Wade Frazier

Hi Krishna: Ah yes, Wikipedia, the necessary evil these days. Your advice makes sense if you can see the edits. Virtually everything that I did there was erased, on the flimsiest of pretexts. The extreme reaction to my work that you just witnessed has been a typical reception for many years. You would think that I was the world’s greatest plagiarist and copyright violator, given what happened. It was the Internet equivalent of Dennis’s spending two years behind bars, and nearly dying there, for failing to file a form. My work means the end of the world as we know it, and at some level, people understand that, and hence the violent reactions, although they can rarely admit it to themselves. I try to not take it personally. I’ll have a little more to say about Wikipedia, but not a whole lot. Like so many things, its performance falls far short of its promise, and it is nearly a parody of an encyclopedia today. I refer to it too, but warily. When the story of life on Earth gets to the human parts, especially current events, Wikipedia can become worse than worthless, with all of the ax-grinders doing their thing, and Wikipedia may well have been captured by the intelligence community, with its neo-con co-founder. On Illich, maybe you can write something on what Illich is missing about the Fifth Epoch (a little homework ). It lies outside of his view of the possible. Without clean and abundant energy, a world of abundance cannot come to pass. I have rarely seen a pundit or philosopher who could really understand abundance, as they fall off the rails into thinking in terms of exuberant, sustainable, and the like. Until people can release their epochal conditioning, they really can’t begin to imagine it, which is why I always say that a person has to be awakened already, or they won’t begin to understand. The GCs know exactly what I am writing about, which is why they keep the lid so tightly on it, as they keep humanity oblivious of its potential, keeping people at the level of survival and temporarily sating their addictions. It is not easy to enslave the awake, not in the Fourth Epoch. The arrival of decentralized, clean, abundant energy will be the biggest event in the human journey, and will wipe away nearly all of the social structures that Illich theorized about, such as nations, exchange institutions, etc. Illich focused on transportation, but that is a tiny aspect of the issue. That conversation that I imagine the choir one day singing has never been heard before, and truly, only a relative few are going to be able to hear it, but they will be enough. Best, Wade

Hi: Ed and I had a friendly correspondence over nearly 20 years, apparently so friendly that I am disqualified from ever editing articles related to him at Wikipedia. I began to try introducing Ed to Brian between around 2001, when I began collaborating with Brian, and 2004, when my NEM experience ended. Ed was never interested. All that I received was polite silence, and in 2003 and 2004, during our NEM effort, the Richard Heinberg experience was very educational for me, in a number of ways. It began in early 2003, when I read some of Uncle Bucky’s work, after one of his pupils called me a “comprehensivist” and I did not know what he meant. The comprehensive lightbulb finally went on for me, which I had been unwittingly groping toward for many years, arguably since I could walk. Mere weeks after finishing with my introduction to Bucky’s work, I read this article by Heinberg, on the eve of Iraq’s invasion. Iraq’s invasion may have been the most emotionally agonizing time of my life, and that is saying something. I had witnessed the USA’s turning into Nazi Germany, with aggressive wars that may be far from over. If humanity survives, the USA’s invasion of Iraq may be seen as the first salvos of World War III, and Bush and Blair will be seen as the 21st century equivalent of Hitler and Mussolini, and here we are again, attacking Russia, like Napoleon and Hitler did. If it turns into a shooting war, those elite plans to make a survival enclave on Mars might be timely. Heinberg’s article was the first time that I read Peak Oiler work. I vaguely knew that the oil would run out one day, but I was not familiar with Peak Oiler work. Heinberg published his first Peak Oiler book a few weeks later. I got familiar, fast, and read books that Heinberg relied on (Catton, Tainter, Deffeyes) before I contacted him in May 2003, through an activist that we had in common. Heinberg’s work was quite interdisciplinary, which appealed to my budding comprehensive awareness, and we had several convergences in our work. One was that Heinberg was Velikovsky’s assistant, and I had been on the fringes of that controversy for several years by that time. Velikovsky was decidedly multi-disciplinary in his approach, although I doubt that much, if any, of his catastrophic work is valid. He got points for advocating catastrophism when uniformitarianism was a dogma, but I don’t see that his work merits much beyond that. Velikovsky was famously attacked by Brian’s erstwhile buddy Carl Sagan, debunker extraordinaire, and Sagan’s dishonest attack arguably kept the Velikovsky controversy alive far longer than it should have. Another convergence was that Heinberg wrote about free energy as a possible solution. He wrote about some of the exact situations, even down to the people, such as Sparky Sweet, that I had been involved with. Heinberg wrote about them in a semi-ridiculing way, but I always give people the benefit of the doubt, until they demonstrate to me that there is no doubt to give them the benefit of. I even did it with Mr. Skeptic. I contacted Heinberg in a very friendly and welcoming way, eager to give him some inside perspective on the very situations that he wrote about, and was more than happy to introduce him to Brian, which was about the same time that Brian invited me to help him establish NEM. Heinberg was not interested. Not only was he not interested, he explicitly stated that until we could agree that humanity is quickly running out of energy and is using too much of it, that there was no point in discussing the issues any further. He was begging the question, as free energy would make his arguments pointless. I walked away from Heinberg, stunned by his response. What made Heinberg’s response doubly bizarre was the he was onboard with the idea that 9/11 was an inside job (which was very “unlefty”), but he could not seem to comprehend organized suppression, which would have orders of magnitude more motivation for elite involvement than 9/11 would have had. Heinberg was a prototypical Level 3. During the next year, our little NEM effort tried to get Brian visibility, using him as a kind of battering ram to open doors. But an interview on Jeff Rense’s program was about all that happened. Brian tried and tried to get into “progressive” venues, and found no takers. Not only was nobody interested, Heinberg was being feted like a conquering hero across the entire Left/environmentalist spectrum. As I bought groceries at my local progressive store in May 2014 (when Mallove was murdered), a cover story featuring Heinberg greeted me as I walked through the door. The same month, there was an interview with Heinberg in Z Magazine, which I had subscribed to for more than a decade by that time, and it was Ed’s primary publishing conduit by then. While Brian’s message was one of healing and abundance, Heinberg beat the drums of doom. Brian was completely shut out from all “progressive” venues while Heinberg got the red carpet treatment at those very same venues. It was kind of mind-bending to me at the time, but Bucky’s work helped me understand what I was seeing: people were addicted to scarcity. Perhaps stated more precisely, people were addicted to their survival mechanisms in a world of scarcity and fear, including their adoptive ideologies, and were not about to let go. Many years of derision and denial, from all quarters, became clear to me in those days. I wanted to walk away from NEM in May 2014, even before Mallove was murdered, as I could tell that our efforts were doomed (from the inside, as our motley crew did not have what it took to make a dent, with inexperience and naïveté a leading reason, but they also did not understand the integrity issue), but Brian begged me to stay, and I poured $15K into NEM over the next several months and quit right after our conference in September 2004. My money, given as a gift when I did not want to be there, was completely wasted. The years 2003 and 2004 were very dismaying to me, I was in the darkest phase of my midlife crisis, and I went quiet for years, while working 60-hour weeks at my day job after I resumed my career, after those several years of study and writing that became my site as it largely stands today. I was not finished writing about Ed and the Left yet, and am still kind of involved, writing Ed’s first biography, no matter how it has gone with Wikipedia. Best, Wade

Hi: Two editors are working on Ed’s bio, trying to improve it, partly by copying over parts of Noam’s bio. We will see how far their effort takes them. The opposition is going to be loyal (some may be well-paid, as Cross may be). I want to call out something about Wikipedia’s deceptions that are partly structural, which Ed might have appreciated. In the world of scholarship, it is far more effective to lie by omission than by commission. Uncle Howard also discussed another propaganda device, in which something is not omitted, but briefly mentioned in the name of completeness (to avoid the charge of omission), but quickly buried, so that genocide becomes an obscure footnote to a rousing tale of adventure and discovery. George Washington has probably been subjected to more hagiography than any other American. I have yet to see even one biography of Washington that even mentions his greatest feat: crafting the blueprint for stealing a continent, which was a criminal plan that worked brilliantly. Using Washington’s advice, the USA forced treaties onto the Indian nations that were not worth the paper they were printed on, as a low-intensity method of swindling them out of their land and lives. Historians cannot find even one treaty with the Indians that the USA honored, because the USA never intended to honor them. It was a fraudulent strategy at the outset. I have written on Washington’s grand plan extensively, with primary documents and numerous history books, but it has never made it into a biography of Washington that I have seen. Just last week, I had some time to kill in a store that had copies of a recent Washington bio for sale. I think it was this Pulitzer-Prize-winning effort (but there are so many that maybe it was another work). I searched in it, and there was not a word about his greatest feat, among quite a bit of discussion about Washington’s relations with the Indians. More than a decade ago, somebody mentioned my work on the talk page at the Wikipedia article on Washington, noting that glaring omission. That is a good way to make hagiography out of somebody’s life: omit the crimes, particularly the historic ones. You can see that nothing remotely fair about that aspect of Washington’s life and career has made it into his Wikipedia biography. It would be like writing about Hitler without mentioning his genocidal Lebensraum plans for Eastern Europe. And that is not a strained analogy at all, as what Washington and friends did to the Indians directly inspired Hitler’s plans, which also largely escaped the history books. That is how you make hagiography at Wikipedia. Somebody else, just this month, is taking a crack at correcting the record. Good luck with that. So, to last night’s post about how the “f**king mess” of my work had to be cleaned up at Brian’s bio, that admin made the call on Brian’s scientific career, deciding that Brian’s pioneering efforts on occultations, which took place in the most prestigious scientific publication in the USA, was not “notable” enough in that admin’s estimation, and was summarily erased. Brian’s papers published in Science comprised a big reason why he was chosen to be an astronaut. But that admin made his call and erased that part of Brian’s career, as unnecessary “hagiography” on my part. That rude admin might even be able to defend himself with, “I only take out the hagiography and leave in the notable facts.” That somebody like that makes editorial decisions and gets to play judge, jury, and executioner says a lot about Wikipedia. To turn to lies of omission, I have stated more than once that Noam’s predictions of the propaganda model, which I never saw at Wikipedia and that censorious admin erased, make Ed’s bio today completely understandable, as the article is dominated by attacks on Ed’s and Noam’s writings on “nefarious” bloodbaths, which the propaganda model predicts. A couple of Jews are thereby portrayed as “genocide deniers,” and outright libel is allowed at Ed’s bio, such as the insane claim that Ed tried to deny that the Srebrenica Massacre ever happened. So, “hagiography” is erased, libel gets to stand, Ed and Noam are falsely portrayed as Khmer Rouge supporters and genocide deniers, and the sidekick of death camp Nazis gets hagiographic treatment. When that rude admin is not using locker room talk, he might even be able to defend his actions with, “I only censor what I deem fit for it, and I don’t add material.” So, he takes no stand on the content of a German scientist’s hagiography, while he eagerly erased my “hagiography.” Of course, the connections and irony of this situation are not lost on me, in a number of ways. Like Haber, Brian was kind of Werner von Braun’s sidekick, as von Braun was responsible for Brian’s being picked as an astronaut, as von Braun was still chasing his Mars dreams, and Brian was the first talent in the stable for it. But NASA lost the budget battle with the Pentagon, which was busy committing genocide in Indochina, which was the beginning of Ed’s and Noam’s political writing careers. While Haber flacked for nuclear power, hosted a Disney show titled, Our Friend the Atom, and later wrote a children’s book of the same name, Brian pursued free energy. Haber gets the hagiography, while Brian’s free energy efforts are erased, and I am sure that, among a stream of four-letter words, that censorious admin can defend it. Of course, he won’t. How can he? It is like benign bloodbaths; much better that they pass in silence. I’ll get over this before long, but it is an amazing set of circumstances, which my “friends” once again probably have a hand in. Best, Wade

