean currents and global climate. One result was fluctuation in Antarctic Bottom Water. Its production declined beginning about 24 mya, and its weakness lasted until about 14 mya. Consequently, Earth’s oceans were not stratified like they are today, with warm water extending far lower into the oceans than it does today. Also, it reduced the temperature gradient between the equator and poles, which drives global currents; the greater the differential, the more vigorous the currents. It was still an Icehouse Earth, but the “mid-Miocene climatic optimum” was relatively warm. The past three million years are the coldest Earth has seen since the Karoo Ice Age that ended 260 mya, but this Icehouse Earth phase began developing in the mid-Eocene. While the steadily declining carbon dioxide levels of the past 150 million years is the ultimate cause of this Icehouse Earth phase, relatively short-term and regional fluctuations have had their proximate causes rooted in other geophysical dynamics.

Whatever the causes were, the early Miocene was warm, and as with Eocene migrations around the North Pole, migrating in the Arctic became easy again, and North America was invaded by Eurasian animals coming across Beringia. The prominent Menoceras descended from Asian migrants, and the strange Moropus was also an Asian immigrant, which had claws on its forefeet, similar to a sloth’s. Pronghorns also migrated from Asia, and the first true cat in North America arrived. Those North American days saw the last of a pig-like omnivore that was rhino-sized. A giraffe-like camel lived then, and the first true equines appeared in the early Miocene and migrated to Asia. The general Oligocene cooling gave rise to tough, gritty plants, and deer, antelope, elephants, rodents, horses, camels, rhinos, and others developed hypsodont teeth, which had greatly expanded enamel surfaces for grinding those plants. Carnivores also migrated from Asia, such as an early bear, an early weasel, and bear dogs. North America’s rodents and rabbits continued to diversify. Later in the Miocene’s warm period, the trickle of Asian immigrants became a flood, with a giant bear dog weighing up to 600 kilograms (1,300 pounds), and two large groups of immigrant rhinos, Teleoceras and several genera of aceratherine rhinos, displaced endemic ones. In a late Pliocene count of North American mammalian genera, a third were not native to North America. But North America fauna was unscathed compared to other continents.

The invasion of North America from Asia (with a little migration from North America to Asia), while important, was not as dramatic as what happened in Africa a few million years later. About 24 mya, Africa and the attached Arabian Peninsula began colliding with Eurasia. The once-vast Tethys Ocean had finally been reduced to a strait between the continents, and one of Earth’s most dramatic mammalian migrations began. By about 18 mya, proboscidean gomphotheres had migrated from Africa, and they reached North America by 16.5 mya. An elephant ancestor left Africa but stayed in Asia. As with the North American interchange with Asia, however, the bigger change came the other way. Rodents, deer, cattle, antelope, pigs, rhinos, giraffes, dogs (including the hyena), and cats came over, along with small insectivores and shrews. Most of the iconic large fauna of today’s African plains originated from elsewhere, particularly Asia. Asian animals invaded and dominated Europe and Africa, and became abundant in North America. In general, Asia had more diverse biomes and was the largest continent, so it developed the most competitive animals. That principle, which Darwin remarked on, became very evident when the British invaded Australia in the 18th century, and imports such as rabbits and foxes quickly prevailed, and endemic species were quickly driven to extinction. The most important Miocene development for humans was African primate development, but that is a subject for the next chapter.

What may explain invader and endemic success with those migrations is what kind of continent the invaders came from, what kind of continent they invaded, and the invasion route. Asia contains large arctic and tropical biomes, unlike any other continent. North America barely reaches the tropics, and only a finger of South America reaches high latitudes, and well short of what would be called arctic latitudes in North America. Africa’s biomes were all tropical and near-tropical. The route to Europe from Asia in the late Oligocene was straight across at the same latitude, so the biomes were similar. About the same is true of the route to Africa from Asia. The Asian immigrants were not migrating to climates much different than what they left. But the route to North America was via Beringia, which was an Arctic route. Primates and other tropical animals were not going to migrate from Asia to North America via Beringia, and even fauna from temperate climates were not going to make that journey, not in Icehouse Earth conditions. Oligocene North America was geographically protected in ways that Oligocene Europe and Africa were not, and it already had substantial exchanges with Asia before and was a big continent with diverse biomes in its own right. It was not nearly as isolated as Africa, South America, and Australia were.

In South America, its animals continued to evolve in isolation, and some huge ones appeared. In the Miocene, the largest flying bird ever known flew in South American skies, looking like a giant condor, with a seven-meter wingspan and weighing 70 kilograms. Glyptodonts first appeared, as well as a rhino-sized sloth, and some large browsers and grazers inhabited the large herbivore guild, and looked like guild members on other continents, for another instance of convergent evolution. In Australia, the Miocene fossil record is thin, but recent findings showed that all Miocene mammals were marsupials, except for bats. Kangaroos diversified into different niches; some were rat-sized, and others became carnivorous. Giant wombats foraged in the Miocene, and marsupial lions first appeared in the Oligocene, kept growing over the epochs, and when humans arrived about 50 kya, they were lion-sized. Giant flightless birds also roamed Australia, as they still did in South America, although just how carnivorous some may have been is debated.

In the oceans, the Miocene warm period meant expanding reefs again, and topical conditions again visited the high latitudes, but not to the early Eocene’s extent. Corals, mollusks, echinoids, and bryozoans all expanded and diversified in the warm period. Also, the first appearance of the closest thing to marine forests was in the Miocene, when kelp developed. Kelp forest denizens such as seals and ancestors of sea otters also appeared in the Miocene. Whales radiated in the warm Miocene oceans, and C. Megalodon was not far behind. The first rorquals appeared in the Miocene, and they specialized in eating polar krill. They were the last whales hunted nearly to extinction by humans, after all other species had been decimated. Rorquals were fast swimmers, and hunting rorquals was not feasible until whaling became industrialized.

For ten million years, Earth’s ecosystems readily adapted to the warmer temperatures, but Greenland began to grow its ice sheet about 18 mya, and by 14 mya the party was over and a steady cooling trend began that lasted all the way to the beginning of the current ice age, as the Antarctic ice sheets grew like never before. Again, tropical flora and fauna in high latitudes either migrated toward the equator or went extinct. Reefs can’t migrate, so those outside of the shrinking tropics died out.

The cause of the cooling at 14 mya has a number of hypotheses, one of which is that mountain-building in that great arc, created by colliding continents exposed rock that then absorbed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in silicate weathering. Around the time of the cooling, the Arabian Peninsula finally crashed into Asia, closing off the Tethys Ocean, which by then was more like the Tethys Strait there. The last remnants of the Tethys consisted of an inland sea that includes today’s Caspian, Black, and Aral seas, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Persian Gulf.

Eurasian mountain building was not the only such Miocene event. The Cascade Range, which I have spent my life happily hiking in, began erupting in the Miocene and rose in the Pliocene, and so are one of Earth’s younger and more rugged ranges. The Sierra Nevada of California also formed in the Miocene, and the Andes grew into a formidable climactic barrier. The Rocky Mountains also had renewed uplifting in the Miocene, and the Southern Alps of New Zealand were built. In the mid-Miocene, the northward movement of Australia toward Asia initiated the plate collision that created the Indonesian archipelago, which blocked tropical flow between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Grinding tectonic plates have created the Pacific Ring of Fire, which is Earth’s most seismically-active region, and have contributed to many Cenozoic mountain-building and volcanic events, but it is only a pale imitation of Mesozoic volcanism. The radioactivity that drives plate tectonics has steadily declined over the eons, and in about one billion years the plates will cease to move and Earth will become geologically dead, like Mars is today. Life on Earth will then quickly end, if it had not already expired. Complex life will likely be long gone by then.

As the cooling event began 14 mya, cooling and drying came again, the tropics shrank, and rainforests gave way to woodlands, woodlands gave way to grasslands, grasslands gave way to steppes, coniferous forests grew and angiosperm forests shrank, and deserts and tundra grew. In the Miocene, another major new biome appeared: grasslands. While grasses originated in the Cretaceous and dinosaurs ate them, it was not until the mid-Miocene cooling at 14 mya that grasslands first appeared as a biome’s foundation. Those grasslands were the first savannas, and North America’s Miocene grasslands would have resembled Africa’s today. As it is today, North America’s grasslands were on the Great Plains. Instead of elephants, there were mastodonts, instead of hippos, there were hippo-like rhinos, in place of giraffes were long-necked camels, some of which indeed reached giraffe size, pronghorns played the antelope role, and horses played zebras. The predators would have looked a little different, with hyena-like dogs, bears, and bear dogs bringing down the big game.

Those grasslands, with their attendant grazers and browsers, and their predators, appeared in the pampas of Argentina, the plains of the Ukraine, China, and Pakistan, and, of course, Africa. Africa’s savanna fauna would have looked very familiar, with elephants, antelope (including impalas, gazelles, etc.), hippos, cats, hyenas, sort-necked giraffes, horses, the first modern rhinos, and the like. In Eurasia and Africa, with the land barriers removed, all the savanna biomes resembled each other. In the late Miocene, C4 plants began to proliferate, especially in those grasslands.

Many plants families incorporate silica into their structures. Diatoms also incorporate silica, and those are among the few life forms that use silicon, although it is one of the most plentiful elements in Earth’s crust. Diatoms seem to gain energy advantages by using silica, and plants seem to have structural advantages, but it is thought that plants also used silica for a defensive measure, as it helps makes plants unpalatable. Eating plants full of silica structures, called phytoliths, is like chewing sand. This is particularly true in grasses, as phytoliths make chewing them a tooth-wrecking process, particularly for ruminants, with their thorough chewing. Grazing herbivores have heavily-enameled hypsodont teeth (also called high-crowned teeth) to deal with the silica and generally tough grassland vegetation, and in North America, hypsodont herbivores proliferated while those without that heavy enamel (also called low-crowned teeth), which were browsers instead of grazers, declined. By about nine mya, the North American browsers had largely vanished, with grazers dominant in the new grasslands. Earth kept cooling and drying, and less than seven mya, steppe began replacing savanna-like grasslands, and forests were decimated. This led to the greatest mass extinction in North America in the Cenozoic Era, as many species of horses, mastodonts, bears, dogs, and small predators went extinct, as well as mice, beavers, and moles. The drying and collapse of the biomes did it. Asia and Africa were hit similarly, although not quite as hard as North America seemed to be, but South America and Australia hardly seemed affected at all. New Zealand’s seafloor changed from warm-water communities to the Southern Ocean communities that it has today.

The Tethys Ocean finally evaporated, literally, at the Miocene’s end, and it was a spectacular exit. As part of the collision of Africa and Europe, Morocco and Spain smashed together and separated the Atlantic Ocean from the Mediterranean Sea. Then the entire Mediterranean dried out. Then the crashing Atlantic waves eroded through the rock and the Atlantic again filled the Mediterranean Sea in floods that may have been Earth’s most spectacular. The grinding continents then threw up another rock dam, and the Atlantic was cut off again and the Mediterranean dried up. That pattern happened more than forty times between about 5.8 and 5.2 mya. Each drying episode, after the rock dam again separated the Atlantic from the Mediterranean, took about a thousand years and left about 70 meters of salt on the floor of the then Mediterranean Desert. The repeated episodes created 2,000-to-3,000-meter-thick sediments of gypsum, which is formed from evaporating oceans, trapped like the Mediterranean was. Creating so much gypsum partially desalinated Earth’s oceans (a 6% lowering), raising their freezing point, and may have contributed to the growth of Antarctica’s ice sheets.

The Pliocene Epoch (c. 5.3 to 2.6 mya), was about as warm as today, but was the prelude to today’s ice age. An epoch of less than three million years reflects humans interest in the recent past. Geologically and climactically, there was little noteworthy about the Pliocene, although two related events make for one of the most interesting evolutionary events yet studied. South America kept moving northward, and the currents that once circled Earth at the equator in the Tethyan heyday were finally closed. The gap between North America and South America began to close about 3.5 mya, and by 2.7 mya the current land bridge had developed. Around three mya, the Great American Biotic Interchange began, where fauna from each continent could raft or swim to the other side. South America had been isolated for 60 million years, with only the stray migrant arrival, such as rodents and New World monkeys. North America, however, received repeated invasions from Asia, and had exchanges with Europe and Greenland. North America also had much more diverse biomes than South America had, even though it had nothing like the Amazon rainforest. How did it go, when South America’s isolation ended? That was the closest thing to a controlled experiment that paleobiologists would ever have. South American fauna was devastated, far worse than European and African fauna were when Asia finally connected with them. More than 80% of all South American mammalian families and genera quickly went extinct, which means around 99% of all species. Proboscideans continued their spectacular success after leaving Africa, with Stegomastodon species inhabiting the warm, moist Amazonian biome, as well as the Andean mountainous terrain and pampas. The Cuvieronius also invaded and thrived as a mixed feeder, grazing or browsing as conditions permitted. In came cats, dogs, camels (which became the llama), horses, pigs, rabbits, raccoons, squirrels, deer, tapirs, and others. They displaced virtually all species inhabiting the same niche on the North American side. The South American fauna that migrated to North America and survived in South America were almost always those that inhabited niches that no North American animal did, such as monkeys, ground sloths, glyptodonts and their small armadillo cousins, capybaras, and porcupines. The opossum was nearly eradicated by North American competition, but survived and is the only marsupial that made it to North America and exists today. And one large herbivore survived, the Toxodon. The largest rodent ever (it weighed one metric ton!) survived for a million years after the interchange. That large predatory bird from South America also survived and migrated to North America and lasted about a million years before dying out. In general, North American mammals were more energy efficient and brainer, thought to result from evolutionary pressures which South America had less of, in its isolation. They were able to outrun and outthink their South American competitors.

The scientific consensus today is that climate change or inhospitable biomes had nothing to do with North American mammals prevailing over South American mammals, which were largely marsupials. But the event that made the exchange possible, closing the gap between those continents, seems to have triggered the current ice age. The closure of the gap between North and South America was the event that led to today’s thermohaline circulation, as it created the Gulf Stream. While the Gulf Stream brings warm water to the North Atlantic, making Western Europe far warmer than it would otherwise be, the pre-ice-age Caribbean had relatively low salinity waters that drifted north into the Arctic, and because of that low salinity, it did not sink but continued into the Arctic Ocean, warming it. Once Pacific access was cut off, the Gulf Stream formed, which was saltier (hence denser) and sank as it cooled in the North Atlantic, sinking to the ocean floor before it got to Greenland, as is the case today. This cessation of warm tropical waters to the Arctic seems to have triggered the growth of Arctic ice, particularly Greenland, which has the world’s second largest ice sheet after Antarctica. The change in currents killed off about 65% of mollusk species along the Atlantic coast of North America, and Florida’s reefs largely died out. Caribbean reefs survived and much of the east North Atlantic’s warm water sea life migrated south into the tropics and the Mediterranean. Japanese mollusks also survived the new currents. It was the western North Atlantic that cooled off, and that led not only to Greenland’s ice sheet, but the largest ice sheets of the current ice age have been North American, with their volumes even exceeding Antarctica’s.

At 2.6 mya, the ice age began, which ended the Neogene Period and began what is called the Quaternary Period, which we still live in. The name “Quaternary” is one of the last vestiges of Biblical influences on early geology, and refers to the time after Noah’s flood. The Quaternary’s first epoch is called the Pleistocene, which ended 12 kya, at the beginning of this ice age’s most recent interglacial period. The past twelve thousand years are called the Holocene Epoch.

The current ice age has come in phases, and about a million years ago a steady rhythm of advancing and retreating ice sheets began and has been happening about every hundred thousand years, which is certainly related to Milankovitch Cycles. During this ice age, the land fauna was already generally adapted to ice age conditions, and during the seventeen ice sheet advances and retreats over the past two million years, there were not any large-scale extinctions, except for the most recent one. In general, the large fauna sizes that have dominated the past 40 million years were well represented on all continents. Proboscideans thrived in all inhabitable continents and biomes. In North America, mammals whose size would astound (and sometimes terrify) modern observers included the short-faced bear (the largest carnivore ever), a bison with horns two meters wide, the largest cat ever, giant mammoths, the largest wolf ever, and the largest beaver ever. They only seem large because of today’s stunted remnant populations. With the exception of the bison, they all lived for millions of years, through numerous ice age events, to all go extinct just after humans arrived. The other continents had similar giants, with Australia having a kangaroo about the size of a gorilla and the largest land lizard ever. Southeast Asia had the largest primate ever, which dwarfed today’s gorillas. With only Africa and parts of Eurasia as partial exceptions, virtually all large fauna went extinct, worldwide, soon after human arrival, and how humans came to be is the next chapter’s concern.

Wade Frazier

10th January 2014, 01:19

Hi Guys:

Yes, cold here, warm where you are (actually, where I live, it is normal, but last summer was warmer than usual). The unsophisticated Global Warming “skeptics” usually seize on regional variation to say, “I rest my case.” It is a bogus argument, but I see it all the time, and even scientists play that game, usually those on the hydrocarbon lobby’s payroll. Or they seize on the obvious alarm of climate scientists to say: “They are alarmed! Alarm is unscientific! Go back to sleep, all is well.”

We are getting “hundred year floods” in the mountains near my home every five years or so these days. The hurricane that wiped out New York, the worst in its history, is evidence of long-term warming. The scientists who want to keep studying it, demanding more data, until there is 99.99% certainly before doing anything, are like the malaria “skeptics” of long ago:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=781038&viewfull=1#post781038

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

10th January 2014, 15:34

Hi:

I am taking a little break from writing the essay, but feeling a lot of pressure to get it done ASAP without having the quality suffer. One thing that becomes clear about the journey of life on Earth is that it is an energy journey. From the photosynthesis that forms the ecosphere’s foundation, to the Sun that provides the energy that makes it all happen, to the radioactivity that powers plate tectonics, to concepts such as Icehouse and Greenhouse Earth, to metabolism and thermoregulation, to food acquisition strategies and abilities, to protection from predation and grazing, to propagating the game through procreation, to powering larger brains to better navigate the game, it is all about energy.

When it comes to the human journey, it becomes even more about energy. From controlling fire to killing off all the easy meat, to domesticating plants and animals, to razing forests and smelting metal, to harnessing wind and water power, to harnessing hydrocarbon energy, to directly harnessing solar energy, to harnessing the energy locked in atomic nuclei, to tapping the Zero-Point Field, it is all an energy game. And cognition rose with it, at least in ways. Reaching a new level of cognition seems to be required if humanity is going to make the leap to FE and abundance, and it will need to begin in the heart.

Comprehensive thinking is not just about reaching complex understandings; the bogus teachings need to be recognized and discarded, first, such as all of those scarcity-based ideologies we are fed:

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

I have watched people raised with religion become materialists, and watched materialists become religious fanatics. I have watched so-called liberals become right-wing nutcases. In those kinds of flip-flops, Orwell’s censored observation in the preface to Animal Farm is apropos:

"To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment."

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

It can be called a failing of the mind, but I always found that it began in the heart. Seizing on one ideology, and then discarding it for another, might seem like a quest for the truth, but in reality is a quest for security, seeking a safe haven where one really does not have to think. All of those havens are also scarcity-based and egocentric, where the adherent gets material benefits and egocentric strokes for playing along.

There is no end to the charlatanry in all of those “isms,” from the lies about national founders:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#fathers

to religious and spiritual hucksterism (there is “real” stuff there, which genuine spiritual masters know well, but very few of them have walked on Earth, and organized religions are all rackets, to one degree or another), to the flacks for capitalism, from the very beginning when the classical economists covered up the violent and greedy acquisition of “capital” that began that entire racket, to the false foundations of materialism, rationalism, and scientism, enforced by organized "skepticism" and its patrons.

Godzilla’s antics are merely capitalism on steroids, and ideologues of all stripes deny his existence, or believe that he is judiciously using the power granted him by a sleeping humanity, and the Young Warriors who think that Godzilla can be defeated in battle are the most delusional and dangerous of all:

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

Godzilla is only a symptom of our malaise, not a cause. Godzilla has achieved mastery of a sort:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#serving

For all of that forebrain growth in the human line, the part of the brain that runs the human limbic system is no larger than in our great ape cousins:

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

It is where the “primitive” behaviors originate from, and when humans are in fear, that part of the brain takes over, and that seems to be why almost nobody can grok FE and abundance, because they have to let go of their scarcity-based comforters to get there. We can’t drag our scarcity-based baggage with us to abundance, and it took me many years to understand, but when the dust finally settled in Ventura:

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

I was ready to begin to learn it, although I began questioning my indoctrination very early on:

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

Raising our consciousness may be what this entire journey of life on Earth is about, if mystical sources are to be believed. Even though I began my journey with a mystical orientation:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#how

I came to the sentience issue the long way around of going out in the real world and trying to change it. It was only after being handed my head that I began on the more secular route of understanding, realizing the pack of lies I had been sold during my indoctrination and conditioning:

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

From scientist-in-training to mystic to businessman to FE activist to historian to studying science again, in ways it has come full circle for me as I write what may be the last big essay of my lifetime (this one will be book-length). My financial pressures may well see to that, and my brain is not as nimble as it used to be.

Even though this thread will reach a half-million page views in the next day or so, I know that my audience is and will continue to be a limited one. Very few can handle what I am serving up, but that is also by design. Only those who can lay aside their scarcity-based teddy bears can begin to understand abundance before the means are delivered to their doors. Those who think that the masses are going to wake up with talk have not been out there trying it out. After Brian O played the Paul Revere of FE for several years, he openly wondered if humans are a sentient species:

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

and I have heard virtually the identical comment from everybody who has played on the high road to FE. It just comes with the territory. People will begin to wake up to the idea of abundance when FE is delivered to their homes, or they can walk down the street and see it, just like Machiavelli observed:

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

That is why chatting up friends, family, and colleagues about FE never goes anywhere, and is even dangerous, as FE means the end of the world as we know it. With FE and abundance, this kind of world begins to come into view:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

but almost all that anybody sees when they begin to understand is that their niche in the world that they have worked so hard to carve out for themselves will vanish. As crazy as it might seem, that is Godzilla’s fear, too. He would rather rule in hell than be a regular member of heaven, and he knows that his game is over if FE got loose. Economically-independent people can’t be controlled by playing the puppet strings of scarcity. Godzilla would lose his key leverage point over humanity. But virtually nobody is threatening to rock the boat as it heads for the waterfalls, and for the tiny fraction that is pursuing FE, they are all mired in scarcity-based approaches. Dennis is the best there ever was at going after FE, but he has appealed to all three of the basic population management ideologies that are used in the USA:

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

and gotten precisely nowhere with them. And when aspirants apply for patents, raise money from investors, think they can sneak past Godzilla if they are clever enough, think that they can vanquish Godzilla in battle, think that Godzilla died in his sleep or is sleeping, think that they can organize a stampede if they get the carrots and sticks lined up properly, think they can become the Bill Gates of FE and so on (Levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11 http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6 ), they are heading for defeat, with the efforts usually self-destructing as greed, paranoia, fear, delusions of grandeur and other pitfalls await, and all Godzilla usually needs to do is sit back and watch it collapse from within. None of those approaches have tried the enlightenment route, and I can understand why, at least until now. People actually pursuing enlightenment are a vanishingly small fraction of the human species, veritable needles in haystacks. But there is a new technology with a global reach, and nobody has ever used it before to try to find those needles and get them to all focus on the human journey’s root issue, and the one that had better be solved ASAP or the entire human species will go down the tubes while taking most complex life with it.

Will my approach have a prayer? Beats me, but I did not see anybody trying it, and I am trying to fill a gaping hole that I saw in all efforts. The scientists and inventors all have tunnel vision, firmly within their paradigm, naïve or paranoid, and/or trying to get rich and famous. Dennis is the best there ever was at the businessman’s approach:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=694872&highlight=wirec#post694872

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

and should have been dead twenty times over so far in his journey, and like Brian O:

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

Dennis has now effectively been run out of the USA, the Land of the Free, after already being run out of his home state:

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

and barely surviving working in the town I was raised in:

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

which I never want to see again. The businessman’s approach to FE won’t work, not in this world, and neither will the tinkerer approach, the religion approach, the flag-waving approach, the stampede approach, the billionaire approach, the Young Warrior approach, and so on. I have seen them all, mostly up close and personally, and watched them all go down in flames, and got scorched a few times myself.

The approach I am taking today is not only an avenue that I did not see anybody try, but it is the only one in alignment with the kind of world I want to live in. All the others are trying to drag scarcity and fear into a world of abundance and love, so they have already sown the seeds of their self-destruction.

As I have been writing of late:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=779835&viewfull=1#post779835

I am becoming an old man, and this may be my last attempt at making a dent. I will end the project rather than see it go down the paths of disaster that I have already witnessed many times. That is why I am going about it like I am, and you can tell that it is not easy for me, not with all the inventor-itis posts, the “let’s do something now” posts, the “let’s be heroes" posts, and the like. I fully accept that I may only be planting seeds in my lifetime, and it will be up to others to raise them to harvest stage. If I can’t make a dent, what I hope is that others will take my approach and do it better. Finding this stuff out the hard way is something that I can’t recommend, as it is not easy to survive the lessons, and I am definitely damaged by the journey, as has everyone on the meat-grinder path.

But the good news is that I have been seeing some at Avalon understand what I am doing, or at least understand it well enough to poke their noses carefully into some of it, find out that I know what I am writing about, and then eagerly try to digest more. There is no teacher like experience, but getting experience on the high road to FE is life-threatening. Probably the only reason why I am able to do what I do is that I was young enough when I went through the meat grinder so that I could survive the experience. I saw many wrecked and prematurely ended lives on my journey, and I will do my best so that I have no more of those on my conscience:

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

The FE field does not need any more martyrs to sober up newbies to the risks:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#business

and if newbies just need to see blood and guts and smell it before they begin to understand, they are not in my target audience. :)

A day of chores awaits me.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

11th January 2014, 04:02

Hi:

Briefly, on the megafauna extinctions, which you have been seeing me write about plenty. A highly respected paper on the subject is this one:

http://bio.classes.ucsc.edu/bioe107/Papers/Megafaunal%20Extinctions/Barnosky%20et%20al%202004.pdf

where relatively impartial scientists looked at the state-of-the-art evidence ten years ago. I have seen this study cited by scientists who favor the climate explanation, saying that the paper helps their case. When I looked at the data, I sure could not see why. On page 71, they have a chart of the continents and what the data shows. The African and Eurasian extinctions were minor, compared to the other continents. But even so, there is not much African data. The European extinction is the only one where climate seems to be significantly implicated, but almost all the data is provisional. For Australia, the data is robust, and humans are 100% implicated. For North America, the data is robust, and the cause is almost all human, with very little climate effect. For South America, it says the data is insufficient, but South America did not have continental ice sheets, and from what I have seen, humans are the primary cause. Elephants were always highly successful everywhere they went, and South America was full of elephants when humans arrived. They all quickly went extinct, just like they did in North America. There is no way that climate is going to be the primary cause for South America:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary_extinction_event#South_America

All scientists agree that all the extinctions after humans arrived on all islands were all human caused, even big islands like New Zealand and Madagascar. All scientists concede that humans have driven many continental species to extinction or its brink in the historical era (passenger pigeon, in the greatest flocks Earth ever saw, and the bison was reduced to less than a thousand before the rest were spared, for instance).

So, the only significant doubt about human agency is Europe and South America, but I don’t have all that much. They would be the only exceptions in the rise and domination of humans. Humans were always the primary variable, as far as I can see, and I have not seen a scientist not from the two camps come away doubting that humans were the primary variable.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

11th January 2014, 16:52

Hi:

I have been engaged in a little correspondence lately, and it is germane to part of the essay that I have yet to write. I first read of New Zealand’s Dr.-Seuss-like pre-human fauna in Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee in the early 2000s. While I had written on startling cultural differences in the New World native versus European cultures:

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

I also was reading a lot of what I would have to call apologetics regarding Native American and “primitive” cultures in general that kind of idealized them. Diamond’s book was one of the early ones I had read that studied early human civilizations and hunter-gatherer peoples, and found that the idealization was off the mark, a kind of wistful looking back to some Golden Age that never was.

Basically, humans have not lived in harmony with nature (or each other) since they learned to control fire, up to two million years ago. It started out on a small scale, of protection from predators and warmth as proto-humans left the tropical environs of Africa, as well as cooking food, which fueled the growing human brain. Early on, however, humans also learned that they could transform the environments through burning the forests, as well as flush out game. This kind of activity goes back at least 70K years. When humans invaded Australia about 50K years ago, they quickly drove all the megafauna to extinction, and seem to have largely done it by burning the forests and other vegetation.

Later human migrations to the Western Hemisphere (12K years ago), and to the Mammoth Steppe in Eurasia (30-40K years ago), show that behaviorally modern humans had developed the toolset and social organization to become Earth’s super-predators, and wherever they appeared in the past 40K years, they drove the elephants to extinction. Elephants are one of Earth’s smartest animals, with a huge, prehensile trunk, and they were likely the most successful mammals of all time, before humans arrived. Elephants lived in all of Earth’s inhabitable biomes that they could get to, for the past several million years, and in Northern Eurasia and the Americas, they all went extinct right after modern humans arrived. Elephants were only the most notable animals. Virtually all large animals went extinct wherever humans arrived in the past 50K years. And there is suspicion that this pattern is far older. When those “hobbits” appeared on Flores Island nearly a million years ago:

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

there was a dwarf elephant species there, along with some other megafauna, and they all went extinct after the hobbits arrived. And the hobbits themselves went extinct right after modern humans arrived. In fact, it looks like modern humans may have driven Homo erectus and Neanderthals to extinction, although those human extinctions are hotly contested these days.

But the pattern seems pretty clear, in that humans swept all other animals before them, as they drove the easy meat and competitors to extinction, wherever they appeared.

So, as with many other animals in the history of life on Earth, there really was a short-lived Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer, which lasted until all the easy meat was gone. Not long after the ice sheets melted and humans began to dominate the fresh new biomes, the easy meat was gone again, and in several places around the world, humans domesticated plants and animals, likely due to the desperation of population pressures. In some places, such as Australia, the natives never learned domestication, but in most places, they did. In Eurasia and Africa, where humans evolved alongside the megafauna, a substantial portion of the megafauna survived, and they became the world’s first draft animals. In the Americas, the first natives exterminated almost all the candidates for draft animals, such as elephants, horses, and camels, and the llama was the closest thing to a draft animal, and the largest domesticated animal in the Americas.

Wherever plants and animals were domesticated, within a few thousand years cities developed. The appearance of civilization was dependent on a local and stable energy source, and domesticates provided it (salmon provided it for the Pacific Northwest natives, in one of the only civilizations that was not built on domestication, as were the Californian natives, but they were rare exceptions). However, those early civilizations were never very stable, basically because they cut out their feet from underneath them as they wiped out local environments, forests in particular, and then exhausted the soils, and the civilization collapsed. The Middle East is full of ancient cities that collapsed and are in deserts today, and the weather was not to blame. The earliest city known, Eridu:

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

was a seashore community. Its ruins are 150 miles inland today, buried under all the silt of upland deforestation over the thousands of years since then. All the early cities of Sumeria met the same fate. In Syria, hundreds of ancient cities lie in ruins in their self-made deserts. The pattern was repeated continuously. I was just reading yesterday, in the book Trophic Cascades, that all of the world’s civilized areas are extremely deforested, which should be no great surprise.

Humans have never lived in harmony with their environments, as they wrested energy from them, usually with no thought to tomorrow. In the pre-contact Western Hemisphere, there was ecosystem management that was sustainable, such as how the Indians burned the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains, to keep them conducive to supporting game animals, or how they terraformed the Amazon with Terra preta:

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

so there were some sustainable civilizations before Europeans arrived, and many Europeans wanted to live like Indians rather than live like Europeans, and for good reason, as Europe was kind of a hell on Earth back then, but that is relative.

The Indians of the Eastern Woodlands had not known agriculture for all that long, and they had to move their villages every generation, as they burned up all the firewood. Today, anthropologists think that the Western Hemisphere was a few thousand years behind the Old World, as they had no draft animals, and their agricultural surplus was not as large. But they were heading in the same direction as all other civilizations, and the collapse of the Mayan and Anasazi civilizations, as well as the collapse of Cahokia, showed the same old story, of environmental over-taxation which reduced the resilience of the civilizations, making them vulnerable to climate fluctuations and other disruptions, and the Mayan and Anasazi civilizations collapsed. New Agers liked to say that the Mayans and Anasazi “ascended,” but the archeological record tells a different story. Where Chaco Canyon is was once forested, but the Anasazi deforested everything for fifty miles around, building their civilization, and when the drought collapsed it, that area remains a desert today, nearly a thousand years later. That is a pattern long seen in the Old World, where early archeologists marveled over all those ruins of great cities built in deserts. They now know that the cities made the deserts, deserts that still exist.

When they finally deciphered the Mayan writings, it was the same old story of Machiavellian politics and wars as the resource base collapsed. Also, in all early civilizations, male elites dominated, and they all had enhanced reproductive rights, which is a polite way of saying that they all had harems. Also, in all of those early civilizations, religion began, and all early religions deified the elite, to justify their status atop the heap. I do not think that anthropologists have found an exception. And those behaviors are also evident when the great apes are studied. The bonobos are the only great apes that don’t sexually coerce the females:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#bonobo

and it was their economy that allowed for the changes, much as women have been liberated by industrialization.

So, the pining for the hunter-gatherer ideal, or the village ideal, is a fantasy of those who see what humans are doing to the Earth and each other. There were no “good old days,” I am sorry to say.

But with FE and abundance, this kind of world can come into view:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

and that has been my game since I was sixteen:

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

Anybody else interested in helping it manifest? :)

When I finish my essay, I will be initiating a conversation in my own forum, which will take the level far above what you have seen at Avalon so far, and maybe the first notes of a choir will be heard. We’ll see.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

11th January 2014, 21:18

Hi:

Today, this page reached a half million page views, less than a week after my three-year anniversary at Avalon. I am thankful that Avalon has provided me this opportunity, and especially to Bill, the author of the feast. I hope the reading experience has been worth it. Even when I get my own forum going, I can see myself having a presence at Avalon as long as there is an Avalon and I am writing. This is the first friendly venue I have encountered on the Internet, and is really the first time that I have interacted with the quasi-public in this way since I removed my email address from my site in 2002:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/critics.htm#troll

Believe me, there are legions of people in cyberspace, some on Godzilla’s payroll (and maybe a few that have infiltrated Avalon but have to behave themselves here), who would love to disrupt what I am doing, and I am thankful for Avalon keeping them at bay.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

11th January 2014, 21:33

Hi:

I have a little time today for another post. This one is going to be on evolution, consciousness, materialists, scientists, “skeptics,” and the intelligent design people. I have written plenty before on the real world of science:

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

and the many myths about it:

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

In my studies for this essay, I have read many scientific papers and specialist literature, as well as books both by science writers and professional scientists writing for the lay audience. A very common observation in those works is disabusing the reader that scientists have any particular virtue, are really that interested in the truth of matters, and the like. One recent passage that I read by a professional scientist stated:

“Scientific meetings can degenerate into shouting matches and name-calling, although the preferred method of attack is to demolish one’s opponent with a witty riposte.”

I recently wrote that the current structure of mainstream science makes them useless on the FE front:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=774788&viewfull=1#post774788

To some degree, their blindness and useless is understandable, but that does not make it less real. Brian O was a big advocate of scientific study of “paranormal” phenomena:

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

but so far, I have lost the battle with the hack editors at Wikipedia, who have renamed my “Frontiers of Science” section of Brian’s bio to “Alternative Beliefs”:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_O%27Leary#Alternative_beliefs

which is not only an inaccurate and misleading title, but it implies that Brian was into “beliefs.” One day, if I ever get anybody to help me on Brian’s “final word” in the moon landings:

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

I will take on the “editors” again. One of them I am pretty sure works in some kind of Godzilla-like capacity, and that just comes with the territory. So, mainstream science is in a straightjacket in very important ways, easily manipulated by Godzilla’s minions to stay away from the important stuff, and scientists have readily acquiesced to the herd management. But at least they have some kind of ideal, a code to live up to, even if they often fail. All professions are like that, so I am not really picking on scientists too much. But I have seen “radicals” and “environmentalists” worship mainstream science, as if it was some temple of truth. That is partly why they are Level 2s and 3s:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level2

But that does not make fringe scientists right, and most of the fringe stuff is bogus, in one way or another, either by incompetence, unconscious corruption by trying to make a buck, or conscious hucksterism, out to dupe the lay people who digest such stuff. I have seen it all.

But that does not make the “skeptics” right, either. In fact, organized skepticism is actually anti-science. They never do any original work (not after they were caught cooking the data long ago), but just attack any scientist who strays from the herd. On the so-called paranormal, they are literally anti-scientific, claiming a priori that there is no paranormal phenomenon worth subjecting to actual scientific testing, and Randi’s bogus antics don’t count. My personal encounters with “skeptics” showed me that they are perhaps the most dishonest bunch I have yet encountered:

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

and that is saying something. Their recent shameless flacking for the bogus Warren Commission:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=767044&viewfull=1#post767044

is typical of the “skeptics,” who are “skeptical” of anything that is not establishment dogma. They are the professional descendants of the Catholic Church’s inquisitors:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#inquisition

Similarly, instead of being the patron saint of the FE movement, prominent members of the FE community shamelessly lie about Dennis:

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

These are all just more evidence of the primary lesson of my journey, that personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity:

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

Materialism is a religion, although materialists pretend that it isn’t, as with all ideologues. Everybody that I respect in the FE field was to one extent or another, a mystic, and it was due to their experiences, not some belief game or reading spiritual literature. Brian O had his awakening performing the same exercise that I did:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#brown

and once you have those kinds of experiences, you know that materialism is a faith built on a false foundation. The Silva class wrecked many White Science careers. :)

But that does not make the intelligent design people right, either. Evolution is a real phenomenon, but its often-attendant materialism is what is bogus.

Back in the 1990s, as I was exploring the fringes, stumbling into the Velikovsky controversy, among others, people began contacting me, to sell me their creationist science. I spent time looking into it, and came away with the idea that calling it “science” was a charitable interpretation. What it really does is ape the methods of science, to a degree, but the goal always seemed to boil down to, “Because my Bible told me so.” In recent years, I have perused more of that kind of stuff, particularly after doing all the paleobiology studies. The creationist “science,” also called intelligent design these days, is still the Bible-based tripe that I saw in the 1990s. IMO, the nature of consciousness is far too subtle to be productively engaged by the materialists and the religious fanatics. They are simply two fanatic camps going at it, and the truth is lost in the battle.

But that does not mean that Jesus was a not a spiritual master, or that there is not some truth in the mythology of Genesis and the Old Testament. But literalist interpretations of ancient texts is the path of delusion, whether it is trying to make the case of ancient catastrophes, ET visitors, and other events. Whatever was in the sky that night:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/ufo.htm#call

was definitely responding to James Gilliland, and in my subsequent visits, I was treated to strange stuff, for sure. Something is definitely happening there, and when Brian O snooped into the UFO issue, it nearly cost him his life:

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

and Ed Mitchell:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Mitchell#Views_on_UFOs

and Gordon Cooper:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Cooper#UFO_sightings

are not exactly a couple of conspiracist flakes.

But that does not mean that many who are telling the world of UFO reality are legitimate, either, or that Earth is hollow, and so on. I have seen the most irresponsible yarn-spinning by people who claim to have inside information. Most of that stuff is disinformation, either the purveyors doing it as part of their jobs, being used as dupes by insiders, of just making the crap up for their notoriety and duping the masses, especially the conspiracists.

But that does not mean that the out-of-this-world technology that the Disclosure Project witnesses speak of is not real. I know some of it is, and probably most of it, because a close friend once got a show:

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

and scientists close to me saw what Sparky Sweet had, for instance:

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

The FE stuff is very real. But that does not make the many FE tinkerers out there legit in that they really tapped the ZPF. It is a lot harder than it looks, and even when a tinkerer taps the ZPF, if he is not immediately taken out by Godzilla’s carrots and sticks:

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

he never gets anywhere, as he needs many millions of dollars to continue along that development path before he gets to anything commercially viable, and that is partly why nothing has made it past prototype stage, and the good stuff all ends up in Godzilla’s Golden Hoard.

Navigating those realms can be a bewildering task, and the naive and unwary can easily get sucked into the many rabbit holes that await.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

12th January 2014, 17:56

Hi:

As an addendum to my last post yesterday, renaming my “Frontiers of Science” section of Brian’s bio to “Alternative Beliefs” is a rather gentle corruption compared to what I have seen the “skeptics” do repeatedly. Mr. Skeptic’s deeply dishonest rendering of Dennis’s story:

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

was so grotesquely performed that he seemed like a rank amateur, but there is plenty of circumstantial evidence, as well as some outright accusations with evidence to support them, that he is a professional:

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

Regarding the paranormal, what the “skeptics” do is literally anti-scientific, although they try to portray themselves as the voice of science. Real science would be investigating phenomena, deriving testable hypotheses and then testing them. The house organ of organized skepticism did just that long ago, but in its first foray into those realms, it cooked the data when it wasn’t to its liking:

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

and has not even pretended to perform science regarding the paranormal ever since. What it does instead is attack any and all research into phenomena that lies outside what is currently accepted by mainstream science. Every time research results are reported, the “skeptics” pounce on it, with an array of strategies, implying fraud often enough, but more often they attack the process and data, trying to find a hole in it. Many times, the investigators themselves will respond to the criticisms by improving their procedures, to remove possible experimental error. And when those areas are addressed, the “skeptics” dream up more possible ways for the data to be flawed. Often enough, the “skeptics” show that they are not even familiar with the experiments, as they dream up stuff that has already been dealt with; too often they can't even be bothered to actually examine the data. Many of their criticisms are the equivalent of grasping at straws, and can become increasingly desperate. One of their favorite tricks is having somebody like Mr. Skeptic “investigate” Dennis, and then he makes his criminally libelous “findings,” and that account becomes the beginning and end of “skeptical” investigations, where forever more if the subject of Dennis come up, the “skeptics” will yawn and point to Mr. Skeptic as the “expert,” and they accept and repeat his “findings” at face value. I have seen it with Dennis for the past seventeen years, and that situation is very common, even standard, among “skeptics.”

On psychic phenomena, one of the great crimes of organized skepticism is treating any and all investigations as either fraudulent enterprises or the Koffee Klatch level of investigation, where the investigators erect houses of cards that blow over in the slightest breeze.

When Robert McLuhan began in the investigations that led to him writing Randi’s Prize, what surprised him was the deep, scientific and scholarly investigations of paranormal phenomena, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing well into the twentieth century, engaged in by leading scientists and carefully written up in scientific and scholarly journals. William Crookes:

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

and Alfred Russell Wallace:

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

were legendary scientists, and both devoted quite a bit of effort to investigating paranormal phenomena, and concluded that they encountered genuine events, but the “skeptics” have gone out of their way to discredit them, and in ways that more than suggest fraud. The Articulate Dead covers numerous accounts of experiments conducted by scientists and other credible investigators, which were written up in the paranormal journals of the day, and the “skeptics” have been pretending for generations that such journals do not even exist. That was one of the red flags when McLuhan began his investigations, how the “skeptics” pretended that such efforts had never even been mounted, trying to chalk it all up to credulous housewives, charlatans, and the occasional scientist who got in way over his head.

But for the McLuhans of the world, whose efforts I cannot help but admire, my message is always:

“Go out and seek paranormal experiences of your own; they are really not that difficult to achieve. Then any doubt you might have about the reality of such phenomena will be removed.”

It used to amaze me how “skeptics” and scientists often avoided having direct personal experiences in these realms. When they do, there is no more doubt, no more belief, no more theorizing. With experience comes knowledge, which is a vastly superior treasure to beliefs and theories. But I have never seen a “skeptic” seriously pursue such experiences. At best, they will say that they tried it for five minutes one day and nothing happened. How inane. Forty hours of meditation training, and virtually anybody can perform and witness remote viewings that knock their socks off:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#brown

I performed psychically so much in my early years, and performed experiments such as “energize” fruit and watch it slowly mummify, or had “hot hands” healing events, and so on, that I have had no doubt about that stuff since I was a young man. Brian O performed similar experiments, sometimes with equipment that could reproduce the effects:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=545477&viewfull=1#post545477

Again, everybody that I respected in the FE field had a mystical orientation, because of their experiences, not some belief or faith game. Anybody who seriously pursues those avenues will quickly hit pay dirt, and they can stop listening to “skeptics” and the like to tell them how reality is; they will know.

Now, they will not have all the mysteries of the universe and creation revealed to them, but they will know that the materialism of science and “skepticism” is a faith built on a false foundation, and that the frontiers of investigating the abilities of consciousness have barely begun. The true final frontier is the realm of consciousness. But the social managers do their best to keep the herd in line, and it is no coincidence that the exploration of consciousness and the pursuit of FE have the very same organizations attacking them. If that stuff got out of the bag and became publicly acknowledged and normal, many games of power and control would simply vanish, not the least of which is Godzilla’s dark game.

While my writings are scholarly, I always encourage my readers to go get some experience:

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

Because only experience can become the anchor of awareness. I have stated it many times: if not for my wild ride with Dennis, I would likely not have much worth saying. Theories and data are nice, but do not lead to knowledge. The hard part about the FE game that I or any FE activist is playing is that getting good experience in the FE field is life-threatening, so unless people are willing to play the game at this level:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

they are not going to meet the wizard (or the flying monkeys :) ). In ways, reaching the level of awareness that FE is real without getting your own underground FE show:

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

or visiting an FE tinkerer before he is wiped out or bought out:

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

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

is not easy, but there is plenty of work that can be done to get immersed in enough experience and information that FE certainly comes into the realm of the possible. I can’t open people’s heads and give them what I know, so they will know it, but almost everything about my public work is stuff that can be checked out. And for the extremely few people who have ever done so, they come away from the experience either highly impressed or afraid, because they know my stuff is valid. The fearful ones are those who see their world crumble, as FE and abundance makes all of their mental games and beliefs obsolete:

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

and I am actually sympathetic to their fear, which is one reason why I don’t even want to interact with such people until they have something to replace their scarcity-based mindset. FE delivered to their homes will blow their belief systems to oblivion, but what can replace it is right there. If FE makes it past the organized suppression and humanity’s inertia, work like mine will not receive a half million views, but billions of views. Part of my work is done with that in mind, so that the new paradigm is already being developed, where people just don’t sit there with their minds blown, but a way forward has already been laid out. It will not have to be the only way, but it will show people what becomes possible with FE, such as this world:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

so the Level 5 fear that is nearly universal among the “smart” is not what carries the day:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level5

FE and abundance is about the end of fear and scarcity as the general organizing principles of humanity.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

Dennis Leahy

12th January 2014, 20:33

I think that Tesla fellow might have agreed with your conclusions, Wade. :~)

“We are whirling through endless space, with and inconceivable speed, all around everything is spinning, everything is moving, everywhere there is energy. There must be some way of availing ourselves of this energy more directly. Then, with the light obtained from the medium, with the power derived from it, with every form of energy obtained without effort, from the store forever inexhaustible, humanity will advance with giant strides. The mere contemplation of these magnificent possibilities expand our minds, strengthens our hopes and and fills our hearts with supreme delight.” -Nikola Tesla

Wade Frazier

12th January 2014, 21:08

Thanks Dennis:

Yes, Tesla was probably the professional grandfather of all FE activists, inventors, and the like. I have written that I don’t think I even knew who Tesla was when I was with Dennis in the mid-1980s. I had only heard of Fuller’s dome when I finished my site in 2002:

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

so, in ways, the territory I have trod in my lifetime is not exactly new. :)

However, Tesla got caught up in the electricity wars with Edison, and J.P. Morgan pulled the rug from under Tesla when he began making FE noises (“Mr. Tesla, where will the meter go?”), and the suppression apparatus began developing a century ago, and is highly refined today. However, tools like the Internet exist, so anybody who starts thinking in terms of FE is not wandering in the wilderness like Dennis and I were. The information is far more readily available today than it was back then.

Like Tesla, anybody who really thinks about the energy issue and the human journey, especially if they have a scientist’s understanding, will pretty quickly begin to realize the immensity of FE, and it is big:

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

The stupendous magnitude of FE, however, also creates many pitfalls. J.P. Morgan was likely an ancestor of today’s Godzilla, and they know the game they are playing. Keeping the lid on FE keeps their dark game going. Terraforming Mars is one of their crazy contingency plans if their power games make Earth uninhabitable. They are truly insane, all ego, and have been calling the shots on this planet for a long time.

But the pitfalls that come with pursuing FE are mostly not Godzilla-related.

Greed, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, and so on:

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

all await the FE aspirant, and almost nobody has ever navigated those hazards successfully. I had fleeting delusions of grandeur during my early days with Dennis, before I was rudely disabused of them:

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

The biggest hurdle to manifesting FE, by far, is humanity’s inertia. All FE aspirants that I ever met were mostly handicapped by their friends, family, and colleagues, not encouraged or helped. That is some of the bizarre territory that FE aspirants have to walk, and that is before Godzilla even shows up. And when he does, the stakes of the game dramatically change. Billion dollar offers to go away, prison and murder attempts if they are refused, etc.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

13th January 2014, 03:04

Hi:

Doing chores, but taking a little break. I came upon this today:

http://www.feasta.org/2014/01/08/hope-in-the-face-of-disaster-creating-a-sustainable-viable-future-path-for-civilisation/

and this just the kind of thing that well-meaning pals send me, thinking that it is right down my alley, when it is anything but. It is just a rehash of Heinberg’s Peak Oil stuff:

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

and authors like that wonder why the masses are not listening to their messages of “The party is over! Here comes austerity, and how will we handle it?” The message of FE and abundance is literally 180 degrees from their message. If people are in denial of FE and abundance, how much are they going to be in denial that they need to embrace austerity? As my encounters with Heinberg and other Peak Oil types showed me, FE and abundance is like the devil to them. They are the most entrenched Level 3s:

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

and work like theirs has only a superficial similarity to mine, in that they take a multidisciplinary approach and energy is the center of it, but they make exactly the opposite points that I do. And their work appeals to the “left” and “progressives.” It takes a discerning eye to tell the difference between work like theirs and mine. People who confuse us are like those people who hand me that essay that libels Dennis:

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

as they call it excellent writing on the FE issue.

Those in the choir will be able to distinguish between those flavors of argument, seeing the forest from the trees. It will take a comprehensive perspective but it will also mean understanding the difference between scarcity and abundance:

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

14th January 2014, 02:43

Hi:

Taking a little break. Some odds and ends…

When I saw Dennis last spring, and he told me about his maximum security, multiple murderer inmate:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=694872&highlight=wirec#post694872

and how he then knew that the prison officials were trying to get him killed, it also shed more light on the accusations of him being a snitch:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=401301&viewfull=1#post401301

It was likely not a coincidence that the guards staged the biggest contraband bust in years within hours of Dennis being transferred to that cellblock. Them putting him back in there, after he already had his life threatened, was likely more of the same. What I saw when we were raided, for instance, showed me that only a small fraction of the officials are in on it. While some of the deputies were definitely in on it, it was only a few of them who perpetrated the theft and espionage during the raid:

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

while the others were oblivious, just following orders in their regimented and compartmentalized operation. So, Dennis had his file “messed up” with all of those “mistakes” that nudged him into medium security:

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

and then the murderer had his lucky day when he was suddenly put into medium security. That man gleefully killed a child-molester inmate a mere week before he was to be paroled:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=401779&viewfull=1#post401779

so Dennis was deep in the shark tank. But it probably took a few people to grease the skids for Dennis that way. A few well-placed bribes or favors called in, and that was all it took, and then the shark tank does the rest.

What Dennis also did not write about in his books and never told me before last spring was that when that commissioner appeared at the prison, unannounced, because Dennis’s incarceration was so bizarre:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=614041&highlight=commission#post614041

the “brotherhood” had informed Dennis that they would kill him that night. The commissioner showed up just in the nick of time. IMO, that is just more of the divine intervention that has attended Dennis's journey. Again, Dennis has come so close to dying so many times that events like that were just days at the office for him.

OK, on to what I am attempting and what I am not. During the study for the upcoming essay, I kind of answered my own question:

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

For none of the epochal events in the human journey were the masses “ready” for it, nor did they anticipate it. Indeed, their world changed into something unrecognizable to them, on the other side of the epochal event (indeed, the people on the other side would have often been unrecognizable). I have no reason to think it will be any different this time. So, when the FE naysayers and Level 5 people:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level5

say that humanity is not ready for FE, they are merely acting like all people have before the epochal events:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=674575&viewfull=1#post674575

Those naysayers are the opposite of visionaries, mired in their scarcity-based paradigm. Also, I have seen, many times, scientifically illiterate people doubt that energy plays all that big a role in our world. Energy is literally everything in our universe, according to people like Einstein. And the level of energy acquisition and use has literally defined the journey of life on Earth, as well as the human journey. I have seen so-called visionaries promote their visions, and if it was not some kind of drumbeat of austerity, as that person linked in the previous post did, while calling it some kind of positive vision of the future (!), it was some kind of airy-fairy amalgam of positive thinking, communication, business, and other stuff, and maybe in some offhand note was something like, “And yes, energy.” When I would see “visions” like that, I hardly knew what to say. Those are completely powerless, shotgun approaches that are not going to get anything done, but the New Age and “progressive” circles are full of stuff like that.

If we don’t solve the energy issue, and pronto, the rest will not matter. And only abundant energy has any hope of raising humanity out of the mire, and FE can also mean that it can be done without damaging the ecosystems, and humanity can even actively heal them, and everybody has a standard of living that makes Bill Gates look like a pauper. Although my work I think has made that very clear, the essay will say it in spades.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

14th January 2014, 05:38

Hi:

I am writing about primates now, and dealing with the issues of social organization and intelligence. Several years ago, there was a bit of a splash when some scientists stated that monkeys have Machiavellian social organization:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071024144314.htm

and when studying chimpanzee societies, their politicking was generally just a cruder version of what humans do.

And some have leapt to Machiavelli’s defense ( :) ):

http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Machiavellian-intelligence-in-primates-and-Machiavelli.php

The idea that the primary stimulus for brain expansion was to navigate socially is new and interesting, but without the fuel provided by human tools, probably the control of fire most importantly, that brain growth could not have happened.

This is an area where citing a stimulus is important, but it rode on top of the energy situation. Without the increased energy to fuel those growing brains, they would not have grown. That kind of situation is called one of positive feedback, where increased energy, due to a mental/technical/social breakthrough, facilitated a rise in intelligence, which facilitated new ways of getting energy, which led to human growth, both physically and in numbers, and ultimately in how complex societies could become.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

14th January 2014, 14:00

Hi:

Here is another strategic post. I came to my approach after more than thirty years of dreaming, doing, failing, picking myself back up and trying again, to then experience more of the same. After Ventura:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#books

I left California, began to dig out of debt, began married life, hit the books, and before long, I was reaching out to people such as Noam Chomsky, looking for allies. While Uncle Noam was gracious, as were his buddies:

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

they really weren’t too interested, and that was the best it would get with the rad left and progressives. I had already seen the environmentalist response to the idea of FE and abundance:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/purpose.htm#environmentalists

and was initially shocked, to later find out that I had seen their typical response to the idea of FE:

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

When I read Richard Heinberg’s work:

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

I saw that somebody was seeing the problem pretty clearly. So, I thought that he might be interested in actual solutions, particularly the Big One that dwarfed all others. I was quickly disabused of that notion. Heinberg was dug in, and his austerity prescriptions only became more draconian over the years:

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

and I never saw that he understood the idea of abundance. Just before I encountered Heinberg, I was introduced to Bucky Fuller’s work, and the paradigm that I had been groping toward by the seat of my britches finally crystallized, and I finally understood that people like Heinberg were addicted to scarcity and failure:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/roots.htm#scarcity2

Ridding Earth of six billion “excess” humans was right in line with his dreary vision, and “progressives” have been eating it up since 2003 (which Brian O found dismaying and depressing, as he was totally shut out of the same venues). That “visionary” that I linked to yesterday:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=783720&viewfull=1#post783720

is typical of Heinberg’s acolytes and Peak Oilers in general. While they can be highly intelligent and seemingly compassionate and full of ideas:

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan10/peak-oil-update01-10.html

http://kunstler.com/cluster****-nation/forecast-2014-burning-down-the-house/

they are all just variations of the scarcity theme. When cult members are deprogrammed, the smart ones are the hardest nuts to crack, as they have built the most formidable defenses. I have seen this phenomenon, where the cult member has an answer for everything, but it is really a form of sophistry. To state it more kindly, they are trapped by the assumptions of their paradigm. I have watched them defend the murders on Sai Baba’s ashram grounds, and I don’t even want to mix it up with them anymore, even with footage of Sai Baba apparently faking a lingam manifestation (and I don't seek Sai Baba cultists, but they approach me):

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?29372-What-technologies-activities-or-concepts-will-be-made-obsolete-by-Free-Energy&p=770226&viewfull=1#post770226

It would be like taking on Christians about the basis of their faith and the belief that many of them have in the literal truth of the Bible. People are not going to be disabused of their cherished beliefs by talk, and contrary evidence is not something they want to see, even scientists:

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

I am not trying to reach any of those kinds of people with my work. I am looking for those needles in haystacks whose love of the truth trumps their need to have comforting and egocentric beliefs. They are very few and far between. People like Heinberg are going to be among the last people on Earth to wake up to FE, and even if they had it delivered to their homes, they will likely go through a period of freaking out, as their carefully constructed paradigm collapses before their eyes.

All approaches to the world’s problems today are rooted in scarcity (except maybe mine :) ). None are based on the idea of abundance, even FE efforts:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6

and the most intelligent are the most hooked on their paradigms:

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

At least some are more honest about their denial than others, such as the rad left, which is ideologically opposed to the idea of Godzilla:

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

My work and upcoming essay is not really about pointing out scarcity (or those hooked on it), because it is everywhere. What it is really about is helping the reader understand how energy runs the world and always has, how the energy level that humanity has enjoyed dictated the kind of society they had:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=674575&viewfull=1#post674575

and what kind of world can await if enough of us can help get FE past the organized suppression and humanity’s inertia. Then we can have a world that looks something like this:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

and the early stages of it can look like this:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#advanced

My essay will meet my readers far more than halfway, and I am not interested in the innumerable “devil’s advocate” criticisms that will come, the critiques that literally beg the question by operating from scarcity and fear assumptions, and the rest of that stuff that I have seen thousands of times. I am not interested in the 99.9% of people who won’t understand and refuse to, but the less than 0.1% who will. And I am looking for singers. Ilie has been singing, as have some others. But they won’t be singing to their friends, family, and colleagues; they will be broadcasting it to the world at large, like a big magnet that will seek to attract the needles.

That is what I am looking for, and am not interested in engaging and convincing the naysayers, those in denial, those beating the drums of scarcity, those who are certain that humanity is not ready for FE and abundance, and the like. As I have stated, if my work makes sense to you and the message of abundance really seats in your awareness, particularly in comprehensive fashion, you are freak, and there is nobody in your daily life like you. If you are highly fortunate, maybe there are one or two others, but that is if you are lucky. That is just how the land lies these days, with scarcity being all that humanity has known since the beginning.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

14th January 2014, 17:36

Hi:

Ok, one more post in-between chores. FE newbies, flush with their first glimpse of abundance, almost always want to rush out and tell everybody they know the good news, to end up shocked at how they are treated, and those who they think would be natural allies literally treat them like the enemy. The “smart” ones, especially those who think they have solutions, are the worst, as FE and abundance totally blows them out of the water, as they pursue and preach austerity “solutions.”

After several years of playing the Paul Revere of FE, Brian O openly wondered if we were a sentient species:

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

and words cannot really convey the journey of disillusionment I went through during my wild ride with Dennis:

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

and when my mother put all those libelous articles together (mostly published by her employer), and took it on tour to my friends, family, and investors, telling the story of her son the crook:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=400492&viewfull=1#post400492

I would like to say that I was surprised or dismayed, but I wasn’t. It was just one more example of what I was seeing come at me from all sides.

Brian was from the Big Time, the former-astronaut, adviser to presidential candidates, Ivy League professor and close colleague of Carl Sagan, Buzz Aldrin, and other big names:

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

Brian had access and credibility that I never will, and I watched him get a permanent hairdo change from the wind of all the doors that slammed in his face. And Brian, as I was, was looking for people who we thought would be natural allies, such as environmentalists, “progressives” and radicals, Peak Oilers, and so on. Not only was nobody home, those groups, more than any others, treated us like the enemy. It took many years for me to figure that out.

Earth and humanity hang in the balance today, and FE would nearly instantly solve all of humanity’s most pressing problems: environmental destruction, Global Warming, poverty, war, and so on. But the only people who can even glimpse it without having a Level 5 panic attack:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level5

are those who have had some kind of awakening experience:

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

and when people glimpse it, gung-hoers like Dennis, Brian, and I rush out there and try to make a dent, to only get our heads handed to us, and the most dismaying part is not that Godzilla is alive and vigilant, but that those who hurt you the most are those closest to you. The primary lesson of my journey I resisted every step of the way:

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

but it is the reason why we don’t have FE today. And nobody wants to hear it, which is actually more evidence of the truth of my primary lesson.

So, I am trying out an approach that I never saw before: the enlightenment approach. Late in their lives, both Dennis and Brian began to see things my way, after both had been run out of the USA for their trouble, and barely surviving their adventures in the Land of the Free.

When I told one very sharp professor pal what I was going to attempt, his immediate response was: “That can’t hurt.” Indeed, do no harm is my motto, not only for the lambs, but for Godzilla. It has to be a love-based effort, or it will not go anywhere, but I do not have the time or inclination to bang on the doors that I have already pounded on, and try to climb the same ramparts like Dennis and Brian tried to scale (and I helped them do it), only to have the boiling oil dumped on us.

I am doing something different, and we will see how it goes.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

15th January 2014, 23:53

Hi:

I have been fasting for a few days, and plan to for the next several weeks, and I am getting in The Zone. I am more than 150 pages into the essay, and have probably done the heavy lifting already, but the next several weeks will be critical to really hitting the notes on the essay, and I am sure that new realizations are ahead of me that will help the essay, but I don’t know what they are yet.

During my career, I have come up with many innovations, some of which I later discovered were considered cutting-edge and/or best practice, and the way I did it was by wrestling with systems problems. Inventing systems that solve complex problems in the most effective way, while also making it easy for the people using the systems, is the ultimate goal of systems design. My process was grappling with the problem, the tools, the goals, and other issues, and welding them together into a comprehensive whole. My process is to jam as much information into my head as possible and let it gestate. Then somewhere along the line, I will get my aha moment and the solution stands there in my mind’s eye.

When I worked for people who understood some of my abilities and they let me go after it, it turned out well. When they wanted to play “engineer” and override me, it did not turn out well. I usually only did that kind of work when I had the opportunity, but in the corporate shuffle I would end up getting a new boss who did not understand, and my systems would get dismantled. I watched entire companies go down when my work was ruined by new management and they then ran the ship into a reef. That has not been easy to watch.

But I was warned about that kind of dynamic when I was teenager, learning at Mr. Mentor’s knee:

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

and I heard plenty about when his ingenious inventions would either be stolen or suppressed, and if the invention was complex, the thieves would usually wreck it, and one stolen invention was literally built upside down, as the thief’s understanding was so poor:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=749310&viewfull=1#post749310

When Dennis would have his companies repeatedly stolen during his heat pump days:

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

the thieves would throw away the only two things worth anything: Dennis and his brilliant marketing plans. That is the typical kind of short-sighted and greedy stupidity that kills companies, nations, and species.

Fortunately, my essay only has one cook, so nobody can wreck it. Will I be able to get the points made and comprehensive vision developed well enough so that people can begin to learn the song, so they can eventually sing it, and it becomes their song, not mine? We will see.

I was just out in my yard, planting some flower bulbs we were given, and puttering around is one of my ways of reflecting. I was thinking about mounting an FE effort one day, which is my ultimate goal.

As Brian more than hinted at:

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

the people in the FE field today don’t have the right stuff to make it happen, and I can only add an amen. The naïve, the greedy, the criminal, the tunnel-visioned, the incompetent, the deluded, and so on, have turned that little cottage industry into a mess that I don’t want to have anything to do with.

For all the naïveté, paranoia, dishonesty, and delusions of grandeur that I have seen in the ranks, some things they are getting right. One of which is that there can’t be any “investors.” Anybody who is investing is seeking a return on investment, and when that is their motivation, the effort is doomed. That is when greed and other foibles rear their heads, and when an inventor thinks he is going to go get a patent for his gizmo, he is already done, but doesn’t know it yet, and has some life-wrecking or life-ending times ahead of him. Or if he is lucky, he gets the Golden Handcuffs:

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

As I have stated many times, the only prayer that the technical route has is for the inventor with the goods to give it to a worthy group. I have never heard of that inventor or the worthy group, but that is the only strategy down that path with a prayer. Of course, it won’t be easy. Nothing about making FE happen will be easy, but pouring the new wine into the old skins of commerce and capitalism is the path of disaster that has played out countless times.

I really don’t pay attention to the FE field anymore, so maybe some aspirants are taking approaches like that. If they are, then maybe they have a prayer, but they won’t really have a prayer until a sufficient nucleus of public awareness supports them, and that is what the choir and planned subsequent activities are all about. Otherwise, Godzilla takes them out with a lash of his tail.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Melinda

16th January 2014, 05:15

Wade Frazier, Post 3313 : “As I have stated, if my work makes sense to you and the message of abundance really seats in your awareness, particularly in comprehensive fashion, you are freak, and there is nobody in your daily life like you.”

Not sure I’m qualified to say if, or to what degree, I get it comprehensively. The reason I’ve quoted the above though is because I’ve spoken about FE with close friends, and fortunately enjoyed non-defensive reactions. Positive ones even. The patient kind. But I’ve become more and more aware, the more I learn about (and therefore wish to explore) the subject, that it can very quickly hit a wall within those people. And it’s not fair to ask them to push beyond it before they’re ready, or (if I’m being more cynical) I back off to avoid their turning against me. Even though the wall may manifest simply as a kind silence. Even though I know it would not necessarily be immediate, or conscious on their part, if they were to struggle with their emotions. It doesn’t feel kind to push. It’s all too easy for a hapless / reckless ego to disguise itself as a righteous ray of light.

Most of us have one or more issues that were someone to breach our comfortable boundary we might feel cornered or confronted emotionally. But I’m still working on accepting, emotionally rather than intellectually (hugely different) that FE is one of those subjects for so many of us. I’ve been aware of that contradiction within me, when it comes to FE, as far back as I can remember. Hopefully I’m learning. It’s a process, an integration – and the better part of me does aim to limit the fallout for others as I tread the path <clasps hands tightly. Exhales> I’ve always agreed with your advice on this Wade – but sometimes my FE imagination finds its way to my voice box in social settings and the ‘enthusiasm floodgate’ alarm light begins to twitch... I return here and am reminded of why you recommend caution – and doing the work rather than projecting. It’s not that there are no others able to have this conversation. It’s just that they really aren’t yet abundant.

Wade Frazier, post 3307 : “The fearful ones are those who see their world crumble, as FE and abundance makes all of their mental games and beliefs obsolete: http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#dominant and I am actually sympathetic to their fear, which is one reason why I don’t even want to interact with such people until they have something to replace their scarcity-based mindset.”

The feelings I process of sad resignation when I feel the walls in others, or due to simply avoiding the FE subject with others, reminds me to go within. To deal with my own ‘stuff,’ in the same way I need to in other aspects of my life. Growing acceptance, self-correction - compassion for myself and others. Even writing it is hard... It does move me. I suppose because simple truths are powerful ones. And because the FE subject and the subject of our spirituality are so truly interlocked – so interchangeable. It isn’t purely a technological issue. None of our physical energy sources have been. But with greater power, greater energy supply, greater creative/destructive potential... the connection can become more apparent.

It feels like once you’ve awakened the FE process in yourself, so much of what’s on offer in mainstream culture appears anachronistic – whether it’s technology or beliefs. I recently visited an earth globe suspended in the Science Museum. It hangs in a pleasantly dark space, lit up with moving images of the earth’s surface and her weather systems. At one point you can see the paths that air traffic takes – tiny little streaks of light that stream over the surface and cluster in pockets of light within Europe, North America and other hubs of activity. You see how small portions of the world, such as European cities are drawing in so much of the light, demanding so much of the energy, like hungry magnets. When the subject is raised by the exhibit voiceover, of how we need to look into renewable energy solutions, I naturally think of FE. I also naturally predict that there will be no mention of it in the exhibit. But it’s ok. I remember not to get upset. I drink in the pleasure of the glowing globe and its shifting surface. Remembering how magnificent she really is. How lucky we are.

Ever glad to have some FE cyber friends. Thank you Wade (and Bill) for creating the space, and to all helping tend it.

http://i1267.photobucket.com/albums/jj550/DoodlemakerUK/EarthRevealedExhibit_zpsb8ee679d.jpg

Found this photo on the web ^^

sandy

16th January 2014, 05:43

Dear Melinda,

Don't know what to say other than THANK YOU for saying so eloquently what I often feel and experience too!! I always have to check in though to see if what I'm feeling is resignation, disillusionment, disappointment or all of the aforementioned....:) and yes it always sits with me as these feelings belong to my situation and sense of self acceptance for wanting so much more than daily reality presents! ~~~sigh~~~ Love you my Sister

Wade Frazier

16th January 2014, 13:30

Hi Melinda, my poet:

Eloquently said. Oh, if you could have seen me my first year with Dennis, and if you could have seen me the next three years. That Dennis is still at it, in the way he goes at it, boggles my mind. If you could have seen Brian when I met him, and Brian ten years later, and Brian at the end of his life, going as hard as ever, as positively as ever, it would have amazed you.

We all knew the enthusiasm, the bright future that could be, and we got to know what it was like to be attacked from all sides, often from those closest to us. That you received positive responses have everything to do with who you are, not the message, and the fact that you did not go deep with anybody. The FE and abundance message is initially received like a child does who is told that Santa is coming soon. How could anybody really not want to live in worlds like these?

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#advanced

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

Yet, if you dig below the initial “Santa’s coming to town” response, a whole laundry list of objections, delusions, and the like rise to the surface. The most common initial one is, “If FE was real, something as great and wonderful as that would have already been delivered to my door.” That is what I have called the Level 1 response:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level1

Probably the next most common response is actually Level 4, which is along the lines of:

“If you ever want to give me an FE machine, I’ll take one.”

That is like the kid who asks Santa for that quadrillion dollar sled:

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

and what was so brilliant about Dennis’s approach when I met him was that he was doing just that, delivering the closest thing to FE that has ever been on the market:

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

and all people had to do was wait for Santa to come down the chimney. I know that he would still love to be able to play Santa like that, but TPTB will not allow it, as the herd is theirs to milk (and all milk cows are slaughtered and eaten when their udders go dry), not to be set free by somebody like Dennis. The electric industry called in all of its favors to take us out in Seattle:

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

If I had to further the analogy, it would be something like, “Santa can’t make it down your chimney tonight, because Uncle Sam took out his sled with a barrage of cruise missiles.” Or, Santa was locked away and an imposter took his place, but when he came down the chimney he burglarized the home instead:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=768396&viewfull=1#post768396

The part that blew me away was that that “Santa” obviously had fake padding, whiskey on his breath, and if you saw him from behind, you could see the pointy tail trailing along the ground, and he faintly smelled of sulfur, but those around you all eagerly climbed into his lap, asking for their heart’s desire. I literally could not believe what I was seeing at first. If I had to make another analogy, it would have been all of those people flocking to Las Vegas in Stephen King’s The Stand, and not beginning to figure it out until the nuke went off. But the difference in what I experienced was that only about 0.1% went to see Mother Abigail:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Stand_characters#Mother_Abigail

while the stampede went rumbling off to Vegas. And there was nothing that I could tell people so that they did not rush off to Vegas, as I watched them go off in a cloud of dust. Later, I saw the sky light up, but I really did not want to watch. And all I heard in the distance was this great, malevolent cackle and a huge grin, looking like the Cheshire Cat, in the mushroom cloud, mocking me.

And that was just the first three years I was with Dennis. Somehow I survived, and a year after I moved away from California, radicalized, I met Brian O, almost like how I met Dennis, and Brian was a gung-ho newbie:

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

Dennis was incredibly back at it, as hard as ever, but at time, before the Internet, few really knew who Dennis was in the FE field. It was only later that he became famous, or infamous, as Santa was universally vilified for never delivering that quadrillion dollar sled.

Five years later, five years where I spent all my spare time trying to understand how the world really was and why it was like that:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#books

after my wild ride with Dennis, Brian published the first thing I ever saw that mentioned Dennis without attacking him, in his Miracle in the Void. Brian’s summary of the FE conundrum was the best I had yet seen (he called it “The Suppression Syndrome”), and I became his biggest fan. But we really did not begin to collaborate until five years later, when I squired him around California while Brian tried to play FE advisor to California’s governor, as he was in the midst of being raped by Enron (losing his job to Arnold in the process), and they tried to run us out of town instead:

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

Brian had been playing the Paul Revere of FE for the past five years, literally globe-trotting, banging on all the doors that a former astronaut, Ivy League professor, and adviser to presidential candidates could:

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

After we were nearly run out of town that day, Brian told me how his ride went. After I staggered out of my home town, radicalized, I had also spent the previous ten years reaching out. I had a website nearly continually for the previous five years, not only reaching out to where I thought there might be a glimmer in somebody’s eye, but I also had my email address on my site and took on all comers. As Brian began to give me the litany of how his ride went:

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

I was sadly not surprised. And Brian had access and credibility that I never will. I only mention Amory Lovins’s reaction by name because Brian did in his book, but Lovins was not even among the biggest names that Brian recited to me that day, with their reactions, one of which was about the biggest name in environmental circles.

When Brian asked if humans were really a sentient species:

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

I knew exactly what he was talking about, and Brian never got to play anywhere close to the level that Dennis and I did. Flagg had essentially tied Dennis to the stake, and I was doing my best to save him, and watching people like my mother in the crowd, cheering Flagg along and throwing the tomatoes not only at Dennis, but at me (and she raised me to be a Golden Boy):

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=300436&viewfull=1#post300436

is one of those moments that I hope that nobody else ever has to experience. But everybody I know who walked the high road to FE had moments like that. In the end, Dennis and Brian were the only people I knew in the FE field who really had the right stuff. Some others may have, but I did not know them well. But when I became familiar with other names in the FE field, they did not quite measure up, and there were plenty of criminals in the field:

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

and I watched people worship them just like they did Flagg, and at least a dozen times I was told by members of the FE field and newbie enthusiasts what a great guy Flagg was as he roasted Dennis (!), and how Vegas was where the action was. When I tried to tell people what Flagg was really doing, all I got back were excuses and defenses of him, and in their denial and disbelief I became the fool and crook as they projected their delusions onto me. The first few times I got that back, I could not believe it, but eventually came to understand it was normal, even among members of the FE field. It was about that time that I decided that I did not want to be a part of any FE efforts, and have been doing my own thing for the past ten years. Dennis and Brian kept trying to get me back in the saddle with them again, but I was done playing those games, and have to try out the strategy that I eventually came to: the enlightenment path, not one that caters to or overlooks people’s delusions and false beliefs about Santa.

Again, I know I am looking for needles in haystacks, and what has continued to surprise me as I have been interacting with the public again is now naïve people are, how much they go running off, hacking at branches, how they can’t tell the forest from the trees, how they just have to go tell their friends, neighbors, and colleagues the “good news” about FE and abundance. All of my pupils have done it, partly because they can’t contain themselves, and I understand ( :) ), but also partly because they can’t believe that their friends’, families’, and colleagues’ eyes won’t light up in recognition when they hear the gospel of FE and its potential. And my best pupils always come back, months or years later, telling me how it went, and all of them got sobered up and realized that I was not making it up. And what happens is that you eventually understand what you are working with, this species called humanity. You finally accept that the vast majority of people are just like those toddlers eager to see Santa. That is about the level of their sense of reality.

As I studied and deconstructed the lies I had been raised with:

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

I began to understand the Santa stories that we were all taught about the Flaggs of the world. So, I began to see why everybody literally believed in Santa, but when I told people that he did not really live in Vegas, I got the most incredulous looks. Anybody who thought that Santa did not live in Vegas was crazy. Once you get that kind of reaction a thousand times or so, and trade notes with people like Brian, you begin to understand where people are.

I do my best to not judge where they are, but to just accept it. The masses are only going to be “help” on the FE front in that if you delivered FE to their homes, they will let you install it. That is what Dennis was trying when I met him, and many years later, I realized that he was not asking more of them than they could deliver, but it was really no help at all. They would just as readily cheer as Flagg roasted Dennis at the stake. I was literally seeing Dostoyevsky’s Parable of the Grand Inquisitor play out in real life:

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

And after that, Dennis began to appeal to varieties of the Santa myth, to rally people around the Christmas tree:

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

and eventually I realized that the only thing they would come for was the promise of a present from Santa (or the promise of an entertaining public execution). But if you could really deliver FE to their homes, what then? My theory is that if people really had FE delivered to their homes, not only could the Earth healing project really begin (and not the million branch-hacking “solutions” that come from all corners, which are all mired in scarcity), but the scarcity-based blinders that everybody wore, the zero-sum-game assumptions that everybody knew by heart:

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

assumptions that were so deeply ingrained that people really were not conscious that they held them, until something like FE challenged them, could fall away, and people’s eyes could open to abundance. It would not make them all saints, not by any means, but Santa’s world could literally become real, not some story they were told and believed when convenient. The bottom line is that Godzilla manages the human herd by making Flagg look like Santa, at least to the undiscerning, which is the vast majority of humanity at this time. Now, a lot of that blindness has been carefully cultivated from the cradle. In the USA, children are trained to worship a flag:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#flag

and are taught that mass-murdering thieves and genocidists:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm#genocide

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#blueprint

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

were heroes and saints, literally:

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

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm#saint

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#weems

and people are fed mind-numbing poison as it is called medicine:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/fluoride.htm#harold

and reality is regularly turned upside down by the social managers. We truly live in Orwell's world, while people boast that they are really free. It is surreal:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#orwell

What has happened, that I could see, is that people dutifully digested all the lies, have easily succumbed to the carrots and sticks of the herd management, and their minds are being kept in a state where they really believe that Flagg is Santa:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/intro.htm#paradigms

I realized that people are going to keep believing that Flagg is Santa, and will actually cheer as Flagg burns Santa at the stake. I am not even interested in anymore in telling John Q. Public about Santa. They will only “believe” when he comes down their chimney. Sorry for mixing my metaphors ( :) ), but I know people who have met the wizard and seen the quadrillion dollars sleds that are hidden away:

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

and have encountered those who made their own and tried to put them under the tree:

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

and what hell they had to pay:

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

and most trying to play the real Santa did not survive the process, as Flagg and his boss, the Crimson King:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_characters_from_the_Dark_Tower_series#The_Crimson_King

took care of them. Most often, the Santa aspirants would quietly disappear, but for the larger-than-life heroes like Dennis, a public execution could be instructive and entertaining for the mob.

Writing this is almost fun, as I bring in works of fiction, but the way the land lies in this world, and the level of sentience that humanity is manifesting, are all too real, and people will not really find out until they really get out there and engage the masses with paradigm-shattering ideas like FE and abundance, and try to slip below the surface of the superficial “Santa” reactions. And then it all comes out, and it is rarely pretty. What almost always comes out is a regurgitation of their conditioning and how they cling to it at all costs, believing it to be their lifejacket, when it was really an anchor, and they sit on the ocean floor of their drowned sentience, thinking that they are sailing the high seas. FE will drain the ocean, and then people will truly breathe for the first time since they were infants. If people can actually draw a breath of fresh air, will they believe it is good, and not the poison that Flagg tells them it is? I think so, and that is really the experiment I am about to try out. In his own way, Dennis was trying the same thing, but when he got waylaid by Flagg a few times, with the Crimson King looking on and chuckling, as the masses cheered, Dennis tried to use Flagg's myths to lead people to the light, to get them to swim from the ocean floor to the surface. I found that it simply won’t work. I don’t want to forcibly drag people to the surface either, which has been Dennis’s strategy at times. I am trying to drain the ocean, and then those people clinging to their anchors will take their first breath and realize they did not die, and that fresh air is not poison.

Enough of the metaphors for now.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

16th January 2014, 16:00

Hi:

Just one note that I have written before… The FE conundrum is not about technology, but is about integrity and sentience. I watched Dennis get taken repeatedly out with rock solid technology with a mountain of test data behind it:

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

and it just didn’t matter. Kangaroo Court, hit men, crooked cops, prosecutors, judges, and other public officials, a media system that is nothing more than an amplifier for the lies, and so on, can take out any fledgling technology on Earth, and has. Godzilla’s Golden Hoard is huge, and all across the USA, barns, workshops, and garages have working energy prototypes in them, some of which only save on energy bills, some will see a car get 100 MPG, and some will produce the ZPF energy effect. I have seen it all, and those tinkering inventors never get anywhere, and even when legitimate businesses are mounted around them, they never survive for long. Godzilla rarely even has to get involved, as the inherent weaknesses in the efforts (an inability to secure funding, greed, naïveté, paranoia, and many other human foibles) collapse the efforts from the inside. And for the 1-in-1,000 efforts that threaten to make a dent and get past their initial internal weaknesses and survive the suppression efforts of the local energy interests, Godzilla finally rolls out of bed and quickly neutralizes the threat, with his impressive and subtle bag of tricks.

Having a nice piece of technology is meaningless, but many newbies get stuck there, which is usually Levels 6 and 7:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6

but also Levels 11 and 10 can come into play. Dead ends, all.

Back to writing about the rise of humanity from our great ape ancestors.

Best,

Wade

sdv

16th January 2014, 16:26

Wade, I look forward to reading your essay. I think of making a huge pot of vegetable soup and stocking up on hot chocolate ingredients, relaxing on my chaise lounge on my balcony (with a view of the bay, the mountains beyond, the sky and the trees below) and soaking up word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, and filling the gaps of my knowing and widening my understanding.

Since it is now midsummer here on the southern tip of Africa, I suppose I am anticipating the publication of your essay here on Avalon round about late Autumn/early winter!

Since I learnt to read at an early age, I have been a speed reader so I anticipate that I can skim through more than 20 pages per hour, but I am training myself to read, then take time to reflect and stretch the reading time for that first read, then go back to the essay and read again and again as I experience life and widen my understanding through experience.

All best wishes for finishing the essay and publishing it here on Avalon in late Autumn/early winter 2014 here in Southern Africa, otherwise I will have to dream of fruit salad and iced water flavoured with lemon and lime as I relax on my chaise lounge!

Wade Frazier

16th January 2014, 17:06

Hi sdv:

Have a sip for me. :)

What I found was that there were at least two ways to read and learn material like what I am writing, as I discovered in my hardest accounting classes (called intermediate accounting, which comprises most of what is covered on the CPA exam). One of my high school chums was a year ahead of me at the university, and I asked him how he studied when I first got there. He said that he would read a chapter, first kind of skimming it. Then he would read it again and begin to ingest the ideas. And he would then read it a third and fourth time, going over it in more detail, and by the fifth and sixth readings, it would finally begin to sink in.

I thanked him for his information. However, when I took the class, I did it differently. I would read each paragraph, slowly, and think deeply about it, and relate it to other information that I knew, fitting it into a comprehensive framework. While it took my friend maybe ten minutes to first skim the chapter, and who knows how much in the other passes, it took me three hours to read one chapter. But when I was done, I did not have to read the chapter again; I had absorbed and integrated it. My friend went on to have a fine career in accounting. However, I got the highest test scores on the national accounting exam in my university’s history, and when I sat for the CPA exam, I did not even study for it. Now, 35 years after I took intermediate accounting, I can tell you that the topic of chapter five of that textbook was on present value concepts, and I can still see pages of that book in my mind’s eye. I have heard that called eidetic memory, but I know my memory is not perfect, and it is not as good as it once was. Did I try to memorize the textbook? No. I hate rote memorization. What I did was study it as deeply as I could, and integrated it with everything else I knew, and when I was done, three hours later, I had absorbed the ideas and information, and most of it is still in my head, 35 years later.

I don’t know many other comprehensive thinkers, and have not traded notes with any of them, but the process that I went through I am imagining is common with comprehensive thinkers. But I also want to know if people who skim once, skim twice, and go deeper on the subsequent passes, can really integrate the information, or if it gets stored in some kind of short-term memory that quickly fades. I’ll ask you in a few years. :)

I have heard of some high-level geniuses that could read a book a day, among their other activities, probably reading a page or two a minute, and they also integrated and retained the information. All I can say to that is that they have a far higher capacity than I do.

My essay is going to have many moving parts, and I will be bringing them all together. If I can’t help lay readers begin to develop some kind of comprehensive perspective with it, I will have failed. My experience has been that my work is not light reading, and the people that really understood my work the best were geniuses, but they all seemed smarter than me, sometimes far smarter. I have known some people whose IQs go off the scale, but I am going to do my best so that people don’t need to have genius-level IQs or scientific backgrounds to understand.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Melinda

16th January 2014, 19:00

...THANK YOU for saying so eloquently what I often feel and experience too!!..

Thank you Sandy, and thank you Wade, for your wonderful replies.

...If you could have seen Brian when I met him, and Brian ten years later, and Brian at the end of his life, going as hard as ever, as positively as ever, it would have amazed you...

I don’t doubt it. I’m already amazed without having met any of these people. Dennis, Brian, Adam Trombly. All the men and the women with the courage it takes. Occasionally I wonder why am I, this arty little person tucked away in my own little life, feeling so drawn to engage the FE subject, albeit only from a distance? But I know the answer. It is obvious. This world belongs to all of us, as does the responsibility for its future. We do not own this planet. But we own our role on it. And supporting one another with discerning hearts and minds is something that can and does matter - even though the materialist view would have us question its effects. We are always stronger for it.

~ much love ~

Carmody

17th January 2014, 03:20

Avalon member 'painterdoug' did this, Wade. I thought you'd appreciate it. (the thread is in the general area)

http://projectavalon.net/Doug_Auld/Brian_O%27Leary_by_Doug_Auld_Artist.jpg

Wade Frazier

17th January 2014, 04:31

Thanks Carmody:

That’s the Brian I knew! :)

That caught one of my favorite facial expressions of his.

Wade

Wade Frazier

17th January 2014, 20:09

Hi:

Well, more than 150 pages into the essay, I am finally getting to the parts that will likely begin to interest most readers, and I just drafted this paragraph:

“Did the larger brain lead to the behaviors, or did the behaviors lead to the larger brain? If other evolutionary trends have relevance, and I think they do, they mutually reinforced each other, providing positive feedbacks, and down one evolutionary line it reached runaway conditions that led to the human brain. That stated, the initial behavior was likely the use of a body part (the brain) for a new purpose, and its success led to selective advantages that led to mutual reinforcement. I think that the likely chain of events was walking upright freeing hands for new behaviors, which led to new ways of making and using tools, which enhanced food acquisition activities, which allowed the energy-demanding brain to expand, as well as related biological changes, which led to more complex tools and behaviors that acquired and required even more energy. That, in short, defines the human journey to this day, which the rest of this essay will explore. There has never been and probably never will be energy-devouring animals like humanity on Earth, unless it is a human-line descendant.”

It is in a discussion of the variance in monkey and ape brains, and their food acquisition practices and social organization. I can see that many readers will think, “He finally cuts to the chase!” And many will jump right to that part or maybe all the way to the end, hoping that I will publish blueprints so that they can make FE gizmos in their garages. :)

But the 150 pages preceding that paragraph, and the probable hundred or more that will follow it, are all vitally important for my intention for the readers that I hope to attract, which is to begin to develop comprehensive perspectives about the situation. I see the essay as a textbook and the beginnings of study, not the end. I would not be able to do justice to the topics that I survey in the next hundred lifetimes, but I think it will be adequate for beginning choir formation. But we will see.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

18th January 2014, 01:53

Hi:

I am definitely Zoning along, fasting and writing. I just finished the bones of my next chapter, titled The Path to Humanity. I am emotionally-centered:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#reading

and I get blissful quite often when fasting. I usually wake up that way when I am fasting, and depending on how the day goes ( :) ), it can last all day, where I am rolling along in an exalted state. Fasting is the ultimate high. Today has kind of been one of those days. Not only do I think that I am doing good work on the essay, but it is coming together more and more with each chapter, and I am getting to the good stuff. I’ll put up a draft of that newest chapter after I polish it up in the next few days. It will likely be only about half as long as my previous two monster chapters, and it stops at the brink of humanity’s first epochal event (s), which were energy and intelligence related. Stone tools were the first big event, and the proto-human human brain began to grow then, likely due to the energy boost that came with the food opportunities that stone tools provided. Stone tools marked the rise of humanity. No animal had ever done anything like it before. Some hundreds of thousands of years later, proto-humans learned to control fire. It was a mental/technical/social achievement that put humans on the fast track to global dominance. Nothing close to it had even been seen before. Nothing could challenge fire-wielding humans, and humans eventually used it to conquer Earth, along with their super-predator toolset and social organization. But I get ahead of myself.

We will see how fast the rest of this essay goes. I may fast until I get it done, so it might go faster than I think, but goal number one is getting it done right, and second place is how fast I do it, and then it will be getting back to the corporate grind.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

19th January 2014, 17:07

Hi:

About to embark on chores and the like for the rest of the day, and below is a very rough draft of my “path to humanity” chapter, again presented without the notes and links. The notes and links are going to be very important parts of the published essay, to assist deeper study, which will likely be required to form the comprehensive perspective that I think will be needed to be part of the choir. People with comprehensive perspectives will be able to keep their eye on the ball. Perhaps paradoxically, their vision will be about as wide as it gets on Earth, but they will also see the bulls-eye clearer than ever.

Best,

Wade

The Path to Humanity

From their Cretaceous origins through their radiations and extinctions in the Eocene, primates continued evolving. About 35 mya, Old World and New World monkeys, called higher primates (also called simians or anthropoids), split. Simians seem to have split from a group also ancestral to prosimians. Today’s prosimians include lemurs, lorises, tarsiers, and bush babies. During the Oligocene, Africa and Southeast Asia became primate refugia. Tarsiers have lived in Southeast Asia continually for about 45 million years, and the only survivors of their evolutionary line live on islands near Southeast Asia. Primate history in the late Eocene and Oligocene is controversial today, with the fate of an extinct group from primates’ wide geographical range in the early Eocene debated, but they seem to be at least cousins to the ancestors of non-tarsier prosimians, if not ancestral to them.

The disputes of evolutionary lineages and geography continue all the way to Homo sapiens, which this chapter and the next will survey. The debates and drama likely have two primary sources: the first is that humans are descendants from those lines, and the second is that there has been a human desire to demonstrate that humanity is radically differ from its ancestors, possessed of unique traits, not only in degree, but in kind. The debates seem to get fiercer the closer the primate line gets to modern humans.

Early primate migrations and extinctions led to a disjointed geographical distribution, as they could only live in tropical canopies. When tropical forests shrank in the cooling conditions that led to the current ice age, primates such as tarsiers found themselves in isolated refugia. In the late Eocene and late Miocene, when tropical canopies disappeared, the primate lines inhabiting them went extinct unless they used an escape route to a surviving tropical forest.

While simians may have first appeared in Eocene Asia, when the late Eocene cooling began, Africa became the primary primate refuge. Around the early Oligocene, a splinter group migrated to South America from Africa and evolved in isolation for the next 30 million years or so. Just as dinosaurs marginalized early mammals, simians marginalized prosimians, beginning in the Oligocene. Today’s prosimians either live where simians do not, or where they coexist with simians, they are nocturnal. Prosimians have simple social organization, with most nocturnal prosimians leading solitary existences. Lemurs living in daylight have social groups of up to 20. Monkeys have far more complex social organization than prosimians, with baboon societies numbering up to 250 individuals, although about 50 is common. Capuchin monkeys are considered the most intelligent New World monkey, and their societies have between 10 and 40 members. Studies of simian societies have shown them engaging in crude versions of human politics, which have even been called Machiavellian, which has caused some to leap to Machiavelli’s defense.

From their origins around 40-45 mya, monkeys continued evolving in Africa’s Oligocene forests, and about 25 mya, some African monkeys began evolving into apes, with Proconsul a controversial transitional fruit-eating monkey. Mary Leakey’s most famous find was a Proconsul skull in 1948. The main differences between apes and monkeys were apes being larger, losing their tails (not having as much need for balancing on tree limbs), and having a stiffer spine and larger brain. Apes began the descent from canopy to ground. Pretty much all simians will eat fruit if they can, but some early monkey/apes developed thicker tooth enamel. That meant that they no longer subsisted on soft fruit and leaves, but were eating coarser vegetation, which was a consequence of living in a cooler, dryer world. No Miocene apes were as adapted to leaf eating as today’s apes and leaf-eating monkeys. As with the first tetrapods to leave water, a prominent speculation today is that those monkeys/apes changed their diets and eventually left the trees because they were losers of arboreal existence, pushed to the margins as they lost the competitive game with other canopy-dwellers. Gibbons split from the line that became great apes about 22 mya and stayed in the trees, with their swinging mode of locomotion.

By 20-17 mya, apes became common in East Africa, with some apes becoming large, up to 90 kilograms, and some resembling gorillas. While virtually all apes eventually abandoned tropical canopies, and while monkeys were scarce in in the Miocene, they stayed and dominate them today, with the number of monkey species increasing and ape species decreasing rather steadily over the past 20 million years. With that late-Oligocene warming that continued into the Miocene, tropical forests began expanding again. When Africa and Arabia finally crashed into Eurasia and began that great invasion from Asia, apes escaped Africa, beginning about 16.5 mya, with thickly enameled teeth suited to the non-fruit foods available outside rainforests. Their migrations resulted in new homes that spanned Eurasia, from Europe to Siberia to China to Southeast Asia. It was a spectacular adaptive radiation that tallied more than twenty discovered apes species so far. That is how gibbons and orangutans ended up in Asia. About 14 mya in Africa, the ancestors of today’s great apes may have appeared, and about 12.5 mya the likely ancestors of orangutans appeared in India. By that time, tropical forests were shrinking once again, and orangutans continued down their evolutionary path isolated from their African cousins, with one possible ancestor living in Southeast Asia about 9-7 mya. A descendant from the orangutan line became the largest primate ever, at three meters tall and more than 500 kilograms. It lived for nine million years, to only go extinct about when humans arrived, and might have something to do with Yeti legends. Today’s orangutans are confined to two islands in Indonesia, Borneo and Sumatra, and are particularly endangered on Sumatra. All apes besides humans are endangered today due to human activities.

In the mid-Miocene cooling’s early stages, beginning about 14 mya, apes abounded in Eurasia and were adapted to the hardier diets that less-tropical biomes could afford, and one from Spain 13 mya may well be ancestral to modern humans and other great apes. It largely lived on the ground and had a relatively upright posture. Its discovery threw many previously accepted ideas of ape evolution into disarray. The idea of apes ancestral to humanity living beyond Africa is a recent one, but is gaining acceptance. Important new fossils are found with regularity, as with all areas of paleontology, but funding for investigating human ancestry is the most plentiful. A 1996 discovery of a Miocene ape in Turkey, which has features common to both orangutans and African apes, led to questioning whether some key ape features are ancestral or convergent. One early fossil ape finding is still highly controversial as to where it fits into the evolutionary tree, as it had ape and monkey features but lived ten million years after the hypothesized ape-monkey split. The great ape lineages are subjected to great dispute and controversy today, with the human ancestral tree regularly shaken up with new findings.

Around 10.5 mya, after Eurasian forests began thinning out, African rainforests began losing their continuity, breaking up into isolated patches, with woodlands and grasslands appearing along rainforest edges. Whether the direct ancestor of humans moved “home” to Africa from Eurasia around 9-10 mya as the Miocene cooling progressed, or indigenous African lines led to humans is uncertain and may always be so, but by seven mya the evolutionary line to humans was firmly established in Africa, as the forests that could support apes in near-African Eurasia disappeared, with the last of those lines going extinct about eight mya. The gorilla line may have split from the human line about seven mya, but recent findings may push that back to ten mya. Whatever the timing really is, there is little scientific debate whether humans and gorillas descended from the same line, and that that ancestor lived in Africa. The genome sequencing projects show that great ape DNA and human DNA are very similar, with chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest surviving cousins, having more than 98% of their genes shared with humans, and human DNA duplication created more variability so that humans have about 94% of their DNA identical to chimps. Gorillas have slightly less DNA in common with humans, and orangutans understandably have the greatest divergence. Humans also lost a chromosome that the other great apes retained.

The terminology of the ape/human line can be confusing to a lay reader, as it gets sliced ever finer as humanity’s time is approached, and I will try to avoid some of the many “homi” and “homo” terms used to describe families, genera, and species. Homo in Greek meant “same,” while homo in Latin meant “human,” which is the meaning used in ape taxonomy. The ape clade is the superfamily called Hominoidea, and all of its branches have “hom” prefixes. Members of the genus “homo” are of the solely human line, with Homo habilis perhaps being the genus’s first member, although its status is still unsettled.

Orangutans are the most arboreal great ape, and in Africa the great apes had definitely left the trees as their daytime residence, although they slept in trees to avoid predators. Gorillas’ ancestors adapted to a leafier diet and made the rainforest their home. Gorillas and chimpanzees are rainforest denizens, but chimps live more on the edge, getting into the woodlands fringes more, and the evidence is that gorillas may have helped push them there. A gorilla is going to win almost any contest with a chimp, and gorillas eat leafier vegetation than chimps do.

Because gorillas can better subsist on leafy vegetation (although the staple of the western lowland gorilla, which is the most prevalent gorilla species, is still fruit; mountain gorillas primarily subsist on leaves) they generally do not have a daily range as large as chimpanzees’, and live in the heart of rainforests, while what became chimpanzees were likely pushed to the margins by their larger cousins (a gorilla almost always wins that contest) and live more along a rainforest’s woodland fringes, and have to range relatively far to find fruit trees, as fruit is their staple. Similar to the largest quadrupedal herbivores, gorillas ingest a great deal of low-energy vegetation each day, and they are also hindgut fermenters, extracting energy from cellulose, which humans cannot do. Chimpanzees are also hindgut fermenters, but have adapted to more diverse environments and their overall range is far larger than gorillas’. As with all organisms, the ecological situation of great apes impacted their evolution, including social organization and behaviors, which has been increasingly studied since the nineteenth century and has provided valuable insights into humanity, some of which follow.

The chimpanzee and human lines seem to have split between five and seven mya, with six mya a common estimate. The species perhaps the closest to that split found so far dates to about seven mya, but the findings have also been used to argue for pushing the human/chimpanzee split back to 13 mya. But whatever the timing that scientists eventually agree on, the splits of orangutans first, gorillas second, and chimpanzees last (with the bonobo split arguably another key split of about a million years ago) is highly unlikely to change.

A recent find of a possible human-line ape may even displace australopithecines as humanity’s ancestors, relegating them to a side-branch that went extinct. These are still the early days of investigating human ancestry, and rapidly and dramatically changing ideas about the evolutionary path to humanity will continue. That is partly because the fossil record is thin and has only been expanded in recent history by numerous teams digging around Africa, with dreams of the ultimate find haunting their sleep. Darwin speculated that humans evolved in Africa, but in the early twentieth century, Asia was considered the likeliest evolutionary home of humans. In 1921, an early proto-human skull was discovered in a Rhodesian mine, and in 1924 an even more primitive proto-human skull was discovered in a South African mine, and Africa became the focus of investigation of the human line, accelerating with the work of what became the Leakey dynasty, which began with Louis Leakey’s checkered but ultimately triumphant career.

That human/chimp find of 6-7 mya had thick teeth that meant that it likely had abandoned the arboreal ape diet, and brings up perhaps the single biggest question of the early human line: “When did our ancestors became bipeds?” One piece of evidence for bipedalism is where the spinal cord enters the skull; if it is underneath the skull, it suggests an upright posture and, hence, bipedalism. There is disputed evidence that that seven mya ape had a skull hole that meant bipedalism. Skull and vertebrae evidence, changes in the shoulders, arms, and hands of apes from Proconsul onward, as well as the pelvis, legs, knees, ankles, and feet, are used whenever relevant ape fossils are found to determine what kind of posture they had, all the way from swinging from branches to walking upright. The great range of motion of the human arm has that arboreal heritage to thank.

Part of that late Miocene ground-foraging existence likely included digging roots, as chimpanzees do today. Around 4.4-3.9 mya came the earliest celebrity humanoid fossil, called Ardi today. Ardi has an older cousin, maybe an ancestor, from 5.8-5.2 mya, but Ardi is the most complete early great ape fossil. Ardi had about the same-sized brain as a chimpanzee, but she may have walked upright. Ardi had relatively delicate features, which suggest that she did not eat roots and tough food, but soft fruits obtained by nimbly climbing trees. Her canine teeth are markedly less prominent than chimpanzee teeth, leading to speculation that her species was less aggressive than chimpanzees.

While the human lineage through those early proto-humans can be shuffled, perhaps radically, with the next new finding, today anthropologists are fairly confident that the human line passes through australopithecines. The first ones appeared about 4.2-4.1 mya, and about 3.9 mya, the most famous australopithecine species appeared, called Australopithecus afarensis, of which the original humanoid fossil rock star, Lucy, was a member. She lived about 3.2 mya, and one of Mary Leakey’s greatest finds was what are probably A. afarensis footprints, dated to about 3.6 mya, which demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that the human line was bipedal by then. But all early humans up to australopithecines also had shoulder and arm adaptations for climbing in trees, bipedal or not, and all early humans climbed at least every night to sleep; sleeping on the ground is not done by great apes today except gorillas, and adult male gorillas are the most regular ground sleepers, with smaller gorillas sleeping in trees. Gorillas are rarely preyed upon in their rainforest homes, other than by humans, rival gorillas, and the stray leopard, which avoids large males. African predators made sleeping on the ground infeasible for primates, and none do today in the kinds of woodland environments where early humans lived. The human line may have not slept on the ground until it learned to control fire.

The study of intelligence is a young science, and the relationship of brain size (both absolute and relative) and structure to what is called intelligence is currently subject to a great deal of research and controversy, and even the definition of intelligence is hotly debated. The neocortex appeared with mammals, and is the key structural aspect of brain evolution that led to human intelligence. The mirror test attempts to determine which animals have self-recognition, and those suspected of being the most intelligent have passed the test, including all great apes, cetaceans, elephants, and even a bird. Humans do not pass the mirror test until about eighteen months of age.

Intelligence can confer great advantages, with the encephalization of theropods an early indicator of its benefits. For instance, spider monkeys have brains about twice the size of howler monkeys, which is thought to be due to their larger societies (about twice as large), and the fact that their diet is more than 70% fruit, while the howler monkey’s diet is less than half fruit, with leaves providing twice the proportion of the howler’s diet over the spider’s. Remembering where and when fruit is ripe, and navigating more complex social environments, takes greater thinking power. Similar to howler and spider monkeys, chimpanzees have to range far to find fruit, which is their staple, while gorillas can more readily eat nearby leaves, and chimps have more complex social lives than gorillas do. Chimpanzees also have proportionally larger brains than gorillas have, and are considered more intelligent.

Did the larger brain lead to the behaviors, or did the behaviors lead to the larger brain? If other evolutionary trends have relevance, they mutually reinforced each other, providing positive feedbacks, and down one evolutionary line it reached runaway conditions that led to the human brain. That stated, the initial behavior was likely the use of a body part (the brain) for a new purpose, and its success led to selective advantages that led to mutual reinforcement. Although it is by no means and unorthodox understanding, I think that the likely chain of events was walking upright freeing hands for new behaviors, which led to new ways of making and using tools, which enhanced food acquisition activities, which allowed the energy-demanding brain to expand, as well as related biological changes, which led to more complex tools and behaviors that acquired and required even more energy. That, in short, defines the human journey to this day, which the rest of this essay will explore. There has never been and probably never will again be an energy-devouring animal like humanity on Earth, unless it is a human-line descendant.

Many traits of apes, including humans, are evident in monkeys. Sexual dimorphism, where genders are different shapes and sizes, is a minor phenomenon among prosimians. But it is pronounced in simians, especially apes, and is why men are larger and stronger than women. Its ultimate causes are primarily sexual selection, or how mates choose each other. A prominent hypothesis is that early monkey troupes had males as sentinels guarding the territorial perimeter, protecting the female-dominated core where offspring were cared for and where the food was. A defensible food source was the key attribute for any simian territory. Most primates are territorial, and extreme territorial behaviors can be seen in monkeys and apes, including murder, with its apotheosis in humans.

Nursing likely led to the more involved mammalian parenting behaviors and increased female participation, which followed the great investment that females have in gestating offspring. Larger simian males are more likely to become dominant, and dominant males often get the most and best food and have enhanced reproductive rights, with females attracted to them. Virtually all monkey and ape societies are male-dominated, and the modern ideal of human females freely choosing their mates (or, perhaps more importantly, non-dominant males choosing their mates, if they get to mate at all) is rarely in evidence in monkey and ape societies, and is a new phenomenon for humans. The phenomenon of attractive women mating with rich and powerful men has deep roots in the simian evolutionary journey.

In addition to their Machiavellian social activities, monkeys are quite vocal, and a key social behavior is grooming, which is integral to forming social bonds. In crab-eating macaques, grooming seems to be a form of foreplay or even a payment for sex, and male chimpanzees and capuchins have paid for sex, so the world’s oldest profession may be old indeed. Vocalizations and grooming behaviors become more prominent in gorillas and chimpanzees (orangutan social organization is markedly different from African apes’), and a recent and important hypothesis is that gossip largely replaced grooming with humans as a cheap way to form social bonds, and “cheap” is almost always measured in terms of energy, relating to how much metabolism is devoted to an activity. Almost all animals devote the vast majority of their energy toward acquiring and consuming food, or avoiding becoming food, with industrialized humans about the only significant exception.

Female simians usually stay within their society of origin, while males leave. That is how simians prevented inbreeding, but that pattern is reversed in chimpanzees and gorillas, where females usually leave. Sexual coercion of females is common behavior among simians. Bonobos and gibbons are among the few simians that overcame it, and it seems to have been due to ecological dynamics, which will be explored later in this essay. Humans have partially discarded that behavior during the industrial age. Those are obviously highly-charged areas of behavioral research, and sociobiology is a highly controversial scientific study. A falsifiable hypothesis is arguably the sine qua non of science, and the behavioral sciences have often been plagued with a lack of them, going back to Freud, which has caused some to say that psychology is not really a science. This essay will sail into some of those murky waters before long.

Becoming bipedal freed hands for other uses. The non-human great apes all have long fingers and short thumbs. Ardipithecus ramidus is an early example of the growing thumb in the ape milieu from which the human line descended. Changes in australopithecine hands may have been at least partly adaptations to throwing and wielding clubs. Lucy’s species existed for about a million years, going extinct about 2.9 mya, but it might have been one of those “happy ending” extinctions where the descendants eventually changed enough over time to become new species. What seems clear today is that australopithecine species were scattered around Africa, as they were a highly successful line. Lucy’s species lived in eastern Africa, around Ethiopia, while other australopithecines lived in southern Africa and others lived in central Africa, which is in a similar range to where Miocene ape fossils have been found. Not long after Lucy’s species disappeared, an australopithecine line appeared that is called “robust australopithecines” today and its members have been assigned their own genus, while Lucy and her cousins are called “gracile.” The robusts had huge jaws and teeth, with a dramatic sagittal crest to anchor their powerful chewing muscles; a member of the line is nicknamed “Nutcracker Man” because of its gigantic teeth.

