WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Krishna]

More lessons from the Radical Left (mostly likely final one).


Growing up in India through college and living in the US after college has allowed me to see differently than living in either on of those places would have allowed. I now understand that most people in the imperial centers were mostly unaware (even if that is because of their willful blindness) of the costs imposed on others. That this is the same dynamic seen within societies. The corruption and rudeness in India is on your face, while in US it is more sophisticated and subtle. While people talk about a lot of issues and express outrage or sympathy, it is mostly talk and much less action. I realize my role and responsibility as a member of the American Empire, but am also aware enough that I don’t put all the problems of India on the doorstep of the West. We are all Universal People with the same vices and virtues.

I realize that human institutions play a critical role in the direction that societies take and have enormous effects on the societies themselves. Which is why I liked the ideas of Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy wikipedia link, that corporations are not real human beings and should not be treated as persons under the law. The colonization of India was done by the East India Company, the mercantile interests continued to be the real power even when the face was changed to the British Government after India's First War of Independence in 1857.

The importance of human institutions can be seen in the how it is shows up in terms of human development. Yes energy is the ultimate cause, but the proximate cause is education (or lack of it) in my opinion, and human institutions have an enormous effect on the spread of education.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Before I get back to Freeknowledge's posts, a pal took me here, yesterday, and I am getting too old for stuff like that, straight up the mountainside, on all fours at times. Once we got on top, it was spectacular. The haze in the distance is smoke from forest fires, in our year of epic drought. Oh, and I got two beestings that itch like the devil this morning.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have too much on my plate at the moment to get to Freeknowledge's important posts, but briefly, before I begin my busy week, in the midst of a global market panic, which was not hard to see coming, I would like to reflect for a moment on markets that run on greed and fear. That is the song of scarcity playing out through humanity's political economy. It is highly primitive behavior for such allegedly "advanced" societies. When scarcity ends and is replaced with abundance, if enough of us can muster the integrity and sentience, markets and similar primitive institutions will go the way of slavery and dinosaurs. The song of abundance is a very different tune.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Tying it all together

Chomsky et all opened my half closed eyes. But the radical left spend a lot less time on solutions, I learnt that political organizing is the way to bring about change. Even there it is not clear what issues to focus on. Paraphrasing Buckminster Fuller I like his idea that “when we illuminate the problem, we should always offer a solution.”

Dreze/Sen are economists primarily working on the transition from agricultural epoch to the industrial epoch from the human development point of view. Here their comparisons of countries at different times in their transition to the industrial epoch offers keen insights into the possibilities of human development for a poor country. From a plot of Mean Years of School for Women aged 25-34 vs Energy consumption
we can see that all education can lead to high incomes (energy use), even countries with low energy use can achieve reasonable levels of education (I am using 12 years of education/high school as benchmark) and education leads to human development.

Likewise for life expectancy energy use helps, but the relationship is not linear, it is logarithmic and after a certain point energy consumption does not have much effect on life expectancy.

This non-linear relationship between GDP/energy use and social utility can be most starkly seen with software and other anti-rival functional goods. While software might seem costly (think Microsoft) software of equivalent functionality has been achieved by Free/Open Source software. Likewise there are enormous pricing differences between Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia but what about social utility and cost to create the original in the first place? Clearly social utility of free software or wikipedia is much higher than competition, likewise the cost of creating them is much lower, wikipedia’s yearly budget is 25 million dollars.

The relationship between energy and anti-rival goods is related to the presence of internet in other words the efficiency of cultural transmission of innovations, compare energy consumption pre internet era and today vs the availability of knowledge or the ability to communicate and form a community like Avalon. Energy use does not explain the increase in the availability of knowledge/information.


With only minor editing Wade says

"If each invention during human history had to be continually reinvented from scratch, there would not be people today. The cultural transmission of innovations was critical for growing humanity’s collective technology, skills, and intelligence.”

"Epochal Events in the human journey, were all energy events above all else, and were all dependent on humans gaining the technological prowess and social organization that enabled them to exploit a new energy source, which was dependent on their increasing mental feats."



My understanding from the essay is that epochal events could have happened multiple times, say the invention of fire. But if the social organization was not present, the innovation did not lead to the next epoch and might have been forgotten locally. In other words social organization is a limiting factor. Likewise the energy availability in any given epoch dictated whether the epoch continued or whether it crashed back into the previous epoch. The rise and crash of civilizations based on environmental degradation are change are good examples of this. In other words continuous energy availability is a limiting factor. Finally knowledge can be stored in the form of books, therefore even when societies swing back and forth between epochs based on energy availability. The subsequent swing to a higher epoch can happen faster based on availability of knowledge learned over millennia. The changes in Europe because of the reintroduction of classical greek writings is a good example.

Thanks Wade for teaching me about the epochal nature of Energy and the Human Journey. My small contribution is to think about the role of social organization and transmission of intelligence during transitions between the epochs.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have a little time this morning, so back to Freeknowledge's posts (and to vaccinations, someday ).

We will continue with this post. Yes, education helps, but the West is also adept at serving up the brainwashing with the education, even in science, which is supposed to be above that fray, but isn't. The human potential is pretty amazing IMO, and how people make do with little resources can be inspiring. But stick those poor Indian kids in their makeshift schools and send them here, and watch what happens.

I am also going to use Freeknowledge's posts as an excuse to broaden into areas related to my big essay, which I have wanted to write about for some time, but did not get the opportunity to so far, so I am grateful to Freeknowledge for throwing some meat into my arena, so I could work it over.

Physical scientists and social scientists often study pristine instances of events, to understand not only what happened but why, in large measure to see if they can detect dynamics and principles that can be generalized to other situations, to see if they have predictive validity. The Cambrian Explosion was the one and only event for the rise of animals. It will never happen again on Earth, and all the phyla of significance were formed then, and all animal evolution had to live within the parameters set by the Cambrian Explosion. The evolution of land plants had its pristine beginning in the Silurian, and by the end of the Devonian, the plant paradigm was also set, and has never varied much since then (the rise of flowering plants was the only truly big one after the Devonian), defined by the framework set hundreds of millions of years ago. Those pristine events in the rise of complex life on Earth did not have to turn out like they did, and the best scientists, like the best historians, do their best to keep a sense of contingency in their thinking and work, and wonder how it might have turned out differently.

The rise of humans arguably began with the split from chimps, as some loser chimps were pushed to the rainforest margins, learned to walk upright so that they could survive and exploit the woodland and savanna margins, and here we are today. Scientists have been working with a very thin collection of fossils regarding the rise of humanity, but their clever methods and constantly improving toolset have yielded a mountain of evidence, and that study won't end anytime soon. Studying adaptive radiations and mass extinctions has yielded many insights, and scientists are applying those insights to our world today, with often frightening results.

The rise of human civilization had at least two pristine instances and maybe four, and scientists have been studying those pristine civilizations for some time, and it is far from finished. Scientific exploration never ends, and the best scientists realized it. The Industrial Revolution had one pristine instance, in England, and all other instances were influenced by the pristine one. Bucky Fuller remarked that non-industrial nations could rapidly industrialize (if they had the energy to ), and would not have to follow the curve of the pristine instances of it. For instance, the introduction of the cell phone to poor nations enabled them to leap-frog the way that the West's communication technology evolved, so they went straight from subsistence villages to using cell phones, which is cutting edge technology in the West. It has caused many bizarre contrasts. One pal was in southern India several years ago, and one enduring image that he brought back was a man squatting in the surf, doing his business, while he was simultaneously talking on his cell phone. In India, cell-phones co-exist with pig toilets. My Boeing pals have told me of some of the engineering problems that Boeing has, such as when its planes are sold to nations that have only begun to industrialize, and they have to design their planes to handle "Third World" practices, such as transporting chickens and cattle on the planes, along with the passengers, in the same compartment.

