Wade Frazier

Hi: In the references to my big essay are many scientific papers, and in the past week (1, 2, 3), Krishna has been citing scientific papers that he has been reading, and that I read in turn. He only cites papers that are germane to my work, and I always pay attention when Krishna tells me what he is reading. He does his homework. Scientific papers, articles, and books formed the foundation of my big essay. I know that its scientific nature scared a lot of readers off, but I tried to make it as easy a ride as I could, and still get to my destination, which was a comprehensive view of the human journey and life on Earth, in which the energy issue was central. In my coming essay update, energy is going to become even more central. While I have tried to make it as easy as I could, there is also no substitute for doing the work. We can’t get there without it. IMO, if you care and have been awakened, you have already cleared the hardest hurdles. Developing a comprehensive perspective will be relatively easy, but it won’t happen overnight. It took many years of stumbling around for me to develop it. The entire purpose of my work is to help the people I seek to get there easier. This post will be on how I read scientific papers. From the beginning, I have tried to cite scientific papers that were both relevant to my work and relatively easy to read. There is a great deal of specialist literature that is almost impossible to read by laypeople or even scientists outside of their field of specialty, as those papers are filled with terms that only specialists know. While such papers have their importance and their audiences, for what I do, popularized science and papers written for a wide scientific readership are the most valuable. The publications Science and Nature are specifically intended for a general scientific audience and are liberally cited in my big essay. Brian O had many papers published in Science and Nature, as has Peter Ward, and both wrote popularized science. Brian taught “Physics for Poets” at Princeton, and his “man of the people” path was evident from a young age. Writing for both scientists and the lay public is not easy, and I could seek no higher authority than Ward’s on the scientific parts of my big essay, as I intended to reach that broad audience. When I heard from Ward, that told me that I was on the right track. In chapter 11 of his The Science Delusion, Rupert Sheldrake discussed the delusion of objectivity that scientific papers perpetuated, such as writing everything in the third person and passive voice, rather than the first person and active. Sheldrake had a point. That the “skeptics” succeeded in having Sheldrake banned from TED is a telling indictment of the scientific establishment’s foot soldiers, and I certainly don’t shrink from describing the limits of today’s science. Objectivity is a seemingly nice ideal, but is elusive if not impossible to attain. That said, scientific papers have their place, and here is how I read them. That paper in Science that Krishna cited on the coevolution of flowering plants and moths and butterflies is a typical paper. Scientific papers usually have abstracts, a kind of executive summary, at the beginning, which gives the paper’s gist. I would say that most papers are rarely read past their abstracts, especially when written for the specialist. I have an executive summary of my big essay. After the abstract, there is usually an introduction, results, discussion, and materials and methods. Some are organized a little differently, with a conclusion and no abstract, for instance. Some papers make strong conclusions, while others are more tentative. The paper that Krishna most recently mentioned was openly speculative, but was still a fascinating and important read. I rarely read too deeply into the materials and methods sections (also call “sources” in papers), but for scientists in the field, that section is usually the most important, because that is where scientists describe their evidence and methods of procuring it, so that other scientists can reproduce the evidence. Unless scientific findings can be reproduced by other scientists, they are not going to make it into the corpus of established science. It is important, IMO, to become familiar with the process of science and become knowledgeable about how scientists go about their work of making their findings reproducible, but I see little need for my readers to get into the nitty-gritty of the materials and methods of each paper. The abstract, introduction, and conclusion can be the most relevant parts of the papers, but the discussion can also be very important, as you can see the logic that the scientists used in arriving at their conclusions. That is also a key section for their fellow scientists, where they look for the soundness of the logical process and often seek flaws in the logic. The key to a successful hypothesis is to account for all of the known aspects of the phenomenon in question, which requires a mind that can hold many different pieces of evidence at once and formulate an explanation that can account for all of them, which can be tested by amassing evidence. I presented several competing hypotheses for explaining the Shuram Excursion, as well as the “Snowball Earth” that preceded the rise of complex life, as examples of how the process works. It generally takes a high IQ to formulate those hypotheses, as part of the measure of an IQ is the ability to hold complex information and process it. It does not have to be fast to get the job done, but higher IQs usually mean faster “processing.” I have been around people a lot smarter than me, and you can almost see the wheels spinning in their heads. That high “CPU speed” also means that they can also make connections that the rest of us can’t see (at least, without help). It can be amazing to interact with minds like that, but people do not need genius IQs to be choir material. It may take some more time to digest it, but I doubt that there is anything in my work that can’t be digested by people with an IQ of 110 or so, if they put their minds to it. It took a lifetime of training, adventures, and study for me to produce my work. In that heavenly Roads world, what took me a lifetime to learn, the average child learns by age five or so. In the Fifth Epoch, scientific literacy will be like what literacy is in Fourth Epoch societies: something that all children learn. In the Third Epoch only about 5% of the population was literate, as most people were illiterate peasants. In the Fourth Epoch, only about 5% of the population is scientifically literate, but that literacy is needed for my approach to have a chance of working. It is just a prerequisite, just like literacy is a prerequisite for school, just like arithmetic is a prerequisite for algebra, which is a prerequisite for calculus. Best, Wade

Hi Krishna: Yes, interesting paper, and it will go into my essay update. Wrangham is in good company, on the fire angle of human evolution. My grandmother and many other relatives went to Western Washington, and my nephew does today. Yes, industrialization allowed England to win the imperial sweepstakes, but it also used its position to enslave peoples and commit genocide. Kind of like how the USA uses its superior economic muscle to enslave much of the world. Using their economic upper-hand to further exploit the world’s peoples was and is evil. I can see people arguing that free energy would result in some kind of global slavery (or strip-mining the planet, or even more destructive wars), but I think that the opposite will happen, which is why free energy has been suppressed like it has been. Godzilla knows full well that free energy means the end of his reign. As a coda to my energy threshold posts, peoples bumped up against the energy thresholds of their epochs, and there were three general outcomes. Take Australia. Once the easy meat was gone, but the kangaroo could not be hunted to extinction, big game hunting remained the dominant form of production, and they never developed plant domestication, and stayed in “Type A” societies. They stayed at a pretty steady-state limit of what the Second Epoch energy level could sustain. When mammoths were driven to extinction, mammoth villages went with them, so there were also Second Epoch “collapses.” Once some Second Epoch societies broke through to the Third Epoch by domesticating plants, the practice spread, and it led to civilization in almost all instances, especially the four pristine ones. Civilization rode atop intensive farming, mainly of grain, but deforestation and intensive farming of the soils was never sustainable, and all early civilizations collapsed. They bumped up against the limits of Third Epoch societies, and then collapsed back down to subsistence practices, while the hinterlands of the civilizations were abandoned. Those collapses were not pretty, full of warfare, famine, and the like. Epidemic disease probably contributed, at least in the Old World. England bumped up against that Third Epoch energy ceiling, but was also using wind and water power at a level that previous Third Epoch societies did not, and when they turned to coal, especially for smelting iron, the Fourth Epoch was born. How they achieved it, when previous civilizations didn’t, has been an enduring controversy, but there is no doubt that without the power of coal (and later, oil and gas), the Fourth Epoch was not possible. No peoples could industrialize on wood. Best, Wade