Becoming bipedal allowed for far greater mobility than knuckle-walkers were capable of, with further excursions from the safety of trees possible, to the nearby savannas and grasslands. Tooth studies of later australopithecines showed them to be eating generous amounts of C4 plants, likely from grasslands. But ranging further from the safety of trees was also dangerous. Similar to Proconsul, key australopithecine fossil finds were apparently where the remains of predator meals accumulated, usually in caves. Those early apes on the path to humanity were the hunted, not hunters. Cats such as leopards were likely primary predators that feasted on australopithecines, with one robust skull showing leopard puncture marks in its skull. Most surviving bones were those from body parts that would have been more difficult to eat, with less flesh on them, so the predators left those parts largely intact, which fossil hunters discovered millions of years later, such as jaws, teeth, hands, and feet. Skull finds are extremely rare.

The woodland fringes that australopithecines and their relatives lived in were markedly different from where gorillas and even chimpanzees exist today. Today’s most successful primates today in fringe environments similar to what australopithecines operated in are macaques, which also suffer high rates of predation. The social organization of humanity’s early ancestors may well have been more like macaques than chimpanzees.

As this essay may have made clear, Earth’s evolutionary tree of life has many branches, so many that no one person can become intimate with all of them, even only the larger ones, and innumerable lines of animals arose, radiated, and died out, almost always going out with a whimper instead of a bang. All australopithecine branches came to their ends, except perhaps for the line that led to humans. About 2.6-2.5 mya, just as the current ice age began, a gracile australopithecine lived in eastern Africa, another in southern Africa, and the robust australopithecine with that amazing skull lived in eastern Africa. The oldest stone tools yet discovered were associated with that east African gracile australopithecine. Many non-human animals use tools, and some even make them. But all early tools would have been made of twigs, bones, sticks, unshaped rocks and the like, and they have not left behind much evidence for scientists to study.

Chimpanzees are the most tool-using non-human great ape, and female chimps make and use tools more often than males do. One problem with studying today’s animals and trying to apply findings to their ancestors is that their line has evolved too. The ancestor of chimpanzees when the split was made with the human line did not look like today’s chimpanzee, and probably did not act quite like one. However, chimpanzees and gorillas adapted to environments that have not remarkably changed for the past 8-10 million years, and it is unlikely that they have changed dramatically over that time. Orangutans are similar. Scientists have argued that since there is little evidence of morphological change in those great apes in the intervening years since they split from the line that led to humans, particularly their cranial capacity, that they likely act similarly today and have similar capacities to their ancestors of millions of years ago. Today’s chimps have about the same-sized brains as australopithecines did. They make and use tools, and an orangutan was even trained in captivity to make stone tools, and all great apes have learned to use sign language and some even invent their own signs.

I think it very reasonable to believe that tool use among humanity’s ancestors predates, perhaps by several millions years, those stone tools dated to 2.5-2.6 mya. The proto-human equivalent of Nikola Tesla (although it may have been a female) discovered how to bang two rocks together to create a hard edge used for cutting, maybe with a little inventor’s serendipity. It may not be possible to overstate the significance of that invention. More than a million years of free hands, due to australopithecine bipedal posture, led to the most significant tool-making event in Earth’s history, at least to that time. The shortening fingers and lengthening thumbs of australopithecines led to more dexterity, and in trying to train today’s great apes to make stone tools, their relative lack of dexterity has been noted as an impediment. Also, the increasing dexterity of the proto-human hand is linked with neurological changes, from the hands to the brain, as early proto-humans took tool-making to a new level, in another case of mutually-reinforcing positive feedbacks.

And as with other seminal events in life’s history on Earth, the breakthrough to make stone tools was likely only done once. Although that australopithecine may have been the smartest member of its species, with an ape IQ that went off the scale, his or her brain was the same size as the fellow members of his or her species, but that would not last long. The swift climb to the appearance of Homo sapiens had begun.

Wade Frazier

20th January 2014, 05:10

Hi:

I have bought a whole lot of books from Amazon in the past several years, as I have been studying for the upcoming essay, and I have spent more than $100 on books before, although I avoid it if I can. Sometimes, even I get sticker shock, such as what I just perused:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0197270131/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used

Maybe I should grab the $1,300 ones before they are gone and I am reduced to buying the $4,300 book. :) Seriously, I have not seen prices like those before, especially for a book that is less than ten years old.

But the winner is this one:

http://www.amazon.com/How-sell-New-found-life-sales/dp/0533040590/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1390194509&sr=1-1&keywords=books+on+sale

Looking forward to writing the next chapters, which will be about interesting and seminal times for humans.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

20th January 2014, 18:03

Hi:

A few odds and ends as I start the week. I have been making posts on the slow collapse of the USA, which began when energy consumption per capita peaked with the first oil crisis of 1973/1974:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_per_capita_energy_use_1650-2010.png

and it has been downhill ever since. That measure of the real economy dwarfs everything else. There are financial measures, such as real wages per hour, especially when they adjust for all the accounting fraud that the government and other interests have been actively performing since then, that tell the stark tale in financial terms:

http://www.thestreet.com/story/11480568/1/us-standard-of-living-has-fallen-more-than-50-opinion.html

The reason why the average wage has fallen by 50% by those measures, while energy per capita consumption has “only” fallen by about 15% is partly because the elite have been disproportionately managing the decline, waging a class war against the rest of American society, so that income and wealth disparities are at all-time highs:

http://www.mybudget360.com/wealth-distribution-in-us-wealth-inequality-america-gilded-age-wealth/

and the worst in the industrialized world:

http://www.businessinsider.com/income-versus-wealth-inequality-2013-12

There is a great deal of Orwellian perception management happening in the media and with other social managers, but for those whose eyes are open, the evidence is all too clear, from Detroit and other American cities beginning to look like something from out of Planet of the Apes:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=774945&viewfull=1#post774945

to the collapse in mall traffic and many other measures:

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2014/01/19/the-retail-death-rattle/

As the world runs out of hydrocarbon energy, the USA is a preview of the steep decline coming.

I am now at the stage of the essay where I chart the rise of humanity and our expanding brains. While there were positive feedbacks between human manipulative ability and social organization being able to wrench more energy from the environment, the issue of sentience arises repeatedly. As I have written in one of my chapter drafts:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=782397&viewfull=1#post782397

when South America finally crashed into North America about three million years ago, and ended 60 million years of South American isolation, nearly all South American mammals quickly went extinct, at a level of around 95% of all mammalian species. It was not done with malice or forethought by the invaders. They just saw opportunities and took them, and the less competitive ones went extinct.

Three million years later, an upright ape from Africa developed the ability to migrate to South America, and within a few thousand years of migration (and maybe as fast as a few hundred), they drove nearly all large animals to extinction, as those large animals were a source of highly concentrated energy, easily obtained by those apes. As with the invasion of three million years previously, there was no forethought given to the exercise, or really even malice. The animals were there for the taking, and humans kept killing all the easy meat until it was gone. They did it wherever they appeared in the past 50,000 years, without exception.

Ten thousand years later, energetically-advanced humans from Europe ended the isolation of those humans in the Western Hemisphere, and they easily conquered, enslaved, and quickly exterminated about 95% those less “advanced” natives. Because those events happened in the historical era, we have documentation regarding that extermination, and with extremely few exceptions:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm#genocide

the genocide was a mere side effect of a century-long gold rush:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/savings.htm#biggest

an orgy of greed that ended up exterminating the natives, with about a 90% eradication in that time, eventually reaching the 95% of the first invasion of three million years ago, and 100% ten thousand years ago, with absolutely no remorse or thoughtfulness by the invaders. And Spain’s successors merely continued the game until the entire world was under European domination:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#jockeying

and in the USA, for instance, the extermination of the natives was cheered:

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

Similar to the invasion of three million years ago, or ten thousand years ago, there was virtually no sense of awareness by the invaders that they knew or cared what they were doing to those they invaded, conquered, and exterminated. That is one of many events that bring up the question that Brian O put to me many years ago: Are we a sentient species?

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

Similarly, my great nation, which is history’s richest and most powerful, took a page from Hitler’s playbook and recently invaded a nation and began an imperial genocide:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

Hitler had more excuse for his actions than the USA did. And as I have lived in the USA while we committed that great, evil deed, I cannot find hardly any Americans who know or care what we did, as we have plundered the energy resources of peoples who live on the other side of the world.

Once again, the question arises: Are we a sentient species?

I discovered long ago that personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity

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

But the issue may go deeper, and the quest of my essay and subsequent work may be to discover if we are really a sentient species, or if we will do to ourselves what we have done to so many others, as we exterminate ourselves and take most complex life with us. It surely does not seem to have to be this way, but it sure is the way we are heading, and fast. Overcoming humanity’s egocentric inertia and Godzilla’s organized suppression just may be the key test of our sentience, to see if 0.0001% of us can reach the level of heart-centered sentience that can not only take us back from the brink of the abyss, but see us head toward true sentience and a world that can look like this:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#advanced

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

Can enough of us attain true sentience? We will see.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

21st January 2014, 23:02

Hi:

The rhythm of writing my essay is study, write, edit, repeat. The overall arc of the essay was envisioned long ago:

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

and I have been studying for several years. Depending on the book I was reading, I might take notes, keeping those notes in the book. As I have been writing the essay and referring to the books, I found that I have not been referring to the notes very often, but rereading much of the books. It makes me wonder how efficient this process has been. :)

After long slogs I take breaks, and then get back at it. The good news regarding writing this essay so far is that the material does not take much of an emotional toll to write, but as I get to the human part of the essay, the going will get harder. But I have already done the heavy lifting for most of that part with my site as it exists today. But it is still going to be work.

I doubt that I will get another stint to write like this in my lifetime, especially when I am still young enough to be near the top of my game. My mind was probably nimbler when I was younger. My memory was definitely better, but I am also on the far end of some pretty steep learning curves. I hope I am in sweet-spot territory. That is a big reason why I took the sabbatical to write it. My mother and her mother both became demented, and I will do all I can so that I do not experience their fates, and working out my brain every day I hope keeps senility at bay for at least a few more years. :)

Below is a warm-up for writing a section coming up soon, which I have written plenty about: the megafaunal extinctions. I most recently did it here:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=782950&viewfull=1#post782950

I have been doing more study lately. I find the tale somewhat like a serial killer on trial. The trail of bodies is long and bloody, and the victims all have similar profiles (easy meat, and lots of it), and evidence that the killer was there, independent of the murder weapons, has been adduced at most crime scenes, and plenty of murder weapons have been recovered at the scene. Most murders really have no doubt about whom the guilty party is, and for all recent murders, a guilty plea has been entered. For most early murders, there is really little if any reasonable doubt, but the defense attorneys are working hard at fabricating some reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind. For some murders committed during the spree, the evidence is relatively thin at present, but all victims fit the profile, the scapegoats used try to create reasonable doubt all have airtight alibies, and there are really no other serious candidates. But since the defense’s job is to use any doubt that may exist, in actuality or fantasized, and inflate it into reasonable doubt and thereby get their clients off, they are working loyally to that end.

I have to hand it to the defense; they don’t give ground easily. But the killer is still on the loose, and the spree is actually escalating. Somewhat paradoxically, the defense admits to the current and escalating murders, as those murders are being captured on video. So, what we have left are a few early murders that are not completely accounted for, and as the principle ideally adhered to is innocent until proven guilty, the defense’s attempt at exoneration for those few unsolved but uncannily familiar crimes could be considered admirable, but it sure does not look good for the defendant.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

22nd January 2014, 23:17

Hi:

This post and the next are kind of collecting my thoughts for the humanity part of the essay, which will likely be less than half of it, but it will take up its remainder. Among the works I am currently reading, in preparation for my next chapter, is The Primate Mind.

Going back to Darwin and his The Descent of Man, the idea that human cognitive abilities are only different from other animals’ in degree, not in kind, has been around as a scientific hypothesis for well more than a century. Animal behavior studies have increasingly confirmed that idea. There may not be any human cognitions or behaviors that did not already exist in primitive form in the animal kingdom long ago. Self-awareness, empathy, language acquisition, problem-solving, and tool-making are all well-represented in non-human animals. With our larger and more complex brains, we merely have more sophisticated versions of those activities. Is any of that demonstrating sentience?

Somewhere along the line, humans developed a relatively sophisticated self-awareness, and the idea of the human ego may well be the best presentation of that concept. Again, I am no materialist, and everybody with my highest respect in the FE and related fields is or was, to one degree or another, a mystic, just as the world’s greatest physicists were:

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

But none of them became mystical because they read mystical literature. They all got that way because of their experiences. The physicists could be rather materialistic about their mysticism (meaning that their mystical experience was limited), and atheistic, but that is mainly only in comparison to the tenets of organized religion, which were always watered-down and corrupted versions of the teachings of the masters (yes, there have been some, with the emphasis on some), used for social control. Their primary approach was taking advantage of humanity’s semi-sentience and egocentrism, where they tried to get people to believe in the literal truth of symbologies, and then if people “bought in,” they received material and egocentric rewards. Then by manipulating the symbols, people’s sense of reality could be easily manipulated.

The secular versions of that religious strategy are easily seen in nationalism, capitalism, communism, etc.

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

An example is people thinking that money really means anything or is important. It is only important at the egocentric (AKA microeconomic) level. And as long as people think egocentrically, their economic obsession is what is in it for them, or what money can buy. And it is mutually reinforced in a world of artificial scarcity, which defines today’s world.

But even the sophisticated ideologies, including scientism, rationalism, and materialism, play the same game, only more subtly:

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

In a world of scarcity, they all work admirably, and more than 99.99% of all humans are trapped in those mires. The reason is that people readily abdicate their sentience for the promise of a full belly. That is why personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity:

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

I came to those understandings only after many years, but I cannot overemphasize the value of experience. I resisted the primary lesson of my journey every step of the way, until I had it beaten into my head in no uncertain terms. The fact that people are trapped in those ideological straightjackets has everything to do with their level of personal integrity. People are not trapped all that innocently. They can feign innocence and ignorance, but, for instance, any American not in a coma has had ready access to information on the Hitler-scale crimes that we committed and continue to commit against the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

but it conflicts with our national self-image:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#cognitive

The “people” have everything to do with those events being totally under the radar and down Orwell’s Memory Hole. We not only have the system that we deserve, but the system that we actively and passively support:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/07/15/considering-the-obvious/

The issue of “What are we here for?” I think is best answered by the best of the mystical literature. The scriptures are all corrupted to further economic and political goals, and the best I have encountered are the collected “channeled” works of Seth, Michael, and Ra, which I began to discover as a teenager:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#seth

But again, I cannot overemphasize the value of experience. Without my mystical awakening, which I received due to my experiences:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#how

those works would have been just pretty words and interesting theories. IMO, there is no teaching on Earth that should be blindly followed and become some dogma, whether it is the corpus and foundational assumptions of mainstream science, organized religion, channeled teachings, and so on. The best teachers assist their pupils to gain their own experiences. The rest are merely trappings. That is why nobody in the choir will be somebody who just read my work and “bought” it because it seemed convincing or pretty. Then it becomes just one more empty ideology, competing in the marketplace of ideas and information. That is not what I am doing or aiming for. My desire is that some rare people who care can benefit from my hard-won experience, the kind that was life-risking and life-wrecking, and maybe they can learn some important lessons without having their lives ruined, and if enough of them can do that, humanity will have a much greater chance of turning the corner, because the ship is going down, my friends. It does not have to be this way, but humanity’s inertia and the active herd management by the social managers, of which Godzilla is only the most ruthless, accomplished, and sophisticated, is responsible for the trajectory to oblivion that humanity finds itself on.

That stated, there has been a great deal of scientific investigation of “paranormal” and psychic phenomena, and books such as McLuhan’s Randi’s Prize are great summaries of the state of research. McLuhan clearly demonstrates the irrational and dogmatic approaches of the “skeptics,” and my encounters with them have shown me that they are among the most dishonest groups out there:

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

and that is saying something. Even with McLuhan’s armchair scholar approach, his insights can be keen ones. On the subject of NDEs, he summarized the accounts of NDE survivors and the attacks by the “skeptics,” and clearly shows how they are grabbing at straws as they concoct all manner of strained and untested “explanations” to dismiss NDE accounts. I’ll reproduce a section from the chapter titled “Experience and Imagination.”

“Let's focus on this word “subjective” for a moment. What is true for me - and perhaps also for other like-minded folk - may be in direct opposition to what other people believe.

I touched earlier on the objective status of science, how it concerns itself with what is true for all of us, as biological beings, and about which there can be no disagreement. The tangible and material can be verified by any qualified person at any time, while subjective impressions, on the contrary, are not open to this kind of universal validation. The role this distinction has played in the Enlightenment is clear, enabling an essentially unifying process which, in an optimistic analysis, can be held to have furthered the development of political and social stability.

Late 19th century scientists by and large considered themselves to be “positivists,” subscribing to the philosophical argument that the only real experience is that which is derived from the senses. In the first half of the 20th century this current of thought culminated in logical positivism, which broadly holds that nothing that cannot be verified experimentally is meaningful at all. It's most literal expression in science was the behaviorist school of psychology, which treated thoughts as meaningless ephemera, and instead looked for insights about humans in the behavior of rats, dogs, and pigeons in experimental situations. This historical development is attributable at least partly to “physics envy” among psychologists, a need to demonstrate their scientific credentials by focusing on demonstrable entities rather than intangible thoughts. Now, at a time when human consciousness is being intensively discussed and investigated, it's sobering to reflect that for much the last century it was not even acknowledged by science to exist.

Yet while subjective feelings are of little interest to science, they are everything in the social sphere. Those of us who are not members of ethnic minorities, are not gay or poor or disabled or sick, find it hard to put ourselves in their shoes, to understand the challenges they face. For that matter, being in one particular minority does not necessarily make us more sympathetic to those who belong to others. Our separateness, as Nicholas Humphrey rightly notes, is what makes us human; it's also the source of many of our problems. Our task, as friends, neighbors, service staff, therapists, doctors, scientists, politicians - or as fellow humans, for that matter - is to be aware of what other people are telling us, to try to grasp what they feel and experience, to take that into account in our own reactions. That's what drives social progress.

But when it comes to paranormal claims there are limits to our broad-mindedness, especially in developed, secular-minded countries. It's true that polls show belief in such things as ghosts and ESP can be quite high, and that might seem to be supported by the proliferation of television programmes about the paranormal. But is it really the case? In a fictional or documentary setting the paranormal is perceived to be entertaining, but when it turns up in real life it can be threatening. People who describe having had a near-death experience often say that doctors, nurses and family members got angry and agitated when they first tried to share their experience, and there are those who for years never even dared to mention it.

This is now perhaps less true than it used to be, however a reluctance to listen continues to be a characteristic of professional sceptics. Their defensive posture leads them to talk about claims as opposed to experiences, too preoccupied by the challenge to their imaginations to think at all closely about what is actually being said. From their perspective, people who report paranormal-seeming incidents are creating problems, if not actually setting out to cause mischief, and this point of view is bound to create a distortion in their reader's minds.

Their insistence that these are mere anecdotes - and for that reason unscientific, undeserving of serious attention - means they lack exposure to first-hand testimony. Blackmore’s Dying to Live, rather tellingly, is sparsely illustrated with direct speech: a comparably bland extract from individuals reported experience at the beginning is followed here and there by a few short quotes, none of which begin to convey the intensity of the experience as it appears elsewhere.

By contrast near-death experience researchers’ studies are laced with copious quotations from individuals who are only too happy to describe something they may have kept locked up for years. This brings the phenomenon alive for the reader; it's more than just a concept, an idea. There is a palpable sense of awe in the first-hand accounts, of euphoria, exultation and mystery. Experiencers struggle to find superlatives to convey the colour, the beauty, the forms, the music - much of which, they insist, is ineffable, utterly beyond description. Those who write it down are able to seek out the most apt word, or turn of phrase, to express the memory. But in a way you get an even greater impact from transcripts of taped interviews, as people who relive the event in their imaginations choke up, grasping for words that will convey the enormity of it.

Listen to these little excerpts, taken at random from extended quotes in Kenneth Ring’s Heading Towards Omega:

“… If you took the one thousand best things that ever happened to you in your life and multiplied by a million, maybe you get close to this feeling…”

“… this wonderful, wonderful feeling of this light…”

“There was the warmest, most wonderful love. Love all around me…I felt light-good-happy-joy-at-ease.”

“I can't begin to describe in human terms the feeling I had at what I saw. It was a giant infinite world of calm, and love, and energy and beauty.

“As I absorb the energy, I sensed what I can only describe as bliss. That is such a little word, but the feeling was dynamic, rolling, magnificent, expanding, ecstatic - Bliss.

How many people can say that anything- anything - they have experienced in this world matches up to these descriptions?

My point is that, without such live comments, readers may be left with the impression that what people experience can be described as “euphoria" or a "a tremendous sense of well-being," a linguistic down-sizing which makes it comparable to the effects of a stiff whiskey or a good workout at the gym. It is then all the easier for a sceptic to argue that it's explicable under scientific terms, a release of endorphins perhaps.

It's natural to look for matches: "That's the claim - this is the explanation." But if the original claim is not accurately represented, the explanation can't be fully trusted.”

That ends the section. McLuhan’s book is filled with trenchant observations like that. But he still writes as an outsider, not somebody who has had his own paranormal experiences. He has class and is perceptive, but experience takes it all past a threshold to another level, and there is no going back. For instance, if Susan Blackmore:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#blackmore

ever tried to get NDE experiencers to chalk up their experiences up to some illusion born of brain chemistry and wishful thinking – to be polite – she would not get anywhere. As I have said regarding FE, the person who denies the reality of FE until somebody delivers FE to their door is like the materialist who will deny all psychic phenomena until they can have their very own NDE, and not the minor ones, but along the scale of George Rodonaia’s:

http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Experiences/GeorgeRodonaia%27s_nde.htm

or these others:

http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Archives/Exceptional%20Accounts.htm

Unfortunately, the Silva course is a shadow of its former self, but it is not too hard for a sincere seeker to have the kinds of experiences that awakened Brian O and me:

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

While they were short of an NDE, they were plenty spectacular enough so that the materialism of modern society and science was readily seen as a religion built on a false foundation, and doors of awareness and possibility opened that simply could not have opened without them. I have had enough “paranormal” experiences that the legitimacy of NDEs does not turn my sense of reality upside-down like it does to materialists.

What I am attempting, on the FE and world-healing scale, is the equivalent of helping the McLuhans of the world seek their equivalent of a remote viewing, and then NDEs will not seem so strange or theoretical, and I also hope to help them understand the magnitude of FE and its epochal importance:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=674575&viewfull=1#post674575

This will be a two-part post, with the rest coming later today or tomorrow. I need to do some essay work.

Best,

Wade

Carmody

23rd January 2014, 14:33

Hi:

I have bought a whole lot of books from Amazon in the past several years, as I have been studying for the upcoming essay, and I have spent more than $100 on books before, although I avoid it if I can. Sometimes, even I get sticker shock, such as what I just perused:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0197270131/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used

Maybe I should grab the $1,300 ones before they are gone and I am reduced to buying the $4,300 book. :) Seriously, I have not seen prices like those before, especially for a book that is less than ten years old.
... ... ...
Looking forward to writing the next chapters, which will be about interesting and seminal times for humans.

Best,

Wade

One would have to verify if this is real or not:

http://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/b/british-academy-monographs-in-archaeology-bama/;jsessionid=F60C5D1901068C3FD01C422E1482AA62?cc=ca&lang=en&

It appears to be straight from the Oxford press, $200, a marginally higher outlier of the normal academic pressing rates...but considerably better than the other rate. I used startpage for the search, it seems to give much better results for books than lets say, google, especially when looking for PDFs.

Wade Frazier

23rd January 2014, 15:28

Thanks Carmody. $200 would be a comparative steal. It looks like it might be available, but my experience has been that once the print run is over and the first edition is sold out, that could be it, and you then scrounge around for one.

I see that the $4K versions are no longer available here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0197270131/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used

I was not set on buying that book, but it was in an area that I was poking into. I just got sticker shock when I saw the prices, prices I had never seen before.

I paid about $200 for Weapons of Satire several years ago, and today they are “only” about $85 to start:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0815602685/ref=dp_olp_all_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=all

But before Amazon developed its market with bookstores, I tried for about ten years to find that book, even using services that specialized in finding books like that, to no avail. Independent booksellers hate Amazon, and consider them the evil empire. I am sympathetic to their sentiments, but it was the only way to find out-of-print books. I visited many antiquarian bookstores in the 1990s and early 2000s, when I wrote my site, and it is one heck of a lot easier to surf Amazon.

I communicated with Jim Zwick, the editor of the Twain book, back when you could not find a copy, and he was planning to print a second edition, but he died several years ago. I tried to find it because Chomsky had discussed that that book was the only example of Twain’s anti-imperialist writings that had ever been published:

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

Zwick published a second Twain book:

http://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Imperialism-Essays-Anti-Imperialist-League/dp/0741444100/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1390489177&sr=1-1

just before he died:

http://twainweb.net/jimzwick.html

His excellent Twain site is gone forever. I only found scraps of it on the WayBack Machine.

I plan to have my site as long as I am alive, and hope to make provisions so that my site survives me.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

25th January 2014, 19:37

Hi:

A lot is happening in my life right now, interfering with my essay writing, and delayed the second part of that post:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=787774&viewfull=1#post787774

As I collect my thoughts, they are a little scattered at the moment, but here goes….

In my lifetime, the study of monkey and ape societies has grown dramatically, and I have been reading the results of those studies. I just finished a book on rhesus monkeys, which is Earth’s most widespread primate next to humans. Rhesus monkeys are extraordinary adaptable generalists, like humans, which is why they have done so well. Rhesus monkeys cannot pass the mirror test:

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

but their societies are Machiavellian in organization and functioning. There is continual vying for dominance. Dominance means power, and power means the best food, the best sex, the best and safest sleeping areas, endless grooming by subordinates, and so on. Macaque societies, however, are dominated by females, as are most primate societies. Great apes are about the sole exceptions, but bonobos reversed that trend, and are the only great apes where females are not sexually coerced with regularity (although humans are working at it :) ). It is very interesting to see that human civilizations operate as only more sophisticated versions of monkey and ape societies. Once again, it is different in degree, not in kind. But in the book I just finished, Dario Maestripieri’s Machiavellian Intelligence, all rhesus macaque behaviors were seen in an economic context, where the ultimate end of all behaviors was getting the most and best, and those at the bottom of the hierarchies got the scraps. But modern theories of the primate mind depicts rhesus behaviors as the result of evolutionarily derived “programming,” without any real thinking on the part of the monkeys.

That is how materialists see it, but even the mystic may see it as hive awareness. Few would argue that rhesus monkeys are sentient. Passing the mirror test is probably a threshold for considering sentience (or ensoulment). Everything has consciousness, IMO, but sentience is something else, at least in theory. But for a pre-sentient species to display many behaviors that are well-represented in human civilization is enough to give a person pause. This goes back to Brian’s question: are we a sentient species?

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

It is not easily answered, and I have long called humanity semi-sentient. Vying for dominance, seeking power, being a patriot in the face of an external threat – all of those behaviors are well represented in pre-sentient species, and IMO, all arise from economic scarcity, which primate researchers would agree with. Even when several hundred rhesus monkeys were relocated to an island near Puerto Rico and all their needs were met and there were no natural predators, they still vied for dominance. When they were first thrown together, they killed each other with gusto as they sought dominance in the island’s pecking order. Even with abundance, they could not overcome their programming and live differently. Can humans? That may well be the crux of my work.

The good news is that as standards of living have risen, particularly in the industrial age, humans have changed their modes of thinking and behaving. As I have stated plenty of times before, watching people being forced to murder each other was the favorite pastime in the greatest ancient civilization:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=769646&viewfull=1#post769646

and three hundred years ago, nobody on Earth challenged the legitimacy of the institution of slavery, and the leading scientist of the day saw nothing wrong with getting rich in the slave trade:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=753632&viewfull=1#post753632

The coming chapters of my essay will deal with the rise of humans and civilization, and I have been doing plenty of study of hunter-gatherer societies and early civilization. Anthropologists found some hunter-gatherer societies that did not regularly conduct war with their neighbors, but that was usually because they were isolated. Once hunting and gathering territories began to abut each other, the violence began. But even in isolated hunter-gatherer societies, they were still violent, with women often bearing the brunt of it. Those “peaceful” hunter-gatherer societies still killed outsiders. With the Inuit, any strange man was killed on sight, no questions asked, as it was assumed by all that he was there to steal a woman.

Places such as this Paleolithic slaughter site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cemetery_117

provide mute testimony to the awesome violence of hunter-gatherer humans before the Domestication Revolution. Early civilization was also extremely violent and steeply hierarchical, with the first set of laws that survive hinting at its brutality:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=769646&highlight=hammurabi#post769646

To think that such peoples would respect megafauna or the “environment” out of some kind of mystical appreciation of them I think is a big stretch. Some humans, out of self-interest, realized that razing forests and engaging in plow agriculture was disastrous in the long run, and there were attempts to ameliorate the process, but they were sporadic and regularly took a back seat to imperial prerogatives. All early civilizations devastated their local environments, with those in the Fertile Crescent and along the Mediterranean all in the ruins of their self-made deserts or buried in the silt of deforestation and plow agriculture. The first city in North America, Cahokia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia#Ancient_city

collapsed from environmental fatigue, and as with Old World civilizations, the death rate in the city was so high that the only way the city survived was a constant influx of people from the hinterland. As the hinterland became devastated by the unsustainable practices, Cahokia eventually collapsed, just like all the others.

In the industrial age, the devastation has accelerated, as humans wrench energy and other resources from the land, which has led us to the brink of the Sixth Mass Extinction, which really began about 50K years ago when humans invaded Australia:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=782950&viewfull=1#post782950

But with each epochal event, which was always initiated and sustained by a small group of humans achieving the social organization and technological prowess to tap a new energy source:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=674575&viewfull=1#post674575

the human “intellectual capital” increased, and their ideologies became more complex and sophisticated, which helped lead to the next epochal event. In ways, the Big Bang hypothesis is only a more sophisticated version of the fairy tales in Genesis.

The next epochal phase is already here, technologically:

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

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

but it will take an unprecedented effort of social organization and mental horsepower to make it manifest in the public sphere.

If it can manifest, worlds like these become feasible:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#advanced

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

The required social organization is what I am attempting to help form the nucleus of, and it will be a nucleus of love (AKA personal integrity), which has never been seen on Earth before (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#burn ), and the mental horsepower part is learning to think comprehensively, and my upcoming essay is intended to help people along on that front. I recently had a big time scientist review my current draft of the essay, and his response was about, “Holy Sh*t. This could be big.” Well, I only want it to be big because people do the work and gain comprehensive understandings, not because it becomes some bandwagon to jump aboard. Bandwagons are easily derailed, as I saw during my days with Dennis.

I actually don’t want it to become big too fast, because Godzilla will then try to kill it, fast. But a slow build, supported by people who have their hearts in the right place and develop comprehensive perspectives, which necessarily has energy front and center, will be hard to defeat, especially when it begins in cyberspace and its members are scattered across the planet. The only problem I really see is being able to find those needles in haystacks. I think they are out there. I really wish that I was just one of five hundred people trying to get going what I am, but there is nobody else trying it, and the audience/participants pretty much do not exist today, so I have to go it alone for now. But I found that my days at Avalon have born some fruit, and for that, I see that my approach might have a glimmer of hope.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Ilie Pandia

25th January 2014, 20:11

Hi Wade,

You've said often that impatience is your Achilles' heel, but I am constantly amazed by your focus and your determination to get this done. :)

I actually don’t want it to become big too fast, because Godzilla will then try to kill it, fast. But a slow build, supported by people who have their hearts in the right place and develop comprehensive perspectives, which necessarily has energy front and center, will be hard to defeat, especially when it begin in cyberspace and its members are scattered across the planet.

Here is how your approach is different. With the situation that we currently find ourselves in (starring into the abyss) one would be tempted to rush into this, to grow an audience as fast as possible, to blast it all over the web. And yet you choose to take small but very focused steps :). Boy, is that hard!!

It's so easy to lose sight of the "big picture". But I guess your own life experience has somehow given you the strength and clarity to follow this through!

You say that you are alone in your efforts and sadly... that is true. While there are many people that know about Free Energy these days and some may even have got a glimpse at the actual suppression, I did not read about anyone seeing the Energy at the core of all things and Abundance (or extinction) as the next Epochal Event. More jobs, more economic growth, more money and less pollution is about as far as I've seen others go. And I remember my first months of writing on this thread when you've shot down all my bright ideas and initiative about how to solve this. I was beginning to think you don't actually want this come about. Your essay Keys to Comprehending Abundance-Based Paradigms (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm) was the one that lit a bright light in my head. :)

Unfortunately I'm pretty sure that without your constant writings here I'd lose sight of this pretty often. But there is some good news as well. I think I got it, like really deep, that Energy is at the core of everything. And so anytime I see some new movement, some new idea, some "channeled information" I ask myself two questions: 1. Is it about Energy? and 2. Is is about Personal Integrity? I think those two are stuck with me right now, and they are a good focus lens (at least for me).

Your new essay, when done, should make it pretty clear that it was always about Energy. I wanted to make a count of how often you said: "and as always it was an Energy dynamic". From the very first life forms to us humans today.

I still struggle with where "nature of personal reality" and perception fit into all of this. Sometimes it looks like free energy or not... in the grand scheme of things, everything will be "OK", even if the Earth (and Sun) will be destroyed... Life will continue its journey onto a different planet or Universe. At some point it's bound to hit the Free Energy stage :). So the question then remains if we will be aware enough to change the current game we have here now on Earth.

Wade Frazier

25th January 2014, 21:52

Thanks Ilie:

If I seem patient, that means that I am making progress on my Achilles’ heel! :)

I have told those close to me that when this life ends, I can probably cross impatience off my list to work on, as I have gotten to work on it every day, and what “better” way to work on patience than have the entire world be in danger of melting down, as I try to help prevent it.

But that seeming patience may only be a function of persistence. And my persistence has to do with understanding what is important. I was just telling my wife that Bucky, Dennis, Brian, and I all began with some kind of Utopian yearning, and we eventually all came to FE. For those who are really thinking deeply about the world’s problems and pursuing solutions, you eventually realize where the energy situation sits (at its foundation), and you eventually come to learn that FE is real, but suppressed. And when you are one of those being suppressed:

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

the part of it being suppressed is easy to accept. :)

I fully admit that my journey was anything but “normal,” with a voice in my head, etc., but Dennis:

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

Brian:

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

and Bucky had similar experiences and moments of truth. Those seem to come with the territory.

I think that my approach is really just the result of trying so many times, and trading notes with people like Brian and the few like him, watching Dennis keep going at it, and digesting all the ways it can go wrong. After three failures, two of them Hindenburg-type wrecks (and I ended up jumping off before the fourth and declined getting involved in the fifth), I decided that the business route to FE was not only insanely risky, but doomed to failure. I helped Dennis rebuild a few times, but each time he had to build a new navy and recruit sailors, and they always mutinied, but usually only when there were already big holes in the ships due to the cannonballs of the assailants. Only Dennis can keep up like that, and I have watched his efforts with a mixture of awe and horror, as he was always taken out. So, I realized that his way probably would not work, and only somebody like him has any business even trying:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

Then I carried Brian’s spears for a while, and while Brian’s spears weighed nothing at all compared to Dennis’s, I saw Brian run out of the USA, fearing for his life:

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

and then he was basically kicked out of the organization he founded, once again. My wife is happy that I did those relatively recent instances of spear-carrying, to get it out of my system. :) For me, they were just more lessons on what does not work and is extremely unlikely to.

So, I kind of came to my current approach by keeping on trying stuff, seeing what the outcome was, tweaking it, trying something else, and the like. I don’t know if what I am planning will work, but as a professor pal recently told me, it won’t hurt. I really am not looking for heroes. Would-be heroes can go sign up to be cannon fodder for Dennis’s next attempt. I really don’t see what I am about to attempt as being the critical missing piece that puts FE over the top, although it could be. What I am really attempting is to help form a nugget of heart-centered sentience that can end up supporting an FE effort that goes over the top. But it does not need to do that; it is one possible outcome of building the choir, and probably the most important one, but a choir like I envision has never been heard on Earth before. What might shake loose if it is heard? For me, that is the mystery that I would gladly spend the rest of my life’s “free time” pursuing. That adventure I hope is not like being Indiana Jones’s sidekick, like my days with Dennis were. Getting dragged beneath the truck with the Nazis riding along with the talisman of unlimited power is not as easy as in the movie. :)

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

25th January 2014, 23:34

Hi:

As I write and think, one way to think about the fifth epochal event or the sixth mass extinction, both of which we are on the brink of, is that both are all about where we get our energy from.

The sixth mass extinction is not only about how the industrialized world uses hydrocarbon energy to power it. In the USA, 86% of energy used is hydrocarbon based, 6% nuclear, 6% hydroelectric, and about 1% “alternative”:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Consumption_by_source

If you look at the entire world, you will see a slight change, where essentially firewood accounts for 11% of energy consumption:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Total_World_Energy_Consumption_by_Source_2010.png

Those comprise the two great vectors of destruction. The hydrocarbons are raising the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, and no credible climate scientist denies that that will ultimately warm Earth. The only question is how much and how fast. Carbon dioxide concentrations are the ultimate cause of Earth’s Hothouse and Icehouse phases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth#Causes_of_greenhouse_earth

with other causes of lesser importance, which can cause short-term fluctuations. In the big picture of Earth’s ecosystems, raising the carbon dioxide levels has many effects, such as acidifying the oceans, warming them, raising the sea levels as ice sheets melt, melting the permafrost and releasing more greenhouse gases such as methane. All of those conditions have happened in Earth’s past, and all have caused mass extinctions, such as killing the reefs (warming, acidification, and rising sea levels all kill reefs), but it was the speed of them that determined how major the extinction was. This one that humans are causing may be the fastest change in the eon of complex life, other than the bolide impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Such fast changes can drive numerous species to extinction just due to climate change, but that is only one aspect of what may be coming. A five foot rise displaces 17 million people in Bangladesh alone. A twenty-five foot rise displaces about half of humanity. All scientists agree that a five foot rise is inevitable from what has happened already. Rising and warming oceans are likely already responsible for events such as that hurricane that recently drowned New York City.

But extreme weather will have an even greater impact on ecosystems. Vast crop failures due to epic droughts and floods are coming and are actually here in the USA, as California is currently experiencing its greatest drought ever, which is part of a national drought:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012-2013_North_American_drought

I am already reading where there may be food shortages where I live because of it, and we are history’s richest people. This all likely at least partly due to burning hydrocarbons to fuel the industrial age. That burning firewood in the non-industrialized world is the other fork of the extinction twin. Humans are deforesting Earth and driving species to extinction via habitat destruction, and it is the greatest cause of extinction today. They are doing it to eat. They take the wood for cooking (in India, as readers of this thread know, they use cow pies) and they use the remnant soils to get crops out of the ground.

Of course, the USA has been committing genocide in Asia to control the greatest hydrocarbon deposits:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

and the other nations will not just stand back forever and watch. If we have World War III, it will likely be over the hydrocarbons, not food or water. The rich nations will not run out of food or water until they run out of hydrocarbons.

So, the energy practices of both the rich and poor peoples are causing the sixth mass extinction event. It is happening now, and got its start about 50K years ago with the invasion of Australia.

With FE, what can happen? No more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, for starters. And in fact, with FE, taking out the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be feasible, to take it down to pre-industrial levels, if we want.

But far more importantly, raping the ecosystems for energy will become obsolete, and that includes deforestation and farming. People will no longer need to grow their food by commandeering and plundering the ecosystems. People won’t even need to live on today’s land, as underground, space-based, underwater, on the water, and floating-in-the-air civilizations become feasible, with the antigravity technology that I know is also being kept under wraps. We could take just one asteroid and mine it, and it would literally provide all of humanity’s material needs. No more need to mine Earth, and even if we still did, it could be done with about zero environmental impact. But I prefer the asteroid solution, as Brian used to advocate:

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

In short, all the ways that humans are destroying the planet can end with FE, and fighting wars over resources or dominance will look insanely stupid, and fast, and I have enough “faith” in potential human sentience that those kinds of events will not be allowed to happen.

So, in summary, our current energy practices are creating the sixth mass extinction, and FE cannot only halt that extinction in its tracks, but it would usher in the fifth epochal event, and humans could live a Star Trek level of existence.

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

The choice is truly ours.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

26th January 2014, 14:22

Hi:

As a cautionary note to those who aspire to be in the choir one day, I now have no relationships with my immediate family. My last one just ended, when I would not give the person all the money that he thought he was entitled to (they were pure gifts from me, which have been coming steadily for several years, amounting to $50K or so, although the relative was performing some work for me, as I wanted him to feel at least somewhat useful, and he eventually came to think that he was entitled to whatever he asked for), and then came all the personal attacks that he could think of. I might have had one person in all of my family, all the way to grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, and siblings, who kind of understood what my life’s work is about. Some would feign understanding while they could get something from me, but I was essentially renting their feigned understanding.

That just comes with the territory of pursuing these kinds of activities. When I have shared my experiences with people such as Dennis, Brian, and the like, the response was always, “Join the club.”

The vast majority of humanity is locked in an egocentric struggle for survival in a world of scarcity, and caring for something beyond their immediate existences is simply incomprehensible to them. That is a key aspect, probably the key aspect, of why personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity:

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

I was a super-kid from the time I was born, a science prodigy who was raised to be a Golden Boy, and when I became what I was raised to be, then I was disowned and attacked, with the very people who raised me unable to understand what they had raised.

And this situation is maybe why I am deluded about what I am trying to do. Maybe too many people have sold out their sentience for the promise of a fully belly for the appearance of FE to help them regain their abdicated sentience and attain a semblance of integrity. All they will do with FE and abundance is take their egocentric power and control games to new levels, and we will destroy the planet even more quickly and thoroughly than we already are. Environmentalists, Peak Oilers, and others like them seem sure of this, with their Level 5 fear reactions:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level5

more than implying that people cannot be trusted with abundance and personal empowerment. Seeing where humanity is today, I have some sympathy toward their fears. But their reactions are purely of the knee-jerk variety, and I found that what was really happening was that they feared having their entire worldview and carefully-carved niches of hell become obsolete. In the end, it was still an egocentric viewpoint, and one that takes a dim view of the human potential.

Studies have shown that when people are in fear, their neocortex shuts down and the reptilian brain takes over, which controls the fight/flight response and other pre-sentient behaviors.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/crisis-center/200807/the-anatomy-fear

http://charlottehenleybabb.com/fear-of-the-neo-cortex/

http://healthland.time.com/2013/04/16/how-terror-hijacks-the-brain/#ixzz2Qf3N3pTS

What if fear and scarcity became obsolete? How would the human organism react? Would we all be like those rhesus macaques, still vying for power?

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=789097&viewfull=1#post789097

Or would people begin to achieve true sentience, the kind that Brian wondered if humanity was capable of:

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

We are already on the fast track to oblivion, with the masses unknowing and uncaring, and Godzilla riding herd as we stampede toward the cliff. Really, what do we have to lose in trying to become a truly sentient species? Maybe what I am attempting is infeasible, primarily because there are not enough sentient people on Earth today, but does that mean that I should not try? Are people capable of sentience? I think that people like Dennis and Brian are proof that we can be. Whether we do or not is up to us, but it is a conundrum. Humanity’s primary trait today is inertia, or as Michael would say (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#michael ), people are in thrall to their false personalities, which is due to their herd conditioning, where their beliefs and understandings are not based on personal experiences and deep thought but what they were indoctrinated into. In the USA, that kind of conditioning has been refined to a science:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/intro.htm#paradigms

The needles that I will looking for soon are those who have overcome their conditioning and are approaching something like sentience, contacting their essence, and whatever other terms seem to describe the state. I know that there are very few people on the planet who have achieved that or even want to, but they are whom I will be seeking. And if my work does not quite hit the mark, as I have my own foibles and lack of understanding, I only pray that others take it to a higher level and heal the planet with it.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Limor Wolf

26th January 2014, 14:59

Wade, stay strong there, good winds are blowing your way. Not being understood is part of the 'heroe's path' that you walk (you may define it as the 'anti-hero', if you like), your 'language' and vision is not yet familiar one to most citizens of this planet, as rooted as it is in reality (the real one). In the meantime it may feel like being a leper in understanding what you understand. Something will break in the inertia soon, then what you are aiming for will pick up steam

I have nothing to end with other then

Love,

Limor

Wade Frazier

26th January 2014, 15:10

Thanks Limor:

Brian, Dennis, myself, and others like us I think always hoped that we were only slightly ahead of our time. :) I hope that I live to see what Brian could not and Dennis may not, but time will tell.

Love,

Wade

Wade Frazier

26th January 2014, 16:02

Hi:

As an example of what I just wrote about, I have mentioned this before:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=579217&viewfull=1#post579217

but when Mr. Professor died, none of his siblings attended the funeral. He had four sisters, I believe. He was the oldest child and only boy. His father was an alcoholic, and Mr. Professor essentially became the breadwinner for the entire family. As with virtually all American men his age, he was in the military, and his paychecks were sent home to help support his parents and siblings. He never got into what he did for his family, but I saw enough of it to get a pretty good idea of it.

During his career in Ventura, he went home in the summers and helped around the farm. His mother nearly worshipped him (I experienced that part one day). He took care of her in her last years, and after she had a stroke that put her into a nursing home for the rest of her life, he visited every day.

His favorite “practical joke” was doing his neighbors' harvest when they were away from the farm, and they came back to a stacked up harvest, scratching their heads:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=296001&highlight=harvest#post296001

He was a millionaire the year before Dennis and I hit town, and when I left town three years later, he was bankrupt and his health had failed:

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

and he was forced into early retirement and moved back to the family farm and took care of his mother. I am sure that he mightily helped out his sisters when he was a millionaire. He and his wife could not have children, so they adopted two, a boy and a girl, but when one was five and the other seven and, as Mr. Professor told me, by that age they are ruined (children like that are ruined by age two). One’s biological mother was a Hell’s Angel biker chick, while the other was raised in an orphanage. The boy was in and out of institutions from age ten, and has spent nearly his entire adult life in prison, with Mr. Professor spending a pretty big chunk of his fortune on lawyers and the like. Mr. Professor finally gave up on his adopted son in his last years, partly because he was broke and could no longer afford the lawyers. He was also too broke to go to Mexico again to get treatment to extend his life:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/medicine.htm#gangrene

and I was too broke, paying off the debt of rescuing Dennis (I paid Mr. Professor each month, and only wished that I was sending him a hundred times as much), and his health failed before I could take him to one last trip to Alaska, which was his favorite recreational venue.

I don’t know all the dynamics, and Mr. Professor had far too much class to get into it much, but his sisters accused Mr. Professor of somehow taking advantage of his mother and the family relating to the family farm (which I know was the exact opposite of the truth), and they all disowned him. That is why none of them attended his funeral. That is the fate of the saints in our world. He saw what my family did to me during those dark days in 1988:

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

and it always pained him to see it, but if we talked today about all the family betrayals that I have endured since 1988, he would say, “Join the club.” So would Brian. It just comes with the territory, I am sorry to say.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

26th January 2014, 19:51

Hi:

As I am reading and writing about brain development and the rise of humanity, I take breaks, and I just saw this:

http://asiaconf.com/2014/01/25/shale-oil-charlatans/

It is nice when the financial crowd begins to wake up to the fact that the real economy is everything, and that it all rides on energy. However, these days, whenever I see any commentary on how the real economy runs on energy and always has, it always segues to Peak Oil, and that never gets far from the drumbeat of doom from people like Heinberg:

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

Sometimes, one of the financial crowd will say something like, “Well, we just need to find a new energy source!” And they then almost always think that the magic of capitalism will provide it. What they fail to see is that capitalism is actually part of the problem, not the solution. Godzilla’s antics are capitalism on steroids:

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

and all of the financial people are capitalists above all else, so the reality of the situation gores their ox and they dismiss organized suppression as a conspiracy theory, etc. And I am not really picking on them, just showing their particular ideological commitments that prevent them from comprehending the reality of the planet we live on. Scientists have their “laws of physics” blinders, their naïveté that denies organized suppression (or they get paranoid about it, which is probably an unhealthier reaction), academics and radicals look to mainstream science for the answers so they also buy the “laws of physics” game, and their structuralism also denies the organized suppression, while the conspiracists go overboard the other way, blaming the organized suppression for the situation, when it is actually a minor part of the dynamic:

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

What all of those avenues of denial and misperception have in common is that they are hooked on scarcity:

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

Their scarcity-blinders make it impossible for them to glimpse abundance. And, again, I am sympathetic to that kind of blinkered denial, and they won’t begin to wake up until FE is delivered to their homes. I eventually came to accept that, and I don’t even try to engage them anymore. All groups on Earth that I have encountered or heard of have that same scarcity-addiction. That is just how it is, when scarcity is all that humans have known, except for a few brief Golden Ages when a new energy source was plundered, such the USA’s industrial rise between about 1870 and 1970, fueled by oil. The party was over when energy consumption per capita peaked in the 1970s:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=786813&viewfull=1#post786813

but it has taken a while for the revelers to realize it, as the janitors are about to arrive and close the joint down.

I am looking for those needles in haystacks who can achieve a comprehensive and abundant perspective before FE is delivered to their doors, and there is plenty they can do without risking their lives like I did to get there:

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

That is my game.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

28th January 2014, 04:24

Hi:

Oh, my brain hurts! As I stated earlier in the essay, the closer science gets to the human chapter of the tale of life on Earth, the more research, the more theories, the more controversy. The subject of the rise of humans and the growing human brain, just the physical aspects, never mind the psychological aspects, is a minefield of competing hypotheses and research. Then when we begin to wrap cognition into it, it begins becoming unwieldy, and fast. Covering the bases and keeping the essay on track for its intention is going to be challenging. If I just keep thinking, “It’s an energy game!” then it makes sense. :)

Again, all that exists is energy and consciousness, and the growth of the human brain is the nexus of those dynamics. The bottom line is that an energy hog like the human brain had to get its energy from somewhere. Either the human body obtained more energy (disproven, as human and chimp metabolism are the same), or it reduced its output to support the brain (the energy savings of bipedal locomotion over chimp locomotion could actually explain the energy differential), or robbed it from other organs/activities, such as shrinking the digestive tract. Cooking comes into the issue, which brings up the control of fire, which was a truly epochal event, something never seen on Earth before, and it made humans invincible. Nothing could stand up to fire-wielding humans. Anyway, navigating all of that and weaving it into a coherent whole is my task for the next week or so. I am several pages into it, and it can be daunting at times. There have been some long days, and they will probably get longer as I get closer to the finish line. I am up to almost 180 pages right now. It will weigh in at over 250.

All that said, I am really happy with how it is going. When I finished my site more than a decade ago, I had developed a rhythm to my work. Today the rhythm is still there, but it has become a little more sophisticated, a little more comprehensive, a little more professional. I suppose that all writers strive for that. I have put in my ten thousand hours or so, and the craft is finally beginning to come clearer. There has been nothing easy about it, but at least I think I have been stumbling forward instead of backward. :)

Going to bed now.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

28th January 2014, 14:19

Hi:

In studying the rise of humans and primate research, and witnessing some current events around me, my approach keeps making more and more sense, at least to me, but maybe I am deluded. :) The roots of many human behaviors go back more than 25 million years. Vying for dominance, seeking the safety of the herd, mindless patriotism; every action is never far from some kind of immediate economic payoff, and those kinds of behaviors are well-represented in monkeys. Apes have more sophisticated versions of those behaviors, and humans more sophisticated still, but it is still all about survival, getting economic benefits and egocentric strokes.

The motivations are always economic above all else: food, shelter, personal safety. Again, it is like Maslow’s Hierarchy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

and in a world of scarcity, human awareness never rises far above the basics; it is all about their immediate self-interest. All other considerations take a back seat, even when the entire planet is at risk due to humanity’s incredibly short-sighted behaviors. When everybody has their blind allegiance to the ideologies that feed them:

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

they have abdicated their sentience for the promise of a fully belly. When they act with zero integrity:

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

to them, they are only doing what they need to survive. As Dennis has stated, he was only screwed by people he liked:

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

and the most common excuse that he would hear when they did it was, “It is nothing personal, just business.” That is what mobsters say in the movies when they kill their friends and family, and that mentality is all too real and pervasive. When some would explain further to Dennis why they were screwing him, they would say that he was so talented that he could start over, but that this was their only chance for success. They were stupid enough to think that robbing Dennis would somehow make them rich, instead of collapsing the entire effort for everybody. They were the classic idiots who killed the goose that laid golden eggs.

And that is why Level 10 approaches will not work:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level10

The masses are operating from pre-sentient motivations that are tens of millions of years old. This behavior is baked deeply, and when freaks like Brian, Dennis, and others glimpse what can be, they immediately want to tell the world, play Paul Revere and the like, to only wonder, years later, if humanity is really a sentient species:

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

To a large degree, humanity isn’t. Monkeys, even the most outcast in their societies, become flag-waving patriots when an outside threat appears, ready to become cannon fodder. When Americans abdicated their sentience in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#wtc

they were simply doing what monkeys have been doing for tens of millions of years. While scarcity and fear reign, humans will not become a sentient species, as their neocortex shuts down:

http://healthland.time.com/2013/04/16/how-terror-hijacks-the-brain/#ixzz2Qf3N3pTS

That is all part of the conundrum, and some very “bright” people are running the show, playing the strings of artificially-enforced scarcity like maestros, and humanity dances to the tune. Only needles in haystacks even want to become truly sentient. They will have to lead the way to sentience, and only when the means of ending scarcity are delivered to the world will humanity begin to become a truly sentient species.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

28th January 2014, 15:19

Hi:

As an addendum to the previous post, when Dennis would try to make alternative energy and FE happen via business efforts, the people attracted to it were all there to cash in (except for a few fools with voices in their heads, etc. :) ). Because their motivation was self-serving, the carrots and sticks of organized suppression easily killed the efforts. Only people like Dennis can survive the underhanded actions of their “allies” long enough so that Godzilla and friends would take notice.

When I bankrolled NEM in its first year:

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

Brian said that he would be pursuing rich altruists. Right then, I began to get cold feet, as I knew that there weren’t any. One of the typical FE newbie reactions is looking for rich “angels” to fund the effort. Money only buys somebody’s effort, so when efforts are looking for money, they are tacitly admitting that they are seeking people who need to be paid to help, which is really no help at all, not for making FE happen. That is why the “investor” model of making FE happen will not work, which goes for all commercial angles, such as getting patents and the like. The motivation is corrupted from the outset, and Godzilla defeats such efforts with rarely needing to raise a claw.

When I met with Dennis last spring, I got the update on what he had been doing:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=694872&viewfull=1#post694872

It was the same old story. Instead of just being run out of his home state:

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

or imprisoned in the state where I grew up:

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

Dennis was run out of his nation. Billionaires swarmed around him when he was flying high, with all sorts of noble rhetoric, and Dennis did not want to have anything to do with them. When they badgered him enough to where they got some of his time, they proved themselves to be just like everybody else; just trying to cash in. With Earth in the balance, one might think that billionaires might want to really help, but they don’t. They did not get to be billionaires by being altruists. I have seen other newbies think they could chase the heirs of dynamistic fortunes, such as Rockefeller heirs. Those avenues are carefully watched and closed off, and the first ones that think they will really help will get horses’ heads in their beds:

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

and go scurrying back to their mansions. The rich are worse than worthless for making FE happen. They are the ultimate beneficiaries of our evil system, and are not motivated to really change anything, even those naïve dynastic heirs. What Foster did is par for the course:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=621892&viewfull=1#post621892

Even if he is well-meaning, and those around me are far from sure about that, he is trapped in his silver-spoon paradigm.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

29th January 2014, 22:26

Hi:

Boy, this has been a long slog, writing this essay, and some days wear me out. But I am now getting to parts that are starting to boggle my mind. It is getting exciting, and the new connections that I was expecting to form as the process of studying and writing continued are happening. I am beginning to think that almost anybody who reads the essay and goes deep can have a personal paradigm shift. That was a kind of “gravy” outcome that I really did not expect. I figured that readers would need to read, reread, and go deep before it began to sink in, but I am beginning to think that it will happen faster and with a higher proportion of people than I originally anticipated. But time will tell. I am OK if it does not – paradigms shifts rarely happen in a person’s lifetime – but I am getting optimistic that it will happen with more people than I thought when I began writing this essay. It is starting to creep up on 200 pages.

Below is an excerpt that I just wrote, and I think I am only a few days from putting up the latest chapter draft.

Best,

Wade

Until now, I have used the word “epoch” in this essay as geologists do, to denote timeframes smaller than periods. But in describing the rise of humanity, I use “epochal” to mean gigantic events, where the human condition before and after the events became so radically different that the two times were like different geological epochs, when the radical changes following the events are considered. I consider making stone tools, growing the protohuman brain, and the control of fire to be the human journey’s first epochal events. In fact, those events led to human existence. They were all likely related, and probably tightly related, and with the current uncertainty I have made them all aspects of the same event. They could arguably be split, but the energy advantages of stone tools and fire greatly contributed to the expanding human brain, and the expanding human brain led to those inventions, in mutually-reinforcing feedback loops. Again, scientists are only certain that two things exist: energy and consciousness. Those interacted to produce humanity’s first epochal event(s).

If habilines began to control fire two mya, one thing is certain: the australopithecine Tesla who banged together the first rocks that fashioned a stone tool, and who was able to continue doing it and eventually taught others, probably via active demonstration or their observation, could not have imagined that his/her invention would lead to a relatively giant descendant (or cousin of a descendant) that slept on the ground, controlled fire, and would quickly migrate to the ends of Earth, traversing distances that were incomprehensible in Tesla’s time. That relatively quick series of innovations, never before seen on Earth, gave birth to a being that would have simply been unrecognizable to that australopithecine Tesla. There have been less than a handful of subsequent epochal events in the human journey, and like the first one(s), they were all primarily energy events, and were all dependent on humans gaining the social organization and technological prowess that enabled them to exploit a new energy source. And each time, the human reality after the epochal event was unimaginable to the humans who lived right before it. And the events and their aftermaths, as with the energy levels attained, became dramatically more concentrated each time, both in the time that the event took, the level of energy use attained, and the time to the next epochal event.

Ilie Pandia

30th January 2014, 05:59

I just had a click with this last paragraph. I knew you were serious when you said we cannot imagine abundance, but when you put it in perspective like that... it makes it very clear just how radically different a Free Energy world would be. It could easily surpass even our wildest dreams or not even look anything like our dreams.

Some of the changes that have happened in my life were very hard to predict or imagine (at least here in Romania, where electric power was a luxury good for a while) so... how will the next epochal event look like?

Wade Frazier

30th January 2014, 13:48

Hi Ilie:

Way back in the 1980s, when we began chasing FE:

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

I began wrapping my mind around the idea of FE and what the ramifications were. It quickly went far beyond my teenage dreams of changing the energy industry:

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

I have a fertile imagination, but I soon realized that I really could not imagine what all the changes would be. The best I could do was think in a directional way, in that scarcity could end (although I did not quite think of it in those terms way back then), and new ways of being would beckon. I could tell that I could not predict what all the knock-on effects would be, not even remotely. I could tell that the world as we know it would end, and for me, it was exciting, because the upside seemed pretty unlimited, and it was also obvious to me that we were rushing toward the abyss. And then I got to live through a nightmare, and almost nobody could even glimpse what we were trying to accomplish, as they projected their fears onto us.

What I found was that the fearful could also see pretty easily that with FE, the world would end as they knew it, and that scared them. All they could see was losing their carefully carved out niche of hell. It took me many years to understand the kinds of reactions I was seeing. I eventually organized them into those Levels we all know so well:

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

Literally thousands of reactions to the idea of FE are behind making that table. In just the past few months, I crossed a threshold: I have now spent more than half of my life thinking about FE and its ramifications. But I know that all my imaginings and study are barely scratching the surface:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#advanced

In 1995, I encountered Roads’s description of a visit to a future Earth:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

I met Roads at about the same time, and I don’t regard his account as fantasy. I know other psychonauts who have made similar visits. I regard Roads’s account as a glimpse of where we can go with FE. But I did not begin to think in terms of epochal events until relatively recently. I was going in that direction when I encountered Fuller’s work:

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

in 2002, but several years ago, I read a book published by Shell Oil, of all companies:

http://www.amazon.com/Energy-Engine-Evolution-Frank-Niele/dp/044451886X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391087019&sr=8-1&keywords=energy+engine+of+evolution

and my approach really began to crystallize. That book expressed it as energy revolutions:

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

but the author left out the super-predator revolution, or what anthropologists called The Great Leap Forward. And, of course, that author could not imagine FE or its potential.

So, I have had plenty of help over the years in developing my perspective and the framework of my essay. But I also know that if I had not been chewing on the idea for half of my lifetime, had my training from the cradle (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paths.htm#_edn4), and if I had not had my wild ride with Dennis, I would not be able to write like I have for more than the past twenty years, and there would be no way that I could be writing the essay that I am. It has literally taken a lifetime to get to where I could write this essay, and I will be surprised if I ever get another opportunity to write another like it. It has become a Bucket List task, and the essay is my planned hymnal for the choir. It also could become a living document, with new editions of it coming out every few years, as so much of it is based on current scientific understandings, and that always changes.

But what won’t change is the idea that we are riding the energy dragon. Without the incredibly high levels of energy that we are using, it would all come crumbling down, and it is beginning to, as the world runs out of hydrocarbons. Almost nobody sees it that way, mainly those who are scientifically illiterate, but the primary difference between the rich and poor nations is their level of energy use. Everything else is noise. I even knew that back in the 1990s:

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

but my understanding is far more refined today. That energy racket essay that I wrote back in about 2001 is going to look pretty tame compared to what I am writing. I will still keep that old essay on my site, as almost a reminder of how we can evolve our awareness if we do the work. The biggest change between writing that essay and the one I am writing is probably being introduced to Bucky’s work. I was really groping along, as a seat-of-the-britches comprehensivist, when I encountered Bucky, and then my paradigm crystallized. It really has not changed much since then; I have just been filling in the details.

Encountering the Peak Oilers the next year, and seeing how Heinberg treated the idea of FE:

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

was another helpful experience in my long journey. I began to collaborate closely with Brian O about the same time:

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

and that was another important event for the development of my awareness.

But all of us FE visionaries readily admit that we really can’t imagine what a world based on FE would look like. Many of the broad strokes are evident: the end of scarcity and poverty, the end of pollution and environmental destruction, the end of war, etc. But it is also evident that those are in terms of bad things about our current world that would go away, not so much what new doors could open. But it would be a good start. :)

For me, doorways of possibility would open that humanity has never glimpsed before. The bizarre part, for me, was how almost everybody ran away, shrieking, holding their heads, instead of getting inspired or excited. Or they kept trying to pour the new wine into the old skins (levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11 http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6).

I eventually kind of came full circle, to what Dennis was trying to do when I met him: he could not rely on the world’s “faith” in what he was doing. He would put “FE” on people’s homes, truly for free:

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

and only then would they begin to wake up. Dennis abandoned that strategy after the Seattle snuff job, but it may have been the most brilliant thing he ever did. Only more than twenty years later did I kind of come to the same vicinity again, after going the long way around, trying out many approaches, carrying Dennis’s and Brian’s spears, and the like. Joe Average is not going to wake up with talk. He will only begin to wake up when FE is delivered to his home:

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

That is all part of the world’s greatest conundrum:

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

If I can find those needles and train them, then maybe what I envision has a prayer of helping. It won’t hurt, nothing like it has ever been seen before, and it won’t be risking people's lives. I will need to keep out the gung-hoers, those who want to rush off and “do something” five minutes after they heard about FE for the first time. And Godzilla is watching. But I can only hope that he is underestimating the power of love and sentience, or underestimating how many people can achieve it and unite their awareness.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Dennis Leahy

30th January 2014, 16:02

Wade, is there a "Cliff's Notes" of Buckminster Fuller's mind? Not a biography, but rather a relatively quick way to experience his thought process - particularly to witness the comprehensivist mind at work, and what it was about Fuller's thinking that ignited and modified/focused some of your thinking.

There are nearly 400 hours of video, and thousands and thousands of pages that he wrote. I know in a huge way, this is an oxymoronic request - to condense and encapsulate a comprehensivist, so please don't laugh too hard at the absurdity of my request. I simply do not have the time (yet) in my life to dedicate to just tackling all of Fuller's material, but would appreciate knowing where I might get a glimpse.

Thanks,

Dennis
p.s. Only answer this if it is easy, off the top of your head - not if it requires sifting through material to find a representative sample. I also realize the answer may be, "no."

Wade Frazier

30th January 2014, 18:09

Hi Dennis:

That is a great question, and is similar to what I asked one of Fuller’s pupils when he said that I was a comprehensivist, and I did not know what he meant. He said that Bucky’s Grunch of Giants:

http://american-buddha.com/grunch.giants.htm

and Utopia or Oblivion were the best introductions to his work. I finished my site in September 2002, and I read Grunch and Utopia that subsequent winter, and after I read them, so much became clear to me, and I looked back at my site with a little frustration. It would have been so much easier for me to have encountered his work five years earlier. All of my short essays on my site since then:

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

have all been far more consciously comprehensive than the 2002 version of my site, and I have Bucky to thank for that.

It is hard to put it all into words, but it was like you had some vague idea that taking a boat across a swift and dangerous river every day was kind of crazy, and you knew that there must be a better way. You stretched a rope across the river one day, to make it so that you would not get swept downstream when you crossed, and it seemed to work. But you soon discovered that the local boat maker depended on replacing boats that were wrecked when the currents swept them away, and even went over the falls a few miles downstream, and he wrecked my rope ferry more than once. I eventually realized that not only was he of evil intent, but he even got the other boat owners to side with him, as he extolled the virtues of navigating dangerous crossings being good for the constitution, a babe-magnet thing to do, and the like, and they stupidly believed him.

I kept thinking about the problem, and one day, in my travels, I came upon Bucky’s Bridge. Hell, there was a way to eliminate dangerous river crossings! :)

In short, I had been a comprehensivist without knowing it, and when I finally saw Bucky’s Bridge, I saw what my professional grandfather had built, and I was no longer thinking of boats. I have written about my encounters with Bucky’s work and what I learned:

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

In fact, my encounter with Fuller inspired the essay where that footnote is, which could be seen as a baby step toward the essay I am writing today. I never read Bucky again, but would like to in my “spare” time, but I surely could not get more out of his work than I already did. To use another analogy, it is like I was using my backyard telescope to look at the moon’s surface, the rings of Saturn, and Jupiter’s moons. It was fun and I became quite the backyard astronomer, but the views were really kind of fuzzy and a lot of work. And then Bucky took me to an observatory. It all became a lot clearer. :)

My Fuller pupil pal said that Grunch was written just before Bucky died, and was really the only time that he kind of got Chomskyan in his writings. If he had done what Chomsky did when he was younger, he likely would have been marginalized far more than he has already, where most people only know about his dome (that is all I knew about him when I was introduced to his work). But since Bucky was an elder statesmen at about age 85 when he wrote Grunch, he let it rip, for the only time in his life that he really did that.

I hope that helps.

Best,

Wade

P.S. I am attaching a photo that my wife took when I was reading Utopia. Reading in bed is perhaps my most common pose, when I am not sitting in front of a computer screen. :)

Wade Frazier

30th January 2014, 19:29

Hi:

Briefly, before I get to work, kind of like an addendum to my previous post, here is another analogy that not only relates to Bucky’s work, but mine. Again, when Dennis essentially gave away his equipment:

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

that was about as brilliant as I ever saw, but not one of his business associates over the years, except me, really understood. Dennis hit the bulls-eye on bringing alternative energy technology to the market, and his approach will probably never be surpassed, and it has virtually never been tried before or since, not when the system is greed-oriented.

But there are other targets and bulls-eyes to hit, and when somebody gains a comprehensive understanding of how the world really works, the target becomes energy, and FE becomes the obvious bulls-eye. But in a world of scientifically illiterate people whose understanding goes no further that how much they pay for their energy (and they rarely understand that food is mostly energy), they don’t even see the target, much less the bulls-eye.

Dennis made the target look like money, not energy, and then everybody not only shot at it, they shot at each other, wanting to be the only person to hit that particular bulls-eye. But it was really a fake target, as it was only a symbol of the real target, but almost nobody could see it, nor did they want to. Their egos understood and even worshipped money. Energy was not something they understood very well, nor did they want to. They liked shooting at the money bulls-eye all day long.

I took a very different approach, not playing the game of deceiving people about hitting bulls-eyes that really did not mean much, and might indirectly help the world, as a side-effect of the greedy money chase (capitalist ideology literally extols greed as a virtue http://www.ahealedplanet.net/intro.htm#greed ). While Dennis found that almost everybody lined up for their chance to fire the arrow at the money bulls-eye, nobody was really interested in the energy bulls-eye, which was the only one that mattered, unless Dennis pasted a money bulls-eye over it.

Hitting the energy bulls-eye means leaving the ego behind, and almost nobody is willing to even try. I have given many facets of that phenomenon, such as personal integrity being the world’s scarcest commodity:

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

or that the dominant ideologies are scarcity-based:

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

or that we are all raised on Big Lies:

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

but what it is all really saying is that nobody is encouraged to aim at the bulls-eye that matters, or even know it exists, and what initially blew me away and still kind of does is that when I try to show somebody the only bulls-eye that matters, they will literally shoot anywhere else in the world that they can, rather than aim at the bulls-eye. As I think about my journey and the kinds of reactions I have received, it is incredible how people would shoot at everything but where I said the bulls-eye was, and most of the time, they did it while shouting what an idiot I was. I should watch them shoot at the only target worth aiming at, master archers that they were. I eventually stopped trying to engage people, as I knew that they would shoot anywhere but at the bulls-eye, and they usually took a shot or two at me. That just comes with the territory.

But once in a great, long while, I would stumble into a Bucky, or a Brian O, and see a master marksman at work. If nothing else, it made me realize that I was not crazy, that there was really a bulls-eye to aim at, even if 99.999% of the archers shot anywhere but at the bulls-eye.

In my own way, I am just trying to do the same thing; help enough of us aim at the bulls-eye so that we get something done, which is probably about the only thing worth doing on the planet right now. If we don’t hit that bulls-eye, and soon, the rest literally won’t matter.

Best,

Wade

Ilie Pandia

30th January 2014, 21:19

OK Wade,

Let me help you with this!

24690

See... it's not as hard as you make it! Now every one will get it! :biggrin1:

Wade Frazier

30th January 2014, 21:52

Thanks Ilie:

That gave me my afternoon laugh. There are several surreal aspects of my journey, not the least of which was that voice in my head that led me:

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

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice2

but only after I felt backed into a corner, and I have a feeling that whatever was behind that voice helped back me into those corners. So, I have wondered how helpful it was really being, or whether it was toying with me. The third time I heard it, I did not ask for it:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice3

and I don’t want to hear from it again. But what a chase to be on! FE would be the fifth and by far biggest epochal event in the human journey. I am not really into that energy scale that Kaku has promoted:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=772221&viewfull=1#post772221

but FE takes us closer to that Type 1 civilization than anything else ever has. And I know that FE is real, and pretty much the entire species is asleep or hacking at branches. The extremely few FE fellow travelers have either been taken out with Godzilla’s carrots and sticks, the slings and arrows from their “allies,” or they are trying dead-end approaches (Levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11 http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6 ).

It is easy to get overwhelmed by it all:

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

but it is the crazed or brain-dead denial that comes from 99.9% of the population that has been the most amazing to me, not what Godzilla is doing, not those who try and fail with the doomed approaches, etc. The deadness of the masses is why we don’t have FE. None of the other stuff is really important, compared to humanity’s inertia. But they won’t wake up by talk.

So, I keep doing what I do, but every now and then I stand back and think of what I burned up my life pursuing, and that I am even pursuing it is mind-boggling to me. I wished for it as teenager, and here I am, all those years later, still at it. Even though that voice sent me on a rough ride, I can’t regret it. It made me what I am, and is behind what I am trying next. It is pretty bittersweet, ambivalent stuff. It would be nice to live to see humanity begin to turn the corner, but I no longer expect it. It would certainly be nice, for many reasons, but this path is teaching me patience. :)

Thanks again for your artistic skills. :)

Back to work,

Wade

Wade Frazier

31st January 2014, 20:01

Hi:

I was hoping that when I got to the human part of the essay that the chapters might become smaller because my original site deals with so much of it, but I might be wrong. :)

The chapter I am working on, about the first epochal event, titled, “Humanity’s First Epochal Event(s?): Growing our Brains and Controlling Fire”, looks like it will be the longest chapter of my essay so far. As I look at it, I don’t see where I can cut too much. I think, however, that the next chapter, titled “Humanity’s Second Epochal Event: The Super-Predator Revolution”, can be a relatively short chapter, but we will see. :)

I hope to get that chapter draft done this weekend, and I will post it here. Although I am trying to keep the essay “level-set” where no one part is much harder to read than any other, and the concepts are all around the same level of difficulty, but the nature of the beast seems to be that as the essay progresses, it takes concepts from earlier in the essay to a new level, as fairly simple phenomena interact to lead to a more complex outcome later. The building blocks all can seem simple, but they begin to draw a larger and more complex picture. I think that is the challenge in achieving a comprehensive perspective. I have had scientists tell me that attaining and maintaining a comprehensive perspective will be hard, maybe too hard, for those who can’t do some science. All I can say to that is “We will see,” but a major goal of this essay, and maybe the major goal, is helping non-scientists begin to think comprehensively. We will see how it goes.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

1st February 2014, 16:29

Hi:

In writing an essay like that one I am working on, or creating and modifying information systems, which I have done professionally in my career, and is likely where my greatest talent and interest lies (which I may not get to exercise again in my career – the standard lament of the creative :) ), if you are going to try to do a good job, it will always take longer than you think, as you always find stuff during the process that needs to be addressed, which takes you on unforeseen tangents and the like. But when you get done, you are glad that you went deeper, as it made the work better, in the end.

It has been no different in writing this essay. I have been doing my best to keep the information at about the same level of detail, sophistication, and the like, but as I have been getting to the human part of the journey, it is getting harder in ways, and that is reflected in what I see in the Wikipedia articles that I link to. I link to Wikipedia many, many times in the essay, partly because they will tend to be the most persistent links. The essay also has 463 footnotes and counting, but it is not terribly scholarly on that account. The final version will likely refer to less than one hundred books, and probably less than one hundred scientific papers. For a 250-300 page work, that is really not very heavy lifting. I am trying to make it robust enough so that it can stand on its own feet, but keep it at a level where non-scientists can follow along and do the work to understand. I think that it should not really be that hard for people willing to do the work.

So, I have been trying to make links that are not going to change rapidly. I see myself updating dead links once a year, and the essay will likely become a living document, updated every year or so, or at least sections will be updated periodically, as scientific and other findings change.

I put a big disclaimer and caution in the essay, however, about the problems with Wikipedia, and refer to an experiment that I performed with Wikipedia several years ago on a massacre article:

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

and my experience with Wikipedia lately has confirmed the main problem with Wikipedia: people’s egocentric biases. The story of life on Earth on Wikipedia is actually treated pretty respectably for most of it. The formation of Earth, geological processes, star formation and processes – these all are primarily written by obvious scientists, and it shows. While there is certainly controversy in all areas, those areas that deal with such non-human subjects are written largely within Wikipedia’s guidelines, where they are refraining from doing original research, deal in a balanced way with the hypotheses, theories, and evidence, and so on. It is often a joy to read. But as I have been getting to the human portion of the essay, Wikipedia has been getting so marred that I am beginning to hesitate to link to it, as everybody begins to grind their axes. As with that massacre article, there is a great deal of muddying the waters as people defend their race, their species, their nation, their ideologies and professions, and the like. What I am seeing at Wikipedia is almost the upshot of my essay: as long as we are egocentric, focused on our narrow self-interest at the exclusion of everything else, we are doomed.

I hope to finish the draft of my current chapter this weekend, but it may bleed into next week, as I keep sorting out the controversies, trying to do them justice, etc. My process in this essay is that I begin reading works relating to the future chapters about when I start the chapter before the one I am writing about. Again, I have been studying the essay’s subject matter for about 25 years (but it really began when I was about eight, as I look back at it http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paths.htm#_edn4 ), and I have been studying for this particular essay since about 2007, but when it came time to write about the Carboniferous period or the rise of reptiles in the Permian, I had to go more deeply on the subjects, and that has been the process of writing the essay; going deeper and more intensely on each subject before I thought I could do it justice.

One book that I am currently reading in preparation for the chapter after the one I am currently writing on is Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, published in 2006, so it is not exactly new. It is about the rise of behaviorally modern people and how they conquered Earth, beginning about 50,000 years ago. I have been studying that subject in many works over the years, but recent work in analyzing human DNA has been painting a pretty stark picture of how today’s humans came to be: they arose and wiped out all human competitors, from Homo erectus to Neanderthals. And along the way, they wiped out all the megafauna that they could. Because humans had been living in Africa and Eurasia for millions of years, African and Eurasian megafauna learned to avoid people, and those animals had the highest survival rate of all the continents, especially in Africa, where humans originated, both Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, which were the two most important species.

DNA testing, where they can read the mutations in mitochondrial DNA (always passed down from the mother) and the Y chromosome (always passed down to men from the father), has clearly shown how humans spread across the planet. Neanderthals ruled Europe and the Middle East, and early human migrations to the Middle East about 100,000 years ago were likely wiped out by Neanderthals. But about 50,000 years ago, behaviorally modern people appeared in Africa, and some very small groups were able to escape Africa and get past the Neanderthals, probably by migrating to the Arabian Peninsula via the Horn of Africa. From there, they began to spread, and an early route was along the coast of Southern Asia and the Indonesian archipelago, where they boated across to Australia, somewhere around 45,000 years ago. They were the first humans to make it to Australia. When they arrived, they quickly drove all the megafauna to extinction. There is no serious doubt amongst scientists that humans were solely responsible for the Australian megafaunal extinctions.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=782950&viewfull=1#post782950

The people that left Africa and conquered the world may have only numbered a few hundred, which created a genetic bottleneck. What that also did, however, is make humans pretty universal in their traits. There has been a lot of recent work on what humans universally have in common, traits which that migrant band possessed:

http://www.udel.edu/anthro/ackerman/universal_people.pdf

Perhaps first and foremost, they mastered spoken language, which was new on Earth. Language allowed for vastly improved cultural transmission, and had a great deal to do with what is called The Great Leap Forward, where humans suddenly began to display cultural modernity, which was reflected in a leap in tool sophistication, art, and other evidence that those early humans left behind. And nothing could stand in their way. Nothing. They quickly drove all other human species to extinction, including the Homo erectus populations of Eastern Asia, the Neanderthals, and even anatomically modern humans who were not part of that wave of 50,000 years ago. They were probably genetically different enough, especially in the language acquisition part of their brains, that none of the other human species could emulate it, which likely led to their extinction.

By 20,000 years ago, all other human competitors were extinct, except for some “hobbits” who hid on Flores Island until modern humans arrive there:

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

The Cro-Magnons not only drove Neanderthals to extinction in what became a range war that lasted for about 15,000 years, but they also began to hunt mammoths en masse on the Mammoth Steppe below the ice sheets. They were the first cold-adapted modern humans, and it did not take them long to drive the mammoths and other megafauna like them to extinction. Then around 15,000 years ago, as the ice sheets began to melt, which began the current interglacial period, humans migrated to the Americas, and the first ones probably used a seashore route, just as their ancestors did in making it to Australia. And it looks like another group made it over land, and they were the ones who quickly drove all the megafauna of the Americas to extinction.

This is all hotly debated today, largely for the same reasons why Wikipedia goes downhill when the subject of humanity is addressed: humanity is in the dock, being held accountable for its “contribution” to the world we live in, and the story is far from pretty.

DNA testing has been providing startling insights into human migrations. The humans who left Africa were a small portion of the human genome at the time, but the entire human genome (excluding those who lived outside Africa) may have only been about 5,000 people or so, 50,000 years ago. The !Kung people are descended from those who stayed behind:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_people

and Andaman Islanders:

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

aboriginal Australians, and New Guineans were among the earliest human groups that all quickly became isolated and were the most “pure” populations on Earth when Europeans began conquering it.

As anthropologists began to study those isolated populations, at least those who survived the initial European onslaught, one thing became clear: they were Earth’s most violent humans. It put a huge dent in the romantic fantasies of the peaceful hunter-gatherers. Those isolated peoples were Earth’s most violent, proportionally. Warfare with their neighbors was standard behavior.

Those modern humans, whom we are all descended from, were the most successful species of all time, and they quickly came to dominate Earth, and after they killed off all the easy meat, their numbers kept growing and population pressures led to the third epochal event: the Domestication Revolution. Independently, in nearly a dozen places, humans began to domesticate plants and animals. Within a few thousand years, in every place where they did that, civilization appeared. And just like there are universal human traits, all early civilizations had striking similarities. They all had elites, always primarily men, who climbed atop the new hierarchies, and they all corrupted the religion of the day (all early peoples had some kind of religion) into making them into deific figures, and they all sponsored monumental architecture to glorify themselves and further reinforce their “divine” status, and they all had enhanced reproductive rights, which is a polite way of saying that they had harems.

Those were universal developments among behaviorally modern humans. What was also universal was that those civilizations were never sustainable, as their methods of wrenching energy from the environment wrecked them, and the civilizations would collapse when they ran out of energy, which came primarily in the form of food back then.

But probably the most important domesticate was humans. The wild, violent males gave way to something more tractable, and many cultural tools were brought to bear on the problem, which largely amounted to social conditioning and what ended up being selective breeding. The innate violence in those early modern humans was largely bred out of the gene pool, but it could still be seen in those isolated early humans.

What a story, huh? :)

The state of the art scientific findings are making that picture clearer all the time, but fierce battles are taking place, and the salvos can be seen on the pages of Wikipedia and even in the scientific literature, where there is a movement to blame all the megafaunal and human extinctions on climate change, disease, and other non-intentional reasons. There is an increasingly marginal opposition to the human-induced megafaunal extinction hypotheses. Killing the large herbivores off as the easy meat that sustained the early human migrations was the primary vector of extinction, but there were also knock-on effects where the species that relied on environments created by those herbivores, elephants in particular, were driven to extinction.

In many ways, it is the same story today, of humans tapping a new energy source and plundering it to exhaustion, as we are doing with fossil fuels today.

Again Brian’s question looms ever larger as I slowly progress to the end of my essay:

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

Are we really a sentient species? Can we be? Do we want to be? That is probably the crux of my essay.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

zenith

1st February 2014, 18:02

Even though that voice sent me on a rough ride, I can’t regret it.
It made me what I am, and is behind what I am trying next.

History of the Universe in 2 sentences. :)

Wade Frazier

1st February 2014, 19:43

Zenith's posts are always short and brilliant. This is still probably my favorite Avalon post:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32467-Free-Energy---No-way-in-hell-&p=432120&viewfull=1#post432120

Wade Frazier

1st February 2014, 23:31

Hi:

I have been doing chores so far today, and taking a little Avalon break before I get back to the essay. This morning, somebody asked me if I knew the movie where the words “F**k You” were said the most times, and my first guess was right. I doubt it is a good thing to know that answer. :)

Thinking about my answer took me to several places in my mind today. One is an anecdote about the mob (yes, the answer to the above question is a mob movie). Unfortunately, I can tell quite a few mobster stories that those close to me have experienced, and a story came to mind that I heard from a close friend recently. Like Godzilla, the mob does not advertise who they are, as it is not good for “business.” Until the 1980s, as I recall, the uniform answer from all mobsters was that there was no such thing as the mob. In the days when the first Godfather movies came out, one of my friends ended up doing “business” with mobsters. He did not seek them out; it was quite the other way around, and is one of the hazards of being in business in certain parts of the USA. Anyway, my friend was with the mobster, and the mobster liked my friend and tried to warn him, it seems. He drove around with my friend, making the “mobster” rounds in his town. My pal began to “get it,” and on one of their stops, he went into a building with the mobster and ended up in a mobster “lounge,” and the guy they made that movie about, the Ice Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iceman_%28film%29 ), was in the room, telling some other “associates” about his recent exploits. My friend heard the Ice Man’s stories with increasing alarm, knowing that he should not be there, and he found a way to excuse himself real fast.

He extricated himself from his business relationship from the mobster as soon as he could, and the mobster received extremely handsome “severance pay.” :) You can get out of situations like that, if you do it right. I doubt, however, that there are any easy exit plans from Godzilla’s organizations, probably like joining a mob family, but about three orders of magnitude higher on the scale.

And that will segue to an addendum to my morning’s post, about the human journey and today’s Universal Human. As I recently wrote, my last remaining immediate family relationship has ended. I knew the person had been a quasi-sociopath since birth, but I still tried to help him, and when he could not use me anymore, he went for the jugular, but I was already protected, knowing who he was. At this stage of my life, virtually all those whom I have helped, including my parents, siblings, and some friends, some of which was on the life-saving scale of help, all eventually tried to go for my jugular. I have written about some of it on Avalon:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=694648&viewfull=1#post694648

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=695102&viewfull=1#post695102

and how I watched it happen to veritable saints:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=789340&viewfull=1#post789340

I was recently in a conversation where I was kind of accused of having a warped view of humanity, and that humans weren’t all like that. The fact is, they mostly are. It is just what it is. Of all those people that attacked me, going for my jugular, not one of them ever apologized, and they all did it self-righteously, and I know that to this day, they all feel justified in what they did. I really do my best to not take it personally anymore. I long ago realized that I was just seeing humanity up close and personal. And to be fair to those who did those things, part of what happened was regarding what my life’s work is all about. Again, nobody has a lukewarm reaction to FE and healing the planet. It overwhelms everything else happening on the planet, and everything that has happened in the human journey so far.

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

What happens is that those around me would get an itch like an Orc being near the One Ring. And if they are around the ring long enough, no matter how they try to behave themselves, their Orc nature comes out. It is just more of what I discovered the hard way:

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

and that is not a judgment of humanity, but just realizing who we are as a species, and as the human journey is getting pieced together by scientists:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=791891&viewfull=1#post791891

the awful story is being told. When I have watched “skeptics” lie so shamefully about Dennis:

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

or the “big names” in the FE field do it:

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

and watched others repeat the lies or naively defend the libelers, and sometimes those very same people turned around and attacked Brian O, those are just more examples of the same phenomenon, and brings up the question whether humanity is really a sentient species, and if we are, if we aren’t all near-Orcs, the kinds of sociopaths who only have a thin veneer of “virtue” that is only used so that we can get in position to trawl in the goodies that we steal from others. Godzilla only seems to be the master of a game that nearly all humans play, and he probably reads stuff like this and laughs, thinking what an idiot I am for even trying.

It is just what it is. That does not mean that I have given up hope, not by any means, but what it does mean is that I have no interest in the naïve, inexperienced, and usually deeply-deluded approaches to the FE conundrum that I have labeled Levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6

People thinking their friends, family, and colleagues’ eyes are going to light up at the mention of FE and abundance and are going to really help are naïve and foolish. I was once naïve and foolish too, but I can no longer afford to play those games, and that kind of stuff is highly unproductive and dangerous, even fatally so. I am looking for needles in haystacks.

Those Levels are all suicidal approaches, but newbies just can’t seem to help themselves. As I have written plenty, people will only begin to put away their Orc ways when abundance reigns, and only FE can do that, which Godzilla knows well. Even if it is our human “nature” to be Orcs, even Orcs can change, which is my game. I have written plenty that watching people being forced to murder each other was the leading entertainment in the ancient world’s greatest empire:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=769646&viewfull=1#post769646

and three hundred years ago, nobody on Earth was challenging the hallowed institution of slavery:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=753632&viewfull=1#post753632

So, we have made “progress,” which was entirely based on our economic situation. Today, the USA can murder millions of people to steal their hydrocarbons:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

but Americans’ consciences are “developed” enough so that they don’t cheer our genocidal slaughters like they did a little over a century ago:

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

They just pretend that the slaughters are not happening, or if they ever acknowledge any of it, it then goes straight down Orwell’s Memory Hole, usually followed by some self-righteous flag-waving:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#orwell

So, that is “progress” of a sort, but certainly nothing where some kind of mass FE movement has a prayer.

On a related note, I see stuff like this fairly often, about how energy runs the show and we are running out of it:

http://ourfiniteworld.com/2014/01/29/a-forecast-of-our-energy-future-why-common-solutions-dont-work/

But the so-called “solutions” those kinds of people bandy about (seriously, look at the “solutions” at the end of that article) are nothing but a drumbeat of doom and austerity. I will likely not be contacting anybody like that when I publish my essay. My experience has been that less than one-in-a-thousand people like that will seriously consider FE for an instant before flying off the handle into Level 5 fears, Level 3 denial, etc., and really bunker up. And what has really been challenging is when well-meaning people send me stuff like that, thinking that that person is somehow going to be an ally of an FE effort. They usually go in the warpath to attack and deny FE, not try to help (and if that woman ever gave FE half a thought, her colleagues would quickly “help” her get back in line with the doom and austerity program). All of my fellow travelers have played the game of going after people like that, and after several years of banging on those doors, Brian O wondered if we were a sentient species:

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

and I sadly understood. I am doing something very different, and we will see how it goes.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

2nd February 2014, 22:06

Hi:

There comes a time in the writing process where writers and editors get tired of looking at it. When writing technical business documents for the past ten years, and having them go through numerous rounds of comments and drafts, there was often a time like that near the end, and I wanted it to be over. But mistakes could become exhibit A in lawsuits, so I always stuck it out to the bitter end. During the process of writing the upcoming essay, every chapter was new and unusual in ways, but for most chapters I reached a sort of “good enough for this draft” stage, and was looking forward to studying for and writing the next chapter. Today I reached that stage on the current chapter. As stated previously, the chapters are becoming more complex, along with the subject matter, and I am sure that I will be revising the later chapters more than the earlier chapters as I near the end of the initial writing process.

Then will come revisions, re-editing, studying some parts more deeply and revising them, etc. But, for now, the current chapter draft is at a place where I want to stop and go to the next chapter. This chapter may receive heavy revision before I publish the essay, but without further preamble, here it the current state of the draft. This is too large for one post, so I am breaking it in two.

Best,

Wade

Humanity’s First Epochal Event(s?): Growing our Brains and Controlling Fire – Part 1

When that human ancestor made the first stone tool, it was the culmination of a process of increasing encephalization and manipulative ability that probably began its ascent with the appearance of apes and accelerated when humanity’s ancestors became bipedal. As mentioned previously, studying great apes today and applying those findings to humanity’s ancestors is problematic, but there has probably not been significant evolution in great apes since they descended from the last common ancestor that they shared with humans, particularly chimpanzees. About 2.5 mya, bonobos split from the other chimpanzee populations and became a separate species, but for many years scientists did not realize it. Another chimpanzee split about 1.5 mya created east and west chimp species that are virtually indistinguishable today. There is very likely that the last common ancestor of chimps and humans looked like a chimp.

Other than humans, rhesus macaques are Earth’s most widespread primates, and both species are generalists whose ability to adapt has been responsible for their success. Rhesus macaques are significantly encephalized, about twice that of dogs and cats, and nearly as much as a chimpanzee. Rhesus macaques have what is called Machiavellian social organization, where everybody is continually vying for rank and where power is everything. Those with rhesus power get the most and best food, the best and safest sleeping places, the nicest environments to live in, and endless grooming by subordinates, whom the dominants can beat and harass whenever they want, while those low in the hierarchies get the scraps and are usually the first to succumb to the vagaries of rhesus life, including predation. But even the lowliest macaque will become a patriotic soldier if his society faces an external threat, as even a macaque knows that a miserable life is better than no life at all. The human smile evolved from the teeth-baring display of monkeys that connotes fear or submission.

For all of their seeming cunning and behaviors right out of The Prince, rhesus monkeys cannot pass the mirror test; they attack their images, seeing themselves as just another rival monkey. Chimpanzees, on the other hand, pass the mirror test, and the threshold of sentience, whatever sentience really is, is likely not far from being able to pass the mirror test. Capuchin monkeys, considered the most intelligent New World monkeys, have socially-based learning, where the young watch and imitate their elders, and different capuchin societies have different cultures reflected in different solutions to similar foraging problems, and different tool-using behaviors.

Chimps and orangutans have distinct cultures and ways of transmitting knowledge, usually confined to observation. They have regional variations in tool use, and orangutans often display startling intelligence in captivity that is not witnessed in the wild, which may be similar to country bumpkins moving to the city where they can develop their intellects or get a chance to use them. Chimps can negotiate, deceive, hunt in ranked groups, learn sign language, use more than one tool in a process, problem-solve, and engage in other human-like activities. Developmentally, a chimp is ahead of a human until about age two, and chimps can also express empathy. Research has shown that imitation (performing somebody else’s actions) and empathy (feeling what somebody else feels) are likely related to similar neurology.

Those observable aspects of today’s simians probably reflect ancestral traits predating the evolutionary splits that led to humans. A chimpanzee’s brain is about 360 cubic centimeters (“ccs”) in size, and that gracile australopithecine that likely made those early stone tools had a brain of about 450 ccs. That brain growth reflected millions of years of evolution since the chimpanzee line split, at least a million years of bipedal existence, and hands adapted to manipulating tools. The cognitive and manipulate abilities of the species that made early stone tools seem to have been significantly advanced over chimps.

The rise of humans was dependent on numerous factors, but the most important may have been the ability to increase humanity’s collective knowledge. If each invention during human history had to be continually reinvented, there would not be people today. The cultural transmission of innovations was critical to growing humanity’s collective technology, skills, and intelligence. Striking stones to fashion tools was new on Earth, and it was likely invented once, and then proliferated as others learned the skill. The pattern of proliferation of stone tool culture in Africa supports that idea.

Those first stone tools are called pebble tools, and anthropologists have placed the protohumans who made them in the Oldowan culture (also called the Oldowan industry, or Mode 1 on the stone tool scale). The rocks used for Oldowan tools were already nearly the shape needed, and were made by banging candidate rocks on a rock “anvil,” and the fractured rock’s sharp edge was the tool. Those first stone tool makers were largely still the hunted, not hunters, and stone edges would have been similar to claws and teeth that would have made scavenging predator kills easy in a way that primates had never before experienced. Modern researchers have used Oldowan tools to quickly butcher elephants. Sawing a limb from a predator kill and stealing it would have been quick and easy. Stone tools also crushed bones to extract marrow, and would have made harvesting and processing plant foods far easier.

Scientists today think that above all, the first stone tools began humanity’s Age of Meat. Meat is a nutrient-dense food, in protein more than calories, is highly prized among wild chimpanzees that use it as a key social tool, and male chimps have used it as payment for sex. The human brain is more than three times the size of a chimpanzee’s, but recent research suggests that the human brain’s size is normal for its body size, while great ape brains seem to be relatively small because their bodies became relatively large, possibly due to sexual selection that resulted from vying for mates. Humans developed relatively larger brains and relatively smaller and weaker bodies, which was likely an energy tradeoff; something had to give. Protohumans began relying on brains more than brawn. The studies of brain size, encephalization, neocortex function, intelligence, and their relationships are in their infancy. The current leading hypothesis for the stimulant for simian brain growth is social navigation. Larger brains were needed for navigating increasing social complexity, and not only the number of individuals in a society, but the sophistication of the interactions. It is also argued that smarter brains allowed for greater social complexity, in another possible instance of mutually-reinforcing positive feedbacks. Societies can perform tasks that individuals cannot. Those Machiavellian rhesus macaques engage in wars and revolutions. They can procure a food source and secure the territory, creating the means of developing a society. Tool-making may have been a bonus of that enlarged brain needed for social navigation, and walking bipedally coincidentally provided new opportunities for hands. There are a fair number of hypotheses proposed to explain the rise of human intelligence, and all of those posited dynamics may have had their influences. As noted previously, brains have very high energy requirements, about ten times the energy needs of equivalent muscle mass, and primates cannot turn their brains off any more than they can turn their livers off. Few studies have been performed on the relationships between energy, brains, and sleep, but a recent one found that sleep seems to be how brains recharge themselves.

Larger brains had to confer immediate advantages or else they would not have evolved, especially as energy-demanding as they are. Evolutionary pressures ensure that there is no cost without a benefit. As humans have demonstrated, intelligence combined with manipulative ability led to a domination of Earth that no other organism ever achieved. Humans weigh about 50% more than chimpanzees, but human brains are 250% heavier. A human brain comprises about 2% of the body’s mass, but uses about 20% of its energy at rest. Growing an energy-demanding organ was funded with the coin of energy. How did protohumans manage it?

There are a number of possible solutions to obtaining the energy to fuel the growing protohuman brain, and they all fall under these categories:

1. Increase total energy input;
2. Reduce total energy output;
3. Rob energy from other tissues and processes; they will either become smaller, more energy efficient, or will be abandoned.

Studies have shown that humans and chimpanzees have the same basal metabolism, so the first possibility is considered very unlikely in our ancestors, although large brains in general seem to require higher metabolic rates. The subject of reducing energy output has an intriguing hypothesis: bipedal motion allowed humans to move using less energy than our pre-bipedal ancestors. Human bipedal locomotion requires only a quarter of the energy that chimpanzee locomotion does, and chimps use about a quarter of their metabolism walking. Even though protohumans would have taken advantage of bipedal walking to range further than chimps (humans can average eleven miles a day, while chimps can only achieve six), thereby using a relatively larger proportion of their energy on locomotion, bipedal locomotion energy savings alone might largely account for the growing brain’s energy needs. The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis was developed to account for the required energy, and proposed that energy to fuel the growing brain came from reducing digestion costs, which was initially provided by eating more meat.

As stated previously, gorillas and chimpanzees are hindgut fermenters and can digest cellulose, and humans cannot. The human digestive tract is only about 60% of the size expected for a primate of our size. Human guts are far smaller than chimp and especially gorilla guts, which process all of that foliage. Chimps and gorilla rib cages flare outward from top-to-bottom, like a dress, as did australopithecine rib cages, to accommodate large guts.

When chimpanzees eat meat, they put large, tough leaves in their mouths. That helps them overachieve as meat eaters, as their teeth and jaws are poorly adapted for chewing meat. Mountain gorillas eat no meat at all. In the wild, great apes spend about half of their day chewing. Chimpanzees are the most carnivorous great ape, and although meat is the greatest treasure in chimpanzee societies, they often stop eating meat after chewing it for an hour or two, and go back to fruit and other softer foods if they can get it. Chimpanzees hunt animals primarily during the dry season when their staple, fruit, is scarce. Chimps have been seen killing monkeys, eating their organs, and then abandoning the corpses to find more monkeys to kill. Organ meats and intestines are far easier to chew, and a poor meat chewer like a chimpanzee prefers soft meats. Just as chimpanzees prefer soft meats, predators will eat soft organs first, leaving the tougher muscle for later, if they eat it at all. It depends on how plentiful the available flesh is, but the pattern across all predator groups is clear: eat the best, first, and leave the lesser quality foods to the end or let scavengers have them. It will always be a cost/benefit decision. All things being equal, the less time and energy needed to eat something, the sooner it will be eaten. If extra time and effort is needed to procure food, then the nutritional reward (primarily in energy) has to be exceptional in order to justify it. Evolutionary pressures have made animals into excellent accountants.

A recent study has challenged The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis, at least as far as robbing energy from the digestive system to fuel the brain. The study compared brain and intestinal size in mammals and found no strong correlation, but there was an inverse correlation between brain size and body fat. But since human fat does not impede our locomotion much, humans have combined both strategies for reducing the risk of starvation. Whales have also bucked the trend, also because being fatter does not impede their locomotion, and it also provides energy-conserving insulation. A human infant’s brain uses about 75% of its energy, and baby fat seems to be brain protection, so that it does not easily run out of fuel. However, the rapid growth of an energy-demanding organ like the human brain seems unique or nearly so in the history of life on Earth, and comparative anatomy studies may have limited explanatory utility. There are great debates today on how fast the human brain grew and what coevolutionary constraints may have limited the brain’s development (1, 2, 3), and the scientific investigations regarding those issues are in their early days.

About a quarter million years after Oldowan culture began, a new species appeared called Homo habilis, named by Louis Leakey in 1964. Whether Homo habilis is really the first member of the human genus has been debated ever since. As with all of its primate ancestors, Homo habilis was adapted for tree climbing. Just as virtually all apes and monkeys sleep in trees, especially those in Africa, with silverback gorillas being about the lone exception, Homo habilis certainly slept in trees. The predators of African woodlands and grasslands have been formidable for many millions of years, and predators of Homo habilis in those days included Dinofelis, Megantereon, and Homotherium. Night camera footage is readily available on the Internet today, showing the night behaviors engaged in by hyenas, lions, and others. The African woodlands and plains are highly dangerous at night, just from roving predators, not to mention being stumbled into by elephants, rhinos, and water buffalos. Today’s African hunter-gatherers sleep around the campfire to keep predators and interlopers at bay, with a sentinel keeping watch as everybody sleeps in shifts through the twelve-hour nights. They are safer from predation at night in camp than they are in daytime as they roam.

The anatomy of habilines (members of Homo habilis) spoke volumes about their lives. They had brains of about 640 ccs, with an estimated range of 600 to 700 ccs, nearly 50% larger than their australopithecine ancestors and nearly twice that of chimps, and the artifacts they left behind denoted improved cognitive abilities. They stood about 1.5 meters tall (five feet), and weighed around 50 kilograms (120 pounds). With the first appearance of habilines about 2.3 mya, Oldowan culture spread widely in East Africa, and also radiated to South Africa. Habiline adaptations to tree climbing meant that they slept there at night, just as their ancestral line did. Their teeth were large, meaning that they heavily chewed their food. Habiline sites have large rock hammers that they likely pounded food on, to break bones and crack nuts. Those habiline stone hammers may well have also been used to soften meat before eating it. Because they slept in trees, habilines were preyed on, with big cats likely doing most of the preying. Today, the leopard is the only regular predator of chimpanzees and gorillas, and leopards have developed a taste for humans at times. But if modern studies of chimpanzees are relevant, our ancestors engaged in warfare for the past several million years, and monkeys have wars, so simian intra-species mass killings may have tens of millions of years of heritage, so habilines were not only wary of predators, but members of their own species.

Chimpanzees are the only non-human apes today that form ranked hunting parties, and they are also the only ones that form hunting parties to kill members of their own species. Distinct from the killer ape hypothesis, which argues that humans are instinctually violent, the chimpanzee violence hypothesis proposes that chimps only engage in warfare when it makes economic sense: when the benefits of eliminating rivals outweigh the costs. Macaque wars and revolutions appear spontaneously, but chimp wars have calculation behind them, befitting a chimp’s advanced cognitive abilities; they plan murderous raids and carry them out. It is quite likely that the advancing toolset of protohumans was used for coalitionary killing when perceived benefits exceeded assessed costs, just like other behaviors that humans and chimps have in common that probably also existed in our last common ancestor.

Habilines and australopithecines coexisted, with the last gracile australopiths discovered so far going extinct about 2.0 mya. Robust australopiths survived to about 1.2 mya (1, 2), and habilines disappeared about 1.4 mya, so they overlapped the tenure of a species about which there is no doubt of its genus: Homo erectus, which first appeared about 2.0-1.8 mya, with the first fossils dated to 1.8 mya. Homo erectus is the first member of the human line that could pass for a human on a city street, dressed up and wearing minor prosthetics on their heads and faces. Homo erectus had a protruding nose and was likely relatively hairless, the first of the human line to be that way, likely related to shedding heat in the new environments it could live in, as well as cool its large brain. There are great controversies about that overlap among those three distinct lines that might all have ancestral relationships. Oldowan culture was likely a multi-species one. There is plenty of speculation that the rise of Homo habilis and its successors caused the extinction of other hominids, driving them to extinction by competition, predation, warfare, or some combination of them. What is certain is that “competing” protohumans went extinct after coexisting with the human line for hundreds of thousands of years. The suspicion that evolving humans drove their cousins to extinction becomes more common as the timeline progresses toward today.

The fossil record is thin for early humans, and any portrayal of the human family tree of those times always carries the disclaimer that it is speculative. Here is a current depiction of the human family tree, with geographical distributions presented. With the paucity of fossils, particularly between 2.5 and 1.0 mya, a timeframe in which the bones of only about fifty individuals have been found so far, discoveries are regularly announced, and can be promoted as a find that will shake up the human family tree, and that recently discovered australopith kept evolving hands better suited for tool-making, in parallel to developing humans, or perhaps is even a human ancestor, relegating Homo habilis to an extinct offshoot, not a human ancestor. With such a scant existing record, such announcements can be more than hyperbole. There are often heated controversies over the dates of fossils and artifacts, where changing a date can completely change how the evidence is viewed. Indeed, many findings can change from minor curiosity to paradigm-shifting discovery and back again, depending on the dates assigned to them.

The most complete fossil find for the early human line is called Turkana Boy, who lived about 1.5 mya. He was a child or juvenile, and would have stood more than 1.6 meters tall as an adult, about as tall as an average woman today (earlier estimates that he would have been more than 1.8 meters tall (six feet) in adulthood appear overstated today). He is the ultimate Homo erectus find so far, and changes from his ancestral species were substantial. His teeth shrank the most between species in the entire line from the chimp/human split, by about 20%, his jaws shrank as well, and perhaps most importantly, his guts shrank, as his rib cage is nearly modern in being more barrel-shaped than flaring at the bottom, which was also the most dramatic rib change in the human line. His hips became narrower and he no longer had the shoulder, arm, and hand adaptations needed for sleeping in trees; he was fully adapted for living on the ground. Homo erectus may have been the first member of its line since the chimp/human split to leave Africa, and was certainly the first to become widespread. The Homo erectus story is a big one, and covers several subjects germane to this essay.

I am taking some liberties in calling Turkana Boy a Homo erectus; he is technically a member of Homo ergaster, which is often considered ancestral to Homo erectus, which is the Asian version’s name. There is great debate regarding how the human family tree branches between Ardi and Homo heidelbergensis, with some calling the various erectus-type species all subspecies of Homo erectus, while others argue for several distinct species. I will not stray far from the orthodox narrative here, for good reason. The reconstructed early human tale is based on very limited evidence, but that evidence will only grow over time, and the tools and techniques for using them will become more sophisticated. While there may be some upcoming radical changes in the view of the early human journey, efforts of countless scientist and fossil hunter lifetimes support the narrative that this essay sketches, and I respect their findings and opinions, even though I acknowledge many limitations and how the human ego became more involved as the story of life on Earth moved closer to its human chapters.

Some further examples of the complexity and debate follow. About when Homo erectus is supposed to have appeared, a fossil was found of a similar date and in a similar location, which was at least contemporary with Homo habilis. Where it fits in the human family tree is unknown at this time, but today it is called Homo rudolfensis, perhaps a descendant of Kenyanthropus platyops, which Maeve Leakey, who led the team that discovered it, argued is a member of a new genus. Because there is Neanderthal DNA in the modern human genome, under the classic definition of a species, Neanderthals have been placed within Homo sapiens by some anthropologists. Some small erectus fossils in Georgia were initially classified in their own species, but are now designated as an erectus subspecies. The “hobbit” fossils recently discovered on Flores Island are widely considered to be island-dwarfed erecti, but they have features that suggest that they may have been habilines or even australopithecines, which would dramatically change the current view on the first migrations past Africa. They may well have been Oldowan culture australopiths that migrated from Africa about when Homo erectus did, and they also controlled fire. Similarly, an erectus species that precedes Homo heidelbergensis is called Homo antecessor, but it also may be an erectus subspecies. The confusion and debate is partly because the differences between those “species” are minor, more on the order of regional variation than any radical change. They probably could have all interbred with each other. Other than the “hobbits,” there are no great anatomical changes, and few noticeable cultural ones among the various specimens for more than a million years of evolution, so I refer to them all as erectus, which many anthropologists also do, particularly when writing for the lay audience. For those who want to explore the relatively fine distinctions, the material is readily available for study and can be another useful example of the process of science, if one of the more heated illustrations.