So, women receiving education as they have, in China, India, and other poor nations has helped reduce their population growth, as women aspired to be more than baby-factories. But just as with evolution, in that no evolutionary innovation could survive if it did not provide immediate benefit, those women generally would not get education that they could not use in their lives. Their demographic transition has been a different animal than the West's although social scientists have been able to generalize the broad trends.

As I have stated many times, making FE happen will not be some mass movement, as the masses are strictly focused on their immediate self-interest, even more so in poor nations, where survival is a daily concern. But, as I discovered the hard way, the West has similar problems, although they live at a higher level of energy use and hence, political economy. When people such as Freeknowledge and SL come to me, they were the lucky "winners" of their poor societies, having access to industrialized nation benefits (such as interacting with me at Avalon ) that their societies could have never come up with on their own (well, give them enough energy, and they maybe could have, in hundreds or thousands of years).

An original aspect of my work is that I make the case that every Epochal Event was initiated by a relative or literal handful of people, and the practice spread. That is where communication comes into play. But the masses could not even imagine the next epochal phase before it began, and it will be no different for the Fifth Epochal Event, which will be humanity's largest, by far, as humanity becomes a Type 1 civilization. I am not trying to reach the masses. They are generally dead to a message like mine, and I know that I seek needles in haystacks. There are no social or political solutions to the FE conundrum. Only delivering FE will do it, which will be a technical project, and don't expect any help from the world's institutions. Humanity's sociality is a pre-sentient dynamic, in which everybody wants to be an accepted member of the herd, and politics is always the tail on the dog of economics. Those are useless paths to epochal change.

I seek the extraordinary people who can imagine the next Epoch before it begins, as a way to help usher it into being. That has never happened before in the human journey, and the kinds of problems that Brian and Dennis ran into, for instance, are indicative of the many ways that humans are addicted to scarcity and cannot even imagine abundance. If I had not witnessed it thousands of times, I would not have believed it, either. That is why no political stripe on Earth will really help FE happen; not the rad left, not the Free Software Movement, but in those groups are stray needles that I can find, and it is why I am encouraging Freeknowledge to write about the Free Software Movement, but my open letter 2.0 will be titled something like "An Open Letter to Some Members of the Free Software Movement."

Much more to write, but it is off to work.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

I am adding some reading material on cough cough "IP" that I am reading. Chomsky on "Intellectual Property" another one

Everything is a Remix by Kirby Ferguson, watch or transcripts 1, 2, 3 and 4

"The intent was to better the lives of everyone by incentivizing creativity and producing a rich public domain, a shared pool of knowledge, open to all." -Kriby Ferguson

He has examples of Apple copying Everything is a Remix Case Study: The iPhone


Also internet is no longer for the winners of poor societies. It is slowly becoming universal. e.g. 1, 2 with the developing world a mere 14 years behind developed world.

The prospects for building a choir have never been better and will become better, unfortunately they will be brainwashed by education no matter where they live in the world. It always looking for needles.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Back to Freeknowledge's posts. More on this post. Virtually all major "philanthropy" on Earth is fake. This isn't new, as it has always been this way on "civilized" Earth (those "generous" elites who amassed their fortunes through immense crimes), and especially those British "philanthropists." Missionaries from Europe often led the rape of the New World, and I went to an elementary school named after one of them, who is up for sainthood today. Mother Teresa was a phony, and so on.

The American version goes way back, too, with American presidents making specious arguments when they weren't advocating naked theft and genocide. American agencies such as the Peace Corps are merely "soft" tools of empire, used before the USA begins playing rough with its banks, spooks, and military, as John Perkins learned. John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie exemplified industrial "philanthropists," and the world is still paying dearly for their "philanthropy," with nonsensical economic theory, a huge medical racket, and other wonders.

When Dennis flew high, he was swarmed with billionaires, and not one of them was worth a damn. They all tried to see how they could co-opt Dennis's effort, and not one of them parted with a dollar. As Bill Gates once said, you don't get rich by cutting checks. The Rockefellers were involved more than once in wiping Dennis out. The Rothschilds got involved, too. But they were lower-level players, a notch or two below Godzilla, with sitting presidents lower still, as actors who read their lines (literally, in the case of Reagan, and Bush the Second could not even get his lines right).

As to human development among the world's poor, some pockets have indeed been able to do relatively well, with sharing, education, and the like, but those Four Asian Tigers were far from pristine instances of industrialization, and they rose when Japan did, which benefitted from the USA's wars in East Asia, supplying our killing machine. They all embodied something like the Protestant work ethic, but the East Asian version. Those tigers are tiny islands of relative affluence in a sea of poverty. It is Fourth Epoch stuff, which all depends on the energy of fossil fuels. The Fifth Epoch will be so radically different that it will be largely unrecognizable to today's people, which is part of the problem. But it was like this for every Epochal Event. When the Fifth Epoch arrives, there will no longer be islands of affluence in an ocean of poverty. I live in the Bill Gates bubble, literally, and my neighborhood is full of high-caste refugees from India. They visit home every year, but almost none of them want to move back. They "made it" to the West and relative affluence. The nouveau riche of China all want to leave, and the USA is always their primary destination, even as declining a nation as we are, similar to Rome's trajectory, as it ran out of energy.

The demographic transition's pristine instance began in England as it industrialized. There was also the introduction of superior New World crops, particularly the potato in Northern Europe, which led to population explosions in places such as Ireland. What we see today, of poor nations going through the demographic transition without industrializing, is them getting the benefits of Western practices (sanitation, improvements in nutrition, basic medicine (sterile, primarily), and yes, formal education). They are riding on the West's coattails to a degree, even those without access to fossil fuels at Western levels. To me, these are just variants of how the Fourth Epoch has proceeded.

In ways, it is similar to the Neolithic Expansion, as agriculturalists, with their superior energy practices, invaded hunter-gatherer lands and pushed them to the margins. The hunter-gatherer women mated with the invaders (who had much greater caloric security than hunter-gatherers, so their lifestyles were far more attractive), and hunter-gatherer men disappeared from the gene pool. When two epochs meet like that, there are going to be variations on how it plays out, but make no mistake, it all rides on the energy practices of the new epoch.