Hi: I decided to look at what was left of Brian’s Wikipedia biography, in a little detail, after that rude admin got done with it. Even though this is about eight years later, it confirmed my strategy of doing Brian’s NASA bio, first, to head off the “skeptics” and other assailants, and even then, they gave it a shot. My thinking was that if I got it on the record with NASA, first, the assailants at Wikipedia would have a hard time of it. Although the last 20 years of Brian’s life, on the free energy quest, has been completely erased at Wikipedia (at least his books are mentioned), at least his Martian credentials survived, which is his unique distinction. The astronaut corps treated me great, as the most famous active astronaut treated me graciously in a situation that was highly politically charged. At Wikipedia, it has been a little different. That rude Wikipedia admin wrote early on in his campaign that it was not the content that he had a problem with, but how I did it: knowing Brian, “plagiarizing” myself, and the like. But when I looked at his edits, he got very editorial, passing judgment on Brian’s scientific career. Brian was an early advocate of coordinating efforts to get stellar occultation data, and one of his papers was among the first of an international organization devoted to such observations, and Brian wrote a paper with Tom Van Flandern in 1972 on one such famous occultation. That admin erased all references to Brian’s occultation work while dismissing it as unremarkable, and while erasing everything about Brian’s work on free energy, that admin literally said about what was primarily my work, “This was a f**king mess,” and dismissed it all as “hagiographic” as he erased it. Not reverted, but erased, as if it never existed, other than the public taking his word for it that he fixed a “f**king mess.” The degradation of Internet discourse is reaching its nadir, when that kind of writing, by an admin, no less, is found at the source that pops up first when almost any kind of Internet search is done today. So, that admin is all over it, making sure that no “hagiography” graces Wikipedia, as he heroically cleans up f**king messes at Wikipedia. Among that admin’s erasures, insults, and threats, he also took me to task for my contribution to a talk page on a German scientist who was the protégé of a doctor involved with human experiments in the death camps, and with his background sanitized by Operation Paperclip, he was able to wrangle quite the career in the USA, not only publishing papers with his human experiment mentor, but he got to be Werner von Braun’s sidekick on a Disney TV show and write a children’s book that extolled the virtues of nuclear energy. Declassified documents tell the story today, but that German scientist’s biography at Wikipedia is outright hagiography. So, while all over my “hagiography” of Brian, that admin took me to task for challenging the treatment of a German scientist while that admin simultaneously turned a blind eye to that hagiography, which has been actively policed by that Nazi’s son. I wonder if that hagiographic account will outlive me. It is almost beyond words, the kind of “selective enforcement” that happens at Wikipedia today. That reasonable editor is now making changes to Ed’s bio, and we’ll see how that goes. I expect fur to fly. Philip Cross already reverted one of his changes, which he reverted back, with support. That reasonable editor is a paragon of editorial virtue, and he believes in Wikipedia. I hope that it goes well for his effort. So far, as far as Ed is concerned, Wikipedia is confirming, in spades, Ed and Noam’s propaganda model. Maybe we should leave it as is, as a testament to Ed’s work. Best, Wade

Hi: I don’t have much time this morning, but in the conclusion of After the Cataclysm, Noam and Ed noted the American media’s achievement of erasing the American bludgeoning of Indochina, turning the USA “from causal agent to bystander,” as it righteously moralized about the Khmer Rouge, even though the USA supported Pol Pot after Vietnam overthrew him and ended the Cambodian genocide. I don’t want to be too hard on them, but there is a cottage industry in science and scholarship that strenuously denies that humans had anything to do with the megafauna extinctions, including our cousin species. Paper after paper is churned out that argues that climate change did it, or various “anything but humans” hypotheses. IMO, the similarities are not coincidental, and are all about defending one’s in-group. It is the American state being defended regarding the media and Indochina, and it is humanity, or perhaps the ancestors of the world’s indigenous peoples, being defended regarding the megafauna and human extinctions. As I noted regarding the history profession, in one of my site’s oldest essays, the documents obtained are less important than the bias of the historian sifting through them. To me, these are just examples of my journey’s primary lesson. That is the reason for our predicament, and all other factors pale to insignificance. As Noam noted, Ed was a model of integrity, and that, more than anything else, attracted me to him. Best, Wade

Hi: I have an eidetic memory, and have only met one person whose memory I can tell is better than mine, and his is truly extraordinary. Like me, his memory is not as good as it used to be, but for many years, you could pick any day on the calendar from 20 years previously, and he could tell you, in detail, what he did that day. Mine is not nearly that good, but I have vivid memories of all years of my life, going back to age two, and I have been thinking about my early years of reading Ed’s work. 1990 was a particularly memorable year for me. I got married, Dennis got rooked into the plea bargain that nearly cost him his life, I had another great hiking summer, I moved away from the town where I was raised, never to return, began to put my wife through graduate school in Ohio, and began the studies that resulted in my site. My alternative media studies began that year, starting with my subscription to Lies of Our Times (LOOT). The first page of my first issue of LOOT is still the one that I remember best, as I saw that the New York Times could also make it up as it went along, which was a situation that I was all-too-familiar with. To once again address Wikipedia’s charges that I am a careless plagiarist and copyright infringer, back around 2000, I asked Ed for permission to reproduce those images that I copied from LOOT. Since my site is non-commercial, I could play the Fair Use card for every quote and image on my site, but I virtually always ask permission, going back to Ralph McGehee and my 1996 site, which has led to some amazing exchanges (1, 2). Ed was LOOT’s editor, and he was happy that I presented those images. LOOT was long-defunct by then, and Ed was happy to see some of LOOT survive in my work. One day back then, Ed wrote that what I had done with my site – putting my essays all under one roof – he hoped to do with his work one day. Alas, he never did, as his work is scattered around the Internet. But, frankly, Ed’s output was so prodigious that it would have been quite a task. When I subscribed to LOOT, Noam was the main attraction for me. I heard of him for the first time the previous year, so I finally got to read the work of this obscure figure. As I have written, it took me about two years to really understand what Noam was saying, as it was so radically different from anything that I had been taught before. In a LOOT issue in the autumn of 1990 was an ad for Ralph McGehee’s book, and reading it was a seminal moment of my awakening. Ed was not the main attraction for me in those early days, and I had no idea who he was when I began reading LOOT. I began subscribing to Z Magazine a year or two later, and have continually subscribed to this day. Somewhere in those first two years of media studies, I began to gain an appreciation of Noam’s sidekick. Ed’s work was easier to read than Noam’s, and Ed was pretty funny as a writer. Ed had a dry wit, and he dealt with very heavy material, such as genocides. That is not an easy dance, to inject a little humor into such dark material, but Ed deftly did it. I began obtaining books early in my studies, and steadily built my personal library that stands at about 2,000 books today. Manufacturing Consent was probably the first book of Ed’s that I bought, and by the time that LOOT’s final issue came out in 1994, I was decidedly impressed with Ed. It was probably around that time when his monthly articles in Z Magazine became the main attraction in Z for me, and I began thinking about him as Uncle Ed. From 1990 until his death, hardly a month went by that I did not read something by Ed. When I wrote my site, largely as it stands today, between 1997 and 2002, I used a lot of Ed’s work, such as his The Political Economy of Human Rights, written with Noam. I wrote about the suppression of his first book with Noam, I reproduced Ed’s National Security State propaganda framework, I used Ed’s writings on Yugoslavia, I summarized the propaganda model, etc. He was firmly Uncle Ed to me, by the time that I contacted him in the late 1990s, and Ed did not disappoint as a correspondent. Ed was not your typical Lefty. He did not have the “conspiracy phobia” that many in the Left did, and Ed was a structuralist extraordinaire. In his Doublespeak Dictionary, Ed wrote about the Magic Bullet and “conspiracy theories.” The cover story of one LOOT issue was about the forged backyard photos of Oswald. Ed was appreciative of my account of Gary’s adventures regarding the JFK hit. Those events had all happened by 2002, which was about the time that I tried interesting Ed in free energy and began trying to introduce him to Brian, to no avail. Ed was far from the only Lefty that I contacted in those days, but on the subject of free energy, only he and Noam ever gave me the time of day. All of the lesser lights blew me off, and I rarely even heard back from them. Best, Wade

Hi: To continue that thread that I began on Ed, the Left, and my life’s work, the essay that these posts will be grist for I don’t intend to be scholarly, but it will mainly be memories of my journey. I don’t plan to consult many books and other sources of information as I write it, but I will primarily ransack my memory. I just took a short spin through my emails, and it looks like I began using Outlook in earnest in 2000. I used Netscape’s email program, as I recall, before then, but I doubt that I will find those emails. I have everything going back to 2000, I believe, but I think that I began emailing Ed before that. My first correspondence with Noam was 1992, I contacted Ralph McGehee in 1996, in preparation for publishing my first site, but I had no public presence for a couple of years soon after that, and if I had to guess, I think that I began trading email with Ed in 1998 or 1999. It was always friendly, and I really can’t recall what our first emails were about, other than praising Ed and eagerly sitting at his scholarly feet. Our first exchange that sits clearly in my memory is when Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were campaigning to have Milosevic delivered to the kangaroo court tribunal at The Hague. I naively donated to Amnesty International in those days, and receiving their pleas to help their campaign to have Milosevic captured and delivered to The Hague was shocking. I asked Ed about it, and he agreed that it was scandalous. He said that he only donated to local human rights groups anymore, and he mentioned a few around the Balkans. I think that we traded those emails in 1999, or it might have been as late as 2000. Ed exposed Human Rights Watch as an imperial tool early on, and I asked him to do something similar for Amnesty International, but he said that he was not planning to, so it was nice to see him give Amnesty similar treatment in later years. In those days, I contacted lefties, looking for free energy allies, but nobody was home. I had my email address on my site until 2002 and took on all comers, in those days of Internet innocence. Noam’s gracious response was one of the few that I ever received from the Left. One day, I wrote to Ed that energy was the basis of all economic systems, and that it was the key to humanity’s future, and he agreed, but his focus was on banking and the exchange aspect of economics, and he said that he needed to get into the energy issue one day, but he really never did. I certainly did not hold that against Ed; he was unparalleled as a media analyst, and had his hands full with that. Brian and I began collaborating in earnest in 2001, and Brian was a Lefty. I tried several times to introduce Brian to Ed, but Ed never took me up on it. It is a lasting source of sadness to this day. Back then, I saw it as the best chance that the Left had to begin comprehending the free energy issue. Brian and Ed were both former Ivy League professors and had plenty in common, going back to Vietnam Era protests. During our NEM days, Brian said that his and my job was enlisting the Left, but nobody was ever home. Almost all that we got were catcalls, and Brian played the Paul Revere of Free Energy for several years before he began openly wondering if humanity was a sentient species. One of the more memorable groups were environmentalists, as Alden Bryant soon learned (and as I learned many years earlier), and I later learned that environmentalists had been treating free energy like the enemy since at least the 1970s. Everybody slammed the doors in our faces, and it took me many years to understand what we were seeing: a general addiction to scarcity, or, perhaps, a better way to say it would be that their adaptive behaviors for surviving in a world of scarcity stunted their perspectives, and when I discovered Uncle Bucky’s work in early 2003, it all began to become clear to me. After receiving a polite silence from Ed after about a half-dozen attempts to interest him in free energy, and to also introduce him to Brian, I gave up and never tried again, after about 2004. I never held it against Ed, but it was emblematic of the problems in attracting the Left’s interest, which to this day is still the likeliest ally that I know of, but they have their ideological commitments that blind them to the bigger picture. I probably did not contact Ed much for the rest of my midlife crisis, which finally ended in 2006. Best, Wade