The leading hypothesis today is that Homo erectus evolved from Homo habilis and first appeared in East Africa between 2.0 and 1.8 mya. If those are not the exact species that the human line descended through during those times, our actual ancestors were close cousins. The early erectus adults had brains of about 850 ccs, and some later specimens reached 1,100 ccs. Today’s human brain only averages about 1,200 ccs. Homo erectus, as with other members of the line, had a brain that was another third larger than Homo habilis, and it likely led to it relatively sophisticated material culture. But as important as its growing brain was, the other anatomical changes were more telling. Homo erectus was fully-adapted for living on the ground and walking great distances. For the first quarter million years of Homo erectus’s existence they lived in the Oldowan culture, which was little more than rocks with sharpened edges, and maybe some sticks. They evolved in a highly dangerous environment, and all their ancestors slept in trees. How could they have slept on the ground? In a word: fire.

More than any other technical innovation, the control of fire marked humanity’s rise. In his The Descent of Man, Darwin called making fire humanity’s greatest achievement, with the only possible exception being the invention of language. Even today, in our industrialized and technological world, almost all of our energy practices are merely more sophisticated ways of controlling fire. The control of fire was at once a social act, a mental act, and a technical act. While making stone tools represented the big break between the human line and its ancestry, it only allowed apes to mimic what other animals could do, with stone tools representing artificial claws, teeth, and jaws of animals far larger and more capable than apes at killing and eating flesh and bones. Protohumans with stone tools could scavenge more effectively and maybe defend themselves with them and even attack others, but it was not initially different in kind from what other animals could do, and was as pathetically small advantage when their first stone tools were merely rocks with sharpened edges. Controlling fire was the radical break with all other organisms that ever lived on Earth.

A bonobo named Kanzi built a fire (using matches) and roasted marshmallows on his own, and has made Oldowan-style tools after being taught. But those who invented stone tools and the control of fire were the Einsteins and Teslas of their day. Hunter-gatherers today often start fires by banging flint against pyrite stones, a combination which throws off generous sparks. Habilines likely used stones like those when making tools. Even Darwin suggested that that may have been how protohumans discovered how to make fire, as they banged rocks together. I have not seen anybody else advocate it, but as with the likelihood that protohumans learned to make stone tools once and the practice then spread, I consider it very likely that the control of fire was learned only once, and then spread. Richard Wrangham thinks that habilines first controlled fire, which led to the evolution of Homo erectus. I think he may be right, and my logic follows.

First and foremost, I have a very difficult time imagining that Homo erectus could have slept on the ground without something to keep Africa’s predators at bay, and I am not the only one. One-meter-tall slender apes swinging sharpened rocks and sticks at saber-toothed cats, hyenas, and the like I highly doubt would have done much to scare them off. Those days predated spears, arrows, and other sophisticated weapons by more than a million years. There is only one deterrent that I can imagine, and I also cannot imagine that Homo erectus was simply vigilant and the sentry awoke everybody when the cats came and they all scrambled up trees. Those apes certainly could not have outrun them. Cats are ambush predators, and sleeping apes on the ground would have been easy meat, except for silverback gorillas, and those cats did not live in the rainforest. Without fire, Homo erectus would have been in the same situation as all of its ancestors, going back tens of millions of years: they slept in trees and other lofty refuges so that predators could not attack them. But all animals respect and fear fire. Fire was the ultimate protection and weapon for humans, even to this day.

Wrangham made the ability to sleep on the ground a key part of his Cooking Hypothesis, and I see it as its lynchpin, for a few reasons. Homo erectus was not only adapted for ground living, its guts and teeth also shrank, which would have reflected eating soft and easy-to-digest food. Along with organ meats, cooked food is the leading candidate for soft foods. If habilines mastered fire, they would have almost immediately used it for cooking.

In the 1990s, Wrangham began to develop his Cooking Hypothesis, which he more fully elucidated in Catching Fire, published in 2009. Wrangham marshals numerous lines of evidence to support his hypothesis, which was widely pilloried by his colleagues. Wrangham conceded that the archeological record was scarce for the early control of fire, but he countered that evidence for early fires would rarely survive. Most caves last a quarter million years or so, as they are made from soft stone, and the forces that create caves also destroy them. Also, early humans, just like gorillas and chimpanzees today, and even early hunter-gatherers, would have been constantly on the move, never sleeping in the same place twice. And if the first fires were made in the African woodlands and grasslands, the evidence would not survive for long, just as the remnants of today’s hunter-gatherer fires on the African savanna quickly disappear. The gist of Wrangham’s Cooking Hypothesis is this:

• Humans cannot solely subsist today on raw food (they cannot get enough calories by eating raw food), but need their food cooked, and all human societies cook their food;
• Cooked food reduces the energy required to digest food, and also allows more calories to be absorbed from food, sometimes vastly more, such as doubling;
• Anatomical changes, beginning with Homo erectus and perhaps even earlier, provide evidence that humans have cooked their food for a very long time, up to two million years, and the control of fire may be responsible for the appearance of Homo erectus;
• The control of fire allowed Homo erectus to leave the trees and sleep on the ground, which was a first for the human line (or perhaps habilines or australopiths were the first to sleep on the ground with fire, but Homo erectus was the first human-line member to be adapted to it);
• The energy boost from cooked food fueled the continued expansion of the human brain, from habilines to today’s humans;
• Cooking reduced chewing time from the six hours per day that other great apes chew to less than an hour for humans; this allowed humans to pursue other activities with their enlarged brain, and was one of the positive feedback loops that led to modern humans;
• Fire became the center of human social life after it was controlled, and the changes attending that development profoundly affected the human journey.

Wrangham’s hypothesis is more robust and subtle than this essay can do justice to, but I will survey some of the findings, implications, and controversy. Raw food has various nutritional properties that are superior to cooked food, such as vitamins, but because cooked food provides more digestible calories for humans than raw food, it provided an evolutionary advantage. Meat, starches, and seeds are far more digestible when cooked, and are much easier to eat. Today, chimps in Senegal will not eat the raw seeds of Afzelia trees, but when a fire passes through the savanna, they search the ground below the Afzelia trees and eat their cooked seeds.

Also, people and animals universally prefer the taste of cooked food over raw, except for fruit, which is designed by the plant to be eaten by animals; no other foods were designed to be eaten (except nectar, blossoms, and mother’s milk). The toxins created by cooking, such as Maillard compounds, can cause health problems in humans, including chronic diseases. But cooking also destroys some toxins, making otherwise inedible food palatable. Cooking also reduces collagen, which makes meat tough, to gelatin (called denaturing the protein, where it falls apart), and converts starch to a far more digestible form. However, as far as species viability is concerned, humans only have to live long enough to produce offspring. Those chronic diseases that shorten human lives today would have been irrelevant in the ancient past, when virtually nobody lived long enough to die of old age and they could reproduce long before the deleterious effects of cooked food caught up with them. Many detriments of cooking and food processing have only become important to human welfare with the advent of civilization. Cooking would have been an undisputed advantage long ago.

Were the dramatic changes in Turkana Boy’s anatomy a result of cooked food, or was Turkana Boy eating organs as his species became hunters instead of hunted, and the stone tools softened up the meat and plant foods so that he did not need to chew as much? Wrangham co-authored a study on shrinking teeth in the human line that began with Homo erectus, which concluded that food processing, cooking in particular, accounted for the effect. Cooked food versus raw food and the number of neurons that can be supported in a brain has been the focus of recent research. The primary reason why Wrangham’s hypothesis was initially dismissed was that archeological evidence for fires that long ago is almost nonexistent. When Catching Fire was published, the earliest evidence with wide acceptance only supported fires beginning around 800 kya, where Israel is today, which is more than a million years before Wrangham’s estimated timeframe. But Wrangham did what all bold scientists do: he made falsifiable predictions. If it turned out that no evidence of early fires was ever found, his hypothesis could begin to look shaky.

Animals can adapt very quickly to changing environmental conditions that impact their food supply. For example, in recent studies of Galapagos finches during a severe drought, small-beaked finches largely died out, because large and hard seeds became dominant. The surviving finch population had measurably larger beaks in one year. It took fifteen years of normal conditions for finch beaks to return to their pre-drought length. Wrangham argued that the biological changes attending cooked food would have been immediately evident, and Homo erectus’s anatomy presented the most dramatic changes seen in the human line. The only other plausible candidate would have been Homo heidelbergensis, but it was only a more robust version of Homo sapiens.

The derision was loud from Wrangham’s colleagues…until evidence of fire being used a million years ago was adduced from Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa by using new tools and techniques. The chortling is subsiding somewhat and scientists are now looking for the faint evidence, and long-disputed evidence of 1.5-1.7 mya controlled fires is being reconsidered. The new tools being used may end up pushing back the control of fire to a time that matches Wrangham’s audacious hypothesis. Wrangham cited the Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis as partially supporting the Cooking Hypothesis, but as discussed previously, the energy to power the human brain may not have solely derived from cooked food’s energy benefits. Wrangham has cited numerous lines of evidence, one of which is a bird called the honeyguide that has coevolved with humans to find honeybee hives and smoke them out, where the humans get the honey and the honeyguide gets the larvae and wax. Recent molecular evidence supports the evolutionary split to the honeyguide from its ancestors being up to three mya.

Two major events happened soon after Homo erectus appeared, and their sequence supports the Cooking Hypotheses, in my opinion. The first of which was the migration of Homo erectus from Africa as early as 1.9 mya; they spread to Georgia and Java by 1.8 mya (perhaps 1.6 mya in the case of Java), and China by 1.7 mya. It was the first migration from Africa by an ape since the Miocene, and Homo erectus may have become the first multi-continental member of the human line, and certainly the first widespread one. Unlike Miocene apes that began to migrate from Africa 16.5 mya, there was no unbroken forest for Homo erectus to migrate through, to get to East Asia. Homo erectus would have had to sleep on the ground for much of the journey, and was not adapted for sleeping in trees, as already discussed.

The other big event happened about 1.7 mya, when African stone tools took a leap in sophistication, and Acheulean culture (also called Acheulean industry and also called Mode 2) appeared and lasted for more than a million years. The quintessential Acheulean tool is the hand axe, and the makers used bone, antler, and wood to help shape the axes. Some argue that the axes were not really axes at all, but for other purposes, even including just the leftover core after the flakes were removed. Some gigantic hand axes have been discovered that could not have been easily used by human hands, and may have been the human line’s first status symbols. Not only were axes made, but also flakes, scrapers, cleavers, and other relatively sophisticated tools. There is almost no doubt among anthropologists that Homo erectus developed Acheulean tools, inventing them from Oldowan tools. The axes have a very distinctive shape, and could even be called a product of craftsmanship, which reflected minds greatly advanced from today’s great apes.

Wade Frazier

2nd February 2014, 22:06

Humanity’s First Epochal Event(s?): Growing our Brains and Controlling Fire – Part 2.

A plausible series of events, where fire came first and Acheulean industry second, is that the Homo erecti that migrated to East and Southeast Asia did not have Acheulean tools, but the primitive Oldowan toolset, and the most remote ones never used Acheulean tools. I consider it quite possible that early Homo erecti migrated from Africa (and maybe even an earlier protohuman, if the “hobbits” were descended from habilines or australopiths) wielding fire. Cooking came with it, and hundreds of thousands of years later, those Homo erecti that stayed home in cosmopolitan Africa invented a new level of technology, Acheulean tools, and that culture never made it to the far hinterland of East Asia. Some have speculated that those East Asian erecti used bamboo more than stone, which would not be preserved for study today, or that as they moved east, they collectively forgot how to make Acheulean tools. I think that the likelier explanation is that they never had Acheulean tools, meaning that they migrated before they were invented, but they brought fire with them, which was the essential technology.

The Homo erecti that arrived in East Asia and the islands off of Southeast Asia existed, with virtually no changes evident in their anatomy or technology, for more than 1.5 million years, to only disappear about when Homo sapiens arrived. Similar to tarsiers finding refuge in the islands off of Southeast Asia, those Homo erecti at the far end of the “known” world seem to have lived like country bumpkins for well over a million years without any outside disturbances or benefits from their cosmopolitan homeland. The foregoing is largely my speculation on the issue, which could collapse like a house of cards with the Next Great Finding, but I doubt it is far from the mark.

Growing the human brain was about more than energy. There is speculation that meat protein helped human evolutionary brain development, and there is also evidence that oils help, and there are surely nutritional requirements besides calories, but calories comprise the vast majority of nutrition. About 80% of what is called human nutrition consists of calories. If animals can get enough energy, the other dietary constraints are usually minor issues.

Apes make poor carnivores and are all adapted for eating fruit as their staple, and fruit is the ideal human food. The dietary shift to meat, likely out of necessity, came with a price. If humans get more than half of their calories from protein, they will die from protein poisoning. Chimpanzees get about ten percent of their calories from protein today, which is about the same level that humans seem to need.

Also, the rise of the human brain was not only about size, even if the human brain turns out to “only” be a linearly-scaled primate brain. The human cerebral cortex is four times the size of a chimp’s, and the cerebral cortex is considered to be where all higher human brain functions originate. For all the influences of using hands, tools, cooking, and the like, they largely only laid the foundation for the cerebral cortex to grow. At this stage, the mystic might say that the growing cerebral cortex allowed for the human brain to host a more sophisticated consciousness, which originates in other dimensions, which is a question largely unanswerable by today’s mainstream science, although Black Science probably has some pretty good ideas about the answers. As with mainstream scientists, I will not attempt to address that question, at least in this part of the essay. In the final analysis, the cerebral cortex’s growth is what made humans radically different from any other land animal in Earth’s history. Cetaceans may have similar levels of brain functioning, perhaps even greater, but they cannot manipulate their environments like humans can, and they cannot make fires. Humans are significantly juvenilized when compared to chimps, for instance, where humans retained traits of chimp infants. An infant chimps’ flat face appears far closer to a human’s than an adult chimp’s does. That juvenilization is partly why humans are far weaker, physically, than other great apes. As the human line increasingly relied on its brain, it lost even more of its brawn.

In summary, becoming bipedal had great portent for evolving protohumans, and the suspicion is very strong among scientists that it led to feedback loops where tool use became advanced, which allowed for a richer diet, which helped lead to larger and more complex brains, which led to more advanced thinking and behaviors, which led to more advanced tools, which led to more acquired energy, better protection, and larger brains, and so it went. But the control of fire was the watershed event. While better tools improved the viability of early humans, nothing on Earth could challenge fire-wielding humans. With the control of fire, humans never had to worry again about being preyed on, not as a threat to species viability, except by other humans. Fire was eventually used for offense instead of only defense, of course.

Until now, I have used the word “epoch” in this essay as geologists do, to denote timeframes smaller than periods. But in describing the rise of humanity, I use “epochal” to mean gigantic events, where the human condition before and after the events became so radically different that the two times were like different geological epochs, when the radical changes following the events are considered. I consider making stone tools, growing the protohuman brain, and the control of fire to be the human journey’s first epochal events. In fact, those events led to human existence. They were all likely related, and probably tightly related, and with the current uncertainty I have made them all aspects of the same event. They could arguably be split, but the energy advantages of stone tools and fire surely contributed to the expanding human brain, and the expanding human brain led to those inventions and more, in mutually-reinforcing feedback loops. Again, scientists are only certain that two things exist: energy and consciousness. Those interacted to produce humanity’s first epochal event(s).

Stone tools and the control of fire had energy consequences to the human line far above all other effects. Whether they happened within a few hundred thousand years of each other, or were separated by more than a million years, they were the key technical/cultural/social events in early humanity’s ability to survive on Earth and expand its range to eventually cover the planet.

If habilines began to control fire two mya, one thing is certain: the australopithecine Tesla who banged the first rocks together that fashioned a stone tool, and who was able to continue doing it and eventually taught others, probably via active demonstration or their observation, could not have imagined that his/her invention would lead to a relatively giant descendant (or cousin of a descendant) that slept on the ground, controlled fire, and would quickly migrate to the ends of Earth, traversing distances that were incomprehensible in australo-Tesla’s time. That relatively quick series of innovations, never before seen on Earth, gave birth to a creature that would have simply been unrecognizable to that australopithecine Tesla, some kind of magical creature. There have only been a few subsequent epochal events in the human journey, and like the first one(s), they were all energy events above all else, and were all dependent on humans gaining the social organization and technological prowess that enabled them to exploit a new energy source. And each time, the human reality after the epochal event was unimaginable to the humans who lived immediately before it. Also, the events and their aftermaths became far more dramatic each time, in shrinking the event’s timeframe and the time to the next epochal event, and the increase in energy levels used.

Did the control of fire lead to Homo erectus, as Wrangham thinks? Or did Homo erectus merely use it to begin dominating the world? Was cooking the seminal event in the appearance of humans? Those questions may not be definitively answered in my lifetime, and led to the somewhat uncertain title of this chapter. Highly transformative developments coincided with the appearance and dispersal of Homo erectus, which was a dramatic break from all that came before - biologically, technically, and culturally - which strongly implies great cognitive enhancements. I believe that the control of fire and cooking would leave deep cultural and biological impacts on the human journey, and that Homo erectus barely changed during its nearly two-million year tenure on Earth, both in biology and in Acheulean artifacts, leads me to favor Wrangham’s hypothesis, at least until the Next Big Finding. Just as Einstein said that every theory is killed by a fact and that his theories would one day become obsolete, but that their best parts would survive in the new theories, I believe that significant aspects of Wrangham’s hypothesis will live on in successor hypotheses. I am already seeing other researchers follow Wrangham’s lead, and I will follow that situation with great interest.

From the initial appearance of Homo erectus about 2.0-1.9 mya, Europe was periodically buried under the ice sheets that began growing and receding when the first stone tools were made, so Homo erectus tended to appear and disappear in Europe. The fact that humans evolved and spread during an ice age has led to competing hypotheses about many aspects of humanity’s rise. While the ice age began about 2.6-2.5 mya, and there have been seventeen identified episodes of advancing and retreating ice sheets, particularly in North America and northern Eurasia, the early ones were not as severe, and they did not achieve clockwork-like regularity until the past million years. But even though they were “regular” on the geologic time scale, driven by Milankovitch cycles, there would have been nothing “regular” about them to evolving humans. When ice sheets advanced, global climate became cooler and dryer; rainforests shrank and deserts grew. Human adaptations to those changes, which could even be discerned in one human lifetime, must have had profound impacts on the human journey. Works such as William Calvin’s A Brain for All Seasons explore such issues. In short, humans had to readily adapt to rapidly changing conditions, and rapid adaptation would have had selective effects on burgeoning human intelligence and problem-solving ability; those that could adapt, survived.

Although our species, Homo sapiens (named Homo sapiens sapiens if we consider that Neanderthals and an early human are subspecies of Homo sapiens, but I will use Homo sapiens in this essay to denote today’s humans), is the only survivor of the past several million years of human-line evolution, many of our cousins and ancestors were recognizably human. When did language begin. When did speech begin? They certainly predated the appearance of Homo sapiens. All great apes have readily learned sign language, and even when monkeys chatter, the same parts of their brains that control human language are used, and there is plenty of evidence that great ape vocalizations can denote objects and other ideas. The communicative abilities of crows can be hard to believe. Becoming bipedal created those neck/skull changes that began to form the structures need for human speech. If fossils are sufficiently preserved, important anatomical features can provide key evidence for human abilities and behaviors. Turkana Boy, for instance, had his inner ear, which is responsible for balance, preserved well enough so that it provided more evidence that he did not spend time in trees (it is larger in primates that regularly climb). Similarly the outer and middle ear of Homo heidelbergensis, which succeeded Homo erectus, apparently enabled keener hearing that its predecessors, which may have reflected the beginnings of spoken language. There is strong evidence that Neanderthals were capable of using spoken language. As with many other human traits, the potential for language seems to have existed with monkeys (even in dinosaurs), and just kept developing more sophistication over the millions of years, with structural and cognitive changes interacting, as human language developed into today’s version.

While many traits that led to human dominance of Earth can be discerned in our distant ancestors, a pile of baggage also came with the deal. All great ape societies but bonobos are male dominated, and the most marginal macaque will quickly become patriotic cannon fodder when his society is attacked. The traits almost always arose from economic costs and benefits, which were always rooted in energy. How bonobos, also called pygmy chimpanzees, became the only great ape species that is not male-dominated is primarily an economic tale.

The bonobos’ scientific name is Pan paniscus, and they live in the range in red in this image, and the other colors represent ranges of other chimp species. Bonobos are separated from all other chimp species by the Congo River, which forms the north, east, and west borders of the bonobos’ range. When the current ice age began 2.6-2.5 mya, the current bonobo range had a huge drought and the rainforest temporarily disappeared south of the Congo. Gorillas are masters of the rainforest, and when the rainforest south of the Congo first disappeared, gorillas left and never came back. Humans are the only great apes that can swim, so the Congo was an impenetrable barrier for chimps and gorillas.

Chimpanzee social organization has male and female hierarchies, with societies of up to 120 members. Fruit trees form the center of a chimp band’s territory, where females forage with their offspring, and the males form foraging parties that patrol the territorial perimeter. Chimps have foraging parties of less than ten members, with numbers ranging between two and nine, and the party size fluctuates rapidly. That is because chimps have to walk kilometers between food sources each day, largely fruit trees, and the varying harvests cannot reliably support larger groups. In general, the larger a territory, the faster that chimps breed, as they have more available energy.

Bonobos have an average partly size of about 17, and party sizes are consistent. How can they have such large and stable foraging parties while no other chimps can? In short, they eat gorilla food. Because gorillas no longer live south of the Congo, the young leaves and herb stems not available to chimps where gorillas live make for nice bonobo snacks as they travel. Since the biomass concentration of gorillas and chimps is nearly the same where their ranges overlap, it meant that bonobos had twice the food supply that chimps did. Bonobos also evolved to better eat gorilla foods, and larger parties put females on a more equal footing with males. Bonobos, both males and females, did not tolerate the alpha male model of other chimp societies, where they dominated everybody.

One chimpanzee and gorilla behavior that can be difficult to comprehend, mentally and emotionally, is male murder of infants. If a chimp or gorilla encounters an infant that he knows he did not sire, he will kill it if he can. Gorillas have a potentate-harem social organization, and when a male matures he is usually ejected from that gorilla society, but might become subordinate to the silverback patriarch (some troupes have more than one dominant silverback, and even up to seven silverbacks in one troupe has been observed). Unsatisfied male gorillas can try to unseat a silverback to steal his harem, and if successful, the new potentate will kill all the infants he can. The average female gorilla will lose an infant to murder by a male in her lifetime. In chimp society, when a female is sexually receptive she will mate with all males in the troupe, especially the dominant ones, so every important male thinks that the child might be his, and thus will not kill it. That strategy has been nicknamed, “Who’s Your Daddy?” If a silverback dies, either from natural causes or murder by rivals, or chimps murder the males of a rival band, the infants of the dead males will all be killed. And the next activity tends to boggle people’s minds: the females who lost their infants will then mate with the killers. That behavior is not confined to great apes: lions and bears also do it. While humans cannot not imagine a woman subsequently mating with her child’s killer, it is standard behavior in those species and provides agonizing evidence of the Selfish Gene Hypothesis. A male chimp or gorilla will not invest time and energy in raising offspring that are not his. Killing them makes the female come into season, and she has a primordial desire to produce offspring. Female chimps and gorillas need protection from other males, and a male strong enough to kill her mate gets the spoils, including her, and she will then mate with the killer and bear his young, and can stay mated for life. Female chimps will kill each other’s infants sometimes, as they play their own dominance games, but mating with the killers of their offspring boggles human minds and makes Darwin’s “war of nature” observations difficult to deny. Male orangutans will not kill infants that they did not sire, but orangutan females are constantly under threat of being raped by non-dominant males (called unflanged).

But bonobos are the only non-human African great ape exception to infanticide, and are also the only great ape species that does not sexually coerce females, humans included. The reason seems to be the social organization that arose from a plentiful food supply that allowed for larger groups where females were no longer vulnerable to male violence. Many behaviors within and between bonobo bands are unknown with chimps. A male bonobo will remain with his mother for his entire life, and male bonobos do not vie for dominance. Instead, bonobos have a sexuality that no other animal on Earth has remotely achieved. They settle nearly everything with sex. Female on female is common, particularly when bands meet, but anything goes in bonobo society, with the sole exception of mothers and sons, as the aversion to inbreeding is baked very deeply in animals, and it is also responsible for the human incest taboo. Bonobo societies are peaceful and seem to live by the slogan, “Make love, not war.” But it started with their economy, when their primary and dominant competitor moved away. In recent studies, the only bonobo sexual coercion observed is females coercing males, which is also rare. A likely influence on ending infanticide is that female bonobos, like humans, conceal their ovulation, so males are not going to suddenly compete to be the father. And since virtually all bonobos have sex all the time, there is no way for bonobos to determine paternity.

Humans took a different path 2.5 mya. There are generally two schools of thought regarding the appearance of Homo sapiens among scientists: one is called the Multiregional Model, and the other is called the “Out of Africa” Model. In their essence, the Multiregional Model had those Homo erectus migrants eventually evolving into today’s races, and the “Out of Africa” Model had humans evolve in Africa and then migrate across the world, replacing/displacing all other members of the Homo genus. The rise of molecular biology and DNA testing has largely resolved the issue in favor of the “Out of Africa” Model. There is also a variety of intermediate views and variations of each hypothesis, generally relating to the invaders mating with the natives, even if they could be classified as separate species. For instance, Neanderthal DNA is part of the human genome, which reflects interbreeding. Since Neanderthals were largely confined to Europe and what became the Fertile Crescent, and the migration of the original Homo sapiens was from Africa, sub-Saharan Africans possess less Neanderthal DNA than any other humans. Africans also have the most genetic divergence, reflecting the idea that humans have lived longer in African than anywhere else. There is virtually no doubt that the first Homo sapiens evolved in Africa.

While Acheulean hand axes are rather beautiful, anthropologist have lamented the “boring million years” that existed after Acheulean culture first appeared about 1.7 mya. It seems that not much was going on, anatomically or technologically, with the human line, from the first appearance of Acheulean culture to about a half million years ago. There is evidence of Acheulean culture spreading in waves across Asia, never quite reaching those in East Asia in what became their refugia, but Acheulean tools were even made by a likely Homo sapiens subspecies less than 200 kya. The Acheulean hand axe is the longest-lived technology in the human journey.

The nexus of Europe, Asia, and Africa has been the site of great migrations, conflicts, extinctions, innovations, and the like, all the way to today, beginning when Asian mammals likely drove half of European mammals to extinction 34 mya, to the invasion of Africa by Asian mammals 18 mya, to the ferment of Miocene apes in and around Africa as they migrated outward then back home, between 16.5 mya and nine mya. The “friction” between collisions of animal assemblages and human cultures, as well as the geographic and climactic variation in that nexus region, not only gave rise to humanity, but human civilization also first appeared in the region and is at the heart of the world’s attention and woes today. As mentioned previously, advancing and retreating ice sheets made Europe a difficult place for the human line to colonize, and they sporadically appeared and disappeared for more than a million years, clear up until this current interglacial period called the Holocene. But Homo erectus began appearing in Southern Europe about 1.5 mya. There were three basic routes to Europe. The easiest would have been largely overland, crossing today’s Turkey to get into Southern Europe around today’s Greece. The other two routes had to cross the Mediterranean Sea, one across Sicily to today’s Italy, and the other across the Strait of Gibraltar to today’s Spain. Sites have been discovered that show early humans using all three routes. In the mountains of Spain is the earliest evidence of the human line in Europe, dating as far back as 1.2 mya. The remains in that cave also show the first signs of human cannibalism. Those cannibals are also thought to be part of the human line, evolved from erectus and called Homo antecessor today. Today, anthropologists are pretty sure that Homo antecessor was a human ancestor and gave rise to Homo heidelbergensis, at least as sure as any of the early human ancestral relationships are. Chimps have also engaged in cannibalism, so this may be another very old primate behavior. With the recent advances in human DNA studies, the human genome provides evidence that all early human societies engaged in cannibalism, possibly as a ritual of eating rivals vanquished by violence.

Homo heidelbergensis fossils and artefacts are prevalent in Africa, Europe, and West Asia, and they may have lived from 1.3 mya to 200 kya, for another long-lived species. They may have been the first humans to bury their dead. In his human-line narrative, it is evident that species times overlap, where one ancestral species coexisted with its probable descendant for hundreds of thousands of years. From the perspective of evolutionary theory, there is nothing unusual about it. From a review of how speciation is thought to happen, it is apparent that genetically-isolated populations can adapt to new environments and eventually become new species, while ancestral and sibling species can continue thriving, just as parents rarely die upon producing offspring. The tree of life on Earth has many branches, and while all branches will eventually end, new twigs from the same branch can grow while the original branch continues growing. Stephen Jay Gould suggested that a transition to a new species averages about 15-20 thousand years. And that is under the “natural” effects of geography, climate, and animals trying to survive. But the human line has changed all that. While animals make nests, burrows, and other structures that enhance their ability to survive, humans began making radically-different environments that are called “artificial” today, and the first artificial environments were campfires surrounded by Homo erecti or close relatives trying to stay safe, warm, and well-fed. When the human line invented fire, they not only created the first dramatically artificial environments, they no longer lived in “harmony” with nature. They could not only use fire to help conquer the world, they also introduced “artificial” variables into human evolution, and the first may well have been the transition to being ground-dwelling and the changes that derived from eating cooked food. Humans introduced radically-new variables to evolution never seen before on Earth.

Over the years, I have become familiar with what is called Creation science, ET interventionist ideas, and other arguments that not only make the case that humans are highly unique, but that human evolution was so different than what came before it that it must have reflected God’s hand or ET intervention. What they fail to take into account, in my opinion, is the rapid evolution of humans that humans are responsible for, in ways that this essay will explore later. While there may be some accuracy in their perspectives, their explanations are not needed to explain how humanity has evolved.

Humans are unique in many ways, although a healthy behavior amongst scientists is stating that humanity is “just another species.” There is even an acronym used in scientific circles to emphasize our mundane status, which is no better or worse than any other organism. Humans are different, but using it to justify our status bestride Earth is egocentric, and the humility of “just another species” scientists is very needed in our world today.

During that boring million years, Homo erectus changed from hunted into hunter. They did not dominate their biomes, but they were also likely respected by local predators, and feared by what they could hunt with their primitive weapons. At what stage big cats and other megafauna in Africa learned to avoid Homo erectus and its descendants is not clear, but it likely happened, and is thought by most scientists today to be why Africa retained its megafauna, and to a lesser extent Eurasia, when the other continents quickly lost them soon after humans appeared, which is a subject for the next chapter. But an early indicator of what likely happened, repeatedly, in the coming rise and dominance of humanity, is when Homo erectus first made it to Flores Island about 900 kya (scientists have found tools but no human fossils), perhaps by rafting: a pygmy elephant, a giant tortoise, and a giant lizard all quickly went extinct. Today, it looks like once the invaders made it to Flores Island they stayed and either eventually forgot how to get off or came to the island by an “accidental” migration as so many other species have hopped the continents. Those invaders eventually became island-dwarfed and lived on Flores for the nearly the next million years, and went extinct soon after Homo sapiens arrived.

The closer we get to humanity, the less our ancestry is doubted among scientists, and there is virtual certainty that Homo heidelbergensis is humanity’s direct ancestor. Its brain was nearly the size of modern humans, and they inherited Acheulean tools from their ancestors and used them for hundreds of thousands of years. But there is evidence that somewhere around 500 kya that began to change; there is evidence of heidelbergensis using stone-tipped spears that long ago in today’s South Africa. Wooden throwing spears were recently discovered in today’s Germany, along with butchered horses, dated to about 400 kya. Scientists today are very confident that Homo heidelbergensis is also the direct ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis, with the split beginning around 500 kya. The range of Homo heidelbergensis was Africa, West Asia, and Europe, but the advancing and retreating ice sheets of Eurasia, Europe in particular, kept driving Homo heidelbergensis southward, and during one of the retreats, it seems like the ancestors of Neanderthals stayed. Neanderthals became a cold-adapted species that specialized in hunting the animals of the cold lands near the ice sheets. As the evidence shows scientists today, life was a brutal proposition in humanity’s early days, and it was particularly brutal for Neanderthals. They probably could not throw very well and relied on ambush predation. Scientists have studied the bones of Neanderthals and compared their injuries to those of rodeo riders, but a recent study cast some doubt on that, partly in light of recent evidence that Neanderthals may have also developed wooden throwing spears. But whether Neanderthals had to stab their prey in close quarters or eventually learned to throw weapons at them, the studies of early human bones describe a very harsh existence, with broken bones regular events, and that is for survivors of the traumas.

Neanderthals invented more sophisticated stone tools about 300 kya, for the first major advance in more than a million years, and their toolset is called Mousterian, or Mode 3. Neanderthals had the largest brains ever measured in the human line, and they seem to have also invented the practice of burying the dead and placing grave goods with them, but they may have inherited burial practices from their Homo heidelbergensis ancestors. As with their ancestors, they cooked and ate vegetables. As with their ancestors, they carved flesh from their corpses, in either the practice of cannibalism or a funerary practice. Neanderthals seem to be a regional variation of humans, adapted to the environments near the ice sheets, and the fact that they interbred with Homo sapiens has caused some scientists to classify them as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. If they did not become a truly separate species, they were slowly speciating as they adapted to their ice age environment. Neanderthals built shelters, may have drawn cave paintings, and engaged in plenty of activities that put them on par with humans of the time. There seems to be little reason for calling them “primitive” when comparing them to Homo sapiens. The last Neanderthals died out about 30 kya, about the same time that Cro-Magnon humans arrived in the region.

To revisit the Neanderthal split from Homo heidelbergensis about 500 kya, that Homo heidelbergensis line stayed in West Asia and Africa. With evidence of stone-tipped spears being made 500 kya, some scientists place the beginning of the Middle Stone Age at about 500 kya. Stone tools have been dated using a relatively new tool called thermoluminescence dating, which works for stone tools that were heated by fires. For dating artifacts before the appearance of behaviorally modern humans about 50 kya, carbon-14 dating will not work, but other tests have been used quite successfully. Neanderthals came to dominate Europe and today’s Middle East, and while the home of Homo heidelbergensis was Africa, it ranged into Europe and West Asia. Whether Homo heidelbergensis existed for only about a half million years or a million is controversial today, but what is not very controversial is that it is the direct ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, with the first members of our species appearing in Africa about 200 kya, and there is evidence that other descendants of Homo heidelbergensis may have existed, with a possible descendant discovered in Siberia. As with the discovery of the “hobbits” of Flores Island, it will not be surprising if scientists find a few more “splinter” species that branched off and died out about the time that behaviorally-modern humans appeared and spread across Africa and Eurasia.

When Homo sapiens first appeared about 200 kya, about the same time that Homo heidelbergensis disappeared from the fossil record, it was in Africa, East Africa in particular. That possible human subspecies or intermediate species between Homo heidelbergensis and Homo sapiens lived in today’s Ethiopia about 160 kya, and there is evidence of Homo sapiens in today’s Morocco about 160 kya. From proconsul to Ardi, Lucy, Turkana Boy, and Homo sapiens, East Africa, particularly around Lake Victoria and the Horn of Africa, was the place to evolve.

The advancing and retreating ice sheets likely had major impacts on events in those times. Milankovitch cycles have 26,000, 41,000, and 100,000-year oscillations, among others, related to Earth’s orientation to the Sun, and the 100,000 year effect is the weakest, but for reasons still rather obscure, it has been the tipping point for the advancing and retreating ice sheets of the past million years. The pattern for the past million years has been creeping glaciation that oscillates, with the glaciations reaching their maximum before they rapidly retreat and Earth has a warm respite that lasts for 10-20 thousand years, before the ice sheets begin to grow again, with another 100,000 years before the next interglacial period. The most extreme glaciation during the current ice age happened between 475 kya and 425 kya. Neanderthals seem to have become permanently separated from their Homo heidelbergensis kin with the growth of ice sheets about 300 kya, and between 250 and 200 kya there were two glacial events that finally ended about 200 kya, which roughly coincided with the final exit of Homo heidelbergensis and the appearance of either Homo sapiens or that possible transitional species. The previous interglacial period began 130 kya and ended 114 kya, and it appears that Homo sapiens left Africa for the first time about then, with evidence found in a cave in today’s Israel. When ice sheets advanced, the Neanderthals retreated southward, and one controversial area is the overlap of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in Israel during the last glacial period. Did Neanderthals wipe out those first Homo sapiens migrants from Africa? Did they interbreed?

Whatever the case may be, it appears clear that the human population in Africa and Neanderthal population in Europe and the Middle East was isolated for tens of thousands of years, perhaps well more than 100,000 years, and humans used a toolkit similar to the Neanderthals’ until something happened between 70 and 50 kya. Just what happened is a matter of great controversy, and in recent years, several disciplines have converged on the issue and is drawing a pretty clear picture today. Some key areas shedding light have been global DNA studies, linguistics partnering with evolutionary theory, and brain studies. Nicolas Wade’s Before the Dawn, published in 2006, has surveyed the new findings and syntheses between those disciplines, among others. In the past generation, as DNA sequencing has been applied to many areas, a startling picture of the human journey has emerged. As discussed previously, mitochondria retained some of their DNA, probably for flexible power generation. For animals that reproduce sexually, the mother’s mitochondria are passed to her offspring, while virtually none comes from the father, if any. Geneticists can measure mutations in mitochondrial DNA and approximate when two different animals shared a common ancestor, whether they belong to the same species or not. Similarly, with nuclear DNA, the Y chromosome produces a male mammal, and mutations in the Y chromosome can also be analyzed by geneticists and can also estimate when two men shared the same ancestor. As discussed previously, putting absolute dates on DNA results has been problematic, but scientists have been working hard at aligning DNA results with fossil dates, which are considered far more reliable, and they have been resolving some of the limitations. But if the timing can be suspect with such analyses, there is far more confidence that descent relationships are valid. Human DNA testing is a burgeoning business, used for everything from freeing prisoners falsely convicted to determining paternity to examining the genetic heritage of the sitting U.S. president’s wife.

The picture emerging from global DNA testing is that all humans on Earth today are descended from a founder population that lived in East Africa, again near the Horn of Africa, around 50 kya. Geneticists think that the founder population may have only been about 5,000 people, and of that population, a few hundred humans at most left Africa about 50 kya, and they conquered the world. If any people ever lived up to Genesis’s instructions to subdue Earth, it would have been them. It may have been because they were the first primates to master language.

Wade Frazier

3rd February 2014, 17:10

Hi:

I am beginning to get to parts of the essay where I can bring the many seemingly disparate parts of it together and begin to weave a comprehensive perspective. This morning I added the below passage into the chapter draft that I put up yesterday. I may end up moving or revising it, but it seems to be good place to introduce the ideas. In that passage there are links to other parts of the essay where I introduce the concepts that I refer to.

Best,

Wade

What is fire? While that may seem a child-like question, understanding what it is and where it came from is vitally-important for understanding the human journey. The first fires were the quick release of the energy of stored sunlight that life forms, plants in that instance, had used to build themselves as they made their energy budget “decisions,” and it was from vegetation that recently died and was dry enough to burn. The energy was released so fast that it became far hotter than the biological processes of making animals warm blooded, hot enough so that the released energy’s wavelengths were short enough (energetic enough), so that human eyes could see them, in a phenomenon called flames. Flames are merely visible side-effects of that intense energy release. For more than a million years, all human fires were made by burning vegetation, wood in particular. What was fire doing? Energy that had been stored by plants, trees in particular, was violently released by controlled fires for human-serving purposes of protection from predation, warmth, light, and food preparation (to obtain more energy from food), and it also became the heart of all human social gatherings. Humans have stared into fires for nearly the entire human journey.

The energy from controlled fire allowed humans to leave the trees, grow their brains, and socially organize in new ways, as humans commandeered energy that otherwise fed ecosystem processes and used it for immediate human benefit. It was the first great human robbery. All heterotrophs “rob” energy from other life forms to live, with the primary exception being the symbiosis that flowering plants entered into with animals. But no animal had ever robbed energy from ecosystems on that scale before. By making fires, humans were liberating many times the energy that their biological processes used, energy that could have fed forest ecosystems. But while humans were only using deadwood, it was the least destructive to forest ecosystems. When humans began burning forests to flush out animals to kill and make biomes suitable for animals to hunt, they were destroying and altering ecosystems on a vast scale. When humans began to raze forests and use the resultant soils to raise crops, they were working their way down through the food chain, no longer harvesting ecosystem detritus but destroying entire ecosystems literally at their roots for short-term human benefit, which eventually turned forest ecosystems into deserts. As this essay will discuss, that was a rampant problem in all early civilizations. Eventually, humans learned to reach even further back into the ecological horizon as they began burning energy stores that were hundreds of millions of years old, with coal being the first and oil and gas being the second, burning them up a million times as fast as they were created. In all instances, humans were releasing the energy of sunlight that had been captured and stored by life forms. In the 20th century, when humans began to use nuclear fission, they were going even further back in time and harvesting energy stored via fusion processes in stars billions of years ago. With each new energy source, humans were harvesting older, more concentrated energy sources, which released far more energy than the previously used source, and in each instance, humans plundered the energy source to exhaustion. Humans have not lived in “harmony” with nature since they learned to control fire.

Wade Frazier

4th February 2014, 04:15

Hi:

I am taking a little break after drafting that chapter. I took a hike today, and attached is from a January hike in the woods near my home. I do a lot of thinking when I hike by myself. I love sharing hikes with good company, but some of my best hikes have been alone, including the best backpack of my life, five days, while on a fast.

I am going to perform an exercise that I have done in the past, but with a little different angle. It was brought up by my recent family fun and games. I have psychopaths in my family. Some are at the far end, and some with a little more conscience, but just a little. One cousin murdered his infant son several years ago and tried to frame somebody else for it, in some kind of kidnap/murder scenario, but he committed the murder likely while on drugs, so his acts were not too clever. Would he have framed somebody else for murdering his own son if he could get away with it? Probably. He tried. Right now, he is a lot more famous in my home state than I am.

I have other close relatives who are on the psychopath scale, from those who did things where the question of murder arises from actions they took, to drug addicts who have sponged off of their families for nearly their entire lives, and have rarely done an honest day of work in their entire lives, and they are getting old. And those were not people that I saw once in a great while, but those whom I saw growing up, pretty closely, and sometimes very closely. I almost do not want to admit it, but knowing psychopaths probably allowed me to quickly wake up during my journey with Dennis, with the lessons of those salient events not lost on me:

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

Bill the BPA Hit Man is a psychopath who was on Godzilla’s payroll:

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

but was eventually “retired” and who now has to fend by himself, ripping people off and using the same MO that he used to help take Dennis’s Seattle company down:

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

Another psychopath and likely Godzilla asset was sicced on us in Ventura, and was also eventually cut loose and had to fend for himself, and is in prison today:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=768396&viewfull=1#post768396

Mr. Deputy is another psychopath:

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

and taking us out made his career, and he recently retired to a hero’s farewell and his annual pension is nearly $250K per year:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=604711&viewfull=1#post604711

Unlike those psychopaths, one close relative killed people for a living:

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

on behalf of the CIA as a contract agent (contract agents never do as well as those on full-time payroll :) ). I also have friends who killed people as part of their jobs. But my CIA relative and my killer friends were not psychopaths, but “patriots” who did it largely for “psychic income,” actually believing that they were serving some higher cause, or allowing themselves to be maneuvered into situations where murdering people became part of their jobs. That is common enough with the USA’s imperial soldiers, but it also happens plenty in other, less military, situations.

People who do it for the “cause” are cheaper to employ, so that system seeks out fools like that, and our nationalistic indoctrination machine churns out such people. And they almost never figure it out. When they do, they almost never do anything about it other than pour themselves into a bottle:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#stockwell

Again, they are extremely rare ones that wake up and don’t take the “deal” of shutting up and collecting their pension, such as Ralph McGehee, who almost did not survive his moment of awakening:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/mcgehee.htm#saigon

The system attracts and encourages psychopaths by its very structure:

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

and that is no accident. As I have been making my way to the current chapter of my essay, I am getting to where humanity conquered the world. It was essentially one great, long, psychopathic spree. However, it was in ways no different than the Great American Interchange of three million years ago:

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

where the invaders from North America quickly drove about 95% of all South American mammals to extinction. It is just what animals do. Humans just did what came naturally when they drove all other human species to extinction, and drove all the megafauna to extinction that they could. I am sure that there was never any pang of conscience in any of that. Heck, read the Old Testament sometime; it is one unending tale of genocide, sanctioned by “God.”

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#joshua

It is simply humanity’s heritage. Rome’s prime entertainment of watching people being forced to murder each other was certainly no great aberration.

Today, Godzilla is merely humanity’s psychopathic fraction that has refined their game to high levels, but he is only playing a game that most people play, to one degree or another.

Maybe because I grew up around psychopaths and had their actions shoved down my throat during my days with Dennis, while my parents actually sided with the psychopaths and even cheered them on at times, I not only gained an understanding of psychopaths long ago, but I also understood how easily they duped “Joe Average” into doing their bidding.

It seemed that Joe Average projected his motivation on others, and could not fathom their motivation, not even when they were close family. Hitler used that to build his Reich, where Big Lies worked much better than small ones:

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

But not only could Joe Average not comprehend the Dark Pathers as they worked their evil:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#serving

often committed in broad daylight, Joe literally called the darkness the light. That phenomenon has been institutionalized, such as calling mass murdering thieves national heroes and saints:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#blueprint

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm#genocide

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

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

Joe Average equally cannot fathom the motivation of the saints, such as what Mr. Professor’s siblings did to him:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=789340&viewfull=1#post789340

Prominent members of the FE field tell Big Lies about Dennis, to try to portray him as a criminal:

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

and “skeptics” do even better in the libel department:

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

while prominent members of the FE field embrace the criminals and assail Brian and Dennis, while I never saw more than a few people in the FE field start to wake up to what was happening.

One observation I have repeatedly fielded about my work is that the reason that I can do what I do is that I am so smart, educated, and well read. That is not it at all. My primary qualifications were starting out a naïve, overgrown Boy Scout:

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

who believed in the Easter Bunny long after everybody else stopped doing it:

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

and who woke during brutal years of carrying Indiana Jones’s whip and hat for him, that happened because of some damn voice in my head led me to him:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice2

Without that Boy Scout nature and my ride with Dennis, I probably would not have anything worth saying. The rest is the small stuff.

But all of that is just a preamble to what I wanted to write about today.

I recently mentioned Bucky’s influence:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=791067&viewfull=1#post791067

It was around those days when some other stuff began to click, definitely related to what I got from Bucky’s work. In the spring of 2002, the drumbeat began for the invasion of Iraq:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

which was a nightmare for me. I had been writing publicly about Iraq since 1991:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#jesus

and had kind of publicly predicted 9/11:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#sunny

So, everything since 9/11 was a nightmare for me. I wrote what I could before the invasion:

http://www.serendipity.li/wot/wade_iraq.htm

and it was no fun getting to be right about everything. How alienating to be an American when we were committing Hitler-level crimes, and almost nobody in the USA knew or cared. Germany must have looked a lot like that in the late 1930s and early 1940s, before Stalingrad. Will the USA eventually get its “Berlin moment”? We will see.

My midlife crisis began in 2000:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/opinions.htm#crisis

but I was in it for a year before I realized I was in it. I was kind of looking forward to my midlife crisis, but I got one made to order that was nearly seven years of uninterrupted emotional agony. It peaked when Dennis delivered an invitation to go to the White House:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=694872&viewfull=1#post694872

and then my wife began to insist, once again, that I seek professional help, and I did. When I go, it is to trauma specialists, and the treatments work.

In August of 2001, I was helping Brian O:

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

and Ralph McGehee:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/mcgehee.htm#protection

carrying their spears, and the next month was 9/11, and I watched my nation lose its sanity, a sanity that it has yet to regain:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#wtc

or maybe we could say that it was always crazy, but its craziness is just more evident now. The dot.com mania was something to behold, and I was in the business at the time. The real estate mania a few years later was more of the same:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/savings.htm#next

and the collapse in 2007/2008 was not surprising to me, although its magnitude was. The system is rotten to its core, and nearly getting body cavity searches to get on an airplane is just how it is these days, and the Enron and related scandals, and what I have seen since 2008, is enough to make me think the end is near for the USA. But back to 2002/2003.

As I realized that I was a comprehensivist, in early 2003, just as we were about to invade, I read something by Richard Heinberg, which was a brilliant little piece of multidisciplinary analysis on what was behind the invasion of Iraq, which was followed a few months later by The Party’s Over:

http://richardheinberg.com/bookshelf/partys-over

and that is when I began studying Peak Oil material. I had a vague idea that the oil was running out, but I was not really very familiar with the Peak Oil literature until I encountered Heinberg. I went deep on it:

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

and Heinberg very surprisingly wrote about FE, but in a kind of semi-ridiculing way:

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

But he at least acknowledged the subject, and some of the situations he wrote about I was actually involved with. One of his FE examples was Sparky Sweet:

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

and I was very close to Sparky’s situation:

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

and would have loved to have introduced Heinberg to Brian O. The invasion of Iraq was probably the single most intense emotional agony that I ever experienced, and that is saying something. It was probably like an awake German watching Germany invade Poland.

Right around the time of Bush’s Hitler-esque Mission Accomplished stunt:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Mission_Accomplished_Speech

I contacted Heinberg through a mutual ally. I had done my homework, and I was raring to go, ready to introduce Heinberg to the inside of the situations that he wrote about. With FE, all of that Peak Oil gloom was totally unnecessary. I had seen many Levels 3s by that time:

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

and got to hear from Brian a couple of years earlier about how his ride as the Paul Revere of FE went:

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

But Heinberg at least wrote about FE, and he actually subscribed to the “Inside Job” hypothesis about 9/11:

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

So, I did not expect to get some kind of “organized suppression of FE is a wacky conspiracy theory” response from him. What I got was a surprise of a different kind. His response was essentially,

“If we cannot agree on the premise that there is not enough energy to go around, we have nothing to discuss.”

I was floored, to put it politely. Why write about FE as a possible solution to the Peak Oil doom-and-gloom at all? I was really puzzled. Brian O asked me to help found NEM about a month later:

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

and the month after that I resumed my career, began to dig out of the debt I went into to write my site, and I was NEM’s sole funding source in its early days. Heinberg was the darling of “progressive” circles, and I was seeing his name and interviews with him all over the place, and I was trying to get Brian’s foot in the door at the very same places that feted Heinberg, and it was a total shut out, and Brian lamented that Heinberg’s Peak Oil stuff dominated all “progressive” outlets on the energy subject, to the exclusion of anything else. I actually began to hear conspiracy theories about Heinberg around the FE community.

When Heinberg gave me his reason for not wanting to engage, and in subsequent interactions with him, I saw that he was obviously not stupid, and I did not get the sense that he was dishonest. What was going on? And all this was happening while I was trying to help get NEM off the ground, working 12-hour days at my day job, and other fun. I was nearly twenty years into my own FE journey by that time, and had seen it all, but Heinberg’s reaction was when I finally understood that people like him were simply addicted to scarcity, and they saw abundance as a threat to their very existence. I know that seems crazy, but it finally clicked into place with me when I saw not only his reactions, but how the “progressives” embraced him while Brian was treated like a pariah. Several years later, I wrote the essay that brought Brian back into my life, and I used his onion concept to make that infamous table:

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

But what I really wanted to write about today was how almost all of the Levels below Level 12 operate from false assumptions, and it is too late tonight to get into that, so I will finish this tomorrow, but would like to finish with this hopeful note…

The human past is agonizing to study. What a benighted species we have been, and I am sympathetic to people who look at what is happening in the world today and thinking that there is no hope for us. Brian’s question whether we are a sentient species:

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

is more appropriate than ever, but I think we can turn the corner, and I really believe that this kind of world can beckon:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

particularly for those who care enough to help humanity head in that direction, and nothing can do it like FE can. In fact, it is very possible that nothing but FE can. All of Godzilla’s antics are not about losing his market share, his trillions, or the like, but losing his slaves. I am sympathetic, but my game is to help people realize that we don’t have to be doomed to either a life of slavery under his lash, nor do we have to just buckle up for the sled ride to oblivion. We can turn the corner and back away from the abyss, but enough of us have to wake up. It won’t take many. FE can manifest, which means that it has to make it past Godzilla’s organized suppression and the inertia of the masses, who are semi-sentient. But that was a deal with the devil that they all entered into, at varying levels of awareness: to abdicate their sentience for the promise of security. They are no help, but they can begin to wake up when FE is delivered to their homes:

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

Time for bed.

Best,

Wade
24806

Wade Frazier

4th February 2014, 18:11

Hi:

OK, on to what I really wanted to write about yesterday. The Levels of the Free Energy Onion below Level 12:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level0

all suffer from false assumptions, or at least assumptions that are very likely incorrect, and I will start from the top.

The first Level 0 person, who has never heard of free energy, has not heard about it because he has not heard of much, because he simply does not care. He (usually a he) only cares about things that have immediate impact on his life, and until FE is delivered to his door, he will not hear about FE. He is too busy pursuing his immediate self-interest. People like him are often called sociopaths. There are other sociopaths in the other layers, but this is probably where most of them are.

The second Level 0 people, who have also never heard of FE, have just not heard about it because as they have gone about their lives, they just never heard about it. In the USA, that is actually kind of hard to do, because of Dennis if nothing else. Dennis began running FE ads in USA Today back in 1987, he did hundreds of radio shows after 1990, when he was forced into that plea bargain that the courts never honored:

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

and he was free to speak publicly again. A year later, he was running ads on TV:

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

and he has been subjected to national media attacks since the Ventura days, and when he began flying high in 1996 after getting out of prison, “skeptics” came out of the woodwork:

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

and Mr. Skeptic has been featured in several national TV shows that have attacked Dennis. I stopped watching the media attacks on Dennis in Ventura, but people around me let me know when Dennis is in the news again, and the last hack piece that I heard of was several years ago:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=412338&viewfull=1#post412338

as Dennis was being run out of the USA, the Land of the Free:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=694872&highlight=wirec#post694872

several years after Brian O left the USA, fearing for his life:

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

Brian founded NEM, and was run out of it by the people he invited into it, but NEM also made some waves, and there are some similar organizations out there. There are people such as Joe Newman who also promote their FE ideas, and Tesla is being increasingly recognized as an FE pioneer.

Heck, even the movie The Incredibles featured FE (ZPE, in that instance) in it:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=212819&viewfull=1#post212819

and many works of science fiction feature some infinite source of energy, or nearly so, powering crafts (Star Trek) or blowing up planets (Star Wars), so, if you have been hiding under a rock, you can claim that you never heard of FE, but you really have to have been really isolated and unthinking to validly make that claim. And I suppose that many people could say that all of those FE mentions were not really related to the possibility of FE on the planet, now. I consider that a weak argument, a kind of Level 1 argument, but some could make it.

Level 1 is where the vast majority of people who have heard of FE immediately end up. Their hearts and minds are trapped by the basic population management ideologies. They believe that if anything as potentially wonderful as FE existed or potentially did, then all of those people trying to make the world a better place would have already brought it to the world. It is a kindergarten-level perspective, but it is the most common one that I have encountered. There simply are not enough “good people” out there like that. The very few saints of FE all end up like Dennis and Brian: dead or run out of the country.

Level 2 is where more thoughtful people end up, such as those who are considered “progressives,” but Level 2s are like the people who send $50 to the Sierra Club, the Red Cross, and the like each year. They are checkbook “activists,” who at least try to do a little about the world’s ills, and those activist organizations are largely fake in that that are really far more interested in their self-perpetuation than they are in really helping the planet. When the issue of FE comes up, those checkbook “progressives” will look to the “experts” at those organizations, to see what they have to say, and those organizations all give FE the big thumbs down, and sometimes they even foam at the mouth while giving it the thumbs down. You probably have to see it to believe it. Level 2 is like Level 3, but just not as sophisticated. They just look to the “experts” that they trust, and seeing the thumbs down is all they need to go back to watching PBS and the BBC.

Level 3 is where those “experts” sit. Heinberg is one of them, but it also is made up of nearly all scientists, academics, and the “smart.” They have invested a great deal in their worldview, literally making a living by it, and they fell prey to their conditioning from the beginning. I don’t want to be too hard on them, like I don’t want to be too hard on anybody, and they are indoctrinated on their first day of class and it continues for their entire careers. They have a framework defined by the “laws of physics,” where the conceit is that the corpus of mainstream science and data comprises the secrets of the universe, or if they are not quite there yet, they have the only worthy tools to unlock them. As Fuller noted:

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

those people are highly naïve. They also have materialist assumptions that blind them in two ways. One is that what is currently accepted as “real” is the end of reality for them. The idea of a ZPF field blows their framework out of the water, even though Einstein and his protégé Bohm said that an ether exists and there is more energy in one cubic centimeter of the “vacuum” than exists in all the matter in the observable universe. So, there is a highly selective version of the “laws of physics” that guides that scientific denial of the possibility of FE. The second way they trap themselves is a kind of corollary to the first trap. There are only two things that scientists know exist: energy and consciousness. But because mainstream science operates from materialistic assumptions, and consciousness is obviously a non-material phenomenon, only roughly and mysteriously associated with brain activity, consciousness has often been denied to even exist in mainstream science, or when it is, it is attributed to some kind of byproduct of chemical reactions in the brain:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=787774&viewfull=1#post787774

and the “skeptics” attack any and all evidence that conflicts with the materialistic assumptions of mainstream science. Non-scientific academics and political radicals have “physics envy” and try to ape the physicists, and that general denial of consciousness extends to their political-economic views, and they have an ideological aversion to the idea that there are some people who surreptitiously manage the world economy, and they deride all such evidence as a “conspiracy theory.”

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

Their denial is really based in a form of religion, which is ironic, as they actually attack “conspiracy theorists” as a kind of religious fanatic. The fact is that most conspiracy theorists do have a religious fanaticism, and their views are relatively primitive and simplistic, but to totally deny conscious manipulation of the system for elite benefit, while only focusing on the structural aspects of the world’s institutions, is failing to see the forest for the trees:

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

and those "smart" people can have very strange views that are highly inconsistent, such as Heinberg buying the “Inside Job” angle on 9/11, but he cannot imagine why anybody would want to suppress FE:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=792942&viewfull=1#post792942

That highly inconsistent way of viewing the world puzzled me, and charges of dishonesty or stupidity could be easily leveled at such contrasting views in the same head, but what I think is happening is an emotional reaction that short-circuits their sentience. They are simply addicted to their conditioning, largely because if they play along they get fed, and their reactions are not even really conscious reactions, but visceral, knee-jerk reactions. That such brainless reactions came from such “smart” people is largely what led Brian O to wonder if humanity was really a sentient species:

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

The bottom line is that all of those Levels of denial are where people have sold out their sentience for a full belly, and FE does not even come onto their radar, or it if does, it is immediately dismissed, usually thoughtlessly, sometimes thoughtfully, and the real “smart” ones put all of their considerable mental horsepower to work to deny it and bury it six feet deep, and then salt the Earth above it. And in their ranks are Godzilla’s agents who supply the shovels and salt, keeping the herd in line.

The vast majority of humanity is in those Levels of denial, far more than 99% of the USA’s population, for instance.

Then there are Levels where at least the possibility of FE is admitted. The first, what I call Level 4:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level4

is actually the most common reaction by those who admit that maybe FE is possible. Again, it does not take much mental horsepower to realize that if FE was real, it would be the most lucrative technology of all time, and could radically transform the world:

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

In fact, that is also largely behind the denial Levels, too, as everybody can easily see that the world as we know it would end, and those denial levels have that fear in the back of their minds, which is behind the most vociferous denial, although few of them are very conscious of it, and they certainly won’t voice the real reason for their denial, if they were even consciously aware of it.

The Level 4s have gotten past knee-jerk denial, kind of, and it has come in two primary flavors, as far as I have seen. The first is the most common, which runs like this: “If you give me an FE machine, I would use it. My home can be a showcase installation, to give your technology credibility.” That is like saying that if I showed up at your home and gave you one quadrillion dollars, you would accept it. Well hell, who would turn that down? As Dennis found with his marketing programs:

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

nobody would reject FE being delivered to their homes. The other main Level 4 reaction comes from the “smart,” usually scientists, who say, "If you gave me an FE device and I could test it to my heart’s content, I might believe that FE is possible." People can accuse me of playing the straw man game:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/critics.htm#straw

where I make up those seemingly stupid reactions so I could show how crazy they are, but I have experienced all of these reactions many times, and when I would trade notes with fellow travelers like Brian, I realized that I am understating the case, if anything.

So, while Level 4 was not technically in denial of FE’s possibility, it suffered from a few false assumptions, such as if somebody really had FE, they would need to put it on somebody’s home to get credibility. The technology would speak for itself. The people offering to be showcase installations are usually motivated like Rosie Ruiz:

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

jumping in at the end of the marathon to get the glory. Scientists who think that what FE needs is their testing of a live FE prototype are highly naïve and suffer from a few false assumptions, one of which is denial that Godzilla exists and is vigilant. The good stuff was sequestered long ago, and sits in Godzilla’s Golden Hoard today. The other is that they do not realize that when FE really appears on the public scene, it will just sit somewhere very public and run all-day and night long. It won’t need showcase installations and scientists poking at it to lend it legitimacy. But there is the problem of Godzilla at that level, and that, along with greed and other delusions affecting the aspirants, has ensured that nothing has ever been close to being demonstrated like that for long, and for the few who have, there was hell to pay and they did not survive for long.

Level 5 is where those with outright, mind-numbing fear of FE live. The Levels are not all mutually exclusive, either, and Level 5 is a great example of that. The so-called environmentalists, Peak Oilers, “Radicals,” and the like react to the idea of FE with fear, first and foremost. When they voice their fear, it is the fear that if FE appeared on the world stage, everybody would immediately use it for wars and strip-mining the planet. While those fears are not totally delusional, they are projections of the scarcity-based mindset on the future, denying that if the means of abundance were delivered to humanity, that they would soon discard their scarcity-based beliefs and behaviors, and wars over resources would become quickly obsolete, just as slavery and the subjugation of women did when nations industrialized. I acknowledge that there can be transitional problems, but there ways to overcome them, such as a global peacekeeping force comprised of grandmothers, and technical efforts to show how easy it would be to mine just one asteroid and provide all of humanity’s material needs, and on a level where Bill Gates’s lifestyle would be seen as impoverished. This kind of world could be just around the corner if FE was wisely implemented:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

The Level 5 fears are deeply irrational, knee-jerk reactions, and strangely, I have seen the Level 5 reaction as the instant reaction of Level 3s most of all. Heinberg kind of epitomized it, and it was along the lines of:

“FE would be our worst nightmare! We would quickly destroy the planet with it! So, it is a good thing that FE is impossible, and I feigned looking into its possibility, but really don’t want to know much about it, as it would be the biggest Pandora’s box ever. However, I have the answer! We just need to get 90% of humanity to voluntarily exterminate itself, as there is not enough energy to support us all.”

I am not kidding. That was the essence of his response:

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

and I have seen many variations of it, and “progressives,” environmentalists, and the like lap Heinberg’s stuff up. It is surreal to witness that orgy of fear and irrationality, coming from such supposedly smart and caring people.

Level 6 is where people finally get past all of those initial fear reactions, but they are still plagued with false assumptions that are rooted in scarcity, fear, and naïveté. Some are understandable, but others are as addicted to scarcity as those early Levels are.

Level 6 is the most naïve level of those pursuing FE. I was never quite there, but the epitome of that mentality is when Sparky Sweet mailed working prototypes of his FE device to the big energy institutions, expecting to get a ticker-tape parade:

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

I have seen many variations of that inventor’s naïveté, and recent examples are Steorn, Rossi, and Keshe. Anybody who applies for an FE device patent is highly naïve and does not stand a chance. They have not even gotten on the playing field yet. Applying for a patent is waltzing right into Godzilla's lair. Level 6 not only suffers from denying Godzilla’s existence, but also has Level 1 naïveté, such as thinking that corporate America is avidly looking for better mousetraps. Well, they are, but not to bring them to market. :) Even Adam Smith admitted that the essence of capitalism is wiping out the competition:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#smith2

So, Level 6 is hopelessly naïve and people there have suicidal approaches, but if they really have something, they may get lucky and receive the friendly buyout offer. We received our first one of those in Boston, in our earliest days, and it was the standard ten million dollar offer:

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

If the aspirant does not take the initial deal and survives the various suppression strategies that not only Godzilla but the lower-level predators also have, they may add a couple of zeroes to their “final” offer, before they really begin to play rough:

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

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

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

So, Level 6 people either never get anywhere, as most efforts really do not make anything worth suppressing (making an FE prototype in your garage is far harder than it looks), succumb to their own foibles, the greed of their “allies,” and the like, or they are derailed by the subtle sabotage which is the cheapest way to eliminate them, and if they make it far enough through that minefield, they will be made the offer they cannot refuse:

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

Level 7s are those who get past the denial that Godzilla is real, but they are maybe even more deluded than Level 6s. They think that they are clever or lucky enough to sneak past Godzilla. I have seen many variations on that theme. It is an adolescent fantasy. Even if 99.99% of humanity is asleep on the FE issue, Godzilla did not get to his position by being asleep, and he is smart and talented, and has been honing his game for centuries, if not millennia. He knows that keeping the lid on FE and related technologies keeps humanity mired in scarcity and easily manipulated. He knows where the leverage points are, even if almost nobody else does, and he manages the FE situation more carefully than any other. He is paying attention to what I am doing, probably with some interest, as I am trying a route that has never been tried before: the sentience route. He is likely very skeptical that I will find enough people with the right stuff for my approach to work, and he may be right. He and I kind of have a wager going. :)

So, Level 7s hide out in shacks in Montana and Alaska, thinking that they are hiding from Godzilla and will sneak right past him. That is suicidal naïveté, in ways more dangerous than Level 6, and once again is built on false assumptions.

Level 8s I usually don’t discuss much, but it is comprised of those who get past the early levels of denial and admit that Godzilla is alive and vigilant, but they have conceded defeat without even leaving their armchairs. Nobody that I have ever respected in the FE field was a Level 8 for even an instant. While I have some sympathy for Level 8s, they also labor from a number of false assumptions, one of which is that Godzilla is inherently that powerful. He isn’t. His power almost solely derives from nearly all of humanity playing the fear game and abdicating their responsibility for the world they live in, playing the victim. On that score the structuralist deniers and the conspiracists are in a loving tryst, playing the victim and blaming elites for our problems:

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

They labor from a number of false but seemingly reasonable assumptions, one of which is that we are a bunch of victims. We have all created the world we live, and Godzilla is a symptom of our malaise, not a cause. If 0.0001% of humanity woke up and combined their sentience toward making FE manifest, it would literally be unstoppable and it would be game over for Godzilla, and he knows it. But other than a handful of heroes and saints, risking and sacrificing their lives:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

nobody is even coming close to making a dent, and in typical fashion, those in the FE field attack those heroes and saints:

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

which only drives home the primary lesson of my journey even further:

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

The world is dominated by beggars, liars, thieves, and sociopaths, while the great herd huddles and tries to survive, abdicating their sentience for the promise of security. Godzilla’s activities are really very modest for the size of the herd he is managing. Less than 100K people with some impressive technological advantages and their mutual self-interest bringing them together have successfully managed the human herd of seven billion. It is pretty surreal when you think about it, but Level 8s do not realize the power that each individual has to change their world. If I find a thousand like Ilie and can train them, it will be game over for Godzilla.

The Level 9s are like a bunch of teenage boys who watched too many cowboy movies, and I have heard their boasts often enough. When they arrive on the scene with their weapons, shouting about how they will defeat Godzilla in battle, the only thing that you can be sure of is that when those weapons get used, the delusional Young Warriors will only kill each other and you with them, while Godzilla looks on and chuckles. If a warrior grows up, he might be useful:

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

but their soul’s role always makes them susceptible to their primary delusion that might makes right.

Level 10 is where Dennis and Brian are and were, and I was too, at least while I carried their spears. I eventually realized that all mass movements aimed for lowest-common-denominator ways of amassing the crowd, and I watched Dennis use all three of the main population management ideologies that Americans are herded by: Nationalism, religion, and capitalism:

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

As I saw, repeatedly, people attracted by such “bait” are there to serve themselves, not the cause, and that army at Dennis’s back always shot their armaments at Dennis in the end because somebody else made a higher bid for their services, and at the level where Dennis played, the higher offers were usually delivered by Godzilla’s minions. Unlike those naïve inventors who happily take the friendly buyout offer and never learn any differently, those who take Godzilla’s bait to betray people like Dennis never get the big payday, but end up trapped in the rubble of the collapsed effort themselves, and Godzilla once again looks on and chuckles. Usually, the efforts do not need to be nudged too much by Godzilla’s minions, and the Treasure of the Sierra Madre effect takes over pretty early:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=465318&highlight=madre#post465318

I watched and lived through several Level 10 efforts, and had my life wrecked for my trouble, before I decided that Level 10 efforts did not have a prayer. Dennis and Brian eventually began to see things my way, but both of them spent their lives playing “man of the people” and using that approach, so got kind of lost when it became evident that their approach would not work for FE. Just before Brian died, he was planning to promote my approach:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#pursuing

and Dennis independently began to come around to my way of thinking when I saw him last spring. I don’t know if my approach has a prayer, either, but nobody has tried it before.

Level 11 is kind of crazed, and I have even seen billionaires play that game. I was briefly bitten by that bug during my early days with Dennis, and I have seen others get overwhelmed by such delusions:

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

So, all of those early Levels suffer from false assumptions, potentially fatal delusions, naïveté, and the like. I could have made a few more levels, if I wanted to slice it finer, where there are several variations of “Let’s sneak past Godzilla,” and “Lets expose Godzilla or defeat him in battle,” but what I have presented in that table is adequate. What those Levels below Level 12 have, at their roots, are fear and scarcity, and as we can see, it wears many guises. Again, scarcity and fear is almost all that humanity has ever known, and it is baked deeply into the bedrock of people’s awareness, and that is why Brian wondered if were a sentient species, as almost nobody was even willing to think about abundance.

After all those years of witnessing all the ways that people’s addictions to fear and scarcity short-circuited their sentience, I eventually decided on the approach that I am about to try out, the love and sentience approach. But almost nobody is fit to even try that approach, and my star pupil Ilie readily admits that if he even thinks about abundance, part of his mind tries to get him back in line with scarcity:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?29372-What-technologies-activities-or-concepts-will-be-made-obsolete-by-Free-Energy&p=770998&viewfull=1#post770998

Only the best of the best on Earth today will be willing and able to even begin to imagine abundance, and they are going to be whom I seek. I am also an introverted semi-nerd, and my approach reflects it. But as an artisan soul:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#reading

it is people like me who come up with new ideas, and the love and abundance that a world based on FE makes feasible:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

will be very hard to root, and for now, just making FE and abundance thinkable is my game:

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

and I am currently writing the textbook (AKA “hymnal”) for the abundance choir to learn the canon, and when it becomes their song, not mine, then the next steps can become feasible, and mature and old sages, kings, priests, etc.:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#michael

can come to take the effort further, into a world where FE and abundance can manifest. As I have been saying for many years now:

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

if I can help people simply imagine abundance, that will be enough for me in this lifetime, and the rest would be gravy. I’ll happily take The Muppet Movie ending to the FE quest, but I don’t demand it. I am taking a path that nobody has tried before, and we will see if it bears any fruit. I think it already has, but I am really just getting started.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

5th February 2014, 17:06

Hi:

I’ll start on the next chapter soon, and I have wanted to write for some time on what I have been seeing in the past fifteen years or so, as I have been studying anthropology and primate research.

Back when I got my wakeup call on Columbus’s true legacy in about 1992:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm#genocide

I began sailing in “revisionist” waters of many kinds, which not only focused on the people that conquered the world, Europeans, but the people they conquered. The invaders often thought that native life was so superior to European life that running off and “going native” was an epidemic problem for the invaders, and the English made it a capital crime to run off and go native as early as Jamestown:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#jamestown

and dancing and singing with the natives was also seen as a degenerate spectacle:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#morton

stamped out by the Puritans. Dancing natives were only good for killing, all the way to Wounded Knee:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#wounded

From my earliest studies, the best scholars would stress that the natives of the Western Hemisphere were not superhuman or subhuman, but just human. But I also read a great deal of what I have to call, in retrospect, idealizing of the natives, often by native scholars. I ran into a similar situation with feminist scholars. Part of me is highly sympathetic to that kind of “advocacy” scholarship, but I have spent many years balancing my perspective from studying what I now know was quite biased. I did my best to not get carried away and keep it as balanced as I could. For instance, there is not much that I would change about the thrust of the masculine/feminine medical paradigms:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/medicine.htm#masculine

But it would look a little different today, and I plan to rewrite some parts of my site before I publish the upcoming essay, and that section will likely be one of them. The bottom line, whether studying monkeys and great apes or “primitive” pre-urban cultures, is that the three basics of life: getting enough energy (food), preserving it (not becoming somebody else’s food or losing one’s energy to somebody or something else), and propagating one's genes through reproduction, have always been the driving parameters of all life on Earth for all time, including humans. It always comes down to those economic principles. Even in our seemingly comfortable industrialized societies, where for the first time in Earth’s history the primary preoccupation of an animal was not getting enough food to eat, economics, particularly the economics of scarcity, still trumps all.

In studying hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists such as New Guinea Highlanders, while the idea of vengeance and other socials factors could play into particular acts of warfare, they were only proximate causes, and the ultimate cause was always economics, generally a battle over access to resources. To this day, the basics have not changed, with today’s genocidal invasions of hydrocarbon country by the USA all about securing the last easy hydrocarbons in a world where they are dwindling fast:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

When scientists study gorillas, chimps, and rhesus and capuchin monkeys, their behaviors can always be explained in terms of raw economics, and all social and “intelligent” behaviors are only means to economic ends. In my studies, I doubt that I have found an exception. With the rise in living standards during the human journey, something like sentience has appeared, where humans have developed consciences, when they could afford them, so that forcing people to murder each other stopped being “entertainment” more than a thousand years ago around Ancient Rome, and only within the past three centuries has the institution of slavery become obsolete, which coincided with the rise in standard of living that industrialization provided. The new economic situation made slavery obsolete, and with the new economy, humans had the luxury of developing their consciences a little more. Again, the world’s smartest man saw nothing wrong with slavery three centuries ago:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=753632&viewfull=1#post753632

but rising standards of living ended up helping people to a new level of conscience. As always, economics came first, and conscience later. Humans are animals, and that kind of behavior is no different in kind than what researchers see in monkeys and apes. That is why FE has the potential to raise human sentience to levels never seen before and scarcely imagined today. I fully admit that if not for the relative economic abundance that I was raised with, as a member of the most privileged demographic group in world history – a white, educated, American man – I likely would not have pursued FE and still do, in my “spare” time. My economic situation had a great deal to do with my journey. Heck, almost all of my FE pals got into the “business” due to the first oil crisis in 1973/1974. Dennis and Brian O started on the FE path because of it:

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

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

and I did, too:

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

So, when people begin to go way out into social and spiritual theorizing about what is happening, they are lost in the weeds and cannot see the forest for the trees. In physical reality, it is always about economics at its root. Godzilla is playing a power game, but it rides atop the economic one, and he knows it, which is why he has the lid on FE as tightly as he does. Real economics is about energy above all else. Every day, because of my profession, I see analysis and theorizing about our economic situation that focuses on money, taxes, retail politics, and the like, when they are symptoms, not causes. All of that is meaningless next to the energy situation. Burning up our primary energy source a million times as fast as it was created renders everything else about the human journey inconsequential noise. And that almost nobody on Earth is even thinking about FE, and particularly with anything resembling sentience and enlightenment, is surreal.

I was telling my wife just yesterday, that in the dark days in Ventura, when we were being attacked by all sides, in my home town, with even my mother cheering our public crucifixion:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=300436&viewfull=1#post300436

there were times when I wondered if I was sane. I eventually came to realize that I was one of the few sane people in an insane world, and when Brian O wondered if we were a sentient species:

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

I sadly knew exactly what he was talking about. The level of humanity’s collective integrity and conscience has always been dependent on the economic situation, which is why the promise of FE is so great, but is also why only highly exceptional people, those freaks whose consciences are not wholly dependent on their economic reality, are going to be any help at all in helping FE manifest. I have called them overgrown Boy Scouts:

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

but they can be Girl Scouts, too. :) Women need to step up, and they can only do that effectively in industrialized nations; in non-industrial nations, women are still baby-producing chattel, being the primary wealth-generation engine of peasant societies (although a lot about that has changed in my lifetime, they are still second-class citizens in those nations).

I don’t kid myself that such people of conscience are going to be easy to find. They are needles in the human haystack, which even people like Dennis had to reluctantly admit, after having the reality of humanity rubbed in his face for many years:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=461803&highlight=tailings#post461803

I am sure that I still have illusions to work through, but on that score and how the land lies, I think I have worked through enough of them to spend my life on a different strategy that I am about to try out, which may have a hope of success and can help save the world’s bacon, and we will see how it goes.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

5th February 2014, 21:35

Hi:

As my posts have shown:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=792942&viewfull=1#post792942

I have been recently reflecting on psychopaths I have known. I never met Bill the BPA Hit Man, but from what I heard of him, he was as talented as Mr. Deputy and Mr. Texas. What those psychopaths, and other psychopaths I have known, have in common is that they have the charisma game down. They all knew how to “turn it on” and make people feel good. And they would use those good feelings as a weapon against them, when the time was right.

Dennis and Brian also are/were charismatic, but they are/were the real deal. They really cared about people. The psychopaths I have known were all highly intelligent, too. They all knew the right words to say, the right gestures, and so on. I am a semi-nerd, and do not pick up on social cues as readily as a salesman, but I am not totally blind, and there were times when the psychopaths would let their masks slip, for just a second, and I could pick it up. Also, they were obviously ethical midgets, so when dealing with rather complex ethical issues, because they were faking trying to appear like good guys, they would say things or take small actions that gave them away, or gave them away enough so that I had my radar up forever after. I always give people the benefit of the doubt, but when they take their masks off, I am done with them. When Mr. Deputy took his mask off when I was on the witness stand:

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

it was the turning point of my life. It certainly was not the first time that somebody had unmasked themselves to me, as I had already received a bellyful of it during my journey with Dennis, probably beginning when my boss engineered the theft of Dennis’s company in Seattle:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#salient1

and the last before Mr. Deputy's performance was watching Mr. Texas take his mask off:

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

but he still tried to play the good guy in front of me:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#salient3

but I had already seen his kind many times by then, but his act was definitely highly polished. People like that in Godzilla’s stable are very good at what they do.

So, when I saw it a few times, I was surprised, but that wore off pretty fast. When I saw the numerous attempts to steal the company, I told Dennis how shocking it was to see, and he said “Join the club”:

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

But what was surprising to me was how easily everybody fell for it. I watched those psychopaths effortlessly manipulate everybody. Well, not quite everybody, as I eventually could spot them fast, but when I tried to warn people that they were getting in bed with psychopaths, they looked at me like I was crazy, even when the smell of sulfur was in the air and that pointy tail sticking out from behind Mr. Texas’s angel robes was plainly visible. People were so stupidly compliant because the psychopath was promising them something, even as he ran Dennis through with his sword (but did it with a smile):

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

I initially could not believe what I was seeing, how easily people fell under the spell, but it helped me later understand events such as how Hitler became so popular among Germans. It is like Jesus said, by their fruits you will know them, and my deep spiritual studies long before I met Dennis:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#my

were probably critical for me to navigate those minefields. It can lead to a highly negative view of humanity if people are not careful. There comes a point where you realize that there is divinity down there somewhere, even in the psychopaths, but very few express it on this planet, as they live in fear.

Because of that background, it has been “interesting” to know people who use that charisma to get what they want, and some even frankly tell me how they do it and how it works. The more honest will say that they turn on that charisma to gain the advantage in a business situation, and they do not seem to realize what they are doing, or feel bad about it. They see it as a business transaction, where they make people feel good and then gain the upper hand in a business transaction, and they seem to think that making somebody feel good was their payment for taking advantage of them. I don’t say anything to that, but I realize how they see me when they turn it on. :)

Because I am a pretty specialized professional, I have had to work in urban areas for my entire career, and it took me that first year in LA:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=406928&viewfull=1#post406928

to realize that anybody that was friendly to me, in a way where they approached me beyond the normal courtesies of holding doors open and the like, were trying to use their charm to take advantage of me. Now, I almost never make eye contact with anybody on the streets. Is that great? Hell no, and is one reason why I hate cities, but that is how it is in the USA, and probably all cities in the world. What a mess.

In cyberspace, Mr. Skeptic plays the same game:

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

with a kind of over-the-top fake friendliness. I never let him get close enough to slip his dagger in my back, but he has stalked and slimed me since 1998, and it has amazed me (although it shouldn't :) ) how he has sucked in some of the names in the FE field. What fatal naivete. With Dennis driven out of business once again, and maybe forever, Mr. Skeptic may kind of slink away, but if he is on the payroll, and he may well be, then he will have to get active again if I have any success with my upcoming efforts, hurling his libelous slime. Or else Godzilla will send a few more sweet-talking psychopaths my way, to do their best to wreck what I will be trying. And that is one reason why the naïve are likely not suited for what I am doing. They have to be far worldlier, or else they will be lambs to the slaughter when the psychopaths arrive, both those on the payroll and the free-lancers who smell blood. That is one reason why I am taking the approach that I am, to help keep the psychopaths at bay.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

7th February 2014, 03:45

Hi:

In preparation for publishing that essay this spring (I hope! :) ), I am beginning to tackle some parts of my site that I had been wanting to edit and/or rewrite, and I just spent all day revising my Columbus essay:

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

which is about the oldest essay on my site, first written in 1998, with an overhaul in 2001 after I hired an editor. I especially changed this section:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm#genocide

but the entire essay received a facelift. I am also using some new mastering tools for making my essays pretty, and let me know if any of it looks strange to you, format-wise.

There are a few other essays that I plan to tweak before I publish that essay, to try to get at least most of the site aligned with my current approach and state-of-the-art in scientific findings and other investigations. We will see how much I end up tweaking, but that was the big one for this month.

Back to the big essay.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

9th February 2014, 16:30

Hi:

I am working like a madman on the writings. Today is the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the British Invasion, when The Beatles were first on The Ed Sullivan Show:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ed_Sullivan_Show#The_Beatles

I vividly remember JFK’s funeral a few months before The Beatles arrived:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paths.htm#apollo1

but I was raised in a quasi-redneck household and only heard country and western music growing up, and walked out of Let it Be in 1970, not even knowing who The Beatles were:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=452991&viewfull=1#post452991

While the USA has been having an extreme weather winter, with epic storms and an unprecedented drought in California, in Seattle it has been a mild winter, with the snow “only” seven feet deep in the mountain pass near my home. But this morning I woke up to the attached. The daffodils are beginning to come up, and spring it not too far off, but not today. :)

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

9th February 2014, 23:19

Hi:

Briefly, I get questioned on what the heck I think I am doing. How is my essay going to help anything? Well, we will see. :)

However, as the end of writing this essay is not too far away, and I am seeing the light at the end of that tunnel, here is what I hope to initially accomplish, and it may be all I accomplish, and anything else would be gravy:

1. That for readers who do the work, they will begin to develop a comprehensive perspective of how the world works, and when they do, energy will be in the center of their radar. They will understand how it runs things, how all economic activity arises from it, and how it is the center of all political-economic decision-making.

2. That they will understand the epochal nature of each time that humanity achieved the technical prowess and social organization that enabled them to tap a new energy source.

3. They will understand how damaging our current energy production methods are to Earth and humanity, and what the benefits are.

4. They will understand the potential of free energy, on the political-economic scale and as well as environmentally and socially.

5. They will understand that adapting to scarcity has been the way of life on Earth for nearly four billion years, and it is little different with humans, but when humans began to tap the extra energy that largely began with controlling fire, it marked the rise of our species and shows how many of our behaviors are not human nature, but our reaction to scarcity.

6. They will understand that violence, warfare, and exploitation were always based on resource scarcity and when free energy is available, virtually all of the motivation for those behaviors would quickly disappear.

7. They would realize that the fears that people have toward free energy (Level 5 epitomizes it http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level5 ) are not really very realistic, but based on the projection of scarcity on a situation of abundance, which is really begging the question.

8. Because of my background and associates, people will get over the hump on my credentials for stating that free energy and related technologies such as free energy are already here http://www.ahealedplanet.net/camelot.htm#underground ), so that they can keep their eye on the ball and not treat it like some Star Trek fantasy. There are few people on Earth who can publicly state that with confidence, and I am one of them. If my other work has not established my cred with my readers, who have done their homework and kicked the tires, then they are not in my target audience.

That is the short version. I recently finished Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization, and have several other works like it, and it is evident that all wars for all time were primarily rooted in economic scarcity and seen as a necessary evil, not something that even the most bellicose society saw as a good thing. But the more bellicose societies saw it as an opportunity for plunder when the benefits of war seemed to be greater than the costs. Chimpanzees do the same thing. I will be covering that territory in the essay soon.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

11th February 2014, 01:01

Hi:

Over the next week, I will be putting up some snippets of what I am working on. I am likely two weeks out from putting up the latest chapter, but we will see. I am constantly revising previous chapters, correcting errors, tightening up parts, reflecting comments from my pals, and making other revisions. Sometimes, I have an idea that I wanted to express and decided to put it in an earlier chapter, and what I just wrote is below, which is going in one of the early chapters.

Best,

Wade

A key tension in mainstream science has long been the battle between specialists and the generalists and multidisciplinarians. If there is a specialist motto, it might be, “The devil is in the details.” Deductive reasoning is their specialty. The generalist motto might be, “I seem to see a pattern here.” They often use inductive reasoning. Specialists are usually those on the ground, getting their hands dirty, doing the detailed work that forms the bedrock of scientific data. Without their efforts, science as we know it today would not exist. However, mainstream science has long suffered from the tunnel vision that overspecialization encourages, and R. Buckminster Fuller thought that that epidemic overspecialization and naïveté of mainstream scientists of his time was a ruling class tactic to keep scientists controlled, not able to see the forest for the trees. In the past generation or so, that has been changing, where multidisciplinary efforts are crossing disciplinary boundaries and achieving synthetic views that were not feasible in earlier times, with patterns emerging that were previously invisible in a world filled with specialists. Many paradigmatic breakthroughs in science and technology were made by non-professionals, specialists working outside their field of specialty, and generalists traversing disciplinary boundaries. A comprehensivist tries to understand the details well enough to refrain from making unwarranted generalizations while also striving for that big picture awareness. Such an attempt could seem like pure folly. Many may see this essay in a similar light, and they may be right.

A footnote to that paragraph reads:

Many examples can be provided, such as the initially-ridiculed light bulb and powered flight, where demonstrations of those technologies were made in public, but mainstream scientists ignored the demonstrations as if they were never made. As my astronomer and former-astronaut colleague told me not long before he died, that kind of wholesale denial by mainstream science is worse today than it was in the times of Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers. For a less famous example, the great linguist Joseph Greenberg ruffled many specialist feathers with his generalist synthesis for cataloging the world’s languages by seeking universal similarities. His generalist synthesis, while having errors in the details, is widely accepted today as largely accurate. See an account of the controversy in Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn, pp. 218-232. The taboo against studying mass extinctions prevailed for more than a century and was broken by a team led by a Nobel Laureate working outside of his field of expertise.

Wade Frazier

11th February 2014, 19:15

Hi:

In a recent post, I linked to what all peoples have in common:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=791891&viewfull=1#post791891

and here is the material in question:

http://www.udel.edu/anthro/ackerman/universal_people.pdf

Below is what I just drafted, which will likely be part of my essay.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Many of the following universal traits have been minimized and even largely discarded with the Industrial Revolution and attendant Scientific Revolution, but they likely were universal about 50 kya when that splinter group of the founder population of today’s humans left Africa. But this list will use “UP” to mean “the Universal People,” meaning what all preindustrial peoples have in common.

1. UP have mastered language, and UP’s languages all have universal traits, such as:

a. Have nouns, verbs, and possessives;
b. Have a number of grammatical and semantic rules that are identical across all UP’s languages, when there was no known reason for them to independently converge; there were other equally valid ways to structure sentences and grammar;
c. Have dualistic traits, when it is not required, such as no UP’s language has single words for these three: good, not good, and bad; or bad, not bad, and good; UP’s languages do not have single words with those intermediate meanings, but related to the poles instead; their languages also describe the middles between the extremes, and can grade them;
d. Have male and female terms;
e. Have time-related terms, in both linear and circular terms;
f. Newborns can be put into any culture on Earth and will grow up mastering the languages they were raised with.
2. UP all use their languages for similar purposes, such as:

a. Use special forms of speech, including poems and oratory, and they have structural similarities;
b. Tell stories and myths, with their cultures having creation myths to explain how the world, and UP’s role in it, came to be, and until the explanations of modern science appeared, all explanations had supernatural aspects to them;
c. Gossip;
d. Use humor and insults;
e. Use language to deceive, and others try to detect deceptive language, partly by inspecting non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions, posture, and gestures.
3. UP have universally-understood facial expressions, such as smiles and frowns.
4. UP’s infants have a fear of loud noises, and by nearly one year of age, they fear all strangers.
5. UP have a natural fear of snakes.
6. UP are seen by their societies as individuals who commit acts intentionally and have a sense of personal responsibility for their actions.
7. UP have a similar conception of age, which is not the only way to think about age.
8. The primary social unit of UP is mothers and their children.
9. UP have a sexual division of labor, with women doing most childrearing and men usually performing strenuous/dangerous labor to economically provide for the society and/or social unit, or protect it.
10. UP have institutions that grant males preferential sexual access to females; and all have standards of appropriate potential mates – the incest taboo is not quite universal, but standards of appropriate unions are.
11. UP have standards of sexual attractiveness which usually relate to a woman’s ability to bear healthy offspring and a man’s ability to economically provide for and protect the primary social unit.
12. UP have hygiene standards;
13. UP’s men commit most of the violence and men dominate all societies.
14. UP’s fathers and young sons compete for the mother’s attention, which creates a tension that has been called the Oedipus complex.
15. UP’s senior kin are partly responsible for socializing offspring, and UP recognize kin relationships;
16. UP’s children learn partly via mimicry, and play and fight; their activities help develop adult skills.
17. UP dance and make music, with those activities often conjoined, and UP have music for children.
18. UP’s societies control fire and make tools and shelter.
19. UP are territorial and judge others by their own standards.
20. UP societies have complex political scheming.
21. UP engage in reciprocal economic exchanges, and can retaliate when exchanges are unequal or other personal inequalities are not addressed.
22. UP plan for the future.
23. UP distinguish right from wrong, and regulate their public affairs.
24. UP groups have leaders, whom the group members want to be generous.
25. UP societies are never democratic or autocratic, so all are oligarchic.
26. UP make promises and can empathize.
27. Envy is common among UP, and all societies try to minimize it.
28. UP think that they are more objective than they really are.
29. UP have laws, particularly against murder and rape, although in warfare those strictures are often relaxed.
30. People who offend the laws are punished.
31. Conflict is common, and UP’s societies try to reduce it, and conflicts are structured around in-group versus out-group dynamics, with different ethical standards for dealing with in-group and out-group people.
32. UP have etiquette and hospitality as ideals.
33. UP’s societies have customary behaviors.
34. UP’s societies have standard eating times and other daily routines, and occasions for feasts.
35. UP’s sexual activities and bodily excretion are conducted in private.
36. UP have fashion and style their hair.
37. UP have taboos on certain foods and utterances.
38. UP’s societies anthropomorphize phenomena and have beliefs that are demonstrably false.
39. UP practiced magic to protect life and attract the opposite sex, and have theories of luck.
40. UP have rituals, and some are regarding status changes, such as rites of passage and marriage; they mourn their dead.
41. UP have supernatural beliefs and believe in extra-physical activities.
42. UP are still materialists, and value property and how it transfers to others, including descendants
43. UP dream and attempt to interpret the dreams.
44. UP try to explain sickness and death, and know that they are connected. They try to heal the sick and use medicines.
45. UP practice divination and try to control the weather.

That, in summary, is what all humans have had in common that anthropologists can determine, and some traits are less than universal, such as women terminating unwanted pregnancies, killing unwanted children, and capital punishment, but were close, which may mean that some societies discarded those behaviors over time or that most adopted them later. Those traits were all likely possessed by that founder group of today’s humanity that lived 60-50 kya, including those few hundred humans that left Africa and conquered the world.

There are some interesting divergences, such as how the West emphasizes linear time while the East emphasizes circular time, and some scientists wonder if that has been at least partly reflected in the DNA of those peoples by now. How many of those UP traits are biological? How many are culturally and economically dependent? What is human nature, and can our seeming sentience change or overcome our natures? This essay will explore those questions. Some UP traits are evident in today’s monkeys and apes, so likely have a long pedigree and are baked pretty deeply into human consciousness if not necessarily human biology, while others have declined in their prominence or seeming importance in the historical era, particularly since the Industrial Revolution began. However, when I read that list and compare it to my American society, which is history’s richest and most powerful, all UP traits still exist, to one degree or another.

Wade Frazier

12th February 2014, 02:36

Hi:

A couple of notes. I have been kind of forced to recently recall my days with Dennis. It happens often enough, but I would rather that people just read my writings so I don’t need to go through that ordeal over and over, as it takes me a while to come down from the process. Sometimes there is compensation for the process, but it is rare, and it usually just leaves me wrung out. Today, I was thinking about one event that I have written about a little:

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

but I really have not even talked to anybody about the details before, and like so many other events in my life, even I sometimes sit back and wonder if they really happened, and I was the person living through them. But I only know one person whose memory is better than mine, so I am blessed/cursed with recalling events in great detail, especially important ones. I have written about the events a little on this thread:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=275430&viewfull=1#post275430

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=422341&viewfull=1#post422341

but not in the kind of detail where even I sit back and really wonder about who is pulling my strings. When Dennis flew me to that Vegas conference, I had not seen him for about a year and a half, and he wanted me to see the fullness of what he was doing. Again, when I helped bust him out of jail, he tried to get me back in the saddle with him, and I told him that I was done playing the Indiana Jones game. But I went there, largely just to see him and his family. But several hundred people attended the conference and Dennis was the main attraction, so I did not get to spend much time with him or his family. That first morning, I sat in the audience and listened to Dennis tell his story. About fifteen minutes into it, I could see what was coming. He was going to introduce me to the crowd as the man who saved his life. It was part of the show, but I wanted no part of it, and left the room before he got to that part of the story. I never asked him about it, but I think he got the message and never asked me again to make a public appearance like that.

But before Dennis got on stage, other groups made presentations, and one was a Madison Avenue company that was staging the ad campaign. About halfway through the initial presentation by that company, which was not very impressive, some guy sitting next to me said “This is bullsh*t.” I am not sure if I nodded or not, but that was probably close to my sentiment. After the Madison Avenue guy finished, then another presenter provided his plan for Dennis’s joint venture partners (who comprised those hundreds of people at the conference). Dennis introduced the speaker, and said that the speaker came on his own nickel from New Jersey to make the presentation, which was intended to impress the audience with his company’s commitment. I left the conference when Dennis got to that part where I would become some kind of prop in the presentation, but I was still recognized by people at the conference, as I am on tapes in Dennis’s materials, as I was prominent during the raid.

But I kept a low profile, and the morning after the conference ended I was flying home to Ohio. I sat in the back of the plane, maybe even the last row, and being a bookworm, I read for the entire flight. The flight continued on to New York, but I was not expecting to see anybody that I knew. It was a plane where the seats ahead of me were kind of offset, and I could see between the seats in the row ahead of me, and just ahead of me to my left seemed to be the speaker that “came on his own nickel,” and just ahead of me was that guy who said that the Madison Avenue presentation was “bullsh*t.” I recognized him, so I guessed that the other guy was that speaker who followed the Madison Avenue presentation. It was not easy to tell from where I sat. And I noticed that several of them were sitting together and chatting, so they all seem to have worked for that company that came on its own nickel. It was just something that I noticed in passing, surprised that I was sitting on a plane leaving Vegas and the people in front of me were from the same conference. Vegas is a big place, so figured that it was a strange coincidence, and in fact, I have never that had kind of experience on an airplane before or since in my life, and I have taken well more than a hundred flights, maybe even more than two hundred, which is ironic for somebody who hates flying, especially after 9/11.

But it was just a minor curiosity as I settled into reading my book. I don’t recall the book I was reading, so my memory is not that photographic ( :) ), but as I recall, it was kind of hard reading (I was reading Chomsky in those days, and that can be hard work), and the flight to Columbus was something like four hours from Vegas. As we descended to land, I put my book down for a moment and just stared ahead of me into space, in a daydream, feeling the strain of that reading stint. As I was sitting there, that guy ahead of me thrust a legal notepad that he had been writing on into the air, literally blocking my field of vision. It seemed like he was admiring his handiwork written during the flight. With his pad thrust in front of my eyes, I focused on the page, and leaping off the page were the words, “The plan to rape and pillage [Dennis’s company]." It was a several part plan to lure Dennis’s joint venture partners into their company and steal the entire effort from Dennis. I had already seen many attempts to steal Dennis’s companies:

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

but having their plans thrust in my face was a new one. :)

When I saw that title, my eyes madly ran down the page to see the plan, and it was the usual stuff that I was too used to seeing in action. Sigh. Between the guy thrusting up his pad, me seeing it and beginning to read it took a few seconds at most, and he then looked over his shoulder at me, and I tried to keep my daydream stare going, but I think that he realized that I had probably seen it. Those guys were from New Jersey, and I then realized that they may have been quasi-mobsters. When our plane landed in Columbus I got off the plane as fast as I could and was looking over my shoulder all the way to my car. I got home and called Dennis, who was still in Vegas. I said that it seemed that I was on the same plane that company that came on their own nickel, and Dennis said, “Yes, they were on the same plane that you were.” Since Dennis bought my ticket, maybe that is why we were sitting close together. I then told Dennis what I had seen, and he told me that that was a good spy effort. :)

If I had stayed around to be introduced to the crowd, that guy who crafted his plan would have recognized me and surely would not have written his plan while sitting in front of me, much less inadvertently shown it to me. Does anybody want to put any money on that being a series of coincidences? :) My life is full of events like that, and when I put on my CPA hat, such events seem preposterous, like something out of the movies.

I talked to Dennis soon after he got back to New Jersey and asked him how it went with that “came on their own nickel” company. The day after Dennis got back, that conference speaker called Dennis up, hot to trot in getting that program going. Dennis replied with:

“That sounds good, but I was wondering if you could explain the plan to rape and pillage my company.” Then Dennis recited some details that I gave him. The man said, “We were just writing some stuff on the plane that that guy saw. It was really nothing.”

Dennis replied with, “Just show me your plan for making this effort successful, and we will go from there.” For some reason, Dennis never heard back from that company. :) I don’t know how much grief I saved Dennis from, but today I was thinking about that event, marveling that it really happened.

The other thing I wanted to write about is that as I have been studying anthropology lately, one thing that surprised me was a pretty simple idea that seems to be getting lost in the analyses. Warfare almost always has an economic root to it, and it is probably always the ultimate cause for all wars, but population density does not correlate with frequency of warfare, and I saw analyses that looked for that correlation and did not find it. But that is really not the right question, IMO.

For hunter-gatherers, their key resources are large and easy animals to kill, access to water, firewood, edible plants, stone for making tools and weapons, etc. For agriculturalists, their key resources are forests, fertile soils and the means to work them, such as draft animals and ore deposits (at least in Bronze and Iron Age agriculturalists in the Old World) that can be mined and turned into metals for plows and other key tools. For early states, the key resources are food to feed their teeming masses, forests for the many uses that wood can be put to, fuel above all else, navigable rivers and other transportation lanes, soldiers to either protect against other states or plunder them, and craftsmen and other professionals to perform the specialized work that runs civilizations. And for all of them, fertile women are a key resource, as they produce the workforce that elites exploit. For a modern industrialized state, the key resources are hydrocarbons above all else, but they also need potable water, strategic metals, a skilled workforce, and all peoples need food as their most basic resource. What they all have in common is that all of those resources are scarce, mostly because they are energy dependent, and when any of them goes to war, it is to secure energy-based resources above all else. So, to borrow from Marx, scarcity in each society is determined by their means of production, not some absolute measure. The USA did not invade Iraq for their food, manpower, or forests. It was all about the oil. Rome did not conquer the Mediterranean and much of Western Europe to seize oil or coal. What they both did, however, was invade and plunder key resources that they coveted, while devastating the conquered peoples who were plunderable. The USA actively destroyed all of Iraq’s institutions except for the oil ministry, and Rome actually seized the conquered populations and made them into slaves who died in the mines, plantations, and arenas.

If a scarcity lens is donned, then all those wars make perfect sense, and are independent of population densities. The population densities reflect the means of production and resultant style of war, but it was the relative scarcity in each society, not its absolute scarcity, that determined whether war was coming or not. If peoples live in plenty, no matter their means of production, they usually live in peace. The bonobos are a good example of that:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=792421&viewfull=1#post792421

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

12th February 2014, 17:56

Hi:

I am also revising parts of my site for when the essay is published, so the site has a more consistent presentation. Today was one of the fun ones, where I updated my pictures page:

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

which includes the most recent and clear picture that I have published of myself.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

12th February 2014, 22:59

Hi:

One thing I have been learning over the years is that worldliness has almost nothing to do with being well-traveled. Worldliness comes from dealing with the important issues facing humanity, being on the ground, trying to do something about the big stuff where the world hangs in the balance. Start bringing disruptive energy technology to market, where you play at a level where you draw Godzilla’s attention, and you become worldly, and fast. I am seeing this pattern over and over, where people who seem to have been around the block a few times turn out to be startlingly naïve. I have been puzzling over this for many years, and have concluded that only when you get into those life-threatening situations, where the world and lives literally hang in the balance, where you get to see Godzilla’s psychopaths at work, where you bear the brunt of how rotten the system is, right to its core, do you begin to understand how the world really works. But, I am hoping that people do not have to stare death and humanity's looming self-extinction in the face to begin to understand, or my plan probably has no hope.

There is the physics/science level of it and the economic aspect of it, and scientists, for instance, often get a pretty good idea of how those aspects work, but they usually fail to see the political/spiritual aspect of it. They are as blind to the sociopaths as nearly everybody else is, and maybe even more.

I have written this plenty before, but the ranking of important attributes to be able to help the choir form goes like this:

1. A person’s heart has to be in the right place, or the rest won’t matter;

2. A person needs to be worldly, which means having discernment about the animal called humanity, and its many different stripes. But if they are really worldly, they understand that the primary lesson of my journey (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#burn ) is probably the most important for somebody to know in this field, and they should already have learned it, or are coming close to;

3. They need to have plenty of mental horsepower, in analytic and critical thinking as well as the creative insight needed to see the big picture; that usually requires the discrimination of the scientist and the eye of the artist; stated another way, they will have the attention to detail and deductive reasoning that the specialist has, as well as the pattern recognition and inductive reasoning that the generalist has.

Those people almost do not exist on Earth, but they will be whom I seek, and that is because if I can’t find people like that, then my plan will probably not work.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

14th February 2014, 17:13

Hi:

I just spent a couple of days, between studies for the current essay chapter that I am working on, updating my spiritual essay:

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

for the first time in several years. I added a section:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#research

and readers can tell that I am leveraging some of my Avalon posts. :)

I may have a cadence of updating parts of my site that I have long wanted to, while working on the essay. We will see.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

15th February 2014, 19:41

Hi:

I am flailing away at the essay. Again, I have been studying a lot of anthropology in the past decade, digesting primate studies, and the like. Genetic testing has established that all humans today are descended from a group that left Africa somewhere around 60,000 to 50,000 years ago, and genetic testing has also established the routes of migration. The Negritos:

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

are descendants from the first immigrants from Africa that stayed isolated. They and the indigenes from New Guinea and Australia are relict populations of those that first left Africa. They all share those universal human traits:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=795942&viewfull=1#post795942

and one thing that anthropologists have done is study their religious practices, as well as some who stayed in Africa and also remained isolated, such as the !Kung people:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C7%83Kung_people

They all were highly violent and stayed separate from all other groups, aided by geographical isolation which they fiercely maintained. Their religious practices were all similar, with singing and dancing marathons that created group cohesion. Those rituals were critical to forming in-group bonds, which were very exclusionary in that all out-groups became enemy or prey. This likely characterized all hunter-gatherer peoples of 50,000 years ago, and as they spread across the planet, all the easy meat that they encountered quickly went extinct, and there is no reason to think that they had some kind of conservation ethic. There is no evidence that any animal ever did, so there is no reason to think that humans would have been very different, and the evidence is strong that humans drove all the easy meat to extinction, globally. Below is a snippet of the chapter I am working on, where I begin to bring together earlier parts of the essay, to make the picture clearer:

Those issues will not be resolved in my lifetime, but Homo sapiens migrated past Africa in the interglacial period of 130 kya to 114 kya, and there is evidence and speculation that those humans may have bred with Neanderthals, may have been killed off by them, may have migrated across Eurasia, or some combination of those events. There is evidence that those heidelbergensis or Neanderthal descendants, the Denisovans, also migrated across Eurasia, perhaps expanding to Southeast Asia as Homo erectus did. The only evidence for Denisovans has come from analyzing the human genome, and their genes are more prevalent in aboriginal Australians and Melanesians. In short, there is plenty of evidence that humans far more evolved than Homo erectus likely populated Eurasia in significant numbers by 200 kya, and maybe even anatomically modern humans around 100 kya, certainly enough to have driven vulnerable species to extinction before culturally modern humans left Africa about 60-50 kya. Homo erectus became extinct less than 150 kya in East Asia or the islands off of it, and the largest primate ever disappeared about 100 kya, two primates that coexisted for more than a million years, and they disappeared concurrent with the rise of humans with sophisticated toolsets, and may well have been early casualties of humanity’s success. That is a prominent suspicion among scientists today.

To briefly revisit conflicts between specialists and generalists, to that speculation above, scientists ideally want persuasive evidence that humans drove Homo erectus and gigantopithecus to extinction, with Acheulean or later technological artifacts associated with kills of those species. Gigantopithecus survived for nine million years, disappearing about when more lethal humans arrived. While such deductive reasoning is sound, the fossil and artifactual record is so thin that such evidence will likely never be adduced, even if it was a common event 150-100 kya. There is genetic evidence that humans interbred with Neanderthals and others such as Denisovans, and they both went extinct soon after culturally-modern humans arrived. That they interbred put to bed the hypotheses that they went extinct before Homo sapiens appeared on the scene.

As will be seen in this chapter, the spread of culturally-modern humans closely coincided not only with the extinction of humans and primates that existed for hundreds of thousands and even many millions of years, but virtually all of the world’s large animals went extinct almost exactly when culturally-modern humans arrived, all except for those that had evolved alongside humans for millions of years in Africa and Eurasia. Some vanished animals were among the most successful in Earth’s history.