Hi: So, here humanity sits today, on the greatest energy threshold of all. Do we get over the hump, or slide all the way back down to the bottom of the hill? While the Industrial Revolution has been the greatest economic boom in the human journey, by far, the fuel for it is quickly running out. When Drake drilled that oil well in 1859, there were a little over two trillion barrels of conventional oil in the ground, and humanity has burned through about half of it so far, and it will all be long gone in this century, at present rates of consumption. The so-called fracking boom in the USA, to make us “energy self-sufficient” – an Orwellian term if there ever was one – is just one more instance of scraping the dregs after the easy energy was plundered. The tight oil, tar sands, and other unconventional sources of oil being mined in North America are of poor energetic quality, with low EROIs. Humanity is an energy windfall opportunist extraordinaire, and plundering one energy source to exhaustion, to move on to the next source, has been the human way ever since the Founder Group left Africa and drove the large animals and other human species to extinction. In the Third Epoch, it was forests and soils, and in the late Third Epoch, a rising Europe caused the human journey’s greatest demographic catastrophes as it plundered entire continents, as well as killing off most of the world’s whales. Not only is the oil quickly running out, but so are the natural gas and even coal and uranium. For somebody like me, what is mind-boggling and very difficult to know, emotionally, is that the means to forever abundant and environmentally harmless energy has existed in Earth for longer than I have been alive, but the global elite have sequestered that technology in history’s greatest cover-up, which is conjoined with the ET cover-up. What my friend saw was likely mostly developed from “captured” ET craft. The USA reached Peak Oil in 1970, and the first oil crisis of 1973-1974 meant the slow decline of the American standard of living ever since. I was raised in a golden age and cannot complain, but watching the needless decline of industrial civilization has not been easy for me, as we invade oil-rich nations and slaughter millions. It is time for some of us to wake up and do something. With this post, I will wind down my energy thresholds thread for now. There is a lot more to say on this vitally important subject, but it is time for other topics and tasks. My biography project on Uncle Ed will last for months or years more, and if I am lucky, I will make the essay update this year. Best, Wade

Hi: I show in my big essay, regarding the Industrial Revolution, that it did not come from nowhere. New energy technologies appeared with civilization, such as the sailboat. Several millennia later, Greeks invented the watermill and windmill. While Romans used the watermill, its use really took off in medieval Europe, especially during the High Middle Ages. By the time that Christopher Columbus sailed into history, watermills produced the work of many millions of people in Europe and reduced the “need” for slaves. Europe achieved the technical feat of turning the global ocean into a low-energy transportation lane, and thereby conquered Earth. The oceangoing sailing ship was history’s greatest energy technology to its time. England rode that wave to industrialization. England began its path to industrialization in earnest in the mid-1500s, but iron smelting quickly consumed the forests. England soon invaded Ireland, to steal its remaining forests, and soon thereafter, England invaded North America, which had Earth’s greatest intact temperate forests. It was a huge energy windfall, which England exploited to the limits. The natives never stood a chance. Europe’s conquest of Earth is history’s greatest crime. The Western Hemisphere was about 90% depopulated in the first century of the conquest, but the Spaniards were not intentionally genocidal, as they needed slaves to get the work done, although they were profligate in their use of slaves, working them to death in the mines and plantations, and raping the women was the favorite Spanish pastime, which led to the huge mestizo class in Mexico, for instance, which Hitler thought was no way to build an empire. The English, however, coveted the land more than the labor, and exterminating the natives was a goal from the beginning, and carried through to the American expansion, which Hitler used as his model for “settling” Eastern Europe. Early in my days of study, after having my clock cleaned during my first stint with Dennis, I began learning the real story of Columbus’s feat, of how my great nation was really “settled,” and how I lived in an empire that pretended that it wasn’t one, although that pretense has slowly been abandoned. If not for my ride with Dennis, I wonder how much I would have truly understood, or even wanted to know. I can’t overemphasize the value of awakening. The introduction of coal into the English economy allowed it to break through the energy ceiling of Third Epoch economies, which was limited by annual amounts of photosynthesis. Coal was more important for smelting iron than for running machines in the early days of industrialization. Wind and water power were competitive with coal until about 1850, well more than a century into the Industrial Revolution. Other than pumping water out of coal mines, the rise of machines used the power of water before the power of coal, and later, electricity and oil. I have written plenty about the explosion of coal use in England, but the numbers still boggle my mind, and those were just the baby steps of industrialization. In that book I am reading, it makes the explosion in coal use very plain, although it also gives due credit to improving farm productivity. Between 1600 and 1800, English farm productivity more than doubled, as measured by harvest per acre. Between 1520 and 1800, the English population more than tripled. Between 1560 and 1860, English energy use went up by a factor of five, per capita, and nearly 30 times on a total basis, and the rise in energy use per capita, which defines peoples’ standards of living, was more than 100% due to coal. The use of other energies per capita actually declined during that period, and coal provided 92% of England’s energy in 1860. Energy consumption per capita in Italy, which was representative of Europe as a whole, was a fifth of England’s in 1860, or about what England’s was in 1560. England exploded out of the chute via industrialization, leaving the rest of the world far behind, and that is why England, a tiny island nation, built the first global empire. The invasion of North America was a huge energy windfall for England, with its intact forests, and later, its political descendant, the United States, discovered and plundered vast hydrocarbon deposits, and it rode that wave to becoming history’s richest and most powerful nation. It was all about energy and remains so to this day, as the USA inflicts oil-control genocides across the world, overthrows oil-rich governments, etc. But in England, the ability of the ruling class to inflict violence on their subjects was stunted in the aftermath of the English civil wars, and as Uncle Noam has written, it was then that the ruling class decided that in order to maintain control, they had to control what people thought, which began the era of scientific management of the masses’ minds, and the careers of people such as Ed Bernays became possible. Uncle Ed specialized in deconstructing the brainwashing techniques used in the USA. Best, Wade