I agree with Freeknowledge that if there was another century of the Fourth Epoch, the world's culture and standard of living will lose most of the great contrasts that we see today (also called the Race to the Bottom, as the capitalist class wages global war against the working class and poor, as the USA's middle class rapidly disappears), but the Fourth Epoch cannot last much longer, in a kind of "choose your poison" scenario. We already reached Peak Oil globally, and conventional oil will be completely depleted in Freeknowledge's lifetime, assuming that he lives to a ripe old age. The very engine of Industrial Revolution, stage two, is oil. That is the sole reason why we see the strife in the Middle East today, ever since the British Navy converted to oil from coal. Oil provides about 90% of the world's transportation energy today. We are mining the dregs of Earth's hydrocarbons today, such as Canada's tar sands, fracking, deep-water drilling, etc. One side-effect of the Hydrocarbon Age is Global Warming, and this year will once again break the record for the hottest year yet recorded. Numerous environmental calamities loom, but the smart money is betting that World War III, over the dwindling oil supplies, will happen before the environmental disasters take out most of humanity, and the world's poor are going to suffer first and most, as usual. So, will we be "saved" from galloping Global Warming by running out of hydrocarbon energy, somehow avoid World War III over the oil, and gracefully transition to something that will be a cross of the Third and Fourth Epochs, in a world that loses 90% of its human population? That is the "solution" that Peak Oilers and environmentalists offer up, and they treat FE like the enemy, believe it or not.

As Michael stated, ensouled species at our juncture do not make it a third of the time, as they wipe out their planet, taking themselves with it, via either environmental destruction or warfare.

Next to those dynamics and looming catastrophes, everything else is noise. But a mere 5,000 can turn the tide and usher humanity into the Fifth Epoch. However, those people are needles in haystacks, and I am using this new medium, the Internet, to find and train them. And the world's poor will be no help at all, and that is fine. I recall the words of Joe Bageant while writing this. Bageant escaped his Appalachian holler during the USA's postwar boom and wrote like a liberal for many years before returning to his roots and writing about his people. I have similar roots, and Bageant said that his books could benefit his people more than any other, but none of them will read them, as they don't read much, but get their "information" from TV and the radio. Dennis is that way, too, with his migrant farmworker roots. The world's poor do not see the point of too much education, as it will not prepare them for their lives of toil. Ilie made a similar observation when writing about the agrarian community that he grew up in, with him as a freak, with college-educated parents. His peers did not see the point in education much beyond becoming literate, and left school for the farm early on.

I strongly doubt that many of the world's poor will be part of the choir, as they are totally immersed in surviving each day, and do not have the time or interest to study my work. They will be the most dramatic beneficiaries of FE, but they are not going to help, and that is OK. My effort is not designed to reach them, although anybody with Internet access can take my "class." I have made my site easy to read on a PC or even iPad, but I am certainly not targeting people who want to read my big essay on their cell phones, and I have stated plenty that I have no plans to make a book from my work. It will be counterproductive and even risky, and my work is a next-generation resource.

In the coming week, I will have more time to write, and will work through my stack of unread correspondence, make some meaty posts, and the like, including catching up on my own thread!

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

Yes Japan benefitted from the wars in East Asia as did Philippines. The key difference is that Korea/Japan/Taiwan could use their education and provide industrial goods for the war machine which kicked them into the high income group. While Philippines with their lower levels of education in the younger cohorts stayed in the lower-middle income countries.

I am not too keen on cultural explanations of the trajectories of countries, be it protestant work ethic or Confucianism. I see those explanations as merely speculations, or worse. I am happy to settle with education as the major explanation.

for the effects of education see Demographic Metabolism: A Predictive Theory of Socioeconomic Change and Rethinking Population Policies Why Education Makes a Decisive Difference, more, and more. In short more than anything else, education is the determining factor. One could say that one of the defining features of every epoch is the level of education, collective intelligence all that made possible by flows of energy.

I don’t agree that kids leave school early on just because they don’t see prospects. This might be true for adolescents kids and older but not before, therefore they are likely to complete 10 years of schooling if the facilities exist. Even in US where it should be obvious to every kid that education is important only 80% finish high school.
See Public Report on Basic Education in India (1998 by Dreze among other authors) for the various motivations for going to school, and what they do if they drop out.

Nobody in the 1960’s Korea knew that their country would become developed because of their education. Likewise when I was going to college there was great uncertainty about job prospects, because India did not see much economic development then, that did not discourage education. If educational facilities exist, dropping out of school really starts only as adolescents (or as adults for the elite), imagined prospects about economic gain do not enter the picture until then.


===Added Later===

Thinking more carefully, yes we are in the fourth (industrial) epoch. Although it does not seem that way in poor countries. Colonization was itself a fourth epoch phenomenon. The green revolution and piped water that explain low mortality all over the world are industrial epoch effects. Education explains the other half of mortality reduction, lower fertility and industrial productivity. In a sense the spread of education is a sign that the transition to the fourth epoch is complete.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

A little break from responding to posts. I just read this, by an analyst that I contacted not long ago (of course, no real interest was shown in my work). Those kinds of analyses will have predictive validity, if we don't turn the FE corner. Again, only those needles in haystacks are going to have what I am looking for, but I knock on doors now and then, but I have yet to see a Peak Oiler or environmentalist, with the sole exception of Alden Bryant give the idea of FE the time of day, if they did not treat FE as the enemy.

Time for bed.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have some time this morning, so back to responding to posts. On this post from Freeknowledge, those with scientific training do not find my big essay hard to digest, and if I had to gauge from the reactions I have seen in the year since I first published the essay, it is looking more and more like the scientifically trained are really the only people who are going to read and study my work, and that is too bad. I designed it with laypeople in mind, not scientists, but maybe people are not scientifically trained for a reason. But I have not given up, and when I saw glimmers of understanding from people such as Nine, it gave me hope that my approach could work for non-scientists.

That post by Freeknowledge, on how agrarian (Third Epoch) education was not very helpful for understanding the industrial world (Fourth Epoch) I think is an important concept. It is related to my recent statement that my work does not target the world's poor, although they will be the most dramatic beneficiaries of FE. The Industrial Revolution has had three general phases. The first began when coal was used to smelt metal and run steam engines, the second was when oil and electricity began to be used, and the third one was when the high tech revolution began, arguably when the USA nuked Japan, and definitely when semi-conductors were invented a couple of years later, which led to today's computerized industrial societies. The feat of flying to the moon was unimaginable to my grandfather as he lived in a sod hut, even though his son helped put men on the moon. I was a science fiction junkie as a teenager, but if you had told me that I could be communicating to the world like I am today, I would have likely regarded it as a nice fantasy.

But the energy practices of this Epoch's phases are the same, of harnessing the energy of fossil fuels. In that regard, it has not changed much since the early 1700s. But the education that people received in each phase was markedly different. However, calculus was around for the Industrial Revolution's beginning, and important aspects of math go back to the Classic Greeks, which arguably was the beginning of modern thought.

Yes, I figure that if I am fortunate, that I have 30 good years left in me to pursue this work, although I also doubt that humanity can wait that long. But again, I will be surprised if many from the poor nations (unless they are lucky winners such as Freeknowledge and SL) are going to study my work and join the choir. I am prepared to be pleasantly surprised, however. In general, they are not as brainwashed as Westerners, so that they have fewer handicaps to overcome, in some important ways. Maybe people trying to reach out to those in non-industrial nations will make a dent, but it won’t be easy. It is similar to how FE efforts are almost exclusively mounted in industrialized nations. Even Tewari's work was copying Trombly's.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Now, on to the post that began the fracas. I am sorry, but copying is theft, if the maker made it with the intention of making a living from it, and the copier does not pay. It is simple ethics. If I made something with the idea that I would be paid as you consumed it, and instead you did not pay me when consuming it, that is a violation of my intent as I made it.