After Africa began colliding with Asia, about 18 mya Asian animals quickly invaded and dominated Africa, with the two primary exceptions being proboscideans and apes, both of which prospered at home in Africa and in the inviting biomes of Eurasia. Proboscideans did even better, not only becoming prominent in Eurasia, but they also migrated to North America by 16.5 mya. They migrated to South America about three mya, as soon as they could, and quickly succeeded in all South American biomes, from rainforest to grasslands to mountains. They beat apes to the Western Hemisphere by 16.5 million years. Elephants pass the mirror test and mourn their dead, and their huge size and prehensile trunks, as well as their ability to eat a wide variety of vegetation, let them flourish everywhere they possibly could. They even formed biomes, as a terraforming force. Until humans appeared, proboscideans were the most intelligent, adaptable, and successful land animals ever. But after nearly twenty million years of global success, they nearly all went extinct soon after encountering culturally-modern humans. They went completely extinct in the Western Hemisphere, and there is controversy today among scientists whether humans caused it.

I have examined the megafauna extinction controversy for many years, and some scientists treat every proboscidean extinction as a unique mystery, with climate and resulting vegetation changes hypothesized, or other causes invoked as agents of extinction, when the very likely cause stares at them each morning in the mirror. The devil is in the details, but some specialists seem to have failed seeing the forest for all the many trees, and I wonder how intentional that is. Scientists have an inherent conflict of interest when attributing such catastrophes to non-human causes. During the remainder of this essay, it will become evident that a human penchant is absolving one’s group of responsibility for catastrophes and crimes, and historians, scientists, and other professionals regularly engage in such interest-conflicted acts, whether they were defending their species, race, gender, nation, class, religion, ethnicity, or profession. That in-group/out-group difference in treatment has deep roots in the human journey.

That ends the snippet. I hope to have that chapter drafted in the next week or so. I am having pals hack away at my work, including my editor, and we will see what comes out the other end of that sausage machine in a few months. My editor likened my style to Faulkner’s, and I had to laugh. I have tried to make my style less idiosyncratic over the years, but Wade’s World is pretty inimitable. The good news is that nobody can realistically accuse me of plagiarizing them. :)

As I get close to the end of this process, pals are contacting me, trying to be helpful, but almost none of them have any conception of what I am attempting or facing, and I have to sigh each time one of them presents me with one of their bright ideas on how I can make a lot of money off it, go on Oprah, and the like. There is nothing about what I am doing that is “normal.” FE would end the world as we know it, and almost everybody can easily see that, especially Godzilla, which is why he is so vigilant in this area, and my pals just cannot seem to wrap their heads around that idea in the slightest. They either pretend that he does not exist, or they come up with some bright idea, along the lines of Level 7 or 10:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level7

and those are not stupid people, so I wonder how they can be so mindless in this area. What I think it mainly is is naïveté, trying to play boy-general:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#ryan

and projecting their self-interested motivation onto me. In summary, people like that are not in my target audience, and they will not understand anything that I am trying to do. The more I see that kind of “helpful” advice, the more I realize that I am truly looking for needles in haystacks.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

17th February 2014, 14:08

Hi:

As an addendum to the end of my previous post, I have been keeping pretty quiet in my daily life about the essay that I am working on, but when somebody close to me hears about it, if they have not already written me off as crazy, the responses are all variations of:

1. Is there a market for it?

2. Can you make a lot of money off it?

3. Can you hit the talk circuit and get on TV?

4. Are you going to publish a book?

and so on. If I ever looked for “investors,” the first people through the door would either be Godzilla’s agents making the friendly buyout offer:

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

free-lance psychopaths trying to steal it:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=796121&viewfull=1#post796121

or those with the silver-tongued approach that is designed to get on the inside, close to me, where they can bide their time and wait for the most opportune moment to stick their knives in my ribs, either as free-lancers or Godzilla’s agents.

Been there, done that. Because of the issue’s magnitude:

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

even well-meaning people are quickly seduced by greed, delusions of grandeur:

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

and so on, and they are almost invariably naïve about Godzilla, his agents, and the free-lance psychopaths, or, as Mr. Professor did, they get paranoid and take out their allies, because they superficially look like what they think bad guys look like:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=698165&highlight=bloody#post698165

These minefields cannot be negotiated by the naïve and/or paranoid. If some high tech zillionaire decided to remember me in his/her will, and a pile of cash showed up at my doorstep one day, I would accept it, but that is about the only kind of money I would ever accept. The rest is too risky and makes the project vulnerable, and I don’t need money, but heart-centered and sentient people who are willing to do the work to learn to think comprehensively.

I have already done the heavy lifting for what I am trying to do. It will be up to the choir to carry the ball further. My “choir” work will look a little like what I am doing at Avalon, but it will only be an interaction with initiates who are long past the newbie delusions and suggestions, such as trying to find the quick and easy way to FE, finding allies among environmentalists, and the like. They will be worldly enough to be past all those pitfalls and dead ends. The conversation will be at a far higher level than has been seen at my Avalon threads.

I am doing something different, and radically so. It looks so strange and harmless that I hope it is fairly low on Godzilla’s radar:

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

but we will see.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

17th February 2014, 14:46

Hi:

OK, one more short one before I begin my day working on the essay. I know that I am looking for needles in haystacks, but the Internet gives me an unprecedented way to try to find them. As can be seen on my Avalon threads, newbies nearly invariably want some quick and easy answer, want to rush out and go “do something,” and so on. When I get the choir going, conversations about Godzilla will be short. He won’t be the focus. He will be acknowledged, honored, and the conversation will move on to more important issues. The focus won’t be on “doing something” for a long time, because only people who have achieved a comprehensive, heart-centered perspective are fit to even start “doing something.” The “work” will be on raising awareness, and if enough people can raise it sufficiently, taking action will be the easy part.

I have stated it many times that impatience is my Achilles heel, and I have been able to work on it every day. :) This year marks the fortieth anniversary of my mystical awakening:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#my

and is about when I first dreamed of changing the energy industry:

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

If I could have time-warped to today from when I was sixteen, and seen myself today and accessed the memories of my journey, I am not sure how much of it I would have believed. I would have probably been in denial of most of it, thinking that I knew how to get past the pitfalls of my journey. In retrospect, those “pitfalls” were my greatest opportunities for learning. If I had not had the trial by fire, I would not be where I am today. I know that almost nobody on Earth can survive such trials, and I am not asking anybody to have them. There are less risky ways to learn:

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

The School of Hard Knocks is not the only one. :)

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

17th February 2014, 21:36

Hi:

I was running some errands this morning, and when I saw that my bank was closed, it hit me. Today is Presidents’ Day! Good ol’ George and Abe! :)

Readers have seen plenty what a saint I think George was:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#blueprint

What is less obvious is my regard for Abe. Abe engaged in the time-honored act of killing Indians:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#blackhawk

as with many future presidents in the nineteenth century. As far as his stature goes, what he is primarily responsible for is “holding the Union together.”

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#civilwar

In that, he was more successful than King George in keeping upstart breakaway provinces from becoming independent. But on the slavery issue, Abe was really nothing special, with his “emancipation” little more than a politician’s gambit:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#gambit

The USA was the last Western nation to abolish slavery, and it was quite an anachronism by the mid-nineteenth century, with Europe long ago abolishing slavery:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#harrison2

that parade of slave-owning presidents traipsing through the White House was something to behold. Like any political entity, Lincoln prevented anybody from “opting out” of the program, like joining the Mafia. The American Civil War was an early example of an industrial giant grinding down an opponent via attrition that the North’s industrial economy could more easily absorb. The situation of the “free” North and the slave-owning South is about the best example I know of regarding how industrialization ended slavery, not any bout of conscience. Slavery was an economically anachronistic institution. Economics came first, and conscience later, if ever. The USA’s genocide in Iraq to seize their oil is a very recent example of that phenomenon:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

On a different note, anybody who knows me for long knows something about my “other” life, and one woman was my most valued employee for several years. She is several years younger than I am. She left my employ a few years ago, and got brain cancer, the kind that is almost always fatal:

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

As I have learned over the years:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/medicine.htm#lemmings

nobody really wants to hear about alternatives, even when they face certain death. I visited her several months ago, when she was nearing her life expectancy after diagnosis, and she knew that I was hip to alternatives. As she was showing me her scars from her brain surgeries, and taking some new drug that killed many of its patients from side-effects, she surprisingly asked me what I would have done. I told her that I would have been to see Burzynski at a minimum:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/medicine.htm#burzynski

I only told her because she asked, and she even listened, but kind of casually. A few days ago, I was informed that her tumors came back with a vengeance soon after I visited her, and she went with the recommended “scorched Earth” treatment, and she is now near death. I try to not let it get to me, and I love her and will remember our good times together, but choosing certain death over even entertaining alternatives really boggles my mind. I will have something to say about that kind of behavior in my essay, as being part of our problem as a species. Are we really a sentient species?

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

19th February 2014, 01:32

Hi:

Man, am I ever a fool. An optimistic fool, but still a fool. I was hoping that my next chapter would be a short one, but it will be my longest yet. As the timeline gets closer to today, the issues are becoming more complex, hence the length. If this chapter ends up being forty pages, I may have to split it, and I have not yet thought about how I might do that. I hope to be finished drafting it in the next week, but we will see. Now, I am really starting to feel the time pressure. :)

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

20th February 2014, 18:03

Hi:

I just finished with my first writing of the next chapter. I am not sure that I can even call the below a draft yet, but I am rushing off to the next one, as I am getting pressed for time. I have editorial comments back on early sections that I will now digest, and by early next week I should be writing about the Third Epochal Event, when humans became civilized. The chapter draft below will have to be a three-fer, as it is the longest chapter yet. As I suspected, it was a very heavy lift, emotionally, and I am not sure that it will get much better in the future chapters, but I am going to do my best.

So, without further ado…

Humanity’s Second Epochal Event: The Super-Predator Revolution – Part 1

Anthropologists and primate researchers long believed that culture was the unique province of humanity, but relatively recent scientific findings have disproven that notion. Capuchin monkeys have cultural learning, and it is more sophisticated with great apes. It took a few million years after the human/chimp split for our ancestors to learn to make stone tools, and that culture then spread widely in Africa. The control of fire, appearance of Homo erectus, and development of a new toolset were likely all closely related and at least partly interdependent, but little seemed to change for the next million years or more. Then the next version of humanity appeared and possessed a larger brain, and new tools and behaviors are evident beginning about a half million years ago. The timeframes continually shrank between major events in the human journey. Only two hundred thousand years later, Neanderthals appeared and created a new toolset, and new behaviors are in evidence. Only one hundred thousand years after that, anatomically modern humans appeared. Only thirty thousand years after that, about 170 kya, new tool-making techniques appeared, as well as humanity’s first known exploitation of the seashore biome, probably due to necessity, where life once again was eked out on the margins, and those humans may have decorated their bodies. About 100 kya, innovation seems to have accelerated again, and by 75-60 kya there is evidence of bedding and sophisticated tools made with complex processes. Needles and perhaps even arrowheads first appeared about 60 kya. There is no doubt among scientists that members of Homo sapiens made those advances, and their artifacts provided evidence of increasing cultural and technical sophistication, which soon left Neanderthals and all other land animals far behind. About 75-70 kya, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia was Earth’s largest in tens of millions of years, and there is controversy today whether that eruption was partly responsible for the genetic bottleneck that Homo sapiens passed through not long afterward. What became today’s humanity seems to have nearly gone extinct at that bottleneck.

Those issues will not be resolved in my lifetime, but Homo sapiens migrated past Africa in the interglacial period of 130 kya to 114 kya, and there is evidence and speculation that those humans may have bred with Neanderthals, may have been killed off by them, may have migrated across Eurasia, or some combination of those events. There is evidence that heidelbergensis or Neanderthal descendants, the Denisovans, also migrated across Eurasia, perhaps expanding to Southeast Asia as Homo erectus did. The Denisovan evidence arose from analyzing DNA from teeth and bones, which is the only physical evidence of Denisovans so far, and their genes are more prevalent in aboriginal Australians and Melanesians. To summarize, there is substantial evidence that humans far more evolved than Homo erectus likely populated Eurasia in significant numbers by 200 kya, and perhaps even anatomically modern humans around 100 kya, and certainly enough to drive vulnerable species to extinction, with their advanced toolkit and hunting behaviors, long before behaviorally modern humans left Africa about 60-50 kya. Homo erectus became extinct less than 150 kya in East Asia or the islands off of it, and the largest primate ever disappeared about 100 kya, two primates that coexisted for more than a million years, and they disappeared concurrent with the rise of humans with sophisticated toolsets, and may well have been early casualties of humanity’s success.

To briefly revisit conflicts between specialists and generalists, to that speculation above, scientists ideally want persuasive evidence that humans drove Homo erectus and gigantopithecus to extinction, with Acheulean or later technological artifacts associated with kills of those species. All that scientists have found for gigantopithecus so far are some teeth and jawbones. While such deductive reasoning is sound, the fossil and artifactual record is so thin that such evidence will likely never be adduced, even if it was a common event 150-100 kya. Gigantopithecus survived for nine million years, disappearing around when more lethal humans arrived, and a camel that roamed today’s Syria went extinct about 100 kya, soon after anatomically modern humans arrived in the vicinity. Is that a coincidence? There is genetic evidence that behaviorally modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, Denisovans, and perhaps other early humans, and they all went extinct soon after those behaviorally modern humans arrived. That they interbred put to bed the hypotheses that they went extinct before Homo sapiens arrived on the scene. If they went extinct after behaviorally modern humans arrived, as the genetic evidence clearly tells us, the implications are obvious, and any extinction hypothesis that invokes climate change or some other natural catastrophe has some high hurdles to overcome. Those events were likely the first salvos of the Sixth Mass Extinction.

As will be seen in this chapter, the spread of behaviorally modern humans closely coincided not only with the extinction of humans and primates that existed for hundreds of thousands and even many millions of years, but virtually all of the world’s large animals went extinct almost exactly when behaviorally modern humans arrived, all except those that had evolved alongside the human line for millions of years in Africa and Eurasia. Some vanished animals were among the most successful in Earth’s history.

After Africa began colliding with Asia, about 18 mya Asian animals quickly invaded and dominated Africa, with the two primary exceptions being proboscideans and apes, both of which prospered at home in Africa and in the inviting biomes of Eurasia. Proboscideans did even better, not only becoming prominent in Eurasia, but they also migrated to North America by 16.5 mya. They migrated to South America about three mya, as soon as they could, and quickly succeeded in all South American biomes, from rainforest to grasslands to mountains. They beat apes to the Western Hemisphere by 16.5 million years. Elephants pass the mirror test and mourn their dead, and their huge size and prehensile trunks, as well as their ability to eat a wide variety of vegetation, let proboscideans flourish everywhere they possibly could. They even formed biomes, as a terraforming force. Until humans arrived, proboscideans were the most intelligent, adaptable, and successful land animals ever. But after nearly twenty million years of global success, they nearly all went extinct soon after encountering behaviorally modern humans. They went completely extinct in the Western Hemisphere, and there has long been controversy among scientists whether humans caused it, although the debate is fading as evidence of human agency becomes clearer.

Some scientists treat every proboscidean extinction as a unique mystery, unrelated to other proboscidean extinctions, with climate and resulting vegetation changes hypothesized as agents of extinction, or other causes invoked, when the very likely cause stares at them each morning in the mirror. The devil is in the details, but regarding the megafauna extinctions, some specialists cannot seem to discern a very clear pattern. Scientists, because they are human, have an inherent conflict of interest when attributing such catastrophes to non-human causes. During the remainder of this essay, it will become evident that a human penchant is absolving one’s in-group of responsibility for catastrophes and crimes, and historians, scientists, and other professionals regularly engage in such interest-conflicted acts, whether they were defending their species, race, gender, nation, class, religion, ethnicity, or profession. That in-group/out-group difference in treatment has a long history, probably going back to the beginnings of territorial social animals.

The findings of mainstream science can be particularly persuasive when lines of evidence from numerous disciplines independently converge, which has become increasingly common as scientific investigations have become more interdisciplinary. DNA testing is clearly showing descent relationships, and ghost ancestors are being discovered via genetic traces. Numerous dating methods are used today, with more regularly invented. Typically, a new technique will emerge from obscurity, often pioneered by a lonely scientist. For instance, dendrochronology, the reading of tree rings, was developed as a dating science by the dogged efforts of an astronomer who labored in obscurity for many years. He was a fortunate pioneer; when he died after nearly seventy years of effort, he lived to see dendrochronology become a widely accepted dating method. Pioneers and their discoveries are usually ignored or pilloried at first, and the pioneer may die in obscurity while others eventually take credit for it. Eventually, the new method breaks past the inertia and even active suppression, if the breakthrough threatens powerful interests. Then the newly accepted method can be seen as a panacea for all manner of seemingly insoluble problems, in the euphoric, bandwagon phase. Yesterday’s heresy can become today’s dogma. Then early victories may not seem as triumphant as previously hailed, and a “morning after” period of sobering up arrives. The history of science is filled with fads that faded to oblivion, sometimes quickly, while advances that survived the withering attacks are eventually seen in a more mature light, where its utility is acknowledged as well as its limitations. DNA and molecular clock analyses have largely passed through those phases in recent years. In the 1980s, the idea of room-temperature superconductors had its brief, frenzied day in the sun when high-temperature superconductors were discovered. Cold fusion had a similar trajectory, although the effect seems real and MIT manipulated their data to try to make the effect vanish. The scientist who spoke out against MIT’s apparent fraud was murdered years later, during a series of events that I was close to. After the bolide impact hypothesis broke through a taboo that lasted for more than a century, some scientists tried explaining all mass extinctions with bolide impacts. Today, the bolide event that ended the dinosaurs’ reign is the only impact event widely accepted as responsible for a mass extinction, and even that event is still under siege by scientists who propose other dynamics for the dinosaurs’ extinction.

In the dating sciences, the tests have all had their issues and refinements. The equipment has become more sophisticated, problems have been resolved, and precision has been enhanced. While there are continuing controversies, dating techniques have advanced just like many other processes over the history of science and technology. These days, dates determined for fossils and artifacts are generally only accepted with confidence when several different samples are independently tested, and by different kinds of tests, if possible. If thermoluminescence, carbon-14, uranium, and other tests produce similar dates, as well as stratigraphic evidence, paleomagnetic evidence, current measurements of hotspot migration across tectonic plates, and with genetic and other evidence introduced in the past generation, those converging lines of evidence have produced an increasingly robust picture of not only what happened, but when.

In the 1990s, I found the dating issue enthralling and saw it assailed by fringe enthusiasts, catastrophists in particular. A couple of decades later, while I understand that, like all sciences, dating has its limitations and the enthusiasm for a new technique can become a little too exuberant, dating techniques and technologies have greatly improved in my lifetime. While dating the Cambrian Period’s beginning to 541.0 mya may seem a conceit, thinking that scientists can place that event to within a hundred thousand years of when it happened, over the years my doubts have diminished. When moon rocks and meteorites can be tested, and the findings support not only Earth’s age previously determined by myriad methods, but also supports the prevailing theories for solar system and the Moon’s formation, call me impressed. While controversies will persist over various finds and methods used, and scientific fraud certainly occurs, as a whole, those converging lines of independently tested evidence make it increasingly unlikely that the entire enterprise is a mass farce, delusion, or even a conspiracy, as many from the fringes continue to argue. There is still a Flat Earth Society, and it is not a parody. I have looked into fringe claims for many years, and few of them have proven valid, and even if many were, their potential importance to the human journey was often minor to trifling. As the story this essay tells comes closer to today’s humanity, the orthodox controversies become more heated, and fringe claims proliferate.

As scientific investigations deal with the human line, the issues increasingly become more complex and difficult to untangle and assess, largely because of human consciousness, which is a wild card, something that if not different in kind is vastly different in degree, at least for land animals; cetaceans may well be another matter. Designing falsifiable hypotheses for testing human behavior and consciousness has provided challenges not seen in other sciences, and experiments performed on our primate cousins have also become more humane. Dissecting chimp brains, while they are still alive, is no longer ethically acceptable, much less doing it to humans. Even today, data on the effects of cold and altitude on humans was primarily gleaned from Nazi experiments on prisoners. Today’s scientists studying human consciousness and its relationship to physical reality have been limited by ethics and what is perhaps the primary limitation: in studying human consciousness, scientists are studying themselves. The ideal of objective examination of the material world is hampered by unresolved paradoxes right at the bedrock, and objective examination of human consciousness, by humans, may well be an impossible goal.

However, studying the human line is in many ways little different from studying other organisms. Maybe there was love among the protists and trilobites, but life’s journey on Earth seemed to rarely stray far from the essentials of acquiring energy, preserving it, and reproducing. It is little different with today’s humans, even in the most “advanced” civilizations. Whatever the means humans used since that founder group left Africa 60-50 kya, the primary goal was always the same: survive long enough to produce offspring. All human societies had to meet that goal, first. There are no hungry philosophers, and the concept of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs can help rank humans needs and desires. If a human does not receive adequate food, water, air, shelter, sleep, and sex, the rest does not matter. Once those needs are met, social needs become important, being that virtually all higher primates are intensely social. But for nearly the entire human journey, the primary preoccupation of all peoples for all time was food security. Until the Industrial Revolution, few humans ever rose much past that most fundamental need of getting enough energy to power their biology. When preindustrial societies ascended past that level, it was never for long, as famine and civilization collapses always brought humans back to the basics of securing food. This essay’s primary purpose may be helping humanity past that threshold, where survival needs are paramount and rarely recede from the forefront of human awareness, even when people pretend that they are not. I live in history’s richest and most powerful nation, near the world’s richest man, and I pass by homeless people each day. Just as the journey of life on Earth has always been primarily about economics (physical wellbeing), which is always rooted in the energy issue, so has the human journey.

While performing the studies that became my website and this essay, one figure loomed particularly largely, both within orthodoxy and on the fringes: Charles Darwin. Perhaps because I live in the USA, which may have more hostility toward evolutionary theory than anywhere else on Earth, with Biblical literalism still so popular, I have encountered many attacks on Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s theory of evolution. I have continually read recent scientific works where the authors remark, “Darwin was right again!”, as another of his hypotheses was proven true by modern scientific investigation. When Darwin wrote that the cradle of humanity was probably Africa, because that was where the most human-looking apes were, his position was dismissed for generations, with most contemporary scientists suspecting that humans evolved in Asia. Among Darwin’s many contributions to science, the most enduring may be that all life on Earth has an ancestry, which can be traced all the way back to the beginning. Biology’s tree of life is only a more elaborate version of what Darwin began sketching long ago. When DNA analysis became feasible in my lifetime, the findings led scientists to say, “Darwin was right again!” Darwin died without ever hearing about genetic theory, but his theory of descent from common ancestry has become the bedrock of evolutionary theory. Also, scientists are using that idea to reconstruct trees of human language and religion, among other human constructs, where all languages and religions today are descended from that founder group of 60-50 kya, and the results are impressive.

Donald Brown published Human Universals in 1991, which noted traits found among all human societies. That book was published more than a decade before the human genome was sequenced and before amassing the genetic evidence that traced the human lineage to those five thousand people in East Africa 60-50 kya. Those universal human features were almost certainly possessed by that founder population. The primary traits of “the Universal People” (“UP”) are listed at this footnote. Some less-than-universal traits are not on that list, such as women terminating unwanted pregnancies, killing unwanted children, and capital punishment, but were close to universal, which may mean that some societies discarded those behaviors over time or that most adopted them later, with the former being more likely.

There have been many interesting divergences in descendants from that founder population, such as how the West emphasizes linear time while the East emphasizes circular time, and some scientists wonder if that has been reflected in the DNA of those peoples by now. How many of UP’s traits are biological? How many are culturally and economically dependent? What is human nature, and can our seeming sentience change or overcome our natures? Some of UP’s traits are evident in today’s monkeys and apes, so likely have a long pedigree and are deeply ingrained into human consciousness if not necessarily human biology, while others have declined in prominence or seeming importance in the historical era, particularly since the Industrial Revolution began. However, when I compared that list to my American society, which is history’s most “advanced,” all UP traits still exist, to one degree or another.

What heads that list may well be the primary trait that led to UP’s dominance of Earth: their mastery of language. While social communication via sound may have begun with dinosaurs and perhaps even earlier, and Homo heidelbergensis had biological features that would have made vocal communication more sophisticated, and Neanderthals had biological features that further enabled speech, scientists strongly suspect that the mastery of language that today’s humans display probably allowed humans to rapidly develop their technology and culture. It was humanity’s first Internet; a way to communicate ideas and information in a way previously unfeasible and even unimaginable, at a level of sophistication that no other land animal ever achieved. That invention provided the opportunity for sharing complex ideas, which created positive feedback loops that allowed for quicker cultural and technological advances. That is not fanciful speculation, and linguistics, studying modern brain abnormalities, and genetics testing has converged on what seems the most plausible hypothesis today, although in these areas, the controversies can be fierce.

Noam Chomsky has been called “the Einstein of linguistics.” His influence on my political-economic thought has been profound, and it has been interesting to stumble upon his work in diverse scientific fields, largely related to linguistics and psychology, but he is also a major figure in philosophy. Chomsky did not find an intellectually satisfying connection between his scientific and political work, but others have. Chomsky has had an outsized influence in linguistics since the 1950s, his interactive style can be polemic and his tremendous influence arguably delayed some directions that linguistics has taken. Darwin’s observations again found new relevance, that time in linguistics, as he noted that language acquisition seemed instinctual. Chomsky observed that any infant on Earth can be placed in any society, and will master the language that he or she was raised with, which is one of UP’s traits. Darwin thought that human mental traits were developed through natural selection, and although Chomsky thought that there was an innate language “organ” in human biology, he did not pursue its evolutionary implications, and linguistics neglected that connection until recently. With the rise of DNA analysis and new directions in linguistics that even Chomsky began taking in his old age, scientists are finding genes and brain regions closely related to language. The predominant evolutionary models have linked language with other forms of communication such as gestures, and Broca’s area in the frontal lobe is closely associated with those activities. One way that scientists linked brain regions with activities and traits was when those areas have been damaged by accident or disease. In 1990, a scientist reported on a London family wherein a large fraction had severe language deficits. In 1998, geneticists studied the DNA of that family and isolated the FOXP2 gene as the cause. Neanderthals shared the same mutation with Homo sapiens, and with other anatomical similarities suggests that Neanderthals may have had some kind of language.

However, all that scientists can tell that DNA does is provide the “blueprint” for making proteins. Proteins have four levels of structure, and the science of epigenetics studies the highly complex way that genes express themselves. DNA provides the foundation for life’s structures, and as with Hox genes, the FOXP2 gene is highly conserved in humans, which means that it does not change. Similar to my analogy of a house’s foundation determining what kind of house can be built on it, those genes form the foundation of the biological structures built from them, and if the foundation is damaged, the resulting house will be defective. Epigenetics and other factors are important, but if the foundation is flawed, the house may not stand at all.

The Great leap forward has been a prominent hypothesis which posited that behaviorally modern humans suddenly appeared. It was once considered an abrupt event that began about 50-40 kya, but as new archeological finds are amassed, as well as recent advances in genetic research and other areas, the story is familiar. While on the geological timescale the event was abrupt, radical, and unprecedented in life’s history on Earth, the “ramping” period seems to have lasted longer than initially thought. A likelier story is that Homo sapiens first appeared about 200 kya in East Africa, which was a primate “tradition” with at least a 25-million-year history. Homo sapiens inherited culture and tools from their ancestors and continued along the path of inventing more complex technologies and techniques, exploiting new biomes, and reaching new levels of cognition. There does not seem to be any Missing Link or development that needs to invoke divine or extraterrestrial intervention to explain the appearance and rise of Homo sapiens. Some Homo sapiens migrated past their African homeland during the previous interglacial period of 130 kya to 114 kya, and brought along the technology of their time. While they may have disappeared, perhaps falling prey to Neanderthals, vestiges of their fate are likely yet to be discovered. They may have contributed to the biological and technological wealth of Eurasian humans and may have begun to drive vulnerable species to extinction with their new tools and techniques. However, Africa remained the crucible of primate biological and technological innovation, as it almost always had to that time, and by 70-60 kya, isolated African humans reached a level of sophistication called behavioral modernity. Art was in evidence, needles made clothes and other sophisticated possessions, and they mastered language, which was likely a unique trait among land animals. They made tools of a sophistication far advanced over other humans, which likely included projectile weapons that radically changed the terms of engagement with prey animals, predators, and other humans.

Those events happened during a glacial interval, the global ocean was about seventy meters lower than today, and today’s 18 kilometer gap at the Red Sea’s mouth was far narrower about 60-50 kya. Today, this seems to have been the founder group’s point of exit from Africa. That route seems likely for a few reasons, one of which is the DNA trail of the peoples living along the periphery of Southern Asia all the way to Australia, and the other is that Homo sapiens were the first humans to arrive in Australia, and it could only be reached by boat. Taking a sea route was a new accomplishment by those behaviorally modern humans, and they likely reached Australia about 50-46 kya, because the Australian megafauna began going extinct about then, and that event begins a long and bloody tale that continues to this day. While earlier extinctions of the megafauna on Flores Island of nearly a million years ago, or Homo erectus and gigantopithecus between 150 kya and 100 kya, can be considered more equivocal, there is virtually no doubt among today’s scientists that the Sixth Mass Extinction began in earnest with the human invasion of Australia.

Before examining the details of the barrage of extinctions that followed behaviorally modern humans wherever they appeared during the next 50,000 years, a brief review of key dynamics is in order, and energy trumps all, as always. As with all predators, the easy meat is always eaten first, and a cost/benefit decision drives the process, which today’s analysts call EROI. It was an instinctual process with most animals. Many human practices today are similar, where members of traditional societies cannot provide answers for their mass behaviors other than, “We always did it this way,” or, “It is part of our religion,” but scientists study their practices and find them energetically ideal, even ingeniously, but nobody in those societies was consciously aware of it. Societies without such energy-efficient practices failed, while those that religiously followed them survived.

In today’s hunter-gatherer societies, the EROI on killing large animals dwarfs all other food sources. The EROI, of calories produced divided by hours of labor invested, for large game (a deer, for example), is on average four times that of small game, fifteen times that of birds, about eight times that of roots and tubers, and 10-15 times that of seeds and nuts. An African elephant carcass provides about six million calories, which would sustain a band of eight people for a year if they could eat it all before it rotted and did not die of protein poisoning. So, the EROI for those easily-killed proboscideans when humans invaded the Western Hemisphere could have been in the hundreds, and could have exceeded a thousand. Large animals have always been the mother lode of hunter-gatherer peoples, and the consensus among anthropologists is that no instincts urge a hunter to kill only what is needed, but a hunter will kill whatever he can. That finding partly derives from studying modern hunter-gatherers. There is no doubt that when early humans intruded into environments that never before encountered humans, where animals would have had no intrinsic fear of humans, people would have had an exceptionally easy time killing all large animals encountered. Animals without experience around humans, such as Antarctic penguins, are easily approached and killed. As happened innumerable times in the historical era, intruding humans killed all the naïve animals they could. The only animals that survived developed a healthy fear of humans and avoided them, but how many could develop that fear before they were all killed? From the very beginning of the eon of complex life, large size was an evolutionary advantage. More than five hundred million years later, a new kind of animal appeared that turned that advantage into a fatal disadvantage, as it found a way to mine that energy stored in large animals, and they quickly plundered it to exhaustion whenever they could.

Wade Frazier

20th February 2014, 18:04

Humanity’s Second Epochal Event – The Super-Predator Revolution – Part 2

As repeatedly seen in the historical era, if a new technology enabled great numbers of animals to be killed, hunters would quickly adopt the practice of killing the most animals they could and harvesting only the choicest cuts, as with bison tongues, as the North American bison was quickly driven to the brink of extinction by American “pioneers.” When Indians obtained horses from Europeans, they too killed all the bison they could, and stampeding them off cliffs was a common practice for thousands of years, but accelerated when horses made the job easier. Some Indians used all parts of a bison, but that seemed a minority practice, particularly after horses made hunting far easier, and was probably economically mandated. Cultural differences between Plains tribes began disappearing with the radical changes that horses and firearms brought to bison hunting, and stealing horses from neighboring tribes became a predilection.

While in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and Eurasia, the five-to-seven metric ton herbivores and the predators that hunted them became a guild that stretched back to the dinosaurs, in marsupial-dominated Australia, they were a little smaller, with the largest marsupial ever, Diprotodon, reaching “only” about three metric tons. Australian animals enjoyed about 45 million years of isolation from the rest of Earth’s ecosystems, and large herbivore/predator guilds thrived there as they did elsewhere. After living for 1.6 mya, Diprotodon quickly went extinct about 46 kya, and their bones have been found with what appear to be butchering marks on them. The next largest denizen of Australia, Zygomaturus, weighed about 500 kilograms, and went extinct when Diprotodon did. Megafauna is variously defined as animals weighing at least 45 or 100 kilograms, which is about as massive as humans. About 90% of Australia’s megafauna went extinct soon after humans arrived. Lizards of up to two metric tons disappeared, a 500 kilogram, three-meter tall flightless bird also disappeared after its family had a 15 million year existence, a gorilla-sized kangaroo, and so on. A number had fossil records of more than ten million years, to go extinct shortly after humans arrived. The list of suddenly extinct Australian megafauna is horrifically impressive. I have yet to see a disinterested scientist or academic deny the idea that humans were primarily responsible, likely solely responsible, for the Australian megafauna extinctions. When a “referee” paper was published in 2006, assessing the state of the debate, the authors attributed the Australian megafauna extinctions entirely to humans. There is evidence that those early Australians engaged in setting great fires. On Borneo, about the same time that humans first invaded Australia about 46 kya, near Niah Cave humans also burned the forests with abandon, probably trying transform the rainforest environment to something human-friendlier.

Along with huge Australian herbivores, their predators went extinct. Australia’s “marsupial lion” lived about 1.6 mya before it died about 46 kya, when its prey did. There is a “loyal opposition” to idea of human agency for Australian megafauna extinctions that churns out papers that attribute the extinctions to climate. However, the vast majority of research results point very clearly to human agency in the extinctions. The battle of the scientific papers will likely not end soon, but this is where the pattern recognition of the generalist can greatly assist, while the specialists’ obsession with minutia get them lost in the details. While the human-agency skeptics sometimes seem to look at the big picture, their picture is not nearly big enough, in my opinion, and what follows is a generalist analysis.

What I have yet to see human-agency skeptics discuss is that the guild of multi-metric-ton herbivores and their attendant predators appeared more than 100 mya, which rose to dominance along with flowering plants. When the Cretaceous extinction wiped out those dinosaurs guilds, it was not long before they began to reappear, with mammals in those niches, and within 25 million years of the bolide event, mammals reached their maximum size and remained there for the next 40 million years, until humans arrived. While species emerged and went extinct, just as they had for the entire eon of complex life, that guild stayed relatively constant in size. With the appearance of humans, entire guilds disappeared. The five-to-seven ton herbivores and their predators vanished and were replaced by guilds a tiny fraction of their size. Car-sized glyptodonts filled a niche that ankylosaurs once resided in, and soon after humans arrived, only dog-sized armadillos remained.

What human-agency skeptics have ignored or argued around are unique features of the megafauna that went extinct and the humans that preyed on them, while they examined minutia. As discussed previously, proboscideans were Earth’s most successful land animals ever before humans arrived. As modern research has discovered, African elephants help create the biomes they live in, as terraforming agents. They were far from idle browsers and grazers, but had outsized impacts on the vegetation, soils, and geological features such as water holes. Dinosaurs may have had similar biome impacts, and it was likely a feature of that large herbivore guild, and scientists have been finding plenty of evidence that vegetation changes that human-agency skeptics attribute to climate change may well be largely the result of the guild’s disappearance, not a cause. Researchers in Africa have also discovered that changes wrought by elephants created biomes dependent on elephant management. When the elephants disappeared, so did the biomes they created, which is why smaller species could also disappear when the large herbivore guild vanished. While Australia was the only non-Antarctic continent without proboscideans 50 kya, and their guilds were comprised of somewhat smaller animals, probably reflecting inherent differences between placental and marsupial mammals, their large herbivores likely had similar biome impacts.

Human-agency skeptics emphasize climate change above all other factors, but that seems a very weak argument. As noted previously, many of the suddenly extinct Australian megafauna had lived for more than ten million years and longer, such as that family of large, flightless birds. Many others appeared during the current ice age and lived for more than a million years, to suddenly go extinct when humans appeared. Scientists have counted 17 glacial episodes during the current ice age, and they have had a clockwork-like regularity for the past million years, and the most severe episode yet was more than 400 kya. How can guilds that likely lived uninterrupted for at least 40 million years, and survived many climate fluctuations of the current ice age in fine shape, suddenly go extinct, worldwide, wherever humans appeared, and it was all due to climate?

As impressive as the capabilities and survival history of the global megafauna were, what seems far more difficult to explain away are the humans that arrived when the global megafauna went suddenly extinct. The only megafauna of note to survive were those that had lived with humans in Africa and Eurasia for more than a million years and learned to avoid them.

Anthropologists reacted to the devastating world wars in the first half of the 20th century by creating a “peaceful savage” meme that dominated thinking regarding “primitive” and ancient peoples. In the early 1990s, as I began the study that became my website, which eventually led to this essay, I was influenced by “the peaceful hunter-gatherer” meme. However, the evidence has been increasing from numerous disciplines that that idea is false, and can even be seen as a romantic notion of looking back to a vanished Golden Age. That “peaceful savage” myth has been overturned by archeological evidence. Often, it was not new evidence coming to light, but archeologists no longer being blinkered by their indoctrination, denying what their eyes were telling them. The evidence finally prevailed, and on the heels of that dogma being overturned, genetic evidence provided new insights into the human journey since that founder group left Africa.

When protohumans mastered stone tools and fire, they eventually transformed from hunted to hunter, and there is no persuasive reason to believe that an early application of their new ability to inflict wounds would have not been used on each other. As this narrative reaches the rise of Homo sapiens and the archeological record’s changing toolsets before people became sedentary, those artifacts may well reflect the conqueror’s toolsets, and the vanished toolsets also represented vanquished and exterminated peoples.

To briefly revisit UP, men have always committed the vast majority of violence, were the primary hunters, and almost always dominated all societies. In general, the higher women’s status, the healthier the society. The !Kung people of Africa stayed isolated hunter-gatherers to the present day. Their click language, with their click sounds shared with other African groups, such as the last full-time hunter-gathers left in Africa, the Hadza, probably sounded like the language that the founder group left with, and has since been lost beyond Africa. Genetic testing has demonstrated that the !Kung and related groups stayed in Africa when that founder group left, and their isolation and warlike ways kept them genetically isolated. Genetic testing also traced the migration path to Australia, and found peoples that stopped along the way, as part of a coastal migration that eventually reached the Pacific side of Asia and maybe all the way to the end of South America. One reason why the coastal route was probably the first was that it was warm and relatively easy. Around 60 kya, the global climate warmed a little, being about the warmest period in the hundred thousand years before this interglacial period, before it began oscillating toward the glacial maximum around 20 kya.

The Andaman Islands are positioned off the Malaysian coast. Sailors avoided the islands for centuries, as the natives killed anybody who landed and burned their bodies. The Andamans looked like African pygmies. As the British conquered the region, they established a penal colony on the Andaman Islands in the late 1700s, when about five thousand aboriginal Andamans lived on the main islands. The Andaman population collapsed from the usual diseases, mayhem, and alcohol that Europeans brought with them, and they were nearly extinct within a century of British contact. Less than one thousand aborigines survive today. The genetic and other evidence draws a convincing picture that the aboriginal Andamans were island-dwarfed descendants of the original inhabitants. The Andaman Islands were never connected to the mainland, so the aborigines likely descended from people who stopped and stayed during that founder migration from Africa.

The Andamans are members of a racial group called Negritos, which appear to be remnant populations of the original migration from Africa. They all survived in marginal environments where they subsisted as hunter-gatherers, while later agricultural immigrants dominated arable lands. About 50 kya, a few thousand years before the migration to Australia happened, the sea level was lower and the islands of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo formed a contiguous peninsula called Sundaland today. New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania were also connected and formed a continent called Sahul today. Deep water lied between those two “lost continents,” and biologists drew lines between them, which note the distribution of animals and plants that did not cross open water. Wallace’s Line is furthest north, followed by Weber’s Line, and Lydekker’s Line is furthest south. Those lines mark the limits of migrations from Sundaland toward Sahul, which followed sea level changes. About 50-46 kya, behaviorally modern humans crossed the water in boats to Sahul, and the peoples of New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania lived in isolation until Europeans arrived. Those peoples have Denisovan remnants in their DNA, which likely means that they interbred with them while driving them to extinction on Sundaland and Southeast Asia, before some migrated to Sahul. Aboriginal Australian isolation was almost certainly maintained how Andaman Islanders did, by killing strange peoples who came ashore. When Europeans invaded Australia in the late 1700s, the aborigines they encountered were in a state of almost constant war. About 43 kya, lowering sea levels due to increasing global glaciation formed a land bridge to Tasmania. People migrated there, too, to become isolated when the seas rose again. The peoples of New Guinea’s highlands were the world’s most isolated, not “discovered” until the 1930s. When Europeans first encountered them, the highlanders did not know that a world existed outside of their highland home, thinking that they were creation’s only people. Unlike other relict populations of the original African migrants, New Guinea Highlanders practiced agriculture and lived in villages, and they were as violent as the others.

Except for New Guinean highlanders, the initial European contact with all of those relict populations was universally disastrous, just as it had been in the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere for centuries. Those initial contacts happened in anthropology’s early days, and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown studied the Andamans in the early 20th century, when they were tattered remnants of their people of a century earlier. The San people were also devastated by European invasion, with the Southern San driven to extinction when the Dutch invaded what became South Africa, with the !Kung surviving in the Kalahari Desert. Andamans, !Kung, and Aboriginal Australians all had/have strikingly similar religious ceremonies, which were marathon singing and dancing sessions that could last all night. Some rituals lasted for months. Their rituals are very likely what the first religions looked like, which were strenuous ordeals where people reached frenzied states that left them exhausted. Today’s leading hypothesis is that those rituals created group cohesion that held their society together. The social glue of monkey and ape societies is grooming, but humans seem to have replaced it with conversation when they mastered language, and those early rituals further cemented the bonds.

What all early civilizations had in common was that while they formed in-group cohesion with their rituals, it also meant that out-groups were fair game, and the connection between religion and warfare precedes that migrating founder group, as long as 70 kya. As will be discussed later, warfare and violence have been enduring human behaviors for the entire human journey, spanning from before the human/chimp split to today, with a brief hiatus when the human spread to open lands. Monkeys have wars, so that primate behavior has a pedigree that is likely tens of millions of years old.

To my knowledge, nobody has ever invoked a climate change hypothesis for the mass extinction of South American mammals when the land bridge formed that allowed for invasion from North America, even though the formation of that land bridge likely triggered the current ice age. About 95% of all South American mammals quickly went extinct when outcompeted by more cosmopolitan invaders that had survived many millions of years of intercontinental invasions. It was a purely Darwinian event, where animals with greater carrying capacities prevailed. There was no big picture awareness of events by invaders or invaded, just as there had never been during life’s history on Earth. They all just tried to survive, and previously isolated South American mammals quickly lost the game, with the survivors able to live in niches that no North American animals did, such as New World monkeys.

Earth had never before witnessed anything like behaviorally modern humans. Nothing came close. They wielded fire and began using it for offensive purposes, to shape environments to their liking. They had sophisticated stone tools and weapons, they mastered language and could engage in group behaviors that no other land animal remotely accomplished. They likely had sophisticated projectile weapons, and if the !Kung example is instructive, they may have also known how to poison their weapons, where one well-placed !Kung arrow can bring down a 200-kilogram antelope in less than a day. What kind of animal in the Western Hemisphere and Australia, that had never seen anything like a human before, and would have been the mother lode kill of the invaders, and the large ones all reproduced slowly, could have withstood that onslaught? None that I can think of. Neanderthals were ambush predators of megafauna that were wary of humans, and whatever projectile weapons they may have had, they would have been inferior to those that behaviorally modern humans left Africa with about 60-50 kya, and Neanderthals still lived off of those animals, with many broken bones and undoubted deaths suffered during hunts. That would have been nothing like what the invaders of the Western Hemisphere and Australia encountered. They could have walked right up to all those animals with no conditioned fear of humans and stuck their spears into them, maybe not even needing to use projectile weapons, much less poisoned ones. That scenario has been called the Blitzkrieg Hypothesis, but it would not have seemed like a rapid event to the invaders. It would have been something like a butcher shop’s version of the Garden of Eden. Further than they could imagine, in every direction, were animals with no fear of humans and could be killed so easily that it may have literally become child’s play. One argument by human-agency skeptics is that continental animals were subject to predation and would have begun fleeing fast. That seems like a spurious argument, and here is why.

The genetic testing that has been performed on humanity in the past generation has shown that the founder group’s pattern of migration was to continually spread out, and once the original settlement covered the continents, people did not move much at all, at least until Europe began conquering the world. There is little sign of warfare in those early days of migration, and the leading hypothesis is that people moved to the next valley rather than be close enough to fight each other. Any conflict would have been easily resolved by moving further out, where more easily killed animals lived. Also, in those virgin continents, people need not have roamed far to obtain food. Today, an !Kung woman will carry her child more than 7,000 kilometers before the child can for walk for himself/herself. If an !Kung woman bears twins, it is her duty to pick which child to murder, because she cannot afford to carry two. That demonstrates the limitations of today’s hunter-gatherer life, but in those halcyonic days of invading virgin continents, which had to be the Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer, those kinds of practices probably waned and bands grew fast. When they reached their social limit they split, with the new group moving on to new lands where the animals again never saw people before. Unlike the case with humans, there would not have been a grapevine where animals told their neighbors about the new killer animal. The first time those megafauna saw humans was likely their last time. It is very likely, just as with all predators for all time, and as can be seen with historical hunting events such as the decimation of the bison, that those bands soon took to killing animals, taking the best parts, and moving on. To them it would not have been a “blitzkrieg,” but more like kids in candy stores. And after a few thousand years of grabbing meat whenever the fancy took them, or perhaps less, those halcyonic days were over as the far coasts of Australia were reached and the easy meat was gone. When that land bridge formed to Tasmania about 43 kya, people crossed and were able to relive that “golden” time for a little while longer, until all the megafauna was gone on Tasmania. It did not take long. They also may have worked their way through the food chain, where the first kills were the true mother lode, such as nobody even deigning to raise a spear at anything less than a Diprotodon or similar animal until they were gone. Then they started killing smaller prey, which eventually did wise up and were harder to kill, and humans had to work at it again and the brief Golden Age was over. The huge fires that accompanied the Australians as they shaped the new continent to their liking, maybe recreating the savanna conditions that they left in Africa, may have also been used to flush out animals if they began to avoid humans.

All continental and even most island ecosystems that humans soon invaded had predators, but they would have been as ill-equipped to deal with the newcomers as their prey did. They were capable of defending themselves, so were probably rarely hunted except by the most foolish young men. No predator on Earth would have wanted to confront fire-wielding humans with their array of weaponry and group skills. The megafauna predators went extinct when their prey did, and probably not because of much direct human violence.

When the first Europeans arrived in Australia, there were islands off the coasts that had not been inhabited for about ten thousand years, when the oceans rose and cut them off from the mainland. On King and Kangaroo islands, the wombats, emus, kangaroos, and other animals were so tame that people killed them with no effort whatsoever. Europeans on one island even built a hut for their wombats to sleep in at night, and they just pulled one from a hut when needed and slaughtered it. No mainland animals acted remotely like that, being shy and furtive around people, for good reason. It did not matter if the environment was warm, dry, wet, or cold; all large animals quickly died off when humans arrived. New Guinea had a similar megafauna extinction pattern: sudden and total.

Africa and Eurasia were another matter, as humans had been living and evolving there for around two million years, and had been hunting for at least several hundred thousand years. Similar to those Negritos and other relict humans, some animals found refugia or were lucky to live in them, and did not go immediately extinct. That coastal route was only the founder group’s initial route. It seems that India was a key point of radiation, where the founder group’s descendants branched off north, east, and west. Homo erectus may not have been capable of interbreeding with modern humans, and nobody thinks that they see traces of their DNA in today’s human genome. But Denisovans and Neanderthal DNA is in the human genome, which likely means that humans interbred with them as they drove them to extinction. Their contribution to today’s human DNA is small, on the order of a few percent. Many thousands of years later, as Europe conquered the world, they interbred with all the peoples that they drove to extinction, and there is no reason to doubt that something similar happened as that founder group’s descendants conquered Earth.

The African and Eurasian megafauna learned to fear and avoid people after hundreds of thousands of years of being hunted, but those extinct humans may have been worthy adversaries and unwary behaviorally modern humans could have been occasional prey. Whatever behaviorally modern humans did to those virgin continents, there is no doubt that they moved to the top of every food chain they encountered. Nothing could withstand those people, and the easy meat fueled humanity’s initial global expansion. That may be when humans became “energy windfall opportunists.” All animals took energy windfalls when they found them (what fueled all those “Golden Ages” of the evolutionary past), but humans have quested after them to this very day, and the first instance was likely when that founder group exploded across the planet, getting all the easy energy that they could with their new, irresistible methods, and driving all other human competitors to extinction. It seems that Denisovans quickly succumbed in the warmer climates, and the “hobbits” effectively hid in their refugia for tens of thousands of years while the behaviorally modern humans passed them by, but Neanderthals were a different matter. There are no known Neanderthal sites on the Mediterranean’s African shores, which would have certainly been quite inhabitable, but contemporary remains of modern humans are found on the southern shores, with the divide evident where Spain and Morocco meet at the strait of Gibraltar. I consider it likely that inhabitants of the northern and southern shores were mutually hostile, with the Mediterranean forming a frontier. They did not mix because they adapted to different biomes and lifestyles, but they adapted to different biomes due to mutual hostility. That did not mean constant warring, but they knew to avoid each other and conflicts were not worth it. But the arrival of behaviorally modern humans changed the terms of engagement.

By about 45-40 kya, that northward migrating band from the founder group reached Europe. Although the exact route is in dispute, the genetic evidence supports the idea that the group originated from a migration into the Levant, probably via the east end of the Arabian Peninsula. Those invaders are called Cro-Magnons today. When they reached the Levant, they began migrating along the Mediterranean’s northern and southern shores, and Neanderthals began disappearing. The process took several thousand years at minimum, and has been called a border war with Neanderthals. The “blitzkrieg” of humans migrating across the length and breadth of Australia in a few thousand years was not in evidence for the migration/invasion around the Mediterranean’s periphery. Neanderthals do not seem to have gone quietly or easily (and maybe ancient Homo sapiens along the southern shore), and may have been the biggest obstacle to Earth’s conquest by behaviorally modern humans.

About 40-35 kya, a new stone technique, developed from the Neanderthals’ Mousterian technology, called Châtelperronian, appeared in today’s France and Spain. It was succeeded by a new stone tool technology that appeared about 30 kya called Mode 4, or Aurignacian, and the people making those tools also made cave paintings. Aurignacian technology was a Cro-Magnon invention of unprecedented sophistication, with blades instead of flakes. There is considerable uncertainty about the exact dates when those two technologies appeared, but the consensus is that Aurignacian succeeded Châtelperronian, and Cro-Magnons invented the Aurignacian and Neanderthals used the Châtelperronian. There seems to have been cultural interaction between the two peoples, as well as genetic interchange. While the controversies regarding Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon interaction and mutual influence will not end in my lifetime, what virtually everybody agrees on is that by about 30-27 kya, Neanderthals were extinct. The Cro-Magnon/Neanderthal controversy is one of the more heated in anthropology, and there are two basic camps on the Neanderthal extinction, just as with the Australian megafauna extinctions: modern humans did it, or climate did it.

Wade Frazier

20th February 2014, 18:05

Humanity’s Second Epochal Event – The Super-Predator Revolution – Part 3

In the historical period, when technologically advanced humans encountered less advanced ones, there was cultural and genetic interchange, but in the end, the technologically advanced peoples marginalized the less advanced ones or drove them to extinction. If any place on Earth could have been used as an illustration of the climate change hypothesis for the megafauna extinctions, ice age Europe would have been it, with ice sheets extending so far southward that Neanderthals lived in relatively few refugia, but I highly doubt that it caused their extinction. Neanderthals lived for at least 300,000 years and survived radical climate changes just fine. Human-agency skeptics have invoked unusually violent climate changes that coincidentally appeared when behaviorally advanced humans arrived around the world, but that seems to be grasping at straws. Again, there is nothing climactically special about the past 60,000 years, not compared to what had happened during the past million years, so invoking climate-change effects for humans and animals that weathered the ice age’s vagaries just fine seems like a huge conjecture that may be politically motivated, and human-agency skeptics have crafted different kinds of climate explanations for each major extinction, such as drying in Australia, getting colder and dryer in Europe, or getting warmer and wetter when most of the extinctions happened. At most, climate was a proximate cause, not the ultimate one. The ultimate one was people virtually every time.

About 30-27 kya, after Neanderthals made their final exit, the only other humans on Earth were “hobbits,” hiding in their refugia. They disappeared around when behaviorally modern humans arrived, too. For the “hobbits,” a volcanic explanation has been proffered for their extinction, although they likely coexisted with modern humans. A problem I have noticed with the arguments of human-agency skeptics is that the fossil and archeological record is currently too thin and the dates too equivocal to confidently place closely occurring events in sequence and establish causal relationships that precludes behaviorally modern human influence. In all such extinctions, I have seen no convincing arguments and evidence that rules out the involvement of behaviorally modern humans, and their “contribution” to those extinctions is perfectly logical and understandable, if not something to beam with pride over.

As scientists have been putting this picture together, one irony is that Cro-Magnons had black skin, and Neanderthals might have had light hair and eyes, as an adaptation to the cold climates they lived in, as with Europeans today. It turns the racist aspect of Europe’s conquest of the world on its head, and has been noted in some scientific corners. For the remainder of this essay, as all other human species were extinct but for the “hobbits” by 30 kya, the word “human” will refer to behaviorally modern Homo sapiens.

From about 32 kya to 22 kya, Gravettian culture prevailed in Europe. That culture produced the first ceramics, and art such as Venus of Willendorf. By 20 kya, pottery appeared in China. But as far as human expansion is concerned, the Gravettian (and related Pavlovian cultures) are most notorious for being mammoth hunters extraordinaire, on the eastern end of their range, on the mammoth steppe near the ice sheets. To revisit proboscideans, they could not swim to Sahul, but flourished everywhere else they could get to. At six million calories per carcass, they were the ultimate hunter-gatherer kill. Also, near the ice sheets, meat could be stored in the ground. Cro-Magnons did just that, and that “freezer” full of meat led to the first seasonally sedentary humans. It long predated the Domestication Revolution where people could be sedentary year-round, but while the megafauna lasted, the first signs of what came later appeared as Cro-Magnons created villages around frozen mammoth meat. Gravettians hunted along migration routes, setting traps and ambushes for mammoths. For thousands of years, mammoths were the primary focus of Gravettian hunters, and many scientists believe that humans at least helped drive the European mammoths to extinction. The Gravettians likely used the bow and arrow, and using poisoned arrows on mammoths would have been child’s play, not a hazardous undertaking. They also tended to focus on the easy meat: the young, relatively defenseless, tender mammoths. Killing the offspring alone would have driven the slowly-reproducing mammoths to extinction, and as the interglacial period began around 15 kya, there would have been new pressures on mammoths. One of them was that fewer mammoths meant that they were not terraforming their environments like they used to, and the warming climate likely reduced their range. For a mammoth facing humans, there was literally no place to hide (except maybe in the living room), and there is no reason to think that hunters would have eased up when mammoth numbers dwindled. If anything, their efforts would have increased to get the last ones, competing and fighting over the final mammoths. In one lifetime or even several, the changes would have been barely noticeable, if at all. There was simply no way out for mammoths, and they went extinct south of the European ice sheets under the ministrations of Cro-Magnon hunters. More evidence of their fate is some mammoths surviving in refugia; islands that humans did not arrive until thousands of years later. Island-dwarfed mammoths survived on St. Paul Island in the Pribilof chain off of Alaska until less than six kya, and went extinct when humans arrived, and several hundred apparently full-sized mammoths survived on Wrangel Island near Siberia and went extinct less than five kya, and again went extinct when humans arrived.

The earliest evidence of fishing is from a man in China from 40 kya who apparently subsisted on freshwater fish, and evidence of harpooned seals dates from 16 kya in Southern France. The techniques of today’s fisherman, such as hook-and-line tackle, did not appear until well into the Neolithic, which began about 12 kya.

This chapter’s reconstruction is largely based on the latest scientific findings as of 2013, along with a little interpretation and speculation on my part. For instance, those mammoth villages have been discovered, with pits for mammoth meat and houses built from mammoth bones. But scientists argue whether Cro-Magnons killed those mammoths or merely scavenged them. I have little doubt that they were primarily hunted mammoths, not scavenged, killed along their migration routes.

While there is great controversy regarding how violent Neanderthals were and how much Cro-Magnons hastened their demise, there is no doubt that sophisticated stone tools were used for far more than hunting mammoths. A Gravettian child’s vertebrae was found with a projectile point lodged in it. Flint blades and projectile points lodged in vertebrae and other bones, and skulls broken by stone weapons, are common finds in Stone Age graves around the world. Before the Paleolithic Era’s about 12 kya, cave paintings depict torture, people pin-cushioned with arrows, and other violent scenes. In 1964, a cemetery discovered in Egypt held the remains of dozens of slaughtered people, which has been dated to about 13 kya. Such finds are increasingly common, and are often situated near coveted resources such as riverbanks. The halcyonic Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer was long gone by 15 kya in the Eastern Hemisphere, but would briefly flourish again in the last continents that humans conquered.

The idea that the American mastodon was killed off by hunting was first proposed by George Turner in 1799, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, an early evolutionist, thought that humans exterminated the extinct ice age mammals, and by 1860, Richard Owen wondered whether anything but humans could have caused that mass extinction. Therefore, when Paul Martin first proposed his Overkill Hypothesis in 1966, it was by no means novel, but he started the modern debate, and the controversy quickly focused on North America, beginning about 15 kya.

As this narrative shows, the North American extinctions came relatively late in the process, but they have been by far the most controversial. The reasons for that appear to be several. One is that North America is the home of history’s richest and most powerful nation, and when Martin first published his proposal, the USA was in the midst of a cultural awakening (as well as an imperial slaughter), and the awesome crimes that Europeans committed against indigenous Americans were being brought to widespread public awareness for the first time. American Indian activist Vine Deloria dismissed the idea of overkill, and until his death he attributed the extinctions to catastrophic celestial events. He was a follower of Immanuel Velikovsky’s work. The idea that American Indians hunted North American mammoths to extinction also conflicted with the then prominent “peaceful savage” and “ecological Indian” themes, so the denial partly reflected political bias.

Scientists are unanimous that the Western Hemisphere’s indigenous peoples primarily came from East Asia, but there has been a cottage industry for centuries proposing other ideas. When Thomas Jefferson sent the Lewis and Clark expedition to North America’s west coast in 1804 to sketch the ultimate reach of empire, they were alerted to find the lost tribes of Israel. But genetic, anatomical, archeological, and other evidence has long since settled the issue of where American Indians came from, and by far the leading hypothesis is that humans migrated to North and South America beginning about 15 kya, and there may have been a migration along the Pacific coastline, continuing the pattern established about 60-50 kya out of Africa. As the ice sheets began melting about 15 kya in North America, a corridor between them formed and humans walked to North America about 11 kya. Those arrivals founded the Clovis culture. The sudden disappearance of virtually all the megafauna of North and South America followed those humans, particularly those that came by land and spread. That is where the original “Blitzkrieg Hypothesis” label was used.

Proboscideans abounded across the Western Hemisphere’s length and breadth, camels and horses evolved in North America tens of millions of years earlier and still lived there. North America hosted giant beavers, the largest carnivore ever, the largest cats and wolves ever, and a stunning variety of huge animals that must have been a wondrous sight. South America had a less spectacular assemblage, but was still highly impressive. Earth’s largest land animal during the Pleistocene, next to the largest mammoths, was the ground sloth, which survived the Great American Biotic Interchange, and had a tenure on Earth of about 30 million years. Within a couple thousand years of initial contact by those humans that came overland, virtually all of the Western Hemisphere’s megafauna went extinct. In South America, the invading humans made dwellings out of proboscidean hides, so they certainly did not go extinct before humans arrived. The South American Toxodon survived the Interchange, to go extinct after humans arrived, and projectile points are found with many Toxodon skeletons.

The Western Hemisphere, more than anyplace else, has been the focus of human-agency skeptics, claiming that climate change did it all, or that the human contribution was insignificant. Their arguments have failed to convince me or virtually anybody else looking into the issue. There has been a trend to put “nuance” into evolutionary dynamics, where multiple causes for events are considered, particularly extinction events. People can go overboard on nuance, which can obfuscate important issues, confusing ultimate and proximate causes. I wonder if some of the “nuance” I am seeing is intentionally misleading or is merely another scientific fashion run amok. If an ultimate cause overwhelms everything else, focusing on the “nuance” of dynamics that are minor at best is misleading. North America had the greatest ice sheets of the current ice age, and Arctic proboscideans would have been affected somewhat, but they survived the previous 16 glacial events just fine, and were a minor aspect of the Western Hemisphere’s megafauna holocaust. South America did not have ice sheets, but merely larger glaciers than today’s along the Andes. From Arctic tundra to Tierra del Fuego, from desert to rainforest, all large animals quickly went extinct soon after humans arrived, when it got warmer and wetter.

My initial 1990s interest in climate change and other hypotheses for megafauna extinctions has gradually turned into skepticism and dismay, and at the footnote that ends this sentence, I provide some context for my extreme skepticism of climate change and other hypotheses.

The Clovis culture’s killing implements abruptly appeared in the archeological record and disappeared just as fast, after the easily killable megafauna went extinct. Today’s North American megafauna are nearly all migrants from Asia, not North American megafauna that learned to avoid humans. Bison are the only significant exception, although they came from Asia, too, and explaining their survival remains a minor curiosity, but is about the only circumstance not neatly aligned with the overkill scenario. The “referee” paper concluded that while the South American extinction was the greatest of all, it is the most poorly investigated and that the overkill hypothesis cannot yet be attached to South American extinctions. That may be a prudent position for a specialist who pronounces judgment only when all the evidence is in, but I will be among the most surprised people on Earth if the pattern of fifty thousand years did not continue there, especially since it had no ice sheets. There can be no more pertinent example than comparing Africa to South America. They inhabited the same latitudes and have similar climates, separated by the Atlantic Ocean. Africa was the home of humanity, where its animals had millions of years to adapt to the human presence, and Africa only lost about 10% of its megafauna (probably to human hunters with their advanced weaponry), while South America lost nearly all of its megafauna, and quickly. Climate change did it? How could it have even contributed?

Gorillas and chimpanzees suffer very little from predation in their rainforest homes. Maybe they made it that way, ridding their environments of threats, and today, other than humans, the greatest threats to gorillas and chimps are other gorillas and chimps. Humans began their journey when a chimp-like ancestor left the dwindling rainforest, likely because it was the loser of rainforest life and was forced to live on the margins. It learned to walk upright as a result, and it began to make tools and grow its brain, and several million years later it reacquired the level of security that those gorillas and chimps had, where it mastered its environment, a global environment, and the only threat that humans really faced afterward were each other. Achieving global mastery was humanity’s Second Epochal Event, as humans became the greatest predators that Earth has known.

As the megafauna that fueled humanity’s global expansion went extinct, all human populations became relatively immobile, and even hunter-gatherers had proscribed ranges. There were no more virgin continents to fill with people, and then humans began to turn on each other in earnest, fighting over their reduced energy supplies. Between the coalitionary killing of chimps and the human warfare of the late hunter-gatherer phase, there seems to have been an intermediate stage that lasted from up to a million years ago among Homo erectus to when hunter-gatherers began forming segmented societies (with some hierarchy) in the past thirty thousand years or so, when the risks of killing one’s neighbor outweighed the advantages, especially when resolving conflicts meant easily moving to new, unoccupied lands. Although there was likely plenty of interpersonal violence, warfare did not appear until there was resource competition among the humans that conquered Earth. It is even speculated that when Homo erectus left Africa nearly two mya, it was the path of least resistance to resolve local resource competition.

Some island refuges around the world where humans had not yet invaded, such as New Zealand, Madagascar, the Caribbean, and Polynesia, including Hawaii, retained their megafauna (the large birds were often not quite large enough to meet the megafauna definition, but they were relatively large). That huge sloth survived in the Caribbean for several thousand years after its mainland brethren went extinct upon meeting humans, and when humans reached the Caribbean, that sloth quickly made its final exit. Most of those islands were not invaded by humans until the historical era, and the story was always the same: the rapid extinction of all easy meat. The pattern is painfully clear, ever since that founder group left Africa, and it continues apace and accelerates. The Sixth Mass Extinction is well underway, and more than half of Earth’s remaining species may go extinct in my lifetime, and almost certainly will by the year 2100 at the current trajectory. Today’s primary culprit is habitat destruction as the world’s poor raze tropical forests to raise crops and procure firewood. But humans have been working their way to the bottom of Earth’s food chains, scraping the last morsels from the ecosystems. When Europe learned to sail the oceans, an oceanic holocaust began, beginning with the global ocean’s primary megafauna: whales. The comprised an energy mother lode which was plundered when humans reached the level of technical sophistication that they could exploit it, and they did it until the 1960s, when nearly all of Earth’s whales were at the brink of extinction. Humans have never practiced conservation except when forced into it after as they began feeling the pinch of exhausting their energy resources. It is no different today with the exploitation of fossil fuels. Humanity’s energy windfall opportunism may be its most characteristic behavior.

As the ice sheets retreated and today’s interglacial period began, humans already at the margins of those ice age environments simply spread toward the Arctic as far as they could. From then until Europe began to conquer the world 500 years ago, there were few mass migrations of note, such as the Bantu expansion in Africa, when pastoral nomads conquered parts of Eurasia, and when agricultural peoples displaced hunter-gatherers. But even with those migrations, it was usually more of a cultural and technological migration than a human one, where the “invaded” peoples adopted the often energetically superior practices of the “invaders” rather than being replaced by them. Genetic testing has shown that that was largely the case in Europe, which has been one of the greater surprises of global genetic testing.

The evidence of inter-human violence, both between early Homo sapiens groups and what happened to Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus, and the “hobbits,” is more circumstantial than finding corpus delicti. But after the megafauna were gone, the evidence becomes staggering for universal human violence, the kind that anthropologists pretended was not there for generations. Those early slaughters before the Holocene were only a prelude. When those relict populations were discovered by Europeans, they were all tremendously violent, both the hunter-gathers and the agriculturalists of New Guinea’s highlands. Their level of warfare technology obviously could not compete with Europe’s, and their style of warfare was dismissed by early Europeans observers as ineffective and ritualized, but those Europeans understood “primitive” people’s warfare as well as they understood their cultures, which was not well at all, but that is also a trait of UP.

Hunter-gatherer lands are far more sparsely populated than agricultural or industrial lands because of how much energy people can extract from their environments. Japanese rice farmers can extract ten thousand times as much food energy from a hectare of land as Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers could. At Japanese rice farmer levels of productivity, the yard of the home I was raised in could have met my family’s food requirements.

The hunter-gatherer means of production and style of warfare seemed hopelessly inept when compared to European methods, but proportionally the violence of those societies was more than an order of magnitude greater than that seen in European societies. As an example, the Chippewa people lived near North America’s Great Lakes and were readily decimated by European expansion, and had population attrition rates from Indian warfare about four times that of Germany and Russia in the 20th century. In the 20th century, which is history’s most war-torn in terms of absolute war deaths, if it had the war death rates of typical nonliterate societies, instead of around 100 million war dead, there would have been two billion war dead. The high death rates from pre-state warfare were due to their political-economies. In “civilized” war, the goal was conquering the enemy and extracting taxes from them, which could range from women (fertile females have been war booty for at least ten million years), to fighting-age men, to food, gold, and other economic windfalls, often called “tribute” in pre-industrial societies. That can only be accomplished with sedentary populations. With hunter-gatherers, about the only “asset” other than useful women would have been the rivals’ lands, so complete genocide and taking the vanquished’s lands and women was a goal met often enough, although a phenomenon appeared that continues to this day. The economic bounty was often taken almost absent-mindedly, while the obsession was on humiliation, acquiring war trophies, etc. Modern statesmen play a similar game, but it is for show, not taken seriously by the war planners, and used to manipulate the masses.

The vicious, take-no-prisoners approach to pre-civilized (also called “nonliterate” or “native,” formerly called “primitive”) warfare was typical, and surprise raids that killed everybody in their beds was the preferred means of attack. That graveyard in Egypt is likely an early example of that mode of warfare, where nobody was spared. A couple thousand years later, about 12 kya, arrows, slings, and maces were added to humanity’s growing arsenal, and the deadliness of warfare escalated. Projectile wounds and all manner of trauma became common findings in excavations of European graves from eight kya to four kya. As anthropologists gradually abandoned their “peaceful savage” meme, they began sorting out ultimate and proximate causes for pre-civilized warfare.

Anthropologists have derived these reasons why all societies go to war: defense, plunder, prestige, and control. Only states have control as a motive, because they can only tax sedentary peoples with economic surpluses. “Defense” is a territorial motive (retaliation and revenge also neatly fit into this category), which is economic, plunder is nakedly economic, and prestige only reinforces or enhances a man’s economic status. So, all motives for war are ultimately economic in nature. All wars had some kind of proximate cause, some triggering event that began the hostilities, and feuds could last for generations, but when the bickering and noise was removed from the signal, nonliterate societies, just like civilized ones, fought primarily for economic reasons, with resource access always being first and foremost. Because land is the source of all wealth (particularly in pre-industrial civilizations), as it is where the energy comes from, all societies, from the smallest band of hunter-gatherers to today’s modern states, fight over territory, which is no different in kind than what chimps do, and it has been that way since the macaques and may have begun with some of the earliest social animals. At the bottom of it all, all people instinctually know that it is all about economics, with the rest just noise, if sometimes pleasantly diverting noise.

This interglacial period has also witnessed spectacular geophysical events, largely related to ice sheet dynamics. The ice sheets of the Northern Hemisphere sequestered an immense volume of water, which lowered sea levels. When the global ocean rose with melting ice sheets, portions of continents such as Japan and New Guinea became islands. The land bridge of Beringia slipped beneath the seas, isolating the Western Hemisphere’s aboriginal peoples, them not being “rediscovered” to any significant degree until Columbus sailed in 1492. Near my home in Washington State is one of many stark remnants of the prodigious floods that attended melting ice sheets. When the obvious evidence of vast floods were linked with ice age melting nearly a century ago, the idea was initially dismissed as crazy speculation, as it conflicted with uniformitarian beliefs of the day. It is now universally accepted as one of many events when ice dams broke and awesome floods scoured the Northern Hemisphere. Catastrophists have long invoked celestial explanations for the demise of the mammoth, while others have cited glacial floods. Those buried mammoths that keep appearing as the Arctic melts due to global warming were likely killed in the innumerable floods that attended melting ice sheets, but that is a far cry from driving the species to extinction. The most violent glacial event may have created a global climate change about 12 kya, and the resulting thousand year period is called the Younger Dryas. The current ice age began in the North Atlantic, and when the Laurentide ice sheet melted, vast floods into the North Atlantic may have reversed Earth’s oceanic circulation, wreaking havoc on Earth’s climate systems. If agriculture had developed by then, the Younger Dryas would have created epic famines, wars, and population displacements. But because few humans were sedentary at that time, that did not happen. However, that event may have been responsible for humanity’s next epochal event: the Domestication Revolution, which is the next chapter’s subject.

As can be seen with bonobos, economics is the foundation of social organization. Social animals are social because their survival chances increase when they combine their efforts. All animal social behaviors are interpreted as strategies toward meeting life’s essential requirements. How far has human behavior “risen” past those basics? In this narrative of the journey of life on Earth, where can we draw the line of when the human line became “sentient”? Are we sentient even now? It was a key question that my former-astronaut colleague asked late in his life, after several years of telling his colleagues about free energy. That question is not easily answered, but I will attempt to by this essay’s end. Bonobo females can be brutal in coercing males back in line with their social plan, and chewed-off fingers have been noted. While bonobo life was filled with sex and cooperation, social enforcement could be brutal. Hunter-gatherer social organization is egalitarian, partly because when people carry their only possessions on their backs, there is little opportunity for economic inequality to gain political power. However, hunter-gatherers have very strict and vigilantly enforced social norms with ancient roots that ensure that level economic and political playing field. A successful hunter must share his kills with all, and anybody who tries to dominate the band immediately has a coalition formed against him (it is always a male, reflecting that ape heritage), putting him back in line. If a man gets too far out of line, there are two fatal punishments. One is banishment from the band. The life-expectancy of a solitary hunter-gatherer is minimal; banishment is usually a death sentence. The exile may try to join another band, but that is highly risky, not the least of which is why the man was banished from his band. The second is capital punishment, and to avoid initiating a feud, the band will “hire” kin of the condemned to perform the execution.

Studies of warfare have shown that absolute population density has little influence on how warlike societies are. However, the proper way to analyze population density and conflict is probably not in absolute terms, but relative terms. Hunter-gather bands slaughtered each other over access to resources such as waterholes, stone quarries, and salt deposits. Ancient states of the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean fought over access to forests, arable lands, and low-energy transportation lanes (usually waterways), and no informed observer thinks that the USA would have invaded Iraq in 2003, after more than a decade of genocidal economic sanctions and helping to bankrupt its own economy by hosting a huge military presence in that region, if the USA was sitting atop enough high-EROI oil to power its economy for centuries. It is the relative abundance of resources that supports a people’s means of production that largely determines how warlike they are going to be. Scarcity leads to violence, whether it is a gang of chimps looking for a neighbor to murder or history’s richest and most powerful nation invading peoples half a planet away to steal their energy resources.

Some nonliterate societies do not engage in warfare. They are a vanishingly small proportion of the world’s native societies, but almost without exception, they are not warlike because they are geographically isolated. The most important variable in predicting a society’s level of internal and external violence is male dominance. Monkeys are matrilocal (matrilineal), where males leave their society of birth to mate, gorillas and chimps are patrilocal (patrilineal), where females leave their natal society to mate, and humans have both kinds of pre-state societies, along with some minor variations. Patrilocal societies are run by gangs of related men, are by far the most violent, engage in the most warfare, and women are subjected to the most violence. Patrilocal societies can also have harems or many “wives” for the alpha males. Patrilocal societies make up nearly 70% of the world’s native cultures that have been documented. Neanderthals appear to have been patrilocal, as well as australopithecines. The determinant of patrilocal or matrilocal residence in humans seems to be the economic contribution of women. In general, where gathering and horticulture brought in more calories than hunting, women had more influence and the society tended to become matrilocal. Those relationships only hold for societies that are not economically centralized, also called unsegmented. When economic segmentation (surplus redistribution) appears, men begin to dominate, with the chiefdom the first step toward state formation.

The next chapter will explore the issue more fully, but the rise of agriculture was a peaceful process, and all “pristine” civilizations began peacefully and only became violent when early states formed and men dominated. The formation of urban communities and states always followed the invention of agriculture. The pattern seems to have been women dominating food production in pre-state horticultural/agricultural societies, so they were matrilocal or women had high status. With the formation of states and the rise of male domination, women’s status universally declined, and did not rise again until industrialization.

Internally, pre-state societies could be quite violent, even the “peaceful” ones, usually with the men going at it. In matrilocal societies, the fighting was more like wrestling matches than deadly encounters. When women fought each other, it was often in “cat-fighting” style where they tried to disfigure each other’s faces as a way to make them less attractive to men.

The Solutrean culture (x. 22 kya to 17 kya) succeeded the Gravettian culture, to in its turn be succeeded by Magdalenian culture (c. 17 kya to 12 kya), and Mode V tools appeared, also called microliths. Those cultures were in France and Spain, the Neanderthals’ former range, in the refugia from the ice sheets that blanketed northern Europe, and the Magdalenian culture spread northward as the current interglacial interval began.

Europe was a crucible for violence probably ever since the human conquest of Neanderthals, and the evidence for warfare and mass violence escalates as the timeline advanced from then. But going back to those chimp gangs, violence is not instinctual as much as calculated, and is a response to economic scarcity above all else. However, those early religious rituals were not only a method to form group cohesion; they were also a way to condition men to throw their lives away while trying to take the lives of others. The rituals and rites of passage for men were often extremely painful ordeals, conditioning them for the short life of a warrior, forming highly-contrasting in-group/out-group beliefs that facilitated killing other people. The portion of the human brain where the emotions appear to be seated, in the limbic system, is no larger than in our great ape cousins. It is well-known that fear shuts down the neocortex, as animals prepare for fight or flight responses, and it is no different with humans. However, the response is much more dramatic with humans, with their prodigious neocortexes and frontal lobes, so the human response to fear is losing much of what makes humans seemingly sentient. Those religious rituals seem designed to bypass the neocortex and form a bridge to the limbic system, where conscious thought is bypassed and emotions rule. Religion seems to have arisen as a response to warfare, but that will be explored in the next chapter, which covers when humanity became civilized, which was its Third Epochal Event.

Similar to why our ancestors may have left the trees and why Homo erectus may have left Africa, that founder group may well have left Africa as an act of desperation, driven to the margins by their neighbors. If they left about 60-50 kya, as seems the most likely timeframe in light of today’s evidence, by 10 kya the entire planet had been conquered, with behaviorally modern humans atop all terrestrial food chains outside of Africa, and in Africa the megafauna avoided them, so there was nothing on Earth that threatened human existence except for other humans. Similar to how that australopithecine Tesla who made the first stone tool could not have imagined the Homo erectus that emerged from his/her act a half million years later, by 10 kya, about a tenth as long as the previous epochal innovative interval, several million descendants of that founder group were spread across the planet, from tundra to desert to rainforest, filling all inhabitable continents. The people existing 10 kya would have been anatomically recognizable and all had UP’s traits, as they do today. However, with cave paintings, microliths versus what the founders left Africa with, several million people versus a few hundred, the immensely diverse climates and the tools used to survive in them, as well as their mutually unintelligible languages, the founder group’s members would not have comprehended a tour of their descendants’ world. The founder’s descendants even began to look different as evolution marched onward, and many racial differences would have been noticeable, although the bizarre white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes had yet to appear. Some people of 10 kya even had companions called dogs, which would have seemed either a miracle, terror, or strange beyond imagining. The world’s large animals paid the ultimate price for fueling that expansion, and the Sixth Mass Extinction thus began.

Wade Frazier

21st February 2014, 17:11

Hi:

After that heavy lift, today and this weekend will be devoted to housekeeping chores, playing with the wife, and so on, but I will be back at it hard next week. That draft that I put up yesterday has been getting tweaked here and there. For instance, I have added the below section to the end of that chapter:

Similar to why our ancestors may have left the trees and why Homo erectus may have left Africa, that founder group may well have left Africa as an act of desperation, driven to the margins by their neighbors. If they left about 60-50 kya, as seems the most likely timeframe in light of today’s evidence, by 10 kya the entire planet had been conquered, with behaviorally-modern humans atop all terrestrial food chains outside of Africa, and in Africa the megafauna avoided them, so there was nothing on Earth that threatened human existence except for other humans. Similar to how that australopithecine Tesla who made the first stone tool could not have imagined the Homo erectus that emerged from his/her act a half million years later, by 10 kya, about a tenth as long as the previous innovative interval, several million descendants of that founder group were spread across the planet, from tundra to desert to rainforest, blanketing all inhabitable continents. The people existing 10 kya would have been anatomically recognizable and all had UP’s traits as they do today. However, with cave paintings, microliths versus what the founders left Africa with, several million people versus a few hundred, the immensely diverse climates and tools used to survive in them, as well as their mutually unintelligible languages, the founder group’s members would not have comprehended a tour of their descendants’ world. The founder’s descendants even began to look different as evolution marched onward, and many racial differences would have been noticeable, although the bizarre white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes had yet to appear. Some people of 10 kya even had companions called dogs, which would have seemed a miracle, terror, or strange beyond imagining. The world’s large animals paid the ultimate price for fueling that expansion, and the Sixth Mass Extinction thus began.

And I moved the Velikovsky mention to a footnote, which currently looks like this:

Velikovsky was a Jewish Biblical catastrophist who proposed a hypothesis that storied events such as parting the Red Sea and manna from heaven were historical events caused by Earth’s near misses with Venus and Mars. I stumbled into the Velikovsky issue in the 1990s while investigating Carl Sagan’s debunking career, and I am still on the controversy’s fringes. There is no astronomical evidence to support Velikovsky’s ideas of wandering and young planets, and the common catastrophist idea that the megafauna extinctions were due to celestial events is less tenable than the climate-change hypotheses. While some in the scientific establishment acted scandalously regarding the reception of Velikovsky’s work (Einstein was one of the few gracious ones), very little data supports Velikovsky’s hypothesis, and the data falsifies it in numerous aspects, such as his idea that Venus erupted from Jupiter several thousand years ago. While catastrophism and uniformitarianism have been two poles of geophysical debate for two centuries, basing scientific arguments on literal interpretations of ancient myths is a dubious approach. Deloria himself became persona non grata in various catastrophic circles when he dismissed the Saturn Myth, which was an even more involved version of the wandering planets scenario. There is no significant evidence in support of those highly speculative ideas, other than novel interpretations of mythical texts, and a great deal of geophysical and astronomical evidence falsifies them.

Time for chores and play.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

21st February 2014, 20:35

Hi:

I can’t help myself, and will make a little post here, cutting to the chase before I get to that part of the essay. I am currently playing the game I have had to regularly play while writing this essay, which is moving out stacks of books surrounding my desk to make way for more, as I change topics. I probably bought four hundred books in the past dozen years that are on the essay’s subject matter, and I will be using more than a hundred of them in the essay, maybe close to two hundred, and citing a hundred scientific papers or so. Only last spring did I organize my library for the first time in several years, after two moves wrecked its organization. My wife banished my library to the garage and my office several years ago, and I can’t blame her. I am in the middle of the biggest resort of my office books in a couple of years, as I move out books not germane to the essay, fill shelves with essay books that I am probably finished with for this essay, and putting the stacks on the floor near my desk and primary “essay” bookcase for the current topics I am writing about. For the first time in many years, I have just taken a rough census of my library. I have five hundred books in my office, and 1,500 in the garage. I thought it was over a thousand, but I did not think it had reached two thousand yet. Well, that day has come. :) If I die anytime soon, nobody will have any idea what to do with it. Ralph McGehee donated his intelligence library to a university when the CIA finally forced him out of business:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/mcgehee.htm#protection

with everything going digital, I wonder if there will be any value at all to my library in thirty years or so, when I cash in my chips (if I make it that long, Godzilla willing). Collecting and digesting it has been fun; I’ll say that.

But, to the point of this post, as you can see in my previous posts and especially the last one, each epochal event created a world that was incomprehensible to those who lived before it happened. The time frame between the epochal events shrank, as did the time of the event itself, and energy use leapt up by an order of magnitude or so each time, as well as humanity’s collective intelligence and skillset, and modern people have begun to develop something like a conscience, and the out-group that they slaughter with abandon is getting smaller. With FE, all of humanity will be seen as the in-group, and ideally all life on Earth will be seen that way, as it is in this world:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

I don’t expect to live to see it come to pass, not in this lifetime, but I do hope to live to see us step back from the edge of the abyss and begin to turn the corner. It can happen in the relative blink of an eye, but it will be up to a small group of people to make it happen, as it did for all the previous epochal events.

At least today’s world has shows like Star Trek and visitations like the one that Roads had that can make the possible future at least somewhat comprehensible. The people who initiated the other epochal events had no conception of what kind of world their innovations would lead to. With us, we can form a foggy idea, and this is the first transition where we had much of an idea at all how the previous ones happened, or even what happened. So, we have great advantages over our ancestors, and the previous one happened during the historical era, so is much more easily studied and understood.

Again, I can barely imagine what kind of world FE can unleash, and I have been living with the idea for more than half of my life. But, for the first time in the human journey, absolute and relative scarcity can become obsolete, and we no longer need to rape Earth to get our energy and we no longer need to settle issues with violence. That alone dwarfs all the other epochal events, much less the easily predicable outcome of FE and the other suppressed technologies that will see humanity become a spacefaring species.

I have seen enough evidence to realize that we are not alone in the universe, and there likely is something like the Federation of Planets that will not allow us to take our violent ways beyond Earth, so we are kind of in prison until we grow up. With FE, that goal is readily attained, and humanity can become a truly sentient species for the first time. We are only fitfully sentient while we live in fear, and fear is the predominant motivation on Earth today, as it has always been until now. It is one of a number of ways that love and FE are joined at the hip.

As I have been studying and writing this essay, I have been continually surprised, as I sorted through the latest scientific findings, how it fit into my hypothesis, which is great news, because it makes the peaceful and abundant outcome of FE more likely than if the pieces did not. I have encountered authors who supplied quite a few of the large strokes, but as I got into the details, I have been amazed to see how neatly so many of the pieces fit together. I had encountered the idea in recent years that chimps and gorillas were pretty violent, and that even monkeys had a kind of Machiavellian political structure, and I had a pretty good idea how the megafauna went extinct, but I was very surprised to find that the latest genetic evidence clearly shows how and when humanity migrated after leaving Africa, and those migration patterns derived from genetic evidence dovetailed perfectly with the megafauna extinctions. And only when the easy meat and virgin territory ran out did people begin to really get violent with each other, and they struggled to survive. That has been the overriding pattern of humanity ever since.

The pattern is so clear now that the climate-change and catastrophic enthusiasts will likely fold their tents soon, at least the reasonable ones. There is still a Flat Earth Society:

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

and they are serious. So, Planck’s observation will likely play out with those fringe and alternative hypotheses, where some will cling to them to their deaths:

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

There will probably be people who will say that we never landed on the moon:

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

even when we establish a base there that can be seen from Earth, and regular “flights” will go there.

There have been unpleasant surprises for me over the years, too, such as finding out that the world’s indigenous peoples were far more violent than anthropologists could admit a generation ago, and I was influenced by what we now know was a romantic fantasy. However, the truth is always the best antidote, and those surprises actually better supported my hypothesis.

There is always more to learn, and hypotheses come and go, but my Epochal Event Hypothesis is a new one, to my knowledge, at least in having five, with the fifth just ahead if enough of us can muster enough heart-centered sentience and comprehensive perspectives. The first and second ones that I have already written about have never been seen before as epochally as I have portrayed them that I know of, partly because a lot of the data and hypothesis that support them is pretty new.

Maybe like all people with their “pet” hypotheses, my “certainty” that my hypothesis is heading in the right direction is a delusion that I will never shake. :)

As I discovered on my crazy journey, where phase one (or probably phase two http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy.htm#glimpse ) ended when Mr. Professor and I busted Dennis out of jail:

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

and after meeting fellow travelers such as Brian O, Mark Comings, and encountering the journeys of people such Bearden, Greer, Trombly, and the few others like them, I realized that:

ALL ROADS LEAD TO FREE ENERGY :)

The energy issue trumps all else, as always, and for the last 2.5 million years, our evolutionary line found ways to artificially wrench more energy from the environment when they reached the level of technological prowess and social organization where they could tap new energy sources, and the Big One is just ahead, or we will fall all the way to the bottom and insects will inherit the Earth. Bucky Fuller was so right:

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

we are facing Utopia or Oblivion. I know which one I vote for. :)

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

22nd February 2014, 13:26

Hi:

That Universal People list:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=795942&viewfull=1#post795942

will go in a footnote to the essay, and this one:

“UP judge others by their own standards.”

is definitely one of humanity’s greatest pitfalls. It manifests in many ways, and interacts with another phenomenon called the "theory of mind."

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

where people try to understand their minds and the minds of others. In my old age, I realize that much of the fantasy that I have read, and a great deal of other literature, is an attempt by the authors to help people realize that not everybody thinks the same, and their lives, basically their political-economic lives, can dictate very different ways of thinking and being. But there are universals, such as everybody wants love.

All of those overgrown Boy Scouts I have known:

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

initially projected their Boy Scout natures onto others, thinking that everybody just wanted to help. They all eventually woke up, but it was often a brutal experience that they nearly did not survive. I watched Ralph McGehee and Dennis cling to their “good people” beliefs until they were very rudely disabused of them. I learned my lesson the hard way:

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

and it may be that the only way that lesson can be learned is the hard way. Not until you get on the high road, where the life and death of our species will likely be decided, do you really begin to become worldly and see the situation clearly. Probably the biggest hurdle I see with people and the FE issue, at least for those who really want to help, is their naïveté. Naïveté is no crime, but it can be a fatal failing in the FE game. And it is one reason why I am going about what I am doing like I am, so that naïve newbies can’t get into much trouble, as they think and act like those 18-year-old boys about to get onto the battlefield:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#business

It took me many years to finally figure it out, but I now realize that I really can’t talk about my life and work with many people, especially those in my daily life, because I am aware of a reality that Joe Average cannot even glimpse. And it is not really what passes for the fringe world, either. The fringes are largely tabloid fodder, in their own way as bogus as mainstream dogmas, and if I ever talk about how I understand how the world works, everybody gets their ox gored and then wants to cross swords with me, as they defend their delusions. I don’t want to play that game with them, but everybody wants to make everybody else “see the light” of their beliefs. What I have always seen is that when people do that with me, they are never challenging me with their experiences or the result of deep study and thought, but are defending their indoctrination, which has nothing to do at all with experiences or thoughtful study, but something more akin to brainwashing. And it actually does not seem to have much to do with “intelligence,” as the “intelligent” only have more sophisticated brainwashing. That is what Brian discovered when he played the Paul Revere of FE, to later openly wonder if humanity was a sentient species:

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

Everybody I ever knew who played on the high road eventually made an observation like that, and that is one reason why I say that Joe Average is not going to wake up via talk. He can’t. He is totally brainwashed, somewhat willingly, as he traded his sentience for security, and lives in fear. His eyes and mind will not begin to open until FE is delivered into his life. And that is totally consistent with how the other epochal events happened. As I have been stating, the initiators of the events could not imagine what kind of world awaited on the other side of their energy innovation. How blind must the masses have been? They would have been totally oblivious.

To that recent post on what the initiators of the Second Epochal Event would have not understood about the future:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=800023&viewfull=1#post800023

and the total incomprehension of the initiator of the first, from the First Epochal Event chapter of my essay:

"If habilines began to control fire two mya, one thing is certain: the australopithecine Tesla who banged the first rocks together that fashioned a stone tool, and who was able to continue doing it and eventually taught others, probably via active demonstration or their observation, could not have imagined that his/her invention would lead to a relatively giant descendant (or cousin of a descendant) that slept on the ground, controlled fire, and would quickly migrate to the ends of Earth, traversing distances that were incomprehensible in australo-Tesla’s time. That relatively quick series of innovations, never before seen on Earth, gave birth to a creature that would have simply been unrecognizable to that australopithecine Tesla; it would have appeared magical. There have only been a few subsequent epochal events in the human journey, and like the first one(s), they were all energy events above all else, and were all dependent on humans gaining the technological prowess and social organization that enabled them to exploit a new energy source, which was likely dependent on their increasing mental talents. Each time, the human reality after the epochal event was unimaginable to the humans who lived immediately before it. Also, the events and their aftermaths became far more dramatic each time, in shrinking the event’s timeframe and shortening the time until the next epochal event, and the energy levels greatly increased each time."

In ways, the first would have been the hardest, as that first Tesla did not even have a brain that could comprehend the future. Chimps never plan for the next day. The second would still have been far beyond the imagining of the founders (and those who made the tools that made the exodus possible). The third, going from hunter-gatherer to civilization, would have also been mind-boggling, but at least it would have been comprehensible, somewhat, although a hunter-gatherer plopped into Rome in about 100 AD, for instance, might have gone catatonic. Similarly, an English peasant from 1600 plopped into today’s London would have gone completely bonkers, and also may have never been able to really adapt to the situation. But at least for the next one, we have shows like Star Trek to give us some hints.

But imagine trying to tell an australopithecine Joe Average about the Homo erectus that slept on the ground, mastered fire, and lived at the ends of the Earth, or tell the Joe Average of the founder group what their journey would lead to in fifty thousand years. Or imagine trying to tell a hunter-gatherer of ten thousand years ago what Ancient Rome was like. Or, imagine trying to tell that peasant what early 21st century London was like. Trying to tell your friends, neighbors, and colleagues about FE and a healed planet is like telling one of those pre-epochal-event people about the future. And each time, Joe Average would have likely reacted in fear, not wonder. It is the same today. Fear or denial is the reaction to FE talk more than 99% of the time, because all people can see is their world coming to an end. They all fear change, because in our world of scarcity, they know that any change means winners and losers, and they don’t want to be a loser. That FE could mean the end of the winner/loser game is simply unimaginable to them. That is a big reason why Level 10 efforts have never really gotten anywhere:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level10

Level 10 “herders” fail to understand that you can’t herd people toward sentience. Right now, the only people who will really become sentient or even want to are needles in haystacks, true freaks among their “peers.” But those are the people I will be trying to find. Godzilla is alive and well, managing the herd, but the herd has proven easy to manage. If they can be brainwashed while young, then they are largely on autopilot for the rest of their lives.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

22nd February 2014, 15:43

Hi:

As an addendum to the previous post, that issue of judging others by their own standard is why Hitler’s Big Lies worked:

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

and why people like Bill the BPA Hit Man:

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

Mr. Texas:

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

and Mr. Deputy:

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

were able to work their black magic so easily among those in Dennis’s efforts, creating internal dissension that helped collapse the ventures. Those three psychopaths were also all on the payroll, although plenty of free-lancers appeared to make their plays, which shocked me the first dozen times I saw it:

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

I spotted Mr. Texas’s move a mile away, and I knew that Mr. Deputy was up to no good, but it was not until he made faces at me while I was on the witness stand that I finally understood:

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

The best psychopaths reveal themselves only to their victims, where others cannot see. That is partly so that they can keep playing their game, but it also seemed to be a boast, given with a surreptitious wink, where the message was, “I am evil, yes I am, but watch how easily I will dupe others, and you can’t do anything about it, because they will never believe your warnings until it is too late (if the victim is any position to warn anybody, and they often are not, as the psychopath waited until he sank the dagger in to wink at his victim).”

And they were right, as the masses literally cheered on the psychopaths as they burned the saints at the stake. The first few times I saw it, I could not believe it, but it eventually became clear that “Give us Barabbas!” was not just some story from long ago, but one that still plays out every day.

Because of the epochal importance of FE, where its economic impact alone is beyond the dreams of avarice:

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

Godzilla, the master psychopath, uses people like Bill, Mr. Texas, and Mr. Deputy to do his bidding, and probably Mr. Skeptic. What floored me was how the very same people in the field who embraced Mr. Skeptic turned around and attacked Brian O, or they would charitably dismiss a scientist’s libel against Dennis:

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

where they literally embraced the libeler and later attacked Brian. And when I would point out very clearly where the Mr. Skeptics of the world were lying about Dennis:

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

where nobody had to take my word about anything, but just had to compare what Mr. Skeptic wrote about Dennis to the official documents, or compare what Dennis wrote to what Mr. Skeptic alleged what Dennis wrote (or did not write):

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/dennis.htm#attack2006

and his lies were laid bare. He was obviously consciously lying, and when his lies were exposed, he just made up more lies, and I heard somebody making an excuse for him just yesterday, somebody who should know better.

Again, Joe Average cannot comprehend the motivation of the psychopaths or the saints, and even confuses the two, in mind-boggling situations, because of that UP feature where they judge others by their own standards, with a “theory of mind” that is spectacularly wrong when encountering people who do not share their motivation. In the FE field, that lack of discernment can be fatal. When the psychopaths and liars unveil themselves for all who have eyes to see, at minimum, they are not qualified to walk the path to FE even two steps and will never be “rehabilitated” in this lifetime to be of any use in walking where angels fear to tread, and they are usually there to destroy the effort, either as an employee or a free-lance predator. Those who make excuses for those charismatic and silver-tongued psychopaths, after they have been unmasked, are not fit for the FE pursuit, either. And that alone eliminates just about every FE aspirant or their supporters that I ever met or heard of. That is why Brian said that the people who would make FE happen are not the people in the field today:

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

The entire inventor/businessman’s/stampede path does not have a prayer in today’s environment, and whenever I hear of the next garage inventor who “has it!” and is applying for patents and raising money, I really won’t want to watch.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

22nd February 2014, 20:45

Hi:

Taking a little break from the chores, and this relates to recent posts. Again, I don’t view this as fantasy:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

and I have long thought about how that world worked. For instance, seeing how the children learned, that civilization probably did not have writing. They had a far superior way of recording and transmitting information. To call them post-literate would be a big error. It would not be anything like today’s brain-addled humans who sit in front of the tube, either on TV or the Internet. They may have math down to an almost instinctual level, and other mental talents that today’s most intelligent people could not even begin to manifest. Whatever those methods were (or will be), they are barely even imaginable today. The technologies of riding that rainbow, or traveling in a bubble that seems sentient, is something that today’s scientific understanding (at least White Science) cannot begin to fathom.

I stated that the epoch that each energy event catalyzed was unimaginable to the pre-event people. Also, the mental aspect was incomprehensible. To that australopithecine that made the first stone tool, human language would have been incomprehensible. Like a chimp, they could have learned some of it, but the kind of language that humans use today would have been beyond their ability to understand. To that hunter-gatherer of ten thousand years ago, writing and math would have been incomprehensible. To that English peasant of 1600 (Bruno was burned at the stake that year, and one of his heresies was saying that Earth was not the center of the universe), today’s scientific theories would have been incomprehensible, and calculus was not even invented yet. To today’s smartest scientists, the kind of thought and “science” of that world that Roads glimpsed would be unrecognizable. That is one of the many reasons why I say that I know that I can barely imagine what changes FE would catalyze.

The easily imagined outcomes of FE are:

1. The end of scarcity and poverty, and the reign of abundance;

2. The end of fear as an organizing principle of civilization;

3. The end of violence as a way to solve anything;

4. The end of exchange-related professions;

5. The end of geographic barriers, which would mean the end of races, different languages, and customs: humans on Earth would have a unified culture and political-economy.

6. Humans would not be earthbound, but would inhabit abodes all over the solar system at a minimum, and might do interstellar travel, if the scuttlebutt I hear is true and we grow up enough to where we would be tolerated in galactic civilization.

Those would just be for starters, the nearly immediate outcomes of FE and the attendant suppressed technologies, which I know for a fact exist on the planet today, and will remain suppressed as long as humanity is asleep and no group can achieve that nugget of heart-centered sentience that will be required for a non-Godzilla-related group to make it happen.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

22nd February 2014, 21:57

Hi:

Another short break…

As I think about my previous post, and what kind of communication, cognition, skills, and the like that exist in the world that Roads glimpsed, or even fifty years into our future if FE appeared tomorrow, I look at what I am doing: amassing a library of written words, digesting it, integrating it into more writing that I will put on the Internet, with a few visual aids, but just a few, and I think back to monks copying manuscripts, or even how I wrote with a pencil in my youth (and used a typewriter for the heavy stuff), and think about how archaic all this will seem not too far into the future.

I see 140-character tweets as degenerate, reflecting the short attention spans that people have developed, but I can see a world that is like the one with those kids in class in that world that Roads visited. They went into a three-hour learning trance and learned more than a schoolchild today learns in a month. That is the direction that I can see it going, where people go deep, for some time, and when they emerge they have made a quantum leap in understanding. Again, it will likely not be via the written word, or even the spoken word. Also, the people in that world were obviously telepathic, and I would think that telepathic abilities would come pretty normally with ramping up the brain that way.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

Ilie Pandia

22nd February 2014, 22:21

So you're saying that your essay will be like "Tweeter level" in that reality that Roads visited :becky: ?

While reading what you've posted so far I always thought that it would be super nice to experience all that in a sort of holographic way... building up from the photons in the Sun to the 6th Epochal event. Perhaps that would be form that your essay would be presented in that advanced "school".

Wade Frazier

22nd February 2014, 22:26

Yes, Ilie:

Actually, my essay would probably be more like a cave painting. :)

It would be in a museum next to some Acheulean hand axes and other “advanced” artifacts for their day.

But seriously, yes, something like my essay would be something that their kindergarteners would learn. I would like to think that it would take them a whole week to learn it, but that is probably just a conceit of mine. :)

Wade

Wade Frazier

23rd February 2014, 16:11

Hi:

For a little preview of the coming chapter, as noted in the previous chapter drafts, chimps and gorillas are male dominated and violent, and females bear the brunt of it, with their infants always subject to murder if the fathers get killed. The killing is done by male gangs. When the food supply doubled, female chimps in what became bonobos overcame male violence, and sex became the predominant mode of social interchange.

As the human line developed tools that enabled them to go on that global killing spree and drive the megafauna to extinction, it was probably male dominated, although artifacts such as Venus of Willendorf have been used to argue for goddess-based religions, and that may be accurate. After all the easy meat got killed off, in areas where they domesticated the first plants (partly because hunting became harder and the cost/benefit of plant domestication made sense), the horticultural village arose. Feminists have long stated that that was the peaceful time when women had it the best, at least until the industrial age, and they were right. The village level of agriculture led to early states, and the village level was peaceful, and women had it relatively good. Early agriculture, however, was a brutal life, and people shrank as a result of reduced calories, but the land could support a hundred times more people.

In lands where they could still hunt, particularly large game, if the society was patrilocal, which means that women left their society to marry, the societies became dominated by related males who ended up ruling like gangs. Those were the most violent “primitive” societies, and their women were always subject to rape and other abuses. In the hunter societies where men left the societies to marry (called matrilocal), the women had higher status and those societies were internally peaceful and less belligerent toward their neighbors. That matrilocal versus patrilocal difference also mirrors the chimp/bonobo difference, although female bonobos create female bonds through sex.

In those matrilocal hunter societies, men formed other kinds of groups, such as civic and sports groups. The societies still fought one another, but they were more peaceful internally and less warlike than those patrilocal societies. Hunting and warfare are natural “allies,” as the same tools and tactics work for each.

As agricultural villages grew, men began to dominate, and cities arose from agricultural villages. Wherever agriculture appeared, cities appeared a few thousand years later. When cities formed, women’s status universally declined once again, and did not rise again until industrialization. The aspect that feminist writers have long written about, where women had it better in village life, where it was more peaceful, and when those states rose, the feminine-based religion declined and male-based religion rose, particularly in the Fertile Crescent, appears to be largely accurate. There has been speculation on why that was, such as whether pastoral herders invaded with their male sky-god religions, or whether when agriculture became more specialized and domestic animals became involved, men took over due to the physical strength needed to handle the animals and plows. Whichever case that was, or a combination of them, men rose to dominance once again, and warring states became the norm everywhere.

Also, states were never stable. That was partly because they all became steeply hierarchical, with elites, professions, and peasants/slaves, and each wanted to conquer their neighbors and exploit them (usually, although some could be relative peaceful to their neighbors, but their severe inequality and male dominance was never a good prescription for happy and peaceful societies), but also because their economic methods were never sustainable. They all deforested the vicinity and wrecked the soils. In Stone Age cultures the damage was less, as they did not smelt metals (which was intensely wood-using) and could not make metal plows, which devastated forests and soils. But in the Old World, where they learned to smelt metals, the pattern of environmental collapse due to overtaxing it became epidemic. Forests disappeared, soils washed away, and those earliest cities of the Fertile Crescent are all buried under silt in the middle of deserts, deserts made by those civilizations. A similar process happened around the Mediterranean’s periphery, with deforestation, siltation, and desertification, with its apotheosis reached with ancient Rome.

China had similar problems, as did the Western Hemisphere’s civilizations. The entire planet is “under-forested” today, for obvious reasons. The Mayan and other collapses, such as at Cahokia and the Anasazi civilization, were due to overtaxed local environments (and epic droughts coincided with the Mayan and Anasazi collapses, but the native practices already weakened the environments, with droughts providing the death knells), and as they collapsed, they descended into fights to the finish.

The bottom line was that none of those civilizations were really sustainable, and they certainly were never abundant. While there was relative abundance, life could be peaceful, but once the inevitable scarcity appeared, life got hard and violent. It is really no different with industrialized civilization. When they are relatively abundant, life is good, but when the primary energy resource is being burned up a million times as fast as it was created, industrial civilization is anything but sustainable. The only societies that ever had anything like sustainability were the village level of agriculture (called horticulture), where there was no plowing, but the villages had to regularly move as they used up the firewood, such as with Pre-Columbian American Indians in the Eastern Woodlands, and diffuse bands of hunter-gatherers. If humanity tried to go to that method of economy today, we would need to rid Earth of at least 90% of its people that live today. That is the Peak Oiler “prescription” today, which is more than a little bizarre, especially when their leading voice knows about FE somewhat, but semi-ridicules then dismisses it:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=784239&viewfull=1#post784239

But that village life that people pine over, or the Eastern Woodlands life (the “paleo” advocates are usually delusional, pining for another “Golden Age” that did not exist, and they attack vegetarians, strangely http://www.ahealedplanet.net/veggie.htm ) were short-lived phases of the human journey. Those peaceful agricultural villages always grew into violent states, and those hunter-gather societies, even those that were matrilocal, were not exactly idyllic existences. For Europeans who invaded the Eastern Woodlands, the attractions of those matrilocal native societies were self-evident, and running off and going native were epidemic problems for the invaders. The Iroquois, Cherokee, and most tribes of the East Coast of North America were matrilocal societies, which was part of their appeal, and the Iroquoian government influenced the USA’s Constitution.

But few living in the West today, if any, would have found their lives attractive. Industrialization was the Fourth Epochal Event, and if anybody in the West today could be transported to any pre-industrial society, they would have wanted to go back home in a heartbeat. Many aspects of our lives that we take for granted today: low infant mortality, a good chance to live to a ripe old age, not going hungry, being clean, sleeping in warm, safe homes, traveling more than a few miles from where we were born, not to mention hot water, indoor plumbing, household appliances, and many mundane aspects of daily life, were unimaginable to pre-industrial peoples.

But, there were aspects of those early civilizations that led to today’s civilizations, so we inherited both the good and the bad. FE can mean the elimination of about all of the bad that we still see. With FE, there can be the first truly abundant civilization ever seen, it would be global, because there would be enough for everybody, not just the most violent who hogged the scarce resources (see: the Middle East today and the West’s influence), and it would be the very first civilization ever that would not be environmentally harmful. Even the peaceful agricultural village wiped out local plants and animals to make way for people.

While I was influenced by the “peaceful savage” meme of anthropology for a while, my prescription for women needing to step up is the same. The transition to FE cannot be dominated by men. Their shared delusions are largely the reasons for those Level 6, 7, 9, and 11 approaches:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6

The Level 10 approach has been the female-friendliest, but all efforts I have seen or been part of catered, to one degree or another, to the population management ideologies:

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

which are all scarcity-based, which also means fear-based. We have to get our hearts and minds out of those ruts if we want to get over the hump. That is what my work is ideally about, and we will see if even I can attain the level needed to get us there. I have seen too many battles and bloodshed to really be the ideal choir-member, but I see “fresh meat” like Ilie, who is singing, and I think there might be a chance for my approach. Nothing has come remotely close to working so far, although Dennis is about the greatest threat that Godzilla has had to deal with so far. But even then, we ended up being pretty easy to take out when Godzilla’s assets were mobilized. The people in the FE field today do not have the right stuff. They are usually a bunch of tunnel-visioned scientists and tinkerers, applying for patents and trying to raise money, and the more prominent voices shamelessly lie about Dennis:

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

are naively duped by people such as Mr. Skeptic:

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

attacked Brian O, and the like. When I would see those people and approaches repeatedly, I realized that the entire FE field, as it is constructed today, is doomed to failure, and bloody failure if they ever get anything going. And whenever newbies appeared like Foster:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=633801&viewfull=1#post633801

they would nearly invariably parrot the disinformation, and when they would be contacted about it, they would either smile and give me the finger, or shrug and continue purveying the disinformation. That kind of behavior only reinforced the primary lesson of my journey:

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

The lack of personal integrity in the world is the root problem, with everything else really just noise. A bunch of criminals and their duped allies are not going to make FE happen. The saints barely have a prayer, and the two people I respected the most were driven from their homeland in the USA. Brian in fear for his life:

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

and Dennis as Godzilla’s minions took him out one last time:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=694872&highlight=wirec#post694872

and it might not have even been Godzilla’s minions that last time, but just the lower level predators protecting their turf, that time the oil companies and their lackeys, including the USA’s sitting president. The USA’s president is down the food chain a ways:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/journey.htm#presidents

Godzilla sits way above those levels.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

23rd February 2014, 18:48

Hi:

As I have written before, the specialist/generalist divide has been weakening, and related to that is that top-down and bottom-up approaches are used to complement each other more and more. Reductionist approaches have been the hallmark of science for a long time, but integrationist approaches and studying emergent properties are making headway, and in the ideal situation they are likely integrated.