Hi Krishna: To your Martin Luther question, your buddy Ian Morris would also place Luther and what happened in a larger context. I think that it is legitimate to wonder how influential New World societies were in triggering the Enlightenment, and Europe’s rise of reason and science was definitely influenced by the reintroduction of “pagan” Greek teachings via captured Islamic libraries. I think that what Luther did was influenced by the same dynamics that caused the New World events, and the erosion of Biblical infallibility by discovering lands not described in the Bible was part of it. I would say that Martin Luther’s work and the “discovery” of the New World had the same ultimate cause, which was the rise of Europe. Luther and Columbus were affected by the process of European expansion. The printing press was invented a half-century before Columbus’s fateful voyage, and the Church intended to use it for further Catholic hegemony, but it backfired. Rising literacy ended up being a threat to Church authority. It was better for Church hegemony to have illiterate peasants, with a priesthood interpreting the “good book” for them, than a literate and rising middle class. The 1521 Diet of Worms, in which Charles condemned Luther, happened at the height of his power, as his armies marauded through Europe, he was the Holy Roman Emperor, plunder rolled in from the New World (the Aztecs were conquered in 1521), and the Church had never had such success in recruiting members of the flock, with thousands of the native survivors baptized daily. But it soon began to unravel, and when Charles stepped down in 1556, the Crown was nearly bankrupt. In 1559, the infamous Index of banned books was first published, and wars soon raged across Europe. When the dust finally cleared in 1648, the Church would never regain its hegemony in Northern Europe. The fighting extended to the New World, and the big losers were the natives. The fitful rise of science began then, too. One deforested imperial contestant turned to coal, and the Fourth Epoch began. Those were chaotic, seminal times, and untangling the dynamics is not easy. Morris credits the increase of Europe’s effective hinterland by learning to sail the oceans, and I will not disagree, but it was an unparalleled disaster for the world’s peoples, with an unprecedented demographic catastrophe that depopulated three continents, another continent had its people forcibly enslaved to replace the quickly decimated natives of the New World (and the Arab slave trade was nearly as bad), and that “stimulating” Transatlantic trade network was wholly evil, as its principle products were slaves, sugar (effectively a drug), rum, and gold and silver bought with millions of native lives. It was a rape-and-plunder economy. England’s first capitalist “bubble” was over the slave trade, and the rape of India began about when the Industrial Revolution began taking off. For me, during my studies, seeing what Europe used its increasing technological prowess for (conquering humanity), and what the USA did with its postwar hegemony, it was all evil, in my opinion. White people had a chance to unite humanity with a rise of living standards that would be epochal in significance, but it used its advantage to slaughter and enslave humanity. You may be a high-caste beneficiary who is eating imperial crumbs, but the vast majority of your countrymen live lives of misery to this day, thanks to the rise of Britain. I wrote about Jimmy Wales being a neo-con, and that has plenty to do with the propaganda article on Ed today at Wikipedia. Wales married Tony Blair’s secretary, and met her at the capitalist enclave at Davos. I don’t need to remind too many people that Blair played Mussolini to Bush’s Hitler. When they had their pre-invasion “summit” in the Azores, it was literally hosted by a fascist (Portugal is Spain’s little buddy). I truly hope that Blair is remembered like Mussolini is, but that won’t happen at Wikipedia. Best, Wade

Hi Krishna: There is a lot of territory to cover relating to your post. I’ll agree that Wikipedia’s failings don’t come from one source, but Wikipedia’s remaining co-founder is a neo-con, which explains plenty. I exposed one of his favorite editors. And disinformation professionals such as Cross have enabling “editors” that follow them around like remora, as it is with Ed’s current bio version. Those people generally don’t have consciences as we think of them, so they can be shameless, such as one editor at Ed’s bio that not only reinstated Cross’s highly misleading account, while incredibly calling it well-sourced, but he has cast aspersions at anybody at Ed’s article who is not participating in the attacks and trying to at least make the bio more neutral, accusing them of sock-puppetry and the like, making up his accusations out of the blue. It was similar to that rude admin’s accusing me of “canvassing” and other baseless claims. They can simply make it up as they go, with impunity, while people like me have their work not only reverted, but completely erased on the flimsiest of pretexts, and that rude, censorious admin kept hurling insults and threats at me. I expect trolls to do that, but not admins. That recent foray at Wikipedia was an example of why I don’t join open-comers forums anymore. I learned my lesson long ago, and when the admins start in, as one did to a forum that I was invited into, it is time to move on. On anything remotely controversial and potentially impacting elite interests, Wikipedia is a miserable excuse of an information resource, and all-too-often, it is outright disinformation and libel, such as how Ed’s bio stands today. An impressive editor is taking up the gauntlet, and we will see how it goes, but I am not holding my breath. I bought my popcorn for the show. I will still likely link to Wikipedia in my essay update, but with an even stronger caveat. I was already planning to take the rest of the summer off from serious writing, such as working on my big essay update, and I had already been planning for years on writing about my interactions with the Left, and was already planning on following my contributions to Ed’s work at Wikipedia with that essay that I am already roughing out in this series of posts, and I don’t plan to stop that effort, even with what happened at Wikipedia. So, this is not setting back my essay update effort any, and it will be very germane to my effort of building the choir. On the homework that you gave me, I am looking at those two Drèze and Sen books that you mention, on a bookshelf on my office, and I’ll see if I can get to them before my essay update. Not sure if you are aware, but Ed cited Hunger and Public Action in his and Peterson’s shredding of Pinker’s imperial valentine. Pinker was citing a far right source, and Ed pointed out the “Structural Violence” in how India’s holocaust was ongoing but invisible in the West, while every crime and mistake by a communist regime was front-page news. That third book that you recommend is only available by Kindle, and I never get any works that way. A scholar, like any professional, cannot afford to rent his tools. Obviously, my work is all about education, so I doubt that I am missing much in that work. We’ll see what of Drèze and Sen’s work makes it into my essay update. I am not too concerned in my work about bringing Third Epoch peasants into the Fourth Epoch, but bringing Fourth Epoch peoples into the Fifth. I know that your heart is with India’s peasantry, and what the British did to them is a historic crime, which I have written about plenty (1, 2), and we’ll see what makes it into my essay update, which might be the most significant one that I will ever do. It will likely take at least a year of my “spare” time to do, and I am in no rush. Then it will be off to more visibility work, building that choir, and I might even publish a book, which would be a highly abridged version of my big essay. There is a lot on my plate, and I am not getting any younger. On a lighter note, attached are some pics from July hikes, including one to here, yesterday. I think that that is my ninth visit to that amazing meadow. My favorite aunt and uncle (who introduced me to hiking) took me there for the first time in 1990, when we did not see another person all day (and hiked through a herd of elk). Those days are long gone, as Seattle becomes a metropolis. Now, the trails are jammed. You have to work hard to avoid the crowds now. Best, Wade

Hi Ernie: I have seen the word “plagiarism” thrown around pretty indiscriminately during my writing career. It seems to be used in a one-size-fits-all way that I don’t agree with. I have seen these behaviors called “plagiarism”: Wholesale theft of another author’s work, in both the ideas and sometimes even the words, calling them one’s own, and selling them for profit. Using the exact words of an author and calling them one’s own, with no reference at all to the copied work, often limited to a phrase or two, but can even be paragraphs of copied writings; Using the exact words of an author, but referencing the work, while some of the exact words, in a phrase, for instance, were not put in quotes; “Plagiarizing” one’s own writings, and in my latest adventures at Wikipedia, even though I had given away the rights to my work on my home page, I was somehow guilty of “plagiarizing” my public-domain self. That first instance of plagiarism is by far the most egregious, and is akin to the theft of a patent, which Mr. Mentor was victimized by repeatedly. That is the slimiest and arguably criminal form of plagiarism, numerous high-profile lawsuits have accompanied that kind of plagiarism, and anybody with the slightest familiarity with my work knows that I have never come remotely close to doing that, partly because I have never charged for my work. I have constantly given credit for where I got ideas from, such as here. That second kind from the list above is also pretty bad, and it has happened to me. I also have never come close to doing anything like the second form, especially consciously. My work has drawn from a vast corpus of literature. It is possible that some ideas germinated from something I once read, which I did not directly cite, but it would have been inadvertent. I have constantly credited and cited seminal works, such as Uncle Bucky’s. I can guarantee that no significant source of ideas has ever failed to receive credit in my work. That third one I may have been occasionally guilty of, and the only instance that I saw from that rude admin that could have qualified was this phrase, which that admin expunged from Brian’s bio: “O'Leary was specifically selected for a potential manned Mars mission when it was still in NASA’s program plan.” When I look at what is left of Brian’s bio at Wikipedia, a lot of it is still my work, so that admin had better completely erase Brian from Wikipedia! That “plagiarized” phrase has some interesting history, they are actually Brian’s words, as I had him write that sentence and made sure that it was never altered during the editing process, as Brian was the best qualified to write that sentence, and it is his unique distinction. Brian’s astronaut bio at NASA’s site is my work, other than that “plagiarized” sentence from Brian, I had quite an adventure getting it published, and a leading space debunker took exception to that very phrase in Brian’s bio, enlisted a NASA historian to debunk it, in one of the most idiotic exercises that I ever saw, and Brian gave me the von Braun and Shepard anecdotes in case I had to battle with the debunkers over Brian’s NASA bio. So, even though the phrase had a note that linked to Brian’s NASA bio, which I was the author of, that phrase was technically Brian’s, and I did not have it in quotes. Guilty as charged. That was the only legitimate “plagiarism” that I saw identified by that admin, which led to the complete erasure of my work. Again, not a reversion, in which a person could see the editing history, but a KGB-like erasure, in which the reader will never know what I wrote, although I just tried to rectify it a little, with the version that I had back in March 2011. I have long hosted my original non-Wikipedia bio for Brian. Having my own publishing conduit comes in very handy. Think of the irony of Brian’s own words being on his Wikipedia bio, but not within quotation marks, and that was the rationale for erasing most of his bio. I still can’t understand that fourth category of “plagiarism,” which seems to be the primary rationale for erasing all of my Wikipedia contributions at Ed’s and Brian’s bios. Although I gave away all of the rights to my writings on my site’s home page long ago, using my own words in my own writings is somehow “plagiarizing” myself, which went beyond the pale. Maybe an attorney can explain it to me one day. One thing is for sure: Wikipedia is not the encyclopedia for the masses, but is a disinformation campaign for anything with any political-economic impact on elite interests. How my contributions have been treated is exhibit A. Best, Wade

Thanks Robert: Yes, people rampantly edit articles about themselves (the CIA, Pentagon, and the like have been very active, for instance), but since they do it anonymously, they get away with it, while honest efforts like mine get erased. This is Wikipedia’s “evenhandedness” in action once again. I certainly did not make the plagiarism “crimes” that I was accused of – the idea of plagiarizing my public-domain self is insane – and even the copyright “violations” that I was accused of are on shaky ground (most of those same quotes live on the Wikiquote page that I built for Ed, and the Wiki-censors don’t seem to have a problem with that), leaving my last “crime,” which was corresponding with Ed over 20 years and offering to make his Wikipedia bio better. I was taken to task by the rude admin for my talk page comments on a German scientist who was the sidekick of death camp Nazis, whose bio has been openly managed by his son into an outright hagiographic article. At Wikipedia, Ed gets smeared, while a close associate of death camp Nazis gets hagiographic treatment, and I get taken to task for pointing it out. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. That is the kind of behavior for which Ed said “hypocrisy” was not strong enough to describe, so he began using “chutzpah.” But I had the book thrown at me, with my work erased, among insults and threats from the admin. Apparently, my real “crime” was exposing the fraudulent edits made by a disinformation effort that Wikipedia’s co-founder has openly defended, and trying to give Ed’s life a little justice, amongst all the libel thrown at him. I had crashed the smear party, and for that, I was taken out back and shot. Of course, different reasons have to be proffered for the treatment afforded me. The real reasons cannot be stated. Best, Wade

Hi: I put up what the original Ed Wikipedia articles looked like, before my contributions were erased: Ed’s bio The propaganda model Manufacturing Consent The Political Economy of Human Rights The links won’t all work, but most seem to. What happened was not too surprising, unfortunately. What I hoped was that, of course, my changes would be edited (that is what Wikipedia is all about), but that the basic framework would survive relatively intact, as well as the key information. I could see my sections on Rwanda, for instance, get trimmed down into fewer categories, but that the basic information would survive. I expected the peanut gallery that is “managing” Ed’s bio today would do their libelous best, and I would have to do battle, but my work was erased and I am forbidden from editing anything related to Ed, because I had corresponded with him and he “wished” that I would help make his bio better. Obviously, my changes to Ed’s bio are the most dramatic, turning his bio from the libelous stub that it is today to something that does his life and career justice. Realistically, my only “crime” was predominantly using primary sources, Ed’s writings, rather than the secondary literature, but it was an article about him, and he has not had a professional bio written yet. Ed and Noam’s propaganda model has been written about plenty, but the mainstream “notable” sources are not going to, because Ed and Noam’s work exposes them. That is a Catch-22 that can keep their work forever on the margins, which Ed might have called a structural constraint. I would be have been happy to see what kind of muting of my supposedly POV language would have looked like. I thought that it was pretty neutral to begin with, but I am admittedly close to the material. Editors are nice to have. I was curious as to what an honest edit would look like, and Prop9 began on that, before the admin swooped in and erased everything. One section that I added to the propaganda model, on its predictions, is like adding relativity’s predictions to an article on relativity, and Noam was the author of the model’s predictions. It is hard to take exception to that, and it makes the attacks on Ed and Noam’s writings on Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda – nefarious bloodbaths – understandable. That is pretty much all that Ed’s bio at Wikipedia is today. The article as it stands today is an exercise in disinformation. The subsequent assessments section seemed appropriate to me, but I would have expected some editing. I thought that my rewrite of the Political Economy of Human Rights article would survive almost intact, although, of course, Noam’s assailants would come running, to continue the smear campaign against Noam on Cambodia. For the Manufacturing Consent article, I merely added summaries of the book’s chapters, added information from the 2002 edition and balanced out the reception section a little. I left in Gitlin’s inane comments, which Fred Gardner ably critiqued. Prop9 is trying to improve Ed’s bio, but has an uphill battle. I’ll watch with interest. Best, Wade