We can argue all day long on societal benefits and legalistic ideas, but if somebody puts effort into something with the expectation of an economic return, and people use it without paying, that is theft. We can say that the theft does not directly extract something from the victim; instead, the victim did not receive the expected benefit. Instead of an "out-go," it was the lack of an "in-go." The loss was more invisible, but it was still a loss. Somebody got the benefit without the producer being compensated.

I spent a decade of my life, for free, having my life-risking and life-wrecking adventures and performing the study, writing, and other toil that produced my site as it stands today (plus most of my "spare" time in those other years – my site is truly my life's work), and I have given it all away. I had to give up ideas like becoming a parent and owning my own home, but it was my decision to do that. I don't ask that of anybody else, and I don’t ask anybody to risk and ruin their lives like I did (or Dennis, or Mr. Professor, or Brian O).

But if somebody did what I did and expected to get rich off of it, selling their wares, that would be their right (and along that path, they might get "lucky" and get the Golden Handcuffs, but selling one's soul is costly in the end). They might not like it that I chose to give away my work, which might make it harder to sell theirs, but it was my choice to give it away, just as it was theirs to try to sell it. If the state wants to outlaw my right to give it away, then we have a problem.

Again, I do not kid myself that I could have done it if I lived in a poor nation. A person in a poor nation cannot afford to do what I did, just as I do not expect many people in poor nations to take advantage of what I have given away. I took advantage of my position as a member of history's most privileged demographic group to do what I have.

All criminals justify their crimes, and "copying is not theft" is just one more rationale. Again, in an FE-based political economy, people will not think in terms of wealth, poverty, and those other overarching ideas in our super-Epoch of scarcity, as almost no human effort will go into making every person richer than Bill Gates, literally. Today's average American is truly richer than the richest man on Earth of three centuries ago, as we take for granted surviving to be an adult, taking hot showers, traveling thousands of miles in hours, and other "trivialities" that were simply unimaginable three centuries ago. The realities of this world are far more unimaginable to people today, but I seek those who can wrap their minds around it without blowing a gasket.

As I have stated, the Free Software Movement could not have arisen except in an affluent society, and I see it as a harbinger of the Fifth Epoch, just like Dennis's marketing plan of putting the world's best heating system on people's home for free. He discovered the hard way that there is nothing resembling a free market in the energy industry, and the further that we pursued our path, the level of evil that we encountered got higher and higher, and we eventually got to meet Godzilla, kind of like in that movie Bambi meets Godzilla. The "funny" part is that people such as Richard Stallman deny that Godzilla even exists, just like the rad left does. They have the naïveté of the inexperienced, and the naïve cannot help with what I am doing. They have to be worldlier and awakened.

As far as the Free Software Movement and Microsoft goes, for instance, if they wanted to make something and give it away, and it directly competed with Microsoft, which Bill Gates rode to becoming the world's richest man, more power to them. But if they wanted to hack Microsoft's source code and give away that which was not theirs to give, then that is unethical, and in the USA it is a crime, if not in the Philippines.

In producing my site, I contacted authors whom I quoted extensively or used their original work, such as Howard Zinn and Peter Ward. They gave me their permission and then some, which is a long way from copying their entire work and "giving" it away, which is what the "copying" movement does.

To me, the motives of many in the Free Software Movement are noble, and I look forward to the day when everything is free (and "free" ceases to even be a concept), and humans have an entirely different framework from trying to survive in a world of scarcity. But if they advocate copying something that somebody made with the intent to sell, and not paying the maker, that is theft, no matter what lofty rationales they invoke. As Seth said, the means become the ends. We will not get to this world via theft and coercion. Prominent rad lefties often advocate coercion and violence, like Marx did. That is the mark of their ignorance, IMO, although they invoke lofty rationales for it, even somebody as brilliant as Chomsky. They are not aiming high enough, not enough to help with what I am doing, and in my experience, their materialistic outlook helped lead to their spiritually stunted stances. That is partly why I found that a mystical awakening is very helpful for what I am doing. I am not sure that it is required, but I found that people mired in rationalism, materialism, and scientism were blinkered in critical ways, from denying that organized suppression exists to invoking the "laws of physics" for why FE is "impossible," to advocating coercion and violence as a worthy path to lofty goals. In short, they do not understand the power of love, and I mean that in mystical and practical ways.

I have given my work away for a number of reasons, and one is to put a high mark on the wall. Making the biggest event in the human journey come to pass requires that the people involved aim very high. Humanity's inertia and the organized suppression have proven to be very formidable hurdles to making FE happen. I learned those lessons the hard way.

Legalistic arguments for rationalizing theft fall far short of what I am attempting, and if the Free Software Movement's members openly advocate theft (with clever arguments for why it is not theft), then they are going to fall short of what I seek. I will keep plowing through these posts, and might get though them by the end of this weekend.

Best,

Wade

[Krishna]

I have a few more questions.

Exclusionary covenants are illegal today. But not following them surely violate the intent of somebody who wrote/wanted those covenants. Should they be legal?

How far does the intent go in time? Should we care about the intent of people 100 years ago, a thousand years ago? How far does the intent go geographically? If one creates a work for a geographically local market, what was the intent? Is it violated if people outside that geography copy it?

Patents are about stopping copying of ideas. Why stop there? Why not stop copying of the idea of software? I am sure that Microsoft would love to own the idea of software, bye bye Free Software. Why stop there? Any business can claim some unique idea, and prevent others from using that idea, the broader the idea the better for the business.

[Krishna]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
To me, the motives of many in the Free Software Movement are noble

As I have stated, the Free Software Movement could not have arisen except in an affluent society, and I see it as a harbinger of the Fifth Epoch,

But again, I will be surprised if many from the poor nations (unless they are lucky winners such as Freeknowledge and SL) are going to study my work and join the choir.

Yes, the Free Software movements thinks about ethics. Since we are talking about intent and coercion, here is a relevant question.

Both Wikipedia and most software by Free Software movement is licensed under a Copyleft license. In short, improvements made to the commons have to be contributed back to the commons (that legalism of Stallman). If the author releases work under a copyleft license is it coercive?

Free Software/Open Source is a harbinger of the Fifth Epoch no doubt, but its success is not because of its ethics, but due to its anti-rival nature. The economics dictate its success, not the (ethical) politics. One could even say it is a by-product of the internet.

Affluence is a factor, in terms of energy my estimate is that people need 25% of US or 50% of Europe energy consumption, which happens to be almost exactly the world average energy consumption today. I am not able to guess how much lower the energy consumption can go. I see the limits from peak oil and global warming. Just imaging here... if we have average consumption of today but much more equitably, the world could be educated to the same level as usa today, therefore we can confidently predict that such a world would have wikipedia/free software at much greater levels of knowledge/usefulness.

In energy terms education is cheap and 10% of India's youth have access to college vs 40% is US. For young people of today, they are 4 times less likely to find you, not ten times as GDP/energy consumption would indicate. The question is will they see much faster education gains?

[Melinda]

Wade Frazier, Post #5565 : “...Yes, education helps, but the West is also adept at serving up the brainwashing with the education, even in science, which is supposed to be above that fray, but isn't. The human potential is pretty amazing IMO, and how people make do with little resources can be inspiring. But stick those poor Indian kids in their makeshift schools and send them here, and watch what happens...”