I have and will continue to make it very clear, however, that when scientists drilled to the very bedrock of what they thought was reality, they encountered a paradox that they have not been able to resolve, and probably can’t resolve, which is the wave-particle duality of subatomic phenomena such as light and electrons. Scientists made some simplifying assumptions to get past that paradox, but the paradox means that the very foundation of physics is shaky, and the primary upshot is the role that consciousness plays. Brian O was big into testing paranormal phenomena, but he also realized that there were limits beyond where today’s science could explore. I have had far too many experiences to buy the materialistic paradigm of today’s White Science:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#research

So, when there is evidence that the bottom-up approach cannot account for, and there is an unresolved paradox at the foundation, and the very evidence I have personally experienced points directly at that paradox and shaky foundation, let’s just say that the entire paradigm is in for a radical overhaul, IMO.

Factor in technologies that I am aware of, demonstrated to people very close to me:

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

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

and I know that a lot will change about the paradigm that today’s White Science operates under. And as I have written, that does not make the fringe stuff valid, and after poking into a great deal of it for the past 25 years, most of it seems invalid, as far as I have seen. The good stuff is exceedingly rare, and the best stuff is usually sequestered by Godzilla’s minions almost immediately, so the fringes are full of chaff. That is just the territory that exists, and most fringe enthusiasts eat chaff every day, not the good stuff, and they constantly bend my ear, trying to get me to look into the fringe flavor of the day or the inventor of the hour. I am past those stages of the journey, and there is not much on the fringes that I am interested in anymore. Unless it can help make FE happen, and not with the delusional approaches that I have called Levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6

I am really not interested. While my approach is comprehensive, I have a definite goal in mind, which is the biggest event in the human journey so far, and am the only person on Earth that I know of that is trying my approach, that is plenty for one man to have on his plate, especially for one who is becoming an old man. :)

Maybe what I am doing will ally with other approaches one day, but I am going to do my best to stay on track with my approach and especially not get sidetracked by the many pitfalls and rabbit holes that newbies want to explore. I am trying to guide as many as I can through the wilderness, not get them lost in woods that are filled with predators that pounce on the unwary and naïve.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

Ilie Pandia

23rd February 2014, 19:21

Hi,

This "shaky foundation" of science (once you get to quantum level) is what I've been looking at lately. Because of the assumptions that been made, even though it kinda works, our entire "scientific knowledge" may be off the mark, and if not, it surely is very limited and constricted.

Consciousness and nature of reality and our perceptions of it are pretty important for me right now. I know it's a chicken and egg problem, but sometimes it seems to me like we need to look there first and then free energy will naturally follow, while other times it seems like without abundance we will never "have the time" to go quantum and really look at what we think "reality" is made off.

As I wrote a post in some other thread, once you get to that consciousness collapsing the wave level all you'll find is unlimited energy that will likely be "free" :) (as we understand free today). The limitations we perceive now, although real enough, get very fuzzy and dream like once you go to that level.

"Any one who is not shocked by the quantum theory doesn't understand it." (attributed to Niels Bohr).

When I've started looking into the quantum experiments to me it was "obvious" that all that was happening were measurement errors caused by the measuring device itself. However that argument was quickly put to rest by the quantum erasure experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_eraser_experiment).

I suspect that consciousness, perception and "free energy" are very linked together. And we are currently not seeing the forest by the trees, being mired in the scarcity illusion. For me personally, if may very well be that the road to free energy goes through self awareness first. We'll see... :)

Wade Frazier

23rd February 2014, 20:17

Hi Ilie:

Great post, young man. You are drilling into the paradox, and there are many people out there trying to marry science and spirituality, or you might say science and consciousness. As I said before, all roads lead to FE. When you begin to chase FE, you see that human consciousness is the biggest barrier to manifesting it. It is evident in Brian’s question of whether humans are really sentient:

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

or my lesson that personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity:

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

or it finally dawning on me what all those dominant ideologies have in common: scarcity, fear, and egocentrism:

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

When I say that love and FE are joined at the hip, I mean that in several ways, including practically and mystically. IMO, these are all ways of seeing the paradox that lies at the heart of our existence. Some have said that I am trying to pray FE into existence, maybe Level 19 style:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level19

but that is not really it. We will become a Level 16 society first:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level16

like that world that Roads visited:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

The greatest spiritual masters have always said that love is the answer, and that our heads go where our hearts lead us. I learned many of those lessons while being on the high road to FE, after encountering those ideas in my spiritual studies. When I say that FE means the end of scarcity and fear and the beginning of love and abundance, I am stating the mystical understanding in worldly clothes. This is all part of the conundrum and paradox, and FE lies at the heart of it, in more ways than one. That is one reason why I am taking the lamb’s path, and one might say that I am going for consciousness, first, and taking practical action, second, but again, not really. A tiny fraction of humanity will need to attain that heart-centered sentience that will necessarily be comprehensive in nature and be somewhat scientifically literate, as that is the language of our industrial/scientific epoch, but they are the ones who will manifest the practicality of FE, and its reality will bring along the rest of humanity into true sentience, where fear is no longer the organizing principle of humanity, but love. It can happen in other ways, but I have never seen that route tried before, it is the only one I know of that is consistent with how the other epochal events happened (initiated by small groups and even one person), and it is also the only one aligned with the world on the other side of the epochal events just ahead if we can get over the hump, and it is also richly informed by the experience of trying and failing, many times, and using strategies that I have come to conclude will not work, and are doomed before they begin because they operate from the framework of the ideological doctrines that prevail today:

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

Basically, you can’t pour the new wine into the old skins. So, in many ways, what I am attempting is nothing new, and in ways there has never been anything like it before. Trying to take mystical understandings and make them practical in the real world is no easy trick, and requires that balancing act of the mystical and the practical, which almost nobody has ever achieved. They either go naive, cynical, or paranoid and try some kind of Young Warrior approach, sneak past Godzilla approach, etc., in short, those levels that have not worked:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6

and are highly unlikely to, or they float off into dreamy and impractical mysticism. We can’t get there by dragging along our baggage. And the way to know if you are on track if is your perspective is loving and expansive, while also keeping your eyes and mind on the details. It is easy to go off the mystical deep end and be so heavenly bound that you are no earthly good, and that arena is full of charlatanry. Materialism and rationalism is a seduction going the other way. Brian and Dennis, each in their own way, tried to bridge those polarities, as I have. That is no easy trick, especially when you are having your life wrecked and trying to dodge Godzilla’s death blows while your friends, family, and colleagues cheer Godzilla along or even help him out. How many are fit for that duty on Earth? I have only met and heard of a handful, and they all paid dearly. I am trying out something that is not so life-risking.

The physics experiments that you cite are highly accurate, and they are measuring “real” stuff. It is the implications of those results that point to something bigger that has eluded the greatest scientific minds ever. This is all a very chicken-and-egg situation, and all I know is that FE points the way out of the corner that humanity has painted itself into, on several levels, and I suspect that if FE and the attendant suppressed technologies made it into public view, they will likely resolve some of those paradoxes. Many alternative physics models have been proposed that account for the paradoxes, and they may have some validity, but I try to not get too wrapped up in them. There is plenty of mystery around FE where probably nobody really knows what is happening.

As I have stated before, and it only came to me after seeing how FE efforts failed and were taken out, was that the ZPF may well be divine in nature, and that unless our hearts were in the right place, we would not be able to successfully use it as a civilization. That has deep mystical as well as practical implications, and is another reason why I advocate the lamb’s path, which Dennis and Brian also advocated, each in his own way, which is primarily why I respected their approaches as much as I did, but I am also trying something different, leaving Level 10 behind, and trying Level 12, the sentience approach, not the self-interested stampede approach. It will start small, and I am interested in quality, not quantity. Watering it down, cutting corners, pandering to people’s egos to get your foot in the door, and the like, will not work for a Level 12 attempt. Level 12 is a horse of a different color, and it is teaching me patience. :)

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

23rd February 2014, 21:54

Hi:

One thing that I see many fringe people do is try to ring bells that probably can’t be rung. For instance, the JFK hit will never be solved, as in fingering who did it. Gary tried to, but that was also his profession, so his attempt is understandable:

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

but it is a conspiracist pastime and huge folly to think that they can get to the bottom of the crime. Similarly, many 9/11 Truthers and the like try to finger who pulled it off. That is not going to happen, especially by independent theorists trying to put the puzzle together like they do.

Similarly, I have seen many fringe scientists and theorists try to come up with some unified field theory, a grand tying up of everything into a neat theory. While that can be an honorable undertaking, nobody has ever come close, and all anybody does is touch one part of the elephant. We are all blind, to one degree or another, down here in physical reality.

The comprehensive nature of my essay may seem to aspire to something like that, but it really doesn’t. I do not attempt to answer all questions. What I do, however, is try to develop a paradigm where people can keep their attention pointed in the important directions and not get distracted by the endless circus on the fringes, see through the many conceits of orthodoxy, and lay aside the dogmas, many of which are painfully obvious. Sheldrake’s book, which was the foundation of his banned TED talk, was not about answering all the questions, but freeing mainstream science from its materialistic straightjacket and expanding its fields of inquiry. Brian tried to do something similar. That is a world apart from trying to answer everything in some grand theory.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

Nine

24th February 2014, 08:36

Dearest Wade,

I am simply looking for the truth....

I was watching this big picture documentary that you might advocate....cept I am a retard upon such matters...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwgbV1FrGyA

I would say that as a spiritual person and yet at the same time a very ignorant person in regards yet....

I might as a philosopher as to ...

I simply lost my connection....as it were....

Answers are for the scientists....as it were....

let me entertain you.....

and where is the truth....

Nine

Wade Frazier

24th February 2014, 11:37

Hi Nine:

Inebriants are one way that people deal with the pain in their lives. It is not a healthy way, but the USA has a long history of making industries out of outlawing inebriants. Prohibition established the Mafia in the USA, and Joe Kennedy sidled up to that trough. Today’s illegal drug trade is destroying Mexico, and the CIA has long funded its covert activities with the drug trade, and the banks facilitated laundering drug money. It is all evil, and is how the dark path operates, making money coming and going, creating a problem and then profiting from the “solution.” Drugs are just one of many ways it does it. Drug addictions are merely symptoms of deeper problems.

I was forced into drinking in my job, and subsequently had a battle with the bottle for twenty years:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/veggie.htm#gandhi

that I did not finally beat until the year 2000, so I know about wrestling with those demons.

When people hear from the deceased, one piece of advice is to give up addictions before they die, or they bring their addictions with them, but have no way to satisfy them:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#akehurst

The near-physical plane is filled with discarnate entities that had physical addictions and stayed near Earth after death, hanging around people with the addictions that they had while alive. For instance, bars on Earth are “inhabited” by discarnate addicts who wait for a drunk to pass out, then they can briefly “possess” them and get a thrill of feeling what they were addicted to while in a physical body. It is truly a hellish existence to hang around the physical plane that way. The vast majority of the time, when the drunk comes back to consciousness, the discarnate spirit is ejected, but that kind of addictive behavior can also lead to spiritual possession. Possessed people get that way from not only addictions to substances, but also addictions to ways of thinking and acting.

In this world:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

there are no addicts, but in this one:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672115&viewfull=1#post672115

addicts abound. A healthy society sees addictions as afflictions, and will try to help people beat their addictions, not cater to them, but criminalizing them is worse. Criminalizing addictions is the mark of a primitive society, so maybe the USA is growing up, just a little, by beginning to legalize an addictive substance, but that is far from being a healthy approach.

Enough said for now.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

24th February 2014, 17:00

Hi:

To my previous post, it is a variation of Ben Franklin’s dictum: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

The medical rackets works by using an inverted understanding of that saying. Prevention can only be sold by the ounce, while “cure” can be sold by the pound. There is no money in prevention:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/medicine.htm#hygeia

When somebody takes drugs to feel good, they are intervening to overcome failed prevention. Intervention is almost always a disaster in the end. In our world, the interveners usually have corrupt motivation, with their intervention designed to help themselves, not those they intervene with. When Europe conquered the world, they often posed as some kind of savior, intervening in native wars and the like. It always ended up being a catastrophe for the natives, with the only real winners being the Europeans. And the natives almost never figured it out, playing “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” game.

The Huron played that game, and it exterminated their tribe within forty years:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#champlain

The British did it in India, the Spanish did it in Mexico:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#aztec

and so on. Recently the USA “intervened” in Iraq, to “free” them, when all of their other rationales fell apart:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

Only Americans were stupid enough to believe what came out of Bush’s mouth, but it was also an intentional stupidity:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/07/15/considering-the-obvious/

If fear was removed as an organizing principle of civilization, drug use and addictions would disappear. That is prevention. Psychopaths rule in a world governed by fear, and as I have been writing recently, in a world of fear, the masses cannot even distinguish the psychopaths from the saints, literally calling the darkness the light:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=800356&viewfull=1#post800356

but our indoctrination system begins developing that brain-addled state, where mass murdering thieves become national heroes and saints:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=792942&viewfull=1#post792942

That kind of indoctrination is prevention, preventing people from becoming sentient:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/intro.htm#paradigms

and the only “intervention” that I plan to do with the masses is help deliver FE to them one day.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

25th February 2014, 00:32

Hi:

I am going through a round of editorial comments on the early part of the essay, and the question again arises: “Just what do you think you are trying to do?”

On one hand, that is a question I have been probably asking myself since I was sixteen and first got my dream of changing the energy industry:

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

and when I chased Dennis out to Boston, I asked myself the same question:

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

when I sacrificed my life to bust Dennis out of jail:

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

when I began intensively studying the lies I had been raised with:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#books

when I signed up with Dennis again:

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

when I began helping Brian:

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

when I began helping him again:

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

when I joined Avalon, when I asked for the sabbatical to write my essay, and many other times, I have had to ask myself what I thought I was doing.

My goal has always been the same: a healed planet and humanity, and a world that looks like this:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

I had dreams like that since I was sixteen, and all I can say is be careful what you wish for. My goal for my writing, probably since 1990, has been to help fill a hole that I had seen in all FE efforts. The people that I had seen in FE efforts were almost all in it for themselves, never seeing beyond what was in it for them. They may have glimpsed the bigger picture, but it always took a back seat to what was in it for them.

When I found those extremely few people who saw past their immediate self-interest, they were usually scientifically illiterate, and really did not understand how the world worked. By “worked,” I mean the nuts and bolts of how things work. The vast majority of Americans have no idea where their energy comes from, whether it is food, oil, or the electricity that powers their homes when they flip switches.

Unless there was a significant group that understood how the world really worked, just on those basic levels, they were not going to focus on what was important for the world, but they just focused on survival and their immediate self-interest. Such people are worse than worthless for the FE pursuit, as I learned from my days with Dennis.

And there were other areas of how the world works that anybody who could support an FE effort needed. They needed to understand something about the organized suppressions without flying off the conspiracist handle. About 99% of the population either denies the organized suppression or obsesses on it, and neither one leads to healthy and worldly perspectives:

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

as both are victim-oriented. My spiritual experiences and training not only were greatly responsible for surviving my odyssey with Dennis, but they also showed me that the rationalist-materialistic paradigm of today’s mainstream science rests on a false foundation.

The spiritual aspect played into all facets of my journey and what I was seeing. My primary lesson, that personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity:

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

had both spiritual and worldly aspects to them. That was the big problem, because people were egocentric because they lived in fear. From some mystical perspectives, all is how it should be, and destroying the world is as it should be. I want something different.

So, the question arises again, what do I think I am doing, writing the essay, jeopardizing my career and life in a number of ways?

If enough people who care can come to understand how the world really works, we can have FE and a healed planet and humanity rather easily. A thousand like Ilie, properly trained, and it is all over for Godzilla, and he knows it. While to some it may seem like he has it all wrapped up, his reign is pretty tenuous, and almost totally relies on a sleeping, egocentric humanity.

But there are many pitfalls along the way, and they keep rearing their heads as I plow forward with my work. One is that the fringes are full of chaff, and I am being besieged with chaff by those around me. As I am writing this, next to my keyboard is a question I got from somebody that I am obliged to answer. Not many people can oblige me, but this is one, and I am little infuriated that I have to answer the question, because it shows how the disinformation mill churns away, bamboozling the scientifically illiterate.

Carbon dioxide is the key greenhouse gas that drives Earth’s surface temperature. I have never seen a paleoclimate study that does not acknowledge that carbon dioxide concentrations have been the ultimate cause of Earth’s surface temperature. The Sun is nearly 50% brighter than it was billions of years ago, but it is a slow increase, not something with sudden changes. Carbon dioxide traps outgoing radiation from Earth’s surface. It is the same kind of effect of how the ozone layer absorbs most ultraviolent radiation that hits Earth. It is just physics 101, not denied by any scientists. The carbon dioxide levels are like a lid put on a boiling pot. A lid that traps outgoing energy is going to make the environment it covers warm up. Again, there is no arguing that principle. Water vapor traps more radiation than carbon dioxide does, but water has patchy cover (clouds), has a higher melting point and is constantly evaporating, precipitating, and getting held up in ice, so it has a wide variability in the atmosphere that carbon dioxide does not.

Carbon dioxide levels have always been an ultimate cause of Earth’s surface temperature, and if those levels increase, Earth’s surface will get warmer. No scientist will deny it. Declining carbon dioxide levels for the past 150 million years, pretty consistently, is the ultimate cause of the current ice age. But there were also proximate causes, such as Antarctica covering the South Pole, Antarctica becoming isolated about 40 million years ago, and three million years ago the land bridge between North and South America formed, and that was the final proximate cause that tipped Earth into the current ice age.

While in this ice age, variations in Earth’s orientation toward the Sun, called Milankovitch cycles:

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

have been the tipping point for the advances and retreats of the ice sheets for the past 2.5 million years. For the last million years, you could almost set your watch by the advances and retreats of the ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere.

So, with the “table being set” by declining carbon dioxide levels, continental configurations and their effects on the ocean’s currents became proximate causes, with the changes in Earth’s orientation to the Sun being the tipping points for growing and receding continental ice sheets.

When scientists began to realize that the measureable increase in carbon dioxide was going to warm Earth overall, the hydrocarbon lobby, whose owners are the source of that carbon dioxide increase (again, no credible scientist will deny it), the hydrocarbon lobby began disinformation campaigns.

Climate models are about the most complex programs known, and they have always been the ultimate application for the most powerful computers, as so many variables interact to produce climate. There are seasonal oscillations and regional variances, but all credible climate scientists (read: no conflict of interest, usually with the hydrocarbon lobby) will say that if you increase the ultimate variable, Earth will warm up. That is like saying that if the Sun got brighter, Earth would get warmer.

So, the increase in carbon dioxide is playing with an ultimate cause of Earth’s climate. But the Internet and media is barraged with all manner of disinformation on this topic. A warm or cold winter in one region is meaningless for the global warming issue. Regional and season variation is meaningless. One popular disinformation tactic these days is trying to show some kind of inverse correlation between carbon dioxide levels and the interglacial periods. Again, the Milankovitch cycles are responsible for the warming and cooling in the past million years, not carbon dioxide levels, per se. No scientists are saying that fluctuating carbon dioxide levels caused the glacial intervals. The levels likely have accentuated the changes, however.

But analyzing those changes and relationships has nothing whatsoever to do with what is happening today. Humans are mining hydrocarbons and burning them, which is creating the fastest carbon dioxide spike that Earth may have ever seen. We are playing with the ultimate variable, not a proximate one. It will definitely change Earth’s climate, and will make it warmer. It has to. Sure, other dynamics are at play, just as there are for all climates, but increasing the ultimate variable is only going to increase temperature overall. From what I have seen from the climate scientists, many think that relatively little of the ultimate warming that will be caused by the increased carbon dioxide has manifested in global temperatures so far. Humanity may have already pushed back the beginning of the next glacial period, which probably should be beginning soon, by 50,000 years or so. Humanity is undertaking a huge geophysical experiment, with the only planet we have to live on. We are playing chicken with Earth. With FE, we could not only stop burning hydrocarbons, but we would bring down those carbon dioxide levels to their pre-industrial levels in my lifetime. But with FE, Earth’s climate would not mean much anymore, as far as human welfare is concerned. Humanity would no longer be at the mercy of the climate.

The scientists who play the global warming denial game are almost always looking at regional variations and oscillations, which is really begging the question of carbon dioxide levels and global climate. Most of those deniers work for the hydrocarbon lobby, including one of Brian’s erstwhile colleagues who sold his soul:

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

So, for those who are saying that carbon dioxide and global climate are unrelated, or that Earth’s temperature causes carbon dioxide levels, they are confusing ultimate and proximate causes, and I have watched a bunch of them play a shell game with their scientifically-illiterate audience, duping them. And people come to me on this issue. I am really tired of hearing it.

Brian O regretted getting sucked into the Face on Mars issue:

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

and the moon landings issue:

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

I am still trying to mop up that mess with his bio at Wikipedia, fighting the “editors.”

What I have found is that almost all fringe figures are addressing scientifically illiterate audiences, so their stuff flies. If they got in the ring with specialists in the areas where they make their fringe claims, hardly any of them would last a minute. Most of that stuff is delusional or an outright scam, preying on the uninformed and unwary.

IMO, people should not digest the fringe views until they at least understand what the mainstream ones are. Then they will have some basis for evaluating the fringe claims. Almost no fringe claims pass muster if subjected to that kind of scrutiny.

Again, there is real stuff out there, but Godzilla pounces on the good stuff almost immediately, removing it from circulation. So, in what I do, I have had to continually deal with people around me asking me to look into fringe claims and the like. I can’t regret doing it, but it won’t be much of my continuing work. Discernment is needed in these areas, and scientific training or understandings are needed to navigate them.

So, one of the things I am trying to do is steer people away from those rabbit holes. It is OK to get lost in one or two, so you understand the process, but doing it as a habit is a supreme time-waster, and for what I am trying to do, I do not have the time to waste.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

25th February 2014, 01:15

Hi:

This marijuana issue is bringing back memories. One is a funny story from my LA days, and it takes a little telling. I have written a little about my movie buff days:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=322756&highlight=wars#post322756

Lucas and Spielberg had a several year run that I will likely never live to see again. From 1977 to 1982, they were responsible for Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and ET. For a young movie buff, it was like I had died and gone to heaven. In 1983, their streak ended when Return of the Jedi came out, and then next Indiana Jones movie laid an egg the next year. Their artistic and commercial peak then was to movies about what the Beatles were to music. The anticipation for Return of the Jedi seemed almost unbearable, and the world premier was about ten-to-fifteen minutes from where I lived in LA. It premiered at midnight. I don’t know what I was I was thinking, but at about ten PM, I thought that I would drive over and see if the line was small enough to where I could sneak into the show. I recall as I drove over seeing Klieg lights in the sky. That should have been my first warning, but I kept going, and as I pulled onto the street where the theater was, oh what a sight. There were several news crews, and I drove past a reporter interviewing somebody in Darth Vader regalia. And probably not some fan, but somebody from the studio in the set costume. As I drove past the theater, I looked down the street where the line wound around the corner back into the streets behind the theater, and the line was about a quarter mile long and ten people wide. I remember seeing tents. The next day I read that the people at the head of the line had camped there for two weeks. The movie played 24/7 there for a week or two, and I read that when the first showing happened at midnight, the people at the back of the line did not get in until three or four shows later.

The next day, I went to Westwood, next to UCLA and Beverly Hills, which was about the only place in LA that was safe to walk at night, and got in line. As with when I saw ET the summer before, I was probably going to have to wait several hours to get into the show. So, I was patiently sitting on a lawn in line, expecting to wait for several hours. We were a kind of captive audience, and various people worked the lines. Some sold food and water, as I recall, but others had different goals. I had only been in LA a few months by then, and had not yet become streetwise, and when I was approached by a person working the lines, I responded. The guy was trying to get signatures for a petition to legalize marijuana. I sat and heard his pitch for fifteen minutes or so. He talked about how it did not have the deleterious aspects that tobacco and alcohol did, and other “benefits.” I sat there listening politely, and then he went into about how the mental impairment was less than alcohol, and finished with, “I should know, because I am stoned out of my mind right now.” I still laugh when I think about that scene. Just then, somebody came down the line with one ticket to sell for the show that was about to start. I must have been about the only singleton there, and bought the ticket and went inside. The movie sucked (I tried to like it, and think I saw it three times, but couldn’t bring myself to like it), and it marked the end of Lucas and Spielberg’s hot streak. Life was still good for a moviegoer, though. The year before, I became one of the early Blade Runner fans, and it has been nice to see it reach its stature today, and Ford did Witness a couple of years later. Maybe it is just nostalgia for my youth, before I went into the meat grinder with Dennis, but I had some compensation in those days, and I still appreciate them.

Marijuana was legalized here in Washington last year, but I have rarely encountered stoned people on the streets (they are easy to smell :) ). It has not led to some kind of societal collapse, and I doubt that many people have picked up the habit because it is legal. I don’t drink, smoke, or toke, and making weed legal probably has had no effect in my neighborhood.

Again, getting stoned, especially regularly, is not a good thing, but I can think of vastly more important issues than that, such as the energy situation. :)

This past weekend, I was with a friend who asked me some energy questions, the kind that I rarely get, and we talked about the Gulf Spill and Fukushima, and as I talked about how we get a lot of our energy here from hydroelectric (which I obviously have mixed feelings about http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#run ), I also discussed the current energy sources, and she said that hydroelectric was the only one that was not “poisonous.” I had not heard it described that way before, but that is apt.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

Ilie Pandia

25th February 2014, 07:19

This past weekend, I was with a friend who asked me some energy questions, the kind that I rarely get, and we talked about the Gulf Spill and Fukushima, and as I talked about how we get a lot of our energy here from hydroelectric (which I obviously have mixed feelings about http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#run ), I also discussed the current energy sources, and she said that hydroelectric was the only one that was not “poisonous.” I had not heard it described that way before, but that is apt.

Actually this is something that I have looked at in the past, when I was studying the work of Viktor Schauberger. I remember someone making the case that the current design for hydroelectric plants has a big negative impact on the habitat of the river where the dam was built. Fish that would thrive in fresh running water would not make it in a lake and those that did were usually in trouble when they hit the turbines. Also the environment after the dam was affected by the flow limitation and control by humans.

So I would not say that it is not "poisonous", but it's probably least so. :)

Wade Frazier

25th February 2014, 15:08

Hi Ilie:

Back when I was with Dennis, just before the raid, when it looked like we might have had a chance, my dream was leading the effort to dismantle all the hydro dams in Washington. Because of what the BPA did to Dennis in Seattle:

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

I am sure that he would have rather led the effort. :)

As my essay makes clear, humans have not lived in “harmony” with nature since our ancestors learned to control fire. And “harmony” with nature usually means kill or be killed. With FE, humans can create a harmony and symbiosis with nature that has never existed before. This world has a harmony with nature that truly boggles my mind:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

All of the “Golden Ages” that dotted the history of life on Earth, of which my essay lists many of them (Golden Age of trilobites, fish, sharks, amphibians, dinosaurs, turtles, mammals, the hunter-gatherer, and so on) were all about having energy sources to one’s self for a while. For all the other animals besides humans, the Golden Age usually ended when other animals evolved to compete or the environment no longer provided the support that was had during the Golden Age. With humans, the Golden Age ended when they plundered the energy resource to exhaustion, and also bred to the limits of the energy supply. All of that American West romanticism was about those wide open spaces (once the Indians were removed from the scene), and filling up the lands with “settlers,” but it was not such a Golden Age:

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

The Western Hemisphere and Australia is still “underpopulated” compared to the Old World, because those continents were recently stolen.

There is quite a debate on how even direct solar is bad news, environmentally.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421503002416

http://solareis.anl.gov/guide/environment/index.cfm

http://ezinearticles.com/?Are-Solar-Panels-Harmful-to-the-Environment?&id=3998233

Wind turbines kill zillions of birds, create noise issues, create turbulence issues, etc. Brian O eventually realized that the traditional “alternative” energy solutions did not cut it:

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

Actually, Dennis’s heat pump was one of the most environmentally benign energy technologies on Earth, as well as one of the most effective. It is still the best heating system that has ever been on the world market:

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

Even FE has been questioned on the field that it puts out. It may not be safe to have under your pillow, but since it is suppressed as much as it has been, it is hard to say. It may be that FE devices may need some shielding or be placed in their own room in a home, but that is a small price to pay. In that world that Roads glimpsed, I am sure that there were no environmental problems at all with their energy generation technologies.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

25th February 2014, 15:39

Hi:

Avalonians have long heard that I did not do forums anymore, until I saw Bill start this one. Some trolls that stalked me I could tell were professionals:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/critics.htm#troll

and it looks like professional trolls have been part of the milieu for a while:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-02-24/conspiracy-theory-true-agents-infiltrate-websites-intending-manipulate-deceive-and-d

I am not going to play in any other forums ever again, except the one I start after I publish that essay, but I may also always have a presence at Avalon.

Back to chores. Going hiking with a friend today. Spring is not far off where I live.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

25th February 2014, 18:24

Nine

27th February 2014, 08:09

Hi:

As I have stated, the parts of the essay that I am getting to is where the heavy emotional lifting begins. Last night, I finished a book on the anthropology of warfare. Virtually all anthropologists who study war study it in order to see if it can be eliminated or reduced. They often study the sociological aspects, and I often see the economic aspects put into a subordinate position, which I believe is a mistake. And as I finished the book, which the end was about ending war, the prescription from the sociological anthropologist was essentially, “Play nice!” Geez! I have a feeling that all sociological frameworks end up in totally useless “advice” like that. Political “realists” also assume away economics, which again I think is getting lost in the trees, not seeing the forest. Again, it is like Maslow’s Hierarchy. In a world of scarcity, people are going to try to gain their disproportionate share (or protect what little they have) and will fight over it.

It has now becoming clear that the reason why warfare appeared in the archeological record as late as it did is that a “Golden Age” of the hunter-gatherer was taking place, as wide open spaces and easy meat were there for the taking. Only when the easy meat ran out, and there was no virgin territory to expand into, did warfare begin to become common. Again, I was amazed to see that that is what has emerged from the latest findings in genetics, great ape studies, and archeology.

Time to go hiking.

Best,

Wade

Dearest Wade,

I simply love your writing and musings about your life....

I hope you had a great hike...going for a 12 miler today and you would luv it here...

I am on page 7 of this thread and it is deep but very cool stuff and it is much appreciated!

I wondered why anyone would troll you but now I know why....

I did the gubernment thing for over three decades and the few things that ring true is that some folks are more equal than others and some are above any laws and that even when proven wrong no one in government ever admits to wrong doing....as it were....

I am taking a bit of a break since your material is somewhat overwhelming and besides I am shopping for a new bicycle...to ride around on....like for hundreds of miles.....its a lot like hiking 'cept ya just can cover huge distance in a day....

You can count upon those things and I luv your analogy of the PTB as Godzilla.....

Nine

Wade Frazier

27th February 2014, 16:10

Hi Nine:

Yes, my work is probably best digested in small doses. I got the Godzilla analogy from Steven Greer:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/journey.htm#greer

when I heard him use it at our NEM conference in 2004:

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

It is apt. Dennis called them the Big Boys, and when I write more formally, such as in my site and upcoming essay, I call them the Global Controllers:

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

Whatever the moniker, they are all too real, but people will not encounter them unless they are doing “disruptive” things such as verging on making something like FE happen. Because of our past experiences together (he stepped on me, but I thwarted his effort, kind of, and lived to try again), Godzilla has not forgotten about me and I am sure that he keeps half an eye out for what I am doing. My goal is to get enough people up to speed on thinking comprehensively before Godzilla decides that he has to do something about me again. Dennis has been a bigger pest, but I am on still the radar, although what I am doing probably seems like harmless nattering from the peanut gallery, and I that is how I would prefer that he sees my efforts (and maybe he is right :) ):

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

I am also going about this in a way where it is not easy for his assets to interfere. Bill has helped out in that regard, with this protected forum.

Have fun hiking and biking.

Best,

Wade

Hi all:

I recently finished Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct, and am reading Henry Gee’s The Accidental Species. They have plenty of relevance to my essay, and pose scientists’ questions on religion, sentience, and the human journey.

Similar to humans having a “language engine” baked into their biology, humans also have a “religion engine.” As I recently wrote in a chapter draft, the earliest religious rituals were singing and dancing sessions that lasted all night:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=799635&viewfull=1#post799635

They were used to foster group in-group cohesion, largely to get young men ready to go kill people from the out-group. Organized religion has a very bloody past, directly-related to warfare, and “religious” human sacrifice is probably related to hunting and warfare, but began to increase as human societies became larger and the elites used human sacrifice partly as a way to terrorize the populace into submission. The sacrifices always had religious overtones, and sacrificing people at the foundations of elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture seems to have been a common feature among cultures, nearly universal. Animal sacrifices eventually replaced human sacrifices in many cultures.

However bloody, superstitious, and primitive such practices were, there was a common thread to them, and it has to do with an emotional connection that is forged between people and their communities. Organized religion is a social institution above all else. On one hand, it has been used to hold societies together, and on the other, it has been used by elites to control their subject populations. All early civilizations had their elites claiming divine sanction for their rule. That can still be seen today with British royalty, even though the Divine Right of Kings was dismissed centuries ago. Less than a century ago, the Japanese religion was focused on its royalty, with the emperor outranking the creator. Japan and Britain are isolated island-nations and are still a little backward due to that isolation. Their more cosmopolitan mainland cousins gave up those elite-aggrandizing superstitions sooner.

But the impulse for religion is baked deeply, even called an instinct, and probably the closest thing to a religious experience that industrialized peoples have is attending rock concerts, which harkens back to those singing and dancing marathons of the earliest religions. When the Beatles came on the scene, it was as if a new religion was founded, and John Lennon’s “We are more popular than Jesus” statement was accurate in ways that he likely did not suspect.

Because of my mystical experiences:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#research

I knew that there was something “real” at the heart of religious practice, even though it was abused by all organized religions, and is a rampant practice today in mystical circles:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#charlatans

The materialists of science have missed the boat, worshipping their intellects and dismissing very dramatic evidence of not only abilities of consciousness that go far beyond rational abilities, but also evidence that the materialist models of consciousness rest on a false foundation. Organized religion is an easy target for scientists and materialists, and New Age and other modern mystical charlatanry:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/purpose.htm#newage

is rampant. But I see that as only more evidence that personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity:

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

not an invalidation that there is far more than meets the eye to creation. Scientists that cannot make the distinction are lost in the weeds, but the political arm of the scientific establishment, the “skeptics,” is perhaps the most dishonest group I have yet met:

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

and that is saying something, and too many scientists look to the "skeptics" to see if there is anything to the paranormal. How foolish. That Mr. Skeptic has duped naïve FE enthusiasts:

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

is only par for the course, as it is regarding all worthy endeavors. Big names in the FE field lie shamelessly about Dennis:

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

and newbies such as Foster avidly repeat the disinformation:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=621892&viewfull=1#post621892

either just being another member of the naïve crowd or stirring up disinformation knowingly. I do not know what the case is, but it really does not matter, as the outcome is the same.

Brian O was a big advocate of scientific testing of paranormal phenomena:

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

and Nicholas Wade ended his The Faith Instinct by calling for a new religion, one that incorporates the findings of science, that brings it up-to-date. In ways, his call is like that of many others who have been trying to bridge science and religion. While religion is about infallible texts and “faith,” which is believing something because they were told to believe it, and while science is materialistic, that union won’t happen. Both need to relinquish their certitude.

While scientists claim to be motivated by doubt, not faith, their cock-sure beliefs about the materialistic assumptions of their “faith” amount to a dogma as deeply baked as it is for any religious fanatic. That is what Sheldrake was challenging when he was banned from TED, with the “skeptics” all over him as avidly as Dominican inquisitors:

http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-for-discussion-graham-hancock-and-rupert-sheldrake/

http://circularstateofmind.wordpress.com/category/tedx-2/

That human need to be “right” is one of our greatest failings, and may be fatal to the species. It is one of the hazards of becoming sentient. As with Einstein, Brian O, and others:

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

the question of sentience is also addressed in Henry Gee’s The Accidental Species. Is humanity a sentient species? If we are, does it really matter? As I have stated many times before, we are semi-sentient:

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

and becoming fully-sentient, or at least achieving a much higher level than we see in the world today, is Godzilla’s greatest nightmare, and is also a nightmare for all those who manage the human herd. Whether it is some “guru” managing his harem and acolytes, or secular herders such as Edward Bernays:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/medicine.htm#bernays

milking the human herd is about the oldest “profession” on Earth, and Godzilla is merely the master shepherd of the moment, and the first to really be able to milk on a global scale. FE can help permanently break the flock/shepherd model of human societies. If people are not mired in scarcity, worlds like these beckon:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

but while people live in scarcity and fear, they are easily herded and controlled, and slaughtered when they stop producing milk.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

27th February 2014, 16:58

Hi:

I just saw this little news item:

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-king-city-police-arrested-car-scheme-20140225,0,7966522.story#axzz2uXhcrXa3

http://news.yahoo.com/california-town-shaken-police-officers-arrested-235107533.html

OK, it is anecdote time. When I was with Dennis in Boston:

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

one of my oldest family friends lived there. I saw the patriarch’s son last year, whom I met when I was four, when my family first moved to California. He is the oldest friend I have. When I realized that I had known him for more than fifty years, it made me feel a bit older. :)

Anyway, I spent an afternoon with that patriarch in Boston. I am not sure if we talked much about my FE efforts, but as we talked, he said that the difference between the East Coast and West Coast was that on the East Coast the people feared the police, while on the West Coast people saw them as public servants. Even though I lost plenty of innocence during my LA days:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=406928&highlight=threatened#post406928

I remember being kind of shocked as he told me about that fear of the police. I had rarely encountered police, other than a few traffic tickets, and really did not know what to make of what he was telling me. We will likely never meet again (although I tried to last year, but the stars did not align), but if we had another talk, I would have asked him if he remembered his conversation with me, and would have told him that I lived on both coasts a number of times, and the authorities on the West Coast were far more corrupt than on the East Coast:

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

Nice thing to learn. :(

So, when I see news like this morning’s, I sigh.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

27th February 2014, 20:58

Hi:

This one has been gestating for some time, and there are few aspects of it that readers have not seen before, but I have not made a comprehensive post on it yet.

Dennis is a self-proclaimed religious fanatic who believes that the Bible is the one and only word of God. I was never with him because of his religious views, but almost in spite of them. He is the greatest human being that I ever met, but he is still human. To me, his fervent Christianity is just like his fervent nationalism. When he was rudely disabused of the nationalist fantasy that he was raised with, he heard a voice in his head as he was about to pull the trigger:

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

and it was not many years after that that he became a Christian fanatic. What those fanaticisms had in common was Dennis, not so much any intrinsic value in those religions. Nearly every time I am with Dennis, he tries to sell his literalist interpretation of the Bible, and I know that he prays for my heathen soul, and he does that because he loves me, and I really can’t get too bent out of shape about it. He is doing the best that he can, he lives honestly by his beliefs, and is the only person on Earth that I know of who meets these qualifications:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

If Dennis had been born in Tibet, he likely would have been a fanatical Tibetan nationalist and Buddhist. I have no doubt about the voice in his head being real, as I have had mine, too, and the second time it spoke up (only when asked), it led me to Dennis:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice2

I don’t call the voice in my head “God,” but just the voice in my head, and one that I don’t want to hear from again:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice3

Was it my friend? Was it God? Was it my “higher self”? I truly don’t know, but it will have some explaining to do when I pass over and meet that voice’s author.

Being an American, I have seen evangelical Christianity, in its many flavors, since I was a child. While I have never gone on my own volition, I have been dragged by others many times to their religious rituals and gatherings. I nearly always wanted to leave them as fast as I could, but some could put on a good show, and sometimes I would enjoy the show. But the religions I have been around are almost exclusively largely belief games that I want no part of, even while I can understand their attractions. But I would not even want to believe in the Christian God. The Christian God does not believe in abundance. :) Heaven is only so big, and I suppose hell will always be big enough for the rest. I saw a cult flyer once (in my LA days, before I became streetwise and never grabbed what was thrust in front of my face) that calculated Heaven to be about 300 square miles. And it was serious.

Again, I have had many experiences that showed me without a doubt that there was far more than meets the eye to our reality, and that the materialistic models of consciousness are false:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#research

but that sure does not mean that I am into sacred texts that need literal interpretation, or am into beliefs or “faith.” I have no use for that stuff. I suppose the closest thing to “faith” for me is that when I asked for the voice (after feeling like I was being backed into a corner), it responded, and I trusted it. I no longer really trust it, but I can’t regret listening to it. It sent me on the journey that became a life’s story that many find hard to believe has even a sliver of truth in it, but I am the person who lived it, and I know the truth of it. And my journey might, in some small way, help my species turn the corner.

So, navigating those waters has been anything but easy, and I am about to publish an essay that may well be the last like it for this lifetime, and it will have plenty of “science” in it, while it also pokes some holes in establishment science and questions materialism.

What I noticed about “skeptics” and other materialists is that whenever the subject came up of “paranormal” phenomenon, the scientists and skeptics almost never played fairly or rationally, which I originally had a hard time comprehending, as they seemed so smart. What they nearly invariably did was not look at the phenomenon by themselves, but they tried to connect them to religious beliefs, with their notions of “creators” and the like, and then made their arguments for dismissing the abilities of consciousness by equating evidence of such abilities with religious fanaticism, when they have almost nothing to do with each other, and are kind of diametrically opposed. In Logic 101 classes, that is called the straw man fallacy:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/critics.htm#straw

It is really a false dichotomy, to either have materialism or fundamentalist religion. In fact, both are fundamentalist religions. I have seen materialists make this equation:

Materialism = rationalism

And any notion of trans-physical realities or abilities of consciousness that go beyond rational ability is dismissed as irrational. How irrational! Accepting the assumptions of materialism is not a rational act, and rejecting them is certainly not irrational, especially when a great deal of evidence calls into question those materialistic assumptions. It is really a very simple logical proposition, but it has been amazing to watch the irrational “skeptics” at work. What Mr. Skeptic did:

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

could be called highly irrational, but as I watched him ply his trade over the years, it became obvious that he knew what he was doing. The “I am a blithering idiot” defense, or the “I have an irrational allegiance to my beliefs” defense does not hold water with him. He is consciously dishonest. Whether that dishonesty is because he is a functional psychopath or he is doing it as part of his job is rather irrelevant to me. What amazed me initially was how his “affable skeptic” act duped people in the FE field:

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

but psychopaths can be very charming and persuasive:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=800356&viewfull=1#post800356

at least for the naïve and easily duped. I eventually got pretty good at sniffing them out, and as Jesus said, by their actions you will know them.

Hitting the bulls-eye with spirituality and religion is actually just like hitting the FE bulls-eye: only loving archers can do it. That is another reason why I say that FE and love are joined at the hip.

It is possible to understand what might lie on the other side of the veil without having your own NDE, just like it is possible to understand the FE conundrum and what might lie on the other side of the FE divide without going on the kinds of life-wrecking journeys that Dennis, Brian, and I took (or Trombly and Greer).

Time to go hiking. It is a nice day out, and somebody has to do it. :)

Best,

Wade

Nine

28th February 2014, 06:59

Dearest Wade,

I simply can not keep up with you since I am a bit retarded yet of course I "feel" things and had some interesting experiences with Government....

What I want to ask you is how can the existing power grid keep up with all the electric cars charging off of that grid? And more coming on line every day?

Can the grid handle this?

As an aside this might amuse you....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi7eMnDEpfg

A 200 mpg motorized bicycle....I bought one of those kits and put over 16000 miles commuting upon it and my coworkers thought I was crazy....It let me retire without purchasing another car.....he...he...

Being thought of as crazy amongst a bunch of psyco's was a benefit of that.....

Do you know what a "fixie" bicycle is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-gear_bicycle#Brakeless

I rode mine without brakes...he...he...

I rode one of those 60 miles per day in the summer and boy did that make some waves with some of my 300 lb co workers...he ...he....

And since folks could not handle any of that I really understand what you are talking about socially with the concept of unlimited free energy....

Again I am a bit of a retard but I got the point.....

Nine

Nine

28th February 2014, 08:12

Nine

28th February 2014, 08:31

Dearest wade...

My problem with the fundies is this....I used to be one of them and they are truly scary....

In Government and effectively governing one has to squash some of these things to keep things running....

Yet many in recent government find some of these folks useful....as it were....

And of course I am off on a tangent....sorry....

If there was an abundance for the supply of human needs all of this would be a moot point....

Nine

Nine

28th February 2014, 09:00

Dearest Wade....

Truth that:

"It is really a false dichotomy, to either have materialism or fundamentalist religion. In fact, both are fundamentalist religions. I have seen materialists make this equation:

Materialism = rationalism

And any notion of trans-physical realities or abilities of consciousness that go beyond rational ability is dismissed as irrational. How irrational! Accepting the assumptions of materialism is not a rational act, and rejecting them is certainly not irrational, especially when a great deal of evidence calls into question those materialistic assumptions. It is really a very simple logical proposition, but it has been amazing to watch the irrational “skeptics” at work. What Mr. Skeptic did:"

I have to really work and think upon what you propose and it is better than any graduate level course in philosophy.....

I used to be a fundamentalist and when I outgrew such ideas I got much happier....as it were...

Why does not Godzilla just use a bit of free energy technology and continue to let us make our monthly payments for energy use just make it a bit cheaper....as it were....

And then move to a free energy society as the people develop....as it were...

Nine

Ilie Pandia

28th February 2014, 10:35

Hi Nine,

I agree that Wade's thread has become very large and it is hard to even keep up, let alone read from page one! :)

So for you, and other new readers I recommend you study this essay that Wade published on his website.

Keys to Comprehending Abundance-Based Paradigms (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm)

That essay is also full of links for stuff if you really want to go deep!

Wade is currently busy writing a new comprehensive essay, focused around how energy powers everything (to put it simply), and so his late posts are about that and assume his readers are familiar with his writings.

Enjoy the read!

Ilie Pandia

28th February 2014, 22:52

I just thought of something:

This is a quote from Wade's essay:

As oxygenic photosynthesis spread through the oceans, everything that could be oxidized by oxygen was, during what is called the Great Oxygenation Event (“GOE”). The event began as long as three bya and is responsible for most of Earth’s minerals. Atmospheric oxygen stayed at a few percent until everything that could be oxidized by oxygen was and, beginning about 750 mya (and perhaps as long as 850 mya), atmospheric oxygen began its steep climb to 20% of the atmosphere and beyond.

In other words, life "terraformed" the planet and changed its environment, sometimes dramatically so.

There is talk about balance and auto-regulation in nature, but that does not seem to be the case. New species, in new energy niches, have an initial Golden Age until the reserves are "burned up", and then they die off making room for the new kid on the block. None of them were likely aware of this process or showed any restraint. The only "natural regulation" was that when food become scarce or nonexistent same happened to its predator.

From that perspective the human species is doing the exact same thing. It is preparing the planet for the next species that will thrive and have a Golden Age in an environment that will look little like the one we know today. If we manage to kill ourselves and take almost all of the ecosystem with us, we would just repeat a very old pattern. Basically this is what Life has been doing ever since it started here.

Acquiring sentience may be the only key to breaking this pattern. But will that mean stagnation, freezing in time the planet as it is, for fear of change? Or would it mean evolution to something that we cannot even imagine right now.

Anyway... humanity as we know it may not be around here for not long. Oblivion or utopia will make room for the next "kid on the block" adapted to the new conditions of life.

And then, a future Wade, billions of years from now, will argue that "humans" unconscious as they were, just trashed their environment as everyone before them. But there is slim evidence that they may have reached some sort of "semi-sentience" and some of the individuals actually saw the Epochal event coming. :)

Wade Frazier

1st March 2014, 04:59

Hi Ilie:

Real fast before I go to bed…

You are getting at the root of what I am doing. Yes, can we refrain from doing what all other life forms have done: breed to the limits of the energy supply, and never even think about the consequences? Whether we call it sentience or something else, humans are on the same trajectory as all other life forms, which is using up the energy as fast as possible.

It is a big and important subject, maybe the most important on Earth, and I will reply more tomorrow.

Best,

Wade

Ilie Pandia

1st March 2014, 06:40

What was maybe not clear from the previous post was the the Great Oxygenation Event looked like "pollution", where the major pollutant affecting the planet was Oxygen. Then we evolved with Oxygen based respiration and suddenly what was pollution is now "essential to life". I was thinking that perhaps in the same way our CO2 and plastic and aluminum pollution may end up being the source of a Golden Age for a different species. :). It looks like the next life form thrived where the previous got extinct by trashing it's environment.

Wade Frazier

1st March 2014, 15:58

Hi Ilie:

I understand your point, and I am also making another. It depends on what way you want to look at it. A few years after Eugene Mallove died:

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

I picked up a copy of Infinite Energy magazine, which he founded. It was a farewell issue by the editor who took over in the wake of Mallove’s murder. When I interacted with Mallove and asked him a few questions, he just said to read all the back issues of Infinite Energy, and all of my questions would be answered. He was a very busy man, but who would follow advice like that? Anyway, I got that issue, began reading, and was increasingly dismayed. That departing editor led off with an editorial that seemed like Julian Simon wrote it:

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

He led off by saying “all is well,” and challenged the idea that there is any elevated extinction rate today. I don’t know of one biologist on Earth making that claim. They estimate that the extinction rate today is anywhere from 100 to 10,000 times the background rate, and is only increasing. We are well on our way to having a mass extinction that might even rival the Permian extinction. The editor made several ignorant statements like that, and the other articles echoed the same thrust, and the worst was an article that lauded the increased carbon dioxide concentrations of the hydrocarbon age. As I write in my essay, carbon dioxide levels have been decreasing for 150 million years fairly consistently (at least until recently), and carbon dioxide starvation has been cited by scientists as the leading reason why complex life will eventually disappear from Earth several hundred million years from now. With FE, that problem, like many others, can go away. But that article said how much our descendants (if we have any) would bless us for raising Earth’s carbon dioxide levels, as if we were far-seeing saints.

Of course, we are no such thing, burning up the world’s hydrocarbons with as much sentience as those oxygen-producing bacteria did when they oxygenated the atmosphere. I have also written in my upcoming essay that there have also been Medean effects, where life killed off life in mass extinctions:

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

So, if animals and plants just produce their waste products with no concern for anything else, it can help, and it can hurt. But, for the first time ever, an animal can have no ecological footprint at all, or maybe even design its effect on the environment, and in a beneficial way. I vastly favor having no impact at first, other than reversing our damage, and down the road, when we have grown up, we can indeed manage levels of oxygen, carbon dioxide, how far Earth is away from the Sun, and the like.

In this world that Roads visited:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

they could have controlled the weather, but chose not to. Roads did not recognize any of the animals in that world. What does that mean? That is where human intention may have radically changed the ecosystems. I can barely fathom how they did it, but what I am certain of is that love made their approach possible. I would not want to live in world where genetic engineering and ecosystems management was driven by greed and fear. In fact, Roads gave us a glimpse of what that kind of world looks like:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672115&viewfull=1#post672115

So, our egocentric, greedy ways may leave our descendants, if there are any, or new kinds of life forms after humans disappear, with a “bounty” of high atmospheric carbon dioxide, acidified oceans, aluminum cans, plastic, and other “blessings” that they can use up in their Golden Age, or we can wake up, become a truly sentient species, and have our actions guided by something other than greed, fear, and egocentrism. Love can change the course, both in our hearts and minds, but it would also be reflected in how we interact with Earth and our fellow life forms. I often think about that episode of sentient trees. How much of that sentience was just humans being able to raise their awareness enough to hear them, and how much was the influence of new levels of consciousness being manifested on Earth by truly sentient humans? As Roads entered that reality, the very atmosphere radiated love and joy, and his mentor said it was due to the:

“energy of Love within this reality…The human energy field is a powerhouse that can be felt across infinity. Humanity is learning how to develop, expand, and express that power.”

As I say repeatedly, love and FE are joined at the hip, in more ways than one. Unless a nugget of people reach that heart-centered sentience that can initiate the Fifth Epochal Event, it likely won’t happen. What the world definitely does not need is somebody becoming the Bill Gates of FE, or the John Rockefeller. But Godzilla realizes that FE means the end of his reign, so he keeps the lid tightly on FE and a multitude of technologies that can quickly send humanity toward that heavenly reality. As we have discussed, that hellish world was very much scarcity-based and they did not enjoy FE, so it looks like those Gray Ones took Godzilla’s game to new levels of “mastery.”

The hells of the lower astral plane are full of “smart” beings:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#hell

So-called intelligence is no great thing, not when it is wedded to a hard heart. The heart is the key, always. So, I understand your observation, all too well, but I am also pointing to what is possible if we truly become a sentient species. Heinberg has compared humanity to an algal bloom, which happens when nutrients are delivered, and then the algae reproduce with abandon and power the food chain until the nutrients were all used up, then they die off and the ecosystem goes barren again, waiting for the next nutrient influx, to do it all over again. Humans have been doing that with its collapsed civilizations, and the big collapse might be just around the corner, as we burn through all the hydrocarbons, and Godzilla’s plans include moving to Mars if it gets really hairy on Earth. Godzilla would rather destroy Earth and humanity than give up his power, which FE in humanity’s hands would do (the losing his power part :) ). It almost seemed like Godzilla was writing that Infinite Energy issue. We can do a lot better.

To specifically address the Great Oxygenation Event:

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

the cyanobacteria never “choked on their waste,” but they did drive anaerobes to the margins, and they have come out to play during anoxic marine events, which may have contributed to mass extinctions. Whether the Great Oxygenation Event actually led to a mass extinction or not is still debated. Nick Lane thinks that there is no evidence for an “oxygen holocaust,” and the evidence does not seem to support it, but others think that the oxygen would have caused a huge holocaust of anaerobes. That debate will continue for a long time, most likely. What few are arguing, however, is that oxygen allowed for more concentrated energy production, and food chains and complex life arose with the oxygenation, although people like Nick Butterfield challenge the “oxygen hypothesis” as far as it being the trigger, but more like an outcome. Following the controversies is a really good way to become familiar with the dynamics. As I have distilled that kind of information, I have actually presented some of my opinions on those controversies. I doubt that many scientists will take them seriously, and I really do not stray far from the consensus opinion today, but crossing those many disciplinary boundaries like I have has given me some perspectives that are uncommon, if nothing else.

Where I will diverge, and even pretty radically, from mainstream science is in the areas of FE, related technologies, and the abilities of consciousness and trans-physical dimensions. But in those areas, I am relying on my direct personal experiences and the experiences of a very small circle around me. I am not relying on much at all that is not my direct personal experience or the direct personal experience of people in my circles, usually people that I know well, sometimes very well.

So, to your points, yes, we could be just laying the groundwork for whatever replaces us after our self-made extinction event, and they adapt to using our trash to build their ecosystems, but if we acquire true sentience, it does not have to be that way. You are right in that we seem to be just repeating a very old pattern, but we can also change it if we become a truly sentient species. I am trying to help option number two manifest. :) It is also very possible that we could crash the applecart for nearly all life. If we destroy the ozone layer, for instance, it could end all land life, and only aquatic life would survive. Then in a few hundred million years, life might again colonize land. And encephalized land life might arise again in 500 million years, just when Earth can no longer support complex life. That is a very possible outcome, and there are others nearly as dire. Life may adapt to our trash, and maybe it can't. For instance, if we made Earth's surface highly radioactive, complex life likely could not survive, which could also extend to the oceans, and we are back at single-celled organisms, and it would take a billion years to get back to where we are, but it could take different directions and complex life might never reappear on Earth. Those are very possible outcomes, instead of something coming along and picking up the pieces of our self-made catastrophe. Humans have been uniquely destroying Earth's ecosystems like nothing else ever has, so it is hard to predict what might survive, and how it might survive.

When I put up that previous chapter draft,

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=799633&viewfull=1#post799633

I said that it was very rough, and I just updated it with the current state of the draft, and probably won’t revise it publicly until I publish the essay. I particularly revised that last section:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=799636&viewfull=1#post799636

Hi Nine:

My work is best digested in long stretches. I don’t want to sound like Mallove, but all of your questions have been answered on this thread. :) The best way to respond to my work is to digest it slowly, over a long time, and then respond with deeply thought out questions. Some of my best correspondents read my work for months and years before I heard from them. My work is not for skimming and stream-of-consciousness responses, but is best addressed by going deep, thinking comprehensively, see the connections, etc. Godzilla is a symptom, not a cause, and I really don’t pay much attention to him, other than when Godzilla's thunderstorms come through, I try to avoid the high ground and stay dry. I played lightning rod once, and I can only afford to do that once in my life, while Dennis takes the strikes again and again, which is kind of beyond my comprehension.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

2nd March 2014, 06:12

Hi:

I was just discussing this issue today, and it is a subject that is not a fun one for me, but it is Godzilla-related. When the Mafia decides to kill you, they will try their best, and when they succeed, it is usually a bloody end where nobody has any doubt that the target was murdered. But even the Mafia is far from being 100% successful. Dennis survived several mob hit attempts, and eventually earned their respect in one region to the point where they left him alone and no longer tried to kill him or muscle in on his businesses. But when the mob makes their hits, they do not try to make it look like something else.

When Godzilla or the spooks try to murder you, especially when you are a free energy activist, fringe scientist, and the like, they try to make it look like something other than a murder that they were responsible for. They try to make it look like a heart attack, accident, suicide, cancer, random crime, and so on. They know that a trail of bodies is going to spook the herd, so they do their best to keep it quiet and make it look like something other than a Godzilla hit. They have quite a deep bag of tricks that they can use. However, when they try to kill you in those ways, they are carefully planned operations, and covering their tracks and making any successful murder look like something else makes it so that if their initial attempt does not work out, they will not keep on doing whatever it takes in that hit attempt to kill you. If the poison does not work, or you survive the attempt that made it look like a heart attack, they will not rush in with a gun to finish the job, because that would defeat the purpose of the operation, of which killing you is just one of their goals.

Even if the induced heart attack does not kill you, it is usually enough to take you out of commission, and will kind of achieve their goal in the first place, which was taking you out of commission. It could also send a message where you then retired from the field, which was really their goal all along, whether by death, disability, or what have you. Again, they usually try the friendly buyout offer before they begin to play rough, on the FE front:

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

But if their goal is death, and their first attempt does not work, which is not only killing you, but making it look like something else, then they retreat, regroup, and mount another operation. Their target is like the king on a chessboard, and they go about it very carefully, but it is not easy to kill people under those constraints, which is why somebody like Adam Trombly can survive all the murder attempts that he has. In summary, it does not work like when the Mafia does it.

This is subject matter that I really don’t like dealing with much, as it gets conspiracists in a frenzy and it hits close to home. I am doing what I can so that I do not make it onto the hit list. I have all sorts of naïve people around me who offer their unsolicited advice about how I should be going about what I am doing, and almost invariably, if I took their advice, I would risk my life in several ways, with assassination being one of the risks. For instance, I will likely do some interviews when I finish my essay and start my forum, but if I decided to do the New Age and fringe science talk circuit, I would likely be risking my life, which naïve newbies cannot fathom, hence the kinds of unsolicited advice that they give me.

I have very particular goals and a strategy, where I am trying to not risk my life or those that I end up interacting with. We will see how it goes.

Time for bed.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

2nd March 2014, 16:48

Hi:

It is time to get cracking on the next chapter, but I was writing to a friend this morning who thinks that there may not be any hope for our species. I decided to make my reply into a post here.

According to Michael, ensouled species that can manipulate their environments destroy themselves a third of the time:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#focus

and they usually leave behind a devastated planet, which obviously creates a great deal of negative species karma, and all karma has to be balanced. That apparently comes with the territory of being an ensouled species. But the point of physical reality is developing consciousness, and if a species does that, the souls that had not finished their incarnation cycle (usually about 100-150 lifetimes worth of experience) have to pick another life form to finish their incarnation cycles. Michael also said that when a species destroys itself, the souls that were not finished will usually decide on a species that cannot manipulate its environment to finish their cycle, so they don’t risk that catastrophe again (usually on a distant planet, and I am not sure if it has to be in the same galaxy or not). According to Michael, there are presently a million ensouled species in our galaxy, and Earth has two: humans and cetaceans (in the way that Michael sees it, all cetaceans are the same species, but whales and dolphins play different soul games, with whales being more “mature”).

One issue is if our brains are biologically wired to be how we are, and if humans can overcome it, and my reply was…

I have been studying one hell of a lot of biology and anthropology in recent years, and I will read biologists say things like “evolution has a lot to answer for,” and I see the point. Being a man is a great way to rack up negative karma, and being a woman is a great way to pay it back. But warfare and environmental destruction have always been based in economics, namely scarcity. Remove scarcity and the fear and exploitation that comes with it, and a lot can change, and quickly. While I can understand the sentiment behind the question of if we are really a sentient species (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#sentience ), we are, and while the USA is a declining empire with a lot of blood on its hands (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#fathers ), it is also an example of how industrialization and the resultant increase in standard of living (a vast increase) can help make societies far more humane. Scarcity breeds violence and environmental destruction more than anything else. Free energy can remove all economic rationales for violence and exploitation, and far more dramatically than how industrialization made chattel slavery and the oppression of women obsolete. A great deal of what seems to be human nature is really the human condition, which is greatly influenced by the economic situation. Also, human nature can change or be overcome by sentience. I have been studying warfare a lot, unfortunately, and all warfare has an economic motive at the bottom. I already knew it for modern nations, but it was interesting to see a bunch of anthropological studies conclude the same thing, whether it was studying chimps, hunter-gatherers, horticultural villages, or states.

It could be very dicey whether humanity turns the corner or not. We are exactly at the juncture where that third of the ensouled species fail. I am told that I helped design Earth school, so devoting my life to my species turning the corner makes sense to me. :) On the human animal, Michael also said that men and women had greater sexual differences than 95% of all ensouled species, so Michael had an appreciation of the male/female divide and how much tension it has created. That kind of tension can create many karmic opportunities.

That ended my response. My point is that the rigors of physical reality have shaped life on Earth, even as life has also helped shape Earth. But becoming a sentient species that can alter its environment brings great opportunity and peril. We can turn the corner or go down in flames, leaving behind a devastated planet. I do not know about you, but I vote for us turning the corner. Godzilla is playing chicken with Earth, but only because the vast majority of humanity is fast asleep, playing victim games, not creator games. One is based on fear, and the other is based on love. Love is how essence contact is made, in Michael terminology, and another way of saying it is that love is how species become truly ensouled and sentient. It is another way how love and FE are joined at the hip.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

2nd March 2014, 17:07

Hi:

One more short one….

I am always encountering scientists who are remarkably naïve about political-economic realities, even those who are multidisciplinary in their orientation. Recently, I read a book by a scientist who argued that Islamic nations were somehow a little more backward than the other Judeo-Christian religions in that there was no separation of church and state, so the kind of Islamic “backwardness” we see is a result of their nations’ religion. What that scientist was seemingly oblivious to is that a big reason for that seeming backwardness is that the West has enslaved those nations and actually forced them into that seemingly backward state.

Take Iran. In the early 1950s, after World War II and the waning of outright colonialism, Iran formed a secular republic, and the US and Britain overthrew their government when the prime minister tried to nationalize their oil:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

Then the USA and Britain installed their puppet. During the Shah’s rule, all democratic organizations were wiped out in the name of “anticommunism,” and the Islamic church was the only institution left. The USA and Britain very actively turned Iran into the theocratic oligarchy that it is today.

Similarly, Iraq had long been the most secular Islamic state, and when the USA invaded Iraq:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#invading

which may one day be seen as similar to the Nazi invasion of Poland, the USA (with little buddy Great Britain carrying our bags once again) purposely destroyed all of Iraq’s secular institutions other than the Oil Ministry, so the USA actively turned Iraq into a nation where Islamic fundamentalists could come to prominence.

So, when Western scientists make those kinds of “backwards” observations, their naïveté shows. That scientist was British, so that kind of blindness was somewhat understandable, but it really made his observations pretty worthless on that score, other than to point out how naïve nationalism can blind even “smart” people.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

3rd March 2014, 20:00

Hi:

This is not new, but I keep being reminded of it. Naïveté is a potentially fatal affliction for the FE pursuit. Everybody I respect in the FE field began their journeys naively, including me, and as I think about it, they were all Americans. My “peers” – white educated Americans – are incredibly naïve, and I wonder how much longer I can even interact with them. I definitely cannot do much “Wade’s World” talk with them, as it blows them out of the water, on many levels. Usually, they cannot even begin to comprehend my experiences in trying to make FE happen, and that often revolves around their TV version of how the USA’s legal system works. It works nothing at all like it is portrayed on TV and in the movies. I wish I had a dollar for every time I saw an attorney say, “They can’t do that!” as the judge says, with a smile, “Watch this!” The judge then does the unimaginable to that lawyer, and the judge follows it up with, “What are you going to do about it?” And those are the lawyers who got off easy in their lesson on how the real world works. In my journey in the California “justice” system, murders and murder attempts of cops, lawyers, judges, magistrates and the like were par for the course.

When they began to bring the sledgehammer down on us in Ventura:

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

I began waking up fast, and when I met Gary Wean:

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

there was not much that could still surprise me, and hearing tales of judges and lawyers being murdered because they bucked the system or got in the way no longer shocked me. When friends and relatives later told me of watching people disappear:

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

and how Kangaroo Court prevailed in even rather mundane legal situations, and I further saw it in my corporate career, the evil of the system became mind-numbingly evident. If average Americans keep their heads down, punch the clock, and keep watching their favorite TV shows, they will never know any better, and will die in their semi-sentient, naïve state, unless it all unravels before they die, and then they may get a dose of reality.

You can see it on this thread and others, with people offering their bright ideas. I have never seen an FE “bright idea” from somebody without any experience on the high road that had any merit. They were variations on themes, almost always falling neatly into Levels 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level6

That dynamic is also rampant in the FE field today, as naïve scientists, inventors, and assorted newbies tilt at windmills. If there is any good news there, it is that virtually none of them ever do anything productive, not productive enough to where Godzilla has to take much interest, so they will not get in too much Godzilla trouble. But they are easily devoured by lower-level predators, which abound in and around that milieu. Those naïve newbie efforts can still wreck their lives, but it will rarely be fatal at the enthusiast level that they play at.

I think that one of the hardest things about making a choir will be keeping people like that out of the choir, those equivalents of 18-year-old boys trying to prove their manhood on the battlefield:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#business

As I get toward the finish line with drafting this essay, that issue is arising with more frequency. I think that I am going to have to lean toward keeping out the naïve rather than letting them in. Again, I started out naively myself, and I wonder how the 27-year-old version of me would do in the choir, and I think the answer is that my 55-year-old-self, who knew what the 27-year-old was in for, would have said, “Come back in a few years, if you survive the experience.”

This is the primary conundrum that I am facing now, as I envision the choir. Few have survived a journey like mine, especially who is still at it, but I can’t expect that those in the choir will have any experiences like that. It kind of comes full circle to what I wrote about several years ago:

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

They had to have some kind of awakening experience, and they usually had to get wounded somehow for the lesson to “seat,” and if they can relinquish their scarcity-based conditioning:

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

or be willing to, if they do the work, then that is probably what I am looking for. And they will be needles in haystacks, and probably only a few of them will be Americans. The brainwashing of Americans goes deep, especially in the “educated” classes, which is a fact that I have been keenly reminded of lately. Conspiracism is a naïve perspective, too, attributing our problems to a few bad apples, when almost all of the damage is done by the herd, to itself. That is why Godzilla chuckles, because his job is really an easy one, when the herd’s size is considered.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Nine

4th March 2014, 08:21

Dearest Wade,

Did you get outside today for a hike in the woods?

It is most important to get outside for at least part of the day....

With much love and care for you....

Nine

Ilie Pandia

6th March 2014, 03:30

Hello Wade,

As you wrote in your essay about elephants creating their own habitat I've found this interesting video that gives a similar example about wolves:

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q

This also talks about a dear population that without the wolves simply grazed everything in their path, leading to soil erosion and all kind of not negative feedback loops (again that so called "self-regulation" not existing).

- Ilie

Wade Frazier

6th March 2014, 14:38

Hi:

I am working like a madman on the next chapter, and no, Nine, I am not hiking at the moment, but would like to. :)

Hi Ilie:

Yes, ecosystems coevolve, and when you remove a key aspect of it, such as a predator, the entire system will change. The concept is called trophic cascade, as mentioned in that video:

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

But the idea is really that multiple energy levels of grazing/predation is unstable, and can collapse. For instance, before wolves were reintroduced, the browsers/grazers were on their way to a population collapse as they ate all of their food out of existence. Human civilizations have been similarly unstable, and it has usually been because of instability at the bottom, not the top. Humans either wiped out their energy supplies, or their civilizations were too susceptible to climate changes, and the climate change could be something that humans induced through deforestation, and a drought did in the civilization.

A major point in my work and upcoming essay is that with FE, no resource would ever become scarce again, especially energy resources, and with abundant energy, all other resources become abundant. But that is only one side of the equation, the human welfare side. The other side, the welfare of all other life forms, would also benefit, where humans can raise fruit and other crops in indoor environments practically anywhere in the solar system they want to, and the thin layer of Earth’s biosphere would not “need” to be exploited for human benefit.

Humans have been doing it so long that they think it is “natural” to devastate the ecosystems for human benefit like we have. There is really nothing “natural” about it. Fires, farms, pastures, and the like are artificial constructs by humans, not “natural.” When human welfare is not dependent on raping Earth and each other, ecosystem exploitation and wars should disappear. Or, they will quickly be seen as stupid and suicidal behaviors, and will go away, if humanity is really a sentient species, or nearly there.

Then humanity can raise its awareness, and worlds like this can come into view:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

where animals are not exploited, there is a harmony between humans and nature that is presently unimaginable, that a Disney movie could not begin to do justice to, and the human standard of living would make today’s Bill Gates Earth’s poorest person, by far.

I know that can happen. Heck, the technologies for it are already here, but while humanity collectively sleeps, lives in fear, and plays kill or be killed, Godzilla has the game well in hand, and we don’t get any, as we rush toward the abyss.

I am trying to help change that game, and we will see how it goes.

I have written about early civilizations and how they wiped themselves out:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=554340&viewfull=1#post554340

and I am in the middle of that part of the essay. The city-states of Sumer all plundered the forests up the river valleys that they lived in, the Tigris and Euphrates, and deforestation led to siltation and soil salination that did them in, and they were all buried in silt, with their soils salted, so they literally did themselves in. But that pattern was there from the very beginnings of urban life, such as at Çatal Höyük:

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

where it was abandoned after about two thousand years due to “aridity,” which was likely self-induced, as they deforested the region. The earliest writings showed that the connection between deforestation and droughts was known back then, but humans just could not help themselves, so their civilizations always cut their legs out from under them as they plundered their resources to exhaustion and then collapsed.

The only reason why industrial civilization is not even more devastating is that it is using the first primary energy source that was not gained by plundering the ecosystem. But the methods are all poisonous, as we recently discussed:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=801462&viewfull=1#post801462

I am currently plunking along on a new post, along with the essay, and the theme is “How I lost my naïveté,” (or, at least some of it :) ) as I keep stating what a killer it is. I have written plenty on my moments of awakening:

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

but I am going to get into unprecedented detail on how it looked through my eyes. It should help readers understand the process. Again, I have been getting hit a lot by people’s naïveté lately, and I am going to get into the process of losing it. Dealing with psychopaths sicced onto our companies was one hell of a way to lose it. Maybe that is why I lost it as quickly and early as I did.

I will also relate how it went with fellow travelers. Some woke up as I did, while others were easily hoodwinked and manipulated. I will end with mentioning just one phenomenon: when you first bear the brunt of the psychopaths' actions, where they take off their masks and are sinking their daggers in you, your first reaction is disbelief. You stand there, watching them outright lie, or perform some gutter move, and your first reaction is thinking that you are not really seeing what you are seeing. Dennis’s attorneys went through that phase.

Mr. Big Time Attorney eventually became disgusted and sued the gangsters that run Ventura County:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#gutter1

to quickly discover that whoever was screwing us made the IRS look like children, and Mr. Big Time Attorney quickly got put in his place.

But a lot of the psychopathy we saw was “functional psychopathy,” where the “psychopaths” were simply doing their jobs. Lying and wrecking the lives of innocents was just what they did as their jobs, freely admitted by them:

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

Once in a while, some had bouts of conscience, usually only when "helped":

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

but they were few and far between.

When the Jewish Holocaust was studied, and how people could participate in it, most people just saw it as their jobs:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#browning

and men who ran death camps would go home at the end of the day and play with their children. Posterity has called such people “monsters,” but those “monsters” are around 85% of humanity today, who will gladly play the monster if it becomes their job to do so. We might try to limit that to men, and there is a validity in that, which is one reason why I keep saying that women need to step up. An FE effort comprised almost entirely of men is likely doomed. And for the effort I am about the mount, women will have to gain some scientific literacy, which relatively few ever pursue. I would not say that my effort is aimed at women, but I will need to attract more of them than have been attracted to FE so far. Making FE happen cannot be a boys’ game.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

6th March 2014, 23:25

Hi:

I think I will throw up part of the upcoming chapter here when I finish dealing with some highly important concepts for my essay, as I am now at the stage of the essay where the earliest civilizations collapsed. Understanding why civilizations collapse is important, and I will be dealing with the work of the authors linked below, Diamond and Tainter in particular. On one hand, it is kind of sad to see the battles in academia over the issue, but on the other, it can be illuminating to actually understand their arguments, and see what can really unify them. Diamond states that the collapses were due to environments collapsing, usually due to humans wrecking them. Tainter takes on Diamond, and Tainter’s work is generally considered the most sophisticated out there on the subject. Tainter surveyed the reasons for collapse given over the millennia and derived an economic rational called declining return on investment in complexity. When you really get into what Diamond and Tainter are saying, it amounts to civilizations running out of energy. It really is that simple. It is just that Diamond is saying that the environment stopped provided the needed resources (which are all energy, or made available by energy), and Tainter says that the return on investment (energy invested above all else) dipped low enough so that the society could no longer support itself. But Tainter is more focused on the moment of collapse, rather than the decline that brought it to the brink. The decline was always about falling EROI, and also reduced absolute energy acquired. The moment of collapse was when hungry urban professionals left town to look for greater food (energy) security.

The relationships are pretty simple. Energy powers all organisms, ecosystems, and civilizations, and more complex biology or civilizations need more energy to power their many moving parts. When the energy runs out, the organism, ecosystem, or civilization collapses. The concepts of efficiency and resilience can be seen in the first link below, by another author that I will deal with in my essay.

http://www.homerdixon.com/2010/05/05/complexity-science-and-public-policy/

http://www.theupsideofdown.com/pdf/20061111-globeandmail-response.pdf

http://www.compassionatespirit.com/Collapse.htm

http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/03/tainters-law-where-is-physics.html

http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/03/joseph-tainter-talking-about-collapse.html

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/files/2014/01/Diamondcritic.pdf

Those are all highly intelligent academics and scientists, and look at how they all see doom, dead ahead. And free energy makes it all go away, almost overnight, and nobody wants to hear about free energy. That is one of the many surreal aspects of my journey, and those authors linked to above were exactly the kinds of people that Brian O tried to tell about free energy, to only wonder several years later if we were really a sentient species:

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

and readers of this thread know the many doors I have banged my head against, as I sought open minds and allies. I have not totally given up on the “smart,” but while I might spend the time to write an email to some of those guys after I publish my essay, I won’t be spending much time on them. Academics and scientists are in straightjackets of a different sort, where they worship the “laws of physics,” where they dismiss evidence of organized suppression as a “conspiracy theory,” etc. Been there, done that:

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

However, the arguments and evidence in those links above are important, as they show how the world works and the problems we face on that score, even if they fall short of suggesting any real solutions.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

7th March 2014, 03:33

Some are following the process I am using, and below is what I have done so far on the next chapter. This is hot off the presses, not really edited or even organized all that well. Interested readers can see how it will differ from the chapter draft that I put up next week, I hope. This will likely be another monster chapter, as it covers the period until the Industrial Revolution. I have to telescope plenty into the chapter, obviously, and have to try to stay on the critical dynamics. So, here it is at the moment.

Humanity’s Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution

In the tropical rainforests where gorillas and chimpanzees live, there are dry and wet seasons, where they must seasonably change their diets to adapt to available foods. Beyond those rainforests, seasonal variation is more pronounced and, once the easy meat was gone, people survived by engaging in the hunter-gather lifestyle familiar to today’s humans. A sexual division of labor existed, where men hunted and women gathered. Men had the strength and speed required to hunt wary animals, particularly large game, while women were less mobile, partly due to caring for children.

Those Gravettian mammoth villages probably hosted humanity’s first semi-sedentary populations, but that short-lived situation ended when mammoths did. The primary necessity for a sedentary population’s survival was a local and stable energy supply. One energy supply tactic, as could be seen with those mammoth hunters, was storing food in permafrost “freezers.” Seasonal settlements existed where people subsisted on migrating animals or when certain plants had a harvestable and seasonal stage of development.

While eating roots has a long history in the human line, permanent sedentism began by harvesting seeds. In the Levant, in a swath of land that includes today’s Israel and Syria, about 13.5. kya the Kebaran people (c. 18 kya to 12.5 kya) made acorns and pistachios a major part of their diets. Mortars and pestles were in the Kebaran toolkit for processing acorns, which must be pounded into a paste and soaked to leach out tannins, and that work fell exclusively to women.

The Natufian culture (c. 15 kya to 11.8 kya) succeeded the Kebaran culture, and the Natufian village at Tell Abu Hureyra in today’s Syria was established about 13.5 kya, and was situated on a gazelle migration route. The residents of that village of a few hundred people also harvested “wild gardens” of wheat and rye. Those villagers became Earth’s first known farmers, and they had dogs. The original settlement was abandoned during the Younger Dryas and resettled after it ended. The effect of a harsher climate may have spurred the origin of agriculture, which began there about 11 kya. By seven kya, the settlement had reached several thousand people, and was then abandoned due to aridity. No evidence of warfare is associated with the settlement. A compelling recent hypotheses is that agriculture could not have developed in warfare’s presence, as farmers would have been too vulnerable to raids by hungry hunters. In the four places on Earth where agriculture seems to have independently developed: the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, no evidence of violent conflict exists before those civilizations fed by the first crops began growing into states. Those states are called “pristine” states, as no other states influenced their development. The peaceful agricultural villages that feminist authors have long written about, where women had it better than at any time before the Industrial Revolution, actually existed, if only for a relatively brief time, in only a few places.

Only when economic surpluses (primarily food) were redistributed, first by chiefs and then by early states, did men rise to dominance in those agricultural civilizations. Because the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent is the best studied and had the greatest influence on humanity, this chapter will tend to focus on it, although it will also survey similarities and differences with other regions where agriculture and civilization first appeared. Almost whenever agriculture appeared, cities eventually appeared, usually a few thousand years later. Agriculture’s chief virtue was that it extracted vast amounts of human-digestible energy from the land, where population densities a hundred times greater than that of hunter-gatherers became feasible. While the debates on the subject may never end, today it is widely thought that Malthusian population pressures led to the development of agriculture. The attractions of agricultural life over the hunter-gatherer lifestyle were not immediately evident. Early agriculture was a life of drudgery compared to the hunter-gatherer or horticultural lifestyle, and humans became shorter and less healthy when they transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farmers, but the land could also support many times the people. On the eve of the Domestication Revolution, Earth’s carrying capacity with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was around ten million people, with an actual population somewhat less, maybe as low as four million. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution in 1800, Earth’s human population was nearly a billion people. No matter how talented a hunter-gatherer warrior was, he was no match for a hundred peasants armed with hoes.

Darwin believed that natural selection only worked at the individual level, but the idea of group selection has become prominent in my lifetime, if controversial. Anthropologists and biologists see evidence of group selection, not only in social animals such as termites, but also in the ability of human societies to survive competition with their neighbors. Hunter-gatherer societies eliminated disruptive members by banishment or death, and has been argued to have been reflected genetically in eliminating uncooperative people from society. Those kinds of activities may have helped cull the human herd of “uncooperative” genes. Another aspect of biology that applies to human civilization is the idea of carrying capacity. Over history, the society with the higher carrying capacity prevailed, and the loser either adopted the winner’s practices or became enslaved, taxed, marginalized, or extinct. When Europe conquered the world, it had the highest energy usage, by far, of any peoples on Earth, which is why it always prevailed. When high-energy societies met low-energy societies, the results were almost always catastrophic for low-energy societies. Hunter-gatherer societies have no chance in a competition with societies that have domesticated plants and animals, much less industrialized societies.

Another early Fertile Crescent village, Çatal Höyük, in today’s Turkey, existed from 9.5 kya to 7.7 kya and was another peaceful agricultural settlement in which the inhabitants numbered several thousand people, in what is arguably Earth’s first city, but it was more like a large village, without the civic features normally associated with cities. The society seemed classless, and women and men had roughly equivalent status. The first domesticated sheep appear at Çatal Höyük, and the beginnings of cattle domestication appear there as well. Çatal Höyük’s residents raised wheat, barley, and peas. Pottery and obsidian mining and tool-making were major industries, and those people made the world’s first known map. Çatal Höyük did not have walls, there was no sign of warfare, and many “shrines” dotted the settlement, which probably supported a hunter-gatherer religion. Çatal Höyük was abandoned in a pattern that would repeat itself in the Fertile Crescent and Old World many times in succeeding millennia; it appears that deforestation and resultant desertification may have spelled the end of Çatal Höyük, as was probably also the case with Tell Abu Hureyra.

In an event that favors the hypotheses of climate-change advocates, there was a dip in global temperatures beginning about 8.2 kya, which lasted for a few centuries. It was likely caused by remnants of the North American ice sheets melting, and the resultant flush of freshwater into the North Atlantic. It was a less severe event than the Younger Dryas, but still caused epic droughts around the world. Some scientists think that the uncertainty caused by those cooling events helped spur agriculture, to enhance food security. Climate change from that event could be why Çatal Höyük was abandoned, and Tell Abu Hureyra survived the event, to only be abandoned several centuries later when another major dip in global temperatures happened. Those two early settlements may have been abandoned partly due to those climate events, but they would have also deforested their hinterlands, which desertified the region, with the settlements permanently abandoned. Environmentally harmful practices combined with droughts destroyed many civilizations in the millennia after those early abandonments, including the Mayan, Anasazi, and Harappan civilizations.

A contemporary of Çatal Höyük, Çayönü Tepesi, near Anatolia, had indicators of developing class systems, and male/female differences in diet. Cattle seem to have been first domesticated about 10.5 kya in the vicinity, which is also where pigs may have been first domesticated, and many progenitors of cereal crops still grow wild in the region. Early on, people also began to domesticate fiber-producing plants, with flax among the first domesticated fiber plants. Fiber crops have often competed with food crops for field space, especially when foreign conquerors reorient that subject population’s efforts, which can lead to starvation in the subject population. A recent example is when Britain forced Bengal to grow jute, indigo, and opium instead of food, and Bengal had a huge famine soon after Britain conquered it.

Goats were first domesticated in today’s Iran about 10 kya, and pigs were first semi-domesticated in the Fertile Crescent as long as 15 kya, and were independently domesticated in China about eight kya. Combining domesticated plants and animals appeared fairly early, where farmers realized that animal manure could fertilize crops, so the close association of pastures and cropland became a standard feature of Fertile Crescent civilizations. Early domestic animals were all herd animals, where humans replaced herd leadership. Since humans are herd animals, their understanding of herd behaviors likely made their efforts easier and more successful.

Just as growing large became a strategy for extinction for the world’s megafauna when a super-predator appeared that could kill them, forests are the greatest biological energy stores that Earth has ever seen. Trees were the plant world’s equivalent of megafauna, and they suffered the same fate wherever civilization appeared. When humans became sedentary, they razed local forests to gain building materials and fuel, and the freshly deforested land worked wonderfully for raising crops, at least until the soils were ruined from nutrient depletion and erosion. Domesticated cattle pulled the first plows, beginning more than seven kya. When humans began to smelt metal, beginning about 8 kya, deforestation was easier, so a dynamic arose in the Fertile Crescent where bronze axes easily deforested the land, which was then worked with draft animals pulling bronze plows, which increased crop yields but also increased erosion. That complex of deforestation, crops, draft animals, and smelted metals yielded great short-term benefits but was far from sustainable, as it devastated the ecosystems and soils and also impacted the hydrological cycle, and gradually turned forests to deserts. Another way that the Bronze Age helped deforest Earth is that smelting metal is enormously energy intensive. When the Mediterranean region had its Bronze Age, the standard unit of copper production was the oxhide ingot (because it was worth about one ox), which weighed between 20 and 30 kilograms. It took six tons of charcoal to smelt one ingot, which required 120 pine trees, or 1.6 hectares (four acres) of trees. Kilns for making pottery also required vast amounts of wood. Wood met many of the energy needs of early Old World civilizations, which were all voracious consumers of wood.

In the Fertile Crescent today, the ruins of hundreds of early cities are in their self-made deserts, usually buried under the silt of the erosion of exposed forest soils. As the Mediterranean Sea’s periphery became civilized, the same dynamic was repeated, where forests became semi-deserts and early cities were buried under silt. Before the rise of civilization, a forest ran from Morocco to Afghanistan, and only about 10% of the forest that still existed as late as 2000 BCE still remains. Everywhere that civilization exists today has been dramatically deforested. The only partial exceptions are places such as Japan, but they kept their forests intact by importing wood from foreign forests. North America and Asia have been supplying Japan with wood for generations. As civilizations wiped themselves out with their rapaciousness, some were aware enough to lament what was happening, but they were a minority. Usually lost in the anthropocentric view was the awesome devastation inflicted on other life forms. Killing off the megafauna was only a warm-up. Razing a forest to burn the wood and raise crops destroyed an entire ecosystem for short-term human benefit, leaving behind a lifeless desert when the last crops were wrenched from depleted soils. In the final accounting, the damage meted out to Earth’s other life forms, not other humans, may be humanity’s greatest crime. Humanity is the greatest destructive force on Earth since that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, and we may be far from finished in devastating Earth and her creatures.

Since humans began to make advanced tools and valuable goods, they exchanged them, beginning as early as 150 kya, and cities have always been situated on low-energy transportation lanes, which before the Industrial Revolution were almost always bodies of water. Before the Industrial Revolution, it took only about 1-2% of the energy to move goods across a body of water, such a lake or ocean, as it did overland. A peasant in Aztec civilization, for instance, could as easily and quickly bring more than forty times the weight of goods by canoe on a trip across the Valley of Mexico’s lakes to Tenochtitlán as he could by carrying a load on his back along the causeways. In 1800, it cost as much to ship a ton of goods more than 5,000 milometers to the USA from England as it did to transport it 50 kilometers overland in the USA.

The main reason for low-energy transportation lanes was so that energy supplies (primarily food and wood) could feed the cities, and that flow of energy was usually reciprocated with the flow of manufactured goods. The standard dynamic of early cities was energy supplies flowing to the cities and city-manufactured goods flowing outward, and cities became hubs of exchange. The so-called “tyranny of distance,” meaning how far goods could be effectively transported to cities, limited the size of their hinterland, which limited a city’s size. More energy-intensive and energy-efficient transportation enlarged the exploitable hinterland, allowing cities to grow. The introduction of the wheel could improve matters, but not always. In pre-industrial Islamic cultures, the camel was a more energy-efficient form of transportation than wheeled carts.

Sedentism was the primary outcome and benefit of agriculture. When people became sedentary, they could accumulate possessions, develop new skills, sleep under the same roof all year, and engage in daily communication with many others, and just as language was the first “Internet,” cities provided a quantum leap in the quick dissemination of information and ideas. The critical trait of a city is professionals living in it, as the development of professions is the most important feature of urban life.

The world’s first true city is widely considered to be Eridu, which was founded near the mouth of the Euphrates River about 7.4 kya, or about 5400 BCE (“Before Common Era,” also called BC, for “Before Christ”, but BCE is today’s convention, just as “CE” has replaced “AD”). Eridu was the first city of what became Sumer, which was an agglomeration of city-states. Sumer was established along and between the Tigris and Euphrates, and the ancient Greeks called the region Mesopotamia, which meant the land between the rivers. Çayönü Tepesi was in the Tigris’s watershed, and it and many settlements like it engaged in deforestation, agriculture, and raising domestic animals. Their practices were not sustainable, as the newly exposed soils washed away, and what remained was depleted of nutrients, although farmers began using manure, both of humans and domestic animals, to restore soil fertility, from the early days of agriculture. Eridu engaged in a practice that characterize cities to the present day, of harnessing gravity, where upstream water flows supplied cities with water and goods brought down rivers. But in what became Mesopotamia, it also brought silt and salt from upriver deforestation and erosion. Eridu was a seashore city, and today its ruins lie more than 200 kilometers inland, due to thousands of years of silt washed downstream by deforestation and agriculture. Siltation and soil salination turned all early cities of Sumer into buried ruins in the midst of a desert. But before silt and salt wrecked those civilizations, many seminal inventions appeared. The sailing ship appeared in early Sumer. Gravity took a ship downstream, and wind power helped it move back upstream.

About 3800 BCE, the Sumerian city of Ur was established at the new mouth of the Euphrates, as Eridu was already becoming an inland city, although more from a sea level decline than silt at that time. About 5000 BCE, the Sumerian city of Uruk was established, upriver on the Euphrates from Eridu, and Uruk became Sumeria’s first great city. About 5000 BCE, the first metal, copper, was smelted. The earliest evidence for copper smelting currently comes from a mountain in today’s Serbia. In the Fertile Crescent, inventions quickly spread, and by about 3300 BCE, smelters learned to add tin to copper and the Fertile Crescent’s Bronze Age began. Metal had obvious advantages over stone, and Bronze Age civilizations in river valleys quickly appeared, with the Harappan Civilization forming in the Indus river valley about 3300 BCE, and the first civilization in the Nile river valley forming about 3100 BCE. The wheel was invented around 3500 BCE and immediately spread. Whether it was invented in Sumer, the Indus river valley, or somewhere else in the region is still debated, but its advantages were instantly obvious, particularly where draft animals could pull them. When the Spanish conquered the Aztecs, they found that Mesoamerican peoples had independently invented wheels, but just had them on children’ toys, and the likely reason was that they had no draft animals, not after the megafauna holocaust of thousands of years earlier.

Warfare began in earnest in southern Mesopotamia about 4000 BCE, fighting over water and land. The city-states of Sumer began to intensely battle each other beginning about 3000 BCE, and the third millennium BCE was a time of constant Mesopotamian warfare. The sieges that city-states inflicted on each other were brutal. When one city conquered another, the men were killed or blinded and enslaved, and the women and children were enslaved. Making mounds from corpses of defeated soldiers was common in official accounts of battles during the third millennium BCE (2999 to 2000 BCE). About the first walled city was Uruk’s colonial settlement Habuba Kabira, founded around 3500 BCE along the Euphrates in today’s Syria, but it was abandoned after several generations. Those wars led to the first written treaties, which was largely concerned with citizens who found themselves on the wrong side the new border. Conscription was an early feature of civilization, closely akin to slavery, although the arrangement was temporary and conscripted soldiers were often promised land for their coerced services; draft-dodging became one of early civilization’s art forms.

Stratified urban populations and the agricultural hinterlands they exploit is civilization’s primary structure to this day. Soldiers, craftsmen, merchants, priests, and other professions appeared with urban civilization. Slaves only made economic sense among sedentary pre-industrial peoples, and forced servitude is the hallmark of early civilizations. The singing and dancing rituals of hunter-gatherer peoples were repressed by priesthoods of urban religions for thousands of years. On early Fertile Crescent pottery, scenes of dancing people proliferated, depicting a tradition that likely had lasted unbroken for more than 60,000 years. By about 3500 BCE, those dancing scenes began disappearing from pottery, as professional priesthoods conquered the ancestral religion, and Western religions have been stifling “ecstatic” religions ever since, and today’s Pentecostals and Shakers have rituals that hail back to religion before civilization. The professional urban priesthood became spiritual middlemen, and direct interactions with other dimensions and “ecstatic” states were discouraged or forbidden. Belief and “faith” replaced direct experience, and later, “sacred” texts recorded the alleged deeds and words of spiritual leaders, who were usually religious rebels themselves and did not leave any writings behind, with the priesthood not only monopolizing the texts but also their interpretation, again becoming well-paid middlemen between the divine source and the flock.

Early elites claimed divine status, with the priesthood abetting the fiction, and a universal practice among early civilizations was erecting monumental architecture, and the ziggurat was the first such structure. In Sumer, ziggurats were not only the center of the state religion, but also held precious metals such as gold, and the priesthood directed mass economic activity, such as organizing irrigation projects. In some ways, the priesthood was only adapting to urbanization, where their professional ancestors developed calendars and other methods of synchronizing vital activities such as plantings and harvests, with their attendant festivals, where mistimings by mere days could lead to famine. Sumerian temples had statues in their central place of worship, in human form and bedecked with jewels and other precious adornments. Offerings of food were presented to the statues, which temple personnel ate that night. In the third millennium BCE, temples owned land and had their own workforce; again a “voluntary” one that discharged religious obligations. While those temples performed valuable societal functions such as taking in orphans, the earliest urban religions were obviously businesses and could become rackets, in a pattern that continues to this day.

Later, palaces appeared, and Sumerian palaces and their related elites are seen today as more of an intrusive dynamic from rural societies, kind of an invasion and conquest rather than a natural outcome of Sumerian urban life. The elite arguably performed some kind of exchange function, but a common idea among anthropologists is that elites became elites because they could, not because they performed a necessary societal function. In early cities, elites usually arose from new professional classes that created and controlled markets. In early Mesopotamian states, palace activities were largely centered around elite lifestyles, not administering state functions. Sumer was the first pristine state, and when other pristine states arose, something like convergent evolution happened, with them all having similar features, which included: male domination, divinely-sanctioned heads of state with harems and other extravagances in their capital cities, including elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture, forced servitude, human sacrifice and/or public executions to terrorize the populace into submission, conscripted “cannon fodder” infantry led by elite officers, fortified cities, taxation, and so on. All pristine states went through similar development paths, with some features appearing earlier or later than others, with minor variation among their attributes, but they all had remarkable resemblances, which likely reflected human “nature,” where UP everywhere reacted to analogous economic conditions in comparable fashion.

After consolidating their ill-gotten positions, the elite can rule more gently. Sociologist Steven Spitzer stated:

“Pristine states, precisely because they lack legitimacy, must develop and impose harsh, crude, and highly visible forms of repressive sanctions; developed states, having successfully ‘re-invented’ consensus, can achieve social regulation through a combination of civil law and relatively mild forms of ‘calculated’ repression.”

The greatest threat to all ruling classes has almost always been those they rule. Only after their rule was secure, usually via bloodshed, did Sumer’s elites perform state duties to provide some superficial legitimacy for their status, and priesthoods attributing divine status or divine sanction to secular elites has always been an effective strategy. The close relationship of secular and religious authority is evident at the very beginnings of civilization. Even today, the British Queen rules the Church of England, which is a tradition in Europe that goes back to Roman Emperors. The laborers drafted to build cathedrals, palaces, and monuments to aggrandize the elite would always perform more efficiently if they were doing it from religious belief rather than coercion, and the world’s monumental architecture was primarily built with “free” labor, not slave labor, as a way of performing religious duties. Combining religious and secular ideologies can even be seen in supposedly secular civilizations, such as American schoolchildren being trained to worship flags, where the words “under God” are part of their daily recitations.

The human ability to think abstractly was exploited by social managers from civilization’s earliest days, and fixating people on irrational symbols, then manipulating those symbols for elite benefit, is arguably a universal trait of civilized peoples. Even today, a great deal of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols, where, as with the earliest religion, the neocortex is bypassed in favor of connecting with the limbic system, and people are easy prey to the cynical manipulation of emotionally-charged symbols, and the effects of childhood indoctrination and conditioning can last for the victim’s lifetime.

While there is evidence of writing existing about 5000 BCE, Sumeria became the first literate civilization about 3000 BCE, after their invention of cuneiform about 3300 BCE. Mesopotamian peoples had used clay tokens for accounting since about 8000 BCE, and the first writings in all civilizations were elite accounting. By the Third Dynasty of Ur, silver became the official unit of accounting, to be later supplanted by gold, probably due to Egyptian mines.

One of the earliest known works of literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh, dating to as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur, which began about 2150 BCE. A brief review of the epic highlights elite themes and dynamics of early civilization. Gilgamesh was a king of Uruk around 2500 BCE, and was one-third man and two-thirds god. In the epic’s first tablet, he used his kingly prerogative to sleep with Uruk’s young women the night before marriage, and his subjects entreated the gods for assistance. The gods responded by creating a “wild man” to distract Gilgamesh, and after Gilgamesh defeated him in battle they became friends. Gilgamesh then suggested that they travel to Lebanon’s cedar forest and kill the demigod guardian of the forest. They journeyed to the cedar forest, killed the demigod, prodigiously deforested the groves, and rafted back to Uruk with the demigod’s head and a particularly large tree to be used in a temple. After the wild man’s untimely death at the hands of the gods as punishment for killing the demigod, Gilgamesh then made otherworldly journeys to learn how to become immortal. After defeating stone giants and felling more than a hundred more trees, Gilgamesh built a boat to survive the coming flood, sent by the gods, and in a story that almost certainly inspired the Old Testament’s tale of Noah, Gilgamesh survived the flood along with the animals he saved, and gods gathered around the sweet smell of Gilgamesh’s sacrifice. After more adventures in an attempt to become immortal, Gilgamesh lamented his folly.

The writers of the Epic of Gilgamesh knew that deforestation led to droughts, and Gilgamesh’s war against the forest foreshadowed the fate of numerous Old World civilizations. The city-states of southern Mesopotamian made regular journeys to Lebanon’s cedar forest. The ruler of Lagash, not far from Uruk, had grand plans for aggrandizing his legacy and leveled cedar forests and rafted their logs downriver to Lagash to fulfil his grandiose schemes. The city-states of southern Mesopotamia deforested upstream river valleys, rafting logs to their downstream cities. Wars between the city-states, and wars of foreign conquest to secure forests and navigable rivers (particularly the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karun of today’s Iran), were common then. Wood became such a coveted commodity that it could approach the value of precious metals and stones, and Akkad’s rulers named mountains with what tree predominantly grew on each one.

What came with the logs, however, was silt and salt, and those civilizations were destroyed by their own rapacity. Southern Mesopotamia practiced irrigated farming, and salination and siltation eventually wrecked Sumer. By the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2100 BCE, the king Ur-Nammu made dredging silt from canals a high priority, and his dredging initiative temporarily revived agriculture and made Ur’s port navigable once again, as it had already been filled with silt. Wheat is more sensitive to saline soil than barley. In 3500 BCE, wheat and barley were grown in equal amounts, but salination began taking its toll. By 3000 BCE, Sumer became the world’s first literate society, and their tablets record Sumer’s decline. By 2500 BCE, wheat amounted to only 15% of the total crop. By 2100 BCE, wheat comprised only 2% of Sumer’s crops. Wheat was not the only casualty. Salt-tolerant barley did better, but crop yields began falling precipitously around 2400 BCE, with a steady decline that reached only a third of 2400 BCE yields by 1700 BCE. The Sumerian people began migrating upriver to lands that had not yet been devastated, and Sumer’s population declined by more than half, with famine a regular visitor as croplands became white with salt.

Upriver from Sumer the Akkadian Empire began forming, and Akkadians began defeating Sumer around 2300 BCE. Akkad’s first king was Sargon, who bloodily came to power and captured Uruk and dismantled its walls while conquering Sumer. That began a pattern of rising and falling empires in the Fertile Crescent that characterized the region for thousands of years. The Akkadian Empire collapsed after only 180 years of existence, and there was a resurgence of Ur under its Third Dynasty around 2100 BCE, and the oldest preserved laws were written then. The Code of Hammurabi, written when Babylonians ruled in their turn a few centuries later, reflected earlier Sumerian laws, and they are notable for documenting the barbarity of their times. Murder and robbery were capital crimes, but capital punishment was also meted out for offenses such as stealing a slave, deflowering a wife before the husband could (where the deflowerer is killed), or a wife is unfaithful (where the wife is killed). A boy striking his father would lose his fingers or hand. “Eye for an eye” came from the Code of Hammurabi.

Just as precipitation ran to the ocean in floods before plants colonized land, denuded lands and razed forests no longer held water like a sponge, and transpiration no longer contributed to the hydrological cycle, rampant deforestation contributed to flooded Mesopotamian rivers as the region also became drier. The flood that Gilgamesh survived, which is evident in the archeological record, was likely related to deforestation, although a great deal of speculation exists regarding the origins of flood myths. The Black Sea is one candidate for flood legends, where the rising interglacial global ocean flooded the lake to levels higher than during the glacial period. Another hypothesis has rising seas flooding the lower end of Mesopotamia. I have read arguments that the legend of Atlantis relates to a seashore civilization drowned under a rising interglacial ocean.

Just as with megafauna extinctions or the Neanderthal extinction, there are plenty of scientists and scholars who argue that human-agency is not responsible for the decline and collapse of civilizations, question whether they collapsed at all, assert that climate change did it, or invasion did it, and so on. While the battle of competing hypotheses is part of the process of science, all scientists whose hypotheses deflect responsibility from people have an inherent conflict of interest, and their work should be examined with that in mind. In the historical era, particularly when Europe conquered the world, the rapid deforestation and desertification of newly conquered lands was evident. Within a century of Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, a valley of verdant forests and fertile farmland was turned into a semi-desert by deforestation and sheep grazing. That valley is known as the Mezquital Valley today, because the desert-dwelling mesquite is the dominant tree in that semi-desert. British invaders of Australia did the same thing to New South Wales in fifty years, with deforestation and sheep grazing. Streams quickly dried up, but flooded when it rained, as the “sponge” of the forest ecosystem was removed, so flood and drought accompanied deforestation.

Since 2003, I have been a student of collapsed civilizations, and there are vigorous academic disputes on the subject. Jared Diamond see collapses as a result of environmental degradation, while Joseph Tainter perceives it as declining marginal returns on investment in complexity. Thomas Homer-Dixon views it as a decline in a civilization’s EROI. Other scientists propose climate explanations, particularly droughts. What they are all stating, in one fashion or another, is that the civilizations ran out of energy. All resources are either energy or energy makes them available, whether they are food, timber, water, metal, or today’s hydrocarbon deposits, where wars are once again fought in Mesopotamia to secure energy. Tainter’s idea of declining marginal returns in investment in complexity is perhaps the most prominent current explanation, but it also did not engage the dynamic’s physics, which others have done. Homer-Dixon has elucidated the dynamics perhaps the most clearly, with his concept of declining EROI, for which he writes articles and gives public speeches. Homer-Dixon’s ideas also incorporate C.S. Holling’s ecosystems theories. Whether climate change did it, humans wiped out their environments, or humanity has reached Peak Oil and a global collapse is just around the corner, it always meant a decline in energy-delivered resources, as well as energy itself. Tainter’s moment of a civilization’s collapse was when a hungry urban professional returned to rural life to gain greater energy (food) security, but a long, often slow decline usually led to that moment, as a society’s return on investment in complexity declined or, as Homer-Dixon stated it, the EROI declined to that disruptive level and civilization collapsed. Just as with wars, the ultimate cause was economic, but some kind of triggering event was the proximate cause, which was warfare often enough. But Rome was sacked three times in less than two centuries only after centuries of declining EROI.

Wade Frazier

8th March 2014, 14:53

Hi:

As I have written plenty, naïveté is a killer for the FE pursuit, mainly because it is like walking onto a battlefield where the salvos are coming at you from all sides, and you walk right into it and don’t even have the sense to duck. Naive people do not last long, as they try doomed strategies because they do not understand how the world really works.

This is a post on how I lost my naïveté.

There have been pieces of it on my site and on this thread, but never like this. So, here goes.

I was that Golden Boy from infancy, memorizing the books that my parents read to me not long after I learned to walk.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paths.htm#_edn4

I can’t remember it, but my memories begin not long afterward, and books have always been my friends. :)

I was raised to be an idealist, but was also raised rather incongruously with racism and bigotry, thanks to my family, and I did not realize how racist and bigoted my upbringing was until after I left home and my roommates began calling me on it. A few years later, I had put it in my rearview mirror, and then it could be like a time warp going home, riding into a time like the slavery or mission eras.

I was brought up in a household fed by the military, which entailed a lot of cynicism, too. One might say that I had cognitive dissonance even then, and my idealism was probably a little over-the-top, as a naïve way to try to counterbalance the cynicism. But I was spared heavy religious and nationalistic indoctrination, which are ways to short-circuit sentience:

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

and my mystical awakening at age 16:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#my

and two months in Europe the same year:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#europe

began to wake me up, but I also applied to the Air Force Academy when I was 17:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#business

So, I can see a lot of fuel for cognitive dissonance in those days. By 19, I was a committed pacifist, and the voice in my head spoke for the first time:

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

and then I focused my idealism on my spiritual and business studies. My girlfriend dumped me a week after we got to the university. I only went there because she did, but it turned out OK, as it was a very reputable school:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Poly_San_Luis_Obispo#Rankings

Then I graduated during the worst recession in forty years, and had to crawl down to LA after a failed attempt to live in Seattle, where I was born. My idealistic naïveté was evident with my Easter Bunny question:

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

after my first few months at the firm. It turned out that nearly every friendly stranger in LA was trying to use me for something, to be their Amway down-line, their Boy Toy, and so on. That summer, I was thrust into Skid Row, and many hellish memories accompany those days:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=406928&viewfull=1#post406928

When I began to get stress symptoms that would not go away, a physical collapse began:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#unhappy

And just as I got a seeming break, I got to see how hookers lived:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#hooker

and a month later the voice in my head spoke up again, when asked:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#voice2

and ten days later I was interviewing at Dennis’s company. I was on fire for three months there, working for free, reconstructing the books, thinking that I had finally found a home and could really pursue my life’s work. After a couple of months there, I took Dennis home from the office one evening, and he told me how Bill the BPA Hit Man was responsible for his employee’s death:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/hitman.htm#death

She worked directly for Mr. Engineer, and he confirmed Dennis’s version of events to me before I moved to Boston. Mr. Engineer lived with us in Boston.

After all I had seen on my journey so far, my first real moment of awakening was when my boss engineered the theft of Dennis’s company:

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

and when I saw those fellow “idealists” cheer as the theft became successful, I had my first big moment of awakening:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#salient1

There was a scene a few days earlier, when Dennis regained access to his facility and my boss tried to come into the building to retrieve incriminating evidence, and I will never forget the confrontation that happened in front of my desk.