Hi: The first civilization arose in a familiar venue: an estuary, where freshwater met saltwater, and where both met the shore. There has been controversy for thousands of years on just how and why civilization formed, and there is a recent entrant to the fray who argued that it was all elite coercion. That recent entrant argued that disease depopulated the early civilizations, and that civilization collapse did not mean population collapse. I am pretty dubious of those assertions, the author liberally citing a book that is borderline libelous does not help his case, and the author is an admitted neophyte to the field. However, I am onboard with the idea that the so-called “grain cores” were a mother lode of energy never seen before, and civilizations were built on them, although the potato seems to have been the primary staple of the South American civilizations, although maize was elite food, so the “grain core” idea has merit in South America, too. However, that mother lode of energy never lasted all that long. Deforestation and agriculture, especially plow agriculture, has never been a sustainable basis for civilization, and rising and falling civilizations characterized all places where civilizations appeared. To be sure, agriculture increased Earth’s carrying capacity, for humans at least, by orders of magnitude, and humanity always bred to the limits of the energy regime. In that way, humans were no different from any other organism, always breeding to the limits of the nutrient supply, and energy above all others, as usual. The first exception ever is the Industrial Revolution, with its demographic transition. Humanity’s fertility rate has fallen in half in my lifetime, which is incredible. So, the ephemeral phenomenon of civilization appeared and disappeared over several millennia, as they all bumped into the energy threshold and collapsed. Epidemic disease did play a role, a collapsing civilization did not necessarily mean a collapse of the region’s population, but I think that that was the exception, not the rule. The Nile Valley was the most reliable food producing region on Earth, as the Nile’s annual flood imported silt and washed away the salination. But it also had rising and falling civilizations, based on the grain harvest. Also, where civilizations appeared were generally not where the crops were domesticated. They were imported and had their day in the sun, for a time. The ice age soils of Europe were more resilient than the southern soils of the Fertile Crescent, but civilization is also relatively new in Europe, so it has not had thousands of years of abuse to turn it into a desert, as happened in much of the Fertile Crescent. The book I am currently reading, on the English Industrial Revolution, which was the only pristine instance, is illuminating regarding the early classical economists and the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was happening as they wrote, but none of them understood what was happening. It took another century before people began to understand what had happened. Those economists not only ignored the realities of early “primitive accumulation” (it was coercive theft, as usual), but they did not understand that coal energy had allowed England to break through that energy threshold that had constrained all Third Epoch civilizations to that time. If England had not turned to coal (and a century later, Europe), it would have been just one more collapsed civilization that ran out of energy. My big essay will be my life’s magnum opus, and I will be updating it, like a college textbook, until I no longer am able to, which I hope is at least 30 years away. A one-man show can only do so much, and for years, I have been planning to significantly revise my Industrial Revolution chapters. There will be more on the transformative effects of the Industrial Revolution, and a little less on elites. It won’t be a huge change, but it will be significant, and more additive than subtractive. Best, Wade

Hi: Another death, another name revealed. Today, John Tunney died. I had no idea that he was the inspiration for the Robert Redford movie The Candidate. Why I mention Tunney today is that he was the U.S Senator who repeatedly called Mr. Mentor at home, to hold Congressional hearings about getting his engine developed. Time marches on. If I live long enough, I will reveal most of the names in my journey. Best, Wade

Hi Krishna: That was a brilliant little post. Interesting paper. Yes indeed, a defensible food source is a key variable, perhaps the key variable, in simian social organization. I completely agree that the economic conditions are highly important evolutionary constraints (food source, defensible “nest”). My message all along is that key changes in human sociality over the Epochs were largely defined by their economic (energy) conditions. You are pointing out very important dynamics for why human societies are like they are today, and how readily the indoctrination and conditioning process works. Godzilla and friends know these things very well, and their mastery of that “material” is what keeps them on top, if out of the limelight. Bernays and friends only took the game to new, sophisticated levels. They understand the human animal very well, and the GCs and their professional ancestors have played the power behind the throne game as long as there have been thrones. They have honed their game into a science, and that is another reason why I know that I seek needles in haystacks. It is the very rare person who is able to break free of the insidious social conditioning and dare to achieve true sentience. In a world of scarcity and fear, that pressure to conform can be very high. One very interesting aspect of my journey was learning many of these lessons the hard way, to see key understandings confirmed by scientific evidence as I performed my studies. For instance my choir “requirements” were developed over many years of adventures and thousands of interactions with people. Only later, particularly during my anthropology studies, could I see the scientific reasons for why my approach might have a prayer, or maybe even more importantly, why those other approaches never stood a chance, and why free energy newcomers invariably advocate those paths of disaster, rush out to tell their social circles the “good news,” etc. My approach draws on the experiences of many fellow travelers, such as Dennis, Brian, Greer, and so on. I am determined to try out my approach, even if I am a choir of one, but I know that unless I can get those 5,000 or so onto the same page and hitting the notes, my approach will not work. A few people cannot get it done, but efforts like this usually start with one person. It has taken me many years to understand why newcomers almost invariably fly off into the quicksand, dive down the rabbit holes, and so on. It is not easy to keep one’s eye on the ball, even when one wants to. That you are doing the work and coming to these understandings bodes well for what I am attempting. People don’t have to go through the meat grinder to understand. Best, Wade

Hi Krishna: Interesting paper! That paper’s hypothesis conforms to a leading hypothesis for why flowering plants appeared: dinosaur grazing pressure. So, there may have also been butterfly and moth grazing pressure. Plants found a way to create a symbiosis with those grazing animals. Let’s call feudalism a late-Third Epoch institution, although you can see its vestiges today. Yes, violent defense of the so-called in-group is as old as social animals. The USA reveres its military, even though it is the greatest force of evil on Earth today. As a non-American, it has to be dismaying to hear about how our soldiers fight for our freedom. They have never done that. They fight for the freedom of capital and profits, I’ll grant them that. The only possible exception was the War of 1812, when the British burned Washington D.C. America’s “patriotic” culture did not appear in the USA until after the drubbing of that war, and it has been mainly offensive imperial wars since then, although the USA excels in creating false pretenses for its wars, such as goading the other side into “starting it,” as with Mexico and Japan, and now we invade countries and slaughter millions as “humanitarians.” I am waiting for the day when an American pundit, in all seriousness, calls one of our invasions a “humanitarian genocide.” We already had to destroy a town to save it. Today, we “get the tumor” but lose the patient. We will see when your “chimpism” makes it into the lexicon. As the energy surplus of each Epoch rose, societies became more humane, because they could afford to. In that way, it parallels bonobo societies, who could reengineer their societies only when their food supply doubled when gorillas left the area. There is still no record of a violent death in bonobo societies, to my knowledge. Find a human society with that record. I believe pretty strongly that the unprecedented energy surplus of the Fifth Epoch will quickly make violence and warfare obsolete. It will be the golden age of golden ages. Best, Wade

Hi: For both ecosystem and civilization collapses, a common hypothesis is that multi-tiered energy systems are inherently unstable, and once they have gone on long enough, they become vulnerable to collapse, like a house of cards. Plenty of recent analyses discuss how energy consumption has peaked, and that the day of reckoning looms, as we have reached our energy limits. But when new energy sources are tapped (breaking through the threshold), golden ages follow. To return to the idea of new ways, places, and greater intensity, the early Third Epoch was all about that. Once plants became domesticated, the Neolithic Expansion began, where those horticultural practices became the basis of the migration, which drove hunter-gatherer men from the gene pool. It happened in the Bantu Expansion thousands of years later, and also seemed to happen when horticulture spread into North America from Mesoamerica. Hunter-gatherers got pushed to the margins, but they harried sedentary peoples, and after animals were domesticated, pastoral raiders attacked the settled communities, as they sought to benefit from the energy surplus of civilization’s intensely worked grain cores. Sometimes they overthrew the settled peoples’ elites, establishing themselves as the new elites (Genghis Khan, for instance), but more often were able to get “tribute,” which was a form of protection racket. The global economy today is dominated by rackets. While we live in a world of scarcity and fear, these dynamics will continue, if global civilization survives. The only solution that I see is abundance, which will necessarily be based on energy abundance. Then the Fifth Epoch will arrive, as a new energy threshold will be reached and breached. Best, Wade