Hi: As I recently wrote, I am going to make lemonade from the lemon that Wikipedia served up, and this coming series of posts will be the raw material for a new essay, which has been on my list of things to do for years. The territory will be familiar, but there will be new material, and it will ultimately deal with my effort to help initiate the Fifth Epoch. I was a bookworm from the time I could walk and was raised to be a scientist, although I did not shake my mother’s bad habits until I became an adult (tabloids at 13, and TV at 18). I read the newspaper daily, from age 9 or so, beginning with the local newspaper, graduating to the LA Times when I was in college, and during my first stint in LA, I subscribed to the Christian Science Monitor, thinking that I was getting alternative news. I had a lot to learn, and my lessons began when I met Dennis. The day that I met Dennis, he spoke in front of a thousand people or so, with several camera crews recording his talk. A week or so later, I saw the only positive TV account of him that I know of, by a Canadian TV station. A week or so after that, I saw the version presented by a Seattle TV station, which was in the Big Lie category, which was my first inkling that the news might not have been about discovering and reporting the truth. The next three years was an education of the kind that you can’t buy, and when I read an “investigative” report on Dennis in the LA Times, in early 1989, I said to myself, “They can just make it up as they go.” I met Gary Wean about a month before reading that LA Times article, I had long since been radicalized, and two months after meeting Gary, Mr. Professor and I sprung Dennis from jail, in the biggest miracle that I ever witnessed, which we all knew was a case of divine intervention. It was our “friends” at work once again. I cannot recall that exact date, but it was around the same time that we sprang Dennis from jail that a roommate told me about some guy named Noam Chomsky, and I had never heard of him before. The next year, in early 1990, while driving to my job in LA of all places, I heard on the radio somebody who might have been Uncle Ed promoting a new magazine titled Lies of Our Times (LOOT). I was so ready for its message, and after I moved to Ohio later that year, one of the first things that I did was subscribe to it, and my education in the alternative media began, although the first page of my first issue of LOOT is still the one I remember the best, as the New York Times could make it up as it went along. All newspapers can make it up as they go, and the TV news was worse. That sums up the American media, although it would be many years before I wrote my first essay on the subject. When Ralph McGehee was forced into the rocking chair by his friends at the CIA, as he was silenced in the Land of the Free, I bought what I could from his intelligence library, including the LOOT issues that came out before I subscribed to it, so I have every issue from LOOT’s existence. LOOT was the beginning of my media studies, and the past year and more of studying Ed’s work, so that I could write his bio, is probably the last such stint in my lifetime, of studying how the media operates. In those days of study in the early 1990s, on a vast array of subjects, I got my hands on all sorts of alternative media literature. Noam wrote an article in LOOT every month, Ed was LOOT’s editor for its entire existence, as well as its leading writer, and I had a growing appreciation of Ed’s lucid writings. Even though I was an eager student, it still took me about two years to really understand what Noam was saying. After two years of study, the movie Manufacturing Consent came out, which was about Noam’s life (which briefly featured Ed), and a month or so after watching the movie at Ohio State (it was the most popular documentary in Canadian history to that time, which played on national TV globally, but it has never aired on an American TV station, which proved Noam’s point in spades), I was driven from my sleep to write a 17-page letter to Noam, about how nobody, anywhere, mainstream or alternative, even mentioned free energy, other than attacks on Dennis. Imagine my surprise when I received a gracious reply from Noam a couple of weeks later, as he described my letter as “tantalizing,” but he said that he did not know anything about the subject and advised me to seek an “expert.” Well, there weren’t any, so I had to become my own. We traded letters a few more times, and I sent him my second “book,” which was really a diary of my days with Dennis and Ralph Hovnanian’s quotation collage, and our correspondence ended on a friendly note. I was given the polite brush-off, but I never held that against Noam. He had plenty on his plate, and his attention to my correspondence out of the blue was an honor and delight. I read Manufacturing Consent in the early 1990s, and soon got my hands on all of Ed’s writings that I could. When I wrote my site as it largely stands today, in the late 1990s, I began corresponding with Ed. As with Noam, Ed was easy to reach and a pleasant correspondent. Ed was a better writer than Noam, very witty, and I began calling him Uncle Ed back then, and I even have an email or two from Ed, signed off with “Uncle Ed.” Those early days of media studies and correspondence with Ed and Noam were a generation ago, and what a privilege to be in the audience while those men were in the primes of their political writing careers. The USA may never see any others like them, along with Uncle Howard and a few others. Uncle Noam is going to go down in history as one of its leading intellectuals and arguably the greatest that the USA ever produced, while most Americans have never heard of him. This post begins what will be quite a series of posts, which will be grist for that essay. Best, Wade

Hi: I already plan to make lemonade out of the lemon of how Wikipedia has treated me and my work. Again, I have been through infinitely worse on my journey, so, even though my biography project for Ed took most of my “spare” time for the past year and more, I was able to produce a biography that will have to do until a professional biographer does Ed’s life justice, if one ever comes along. I would hate for my bio to be the last word on Ed’s life. It should be one of the first words, not the last. Although almost none of my effort on Ed lives at Wikipedia today (however, the Wikiquote page survives for now), there are benefits to having one’s own private publishing conduit, and I expect that my bio of Ed will outlive me. Too bad that Ed’s bio today at Wikipedia is an exercise in disinformation, but that is par for the course for the great. Societies honor their living conformists and dead dissidents. An essay is germinating in my head, and I have tentatively titled it, “Ed Herman, the Left, and My Life’s Work.” Ed’s work was significant in my life in more than one way. One member of the peanut gallery at Ed’s bio at Wikipedia called my Wikipedia bio of Ed “hagiography,” soon after reinstating libelous material about Ed that others removed. Actually, I really don’t mind the label of “hagiography” much, because Ed was a saint. Dennis, Mr. Professor, and Brian will always head my Pantheon, but Ed sits in the second circle, with Howard and Noam. They all are/were great, great men, whom it was an honor to interact with. That essay is going to go into some detail of my latest encounter with Wikipedia (and I don’t expect to have others – I have finally learned my lesson), but it won’t be some “woe is me” tale, which I have never written, but it will be about how Wikipedia has become a propaganda organ that actually confirms Ed and Noam’s propaganda model, even though Wikipedia is supposedly a non-profit effort, with its main “product” created by volunteers (but sometimes well-paid “volunteers” that work on behalf of various vested interests). But that is only going to be a point of departure for how an effort like Wikipedia can become a disinformation mill, and it will go into my encounters with Ed and the Left, back to when I first heard of Noam in 1989, and the next year I heard of Lies of Our Times. It will cover my growing appreciation of Ed’s work, which led to our correspondence, which began in the late 1990s and continued to his life’s end. But Ed’s life and mine had overlaps that surprised even me as I studied to write his bio, and his work influenced mine to no small degree. Learning at his scholarly feet might well be the high point of my scholarly career. There won’t be another like him in my life. I tried to introduce Ed to Brian several times, to no avail, and that is emblematic of the Left’s limitations. Brian wanted to enlist the Left in our free energy efforts, but nobody is home in the Left on the really big issues, so big that I had to invent “Epochal” to describe them, just like environmentalists, New Agers, etc. But even though I was never able to interest the Left in free energy and healing humanity and the planet with it, there was plenty about their work that is germane to mine. It is important work, when its limits are also acknowledged (reshuffling the deck of scarcity is no real solution). Ed lived in the ivory tower, but did an awesome amount of good while seated in his lofty perch. The huge shoes that he leaves behind might never be filled. Best, Wade

Hi: I really don’t want to spend too much time on the issue, but a couple of people are trying to pick up the ball for Ed at Wikipedia, and they are going to have a very hard time of it. I was looking at the edits and discussions of those who oppose them, and they have actively libeled Ed and have made their hostile stances quite clear. Their agenda is obvious. It is a chorus of imperial hacks, and their ringleader is a professional libeler, whom the co-founder of Wikipedia has openly defended. One of the amazing, or perhaps not, aspects of the attacks on Ed is their preventing even any presentation of Ed’s chief theoretical construction, the propaganda model, and its predictions, which would expose the reasons for why the only material currently being allowed at his biography is his work on “nefarious bloodbaths,” which is dominated by the attacks on his work, which always misrepresents his stance, which was about how the media treats nefarious bloodbaths. So, their constant hammering on and, in general, lying about Ed’s writings on Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, is actually a proof of his and Noam’s propaganda model in action. It is like dismissing Einstein as a crank without ever mentioning relativity. It is Orwellian to the max. I am crazily busy at work, and won’t come up for air for a couple of weeks. I was already planning to take it relatively easy on writing over the rest of the summer, but even my posts will suffer over the next few weeks. I’ll respond to them when I can. Best, Wade

Hey Krishna: You get a gold star for your performance this weekend. I greatly appreciate your effort, old buddy, and I won’t minimize what happened this weekend, but what I lived through during my adventures with Dennis made this weekend look like a picnic. Nobody is coming to arrest me. I am already kind of laughing about it. We’ll see if anybody picks up the ball, and it looks like Prop9 is going to give it the college try. It would be nice if some others came to the party, but I have my doubts. It is usually a handful against the forces of darkness. That is just what it is. I don’t want you to get banned from Wikipedia, so you can back off for now. There is a lot that I am up against, and I don’t want to get too “conspiratorial” about what happened this weekend, but, as I wrote, I don’t see where that oh-so-rude admin has a leg to stand on regarding erasing my work, KGB-style, but I am finished with trying to get justice in a rigged court. They can just make it up as they go. As you probably noticed, not only is Philip Cross a disinformation professional, and is likely really a group of people with intelligence connections, but “he” did not even need to roll out of bed, as the admin and the other “editors” have “his” back. The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has publicly defended Cross, so it looks like Wikipedia may have already been captured by the intelligence community, so I would not expect the admin to buck what the founder openly supports. As Ed might say, the values are internalized and are not even consciously acted on. That admin might even believe that he just saved Wikipedia from a lawsuit over copyright violations and plagiarism, from perhaps me and Ed’s and Brian’s estates. As you can tell, that was a “kill the messenger” moment at Wikipedia, and only one or two need to be on the payroll, if that, and then the mob does the dirty work, gratis. I learned those lessons 30 years ago. I am finished with this phase of my bio project for Ed, and am putting it behind me. I was planning to enjoy what is left of the summer up here in the spectacular Pacific Northwest, without any heavy lifting for my writing work, and I’ll be pretty busy at my day job. It is time to move on, and I was planning to reply to your other recent posts. Interesting material. Love, Wade

Hi: I just posted out the Word files that I used to compose my additions to my articles on Ed. They are here: Ed’s Wikipedia bio Ed’s Wikiquotes The Manufacturing Consent article The propaganda model article The political economy of human rights article The Counter-Revolutionary Violence article The book cover of After the Cataclysm I also put out my work on Brian’s bio, at least as of 3-10-11. All Earthlings (Martians do not have my automatic permission, but they can nicely ask. ) have my permission to use those files however they wish. It also contains Wikipedia code that is not my work, but that code is already at Wikipedia, available to anybody, so I don’t think that anybody can come after me legally for giving away this work that took probably 100 hours or so of coding effort. This post ends my efforts at Wikipedia. Best, Wade