I had another moment of awakening in a courtroom a month later:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#salient2

It was obvious to me what my boss had done, as he purposefully kept me from auditing the area where he engineered the theft. But I was still friendly with him, and even signed an affidavit for him on the accuracy of the financial records that I reconstructed. I would not do something like that again, but it reflected my naïveté. I would tell the truth to anybody, even if it helped those committing crimes against us. I cannot really fault my young self for behaviors like that, but I had a lot to learn. I still think that truth is the best antidote to lies, but I also found out that almost nobody really wants to hear the truth, not when believing lies keeps their belly full.

From four hundred employees that Dennis had to begin the year, I was the only person who chased him out to Boston to rebuild:

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

When I raised the money to rescue us from the brink, and also begin our days of FE pursuit:

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

I had no idea what I was in for, and being attacked by my investors soon afterward:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=578559&viewfull=1#post578559

was when I began waking up fast. Part of me could not believe it. I was thinking, “This is Wade here. You know I am going to do the right thing.” And as people began attacking me over the next few years, that was one of the most dismaying parts about it. People whom I had known for nearly my entire life treated me like a criminal. As I later discovered, it was usually a rationale so that they could commit crimes against me with a clear conscience (or relatively clear :) ). While that was happening, I probably recalled Jesus’s words from The Aquarian Gospel:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#aquarian

where he said that those who judge harshly have crime in their hearts. It is just another way of describing projection:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=696058&highlight=projection#post696058

My spiritual studies are partly what saw me survive those days, and the reality of the lessons I digested could come crashing down on me like that.

Soon after I raised the money, somebody said that the USA was too “fascist” for our efforts to succeed:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=422926&viewfull=1#post422926

I lived with Dennis at the time, who is an extremely influential personality, and his attitude was that the American people were inherently “good” but needed something to believe in. It was quite an idealistic statement, and I agreed with it, in my naïveté. The next few years rudely disabused me of that notion, and a decade later, Dennis agreed that people simply do not care for anything other than their little egocentric existences, but he kept sifting through the mine tailings of humanity, looking for gold nuggets. It takes the motivation of a saint to keep doing that, knowing that the very people you are trying to uplift will betray you at the first opportunity, and you have already forgiven them for what you know they will do. I could only look on in awe.

When we ended up in Ventura, to my dismay, as I had left Southern California twice already, vowing to never live there again, it was not long before I had seen about a dozen attempts to steal our company by Dennis’s associates, the first being when I saw my boss engineer the theft of the Seattle company. When I told Dennis one day how shocking it was to see, he told me to join the club:

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

I was about to get a lot more shocked. When I stood in our parking lot as all of those cars drove up in a cloud of dust, when the raid began:

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

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=579023&viewfull=1#post579023

I was kind of in shock. The next day, when we found out about their theft and espionage:

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

I wanted to get some sheriff’s deputies alone in a room with a baseball bat. That I could even have thoughts like that was horrifying. Six weeks after the raid, as I tried operating with all of my records gone, I began going into a general physical collapse, and my days with Dennis were drawing to a close.

His arrest was not a big surprise:

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

and the million dollar bail did not shock me (I did not hear about the billion dollar offer to go away until I heard Dennis talk about it publicly in 1996, and then read it in his most popular book http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#offer, and when I heard it, I was not terribly surprised, and also was not surprised that Dennis rejected it: I would not have been tempted, either, I think :) ), but when I went to the first hearing after Dennis was arrested, I was shocked when I heard Ms. Prosecutor tell a string of lies while arguing for why the million dollar bail was justified. I suppose that weathering all the attacks, watching our associates try to steal our company, and the other mayhem, even being raided like we were, did not prepare me for the criminal behavior I would soon see perpetrated by the prosecution, Mr. Deputy, and the like. I still had a naïve notion that they were just doing their jobs, at least most of them, which is a façade that they tried to uphold, and Mr. Deputy held it up until I was on the witness stand, and then his mask came off. But as I look back at it, watching the prosecutor tell a string of lies in front of the judge was my warning of what was to come.

But my next big moment of awakening was when I pulled into the driveway of our offices, a few minutes after Mr. Texas successfully shut them down by threatening all of the employees. I had no idea what I was walking into, but within seconds I had sized up the situation, and I could smell Mr. Texas’s play from a mile off. But I was shocked that Mr. Engineer was going to go work for Mr. Texas:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#salient3

That part I refused to believe, especially the part where Mr. Researcher would also go to work for Mr. Texas. Those old men were going to get their throats slit, maybe literally, going to work for the thieves. I literally could not believe what I was hearing, and visited Mr. Researcher later that day, and heard him scoff at my warnings:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=400493&viewfull=1#post400493

Mr. Engineer and Mr. Researcher were abandoning Dennis to go work for the cutthroats, and nothing I could say would dissuade them. I was stupefied. To Mr. Engineer’s credit, a few years later, when Dennis had (as usual) forgiven Mr. Engineer, Mr. Engineer told Mr. Researcher: “We are a couple of saps.”

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=580973&viewfull=1#post580973

To give an idea of what I was living through in those days, going bankrupt was the least of my worries:

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

When my mother attacked me on the day of the raid, when I called her to warn her to keep her head down at work and not defend me at the office when they printed what would likely be a libelous story, and I was later told that she made a scrapbook of those libelous articles and took it on tour to my friends, family, and investors, telling the story of her son the crook:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=300436&viewfull=1#post300436

it did not even phase me. By then, I knew that it just came with the territory. But my day on the witness stand was when it all came together in my radicalizing moment:

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

Mr. Deputy’s threats had already driven Mr. Researcher into hiding:

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

leaving me as the star witness:

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

When Mr. Deputy began making faces at me while I was on the witness stand:

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

I initially did not know what to do. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. Up until that moment, he played the “I am just doing my job” act with me. He took his psychopath’s mask off when I was on the witness stand. The next month, I thought that getting a shotgun and “cleaning up” Ventura County might be a good idea. Having thoughts like that was the lowest moment of my life:

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

In early 1989, I decided that I would do anything I could to get Dennis out of jail, and that was when I met Gary Wean, who gave me the best advice that I could get, which actually led to Dennis’s escape from jail:

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

as he told me that no government official in the entire USA would intercede in the evil acts in Ventura, and that I was on my own. That kept me from wasting my time, camping on a Senator’s doorstep, and I decided to sacrifice my life:

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

It worked, which is still the biggest miracle that I ever witnessed, and Dennis knew that the hand of God acted when Mr. Professor and I rode to the rescue. Dennis and I talked about those events last year, and he said that the lesson that he took from that was the power of love. Mr. Professor and I had our lives wrecked, and those days shortened Mr. Professor’s life:

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

and his death sent me into the darkest phase of my midlife crisis, but we could never regret what we did. We passed the “test,” at the cost of our lives.

After that day on the witness stand, nothing about human behavior could ever surprise me again, but it has been educational to see people lose their naïveté or try to. For instance, I was recently talking with somebody who witnessed some of Mr. Deputy’s evil deeds, as he was committing them, and the person was in denial that they even happened. I was kind of shocked when I saw that, but it is just another manifestation of cognitive dissonance:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#cognitive

where people deny what their eyes are telling them. When my legal fund secured Dennis’s lawyer, who was the one on the case when we sprung Dennis from jail, the attorney was a college professor and had never actually worked in a courtroom before. After one of the early hearings, he told Dennis, in shocked tones, that Ms. Prosecutor lied to him. Dennis told him to join the club.

When Mr. Big Time Attorney took the case, using up the last of my legal fund:

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

the saints at the courthouse tried to get his license to practice denied by lying to the state bar, saying that he was practicing without a license. Mr. Big Time Attorney had never worked at the county level before, as most or all of his cases had been at the federal level, even taking on the IRS in the USA’s Supreme Court and winning. His initial reaction was shock, and with each gutter maneuver by the prosecution, he became increasingly incensed. After the hearing where they tried to have Dennis rejailed because Dennis tried to revive the business, on his own initiative, Mr. Big Time Attorney prepared and filed a lawsuit in federal court:

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

Many of the same crimes that Mr. Deputy and friends had committed were identical to crimes that the IRS had committed, and those IRS agents had their careers destroyed because of it (some may have gone to prison, as I recall). Mr. Big Time Attorney was looking forward to mopping up the slime in Ventura County. Then he had his moment of revelation on the federal courthouse's steps:

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

and the light went out of his eyes. When he was threatened with disbarment for even bringing the lawsuit, it was only more icing on the cake. When I saw Dennis last year, we discussed Mr. Big Time Attorney’s awakening moment. Beating the IRS in the USA’s Supreme Court is no small beer, and Mr. Big Time Attorney had the swagger of a champion as he defended Dennis. To give Mr. Big Time Attorney some benefit here, he was not totally naïve, as he had received many death threats over the years because of the cases he took, to the point where he had to carry a gun with him. But the Ninth District Federal Court is the most corrupt in the USA:

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

as Gary found out the hard way:

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

and as Dennis told me last year, the “champion” was informed in no uncertain terms that beating the IRS in the USA’s Supreme Court was nothing, and that the “system” in Southern California let Mr. Big Time Attorney know that he was something unpleasant that they stepped in, and they unceremoniously wiped him from the bottom of their shoes. Mr. Big Time Attorney was never the same after those events.

When I heard that Mr. Investigator told Mr. Researcher that he did not care if the defendants were innocent or guilty, and he told just as many lies as he needed in order to gain that conviction and keep his kill ratio high:

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

it was an amusing anecdote to me by then. The system is evil, and everybody plays along, and that initial shock, of refusing to believe what your eyes are telling you, is a normal part of the awakening process and losing one’s naïveté.

My paradigm was shattered in Ventura, and it was similar to what soldiers in battle described, where their belief in basic human goodness died:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/war.htm#goodness

After helping mount several Level 10 efforts:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level10

I realized that they were erected on naïve ideas about basic human goodness. Oh, there is divinity deep down in everything, but the predominant human emotion is fear, and all of those disgusting behaviors that I saw were all rooted in fear. The masses will be no help at all in making FE happen.

When I saw Dennis try the religion route, or the “Patriot” route, or the business route, I could tell that he was trying to use people’s selfish allegiance to the ideologies that fed them to deceive them into saving themselves. Dennis was taking the semi-sentience route:

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

I came to reject the approach not only for strategic reasons (you can’t out-herd the master shepherd, Godzilla), but also for spiritual/idealist reasons. As Seth said, the means become the ends:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/visions.htm#idealist

and people are not going to be deceived into enlightenment. I seek those awake and awakening needles in haystacks, and will be using the Internet to try to find them. I also realized, while performing my studies over the years, that all of the epochal events of the human journey were initiated by only a relative handful of people. When the new energy regime was established, only then did the masses get aboard and reach new levels of being and sentience. I doubt that it will happen any differently this time. As I have stated plenty, one thousand like Ilie, properly trained, and it is game over for Godzilla, and he knows it. His greatest triumph is making FE and what can come with it unimaginable:

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

and if enough people can only imagine it, it will be enough to catalyze its reality, and I do not mean that in some New Age way, but in real, practical ways. Until the conversation is raised far above naïve denial and their attendant "bright ideas," conspiracist paranoia, and those other unproductive and suicidal mindsets, Godzilla has the game well in hand.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

9th March 2014, 17:11

Hi:

I am taking a little break today, but for those interested, I wanted to put up that chapter draft as it stands at the moment. It may become evident how the subject tends to spiral in many directions, and it is becoming challenging to keep it aligned with my intention. Below is fifteen pages of material, and I am going to try to cover the territory until the Industrial Revolution in the next fifteen pages, which is most of history. I don’t think it will be easy. :) I hope to get that chapter finished by next weekend. Heavy lifting. Because of its length, I have to bust it into two pieces.

Best,

Wade

Humanity’s Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution, Part 1

In the tropical rainforests where gorillas and chimpanzees live, there are dry and wet seasons, where they must seasonably change their diets to adapt to available foods. Beyond those rainforests, seasonal variation is more pronounced and, once the easy meat was gone, people survived by engaging in the hunter-gather lifestyle familiar to today’s humans. A sexual division of labor existed, where men hunted and women gathered. Men had the strength and speed required to hunt wary animals, particularly large game, while women were less mobile, partly due to caring for children.

Those Gravettian mammoth villages probably hosted humanity’s first semi-sedentary populations, but that short-lived situation ended when mammoths did. The primary necessity for a sedentary population’s survival was a local and stable energy supply. One energy supply tactic, as could be seen with those mammoth hunters, was storing food in permafrost “freezers.” Seasonal settlements existed where people subsisted on migrating animals or when certain plants had a harvestable and seasonal stage of development.

While eating roots has a long history in the human line, permanent sedentism began by harvesting seeds. In the Levant, in a swath of land that includes today’s Israel and Syria, about 13.5. kya the Kebaran people (c. 18 kya to 12.5 kya) made acorns and pistachios a major part of their diets. Mortars and pestles were in the Kebaran toolkit for processing acorns, which must be pounded into a paste and soaked to leach out tannins, and that work fell exclusively to women.

The Natufian culture (c. 15 kya to 11.8 kya) succeeded the Kebaran culture, and the Natufian village at Tell Abu Hureyra in today’s Syria was established about 13.5 kya, and was situated on a gazelle migration route. The residents of that village of a few hundred people also harvested “wild gardens” of wheat and rye. Those villagers became Earth’s first known farmers, and they had dogs. The original settlement was abandoned during the Younger Dryas and resettled after it ended. The effect of a harsher climate may have spurred the origin of agriculture, which began there about 11 kya. By seven kya, the settlement had reached several thousand people, and was then abandoned due to aridity. No evidence of warfare is associated with the settlement. A compelling recent hypotheses is that agriculture could not have developed in warfare’s presence, as farmers would have been too vulnerable to raids by hungry hunters. In the four places on Earth where agriculture seems to have independently developed: the Fertile Crescent, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes, no evidence of violent conflict exists before those civilizations fed by the first crops began growing into states. Those states are called “pristine” states, as no other states influenced their development. The peaceful agricultural villages that feminist authors have long written about, where women had it better than at any time before the Industrial Revolution, actually existed, if only for a relatively brief time, in only a few places.

Only when economic surpluses (primarily food) were redistributed, first by chiefs and then by early states, did men rise to dominance in those agricultural civilizations. Because the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent is the best studied and had the greatest influence on humanity, this chapter will tend to focus on it, although it will also survey similarities and differences with other regions where agriculture and civilization first appeared. Almost whenever agriculture appeared, cities eventually appeared, usually a few thousand years later. Agriculture’s chief virtue was that it extracted vast amounts of human-digestible energy from the land, where population densities a hundred times greater than that of hunter-gatherers became feasible. While the debates on the subject may never end, today it is widely thought that Malthusian population pressures led to the development of agriculture. The attractions of agricultural life over the hunter-gatherer lifestyle were not immediately evident. Early agriculture was a life of drudgery compared to the hunter-gatherer or horticultural lifestyle, and humans became shorter and less healthy when they transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farmers, but the land could also support many times the people. On the eve of the Domestication Revolution, Earth’s carrying capacity with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was around ten million people, with an actual population somewhat less, maybe as low as four million. On the eve of the Industrial Revolution in 1800, Earth’s human population was nearly a billion people. No matter how talented a hunter-gatherer warrior was, he was no match for a hundred peasants armed with hoes.

Darwin believed that natural selection only worked at the individual level, but the idea of group selection has become prominent in my lifetime, if controversial. Anthropologists and biologists see evidence of group selection, not only in social animals such as termites, but also in the ability of human societies to survive competition with their neighbors. Hunter-gatherer societies eliminated disruptive members by banishment or death, and has been argued to have been reflected genetically in eliminating uncooperative people from society. Those kinds of activities may have helped cull the human herd of “uncooperative” genes. Another aspect of biology that applies to human civilization is the idea of carrying capacity. Over history, the society with the higher carrying capacity prevailed, and the loser either adopted the winner’s practices or became enslaved, taxed, marginalized, or extinct. When Europe conquered the world, it had the highest energy usage, by far, of any peoples on Earth, which is why it always prevailed. When high-energy societies met low-energy societies, the results were almost always catastrophic for low-energy societies. Hunter-gatherer societies have no chance in a competition with societies that have domesticated plants and animals, much less industrialized societies.

Another early Fertile Crescent village, Çatal Höyük, in today’s Turkey, existed from 9.5 kya to 7.7 kya and was another peaceful agricultural settlement in which the inhabitants numbered several thousand people, in what is arguably Earth’s first city, but it was more like a large village, without the civic features normally associated with cities. The society seemed classless, and women and men had roughly equivalent status. The first domesticated sheep appear at Çatal Höyük, and the beginnings of cattle domestication appear there as well. Çatal Höyük’s residents raised wheat, barley, and peas. Pottery and obsidian mining and tool-making were major industries, and those people made the world’s first known map. Çatal Höyük did not have walls, there was no sign of warfare, and many “shrines” dotted the settlement, which probably supported a hunter-gatherer religion. Çatal Höyük was abandoned in a pattern that would repeat itself in the Fertile Crescent and Old World many times in succeeding millennia; it appears that deforestation and resultant desertification may have spelled the end of Çatal Höyük, as was probably also the case with Tell Abu Hureyra.

In an event that favors the hypotheses of climate-change advocates, there was a dip in global temperatures beginning about 8.2 kya, which lasted for a few centuries. It was likely caused by remnants of the North American ice sheets melting, and the resultant flush of freshwater into the North Atlantic. It was a less severe event than the Younger Dryas, but still caused epic droughts around the world. Some scientists think that the uncertainty caused by those cooling events helped spur agriculture, to enhance food security. Climate change from that event could be why Çatal Höyük was abandoned, and Tell Abu Hureyra survived the event, to only be abandoned several centuries later when another major dip in global temperatures happened. Those two early settlements may have been abandoned partly due to those climate events, but they would have also deforested their hinterlands, which desertified the region, with the settlements permanently abandoned. Environmentally harmful practices combined with droughts destroyed many civilizations in the millennia after those early abandonments, including the Mayan, Anasazi, and Harappan civilizations.

A contemporary of Çatal Höyük, Çayönü Tepesi, near Anatolia, had indicators of developing class systems, and male/female differences in diet. Cattle seem to have been first domesticated about 10.5 kya in the vicinity, which is also where pigs may have been first domesticated, and many progenitors of cereal crops still grow wild in the region. Early on, people also began to domesticate fiber-producing plants, with flax among the first domesticated fiber plants. Fiber crops have often competed with food crops for field space, especially when foreign conquerors reorient that subject population’s efforts, which can lead to starvation in the subject population. A recent example is when Britain forced Bengal to grow jute, indigo, and opium instead of food, and Bengal had a huge famine soon after Britain conquered it.

Goats were first domesticated in today’s Iran about 10 kya, and pigs were first semi-domesticated in the Fertile Crescent as long as 15 kya, and were independently domesticated in China about eight kya. Combining domesticated plants and animals appeared fairly early, where farmers realized that animal manure could fertilize crops, so the close association of pastures and cropland became a standard feature of Fertile Crescent civilizations. Early domestic animals were all herd animals, where humans replaced herd leadership. Since humans are herd animals, their understanding of herd behaviors likely made their efforts easier and more successful.

Just as growing large became a strategy for extinction for the world’s megafauna when a super-predator appeared that could kill them, forests are the greatest biological energy stores that Earth has ever seen. Trees were the plant world’s equivalent of megafauna, and they suffered the same fate wherever civilization appeared. When humans became sedentary, they razed local forests to gain building materials and fuel, and the freshly deforested land worked wonderfully for raising crops, at least until the soils were ruined from nutrient depletion and erosion. Domesticated cattle pulled the first plows, beginning more than seven kya. When humans began to smelt metal, beginning about 8 kya, deforestation was easier, so a dynamic arose in the Fertile Crescent where bronze axes easily deforested the land, which was then worked with draft animals pulling bronze plows, which increased crop yields but also increased erosion. That complex of deforestation, crops, draft animals, and smelted metals yielded great short-term benefits but was far from sustainable, as it devastated the ecosystems and soils and also impacted the hydrological cycle, and gradually turned forests to deserts. Another way that the Bronze Age helped deforest Earth is that smelting metal is enormously energy intensive. When the Mediterranean region had its Bronze Age, the standard unit of copper production was the oxhide ingot (because it was worth about one ox), which weighed between 20 and 30 kilograms. It took six tons of charcoal to smelt one ingot, which required 120 pine trees, or 1.6 hectares (four acres) of trees. Kilns for making pottery also required vast amounts of wood. Wood met many of the energy needs of early Old World civilizations, which were all voracious consumers of wood.

In the Fertile Crescent today, the ruins of hundreds of early cities are in their self-made deserts, usually buried under the silt of the erosion of exposed forest soils. As the Mediterranean Sea’s periphery became civilized, the same dynamic was repeated, where forests became semi-deserts and early cities were buried under silt. Before the rise of civilization, a forest ran from Morocco to Afghanistan, and only about 10% of the forest that still existed as late as 2000 BCE still remains. Everywhere that civilization exists today has been dramatically deforested. The only partial exceptions are places such as Japan, but they kept their forests intact by importing wood from foreign forests. North America and Asia have been supplying Japan with wood for generations. As civilizations wiped themselves out with their rapaciousness, some were aware enough to lament what was happening, but they were a minority. Usually lost in the anthropocentric view was the awesome devastation inflicted on other life forms. Killing off the megafauna was only a warm-up. Razing a forest to burn the wood and raise crops destroyed an entire ecosystem for short-term human benefit, leaving behind a lifeless desert when the last crops were wrenched from depleted soils. In the final accounting, the damage meted out to Earth’s other life forms, not other humans, may be humanity’s greatest crime. Humanity is the greatest destructive force on Earth since that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, and we may be far from finished in devastating Earth and her creatures.

Since humans began to make advanced tools and valuable goods, they exchanged them, beginning as early as 150 kya, and cities have always been situated on low-energy transportation lanes, which before the Industrial Revolution were almost always bodies of water. Before the Industrial Revolution, it took only about 1-2% of the energy to move goods across a body of water, such a lake or ocean, as it did overland. A peasant in Aztec civilization, for instance, could as easily and quickly bring more than forty times the weight of goods by canoe on a trip across the Valley of Mexico’s lakes to Tenochtitlán as he could by carrying a load on his back along the causeways. In 1800, it cost as much to ship a ton of goods more than 5,000 milometers to the USA from England as it did to transport it 50 kilometers overland in the USA.

The main reason for low-energy transportation lanes was so that energy supplies (primarily food and wood) could feed the cities, and that flow of energy was usually reciprocated with the flow of manufactured goods. The standard dynamic of early cities was energy supplies flowing to the cities and city-manufactured goods flowing outward, and cities became hubs of exchange. The so-called “tyranny of distance,” meaning how far goods could be effectively transported to cities, limited the size of their hinterland, which limited a city’s size. More energy-intensive and energy-efficient transportation enlarged the exploitable hinterland, allowing cities to grow. The introduction of the wheel could improve matters, but not always. In pre-industrial Islamic cultures, the camel was a more energy-efficient form of transportation than wheeled carts.

Sedentism was the primary outcome and benefit of agriculture. When people became sedentary, they could accumulate possessions, develop new skills, sleep under the same roof all year, and engage in daily communication with many others, and just as language was the first “Internet,” cities provided a quantum leap in the quick dissemination of information and ideas. The critical trait of a city is professionals living in it, as the development of professions is the most important feature of urban life.

The world’s first true city is widely considered to be Eridu, which was founded near the mouth of the Euphrates River about 7.4 kya, or about 5400 BCE (“Before Common Era,” also called BC, for “Before Christ”, but BCE is today’s convention, just as “CE” has replaced “AD”). Eridu was the first city of what became Sumer, which was an agglomeration of city-states. Sumer was established along and between the Tigris and Euphrates, and the ancient Greeks called the region Mesopotamia, which meant the land between the rivers. Çayönü Tepesi was in the Tigris’s watershed, and it and many settlements like it engaged in deforestation, agriculture, and raising domestic animals. Their practices were not sustainable, as the newly exposed soils washed away, and what remained was depleted of nutrients, although farmers began using manure, both of humans and domestic animals, to restore soil fertility, from the early days of agriculture. Eridu engaged in a practice that characterize cities to the present day, of harnessing gravity, where upstream water flows supplied cities with water and goods brought down rivers. But in what became Mesopotamia, it also brought silt and salt from upriver deforestation and erosion. Eridu was a seashore city, and today its ruins lie more than 200 kilometers inland, due to thousands of years of silt washed downstream by deforestation and agriculture. Siltation and soil salination turned all early cities of Sumer into buried ruins in the midst of a desert. But before silt and salt wrecked those civilizations, many seminal inventions appeared. The sailing ship appeared in early Sumer. Gravity took a ship downstream, and wind power helped it move back upstream.

About 3800 BCE, the Sumerian city of Ur was established at the new mouth of the Euphrates, as Eridu was already becoming an inland city, although more from a sea level decline than silt at that time. About 5000 BCE, the Sumerian city of Uruk was established, upriver on the Euphrates from Eridu, and Uruk became Sumeria’s first great city. About 5000 BCE, the first metal, copper, was smelted. The earliest evidence for copper smelting currently comes from a mountain in today’s Serbia. In the Fertile Crescent, inventions quickly spread, and by about 3300 BCE, smelters learned to add tin to copper and the Fertile Crescent’s Bronze Age began. Metal had obvious advantages over stone, and Bronze Age civilizations in river valleys quickly appeared, with the Harappan Civilization forming in the Indus river valley about 3300 BCE, and the first civilization in the Nile river valley forming about 3100 BCE. The wheel was invented around 3500 BCE and immediately spread. Whether it was invented in Sumer, the Indus river valley, or somewhere else in the region is still debated, but its advantages were instantly obvious, particularly where draft animals could pull them. When the Spanish conquered the Aztecs, they found that Mesoamerican peoples had independently invented wheels, but just had them on children’ toys, and the likely reason was that they had no draft animals, not after the megafauna holocaust of thousands of years earlier.

Warfare began in earnest in southern Mesopotamia about 4000 BCE, fighting over water and land. The city-states of Sumer began to intensely battle each other beginning about 3000 BCE, and the third millennium BCE was a time of constant Mesopotamian warfare. The sieges that city-states inflicted on each other were brutal. When one city conquered another, the men were killed or blinded and enslaved, and the women and children were enslaved. Making mounds from corpses of defeated soldiers was common in official accounts of battles during the third millennium BCE (2999 to 2000 BCE). About the first walled city was Uruk’s colonial settlement Habuba Kabira, founded around 3500 BCE along the Euphrates in today’s Syria, but it was abandoned after several generations. Those wars led to the first written treaties, which was largely concerned with citizens who found themselves on the wrong side the new border. Conscription was an early feature of civilization, closely akin to slavery, although the arrangement was temporary and conscripted soldiers were often promised land for their coerced services; draft-dodging became one of early civilization’s art forms.

Stratified urban populations and the agricultural hinterlands they exploit is civilization’s primary structure to this day. Soldiers, craftsmen, merchants, priests, and other professions appeared with urban civilization. Slaves only made economic sense among sedentary pre-industrial peoples, and forced servitude is the hallmark of early civilizations. The singing and dancing rituals of hunter-gatherer peoples were repressed by priesthoods of urban religions for thousands of years. On early Fertile Crescent pottery, scenes of dancing people proliferated, depicting a tradition that likely had lasted unbroken for more than 60,000 years. By about 3500 BCE, those dancing scenes began disappearing from pottery, as professional priesthoods conquered the ancestral religion, and Western religions have been stifling “ecstatic” religions ever since, and today’s Pentecostals and Shakers have rituals that hail back to religion before civilization. The professional urban priesthood became spiritual middlemen, and direct interactions with other dimensions and “ecstatic” states were discouraged or forbidden. Belief and “faith” replaced direct experience, and later, “sacred” texts recorded the alleged deeds and words of spiritual leaders, who were usually religious rebels themselves and did not leave any writings behind, with the priesthood not only monopolizing the texts but also their interpretation, again becoming well-paid middlemen between the divine source and the flock.

Early elites claimed divine status, with the priesthood abetting the fiction, and a universal practice among early civilizations was erecting monumental architecture, and the ziggurat was the first such structure. In Sumer, ziggurats were not only the center of the state religion, but also held precious metals such as gold, and the priesthood directed mass economic activity, such as organizing irrigation projects. In some ways, the priesthood was only adapting to urbanization, where their professional ancestors developed calendars and other methods of synchronizing vital activities such as plantings and harvests, with their attendant festivals, where mistimings by mere days could lead to famine. Sumerian temples had statues in their central place of worship, in human form and bedecked with jewels and other precious adornments. Offerings of food were presented to the statues, which temple personnel ate that night. In the third millennium BCE, temples owned land and had their own workforce; again a “voluntary” one that discharged religious obligations. While those temples performed valuable societal functions such as taking in orphans, the earliest urban religions were obviously businesses and could become rackets, in a pattern that continues to this day.

Later, palaces appeared, and Sumerian palaces and their related elites are seen today as more of an intrusive dynamic from rural societies, kind of an invasion and conquest rather than a natural outcome of Sumerian urban life. The elite arguably performed some kind of exchange function, but a common idea among anthropologists is that elites became elites because they could, not because they performed a necessary societal function. In early cities, elites usually arose from new professional classes that created and controlled markets. In early Mesopotamian states, palace activities were largely centered around elite lifestyles, not administering state functions. Sumer was the first pristine state, and when other pristine states arose, something like convergent evolution happened, with them all having similar features, which included: male domination, divinely-sanctioned heads of state with harems and other extravagances in their capital cities, including elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture, forced servitude, human sacrifice and/or public executions to terrorize the populace into submission, conscripted “cannon fodder” infantry led by elite officers, fortified cities, taxation, and so on. All pristine states went through similar development paths, with some features appearing earlier or later than others, with minor variation among their attributes, but they all had remarkable resemblances, which likely reflected human “nature,” where UP everywhere reacted to analogous economic conditions in comparable fashion.

After consolidating their ill-gotten positions, the elite can rule more gently. Sociologist Steven Spitzer stated:

“Pristine states, precisely because they lack legitimacy, must develop and impose harsh, crude, and highly visible forms of repressive sanctions; developed states, having successfully ‘re-invented’ consensus, can achieve social regulation through a combination of civil law and relatively mild forms of ‘calculated’ repression.”

The greatest threat to all ruling classes has almost always been those they rule. Only after their rule was secure, usually via bloodshed, did Sumer’s elites perform state duties to provide some superficial legitimacy for their status, and priesthoods attributing divine status or divine sanction to secular elites has always been an effective strategy. The close relationship of secular and religious authority is evident at the very beginnings of civilization. Even today, the British Queen rules the Church of England, which is a tradition in Europe that goes back to Roman Emperors. The laborers drafted to build cathedrals, palaces, and monuments to aggrandize the elite would always perform more efficiently if they were doing it from religious belief rather than coercion, and the world’s monumental architecture was primarily built with “free” labor, not slave labor, as a way of performing religious duties. Combining religious and secular ideologies can even be seen in supposedly secular civilizations, such as American schoolchildren being trained to worship flags, where the words “under God” are part of their daily recitations.

The human ability to think abstractly was exploited by social managers from civilization’s earliest days, and fixating people on irrational symbols, then manipulating those symbols for elite benefit, is arguably a universal trait of civilized peoples. Even today, a great deal of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols, where, as with the earliest religion, the neocortex is bypassed in favor of connecting with the limbic system, and people are easy prey to the cynical manipulation of emotionally-charged symbols, and the effects of childhood indoctrination and conditioning can last for the victim’s lifetime.

While there is evidence of writing existing about 5000 BCE, Sumeria became the first literate civilization about 3000 BCE, after their invention of cuneiform about 3300 BCE. Mesopotamian peoples had used clay tokens for accounting since about 8000 BCE, and the first writings in all civilizations were elite accounting. By the Third Dynasty of Ur, silver became the official unit of accounting, to be later supplanted by gold, probably due to Egyptian mines.

One of the earliest known works of literature is the Epic of Gilgamesh, dating to as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur, which began about 2150 BCE. A brief review of the epic highlights elite themes and dynamics of early civilization. Gilgamesh was a king of Uruk around 2500 BCE, and was one-third man and two-thirds god. In the epic’s first tablet, he used his kingly prerogative to sleep with Uruk’s young women the night before marriage, and his subjects entreated the gods for assistance. The gods responded by creating a “wild man” to distract Gilgamesh, and after Gilgamesh defeated him in battle they became friends. Gilgamesh then suggested that they travel to Lebanon’s cedar forest and kill the demigod guardian of the forest. They journeyed to the cedar forest, killed the demigod, deforested the groves, and rafted back to Uruk with the demigod’s head and a particularly large tree to be used in a temple. After the wild man’s untimely death at the hands of the gods as punishment for killing the demigod, Gilgamesh then made otherworldly journeys to learn how to become immortal. After defeating stone giants and felling more than a hundred more trees, Gilgamesh built a boat to survive the coming flood, sent by the gods, and in a story that almost certainly inspired the Old Testament’s tale of Noah, Gilgamesh survived the flood along with the animals he saved, and gods gathered around the sweet smell of Gilgamesh’s sacrifice. After more adventures in an attempt to become immortal, Gilgamesh lamented his folly.

The writers of the Epic of Gilgamesh knew that deforestation led to droughts, and Gilgamesh’s war against the forest foreshadowed the fate of numerous Old World civilizations. The city-states of southern Mesopotamian made regular journeys to Lebanon’s cedar forest. The ruler of Lagash, not far from Uruk, had grand plans for aggrandizing his legacy and leveled cedar forests and rafted their logs downriver to Lagash to fulfil his grandiose schemes. The city-states of southern Mesopotamia deforested upstream river valleys, rafting logs to their downstream cities. Wars between the city-states, and wars of foreign conquest to secure forests and navigable rivers (particularly the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karun of today’s Iran), were common then. Wood became such a coveted commodity that it could approach the value of precious metals and stones, and Akkad’s rulers named mountains with what tree predominantly grew on each one.

What came with the logs, however, was silt and salt, and those civilizations were destroyed by their own rapacity. Southern Mesopotamia practiced irrigated farming, and salination and siltation eventually wrecked Sumer. By the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2100 BCE, the king Ur-Nammu made dredging silt from canals a high priority, and his dredging initiative temporarily revived agriculture and made Ur’s port navigable once again, as it had already been filled with silt. Wheat is more sensitive to saline soil than barley. In 3500 BCE, wheat and barley were grown in equal amounts, but salination began taking its toll. By 3000 BCE, Sumer became the world’s first literate society, and their tablets record Sumer’s decline. By 2500 BCE, wheat amounted to only 15% of the total crop. By 2100 BCE, wheat comprised only 2% of Sumer’s crops. Wheat was not the only casualty. Salt-tolerant barley did better, but crop yields began falling precipitously around 2400 BCE, with a steady decline that reached only a third of 2400 BCE yields by 1700 BCE. The Sumerian people began migrating upriver to lands that had not yet been devastated, and Sumer’s population declined by more than half, with famine a regular visitor as croplands became white with salt.

Upriver from Sumer the Akkadian Empire began forming, and Akkadians began defeating Sumer around 2300 BCE. Akkad’s first king was Sargon, who bloodily came to power and captured Uruk and dismantled its walls while conquering Sumer. That began a pattern of rising and falling empires in the Fertile Crescent that characterized the region for thousands of years. The Akkadian Empire collapsed after only 180 years of existence, and there was a resurgence of Ur under its Third Dynasty around 2100 BCE, and the oldest preserved laws were written then. The Code of Hammurabi, written when Babylonians ruled in their turn a few centuries later, reflected earlier Sumerian laws, and they are notable for documenting the barbarity of their times. Murder and robbery were capital crimes, but capital punishment was also meted out for offenses such as stealing a slave, deflowering a wife before the husband could (where the deflowerer is killed), or a wife is unfaithful (where the wife is killed). A boy striking his father would lose his fingers or hand. “Eye for an eye” came from the Code of Hammurabi.

Just as precipitation ran to the ocean in floods before plants colonized land, denuded lands and razed forests no longer held water like a sponge, and transpiration no longer contributed to the hydrological cycle, rampant deforestation contributed to flooded Mesopotamian rivers as the region also became drier. The flood that Gilgamesh survived, which is evident in the archeological record, was likely related to deforestation, although a great deal of speculation exists regarding the origins of flood myths. The Black Sea is one candidate for flood legends, where the rising interglacial global ocean flooded the lake to levels higher than during the glacial period. Another hypothesis has rising seas flooding the lower end of Mesopotamia. I have read arguments that the legend of Atlantis relates to a seashore civilization drowned under a rising interglacial ocean.

Just as with megafauna extinctions or the Neanderthal extinction, there are plenty of scientists and scholars who argue that human-agency is not responsible for the decline and collapse of civilizations, question whether they collapsed at all, assert that climate change did it, or invasion did it, and so on. While the battle of competing hypotheses is part of the process of science, all scientists whose hypotheses deflect responsibility from people have an inherent conflict of interest, and their work should be examined with that in mind. In the historical era, particularly when Europe conquered the world, the rapid deforestation and desertification of newly conquered lands was evident. Within a century of Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, a valley of verdant forests and fertile farmland was turned into a semi-desert by deforestation and sheep grazing. That valley is known as the Mezquital Valley today, because the desert-dwelling mesquite is the dominant tree in that semi-desert. British invaders of Australia did the same thing to New South Wales in fifty years, with deforestation and sheep grazing. Streams quickly dried up, but flooded when it rained, as the “sponge” of the forest ecosystem was removed, so flood and drought accompanied deforestation.

Since 2003, I have been a student of collapsed civilizations, and there are vigorous academic disputes on the subject. Jared Diamond see collapses as a result of environmental degradation, while Joseph Tainter perceives it as declining marginal returns on investment in complexity. Thomas Homer-Dixon views it as a decline in a civilization’s EROI. Other scientists propose climate explanations, particularly droughts. What they are all stating, in one fashion or another, is that the civilizations ran out of energy. All resources are either energy or energy makes them available, whether they are food, timber, water, metal, or today’s hydrocarbon deposits, where wars are once again fought in Mesopotamia to secure energy. Tainter’s idea of declining marginal returns in investment in complexity is perhaps the most prominent current explanation, but it also did not engage the dynamic’s physics, which others have done. Homer-Dixon has elucidated the dynamics perhaps the most clearly, with his concept of declining EROI, for which he writes articles and gives public speeches. Homer-Dixon’s ideas also incorporate C.S. Holling’s ecosystems theories. Whether climate change did it, humans wiped out their environments, or humanity has reached Peak Oil and a global collapse is just around the corner, it always meant a decline in energy-delivered resources, as well as energy itself. Tainter’s moment of a civilization’s collapse was when a hungry urban professional returned to rural life to gain greater energy (food) security, but a long, often slow decline usually led to that moment, as a society’s return on investment in complexity declined or, as Homer-Dixon stated it, the EROI declined to that disruptive level and civilization collapsed. Just as with wars, the ultimate cause was economic, but some kind of triggering event was the proximate cause, which was warfare often enough. But Rome was sacked three times in less than two centuries only after centuries of declining EROI.

One key feature of Mesopotamian life resulted from wars and migrations. In cities, social organization along family or clan lines became obsolete, and professional associations became prominent. Mesopotamian cities absorbed invader cultures while also adapting to them, and ancient Mesopotamian civilizations became multicultural. The first cities also had many problems to solve, such as sanitation, where the water supply and sewage system had to be separated. Also, in a pattern that continues to this day, upriver settlements usually flushed their sewage into the rivers, as they no longer had to concern themselves with it, but it obviously affected downstream civilizations. In many poor nations today, as major rivers enter the oceans they are virtually open sewers, becoming increasingly polluted as rivers pass settlements and cities. Also, the domestication of animals is generally considered to be the origin of many epidemic diseases, and the close quarters of urban living often meant epidemics that decimated urban populations, with the Plague of Athens in 430 BCE, during the Peloponnesian War, being one of the earliest recorded epidemics. Filth, pollution, and crowding were major problems for early cities, and life expectancy was always lower in the cities than in the hinterland. Life expectancy in the city did not rise to the hinterland’s until the 20th century. Surplus population from the hinterland repopulated all cities in history until the 20th century.

Fertile Crescent civilizations are universally regarded as humanity’s first. In China, the peoples began to domesticate millet around nine kya, about two thousand years after Fertile Crescent farming began. Some scientists are skeptical that Chinese domestication really developed without any Fertile Crescent influence, even if it was just the idea of domestication. Similarly, agriculture began in the Western Hemisphere in Mesoamerica, with people domesticating squash about 10-8 kya. The potato could have begun domestication in Peru at about the same time. At most, those are the two places where plants were domesticated independently in the Western Hemisphere, and the practice spread. Plants were independently domesticated in as few as five regions on Earth. Whether the idea of domestication passed between regions where it is thought to have appeared independently, where the pig, for instance, may have been domesticated independently in the Fertile Crescent and China, nearly all domesticated plants and animals were likely domesticated once, and the idea/technique/offspring spread. The horse is an instance where genetic evidence points to domestication happening once, with a limited number of stallions, and wild mares were subsequently incorporated into domestic herds. Once a herd animal was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent, the idea of domesticating herd animals certainly made subsequent domestication events less innovative. The Domestication Revolution, even if it happened in as many as nine places independently, as with the previous two epochal events (stone tools/controlling fire, and that found group that left Africa), the people who initiated the Third Epochal Event were relatively few. Probably only a few hundred people were beacons of innovation, or maybe even only a few dozen or less, when they are added together, and the domestication of animals in the Fertile Crescent may have had a lone inventor, or handful of them, who initiated the process, and the domestication of plants may have had similarly few inventors.

Wade Frazier

9th March 2014, 17:12

Humanity’s Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution – Part 2

As has been evident in this essay so far, and will become more evident, scientific orthodoxy and I do not agree on everything; far from it. Not only is mainstream science imprisoned by barriers erected by a faction of the global elite, where paradigm-shattering scientific findings and world-changing technologies are ruthlessly suppressed, but all of my fellow travelers were, to one extent or another, mystical in their orientation. Their mystical persuasion had nothing to do with beliefs, studying sacred texts, or other indoctrination, but their experiences. My astronaut and Ivy League professor colleague was a staunch advocate of scientific testing of “paranormal” phenomena. After I had dramatic events that initiated my mystical awakening, I also performed experiments and had many undeniable experiences that clearly demonstrated that the materialistic models of consciousness that dominate mainstream science rest on false foundations. My astronaut colleague nearly lost his life, courtesy of the USA’s military, when he looked into the UFO phenomenon, after being made an offer he could not refuse, and the attack shortened his life. There is far more happening than the TV news tells us.

The physical dimension is not the only one, and accomplished psychonauts can visit others, some of whom I know, and some have even brought back designs for inventions used in every Western home today. Scientists call flashes of inventive insight “the creative moment,” but there is often far more to it than novel and poorly understood brain activity.

When scientists attribute all “beliefs” in the “supernatural” to superstition, wishful thinking, reaching a delusionary “high” by stressing the body to exhaustion, similar to a substance-induced state, and other human foibles, they err. Instead of considering that accomplished mystics can visit other dimensions or gain perspectives regarding this one that could be called “magical,” scientists tend to see those “primitive” states that may provide windows to other dimensions as nothing more than “a distorting mirror.” There is something real at the root of religious behavior and belief, but just as with everything else in a world of scarcity, people corrupted it into a way of getting fed, men used it to gain sexual access to women, and the like. The same scandalous behaviors haunt the New Age community today. No worthy mystic is going to ask people to “believe,” have “faith,” memorize “sacred” texts, and the like. Those are the tools of religious racketeers. People can seek their own experiences, and there is a mountain of scientific data that supports the reality of “paranormal” phenomena. Even calling it “paranormal” is misleading. Those abilities of consciousness are normal, if only underdeveloped in the West and abused by charlatans and other opportunists. Many “mystics” fake such abilities, but relatively few in the milieu do. For all the many failings of organized religion and the rampant mystical hucksterism that abounds, materialism is a religion, not much different from the world’s religions, but its founding articles of faith are called “assumptions.” While I understand and can even appreciate the seductions of the rationalist-materialist paradigm, it rests on a false foundation. There are some highly sophisticated ways of viewing the cosmos and the human role in it that have little to do with dogma and the usual trappings of organized religion, and lot of it can be tested, even scientifically at times.

One enduring question about civilization is “Why?” Why would somebody leave a village for a shortened life-expectancy in a city? Ever since the ancient Greeks and Confucius, that question has been asked. There are two basic theoretical camps: one is integration theory, and the other is conflict theory. Integration theories have people moving to civilization because of the benefits gained, which are obviously many. Conflict theories, of which Karl Marx was a proponent, have elites exploiting civilizations in service to their greedy and vain motivations. Academics have written that integration theories account best for providing life’s necessities for the masses, which is why they migrate to civilizations, while conflict theories best explain elite appropriation of economic surpluses.

In Sumer in the third millennium BCE, about 80% of the population lived in cities so that they could sleep behind fortifications to protect against attack. However, about 80-90% of the population was engaged in agriculture. Before industrialization, the vast majority of civilized populations were involved in agriculture, as the surplus could only support a small non-agricultural population, which were professionals and the elite. All elites for all time have engaged in conspicuous economic consumption as the mark of their status. Until the Industrial Revolution, except for the brief Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer, the primary preoccupation of all people for all time has been food security, as hunger was a constant specter.

People on the edge of starvation will rarely if ever display enlightened activities in relationship to their environment or each other, as they battle for survival. While early farmers could see the effects of deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion, gentle, sustainable practices often took a backseat to market forces, imperial prerogatives, and warfare. What could be obvious to farmers was not evident to potentates sitting on distant urban thrones, merchants, or money-changers, and as the city conquered what became the hinterland, short-term economic plunder took precedence over long-term environmental management far too frequently.

Until the 20th century, people had no idea how their activities impacted a portion of their environment that may end up hastening humanity’s demise more than self-made deserts: the atmosphere. Agriculture and civilization meant deforestation, and there is strong evidence that the Domestication Revolution began altering the composition of Earth’s atmosphere from its earliest days. The natural trend of carbon dioxide decline was reversed beginning about 6000 BCE. Instead of declining from about 260 PPM at 6000 BCE to about 240 PPM today, which would have been the natural trend, it began to rise, reaching 275 PPM about 3000 BCE. By the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were about 40 PMM higher than the natural trend would suggest. When a forest is razed and the resultant wood is burned, which is usually wood’s ultimate fate in civilizations, it liberated carbon that the tree absorbed from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and human activities began measurably adding methane to the atmosphere by about 3000 BCE, which coincided with the rise of the rice paddy system in China. In nature, methane is primarily produced by decaying vegetation in wetlands, both in the tropics and the Arctic, and human activities have increased wetlands even as they made other regions arid. Domestic grazing animals and human digestive systems also contribute to methane production. While atmospheric alteration by human activities has only come to public awareness in my lifetime, human activities have had a measurable effect on greenhouse gases since the beginnings of civilization, even though the effects were modest compared to what has happened during the Industrial Revolution, as humans burn Earth’s hydrocarbon deposits with abandon.

All early cities were built in warm climates, to take advantage of their “energy subsidy.” Heating cool-climate buildings is extremely energy-intensive and growing seasons are shorter further from the equator, which explains why cool-climate civilizations developed much later than warm-climate civilizations. From its beginnings in the region that included Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and the Levant, agriculture made its inexorable march across the land masses, and spread to the furthest arable reaches of Europe before 3500 BCE. As agriculture spread, so did warring empires. What is called the Near East and Mediterranean region was slaked with blood early and often, as empires rose and fell. Sumer was conquered by Akkad, and when Akkad fell, Ur had a resurgence, to be supplanted by Babylon, which was supplanted by Assyria, which was supplanted by a neo-Babylonian civilization, which was supplanted by Persia, which was supplanted by Macedonians led by Alexander the Great, whose military methods were unsurpassed for the remainder of humanity’s pre-industrial times. Alexander’s forces could have arguably defeated Wellington’s forces at Waterloo in 1815. The wars over control of Mesopotamia have continued until this day, with history’s richest and most powerful nation recently invading the region to secure hydrocarbon energy while purveying blatantly fraudulent rationales which fooled nobody except for the imperial citizenry, and even they largely winked at the “noble” rationales given.

The rest of this chapter will trace many important pre-industrial developments which helped set the stage for the Industrial Revolution, which is humanity’s fourth and most recent epochal event, but until the last few centuries in Europe preceding the Industrial Revolution, the basics among all civilizations did not appreciably change. Cities situated on low-energy transportation lanes, which were almost always bodies of water, exploited forested and agricultural hinterlands, which was worked by peasants and slaves, while cities housed professionals and the elite. Forests and agriculture provided the primary energy supply of all pre-industrial civilizations, which was usually supplemented with the products and services of domestic animals. Food security was always an issue, and all pre-industrial civilizations were steeply-hierarchical - economically, socially, and politically - with the means of production providing small surpluses that supported a small elite and professional class. Fighting over resources and plunder has been the primary predilection of all civilizations for all time, except for a very brief interlude at the beginnings of the formation of pristine civilizations.

Those basics never really changed, and environmental destruction accompanied all civilizations, as razing forests and growing crops could never really be sustainable and certainly could not form the foundation for economically abundant societies. Economic scarcity, which is always rooted in energy scarcity, was as deeply ingrained into all ideologies as thoroughly as those early religions that accessed the limbic system to reinforce group cohesion. Economic scarcity was and is so pervasive that it is an assumption of all of today’s dominant ideologies. As with all assumptions, scarcity has become a barely visible framework to adherents of all dominant ideologies. If energy was abundant, scarcity-based realities and ideologies would quickly become obsolete, as well as many societal features that are scarcity’s side-effects, such as elites, greed, warfare, and environmental destruction.

Wade Frazier

13th March 2014, 03:23

Hi:

Well, I sure am not going to get to the Industrial Revolution as fast as I had hoped, and another monster chapter is in the making. It will be a good one, but long. As with my posts that began a couple of years ago, as I got to the civilizations of the Mediterranean:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=602338&viewfull=1#post602338

the going is slow with Rome and friends. Many important lessons there.
I just read this:

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2014-03-12/top-expert-debunks-radiation-myths

and it relates to posts here a while back:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=639659&viewfull=1#post639659

Ionizing radiation is not good for life forms. Ever. It is not “creative destruction,” but just destruction.

The Snowden revelations keep getting uglier:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/03/12/nsa-plans-infect-millions-computers-malware/

With “public servants” like them, who needs enemies?

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Limor Wolf

13th March 2014, 16:00

The day before yesterday I was reading another one of the chapters of the essey's draft that Wade has posted here (I am a slow reader, only on page 165, post #3280-1) - 'The reign of Dinosaur's' , so my following random thoughts are in relations to that and not yet to any other later parts.

It all feels like a profound story telling, so far I noticed two things - there are always processes (nothing is fixated and there are always dynamics even if over milions of years) and what feels like either a priodicity of species appearing and disappearing or that of evolution if the species manage to survive (survive human beings that is). If the later, then the process begets thing which led to another thing and to another. Inference - life on this planet equals development.

What I find very fascinating is the sudden appearence of species with no understanding or ability to theorise where they appeared from (for example the crab), and the thoughts are wandering to far more philosophical realms (I know, I know, it should all be about energy of the ' here and now'), who and what has created the flowers with seeds and the animals with reproductive capacity..? what is this energy that creates universes? this life force that encourages continuity in such a highly inteligent way? For me, Wade's essey and writing evokes such unanswered questions for the fact that it touches the fundamentals of construction and creation processes as well as dismantling and extinction, but it's possibly best to concentrate on the less grandiose mysteries of life : )

If to continue these thoughts, the fact that many of the 'convictions' on which the hypotheses are built (as opposing to the things who can be measured or be concluded with a logical or measurable linkage ) are actually theorised, the dynamics then, are not always understood. (things appear and disappear with no explanation) and also can not be explained as energy related. So (understandably so..), any attempt to summerise life on this planet via scientific tools only is a logical attempt to examine what appears to us as the "mysteries" of our existance here.

Here's an exception I've encountered lately, I began to read a story of an Isareli guy who lives on Prana (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prana)and without food, he was recently able to demonstrate it and was not eating/drinking for eight days infront of a TV camera while submitting himself to medical testings by a pre-scheduled team. I signed up for a workshop that he ran in order to learn how to get more prana energy into our body which unfortunately was canceled, I exchanged a few words with him. I have learned and read about breatharians before and am very interested on the use of free infinite energy as a mechanism that can propel our body, and if that, no doubt any other man made technology. We also have two declared woman members on Avalon who had breatherian experiences and without going into too much detail, I myself had an episode of existing without sleep for 14 days in a row in total and complete consciousness and awarness minute by minute. What type of mitochondria do breatharians have? How come it is so efficient (they normally don't need much sleep and their metabolism values are kept within the normal range and in general the 'consumption' of free energy of the pranic nature seems to be less eroding to the system ) There is going to be a complete breakage in scientific understandings when consciousness and energy (and the energy of consciousness) is going to be tied together and will be more visibly common, a component so strong in it's directive power that it's going to change the picture. Wade, you may have to leave room for more episodes in the energy saga of earth for future breakthrough. If for example we take breatharianism again, something in the equation of size, heart bit, metabolism and longevity known in mammals today and considered with all animals is going to be undermined in the future, as the metabolism and the longevity part (the last one not yet known, but very likely is affected) as reflected in a person (mammal) who does not need to consume food and drink as fueling energy for biologic processes to occur, will no doubt change some of the most prevalent basic premises in science.

Wade's work lights some very interesting points for me beyond the obvious, for example that territory choice is also influenced by energy considerations, such a point has not crossed my mind, but it makes perfect sense, territorial behaviour is a prime nature to any ' biologic component' (whether a plant, an animal or a human) to operate itself with as much convenience of attainment of energy sources and with less need to waste one's own energy to reach them ( a clear necessity in a world that consumes exhaustible energy resources), even technological devices are built with the same currently logical considerations.

Energy indeed rules the world With regards to territory and energy, I was trying to think of an exception, I couldn't find any, even the Bedouins (http://www.bedawi.com/Bedouin_Culture_EN.html), the nomadic desert tribes, who live a relatively non sedentary life when it comes to teritorrial behaviour and are a lot more exposed to variable factors need to settle near water or take with them the energy sources when they migrate, as few as they may be in compared to modern society, but they can not avoid them.

The only one life changing transition that we can look forward to and is apparently beginning to happen is the transformation to free enrgy type of economy. Such a transition might be happening with the rise of breatharians. These are possibly the first harbingers announcing a change in the energy concept of the human race and this planet to something that will simply define life from the beginning. If this direction of development (which is organically enough) will be allowed to develop and not be overcome by all the genetic interventions and manipulations happening right now, than hopefully no 'bolide event' will have to come to change things once again (remember, life is much more inteligent than we may think..) but if some 'unnatural' hands will manage to take matters to their hands to the extent of 'no coming back' then sadly such an event may very well be a welcomed solution. The first option is much more appealing, so we must allow our developed consciousness to take us there.

Thank you very much Wade for your grand work that encourages and allows us with these kind of reflections, thoughts and perceptions. It may further lead us to the 'longed for' understandings of the role of energy in our life and how in it's purest form it is going to take us to a new and far more promising regions .

Blessings ~

Limor

Wade Frazier

14th March 2014, 15:01

Hi Limor:

What you call Breatharian, I call Level 19:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level19

but us all becoming Level 19s is in no way practical right now. I have tapped that source myself, but more modestly:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#hands1

I doubt that there were many, if any, Level 19s in this society:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

Biologists see extinctions primarily in terms of energy, as do I, and speciation is an adaptive response to new environments, and the adaptations are generally energy-related. My finished essay will make that very clear. Energy not only forms that foundation, it also determines what can sit on that foundation.

I will likely be fairly quiet the next few days, but I will put up the latest, where I just spent a few days on Rome and friends. Again, I have to split it into parts because of Avalon’s space limits.

Best,

Wade

Humanity’s Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution – Part 3

In the waning days of early Mesopotamian civilizations, conservation became a concept. That dynamic played out innumerable times over the succeeding millennia, where an early Golden Age of civilization, with the lands blanketed in forests, gave way to increasingly desertified lands, and a conservation ethic began taking root. It was always too little and too late, however, and the civilization collapsed, leaving behind a wasteland that did not recover for centuries, to often be devastated once again when civilization could reappear. To those other universal aspects of pre-industrial civilizations, that dynamic should be added.

With southern Mesopotamia slowly becoming a wasteland, people began migrating away as environmental refugees, and perhaps the most famous is Abraham; the Old Testament’s founder of the Israelites. Abraham migrated from Ur around 2000 BCE, ultimately settling in Canaan. While I respect the inspiration likely behind a Jesus, who was a historical figure, modern archeologists and historians have not been able to establish much historical accuracy in the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. There is little or no evidence that Moses existed, or that the Exodus, conquest of Canaan (the evidence is that Israelites were Canaanites), and many other Old Testament events really happened. If there was any historical truth at all, the facts were inflated into fantastic stories designed to serve various agendas.

Many stories about Jesus, such as the virgin birth and resurrection, were already circulating in other religions of the day, and there is little evidence that Mohammed existed, and if he did, he likely lived around Jerusalem, not on the Arabian Peninsula. After a career of archeological investigation in the region where the Biblical Israel was founded, one anthropologist likened the Hebrew Bible to propaganda with tiny bits of historical truth in it, as some facts are needed to help people swallow fanciful stories. To modern observers not under the thrall of limbic conditioning, tales of people living to be nearly a thousand (Old Testament), or more than 40,000 years (Sumerian King List) are not taken seriously. But literalist interpretations of ancient texts abound, whether it is religious fundamentalists or scholars such as Velikovsky and Sitchin trying to explain mythical events as if ancient texts were literal truth.

The first five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch, are today considered by scholars to have been a political tract, written centuries after the alleged events occurred. It was similar to the fabrications in the American history taught to today’s schoolchildren, as a way to cultivate blind obedience to the state. Early Israel and Judah were tiny kingdoms in the hills, sandwiched between Assyria and Egypt, which were warring regional powers. Israel was destroyed about 722 BCE, after the Israeli king defied the Assyrian king, and ten of Israel’s tribes were forcibly relocated by Assyria and became lost to history. Those “lost tribes” became the focus of all manner of fantasy for millennia. Writing the Pentateuch was an understandable effort to help Israelites survive, as a kind of nationalistic parable. The New Testament and Koran were also written long after the alleged events, with huge political battles over what the official story would be. Whatever divine inspiration Jesus may have had access to, or other figures in Judeo-Christian or Islamic tales, what is certain is that priesthoods and rulers shamelessly distorted them to serve their agendas of amassing and maintaining wealth and power, in a dynamic that begins with the first civilization and lasts to this day.

The Nile valley made the rise of Egyptian civilization possible, and it had the Old World’s most reliable food supply. Even today, half of Egypt’s population lives on the Nile’s delta. The annual floods brought silt from deforestation and erosion from the highlands to the delta, which kept the fields fertile. Unlike the Mesopotamian disaster, salination was not a major problem for Egyptians, except at Faiyum and irrigated areas above the flood line. The Egyptian and Harappan civilizations were not pristine, being beneficiaries of Fertile Crescent innovations, and arose from hunter-gatherer societies that did not pass through the learning and evolutionary curve for domesticating their plants and animals. Those pristine civilizations may have been the only places on Earth where civilization could first appear. If not for those regions where people domesticated plants, humanity might all be still living like aboriginal Australians did for around 50,000 years.

While Africa did not lose its megafauna like Australia and the Americas did, visitors to North Africa today from ten thousand years ago would have been amazed, and not just because of modern civilization, but all the megafauna that disappeared from North Africa and how desert-like the environment became. Before Egyptian civilization arose, the Nile valley hosted nearly the full complement of iconic African megafauna, with elephants, hippos, lions, rhinos, giraffes and many others, and a staggering abundance of waterfowl lived in the Nile valley and on its delta. That early graveyard of slaughtered humans, which was only discovered because the dammed Nile would soon sink it, was on the Nile’s banks, so humans had been fighting over the Nile’s resources for many millennia when civilization began there. Migrants from the Fertile Crescent began to settle the Nile valley beginning about 6000 BCE, not long before Çatal Höyük was abandoned. Around 3600 BCE, the Nile’s villages began their rise to civilization, and about 3100 BCE the first polity that controlled Upper and Lower Egypt appeared, and dynastic rule began. Gold was mined for the first time on Earth on an industrial scale, and Egypt set the standard for labor brutality in gold mining, not pyramid building. In one many juxtapositions of the “divine” and profane that would be seen in subsequent civilizations, gold was a sacred metal in Egypt, and pharaohs were literally sons of the solar deity Ra. A pharaoh’s primary “job” was interceding with the gods to ensure a proper annual Nile flood. When the floods failed, so did the peasantry’s faith in the nobility, and droughts brought an end to pharaonic dynasties, and subsequent rulers were more modest about their divine abilities to affect the Nile’s annual flood.

By the end of the Old Kingdom around 2200 BCE, elephants, rhinos, wild camels, and giraffes were locally extinct in the Nile valley or on the brink of it. Old Kingdom ships sailed to Lebanon to raze their trees by 2650 BCE, a century before the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. Slaves did not build the pyramids, but mainly agricultural workers working for a wage during the off-season. The entire Giza complex was built in about a century, and remains the ultimate elite-aggrandizing monumental architecture. Ancient Egypt reached the height of its power during the reign of Amenhotep III, around 1350 BCE. Amenhotep III claimed that he personally killed 102 lions; hunting lions was the ultimate sport of pharaohs, after playing with their harems. Tutankhamun, the pharaoh with the resplendent tomb, ruled a generation after Amenhotep III. The lives of thousands of slaves paid for the mask of Tutankhamun’s mummy. Nubian gold mines were filled with the skeletons of dead miners. Nobody survived mining for the pharaohs; they were uniformly worked to death, whether they were men, women, children, elderly, or disabled, with an endless supply of new slaves to replace the dead ones. The Incas would also have a sun god religion, and gold also became a sacred metal reserved for royalty (and silver was also sacred and represented the moon, which Incan royalty also claimed descent from), but they did not work people to death to obtain it. A great deal of Nubian gold ended up in royal tombs, to be looted after the New Kingdom collapsed after the Twentieth Dynasty about 1060 BCE.

While the relatively gentle river valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt saw long, slow declines in their environments, when civilization came to the more mountainous periphery of the Mediterranean Sea, environmental damage came much faster and more dramatically, particularly as the Stone Age gave way to the Bronze and Iron Ages. Before civilization arrived, the Mediterranean’s periphery was heavily forested and, as with Lebanon, cedars were plentiful. The Mediterranean islands had their own megafauna extinctions about 12 kya, with island-dwarfed hippos and elephants going extinct soon after humans arrived. Any place that can support hippos is blessed with an abundance of water, and islands such as Crete and Cyprus were blanketed with verdurous forests before the rise of civilization.

As people fled from the increasingly barren and devastated Fertile Crescent, Bronze Age settlements began growing on the Mediterranean’s east end. During the Babylonian reign of Hammurabi, wood was extremely scarce, and his agents were charged with finding more wood. Under Hammurabi, illegal woodcutting was a capital crime. The search for wood extended past deforested Lebanon to the Mediterranean’s periphery, and Crete’s inhabitants began to trade wood for luxury items with Near East civilizations. The nearly extinct Near East cedar had become reserved for palaces and temples in Mesopotamia, but on Crete, cedar was so abundant that it was used for tool handles and other mundane uses. Trade with the Near East quickly boosted Crete from a forested hinterland, isolated in the eastern Mediterranean, into a powerful state, at least while its forests lasted. In early Minoan civilization, wood was used lavishly. The Minoan success influenced the nearby Peloponnesian peninsula, and Mycenaean civilization began about 1600 BCE. Minoans developed the still-undeciphered Linear A script. The Mycenaean Greeks developed Linear B, and it has been largely decoded and was all elite accounting, and it is likely that Linear A also was only accounting. About 1700 BCE, the Minoan palaces were destroyed, probably by an earthquake, and the palaces were rebuilt on a grand scale, and settlements expanded in the Minoan Golden Age, which lasted about three centuries, and then a swift decline happened which saw the end of Minoan civilization by 1200 BCE, which was then annexed by Mycenaeans.

Many reasons were proffered to explain the Minoan decline and collapse, including the now-rejected idea that a volcanic eruption did it. What is increasingly being cited as the reason for the Minoan decline, and was likely the ultimate reason for its collapse, was that Minoans wiped out their energy supply, primarily via deforestation. Minoans, just as with many other collapsed civilizations, exceeded its carrying capacity. For organisms, carrying capacity always meant food and the ability to reproduce, but for civilizations, it also meant the energy needed to run the civilization’s moving parts, including transportation and the energy used to build structures and goods. If we revisit the “decision” that life faces, whether to use energy to fuel biological processes or build biological structures, civilizations faced the same choice. Humans commandeered the energy that a tree invested in its growth, and there were two basic ways to use it: liberate the energy in the structure by burning it, or use that structure for building human-usable tools or structures, which could include buildings and ships. As previously discussed, metal smelting used stupendous amounts of wood, as did pottery-making and fireplaces and furnaces to heating buildings. Minoans also built a tremendous fleet of ships for trade and military dominance. When rebuilding Minoan palaces, Crete’s inhabitants used wood exuberantly, but by 1500 BCE, the use of wood in palaces declined precipitously, and when Mycenaean Greece took over Crete, the forests were gone and the Greeks used Crete to pasture their sheep.

As discussed previously, in relatively recent history, deforestation and the introduction of sheep was an effective method of turning forests into deserts. Within a few centuries, Crete was turned from verdant forest to sheep pasture, and a civilization arose and vanished. In the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean periphery, introducing goats was another way to ensure that forests never reappeared. Goats easily climb into trees to eat them, but the primary damage that goats and sheep inflicted was that they ate any attempts by the forest to regenerate, and their hooves pounded the ground, flattening and compacting the soils, completing the process begun with deforestation of killing the soil’s role in the hydrological cycle.

As Minoan civilization collapsed and Mycenaean civilization expanded, the forests of Cyprus were the next to go. Beginning around 1300 BCE, Cyprus, with largely intact forests and rich copper deposits, became the center of bronze production, and a deforestation effort even more spectacular than Crete’s commenced. Again, Crete and Cyprus once hosted hippos, and in the pre-deforestation period on Cyprus, pigs roamed the forests. As the moist woodlands quickly began to disappear, pigs could no longer be raised, and goats and sheep were introduced to graze the denuded hillsides. On Mycenaean Greece, they were also rapidly deforesting the Peloponnesian peninsula, but they took steps to at least try to protect their urban areas from the flooding and erosion that deforestation caused, by building dams and dikes to prevent and redirect floods. The Cypriots took no such measures, and the torrents and silt washed down the exposed hillsides and quickly buried and washed away towns and filled harbors. By 1100 BCE, the harbor at Hala Sultan Tekke was completely filled with silt and its use a port ended. Similarly, Enkomi quickly silted up and changed from a coastal city to an inland one which was often flooded with mud and debris from the hillsides. In 1050 BCE, the town was abandoned, and 90% of the settlements on Cyprus had been abandoned by that time. In less than three centuries, Cyprus was turned from a heavily forested island into a deserted wasteland, and the collapse of Cyprus ushered in the Mediterranean’s Iron Age.

Mycenaean Greece arose from Minoan influence, and the Greeks quickly set about to reproduce the Minoan “success.” There was a seductive logic to deforestation and agriculture. The products of deforestation were the very stuff of civilization, with cities built from plundered wood and crops raised on exposed soils, and goats and sheep pastured on the former forest soils. It all made great sense, if only short-term, and as Mycenaean civilization quickly expanded via those dynamics, the people only saw it as “progress,” something to be celebrated, not viewed with alarm.

As the Peloponnesian plains near shore were shorn of their forests, settlements expanded into the hills. Pottery operations began relocating far from settlements so that they could have unchallenged access to the forests to fuel their kilns. The deforested hillsides of Mycenaean Greece unleashed torrents of mud during the rainy season, and the Mycenaean port of Pylos was surrounded by barren lands, with the pine forests long gone, and Mycenaean engineers built earthworks that rerouted the local river around Pylos. Today, the typical Mediterranean “soil” is either limestone bedrock or reddish “soils” which lay atop the limestone and remained after forests and brown topsoils were removed. The Mediterranean’s “soils,” climate, and biomes are not “natural,” but are the result of millennia of Mediterranean civilization. In its turn, Mycenaean civilization collapsed, for the same reasons as the others, as its energy practices were anything but sustainable.

In the late Mediterranean Bronze Age, Troy, situated on the waterway between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, became a coveted port, sitting near Scamander Bay. The Trojan War, made famous by Homer, was fought about 1200 BCE. It was long thought to be a fanciful tale, but archeologists doggedly searched for Troy and excavated it in the 19th century. Scamander Bay is long gone, filled with silt, and Troy was buried by nearly ten meters of silt. The wars that Mycenaean Greeks fought with their neighbors, as with all wars, were primarily resource-based, as the environmentally devastated homeland could no longer support the people in the style to which they had become accustomed.

By 1150 BCE, the civilizations of Mycenaean Greece, the Hittite Empire of Anatolia, the New Kingdom of Egypt’s in Syria and Canaan had all collapsed, and many causes have been considered, but the deforestation and desertification of the region must have had a major influence and was likely the ultimate cause. In Pylos, post-Mycenaean farmers began planting olive trees instead of farming grain, as olive trees could grow in the depleted soils and can even grow in the limestone bedrock. Olives became a famous Greek crop because of Greece’s lost soils. Contemporary observers noticed the environmental devastation that Mycenaean civilization inflicted, and the epic Greek tale Cypria clearly attributes the decline and collapse of Mycenaean civilization to overpopulation and related environmental ruination, and Zeus saved the land by getting rid of humans.

Greece entered a 300-year Dark Age as their forests began to recover, and there was a great migration of Greeks to the Anatolian peninsula, where the pattern of deforestation, siltation, and desertification was repeated. Myus was a port city founded by fleeing Mycenaean Greeks, and today that port sits more than twenty kilometers inland, buried beneath the silt of upriver deforestation and agriculture. Ephesus suffered an identical fate, and that dynamic was repeated all over the Mediterranean’s periphery, and reached its peak with Roman civilization.

As Mycenaean and other civilizations declined and fell, Phoenician civilization saw its civilization peak between 1200 BCE and 800 BCE, with their great fleets ruling the Mediterranean. As with the preceding powers, the Phoenicians established colonies on the Mediterranean’s periphery that had not yet been devastated, and established Carthage about 850-810 BCE.

After centuries of ecological recovery, Greek civilization began to rise again beginning about 700 BCE, and it was an Iron Age, not a Bronze Age, and those Greeks were humble farmers, able to use partially regenerated forests for a self-sufficient lifestyle that could later be seen in the Protestant work ethic and the pioneering spirit. The poet Hesiod hectored his farmer audience with homilies that could have been uttered by Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard. Athens was established before 1400 BCE and became an important Mycenaean city, and began its resurgence in the late years of Greece’s Dark Age, and between 900 BCE and 300 BCE it became one of the more remarkable experiments in the human journey. By 600, resurgent civilization had once more eroded the Greek countryside, and Peisistratus, also known as the Tyrant of Athens, offered a bounty to farmers to plant olive trees, as it was about the only crop that could grow on the badly eroded hills, and farming them did not increase erosion.

In 508 BCE, Athens entered its classical period, which lasted for nearly two centuries. In those two centuries, so much was invented by Greek philosophers and proto-scientists that it has been studied by scholars for thousands of years. One provocative question that scholars have posed is why the Industrial Revolution did not begin with the Greeks. The answer seems to be along the lines of Classic Greeks not having the social organization or sufficient history of technological innovation before wars and environmental destruction ended the Greek experiment. The achievements of Greece over the thousand-year period of their intellectual fecundity are far too many to explore in this essay, but briefly, the Greeks invented: democracy, Western philosophy, Western medicine, the watermill, a monetized economy, branches of mathematics such as geometry, while developing other branches to unprecedented sophistication, and heliocentric astronomy, including the idea that Earth was spherical in shape. Long after the Classic Greek period was over, Hellenic intellectuals and inventors kept making innovations that had major impacts on later civilizations, such as Heron of Alexandria inventing the windmill and steam engine.

For all the nascent enlightenment fermenting in Greece, it was still limited by its resource situation and was in regular warfare with its neighbors. Greek colonies along the Anatolian peninsula’s edge were conquered by Lydia, led by Croesus, who minted the first standardized coins, of electrum, which is a naturally occurring gold/silver alloy. Croesus was defeated in his turn by Persians led by Cyrus the Great. In 499 BCE, Anatolian Greeks waged a war that threw off Persian rule, but started a series of wars with Persia that lasted to 449 BCE. Building the fleets that defeated Persia began decimating Greece’s forests once again, and much of the diplomatic wrangling and outright battling was to deny the belligerents access to forests to build their fleets. Conquering and then destroying entire cities was a Persian tactic and common for the time, and the Persian extermination of Athenian forces at Thermopylae is one of history’s legendary battles. When Athens emerged victorious (after the Persians sacked and burned Athens), they likely had the world’s greatest navy. Building the Parthenon was one of many civic undertakings during Athens’s Golden Age, but it lasted only a generation, but few today would call it very golden. In the world’s first “democracy,” slaves outnumbered citizens and women were virtual prisoners in their homes.

Athens began a war with the Spartan-led Peloponnesian peoples lasting from 431 BCE to 404 BCE. The war was another largely naval one, and fighting over forest access was the prominent dynamic, with Spartans invading Attica and leveling its trees, turning it into a barren wasteland. In the aftermath of Attica’s destruction, a disease broke out and accompanied Attica’s refugees to an increasingly overcrowded Athens, and one of the world’s first recorded epidemics happened, today called the Plague of Athens, and historians and scientists have made many guesses as to the disease’s identity.

As the war continued, the Athenian hinterland was turned into a desert. Plato described the deforestation of Mount Hymettus, which remained barren until my lifetime, when the Greek government began to reforest it, but many trees could only be planted by blasting holes in the limestone bedrock. When residents of Attica returned home after the Spartan occupation, they built their homes with a southern orientation, to take advantage of sunlight, as wood was scarce. After five years of peace with Sparta subsequent to signing a treaty in 421 BCE, Athens took to the offensive again and pretended to intervene in a war in Sicily to protect Ionian colonists, but they really did it to conquer Sicily and plunder its forests and other resources, and thereby build a another naval fleet to conquer Sparta. The Sicilian Expedition was a catastrophe for Athens, and it lost most of its navy. There were other setbacks and victories, but a starving and besieged Athens finally surrendered to the Spartans in 404 BCE. The environment around Athens could feed nothing but “bees,” and where wolves once roamed, not a rabbit could be found. As Athens slowly became the center of a wasteland, the changing perceptions could be seen in contemporary writing. While forests were plentiful in 700 BCE, Greek authors wrote of trees in pragmatic fashion or as impediments to progress. As the forests disappeared along with the ecosystems they supported, an ecological consciousness began to appear. Plato and Aristotle placed forests at the root of a civilization’s health, and Plato gave trees a major role in his Utopia. Conservation only became an idea when the environment had already been ruined by “progress." Numerous commentators of the day wrote about the connections between forests and a healthy water supply, and many clearly saw the relationship between deforestation, erosion, and desertification, including Plato. Aristotle and his professional heir Theophrastus wrote about ecological ideas. Theophrastus could be considered the first ecological writer, and he had the beginnings of an ecosystems approach. He noted that when the region surrounding Philippi was deforested, it became dryer and warmer.

By 395, Athens joined in the Corinthian War against Sparta, and the diplomatic maneuvering included Persia and Egypt. Sparta prevailed with the treaty signed in 387 BCE, but Athens also began recovering and Persia had unchallenged rule over Ionia for more than fifty years, until Alexander the Great of Macedonia conquered them all. With a military prowess unsurpassed until the advent of industrialized warfare, Alexander conquered all early civilizations of note, including Greece, Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and all the way to the edge of India and the Himalayas. Alexander died in a Babylonian palace in 323 BCE, perhaps from poisoning, and his legacy created new connections between East and West, widely spread Greek culture, and helped inspire the next imperial aspirant, Rome.

Rome began as a settlement of shepherd’s huts, became a city around 750 BCE, and naturally fought with their neighbors. The northern Italian Peninsula was dominated by Etruscan civilization during Rome’s early years. But as with all civilizations previously reviewed, they only appeared where the essentials of a stable and relatively abundant energy supply could be exploited, which consisted of a navigable body of water, exploitable forests, and arable land which was usually exposed for agriculture after forests were removed. Etruscan culture was influenced by Greek colonies on the southern end of the Italian peninsula, which in turn influenced Rome. The Italian region was about the last place in Southern Europe that had timber suitable for shipbuilding, and forests near Rome boasted fir and silver fir, which were ideal for building naval ships. Some of Rome’s hills were named after trees that grew on them, such as oak, laurel, and willow. Thick forests grew near Rome in its early days, with a warring tribe able to elude the Roman army by disappearing into a forest near Antium (now called Anzio), and near today’s Naples were the “Avernian” woods, which meant “birdless,” because the trees were so thick that birds did not enter it. A little north of Rome sat the Ciminian forest, a deep and dark forest which no Roman dared enter before 310 BCE, when a Roman expedition explored the forest. The Senate forbade such a dangerous expedition into the unknown, but the intrepid party investigated the forest, with their findings avidly followed by the Roman public. Similar to early Crete, early Rome’s most important export was wood, sold to obtain finished goods from more developed eastern Mediterranean civilizations that had already lost their forests.

Between 540 BCE and 535 BCE, Carthage and Etruria combined to fight Greek colonies where today’s Marseille is, and on Corsica. The Greeks won, but it was a Cadmean “victory” that ended their Corsican settlement. Etruscans ruled Rome in its early days. Around 509 BCE, Rome overthrew its monarchy, established its independence from Etruria, and formed what today is called a republic, which held a tension between the aristocratic ruling class (patricians) versus the non-elite (plebeians). Centuries of interactions and wars with Etruria concluded with the final battle in 282 BCE, and Etruscans were absorbed into Roman culture, disappearing as a people. Etruscan cities became Roman cities, and Etruria’s fate was a preview of the polyglot empire that Rome would become, as it absorbed conquered peoples.

As with Spartans, Macedonians, and other contemporary cultures, military prowess was greatly honored, in that “might makes right” Roman world. Rome began battling with its neighbors early and often, in wars of both offense and defense. Its strategies and tactics ultimately hailed from the Greeks, and it expanded its control over the Italian Peninsula. Other than an invasion and sack of Rome around 390 BCE by Celts, Rome was usually on the winning side. The bountiful forests in the vicinity allowed Rome to rebuild after it was sacked and burned. Even when Rome lost, such as against the Greek Pyrrhus in 280 BCE, he remarked that he could not withstand another “victory” like that, and that comment immortalized him.

As Rome rose, it subdued its neighbors with a mix of diplomacy, alliances, and military superiority, and once it conquered and digested the Italian Peninsula, it played on a larger stage, with the first war with Carthage beginning in 264 BCE, which was initially fought over Sicily, but came to mean Mediterranean dominance. Rome built its first navy during that First Punic War, and local forests provided the wood. The First Punic War lasted to 241 BCE and ravaged both sides, but Rome prevailed. Rome’s success partly relied on its ability to attract private investment in building its navy. Once Carthage was dealt with, Rome began a series wars across the Adriatic that lasted for generations, and by 218 BCE, it was at war with Carthage again. The Second Punic War is the one where Hannibal led elephants through the Alps, and an axiom of warfare was born in that war, which is, “The only battle you have to win is the last one.” While Hannibal defeated the Roman armies in his battles, he had logistical problems and could not gather sufficient forces to conquer Rome. Rome simultaneously fought a war in Macedonia, which was a preview to the imperial troubles it would have centuries later when it became an empire. Carthage was a merchant power and hired mercenaries to fight its wars, which has rarely proven effective. The Second Punic War ended in 201 BCE with Carthage’s Mediterranean influence a shadow of its former glory, and a couple of generations later, Rome completely destroyed Carthage in a “war” that was essentially an extermination campaign. The Romans burned Carthage to the ground in 146 BCE and Carthage’s surviving 50,000 citizens lived short lives of slavery after that, and Carthage’s settlements became Roman settlements. The same year, the Greek city of Corinth suffered the identical fate at Rome’s hands, and Rome ruled the Mediterranean virtually unchallenged. Ancient warfare had always been savage, but the fate of Carthage and Corinth marked a change in how Rome conducted it wars, and helped set the stage for Rome’s transformation into an empire.

The lake that surrounded Tenochtitlán greatly increased its effective hinterland, as the lake was one big low-energy transportation lane. The Mediterranean Sea was essentially one huge lake that provided a low-energy transportation lane to all civilizations along its periphery. Rome was the only power to ever really control all of it for any length of time, and that was a key to its dominance.

In 112 BCE, Rome fought a war against the last resistance in Northern Africa, but the war displayed signs of internal corruption in the Roman Republic, where officials were for sale. Military conquest, with its resultant spoils of plunder, quickly became the Roman way. Rome eventually became a huge parasite, providing almost nothing of value to the world while sending its soldiers to distant lands to conquer and rape them, with plunder routes to Rome’s maw covering vast distances. During the height of the Roman Empire, about 50 million imperial subjects were exploited to essentially feed the capital city’s residents, of which hundreds of thousands received free food. As the Republic became more far-flung, dominating the Mediterranean’s periphery, soldiers began having more allegiance to their generals than the Republic, and that situation contributed to the civil wars that ended the Roman Republic and began its status as an empire.

Scholars have argued whether the civil wars began in the second or first century BCE, but political strife began with a proposal for land reform, tendered in 133 BCE. With Rome’s conquests, it was flush with slaves, and rich landowners began to create great plantations, and the farmers that had been the backbone of Rome were being pushed off the land and outcompeted by slave labor. The situation was a preview of today’s agribusiness conglomerates. The land reform measure tried to reverse that trend, which enraged rich landowners. Slaves also began rebelling, with the first slave revolt beginning in 135 BCE, and the third and last one led by Spartacus ending in 71 BCE. Those slave revolts cost about a million lives. Roman politics was a very bloody affair in those days, where the losers of political wrangling would be murdered, along with their entire families and supporters. The man who proposed the populist land reform law, Tiberius Gracchus, was murdered in the Senate in 133 BCE, along with more than 300 of his supporters. A decade later, his brother, Gaius Gracchus, was elected to office and pursued the same land reforms, and he was murdered, along with 3,000 of his followers. That was the beginning of the Roman Republic’s end.

In 63 BCE, a conspiracy to overthrow the Republic was exposed by Cicero, and in 60 BCE the First Triumvirate was formed, and the three members, including Julius Caesar, all came to violent ends and the Roman civil wars began in earnest. The Second Triumvirate was formed in 43 BCE, and included Augustus Caesar and Mark Antony, of Cleopatra fame. When Augustus defeated Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet in the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, the Roman Republic ended and Rome became an empire; the greatest that humanity has known. At its height, it governed a quarter of humanity. From the beginnings of the Roman Republic in 509 BCE to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 CE, Rome as a republic or empire lasted for nearly two millennia, and its impact on Western Civilization and hence the world has been incalculable. There are far too many important lessons to be learned from the Roman experience than this essay can explore, but I will try to keep the lessons within this essay’s theme and purpose, which is humanity’s relationship to energy and our collective future.

To modern observers, Imperial Rome’s rapaciousness and brutality may be its most notable aspects. Rome’s favorite entertainment was watching people being forced to murder each other. Originally an Etruscan funerary rite, it began getting out of hand by 200 BCE, and by 100 BCE the “games” were state-sponsored, and by Rome’s imperial days, emperors tried to exceed their predecessors with gory spectacles. While the Coliseum, built at the height of the “Peace of Rome,” became the center of that imperial entertainment, arenas dotted the Empire. The Roman Empire’s gladiatorial games consumed at least a million lives. With such blatant disregard for their innumerable victims, Romans could not be expected to display much enlightenment in their relationship with their fellow species, and in fact, the Roman Empire was by far the most environmentally destructive polity of the ancient world. The environmental devastation that previous civilizations imposed on their environments was merely a warm-up. This litany will start with animals. While Egyptian civilization drove all megafauna and many other species to extinction in the Nile Valley, Rome initiated waves of wildlife extinctions that covered all of North Africa, and a great deal of it was for entertainment in the arenas.

Mock “hunts” were staged in the arenas, and a law forbade using African animals for that purpose, but in 170 BCE an official exemption was issued, and animals died in the arenas in mind-boggling numbers. Crocodiles and hippos from the Nile, elephants and lions from Africa, tigers from India, polar bears eating seals, leopards, bears, bulls, and other animals unfortunate enough to be caught ended up in the arenas. They were often used as instruments of execution of condemned people, including criminals, Christians, and other enemies of the state. Cicero mentioned one lion who executed 200 people in the arena. But there was also a professional class that “hunted” those animals, and the animals were also regularly pitted against each other. Augustus had 3,500 animals killed in 26 such events, 9,000 were killed to dedicate the Coliseum, and Trajan’s victory over Dacia was celebrated with 11,000 wild animals killed. Elephants, rhinos, and zebras went extinct in North Africa, but a few lions survived in the Atlas Mountains until the 20th century. Lions, leopards, and hyenas lived in Greece, and leopards lived in Anatolia as late as the first century BCE. The Roman arenas were primarily responsible for their extinction. Animals being hunted to extinction are rare events today; most animals go extinct due to human-caused habitat destruction, but the Roman arenas were a kind of continuation of the Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer, at least until the animals went extinct. But habitat destruction was also monstrous during Rome’s reign.

Livy, writing during the reign of Augustus (27 BCE to 14 CE), recorded the astonishment of his contemporaries when learning that the Ciminian forest was once as dense as those at the Empire’s edge, in today’s Germany. Augustus and Agrippa had just returned from the frontier in Germany, and the Roman public was amazed that such a forest existed, and nobody suspected that only a few centuries earlier, Italy had such forests. All over the Italian Peninsula, the forests quickly disappeared. When the deforested hillsides came down, they often formed marshes and swamps. Malaria is Italian for “bad air,” and by about 300 BCE, Greece got malaria from its deforestation and marshes, and Italy got it a couple of centuries later.

Compared to the Greeks, Romans were not very innovative; they largely copied the peoples they conquered, but the Romans did invent window glass in the first century CE. Just as with those earlier civilizations, as Rome began turning Italy into an arid land, shorn of its forests, Romans began to learn conservation, and they used the new glass panes and oriented their homes to the Sun, to reduce fuel use. Just like the Greeks, as the forests disappeared, the day’s writers developed a romantic view of forests as places for quiet contemplation and, as in Hammurabi’s time, wood rustling became a lucrative pastime of Italian Peninsula thieves.

Rome had an underdeveloped economy. It largely relied on military conquest and plunder, not developing its domestic economy. Nevertheless, on an absolute scale, Rome was unprecedented, and a lead spike in Greenland’s ice cores in the first century CE provides evidence of Rome’s level of industrial activity. The world’s lead mining did not reach Roman levels again until the 1700s. The arenas were only one place of many where slaves died. The mines in Spain were also charnel houses, consuming lives at an astonishing pace. Many Carthaginians ended up in the mines, and Spain was deforested just like Greece, Italy, Anatolia, and the like. Modern observers, similar to those first century Romans, would scarcely believe that those arid nations hosted lush forests not long ago. I spent two months in Europe when I was sixteen and traveled the length of Italy, Greece, and the former Yugoslavia, and sailed through the Greek isles. I vividly recall the tremendous olive groves of Delphi and starker scenes, where islands were nothing more than barren rock and the mountains could have an austere beauty like a moonscape, and had I been told that all of those places hosted thick, moist forests a few millennia ago, I might not have believed it, either.

The Italian Peninsula, during Rome’s Republic days, hosted ceramic and glass-making industries. Those industries died out in Etruria and moved to today’s France, in the Rhone river valley in particular, and by 300 CE, the industry died in France due to deforestation, and moved to today’s Germany before the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Rome invaded the British Isles, too, and leveled about a thousand square kilometers of Britain’s forest for its iron industry. In a century the region was deforested and mining collapsed. As with those earlier civilizations, silt filled ports. Ravenna was a coastal town before the Roman conquest, near the mouth of the Po River, and today it sits several kilometers inland. Ostia, Rome’s port at the Tiber’s mouth, was abandoned after numerous dredging and earthworks projects, filled with silt, becoming a malaria-infested marsh, and Claudius built an artificial harbor at Portus. Trajan enlarged it, but ultimately Trajan built the new port at Civitavecchia, 80 kilometers away, which proved a very costly move. Numerous Roman ports suffered similar fates.

Wade Frazier

14th March 2014, 15:01

Humanity’s Third Epochal Event: The Domestication Revolution – Part 4

Cyprus’s inhabitants learned the lesson of the first forest holocaust, and for the next millennium they carefully managed their wood resources, but Rome arrived, and two centuries of Roman copper operations completely deforested Cyprus, and it was not the last time that Cyprus’s forests became the subject of imperial plunder, because after a couple of centuries of recovery from Rome, Islamic and Christian empires fought over its forests.

North Africa was treated the same way. The Carthaginian environs became one big plantation for Rome, and centuries of Roman farming and deforestation turned Carthage into today’s desert nation of Libya. Rome ruthlessly deforested North Africa, especially near Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. The lavish lifestyles in Rome, compared to the short lives of misery that those who supported it, has no greater contrast in the ancient world, and arguably in world history. The Romans loved their baths and bacchanalian delights, and a fleet of sixty ships sailed the Mediterranean to find wood to heat Rome’s baths. Most of their loads came from Africa’s forests. I believe that is the only time in world history when firewood was freight for seagoing ships, and it is likely that the “lake” of the Mediterranean made that enterprise feasible. The energy-density of wood and the energy costs of shipping it make firewood uneconomical for shipping by sea, except in the Roman Empire’s insane economy. Roman aristocrats developed a fetish for a type of sandarac tree, and within a century that species was driven to extinction.

After defeating Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet, Augustus and succeeding Roman Emperors made the Nile’s breadbasket their personal preserve. The arrival of the emperor’s wheat fleet from Egypt each year was a big event for Rome’s hungry mouths. It is somewhat fitting that the last remnant of the ocean that has provided humanity with most of its oil was also the low-energy transportation lane for the world’s greatest empire.

Economics is the study of humanity’s material wellbeing, but humans have rarely thought past their immediate economic self-interest, even when the long-term prospects were obviously suicidal, such as today’s global energy paradigm. Because environmental issues affect humanity’s material wellbeing, they are economic in nature. As can be seen so far in this essay, there was little awareness or seeming caring in early civilizations that they were destroying the very foundations of their civilizations. Even if they did not care how much other life forms suffered, they did not seem to realize that it also meant that those oppressed and exterminated organisms and wrecked environments would not provide much benefit to humanity in the future, especially energy, whether it was food or wood.

Far more oblivious, however, is when the predilection is not using yardsticks to measure economic reality, but manipulating the yardsticks. From the earliest days of using “precious” metals as a medium of exchange, humans have been obsessed with cheating the system. As Adam Smith once noted, so-called precious metals are only “precious” because they are scarce. Smith called gold rushes about the most counterproductive activity that humanity could engage in. He stopped short of calling it stupid, but others did not refrain from it. The obsession with gold does did not even rise to the level of economic short-sightedness; anybody questing after easy gold is a thief, trying to steal from their societies to get a free ride. When nations invade others to steal their gold, that is naked, aggressive theft. With the economic logic that had a fleet sailing around the Mediterranean seeking firewood for hot baths, Rome invading other peoples to steal their gold makes a certain absurd and evil sense, and Rome did it regularly. Their invasion of Dacia (today’s Romania) in 105 CE was one of those instances, and it was done by one of the “good emperors,” Trajan, during the Peace of Rome. After conquering Dacia to fill the coffers with gold, silver, and plunder, where they razed the capital city to the ground, Trajan’s troops brought fifty thousand prisoners to Rome be sold as slaves, and ten thousand captured Dacians were forced to fight to the death in gladiatorial combat in the ensuing celebration, when 11,000 animals also died, and a still-standing monument commemorates Trajan’s heroic deed. During the Peace of Rome, Jews had uprisings against Roman rule, and Rome brutally put down the final rebellion in 135 CE, in the final scattering of the Jewish people. What Assyria and Babylonia began, Rome finished.

After two centuries of “peace” and good times, the Empire began unravelling. The debate surrounding the Roman Empire’s collapse has been a far larger cottage industry than arguing why the megafauna went extinct, but I think that Thomas Homer-Dixon has it right that Rome ran out of energy, or stated more precisely, its EROI declined to a level where the Empire became vulnerable to disruptions. When Rome crashed, it crashed hard.

Energy is the master resource of all organisms, all ecosystems, and all economies, and when a civilization centralizes its energy consumption, food and wood in pre-industrial civilizations, to a central city, and it has to keep expanding further and further from that city to obtain that energy, the tyranny of distance is going to reduce the EROI of those increasingly distant energy resources. Also, the practices of deforestation and agriculture provide short-term agricultural yields, but the wood would be almost instantly used (about 90% of the wood imported to Rome was burned, which was the typical ratio for ancient cities ). The soils would erode and become depleted and often abandoned as the land could no longer support farming, partly because the entire process made the land more arid. If they could import water to irrigate (usually a rare situation), that could help ameliorate the process, but it took more time and effort, making it more difficult. There were no accountants, scientists, or engineers monitoring and measuring the process, but all of those dynamics would reduce the EROI of the energy system, making it less resilient and vulnerable to disruptive shocks.

In those dynamics, where the imperial logic was to devour ever-more territory and people, it was doomed to end, and the end began with the world’s first great epidemic, the Antonine Plague, which began in 165 CE and seems to have carried off one emperor in 169 CE and may have killed Marcus Aurelius in 180 CE. In a possible case of the chickens coming home to roost, the plague was carried to Rome by troops coming back from a “good emperor” campaign in Mesopotamia. Marcus Aurelius’s death marked the Peace of Rome’s end. Another epidemic appeared in 250 CE, claiming another emperor in 270 CE as it still raged. After Rome was no longer the Empire’s capital, in 541 CE the Plague of Justinian hit Constantinople, which may have been bubonic plague. Those are about the only known epidemics of ancient times, including the Plague of Athens. By 600 CE, Rome’s population collapsed to about 100,000 people from a million at 100 CE, and in 1084, during the peak of the Medieval Warming Period and a time of great city-building in Europe, Rome’s population was 15,000, with its residents living among the ruins of the greatest civilization that Earth had yet seen. After Rome collapsed, the entire Mediterranean periphery went moribund for centuries, slowly recovering from the environmental and human devastation of Rome’s reign.

As previously discussed, when scientists and scholars discuss megafauna extinctions, including Neanderthals, or the collapse of civilizations, some will always attribute such events to climate change, deflecting responsibility from humans. Climate change has probably never been the ultimate cause for those events. The ultimate cause was likely always humans and everything else is a proximate cause, at most. In the past several hundred years, there are clear instances where deforestation and sheep grazing quickly turned moist forests and/or fertile farmland into semi-deserts in less than a century, particularly in the kinds of temperate regions where the first civilizations arose. When scientists have investigated and reconstructed the dynamics that led to the collapse of Cahokia, the classic Maya, or the Anasazi, the story was always the same, where human civilizations altered the ecosystems, usually via deforestation and agriculture, which made them lose their resiliency and a drought did them in, and those urban areas were permanently abandoned. It is similar to the hypothesis for why mass extinctions have punctuated the eon of complex life: those multi-tiered energy systems are inherently unstable and susceptible to collapse.

The rise and fall of Rome is an iconic example of the trajectories of pre-industrial civilizations. Only so much energy surplus can be skimmed off economic systems based on the energy of wood, food, and muscle power. I wanted to cover some civilizations in detail to make the dynamics clear, and will largely only survey other pre-industrial civilizations, as the patterns were similar, with some important variations.

Wade Frazier

16th March 2014, 19:43

Hi:

After a two-day break, I am back at it. Again, the early drafts of essay sections that I have put up on this thread will look plenty different by the time the essay is published. For instance, I added this paragraph to my Roman Empire section:

"The EROI of elephant flesh easily explains the Cro-Magnon obsession with them, as well as why they disappeared so quickly along with the other megafauna, but the really big game were whales. Whales are an order of magnitude larger than elephants, with the blue whale about thirty times the size of today’s largest elephant. Claudius played “gladiator” with a trapped killer whale at the Roman port of Ostia, and by about 500 CE, whales had been hunted to extinction in the Mediterranean. Until humans achieved the social organization and technological prowess that allowed them to sail the seas and hunt whales, that energy source remained unexploited. After Rome collapsed, professional whaling did not resume for another millennium (other than Basques in the Bay of Biscay, beginning around 1050 CE), when Europeans learned to sail the oceans with history’s greatest energy technology to that time: sailing ships that could navigate the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans."

As I near the end of the essay, I keep being reminded that I am really hunting for needles in haystacks. I am continually besieged by naïve notions of how the world works, with plenty of denial at their foundation. The people I will be looking for have had some awakening event that gets them past those barriers to comprehension, and they will either have relinquished or be well on their way to relinquishing their scarcity-based conditioning:

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

While there are conspiratorial aspects of what is happening, it is really minor, and conspiracism can be a rabbit hole that people disappear into and never emerge from. Also, most fringe stuff is invalid and swallows up many who travel off the beaten path. To get to the good stuff and productive understandings is like walking the razor’s edge, and the people I will be looking for will not settle for comforting fictions, but they want to know the truth, whatever it might be, because only that will set us free.

I know that that is going to be far less than 1% of the population, but the Internet can help me find them, or them find me.

I really need to resist the many Level 10—ish suggestions I keep getting:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level10

where I water down what I am doing for mass appeal. That is a path toward getting nothing at all done. Again, if somebody really understands my message, it is virtually guaranteed that nobody else in their daily life will. Those are just the numbers, sad as they are, but out of seven billion people, finding seven thousand I think is feasible, but we will see. That is far more than initiated any of the other epochal events in the human journey.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

16th March 2014, 20:28

Hi:

I’ll try to keep these to a minimum, but I cannot overemphasize the dynamic below, and the second paragraph I just wrote:

Energy is the master resource of all organisms, all ecosystems, and all economies, and when a civilization centralizes its energy consumption, food and wood in pre-industrial civilizations, to a central city, and it has to keep expanding further and further from that city to obtain that energy, the tyranny of distance is going to reduce the EROI of those increasingly distant energy resources. Also, the practices of deforestation and agriculture provide short-term agricultural yields, but the wood would be almost instantly used (about 90% of the wood imported to Rome was burned, which was the typical ratio for ancient cities ). The soils would erode and become depleted and often abandoned as the land could no longer support farming, partly because the entire process made the land more arid. If they could import water to irrigate (usually a rare situation), that could help ameliorate the process, but it took more time and effort, making it more difficult. There were no accountants, scientists, or engineers monitoring and measuring the process, but all of those dynamics would reduce the EROI of the energy system, making it less resilient and vulnerable to disruptive shocks.

After newly exposed forest soils have produced a few crops, the yield will decline due to nutrient depletion. When the croplands receive less precipitation due to desertification, yields drop. When soils wash downstream via erosion, crop yields in those eroded soils will decline. Those effects reduce the EROI of farming those lands. When cropland is abandoned due to aridity, nutrient depletion, and erosion, and lands further from Rome were conquered, deforested, and farmed, it took more energy to transport those crops to Rome than with farms closer to Rome. That also depressed the EROI. When harbors silted up and needed dredging, or were eventually abandoned and a port was built further away, that also reduced the EROI of Rome-bound food. When food was used to feed soldiers who traveled increasingly vast distances to conquer and plunder peoples and their lands, those would be lower-EROI ventures than conquests closer to Rome. That dynamic has also been called imperial overreach in academic parlance, but in scientific terms, it is really just sucking the dregs of low-EROI resources after high-EROI energy sources have been depleted. Rome’s decline was really just another resource-depletion story. Humanity’s first one was killing off the megafauna, and Rome only experienced what Sumerian, Minoan, Mycenaean and numerous other early civilizations already suffered. Rome just did it on an unprecedented scale.

That dynamic also richly applies to today’s industrial economy, where the easy hydrocarbons are all gone, and the USA genocidally invades Hydrocarbon Country:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

and where we have short-lived “booms” such as fracking, mining shale oil in North Dakota and tar sands in Canada. Those all have EROIs of less than 4, and even around 2, which is a far cry from EROIs of 100-to-1 that East Texas oil had nearly a century ago:

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

That resource-depletion scenario, of steadily declining EROI, until the energy resource was gone or it was not worth mining anymore, extended to forests, whales, fur, and hydrocarbons. Of course, the end of the hydrocarbon era will make Rome’s collapse look like a picnic, unless we get to have FE. :)

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

17th March 2014, 04:56

Hi:

The essay’s progress is fairly linear, but not always, as I end up revisiting earlier parts of the essay as I engage new material on various subjects that touch on the earlier chapters of the essay. I am seeing a seeming of lack of communication between various disciplines, where the data is “congealing” rather impressively, but even multidisciplinary efforts seem to be missing some connections, and one of them is how the disappearance of the world’s megafauna neatly coincides with what is now known about early human migrations. I’ll see sporadic acknowledgement of the connection, but it sure looks like that wherever behaviorally modern humans arrived on their global migration from that founder group of 60-50 thousand years ago, all other humans and all megafauna went extinct at about the same time. And we also have a great deal of evidence that they “interacted.” DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans is in the DNA of human descendants of the populations that encountered them. Proboscidean (elephant) hides have been found in South America, where humans made shelters out of them. The Australian megafauna that went extinct just when humans arrived seem to have butcher marks on their bones, and great fires in Australia and Indonesia coincide with the first signs of human habitation as well as the megafauna extinctions.

Again, the EROI of megafauna dwarfed every other food source, and those animals that never saw even a monkey before would have been east meat for those first human arrivals. I understand scientific and scholarly caution, but the pattern seems obvious, and I have not really seen anybody putting the puzzle together like that yet. I think that in the near future, many uncertain dates of early human arrival are going to be calibrated to when the megafauna and other humans disappeared. It is being done here and there, but nobody is really seeing it as a truly global phenomenon yet that I have seen, not incorporating the latest genetic and other findings. I won’t be so cautious in my essay. I have to believe that somebody else has done it, but I have not yet found it.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

17th March 2014, 12:46

Hi:

As I survey the other pre-industrial civilizations (those early ones had similar dynamics to all the others), here are some warm-ups to industrial civilization and Peak Oil:

http://www.societalmetabolism.org/aes2010/Proceeds/DIGITAL%20PROCEEDINGS_files/PRESENTATIONS/Invited%201Charlie_Hall_Presentation.pdf

http://www.advisorperspectives.com/newsletters12/pdfs/Energy_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations.pdf

Such authors may hear from me after I publish my essay, but I have found people like those to be among the most heavily-entrenched Level 3s:

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

but they do understand, very well, how energy runs the show.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Robert J. Niewiadomski

17th March 2014, 18:31

This NewScientist article on "reducing energy costs" might be of "some" interest to this thread spirit. Although not at all enlightening it gives an impression of general attitude to the so called "energy crisis".
Clean energy or cheap energy? We can have both (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129600.200-clean-energy-or-cheap-energy-we-can-have-both.html)

My reaction? Facepalm with a pinch of aargh:(

Sorry if you find this post to be a spam :(

PS
I am being kept away from this thread lately by my duties :( I wish i had more time...

Wade Frazier

17th March 2014, 19:24

Hi Robert:

No, not spam, but also the usual stuff. Scientists with a clue know how perilous our situation is. They understand quite well how energy runs everything, and that burning up our primary energy source million times as fast as it was made is crazy. The collapse of industrial civilization will make everything that went before it look like a warm-up.

Climate scientists and biologists are terrified. The sixth mass extinction is well underway, but it has been mostly “on the ground” as we hunted all the easy meat to extinction, have been working our way down the food chains ever since and are wiping out habitats at a surreal pace. Human-induced climate change is only getting started, and that one may scare scientists more than anything else, as epic crop failures and rising oceans can displace or starve billions of people, and they will not go quietly, and if World War III happens, it will likely happen because of fighting over Middle East oil, but it could also be fighting over food and water in the poorer nations, but they are usually not the ones with nukes.

I have called this situation a race of the catastrophes, and in that light, the denial that I see, and that Brian and other fellow travelers saw, is really kind of off-the-scale insanity, to not even be willing to consider FE as the permanent solution to all of those looming catastrophes, which is why Brian wondered if humanity is really a sentient species:

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

I understand the point. :)

That Godzilla wants to terraform Mars as his ultimate survival enclave, while he has suppressed FE and a host of world-saving technologies, is only part of the insanity.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

18th March 2014, 15:24

Hi:

I am doing some things to try to keep the chapter from becoming too monstrous, and here is what I produced since the last chapter post.

Best,

Wade

China’s was the second pristine civilization to rise, and although the Tibetan Plateau and Himalayas separated China from the Fertile Crescent and India, there was cultural and technological diffusion, and China was ahead of Fertile Crescent civilizations at times in technological and cultural innovation. By nine kya, agriculture was firmly established in China. China has had less investigation of its prehistory, but it seems clear that China’s deforestation began with agriculture, just like everyplace else, and by 1000 BCE, China was largely deforested. The rice paddy is the most sophisticated pre-industrial agricultural system ever created. It began adding to Earth’s methane concentration by 3000 BCE, and rice paddies bred malaria, to the extent that the paddy system in southern China was not successful until the local populace had partially adapted to malaria. As deforested lands alternately flood and desertify, managing water in China became the foundation of imperial practice like nowhere else in history. While pharaohs claimed divine control over the Nile’s flood, in practice they did nothing at all. Chinese emperors and the states they controlled, however, owed their legitimacy in their subjects’ eyes to how well they controlled flooding and drainage. The Yellow and Yangtze rivers carried more than thirty times the silt that the Nile did, and deforestation with the resulting flooding, siltation, and desertification have been major Chinese problems for thousands of years. While the idea has been challenged, the idea that China reached early political unity due to few geographic barriers has merit. China has been politically unified nearly continually for more than two millennia.

In northern China, dry farming was practiced, beginning with millet, and in southern China the rice paddy system dominated. China and East Asia never had the level of animal domestication that Fertile Crescent and European civilizations had, and human excrement was used to fertilize East Asian crops for millennia, up until industrialization. The lack of domestic animals in China meant that any kind of wild animal, including arthropods, became food.

Many important early innovations can be traced to China, with the earliest pottery yet discovered made there about 20 kya. The Chinese invented paper about 200 BCE, the fishing reel in the fourth century CE, toilet paper in the sixth century CE, paper money and porcelain in the seventh century CE, gunpowder in the ninth century CE, movable type and using a compass for navigation around 1040 CE, bombs and hand cannons in the 13th century CE, along with other weaponry such as land and water mines. Chinese innovations helped lead to Europe’s rise. Horses were not primarily used for plowing until the Chinese invention of the horse collar in the fifth century CE, which was used in Europe by 1000 CE. Horse-drawn plows could move 50% faster than ox-drawn plows, which increased Europe’s agricultural surplus. China mounted the largest oceanic naval excursions to their time, between 1405 CE and 1433 CE, but China soon became insular for reasons still debated. Europe then took the technological lead and soon conquered the world. China’s political unity was likely the ultimate reason for its change in direction, where controlling the throne controlled the empire’s direction.

China followed the developmental trajectory of other pristine states, where it was initially peaceful for thousands of years, until the chiefdom began giving way to early states, and potentates were men, they had harems, and so forth. Elites commandeering their disproportionate share of peasant-provided agricultural surplus is a universal aspect of all pre-industrial civilizations. China and Fertile Crescent civilizations both suffered from intrusions by pastoral societies from Eurasia’s grasslands. Marija Gimbutas presented her Kurgan Hypothesis in 1956 to explain the spread of Indo-European languages, and the hypothesis’s primary thrust was that male-dominated pastoral peoples, with their male, sky-god religions, conquered agricultural peoples with their Earth-based goddess religions. Her hypothesis was used by feminists ever since and created a firestorm of controversy. The Kurgan Hypothesis may not be as wrong as its detractors allege. However, as with many radical hypotheses, the initial one was found deficient during testing, but variants of the original hypothesis survive, which is the case today.