Hi: The evolutionary path to humanity has marginal fish, marginal monkeys, and marginal chimps as our ancestors, and a group of marginal humans conquered Earth. Those marginal members entered frontiers and flourished. Flourishing, however, was usually at the expense of what already lived there. There are some exceptions, such as the Cambrian Explosion, in which the expansion was to truly virgin environments, or when plants colonized land, but more often, it was into lands that had already been shorn of their inhabitants through a mass extinction, such as the Mammalian Explosion, or the expansion displaced the previous inhabitants, often driving them to extinction, such as when North and South America met. The expansion of humanity meant the extinction of most large land animals, as well as all other human species. There was only so much energy to go around, and dominant humans took all that they could, as they were an irresistible force that had never been seen on Earth before. Achieving new energy thresholds could be highly destructive. Somebody or something usually paid for those golden ages. It took about 50,000 years from humanity’s exit from Africa for the complete conquest of Earth, and in the few places conducive to it, another energy threshold was reached. Where the easy meat had been rendered extinct and the plants conducive to it, women domesticated plants, and the Third Epoch began. The early Third Epoch was another golden age, and for those societies that became matrilineal, they were the human journey’s most peaceful preindustrial cultures. All golden ages ended, however, as they ran out of the easy energy, through resource depletion and competition. While the formation of civilization was peaceful in the pristine instances, that never lasted long. Men rose to dominance again, women’s status universally declined, as they became the broodmares of agrarian economies, mass warfare made its appearance, and all early civilizations collapsed as they burned through their energy supplies, which were arable land and wood. For the next several millennia, human civilizations rose and fell, as they bumped into their energy ceilings, which were determined by how much solar energy could be wrested from the land, in the form of wood and food. Civilization’s energy methods were never sustainable, in a pattern that lasts to this day. But several centuries ago, a marginal island nation, which would have collapsed back into obscurity, as it was completely deforested, turned to coal out of desperation, and the Fourth Epoch was born. It was the greatest energy threshold in the human journey so far. Of course, the Fifth Epoch will dwarf it, but tapping the power of fossil fuels was epochal in scale. The surplus energy of today’s Fourth Epoch in the USA is about 25 times, per capita, of that generated in the late Third Epoch, and because that surplus energy largely runs machines, each American has the equivalent of hundreds of slaves working on his/her behalf, and those machines perform more than 99.9% of all work in the USA. That is why the average American lives a richer life than Earth’s richest human of three centuries ago. Best, Wade

Hi: Before I write the Wikipedia article on Noam and Ed’s Political Economy of Human Rights, I am reading both books cover-to-cover. For books that I have studied, I often made notes, which I then placed in those books. As I began reading those volumes, I found my notes from when I read them 20 years ago. I have written about their initial suppression before. So, this is very familiar territory for me, also because the themes of those books have been repeated by Ed and Noam ever since. This year is the 45th anniversary of their work’s original suppression. Speaking of anniversaries, this year I not only turn 60, but the raid happened 30 years ago on this coming Sunday, which began my life’s worst year (so far! ). How times flies, and how short life is. Best, Wade

Hi: By the end of the Cambrian Explosion, all animal phyla of note were established, and none since then. The Cambrian Explosion for plants was the Devonian, and their phyla are called “divisions.” By the Devonian’s end, the basics of plants were set, with roots and leaves being standard features, and trees existed, with their bark, trunks, and branches, and seed reproduction was established. Cycads and conifers appeared in later divisions, but they were not dramatic changes. The only dramatic change in plants since the Devonian came about 160 million years ago, when flowering plants appeared. Flowering plants were unique in that instead of devising defenses against animals, which plants had done for nearly 300 million years to that time, plants decided to partner with animals to lower their reproductive costs, which are always measured in energy. It was a symbiosis with profound consequences, including the appearance of primates on the evolutionary scene, which led to us. Nectar and fruit were new energy sources, and land animals adapted to them. When new ways or new places were established, there was usually a golden age as the practices spread. Those golden ages often followed mass extinctions, as the ecosystems were wiped clean and a new way flourished. The new way may not have been more energy efficient than the former way, but it was able to survive the mass extinction, which exemplifies the tradeoffs between efficiency and resilience. All life is able to breed with abandon when conditions permit, so golden ages ended with the energy niches filled, and easy living became competitive again. Over the eon of complex life, the general trend has been away from stationary living to mobile living, which was more energy intensive but provided enhanced survival prospects. Archosaurs dominated the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs reigned, and mammals were small, nocturnal burrowers, living in the margins. Without the catastrophe that ended the reign of dinosaurs, mammals would likely still be living in their burrows, if they would have survived at all. But when the slate was cleared of dinosaurs, with the exception of birds, mammals rose to dominance, and the Eocene is perhaps the golden age of life on Earth. Mammals filled the niches that dinosaurs did, but never became quite as large. There was something about dinosaurs that led to their dominance, and it is a lively controversy today. Volcanism, and the resultant addition of carbon dioxide to the carbon cycle, has been declining for at least 100 million years, and beginning about 50 million years ago, a 200 million year hot Earth period ended, and Earth cooled into the ice age that we have today, punctuated with relatively warm periods, such as the early Miocene. The greatest extinction in the Age of Mammals (so far ) happened when Earth cooled off. The greatest extinction ever happened as a 100 million year ice age ended, and the ancestors of mammals were supplanted by the ancestors of dinosaurs. Hot Earth, cold Earth, golden ages, mass extinctions – these are all primarily energy events. Primates evolved to take advantage of the tropical canopy, dominated by flowering plants and their mother lode of energy: fruit. During cold periods, the tropical canopies shrank, and conifer forests have been a cold-climate phenomenon since flowering plants took over warm climates. Africa became a primate refuge during cold periods, and some marginal monkeys left the canopy and became apes, to spread across Eurasia in the Miocene, to once again huddle in Africa when Earth became cool again. Some prosimians, monkeys, and apes ended up in Southeast Asia as their refugias, where they live to this day, but Africa has been the crucible of primate evolution for a very long time. The African great apes were fruit eaters, but as the tropical canopy shrank in the trajectory to our current ice age, marginal gorillas became chimps, forced to the rainforest’s periphery, and marginal chimps left the rainforest for the woodlands and savannas of Africa, learned to walk upright, and the path to humanity was set. Learning to walk upright was an energy breakthrough for the human-line, as it lowered the energetic cost of walking and increased its range. But it would have stopped there, until the human line began fashioning tools with its free hands, in a way that no animal had done before. It was a key energy breakthrough that improved their diets (again, an energy dynamic). A controversy today is how the human line overcame the energy constraints to grow our large brains, which is the key to the human journey. Without that energy breakthrough, humanity would not exist. Best, Wade