The education topic reminds me of a story I came across about an Afghan women, Razia Jan, who built a school for young girls in a village north of Kabul. Can't remember where I found it. Maybe someone here posted it, in which case please forgive my forgetful brain

http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-po...jan-zabuli-men

In the (above linked) article she explains the fierce opposition she faced, dealing with the entrenched culture of oppression towards females, and violence from men who felt threatened by her endeavour.

One of the aspects of the story that moved me, and why I bring it here, is that she decided to teach the girls how to write their fathers' names during the first week of school – a step that resulted in a change of attitude from many males and elders who've since felt able to support her efforts and even look her in the eye.

On teaching the girls how to write their fathers' names :

“For the fathers, that changed everything. Jan, who spent more than 30 years in the United States, remembers their reactions. “I swear to God, the guy was crying. He said, ‘I don’t know how to write my name. I put my thumb on everything. And my 4-year-old girl knows how to write my name.’””

““When the filmmaker Beth Murphy came in 2009, she filmed these men saying that they didn’t want the school. When she came again in 2014, these men were saying that this was the best thing that has happened to our daughters, and they were so proud.
So I have the backing of the whole community. Yes, of course, some people might resist. But the men are coming with their kids.
I have three girls from the school who got married. And just recently their husbands, young men, brought their wives and said, “We are married, but can she still continue her education?””

Reading the story reminded me yet again of the potential with free energy. Much misogyny and opposition from (mostly) men to women's empowerment comes from a fear of losing standing, and that standing is based on the limited cultural norms that dictate a man's sense of self worth, e.g :

- His ability to provide for his family (in a competitive economy that is hard on him)
- His ability to feel he is master of his domain (in contrast to the way he feels he is subject to outside rule or whim from government / employers / neighbours.)

If we have access to the tools to experience true sovereignty, and to independently generate what we need to live well, many of the current factors that are shallow fuel for self-respect and 'standing' can quickly be made obsolete.

As an aside, certain women's opposition to the betterment of other women is also a fear of losing standing in a changing world, as women who have been conditioned to see their self-worth through the eyes of an oppressor (who defines it for them) might fear their role seeming belittled by that of educated women, and may also fear dealing with feelings of guilt or shame because they had lacked the courage to aim for greater rights. But support networks can be a key feature in finding the courage to act, and access to them is obviously dependent on broader energy use - it being key to social organisation (from texting, to cars, to sheltered meeting venues.)

A lot of men whose ancestors may have been prone to misogyny have grown up in a world that increasingly advocates the equal rights of women. Subsequently the increased opportunities available to women have given more men cause to be thankful for that equality and see the benefit of it. More educated women active as healers, teachers, artists, inventors - helping to build and bind community positively with inspired and creative minds.

I see it as similar to when Wade reiterates the idea that a lot of people may not be equipped to appreciate the benefits of FE until it is delivered to their door. Many people have not appreciated the benefits of equality, or varying kinds of technology, until the joys of a practical application enabled them to experience (first-hand) the improved quality of life.

In the case of Razia Jan, she had spent some years in the United States before returning to Afghanistan (her place of birth) to build her school, and has been involved in projects that build bridges between the worlds on both sides of the Atlantic. Journeys and communications made possible by a world run on the energy of physical fuels.

Energy is obviously crucial to education in the modern world – from the manufacture / transport / recycling of everything from buildings to books to computers. A dozen students sharing one computer on a school property does not give the same equality of information-access as places where every student has a computer to read and research in their own time – and a well-travelled student or teacher has firsthand knowledge to share the differences they witness abroad.

Computers for all can seem gluttonous viewed under our current energy paradigm, but one of the things I look forward to greatly with FE is our ability to recycle virtually everything we make, cleanly and efficiently, without harm to the environment. Not just by recycling the materials into something new, but through the reduced causes of competition inherently increasing our willingness to share, both goods and the skills to maintain them.

On another note, one quote from the article on Radia reads :

““The idea of a women’s college is fairly radical today—but when Jan was growing up in Afghanistan, it wouldn’t have been so rare. “Boys and girls were treated the same,” she says. “We went to school, we could go on bike rides, wear a skirt—we never covered our heads.””

We may never know how Afghanistan would have grown without the influence of the Taliban. But whatever internal/external circumstances supported their rise, and whoever helped fund it, a free energy world where every man and woman has access to clean, abundant energy can facilitate a sovereign way of life for everyone, regardless of country. Populations of liberated individuals who do not rely on governments or religious institutions to meet and/or regulate their agricultural, medical, manufacturing, employment or educational needs are in a better position to defend against the corruption of whatever community regulators they do decide to elect. Those populations will be made up of men and women whose self-worth need not be defined by poor access to educational tools, or by the oppressive economic factors that discourage our use of them.

Wade Frazier, Post #5571 : “...copying is theft, if the maker made it with the intention of making a living from it, and the copier does not pay. It is simple ethics. If I made something with the idea that I would be paid as you consumed it, and instead you did not pay me when consuming it, that is a violation of my intent as I made it...”

On the copyright/income debate, one of the things that has saddened me over the years is when people fail to make connections (just as they do with failing to see the relationship between energy access and quality of life.) I've met educated people who believe that music (for example) should be free because it provides spiritual fulfilment. They failed to realise that if an artist has to glean their income elsewhere they will not have time to hone their craft and promote their product; there won't be money to pay for quality equipment, musicians, tours and promoters. If they can manage to keep working, it can put them in the position of having to promote (often corporate) sponsors whose agenda may not align with their or their audience's independent spirit or philosophy. The same could be said of scientists or historical researchers, etc, who need time, funds and a spirit of independence to research and hone their work before publishing, and to promote it for discussion afterwards.

The more they are funded directly by sales, the less they are beholden to corporate interests whose agendas may censor / limit their work in a way that's politically acceptable, and the better position they are in to fund future works independently. I'm guessing that most authors (or their publishers) are not protective of copyright because they wish to punish people in poverty for enjoying their work for free, but because they need it in a world where – should their work generate income – they will have legal grounds to seek recompense. If people can afford to pay but simply refuse, we will (if we don't regulate ourselves as our own moral/ethical guardians) get the culture we pay for - which, if we're paying nothing, may not be much of a culture at all, except the ones that moneyed behemoths agree to shape for us.

Where it unfortunately gets cloudy, is in how the middlemen who collect for creators often take more than is necessary, leaving the author with an inappropriately small piece of the profit their work generates. With the internet revolutionising access to information, one of the offshoots is more independent creation and more self-publishing. But it still requires someone, somewhere, to fund the work. In a free energy world, where people have the means to create abundance (let alone security) I think more and more people will be happy to give their work away, and their main concern will be that others don't try and falsely take credit in order to generate benefits (of varied kinds that are not financial.) But until then, I would think we need to be mindful of blanket advocacy for free information – the kind that damages those who can encourage our mental and spiritual growth through their work that still costs money and time (which also means money) to create and to share.

I'm not claiming to address (with the above) every aspect of the copyright debate that may have surfaced here recently. Just sharing a little reflection on one aspect.

A world based on scarcity has enabled wealthy parties to sweep up increased levels of power, through influence over laws, land and other resources - gathering higher numbers of minions to do their bidding. But as we safely and peacefully implement a free energy culture, spiritually hand in hand with physically, enabling us to provide for ourselves and freeing us from survival mode to think more broadly and compassionately, we will be able to address any number of laws that are outdated in a benevolent and considerate world.