Nomadic pastoral societies did attack and invade settled agricultural ones, and the spread of the Indo-European language and pastoralism is probably a valid connection, but for different reasons than Gimbutas hypothesized. Human herder societies independently developed the ability to digest milk past infancy, which increased their carrying capacity five-fold versus raising animals for meat, and then they became a threat to sedentary civilizations. Not only was it a huge energy advantage for pastoral societies that could digest milk, but it made many marginal environments inhabitable by sedentary societies, and made already settled ones far more energy and nutrient secure. Also, when peoples began to rely more on cattle than crops, they could become more mobile. Pastoral societies of the steppe were patrilineal, which are the most violent societies, and they indeed invaded settled societies and often set themselves up as the new elite. Peoples who could digest milk not only came to dominate grasslands, but they also did well in marginal agricultural lands, such as Northern Europe. The allele that allows lactose digestion reaches nearly 100% in northern Europe, while those that evolved without milk-producing animals, such as Chinese and Native American peoples, cannot digest milk at all. Lactose tolerance appeared about 8 kya in pastoralists and spread with their migrations. In places such as Northern Europe, there were no vast grasslands to roam, pastoralists became sedentary, and the combination of farming and dairy cows was northern Europe’s staple for millennia.

Other genetic adaptations happened in the same region around the same time. Blue eyes are blue due to a lack of iris pigment, and first appeared between six kya and ten kya, and the region around the Baltic states is thought to be the home of blue eyes, as it has the highest blue-eye frequency on Earth. Blond hair first appeared in northern Europe about 11 kya, and first became prevalent around Lithuania about five kya. Those losses of pigment are related to light skin, which was an adaptation to reduced sunlight in regions further from the equator. Lighter skin evolved independently in Europe and East Asia, and may have evolved numerous times, and in Europe it seems to have evolved about six kya. Racism is a relatively recent phenomenon because race itself is recent on the evolutionary scale, as geographically isolated humans began the process of speciation.

It is generally accepted today that the original pristine states were based on agriculture and before those societies became states, when they were at the village level of social organization, they were largely classless and women had high status, likely related to women’s economic contribution. As agriculture became masculinized, probably due to the physical requirements of forest clearance and handling draft animals, men ascended in importance and women’s status declined. The general thrust of the Kurgan Hypothesis is likely accurate, in that pastoralists invaded agricultural societies, where violent patrilineal nomadic societies invaded sedentary societies and set themselves up as the elite and the religion of the conquerors became the religion of the conquered. The agriculturalists of Europe, however, were likely hunter-gatherers who adopted agriculture, not those from pristine states. They may have not been so peaceful, and a European mass grave from today’s Germany dates to about seven kya, about the time of the alleged Kurgan Invasion, and debate has raged whether that grave was due to endemic violence or invaders. Beginning about 3500 BCE, from archeological examinations of European graves, evidence of violent death, particularly for males, shows a dramatic increase. Between 3500 BCE and 2000 BCE, the rise of the professional warrior can be seen in Europe’s artifacts and grave goods. The Iceman died in the Alps about 3300 BCE, and he died violently. New Guinea’s highlanders lived in isolation for many millennia and adopted agriculture, but as with other relict populations of the founder group migrations, they were in continual warfare, and straying into another village’s territory was risking death. Anthropologists looking for an epoch in the human journey when neighboring peoples coexisted peacefully have always come away disappointed. There have been brief, non-violent phases of the human journey, in some situations, usually where there was relative economic abundance. When resources became scarce, and theft, coercion, and violence became profitable, then bloodshed usually attended the situation.

About 1000 BCE, one of the largest migrations in the human journey began, called the Bantu Expansion, which expanded because of their use of iron and agriculture, and they displaced or absorbed hunter-gatherers as they expanded across sub-Saharan Africa. In a dynamic too common in human history, invading men mated with the women of the invaded, which mitochondrial DNA provides evidence of.

Mesoamerica’s Domestication Revolution was one of two certainly pristine ones known, and the one around today’s Peru may have been another. The other two pristine states of the human journey arose there, and they followed the same general patterns as Sumer and China in that they began peacefully with no classes and, as they grew into states, men came to dominate, elites appeared with monumental architecture devoted to them, potentates had harems and divine sanction, and other features that seemingly evidenced universal human traits and/or reactions to similar environmental conditions. The development of religion in what became Mesoamerica’s pristine culture, the Zapotec state, has been documented by archeologists who traced a seven-thousand-year progression from hunter-gatherers to egalitarian early agriculturists to an elite-dominated society to a pristine state. It was similar to how Mesopotamian civilization developed, including the replacement of singing and dancing by priestly rituals. Highly controversial aspects of Mesoamerican societies have been human sacrifice and cannibalism. They definitely happened and on a pretty grand scale at times. The question of Western Hemispheric cannibalism has touched on the lack of domestic animals, so it may have had nutritional aspects, or what is called culinary cannibalism. But most seeming cannibalism is of the cultural cannibalism variety, where eating flesh has symbolic meaning, whether it is eating somebody to keep their spirit in the family/tribe or gain spiritual dominance over a fallen foe. Cannibalism was a common charge made against peoples that Europe conquered, but was usually a sensational allegation to remove their humanity and justify their bloody treatment by Europe. Columbus made his cannibalism accusations against Caribs from whole cloth.

It took about two millennia to domesticate maize (wheat may have only taken a couple of centuries or less to domesticate), for one of humanity’s greatest feats of domestication. Maize was a near-universal staple among the Western Hemisphere’s agrarian natives in 1492. Anthropologists have surmised that the Western Hemisphere was a few thousand years “behind” Old World civilizations in 1492. In South America, the Moche culture, which produced the Western Hemisphere’s other pristine state, began smelting bronze about a thousand years before Europeans arrived, as elite prestige goods. What kinds of civilizations might have emerged from the Western Hemisphere had Europe not intervened will always remain a tantalizing question.

Because the Western Hemisphere’s inhabitants were virtually all in their Stone Age, they did not ravage their environments like Old World civilizations did, and many societies were environmentally sustainable and provided seeming answers to questions that scientists have asked about Old World civilizations' development. The natives of coastal California were familiar with agriculture, as it was practiced by inland tribes, but they never adopted it. California was so bountiful, and its climate was so human-friendly, that they retained their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Similarly, northward on the Pacific Coast, natives created an economy where half of its calories derived from salmon runs, and those peoples were relatively sedentary without agriculture. Natives turned the Great Plains into a big pasture for bison, with the biome partly maintained by annually burning the grasslands. In Mesoamerica, milpa farming has been sustainable for thousands of years. In the Amazon, the natives transformed the rainforest, where a higher proportion of trees provided human-digestible foods than any other “wild” place on Earth, and they terraformed thin tropical soils with charcoals (intentional) and ceramics (maybe unintentional), making super-soils called terra mulata and terra preta. In summary, native practices in the Western Hemisphere were often sustainable if not quite abundant. But when civilizations arose, they had similar problems to their Old World counterparts, and not just the injustices of steeply-hierarchal societies, but environmentally.

The North American city of Cahokia, North America’s only pre-Columbian city, likely collapsed from environmental over-taxation. The Anasazi civilization also overtaxed its environment and collapsed in a drought, as did the Classic Maya. The lauding of Native American environmental conscience seems largely a romantic invention, similar to the “peaceful savage” fantasy. While Native Americans obviously had a far gentler tenure on the land than what happened in the Old World, it may have been only a matter of time before they “progressed” with metal smelting, rampant deforestation, and the like. Without draft animals (the bison was probably the only candidate for that, and turning it into a domesticated draft animal may not have been feasible), their civilizations might have taken very different paths than the Old World’s. But we will never know and speculation about it does not seem very profitable, but those civilizations did show different ways to do it, even if what the Spaniards stumbled into seemed familiar, with cities, markets, elites, monumental architecture, warriors, priests, peasants, slaves, and so on.

This essay’s purpose, regarding the human journey’s epochal phases, is to show how humans achieved each epochal event, which was always about tapping a new energy source, and how each event transformed the human journey. While the civilizations of India and Southeast Asia had unique qualities and achievements, and the Buddhist religion has a great deal to commend (founded in the name of another “rebel,” as Christianity was, as well as other world religions), the economic methods of all pre-industrial sedentary societies were essentially the same. Agriculture provided a local and stable energy supply that allowed for sedentism, forests were removed to make way for crops, and domestic animals were used to provide labor and/or flesh products, while their manure helped replenish soil nutrients depleted by agriculture. Everywhere that agriculture appeared, so did civilization, with varying levels of urbanity. Elites dominated all civilizations, and they almost always invoked either a divine nature or divine sanction to justify their status, and they always engaged in conspicuous economic consumption. Agricultural workers provided the food that sustained civilization, but the agricultural surplus of such systems were always modest, and the primary preoccupation of all peoples for all time before the Industrial Revolution was avoiding starvation, which industrialized peoples seem to have partly forgotten.

The methods of pre-industrial civilizations, with deforestation and agriculture, were never really sustainable, as they disrupted ecosystems and even affected local climates. The only way that the milpa system, for instance, was sustainable was that they let the land go fallow for eight years after two years of crops, to let the damage heal before farmers repeated the cycle. Only when practices were intermittent, to allow ecosystems to recover somewhat, could they be called sustainable, but even then the idea is somewhat misleading. It was an ecosystem commandeered for human benefit at the expense of the original ecosystem’s denizens, and the practice never approached true abundance. Those civilizations were all mired in scarcity, with only about one person in a thousand living to a ripe old age, and only about one-in-100,000 “making it” economically (the potentate). In such a world of scarcity, life was often cheap, and virtually every pre-industrial civilization had forced servitude, from forced marriages to debt bondage to chattel slavery to becoming a human sacrifice to other forms. Because of pre-industrial civilizations’ low economic productivity, economic freedom primarily resided with the elite, so the struggle for freedom characterizes all pre-industrial civilized peoples. However much peoples around the world seemed different, with different cultures, they were all still UP. With the contributions from China and other civilizations, much of it coerced, such as what the Western Hemisphere provided to the world (potatoes, cassava, maize, sweet potatoes, a functioning democracy, mountains of gold and silver, and many other benefits), Europe conquered the world, and along the way it tapped a new energy source.

To again compare people from different epochs, where that stone tool Tesla could not have imagined what his/her invention would lead to a half million years later, or how a member of the founding group could not have comprehended what their journey led to fifty thousand years later, imagine a hunter-gatherer of ten thousand years ago being dropped into Rome at 100 CE, much less London in 1600 CE. History has some relevant examples. When Ishi, the last of his people, came out of hiding in his dying world and strode into civilization, it caused a sensation. He soon died of tuberculosis, but his encounters with civilization were recorded. He attended an opera, and the popular account portrayed his rapport with the diva, but Ishi actually stared in amazement at the audience, as he had never before seen so many people in one place. When he saw an airplane in flight, he laughed in amazement. Imagine a hunter-gatherer of ten thousand years ago being dropped into imperial Rome. That hunter-gatherer had seen dogs, but horses, cows, sheep, and the like would have been astounding, and watching a horse or ox pull a cart would have been stunning. Crops would have been an amazing sight. Imagine that hunter-gatherer at the Coliseum. The building and crowd alone would have boggled his mind, even if the festivities might have been horrifically familiar. Metals and glass would have seemed magical. Writing had not yet been invented, so even the concept would have been difficult. There were no more singing and dancing religious rituals, and no wide-open spaces to hunt a meal. Imagine that hunter-gatherer visiting a Roman bath. Hot water alone would have been surreal, while the cavorting might have been delightful. What would his reaction have been to Rome’s markets? Rome was also loud and could be a hellish existence, so the hunter-gather might have longed to flee to the countryside before long, but the countryside would have little resembled the one he knew. He obviously would not have understood anything that anybody said, but they were also all members of UP, so he would have seen many behaviors and traits that he eventually understood, but how long would his shock have lasted? Could he have really ever adapted to Roman society (if he did not quickly end up in the arena as a novelty)? It was all made possible by the local and stable energy source that agriculture provided, which led to an epoch that changed very little until the next energy source was tapped: the hydrocarbon energy that powered the Industrial Revolution. The rest of this chapter will survey the developments that led to that momentous event.

Wade Frazier

18th March 2014, 17:20

Hi:

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

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

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

18th March 2014, 21:20

Hi:

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

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

19th March 2014, 22:59

Hi:

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

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

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

http://www.pureenergysystems.com/events/conferences/2004/NewEnergyMovement/index.html

where Mark spoke:

http://www.pureenergysystems.com/events/conferences/2004/NewEnergyMovement/6900049_MarkComings/index.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best,

Wade

The Mark Comings Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wade Frazier

20th March 2014, 19:15

Hi:

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

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

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

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

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

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

My experiment with Wikipedia several years ago:

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

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

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

Off to go hiking. Somebody has to do it. :)

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

20th March 2014, 23:03

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

Wade Frazier

21st March 2014, 02:59

Hi:

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

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

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

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

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

When I encountered the Peak Oilers:

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

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

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

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

Time for bed.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

21st March 2014, 17:24

Hi:

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

Best,

Wade

Epochal Event 3.5 – The Rise of Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wade Frazier

22nd March 2014, 18:09

Hi:

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

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

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=652292&viewfull=1#post652292

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

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

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

22nd March 2014, 20:52

Hi:

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

http://www.pureenergysystems.com/events/conferences/2004/NewEnergyMovement/6900049_MarkComings/index.html

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

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

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

23rd March 2014, 15:32

Hi:

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

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

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

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

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?32399-A-Future-Earth&p=672748&viewfull=1#post672748

Going to go play now.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

23rd March 2014, 20:06

Hi:

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

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/03/22/kelly-mcparland-nasa-backed-study-indicates-its-elizabeth-may-or-mass-extinction-your-choice/

http://www.scribd.com/doc/212697658/Handy-Paper-for-Submission-2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to run.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

24th March 2014, 11:10

Hi:

I just saw these, this morning:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-23/probably-most-important-chart-world

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-22/guest-post-oil-limits-and-economy-one-story-not-two

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

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

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2014-03-23/anti-science-those-who-wish-debate-climate-threatened-death-or-jail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

as people such as Brian O discovered the hard way:

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

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

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

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

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=811647&viewfull=1#post811647

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=803353&viewfull=1#post803353

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

24th March 2014, 13:17

Hi:

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Humanity’s Fourth Epochal Event: The Industrial Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wade Frazier

25th March 2014, 22:28

Hi:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

26th March 2014, 19:37

Hi:

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

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

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

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

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=811647&viewfull=1#post811647

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

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

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

27th March 2014, 03:07

Hi:

I read this little ditty just now:

http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Showdown-in-Ukraine-Putins-Quest-for-Ports-Oil-Pipelines-and-Gas.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_C._Perry#The_Perry_Expedition:_Opening_of_Japan.2C_1852-1854

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_the_Great#Early_reign

and he then read about Napoleon’s Russian Campaign:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With abundance, that all goes away.

Time for bed.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

27th March 2014, 15:26

Hi:

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

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

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

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=412338&viewfull=1#post412338

to the “skeptics”:

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

to Dennis’s “allies”:

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

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

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

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=621892&viewfull=1#post621892

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

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

27th March 2014, 17:03

Hi:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

27th March 2014, 18:56

Hi:

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

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Humanity’s Fourth Epochal Event: The Industrial Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ilie Pandia

27th March 2014, 21:06

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

Wade Frazier

27th March 2014, 22:49

Hi Ilie:

In that energy-economy book I am reading, they articulated, from an academic’s perspective, what I had realized on my own long ago. But it can really be helpful to see the academic/scientist take on those issues.

Basically, economics began before the science of energy, and early on, economists became disconnected from reality, seeing economics as a social and exchange phenomenon, divorced from the realities of living in the physical universe, partly because the profession “grew up” in a time of ever-increasing energy provided by fossil fuels, so they just assumed away energy. I had seen the disdain that scientists had toward economists when I studied the Peak Oilers, and the reason for it has become clearer over the years. I knew that homogenizing everything with money and then cranking out differential calculus was a bogus way to analyze how the world worked, and my recent readings helped me see where they went astray. Part of their “lost” nature was purposeful, to hoodwink the public and make economists seem like they had arcane powers of perception, but that is just PR.

Economics is not really a science. Scientific theories are ideally falsifiable, but economics is plagued with all manner of unproven assumptions, more so than in real sciences. As long as economists can keep the masses focused on money and prices, they can continue to play their games of obfuscation. Economists are really just another servile class of professionals who give ideological service to the elite, to justify their status and help prevent the masses from focusing on what is important.

Until economists make energy the root of all economic activity, they are living in a fantasy world. Money is meaningless in the big picture. That was one of the points of my essay, and it is nice to see some economists state the same thing. :)

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

28th March 2014, 16:07

Hi:

I am now coming to the part of my essay where I will lose most of my English-speaking audience, and that is fine. Only people with the integrity and sentience to see clearly, to accept their responsibility for the world we see today, are going to be helpful for what I have in mind.

The biggest difference between Dennis’s strategy and mine is that Dennis sought to use people’s delusions to help free them, while I use the opposite approach, of only working with people who no longer drink the Kool-Aid, or helping them kick the habit. I am sure that I will be revising the below section that I just wrote, but it is probably only the beginning of my chronicling of the West’s immense crimes. I don’t do it to make people feel bad, but unless people actually understand how the world really works and how it came to be this way, they are not going to be useful for what I plan to do. People in the thrall of egocentric conceits are not my target audience, and passages like the below will help weed them out.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Early industrial Britain was hellish. However, it was far more hellish for those that Britain invaded, conquered, and exterminated. When the English finally established a beachhead at Jamestown in 1607, after its Roanoke colony failed, epidemics introduced by European invaders had already thinned the population in what became Virginia. In the first generation, more than 80% of the English invaders (nearly half of them were indentured servants) died from the vagaries of “settling” Jamestown. But the “surplus” population of England kept arriving in endless waves and overwhelmed the natives. Within forty years, the original inhabitants of Jamestown’s vicinity, the Pamunkey, had been almost entirely exterminated. The “settlers” then engaged in raising tobacco with African slave labor, and the Virginian plantation economy was born. Pocahontas fantasies aside, the relationship between the natives and invaders was largely hostile from the beginning.

The story in Massachusetts was a little different. The “pilgrims” aboard the Mayflower, contrary to the myths, were not coming to North America to escape persecution, but sought economic opportunity. They lived in the Netherlands, free of persecution, when they decided to sail on the Mayflower in 1620. They were aiming to settle around the Hudson River’s mouth, but missed and initially invaded land that had been cleared by another epidemic introduced by Europeans. As with Jamestown, the “settlers” had high mortality rates, with only about half of them surviving the first winter. Without native help, the intruders would not have survived. For about ten years, the pilgrims and their benefactors lived in peace, but boatloads of land-hungry English came behind the pilgrims, and wholesale slaughters of Indians and stealing their lands became regular affairs. In 1675, a war virtually exterminated the tribe that welcomed the pilgrims, with the welcoming chief’s son killed and his head mounted on a pike at Plymouth for twenty years. That happened with the “friendly” settlement. Extermination and dispossession came to all native tribes that the English encountered as they stole the coveted land. The USA’s first president and its richest citizen crafted the plan to steal native lands with treaties that the invaders would never honor, in what is history’s greatest swindle, which his biographers cannot bring themselves to mention, in court-historian style.

Although racism has some roots in antiquity, it began to be institutionalized with Europe’s conquest of the world. For the first time ever, a person could board a ship in a land of people with skin of one color, and disembark weeks or months later and see people with skins of totally different colors. Also, since the people with non-white skin that Europeans encountered were always exploited, slaughtered, or dispossessed, their different skin color became part of the abuse-justifying ideology of the intruders. Racism reached its apotheosis with the USA, which in scale, intensity, and duration is history’s most racist nation. The racism always had an underlying economic rationale, which justified the genocide of the Indians, the enslavement of the Africans, the horrific treatment of East Asians, and so on. When Europeans fought each other in the imperial age, they had a rather gentlemanly way of fighting and treating captured prisoners, but when the opponents were Indians, for instance, scalping them, making clothing from their skins and the like was standard behavior. What death camp Nazis did with their “souvenirs” was hardly an aberration. That kind of behavior was evident from the very beginnings of the European invasion of North America, and during the USA’s theft of temperate North America, its future presidents could be found at the forefront of such “souvenir” collecting. Intentionally inflicting disease onto the Indians was part of the British bag of tricks, and hunting Indians like animals was a favorite sport of the Spanish and Americans.

Within three centuries, the Eastern Woodlands between the Atlantic Ocean and Mississippi River were completely consumed in the human journey’s most dramatic deforestation. All Indian tribes in what became the continental USA were exterminated, with bedraggled survivors banished to the worst land in “reservations,” with the slaughter and dispossession cheered by the “settlers” the entire time. The passenger pigeon, which likely flew in the greatest flocks that Earth has seen, became extinct during the USA’s final consolidation of its continental theft, and the bison was nearly driven to extinction. In 1890, after the final massacre at Wounded Knee, the genocide that began in 1492 was largely complete. In the words of a keen critic of Europe’s invasion of the Western Hemisphere, “There was, at last, almost no one left to kill.” The damage that Europeans and their descendants meted out to the Western Hemisphere’s peoples and lands was far greater than what Rome inflicted on the Mediterranean’s periphery and Europe, and those seeking evidence of an imperial conscience among members of the Roman and American polities will usually be disappointed. Even today, humanity may have no more collective conscience than it had 50 kya, which is a potentially fatal problem for complex life on Earth, including humanity. However, in many ways, industrialized civilization is far more humane than pre-industrial civilization.

As the upper classes in Britain dispossessed the peasantry and forced them into factories and mines, the recalcitrant were judged “criminals” and deported, which further conditioned the remainder into obedience. Georgia became a penal colony, and after the American Revolution, Australia and Tasmania became the dumping ground for Britain’s “criminals.” The ships that conquered the world were also not filled with the best and brightest. They were often prisoners captured via “impressment,” and enslavement of labor via “blackbirding” was done even after the official end of slavery. With those kinds of labor practices, the vile fashion in which Europe engaged the world’s peoples was not unusual. When the peasantry gained some rights, it was often as a side-effect of elite squabbles, such as the Magna Carta.

About the same time that British industrialization really began to grow, Britain began its imperial ascendance. It was no coincidence. When that land-greedy president was young man, he led a land-grabbing expedition into the Ohio River Valley that ignited what became humanity’s first war fought on multiple continents. When Britain won that war in 1763, the French gained vengeance a decade later by supporting the elite rebellion that led to founding the USA. Just as the development of the Western Hemisphere’s civilizations was radically altered by Spanish invasions and we will never know how they might have independently developed, whomever Europeans conquered had their economies commandeered by their new overlords, and their development traveled a very different path than it might have. As soon as Britain defeated France in the Seven Years’ War, its rape and plunder of India began, which started with Bengal in 1764. Before the English conquest, India was ahead on the industrialization curve in ways, with early British visitors learning Indian steel-making techniques. Bengal’s capital was Dacca, a textile center and arguably the world’s richest city, which is precisely why the British conquered it first. English visitors in 1757 judged Dacca every bit as rich as London. Instead of feeding themselves and producing their own finished goods, Bengal was enslaved by the British and the region was turned into a giant plantation under the auspices of the English East India Company. The effects of British dominance led to a famine beginning in 1770 that killed off about ten million people, and the second great period of European-induced genocide began. By 1840, Dacca’s population collapsed from 150,000 to 30,000 people, and even today, Bangladesh is one of the world’s most miserable nations, which is a legacy of Britain’s conquest and subjugation.

The practice of enslaving the local populace into growing crops, both food and textile fibers such as jute and cotton, for shipment to the imperial headquarters, was not just confined to the world’s dark-skinned peoples. One of the greatest boons to humanity from the Western Hemispheres’ conquest was the introduction of native crops. The introduction of cassava, potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and other New World foods is credited with the rapidly growing world population that began taking off in the late 1700s. More than half of the world’s crops grown today originated in the Western Hemisphere. An impact of that introduction in Europe was Ireland’s skyrocketing population, fueled by potatoes, which became the peasants’ staple. That monocrop strategy backfired in the 1840s with the Great Potato Blight. What is less known is that the famine in Ireland would not have happened if they had not exported their other crops to England during the Blight. The Irish famine was one of many “free market” famines that England imposed on its subjects, while obesity began becoming an issue in England in the late 19th century. It was a direct energy transfer from the subjugated to the overlords.

Beginning in 1875, El Niño events precipitated famines that took the lives of tens of millions of people, in China and India in particular. While India was starving, its wheat exports to Britain quadrupled. In the two thousand years before British hegemony, India had less than one famine per century. Under British rule, famines happened every few years, for a 3,000% increase. In the midst of the carnage, British “philanthropists” promoted the railroads and other “benefits” that India received from the British presence, but India’s native scholars noted that the railroads were built to take the plunder from India, not bring needed food and other goods to its masses. A similar railroad plunder route was built during the Scramble for Africa. Once lands, peoples, and markets had been conquered, “philanthropy” was a primary means to administer even more oppression. Other “philanthropists” took Britain’s lead, and the final theft of Cherokee lands in Oklahoma was achieved under the rubric of “philanthropy.” Belgium initiated the first African genocide of the industrial age under King Leopold’s “philanthropy,” which killed about half of the population of the Congo’s subject peoples, and Belgium’s rivals achieved similar levels of extermination during the “rubber boom” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not long after King Leopold’s “philanthropic” genocide, John Rockefeller’s strikebreakers machine-gunned striking coal miners in 1913 in one of the great robber baron outrages. In the wake of that massacre, Rockefeller hired J.P. Morgan’s publicist, who soon concocted the charade of Rockefeller the “philanthropist” who gave a dime to everybody he met, and he became a great “philanthropist” who helped establish today’s cancer racket. That Morgan/Rockefeller publicist is considered the father of public relations. Public relations is a scientific way to brainwash the masses, which has been raised to a high degree of sophistication, particularly in the USA and Britain. The root of public relations lies in the English Civil Wars of the 1600s, when the absolute power of royalty was permanently undermined and the “rabble” began to have a say in their governance. When the state could no longer inflict violence with impunity on its subjects, controlling what people thought became the leading elite tool of population control. Indoctrination and brainwashing began its ascendance in Britain to previously unimagined heights, which led to works such as Orwell’s 1984. During my adventures, I have heard tales from fellow travelers about their encounters with “humanitarians” and “philanthropists,” and one of them, after numerous encounters with such “benefactors” asked the question, “If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?”

Most of the world’s poorest nations export food to the West’s industrialized nations, who are history’s fattest people, while the people in the exporting nations are hungry and underweight, with neocolonial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund performing “philanthropic” duties. Once in a great while, somebody from the inside of such “philanthropic” organizations comes forward and discloses the real game, such as John Perkins and those his revelations inspired to come forward. Imperialism seemed more honest in Rome’s time, or Spain’s, where it was simply might makes right, and they conquered, enslaved, and plundered because they could. Conquest, exploitation, and genocide under the banners of “philanthropy,” “humanitarian intervention,” or “freeing Iraq” is a far more dishonest exercise. Is it an improvement to perform the same malevolent deeds under a thinly-veiled “humanitarian” cover story? It seems to only give a superficially plausible rationale for the imperial class, which in the USA is all who live in it, except maybe reservation Indians, so that they can sleep better at night, but it seems to largely be a wink-and-nod exercise.

In summary, the industrialization of Britain, the USA, and Europe was greatly assisted via thefts on an epic scale, such as entire continents. Where the people could not be easily eradicated or where tropical diseases decimated the invaders, the conquerors “only” enslaved them, turning their economies into mines and plantations for conqueror benefit. Most of humanity’s misery today is a legacy of those activities and a key dynamic of the Sixth Mass Extinction, as the world’s poor are destroying the habitats of the world’s endangered species in order to eat.

Wade Frazier

28th March 2014, 17:38

Hi:

My post from yesterday:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=814713&viewfull=1#post814713

was echoed by another writer today:

http://www.sovereignman.com/trends/weve-seen-this-movie-before-14041/

That rhyming history. :)

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

28th March 2014, 21:06

Hi:

I am spending a little time this afternoon cleaning up. Attached is what my desk looked like yesterday. The floor and desk is part of what I have been referring to in writing my most recent chapters. It is way too much for one sane person to study. When I finished the pre-human chapters of my essay, I had a similar pile that I had to clean up to make way for books for the humanity part of the essay.

Again, I expect this essay will be about the last, if not the last, major essay of my lifetime. I anticipate that it will be like a textbook, with periodic revisions. While writing it, many areas I longed to burrow into and get lost for months, but I had to pull out and keep going, trying to balance depth with breadth. I want to have enough meat that people can sink their teeth into, while also keeping the view high enough to where the connections are visible. It is easy to get lost in the weeds, or fly too high above the forest and fail to see the trees. One reason I am writing this now is so I have as near to my full brain capacity as I can, to do the subject justice. In ten years, I doubt I would have been able to write the essay like I am doing today.

There would not be enough time in my next ten lifetimes to begin to do justice to the subjects that the essay covers, but it will have to be good enough for now, to get a choir going. I can see the updates to the essay being the result of me going deeper into various areas, and rewriting chapters or sections of them. One of my dreams for the choir is to hear from members who are specialists in areas who can improve the material. One man can’t get it all right. Often, generalists will miss on the details, but their generalist approach will make radical contributions that specialists are incapable of. At least, the generalists that did not overgeneralize. :)

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Robert J. Niewiadomski

28th March 2014, 23:20

The "philantropy" way of doing bussines have been rebranded to "Corporate Social Responsibility (or Conscience (Con... WHAT?!)" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibility) and seems to be backed by "scientific research" of pulling strings and pushing buttons.

Now, how do you dare to pour feces over McDonald when it is involved with helping sick children and their parents with Ronald McDonald Houses Charity? Honestly? My mind just shuts down when i try to combine those two sides of the coin. Very clever. I wonder if it has anything to do with earning some positive karma to neutralize some of that negative bit. And gag the critics at the same time.

The other example of SCR in action is greenwashing done by sc "energy corporations".

Conscience might be a hint here: if you separate "con" and "science" you get science of conning ;)

Wade Frazier

29th March 2014, 01:10

Hi Robert:

Robber Baron “philanthropy,” or even the Gates/Buffet kind, actually has more going for it than corporate “philanthropy” does. If corporate “philanthropy” does not enhance a corporation’s profits, the shareholders can sue. That said, what a sham, to think that cutthroat competitors can become caring “philanthropists.” As the lefties have long stated, charity is a poor substitute for justice.

With FE and the real, absolute abundance that would come with it, the very idea of profits, money, exchange, and the like would become obsolete, like chattel slavery and turning women into baby machines.

For me, I am happy to just show how oxymoronic the term “billionaire philanthropist” is. A big part of what I am doing is showing what things really are, not so that we can judge them, but so we can see how they are artifacts of the current Age of Scarcity. Not only will they likely vanish with abundance, but those scarcity-based paths are also not likely to be very helpful in making abundance manifest.

Billionaires did not get that way because of their big hearts. High tech is still relatively innocent, because it is new, so “Don’t be evil” can actually be uttered in the halls and not laughed at. In places like Godzilla’s lair, the motto is: “All evil, all the time.” :)

If I can make it clear how those billionaires are anything but “philanthropists,” then it closes off one blind alley that FE newbies often stumble down (or at least tries to close it off! :) ). You would not believe the kinds of naïve stuff I have seen. I admit to carrying Brian’s and Dennis’s spears to the DOE:

http://www.brianoleary.info/Impacts.html

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

but both times, I wondered what we thought we were going to accomplish. I have seen people bang on the Pentagon’s doors and elsewhere that really risk one’s life, if they are genuine about making FE happen. Many “billionaire philanthropists” have poked their nose into FE, and none have been genuinely helpful, as they usually try to make some power play to control it, and end up destroying it if they get a chance. And any that harbored genuine notions of helping were quickly dissuaded by Godzilla’s minions (the equivalent of horses’ heads in their beds if they did not take the subtle hints), and went scurrying back to their mansions. Billionaires and politicians are not noted for their heroism. :)

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

29th March 2014, 01:47

Hi:

One last post before I sign off for tonight. I obtained JFK and the Unspeakable, which is about how JFK became a “dove” after the Cuba stuff, which is why he was killed. That is what Gary surmised in his book, too:

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

That book does not mention Gary, but his testimony may one day get its due.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

30th March 2014, 04:32

Hi:

Well, 25 pages into my Industrial Revolution chapter, I decided to split it at the rise of electricity and oil. Part 2 may be just as big, but we will see. But part 2 is really Epochal Event 4.5. Using oil instead of coal was not a fundamental difference, or the level of energy. Coal, gas, and oil are all made from dead organisms preserved by geological processes. Electricity, like hydrogen “power,” is not an energy source at all, but just a medium for transferring energy.

Several centuries after England began to industrialize with coal, the basics are still the same. The only change of note is nuclear energy, but it is a small fraction of global energy, at around 5% of total production and falling fast, with the wonders of Fukushima, etc.

Again, the moving parts proliferate the closer the story gets to today, and that first half of the Industrial Revolution needs more work, and I will likely add several more pages to it, but I might put it up in a few days. I am more than 310 pages into this monster, which will likely tip the scales around 400, not including the notes.

Going to bed now.

Best,

Wade

Ilie Pandia

30th March 2014, 15:45

Hi,

Can you elaborate on this more?

"Electricity, like hydrogen “power,” is not an energy source at all, but just a medium for transferring energy."

Wade Frazier

30th March 2014, 16:13

Well, that was faster than I thought. :) I got on a roll this morning, and below is my first cut at the Industrial Revolution, Phase 1. I am roaring along to the next chapter, titled, “Epochal Event 4.5 – The Rise of Oil and Electricity.” As usual, it is too big for one post, so it is broken into pieces. I really have not put on my editor’s hat yet, and will do that probably when I get the first draft roughed out. I am kind of looking forward to the process and kind of dreading it. I clearly recall when I edited my American Empire essay:

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

back in 2002, and it seemed like it was never going to end. This essay will be about twice as long. Heavy lifting ahead. :)

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Humanity’s Fourth Epochal Event: The Industrial Revolution – Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The earliest economic school of thought was French, with its practitioners called Physiocrats. They formed the first and so-far only economic school that rooted economic activity and wealth in energy terms. Physiocrats worked before the science of energy was invented, but they understood that land was the basis of wealth, or more specifically, the crops, timber, metals, and other resources that could be wrested from them via labor. The Physiocrats were opportunists who developed economic theories that they planned to profit from, to climb into the aristocracy. The first English economist of what later became the classical school of economics was arguably William Petty who, like his successors, derived theories that he planned to benefit from. They either tried to join the rising rich classes themselves, or performed ideological services on their behalf to curry favor. There was nothing of the disinterested scientist in their work, but they became ideological warriors of the rising capitalist class. It became Karl Marx’s task to name them, which he called the bourgeoisie. Preceding the nominal classical economists was James Steaurt, called a mercantilist philosopher today, but he was really one of the most honest classical economists in describing the early forces of capitalism, of forcing peasants off the land and enslaving them to market forces.

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

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

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

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

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

Wade Frazier

30th March 2014, 16:14

Humanity’s Fourth Epochal Event: The Industrial Revolution – Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early industrial Britain was hellish. However, it was far more hellish for those that Britain invaded, conquered, and exterminated. When the English finally established a beachhead at Jamestown in 1607, after its Roanoke colony failed, epidemics introduced by European invaders had already thinned the population in what became Virginia. In the first generation, more than 80% of the English invaders (nearly half of them being indentured servants) died from the vagaries of “settling” Jamestown. But the “surplus” population of England kept arriving in endless waves and overwhelmed the natives. Within forty years, the original inhabitants of Jamestown’s vicinity, the Pamunkey, had been almost entirely exterminated. The “settlers” then engaged in raising tobacco with African slave labor, and the Virginian plantation economy was born. Pocahontas fantasies aside, the relationship between the natives and invaders was largely hostile from the beginning.

The story in Massachusetts was a little different. The “pilgrims” aboard the Mayflower, contrary to the myths, were not coming to North America to escape persecution, but largely sought economic opportunity. They lived in the Netherlands, free of persecution, when they decided to sail on the Mayflower in 1620. They were aiming to settle around the Hudson River’s mouth, but missed and invaded land that had been cleared by another European-introduced epidemic. As with Jamestown, the “settlers” had high mortality rates, with only about half of them surviving the first winter. Without native help, the intruders would not have survived. For about ten years, the pilgrims and their benefactors lived in peace, but boatloads of land-hungry English came behind the pilgrims, and wholesale slaughters of Indians and stealing their lands became regular affairs. In 1675, a war virtually exterminated the tribe that welcomed the pilgrims, with the welcoming chief’s son killed and his head mounted on a pike at Plymouth for twenty years. That happened with the “friendly” settlement. Extermination and dispossession came to all native tribes that the English encountered as they stole the coveted land. The USA’s first president and its richest citizen crafted the plan to steal native lands with treaties that the invaders would never honor, in what is history’s greatest swindle, which his biographers cannot bring themselves to mention, in court-historian style.

Although racism has some roots in antiquity, it began its institutionalization with Europe’s conquest of the world. For the first time ever, a person could board a ship in a land of people with skin of one color and disembark weeks or months later and see people with skins of markedly different colors. Also, since the people with non-white skin that Europeans encountered were always exploited, slaughtered, or dispossessed, their differing skin color became part of the abuse-justifying ideology of the conquerors. Racism reached its apotheosis with the USA, which in scale, intensity, and duration is history’s most racist nation. The racism always had an underlying economic rationale, which justified the genocide of Indians, enslavement of Africans, horrific treatment of East Asians, today’s agricultural labors of Latinos, and so on. When Europeans fought each other in the imperial age, they had a rather gentlemanly way of fighting and treating captured prisoners, but when the opponents were Indians, for instance, scalping them, making clothing from their skins and the like was standard behavior. The death camp Nazis’ “souvenirs” were not unusual. That kind of behavior was evident from the very beginnings of the European invasion of North America, and during the USA’s theft of temperate North America, its future presidents could be found at the forefront of such trophy collecting. Intentionally inflicting disease onto the Indians was part of the British bag of tricks, and hunting Indians like animals was a favorite sport of the Spaniards and Americans.

Within three centuries, the Eastern Woodlands between the Atlantic Ocean and Mississippi River were completely consumed in the human journey’s most dramatic deforestation. All Indian tribes in what became the continental USA were exterminated to one degree or another, with bedraggled survivors banished to the worst land in “reservations,” with the slaughter and dispossession cheered by the “settlers” the entire time. The passenger pigeon, which likely flew in the greatest flocks that Earth has seen, became extinct during the USA’s final consolidation of its continental theft, and the bison was nearly driven to extinction. In 1890, after the final massacre at Wounded Knee, the genocide that began in 1492 was largely complete. In the words of a keen critic of Europe’s invasion of the Western Hemisphere, “There was, at last, almost no one left to kill.” The damage that Europeans and their descendants meted out to the Western Hemisphere’s peoples and lands was far greater than what Rome inflicted on the Mediterranean’s periphery and Europe, and those seeking evidence of an imperial conscience among members of the Roman and American polities will usually be disappointed. Even today, humanity may have no more collective conscience than it had 50 kya, which is a potentially fatal problem for complex life on Earth, including humanity. However, in many ways, industrialized civilization is far more humane than pre-industrial civilization.

As the upper classes in Britain dispossessed the peasantry and forced them into factories and mines, the recalcitrant were judged “criminals” and deported, which further conditioned the remainder into obedience. Georgia became a penal colony, and after the American Revolution, Australia and Tasmania became the dumping ground for Britain’s “criminals.” The ships that conquered the world were also not filled with the best and brightest. They were also often prisoners captured via “impressment,” and enslavement of labor via “blackbirding” was done even after the official end of slavery. With those kinds of labor practices, the vile fashion in which Europe engaged the world’s peoples was just a sign of the times. When the peasantry gained some rights, it was often as a side-effect of elite squabbles, such as with the Magna Carta.

About the same time that British industrialization really began growing, Britain’s imperial ascendance commenced. It was no coincidence. When that land-greedy president was young, he led a land-grabbing expedition into the Ohio River Valley that ignited what became humanity’s first war fought on multiple continents. When Britain won that war in 1763, the French gained vengeance a decade later by supporting the elite rebellion that led to establishing the USA. Just as the development of the Western Hemisphere’s civilizations was radically altered by Spanish invasions and we will never know how they might have independently developed, whomever Europeans conquered had their economies commandeered by their new overlords, and their developments traveled a very different path than they might have. As soon as Britain defeated France in the Seven Years’ War, its rape of India began, which started with Bengal in 1764. Before the English conquest, India was ahead on the industrialization curve in ways, with early British visitors learning Indian steel-making techniques. Bengal’s capital was Dacca, a textile center and arguably the world’s richest city, which is precisely why the British conquered it first. English visitors in 1757 judged Dacca every bit as rich as London. Instead of feeding themselves and producing their own finished goods, Bengal was enslaved by the British and the region was turned into a giant plantation under the auspices of Britain’s East India Company. The effects of British dominance led to a famine beginning in 1770 that killed off about ten million people, and the second great period of European-induced genocide began. By 1840, Dacca’s population collapsed from 150,000 to 30,000 people, and even today, Bangladesh is one of the world’s most miserable nations, and ironically is a textile center once again, which is a legacy of Britain’s conquest and subjugation.

The practice of enslaving the local populace into growing crops, both food and textile fibers such as jute and cotton, for shipment to the imperial headquarters, was not just confined to the world’s dark-skinned peoples. One of the greatest boons to humanity from the Western Hemispheres’ conquest was the introduction of native crops. The introduction of cassava, potatoes, sweet potatoes, maize, and other New World foods is credited with the rapidly growing world population that began taking off in the late 1700s. More than half of the world’s crops grown today originated in the Western Hemisphere. An impact of that introduction in Europe was Ireland’s skyrocketing population, fueled by potatoes, which became the peasantry’s staple. That monocrop strategy backfired in the 1840s with the Great Potato Blight. What is less known is that the famine in Ireland would not have happened if they had not exported their other crops to England during the Blight. The Irish famine was one of many “free market” famines that England imposed on its subjects, while obesity began becoming an issue in England in the late 19th century. It was a direct energy transfer from the subjugated to the overlords.

Beginning in 1875, El Niño events precipitated famines that took the lives of tens of millions of people, in China and India in particular. While India was starving, its wheat exports to Britain quadrupled. In the two millennia before British hegemony, India had less than one famine per century. Under British rule, famines happened every few years, for a 3,000% increase in frequency. In the midst of the carnage, British “philanthropists” promoted the railroads and other “benefits” that India received from the British presence, but India’s native scholars noted that the railroads were built to take the plunder from India, not bring needed food and other goods to its masses. A similar railroad plunder route was built during the Scramble for Africa. Once lands, peoples, and markets had been conquered, “philanthropy” was a primary means to administer even more oppression. Other “philanthropists” took Britain’s lead, and the final theft of Cherokee lands in Oklahoma was achieved under the rubric of “philanthropy.” Belgium initiated the first African genocide of the industrial age under King Leopold’s “philanthropy,” which killed about half of the Congo’s subject peoples, and Belgium’s rivals achieved similar levels of extermination during the “rubber boom” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not long after King Leopold’s “philanthropic” genocide, John Rockefeller’s strikebreakers machine-gunned striking coal miners in 1913 in one of the great robber baron outrages. In that massacre’s wake, Rockefeller hired J.P. Morgan’s publicist, who soon concocted the charade of Rockefeller the “philanthropist” who gave a dime to everybody he met, and he became a great “philanthropist” who helped establish today’s cancer racket. That Morgan/Rockefeller publicist is considered the father of public relations. Public relations is a scientific way to brainwash the masses, which has reached a high degree of sophistication, particularly in the USA and Britain. The roots of public relations lie in the English Civil Wars of the 1600s, when the absolute power of royalty was permanently undermined and the “rabble” began to have some say in their governance. When the state could no longer inflict violence with impunity on its subjects, controlling what people thought became the preeminent elite tool of population control. Indoctrination and brainwashing began its progress in Britain to previously unimagined levels, which led to works such as Orwell’s 1984. During my adventures, I have heard tales from fellow travelers about their encounters with “humanitarians” and “philanthropists,” and one of them, after numerous encounters with such “benefactors” asked the question, “If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?”

Most of the world’s poorest nations export food to the West’s industrialized nations, who are history’s fattest people, while people in the exporting nations are often hungry and underweight, with neocolonial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund performing “philanthropic” duties. Once in a great while, somebody from the inside of such “philanthropic” organizations comes forward and discloses the real game, such as John Perkins and those his revelations inspired to come forward. Imperialism seemed more honest in Rome’s time, or Spain’s, where it was simply might makes right, and they conquered, enslaved, and plundered because they could. Conquest, exploitation, and genocide under the banners of “philanthropy,” “humanitarian intervention,” or “freeing Iraq” is a far more dishonest exercise. Is it an improvement to perform the same malevolent deeds under a thinly-veiled “humanitarian” cover story? It seems to only give a superficially plausible rationale for the imperial class, which in the USA is all who live in it, except maybe reservation Indians and those Latinos working in the fields, so that they can sleep better at night, but it seems to largely be a wink-and-nod exercise.

Wade Frazier

30th March 2014, 16:14

Humanity’s Fourth Epochal Event: The Industrial Revolution – Part 3

In summary, the industrialization of Britain, the USA, and Europe was greatly assisted via robberies on an epic scale, such as entire continents. Where the people could not be easily eradicated or where tropical diseases decimated the invaders, the conquerors “only” enslaved them, turning their economies into mines and plantations for conqueror benefit. Most of humanity’s misery today is a legacy of those activities and a key dynamic of the Sixth Mass Extinction, as the world’s poor are destroying the habitats of the world’s endangered species in order to eat.

Not only did imperial exploitation impoverish the world’s peoples, it also enriched the imperial peoples. That was the entire point of imperialism. Just as the priesthood and court historians glorified early elites, all manner of imperial apologist justified imperial crimes, and Rudyard Kipling’s welcome of the USA to the imperial smorgasbord, with his poem “The White Man’s Burden,” is perhaps the ultimate example of arrogant imperial delusions, at least held by their court bards. The USA carried its “burden” by bringing genocide to hundreds of thousand Filipinos who could not be dissuaded from childish notions of freedom; the USA slaughtered and tortured them into submission. Kipling’s imperial enthusiasm declined after he incited his son to join in World War I’s festivities, where he met the typical soldier’s fate. The most neglected part of Mark Twain’s body of writings is his anti-imperialist work, marginalized by both his family and American publishers.

Those imperial games of indoctrination, apology, censorship, obfuscation, and turning reality upside-down are highly relevant to the West’s economic trajectory, and are leading reasons why free energy and its potential outcomes reside outside the realm of possibility for the world’s people, particularly those living in industrial societies. Sources of energy not endorsed by the scientific establishment and its patrons are unthinkable today, which is arguably the greatest triumph of humanity’s social managers. When people encounter the idea of free energy, they almost invariably have reactions of denial that range from reflexive to thoughtful to sophisticated. For those of us who know that free energy and related technologies exist, witnessing that entrenched denial can be quite a spectacle; to the extent where my astronaut colleague openly wondered of humanity was a sentient species. That subject will be revisited in this essay, but the development of industry, science, and political-economic ideologies, even though they are inextricably entangled with imperial dynamics, deserve much more treatment.

The relationship between Britain and its North American colonies has greatly influenced global civilization for the past few centuries. Whether the balance tipped to the side of good or evil depends on whom is asked. Many extinct peoples of North America cannot answer, but we can reasonably guess their reply. The passenger pigeon would likely vote in in the negative, as would the peoples of India, as would most surviving remnants of the Native Americans, as would many other colonized peoples, both during the ascent and dominance of the British Empire as well as the American Empire. The preferred fiction is that the USA is not an empire, even though it has several hundred military bases scattered across the world, even though it has killed far more people internationally than the rest of the world put together since World War II, and the tally does not include the millions, even billions, immiserated by the USA’s neocolonial policies.

The methods and technologies of industrializing England quickly began appearing in the North American colonies, with the first colonial blast furnace built in Massachusetts in 1644. By 1775, North American British colonies were producing as much iron as England and Wales. The first sawmill in North America was built in Virginia in 1611 by German immigrants recruited by England, as deforested England did not have sawmills. Over the next two centuries, towns in the Eastern Woodlands were often founded by and built around sawmills. John Adams, the USA’s second president whose family lands were on Thomas Morton’s idyllic Merry Mount, once “boasted” that his family may have felled more trees than any other family in the USA. The colonists acted like the world’s greatest beaver-infestation, leveling the forests with abandon. A deciduous forest can create about a foot of topsoil in four centuries, so the soils of the Eastern Woodlands were fertile beyond the wildest European imagination.

After a celebrated whaling incident in 1672, Nantucket became the headquarters of American colonial whaling. By the 1730s, the American colonies had sixty whaling ships competing with European ships in eradicating the North Atlantic’s megafauna. Rorquals could not be profitably slaughtered until the advent of industrial whaling in the late 1800s, so the sailing ships immortalized in Moby-Dick scoured the world of its pre-industrially gainful whales. Before 1800, the whales catchable by the day’s technology were quickly going extinct in the Atlantic, and the fleets began sailing the Pacific and Indian oceans in search of whales.

With the Eastern Woodlands’ tremendous forests, iron could be smelted with the preferred wood, and in 1810, the USA produced 45,000 metric tons of pig iron. The colonial era was marked early on by mercantilist practices. In Mesoamerica, where the first European colony was established in an urban area, royal monopolies in gold and silver, stealing arable land from the natives, and banning industries that could compete with those in Spain were predominant practices. When the British conquered Bengal as its foothold in India, it immediately began to ban weaving and turn Bengal into a plantation to supply Britain’s mills. British soldiers even amputated the thumbs of Bengali weavers. When Mohandas Gandhi began agitating for freedom from Britain, one of his campaigns was reviving locally-made cloth, not imported British textiles.

Even with their white colonists in North America, the British prevented textile mills from appearing. It was not until the Revolutionary War that the American colonies began to make textile mills. In a celebrated incident, an advocate of American industry tried to smuggle out models of the latest British textile machinery, which the ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, would then route to America. British officials uncovered the plot and initially prevented the transfer of the key technology, but within a year the entrepreneur still obtained the models. There was great debate on the direction of the USA among the Founding Fathers. Although they were not very heroic, the Founding Fathers were students of history and knew the sorry trajectory of the Old World’s civilizations, where republics became empires that collapsed. New England was dominated by family farms, while the southern colonies were dominated by plantations run with slave labor, with nearly all early American presidents being slave-owning members of the “Virginia aristocracy.” The day’s debates centered on whether the USA would abandon its mercantilist roots and become a capitalist economy. In general, slave-owning aristocrats were against industrialization, while cities of northern states began embracing the Industrial Revolution. The first successful cotton mill in the USA was built in Rhode Island in 1793. The USA had a more locally-integrated economy than Great Britain. Instead of growing cotton in India and shipping it across the world to British mills, the USA could grow cotton on southern plantations and ship it just up the coast to New England’s mills.

While the power of coal was primarily responsible for the USA’s great industrial ascent in the late 19th century, the wind and water power that Europe exploited for several centuries remained competitive with steam power until the late-19th century, and Americans only turned to coal as the forests disappeared. All along the USA’s eastern seaboard, mills appeared along the streams and rivers. In the hills surrounding Providence, Rhode Island in the 1830s were 120 mills, all water-powered. In 1838, there were only two thousand steam engines in the USA, and all but 600 were in use to propel boats and trains. In the USA in 1840, 60,000 small water-powered establishments existed, and less than 1,200 steam-powered manufacturers. Water was still the dominant industrial source of power.

By the American Revolution, the eastern seaboard had already been largely deforested by “settlers.” Boston had wood shortages beginning as early as 1638, and New England was almost completely deforested by the Revolutionary War. One key issue leading to the Revolutionary War was the “king’s trees” in New England, those tall pines coveted for naval mast wood. During the Revolutionary War, it was seen as almost a patriotic duty to cut down the king’s trees.

As with the Spanish experience in Mesoamerica and the British experience in Australia, contemporary New English observers noted the local climate changes in New England by the late 1700s, where the summers got hotter, the winters colder, and the land became more arid, with streams disappearing during the summer and flooding in the winter. In his classic study, William Cronin noted that New England became “sunnier, windier, hotter, colder, and drier” than before it was deforested. The eastern seaboard began turning to British coal soon after the American Revolution. As noted previously, coal from Britain was cheaper than coal hauled fifty kilometers overland in the USA, and early America relied on British coal. It was not until canals and railroads were built that the USA began to use its domestically mined coal. The anthracite mines of Pennsylvania turned Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and other cities in the region into the heart of early American industry. Steam locomotives were invented in Great Britain and the USA in the late 1700s, and Richard Trevithick is credited with building the first steam-powered railroad in 1804, after many years of effort. The Erie Canal opened for business in 1825, and the USA’s first common carrier railroad was built between Baltimore and the Ohio River in 1830, as Baltimore competed with the canals that serviced Philadelphia and New York. Railroads became humanity’s first low-energy transportation lanes that were not bodies of water (roads kind of qualified, but they were minor advances compared to railroads). Many American cites were not built on bodies of water but along rail lines and, later, roads traveled by cars and trucks.

Canals were competitive with railroads, sailing ships were competitive with steamboats, and watermills were competitive with steam-powered mills until around 1850. It took nearly 150 years for coal-powered steam to prevail against wind and water power. Water and wind power were not only geographically restricted, but they were also dependent on the weather. Calm air (and storms) and droughts (and floods) were the bane of wind and water power. Coal did not have those restrictions. American towns were built on hillsides above watermills to house the workforce. As coal-power made its ascendance, those mills and towns were abandoned. The pollution of industrial America’s cities could rival London’s. A visitor to Pittsburgh in 1841 described approaching the city as entering a dark cloud of coal smoke, with the peoples and buildings inside it blackened like some vision from hell. Far from an indictment, however, the visitor happily saw it as “progress” that would soon arrive at his hometown of Cincinnati. The rivers of the Eastern Woodlands ran blue and clear before Europeans arrived. When I lived in Ohio, the Ohio River at Cincinnati in the 1990s had brown, stinking waters that nobody in their right minds would swim in. The Cuyahoga River that flows through Cleveland first caught fire in 1868, and the 1969 fire finally led to environmental legislation that began to clean up the USA’s lakes, rivers, and air. The air pollution that I experienced in Los Angeles in the 1980s rivaled conditions reported in China today.

The railroad became the USA’s largest enterprises before the Civil War, and the first robber baron fortunes were built then, such as the Vanderbilt fortune, which began with steamboats. North America is the richest continent ever stolen, and Americans pillaged it to a scale never seen before or since. American prosperity was almost wholly founded on the rich energy resources that they stole from the inhabitants, the first being the forests, soils, and streams of the Eastern Woodlands, to be followed closely by coal, and then oil. No people in world history had access to that kind of loot and the means to exploit it. The USA spent the 19th century stealing the continent from the natives and erecting an industrial civilization, and the losers of Europe’s competitive existence then poured into it. In 1800, the British Isles had four times the USA’s population, but by 1900 the USA had nearly twice Britain’s population. In 2013, the USA had nearly five times the population of the UK, but the UK is more than seven times as densely populated. The Western Hemisphere and Australia are markedly underpopulated compared to the Old World. While the USA was raping a continent, the UK was preying upon most of the planet. In 1815, when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, the UK’s navy was nearly three times the size of France’s, which was its only rival. Naval power was the key to colonial success and world domination in the 19th century. The UK led the effort, and its industrial production was the key. In 1750, Europe had less than a quarter of the world’s industrial output, and by 1900, it and the USA comprised more than 85% of global output. The USA’s industrial output was little more than a third of the UK’s in 1860, but by 1900 the USA surpassed its ancestor and reached nearly a quarter of global production, although the UK still had more per-capita industrialization. In 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, the USA produced more than 40% of the world’s manufactured goods, more than the UK, Germany, the Soviet Union, France, Japan, and Italy combined. In 1950, as the world recovered from the great imperial battle known as World War II, the USA’s Gross National Product (“GNP”) was larger than those same nations, and the USA’s per-capita GNP was nearly twice the UK’s and nearly seven times Japan’s.

Among the many outcomes in Great Britain and the rest of humanity as it fell under capitalist domination was a profound alteration in how people made a living. The “benefits” that Earth’s conquered peoples enjoyed from Europe’s rise to dominance were highly equivocal, and Europe shattered millennia of economic, political, and social relations. What started as feudal domination in England gave way to Game Laws, Enclosure, and other ways to drive the peasantry off the land and into the mines and mills, which deepened Great Britain’s class divide. Capitalism began in the English countryside but soon unseated mercantilist colonial domination with capitalist practices. The primary outcome of capitalism, socially, was severing the connection of peasants to the land and reorganizing their efforts into what Marx called the capitalist mode of production. It was radically different than just skimming their efforts, but changed how they worked. Contemporary observers in the 19th century clearly saw that a new class of humans was created by that change, today called the working class, which Marx called the proletariat. The working class was comprised of peoples who no longer had any claim to land to farm, and only had their labor to sell in a monetized market. The capitalist class violently formed the working class, from the countryside of England to the plains of Bengal. The USA was a more rural phenomenon, with a virgin continent there for the taking, and the illusion of self-sufficiency was pursued by “pioneers,” which is still reflected in its national character. Similar to how hunter-gatherer societies became dependent on agricultural and pastoral ones, if they survived at all, the so-called pioneers of American expansion across the continent were dependent on industrialization and its markets. The American image of an independent pioneer taming the vast wilderness is a fantasy, especially what happened in the western half of North America in the last half of the 19th century.

A string of slave-owning aristocrats and slavery advocates paraded through the White House clear until the Civil War. By the 1840s, the USA’s continued embracement of slavery made it an embarrassing anachronism among Western nations. The USA was about Earth’s last nation to recognized Haitian independence, not formally acknowledging the world’s only successful slave rebellion until 1862, for obvious reasons, although the USA began shipping freed American slaves to Haiti in 1824, and established Liberia for that expressed purpose in 1820.

Until about 1880, American immigration came largely from the Anglo, Celtic, and Germanic peoples, then the flood from eastern Europe and Scandinavia began, soon followed by southern Europe. By 1890, the American “frontier” had officially vanished along with the Indians.

The rise of science accompanied the rise of industrialization, capitalism, and global empires, and they all interacted. The greatest scientists always stressed how little they and their profession knew. However, they were always in the minority, as the priest class of the scientific endeavor has continually tried to make science into an arcane province that holds the keys to the universe’s secrets. From those ranks have regularly come self-satisfied utterances that they have it all figured out and that the universe’s mysteries are completely resolved or nearly so.

Newton invented his Laws of Motion, but the science of energy did not develop until more than a century after the steam engine appeared. I have heard physicists question whether thermodynamics owed more to the steam engine than the converse. The so-called laws of thermodynamics began their formulation with Sadi Carnot’s publication in 1824, which is actually the third in line of the four laws of thermodynamics and is the earliest enunciation of the concept of entropy, with Carnot building on his father’s work. A generation later, European scientists began taking his work further. The great works of Maxwell, Faraday and friends formed the foundation of today’s science of energy, and many basic terms of today’s energy science were named after the pioneers of energy technology and theory, including Joule, Watt, Volt, Ampere, Coulomb, Fahrenheit, Celsius, Kelvin, and Rankine.

That phenomenon of placing human names on the natural world was similar to European “explorers” placing their names on Earth’s geographical features as they “discovered” them. It was a bid for immortality, although naming it after themselves was frowned upon. It was usually an honor bestowed by others in the same enterprise. I born in and live in Washington State, bounded by the Columbia River, in a nation with its capital city named Washington, the District of Columbia. I once worked in Columbus, Ohio. It is impossible for an American to avoid the influence of the USA’s two greatest Founding Fathers, who were greedy, mass murdering thieves above all else (1, 2). Fairy tales have been told American schoolchildren for centuries about Washington, as well as Columbus’s heroic feat, and there was even an effort to canonize Columbus. American ideologists thereby turned darkness into light, and few Americans ever discover any differently. In preparation for the celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s feat, which had the highest event attendance in world history to that time, American children were trained to worship a flag. The original gesture was copied by Hitler and Mussolini, which led Americans to taking down their arms and putting their hands on their chests, and a decade later, overtly religious terminology was added to the ritual. Those issued are highly relevant to this essay’s subject matter, as such indoctrination is another form of limbic conditioning designed to bypass the neocortex and conscious thought to control people, so they either throw their lives away “defending” the tribe or nation, cheer as others do so, or many other actions designed to serve those manipulating the symbols. Monkeys can be trained to salute flags or Der Führer, as could be seen in that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but they cannot pass the mirror test.

The practice of scientists achieving immortality by having the natural world named after them was far from innocent, and the battle for precedence and its attendant riches has sent science and technology awry in ways that few suspect. For instance, in the 1850s a key scientific question was what life was and how it came to be. Louis Pasteur is credited with winning the “spontaneous generation” debate, which is still taught in microbiology classes, but today’s microbiology students are taught something that resembles a utilitarian fairy tale more than the truth. Pasteur’s life’s ambition was becoming rich and famous, which he achieved. In an action that foreshadowed the Nazi’s human experiments, Pasteur advocated potentially fatal medical experiments on condemned prisoners. Pasteur was one of science history’s more unlikeable figures, but that aside, he may have plagiarized a contemporary in his rush to fame and fortune. His alleged plagiarisms may have marched biology off in the wrong direction in the 1850s, with his germ theory of disease. His rival, who pointedly accused Pasteur of repeatedly stealing his work, took a different direction. His work, neglected to this day, showed that internal cellular dynamics, not outside agents, were primarily responsible for health and disease, and that barely visible dynamics at the subcellular level seemed to be key biological processes. That entire line of investigation has been marginalized by mainstream science ever since, even though microscopes invented in the early 20th century achieved optical resolutions that mainstream science still considers “impossible,” but surviving micrographs from the first microscope show that it indeed achieved its “impossible” resolutions, where it revealed life processes that are still indecipherable by today’s microscopes. The inventors of both microscopes were not even aware of Pasteur’s contemporary, but their findings confirmed his discoveries of more than a century ago.

The inventor of the second microscope to achieve those “impossible” resolutions, which he first built in 1949, was still alive in 2014, pursuing his work. The first biologist/inventor was wiped out by the American medical establishment in the 1930s, in a clear case of medical racketeering, and the second one nearly went to prison in Canada after being run out of Europe. Both scientists developed disease treatments as a consequence of their microscopes’ findings, treatments that were outlawed in the USA. Those are examples of pure science conflicting with vested economic interests and losing. The professional descendants of those who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope are well represented today. Few scientists have bothered to see what those microscopes have revealed, partly because their findings threaten the foundations of Western biology and medicine. That seeming misdirection of mainstream science is relatively innocent compared to what happened in energy theory and technology.

At the same time that the spontaneous generation debate was waning, the theory of evolution exploded onto the scene in 1859. That theory had no immediate economic impact, and has been pursued relatively free of vested-interest influence. Western science has progressed through several phases. Since those seminal works of 1543, early scientists struggled with the Church’s suppression efforts as well as the attacks of their peers, but by the Enlightenment, science became the epitome of the Age of Reason. Deductive reasoning and reductionism reigned, and many saw nature as a big mechanism. The early 1800s witnessed the Romantic era, which had impacted science, where holistic approaches, inductive reasoning, and emotions were appreciated. The late 1800s saw the rise of positivism, which placed all authoritative knowledge within a framework of the senses (and their extensions) and logic. I have called it the rationalist-materialist paradigm, and it is still influential in the ranks of establishment science. Then the 20th century’s relativity and quantum theory led to something verging on the mystical, with that wave/particle duality of light paradox and the observer effect, which science has yet to resolve.

Other paradoxes arose with industrialization. At least within industrial societies, the energy of fossil fuels elevated everybody’s standard of living. Today’s poorest Americans enjoy amenities that the world’s richest people of three centuries ago did not have access to. The USA’s poor are generally obese, which is unimaginable for preindustrial peoples, where poverty meant starvation. Chattel slavery ended with industrialization, and with strong backs and quick hands no longer in such demand, women also became liberated, as they no longer “needed” to give birth to exploitable farmhands and cannon fodder. Life expectancies rose and birth rates fell in the demographic transition.

Using fossil fuels saved trees but ruined farm soils with overeager plowing, as the steam tractor made its appearance in the late 19th century. When Americans invaded and settled the Great Plains, the rich ice age soils were easily plowed, and the Great Plains quickly lost half of its topsoil (a greatly accelerated process, compared to Sumer and subsequent preindustrial civilizations), and in the 1930s those methods took their toll in the Dust Bowl. For the second time that I know of, my ancestors became environmental refugees due to their economic practices, and that is how my father’s family came to Washington State.

With industrialization, peoples could export their environmental devastation onto other unfortunates. An early trick of smokestack industries was making the smokestacks taller so that the pollution was “airmailed” to their neighbors. Japan regenerated its forests by importing timber from raped forests abroad, mostly from the Asian mainland and North America. Burning fossil fuels has also raised the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content, warming Earth. It was not until 1859 that the radiation-absorbing properties of greenhouse gases were measured, and it took another half century before scientists began to suspect that the fossil fuel era might be warming Earth’s atmosphere. A century later, there is still a faux debate regarding the atmospheric-warming effects of burning fossil fuels, largely due to scientists who sold their souls to the hydrocarbon lobby, along with a mainstream media that is always willing to provide propaganda services for its patrons. No climate scientist will deny that carbon dioxide traps infrared radiation and warms Earth’s atmosphere, and its declining concentration has been the ultimate reason for the icehouse Earth phase that has prevailed for the past 35 million years. The only real “debate” is whether proximate causes will have local and oscillating effects as Earth warms, as they already have, which is normal. I have seen no credible climate change “skepticism” that does not focus on the local and temporary variations due to proximate causes. The “debate” is almost entirely a concoction of the hydrocarbon lobby, those on its payroll, and the enabling media. Climate scientists without conflicts of interest are terrified by what is happening. Humanity is conducting a vast experiment with the only atmosphere and biosphere that we have, the outcome of which could spell the doom for billions of people, not to mention many other species, and the catastrophe could manifest in a number of ways.

With industrialization’s rising living standards, poverty was less desperate and violence was societally reduced. However, warfare, when it was waged, became far deadlier in absolute numbers. With the vast populations of industrialized nations, armed forces of previously unimaginable size, mobility, and destructive capacity appeared. The world’s first industrial war was The Crimean War, which began in 1853. Steamships and railroads were tactically used in warfare for the first time, and new inventions such as the telegraph were used. It was also the first war to be photographed. The war debt Russia incurred for the war induced it to “sell” Alaska to the USA. As with the Louisiana Purchase and other imperial transactions, the natives were never consulted about such “sales,” nor did they receive any proceeds. As I write this in March 2014, Crimea is once again the focus of imperial wrangling, with the participants nearly the same ones as 160 years ago, with the only major addition being the USA (and the West dismantled the Ottoman Empire after World War I), which had yet to reach global imperial status in 1853, although its first imperial foray into Asia began the same year.

More than a half million people died in the Crimean War. Several years later, the USA had the second industrialized war, inflicted on itself, and its death toll was higher than Crimea’s. Those wars provided a preview of industrial warfare. While the death toll from industrialized nation warfare was proportionally less than in “primitive” civilizations, the warfare itself was more horrific. Germans brought their factory expertise to genocide in World War II, and the USA developed a bomb that vaporized entire cities of civilians. The industrial powers came to realize that humanity might not survive another war between industrial powers, so all wars since then have been against largely defenseless peoples, something that the USA has excelled at since World War II.

The USA’s Civil War was not only a watershed event in American history; it also became a pivotal event in world history because it marked the transition from a largely-rural nation, still engaged with subduing the natives and stealing their last lands, to quickly becoming an industrial juggernaut that Earth had never before witnessed, with consequences both salubrious and catastrophic, and the final chapters of its imperial history have yet to be written. With the Civil War, the robber barons began their ascent to dominance, and what I call phase two of the Industrial Revolution began, and the rise of oil and electricity dramatically transformed industrial civilization.

Wade Frazier

30th March 2014, 17:01

Hi Ilie:

I am responding to your question here:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=816107&viewfull=1#post816107

Leaving the ZPF aside for now, mainstream science recognizes only one source of energy, which is the Big Bang. Everything came from there. To draw the picture tighter, all energy sources that humanity currently taps are fusion energy. Sunlight is powered by fusion, and even fission is the product of releasing fusion energy from dead stars. All elements besides hydrogen were created in stars.

To draw the picture even more tightly, when humans burn wood or fossil fuel or even digest food, they are liberating sunlight energy that was captured by life forms. In more mundane terms, energy sources in practical terms are reservoirs of potential energy that can be tapped and turned into kinetic energy. That is what happens when fuel is burned or an atom is split. The forms of energy that power today’s world are often “downstream” from that liberation of energy. That act of liberation is where the power comes from. For instance, a hydroelectric dam farms the energy of the hydrological cycle, and the power comes from sunlight hitting the surface of bodies of water and breaking their connection to their fellow water molecules, and they are swept up into Earth’s churning atmosphere. But that water always comes back to Earth, and where it hits land as it falls and is above sea level, hydroelectric dams farm that energy (from the potential energy of the gravity differential) on its way back to zero potential energy where it began its journey, and the turbine takes that energy and uses it to excite electrons in metals, and we get electricity. The electrons were already in the metal, and what electric turbines really do is pump electrons down metallic pipelines toward cities and industrial facilities that then use that energy which was only converted from one kinetic form to another.

Would you call the water at the turbine a source of energy? No. It is merely the carrier of the Sun’s energy that those water molecules absorbed not long ago. The energy source was the Sun. Water and electrons were only energy carriers. We can also say that wood and oil are not sources of energy, but just carriers of energy captured by life forms that has not yet been returned back to space, where it was heading when chlorophyll captured those photons.

So, the Sun (and dead stars in our galactic vicinity that created the planet we live on) is the source of all the energy we use, and everything else could be considered a carrier. Heck, we could also say that the Sun is only a carrier of Big Bang energy. :)

So, there is more excuse to call the Sun a source of energy, or wood and oil, but water and electrons have the least excuse to be called sources of energy, and no scientist will call them that. The potential energy in the chemical bonds (or hydrogen bonds) has already been converted into kinetic energy.

On hydrogen “power,” it is the same story, where electricity was used to disassociate water into hydrogen and oxygen, and recombining them is where hydrogen “power” comes from. Calling hydrogen an energy source would be like calling batteries an energy source.

Brian O was a big promoter of Randall Mills and his hydrino concept. There may indeed be something to it, but even then, it sure could not be called hydrogen power, and Mills himself says that the hydrogen atom is only being used to tap the ZPF, not an energy source in of itself.

It is really maddening to hear the media tout “hydrogen power” or biofuels or other crap that has either an EROI of about one or even less than one, which is the case with hydrogen “power.” Can we solve the world’s energy problems by buying batteries? That is the kind of crap that the mainstream media promotes, and scientifically illiterate people fall for it.

Hydrocarbon-powered industrial civilization is reaching its end, as the EROI has fallen from over 100-to-1 a century ago to less than ten for newly discovered sources, and global EROI will fall to ten in this decade. An EROI of 5-10 is currently thought to be the minimum needed to run a civilization. Tar sands and shale oil are already around 4-to-1 or less, not to mention the environmental devastation, and anybody who thinks it is some great boon to humanity is either brainwashed or works for the hydrocarbon interests.

Those in the choir will understand those issues, from a scientific and economic perspective, and will not be swayed by the latest propaganda from the energy gangsters or the latest fringe claimant who thinks that we can solve our energy problems by burning sagebrush (yes, I have heard that argument :) ).

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Ilie Pandia

30th March 2014, 18:09

Hm, it's now obvious to me that I have a major confusion to clear up in my "thinking":

Initially I saw nothing wrong with this:

"Calling hydrogen an energy source would be like calling batteries an energy source."

When you "burn" hydrogen you get power, so in my mind hydrogen (if you could find it freely floating around with some oxygen handy as well) was an energy source...

In physics class, batteries have always been called (and used as) energy sources (although "power supply" would be the correct translation and not "energy source"), so in my mind batteries were indeed "energy sources".

What finally drove it home for me was:

"Can we solve the world’s energy problems by buying batteries?"

The answer is no, and when I thought of why that is, it becomes obvious why batteries are NOT energy sources. :)

At least now I know where to focus my efforts: "Big Bang energy tapping devices" :becky: (aka BBETDs)

Wade Frazier

30th March 2014, 18:36

Hi Ilie:

Some of that seeming confusion is just terminology. I know that if you and I talked about hydrogen “power,” and we walked it back through the steps to “making” it, I would not have had to point it out to you.

In today’s mainstream science and industry, the only energy sources that humans may be able to profitably mine are:

1. The potential chemical energy in currently living organisms and recently dead ones, such as food and wood, which all came from the captured sunlight of photosynthesis;

2. The potential energy of hydrocarbons, overwhelmingly accepted to be residual photosynthesis captured in dead organisms;

3. Various forms of sunlight-powered kinetic energy, such as sunlight directly with photoelectric panels, and other indirect forms such as hydroelectric and wind (Earth’s rotational energy also is farmed to some degree when we harness wind), or temperature differentials, which was what Dennis's heat pump did (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#new);

4. Radioactive decay in Earth, either by mining radioactive materials directly and putting them in nuclear power plants, or by mining geothermal energy, which is also from radioactive decay;

5. Gravity between large bodies, such as tidal energy (caused by the moon).

That is about it. I think that all “sources” currently considered are variations of those. The ZPF, even though people such as Bohm and Tesla hypothesized that it could be tapped, with Tesla even going after it, and I know that it has been tapped:

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

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

has successfully been kept off the radar of scientists by their indoctrination into the “laws of physics.” It is a really irrational position, but that is where the “smart” get stuck, in Level 3:

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

Making what already exists simply imaginable is my primary goal. :)

In summary, anything that is just a storage medium from those sources listed above scientists do not consider energy sources, or at least the kind that humanity can live on. Examples include hydrogen “power,” batteries, a stretched rubber band ( :) ), a rock at the top of a hill, and so on.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

30th March 2014, 19:04

Hi:

I have been writing about Orwell a bit in my essay, and I just read this:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-30/2014-brave-new-dystopian-1984-world

It is kind of like the Peak Oil/Global Warming race of the catastrophes. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death:

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

also covered the “race” between Huxley and Orwell.

Fun stuff. :)

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

1st April 2014, 01:16

Hi:

Oh boy, I am now getting into the robber barons and their malign influence. Navigating that territory is going to be challenging. From outright Godzilla activities to just greedy empire-building to how the masses fall right into line – it will not be easy. Navigating between structuralist denial and conspiracist obsession:

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

will be no easy trick. Those in the choir will have to maintain that challenging balance between those poles. Acknowledging Godzilla and his antics, without obsessing on them, or thinking that they are the root of our problems, however spectacular his activities and technological advantage may be, is something that almost nobody can do, and the secret is thinking like a creator instead of a victim:

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

and that always starts in the heart. Love is the answer in more ways than one, but dealing with the darkness, especially Godzilla’s level of “mastery,” can be a very wearying task.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

1st April 2014, 15:18

Hi:

Today is a day for chores and play, but I will put up what I have been working on lately, to show the challenges of writing this part. I am sure that it will change, maybe a lot, by the time my final version is published.

I will soon put up a post at Avalon on my visit to the site of the Ludlow Massacre last year, when I took a Bucket List trip around the USA, and literally stumbled on the site as I was driving:

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

I am attaching one picture that I took that day.

Best,

Wade

Epochal Event 4.5 – The Rise of Oil and Electricity

When Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, published in 1851, whaling expeditions had lengthened from brief excursions near Nantucket to three-year voyages that circled the world, hunting the remaining whales. American whaling peaked in 1847, in a classic resource depletion scenario, as whaling’s EROI fell fast. The primary whale product was oil for lighting lamps. In 1848, the USA completed the theft of more than half of Mexico, beginning with the seizure of Texas. The next year, the biggest gold rush in American history began, and the rabble got to California any way it could. The genocide of the remaining natives began in earnest, with California’s first governor declaring an open season on natives. The Pacific whaling fleet was crippled when its crews deserted in San Francisco and swarmed into the Sierra’s gold fields.

In 1859, the USA’s first commercial oil well was drilled, and its Civil War began the next year. The southern rebels sank most of the Pacific whaling fleet during the war, and that, combined with the establishment of the petroleum industry, spelled the end of American whaling. Railroads were the USA’s first big businesses, and in the 1860s the first transcontinental railroad was built. The telegraph was an early use of electricity, and it proliferated with the railroads, usually running alongside the rails as the USA expanded across the continent. But as with World War II, the USA’s Civil War was an industrial opportunity. The Civil War stimulated the North’s industrial production. In 1830, the USA’s industrial production was a quarter of the UK’s, a third in 1860, two-thirds in 1880, and a third greater in 1900. On the eve of World War I, the USA’s industrial production was more than twice the UK’s, with the USA far and away Earth’s greatest industrial power, and it grew even more dominant by 1929.

With its skyrocketing industrial growth, economic empires grew as never before and the USA’s Gilded Age was born, dominated by robber barons. Industrial, financial, pharmaceutical, and other empires were born or began steep growth trajectories during the Civil War, with John Davison Rockefeller’s oil empire the most notorious and successful. Rockefeller established an oil refining business in 1863 after careful study of the new industry. As with bears and early elites, Rockefeller quickly realized that controlling production was unnecessary. If he positioned himself properly between the producers and market, he could control the entire industry. Rockefeller’s father was a genuine snake oil salesman and con man who mentored his sons and was John’s early financier. John Rockefeller was a genius, if a diabolical one. He used the rich man’s exemption and bought his way out of military service in the Civil War and began building his empire. He decided that controlling refining and distribution was the path to dominance. He negotiated kickbacks from the railroads used to transport oil, but took it further when he negotiated kickbacks on the railroad traffic of his competitors, in one of history’s most clever and unscrupulous plans. Beginning in Cleveland, he used his shrewd kickback scheme and various carrots and sticks to wipe out or buy out all other refiners. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil eliminated the hundreds of small refiners that formed the initial industry. By 1879, his empire controlled 95% of American oil refining, setting the stage for him to become history’s richest person, with nearly ten times the relative wealth of Bill Gates. Recalcitrant Standard Oil competitors could have mysterious explosions destroy their refineries, and more than one came to an untimely demise, but if Rockefeller’s prey put up a good fight or showed talent, he hired them and soon amassed a team unmatched in capability and ruthlessness.

The Rockefeller Empire’s tale is far from an irrelevant historical curiosity. During my days of pursuing free energy, we encountered the Rockefeller name many times. Companies they controlled were directly involved with wiping out energy companies that we worked with. When my partner was offered about a billion dollars to fold up our operations, the Rockefellers may well have been involved, and we later had direct dealings with Rockefeller heirs, including one of the biggest names. The Rockefeller Empire was likely behind a number of organized suppression strategies directed at our operations. Long after I “retired” from the field, my partner kept trying to make an impact before he was run out of the USA, soon after direct contact from the Rockefeller Empire. Rothschild interests were also involved. While the Rockefellers and Rothschilds are subjects of all manner of conspiracy theory today, our encounters demonstrated that the allegations are not entirely groundless. However, the fact that they identified themselves by name means, to me, that they are no longer at the top of the global food chain, if they ever really were. The people who really run the world are not household names. I call them the Global Controllers, while my partner called them the Big Boys, and a leading name of free energy pursuit today called them “Godzilla.” Whatever name is used, the organization is real. We also had dealings with them, and they do not identify themselves by name. They act through intermediaries and have cloak-and-dagger methods down to a science. Whether it was the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, or Global Controllers, we never contacted them, but they contacted us.

Anybody knowledgeable about that milieu realizes that naming names is dangerous and I usually make it a point to not know the names. Others who should know have named some organizations or, more accurately, factions of some organizations. We also had encounters with provocateurs from those organizations when they helped destroy our companies. This can be rather difficult and delicate territory to navigate, and here is my current view on the situation. Sitting American presidents operate far below the tops of those organizations, in the dark and out of the loop, and they all know that they are not near the top. They have power of a sort, but are largely actors, not necessarily following orders, but they know their place or have a good idea what it is, and they cannot impact the vitally important issues. The last president who thought he could was John Kennedy, and he was rudely disabused of that notion.

From the beginnings of civilization, all elites have always played the same games, which were concerned with gaining economic power as a way to amass political power. All ruling classes exploited those they ruled. The elites of city-states, whether it was Sumer or Mesoamerica, tried conquering their neighbors by using soldiers they commanded, and could thereby form larger polities. Nations and empires have constantly formed, fragmented, and fallen over the millennia, and they almost always fell because they ran out of energy. Greed and megalomania can never be satiated, and those in thrall to those conditions always seek more, like drug addicts. Psychologists have found that psychopaths often become successful politicians and corporate executives, as their affliction works to their advantage where amassing wealth and power are organizational goals. For those who have encountered today’s hyper-elite and lived to tell about it, the evils that attend that environment are difficult for “normal” people to understand. Those megalomaniacs have taken greed and a lust for power to nearly inconceivable levels. Just as John Rockefeller hired talented psychopaths, so do the Global Controllers. I have encountered their agents, and they were talented, I will grant them that. People who do well in that domain have particular traits, and many of which most people would call evil. The man responsible for the death of a woman in our organization attended her funeral and tried to blame my former partner for her death. He likely worked for the Global Controllers, but he was a contract agent, as many of them are, and he later defrauded the public with the skills he used to help destroy our company. People like him do not have consciences. He would have done well in Hitler’s SS, for instance.

What psychologists call psychopaths or sociopaths, mystics call dark pathers and other terms. Such people have simply made self-service a science, and reaching high levels of “evil” requires great commitment. Genghis Kahn was a busy man, slaughtering millions and leaving behind millions of descendants. That takes hard work and a sense of duty. When evil-minded people revealed their true motivations to me (usually as they sank in their figurative daggers), I could not help but be somewhat impressed with their abilities. Dark path professionals were sicced on us, and being on the receiving end of their evil deeds engendered a certain kind of awe.

But the dark path is dark indeed, and while indoctrination and other kinds of limbic conditioning help form “cohesion” in societies, in the ranks of the Global Controllers and other criminal organizations, the carrots and sticks that hold those organizations together can be breathtaking. I avoid knowing too much about it, as it is damaging to a normal person’s psyche to be aware of activities at those levels. Studying the Jewish Holocaust, the genocide of the Western Hemisphere’s natives, and today’s recent and continuing imperial genocides inflicted by my nation damaged me. Those diabolical organizations are always in danger of fragmenting, as everybody vies for wealth and power, and I doubt that there is an unbroken line of conspiring elites that stretches back to civilization’s beginnings. They have risen and fallen along with their civilizations, and they could only play a regional game at most. However, with Europe’s conquest of the world, power-addicted elites began thinking on a global scale for the first time. Therefore, I would not be surprised to discover that some elite organizations have a pedigree that stretches back for centuries, and conspiracists have long traced those lineages. But my impression is that regular turnover exists at the top. With retail dynasties (Rome, Mayans, European royalty), they could trust relatives more than others, so heredity played a role, and it apparently does with the Global Controllers. A relative nearly tried to recruit me into the family “business,” and his employers played at a higher level than John Perkins’s employers did, but it was still down a level or two from the Global Controllers’ strata.

I need to address a major problem with the Global Controllers and making a positive impact on a global level; almost nobody focuses on what is important. Conspiracists tend to obsess on elite machinations, but they tend to become paranoid and often confuse retail elites with the Global Controllers. David Rockefeller is not one of them, nor are the Rothschilds. They play at high levels, but not at the top. Also, what I learned from my journey is that hyper-elites can only play their games with the responsibility that almost all people have abdicated as they play the victim. The Global Controllers are really a symptom of our malaise, not a cause. While conspiracists often focus obsessively on elite machinations, academics and scientists tend to deny that the hyper-elites even exist. It took me many years to understand their resistance to even acknowledging the existence of hyper-elites, and I think it relates to the mainstream scientific worldview that considers consciousness nothing more than a byproduct of biochemical reactions. They have an ideological aversion to the idea that anybody is manipulating events on a global scale, and believe that the situation can be explained by anarchic elites merely competing with each other. They believe that conspiracists see a pattern where none exists, or that it can be explained without invoking conscious intent, just like their materialistic theories of how the universe operates. Radical leftists have openly admitted their ideological aversion to the existence of such elites. Neither obsession nor denial is helpful for attaining productive understandings of the issue. Conspiracists and structuralists are united in thinking like victims, and that, as I see it, is their primary limitation. Until they relinquish thinking like a victim, they will not constructively engage the critical issues that humanity faces.

This essay will return to that theme, but will put it aside for now. One lesson I learned from interacting with that level of the global game is that there is often more than meets the eye happening with global events, and accepting them at face value is probably foolish. That said, documented history and archeological and other physical evidence can also provide important insights, and this essay will continue along a scientist/historian’s path for now.

Other robber baron empires have had profound and continuing effects on not just the course of industrial and national trajectories, but the very path of science and medicine. Andrew Mellon parlayed his robber baron heritage into becoming the USA’s Secretary of the Treasury, and presided over fluoride (ionized fluorine) beginning its surreal makeover from toxic industrial waste to a tooth’s best friend. Mellon controlled the world’s largest fluoride polluter at the time, which was the world’s largest aluminum producer, which also enjoyed an American monopoly. There is virtually no credible theory or data that justifies fluoride’s status as a safe and effective cavity preventative for children, and indisputable evidence that it is a highly effective enzyme poison, used in biological laboratories today for that purpose. Revisiting that “lock-and-key” analogy for enzymes, hydrogen bonds hold the lock’s shape in place. An ion with an extra electron will be more negatively charged than any part of an uncharged molecule that unevenly shares electrons, such as in water and organic molecules, where hydrogen atoms attain a slightly negative charge. Therefore, negatively charged ions will displace hydrogen bonds in molecules, particularly if they are small enough to slip into the molecules’ crevices. Because it is the smallest negatively charged ion known to science, the fluorine ion can get close and break hydrogen bonds, essentially replacing the hydrogen atom with a fluorine ion. When fluorine ions disrupt an enzyme’s hydrogen bonds, the lock becomes “bent” and the key no longer fits. That is how fluoride poisons enzymes, and it damages more than enzymes; DNA’s double helix is held together by hydrogen bonds. The story of how industrial interests transformed fluoride into “medicine” is mind-boggling, and shows how severe the distortion of science and medicine has become. Lead, aluminum, and other elements also received industrial makeovers, and all three of them had early toxicity studies performed at an industrially funded laboratory that predictably gave a clean bill of health to all three.

Other industries were also fluoride polluters, and they helped shaped the “science” of fluoridation, most notably the nuclear industry, beginning with the Manhattan Project, whose involvement has been partly revealed by declassified documents. While the Manhattan Project’s research into fluorine toxicity is still largely classified (although what has been declassified is shocking enough), a study performed by that industrially funded lab showed fluoride’s dramatic harm on animals, and the results were buried. Because the study was performed by an unclassified industrial lab and not by the federal government, a researcher recently discovered the study. Among the more alarming effects of fluoride is brain damage. A scientist who discovered that connection had her career wrecked, and the man who ran the Manhattan Project’s still-classified fluorine studies “consulted” on that scientist’s research. Studying the history of fluoridation is descending into the heart of darkness, and the average American, who is history’s most fluoridated person, has no awareness of the situation. The fluoride issue is one of many where physical, biological, and medical science became subservient to economic interests. Reality could be turned upside down, with poison turned into “medicine,” with such situations lasting to this day. People who try rectifying the crimes, both those of long ago and those continuing, can lose their careers or be branded “quacks,” “pseudoscientists,” “conspiracy theorists,” and the like.

John Rockefeller only became excited when pondering how rich he would become. He became a “philanthropist” early on. It was a plainly fake philanthropy, as became evident to everybody in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre in 1914, where Rockefeller’s strikebreakers turned machine guns striking coal miners in Rockefeller’s diversifying empire, and women and children died in the attack. In the aftermath, as Rockefeller tried repairing his image, that charade of giving away dimes was concocted by J.P. Morgan’s publicist. At the same time that his men were machine-gunning striking workers, he became the first great “philanthropist” of Western Medicine, and was instrumental in turning it into the racket it is today.

Wade Frazier

2nd April 2014, 15:18

Hi:

Quickly, before I begin my busy day, the nature of what the USA has done to Iraq and Afghanistan is typical of empires. The excess deaths almost totally inflicted by the USA on those two nations amounts to nearly ten million people (and that is not including two wars that the USA created and enabled, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#brzezinski), and the Iraqi-Iran war (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#iran)). About the only place where the toll is even acknowledged is by a Jewish scientist living in Australia:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/links.htm#iraqideaths

For all of the imperial citizenry, it went right down the Memory Hole, if it ever registered in the first place. Almost all of the identified 9/11 perpetrators were Saudis, but we never invaded them, good, oil-rich allies that they are, with one of Earth’s most repressive regimes. The murderous hypocrisy is off the scale.

Off to my day.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

2nd April 2014, 19:47

Hi:

The previous post was related to tweaks I am making to my site, to align it with my essay. As readers know, I recently updated my Columbus essay:

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

and as I look at the essays from the 2002 version of my site (the last major revision), it is generally the oldest essays that I want to tweak some more, such as my fluoridation essay:

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

which is about the oldest on my site. My upcoming essay deals with fluoride a bit, after I lay the groundwork for the situation better than I did in the fluoride essay. You can seem some of it in this post:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=817117&viewfull=1#post817117

Readers should be able to understand and easily visualize how the fluorine ion damages organic molecules by breaking their hydrogen bonds.

I have wanted to revise my American Empire essay for ten years, but that task will be pretty monumental. I may revise it after I get the new essay published, but I just updated the imperial death toll section:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#toll

As I write, the death toll of more than ten million people is conservative. The death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan alone may be nearly ten million. Studying World War II and the Jewish Holocaust damaged my marriage, and I am not sure I what it takes to revise that essay, although I would like to:

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

Studying the genocide of the natives of the Western Hemisphere was also very heavy lifting:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm#genocide

that always takes a toll when I look into it. I hope to get to the fun part of my essay soon, there is agonizing territory that still needs to be traveled.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

2nd April 2014, 20:28

Hi:

One thing I forgot to add is that for those studying holocaust and genocides, targeting a group for destruction and carrying it out does not mean that they all died violently, or that even the violent deaths all had “made in the USA” on the weapons. When a people is targeted for destruction, as the Iraqi and Afghani peoples were, the means of destruction can be quite varied, and can even seem unintentional, like “collateral damage.” There is no such thing as collateral damage, especially in the imperial context. If you go on a high-speed chase through the streets to catch a “crook” and run over children in a crosswalk, they are not “collateral damage,” but easily foreseen consequences of driving through a town at 150 KPH. That the drivers did not intend to kill those particular children does not mean that that they knew damn well that innocents would die if they drove through town like that.

Genocidal activities include straight imperial violence, such as the bombings of Iraq and Afghanistan, “lighting” up a street or slaughtering drivers at roadblocks. Hell, the USA’s troops took “trophy shots” of people killed that way. But bombing out a nation’s infrastructure and then waging an embargo against them so they could not build it, and consequently multitudes of children died because of contaminated water supplies, for instance:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#continuing

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#kuwait

also qualifies as genocide. What the Israelis are doing the Palestinians qualifies as genocide, very ironically. When the USA targets a nation and its infant mortality rate then skyrockets, or they get the world’s highest rate of cancer from the depleted uranium and other highly toxic weaponry dropped on them, that is genocide. The effects were easily predictable and in fact were predicted by many before the invasion.

When the USA destroyed all of Iraq’s institutions except for the Oil ministry, and helped create a lawless environment and ethnic and religious wars, that is genocide: an easily predictable outcome of the USA’s behavior.

When the USA presided over the Nuremberg trial, the ultimate crime the Nazis were convicted of was offensive wars that disturbed the peace, and the Nazis were responsible for the accumulated evil that attended those invasions. The same standard applies to the USA. In fact, the judge at Nuremberg, an American, told his associates that we were making ourselves accountable for the Nazis’ crimes if we did the same thing, and we have, many times, since World War II. The blood is on my hands and those of my fellow Americans. Blaming Bush and the neocons does not cut it. That other nations were also complicit does not remove our responsibility, and feigning ignorance of the fate of the very peoples that we invaded and slaughtered is really scraping the bottom of the barrel, integrity-wise. That a Jew in Australia is about the only person in the West actually computing the death toll of its victims speaks volumes about the West’s collective integrity, as in it does not have any. And that has everything to do with why we do not have FE today:

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

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

3rd April 2014, 02:11

Hi:

As may be obvious, my essay will be generalist in nature. Generalists “specialize” in seeing patterns and connections, and the best try to not overgeneralize or stray far from the details, or else their generalizations will tend to be invalid.

That said, deifying and heroifying elites happened from the very beginnings of civilization, and casting rape and plunder in a benign and even heroic and divine light was pretty typical. Somewhere along the line, rape and plunder stopped becoming heroic, so a different tactic was taken, and what became seen as crimes were swept under the rug, while elites were still heroified and deified. Often enough, actual crimes were transformed by ideologists into heroic deeds, turning reality upside down.

But making elite crimes invisible became common, and the way that English peasants were pushed off the land and into mines and factories is one of those instances, and the classical economists abetted those crimes by ignoring them in their theorizing.

As I have been reading a book on energy-based economics, the authors got kind of pissed at the economics profession as it has worshipped money and been oblivious to energy. Because early economists did their work before the science of energy arose, their blindness was somewhat understandable, but for economists of the past 150 years or so, to ignore energy and the real economy in favor of models of equilibrium that assumed production and homogenized everything into money and then performed calculus-based analytics – well, what the hell were they thinking? This is an early example of what could be called pseudoscience, where a discipline presents itself as scientific when it is not.

As I write the chapter on the rise of oil and electricity, making energy invisible in economic theory seems to be another trick in the bag of making elites invisible. The leading institution in economic theory is the University of Chicago, and they have been notorious for their worship of money in their theories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_%28economics%29

More than any other recent institution, they have made energy invisible in economic theory. The school’s greatest patron was John Rockefeller. So, the world’s greatest energy mogul reshaped the economics school that helped make energy invisible. Hmmm. I can see that raising the eyebrows of conspiracists, and there may be something to it.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

4th April 2014, 14:50

Hi:

Here is a revised snippet of what I am working on. Heavy lifting…

Best,

Wade

When Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, published in 1851, whaling expeditions had lengthened from brief excursions near Nantucket to three-year voyages that circled the world, hunting the remaining whales. American whaling peaked in 1847, in a classic resource depletion scenario, as whaling’s EROI fell fast. The primary whale product was oil for lighting lamps. In 1848, the USA completed the theft of more than half of Mexico, beginning with the seizure of Texas. The next year, the biggest gold rush in American history began, and the rabble got to California any way it could. The genocide of the remaining natives began in earnest, with California’s first governor declaring an open season on natives. The Pacific whaling fleet was crippled when its crews deserted in San Francisco and swarmed into the Sierra’s gold fields.

In 1859, the USA’s first commercial oil well was drilled, and its Civil War began the next year. The southern rebels sank most of the Pacific whaling fleet during the war, and that, combined with the petroleum industry’s establishment, spelled the end of American whaling. Railroads were the USA’s first big businesses, and in the 1860s the first transcontinental railroad was built. The telegraph was an early use of electricity, and it proliferated with the railroads, usually running alongside the rails as the USA expanded across the continent. Those railroads were instrumental in the extinction of the passenger pigeon, the near-extinction of the bison, and the disappearance of the American frontier. As with World War II, the USA’s Civil War was an industrial opportunity. The Civil War stimulated the North’s industrial production. In 1830, the USA’s industrial production was a quarter of the UK’s, a third in 1860, two-thirds in 1880, and a third greater in 1900. On the eve of World War I, the USA’s industrial production was more than twice the UK’s, with the USA far and away Earth’s greatest industrial power. It grew even more dominant by 1929, and was virtually alone on the world stage in 1945.

The USA has been a plutocracy since the very beginning, with George Washington being the USA’s richest man; a slave-owning land baron whose armies he commanded made him richer. John Jay was the USA’s first Supreme Court Chief Justice, and strongly believed that those who own the nation should govern it. Probably beginning with Zachary Taylor, assassinating American presidents became a sport, with Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Kennedy, Ford, and Reagan subject to assassination attempts that were usually successful, and presidential candidates Robert Kennedy and George Wallace were also subjected to assassination attempts. Only the Lincoln assassination has been widely acknowledged to have been part of a conspiracy. Every other time it was attributed to a “lone nut” assassin, if the weak conclusion given by the second official John Kennedy assassination investigation is discounted. I have no doubt that John Kennedy’s death resulted from a conspiracy, and in 2013, for the first time ever, the Kennedy family publicly stated the truth: the Kennedy family never believed the “lone nut” theory regarding John’s murder. Robert Kennedy’s son made that public admission, and if the Kennedys never believed the official story for John’s murder, they certainly do not believe it for Robert’s murder. The Kennedys have not revealed that opinion yet, but they probably do not need to. Fear is what likely kept them silent for fifty years. I consider it very possible that none of those assassinations and attempts were the work of “lone nuts.”

With its skyrocketing industrial growth, economic empires grew as never before and the USA’s Gilded Age was born, dominated by robber barons. Industrial, financial, pharmaceutical, and other empires were born or began steep growth trajectories during the Civil War, with John Davison Rockefeller’s oil empire the most notorious and successful. Rockefeller established an oil refining business in 1863 after careful study of the new industry. As with bears and early elites, Rockefeller quickly realized that controlling production was unnecessary. If he positioned himself properly between the producers and market, he could control the entire industry. Rockefeller’s father was a genuine snake oil salesman and con man who mentored his sons and was John’s early financier. John Rockefeller was a genius. He used the rich man’s exemption and bought his way out of military service in the Civil War and began building his empire. He decided that controlling refining and distribution was the path to dominance. He negotiated kickbacks from the railroads used to transport oil, but took it further when he negotiated kickbacks on the railroad traffic of his competitors, in one of history’s most clever and unscrupulous plans. Beginning in Cleveland, he used his shrewd kickback scheme and various carrots and sticks to wipe out or buy out all other refiners. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil eliminated the hundreds of small refiners that formed the initial industry. By 1879, his empire controlled 95% of American oil refining, setting the stage for him to become history’s richest person, with nearly ten times the relative wealth of Bill Gates. Recalcitrant Standard Oil competitors could have mysterious explosions destroy their refineries, and more than one came to an untimely demise, but if Rockefeller’s prey put up a good fight or showed talent, he hired them and soon amassed a team unmatched in capability and ruthlessness. John Rockefeller only became excited when pondering how rich he would become. He became a “philanthropist” early on but it was plainly a fake designation, as became evident with the Ludlow Massacre in 1914.

The Rockefeller Empire’s tale is far from an irrelevant historical curiosity. During my days of pursuing free energy, we encountered the Rockefeller name many times. Companies they controlled were directly involved with wiping out energy companies that we worked with. When my partner was offered about a billion dollars to fold up our operations, the Rockefellers may well have been involved, and we later had direct dealings with Rockefeller heirs, including one of the biggest names. The Rockefeller Empire was likely behind some of the organized suppression activities that we experienced. Long after I “retired” from the field, my partner kept trying to make an impact before he was run out of the USA, soon after direct contact from the Rockefeller Empire. Rothschild interests were also involved. The Rockefellers and Rothschilds are subjects of many conspiracy theories today, and our encounters demonstrated that the allegations may not be groundless. However, the fact that they identified themselves by name means, to me, that they are no longer at the top of the global power structure, if they ever really were. The people who really run the world are not household names. I call them the Global Controllers, my partner called them the Big Boys, and a leading name in the free energy field called them “Godzilla.” Whatever name is used, the organization is real. We also had dealings with them, and they do not identify themselves by name. They act through intermediaries and have developed their cloak-and-dagger into a science. Whether it was the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, or Global Controllers, we never contacted them, but they contacted us.

Anybody knowledgeable about that milieu realizes that naming names is dangerous and I usually make it a point to not know the names. Others who should know have named some organizations or, more accurately, factions of some organizations. We also had encounters with provocateurs from those organizations when they helped destroy our companies. This can be a difficult and delicate subject, and what follows is my view as of early 2014, which has not changed much for a decade or more. Sitting American presidents operate far below the tops of those organizations, in the dark and out of the loop, and they all know that they are not near the top. They have power of a sort, but are largely actors, not necessarily following orders, but they know their place or have a good idea what it is, and they cannot impact important issues. The last president who thought he could was John Kennedy, and he was rudely disabused of that notion.

From the beginnings of civilization, all elites have always played the same games, which were concerned with gaining economic power as path to political power. All ruling classes exploited those they ruled. The elites of city-states, whether it was Sumer or Mesoamerica, tried conquering their neighbors by using soldiers, and could thereby form larger polities. Nations and empires have constantly formed, fragmented, and fallen over the millennia, and they almost always fell because they ran out of energy. Greed and megalomania can never be satiated, and those in thrall to those conditions continually feed their addictions. Psychologists have found that psychopaths often become successful politicians and corporate executives, as their affliction works to their advantage where amassing wealth and power are primary organizational goals. For those who have encountered today’s hyper-elite and lived to tell about it, the evils that attend that environment are difficult for “normal” people to understand. Those at the top have taken greed and a lust for power to nearly inconceivable levels. Just as John Rockefeller hired talented psychopaths, so do the Global Controllers. I have encountered their agents and they were talented, I will grant them that. People who succeed in that domain have particular traits, many of which could be called evil. The man responsible for the death of a woman in our organization tried to blame my former partner for her death at the funeral. He likely worked for the Global Controllers, but he was a contract agent, as many are. He later defrauded the public with the skills he used to help destroy our company. People like him do not have consciences. He would have likely done well in Hitler’s SS, for instance.

What psychologists call psychopaths or sociopaths, mystics call dark pathers and other terms. Such people have simply made self-service a science, and reaching high levels of “evil” requires great commitment. Genghis Kahn was a busy man, slaughtering millions and leaving behind millions of descendants. That takes hard work and a sense of duty. When evil-minded people revealed their true motivations to me (usually as they sank in their figurative daggers), I was impressed, in a horrified way. Dark path professionals were sicced on us, and being on the receiving end of their evil deeds engendered a certain kind of awe.

But the dark path is dark indeed, and while indoctrination and other kinds of limbic conditioning help form “cohesion” in societies, in the ranks of the Global Controllers and other criminal organizations the carrots and sticks that hold those organizations together can be breathtaking. I avoid knowing too much about it, as it is damaging to a normal person’s psyche to become aware of such activities. I was damaged by merely studying the Jewish Holocaust, the genocide of the Western Hemisphere’s natives, and today’s recent and continuing imperial genocides inflicted by my nation. Those diabolical global organizations are always in danger of fragmenting, as everybody vies for wealth and power, and I doubt that there is an unbroken line of conspiring elites that stretches back to civilization’s beginnings. They have risen and fallen along with their civilizations, and they could only play a regional game at most. However, with Europe’s conquest of the world, power-addicted elites could begin thinking on a global scale for the first time. Therefore, I would not be surprised to discover that some elite organizations have a pedigree that stretches back for centuries, and conspiracists have long traced those lineages. But my impression is that turnover regularly happens at the top. With retail dynasties (Rome, Mayans, European royalty), they could trust relatives more than others, so heredity played a role, and it apparently does with the Global Controllers. A relative nearly tried to recruit me into the family “business,” and his employers played at a higher level than John Perkins’s employers did, but it still seemed down a level or two from the Global Controllers’ stratum.

One major problem with the Global Controllers and making a positive impact on a global level is that almost nobody focuses on what is important. Conspiracists tend to obsess on elite machinations, but they often become paranoid and often confuse retail elites with the Global Controllers. David Rockefeller is not one of them, nor are the Rothschilds. They play at high levels, but not at the top. Also, what I learned from my journey is that hyper-elites can only play their games with the responsibility that almost all people have abdicated as they play the victim. The Global Controllers are really a symptom of our malaise, not a cause. They cannot be beaten at their game, and it is foolish and even suicidal to try. The best we can do is making them obsolete. While conspiracists often focus obsessively on elite machinations, academics and scientists tend to deny that the hyper-elites even exist. It took me many years to understand their resistance to even acknowledging hyper-elite existence, and I think it partly relates to the mainstream scientific worldview that considers consciousness nothing more than a byproduct of biochemical reactions. They have an ideological aversion to the notion that anybody manipulates events on a global scale, and believe that the situation can be explained as anarchic elites merely competing with each other. They believe that conspiracists see a pattern where none exists or that the situation can be explained without invoking conscious intent, just like their materialistic theories of how the universe operates. Radical leftists have openly admitted their ideological aversion to the existence of such elites. Neither obsession nor denial is helpful for attaining productive understandings of the issue. Conspiracists and structuralists are united in thinking like victims, and that, as I see it, is their primary limitation. Until they relinquish thinking like a victim, they will not constructively engage the critical issues that humanity faces, energy above all else.

This essay will return to that theme, but will put it aside for now. One lesson I learned from interacting with that level of the global game is that there is often more than meets the eye happening with global events, and accepting them at face value is a delusionary path. That stated, documented history and archeological and other physical evidence can provide important insights, and this essay will continue along a scientist/historian’s path for now.

Other robber baron empires have had profound and continuing effects on not just the course of industrial and national trajectories, but the very path of science and medicine. Andrew Mellon parlayed his robber baron heritage into becoming the USA’s Secretary of the Treasury, and presided over fluoride (ionized fluorine) beginning its surreal makeover from toxic industrial waste to a tooth’s best friend. Mellon controlled the world’s largest fluoride polluter at the time. It was also the world’s largest aluminum producer, and enjoyed an American monopoly. There is virtually no credible data or theory that justifies fluoride’s status as a safe or effective cavity preventative for children, and indisputable evidence that it is a highly effective enzyme poison, used in biological laboratories today for that purpose. Revisiting that “lock-and-key” analogy for enzymes, hydrogen bonds help form the lock’s shape. An ion with an extra electron will be more negatively charged than any part of an uncharged molecule that unevenly shares electrons, such as in water and organic molecules, where hydrogen atoms attain a slightly negative charge. Consequently, negatively charged ions will displace hydrogen bonds in molecules, particularly if the ions are small enough to slip into the molecules’ crevices. Because it is the smallest negatively charged ion known to science, the fluorine ion can replace a hydrogen atom in a molecule, thereby breaking the hydrogen bond. When fluorine ions disrupt an enzyme’s hydrogen bonds, the lock becomes “bent” and the key no longer fits. That is how fluoride poisons enzymes, and it damages more than enzymes; DNA’s double helix is held together by hydrogen bonds. The story of how industrial interests transformed fluoride into “medicine” is mind-boggling, and shows how severe the distortion of science and medicine has become. Lead, aluminum, and other elements also received industrial makeovers, and all three of them had early toxicity studies performed at an industrially funded laboratory that predictably gave a clean bill of health to all three.