Hi: My list of free energy approaches that have not worked and are not likely to was amassed by life-risking, life-wrecking, life-shortening, and life-ending trial-and-error. If free energy (FE) newcomers get past fear and denial responses to the idea of FE, they nearly invariably make all of the newcomers’ mistakes, and rushing to tell their social circles the “good news” is by far the most common, and the best of my students nearly always do that, to come back to me, chastened by the experience. If they are lucky, they did not damage too many relationships, often beyond repair, and careers have ended because of FE proselytizing. The social approach is not going to work for this. I learned this the hard way myself, and then some, getting my family and friends involved with my efforts, particularly my days with Dennis. What I found over the years was that if people reacted in denial and fear, it was often a “better” reaction than if they expressed interest. Those who expressed interest almost always presented their “bright ideas,” which were all variations of the failed approaches, and with my patience issues, it really gets tiring to receive those replies. When I tried to dissuade them from trying to “help” like they wanted to, that was when I received most of the active attacks, as their egos could not handle it. They needed to lash out at somebody, and I represented a challenge to their delusions that came up with their “bright ideas” in the first place. And those closest to me knew where to hit me where it hurt, and weathering the attacks of friends and family were among the worst parts of my journey. Usually, the people who attacked me the hardest were those whom I went out of my way to help, when they asked for it, and their attacks were how they “repaid” me. Today, except for a very small circle around me, the conversation topics are sports and the weather. The vast majority of my social circle, including professional colleagues, has no idea of my “revolutionary” background. It is easier for me that way. Best, Wade

Hi: Similar to how extremophiles found a way to live between the hot crust and cool water, and bacterial colonies found that they could make a living on the shore, and how the first ecosystems were near land, the shoreline was where the fish migration to land began (as arthropods did earlier). Once again, there is controversy over whether it was freshwater or ocean shores where that migration began. What they are finding in digs of the late Devonian and early Carboniferous is that estuaries are where the first fish made it onto land, which makes sense, as they allowed easy movement between land and water, and where freshwater met saltwater. And another theme among paleologists is that marginal organisms broke through into the frontier areas, out of necessity, not some sense of adventure. It was likely marginal fish, driven to the margins of marine life, which began exploring the shores. Once they were able to survive on the frontier, brand new energy regimes were possible (new ways and places). Early plants reproduced by spores, and they needed wet environments for that, as their reproduction cycle included the step in which the sperm had to swim to the egg. Similarly, the first fish onto land still reproduced in the water. So, early plants and land vertebrates had to stay in wet environments, which generally meant close to shore. The first forests were rainforests, and ferns and horsetails are survivors of those days. And those swampy rainforests are where amphibians lived in their golden age. Moving to land was a huge energy windfall for plants and animals. Land-based biomass is about 500 times as great as ocean-based biomass, and is mainly contained in forests. The success of the first rainforests ironically brought on their demise. Again, it took fungi about 100 million years to learn how to digest lignin, and for those 100 million years, dead trees just piled up in the swamps and were subducted in the formation of Pangaea, which took so much carbon dioxide out of the air that it brought on an ice age, which destroyed the rainforests. Plants developed seed reproduction in the Devonian, to adapt to dryer conditions, and as usual, it took animals many millions of years later to make similar adaptations, and amniotes appeared, which displaced amphibians as the dominant land animals. Once seed plants and amniotes appeared, land-based ecosystems in dryer environments became possible, and they eventually blanketed the continents, again colonizing a frontier, for a huge energy windfall. This theme is going to keep repeating to today’s human-dominated world, as coming posts will show. Best, Wade

Hi: The first 200 million years or so of the eon of complex life took place in the ocean. Mass extinctions came early and often, and anoxia was likely a cause of most of them. An ice age precipitated the first of the Big Five, and like today, most sea life lived near the continents, in shallow seas, to take advantage of nutrient wash-off from the continents. All organisms die if they lack key nutrients, and energy is the most important of all, as always. If oxygen levels crashed, those “all-in” aerobic respirators had a hard time, often dying off en masse. Nautiloids had a superior breathing system, conjoined with their propulsion system, and they have exploited marginal marine environments for hundreds of millions of years, which is why they still exist. They were early dominant predators, supplanting arthropods, to be supplanted in their turn by fish. Former dominants pushed to the fringes, or coming from the fringes to dominance, is a key theme of the eon of complex life. Nearly 500 million years ago, a seminal event was plants migrating to land. Land was a radically different environment, and plants (algae) had to make many adaptations to live on land. They had to grow roots, develop a polymer, lignin, which allowed them to grow tall, solve desiccation and reproduction problems, protect themselves from sunlight’s ultraviolet radiation, and find a way to survive temperature extremes. About 40 million years behind plants came animals, and arthropods first. They had to solve some of the same problems that plants did, and most animal genera stayed in the ocean, never finding a way to migrate to land. Land was a harsh frontier, but once its vagaries could be mastered, it was the greatest boon of complex life. Land’s biomass dwarf’s the ocean's. Complex life had to find new ways to live in new places, and the energy issue was central, as always. Similar to how oxygenic photosynthesis may have increased the atmosphere’s oxygen levels to multiples of today’s, until life learned to use oxygen in respiration, when forests grew, made possible by lignin, it took 100 million years or so before life figured out a way to digest lignin, with brute force enzymes. In the meantime, those dead trees formed the coal beds that powered the Industrial Revolution. Those anoxic events in the ocean formed the oil deposits that we burn with such abandon today. Best, Wade

Hi: One thing that became particularly clear as I studied for and wrote my big essay were how golden ages and mass extinctions often were related, as golden ages often followed mass extinctions, when previously marginal creatures flourished in the wake of a mass extinction, when their predators or competitors died off in the mass extinction. There is controversy regarding all mass extinctions, especially what caused them. One theme that recurred was whether hostile environments or competition from other species caused the mass extinctions. The Great American Interchange is not controversial, as far as the idea that the more cosmopolitan North American fauna easily outcompeted their isolated South American counterparts, driving them to extinction. When Europe merged with Asia, a similar turnover happened, and that is controversial, as far as whether it was climate change or competition. Similar controversy surrounds the rise of dinosaurs. Many big questions still don’t have definitive answers, if they ever will. The Cambrian Explosion also led to the phenomenon of food chains, which aerobic respiration made possible. Everything in the ocean gets eaten, as energy passes through the marine ecosystems. In the eon of complex life, until the rise of humans, nothing as dramatic as the early energy events happened, such as photosynthesis, aerobic respiration, and the rise of complex cells, but there were still many amazing biological breakthroughs, which were usually energy breakthroughs, and I’ll explore some of those in coming posts, and they were about new ways, new places, and greater intensity. Best, Wade