Hi: Well, that did not last long. I’ll write an essay on it one day, titled something like “My Adventures at Wikipedia, The Sequel.” More than ten years ago, a friend and I made additions to a wildly biased list at Wikipedia, to only see them all get deleted within a few days, mostly by the “editors,” but the worst offenders might have been the admins. There was literally nothing to rationally dispute about our additions. They were simply numbers of natives slaughtered, where, when, and the scholarly source of the numbers. It was unassailable, especially when our effort was the first to introduce scholarly sources to the list. Then we just stood back and watched what happened. In the end, the logic at Wikipedia was that two white invaders being murdered by some angry Indians was a “massacre,” but slaughtering 40,000 (my number, but I have seen higher numbers estimated) residents of Tenochtitlan after the Cortes-led siege ended was somehow not a massacre. If it was 100,000, which it may have been, would it have been a massacre? The bias was blatantly racist. When reporting on Ed and David Peterson’s genocide reporting ratio, in which a death in a “nefarious bloodbath” was more than 25,000 times as likely to be reported as a “genocide” in the media as a death in a “benign bloodbath,” I wrote that it might be the greatest statistical disparity to be found in the social sciences, but Wikipedia’s reporting may be more extreme. Yesterday, I made my additions to those articles that I linked to, and then stepped back to watch what happened. Predictably, one of Ed’s libelers called my additions “hagiography,” but according to the only honorable and reasonable person that I saw write yesterday, my version is the closest thing to a normal Wikipedia article that has yet been written about Ed. I was expecting that the editors would start at it, and that reasonable editor immediately did. That is how it is supposed to work at Wikipedia. I was expecting edits, but that the framework would at least survive, because what was on Ed’s bio was basically a bunch of attacks on his exposures of the media’s treatment of “nefarious bloodbaths,” and more often than not, the critics cited in Ed’s Wikipedia bio libeled him. I never saw even one of those critics cited on Ed’s bio make even one valid criticism. It was all lies, misrepresentations, errors in logic, and the like. It was just more evidence of what Noam wrote about, that Western intellectuals are so indoctrinated that they are incapable of understanding “trivial realities” when they aren’t being patently dishonest. Noam once said that he did not mind scholarly disagreement, but that he did mind all of the lying. So, the reception to my edits was disparagement but also serious editing. I would have taken that any day, but also I wondered when an editor would argue that all of my edits should be deleted. It turned out that nobody needed to, because an admin did it for them, and quite rudely. He made multiple threats about banning me from Wikipedia, and when he finished his diatribes, I was apparently guilty of three editorial crimes: I was a fan of Ed’s who had communicated with him. We traded somewhere around a hundred emails over about 20 years. Apparently, that gave me a conflict of interest, making me disqualified to edit any article related to Ed. I had made quotations in my edits, from other copyrighted material, which was a copyright violation. I was guilty of plagiarism. Those were my crimes, and all of my edits were unceremoniously deleted from Wikipedia. Not a simple reversion, mind you, but a KGB-like erasure of what I wrote, so that the public will never see it, at least on Wikipedia. I’ll deal with my “crimes” one at a time. On being Ed’s fan, I am guilty as charged. So, communicating with an author disqualifies anybody at Wikipedia from making edits about said author. I am guessing, but that crime may have been committed at Wikipedia a million times by now, so I am in good company. But, since 99.9% of the editors at Wikipedia are anonymous cowards, there is no way to tell what their conflicts of interest might be. Such conflicts will only be identified for people who use their real identities, and I made it easy on everybody by announcing my “conflict” as I came in the door. On the Heinz Haber article, his son sat on that article like a hawk, erasing anything that suggested that his father was involved in medical experiments in World War II. Haber may not have been involved with medical experiments, but his greatest claims to fame were: as the protégé of a German doctor, Hubertus Strughold, who definitely was involved in human experiments; the Disney sidekick of Werner von Braun, the most famous of the NASA Nazis, whose V-2 rockets cost the lives of at least 20,000 concentration camp inmates; and Haber made a children’s movie for Disney and wrote a children’s book that extolled the virtues of nuclear energy. However, Haber came over via Operation Paperclip, which was legendary for whitewashing the criminal backgrounds of the German scientists that it brought over. Haber’s mentor, Hubertus Strughold, destroyed all of his files that would have documented his participation in human experiments, but one slipped through the cracks and was discovered in 2004. Haber co-authored a paper titled, “Man Under Gravity-Free Conditions” in the now-legendary German Aviation Medicine, World War II, which was published by the Air Force, after it was sanitized by Strughold (working at the same facility that Haber did), who deleted passages in the work that suggested that experimental results derived from human subjects, experiments conducted by his colleagues such as Strughold’s good friend Siegfried Ruff (who gets softball treatment at Wikipedia) and Hermann Becker Freyseng, who worked for Strughold. Now, there is a conflict of interest, and the Haber article to this day is outright hagiography. You can see yesterday’s rude admin taking me to task over my contributions to the Haber talk page, while Haber’s son gets to edit the page about his father like a hawk. This is the “evenhandedness” of Wikipedia in action. Take that in for a moment. Until yesterday, I had no idea that that “relationship” with Ed gave me an insoluble conflict of interest, which was apparently the primary reason for erasing all of my work. I’ll guarantee you that my so-called conflict of interest is nowhere near as great as “Philip Cross’s”, who is very likely not a person, but a pseudonym for a group of individuals, and it would not surprise me to discover that they work for MI6 or the CIA in some capacity, and George Galloway, one of Cross’s favorite editorial targets, is readying a lawsuit that will presumably expose Cross’s identity. So, my admitted “conflict of interest” disqualifies me, but Cross’s hiding behind a pseudonym, as “he” purveys disinformation, is just fine. I went into great detail on one of “his” disinformation additions to Ed’s bio. Every time that somebody removed it, it was restored by other editors. So, this is far from a negligent oversight, but those editors are very actively misrepresenting Ed’s work. The bizarre part is that the passage that keeps getting added twists one of the greatest acts of censorship in the late 20th century into seeming to be a responsible and righteous act. Calling the treatment on Ed’s bio “Orwellian” is an understatement. Those kinds of misrepresentations and outright libel dominate Ed’s bio today, and that reasonable editor has proposed, after my erasure, to make Ed’s bio more like a normal Wikipedia article, but he is already being shot down. I was going to refer to my last post at Wikipedia, but that was hidden from casual readers, and I reproduce it here. My second editorial crime was reproducing copyrighted material when I quoted somebody. Look through any Wikipedia article, and particularly any biographical one, and you will see plenty of quoting, and Wikipedia has a “blockquote” feature just for lengthy quotations. When I began to ready Ed’s bio for Wikipedia, I realized that there were far more quotations to make, to give Ed’s work justice, than I could put in the Wikipedia bio, and I suspected that what happened yesterday was well within the realm of possibility, so I built a bunch of quotes at Wikiquote, so that Ed’s voice would be heard at least once in the Wiki-universe, amongst all the libel against him. So, the logic seems to be that putting quotes at Wikiquote is fine, but putting them in a Wikipedia article is a copyright violation. I am no attorney, and I can’t make any sense out of that logic. I expected that some of my quotes in the Ed articles would be erased and turned into paraphrases, and I planned to add the erased quotes to Wikiquote, if they were not already there. I do plan to add quotes to Ed’s Wikiquote page, from yesterday’s erased effort, but not immediately. I already have added a pretty big slug of quotes (that page is all my work so far) that fills in the blanks on Ed’s writings, to show how off-base his assailants are, and that is enough for now. I was already planning to take an Ed break, after it consumed most of my “spare” time over the past year, and especially after yesterday’s adventure in censorship. The last “crime” that I was accused of was plagiarism. Whom did I plagiarize? Myself! It seems that if I put anything on Wikipedia that was already on my site, that is plagiarism. Krishna informed me that it was not plagiarism, which I already knew. I have been writing long enough to know what plagiarism means. It is stealing somebody else’s work and presenting it as one’s own. I have been plagiarized and impersonated on the Internet, and the crazy part about being plagiarized is that you can be accused of the plagiarism. I don’t keep track of how often I have been plagiarized, but one event happened in 2001, when a professional Hollywood writer plagiarized my writings about Mick Cohen, and I was the person accused of plagiarism (you can see that event at the Above Top Secret forum, before they banned me – yes, I am used to this kind of treatment, where the trolls get free play while assailing me, and I get banned). The good news is that it was easy to prove when I published my work, and the plagiarist published his work a few months after mine. But it is kind of surreal to be plagiarized, to then be accused of being the plagiarist. So, real plagiarism, where I copied somebody else’s work and called it mine, is actually nowhere in evidence in any of my work or what I posted at Wikipedia (you can see what I do when copyrighted material is added to my site, outside of the stray Fair Use quote, and that was quite an experience), but the person that I plagiarized was myself, of all people. Should I be angry at being ripped-off that way? Krishna began reading my work around 2001-2002, and after years of Krishna’s working on me, I finally contacted Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Movement and the spiritual grandfather of Wikipedia. Krishna’s idea, and I thought that it made sense, was that Free Software and Free Energy activists would be natural allies, and I wrote an open letter to that effect, around the time that I contacted Stallman in 2006. Alas, after a frustrating month of trading email with Stallman (Does that disqualify me from ever editing his Wikipedia article? It would seem so.), I gave up. He is a classic Level 3, where so many of the “smart” end up. That is no crime, but Stallman is not going to be any help. I can’t remember exactly when I did it, but Krishna kept working on me, and I put my copyright release on my home page at least several years ago, meaning that anybody can use it in any way they wish, including me ( ), without fear of any copyright infringement. Basically, I am a “public-domain” writer, although I ask people to at least cite me, if they use my work. But I doubt that I would ever sue anybody who didn’t. So, the “plagiarism” that I stand accused of is plagiarizing myself! Because I used words from my own writings (including Brian’s NASA bio, which I wrote), and even though my writings on my site are all public domain, I was guilty of plagiarizing myself, and all of the examples that the censorious admin presented were “plagiarisms” of my public-domain self. The admin informed me that any well-educated middle-schooler knew that, which was one of quite a few insults and threats. I guess that I am just not smart enough to understand or was trained badly, but I just can’t seem to wrap my head around the idea that if I use my own public-domain writings at Wikipedia, that I am guilty of plagiarism. Maybe a lawyer can explain it to me one day, but since I will never contribute to Wikipedia again, I don’t think it matters, and I will file yesterday’s series of events into my Twilight Zone file. It was a truly bizarre day. To add icing to the cake, that censorious editor also wiped out most of my work on Brian O’s bio (my crimes were knowing Brian and using my own writings), and now it is just a stub, with nary a mention of free energy. What a travesty. I have been on the receiving end of “selective enforcement” activities that make what happened yesterday pale into insignificance, and I’ll get over it soon. I’ll one day publish the code that I wrote to put it into Wikipedia (probably 100 hours or so of effort), and anybody can use it however they wish. My best version of Ed’s bio sits on my site today, and shows up as the third result on Bing and the second result at Google, if somebody enters “Edward S. Herman biography”, so my work is not completely banished to Siberia, but it is really a shame that Ed’s Wikipedia bio is an exercise in disinformation, but such is today’s world, and it is only more confirmation of Ed and Noam’s propaganda model. While it would have been nice to get through Wikipedia’s censorious gauntlet, it was not to be, and I am finished with trying, although I am being encouraged to keep fighting at Wikipedia. But it is a rigged game, in my opinion, and in the opinion of others who would know. While Uncle Ed is near the head of my pantheon, I have bigger fish to fry these days. What an honor to have done this work, but it has set back my big essay update by more than a year, as well as other “visibility” work relating to my effort. It is time to move on. Maybe somebody will make a dent in rectifying Ed’s Wikipedia bio one day, which today stands as an exercise in disinformation, but it won’t be me. Best, Wade

Hi: My biography project for Uncle Ed just reached a milestone with my publication of: My revised biography on Ed on my site. I considerably beefed it up from last year’s version, particularly my chapter on Noam and Ed’s The Political Economy of Human Rights. I have also hosted documents on my site which Wikipedia would likely erase the links to, such as Michael Hourigan’s affidavit about how his investigation into the assassination of Rwanda’s president was killed, and the text of Noam and Ed’s After the Cataclysm. A Wikiquote page for Ed’s writings, which is sure to grow. Ed’s biography at Wikipedia, and related articles: Manufacturing Consent; The propaganda model; The Political Economy of Human Rights, which was only a stub before I changed it. The article on their first work together, which was censored. I fixed that some months ago. It has kind of been censored twice, with Philip Cross, mentioned below, misrepresenting what happened. Ed originally asked me to rework his execrable Wikipedia bio, and that is where most of my Wikipedia effort went, but the other articles needed work, too. The infamous anti-historian Philip Cross (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) has been the most prolific “editor” of Ed’s bio so far, and I am trying to get Cross banned from editing Ed’s articles. How the disinformation effort has been working against Ed and Noam is that what they actually wrote has been excluded from Wikipedia so far, such as the concept that they used from the very beginning of their collaborations, of benign, constructive, nefarious, and mythical bloodbaths and how the media treats them. That was quite an achievement, to completely exclude that major theme from Wikipedia (I added it last year). Then, with their actual writings suppressed, the attacks on their work commenced. That is the “straw man” logical fallacy at best, and libelous at worse. I have had plenty of experience with the racist, imperial “editors” at Wikipedia before, but I can easily live with Brian O’s Wikipedia bio as it exists today. I wrote an initial entry on Ed’s talk page, announcing my intentions. We will see how it goes. Best, Wade

Hi: A few odds and ends as I work hard on Ed’s bio project. The booklet that saved my father’s life was banned in the USA, and a generation later, that book’s banned advice is now the mainstream advice. Of course, that disgraced pioneer will not receive any mainstream recognition. A generation ago, a close friend asked me about a wintertime raw patch of skin on her arm, I said it was nothing, but she went to a dermatologist anyway, was diagnosed with melanoma, and had surgery to remove it, with a big scar on her arm to this day. I have written on my site for a generation that mammograms may cause more cancer than they detect, that there may be a condition that mainstream medicine calls malignant that is really benign, that the “winning the war on cancer” idea is largely a fraud, and that diagnosing benign conditions as malignant is one of the many sleights of hand that provide those winnings statistics. Well, surprise of surprises, that friend just had her annual cancer checkup, which she has had every year for more than 20 years, since her “melanoma” was removed, and her mainstream dermatologist, who is a prominent member of the medical community, told her during her medical examination that she likely did not have melanoma a generation ago, that “new” findings show that many benign conditions have been misdiagnosed as melanoma and breast cancer in the past, and that mammograms may cause more cancer than they detect. Imagine that! I wonder if I will live to see the entire cancer treatment paradigm of attacking the tumor finally called insane by mainstream medicine and abandoned. It is a huge racket, so we will see. Will I live to see fluoride’s use as a dental “preventive” finally admitted to be a huge and deadly fraud? I have not had to update my medical racket or fluoride essays in the generation since I wrote them, as far as the thrust of those essays goes, but I add material when mainstream medicine finally admits what the disgraced pioneers had long stated, as billions of people have been victimized by the state of affairs in medicine. There is a method to the madness of my site, and that is to help people think comprehensively, whether it is the media’s lies that Ed and friends expose, writing on the medical racket, the Permian Extinction, or today’s arrested state of the free energy field. Once people can begin thinking comprehensively and sharpen their tools of discernment, they can become useful for my little project. Otherwise, they get trapped by their delusions and tunnel vision, and hack at branches if they hack at all. It takes a lot of hard work to develop the needed awareness, even for those few with the right stuff. I can’t tell you how many people approach me, dragging along their baggage of delusions, with their “bright ideas” that are completely useless for what I am doing, and it does not matter how much I have tried to dissuade them, they just had to go out and try it. I often get to hear later what a disaster it was, and I really don’t want to hear it. I have been regularly approached by academics over the years, and even the most worldly of them are usually quite naïve. Some are hip, but they are vanishingly few. One issue that I have often written about is the “laws of physics” and free energy. Brian was fond of saying that there are no “laws of physics,” but just theories. When scientists invoke the “laws of physics” to dismiss free energy’s possibility, they are playing priests, not scientists. Thinking like a true scientist is good work and necessary for what I am doing, but it is not the only way to think. The greatest scientists had a mystical bent, and for good reason. Once somebody becomes scientifically literate, theories are just seen as theories, ready to die at the hands of the next fact. Some theories are stronger than others, but even Einstein expected his theories to one day die at the hands of new facts, but that the best parts of his theories would live on in the new theories. I was reading in the latest Scientific American how scientists are embroiled in the issue of the connection between the quantum and classical views of physics, and there are several competing hypotheses, which is normal science at work. If and when the technologies that my friend was shown finally come into the open, today’s physics texts, as well as the entire paradigm that today’s science operates under, will be scrapped. Science and technology in the Fifth Epoch won’t resemble today’s much, but almost none of today’s world will survive into the Fifth Epoch. That is what Epochal change means. Best, Wade

Hi: I have been devoting my writing time to my Ed bio project. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel for this phase, finishing it in the next week or two, and then I plan to take the summer off from heavy lifting. I need a break from the last two relentless years. Come autumn, I plan to then get on with my big essay update, which will likely take a year or so of my “spare” time, and then onto more visibility activities relating to my work. What a heavy lift the Ed project has been, but it has been a labor of love and an honor. Just this weekend, I decided to beef up Ed’s latest on demonstration elections, and his contrast between the treatment of Iran and Honduras in 2009. In a preview of what I may face at Wikipedia, the Iranian protestor who was shot has a big Wikipedia article on her, and Oxford has a scholarship in her name, while the Honduran protestor who was shot two weeks later not only has no article on him, but the account of his death at Wikipedia looks a bit like disinformation, such as an unfounded allegation that the protestors, not the military, shot him, and that the soldiers were somehow justified if they shot him, anyway. It is Ed and Noam’s Propaganda Model in action once again. Here is somebody who learned Ed’s lessons. I found another tribute from one of his co-authors, and we’ll see if I can work it in. Those who knew Ed all felt blessed, even those whom he chastised, as they felt that he helped them make their work better. Best, Wade

Hi: I have been busy lately working on Ed’s bio for my site. I’ll publish the revised bio about the same time that I publish my Wikipedia article on The Political Economy of Human Rights and my rewrite of Ed’s abysmal Wikipedia bio, which is what Ed asked me to work on, which began this entire project. The imperial hacks will be up in arms with my Ed bio, and we will see how those battles go. But even though they might do their best to erase my work, which is not new to me at Wikipedia, they are going to have a very hard time erasing the Wikiquote page that I put up for Ed. I have been beefing it up in recent days, and am probably about done for now. I can see that page growing over time. I expect that this phase of my Ed bio project will last well into the summer, and then it will be off to my long overdue big essay update. Best, Wade

Hi: Here is an early draft of my rewrite of my summary of Noam and Ed’s After the Cataclysm. It will receive plenty more work before I get it into the shape I want, but here is a peek. After the Cataclysm In Chomsky and Herman’s After the Cataclysm, their emphasis was on how the American media system focused on events in Indochina after the American withdrawal, and how it helped reconstruct the USA’s imperial ideology. The bludgeoning of Southeast Asia, which caused several million deaths, had to be framed as a noble cause gone awry, instead of an imperial undertaking. In that regard, the USA’s media engaged in the task of transforming the USA from perpetrator to a concerned observer with clean hands that could righteously moralize about the failings of its victims, as it falsely portrayed them as the victims of others, as if the USA had no responsibility for how events unfolded in postwar Indochina, even as it actively prevented aid from reaching its victims. In After the Cataclysm, Chomsky and Herman made their stance explicit, writing in the book’s first paragraph: “We will consider the facts about postwar Indochina insofar as they can be ascertained, but a major emphasis will be on the ways in which these facts have been interpreted, filtered, distorted or modified by the ideological institutions in the West.” Chomsky and Herman wrote about how American pundits immediately began framing the American invasion of Indochina as a mistake, not a crime, and how the media endlessly repeated the myth that the USA’s intention was to protect the freedom of South Vietnam’s peasants. Chomsky and Herman quoted the New York Times’s leading “dovish” pundit on the Vietnam War, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Anthony Lewis, who wrote: “The early American decisions on Indochina can be regarded as blundering efforts to do good. But by 1969 it was clear to most of the world – and most Americans – that the intervention had been a disastrous mistake.” That became the standard theme of American apologists. The USA was not attacking Vietnam, but defending it, in its “blundering efforts to do good.” Chomsky and Herman wrote that reframing crimes as “mistakes” and “errors” had rich precedence; they quoted Klaus Barbie, also known as the Butcher of Lyon, during his comfortable retirement in Bolivia, after rendering his services to the Third Reich: “the mass killings of Jews constituted a grave error. Many of the SS officers believed that the Jews could have been put to better use building roads to facilitate the advance of our troops.” Chomsky and Herman wrote that as Herman Goering was being interrogated at Nuremberg after the Nazis were defeated, he said that genocide of the Jews was not a crime, but a: “vast political blunder; many would have made good nationalists and joined in the Liquidation of the communists. If only Hitler had not confused the issues….” Chomsky and Herman surveyed the USA after its Revolutionary War, and France after World War II. In postwar France, around 30,000 to 50,000 French citizens were summarily executed, often by mobs, generally for the alleged crime of Nazi collaboration, and such murders happened while France was under the authority of Dwight Eisenhower, with Winston Churchill’s approval, as Eisenhower implemented Franklin Roosevelt’s directive. In the American Revolutionary War, the relative affluence of Americans muted the barbarities that typically plague postwar situations, but Chomsky and Herman noted that about 100,000 loyal British subjects were driven from the colonies by the revolutionaries, and that massacres were common between loyalists and rebels. About 20% of the colonial population, about a half million in all, were loyalists to the British crown. Chomsky and Herman used those postwar examples, both of which had minimal suffering compared to what the Vietnamese people endured, in order to calibrate what the postwar experience in Vietnam could have been like. Contrary to Nixon’s warnings of a communist bloodbath in postwar Vietnam, one did not happen. In their chapter on postwar Vietnam, Chomsky and Herman wrote about how the American media portrayed the events in Vietnam in the harshest possible light. The testimonies of many credible Western witnesses, who noted many positive developments in Vietnam’s recovery from the American invasion, were disregarded in favor of the testimony of a French priest, André Gelinas, who served in Vietnam and made extremely fanciful and lurid claims, such as that the Vietnamese people wished that the USA would drop atomic weapons on them, to end the scourge of communism once and for all. Virtually none of Gelinas’s claims could be independently verified, and when they could be subjected to verification, the findings demonstrated that Gelinas was far from a credible witness. A great deal of credible Western testimony, such as from Quakers, Mennonites, relief workers, and UN officials, was entirely disregarded by the American media in favor of Gelinas’s fabrications, which were prominently published in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among other media venues. Chomsky and Herman made it clear that few nations on Earth really helped much with reconstructing Indochina after it was destroyed by the USA. When help was given, it was invariably done over the objections of the USA, as it tried to prevent Indochina from receiving any assistance as it recovered, in a historic example of vindictiveness. Most of Indochina’s draft animals were killed in the wars, farmers were pulling plows in the aftermath of the American invasion, and when India sent 100 water buffaloes to Vietnam to help replenish its decimated herds, India had to route its donation through the Indian Red Cross, to avoid American retribution, as the USA outlawed any nation’s aid from going to communist-ruled Vietnam or Cuba. Chomsky and Herman summarized how the American ideological system operates, which became a prominent theme in their work: “The beauty of the democratic system of thought control, as contrasted with their clumsy totalitarian counterparts, is that they operate by subtly establishing on a voluntary basis – aided by the forces of nationalism and media control by substantial interests – presuppositions that set the limits of debate, rather than by imposing beliefs with a bludgeon. Then let the debate rage; the more lively and vigorous it is, the better the propaganda system is served, since the presuppositions (U.S. benevolence, lack of rational imperial goals, defensive posture, etc.) are more firmly established. Those who do not accept the fundamental principles of state propaganda are simply excluded from the debate (or if noticed, dismissed as ‘emotional,’ ‘irresponsible,’ etc.).” Thousands of Indochinese farmers and others were killed by exploding ordnance that did not initially explode when the USA dropped it on Indochina, as well as leftover American mines. Laotian Vice-Foreign Minister Khamphay Boupha met with the American official in charge of postwar Indochinese relations, Frederick Brown, and Khamphay concluded his summation of the meeting with: “The US has dropped 3 million tons of bombs – one ton per head – forced 700,000 people to abandon their fields; thousands of people were killed and maimed, and the unexploded ordnance continues to take its toll. Surely the US does not show humanitarian concern by refusing to heal the wounds of war.” Khamphay noted that Brown not only dismissed the idea of any forthcoming aid, but that the USA “forced Thailand to close the border.” Chomsky and Herman wrote at length on the failings of Christian Science Monitor, as it parroted the propaganda about postwar Indochina as uncritically as the rest of the media, while it portrayed itself as a publication of high-minded thought on foreign affairs. The largest chapter in After the Cataclysm was on postwar Cambodia. That chapter became the basis for a major international campaign to falsely portray Chomsky, and to a lesser extent, Herman, as apologists for the Khmer Rouge and defenders or deniers of the resultant genocide in Cambodia. Chomsky and Herman repeated throughout After the Cataclysm that their concern was the media’s treatment of postwar Cambodia, for example: “As in the other cases discussed, our primary concern here is not to establish the facts with regard to postwar Indochina, but rather to investigate their refraction through the prism of Western ideology, a very different task.” Chomsky and Herman wrote that Time magazine, in preparation for an article on Cambodia (“Cambodia: An Experiment in Genocide”, July 31, 1978) had approached Chomsky to elicit his support for the Khmer Rouge regime. Chomsky replied to Time with a partial list of fabrications about the Cambodian situation that Time and other American publications were responsible for. Time’s article did not name any “political theorists” who defended “the Cambodian tragedy” and Khmer Rouge atrocities because, as Chomsky and Herman noted, Time could not find any. Chomsky and Herman wrote about Cambodia: “It is a common error, as we have pointed out several times, to interpret opposition to U.S. intervention and aggression as support for the programs of its victims, a useful device for state propagandists but one that often has no basis in fact.” Chomsky and Herman wrote: “Another common device is to thunder that the doves ‘had better explain’ why there has been a bloodbath, or ‘concede’ that their ‘support for the Communists’ – the standard term for opposition to U.S. subversion and aggression – was wrong; it is the critics who must, it is claimed, shoulder the responsibility for the consequences of U.S. intervention, not those who organized and supported it or concealed the facts concerning it for many years, and still do. “It is, surely, not in doubt that it was U.S. intervention that inflamed a simmering civil struggle and brought the horrors of modern warfare to relatively peaceful Cambodia, at the same time arousing violent hatreds and a thirst for revenge in the demolished villages where the Khmer Rouge were recruited by the bombardment of the U.S. and its local clients. Matters have reached such a point that a social democratic journal can organize a symposium on the quite astounding question of whether opposition to the U.S. war on Indochina should be reassessed, given the consequences in Cambodia.” Chomsky and Herman replied to that logic with: “Evidently, the question can be raised only if one accepts two assumptions: the U.S. intervention in Indochina would have prevented a Cambodian bloodbath or was designed for this purpose; the United States has the right to use force and violence to prevent potential crimes – and thus, a fortiori, to resort to force to prevent actual crimes by invading Indonesia, much of Latin America, etc. It is difficult to decide which of the two assumptions that are jointly required for the question even to be raised is the more absurd.” In their chapter on postwar Cambodia, Herman and Chomsky repeated their theme from The Washington Connection, on the discrepancy regarding the media’s treatment of Cambodia and East Timor, such as: “A few months after Khieu Samphan’s now famous ‘admission’ that his regime was responsible for the deaths of about one-sixth of the population of Cambodia, Indonesian Prime Minister Adam Malik admitted that 50-80,000 people, close to the same percentage of the population, had been killed in East Timor in the course of what the Indonesia propaganda ministry and the New York Times called the ‘civil war’ – that is, the U.S. backed Indonesian invasion and massacre – though one would not have discovered that fact from the U.S. media. While Khieu Samphan’s ‘admission’ was concocted by the media and scholarship on the basis of remarks that quite possibly were never made, Malik’s admission, by contrast, was clear and explicit. A comparison of media reaction to the actual admission by Malik and the concocted ‘admission’ by Samphan gives some insight into what lies behind the machinations of the Free Press.” Chomsky and Herman wrote at length about the tragedy of Cambodia and what caused it. Contrary to the “gentle land” description of pre-war Cambodia found in the media, Cambodia had long been torn by strife, particularly by France’s brutal imperial reign. Chomsky and Herman wrote on subjects completely neglected by the American media regarding Cambodia, such as the idea that Nixon and Kissinger’s escalation of bombing in 1973 not only created the conditions that brought the Khmer Rouge to power, but it was an intentional outcome; the authors considered Michael Vickery’s explanation to be persuasive: “Vickery points out that the Kissinger-Nixon policy during the last two years of the war was a ‘major mystery,’ for which he suggests an explanation that appears to us quite plausible. Referring to the ‘Sonnenfeldt Doctrine,’ which holds that ‘pluralistic and libertarian Communist regimes will breed leftist ferment in the West,’ he suggests that ‘when it became clear [to U.S. leaders] that they could not win in Cambodia, they preferred to do everything possible to ensure that the post-war revolutionary government be extremely brutal, doctrinaire, and frightening to its neighbors, rather than a moderate socialism to which the Thai, for example, might look with envy.’ In short, though it was understood that the United States had lost the war in Cambodia (even though it was, quite clearly, still trying to win it in Vietnam), the destruction of rural Cambodia, by imposing the harshest possible conditions on the eventual victors, would serve two classic ends: retarding social and economic progress, and maximizing the brutality of the eventual victors. Then the aggressors would at least be able to reap a propaganda victory from the misery they had sown.” Chomsky and Herman wrote that before the 1973 bombing (the same year that Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize), the Khmer Rouge were far more moderate in their ideology. The authors quoted leading Cambodian scholar David Chandler, an American, who wrote: “What drove Cambodians to kill? Paying off old scores or imaginary ones played a part, but to a large extent, I think, American actions are to blame. From 1969 to 1973, after all, we dropped more than 500,000 tons of bombs on the Cambodian countryside. Nearly half of this tonnage fell in 1973…In those few months, we may have driven thousands of people out of their minds. We certainly accelerated the course of the revolution. According to several accounts, the leadership hardened its ideology and got rid of wavering factions during 1973 and 1974.” Another neglected idea in the American media about Cambodia also applied to Vietnam, in that Indochina was comprised of peasant societies that had societal dynamics markedly different from industrial ones. Agrarian civilizations produced limited agricultural surpluses that could only support a small non-food-producing population, generally comprised of urban professionals and the elite, who coercively taxed the agrarian hinterlands to support the cities. Cambodia’s and Vietnam’s cities had long been the headquarters for France’s colonial undertaking, and the USA’s epic bombing of Indochina was partly inflicted to drive the peasantry off of their lands and into cities and “strategic hamlets,” to destroy the popular base of support for communism. Without the huge influx of food to the cities of those war-torn nations, delivered by the USA, the artificial economies of Saigon and Phnom Penh would not have survived, and the urban dwellers would have soon starved to death. The evacuations of Saigon and Phnom Pen to the countryside were largely a return of rural peasants who had been forced into the cities, in order to stave off starvation, especially when the USA avidly prevented any foreign aid from reaching those nations. In addition, the longstanding conflict between rural and urban society in Indochina was greatly intensified by the American invasion, and Chomsky and Herman wrote that the brutal aftermath in Cambodia seemed to be largely due to peasant vengeance on urban dwellers that comprised the colonial elite under French and American rule. The authors wrote that those historical dynamics contributed to the atrocities and brutal rule of the peasant-based Khmer Rouge. Chomsky and Herman also noted that the early reports of atrocities in postwar Cambodia came from parts of the nation where the Khmer Rouge’s influence was relative muted, as the traumatized peasants engaged in prodigious score-settling, particularly against the wealthy and city-dwellers. Chomsky and Herman wrote that the primary account that Americans were familiar with regarding Phnom Penh’s evacuation was an article by John Barron and Anthony Paul in Reader’s Digest, which depicted horrific suffering inflicted on the evacuated city dwellers by the Khmer Rouge. Chomsky and Herman performed a detailed analysis of the Barron-Paul account of postwar Cambodia and concluded that it fell far short of a work of scholarly integrity. Shane Tarr, a New Zealander journalist, and his Cambodian wife participated in Phnom Penh’s evacuation, and their account bore little resemblance to the Barron-Paul account, particularly regarding atrocities, which they never witnessed. Their account was never given any Western media treatment, other than being sarcastically dismissed, and their account was far from alone in being ignored by the Western media, as it did not conform to the media’s preferred version. Near the end of After the Cataclysm, Chomsky and Herman wrote: “When the facts are in, it may well turn out that the more extreme condemnations were in fact correct. But even if that turns out to be the case, it will in no way alter the conclusions we have reached on the central question addressed here: how the available facts were selected, modified, or sometimes invented to create a certain image offered to the general population. The answer to this question seems clear, and it is unaffected by whatever may be discovered about Cambodia in the future.” Chomsky and Herman could not have been clearer that their task was to focus on how the American media handled events such as the slaughters in Indonesia, East Timor, and Cambodia, not to support the regimes that might have slaughtered fewer people than their neighbors did, as if the lesser of two evils was somehow good. In their final comments in After the Cataclysm, Chomsky and Herman wrote: “Our primary concern has been U.S. global policy and propaganda, and the filtering and distorting effect of Western ideology, not the problems of reconstruction and modernization in societies that have been victimized by Western imperialism. Correspondingly, we have not developed or expressed our views here on the nature of the Indochinese regimes. To assess the contemporary situation in Indochina and the programs of the current ruling groups is a worthwhile endeavor, but it has not been our current objective. […] The success of the Free Press in reconstructing imperial ideology since the U.S. withdrawal has been spectacular. The shift of the United States from causal agent to bystander – and even to leader of the struggle for human rights – in the face of its empire of client fascism and long, vicious assault on the peasant societies of Indochina, is a remarkable achievement. The system of brainwashing under freedom, with mass media voluntary self-censorship in accord with the larger interests of the state, has worked brilliantly.” In their subsequent Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky summarized the decade of the Cambodian catastrophe and the American media’s treatment of it: “Phase I: From 1969 through 1975, U.S. bombing at a historically unprecedented level and a civil war sustained by the United States left the country in utter ruins. Though Congress legislated an end to the bombing in August 1973, U.S. participation in the ongoing slaughter continued until the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975 […] The vast numbers of Cambodians killed, injured, and traumatized in that period were, in our conception […] ‘unworthy victims.’” “Phase II: From April 1975 through 1978 Cambodia was subjected to the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge, overthrown by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 […] the Pol Pot era is the ‘holocaust’ that was widely compared to the worst atrocities of Hitler and Stalin, virtually from the outset, with massive publicity and outrage at the suffering of these ‘worthy’ victims.” “Phase III: Vietnam installed the Heng Samrin regime in power in Cambodia, but the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) coalition, based primarily on the Khmer Rouge, maintained international recognition apart from the Soviet Bloc. Reconstructed with the aid of China and the United States on the Thai-Cambodia border and in Thai bases, the Khmer Rouge guerillas, the only effective DK military force, continued to carry out activities in Cambodia of a sort called ‘terrorist’ when a friendly government is the target […] Phase III renewed the status of the people of Cambodia as worthy victims, suffering under Vietnamese rule.” Best, Wade

Hi: My post this summer will include drafts of my writings on Ed and Noam. I am far from finished, but this is a draft of my revision of The Washington Connection, which I worked on this morning: The Political Economy of Human Rights Herman and Chomsky’s first uncensored collaboration was “Saigon’s Corruption Crisis: The Search for an Honest Quisling”, published in 1974. The article discussed the American government’s intractable problem in Vietnam: finding a puppet who was not corrupt, in order to change the image of the regimes in Vietnam and renew generous funding from Congress. In 1977, previews of Chomsky and Herman’s next collaboration appeared in various publications. One was a preview of the first two chapters of The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. Herman’s writings were published in Monthly Review over several decades. Another was on the American media’s treatment of Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975, when little confirmable information on Cambodia’s situation was available to the West. In 1979, Chomsky and Herman published the two-volume The Political Economy of Human Rights; The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism was the first volume, and After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology was the second. The combined works greatly expanded on CRV. The preface of The Washington Connection established the theme of those two works, which contrasted the facts of the United States’s international behavior with the popularly held beliefs about them in the United States. The Washington Connection The facts asserted by the authors were that the United States had “organized under its sponsorship and protection a neocolonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror and serving the interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite.” The beliefs asserted by the authors, which they called an “ideological pretense,” were that the “United States is committed to furthering the cause of democracy and human rights throughout the world, although it may occasionally err in the pursuit of this objective.” The authors noted that between 1960 and the publication of their work in 1979, more than 18 Latin American governments had been subjected to military takeovers, and the United States was essential to the overthrow process in all of those nations. The authors wrote that torture had been no more than a historical curiosity in recent centuries, but suddenly flourished in the “free world” while it had simultaneously declined in the Soviet domain after Stalin’s death. The inner cover of The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism presented a diagram of nations that routinely tortured their citizenry during the 1970s. That diagram listed the 35 nations that practiced torture on an administrative basis, and 26 (74%) of them were client states of the United States. The diagram also presented the amount of military aid provided by the United States to those torturer regimes from 1946 to 1975, which amounted to many billions of dollars, as well as how many of those nations’ military and police personnel were trained by the United States from 1950 to 1975, a count which exceeded 200,000 people. The authors noted that 35,000 Latin American officers had been trained at the School of the Americas, which was known as the “school of coups.” The School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, became infamous for running a torture school, and long after The Washington Connection was published, the Pentagon declassified some of their training manuals, which advocated torture and described torture techniques. In The Washington Connection, Chomsky and Herman argued that the term “terror,” as used by the American media, was a political construct applied only to violence committed by marginal groups, even American students who protested the Vietnam War, while state terror, which was immensely more destructive, was defined away as not being terror at all, but was described by euphemisms such as “police action,” “protective action,” and similar terms, even while the Cuban and Cambodian governments’ violence was deemed “terroristic.” Chomsky and Herman surveyed the CIA’s methods of subversion, including: Assassinating foreign heads of state; “Direct conspiracies with terrorists, mercenaries or (usually) military factions within a country to disrupt or overthrow a government in disfavor”; “Political bribery and funding foreign politicians”; Propaganda, in a “wide variety of forms”; Organizing and funding demonstrations; Actual information collection, which was its primary official function in its charter, but it routinely provided that information to those torturer regimes and the CIA’s proxies for harrying and overthrowing governments. A theme throughout The Washington Connection was that those activities had the singular purpose of providing a favorable investment climate for American interests, primarily transnational corporations. Torture, slaughter, even genocide, and terror was performed with the objective of cowing a populace into apathy and submission so that foreign interests could plunder the labor and natural resources of those subject nations. A generation later, John Perkins described those activities from the inside, as a member of a “middle management” that described themselves as “economic hit men,” who openly acknowledged among themselves that their purpose was to plunder the labor and resources of subject nations. When people such as Perkins failed to get foreign leaders to sell out their nations to transnational corporations, then the “jackals” (covert operatives, usually CIA contract agents) were sent in, often to assassinate foreign heads of state. Perkins had clients that were populist leaders of Panama and Ecuador, Omar Torrijos and Jaime Roldós, and after the economic hit men unsuccessfully tried to get them to sell out their nations to the “corporatocracy,” both men soon died in aircraft “accidents” that Perkins strongly believed were “jackal” operations. Chomsky and Herman wrote that the CIA-enabled Latin American dictatorships had similarities to Nazi Germany, not the least of which was the CIA’s use of Nazis, particularly those who fled to Latin America after World War II, often with American assistance and protection, but with some important exceptions. Anti-Semitism was rarely evident in the ideology of those Latin American dictatorships, although Argentina was an exception, with its long history of anti-Semitism. More importantly, unlike European fascism, the Latin American variant had no popular support. The regimes were “denationalized” and had no allegiance to their nations’ masses, but instead were beholden to their foreign sponsors, so they treated their domestic populations as their enemies. Accordingly, the authors termed those regimes “subfascist.” The authors noted that the phenomenon of American-supported subfascist regimes was far from confined to Latin America, but was the typical situation in American client states globally. In The Washington Connection, Chomsky and Herman described how the American mass media operated, and included a brief discussion of the features of what became their Propaganda Model, which was further developed in their Manufacturing Consent. In an early example of the media’s double standards that became a regular feature of Chomsky and Herman’s media analytics was a section of The Washington Connection titled, “Cambodia: Why the Media Find It More Newsworthy Than Indonesia and East Timor.” Chomsky and Herman explicitly made their arguments about the Cambodian slaughter in the 1970s; they were framed in the American media’s treatment of it, as they stated: “Even today, as regards East Timor, where our brutal Indonesian satellite (authors of the 1965-1966 butcheries) have very possibly killed as many people as did the Khmer Rouge, there is a virtually complete blackout of information in the Free Press. This is a bloodbath carried out by a friendly power and is thus of little interest to our readers. It is a ‘benign bloodbath’ in our terminology.” In The Washington Connection, Chomsky and Herman provided more examples of their framework of constructive, benign, nefarious, and mythical terror and bloodbaths, several of which were not in CRV, and they considerably expanded on their discussions in CRV. The terror and bloodbaths discussed in The Washington Connection included: Benign and Constructive: American client regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia; Benign: East Pakistan, early 1970s; Burundi, 1972; Indians of Latin America, particularly the genocide of the Aché of Paraguay, where the effort was led by American missionaries, enabled by the State Department and other American government agencies; and a lengthy discussion of the Indonesian invasion and aftermath in East Timor, which was the greatest proportional genocide of an ethic group since World War II; Constructive: Indonesia, 1965-1969; Thailand and the Philippines, post-World War II to the 1970s; Dominican Republic, from the 1965 American invasion to the 1970s, Latin America in general, from the American overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954, to the mid-to-late 1960s epidemic of overthrown governments, to the subfascist terror regimes in the 1970s; Nefarious and Mythical: Vietnamese land reform in the 1950s and the Huế “massacre” in 1968. Chomsky and Herman provided voluminous details, context, and dry humor regarding those events. For instance, in the early days of Marcos’s subfascist terror regime in the Philippines, they routinely tortured dissidents, such as Trinidad Herrera, who organized protests in a squatter community near Manila, but was released after a tremendous international outcry that finally spurred the State Department to intervene to obtain her release. The testimonies of Marcos’s torture victims became a public relations problem, so the Marcos regime graduated to a “more advanced subfascist process” in which dissidents then began simply disappearing, never living to describe their treatment. The authors described a similar process in Thailand, in which “disappeared” dissidents (such as protesting students) were disposed of by incineration, even while the victims were still alive. Chomsky and Herman repeatedly noted that after successful constructive terror, American investment would pour into subject nations, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, as those nations became investors’ paradises. Chomsky and Herman, in a preview of Manufacturing Consent, described the American media’s enabling performance of those activities, such as the New York Times’s performance regarding the East Timorese genocide, particularly that of its Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, Henry Kamm, who uncritically promoted the Indonesian government’s propaganda as it slaughtered the East Timorese in its unprovoked invasion. As the genocide in East Timor reached its peak, the American media went completely silent, which Chomsky later said reached the level of actual complicity in genocide. In an early example of the pairing analysis of the media that Herman and Chomsky made famous in Manufacturing Consent, they noted that the trial of Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky received more American media coverage in 1978 than the collective coverage of several thousand murders inflicted by Latin American client regimes in the same year. Chomsky and Herman regularly noted the media’s irrationality in its reporting, such as the logical fallacy known as false alternatives, in which people who opposed the American invasion of Vietnam on principle were called “supporters of Hanoi.” The authors described at length American president Jimmy Carter’s hypocrisy as a “human rights” advocate when it came to how American client regimes treated their domestic populations, such as in American-supported dictatorships in Nicaragua and Iran, as well as Carter’s presiding over the greatest proportional genocide since World War II, as his administration renewed weapons sales to Indonesia when it began running out of bullets. The authors wrote that the United States was far from alone in supporting the Indonesian genocide in East Timor, as several Western nations provided various forms of assistance, including France and notably the United Kingdom; British Aerospace sold $25 million of counterinsurgency attack aircraft to Indonesia in 1978, which would have only been used on East Timor at that time. Western oil companies lined up in the wake of the invasion to negotiate oil exploration rights in Timor Gap. Chomsky and Herman wrote at length about the USA’s operations in Vietnam, including mass murder programs such as Operation Speedy Express and the Phoenix Program. Details of the American operations were provided by examples such as the Congressional testimony of K. Barton Osborn, who: “served in a covert program of intelligence in Vietnam, not only testified to a wide variety of forms of torture used by U.S. and Saigon personnel, but also made the startling claim that ‘I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC [NLF] suspect who ever lived through an interrogation in a year and a half, and that included quite a number of individuals.’” Vietnamese land reform in the 1950s was a dismantling of an economic order that exploited peasants, as had been happening throughout the Third World since World War II, but it was also an endemic issue in agrarian societies, going back to the first civilizations. The most credible estimates were that the communist leadership in North Vietnam executed as many as two thousand people during its land reform activities. However, in late 1969, Nixon announced that 50,000 people had been executed by North Vietnam’s communist leadership. Several months later, Nixon said that the number was “hundreds of thousands,” and a month later, when huge protests were held across the USA in response to Nixon’s announcement that the USA was bombing Cambodia, Nixon announced that “a half a million, by conservative estimates…were murdered or otherwise exterminated by the North Vietnamese.” Nixon’s lies were made to bolster his claims that the North Vietnamese would massacre millions of South Vietnamese if they ever ruled over South Vietnam, and preventing a communist bloodbath became his rallying cry. Vietnamese land reform became one of Chomsky and Herman’s mythical bloodbaths. Nixon’s lies about Vietnamese land reform and warnings against communist bloodbaths were part of a longstanding ideological construct that the USA was preventing or containing communist “aggression.” In that framework, the USA was never the aggressor, but was responding to or preventing communist aggression. That stance became known as “containment,” and was the USA’s official rationale for the Cold War. Herman and Chomsky spent a good deal of their political writings demonstrating that the “containment” policy was pure propaganda. The USA never felt threatened by communist expansion from the Soviet Union or China. Peasant nations freeing themselves from centuries of European colonial domination would no longer be subjected to capitalist-imperialist exploitation, and that was the real threat that the USA addressed with its foreign policy. In his Beyond Hypocrisy, Herman wrote about the fictions that the containment policy was founded on, and he analyzed National Security Council Report 68 (“NSC-68”), prepared just before the Korean War in 1950. NSC-68 was a planning document for American leadership, and its author, Paul Nitze, advised the Reagan administration more than 30 years later. NSC-68 frankly recognized Soviet weakness, as it recovered from tens of millions of deaths in World War II. NSC-68 made explicit plans to subtly attack the Soviet Union, first by stripping away its satellites, and then to subvert the Soviet Union itself. NSC-68, like the Reagan administration’s “Defense Guidance, 1984-1988” report, authored by the Pentagon, openly acknowledged Soviet weakness and how to aggressively exploit it. NSC-68, declassified in 1975 by Henry Kissinger, acknowledged that in order to subvert the Soviet Union, the USA needed a large military and mobilized public. Herman wrote: “Doublespeak embedded in a convenient matrix of anticommunist ideology was essential, as the U.S. establishment was obliged to pretend (or internalize the belief) that the huge global expansion of the U.S. political economy on which they had embarked was ‘defensive’ and responsive to some external threat; that we were ‘containing’ somebody else who was committing ‘aggression’ and threatening our ‘national security.’ “The words and phrases ‘defense,’ ‘containment,’ ‘aggression,’ and ‘national security’ are core items of the doublespeak lexicon, essential ingredients of the ink squirted out by imperial cuttlefish.” Nitze was a leading foreign policy hawk, and the leading dove of the early postwar years, George Kennan, authored Policy Planning Study 23 (“PPS-23”) for the U.S. State Department in 1948, the year after the USA renamed its War Department to the Defense Department. PPS-23 was declassified in 1974. Kennan made infamous observations in PPS-23, including: “Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. “…We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and - for the Far East - unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.” Kennan was the author of the USA’s “containment policy,” but Kennan wrote in 1985: “In no way did the Soviet Union appear, at that moment, as a military threat to this country. The Soviet Union was utterly exhausted by the exertions and sacrifices of the recent war.” In the 1960s, Kennan lectured on the idea that when the USA created NATO: “they had drawn a line arbitrarily across Europe against an attack no one was planning,” and Kennan admitted that there was really “nothing to contain.” Herman and Chomsky regularly wrote about American policymakers in the early postwar years and what the real game was, which they openly admitted in their top-secret planning documents. Best, Wade

Hi: Yesterday, I worked on Ed’s quote page and added some to Noam’s. As my Ed bio project continues, his quote page will grow. No hacks have arrived yet. We’ll see how that goes. Next up is updating this chapter of my Ed bio for my recent studies (and some other bio changes), then writing the article on those books, then I will be taking on Ed’s horrific Wikipedia bio and tweaking some other Ed-related articles. Then the hacks will likely arrive. This process could take all summer, but I hope not. Then I will begin plunking along on my long overdue update of my big essay. I expect that process to take a year or so, of my “spare” time. It will be a significant update. Maybe I’ll get lucky and it will only take a few months. We’ll see. Then I am going to engage in some more visibility work, do some interviews, etc. Best, Wade