Other industries were also fluoride polluters, and they helped shaped the “science” of fluoridation, most notably the nuclear industry, beginning with the Manhattan Project, whose involvement has been partly revealed by declassified documents. While the Manhattan Project’s research into fluorine toxicity is still largely classified (although what has been declassified is shocking enough), a study performed by that industrially funded lab showed fluoride’s dramatic harm to animals, and the results were buried. Because that study was performed by an unclassified industrial lab and not by the federal government, a researcher recently discovered it. Among the more alarming effects of fluoride is brain damage. A scientist who discovered that connection had her career wrecked, and the man who ran the Manhattan Project’s still-classified fluorine studies “consulted” on that scientist’s research. The average American, who is history’s most fluoridated person, has no awareness of the situation. The fluoride issue is one of many where physical, biological, and medical science became subservient to economic interests. Reality could be turned upside down, with poison turned into “medicine,” with such situations lasting to this day. People trying to rectify the crimes, both those of long ago and those continuing, can lose their careers or be branded “quacks,” “pseudoscientists,” “conspiracy theorists,” and the like. Edward Bernays designed the propaganda campaign to fluoridate the USA’s water supplies.

The Rockefeller and Mellon empires were only two of many built during and after the Civil War. J.P. Morgan got his start just before the Civil War began and made a quick ascent as a banker and financier. He participated in some of the most momentous events in U.S. and industrial history. It is a big story that this essay cannot do justice to, but he was ubiquitous, including masterminding what became arguably the biggest swindle of the American government to that time: the purchase of land for the Panama Canal in 1903; which was the largest payment yet made by the USA’s federal government. The future “trust-busting” president and Supreme Court Chief Justice was at the trough with Morgan on that swindle. After milking the government with his scheme, Morgan rode to the “rescue” in 1907 to quell a bank panic, and several years later, the Federal Reserve Act was snuck through when Capitol Hill was virtually empty, two days before Christmas. Earlier in the same year of 1913, the Income Tax Amendment was passed, which prepared the USA’s government to attain truly imperial stature. Those events have been grist for conspiracists for the past century, and many allegations may well be true. The most powerful Senator on Capitol Hill was Mark “Dollar” Hanna, a childhood friend of John Rockefeller and fixer for Standard Oil at a time when the corruption was open in Washington, with politicians routinely bought and sold by the robber barons.

Perhaps Morgan’s greatest industrial undertaking was participating in the epic battle between Thomas Edison and his former employee, Nikola Tesla. Edison himself was not a particularly brilliant inventor; many of his inventions were the result of his team’s hard work. Electric lighting is a good example, where his team engaged in brute force experimentation with thousands of filaments before they hit on something that worked in 1879, seemingly at Edison’s suggestion for the filament that finally worked. When the Wizard of Menlo Park demonstrated electric lights near his laboratory, he was widely pilloried for his “idiotic” idea, which was called a “fraud” foisted on the public by scientists who would not leave the comfort of their armchairs to go see for themselves. Morgan backed Edison’s electric light company and had the first home in New York lit by electricity. Edison was also notorious for stealing inventions, and there is even a tale of a rival inventor “disappearing,” Mafia-style. It was simply a sign of the times and an era we still live in.

In the flood of immigrants to the USA in the 1880s came the Serbian Tesla, who had already worked for an Edison company in France. After a dispute in 1885 when Tesla redesigned Edison’s inefficient motors and generators, and the reward that Tesla said Edison offered was not given, Tesla quit and began his own electric company. The investors soon kicked him out, leaving Tesla digging ditches in 1886-1887, and then he started another company.

Edison’s companies were beginning to electrify the world in the late 1880s, but they used direct current. Direct current has advantages over alternating current, but its great limitation is that resistance in electric lines quickly saps low-voltage direct current in heat losses. The higher the voltage of current transmitted over electric lines, the less proportional energy is lost to heating. Alternating current’s voltage could be stepped up by transformers and transmitted great distances with little line loss and then stepped back down for use, while direct current could not be manipulated that way. The primary upshot was that only one generator was needed to supply many miles of electric lines carrying alternating current electricity, while direct current electricity needed a generator every kilometer or so. The economies of scale of centralized generation made direct current a poor way to electrify the world when compared to alternating current. Edison was beaten from the beginning but did not go down without a fight; he is a household name today, while Tesla’s name languishes in obscurity (at least until a car company was named after him).

High voltages are dangerous for various reasons, but the risk of electrocution is the main one. Even though he was beaten by a superior technology, Edison engaged in a disgraceful campaign against alternating current. He had thousands of animals electrocuted in demonstrations of the dangers of alternating current, including horses and even an elephant in 1903. Although Edison was personally opposed to the death penalty, his commercial sensibilities overcame his personal qualms and he made his most notorious invention, the electric chair, powered with alternating current. The first execution with Edison’s new contraption was performed in 1890, where the victim was barbecued. By that time, Tesla had partnered with George Westinghouse in the battle against Edison, and Edison coined the term for execution by electrocution as being “Westinghoused.” By 1891, the short-lived “war” was largely over, with alternating current prevailing. In 1892, Edison’s company was absorbed into what became General Electric, which J.P. Morgan controlled, and Morgan was also Westinghouse’s financier.

The War of Currents nearly bankrupted Edison and Westinghouse, and Tesla relinquished his patent rights to his alternating current technology to Westinghouse for a modest lump sum in 1897. Tesla’s royalty agreement would have made him one of the world’s richest men, and humanity might have taken a different direction if not for the battle with Edison. Tesla immediately began thinking in terms of what could be called free energy. Tesla’s inventions were legion and sometimes stolen by contemporaries such as Marconi. In 1898, Tesla began designing a tower for producing radio signals, and construction commenced in 1901. Morgan was Tesla’s financier and was making money hand-over-fist with the alternating current technology that Tesla had relinquished his rights to. Tesla may have felt entitled to Morgan’s support. As Tesla built his radio tower, he began to tell of grander goals, such as producing energy that could be transmitted wirelessly to anywhere on Earth. His initial idea was tapping into the electric potential between Earth and its upper atmosphere, and anybody could put a device in their yard and use the current that Tesla induced. When Tesla made those proposals, however, the robber barons were making big investments in copper mines to electrify the nation. Morgan stopped funding Tesla’s idea in 1903, just when he and the Guggenheim family funded what became the world’s greatest copper mine. Many years later, Tesla’s official biographer, who knew him, said that when Tesla began writing “free energy” articles and talked publicly about it, another Wall Street financier heavily invested in copper mines told Morgan that Tesla was acting “crazy” with proposing free energy to everybody that nobody could meter. Wall Street then pulled the rug out from under Tesla, and he never regained his momentum. Tesla eventually advocated what today would be called Zero Point Energy, although he couched it in the form of cosmic rays. Tesla also originated an idea for a “death ray” weapon and other kinds of inventions that have cast him as a highly enigmatic figure. Upon his death in 1943, the FBI seized his papers, and there is plenty of conjecture and some evidence that there was a surreptitious earlier seizure by other governmental agents. There are some way-out speculations about Tesla, including time travel and myriad exotic technologies. While I have looked into them somewhat, I am not sure what to make of them, other than knowing that some of what some around me have witnessed makes the allegations seem not so outlandish.

And I do stuff like add this paragraph to an earlier chapter:

The hydrological cycle is how water circulates through Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, and land. The energy of sunlight drives it, and that sunlight is primarily captured at the surface of water bodies, the oceans in particular. While the hydrological cycle’s patterns have change over the eons as Earth’s surface has changed its continental configurations and temperature, today’s global weather system generally begins with sunlight hitting the atmosphere, with the equator’s air receiving the most direct radiation and becoming warmest. That air rises and cools, which reduces the water vapor that it can hold, so it falls as rain. That is why tropical rainforests are near the equator. The rising equatorial air creates high-pressure dry air that pushes toward the poles, and at about 30o latitude that air cools and sinks to the ground. That dry air not only does not bring precipitation, it sucks moisture from the land it hits and forms the world’s great deserts. That high pressure at the ground at 30o latitude pushes air back toward the tropics, and Earth’s rotation creates a distinctive bend in the northern and southern hemispheres that create trade winds which pick up moisture as they approach the equator. The pole-ward sides of the mid-latitudes’ dry temperate regions also have low pressures and wet climates, and dry high-pressure zones exist at the poles. As clouds pass over land, mountains force them upward and they lose their moisture in precipitation. As the water makes its way back to the oceans to start the cycle again it provides the freshwater for all land-based ecosystems.

When I finish the first draft, there will be many changes, where I pull together the various pieces of the essay, making connections, reducing repetition, and the like. It won’t be light reading. My guess is that the essay will be like a textbook and will be read like one, where the reader takes on a chapter at a time, reading each one, taking the links, absorbing it before moving on to the next chapter. In order to gain the comprehensive perspectives that I think will be needed in order to really help FE along, that will likely be required. It won’t be for skimmers and quick-study artists. I can see the best students taking about a week per chapter, which means that they won’t come up for air for several months. But when they do, I will be there.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Ilie Pandia

5th April 2014, 06:37

Reading about fluoride I realized that we have chemists and bio-chemists that know their science and have the tools to test this. They surely must know just how "safe" the fluoride is... and yet not a peep!

They must have children, lovers, wives, husbands and parents that will become the beneficiaries of Fluoride health (not mention the "fellow men"...). It's mind boggling that something so easily testable and explainable is still being suppressed. Even dentists must have learned about fluoride in their chemistry class, yet they still parrot the "good for your teeth" stuff.

I am however happy to report that since the beginning of 2014 I've seen fluoride attacked with viciousness and I will not be surprised if it gets completely banned by the end of this year! Fingers crossed!

Wade Frazier

5th April 2014, 07:05

Hi Ilie:

When the propaganda barrage for fluoridation began in the 1950s, half of dentists did not believe it, but they knuckled under. Yes, it can really be something to see how it ends up becoming “good for you.” Many scientists and dentists fought it, but it was bad for their careers. My dentist is a no-fluoride dentist, I think about the only one in Seattle.

What has been far more stupefying for me has been cancer treatment. I am going to a funeral tomorrow for a friend who died of brain cancer. She knew that I knew about alternatives, and the last time I saw her, she even asked me what I would have done. I told her, and she regarded it almost amusingly. I saw her on about her last good day. She was several years younger than me. She knew that with her cancer and mainstream treatments, she would only live a year or so, which is what it ended up being. She chose certain death over even looking into alternatives. I would have never even brought up alternatives to her, but she asked. I really did not try to sell her. I have another friend in the same circles with cancer, again younger than me, and I at least offered to point the person toward alternatives, but the person did not want to hear about it, and now I am hearing about how the treatment is going. It is not easy to watch.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/medicine.htm#lemmings

So, the institutional control that leads to such evil situations is amazing to witness, but how everybody plays along, even to their deaths, is the mind-boggling part, to me.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

6th April 2014, 19:53

Hi:

As I see my essay’s end in sight, I hear from pals periodically, and almost none of them understand. My essay will be available to anybody on Earth, and the forum I plan to mount will also be readable by anybody on Earth, but I am not targeting the masses in any way. My essay has been weaving in mass population control via indoctrination into concocted ideologies, which began with the very first civilizations. Before the Domestication Revolution, there really was not ideological indoctrination as such. The conditioning was more primal, with singing and dancing rituals, and painful rites of initiation for men, baking in both “loving” regard for the in-group and deadly regard for the out-group.

With the rise of civilization and professions, the priesthood engaged in an unholy union with the first elites, who were always commercial successes, to bend the civilization to their will and skim the economic surplus. It has only become more refined over the millennia, and has reached high levels of sophistication in modern times. However, when I looked at the major belligerents of the World Wars, the ideologies of nationalism, capitalism, and religion were all based on literal fairy tales, whether it was royalty, the capitalists, or national leaders. Mass-murdering thieves became heroic icons and divine figures. Even the personages of religion were so laden with fairy tales that the historical figures, if they even really existed, would not have recognized their iconic representations, much less the religions founded in their names. Science has a different kind of indoctrination, seeming to be more adult, but it also has many effective fairy tales that keep scientists within the rationalist-materialist paradigm, or what is also called logical positivism:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science#Logical_positivism

which is still the religion of the “skeptics”:

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

and scientists operate from many unproven assumptions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science#Axiomatic_assumptions

just as with any other ideological pursuit.

My work takes on all of that stuff, and since almost everybody kneels at at least one of those scarcity-based altars:

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

nearly everybody will get at least one of their oxen gored by my essay. I present the development of the ideologies in a way that the fairy tales of the dominant ideologies will become clear to readers. But, what I have found is that when somebody has their ideological teddy bears soiled, they respond in the same frame of mind they had when they had the fairy tales beaten into them, and their defenses/attacks are almost always infantile in nature. Again, I have never seen an attempt to invalidate my work that was honest, informed, and rational. Those who have given me honest, rational, and informed critiques were always trying to make my work better, not invalidate it.

So, almost nobody will be able to make it through my essay without having one of their cherished beliefs challenged, and my experience has shown me that less than one in a thousand can get past that. And the reason for their irrational adherence is two-fold: their beliefs feed them and give them egocentric strokes.

When my pals have tried to turn their family, friends, and co-workers on to my work, it almost always ended badly, and I have seen friendships, family relationships, and even careers end when dealing with the information in my essay. Back in the 1990s, I allowed myself to be put into the position of fielding responses by friends of my pals. It was highly educational:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/critics.htm#false

but I am not going to do it again. I am not interesting in interacting with those who are incapable of understanding my work, but the needles in haystacks that do. And, again, it really does not have much to do with “intelligence,” but people being able to relinquish their self-serving indoctrination. And only those who can do that are going to be candidates for joining the choir. That is the most basic requirement.

After meeting that minimum requirement, then they can begin to learn how the world really works, not how they were told it works. We only really learn through experience, and somebody usually has to have some kind of awakening experience that demonstrates the lies behind their indoctrination. When they have achieved that, in whatever ideology they saw through, seeing how the same process works for all ideologies will allow them to more easily see through the others and relinquish them, because they are all barriers to enlightenment, as they are all based on scarcity and fear. I am shooting for love and abundance, and that song has never been heard on Earth before, other than some lone voices in the wilderness such as Dennis and Brian, and even they still had some residual taste of Kool-Aid in their mouths. A choir singing the love and abundance song has never been heard on Earth before, and I fully expect that some of my pupils will one day sing far better than I can. I have been through the meat grinder a little too much. Relatively unscarred singers like Ilie will one day sing far better than I ever will.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

7th April 2014, 20:20

Hi:

I am getting to a delicate part of the essay, but I am barreling ahead. When studying the World Wars, particularly World War II, the primary belligerents, from the American view, were the Americans, British, Germans, and Japanese. All four of them had nationalistic ideologies that were the equivalent of believing in Santa Claus. The British had the oldest, with their royalty worship, and the USA had its flag worship and Founding Fathers who were made to resemble Santa Claus:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#weems

with a literal effort to make Columbus a saint:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm#saint

The Japanese created a religion where its emperor actually outranked the Creator, and Hitler did his best to recreate some kind of Golden Age that never was, making Roman iconography the Reich’s imagery, with all manner of ornate pageantry. Hitler’s salute looked just like the American Pledge of Allegiance, and only after going to war with Germany did Americans change the ritual:

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

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#flag

The USA’s craziness was never more evident than in the wake of 9/11:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#wtc

and was used by Bush and company to invade nations and steal their resources:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#invading

while committing genocide that virtually nobody in the USA even acknowledges.

In every instance, those childish ideologies were designed to make imperial crimes somehow noble deeds and the destiny of those committing those awesome crimes. They believed in Santa Claus in order to justify genocide. Similar fairy tales were told about all figures in organized religion, and in the industrialized world, making moguls into saints has been the latest trend, but in the USA, it goes back to the robber barons. Bill Gates began to be treated like royalty in the late 1990s, when he became the world’s richest man through the monopolistic tactics of Microsoft.

As Seth once said, nobody can be more cruel than the self-righteous, and all of those ideologies were designed to create a self-righteous imperial class who would cheer on the violence.

I am dealing with these issues straight on for a very good reason: believing in Santa Claus means that a person is disconnected from reality, and only people with their feet firmly on the ground are going to be any help in what I will be attempting. Yoking one’s awareness to scarcity-based ideologies wrecks a person’s ability to imagine abundance. Joe Average will only begin to wake up when FE is delivered to his home:

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

and this is OK. All epochal events began that way. It was up to a small group to make the energy breakthrough that everybody else rode to higher levels of economic wellbeing and sentience. The epochal change itself was unimaginable to those living just before the change, and it is the same this time. Only a relative few visionaries who also get out of their easy chairs are going to get it done.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

8th April 2014, 14:27

Hi:

Briefly, to expand a little on the previous post. The reason why I am not seeking people under the thrall of population management ideologies is that such people nearly invariably end up hurting FE efforts more than helping them. Not only do their delusions have them continually looking in the wrong directions, their allegiance to those scarcity-based ideologies also is like a bit in a horse’s mouth, and the social managers are professionals at grabbing the reins.

When people such as Mr. Deputy:

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

Bill the BPA Hit Man:

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

and Mr. Texas:

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

worked their evil, it was amazing to watch how effortlessly they manipulated people, by playing to their naivete, fears, greed, or all of them. Joe Average is putty in their hands, and that is why I say that nobody can out-herd the master shepherd. They easily got my own mother to turn on me:

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?10672-WADE-FRAZIER-A-Healed-Planet&p=300436&highlight=treasure#post300436

Again, most people have to see it to believe it, but newbies need to get over that hurdle before they are going to be any help at all for making FE happen. Level 10 efforts:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level10

simply do not have a prayer in the current environment, which I learned the hard way.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

10th April 2014, 02:07

Hi:

I am doing heavy lifting, but the chapter is going well and I hope to finish it by this weekend. As usual, as I progress I am doing little course corrections, or, more properly, deciding to change where I end chapters and what to call them. I am going to end the chapter titled “Epochal Event 4.5 – The Rise of Oil and Electricity” with World War II, and the next chapter will be titled:

“The Post-War Boom, Peak Oil, and the Decline of Industrial Civilization”

Which will bring the narrative to today. I am 334 pages into it, and will be around 400 when I finish. Then it will be a chapter on the Fifth Epochal Event, which probably only free energy can initiate, and then it will be a chapter on the choice facing humanity: The Fifth Epochal Event or the Sixth Mass Extinction, one that might take us with it. Then it will be on what has not worked so far on initiating the Fifth Epochal Event and what might. That is where I think a choir will help. :)

Some days, it hits me how big the issues are that I have been dealing with for my entire life. We are at that moment when we either get over the hump or wipe ourselves out, in the most important transition that any ensouled species ever makes, and we all have a chance to profoundly impact the outcome. Who would not want to be a part of it? Nothing about my journey has been easy, but I can’t regret any of it.

What has made this current chapter harder in ways than the others is dealing with the rise of the robber barons and the Global Controllers. I have to tread on conspiratorial topics, some of which I have been very close to in my life. Dealing with them and keeping them in their proper perspective is not easy. It is emotionally loaded material, and I can see a lot of editorial fiddling coming for that chapter.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

12th April 2014, 14:13

Hi:

I took a break this morning and added a little update to my financial scandal essay:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/savings.htm#coming

and tweaked the essay for stylistic changes. I am optimistic that I will get the latest essay chapter draft finished this weekend.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

12th April 2014, 19:40

Hi:

This is one of those, I am sick of looking at the chapter moments, so I will move on to the next chapter. This chapter will likely get a little work done on it by the time I publish the essay. I have to split it into two parts, so here goes.

Best,

Wade

Epochal Event 4.5 – The Rise of Oil and Electricity – Part 1

When Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, published in 1851, American whaling expeditions had lengthened from brief excursions near Nantucket to three-year voyages that circled the world, hunting the remaining whales. American whaling peaked in 1847, in a classic resource depletion scenario, as whaling’s EROI fell fast. The primary whale “product” was oil for lighting lamps. In 1848, the USA completed the theft of more than half of Mexico, beginning with the seizure of Texas. The next year, the biggest gold rush in American history began, and the those seeking the easy money got to California any way they could. The genocide of California’s remaining natives began in earnest, with California’s first governor declaring an open season on natives. The Pacific whaling fleet was crippled when its crews deserted in San Francisco and swarmed into the Sierra’s gold fields.

In 1859, the USA’s first commercial oil well was drilled, and its Civil War began the next year. The southern rebels sank most of the Pacific whaling fleet during the war, and that, combined with the petroleum industry’s establishment, spelled the end of American whaling. Railroads were the USA’s first big businesses, and in the 1860s the first transcontinental railroad was built. The telegraph was an early use of electricity, and it proliferated with the railroads, usually running alongside the rails as the USA expanded across the continent. Those railroads were instrumental in the extinction of the passenger pigeon, the near-extinction of the bison, and the disappearance of the American frontier. As with World War II, the USA’s Civil War stimulated its industrial production. In 1830, the USA’s industrial production was a quarter of the UK’s, a third in 1860, two-thirds in 1880, and a third greater in 1900. On the eve of World War I, the USA’s industrial production was more than twice the UK’s, with the USA far and away Earth’s greatest industrial power. It grew even more dominant by 1929, and was virtually alone on the world stage in 1945.

The USA has been a plutocracy since the very beginning, with George Washington being the USA’s richest man; a slave-owning land baron whose armies he commanded made him richer. John Jay was the USA’s first Supreme Court Chief Justice, and strongly believed that those who own the nation should govern it. Possibly beginning with Zachary Taylor, assassinating American presidents became a sport, with Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Kennedy, Ford, and Reagan subject to assassination attempts that were often successful, and presidential candidates Robert Kennedy and George Wallace were also subjected to assassination attempts, and other political figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, Fred Hampton, and John Lennon were assassinated, and they may well have all died in operations similar to those that killed the Kennedys and other attempts of that era. Only the Lincoln assassination has been widely acknowledged to have been part of a conspiracy. Every other time it was attributed to a “lone nut” assassin, if the weak conclusion given by the second official John Kennedy assassination investigation is ignored. I have no doubt that John Kennedy’s death resulted from a conspiracy, and in 2013, for the first time ever, the Kennedy family publicly stated the truth: the Kennedy family never believed the “lone nut” theory regarding John’s murder. Robert Kennedy’s son made that public admission, and if the Kennedys never believed the official story for John’s murder, they certainly do not believe it for Robert’s murder. The Kennedys have not revealed that opinion yet, but probably do not need to. Fear likely kept them silent for fifty years. I consider it very possible that none of those assassinations and attempts were the work of “lone nuts.” The spooks were busy in 1960s and 1970s, and assassinating American political figures would have been a modest undertaking compared to the Phoenix Program and killing several million people in Southeast Asia. Creating scapegoats to deflect attention from covert activities may have become a science in certain circles.

With its skyrocketing industrial growth, economic empires expanded as never before and the USA’s Gilded Age was born, dominated by robber barons. Industrial, financial, pharmaceutical, and other empires were born or began steep growth trajectories during the Civil War, with John Davison Rockefeller’s oil empire the most notorious and successful. Rockefeller established an oil refining business in 1863 after careful study of the new industry. As with bears and early elites, Rockefeller quickly realized that controlling production was unnecessary. If he positioned himself properly between the producers and market, he could seize control of the entire industry. Rockefeller’s father was a genuine snake oil salesman and con man who mentored his sons and was John’s early financier. John used the rich man’s exemption and bought his way out of military service in the Civil War and began building his empire. He decided that controlling refining and distribution was the path to dominance. John Rockefeller was a genius. He negotiated kickbacks from the railroads used to transport oil, but took it further when he negotiated kickbacks on the railroad traffic of his competitors, in one of history’s most clever and unscrupulous plans. Beginning in Cleveland, he used his shrewd kickback scheme and various carrots and sticks to wipe out or buy out all other refiners. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil eliminated the hundreds of small refiners that formed the initial industry. By 1879, his empire controlled 95% of American oil refining, setting the stage for him to become history’s richest person, with several times Bill Gates’s relative wealth. Recalcitrant Standard Oil competitors could have mysterious explosions destroy their refineries, and more than one came to an untimely demise, but if Rockefeller’s prey put up a good fight or showed talent, he hired them and soon amassed a team unmatched in capability and ruthlessness. John Rockefeller only became excited when pondering how rich he would become. He became a “philanthropist” early on but he was a standard phony humanitarian, as became evident with the Ludlow Massacre in 1914.

The Rockefeller Empire’s tale is far from an irrelevant historical curiosity. During my days of pursuing free energy, we encountered the Rockefeller name many times. Companies they controlled were directly involved with wiping out energy companies that we worked with. When my partner was offered about a billion dollars abandon his efforts, the Rockefellers may well have been involved, and we later had direct dealings with Rockefeller heirs, including one of the biggest names. The Rockefeller Empire likely inflicted some of the organized suppression activities that we experienced. Long after I “retired” from the field, my partner kept trying to make an impact before he was run out of the USA, soon after direct contact from the Rockefeller Empire. Rothschild interests were also involved. The Rockefeller and Rothschild dynasties are subjected to many conspiracy theories today, and our encounters demonstrated that the allegations may not be groundless. However, the fact that they identified themselves by name means, to me, that they are no longer at the top of the global power structure, if they ever really were. The people who really run the world are not household names. I call them the Global Controllers, my partner called them the Big Boys, a leading name in the free energy field called them “Godzilla,” and other terms such as “Sinister Secret Government” have been applied. Whatever name is used, the organization is real. We also had dealings with them, more than I can publicly disclose, and they do not identify themselves by name. They act through intermediaries and have developed their cloak-and-dagger methods into a science. Whether it was the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, or Global Controllers, we never contacted them, but they contacted us.

Anybody knowledgeable about that milieu realizes that naming names is dangerous and I usually make it a point to not know the names. Others who should know have named some organizations or, more accurately, factions of some organizations. We also had encounters with provocateurs from those organizations when they helped destroy our companies. This can be a difficult and delicate subject, and what follows is my view as of early 2014, which has not changed much since the early 2000s. Sitting American presidents operate far below the tops of those organizations, in the dark and out of the loop, and they all know that they are not near the top. They have power of a sort, but are largely actors, not necessarily following orders, but know their place or have a good idea what it is, and they cannot impact important issues. The last president who thought he could was John Kennedy, and he was rudely disabused of that notion.

From the beginnings of civilization, all elites have always played the same basic games, which were concerned with gaining economic power as a path to political power. All ruling classes exploited those they ruled. The elites of city-states, whether they were in Mesopotamia or Mesoamerica, tried to militarily conquer their neighbors and form larger polities. Nations and empires have constantly formed, fragmented, and fallen over the millennia, and they almost always disintegrated because they ran out of energy. Greed and megalomania can never be satiated, and those in their thrall continually feed their addictions. Psychologists have found that psychopaths often become successful politicians and corporate executives, as their affliction is advantageous where amassing wealth and power are primary organizational goals. For those who have encountered today’s hyper-elite and lived to tell about it, the evils they relate about that environment are difficult for “normal” people to understand. Those at the top have elevated greed and a lust for power to nearly inconceivable levels. Just as John Rockefeller hired talented psychopaths, so do the Global Controllers. I have encountered their agents and they were talented, I will grant them that. The man responsible for the death of a woman in our organization tried to blame my former partner for her death at the funeral. He likely worked for the Global Controllers but was a contract agent, as many are. He later defrauded the public with skills he used to help destroy our company, as did another contract agent provocateur, who sat in prison as of 2014. People like them do not have consciences. They would have likely done well in Hitler’s SS, for instance.

What psychologists call psychopaths or sociopaths, mystics call dark pathers and other terms. Such people have simply made self-service a science, and reaching high levels of “evil” requires great commitment. Genghis Kahn was a busy man, slaughtering millions and producing millions of descendants. That takes hard work and a sense of duty. Dark path professionals were sicced on us, and being on the receiving end of their evil deeds engendered a certain kind of awe and was an effective way to lose one’s naïveté.

But the dark path is dark indeed, and while indoctrination and other kinds of limbic conditioning help form “cohesion” in societies, in Global Controller and other criminal enterprises the carrots and sticks uniting those organizations can be breathtaking. I avoid knowing much about it, as that knowledge can be damaging to a normal person’s psyche. I was damaged by merely studying the Jewish Holocaust, the genocide of the Western Hemisphere’s natives, and today’s recent and continuing imperial genocides inflicted by my nation. Those diabolical global organizations are always in danger of fragmenting as everybody vies for wealth and power, and I doubt that there is an unbroken line of conspiring elites that stretches back to civilization’s beginnings. They have risen and fallen along with their civilizations, and they could only play a regional game at most. However, with Europe’s conquest of the world, power-addicted elites could begin thinking on a global scale for the first time. I would not be surprised to discover that some hyper-elite organizations have a pedigree that stretches back for centuries, and conspiracists have long traced those lineages. But my impression is that turnover regularly happens at the top, which is generally beyond the purview of conspiracists. With retail dynasties (Rome, Mayans, European royalty, China, etc.), they could trust relatives more than others, so heredity played a role, and apparently also does with the Global Controllers. A close relative nearly tried to recruit me into the family “business,” and his employers played at a higher level than John Perkins’s employers did, but it still seemed down a level or two from the Global Controllers’ stratum.

One major problem with making a positive impact on a global level, hyper-elite machinations aside, is that almost nobody focuses on what is important, which I hope to help remedy with this essay. Almost everybody hacks at branches if they hack at all. Conspiracists tend to obsess on elite machinations, which is of dubious benefit to begin with, but they often become paranoid and also confuse retail elites with the Global Controllers. Bill Gates and David Rockefeller are likely not members of the Global Controller’s organization. Also, I learned that hyper-elites can only play their games with the responsibility that almost all people have abdicated as they play the victim. The Global Controllers are only a symptom of our malaise, not a cause. They cannot be beaten at their game, and it is foolish and can even be suicidal to try. Making them obsolete is the best that we can do. While conspiracists often fixate on hyper-elite machinations, academics and scientists tend to deny that they even exist. It took me many years to understand their resistance to even acknowledging hyper-elite existence, and I think it partly relates to the mainstream scientific worldview that considers consciousness nothing more than a byproduct of biochemical reactions. They have an ideological aversion to the notion that anybody manipulates events on a global scale, and believe that what seems conspiratorial is only anarchic elites competing with each other, like Darwin’s view of evolution. They believe that conspiracists see a pattern where none exists, or that the situation can be explained without invoking conscious intent, similar to materialistic hypotheses of how the universe operates. Radical leftists have openly admitted their ideological objections to the existence of such elites; such an idea scares them. Neither obsession nor denial helps attain productive understandings of the issue. Conspiracists and structuralists are united in thinking like victims, and that, as I see it, is their primary limitation. Until they relinquish thinking like a victim, they will not constructively engage the critical issues that humanity faces, and energy ranks above all else. Victims are reactive instead of proactive, and only combined positive intention and resulting action has a prayer of working, in my opinion.

I do not make it a point to collect stories, but I am aware of literally thousands, probably tens of thousands, of cases of technology suppression, largely performed by the Global Controllers’ agents. Most involve alternative and free energy, but they also include exotic materials, antigravity technology, and technologies that would make almost all of humanity’s major industries immediately obsolete. Much of what has been suppressed would appear magical to the masses. The Global Controllers and other private interests often use governments and other public organizations to their ends. That happened each time our companies were wiped out. Public officials wielded the public ax, always acting in concert with the media, but they always did so on behalf of their private interest patrons.

My astronaut colleague had his life shortened courtesy of the USA’s military when he looked into UFOs and, like me, he did not make it a point to collect suppression stories as others have, but he knew about twenty-five dead inventor stories. The Global Controllers are not squeamish, but they rarely resort to violence in the public arena; they know that a string of deaths threatens to focus attention on their efforts. Also, their methods and goals are different than Mafia hit men; their assassinations are made to resemble something else, such as suicides, heart attacks, strange cancer cases, random crimes, accidents, and the like. When they murder free energy inventors and other perceived threats to their hegemony, there are no “double taps,” and making the assassinations look like something else is more important than being successful with any one attempt, which is partly why people such as my former partner have survived multiple murder attempts. If the often-complex assassination plan does not produce the desired result, they simply plan another attempt if necessary. Quite often, a failed assassination attempt will still frighten or incapacitate the target to where he (almost always a man, not a woman) is no longer a threat, and further action is unnecessary. They have a gigantic bag of tricks, and more than 99% of all threats are defused without resorting to violence, with the “lucky” targets receiving the Golden Handcuffs buyout. Even then, very few taking the money realized why they were bought out. We received the first friendly buyout offer soon after we began pursuing free energy, and the offer escalated by a couple orders of magnitude before they began to play rough. Such events are unremarkable in that milieu, although it blows the minds of average people and naïve newcomers to the field. Nobody offers corporate cubicle-dwellers, armchair academics, or protestors millions or billions of dollars to cease their activities. It is primarily in the realm of disruptive technologies, especially energy technologies, that such organized suppression strategies are used. The Global Controllers’ organized suppression of disruptive technologies is a science, and that scene from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark is not very fictional.

The Global Controllers have deep pockets, and keeping free energy and related technologies such as antigravity under wraps is perhaps their greatest priority. If there is any good news to relate, it is that all informed observers know that humanity is quickly making Earth uninhabitable, which has made most Global Controllers uneasy. They do not want to live in their underground and off-world survival enclaves if Earth’s surface becomes uninhabitable, and members of that disenchanted faction gave a close friend an underground exotic technology show. In my circles, receiving such a demonstration was unexceptional.

This essay will return to that theme, but will put it aside for now. One lesson I learned during my adventures is that with global events, far more than meets the eye, and accepting events at face value is rarely appropriate. That stated, documented history and archeological and other physical evidence can provide important insights, and this essay will continue along a scientist/historian’s path for now.

Other robber baron empires profoundly affected not only industrial and national trajectories, but the very path of science and medicine. Andrew Mellon parlayed his robber baron heritage into becoming the USA’s Secretary of the Treasury, and presided over fluoride (ionized fluorine) beginning its surreal makeover from toxic industrial waste to a tooth’s best friend. Mellon controlled the world’s largest fluoride polluter at the time. It was also the world’s largest aluminum producer, and enjoyed an American monopoly. There is virtually no credible data or theory that justifies fluoride’s status as a safe or effective cavity preventative for children, and indisputable evidence that it is a highly effective enzyme poison, used in biological laboratories today for that purpose, and it also destroys teeth instead of protecting them. Revisiting that “lock-and-key” analogy for enzymes, hydrogen bonds help form the lock’s shape. An ion with an extra electron will be more negatively charged than any part of an uncharged molecule that unevenly shares electrons, such as in water and certain organic molecules, where hydrogen atoms attain a slight negative charge. Consequently, negatively charged ions will displace hydrogen bonds in molecules, particularly if the ions are small enough to slip into the molecules’ structure. Because they are the smallest negatively charged ions known to science, fluorine ions can easily displace hydrogen bonds in molecules. When fluorine ions disrupt an enzyme’s hydrogen bonds, the lock becomes “bent” and the key no longer fits. That is how fluoride poisons enzymes. DNA’s double helix is also held together by hydrogen bonds. The story of how industrial interests transformed fluoride into “medicine” is stupefying, and shows how severe the distortion of mainstream science and medicine has become. Lead, aluminum, and other industrial elements also received makeovers, and had early toxicity studies performed at an industrially funded laboratory that predictably gave a clean bill of health to all of them.

Other industries were also fluoride polluters and helped shaped the “science” of fluoridation, most notably the nuclear industry, beginning with the Manhattan Project; its involvement has been partly revealed by declassified documents. While the Manhattan Project’s research into fluorine toxicity is still largely classified (although what has been declassified is disturbing enough), a study performed by that industrially funded lab showed fluoride’s dramatic harm to animals, and the results were buried because they did not provide an industry-friendly result. Because that study was performed by an unclassified industrial lab and not the federal government, a researcher recently discovered it. Among the more alarming effects of fluoride is brain damage. A scientist who stumbled into that connection had her career wrecked, and the man who ran the Manhattan Project’s still-classified fluorine studies “consulted” on that scientist’s research. The average American, who is history’s most fluoridated person, has no awareness of the situation. The fluoride issue is one of many where physical, biological, and medical science became subservient to economic interests. Is fluoride a population management tool to dumb down the public? Reality could be turned upside down, with poison turned into “medicine,” with such situations lasting to this day. People trying to rectify the situations can lose their careers or be branded “quacks,” “pseudoscientists,” “conspiracy theorists,” and the like. Edward Bernays designed the propaganda campaign to fluoridate the USA’s water supplies.

The Rockefeller and Mellon empires were only two of many built during and after the Civil War. J.P. Morgan got his start just before the Civil War began and made a quick ascent as a banker and financier. He participated in some of the most momentous events in U.S. and industrial history, such as forming U.S. Steel. It is a big story that this essay cannot do justice to, but Morgan was ubiquitous, including masterminding what became arguably the biggest swindle of the American government to that time: the purchase of land for the Panama Canal in 1903; which was the largest payment yet made by the USA’s federal government. The future “trust-busting” president and Supreme Court Chief Justice was at the trough with Morgan on that scheme. After milking the government, Morgan rode to the “rescue” in 1907 to quell a bank panic, and several years later, the Federal Reserve Act was snuck through when Capitol Hill was virtually empty, two days before Christmas. Earlier in that same year of 1913, the Income Tax Amendment was passed, which prepared the USA’s government to attain truly imperial stature. Those events have been grist for conspiracists for the past century, and many allegations may well be true. The most powerful Senator on Capitol Hill was Mark “Dollar” Hanna, a childhood friend of John Rockefeller and political fixer for Standard Oil at a time when the corruption was open in Washington, with politicians routinely bought and sold by robber barons.

Perhaps Morgan’s most portentous industrial undertaking was participating in the epic battle between Thomas Edison and his former employee, Nikola Tesla. Edison himself was not a particularly brilliant inventor; many of his inventions were the result of his employees’ hard work. Electric lighting is a good example, where his team engaged in brute force experimentation with thousands of filaments before they hit on something that worked in 1879, seemingly at Edison’s suggestion for the filament that finally worked. When the Wizard of Menlo Park demonstrated electric lights near his laboratory, he was widely pilloried for his “idiotic” idea, which was called a “fraud” foisted on the public by scientists who would not leave the comfort of their armchairs to go see for themselves. Morgan financed Edison’s electric light company and had the first home in New York lit by electricity. Edison was also notorious for stealing inventions, and there is even a tale of a rival inventor “disappearing,” Mafia-style. It was simply a sign of the times and an era we still live in.

In the flood of immigrants to the USA during the 1880s came the Serbian Tesla, who had already worked for an Edison company in France. After a dispute in 1885 when Tesla redesigned Edison’s inefficient motors and generators, and the reward that Tesla said that Edison promised was not given, Tesla quit and began his own electric company. The investors soon kicked him out, leaving Tesla digging ditches in 1886-1887, and then he started another company.

Edison’s companies were beginning to electrify the world in the late 1880s, but Edison used direct current. Direct current has advantages over alternating current, but its great limitation is that resistance in electric lines quickly saps low-voltage direct current in heat losses. The higher the voltage of current transmitted over electric lines, the less proportional energy lost to heating. Alternating current’s voltage could be stepped up by transformers and transmitted great distances with little line loss and then stepped back down for use, while direct current could not be manipulated that way. The primary upshot was that only one generator was needed to supply many miles of electric lines carrying alternating current, while direct current needed a generator every kilometer or so. The efficiencies of alternating current transmission and the economies of scale of centralized generation made direct current a poor alternative for electrifying the world. Edison was beaten from the beginning but did not go quietly; he is a household name today, while Tesla’s name languishes in obscurity (at least until a car company was named after him).

High voltages are dangerous for various reasons, but the risk of electrocution is the main one. Even though he was beaten by a superior technology, Edison engaged in a disgraceful campaign against alternating current. He had thousands of animals electrocuted in demonstrations of the hazards of alternating current, including horses and even an elephant in 1903. Although Edison was personally opposed to the death penalty, his commercial sensibilities overcame his personal qualms and he made his most notorious invention, the electric chair, powered with alternating current. The first execution with Edison’s new contraption was performed in 1890, where the victim was roasted. By that time, Tesla had partnered with George Westinghouse in the battle against Edison, and Edison tried coining the term for execution by electrocution as being “Westinghoused.” By 1891, the short-lived “war” was largely over, with alternating current prevailing. In 1892, Edison’s company was absorbed into what became General Electric, which J.P. Morgan controlled, and Morgan was also Westinghouse’s financier. When you finance both sides you will always win, such as arming both sides in a war or being the “house” in a poker game. In the courtroom, the lawyers always win. Enabling the combatants, not being one, is a tried-and-true strategy.

The War of Currents nearly bankrupted Edison and Westinghouse, and Tesla relinquished his patent rights to his alternating current technology to Westinghouse for a modest lump sum in 1897. Tesla’s original royalty agreement would have made him one of the world’s richest men, and humanity might have taken a different direction if not for the battle with Edison. Tesla immediately began thinking in terms of what could be called free energy. Tesla’s inventions were legion and were sometimes stolen by contemporaries such as Marconi. In 1898, Tesla began designing a tower for producing radio signals, and construction commenced in 1901. Morgan was Tesla’s financier and was making money hand-over-fist with the alternating current technology that Tesla had relinquished his rights to. Tesla may have felt entitled to Morgan’s support. As Tesla built his radio tower, he began telling of grander goals, such as producing energy that could be transmitted wirelessly to anywhere on Earth. His initial idea was tapping the electric potential between Earth and its upper atmosphere, and anybody on Earth could easily and freely use the current that Tesla induced. When Tesla made those proposals, however, robber barons were making big investments in copper mines to electrify the nation. Morgan stopped funding Tesla’s idea in 1903, just when he and the Guggenheim family financed what became the world’s greatest copper mine. Many years later, Tesla’s official biographer, who knew him, said that when Tesla began writing “free energy” articles and talked publicly about it, another Wall Street financier who was heavily invested in copper mines told Morgan that Tesla was acting “crazy” with proposing free energy for everybody that nobody could meter. Wall Street then abandoned Tesla and he never regained his momentum. Tesla eventually advocated what today could be called Zero Point Energy, although he couched it in the form of harnessing cosmic rays. Tesla also originated an idea for a “death ray” weapon and other inventions that have cast him as an enigmatic figure. Upon his death in 1943, the FBI seized his papers, and there is plenty of conjecture and some evidence that there was a surreptitious previous seizure by other governmental agents. There are some way-out allegations about Tesla, including time travel and myriad exotic technologies. I have looked into them somewhat, and knowing what some around me have witnessed makes the rumored technologies far from unreasonable. The publicly available evidence is relatively thin, however, but would be if they were genuine technologies and events, as many powerful interests would want them kept secret and under their control.

The modern use of electricity is little more than pumping electrons to power electrical equipment, in the same basic fashion that running water was used to run mills. The electron flow, like running water, is not the ultimate source of energy, but is just an energy flow that humans harnessed. With electricity, the first major applications had waterfalls as energy sources. But coal-fired electric generators quickly became the standard, for the same reason why coal overcame water and wind generations earlier, and coal power today provides nearly half of the USA’s and the world’s electricity. Electrons pumped across copper wires became a major innovation that led to modern homes and cities. Before electricity was used to transmit energy, power was only available at the site where usable energy was produced. Watermills, windmills, and heat engines transmitted pre-electrical energy via gears, straps, and pulleys, which were cumbersome and dangerous. With the introduction of electricity to transmit energy, factories became far more versatile and humane, and as cities and homes were electrified they were radically transformed. The USA led the world in introducing electrical appliances to homes; refrigerators, thermostatically controlled central heating and air conditioning, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, dryers, dish washers, radios, televisions, and computers, to name a few innovations, made the early 21st century’s home virtually unrecognizable to a home-dweller during the USA’s Civil War. Electricity also powers the process used today to refine aluminum, and modern equipment of all kinds would simply be unfeasible without electricity.

Isolating scientific, economic, social, and political dynamics is likely unworkable for analyzing the Industrial Revolution, as they all interacted like never before. In some ways the story was familiar, with a new class of elites ending the previous regime’s primacy. But many changes were either unprecedented or reflected changes in dynamics with thousands of years of history. The trajectory of slavery demonstrated that how people treated each other was dependent on the economic situation, and makes the idea of an inherent human “morality” difficult to support. Virtually all wars have had economic motivation behind them, from the very beginning. Even though chattel slavery became obsolete with industrialization, imperial exploitation regularly reached genocidal levels. From the rubber boom during Europe’s Scramble for Africa to wiping out the remaining American Indians that lived on coveted land to today’s imperial genocides inflicted by the USA, the record is grim for such “civilized” peoples. Competing over world conquest kept Europeans from fighting each other while the plunder was plentiful. Most violence was directed toward relatively helpless pre-industrialized peoples, as they were easy prey, no different in kind than chimp coalitionary violence or why male monkeys and apes murder infants they did not sire. The USA’s Civil War and the Crimean War, however, were both wars of empire, with one to hold a nascent empire together and the other a battle between rising empires carving up a declining empire. In 1870, France and a rising Prussia had a war that resulted in a Germanic victory. The victors imposed onerous war reparations on France, with France returning the favor at World War I’s end, which helped lead to World War II.

Between 1871 and 1914, Europe lived in a Golden Age called La Belle Époque. Between 1860 and 1910, English life expectancy rose from about 40 to more than 50, and obesity became a trait no longer confined to the elite. It was one of humanity’s most fecund artistic eras, when some of my favorite artists lived, including my all-time favorite. The Renaissance was also a time of great artistic advances, and the Enlightenment and Romantic eras produced the greatest music yet made. Those artistically fertile periods had relative economic abundance in common. However, while the imperial heartland had cultural awakenings and lived the good life, the sufferings of their imperial subjects were often greater than ancient Rome’s. The “philanthropic” genocide in the African rainforests was one of the greatest ever for Old World peoples, with all European powers involved. The famines that began in 1875 were largely imperial creations, and another series of El Niño related famines began in the late 1890s, which hit China and India particularly hard, as their traditional famine-prevention systems were destroyed by imperial interference, especially British. The famine in China led to the Boxer Rebellion, which the imperial powers brutally repressed. European powers used those droughts to further establish their capitalistic raping of Earth’s pre-industrial peoples, which contemporary observers noted. India became the home of peaceful activists such as Gandhi only after the British bloodily suppressed the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857. The imperial powers always framed native resistance as “rebellions,” “mutinies,” and other terms designed to portray the conquerors as legitimate rulers. The famines of the 1870s and 1890s killed between 30 and 60 million people, while imperial Europe lived in an obesity-encouraging Golden Age. There have been many academic attempts to separately analyze the rise of capitalism from Europe’s conquest of the world, but they were deeply interrelated. There is even a school of thought called realism that tries to separate political from economic dynamics. While the USA was stealing North America from its natives and neighboring nations such as Mexico, it was not called imperial conquest but “settling” the continent by heroic pioneers and fulfilling a nation’s divine destiny.

Wade Frazier

12th April 2014, 19:41

Epochal Event 4.5 – The Rise of Oil and Electricity – Part 2

The rise of oil was the other radical energy event of the late 19th century. Rockefeller’s empire was originally built on replacing whale oil for lighting, but Edison’s light bulb soon ended that need, and little did Rockefeller suspect it, but oil’s big days were just ahead. Oil is the world’s most coveted resource for a few reasons. Liquids are near-solids in partial-lattice states, where the temperature (energy of motion) is high enough so that lattices continually break and reform. Raise the temperature higher, and those partial lattices disintegrate and the liquid becomes a gas. Solids cannot flow, and liquids are far denser than gases, so a liquid energy resource will be far superior to a solid (coal) or gaseous (natural gas) fuel. A metric ton of oil contains nearly twice the energy of a metric ton of coal, and can be pumped through pipes. Until World War I, all ships and trains were powered by coal. In 1769, as Watt was working on his first steam engine, a Frenchman invented a steam vehicle to use on roads, and coal-powered cars were the standard until internal combustion engines replaced them. There were also electric and gas-powered vehicles in those early days, but oil was quickly seen as a superior fuel for those reasons stated above, and Henry Ford’s company, established in 1903, quickly led to the dominance of oil-powered cars. The Wright brothers could not have flown in 1903 with anything other than an oil-powered engine.

Rockefeller became a robber baron extraordinaire with the rise of oil in transportation. In the USA in 2011, more than 90% of all transportation energy was provided by oil, and the proportion is about the same for global industrial transportation. In the West, nearly all coal is used to produce electricity. A watershed event in oil’s use in transportation was when Winston Churchill, after observing the rigors of loading ships with coal in 1911, converted the British Navy to oil. Britain did not have domestic sources of oil as the USA did, and thus began the West’s domination of the oil-rich Middle East, which continues to this day. By 1920, Churchill advocated chemical warfare against the peoples of what became Iraq, as Britain secured the region for oil interests, and before World War II was over, Churchill called for the complete genocide of the Japanese people, approved fire bombings of German cities, advocated poison gas and anthrax attacks on Germany, and his policies starved millions of people in Bengal, once again. His imperial crimes were numerous, but he is primarily remembered in the West as the great statesman who stood up to Hitler. Similarly, Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure that Dracula is based on and whose cruelties are legendary, is seen as a Romanian hero for fighting off the Ottoman Empire.

From carving up the Ottoman Empire at World War I’s end to overthrowing Iran’s government in 1953 to supporting both sides in the Iraqi-Iranian war of the 1980s to the first Gulf War and subsequent genocidal sanctions to the USA’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the current oppression of Iran, it has been all about the oil. Everything else is an inconsequential distraction from the primary dynamic. Iraq’s oil fields were history’s greatest material prize, now controlled by American oil companies, and no informed observers were fooled for an instant by the “war on terror” pre-invasion rhetoric by the oil-executive-dominated Bush administration (Bush, Cheney, Rice, etc. – Rice even had an oil tanker named after her). Both World Wars had control over oil as a critical strategic goal, and arguably the critical goal.

John Rockefeller was a Baptist, and in 1887 he began to donate to the Baptist University of Chicago. The University of Chicago subsequently became the ideological headquarters of economics. By the 1870s, the science of energy had developed greatly from the previous century, when fire was thought to be caused by phlogiston, but economics entered its neoclassical phase from which it has yet to emerge. It competed with Keynesian economics for much of the 20th century, with neoclassical economics reaching its triumphant phase with the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Chicago School economists were the dominant Nobel Laureates in the early 1990s, but the school has recently been receiving “credit” for the economic collapses in the first decade of the 21st century.

Neoclassical economics is an ideology that focuses on how free markets optimize economic activity, and Milton Friedman became the guru of neoclassical economics with his monetarist thought, which began its rise in the 1950s. Friedman picked up his Nobel Prize in 1976, three years after Henry Kissinger won his Peace Prize, and Friedman even had a prize named after him by an arch-conservative organization. While classical economists carefully obscured the true nature of “primitive accumulation” that Marx eventually pointed out, and removed the focus from the real world of how wealth is created and placed it onto theories of markets and exchange, neoclassical economists had far less excuse to ignore the real world and new scientific findings. But they viewed economic activity as a purely social phenomenon. Energy and other resources were simply assumed as an economic input only limited by market forces. That nonsensical style of analysis reached its apogee with economists such as Julian Simon and his stable of corporately owned “scientists,” and is still dominant today and called neoliberalism. The “free market” can solve all of humanity’s problems, according to neoliberal doctrine. Unfortunately, there are no free markets and they likely never existed. Neoclassical economists tried to ape physicists by using differential calculus in their analytics, but they were mimicking the style, not the substance, of science. The obsession with math was an aspect of mainstream science that also helped send it awry. In order to use calculus and other sophisticated analytic schemes, economists have to make numerous untested assumptions about the real world, which generally make the analyses worthless. In dealing with the real world, Einstein said that the more elegant and beautiful the math used to describe a theory, the more likely the theory was wrong. Einstein avoided math when he could in his theoretical work.

As Adam Smith’s invisible hand, fear, became an assumption of classical economics, neoclassical economists assumed greed in their supply and demand curves. Greed and fear are thereby founding principles in today’s economic theory, and greed is literally cheered on Wall Street as a salubrious and critical aspect of capitalism. How can an ideology that elevates, even celebrates, greed and fear be considered beneficial?

Many assumptions of neoclassical economics have been convincingly falsified by the physical, biological, and social sciences. Some of those assumptions are people being independently-minded rational actors who do not look to what others do (i.e., humans are not herd animals), that the economy can be divorced from the ecosystem that supports it, that money can substitute for anything, and that economic production can be described without referencing physical work. Neoclassical economics ignores the fact that entropy saps the efficiency of any system, economic or otherwise. Unlike a genuine science, almost no branches of today’s economics, particularly neoclassical economics, base their theories on hypotheses that can be tested and falsified. Today’s mainstream economics resembles a faith more than a science.

In 2003, when I began studying peak oil literature, the disdain with which scientists held economists was evident, and they articulated the difficulties I had with mainstream economics since my business school days. A recent textbook written by an economist and ecologist analyzed the disconnection between economists and the real world, and the way that all economic schools have ignored energy was, in the opinion of the authors, their most grievous error. I do not take overarching conspiracy theories very seriously, as they do not adequately explain how most people act. People blindly and uncaringly performing their jobs are how most of the free energy suppression that I survived was inflicted. Structural features, candidly admitted by some as they bludgeoned us, explain most activity. However, that did not mean that those at the top did not know what they were doing, or even those further down the command chain, and my life’s turning point was when a public official revealed his true motivation. Organized suppression is one part conspiratorial and nine parts or more structural, in my experience. Those doing most of the dirty work really do not know whose interests they are serving or even if they are abetting evil, and most do not even care much as long as it pays well, which was my journey’s primary lesson.

The chief medical racketeer of the mid-20th century actively promoted the single greatest cause of cancer while trying to monopolize cancer cures. Did his right and left hands did not know of each other? History’s greatest energy mogul established a world-leading school that ignored energy and obsessively focused on money and exchange as the linchpin of economic activity. Could that have merely been a coincidence? Or were we seeing a new level of the game of elite obfuscation, where the very foundation of life on Earth and all economic activity was made invisible in the day’s dominant economic ideology? Unfortunately, I have even seen “radical” economists completely ignore energy, trapped within a paradigm from the 18th century. That dismissal of energy and the real world in economic theory has been defended to this day with “fallacious arguments and lies.” When scientists and academics have engaged in a multidisciplinary examination of today’s economics, they are astounded at how primitive it is, using the “laws of physics” as they were understood in the 19th century, before the concept of entropy was introduced. Modern economics has used an obsolete framework for two centuries, and its obvious conflicts of interest need to be considered when assessing why it became that way and has remained there.

A key question for any investigation into skullduggery is cui bono, or “who benefits?” Without any significant exception that I know of, academic and corporate institutions always created ideologies and analyses that benefitted the institution’s patrons. Why would it be any different? That is why “corporate philanthropy” is an oxymoron, and virtually all robber baron “philanthropy” had zero humanitarian impulse behind it. How could the most ingeniously ruthless men of their generation suddenly grow big hearts? I see the same kind of “humanitarian” impulses today with billionaire philanthropists. When my former partner was riding high and in the spotlight before the sledgehammers came down (and they always eventually did), billionaires swarmed him, with many self-professed “philanthropists” in their ranks; none ever helped, but all tried to wreck or hijack the effort.

The institutional control created by robber barons became ubiquitous. In the 20th century’s first decade, Rockefeller and Carnegie funded a 1910 report that began to take the practice of Western medicine in new directions, and alternative approaches were wiped out as the “philanthropists” joined forces with rising medical racketeers. Huge drug empires then began their climb, after getting their start in the Civil War providing mercury “medicine” to the troops, and industrial “medicine” made its appearance. Cancer treatment became an “attack-the-tumor” racket in the late 19th century when sterile surgery was developed, soon followed by radiation and then chemical attacks, which derived from chemical warfare experiments in World War II. Just as evolution’s course was always contingent on previous developments, where novel fundamental developmental paths became infeasible, once the foundation of Western medicine was created by robber baron “philanthropists,” it influenced all future development; not because it was the ideal approach, but because the “approved” approaches grew from within the paradigm and anything outside it was marginalized or wiped out. One of the USA’s Founding Fathers specifically warned against such a racket forming. Those foundational assumptions are taught to all students on their first day of class and they are not challenged from that day forward, regurgitated as tautologies for the rest of adherents’ lives. The ideological momentum of such indoctrination goes deeply, right into the limbic system. That was exactly what my astronaut/professor/activist colleague encountered when he tried interesting his peers in free energy. I have called it being blinded by the paradigm. Scientists may be the most blinded of all groups to the reality and potential of free energy technology, and they have made the most sophisticated arguments to support their denial. Fuller believed that their naïveté and blindness was carefully cultivated by the elite.

American nationalism reached orgiastic dimensions by 1890. The Columbian Exhibition, held in 1893, was powered with Tesla’s alternating current and American “progress” seemed limitless. At that time, other imperial aspirants were feverishly trying to catch up. The USA forced Japan into the international arena in order to exploit it, and Germany/Prussia rose in the late 19th century. Japan kept the West out for centuries until Perry’s “diplomatic” invasion of 1853, and Japanese elites could easily see what colonization would mean to Japan, with Bengal and other colonized regions not far away. Japan avoided India’s and China’s fates with a steep ascent to industrialization, transitioning from a feudal land where the sword and musket prevailed to winning a war with China in 1894 and beating Russia in 1905. After Napoleon inflicted the Enlightenment onto Germany, it also began playing catchup with the West. Unfortunately for Germany and Japan, the UK, France, Russia, and the USA had already laid claim to most of the world. Japan, being an island nation like the UK, with even fewer natural resources, began to look at the Asian mainland as the USA looked at North America: theirs for the taking under a “Manifest Destiny” ideology. Germany had plenty of coal but few other industrial resources, and it developed a similar “lebensraum” ideology toward eastern Europe, with Hitler emulating the USA’s Indian reservation system with his concentration camps and he admired the “efficient” methods of genocide that the USA used on its natives. On the eve of World War I, of more than thirty essential industrial materials, Germany had to buy nearly all of them on the world market, while the USA, the UK, and France could obtain them by plundering their colonies or conquered lands in their contiguous polities. Germany could not expand without encroaching on another empire. The Western Hemisphere was long ago declared off-limits by the USA, and Britain, France, and Russia controlled nearly everything else, so there was little opportunity for Germany or Japan to garner any plunder. Germany had to content itself with scraps from the Scramble for Africa, and both enthusiastically raped China during the Boxer Rebellion, along with the other imperial powers. But their opportunities were limited in a colonized Earth, and that, far more than any other reason, led to the World Wars.

In 1910, humanity’s greatest balance-of-payment disparity was between the UK and India, with India providing 60 million pounds to the UK, which was more than matched by British Commonwealth payments to the USA of about 80 million pounds. No other nation had a notable impact on international monetary exchanges. The single most telling statistic of Britain’s pillage of India is that as the UK became Earth’s richest nation, per capita income in India did not increase between 1757 and 1947. All imperial and colonial efforts were simply plunder operations. The USA engaged in neocolonialism early on, which was colonialism in everything but the name. The USA’s flag does not fly over Iraq today, but everybody knows who calls the shots. Once in a great while, even American soldiers figured out the real game and named it, but they were always marginalized or silenced.

By the 1850s, Germany was the heart of laboratory science, and seminal discoveries and achievements came from German labs. As agriculture became industrialized, two nutrients were identified as key limiting resources as per Liebig’s Law: phosphorous and nitrogen. Until 1909, humanity’s source of nitrogen for agriculture was manure. Guano was even the main source of nitrate for gunpowder when World War I began in 1914. After a hundred years of failure by many eminent chemists, in 1909 Fritz Haber made one of history’s most momentous breakthroughs when he discovered a way to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and make ammonia. That energy-intensive process is responsible for half of humanity’s food supply today. It is also partly responsible for a great deal of water pollution, dead zones in the oceans, and proliferation of weaponry. Haber has also been called the father of chemical warfare, as he was instrumental in developing the poison gases used in World War I, but he nevertheless won his Nobel Prize in 1918 for his nitrogen breakthrough. Phosphorus, which forms the coin of energy in all life on Earth, is the sole element that humanity has not found a substitute for in industrial civilization. Energy makes nitrogen and other elements more available or allows for substitution, while phosphorous must be mined or recycled. German chemical wizardry continued after World War I, and Germany was the headquarters of science in the early 20th century. Relativity and quantum theory, the two pillars of today’s physics, were developed in Germanic nations, with Einstein, Planck, Lorentz, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, and Bohr dominating physics in the early 20th century, with relatively minor contributions from American, British, and French scientists. From the first Nobel prizes awarded in 1901 to the rise of Nazi Germany in 1933, more than a third of the awards in physics and chemistry went to Germans, and if the Swiss, Dutch, Austrian, Danish, and Swedish laureates are added, they amount to well more than half, particularly for their theoretical work.

World-class geniuses such as Einstein and von Neumann were Ashkenazy Jews, which is an ethnic group with ten times the Nobel Prizes that their proportion of the USA’s population would suggest. To take a recent example, in the three-year period ended in 2013 (the most recent prizes awarded when I drafted this chapter), four of the seven physics and five of the six chemistry Nobel laureates were Ashkenazy Jews, and they amount to well less than 1% of the world’s population. A recent controversy surrounds why they have such high achievement, which was ignited by a 2005 paper that argued that Ashkenazy Jews have exceptionally high verbal and mathematical skills as a genetic effect due to their insular mating habits and intellectually demanding professions in finance and business for most of a millennium in Eastern Europe. The controversy will not end soon, but the genetic and biological aspects of what is called “intelligence” are very real, but the “nurture” aspect of mental achievement is also well-founded. If the hypothesis about Ashkenazy Jews is valid, it means that nurture became nature, and helps support the idea that, as a species, we become what we do.

Also evident with those geniuses and their technical and theoretical achievements was predominantly using them in warfare, in what Fuller called humanity’s “suicidal fixity” on weaponry. The first practical application of E = MC2 was making the most destructive weapons ever devised. Einstein said that the greatest mistake of his life was urging the USA to develop nuclear weapons before the Nazis did. The chemical prowess of German scientists was prominent in both World Wars, World War II perhaps even more notoriously, where Zyklon-B was used in the Nazis’ death factories, where they used industrial methods for genocide. Sarin was planned to replace Zyklon-B in the gas chambers, but the war ended before they could deploy it. Sarin was developed at the largest chemical company on Earth, IG Farben. When Hitler came to power in 1933, American industrialists were solidly behind Hitler. In his Mein Kampf, Hitler openly acknowledged his debt to Henry Ford. Hitler later said that he learned everything he knew about Jews from Ford, and Ford received an award from Germany in 1938. The Rockefellers sent their PR wizard to Germany in 1934 to burnish Farben’s and the Third Reich’s image. I have heard via World War II participants about the demoralization that American soldiers experienced when they captured German trucks, and about a third were made by Ford. The Rockefellers’ relationship to the Third Reich was so cozy that they nearly faced charges of treason under the Trading the Enemy Act, and apparently kept working with Hitler’s regime clear until the end of World War II. While Standard Oil escaped asset seizure, the Bush family’s company did not, when a company that Prescott Bush, George H.W.’s father and George W.’s grandfather, was a director of, was seized for its support of the Third Reich while it was at war with the USA. The Bush political dynasty got its start being sycophants and political fixers for robber baron interests. In my circles, it is acknowledged that David Rockefeller was George H.W.’s mentor. I cannot publicly disclose my connections, but I have more than one single degree of separation from key players in that community, and the relationships between members of Europe’s and America’s oligarchies can seem incestuous, and many conspiracy theories surrounding them are understandable and likely significantly true. However, the Global Controllers have merely taken elite games as old as civilization to high levels of reach and sophistication. But the power for change is in our hands, not theirs, but not while we are sleep and easily manipulated.

Examining the belligerents in World War II makes the childish nature of imperial peoples evident. Going back to the English civil wars, when Western states began to lose their ability to rule by violence, elites began developing the science of controlling what people thought. Ideological indoctrination to accept elite rule is as old as civilization, but with the rise of science and industry, indoctrination became scientific. By the early 20th century, people such as Bernays and Lee baldly advocated their strategies for molding the public’s mind, and terms such as “the manufacture of consent” and “necessary illusions” were openly used by such pioneers. The basic premise was that the masses were too stupid to know what was good for them, so their collective mind needed professional managers working on behalf of the “public good.” In reality, it was elite manipulation of the masses. Sell industrial waste to the public as medicine, make attacking the body the only path to healing, turn mass-murdering thieves into national heroes, portray a deadly addictive substance as a badge of freedom while medical authorities promote the same deadly substance, etc., and it all worked brilliantly. I have watched people choose certain death over questioning their indoctrination. While drafting this chapter, I attended the funeral of a friend who died of a horrific cancer that quickly kills the patients (life expectancy of about a year after diagnosis when using mainstream treatments). I learned long ago that disease patients almost never want to hear about alternatives, so I rarely volunteer the information. However, that friend knew that I was familiar with alternatives and even asked me the last time we met what I would have done. I replied with treatments which have cured that particular cancer, and my friend regarded my information with a kind of amused detachment and died six months later.

Because the Soviet Union was created through violent revolution that took years to complete, like a pristine state, its new elites continually vied for legitimacy and resorted to extreme violence to consolidate their rule. When dictators can rule by violence, they do not need to manufacture consent. The other belligerents in World War II were more mature states, and the primary ones were: Germany, the UK, the USA, and Japan. Each one had nationalist ideologies that resembled fairy tales. The UK had royalty worship and racist imperial ideology, the USA had an even more bizarre flag worship and Founding Father stories that were literally fables, Japan had a religion that elevated its emperor above the Creator in the eyes of some of its theologians, and combined it with a feudal warrior code, and Hitler tried to recapture a Golden Age that never was, reviving Roman iconography and staging grandiose mass rituals such as the Nuremberg Rallies, which resemble the USA’s Democratic and Republican presidential conventions. Those national ideologies were all based on kindergarten-level indoctrination, the Judeo-Christian religions were all based on myths, and the dominant economic ideology was a fake science that dismissed reality in favor of heroic tales of efficiency. Little resembling clear adult thought could be found in those dominant ideologies.

The racist ideology that Hitler’s regime promoted was only a slightly more extreme version of what other imperial aspirants already had, and Hitler learned it from one of the USA’s greatest industrialists. Hitler’s ideological crime was using racist ideology to make chosen white people inferior. All such ideologies appealed to people’s egos as they elevated their group at the expense of others and, with their superiority then self-evident, they could commit their awesome crimes with clear consciences, free of cognitive dissonance. But social managers needed to further manipulate the public’s mind. While the militaries of World War II’s warring nations all committed heinous atrocities, no domestic presses reported on their troops’ atrocities. Everybody was a cheerleader, but fabricating atrocity stories about the other side was typical. One reason why few believed early stories about the Jewish Holocaust as it was happening was that the British media fabricated similar stories about Germans in World War I, so many thought that it was just more British propaganda. Hitler realized that the British won the propaganda war in World War I and he was determined that Germany would upgrade its propaganda. Goebbels studied the work of Bernays and other propagandists to create the Third Reich’s propaganda. The Nazi and communist propaganda was relatively clumsy, in ways far behind the English and American art form. For nearly thirty years, I have seen Soviet and Chinese immigrants to the USA asked what the difference was between communist indoctrination systems and the Western media and educational institutions, and the answer was approximately: “In my homeland, everybody knew they were being lied to, but Americans usually believe the propaganda they are fed.”

The Industrial Revolution above all else rode on the energy of hydrocarbon fuels. A very strong American, hauling water, can perform about one kilowatt-hour of work in a ten hour day, and a typical American about half that. An electric pump could do the same work for less than 1/2000th of the worker’s wage cost. Not only could the Industrial Revolution’s energy technologies work far more cheaply than humans could, they could perform feats far beyond what muscle power could achieve. A slave-borne palanquin never attained a speed of 100 KPH, nor could it fly, nor could it travel to the moon. The energy of fossil fuels allowed for previously unimaginable feats of strength and speed, and materials and machines were created that would have seemed magical to pre-industrial peoples such as plastics and electronic equipment. The relationship between energy use and economic output, measured in Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”), is nearly linear, with half of GDP changes correlated with oil use. The relationship between GDP and energy consumption in Japan is a typical example.

Today, average Americans use about eighty times the energy that is provided by their diets, which has been called having eighty energy slaves, but that understates the reality. A barrel of oil provides about one year of the calories needed to fuel a human body, but if that oil was used to power machines, it would perform more than ten man-years of work, often doing work that humans often could not perform in any case, such as propelling an automobile at 100 KPH. Americans really have several hundred energy slaves working for them, which is why the average American lives a richer lifestyle than Earth’s richest human of two centuries ago.

Fuller said that if oil was priced by the benefit that humans received, every barrel of oil should cost one million dollars. But because it takes relatively little human effort to obtain oil, it sells for only about one hundred dollars per barrel today. Similarly, the Sun’s energy powers the hydrological cycle, without which there would not be land-based life. If humans had to desalinate water instead of rely on the Sun for the energy to provide fresh water, and humanity did not have an energy source such as fossil fuels, humans would quickly go extinct. But because nature provides the water that humans use and nobody pays for it (a concept that is eroding, as corporations are busy privatizing humanity’s water supplies), neoclassical economists ignore the critical economic benefits provided by the hydrological cycle. Homogenizing everything with market prices and then creating differential calculus analytics is not helpful for understanding how the world really works. Neoclassical economists have tried to divorce energy consumption from economic production, but such analyses only have seeming validity if how the world actually works is ignored. American food production takes nearly 20% of the USA’s energy use, so more than ten calories of fossil fuels are burned to provide every calorie of food eaten. The concept of diminishing returns and energy consumption applies to national economies. Poorer nations receive a relatively large benefit for incremental energy use, while the industrialized nations do not get as great an increase. But statistics such as worker productivity in the USA had a tight linear relationship with energy use for eighty years, from 1905 to 1984, when the data stopped being collected.

At this juncture, I will ask my readers to perform an exercise that I first read about from peak oil advocate Richard Heinberg, which is to lay aside data and graphs and just think about how energy makes everything in our daily lives possible. Think about your food, water, mode of transportation, and materials that comprise your home and possessions, and think of the role that energy played in providing them. Think about the energy that you use each day in powering your home and in your transportation, even if it is just walking. Then imagine running out of energy. When you flipped on a light switch, nothing happened. When you turned on the tap, no water came out. Your refrigerator stopped working, food stopped being delivered to your community, and no electricity, oil, gas, coal, or even wind or water power was available. Everything in your life would come to a sudden halt. When people have tried to demote energy below spirituality, social relations, or even made it irrelevant to economics, my question is for them to see what they can forego the longest: prayer/meditation, social interaction, sex, or energy. The fossil fuels burned to power industrial civilization do the work, providing several hundred energy slaves for each American and no less than hundreds per person in every industrialized nation. All that those energy-leveraged humans do is direct the energy, like holding the reins of a gigantic beast that each person rides each day. Airline pilots half-joke that they begin their workday by strapping jet airliners to their waists. Without that energy to direct in the myriad ways that industrialized humans use it, civilization would all come to an abrupt end.

Another energy concept is that of efficiency. For the hunter-gatherers who cooked food over the campfire, the energy was used with an efficiency of less than 5%. When humans began using hearths as they became more sedentary, their energy efficiency increased. As humans built dwellings and fireplaces, energy efficiency increased, and today, energy efficiency in advanced industrialized civilization reaches more than 35%. As humans kept increasing their gross energy input and the efficiency in using the energy, the energy surplus increased. Just as with all life forms, an increased energy surplus meant an easier life and a better chance of survival. In recent years, while the USA’s GDP-per-capita has risen, its energy-consumption-per-capita has been stagnant since the 1970s. Some have argued that it shows how much more efficient the USA’s economy has become, but it is more likely related to the USA’s de-industrialization, where heavy industry has moved to low-wage nations with weak environmental laws. The USA imports more finished goods where the energy for mining and manufacturing them was used in other nations, similar to the imperial subsidy that Britain received from its colonies, but far more pronounced when the USA is receiving finished industrial goods and not raw materials, as Britain received from India. In generating energy, so-called technological societies have nearly the same energy efficiency as advanced industrial ones, largely due to the entropy created by power generation.

The rise in energy use, particularly fossil fuel use, has been highly dramatic during the Industrial Revolution. Today’s global hydrocarbon use has increased 800-fold since 1750, and 12-fold during the 20th century, and about 90% of the 20th century’s increase happened after World War II. The seven billion barrels of oil burned by the entire world during World War II is equal to what the USA burned in 2010. As discussed previously, when the English began to invade North America, they stumbled into Earth’s richest continent. An English “settler” in North America in 1670 consumed as much energy as a person today does in Uruguay and more than about half of today’s nations. Between 1880 and 1920, American energy consumption per capita doubled, and between World War II and 1970 it nearly doubled again, as Americans became the richest and most powerful people in world history.

Going back to the beginnings of the first mercantilist powers and their corporations, to how the first capitalists gained their “capital” violently, to the rise of the robber barons, what Marx called separating the workers from the means of production had to be performed first so that the ownership class could form. With the workers put in their place, then the “owners” could create instruments of ownership and trade them. Thus began stock markets. Similar to how economics became divorced from the real world, when stock markets formed, owners became divorced from corporate operations. In corporate America, for instance, there are theoretical governance mechanisms such as boards of directors and company officers that answer to the shareholders, but the relationship is often more theoretical than actual, and “cooking the books” to make management look good and inflate the stock price is as old as corporations. Dealing with that aspect of corporations is largely what I do to make a living, and I have lived through several major scandals in my career, and they are nowhere near finished.

With that separation from reality, speculation frenzies have been major aspects of how stock markets operate. The first bout of market insanity was the Dutch tulip mania in the 1630s. The slave-trade frenzy that wiped out Isaac Newton was less than a century later and was in stock speculation, and the boom/bust capitalist economy was born, where greed and fear prevailed. The USA has devolved into the serial bubble economy as its empire has declined, and until the crises of the early 21st century, the USA’s previous market mania was in the 1920s. Back then, companies with nothing more than “blue sky” behind them sold stock to the public. It was essentially no different than the Spanish gold rush that Columbus began. Those orgies of greed were usually associated with some new product, market, or a financial sleight of hand to finance them. The 1920s bubble was sandwiched between the first World War and its sequel, with a depression leading to the rise of fascism and the second war. As noted previously, American industrialists warmly embraced fascism, and there was even a plotted White House coup about when Hitler came to power, backed by leading industrialists and politicians who tried to entice America’s greatest war hero into becoming their front man.

As discussed previously, Hitler tried avoiding Germany’s mistakes of World War I and tried getting its propaganda to approach the UK’s level of mastery, but his biggest mistake was the same one that Napoleon made in the previous century: invading Russia. History’s greatest battles were fought between the German and Soviet armies, and their brutality was unmatched, which is saying something. The Jewish Holocaust was a side-effect of the German invasion of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The Jews and Gypsies were merely the first on Hitler’s list of “subhuman” races to be cleared for German “settlement” of Eastern Europe under his lebensraum program. The death toll of the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, from purely exterminatory campaigns, is estimated to be between 15 and 20 million people. The Soviet “intelligence” files that the USA built the CIA on were residue from the murder of millions of Soviet prisoners of war. Hiring death camp Nazis, many of whom were actually involved with human experiments, became a favorite American pastime after World War II, with death camp Nazis becoming space race heroes, nuclear industry propagandists, and stars of Disney TV shows for children and who also wrote children’s books. Mind control programs such as MKUltra came from those Nazis that the USA “rehabilitated” into heroes. You could not make this up if you tried. From what I am privy to, those programs and Nazis exposed by declassified documents are only the tip of the iceberg, with the worst activities happening in private settings or federal operations which will never be declassified. I have encountered that situation repeatedly on my journey, not only from my studies, but hearing about the operations firsthand or secondhand. I never sought those testimonies, but people sought to tell me about them and, as previously stated, I do not like knowing many names, places, and dates, and I will take most of them to my grave with me. It simply comes with the territory, although I have revealed some of the more personally and globally relevant anecdotes, while keeping identities private, usually because the participants/victims fear reprisals, even extending to their families. My astronaut friend took his story of surviving a murder attempt to his grave, never publicly disclosing the details, and only alluding to it in a very general way. That was a typical response.

The USA finished off humanity’s greatest war with dropping the most destructive weapons in history on cities, and then lying to the jubilant American people about whom it was dropped on and why. In the wake of dropping nuclear weapons on women and children, the USA had unprecedented global hegemony, with control of both sides of both major oceans, and half of the world’s wealth and industrial capacity. Then began the postwar boom, which was an era of economic prosperity never seen before or since, and I had the good fortune to be born in the midst of it. Above all else, it was an economic event born of cheap energy, and has been called the Golden Age of Capitalism. When energy stopped being cheap in the 1970s, the boom ended and the long decline set in, not just for the USA, but the world in general, which is the subject of the next chapter.

Wade Frazier

14th April 2014, 00:22

Hi:

I am getting bombarded with emails of “progress” made by various FE advocates, New Age news of the day, and the like. People put plans on the Internet for their FE gizmo, but don’t show one working, or have anyplace anybody can go to see on working, and so on. Others treat FE like a really cool idea, maybe even better than yesterday’s New Age flavor of the day. Man, I have no interest in those approaches.

How much big talk have we seen over the years? How many plans, patents, and blueprints are out there? They all come and go, like leaves blowing in the wind. Nearly thirty years ago, Dennis gave away the rights to his heat pump technology, we sold plans to make them, etc. There is just not an army of tinkerers out there willing to do it, and when the “breakthrough” is some plans, spending thousands of dollars for parts, and then dangerous tinkering with high voltages and the like, and they can’t show one working, it is definitely not ready for Prime Time.

The scattershot approach holds no interest for me, or that mythical army of garage tinkerers ready to go, etc. Making an FE gizmo is a lot harder than it looks, and the last I knew, Godzilla had not yet died in his sleep. I don’t know if the FE chatter that I see out there is a good thing or not. Maybe more people hear of the idea of FE, but I have yet to see any attempt with a prayer.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

14th April 2014, 15:19

Hi:

To my previous post, humanity’s fifth epochal event is no small beer, and fresh perspectives may help, but virtually every newbie I ever saw began with the inventor/tinkerer approach. I was there, forty years ago, myself. At least the approaches I see these days increasingly advocate open-sourcing and giving it away, but they are all still stuck on the tinkerer/inventor/garage approach. I have never seen one of them with a prayer. Even when somebody like Sparky Sweet came up with one:

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

the fun only began. IMO, that entire approach is putting the cart before the horse, kind of like jumping to the end of a very long process, thinking that all intermediate steps can be skipped.

Many inventors have even demonstrated working FE devices in public, for nearly the past century, but they never lasted long. When they get taken out, the crowd disperses, some may try to pick up the pieces, and I have seen situations where the descendants are still trying to get the inventor’s device re-started, nearly a century later. Ultimately, FE is about delivering technology, but those New Age, garage approaches fall way short of what is needed, IMO. I almost want to avoid all technology talk, because it becomes a lure to take people down the rabbit holes of distraction, and they never come back. As far as I am concerned, the entire inventor/tinkerer approach is a red herring and a huge time-waster. None of those advocates have any experience at all with developing disruptive technology for public use. It is a lot harder than it looks. It is kind of like the Hollywood movies have made it all seem so easy, where that mad scientist in Back to the Future created a time machine in his lab. People have that kind of fantasy of how it works. The Wright brothers’ approach, where they could make planes in their shop, is not amenable to the FE pursuit, I am sorry to say.

Best,

Wade

Nine

15th April 2014, 06:50

Dearest Wade,

Thank you for your wonderful articles.

You know the internet is full of such bull****...can I say that here...

Not what you write about...you are sane.....

Its full of spook agencies selling us propaganda and simple **** and I am increasingly tired of it and simply have moved on from a lot of it....

Yes you are correct in your approach of not trying to appeal to the masses....and your appeal is to the young thinkers out there and of course I am burned out from a long life within the system....as it were....

The 70's and the 80's and the 90's and some of the new century was a blur of work and family and children and that's the way it was for me at least...

I at least woke up....

Your writing and essays are much appreciated ....

Thank you...

Nine

Wade Frazier

15th April 2014, 12:07

Hi Nine:

Yes indeed, for those in the system, it beats it right out of you. Just yesterday, I saw the new propaganda making the rounds that Pakistan is responsible for the USA being in Afghanistan, as they hoodwinked us. I hardly know what to say about such tripe. The CIA’s biggest covert op ever was pouring several billion dollars of arms and supplies into Afghanistan through Pakistan, using them as cannon fodder in a war that the leading U.S. “diplomat” bragged about creating:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#brzezinski

A New York Times reporter has written the book that now points the finger at Pakistan. The New York Times is the imperial press, and has zero credibility on such matters:

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

You have to accept many imperial assumptions to even begin to think the way that that NYT reporter did.

On the masses, I learned that lesson the hard way. Dennis is the best I ever saw or heard of for trying to do FE the “masses” way, and I saw how those efforts turned out:

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

People have to let go of all the crap they are sold before they can begin to understand what is happening, and yes, the younger people have been fed the crap for less time, and have less invested in believing it, so they are easier to reach. Fuller noticed it, too:

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

I keep getting bombarded about the latest FE effort. It sure would be nice to be able to take a few months off from your day job and make the Fifth Epochal Event happen in your spare time, but it is not so easy, as far as I have seen.

My upcoming essay is intended to help readers reach the higher levels of understanding needed to help humanity turn the corner. Conspiracists, structuralists, scientists, New Agers, FE tinkerers, etc., all have their particular perspectives. While there is something worthwhile in all of them, they usually have a lot of naïveté associated with them, particularly if they are from the West, and paranoia does not help, either. Shedding one’s naïveté and paranoia is only part of the process, however. Developing a comprehensive understanding of the issues takes some scientific acumen and enough real-world experience to see through the population management techniques that come from many quarters. We have to free our minds from the indoctrination and the puny conceptions we are fed if we are going to get anywhere.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

16th April 2014, 02:32

Hi:

A couple of observations today, during a break from work. It really is hard to keep track of all the mass shootings in the USA. It is a direct result of our violent, gun-nut culture, although the NRA will never admit it. A little over a year ago, a deeply disturbed young man shot up an elementary school, killing 26 people.

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

The one-year anniversary was a somber day, and triggered plenty of introspection on the murders and why it happened. Nobody waved any flags, however, that I recall.

http://newtown.patch.com/news/sandy-hook-one-year-later

A year ago today, two deeply disturbed young men bombed the Boston marathon, and there was a week-long saga of apprehending them. Several people died and a few hundred were injured. In both events, the conspiracist mills cranked overtime with a wide array of bizarre theories, including ones that provided “evidence” that neither event even really happened.

The young man (age 20) who killed those children was a white American, and nobody really knows what motivated him to do it. The young men (ages 19 and 26) who bombed the marathon were from the former Soviet Union, fell under the spell of the Islamic equivalent of the NRA, and committed their heinous acts as some kind of retribution for American foreign policy. What is highly ironic about those “extremist” Islamic beliefs is that the USA and Britain are primarily responsible for those beliefs. As my recent chapter draft has alluded to, when Winston Churchill converted the British Navy to oil from coal on the eve of World War I, the fate of the Middle East was sealed, and characters such as Lawrence of Arabia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._E._Lawrence#Arab_revolt

were sent in to steal the oil by helping to tear apart the Ottoman Empire. The British elevated a fringe Islamic sect into prominence, and they run Saudi Arabia today, which is where most of the alleged 9/11 hijackers came from. They are further to the right than the NRA, but they are the USA’s good allies, as they have provided cheap oil for generations. The British got an oil monopoly in Persia with their efforts, but after World War II and as Europe lost its empires, Persia (Iran) became a republic with an elected leader, and in 1953, the British were about to lose their monopoly as Iran wanted to control their oil and profit from it (and become industrialized, just as all such nations wanted to do after World War II), and Britain asked the USA for help, and the USA obliged by overthrowing the Iranian government and installing a dictator called the Shah. As John Perkins was taught:

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

the USA began to privatize covert action after overthrowing the Iranian government, to make it harder to become accountable to any kinds of investigations and official action. The Shah wiped out all progressive organizations that supported the democratic culture that was forming in Iran, and the Islamic Church was all that was left. The Islamic clerics that run Iran today would have never been very influential if not for the USA, Britain, and their puppet. Similarly, about the time that the Shah was overthrown, the USA armed and incited Afghanis to violence to bait the Soviet Union into invading, and as I noted in my previous post, the USA’s foreign policy architect took credit for luring the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.

As my friend Ralph McGehee wrote before the CIA silenced him:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/mcgehee.htm#protection

the jihad in Afghanistan was entirely a CIA creation, even to the point of printing up thousands of copies of the Koran for the training schools. Anybody hip to this stuff knows that KLA members:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#terrorist

were just more jihadists that we trained and used. The overthrow of the Libyan government and other recent evils were also inflicted by Islamic thugs that we trained and supported; the kind of thugs that can be found in all nations. Similarly, Saddam Hussein was a tyrant (who was once on the CIA’s payroll) in the most secular Islamic nation (after we wrecked Iran) who scourged jihadists in Iraq, and now Al Qaeda thrives in Iraq, again courtesy of the USA.

So, those angry young men who bombed the Boston Marathon were influenced by the very people that the USA and Britain trained and encouraged. It could be seen as a form of blowback, but it is probably more accurate to just consider them close cousins to that kid who shot up that school. Could they have been part of some covert op run by the USA? Maybe, but there is no convincing evidence that I have heard of. They seem to be immigrant versions of that kid who shot up that school.

So, why the nationalistic displays today for the Boston Marathon? They are all over the media today:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2014/04/boston_marathon_bombings_one_year_later.html

http://wwlp.com/2014/04/15/boston-marathon-bombing-one-year-later/

Why not for that school? Why not for all the acts of mass violence that happen almost daily in the USA? If that school shooter had been black, or if there was some evidence that he did not destroy that it was some political statement and not just murder, would we have waved flags on that day? Instead of treating those young men as the criminals they are, they have become one more reason for grand displays of nationalism. What happened at the Boston Marathon would have been just an average day in today’s Iraq.

If an American reads Orwell’s 1984, it can be eerie to see how much today’s nationalistic ceremonies resemble those described in Orwell’s prescient novel, especially after “terrorist” attacks.

On a related note, I discovered today that Michael Ruppert recently killed himself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ruppert#Death

I tried to interest him in FE long ago:

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

but got nowhere, as usual. Ruppert was a big advocate of the “inside job” angle on 9/11 but, like his pal Heinberg, he just could not seem to wrap his head around organized suppression of disruptive technologies. That bifurcation in their thinking was remarkable, to put it mildly, and was evidence that helped me conclude that people like them were addicted to scarcity. The peak oiler message is one of almost unremitting doom and austerity:

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

and I have seen FE and abundance treated as the enemy in those circles, and they are among the most entrenched Level 3s:

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

Ruppert’s last video clips showed a deeply distraught man:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNVHbzlzUS8

How could you preach doom and gloom and not be distraught? In my essay, I have written how studying the dark stuff damaged me, as it has every scholar in those fields, but suicidal? There is too much work to do. :)

I see Ruppert’s fate as a cautionary tale. If you want to look into an abyss that is largely of your own making, then be prepared for what you will find. That said, Ruppert did some very good work. I still link to the court transcript that shut the lid on the Tailwind flap:

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

that is on Ruppert’s site. Iris Chang committed suicide:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Chang#Depression_and_death

while studying atrocities.

These are dangerous subjects. Gary Webb killed himself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb#Aftermath_and_death

I entertain the idea that he may have been murdered, but because how his life was wrecked for reporting the truth about the CIA, it almost does not matter if he pulled the trigger or not. His blood is on the evil empire’s hands.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

16th April 2014, 18:41

Hi:

Briefly, I am now getting to the part of the essay where I discuss UFOs and the ET presence. Again, Brian O nearly died when he poked his nose into it:

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

and when I heard Greer’s Disclosure Project witnesses began to describe, in 1997, when they had those hearings on Capitol Hill:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/journey.htm#adamiak

some of the exotic technologies they witnessed, including FE and antigravity, I had already heard my friend describe seemingly identical technologies from the little show he got:

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

The stuff is real, but reaching productive understandings of the issue is the same process as navigating the structuralist/conspiracist divide: people have to think like creators instead of victims in order to attain comprehension. We are not alone in the universe, few ETs are motivated by hostile intent, but they are also not going to save us from ourselves. It is time for us to grow up and become responsible members of galactic society. We have to clean up our own mess; nobody is going to do it for us.

Godzilla is covering up ETs for the same reason he has squirreled FE, antigravity, and other technologies in his Golden Hoard: to maintain his global power game. It is all about power, but keeping a chokehold on energy production is primarily how he maintains the game.

Again, Godzilla can’t be snuck past, defeated in battle, and so on. He can only be made obsolete, and that will only happen with we begin to act like creators, and creators create with love. It is really about that simple, but oh-so-hard to do in a world based on scarcity and fear.

As with the organized suppression of FE, denying the ETs or fixating on the suppression of their presence is counterproductive. The ETs will not solve our problems for us, and only when we are ready to meet them as equals are they going to come out into the open. They apparently have some karma regarding our situation, maybe including genetic intervention, and I mean maybe, and a lot of today’s “high tech” technology may indeed have the ET influence to thank. Those are areas where I try to tread lightly, and they are rabbit holes that can easily swallow up newbies. Keeping both feet on the ground and a whole heart is the key to solving this global riddle.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

Wade Frazier

17th April 2014, 16:04

Hi:

Here is what I have so far on the latest chapter, which will be my last one that deals with historical issues. We will see how much of it survives the editorial process. I have to tread warily in the UFO/ET issue, but I have been close to it for many years, sometimes with zero degrees of separation, and sometimes up to two, but I am not going to write about anything that is not pretty close to my circle.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

The Postwar Boom, Peak Oil, and the Decline of Industrial Civilization

Europe’s conquest of Earth set numerous demographic trends in motion, some of which were new in the human journey. Of all the calamities that humanity has inflicted onto its fellow humans, the greatest proportional one was when our distant ancestors, themselves descendants of the founder group that left Africa, drove all other human species to extinction, probably violently. Also, virtually all megafauna on three continents that had never before encountered humans were quickly driven to extinction after humans arrived. The next genocide of such proportion was fifty thousand years later with Europe’s conquest and “settling” of the Western Hemisphere and Australia. The result of Europe’s exploitation of Africa, including the transatlantic slave trade and the rubber boom’s “philanthropic” genocide, is proportionally the next greatest disaster in the human journey. The Arab slave trade should also be given “credit” here; while it was not as intense as Europe’s rape of Africa, it lasted for longer and ultimately tallied more victims. Africa, the Western Hemisphere, and Australia are all relatively underpopulated compared to Eurasia today, largely due to those holocausts primarily inflicted by European peoples. The West’s immense debt to the rest of humanity may never be repaid. The West rarely even acknowledges it. Also, peoples in Asia suffered demographic catastrophes as a result of Europe’s conquest, with Bengal’s rape a seminal instance. Asia’s proportion of the world’s population declined relative to Europe’s between 1750 and 1900 as it suffered under the European lash. India’s excess deaths alone under British hegemony have been estimated at nearly two billion.

But Europe received a “boost” by exploiting humanity and Earth, and key trends emerged that may see the West begin to repay its debt, and one appearing with the Industrial Revolution is called the demographic transition; preindustrial societies had high birth and death rates, and as industrialization progressed, several changes happened, which included:

1. Improvements in sanitation and nutrition reduced death rates, particularly infant mortality;
2. Machines made human labor less valuable, particularly unskilled labor, which led to these consequences:

a. Slavery became economically obsolete;
b. Children were no longer net assets to parents, but net liabilities, so women gave birth to fewer children;
c. Women began to receive education and their “opportunities” were no longer confined to producing exploitable children;
3. Industrialized societies had educated populations with long life expectancies and low infant mortality, women’s status was higher than ever before, and slavery was seen as a barbaric relic of primitive times.

The mortality decline preceded the fertility decline by about a century when the demographic transition began, and mortality decline preceding fertility decline is a universal feature of the transition.

While slavery’s end is not part of the demographic transition, the demographic transition and slavery’s end had the same ultimate cause: the rising standard of living of industrialized lifestyles that made exploitation of children, women, and slaves uneconomical. As people became more affluent, they developed new levels of social conscience.

Few would argue that industrialized peoples live in the best of all possible worlds, but industrialization triggered those changes, and few would say they were not beneficial. In very real terms, an increase in energy use was an increase in freedom, as it provided choices either previously unimaginable or unavailable to non-elites. All non-industrialized peoples long to enjoy the benefits of industrialization. The only pristine industrialization was in the UK, and other nations were influenced by the UK’s experience. After World War II, Europe lost its empires. Imperialism was partly replaced with neocolonial exploitation that the USA largely imposed, as is clearly intended in declassified documents, but once the de jure imperial masters were gone, all newly freed nations embarked on industrialization if they could. The key constraints were access to fossil fuels and the ability to exploit them.

From the very first settlements to the very first cities, the advantages of bringing humans together in such groups were primarily economic and social. Mass communication and professions became possible for the first time. All human settlements were located on low-energy transportation lanes, where food and energy-related materials could cheaply (“cheap” is always primarily an energy concept) supply the settlements’ residents. Virtually all settlements were dependent on surplus energy provided by domestication and low-energy transportation lanes to deliver it (one of the few exceptions being the Pacific Northwest’s salmon-based economy). The key dynamic of all civilizations was that the energy surplus generated by agriculture allowed for a proportion of the population that did not have to raise food and could learn new skills. They became the first professionals and elites. But early agriculture’s surplus was modest, and in Sumerian cities, more than 75% of the residents were full-time farmers. All early civilizations needed at least 90% of the workforce engaged in agriculture, to support a relatively small professional class and elite. The peasant/slave/serf and their variants formed the backbone of all preindustrial civilizations. Because the energy surplus was so small, freedom was truly limited, and social structures were rigid and often enforced with draconian measures. The relationship between elite and commoners was a carrot-and-stick relationship, with civilization’s benefits attracting the populace, and partial appropriation of the surplus came with the “deal.” Religions and customs were bent to elite benefit or were invented wholesale, but also were used to keep civilization orderly, which was one of its primary attractions. The violence of early states on their domestic populations eventually gave way to milder forms of coercion. While cities oppressed their hinterlands, they could also stimulate innovation and economic growth. Clear until the 20th century, cities only maintained their populations by a constant influx of “surplus” population from the hinterland to the city. Even in the late 19th century, migrating to the city meant a 50% increase in infant mortality. Rural wet-nursing became a profession in European civilization, as affluent urban mothers sent their infants to be raised in the hinterland. In nations such as the USA, Sweden, and Japan, urban life expectancy did not reach rural life expectancy until World War II.

During the urbanization of the High Middle Ages, and even with the spread of watermills, Europe’s workforce was still about 80% devoted to farming. The productivity of industrializing agriculture led to the great decline in agricultural workers. By 1800, less than 40% of the English workforce was involved in agriculture. As late as 1870, more than 70% of the USA’s workforce was still engaged in agriculture, and is less than 2% today.

When a city attains a population of about 100,000-to-200,000 people, the costs of civilization begin outweighing the benefits, and when a city reaches a population of about a million, the detriments become so pronounced (clogged transportation lanes, pollution, crowding, crime, disease, etc.) it must enact extraordinary measures to remain livable.

One outcome of the colonial and continuing neocolonial eras is a population explosion in poor nations. Paradoxes and contradictions are debated, but the primary outcome is the West feeding the urban hells of poor nations. Until World War II, the so-called Third World was a net exporter of food, but by the 1980s, imports of Western-grown food (primarily grain) provided nearly half the calories consumed in the cities of the Third World’s market economies. The other trend was the “Green Revolution,” where industrialized agricultural methods were introduced to Third World nations. Increased calories and decreased infant mortality led to the population explosion, but the demographic transition has been global; in my lifetime, global fertility has declined from five to less than three children per woman, with deeply impoverished Africa being Earth’s only remaining place with high birthrates. Women need to produce 2.1 children on average for a population to remain stable, and Europe’s birth rate has fallen to 1.4 per woman in 2014, and all industrial civilizations currently have less than replacement-rate fertility. In the USA, exceptions to that proclivity are largely confined to immigrants from preindustrial societies and members of preindustrial religions that supported high birthrates in order to keep the religions flush with adherents, the Roman Catholic and Mormon churches in particular. I live near Microsoft’s headquarters and am surrounded by immigrants from across the world. Microsoft’s employees from preindustrial societies, such as India, China, Africa, and Latin America often have large families, while Microsoft’s employees from industrialized nations have small families. Also, employees from preindustrial nations often bring their parents, who help provide child care. Such multi-generational households disappeared in the USA long ago. It has been interesting to witness the contrasts.

The West’s interaction with the developing world likely had little benevolent intent behind it. In this area, I have probably had more awakening and engaged in more study than for any other subject that this essay addresses. When I first dreamed of changing the energy industry when I was sixteen, I imagined that not everybody would welcome a change in humanity’s energy paradigm. I clearly recall thinking that the resistance would come from foreign interests in tropical locales. I was probably influenced by the propaganda surrounding the USA’s invasion of southeast Asia. Little did I suspect that the interests most hostile to changing humanity’s energy paradigm lived in the West, which I learned about the hard way. After my life was wrecked, I staggered from my home town, knowing that whatever I had been taught about how the world really worked was likely false, and I began seeking alternative sources of information. My first alternative influences on that subject were the work of Noam Chomsky, Ralph McGehee, Ed Herman, Howard Zinn, and others like them. If I had not already been radicalized, I wonder how receptive I would have been to their message. Those men were all among my most gracious correspondents, and I learned more from their collective efforts than I did from any other body of work.

In essence, the fake philanthropy of John Rockefeller and the robber barons simply went global, neatly conjoined with the fake philanthropy of the imperial powers. Playing the “humanitarian” game is quite a racket. Even “saints” such as Mother Teresa and the pious padre whom my elementary school was named after did not fare well under scrutiny. As I studied the “radical” works of my early mentors, it became obvious that international and American institutions officially devoted to alleviating the suffering of the world’s poorest people were often as phony as John Rockefeller’s “charities.” The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, USAID, and even the Peace Corps are all neocolonial tools designed to oppress the world’s poor, not help them. Nearly all of the world’s poorest nations export food to the USA. In effect, it is little different than what the British did to Bengal, where people starve while they ship food to the rich nations. The desire of the world’s poor to be free of colonial and neocolonial oppression, and how Western institutions lie about it, is something that people such as Ralph McGehee learned through bitter experience.

While the work of Chomsky, Herman, and friends is called institutional analysis, structural analysis, or functionalism, they are often charged with being conspiracy theorists or conspirators themselves, which is the exact opposite of the truth. For nearly thirty years, I have studied a wide array of analyses, from far right conspiracy theories to far left Marxian analytics, and it took me a many years to finally realize why neither conspiracists nor structuralists seemed capable of understanding the milieu around exotic technologies and their organized suppression. Conspiracists believed in conscious manipulation dictating how events manifested, while structuralists believed that conscious intent was not necessary to explain how events transpired. While structural analysis is far more sophisticated than conspiracy theories, both views suffer from their foundational assumptions. Humanity’s current state is largely due to people’s lack of personal integrity and their limited awareness as they try surviving in a world that is complex beyond their understanding, but that does not mean that everybody is so unaware. Hyper-elites know what they are doing, after a fashion, and they have taken their lack of personal integrity to awe-inspiring levels. However, their control is far less than total, and they do not need to micromanage the situation. Similar to bears and John Rockefeller, hyper-elites know that if they only control key choke points, they can then control the entire planet. For the herd’s size, the shepherd’s task has been surprisingly easy. As always, finding an opportune place to intervene in the energy production/consumption process was the key to control and receiving the highest EROI, and hyper-elites “vertically integrated” to control production, or more accurately, to prevent production of free energy. The organized suppression of disruptive energy technologies has become a science at the hyper-elite level, and as Chomsky has pointed out, elites will choose hegemony over survival. However, playing chicken with Earth has even made hyper-elites uneasy, and most currently favor disseminating free energy and related technologies, which could readily move humanity back from the brink of the abyss. Members of that disenchanted hyper-elite faction gave my close friend a demonstration of some of their hoarded technologies. However, the dark heart of that organization is black as a moonless midnight, and in my circles it is known that one crazed hyper-elite contingency plan is terraforming Mars if Earth’s surface becomes uninhabitable. Sanity may prevail, but I will not idly hope for the best, which is the motivation behind writing this essay.

Soon after hiring all the useful Nazis at World War II’s end, the USA’s national security state was born. The CIA was founded then, as was the NSA. It did not take long for the USA to begin wars both hot and cold, with the USA of Truman’s administration invading Korea in 1950, and the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy was dominated by a pair of brothers who long represented robber baron interests. One was the Secretary of State, and the other ran the CIA. They got their start at the same company that conspired with Morgan in swindling the American government on the Panama Canal deal. Robber baron interests rode roughshod over Latin America for generations, and those brothers’ achievements included overthrowing the Iranian government on behalf of American and British oil companies in 1953, and overthrowing the Guatemalan government on behalf of United Fruit in 1954, which the brothers literally had a financial stake in, with the CIA brother serving on United Fruit’s board of directors. The Secretary of State brother’s activities inspired the term “brinkmanship,” as his notion of diplomacy was threatening the Soviet Union with nuclear attack. The CIA brother was deeply involved with Nazi Germany and was instrumental in “rehabilitating” some of Hitler’s biggest cheerleaders and putting them back into the same positions they had while supporting Hitler. The Secretary of State brother chaired the Rockefeller Foundation’s board of trustees for a generation. John Kennedy fired the CIA brother for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and that brother sat on the Warren Commission and covered up the CIA’s involvement in Kennedy’s murder. The CIA brother is one of the prime suspects in Kennedy’s murder among independent researchers (the CIA specialized in assassinations), and led the “investigation” into the murder. Such stark conflicts of interest have characterized American government since its first president, although that one was more along the “fox-in-the-henhouse” variety that became increasingly common in the USA after 1963.

The USA enjoyed its postwar boom until the oil crisis of 1973. Rosie the Riveter went home and got pregnant by her returning war hero. I was born in 1958, during that heyday when having children became the national pastime. The USA’s postwar boom was the greatest prosperity that any peoples ever had, and televisions shows such as Lassie, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, and Leave it to Beaver depicted that Golden Age, or at least how it ideally looked. The average American family more resembled Archie Bunker’s, not Ozzie’s. In the 1950s, June Cleaver replaced Rosie as an icon, getting her husband’s pipe, paper, and dinner ready after his workday in corporate America. By the early 1960s, the American housewife was imbibing Librium and Valium, with the Rolling Stones soon singing about Mother’s Little Helper.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union sold its system to newly free former colonies as a path to industrializing in a generation. Mutually Assured Destruction was a real threat, and the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest that humanity has yet come to a nuclear war. I doubt that John Kennedy’s murder will ever be solved, but my policeman friend, who helped me spring my partner from jail, who knew of Oswald’s involvement in the operation that got John Kennedy killed, believed that John Kennedy was killed because he began negotiating world peace. My friend’s account of Oswald’s involvement took on a new level of credibility with the declassification of the Operation Northwoods documents, and a recent book on the John Kennedy assassination, endorsed by Robert Kennedy Jr., also makes the case that John Kennedy was murdered because he was attempting to negotiate world peace after he realized how close the USA came to igniting a nuclear war.

As is obvious, the closer this narrative comes to the present day, the more personal it becomes, as it reaches my lifetime and the lifetimes of those around me, and our efforts had global implications. Because the subject needs to be addressed and I have been involved with it, I will describe what I am aware of regarding the UFO and extraterrestrial (“ET”) issue. In the early 1990s, an emergency room doctor mounted an effort called the Disclosure Project to inform the public about the UFO/ET issue. After years of briefing officials from many institutions, including the Vatican, United Nations, White House, Pentagon, and the USA’s Congress (and he never received a scoffing or disbelieving reaction), secret congressional hearings were held so that witnesses could testify (and key Disclosure Project members developed strange and fatal cancer cases immediately afterward). An astronaut who walked on the Moon co-chaired the hearings and has been quite vocal about the ET presence. One Disclosure Project witness was one of the first astronauts, and other astronauts have described their experiences, at least of those who could talk publicly about them. I am aware of recent astronaut close encounters that have been classified, from sources close to me. My astronaut colleague looked into the UFO issue in a highly public way and nearly died the day he returned home after refusing an “offer” from the USA’s military to work on classified UFO projects. He had no doubt that his brush with death and the “offer” were related. Similar to John Kennedy’s murder, the cloak and dagger crowd is deeply involved and there is a three-ring circus of conspiracy theories in circulation, which includes not only those hatched by unbalanced conspiracists but also by those involved with the cover-up, as disinformation. While the subject is publicly dismissed and attributed to the fantasies of the tin-foil-hat crowd, the situation is quite real. I went to see UFOs for myself, and was not disappointed.

When I began hearing Disclosure Project witnesses testimony, some exotic technologies they described were nearly exactly what my friend was shown, which I heard about several years before I heard the Disclosure Project’s witnesses describing it. I have numerous connections to the issue, some of which involve highly public figures but, to me, the important issue is why there is a cover-up. Eisenhower was the last American president really in the loop on the UFO issue. John Kennedy was briefed on it, but the situation had been largely privatized by that time. Jimmy Carter had a famous confrontation with the Director of Central Intelligence soon after becoming president, where Carter asked for the CIA’s files on UFOs and was rebuffed. The CIA’s Director of Central Intelligence was none other than George Bush the First, whom Carter fired soon after Bush rejected his request. I have also heard credible stories that Carter was threatened into silence. The most prominent NASA-Nazi was Wernher von Braun, who was largely responsible for NASA hiring my astronaut colleague; he was picked with von Braun’s desired mission to Mars in mind. Dr. von Braun told his spokesperson in his last years that ETs would be portrayed as the ultimate terrorist threat and used to form a one-world dictatorship so that humanity could huddle under its “protection,” and that the “threat” would be a fabrication created by the Global Controllers, as ETs generally do not have hostile intent. As an example of anecdotes from those close to me, one friend was close to Allen Hynek’s family, and was told that Hynek’s transformation was indeed how it has been popularly presented, in that Hynek first approached the issue as a disbeliever and debunker, to eventually become convinced by the evidence that UFOs were a real phenomenon. In my circles are many who have experienced sightings and close encounters, and few, if any, would be considered members of the tin-foil-hat crowd. The stories of electrogravitic research going “black” in the 1950s also aligns with my understanding of the issue.

My perception today is that the reason for the UFO/ET cover-up has little or nothing to do with fear of a War of the Worlds reaction (which Eisenhower might have rightly feared in the 1950s, but most Americans today believe that we are not alone in the universe or are open to the idea), but to suppress exotic technologies that would end hyper-elite rule on Earth. Their rule would end for two reasons, the first of which is that free energy and antigravity technologies would radically transform human civilization in ways that TV shows such as Star Trek depict, where humanity lived in true economic abundance for the first time. People living in scarcity are easily manipulated, but people living in abundance would not be. The second reason is that few humans would have much obedience to obviously corrupt Earth-based institutions, particularly draconian ones, when it became accepted that humans are simply one of many sentient species in our galaxy and that we are not particularly advanced at all; we are more like cavemen than distinguished members of galactic society.

While knowledge that we are not alone in the universe will change humanity’s self-regard, and NASA was warned about such a change, changing humanity’s economic and environmental situation is by far the most important upshot of the UFO/ET issue, which the Disclosure Project’s founder also realizes; he has been involved with the free energy issue for many years. He spoke at a conference that I helped organize and fund in 2004, where I learned from him about how large the Global Controllers’ payoffs for silencing inventors have been, which was congruent with my experiences.

The corporate order that remade fluoride into “medicine” in the 1950s or that overthrew the Iranian and Guatemalan governments likely resided a few levels below the Global Controllers in Earth’s power structure. The connections between them will have almost no publicly available documentation, and what might become public will always have its authenticity debated, and again, I will leave those issues behind for now and focus on more publicly known issues of history and science.