Hi: On life’s energy game, the breakthroughs were about: New places New ways More intensity New places and new ways were often related. The new place allowed for a new way, or a new way allowed for new places to be exploited. More intensity is another way of saying “more power,” or the rate of energy generation/use per unit of time. New ways led to new places, such as photosynthesis and splitting water to get that electron. And new places led to new ways, such as when plants and animals left the ocean. Switching to oxygen for respiration turbo-charged life, as energy generation leapt up by an order of magnitude and more. The primary nutrient was often energy, but also, energy made nutrients available. DNA and proteins have nitrogen as their key ingredient, but nitrogen is inert, unless it is subjected to very high temperatures (about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit), which lightning strikes achieve. Also, a very energy-intensive enzyme process can combine nitrogen with hydrogen, to produce ammonia. Until an artificial way to “fix” nitrogen was developed a century ago, the lack of fixed nitrogen was a very real limit on human food production. When complex cells were “invented,” with their mitochondrial energy centers, complex life became possible. Life could stay at the threshold for millions and even billions of years, before it was able to make the breakthrough. Complex cells were around for more than a billion years before complex life began evolving. One bacterium is thought to be the ancestor of all life on Earth today. We don’t have organisms (except maybe somatids ) to show us how life looked before then. But since then, many different life forms found something that worked, and the environment was still around, so those extremophiles and bacterial colonies still exist. They found their refugia and still live there. Nothing has improved on cyanobacteria for three billion years or more. Life began eating each other early on, with grazing and predation, and life’s arms race was on. That was largely a zero-sum game, as far as life went. An ice age seems related to the rise of complex life, with the extremes that it produced. The first large organisms were animal-like, but that might have been hard to see at times. Throughout the journey of life on Earth, new ways often came after the old ways died out, and those directly relate to the ideas of speciation and extinction. Speciation is about the new, extinction is the dying out of the old, and mass extinctions “cleared the table” for dramatically different ecosystems to appear. Those old and new ways were always primarily about energy: how to acquire it, how to store it, how to use it. At about 540 million years ago, the game of complex life was suddenly on, in the Cambrian Explosion. Ever since, the game of complex life was always, “survive long enough to reproduce.” Best, Wade

Hi: It is obvious that I am no materialist. I know that the materialistic models of consciousness are false, through my experiences, not study or a received teaching. I am not sure if a mystical awakening is needed for my effort, but materialism is just another false faith. That said, I have no problem with the idea that life on Earth evolved from non-life, at least as we know it. I have seen plenty of “channeled” material that said that it was seeded here, but I take that with a grain of salt. Another hypothesis is that it was seeded here from Martian meteorites, but that hypothesis has that Martian life evolving from non-life on Mars. At this time, I like the idea that life first evolved in geothermal vents, either in the ocean or in freshwater environments. The leading hypotheses make the case for them. It is definitely mind-boggling to consider that life bootstrapped itself, and cellular membranes, something like RNA, and a means of farming energy from chemicals had to be features of early life. Enzymes had to be one of the first inventions of life, which speed up reactions by millions and billions of times. Without enzymes, life as we know it would not exist. We still have bacteria that do it how the earliest bacteria did it, and we call them extremophiles today, as they live in environments that complex life can’t live in. They are extreme, compared to what complex life lives in, in that they are too hot or chemically harsh, but that harshness is what provided the energy gradients that early life was able to farm. I am speculating a little here, but warmer mixes of chemicals have lower thresholds for reaction, and I am pretty sure that those lowered chemical reaction thresholds were vital to life’s first forming. Geothermal vents in the oceans and places such as Yellowstone are hot, but more importantly, vent fresh chemicals with lots of potential energy in them, which is what extremophiles feast on. The first life was chemosynthetic, and was confined to those volcanic vents. Sure, there were plenty of volcanic vents in the Hadean Eon, but as Earth cooled down, those extremophiles had increasingly limited ranges, until one of them harnessed a new energy source: sunlight. Then the range of life greatly expanded, no longer confined to volcanic vents. But photosynthesis, while farming sunlight, also had limitations in what it could do. It needed chemicals that could provide electrons, and it took what it could, but the early electron donors were also relatively scarce, which limited where photosynthesis could be performed. But one day, a bacterium learned a new trick, which was wresting that electron from water. That was one hell of a trick, as water does not give up an electron easily, but getting that electron from water meant that life could once again greatly expand its range. That water-splitting bacterium saved Earth’s ocean and made the past few billion years of life on Earth possible. Without it, Earth would look like Venus and Mars do today. Each one of those innovations by life increased life’s energy consumption by orders of magnitude, in fact, many orders of magnitude in those early days of life on Earth. In my essay update, I will discuss some recent speculations on those early days, and one of them is that when oxygenic photosynthesis appeared, Earth’s oxygen levels might have risen to multiples of today’s, so that the atmosphere might have been 90% or more oxygen, until other life learned how to use oxygen in respiration. I recently presented diagrams of electron transport chains in my fluoride essay update. Oxygen is one of the most electronegative elements, which means that it can provide about the greatest electron “suction” to power the electron transport chain. Complex life might not exist but for the energy that aerobic respiration provides. Life cleared another energy threshold when aerobic respiration was invented, but it could not have been invented until oxygenic photosynthesis provided the oxygen. It seems that complex cells first formed by respiring hydrogen, however. But there is not much hydrogen in the atmosphere or anyplace else, floating around. When Earth’s atmosphere became permanently oxygenated, then new forms of life took advantage of it, and another energy threshold was exceeded. Today, a complex cell burns energy 100,000 times as fast as the Sun produces it, pound-for-pound. That was the result of several energy thresholds being reached, and then life figuring out a way to burst through it. That all happened long before the first fish flopped onto land. Biochemically, the past 600 million years of complex life on Earth have been boring, with virtually all complex life respiring oxygen, splitting water for photosynthesis, and the like. Once life found what worked best, it went all in, but we can still get windows into the past at volcanic vents, a few places where bacterial colonies won’t be eaten, etc. Best, Wade

Hi: Ed’s death set back some of my plans. I’ll finish those big picture posts one day, and I still hope to update my big essay this year, and the next posts will be a preview of part of it. The coming theme is not new, but I will be making it more explicit in my essay update. Suzana’s book touched on the theme, in that the human line had to overcome an energy threshold to grow its big brains, and Suzana came down on the side of the cooking hypothesis to provide that energy boost. The book I am currently reading on the Industrial Revolution explored the same dynamic, in that coal enabled England to overcome the energy threshold that limited Third Epoch societies, and English society burst through into the Fourth. Until England turned to coal, all Third Epoch societies reached the limits of what food and wood could provide, and diminishing returns (and resource depletion) resulted in stagnation and collapse, as those societies ran low on energy. This dynamic of life and societies hitting energy thresholds, to either fall back or burst through them, goes all the way back to the early days of life on Earth, a few posts should make this clear, and I’ll be drawing on some of my reading since my last essay update (nearly three years ago (!), how time flies). Where we are today, in our late-Fourth Epoch, is just another iteration of a very old dynamic. We will either burst through into the Fifth Epoch, or we might slide all the way back to the bottom of the hill. Best, Wade