I read two more articles the other day about the ugly environmental cost of the solar-power industry. If we can facilitate something far less costly to the environment, that safely provides significantly greater abundance, and supports a much broader freedom for individuals to create and share independently, it would seem foolish not to. Recently I've also come across several people in interviews mentioning shoe-box sized free energy devices (based on magnetic motors), which seem a lot more practical than solar-panels that are vulnerable to harsh weather. Those devices have (as many here either know or sense) been suppressed. Still, it continues to amaze me, what a significantly healed and uplifted world we can have, if we can muster the strength to create the spiritual foundation.

I was feeling down earlier, but felt nature calling me to the trees. So I went for a long walk in the park and soon enough felt nourished in body and spirit. Walked through the trees, bare feet on the warm, wet grass. Felt completely and truly uplifted. When I returned home and gazed through the window, I witnessed the formation of a double rainbow, arcing across the sky. Apparently in some cultures it signifies transformation, and both the material and spiritual realms.

Seemed apt to share, in a thread for free energy

Much love to all

Pic from the web : a double rainbow through the trees

[heyokah]

Here's what Harald Kautz Vella has to say about scarcity versus abundance.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZSqEG3rOoII

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

OK, I am going to have time to catch up on a bunch of chores, including catching up on this thread. To address this post more fully, again, the cause of the pristine demographic transition was the rising standard of living that industrialization brought. Women and slaves being liberated was an effect, not a cause. In the non-pristine instances, poor nations are getting the benefit of Western technology and culture, and women are getting educated, but without the economic opportunity that breaking out of an agrarian economy affords, it is a great struggle, of that kind of partway stage. We saw Iraq and Iran making their way to the Fourth Epoch, but they sat on Fourth Epoch fuel, so the West (the USA, really, with token support from imperial has-beens like the UK and sycophant nations eager for some of the imperial spoils) destroyed those nations, and Iraq quite evilly.

Where I live, across the street from Microsoft, is kind of a little world's fair, with nerds from all over the world living and working, especially from the high castes of India and East Asia, but I also see Africans, Middle Easterners, Eastern Europeans, Russians, etc. While most Indian men dress in Western fashion, it seems that about half of the Indian women (who are not Microsoft employees, but their wives) walk around in saris, but I rarely see the red dots on their foreheads. It is quite an East-meets-West scene, and far from a pristine instance of the demographic transition. Many bring over their parents, who very much cling to their traditional ways and dress, to care for the children, and I often see those huge Indian families at the grocery store, where the dad is at work while the mother carts around several small children. You almost never see that with white people in the USA. Anyway, interesting, and those Asian children born and raised here will almost certainly never move back to the Old Country, unless the USA keeps collapsing like it has been. People raised in a Fourth Epoch economy are not going to want to live in a Third Epoch economy. In the USA, you have Amish and intentional agrarian communities, and they are like peasant communities (Third Epoch) in a sea of industrialized communities (Fourth Epoch).

When Darren stumbled into my work years ago, and read about my comments on the austere environmentalists, he thought I was wrong, but the reality of his existence eventually became clear to him, as he realized that he kind of lived a peasant's life, struggling to get his energy.

So, there are going to be small fluctuations, as women's status goes up and down based on economic conditions, and the like. There is going to be regional variation and proximal causes and feedback effects, but it is really all about the Epochs, which is all about the available energy. It dwarfs everything else.

On this post, with Dennis's heat pump, tinkerers definitely began the business, but they were never going to help take the business into the industrial phase. The entire "industry" was stuck in arrested development, like the FE field is today, dominated by scientists and tinkerers. The craftsman approach is Third Epoch, and does not work for industrial production. You need a factory environment to achieve the quality needed for industrial-level production. Tinkerers in the field don't cut it. Although Dennis was an untrained businessman, and a marketing and sales genius the likes I have never seen before or since, the way that he industrialized fledgling industries stuck at the craftsman stage was incredible. He did it with the foam insulation industry before he got involved with his heat pump, and his programs were so explosive that his "allies" constantly tried to steal his business (but never understood that Dennis's marketing programs, not the technology, made the difference), and his attempts to carpet the USA with his heat pump is what brought the organized suppression to his efforts in Seattle, and when we started making FE sounds, Godzilla finally rolled out of bed to see what all the noise was about, and we were then quickly wiped out.

Again, I'll be catching up here, soon, and will make a bunch of lengthy, Wade-like posts.

Best,

Wade

[Melinda]

As a 'P.S.' to my last post, thank you freeknowledge for the Chomsky interview link (Post #5566) :

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20090519.htm

This post isn't aimed directly at you freeknowledge, it's just a general exploration...

As usual, Chomsky's in-depth understanding of myriad situations enables concise overviews that cut to the heart of Western economic hypocrisy - such as where he outlines how the wealth of the West was largely built on piracy, but modern Western media / government (shaped by financially powerful corporate influence) decries Somali pirates whose waters are being plundered and polluted by those same or similar wealthy foreign interests. I also understand the points that huge corporations (e.g. pharmaceuticals) can use intellectual property rights and WTO protection to support insidious market monopolies - he suggests that if pharmaceuticals' development budgets were taken over by the public and corporations were regulated, made to sell at market prices, the public would make huge savings.

In a neat summation of corporate-level piracy he writes:

“It's called "kicking away the ladder". First you use certain bits of development, and then you kick away the ladder so others can't follow you.”

Theoretically, if the pharmaceutical industry wasn't essentially an influential lobby of organised criminals, not only could the public make huge savings if the true cost of their development budget was publicly funded/regulated, but it could make savings due to genuine (often inexpensive) cures being legally permitted to surface/flourish.

Perhaps due to ignorance of a great deal concerning various industries and niche areas of their research, I'm uncertain how much information protected (or even hoarded) by copyright and patent protection is actually necessary to assist what is fundamentally necessary to curing our bodies, minds and politics (even though I'm aware that entities like Monsanto would gladly patent every last seed, if they thought they could.) But it prompts the recurring question, how can we garner the strength to oppose powerful economic interests, who poison governments as well as the planet, in an economic system to which most are addicted, without first creating the energy means to sustain ourselves independently? (For those living off of prana the debate perhaps only remaining irrelevant until those who don't, come to plunder the forest and/or mountain in which they live.)

Additionally, Chomsky says of artist copyright :

“...it should be, in a free democratic society, a sort of responsibility arrived at by democratic decision to maintain adequate support for creative arts as we do for science. If that were done, the artists wouldn't need copyrights to survive. That's economically more efficient, I believe, and morally more justified.”

I've come across that premise before, and under our current energy/economic paradigm it makes a point, one that I used to align with to a degree. But compared to the deeper independence that can be facilitated by a free energy culture, it also has a whiff of dependency about it. And it also raises the questions, such as:

1) If artists were subsidised by a budget, with their income capped, would they not receive the benefit of market profits the way other creators/goods-providers would? Would that limit their long-term ability to fund their own creations or philanthropic endeavours?

2) Who would manage the funds that form the budgets? And if those bodies, or their artist vetting systems are open to corruption, does that make the artists' situation less or more democratic than if they function with copyright protection in a market economy?

