WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

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

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.

Hi:

My post from yesterday:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post814713

was echoed by another writer today:

http://www.sovereignman.com/trends/w...-before-14041/

That rhyming history. :)

Best,

Wade

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

The "philantropy" way of doing bussines have been rebranded to "Corporate Social Responsibility (or Conscience (Con... WHAT?!)" 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 ;)

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

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

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

Hi Ilie:

I am responding to your question here:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=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

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)

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

Hi:

I have been writing about Orwell a bit in my essay, and I just read this:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...ian-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

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

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.

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

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:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=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