Hi: I was away for a couple of days. Well, Krishna, chimps invented “institutional” killing. When you state this: “All of them in practice had male domination of human institutions and violence as the core”, you could have well been describing chimp societies. What is an institution, other than people who were more specialized, as they lived off of the energy surplus of the Third Epoch? I just see it as scaled-up “chimpism.” Institutions could as easily follow “bonoboism”, if there was abundance and power-seeking males no longer had anything to grope after. I think that we are describing similar things. I think that the human male has a deep-seated evolutionary predilection to commit violence. This goes back to social animals and simian dimorphism. I’ll buy Boehm’s hypothesis, that male psychopaths have been gradually eliminated from the human genome. We obviously have a ways to go, but in the Fifth Epoch, as you know, psychopaths will not be able to play their games as they do today, and Godzilla is the master of ceremonies. The chimps will no longer have their day in the sun, alas! Well, it seems that the “freeknowledge” moniker is an Internet cliché today. Serg, you could do just one of those a year and contribute significantly to my effort. Welcome to the workaday world. Happy New Year, too. Yes, juggling a job with what I am doing is not easy, but I am not asking anybody to give up their day jobs. Just give me a little surfing time. Not easy to live any Fifth Epoch ideas in the Fourth Epoch. It is the nature of the beast, just like with the other Epochs. You are a young man, and have plenty of time to work on this stuff. You are far better read on the “left” and “radicals” that I am, and have your own notes to contribute. Believe me, you are speaking for many who watch from the shadows. Your big posts in the past were valuable. I’ll take quality over quantity, anytime. Seeing the Left’s limits is good work. Reshuffling the deck of scarcity is not the answer. Yes, indeed, the most sophisticated Third Epoch people could not begin to imagine the Fourth. That is why the Fifth is incomprehensible to almost everybody today. Going to back to my interview with Bill and Kerry, helping make the Fifth Epoch comprehensible is enough for me. The rest is gravy. I don’t need to carry the ball into the end zone. Just getting it a few more inches down the field is plenty. The biggest event in the human journey won’t come easily. Building the choir is going to be the hard part. The rest will be easy. Ah, Star Wars and Star Trek. Plenty has been written before on this. Not sure when I’ll see the newest Star Wars. My wife and I are in season 5 of Voyager. Been at it a few months, with a few more to go. We watched some of it when it was prime time, I watched the whole series about ten years ago via Netflix, and my wife wanted to watch a woman captain for this go-around. Star Trek is definitely the greatest sci-fi franchise ever, IMO, and that it kept reaching high, Fifth Epoch-high, is what made it special. I’m sure I’ll see the new series one day. Yes, that Roads world hit all the notes. Well, Serg, you inspired me to put up my own end-of-year post, coming before 2018 hits Seattle. Best, Wade

Damn, Krishna: You might have a career in comedy. That gave me my laugh of the day. I hope that posterity gives you full credit for “chimpism” to describe our political-economy. But seriously, you are a perceptive young man, and the first and second Epochs were highly chimpish, if, by that term, you mean the psychopathic methods of male chimp rule. You know all too well that when the gorilla competition left, some isolated chimps became bonobos. And the closest that humanity came to the bonobo ideal, at least until the Industrial Revolution, was during the Neolithic, in those societies that became matrilocal. The Third Epoch became chimpish again with the rise of civilization. I am optimistic that the Fifth Epoch means the end of chimpism, in all of its forms. Godzilla is the apotheosis of chimpism, with Trump, Bush, and Bill Clinton only dabblers. Here is another hypothesis on the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Good stuff, and I am really looking forward to updating my big essay, but I need to work on Ed’s legacy, which will likely take the winter to finish, in my “spare” time that I won’t have much of. My annual hurricane begins next week, and won’t stop until mid-May. I can see me plunking along on Ed’s legacy for years. Ed’s output dwarfed Brian O’s. I seem to see your telltale signs on that CRV article. I am ready for the fight, but really, what are they going to object to in my revision? It is just the facts. Next up for me is Noam and Ed’s next joint effort. This is going to be a “passing scene” post. Attached are pictures from this morning. That bobcat was in our backyard, and I am pretty sure that it is the one that I saw in our backyard, also in late December, a few years ago. That bobcat turned and look at me, taking pictures, but kept sauntering along the fence, looking for snacks. That is why our cats don’t go outside. If you think I am energy-centric, look at this one that chalks the Great Depression to an energy crisis, or the collapse of the Soviet Union on one (1, 2). I am not saying that there is nothing to them, but I am far from alone on the energy issue these days. Speaking of collapses, here comes another financial system collapse, but this will be global. One of my favorite analysts called the last two crashes, and the next is coming fast, and expect another collapse. Another of my favorites expressed his outright awe today on the insanity around blockchain technology. What is happening today is far beyond anything that happened during the first Internet mania. Recent events are going into the annals alongside tulips, swampland in Florida, and other manias, but this one might trump them all. A company named “UBI Blockchain Internet” has no revenues, bought a shell company a couple of years ago, and its market cap hit $8 billion a week ago and the founders cashed out. The company was literally nothing but a name, and it made the owners into billionaires. None of the money is even going to go to the company. All that will be left is an empty shell. And in our era of “regulation,” they are going to get away with it. It makes a Vegas casino look like a conservative way to spend your money. But it gets more surreal, to wit (from that article that I linked to above): “There is a gaggle of others with similar trajectories: Beverage-maker Long Island Iced Tea [LTEA] soared 280% within seconds after it announced that it would change its name to Long Blockchain; also Riot Blockchain, Seven Stars Cloud Group, Siebert Financial Corp, among others. They all have minuscule or no revenues, though their combined market capitalization is many billions.” I have never seen anything so insane, and that article finished with, “This phenomenon happens only during the very late stages of a bubble. But going back over the last three bubbles and crashes, to 1987, I have never seen anything this crazy. This is truly awe-inspiring.” Probably time to update my S&L essay for this, as the everything bubble has reached surreal levels. Best, Wade

Hi Krishna: Hunger and Public Action is sitting in view as I write this, on a bookcase across the room. One day… This issue is an important one. I write about the pristine instances that began each Epoch. Studying the pristine instances is highly important, IMO, as it can unearth important principles. I am currently reading Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, which is understandably energy-centric. The non-pristine instances are more about how the pristine instances spread, and those also can highlight important dynamics, and Hunger and Public Action is one of those studies. Literacy was an urban Third Epoch phenomenon, invented as elite accounting. Peasants in the Third Epoch were uniformly illiterate. Only in the Fourth Epoch is literacy universal. So, bringing literacy to the world’s poor is bringing them Fourth Epoch goods as a way to bring them into the Fourth Epoch, or at least its fringes. The means of literacy that those peasants enjoy are all Fourth Epoch and, as I stated before, literacy is one of the easiest deficiencies (at least, from a Fourth Epoch perspective) to address. And yes, as Suzana writes in The Human Advantage, a big brain alone is not enough. Like a muscle, it needs to get used. Yes, get peasants literate, and it increases the potential of what they can do. That could have never happened in a pristine Third Epoch situation, but in the Fourth Epoch, it is relatively inexpensive to provide key Fourth Epoch means of human development to Third Epoch peoples. It is a fast way to put them through the Demographic Transition, to cheaply give them benefits that the first industrializing peoples achieved. That said, without access to Fourth Epoch energy sources, those peasant societies are not going to industrialize. Up here in Seattle, I have heard the funny stories of the problems that Boeing has faced in airplane design. When their planes were sold to underdeveloped nations, the planes often ended up carrying donkeys and chickens, which created design challenges for Boeing. Best, Wade