I'm wondering where and how would we draw the line at what kind of creations/products deserve state or 'publicly managed' budget allocations, and which creators conversely get to benefit from the independence that can result from market profit?

I can see how intellectual property law can be used, in our flawed economic system, to reduce people's manoeuvrability. In a system that compounds scarcity, people gladly take what goods they can for free where legal consequences can be avoided, hence download piracy, hence powerful lobbying interests saying we need greater internet controls to manage our freedoms (in a way that may have dire consequences for freedom of information that go well beyond, and stifle more vital areas, than the entertainment industry.)

On the one hand, the web has lead to greater democratisation, e.g. I can watch/read/hear an offering, but if I decide it wasted my time then at least I didn't have to pay for it. But how many honestly decide to purchase something after enjoying it for free? And in an economic realm of artificial scarcity (artificial because it suppresses FE and profit-diminishing innovation) how many people can afford to purchase everything that uplifts them?

Debates like this always tend to bring me back to free energy. If we can address the root of the problem, and we can all have access to the energy that can support not only our survival but a considerably higher quality of life, there will be less incentive for corruption and/or profit-drives, and there can be less need for concern over which science or art gets funding from state or 'free' market mediums.

I know that can sound 'pie in the sky' to people who wish to at least try and amend our deeply flawed systems now. But if we don't cut to the heart of the problem with our energy sources, we risk destroying our home planet while we're busy restructuring the political system which, compared to our ecosystem collapse, is just an another brand of distraction, (hence the ties between politicians and the entertainment industry.) In that regard I wish more people were joining the debate due to seeing its relevance. (And I'm not referring to specifically Noam, whose cultural contribution most here acknowledge as great enough already.)

If anyone feels I've misunderstood anything, please let me know. I haven't delved into every last one of freeknowledge's copyright links.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This is the first in a series of posts, as I take a break from chores and responding to posts. I'll put these in my forum, too. This will take the weekend to complete, and maybe longer.

There is a method to the madness of my big essay, but I have yet to have anybody really play with me. The first half of my big essay is a warmup for the last half, as humanity enters the stage. There are many events for which the observer could ask, "Was that intentional, or an accident?" The best scientists say that as far as our physical universe and the journey of life on Earth are concerned, today's science cannot answer that question. That same question has been posed for many geopolitical events, and the conspiracists and structuralists are at the same poles as creationists and materialists are on the evolution debate, and it took me many years to realize that both debates spring from the same mentalities. When you have direct personal experience of abilities of consciousness that far exceed what scientists are willing to admit, you see those arguments as pretty pointless and as the battles of two fundamentalist camps, although the issues themselves are very important, IMO.

In the realm of animal behavior and cognition, there is great controversy over the level of cognition behind animal behaviors. The same can be debated for humans. In evolutionary theory, there is debate over the "survival of the fittest," the "arrival of the fittest," and how things came to be. Why did one species survive while another did not? Those are big questions, and have many tentative answers, presented with varying levels of confidence. I think that why the dinosaurs died out and what survived is well explained by the bolide hypothesis, but the controversies still rage.

Anthropologists have studied "primitive" societies and found their practices energetically ideal, but nobody in the societies thought of it that way. They were just following their traditions that were thousands of years old and integrated into their religion and culture. An evolutionary explanation might be that societies that did not adopt energetically ideal practices did not survive, whether they did so consciously or not, so the fittest are here today, no matter what Epoch they lived in. That is a fascinating way to view it, and it may be the right answer, even though it has been dismissed by some as a tautology. Of course, whatever life exists today is here because it successfully played the energy game, and those that did not are not here today.

Humanity's Epochal Events were all energy events above all else, and none of them were planned, but just kind of happened, when the inventor(s) came up with something new, to make their lives better. None of them suspected what their inventions would lead to. How could they? Their world ended as they knew it, because of their new energy practice. Even for the most recent event, the Industrial Revolution, nobody planned it, in the sense of, "Hey, let's have an Industrial Revolution." England was the beneficiary of a confluence of events, largely energy events, which led to the Epochal Event. In ways, it was the least radical of the four so far. The first led to humans, the second led to their conquest of Earth, and the third led to civilization and hundreds of times as many humans. The Industrial Revolution, for all of its vast changes, was not as dramatic as any of those. But all of those will be dwarfed by the Fifth, as humanity becomes a space-faring species and a Type 1 civilization, and more importantly, the super-epoch of scarcity will end, in ways similar to the Pre-Cambrian super-eon of simple life ending as complex life arose.

Greedy Englishmen (actually, the one who initiated the trend was an invader, William the Conqueror, of Viking stock) removed the peasants from the land with Game and Enclosure Laws and began mechanizing farming, and those dispossessed peasants became the Industrial Revolution's first workforce, working in the mines and mills owned by a rising class that is today called capitalist. Just as court historians provided ideological service to the elite in preindustrial civilizations, intellectuals prostituted themselves and justified capitalist rule via their economic theories. The rise of England was a story of energy, technology, greed, bloodshed, and conquest that historians and other intellectuals dressed up into a tale of glory, as that little island nation became history's greatest empire, which spanned the globe, until it was eclipsed by its offspring. Neither capitalists nor royalty cared one whit for those they conquered and exploited. They were simply playing the wealth and power game, and were able to make it a global game, beating out their neighbors. None of them were trying to initiate an Epochal Event, and none of them were trying to uplift humanity. That was never the intention, but self-interest guided all actors. The West's reign has been devastating for the world's peoples, as demographic catastrophes were inflicted by those white people. The charade of "charity" and "philanthropy" attended those events, but it was virtually all fraudulent.

For the first time ever, people are trying to initiate an Epochal Event, with some idea of its ramifications, and that is what my choir idea is all about. Somewhat bizarrely, the technology to make the Epochal Event happen is older than I am but is sequestered in ultra-elite enclaves. In my circles, that is not even news, but old hat, and Brian nearly yawned when I told him about what my pal saw, when he got his little exotic technology demonstration. My friend's bewildered response to the show was, "You guys don’t live in my galaxy." Anybody who does even a little digging happens upon the president of Lockheed's Skunkworks waxing on about ETs and ESP. Heck, what is sequestered at the Skunkworks, Phantom Works, Area 51, and the like is not even the good stuff. Maybe once they were, but the good stuff has long since disappeared into Godzilla's Golden Hoard. My pal only got a little peek.

On this thread, various people have bombed in with, "Energy, so what?" So everything. Only the scientifically illiterate make remarks like that. Even on the financial side of things, the importance of energy should be evident. Six of the seven largest corporations on Earth are oil and gas companies, and more than half of the world's twenty largest companies are energy companies. Energy is everything in our universe, and energy runs everything on Earth. Average Americans have the equivalent of several hundred energy slaves working for each one of us. That is why we are history's richest and most powerful nation. Everything else is noise. All geopolitical events of significance revolve around the energy issue, which explain everything about the West's involvement in the oil-rich Middle East for the past century, and pundits have to work real hard to obscure it.

Time for bed.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The previous post was a prelude to a discussion that I need to have about the Epochs and making FE happen. Making FE happen will be the hardest nut that humanity has ever cracked, and it is not really about technology. The technology has already been made. The challenge is to humanity's integrity and sentience. I don’t need very many for my idea to work, but there are not many on the planet today. Mr. Professor and Brian O had the right stuff, but their journeys shortened their lives. A few hero/martyrs cannot get it done. Dennis is as heroic as I ever heard of, and he can't get it done by himself. Indiana Jones versus humanity's inertia and Godzilla and friends has not been a pretty contest, let me tell you. Dennis should be dead dozens of times over, and there are far more pretenders than contenders in the field, with FE newbies announcing that they are the Messiah, shamelessly lying about Dennis, naively embracing the criminals while attacking Dennis and Brian, etc.

The Energy Epochs define the human journey, and each one was so radically different from the others that placing people from one Epoch into another would have been so traumatic that they would likely not have survived, or gone insane. Even within the Epochs, the changes could be vast, but there was also continuity in ways. The human journey, from when Homo sapiens appeared on the world stage until today, has been about controlled combustion. That has been a constant. Another has been weapons and inter-human violence. The first stone tools likely found dual use as a way to obtain more calories and attack or defend from neighbors. Spears and arrows were certainly used for hunting, but people regularly used them on each other, especially as societies ran out of energy as they drove the easy meat to extinction. Humanity has had many golden ages of easy energy as they exploited new energy resources that eventually became hard times and societal collapses as they ran out of that energy. Another constant has been the dance between the sexes, and women have generally been second-class citizens or even chattel, in our might-makes-right world, which has not been that different from chimp and gorilla societies in important ways. To date, only bonobos overcame the penchant for violent male rule. We pretend that we have progressed beyond that, but the world's most powerful nation regularly invades nations under the flimsiest pretexts (the real reason was to steal their resources, mainly energy, and enslave them) and slaughters millions, primarily children. The USA is not that different from Hitler's Germany (heck, we hired all the useful Nazis after World War II, which nearly led to World War III), for all of its high-sounding rhetoric, and most Americans do not care in the slightest, as their focus is completely egocentric, with their awareness rarely extending past their immediate self-interest, and the "civilized" West generally either stands by and watches or enables the USA's behavior, to get a cut of the loot.

But for the constants, the changes between the Epochs were radical, and the Epochs had their phases. The controversy of just when the human line controlled fire and when they used it for cooking will likely outlive me, but the First Epoch would have had the "before fire" and "after fire" phases. Even wild chimps have an appreciation for the virtues of cooked food, so fire must have been used for cooking soon after it was controlled, and it may well have led to the appearance of humans on the evolutionary stage.

The Second Epoch had its "easy meat" and "hard times" phases, as the early golden age gave way to population growth, reduced territories, and warfare as neighbors fought over their scarce energy supplies. Australia was a kind of time capsule for that phase, as the aborigines remained in their hunter-gatherer phase until the British invaded them.

The Third Epoch had two phases and arguably a third. The first was substance agriculture, and in the pristine instances of agriculture (called horticulture in its early phase), women brought in most of the calories, their status rose, for the first time in the human line in at least ten million years, in many such societies, they became matrilocal, broke up the male gangs, and those are the human journey's most peaceful pre-civilized societies. The second phase was the rise of civilization, and the pristine ones all began peacefully, until men reasserted their dominance and those societies once again became ruled by violent men. With the rise of civilization came many features that are still with us today, with professions, literacy, metal use, mass warfare, and so on. Where the first civilization appeared, in today's Iraq, has been the site of rising and falling empires ever since, even to this day, as the USA invaded and destroyed the nation in order to control its oil. From the Mongol hordes to today's most "enlightened" nation, as Uncle Noam has stated, human morality has not changed in the slightest. The arguably third phase of the Second Epoch was when Europe began to ride an energy wave that saw them turn the global ocean into a low-energy transportation lane and use it to conquer humanity. That conquest was well underway when one of the imperial contenders had to resort to coal because all of its forests were gone, and the Fourth Epoch began.

The First Epoch was fueled by enhanced energy supplies via manufactured tools and the control of fire, to burn wood. The Second Epoch was fueled by Earth's large animals, which were nearly all driven to extinction. The Third Epoch was initially fueled by deforestation and crops, and in its second phase, those dynamics were intensified, and humans also began using animal and wind power. That arguable third phase began when northwestern Europe began using watermills in its High Middle Ages, and rode that wave to world conquest, assisted by the reintroduction of Classic Greek teachings.

The Fourth Epoch began with harnessing fossil fuel energy, and the first was coal. In those early days of the Industrial Revolution, coal was more important for smelting metal than its use to power steam engines. Wind and water power were competitive with coal power until the mid-19^th century. Soon after coal overtook wind and water power in the USA, as the USA led the way in driving the ocean's megafauna to the brink of extinction and that energy supply began running out and the USA began mining oil, the Fourth Epoch's second phase began. The widespread use of electricity came soon afterward, and the USA quickly became the world's richest and most powerful nation, overtaking its British parent. The West mercilessly raped and plundered the world's people, inflicting unprecedented demographic catastrophes on them, in its quest for wealth and power, which has always been and always will be rooted in the energy surplus.

When imperial latecomers arrived at the global smorgasbord, there were only crumbs left for them, which led to the greatest wars that humanity has yet experienced, capped off with exploiting a new energy source: an atom's nucleus. The day after the USA nuked Hiroshima, people began writing about the potential of that new energy source, and the Fourth Epoch's third phase began, which I live in today.

The Fifth Epoch had its first glimmerings with the man who invented the technology that electrified the world, and the organized suppression of FE by the global elite likely began back then, and it has been refined into a science today.

My next post is going to be about the cognitive/social aspects of the Epochs and their ramifications for my choir efforts and the people I seek. People in the Third Epoch today, or even the early Fourth, will probably not be much help for what I am attempting. The Fifth Epoch will most likely be initiated by people living in the Fourth Epoch's third phase, which means people living in high-tech industrial cultures. They will have the least amount of ideological baggage to drag along with them (although, in ways, they are history's most brainwashed people). Some lucky people from Third Epoch societies, such as SL and Freeknowledge, may be able to help with what I am attempting, but their roots are in the Third Epoch, so it will be challenging for them. Dennis began his life that way, too, and his efforts can be seen as a harbinger of the Fifth, but Dennis is one-of-a-kind.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I may not have time for another post today, but today's reading included yet another presentation on the USA's energy supply over the course of its history, on a percent basis. I read about how the Pentagon's new war manual reads just like something that the Nazis would have written. I was also reading about what is shaking up the stock markets these days, which was written by one of the more perceptive financial bloggers out there, who unfortunately is a Peak Oiler, and I have never been able to reach one of them, and I tried with him, too, fool that I am.

I had a nature/nurture exchange today, and I think that the pig toilet analogy is appropriate. If somebody is fed crap all of their life, they develop a taste for it, even crave it, and cannot imagine eating anything else. I have watched people embrace certain death rather than question their conditioning. It was awe-inspiring to witness. I am an American, and can speak best to what happens in my great nation, but we are all UP, and react similarly to similar situations. Americans are force-fed the red, white, and blue Kool-Aid from their cradles, forced to worship a flag, etc. I know what the brainwashing feels like, believe me, and it happens on many levels, but people can wake up from the nightmare if they want to. After many years on the FE trail, I finally came to understand that people are addicted to scarcity, or more accurately, their adaptations to survive in a world of scarcity. Take away scarcity, and a lot will change, and dramatically, so dramatically that the world will end as we know it.

Time for chores.

Best,

Wade