Hi: As I worked on Ed’s Wikipedia bio, I realized that the only way to do justice to Ed’s work, at least at Wikipedia, is going to be to either make new Wikipedia articles for some of his books or beef up articles that already exist. That is going to be a big job that I won’t finish this year. At this time, there are Wikipedia articles on: Manufacturing Consent The propaganda model The Political Economy of Human Rights Counter-Revolutionary violence Lies of Our Times Which may all be largely “notable” because of Noam’s involvement, but I think that I may be able to add articles on: Corporate Control, Corporate Power Hope and Folly Demonstration Elections The Politics of Genocide Enduring Lies I would like to be able to add articles for: The Real Terror Network Beyond Hypocrisy The Global Media But I might run into notability problems for those. I understand that The Politics of Genocide and Enduring Lies are going to be tough going, and might get erased by the “editors,” but it is worth a try. I’ll go after the less controversial ones, first, but with Ed, that is relative. I can tell what I am going to be plunking along on next year (and maybe even longer). Last night, I already worked on the Counter-Revolutionary violence article. Nobody changed it back yet. While Ed’s bio is truly atrocious, the other articles misrepresent Ed and Noam all the time, by clever omissions, sources that miss the point, etc. This is going to be a long haul. Best, Wade

Hi: I finally put up Ed’s bio draft, here. The next step is getting feedback from Ed’s pals, then making a Wikipedia-sized version of it, then doing battle with Wikipedia’s editors. I hope to have something at Wikipedia within a week. I kind of look forward to it, and kind of don’t. But for Ed, I happily will. More eulogies came in, such as here. Those who knew and worked with Ed stressed his kindness, humility, and generosity. Ed’s giant shoes are now empty, but we will carry on. While working on Ed’s bio, plenty of ideas for posts came up. I’ll never run out of topics to write on. Best, Wade

Hi: I also drafted a section on challenges and defenses to the propaganda model, which I will put in the criticisms chapter. Best, Wade Challenges and defenses of the propaganda model Ever since Manufacturing Consent was published, it has received a wide spectrum of response. Herman and Chomsky’s PM is a hypothesis of how the media operates, not how effective it is. In the conclusion of Manufacturing Consent, the authors wrote: “The system is not all-powerful, however. Government and elite domination of the media have not succeeded in overcoming the Vietnam syndrome and public hostility to direct U.S. involvement in the destabilization and overthrow of foreign governments.” NYT published a review of Manufacturing Consent by Cornell professor Walter LaFeber. LaFeber wrote that the impressive detailed work in Manufacture Consent was weakened by the tendency of the authors to “overstate” their cases, and LaFeber provided examples that he argued contradicted the PM, notably that activists had hampered the Reagan administration’s attempts to support the Nicaraguan Contras. The year after Manufacturing Consent was published, Chomsky addressed critiques of the PM in his Necessary Illusions. Chomsky wrote that the PM held up well to tests of its validity, and noted that paired examples clearly identify the double-standards that the media uses for reporting similar events. Chomsky reiterated the dichotomous treatment of Polish and Central American priest and nun murders, in which the murder of one priest in an enemy regime received far more coverage than a hundred priests and nuns in client regimes. Chomsky replied to LaFeber’s critique by noting that it was one of the few reactions to a PM that was not “invective.” Chomsky replied to LaFeber’s assertion that activist victories contradicted the PM with: “Consider [LaFeber’s] first argument: the model is undermined by the fact that efforts to ‘mobilize bias’ sometimes fail. By the same logic, an account of how Pravda works to ‘mobilize bias’ would be undermined by the existence of dissidents. Plainly, the thesis that Pravda serves as an organ of state propaganda is not disconfirmed by the fact that there are many dissidents in the Soviet Union. Nor would the thesis be confirmed if every word printed by Pravda were accepted uncritically by the entire Soviet population. The thesis says nothing about the degree of success of the propaganda. LaFeber’s first argument is not relevant; it does not address the model we present.” LaFeber’s second and third arguments against Manufacturing Consent fared similarly in Chomsky’s analysis, particularly an instance of reporting that LaFeber argued undermined the PM, when the Reagan administration lied when stating that Soviet MIGs had been delivered to the Nicaraguan government, coinciding with the Nicaraguan election. The MIG lie pushed the Nicaraguan election completely out of media attention. Chomsky replied that it was not an exception at all, but conformed to the PM. Chomsky’s response to LaFeber’s “exception” finished with: “That the media questioned what was openly conceded by the government to be false is not a very persuasive demonstration of their independence from power.” Herman replied that the MIG event “fits our propaganda model to perfection.” Herman and Chomsky noted that LaFeber’s was one of the few critiques of Manufacturing Consent worth replying to, but it contained logical fallacies that invalidated his critique. Chomsky wrote that the PM generated several kinds of predictions, of first, second, and third orders. Chomsky wrote that the first order prediction of the PM was that constructive bloodbaths will be welcomed, benign bloodbaths ignored, and nefarious bloodbaths will be: “…passionately condemned, on the basis of a version of the facts that would merely elicit contempt if applies to a study of alleged abuses of the United States or friendly states. We presented a series of examples to show that these consequences are exactly what we discover.” The second-order prediction is that within mainstream circles, studies such as Manufacturing Consent will be absent, which was true, and the third-order prediction was how the mainstream would receive the analysis in works such as Manufacturing Consent. Chomsky and Herman’s third-order prediction was that exposure of the facts would elicit no reaction for constructive bloodbaths, “occasionally noted without interest in the case of benign bloodbaths; and it will lead to great indignation in the case of nefarious bloodbaths.” Chomsky’s reasons for the reactions were that for constructive bloodbaths the facts cannot be acknowledged, partly because it would expose the hypocrisy of the denunciations of nefarious bloodbaths, as well as the social role of the “specialized class” of privileged intellectuals, but that the exposure also “interferes with a valuable device for mobilizing the public in fear and hatred of a threatening enemy.” Chomsky wrote that for benign bloodbaths, as long as the United States’s role remained suppressed, then exposure of the facts produced little ideological damage. As can be seen in the following examples, the greatest attacks against Herman and Chomsky conformed to the PM’s third-order prediction, when they exposed the media’s treatment of three nefarious genocides, in Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda.