Wade Frazier

Hi: Oh my, I was on a roll today, as I had the day off from work. To expand on what I have previously written, my original draft of Ed’s bio was intended as more of an introduction of my bio work to Ed, which I hoped would lead to a close collaboration with him on his bio. There was already a decent Wikipedia bio on the propaganda model, so I skimped on the Manufacturing Consent chapter, as I planned to go fairly light on it in Ed’s bio. With Ed’s death, I decided that my Ed bio needs to stand on its own. I’ll still make an edited bio for Wikipedia, but Ed thought that Manufacturing Consent was his most important work, so I needed to do justice to it in my bio, so it is now the largest chapter of Ed’s bio, and I am reproducing the chapter draft in full below. I plan it publish Ed’s bio on my site, as well as Wikipedia, by year-end, and we will see how that ambitious timeframe goes. If I can’t get it done by then, then in January, but I really want to get it done this year. Best, Wade Manufacturing Consent and the propaganda model Herman’s framework of analysis in Corporate Control, Corporate Power, in which competing interests would still unite on the mutually beneficial goal of maximizing corporate profit and power, was a precursor to his and Chomsky’s propaganda model (PM), of which Herman was the primary author. The PM formed the central framework of his next effort with Chomsky, published in 1988 and titled Manufacturing Consent, which is arguably their most famous work, both jointly and individually. The book’s title came from Walter Lippmann’s writings, which noted the “manufacture of [the public’s] consent” for elite activities. Herman and Chomsky’s PM has the following “news filters” that determine the mass media’s news content in the United States. Size, ownership, and profit orientation of the mass media Herman and Chomsky cited the work of James Curran and Jean Seaton on the British working-class press in the first half of the 19th century. British elites tried to destroy the working-class press through punitive laws, which proved ineffective. After the punitive laws were repealed, there was a brief renaissance of the working-class press, but the last half of the 19th century saw the “industrialization of the press,” and the working-class press could not survive in an environment of capitalist industrial practices. In 1837, the cost of establishing a profitable national weekly newspaper was less than a thousand pounds and breakeven sales were a circulation of 6,200. By 1867, the cost of establishing a new London daily was 50,000 pounds, and in the early 20th century, the Sunday Express invested two million pounds to reach a breakeven circulation of 250,000. By the end of the 19th century, the British working-class press was effectively defunct. The authors noted that similar dynamics were at work in the United States in the 19th century, and by 1945, even small-town newspaper publishing was considered big business, with huge capital investment required to start-up a newspaper. Herman and Chomsky analyzed the American media in the late-20th century, particularly 24 of the largest media companies. The authors cited Ben Bagdikian’s statistics that showed that the 29 largest media systems dispensed more than half of the newspapers, books, broadcasting, magazines, and movies in the United States. Herman and Chomsky argued that of great importance was also how those large media organizations provided the national and global news for local media organizations, which usually only provided original news on local events. Herman and Chomsky made the case that those large media conglomerates were all profit-seeking corporations that were owned and controlled by wealthy interests, and that any reporting contrary to the interests of the owners would be distorted by that conflict of interest. In addition, large industrial corporations such as General Electric, which was also a huge military contractor at the time, diversified into owning media companies, which further concentrated the ownership of the media into a few rich hands and created greater conflicts of interest. When Ben Bagdikian first published The Media Monopoly in 1983, he noted that 50 media organizations controlled more than half of the United States’s media content (which shrank to 29 companies in The Media Monopoly’s 1987 edition, which was cited in Manufacturing Consent). Bagdikian observed that each edition of The Media Monopoly was dismissed by media figures as “alarmist,” but that by 2004, the number of media organizations controlling more than half of its output had shrunk to just five companies. Bagdikian contended that such a huge concentration of media companies “constitute a new Private Ministry of Truth and Culture” that Herman and Chomsky wrote: “can set the national agenda.” A few years after Manufacturing Consent was published, the influence of media ownership became starkly evident during the first Gulf War. General Electric (GE), through its subsidiary GE Aerospace, was one of the world’s largest military contractors in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and GE had acquired NBC in 1986. Before 1991, GE had been involved in several instances of censoring NBC’s reporting, such as removing a reference to GE in a Today Show segment on substandard products. During the United States’s Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991, GE’s technologies were part of nearly every weapons system deployed in that war. NBC regularly dispensed with journalism in favor of cheerleading, such as calling Iraq’s Scud missile an “evil weapon” while describing an American missile as “accurate within a few feet” soon after admitting that such an “accurate” missile had just hit Iraqi homes. When the United States invaded Panama in 1989, the Pentagon’s spokesman was Pete Williams, whose prevarications on behalf of the Pentagon became legendary (such as his announcing 457 Iraqi deaths during Operation Desert Storm, when the real number was more like 100,000), and his performance during Operation Desert Storm earned him the appellation as commander of “Operation Desert Muzzle.” Williams’s and the Pentagon’s lies were so influential to NBC anchor Tom Brokaw that he announced that the Patriot anti-missile system “put the Scud in its place.” NBC’s glowing commentary failed to mention that the weapons it praised were built by its owner. In 1993, NBC hired Williams as a news correspondent, a position that he still held in 2017. GE’s influence contributed to a spectacular instance of censorship during 1991’s Gulf War. Jon Alpert has won 15 Emmy awards and has twice been nominated for Academy Awards for his documentary efforts. He was the first American journalist to bring back uncensored footage from Iraq in 1991, which depicted heavy civilization casualties. The footage was presented to NBC, which had commissioned the effort, and although even Tom Brokaw wanted it aired, NBC’s president Michael Gartner not only killed the story but fired Alpert and ensured that he never worked for NBC again. Alpert then took the footage to CBS, where CBS Evening News Executive Director Tom Bettag told Alpert that he and his footage would be on the air with CBS Evening News’s anchor Dan Rather the next evening. However, Bettag was fired that night and Alpert’s footage never aired on an American news show. It was not until 1997 that the American public learned the truth of those highly praised weapons systems, when a report by the General Accounting Office was declassified, which detailed the exaggerations of effectiveness made by the Pentagon and weapons manufacturers regarding the American weapons used in Operation Desert Storm. The advertising license to do business Herman and Chomsky wrote that the Liberal chancellor of the British Exchequer, Sir George Lewis, in the mid-19th century observed that market forces would marginalize dissident opinion by promoting those newspapers “enjoying the preference of the advertising public.” The authors noted that, indeed, the pressure of advertising weakened the working-class press, and that the subsidy of advertising and the affluent audiences that they target, as well as the “downscale” audience that is also attracted, gives media that cater to affluent audiences an economic edge that marginalizes and drives out media that don’t attract or rely on such advertising revenue. Herman and Chomsky cited Curran’s work on the subject, which noted that in its last year of publication, the Daily Herald had nearly twice the circulation of The Times, Financial Times, and the Guardian combined, and was held in higher regard by its readers than the readers of any other newspaper, but because it was not integrated into establishment systems with their generous advertising revenue, it failed, along with other social-democratic newspapers in the 1960s, which contributed to the Labor party’s decline. The authors wrote: “A mass movement without any major media support, and subject to a great deal of active press hostility, suffers a serious disability, and struggles against grave odds.” Herman and Chomsky wrote about how CBS took pride in informing its shareholders how it used a sophisticated approach to attract and retain affluent audiences. Just as the 19th century British press did, CBS was not seeking a wide-audience, but an affluent one that, in the 21st century parlance of the Internet, can be “monetized.” A 21st century Internet adage is that if you use anything for free, the product being sold is you. The authors noted that advertisers, seeking those affluent audiences, exert great influence on media content. Advertisers do not want to help fund unsettling media content, but prefer content that puts viewers in the “buying mood.” Herman and Chomsky provided an example of advertiser clout when, in 1985, public-television station WNET lost its corporate funding from Gulf + Western when it broadcasted a documentary titled “Hungry for Profit,” which depicted predatory corporate practices in the Third World. Even before the documentary aired, WNET’s executives, who anticipated the negative corporate reaction, did their best to “sanitize” the show, but that effort did not prevent Gulf + Western’s pulling its funding while its CEO stated that the show was “virulently anti-business if not anti-American.” The London Economist remarked on the situation: “Most people believe that WNET would not make the same mistake again.” Advertisers can also gang up on publications that step out of line, an example of which was when Mother Jones ran a series of articles in 1980 that discussed the medical findings that smoking was a major cause of cancer and heart disease. The tobacco companies pulled their ads en masse from Mother Jones, and that event helps explain that while Reader’s Digest had been campaigning for generations on the health hazards of smoking, no other mainstream publication dared to, including Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. Eight years after the Mother Jones incident, the world’s largest ad agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, lost its huge RJR Nabisco account when it produced an ad that announced Northwest Airline’s strict no-smoking rule on its flights. RJR Nabisco sold the Winston and Camels cigarette brands. Saatchi and Saatchi learned its lesson, and when it subsequently bought an ad agency that was preparing anti-smoking messages for the Minnesota Department of Health, Saatchi and Saatchi cancelled the deal with the health authorities rather than risk its $35 million fee for promoting Kool cigarettes. The next year, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop angrily denounced magazines and newspapers that were full of ads for cigarettes and refused to publish anything on the dangers of smoking. The media collectively yawned and quickly consigned Koop’s diatribe to media oblivion. Andrew Mills, TV Guide’s assistant managing editor, stated in an interview for Unreliable Sources, “I think it would be naïve to expect publications that take a lot of revenue from the tobacco industry to go after them vigorously.” When Mills made that statement, every issue of TV Guide was filled with cigarette ads, and Mills never heard that TV Guide ever thought of publishing anything critical of cigarettes. Some tobacco-ad-carrying publications went even further, as Playboy magazine ran an essay authored by an attorney that attacked proposals to limit cigarette ads, defended the rights of cigarette companies to promote cigarettes, and the essay specifically defended a Camels ad aimed at teenagers. In that issue of Playboy was a two-page color Camels ad. The conflicts of interest with advertisers could reach extreme levels. For a generation, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) ran tobacco ads. It only stopped running them in 1954 when drug companies that advertised in JAMA, as well as physicians, complained. Drug ads appeared next to cigarette ads in JAMA’s pages, those cigarette ads featured doctors promoting various brands, and the ads often made health claims that made cigarettes appear to be wonder drugs. The event that finally spurred JAMA to cease running cigarette ads was the final ad campaign for cigarettes in its pages, which began when JAMA’s former editor, Morris Fishbein, the face of American medicine for a generation, entered into a lucrative consulting arrangement with Lorillard, the maker of Kent cigarettes, to structure research that “proved” the superior properties of Kent’s new Micronite filter, which was made of asbestos. The ad blitz that followed the Micronite filter “research” finally inspired the AMA to stop running cigarette ads and declare that its scientific meetings would ban cigarette exhibits (although the AMA’s headquarters had cigarette vending machines in its lobby until the 1980s). Fishbein worked with Phillip Morris on a similar “research” campaign in the 1930s, for the diethylene glycol “moistener” in its cigarettes, which Phillip Morris’s representatives used for a publicity campaign that it took directly into doctor’s offices and onto JAMA’s pages. It was not until 1950, the year after Fishbein was finally ousted as JAMA’s editor, in the aftermath of a scandal relating to his wiping out an alternative cancer treatment practitioner (after the practitioner refused to sell out to Fishbein and his associates, as they refused to treat the indigent for free, as that practitioner did), that the first study of lung disease and smoking appeared in JAMA’s pages. That study showed that 96.5% of lung cancer patients in examined St. Louis hospitals were smokers. In the increasingly hostile environment for American cigarette companies during the 1980s, the Reagan administration successfully used the threat of trade sanctions to force Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand to open their markets to American tobacco companies. The “free trade” rhetoric behind the Reagan administration’s offensive was reminiscent of the British Opium Wars against China. The tobacco industries in those nations were stagnant before the entry of the American tobacco companies, and their market was primarily comprised of adult men. In the wake of the entry of American tobacco companies, with ad blitzes that specifically targeted women and children, smoking rates in those nations skyrocketed. Such subservience to their advertisers was far from restricted to cigarette ads. At Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, they would give their advertisers advanced notice, including tobacco companies, if an article ran, including plane crashes and studies on alcoholism, that put their advertisers’ products in an unflattering light, so that the advertisers could move their ads accordingly. Also, those publications would produce ads that looked like news, not ads, to readers who were not careful to distinguish ads from “news.” Herman and Chomsky concluded that the “buying mood” imperative of TV advertisers ensures that only bland, lightly entertaining content will be delivered to viewers, as the primary reason for advertising is to disseminate the “selling message.” The sourcing of mass media news Herman and Chomsky wrote, “The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interests.” The authors noted that the media’s needs for a reliable stream of raw material for news, and the need of powerful institutions to shape society to their advantage, form the basis of mutually beneficial arrangements between the media and governmental and corporate institutions, which steadily produce material that is increasingly published by news agencies virtually unaltered, turning the mass media into little more than a conduit of governmental and corporate propaganda. The media dependency on those news sources can be extreme. Herman and Chomsky wrote, “It is very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily news liars, even if they tell whoppers.” Herman and Chomsky presented a survey of the American military that showed that the Pentagon produced 371 magazines in 1971, at a cost of $57 million, which was 16 times larger than the largest American publisher. The authors wrote about Senator J.W. Fulbright’s investigation of the U.S. Air Force in 1968 that yielded the findings that the Air Force had 1,305 full-time public relations employees, and Herman and Chomsky noted that the resources that governmental and corporate institutions devoted to spreading their message are hundreds and even thousands of times greater than those of dissident organizations. Regarding the American government’s public relations efforts, Herman and Chomsky wrote: “It should also be noted that in the case of the largesse of the Pentagon and the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, the subsidy is at the taxpayer’s expense, so that, in effect, the citizenry pays to be propagandized in the interest of powerful groups such as military contractors and other sponsors of state terrorism.” Herman and Chomsky wrote that in 1972, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urging them “to buy the top academic reputations in the country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on campus.” The authors noted that in the 1970s and early 1980s, that buy-an-expert trend began the era of “think tanks” that had the effect of “propagandizing the corporate viewpoint.” Herman and Chomsky provided an analysis of such “experts” on terrorism and defense on the highly regarded MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour for a one-year period in 1985-1986, on the subjects of the so-called Bulgarian Connection to the assassination attempt on John Paul II, the shooting down of Korean airliner KAL 007, and terrorism, defense, and arms control. The majority of guests on the show were current and former officials and conservative think tank “experts.” The year after Manufacturing Consent was published, the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) published a study of 40 months of Nightline shows, which confirmed Herman and Chomsky’s analysis of MacNeil/ Lehrer News Hour, in that the vast majority of American guests on the show were professionals, government officials, or corporate representatives. Only five percent of the guests spoke on behalf of the public interest (peace, environmental, consumer advocates, and so on). Nightline’s most frequent guests were Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, both former U.S. Secretaries of State. Nightline responded to FAIR’s survey and Ted Koppel, the host of Nightline, replied that FAIR’s survey merely reflected Nightline’s shows during the reign of the conservative Reagan administration. FAIR’s director, Jeff Cohen, replied to Koppel’s defense with: “This explanation could have been given uttered by a Soviet TV news programmer – pre-glasnost. American television news is not supposed to be strictly a forum for representatives of the state. FAIR does not criticize Nightline for inviting policy makers to appear on the show, but for its exclusion of forceful American critics of the policy. Critics, and critical sources, are part of a news story.” In 1994, the authors of the Nightline study released by FAIR, David Croteau and William Hoynes, published By Invitation Only: How the Media Limit Political Debate, which presented not only their Nightline research results, but also their analysis of the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, and their results were similar to Herman and Chomsky’s. Their study of several hundred Nightline episodes showed that of Nightline's guests, 82% were male, 89% were white, and 78% were government officials, professionals, and corporate representatives. They also presented the same data taken from The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. Those numbers were even more skewed, at 87% male, 90% white, and 89% government officials, professionals, and corporate representatives. The media themselves also provided their own “experts,” such as Claire Sterling and John Barron, and another class of experts was remarked on by Herman and Chomsky, of “former radicals who have ‘come to see the light.’” Those former “sinners,” whose work was formerly marginalized and ridiculed by the mass media, were suddenly catapulted into the bright lights and became revered “experts.” The authors recalled how Soviet defectors during the McCarthy era vied with each other to provide the most lurid stories and warnings of a coming Soviet invasion. Herman and Chomsky concluded that, “The steady flow of ex-radicals from marginality to media attention shows that we are witnessing a durable method of providing experts who will say what the establishment wants said.” Flak and the enforcers The PM’s first three filters act as powerful coercive controls over what news is published, but sometimes news that does not conform to the dictates of power is produced. Herman and Chomsky wrote about “flak” as a negative reaction directed at media organizations. It can simply be a letter to the editor or phone call to a TV station, but the most influential flak comes from highly organized operations or the powerful, such as a call from the White House to a TV news anchor. The authors emphasized right-wing think tank flak and cited Accuracy in Media (AIM) in particular. AIM is a media watchdog organization founded by Reed Irvine, whose media attacks were frequently published in the media, as he and AIM were given ready access to the media. AIM was one of many corporate-funded organizations that rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, whose general purpose was to produce flak to police an already right-leaning media while using the Orwellian “liberal” epithet to describe the media. Freedom House has had close relations with AIM, and Herman and Chomsky provided an example of Freedom House’s kind of flak when they wrote: “In 1982, when the Reagan administration was having trouble containing media reporting of the systematic killing of civilians by the Salvadoran army, Freedom House came through with a denunciation of the ‘imbalance’ in media reporting from El Salvador.” Herman and Chomsky analyzed one of Freedom House’s most notable publications, Peter Braestrup’s Big Story, which contended that the media helped lose the Vietnam War. The authors wrote that the premise of Big Story was that the media’s function was supposed to be as cheerleaders for all American wars, no matter the merits of American interventions and invasions. In the years before and after Manufacturing Consent was first published, spectacular instances of flak were seen. In 1982, NYT's reporter Ray Bonner accurately reported on the El Mozote massacre, committed by American-trained El Salvadoran forces. About one thousand people were murdered, mainly women and children. That mass murder was committed by Reagan's "fledgling democracy," reporting the truth cost Bonner his job, and AIM led the attack. The alternative media covered the El Mozote and Bonner story extensively in the 1980s, and Bonner was vindicated when the mass grave was discovered. In 1998, a joint project by Time and Cable News Network (CNN) produced a report on Operation Tailwind, which was a secret American operation in Laos in 1970. CNN reporters April Oliver and Jack Smith published their story on the alleged use of Sarin nerve gas by the American military in Operation Tailwind, which was partly mounted to find and kill deserting American soldiers. CNN's Peter Arnett also helped report the story. It was broadcasted on June 7 and June 14, 1998, and Time ran it in its June 15, 1998 edition. The reporters worked on the story for several months and interviewed people involved in the operation, as well as Major General John Singlaub and Admiral Thomas Moorer, who were aware of operations such as Tailwind. CNN was prepared to support its reporters, but did not anticipate the level of flak. AIM went on the attack, but the biggest flak came from the Pentagon and Henry Kissinger. In the flak’s wake, CNN hired two attorneys to critique Oliver and Smith's report, CNN retracted the story, and Oliver and Smith were fired. The establishment press accounts of the Tailwind controversy made it appear as if CNN responsibly retracted a story that its loose cannon reporters snuck through. Whatever inaccuracies there may have been in their story, Oliver and Smith were fired because of whom they offended. Peter Arnett's career with CNN ended in April 1999 because of the issue. He was one of America's finest mainstream reporters, but his continual reporting of the "wrong" story, such as his uncensored reports from Baghdad in 1991, won him the enmity of many powerful people. Reed Irvine publicly called for the firing of those responsible for the Tailwind story and got his wish. Oliver and her colleagues were eventually vindicated. Singlaub sued Oliver to clear his name, sullied in the Tailwind flap. On January 17, 2000, Thomas Moorer, in the presence of Oliver and Singlaub, was deposed as part of the lawsuit. The transcript of that deposition was posted to the Internet, and Moorer confirmed all the essentials of Oliver’s reporting, including: Sarin gas (also known as "BG" and "CBU-15") was stockpiled at the Nakhorn Phanom base in Thailand, where the Tailwind mission was launched; The mission sought American "defectors," and that killing them would have been a mission option; Sarin was regularly used on the secret missions, the pilots knew they carried it and knew how, when, and why to deploy it; Moorer justified its deployment if it would save American lives, and admitted that the Montagnards had gas masks that were too large to fit properly, which allowed the nerve gas to kill them and prompted the USA to begin making smaller gas masks; He believed that Sarin was used on the mission and that it was successful. In essence, Oliver's reporting was accurate. Although the Tailwind flap was huge news when it happened, the revelations of Moorer's testimony failed to receive any mainstream media coverage. Singlaub's lawsuit was quietly settled and Oliver received a substantial settlement from CNN, reputed to be about $1 million, although the nature of such settlements is that Oliver cannot publicly say that she was vindicated, but the silence of Singlaub and others spoke volumes, and Oliver always stood by her story. The careers of Oliver and others were ruined, but not a hint of "sorry" could be heard from Irvine or the others who attacked Oliver and her colleagues for reporting the truth. They merely moved on to their next flak targets. Similarly, reporter Gary Webb ran a series of reports in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 regarding the issue of Contra complicity in the drug trafficking in South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere. The same stories came out during the Iran-Contra scandal, and it put the powerful in a bad light. There was no substantive objection to Webb's powerfully supported story, and the CIA and Justice Department confirmed key elements of it, but nevertheless, Webb’s career ended. Webb committed suicide in 2004, largely because of the financial pressures of his career’s termination over his accurate reporting. Immediately after Oliver and Smith's public professional execution came the story of Mike Gallagher of the Cincinnati Inquirer, who published a series of articles about Chiquita Brand International in May 1998. Chiquita used to be known as United Fruit. The USA overthrew the Guatemalan government in 1954 so that United Fruit could continue to "own" the country. Gallagher reported that what went on in Central America was merely more of the same, and he found himself legally attacked by Chiquita, accusing him of illegally accessing their voicemail system. During American invasions, the flak could become deadly. During the American invasion of Panama, American troops murdered Spanish photojournalist Juantxu Rodríguez for the crime of taking pictures of the invasion. For instance, several Reuters reporters were murdered by the American military, with the first coming during the conquest of Baghdad, when the invading Americans shelled the Palestine Hotel, which was well known to host foreign journalists. It was later revealed to be a potential target before the invasion. Later that year, before the Abu Ghraib prison became a household word in the West, for its tortures and murders of prisoners, a Reuters cameraman was killed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib as he stood outside of its gates, filming. Another Reuters photographer was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib. In 2007, a Reuters photographer and his driver were murdered by an American helicopter crew. The information about those murders was suppressed until footage of them was leaked by Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning and Wikileaks. The killers received no reprimands while Manning went to prison and Wikileaks’s founder, Julian Assange, lives in political asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, under the specter of rendition and prosecution by the United States. Between 2002 and 2017, the United States sank from 17th to 43rd in press freedom, in the annual report by Reporters without Borders. Herman and Chomsky wrote, “News management itself is designed to produce flak.” Anticommunism (or “fear ideology”) as a control mechanism (partly replaced by the “war on terror” after the fall of the Soviet Union) The final news filter presented by Herman and Chomsky was ideological, and when Manufacturing Consent was first published, that ideology in the United States was anticommunism. The authors wrote: “Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the specter haunting property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class positions and superior status.” After the fall of the Soviet Union, Chomsky said that he thought that the final news filter should have been more generalized, to portray a malevolent external power to scare the populace into huddling under the “protection” of the state, as a primary strategy of elite rule is through “induced fear,” and especially in democratic societies. Herman stated near his life’s end that in the first edition of Manufacturing Consent, they should have probably included market ideology as a filter, as the market economy has long been promoted in the American media as an “ideal arrangement of the economic order.” Herman and Chomsky stated that their hypothesis was no “conspiracy theory,” but that market and structural principles were a better explanation of the media’s behavior. A Canadian documentary of Chomsky’s life and work was released in 1992, titled Manufacturing Consent, which briefly featured Herman. It was the most popular documentary in Canadian history to that time, yet it never played on American mainstream television or had a mass theatrical release in the United States, but played at American colleges. After presenting the PM, Herman and Chomsky presented case studies of the PM in action. In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky coined the terms “worthy and unworthy victims” (which Chomsky later stated was Herman’s invention). Worthy victims are victims of official enemies, and unworthy victims are victims of us or our allies and clients. Herman and Chomsky often used pairing analysis, which Herman thought that, along with his structural analysis of the media, was his chief contribution to the field of scholarship. Not that Herman invented paired analysis, but he believed that he and his coauthors’ efforts may have “given them more weight and salience” in subsequent studies. Their paired analysis of worthy and unworthy victims in Manufacturing Consent also became their most famous, in which they compared the media’s coverage of the murder of Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko by the Polish police to the murders of one hundred church workers in Latin America, who were killed by American client regimes. Herman and Chomsky studied the coverage in NYT, Time, Newsweek, and CBS News, which in 2017 are still the most respected media productions in the United States. For the murders of Popieluszko and the Latin American church-workers, including Archbishop Romero and four American churchwomen, the authors adduced the number of articles, their length, whether they were on the front page and in editorials, and in the case of CBS News, how many news segments were on the evening news. The coverage afforded Popieluszko’s murder was far more than the collective coverage of the hundred murders of church-workers in El Salvador and Guatemala, which were American client states when the murders occurred. Herman and Chomsky noted that the coverage of Popieluszko’s murder was “somewhat inflated” because of the coverage of the trial and convictions of the Polish policemen who murdered Popieluszko, while virtually no murders of the hundred church-workers in Latin America were prosecuted. The quantitative aspect of Herman and Chomsky’s analysis was complemented by a qualitative one. The media’s treatment of worthy victims stress their humanity and even saintly qualities, while the media’s treatment of unworthy victims’ suffering is perfunctory if at all, and in the case of the American churchwomen, American Secretary of State Alexander Haig and American ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, went so far as to say that the women deserved it, as they lied about the circumstances of their deaths and their relationship with the “rebels” in El Salvador (those women had none). The media’s reaction to Popieluszko’s murder was to provide great detail on the manner of his death, demands for justice, and the search for responsibility at the top, as the media strongly hinted at Soviet involvement. For Archbishop Romero’s and the 99 other church-workers’ murders, including the American women, the coverage was muted, if any, and only rarely was there even an attempt to investigate or prosecute, or any interest shown by the media in knowing who might have been responsible for the murders. When four El Salvadoran National Guardsmen were eventually prosecuted for the murders of the American women, years later and only because of intense American pressure, the trial officials and American media never even hinted at whose orders they might have been carrying out. In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky argued that those news filters reflected conflicts of interest that biased the news toward serving powerful interests instead of objectively informing the public. Manufacturing Consent presented several other case studies of the news filters in action, including “Legitimizing versus Meaningless Third World Elections in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua,” the “KGB-Bulgarian Plot to Kill the Pope,” and the Indochina wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. As they summarized the American media’s retrospective treatment of the Vietnam War, Herman and Chomsky wrote: "The war was a 'tragic error,' but not 'fundamentally wrong or immoral' (as the overwhelming majority of the American people continue to believe), and surely not criminal aggression - the judgment that would be reached at once on similar evidence if the responsible agent were not the USA, or an ally or client. "Our point is not that the retrospectives fail to draw what seem to us, as to much of the population, the obvious conclusions; the more significant and instructive point is that principled objection to the war as 'fundamentally wrong and immoral,' or as an outright criminal aggression - a war crime - is inexpressible. It is not part of the spectrum of discussion. The background for such a principled critique cannot be developed in the media, and the conclusions cannot be drawn. It is not present even to be refuted. Rather, the idea is unthinkable. "All of this reveals with great clarity how foreign to the mobilized media is a conception of the media as a free system of information and discussion, independent of state authority and elite interests." In 1989, Manufacturing Consent won the National Council of Teachers of English’s George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language (the Orwell Award). The same year, Exxon earned the National Council of Teachers of English’s Doublespeak Award, for its prevarications about its cleanup of the Exxon Valdez’s Alaskan oil spill. Subsequent assessments In 1999, Herman revisited the PM and analyzed the mainstream media and “left” academic critiques, including the criticisms that the PM was a “conspiracy theory,” that it came from Chomsky’s linguistics (when it really came from Herman’s institutional framework of analysis), that it ignored what reporters thought, that it ignored journalistic professionalism and objectivity, that it failed to explain opposition and resistance, and that it was too functionalist and determinist. With his characteristic approach, Herman argued that all such criticisms were invalid. Herman further noted in his decade-later review of the PM that changes in the economy, communications industries, and politics made the PM more relevant than when Manufacturing Consent was first published. Herman noted that with the demise of the Soviet Union, Reagan’s “miracle of the market” had nearly become a subject of religious faith among the American elite and media. Herman provided 1990s examples of the PM in action, such as when the media became cheerleaders for the North American Free Trade Agreement and harshly condemned any dissent to it. Herman also noted how the media treated the chemical industry and its regulation, and its coverage of the single-payer medical insurance issue. Herman argued those examples made the PM perhaps more relevant in 1999 than in 1988, when it was first published. In 2009, Herman and Chomsky participated in interview about the PM, 20 years after it was first published. They noted that the propaganda framework for the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, under plainly false pretenses, was never questioned in the mainstream media. Herman and Chomsky noted that a NYT retrospective in 2008 featured notable “experts” for think-pieces on the global situations that the incoming president would face, and every article assumed that the American invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were “legitimate, even noble.” Herman and Chomsky observed that the media’s treatment of those invasions were just like it treated the American wars in Indochina. At worst, they were “strategic blunders” in their high mission of spreading freedom, and the American media never referred to any of them as aggressions. Herman and Chomsky noted that the effects of four filters had become even more pronounced in the intervening 20 years, while the fifth, anticommunist ideology, had somewhat receded since the demise of the Soviet Union, but that the “‘war on terror’ has provided a useful substitute for the Soviet Menace.” In the last essay that was published in Herman’s lifetime, Herman assessed the PM 30 years after it was first published. Herman noted that the casualty-free Russian annexation of Crimea, after the American-backed coup in Ukraine, was regularly described as an “aggression” in the American media, while the unprovoked and casualty-rich American invasion of Iraq was never described that way. Herman noted a similar double standard of the use “genocide,” such as when it was “lavishly” used to describe the Srebrenica massacre of approximately 500 military-aged men, while the U.S. sponsored sanctions regime against Iraq, which preceded the invasion and claimed the lives of at least a half million children was not only not called “genocide,” but Madeleine Albright said that those deaths were “worth it” on national TV. Herman discussed the same criticisms of the PM that he previously identified, and he noted their superficiality and the critics’ inability to address what the PM really is. Herman noted another criticism, that the PM was not deterministic enough, as if some formula could be used to rank the filters and predict media performance for various situations. Herman wrote that all such criticisms demonstrated that the critics did not understand what the PM is, which is a broad analytic framework. Herman wrote that the biggest change in the media since Manufacturing Consent was published was the growth of the Internet, but that the rise of Google and Facebook, while taking advertising revenues from the traditional media, don’t even produce content, but are in the “spying and selling” business. However, with their control over the “eyeballs” that advertisers seek, Facebook seeks to become a platform for the mainstream media, and may be on its way to controlling online journalism. Herman observed in a late-life interview that the Internet Revolution has actually been regressive, as far as journalism and media freedom went. Dissidents may have the ability to publish like never before, but that does not mean that anybody knows about it or reads it. Herman wrote of the Internet-Age media campaign to justify invading Iraq, and how the lies told before the invasion were lurid and quickly exposed, one after another, with NYT and Washington Post notably swallowing Bush administration disinformation whole, and instead attacked the findings of the United Nations and American inspectors of the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), which clearly demonstrated that Iraq had been completely disarmed, and NYT even published an attack on the most vocal American WMD inspector, Scott Ritter. NYT in particular, and especially its journalist Judith Miller, became conduits for the Bush administration’s disinformation campaign against Iraq. In the wake of no WMD being found after Iraq’s invasion, NYT and Washington Post offered semi-apologies, yet not only were the personnel responsible for publishing the disinformation not fired, but the very same people almost immediately began publishing lurid articles about Iran’s alleged WMD. Herman provided 21st century paired examples to demonstrate that the PM was alive and well. In 2009, Iran and Honduras held elections. Iran’s was contested, while the Honduras election happened soon after a coup that the United States supported, and was another infamous Latin American Demonstration Election, and only two elite coup-supporters were on the ballot. Nevertheless, American newspaper coverage used “fraud” and “rigged” to describe the Iranian elections 2,139 times, versus 28 times for the Honduran elections. One Iranian protestor was shot and killed in a peaceful demonstration in Iran, and one Honduran protestor was killed by the Honduran military two weeks after the Iranian protestor’s death, and his murder was dramatically captured on video. Herman noted the disparity in the American media’s coverage of those two deaths: 736-to-8 in the print media, and 231-to-1 on TV news, in favor of the Iranian protestor’s death, which was nearly the same ratio in Manufacturing Consent regarding Popieluszko’s murder versus the Latin American church-worker murders. Herman concluded with: “The Propaganda Model is as applicable as it was thirty years ago…The Propaganda Model lives on.

Hi: Here is the final filter of Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model, followed by their famous paired example of media coverage of murders, depending on who was performing the murders. Anticommunism (or “fear ideology”) as a control mechanism (partly replaced by the “war on terror” after the fall of the Soviet Union) The final news filter presented by Herman and Chomsky was ideological, and when Manufacturing Consent was first published, that ideology in the United States was anticommunism. The authors wrote: “Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the specter haunting property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class positions and superior status.” After the fall of the Soviet Union, Chomsky said that he thought that the final news filter should have been more generalized, to portray a malevolent external power to scare the populace into huddling under the “protection” of the state, as a primary strategy of elite rule is through “induced fear,” and especially in democratic societies. Chomsky and Herman wrote that since the demise of the Soviet Union, the “‘war on terror’ has provided a useful substitute for the Soviet Menace.” Herman stated near his life’s end that in the first edition of Manufacturing Consent, they should have probably included market ideology as a filter, as the market economy has long been promoted in the American media as an “ideal arrangement of the economic order.” Herman and Chomsky stated that their hypothesis was no “conspiracy theory,” but that market and structural principles were a better explanation of the media’s behavior. A Canadian documentary of Chomsky’s life and work was released in 1992, titled Manufacturing Consent, which briefly featured Herman. It was the most popular documentary in Canadian history to that time, yet it never played on American mainstream television or had a mass theatrical release in the United States, but played at American colleges. After presenting the propaganda model, Herman and Chomsky presented case studies of the propaganda model in action. In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky coined the terms “worthy and unworthy victims” (which Chomsky later stated was Herman’s invention). Worthy victims are victims of official enemies, and unworthy victims are victims of us or our allies and clients. Herman and Chomsky often used pairing analysis, which Herman thought that, with the propaganda model, was his chief contribution to the field of scholarship. Not that Herman invented paired analysis, but he believed that he and his coauthors’ efforts may have “given them more weight and salience” in subsequent studies. Their paired analysis of worthy and unworthy victims in Manufacturing Consent also became their most famous, in which they compared the media’s coverage of the murder of Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko by the Polish police to the murders of one hundred church workers in Latin America, who were killed by American client regimes. Herman and Chomsky studied the coverage in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and CBS News, which in 2017 are still the most respected media productions in the United States. For the murders of Popieluszko and the Latin American church workers, including Archbishop Romero and four American church-women, the authors adduced the number of articles, their length, whether they were on the front page and in editorials, and in the case of CBS news, how many news segments were on the evening news. The coverage afforded Popieluszko’s murder was far more than the collective coverage of the hundred murders of church workers in El Salvador and Guatemala, which were American client states when the murders occurred. Herman and Chomsky noted that the coverage of Popieluszko’s murder was “somewhat inflated” because of the coverage of the trial and convictions of the Polish policemen who murdered Popieluszko, while virtually no murders of the hundred church-workers in Latin America were prosecuted at all. The quantitative aspect of Herman and Chomsky’s analysis was complemented by a qualitative one. The media’s treatment of worthy victims stress their humanity and even saintly qualities, while the media’s treatment of unworthy victims’ suffering is perfunctory if at all, and in the case of the American women, American Secretary of State Alexander Haig and American ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, went so far as to say that the women deserved it, as they lied about the circumstances of their deaths and their relationship with the “rebels” in El Salvador (those women had none). The media’s reaction to Popieluszko’s murder was to provide great detail on the manner of his death, demands for justice, and the search for responsibility at the top, as the media strongly hinted at Soviet involvement. For Archbishop Romero’s and the 99 other church-worker victims’ murders, including the American women, the coverage was muted, if any, and only rarely was there even an attempt to investigate or prosecute, or any interest shown by the media in knowing who might have been responsible for the murders. When four El Salvadoran National Guardsmen were eventually prosecuted for the murders of the American women, years later and only under intense American pressure, the trial officials and American media never even hinted at whose orders they might have been carrying out. Best, Wade

Hi: Here is a rough draft of Ed and Noam’s fourth propaganda model filter Flak and the enforcers The propaganda model’s first three filters act as powerful coercive controls over what news is published, but sometimes news that does not conform to the dictates of power is produced. Herman and Chomsky wrote about “flak” as a negative reaction directed at media organizations. It can simply be a letter to the editor or phone call to a TV station, but the most influential flak comes from highly organized operations or the powerful, such as a call from the White House to a TV news anchor. The authors emphasized right-wing think tank flak and cited Accuracy in Media (AIM) in particular. AIM is a media watch-dog organization founded by Reed Irvine, whose diatribes were frequently published in the media, as he and AIM were given easy access to the media. AIM was one of many corporate-funded organizations that rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, whose general purpose was to produce flak to police an already right-leaning media while using the Orwellian “liberal” epithet to describe the media. Freedom House has had close relations with AIM, and Herman and Chomsky provided an example of Freedom House’s kind of flak when they wrote: “In 1982, when the Reagan administration was having trouble containing media reporting of the systematic killing of civilians by the Salvadoran army, Freedom House came through with a denunciation of the ‘imbalance’ in media reporting from El Salvador.” Herman and Chomsky analyzed one of Freedom House’s most notable publications, Peter Braestrup’s Big Story, which contended that the media helped lose the Vietnam War. The authors wrote that the premise of Big Story was that the media’s function was supposed to be as cheerleaders for all American wars, no matter the merits of American interventions and invasions. In the years before and after Manufacturing Consent was first published, spectacular instances of flak were seen. In 1982, The New York Times's reporter Ray Bonner accurately reported on the El Mozote massacre, committed by American-trained El Salvadoran forces. About one thousand people were murdered, mainly women and children. That mass murder was committed by Reagan's "fledgling democracy," reporting the truth cost Bonner his job, and AIM led the attack. The alternative media covered the El Mozote and Bonner story extensively in the 1980s, and Bonner was vindicated when the mass grave was discovered. In 1998, a joint project by Time and Cable News Network (CNN) produced a report on Operation Tailwind, which was a secret American operation in Laos in 1970. CNN reporters April Oliver and Jack Smith published their story on the alleged use of Sarin nerve gas by the American military in Operation Tailwind, which was partly mounted to find and kill deserting American soldiers. CNN's Peter Arnett also helped report the story. It was broadcasted on June 7 and June 14, 1998, and Time ran it in its June 15, 1998 edition. The reporters worked on the story for several months and interviewed people involved in the operation, as well as Major General John Singlaub and Admiral Thomas Moorer, who were aware of operations such as Tailwind. CNN was prepared to support its reporters, but did not anticipate the level of flak. AIM went on the attack, but the biggest flak came from the Pentagon and Henry Kissinger. In the flak’s wake, CNN hired two attorneys to critique Oliver and Smith's report, CNN retracted the story, and Oliver and Smith were fired. The establishment press accounts of the Tailwind controversy made it appear as if CNN responsibly retracted a story that its loose cannon reporters snuck through. Whatever inaccuracies there may have been in their story, Oliver and Smith were fired because of whom they offended. Peter Arnett's career with CNN ended in April 1999 because of the issue. He was one of America's finest mainstream reporters, but his continual reporting of the "wrong" story, such as his uncensored reports from Baghdad in 1991, won him the enmity of many powerful people. Reed Irvine publicly called for the firing of those responsible for the Tailwind story and got his wish. Oliver and her colleagues were eventually vindicated. Singlaub sued Oliver to clear his name, sullied in the Tailwind flap. On January 17, 2000, Thomas Moorer, in the presence of Oliver and Singlaub, was deposed as part of the lawsuit. The transcript of that deposition was posted to the Internet, and Moorer confirmed all the essentials of Oliver’s reporting, including: Sarin gas (also known as "BG" and "CBU-15") was stockpiled at the Nakhorn Phanom base in Thailand, where the Tailwind mission was launched; The mission sought American "defectors," and that killing them would have been a mission option; Sarin was regularly used on the secret missions, the pilots knew they carried it and knew how, when, and why to deploy it; Moorer justified its deployment if it would save American lives, and admitted that the Montagnards had gas masks that were too large to fit properly, which allowed the nerve gas to kill them and prompted the USA to begin making smaller gas masks; He believed that Sarin was used on the mission and that it was successful. In essence, Oliver's reporting was accurate. Although the Tailwind flap was huge news when it happened, the revelations of Moorer's testimony failed to receive any mainstream media coverage. Singlaub's lawsuit was quietly settled and Oliver received a substantial settlement, reputed to be about $1 million, although the nature of such settlements is that Oliver cannot publicly say that she was vindicated, but the silence of Singlaub and others spoke volumes, and Oliver always stood by her story. The careers of Oliver and others were ruined, but not a hint of "sorry" could be heard from Irvine or the others who attacked Oliver and her colleagues for reporting the truth. They merely moved on to their next flak targets. Similarly, reporter Gary Webb ran a series of reports in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 regarding the issue of Contra complicity in the drug trafficking in South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere. The same stories came out during the Iran-Contra scandal, and it put the powerful in a bad light. There was no substantive objection to Webb's powerfully supported story, and the CIA and Justice Department confirmed key elements of it, but nevertheless, Webb’s career ended. Webb committed suicide in 2004, largely because of the financial pressures of his career’s termination. Immediately after Oliver and Smith's public professional execution came the story of Mike Gallagher of the Cincinnati Inquirer, who published a series of articles about Chiquita Brand International in May 1998. Chiquita used to be known as United Fruit. The USA overthrew the Guatemalan government in 1954 so that United Fruit could continue to "own" the country. Gallagher reported that what went on in Central America was merely more of the same, and he found himself legally attacked by Chiquita, accusing him of illegally accessing their voicemail system. During American invasions, the flak could become deadly. During the American invasion of Panama, American troops murdered Spanish photojournalist Juantxu Rodríguez for the crime of taking pictures of the invasion. Several Reuters reporters, for instance, were murdered by the American military, with the first coming during the conquest of Baghdad, when the invading Americans shelled the Palestine Hotel, which was well known to host foreign journalists. It was later revealed to be a potential target before the invasion. Later that year, before the Abu Ghraib prison became a household word in the West, for its tortures and murders of prisoners, a Reuters cameraman was killed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib as he stood outside of its gates, filming. Another Reuters photographer was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib. In 2007, a Reuters photographer and his driver were murdered by a American helicopter crew. The official story of those murders was suppressed until footage of the murders was leaked by Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning and Wikileaks. The murders received no reprimands while Manning went to prison and Wikileaks’s founder, Julian Assange, lives in asylum in the Ecuadoran embassy in London. Between 2002 and 2017, the United States sank from 17th to 43rd in press freedom, in the annual report by Reporters without Borders. Herman and Chomsky wrote, “News management itself is designed to produce flak.”

Gee, Krishna: When I see a brilliant little post like that, I can see that I am not wasting my time! Yes, what we saw was mostly structural, but also conspiratorial, as in each situation what they did was blatantly illegal and even evil, but they were always able to portray their actions as “protecting the public,” which is the greatest racket Earth, and, of course, the elites largely operated from the shadows, using their lackeys to attack us. In my coming essay update, virtually every chapter is going to be revised, and some will be pretty significant. The First, Second, Third, and Fourth Epochs will get significant overhauls. Why the common people participated in each Epochal Event is a very good question. It looks like the immediate impetus for each one was survival, which led to opportunities scarcely imagined. The benefits of each Epoch over the previous one were obvious, and a reduction in violence was definitely part of it, but each event was also world-changing, bringing things into existence that were not even imaginable in previous Epochs. Literacy was not even a concept in the Second Epoch, nor were crops, metallurgy, civilization, etc. I am doing what I can so that the Fifth Epochal Event is not survival-oriented (which is partly why all previous efforts have failed), although the USA’s first energy crisis is what led my fellow travelers and me into the free energy field. I think that it was the carrot more than the stick which got the common peoples (or common apes, for the First Epoch ) to play along with each Epochal Event, and yes, elites are a passing phase that will disappear in the Fifth Epoch, and they know it, and that understanding is behind the actions of those at those highest levels. It will be Game Over for them, and they know it. For years, I have wanted to do a pretty big overhaul of the Fourth Epoch chapters. The beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England was a seminal event in the human journey, and there was little, if anything, that made it inevitable. It was a confluence of circumstances that led to it. One pal recently gave me an old Scientific American article on coal and the Industrial Revolution, which spurred me to order this book, which surely will make it into my essay update. These kinds of heads up from my pals, and you are a key one, is helping me flesh out my work, to make it more comprehensive and better. The basic thrust will never change: the Epochal potential of free energy (and related sequestered technologies), but I am likely a ways from getting that big essay into the shape that I originally wanted, but what is there today is still pretty close. If I die tomorrow, that essay can stand on its own, but I can hardly wait to work on the next update of it. Lots of good stuff to add. If I had to guess, I am about five years away from getting the big essay into what I will consider world-class shape, although the current version is more than adequate for choir-formation. You are hitting some notes, Krishna, and I appreciate it. Best, Wade

Hi: Before I take a little hike, I want to comment on Ed and Noam’s propaganda model. They never denied that there are “corporate abuses and scandals” (from Ed’s last essay that was published in his lifetime), but that did not invalidate the framework of the propaganda model. The propaganda model works without much elite coordination at the top. But that does not mean that there is not any. I found the same thing in my adventures and in my medical racket studies. Most of the organized suppression is structural, which means that people just pursuing their narrow self-interest do the vast majority of the damage. Doctors and drug company employees who only care about getting rich, prosecutors who don’t care if their targets are innocent or not and will lie their asses off to gain those coveted convictions, are part of the dynamic. Sheriff’s deputies who rob their targets in raids, as standard operating procedure, are also part of the scene. Local energy interests protecting their turf, as they wipe out innovations that can disrupt their markets, including hiring hit men, without any direction or encouragement from the global cartel, is also part of the dynamic. In our adventures, we suffered organized suppression from the local, state, national, and global interests. So, the structural approach does not have to deny elite control, although structuralists are often ideologically opposed to the idea of it. A purely structural, or a purely conspiratorial, view of the issue is going to be lopsided. Both dynamics play their part. That is what comprehensive thinking means. If people understand the primary lesson of my journey, then a lot becomes clearer. People such as Ed, Noam, Ralph, Howard, Mr. Professor, Dennis, Brian, etc., are beacons in the darkness, and why I know that I seek needles in haystacks. Best, Wade

Hi: I have been busy on Ed’s bio, and just read his last published writing while he was alive, on the propaganda model at 30, in Project Censored’s 2018 edition. I have watched about all of Ed’s interviews that I could, and several happened in his home. It looks like Ed’s office was likely not far different from Noam’s, on the messy scale. During my studies over the years, I regularly encountered accounts of meeting renowned scientists and scholars, and their offices could be a maze of stacks of books and other materials, such as fossils. Well, mine is not as bad! I am attaching a picture that I just took of my home office. Those stacks in front of and on my desk are related to Ed’s bio. You can see one stack at the end of my desk. It is one of two (the other is behind it), which are for when I tackle my essay update. I also attached what the floor next my bed regularly looks like. Around every couple of months, I clean it up and reduce the stack to only a few items, but then it immediately begins growing again. I have never injured myself tripping on a stack, etc., so my “system” seems to work. When I wrote my big essay, the process was spending a week or two on a chapter, and I would have a huge stack next to my desk, and I would clear it away for the next chapter. I particularly remember that process when I was working on the journey of life on Earth. To a degree, it is just the nature of the beast. The constant fight against entropy! Best, Wade

Hi: I need to focus on Ed’s bio for the rest of the year, but Krishna’s posts on development and poor nations deserve being addressed. In an era of phony “progressive” and “humanitarian” organizations, Oxfam seemed at times to be better than most, but that may be just another mirage. That quote from Oxfam also seriously understated the situation. The vast majority of development aid to the poor nations was phony from the outset, led by the World Bank, IMF, and the like. When John Perkins came forward, nobody in my circles was surprised in the slightest. The Peace Corps is a neocolonial tool, and if the Peace Corps and missionaries fail to keep those nations enslaved to global capitalism, then it is time for the CIA and the spooks, and then if that fails, send in the marines. I know of no truly “rich philanthropists” active on the planet today. The very term is an oxymoron. It would be a relative pittance to raise human development stats away from the brink that so many nations are on today. I don’t know anybody in my circles at home that thinks that Bill Gates is really some kind of humanitarian. Gates’s promoting an imperial valentine such as The Better Angels of our Nature is typical Gates. Gates is close chums with Paul Kagame, who is probably the greatest mass murderer alive. Those are the kind of “humanitarian” efforts that I am all-too-familiar with. When Dennis was flying high, billionaires would swarm him, and I never heard of one of them parting with a dollar, as they sniffed out opportunities. Greer had similar encounters with those billionaire “philanthropists.” Brian went to his grave looking for rich humanitarians, and never found one. As the Fifth Epoch begins, all problems of poverty and human development will be solved, almost as an afterthought. In that light, it has been surreal to see all progressive organizations that I ever heard of react to the idea of free energy with denial and fear, and even go into active attack, seeing free energy as the enemy. I think that it is just another egocentric reaction, as people carve out their niches and defend them. If poverty, environmental devastation, disease, and the like went away, what would those “humanitarians” and “progressives” do all day? Best, Wade

Hi Krishna: Keep working that muscle! That brain and intelligence work that you cite is the nature/nurture argument for the 21st century. In this world, probably everybody’s IQ is over 200, and I’ll allow that there may have been some genetic (nature) tinkering involved, but done under the framework of love, not fear and greed, as dominates this world, and ours today. For my part, the Free Software Movement already gets credit, thanks to your making me aware of it, no matter how Stallman is still stuck in the religion of his Epoch. The mastery of language was the first human Internet, the city was the second, literacy was the third, close behind the city, and now we have the true Internet. For many years, it has been well known that you can very cheaply bring up the most critical human development stats close to Western levels. Reducing infant mortality, eradicating hunger and its related diseases, raising literacy, and the like can be done globally for a tiny fraction of what the Pentagon spends each year. That is the surreal part that true humanitarians have discussed for at least the past 70 years, and probably far longer. Even Eisenhower remarked on it. But the global rackets have actively prevented it and, of course, Godzilla is the most culpable of all, although we all have played our part. On that brain aspect, I have recently been informed that my Einstein of a father now has dementia. My mother went demented, as her mother did, but they never stimulated their brains. That my father has it too, at only 81, is more incentive than ever to keep my motor going in high gear for the rest of my life. Ed still had it until the very end, at 92, and he is my inspiration on that score. With my father’s coming demise, I am going to be freed to write far more frankly about my journey with Dennis, as my father’s role was greater than I have publicly disclosed so far. We’ll see when I can. Best, Wade

Hi: Here are two other sections on Ed and Noam’s propaganda model. We’ll see if the cigarette vignette makes it into the final version. The advertising license to do business Herman and Chomsky wrote that the Liberal chancellor of the British Exchequer, Sir George Lewis, in the mid-19th century observed that market forces would marginalize dissident opinion by promoting those newspapers “enjoying the preference of the advertising public.” The authors noted that, indeed, the pressure of advertising weakened the working-class press, and that the subsidy of advertising and the affluent audiences that they target, as well as the “downscale” audience that is also attracted, gives media that cater to affluent audiences an economic edge that marginalizes and drives out media that don’t attract or rely on such advertising revenue. Herman and Chomsky cited Curran’s work on the subject, which noted that in its last year of publication, the Daily Herald had nearly twice the circulation of The Times, Financial Times, and the Guardian combined, and was held in far higher regard by its readers, but because it was not integrated into establishment systems with their generous advertising revenue, it failed, along with other social-democratic newspapers in the 1960s, which contributed to the Labor party’s decline. The authors wrote: “A mass movement without any major media support, and subject to a great deal of active press hostility, suffers a serious disability, and struggles against grave odds.” Herman and Chomsky wrote how CBS took pride in informing its shareholders how it used a sophisticated approach to attract and retain affluent audiences. Just as the 19th century British press did, CBS was not seeking a wide-audience, but an affluent one that, in the 21st century parlance of the Internet, can be “monetized.” The authors noted that the advertisers, seeking those affluent audiences, exert great influence on media content. Advertisers do not want to help fund unsettling media content, but prefer content that puts viewers in the “buying mood.” Herman and Chomsky provided an example of advertiser clout when, in 1985, public-television station WNET lost its corporate funding from Gulf + Western when it aired a documentary titled “Hungry for Profit,” which depicted predatory corporate practices in the Third World. Even before the documentary aired, WNET executives, who anticipated the negative corporate reaction, did their best to “sanitize” the show, but that effort did not prevent Gulf + Western’s pulling its funding while its CEO stated that the show was “virulently anti-business if not anti-American.” The London Economist remarked on the situation that “Most people believe that WNET would not make the same mistake again.” Advertisers can also gang up on publications that step out of line, an example of which was when Mother Jones ran a series of articles in 1980 that discussed the medical findings that smoking was a major cause of cancer and heart disease. The tobacco companies pulled their ads en masse from Mother Jones, and that event helps explain that while Reader’s Digest had been campaigning for generations on the health hazards of smoking, no other mainstream publication dared to, including Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. Eight years after the Mother Jones incident, the world’s largest ad agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, lost its huge RJR Nabisco account when it produced an ad that announced Northwest Airline’s strict no-smoking rule on its flights. RJR Nabisco sold the Winston and Camels cigarette brands. Saatchi and Saatchi learned its lesson, and when it subsequently bought an ad agency that was preparing anti-smoking messages for the Minnesota Department of Health, Saatchi and Saatchi cancelled the deal with the health authorities rather than risk its $35 million fee for promoting Kool cigarettes. The next year, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop angrily denounced magazines and newspapers that were full of ads for cigarettes and refused to publish anything on the dangers of smoking. The media collectively yawned and quickly consigned Koop’s diatribe to media oblivion. Andrew Mills, TV Guide’s assistant managing editor, stated in an interview for Unreliable Sources, “I think it would be naïve to expect publications that take a lot of revenue from the tobacco industry to go after them vigorously.” When Mills made that statement, every issue of TV Guide was filled with cigarette ads, and Mills never heard that TV Guide ever thought of publishing anything critical of cigarettes. Some tobacco-ad-carrying publications went even further, as Playboy magazine ran an essay authored by an attorney that attacked proposals to limit cigarette ads, defended the rights of cigarette companies to promote cigarettes, and the essay specifically defended a Camels ad aimed at teenagers. In that issue of Playboy was a two-page color Camels ad. The media’s conflicts of interest with advertisers could reach surreal levels. For a generation, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) ran tobacco ads. It only stopped running them in 1954 when drug companies that advertised in JAMA, as well as physicians, complained. Drug ads appeared next to cigarette ads in JAMA’s pages, those cigarette ads featured doctors promoting various brands, and the ads often made health claims that made cigarettes appear to be wonder drugs. The event that finally spurred JAMA to cease running cigarette ads was the final ad campaign for cigarettes in its pages, which began when JAMA’s former editor, Morris Fishbein, the face of American medicine for a generation, entered into a lucrative consulting arrangement with Lorillard, the maker of Kent cigarettes, to structure research that “proved” the superior properties of Kent’s new Micronite filter, which was made of asbestos. The ad blitz that followed the Micronite filter “research” finally inspired the AMA to stop running cigarette ads and declare that its scientific meetings would ban cigarette exhibits (although the AMA’s headquarters had cigarette vending machines in its lobby until the 1980s). Fishbein worked with Phillip Morris on a similar “research” campaign in the 1930s, for the diethylene glycol “moistener” in its cigarettes, which Phillip Morris’s representatives used for a publicity campaign that it took directly into doctor’s offices and onto JAMA’s pages. It was not until 1950, the year after Fishbein was finally ousted as JAMA’s editor, in the aftermath of a scandal relating to his wiping out an alternative cancer treatment practitioner, that the first study of lung disease and smoking appeared in JAMA’s pages. That study showed that 96.5% of lung cancer patients in St. Louis hospitals were smokers. In the increasingly hostile environment for American cigarette companies during the 1980s, the Reagan administration successfully used the threat of trade sanctions to force Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand to open their markets to American tobacco companies. The “free trade” rhetoric behind the Reagan administration’s offensive was reminiscent of the British Opium Wars against China. The tobacco industries in those nations were moribund before the entry of the American tobacco companies, and their market was primarily comprised of adult men. In the wake of the entry of American tobacco companies, with ad blitzes that specifically targeted women and children, smoking rates in those nations skyrocketed. That groveling before their advertisers was far from restricted to cigarette ads. At Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, they would give their advertisers advanced notice, including tobacco companies, if an article ran, including plane crashes and studies on alcoholism, that put their advertisers’ products in an unflattering light, so that the advertisers could move their ads accordingly. Also, those publications would produce ad copy that looked like news, not an ad, to readers who were not careful to distinguish ads from “news.” Herman and Chomsky concluded that the “buying mood” imperative of TV advertisers ensures that only bland, lightly entertaining content will be delivered to viewers, as the primary reason for advertising is to disseminate the “selling message.” The sourcing of mass media news Herman and Chomsky wrote that “The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interests.” The authors noted that the media’s needs for a reliable stream of raw material for news, and the need of powerful institutions to shape society to their liking, form the basis of symbiotic arrangements between the media and governmental and corporate institutions, which steadily produce material that is increasingly published by news agencies virtually unaltered, turning the mass media into little more than a conduit of governmental and corporate propaganda. The media dependency on those news sources can be extreme. Herman and Chomsky wrote, “It is very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for daily news liars, even if they tell whoppers.” Herman and Chomsky presented a survey of the American military that showed that the Pentagon produced 371 magazines in 1971, at a cost of $57 million, which was 16 times larger than the largest American publisher. The authors wrote about Senator J.W Fulbright’s investigation of the U.S. Air Force in 1968 that yielded the findings that the Air Force had 1,305 full-time public relations employees, and that the resources that governmental and corporate institutions devoted to spreading their message are hundreds and even thousands of times greater than those of dissident organizations. Regarding the American government’s public relations efforts, Herman and Chomsky wrote: “It should also be noted that in the case of the largesse of the Pentagon and the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, the subsidy is at the taxpayer’s expense, so that, in effect, the citizenry pays to be propagandized in the interest of powerful groups such as military contractors and other sponsors of state terrorism.” Herman and Chomsky wrote that in 1972, future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urging them “to buy the top academic reputations in the country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on campus.” The authors noted that in the 1970s and early 1980s, that buy-an-expert trend began the era of “think tanks” that had the effect of “propagandizing the corporate viewpoint.” Herman and Chomsky provided an analysis of such “experts” on terrorism and defense on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour for a one-year period in 1985-1986, on the subjects of the so-called Bulgarian Connection to the assassination attempt on John Paul II, the shooting down of the Korean airliner KAL 007, and terrorism, defense, and arms control. The majority of guests on the show were current and former officials and conservative think tank “experts.” The year after Manufacturing Consent was published, the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) published a study of 40 months of Nightline shows, which confirmed Herman and Chomsky’s analysis of MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, in that the vast majority of American guests on the show were professionals, government officials, or corporate representatives. Only five percent of the guests spoke on behalf of the public interest (peace, environmental, consumer advocates, and so on). Nightline’s most frequent guests were Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, both former U.S. Secretaries of State. Nightline responded to FAIR’s survey and Ted Koppel, the host of Nightline, replied that FAIR’s survey merely reflected Nightline’s shows during the reign of the conservative Reagan administration. FAIR’s director, Jeff Cohen, replied to Koppel’s defense with: “This explanation could have been given uttered by a Soviet TV news programmer – pre-glasnost. American television news is not supposed to be strictly a forum for representatives of the state. FAIR does not criticize Nightline for inviting policy makers to appear on the show, but for its exclusion of forceful American critics of the policy. Critics, and critical sources, are part of a news story.” In 1994, the authors of the study released by FAIR on Nightline, David Croteau and William Hoynes, published By Invitation Only: How the Media Limit Political Debate, which presented not only their Nightline research results, but also their analysis of the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and their results were similar to Herman and Chomsky’s. Their study of several hundred Nightline episodes showed that of Nightline's guests, 82% were male, 89% were white, and 78% were government officials, professionals, and corporate representatives. They also presented the same data taken from The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. Those numbers were even more skewed, at 87% male, 90% white, and 89% government officials, professionals, and corporate representatives. The media themselves also provided their own “experts,” such as Claire Sterling and John Barron, and another class of experts was remarked on by Herman and Chomsky, of “former radicals who have ‘come to see the light.’” Those former “sinners,” whose work was formerly marginalized and ridiculed by the mass media, were suddenly catapulted into the bright lights and became revered “experts.” The authors recalled how Soviet defectors during the McCarthy era vied with each other to provide the most lurid stories and warnings of a coming Soviet invasion. Herman and Chomsky concluded that, “The steady flow of ex-radicals from marginality to media attention shows that we are witnessing a durable method of providing experts who will say what the establishment wants said.” Best, Wade

Hi: Over the next week, I will largely put up sections of Ed’s bio that I am working on. I previously mentioned that what I published last month was only intended as a rough draft, and the Manufacturing Consent chapter was intentionally short, because Wikipedia already had a fairly decent article on Ed and Noam’s propaganda model. I decided to beef up the Manufacturing Consent section to get it to a standalone standard in my bio, although I will likely truncate it in my Wikipedia bio, because of that propaganda model at Wikipedia. What is pretty bizarre is that Ed was the primary author of the propaganda model, which is widely used by media analysts globally, while the Wikipedia article on Ed himself is borderline libelous. So, without further ado, here is my section on Ed and Noam’s first filter of their propaganda model, which is who owns the media. I partly draw on my previous writings on the issue. You can’t see my references in this post, but they will be available when I publish my final bio on Ed. Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model has the following “news filters” that determine the mass media’s news content in the United States. Size, ownership, and profit orientation of the mass media Herman and Chomsky cited the work of James Curran and Jean Seaton on the British working class press in the first half of the 19th century. British elites tried to destroy the working class press through punitive laws, which proved ineffective. After the punitive laws were repealed, there was a brief renaissance of the working class press, but the last half of the 19th century saw the “industrialization of the press,” and the working class press could not keep up with capitalist industrial practices. In 1837, the cost of establishing a profitable national weekly newspaper was less than a thousand pounds and breakeven sales were a circulation of 6,200. By 1867, the cost of establishing a new London daily was 50,000 pounds, and in the early 20th century, the Sunday Express invested two million pounds to reach a breakeven circulation of 250,000. By the end of the 19th century, the British working class press was effectively defunct. The United States never had anything resembling a working class press. Herman and Chomsky analyzed the American media in the late-20th century, particularly 24 of the largest media companies. The authors cited Ben Bagdikian’s statistics that showed that the 29 largest media systems dispensed more than half of the newspapers, books, broadcasting, magazines, and movies in the United States. Herman and Chomsky argued that perhaps more important was how those large media organizations provided the national and global news for local media organizations, which usually only provided original news on local events. Herman and Chomsky made the case that those large media conglomerates were all profit-seeking corporations that were owned and controlled by wealthy interests, and that any reporting contrary to the interests of the owners would be distorted by that conflict of interest. In addition, large industrial corporations such as General Electric, which was also a huge military contractor at the time, diversified into owning media companies, which further concentrated the ownership of the media into a few rich hands and created greater conflicts of interest. When Ben Bagdikian first published The Media Monopoly in 1983, he noted that 50 media organizations controlled more than half of the United States’s media content (which shrank to 29 companies in The Media Monopoly’s 1987 edition, which was cited in Manufacturing Consent). Bagdikian observed that each edition of The Media Monopoly was dismissed by media figures as “alarmist,” but that by 2013, the number of media organizations controlling more than half of its output had shrunk to just five companies. A few years after Manufacturing Consent was published, the influence of media ownership became starkly evident during the first Gulf War. General Electric (GE), through its subsidiary GE Aerospace, was one of the world’s largest military contractors in 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and GE had acquired NBC in 1986. Before 1991, GE had been involved in several instances of censoring NBC’s reporting, such as removing a reference to GE in a Today Show segment on substandard products. During the United States’s Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991, GE’s technologies were part of nearly every weapons system deployed in that war. NBC regularly dispensed with journalism in favor of cheerleading, such as calling Iraq’s Scud missile an “evil weapon” while describing an American missile as “accurate within a few feet” soon after admitting that such an “accurate” missile had just hit Iraqi homes. When the United States invaded Panama in 1989, the Pentagon’s spokesman was Pete Williams, whose prevarications on behalf of the Pentagon became legendary (such as his announcing 457 Iraqi deaths during Operation Desert Storm, when the real number was more like 100,000), and his performance during Operation Desert Storm earned him the appellation as commander of “Operation Desert Muzzle.” Williams’s and the Pentagon’s lies were so influential to NBC anchor Tom Brokaw that he announced that the Patriot anti-missile system “put the Scud in its place.” NBC’s glowing commentary failed to mention that the weapons it praised were built by its owner. In 1993, NBC hired Williams as a news correspondent. GE’s influence led to a spectacular instance of censorship during 1991’s Gulf War. Jon Alpert has won 15 Emmy awards and has twice been nominated for Academy Awards for his documentary efforts. He was the first American journalist to bring back uncensored footage from Iraq in 1991, which depicted heavy civilization casualties. The footage was presented to NBC, which had commissioned the effort, and although even Tom Brokaw wanted it aired, NBC president Michael Gartner not only killed the story but fired Alpert and ensured that he never worked for NBC again. Alpert then took the footage to CBS, where CBS Evening News Executive Director Tom Bettag told Alpert that he and his footage would be on the air with CBS Evening News’s anchor Dan Rather the next evening. However, Bettag was fired that night and Alpert’s footage never aired on an American news show. It was not until 1997 that the American people heard about the truth of those highly praised weapons systems, when a General Accounting Office report was declassified, which detailed the exaggerations of effectiveness made by the Pentagon and weapons manufacturers regarding the American weapons used in Operation Desert Storm. I’ll put up the other sections as I draft them. Best, Wade

Hi: I have been working on Uncle Ed’s big biography lately, and plan to be relatively quiet until I get it done. I want to get my Ed project done this month, including getting a Wikipedia bio published, and then it will be off to battle the hack “editors” at Wikipedia. I have been doing my homework, and Ed wrote about the numerous attacks on Noam over Cambodia and the Faurisson Affair in this book, but it costs over $1,000 today, so I’ll have to do without it. But Ed talked and wrote about the issues enough elsewhere, so I can get my task done well enough. The next steps will have to be taken by a professional biographer. Some of Ed’s pals have offered to help, and we will see how it goes. I’ll leave you with a morsel from my account of Ed’s academic career, which I drafted this morning as an overhaul of this section, as I make my way through his bio. As I have written, Ed and I had some profound professional overlaps that I did not fully realize until recently. The below further reflects those overlaps, and shows how Ed was far from a slouch in his profession. Academic career and writings Herman’s post-doctoral career began at Penn State in 1954. In 1958, he joined Wharton’s finance department to help perform studies of banks and corporate control mechanisms, which Wharton had contracted with various government agencies to study. For the next 15 years, Herman participated in studies of various financial institutions. Herman’s specialty was analyzing the power and control issues in those institutions. In 1962, Herman’s team, led by Wharton professor Irwin Friend, completed the first large-scale study of mutual funds, which was commissioned by the Securities and Exchange Commission and published by the United States Congress. Wharton’s study became a landmark in the field, and one of its key findings was that: “The main problems affecting mutual funds do not seem to relate to the size of the individual funds or companies…The more important current problems appear to be those which involve potential conflicts of interest between fund management and shareowners, the possible absence of arm’s-length bargaining between fund management and investment advisers.” Among the Wharton study’s conclusions was that the performance of mutual fund advisers was no better than that achieved by randomly selecting securities. In the study’s wake, one senator picked a portfolio by throwing darts at a list of stocks, which subsequently performed better than the average common stock mutual fund. In a preview of his political writings and media analysis, Herman publicly defended the study from an attack by an interest-conflicted mutual-fund-related professional, which generally praised the study but challenged the motivation of its authors, including Herman’s. Wharton’s next major study was on savings and loan banks, for which Herman wrote the chapter on conflicts of interest. When the study was published, the savings and loan industry called a press conference to specifically dispute Herman’s chapter, and Herman was particularly proud of receiving that denunciation. Herman then studied bank trust departments and their conflicts of interest. In 1981, Herman published Corporate Control, Corporate Power, which The Twentieth Century Fund sponsored. It was partly an update of A.A. Berle, Jr. and Gardiner C. Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property. In Corporate Control, Corporate Power, Herman analyzed the internal structure of American corporations, their influence over the American economy and polity, and the competing interests within corporations, which were primarily owners, lenders, and managers. Herman wrote that corporate managers had prevailed in those power struggles, and that in 1981, management’s “triumph is virtually complete,” although managerial ascendance did not dim the overriding corporate goal of profit maximization. The primary competing interests within corporations were united on that premise. Herman wrote that expanding government influence in the 1960s and 1970s was resisted by the American business community and that “Big Government” was in the midst of attacks on it. Herman concluded that American corporations were, on average, as immune to outside influence as they were at the turn of the 20th century, as they operated with virtual autonomy, no matter their impact on American society, including environmental harm. Herman wrote that government influence over corporations was “extremely modest,” and that efforts by public interest groups and citizens to make corporations more accountable to American society were “extremely feeble.” Near his life’s end, Herman said that although he sometimes received anonymous and unhappy critiques from members of Wharton’s faculty, many at Wharton thought that his public political writings and media analyses were valuable, and he never had any professional repercussions at Wharton due to his activism or his political writings or media analyses. Herman noted that because he was a “steadily producing professor according to the rules of the game, I was promoted and became a full professor during the Vietnam War years,” and that Wharton’s dean was friendly to Herman. That is it for that section, and I’ll try to make a post or two this week, between stints of writing on Ed. Best, Wade

Hi: While the downsides of civilization were many, there were also numerous attractions, which Scott underplayed in his work to the point where the benefits of civilization were not even evident, as if only elites would want to live there. For people living in the Fourth Epoch, it is very difficult to even imagine lives in the other Epochs. We may be able to get some sense of their material life, social and political organization, and the like, but try to imagine a late-Second Epoch person, living when nomadic life was all that was ever known. No crops, no homes, other than the cave that might be seasonally inhabited for the fortunate few, your only possessions were what you could carry, and you were lucky to live to adulthood. You had language, largely used for gossip, but no Third Epoch features even existed, other than the few bands that had dogs. In the late Second Epoch, you killed members of neighboring bands on sight, except for fertile women, who were always worth stealing. The early Third Epoch saw the rise of the horticultural village, and for the fortunate ones that became matrilocal, life was better than ever before, in the Golden Age of the early Neolithic. But even horticultural villages were rarely sustainable and regularly abandoned, as the wood and soils were depleted. But social organization was still along kinship lines. You knew or were at least familiar with everybody in your society, and while your community was still territorial, it was a pretty gentle territorialism in matrilocal societies, and relatively few people died violently. But tools were still made of stone, bone, and plants, literacy was not even a concept, and the idea of a city, professions, metallurgy, elites, and monumental architecture was completely alien, something never seen before. Hollywood has long portrayed the awe of “hayseeds” when gawking at the wonders of big cities. The first cities had to be places of awe for their visitors. Nothing like them had ever been seen before. They all had monumental architecture to overawe those viewing them, and it had to have worked, or else they would not have been built. Even today, the necropolis at Giza is an awesome sight, even stripped and defaced, the mere skeleton of an ancient marvel that took a century to build. Fourth Epoch peoples might disparage the “marvels” of the first cities, but for their time, they were spectacles and humanity’s greatest achievements. When invading Spaniards approached Tenochtitlan, the sights so overwhelmed them that they thought they were dreaming. And they weren’t all rubes; some had visited Venice and Constantinople. So, imagine what the effect must have been on peoples who had never even seen cities before. Cities were not just places to marvel at, but they were lived in, and never-before-seen social organization accompanied them. Cities are where professions formed, and for the first time ever, people socialized along something other than kinship lines, and professional associations began. It is hard to overstate that effect, of ending kinship as the basis of society. The levels of wealth creation and concentration were also unprecedented, and temples and palaces became regular features of cities from the beginning. Elites and professions appeared with cities, and there were plenty of downsides to cities. Filth and crowding were only part of it, but those led to epidemic diseases that eventually scourged cities. All city-states had their professional armies, and in Otterbein’s hypothesis, the rise of civilization was one of the two paths to war. All early cities had slaves, too. Forced servitude was a standard feature of Third Epoch societies. Slavery began when sedentism did and ended with industrialization. The first written laws largely dealt with slave matters, and closely following the first cities was the first empire. Laying siege to cities was a standard feature of the Third Epoch, and conquering a city and putting the men to death (or becoming crippled slaves, by either blinding them or cutting off feet) and stealing the women were typical outcomes. No city was ever sustainable, either, as they burned through their energy supplies, which in the Third Epoch was comprised of wood and arable soil. Those early cities all eventually collapsed, leaving ruins for scientists to investigate. That dynamic of unsustainability is far from confined to the Third Epoch. No Fourth Epoch city was ever sustainable, either. Fourth Epoch civilizations are burning through their primary energy sources a million times as fast as they were created. With all of the recent ballyhoo about electric cars, windmills, and how the USA was becoming energy self-sufficient, I recently saw a graphic of global energy consumption in 2013. Fossil fuels provided nearly 80% of global energy consumption, nuclear energy about 2%, and “renewable” energy was 19%. About half of the “renewable” 19% was basically firewood (or cow pies ), which is still the primary energy source of the world’s poor nations, still in their Third Epoch, which is more than 80% of humanity. The remainder of “renewable” is more than 3% energy from crops, almost 4% hydroelectric, and wind, solar, geothermal, and ocean energy combined are well short of 1%. All of that hype, and it is still less than 1%. Take away hydroelectric dams and nuclear energy, neither of which is ideal or very sustainable, and about 99% of Fourth Epoch fuels are fossil fuels. The prize hydrocarbon, conventional oil, will be completely burned up in this century, and the others are not far behind. And that is if we don’t have a species-ending catastrophe before we suck out the last dregs. There is no way that Fourth Epoch denizens would want to live in the Third, if they could have understood what it really meant. Today’s average American lives a richer life than Earth’s richest human of three centuries ago, when the Industrial Revolution began. The average Fifth Epoch denizen will live a vastly richer life than Bill Gates does today. But for Second Epoch denizens, the Third Epoch would have been mind-boggling, just as the idea of the Fifth Epoch blows people’s minds today, as nearly everybody reacts in denial or fear. You could not have talked a Second Epoch person into wanting to become a Third Epoch person. It had to be experienced to be understood, just as it is today regarding ideas of the Fifth Epoch. The masses are not going to be talked or enticed into embracing it. Best, Wade

Hi: My big essay attempts to make very clear the profound differences between each Epoch, which why I call them Epochs. The First Epoch was a radical departure from the history of life on Earth, when a big-brained tool-maker appeared on the evolutionary scene and learned to control fire. Nothing remotely like it ever existed before, and the Second Epoch was about their conquest of Earth, as they expanded their numbers by a thousand-fold. Each Epoch would have been incomprehensible to the beings who lived immediately before it. That goes for the First Epoch as much as the coming Fifth, even though we have works of fiction and other accounts to give us hints. The Third Epoch would have been entirely incomprehensible to Second Epoch peoples. The first hint of the coming Third Epoch was likely the domestication of the dog, which may have domesticated themselves. Animals were domesticated around the time that plants were, and humans were also domesticated, in a process that likely began before anything else was domesticated, as psychopathic men were gradually eliminated from the gene pool. The human conscience gradually grew, and each Epoch was markedly more humane than the previous one, as the energy surplus increased. Chimps slaughtered each other with abandon, and once the Golden Age of the Hunter-Gatherer ended, people did the same, although the “Golden Rule” applied to in-group members, but that in-group could shrink to one in hard times, when eating’s one’s children was acceptable practice, and I suppose that the parents sized up each other when the child-food ran out. The out-group was fair game, but men slaughtered each other in the late-Second Epoch at rates slightly less than male chimps slaughtered each other, so you might say that “progress” was made. Bonobos showed how a doubling of their energy supply could allow a society to radically reengineer itself, and bonobo societies are more peaceful than any human society ever was. The early Third Epoch saw a similar reengineering in horticultural societies. It happened where the easy meat had been rendered extinct and some plants were conducive to domestication. In those relatively few places, women began bringing in more calories than the men, and those societies often became matrilocal (which was likely a first in the human line in at least ten million years), related to the increasing status of women, not far removed from the bonobo experience, which broke up the male gangs, and those became the human journey’s most peaceful preindustrial societies. Women don’t have the proclivity to dominance and violence that men do, which is rooted in our evolutionary journeys. When men run the show, it usually becomes greedy and violent, and psychopaths make great politicians and corporate executives. The women who “make it” in those professions often have that psychopathic edge, such as how Hillary joked about murdering a head of state and destroying a nation. Being a psychopath seems to be a prerequisite to becoming the American president, and they are all puppets and know it. The last president who thought that he could make a dent was JFK, and he got taken care of. One of the most compelling hypotheses that I have seen in my studies of those days is that warring societies could not have domesticated plants or mounted the efforts that led to civilization. But once those societies were on the way to forming civilization, they all had similar dynamics, without influencing each other, which supports the idea that humans in similar circumstances will act similarly, kind of like convergent evolution. Otterbein’s and Scott’s work are not that far apart, as far as the formation of civilization went. Once an agricultural surplus was generated and could be used for political purposes, men rose to dominance once again and the establishment of their rule was a brutal process. Women’s status universally declined with the advent of civilization and only rose again when the Fourth Epoch began, which also ended slavery as a hallowed institution. Only after the ruling class violently established their dominance could their rule become more bureaucratic and gentler. However, warring polities became the norm with the rise of civilization, wherever it appeared, as they fought over energy supplies, which at its most essential was the intensely farmed “cores” of civilization, which provided the energy surplus to sustain civilization, as well as the wood of forests. The dynamics of early civilizations were never stable, as they rapidly depleted their energy bases of arable soils and wood, and they all collapsed, to only rise again in the regional vicinity, where the same practices could be repeated for a time, until their inevitable collapse. The Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean’s periphery is the first and best-studied example of those dynamics. It has nearly all been rendered a semi-desert or outright desert today. Best, Wade

Hi: My previous post is an example of what comprehensive thinking is all about. Comprehensive thinking is about combining the detail orientation of the specialist with the pattern recognition and big picture thinking of the generalist. It is not easy, but the potential insights are more than worthwhile to pursue. They could have Epochal significance. The challenge is to learn the details well enough to not overly generalize, and seek the overarching principles at work (if there are any ). It is kind of like unified field thinking. Today, scientists are often trained to think that way, so they don’t get stuck in overspecialization and can see the bigger picture. Sedentism partially preceded the domestication of plants, but not by much. Sedentism was only possible with a stable and adequate energy (AKA food and wood in preindustrial societies) supply. Before the Domestication Revolution, that was possible in only a few places on Earth. Where land met water was always a good place for that, for a few reasons, and some are a water supply and the relative ease of water transportation, but ever since bacterial colonies, where land met water was a key environment, even for the beginning of life on Earth. The shore is where fish learned to walk, and the primary environment by which humanity conquered Earth. Even today, nearly half of humanity lives near the coasts. Ancient shellfish middens (Europe, Florida, California, etc.) are evidence of at least semi-sedentary humans living off of seashore environments for a long time. In the Pacific Northwest, Indians lived in semi-sedentary villages that took advantage of both estuary environments and salmon runs. In California, south of the salmon runs, Indians took advantage of seashore environments and the acorn harvest. One good week of acorn harvesting could feed a family for years, and they stored the acorns in silos. Those were all sustainable situations and led to at least semi-sedentary living, as long as populations were relatively small. Mammoth villages, however, only lasted as long as the mammoths did, as humans quickly drove them to extinction. Acorns and pistachios formed the basis of the culture immediately preceding the first acts of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent, so they also got a taste of semi-sedentary living, and liked it. I doubt that I need to explain to anybody what the benefits of sedentary living are. Even in my industrialized world, those leading nomadic existences are generally marginal people, such as those miserable truck drivers. The sailors that conquered the world on behalf of Europe lived horrific lives, if they survived for long. Around today’s Turkey is where key crops and animals were domesticated, in upland environments. Only thousands of years later did those domesticates form the basis of the “grain cores” of civilization. Without domesticated animals to fertilize the grain cores of the Fertile Crescent, the civilization would not have lasted long. In China, with few domesticates, people fertilized the farms with their night soil practices. The Mississippian culture had neither domesticated animals nor used night soil methods, so their culture did not last long and their first city soon collapsed from environmental exhaustion. Scott’s book makes the case that civilization was an invention of peasant-enslaving elites, who became elites by enslaving people to work the grain cores. There was certainly coercion involved in building civilization, but slavery appeared wherever sedentary living did, which Scott did not deny. His case was that coercion by elites was the sole reason why civilization appeared, which he called the state. I will be studying his referred works before I make my essay update, but the benefits of civilization were also many. The constant influx of peasants into the cities, to sustain their populations, was a feature of all cities until the 20th century. From what I have seen in my studies, the attractions of civilization were not just elite-living or aspiring to be one, or to be the professional class that supported them. The “class-conflict” theories of civilization formation are only one set of theories, and the other were the attractive benefits that civilization conferred. That debate is thousands of years old. Scott comes down on the “class-conflict” side, but it was far more than that. In the past decade, I saw a poll of people in the Seattle area, and the ideal living situation for most people was living in rural environments with urban amenities. I completely understand, and that would be my ideal, too. In the Fifth Epoch, everybody on Earth could enjoy that lifestyle. It is very true that hunter-gatherers in their Golden Age would hardly want to trade their lives for the drudgery of the peasant in the grain cores or becoming a slave, but in order to understand those dynamics, both a bigger and longer-term picture needs to be attained. The Neolithic Expansion was a Golden Age, at least for the farmers, and the hunter-gatherer women ran, not walked, into the arms of those farmers. Whether it was in sub-Saharan Africa, the Fertile Crescent, or today’s American Southwest, lands suitable for farming were there for the taking, and life was easy at first, at least while the forests and soils lasted, and “pests” had yet to adapt to eating those human crops. Scott made the case that “non-state” peoples during the Third Epoch easily moved back and forth between hunting, gathering, herding, and farming, moving from one mode to another as conditions warranted, and their flexibility allowed them to escape the clutches of states for millennia. Well, those people were going to be relatively few. Civilization arose where intense food-production was feasible, which obviously meant far more people. The difference in Earth’s carrying capacity under the hunter-gatherer versus farmer modes of production was a factor of 200. The difference was so dramatic that I call it an Epochal difference, and there was no way that very many people could move between the hunter-gatherer and farmer lifestyles. The numbers just don’t support that idea very well. I will not underplay the coercive aspects of states. They have always been coercive, although the elite reigns over their subjects are far gentler in Fourth Epoch societies versus Third Epoch ones, at least on the surface. That said, plenty of good stuff that Scott amasses in his book will make it into my essay update. There is a lot to write about the Third Epoch, and those chapters of my big essay will be significantly revised in next year’s planned essay update. The basic thrust will not change, but it is going to be fleshed out more. Best, Wade

Hi: During my studies over the years, one dynamic became very fascinating. All life finds its energy niche, where it can survive. Sometimes, life helped build that niche, and some niches have lasted for billions of years. Those niches can give a glimpse into the past. In hydrothermal vents today we can see the most primitive forms of life still at it, called extremophiles today, but they probably represent the earliest life on Earth, and are probably doing it just like they did nearly four billion years ago. When a bacterium learned how to split water for its photosynthetic needs, oxygenic photosynthesis was born, which ultimately saved Earth’s ocean and made land-based life possible. That event likely happened more than three billion years ago. The oldest fossils yet found are of colonies of that bacteria. Those colonies can even be found today, in a few places on Earth too hostile for animals that can eat those colonies. So, in environments too hostile for complex life, we can still find bacteria living like they have for billions of years. The bacteria that learned how to split water also became the energy center for all plants. We all owe our existence to bacteria. There is little reason to believe that cyanobacteria have changed much for billions of years. They found something that worked, keep doing it, and nothing else on Earth does it. Sponges were among the first animals, and they are still at it, with a lifestyle that still works. The direct ancestor of vertebrates may still be around. The coelacanth and nautilus are so-called “living fossils,” as they survived for hundreds of millions of years in deep-water energy niches while all of their cousins died off, leaving them the last leaf on their branch of the tree of life, although coelacanths are our direct ancestors or close cousins to them. After amazingly surviving in their niches for hundreds of millions of years, as evolution passed them by, they are both threatened with extinction by humanity. The horsetail is a living fossil, nearly 400 million years old, and horsetails helped form the first forests. Their large cousins were driven to extinction long ago, as other plants overtook them in the game of evolution, but horsetails thrive today in the niches that resemble what they thrived in so long ago. These relics all provide a window into the past, for scientists to study and amateurs like me to marvel over. I hike past horsetails almost whenever I hike, and they are usually found near ferns, which are nearly as old and can also still live in wet environments. Humans are about to become living fossils, as they drive all of their cousins to extinction. It began when humans conquered Earth, and all great apes today are in danger of becoming extinct, due to humans. While no First Epoch specimens live today, in the historical era, Third Epoch humans encountered Second Epoch humans that lived in their energy niches. Basically, Third Epoch humans drove Second Epoch humans to extinction or the brink of it, and this also goes back to the Neolithic and Bantu expansions and other migrations. Perhaps the most illustrative example is Australia, but all other continents had similar encounters, especially when Europe conquered Earth. One of the more fascinating hypotheses that I encountered in my studies was the idea that plant domestication and state formation could not have happened if the region had warfare. Where humans had not hunted the big game to extinction and hunting was still the dominant mode of production, men still ruled with patrilocal societies, and those were violent societies that warred with their neighbors once the Golden Age of the Hunter Gatherer ended. But where the big game was driven to extinction and the plants conducive to it, women domesticated plants as an adjunct to their gathering duties, and the Third Epoch began. Aboriginal Australians could never hunt the fleet-footed kangaroo to extinction, so hunting remained the dominant form of production for nearly 50,000 years, until an industrializing Britain invaded and quickly brought aboriginal Australians to the brink of extinction. But before they were wiped out, white people got a glimpse into the human past. Those patrilocal aboriginal societies were in constant warfare with each other, and although there were plenty of candidates for domestication in Australia, as with the other continents, Australians never did, as stealing the neighbor’s crops would have been easy for hungry hunters. Aboriginal Australians also had a religion dominated by dancing and singing rituals that could go on all night and their rituals could last for months. With the rise of DNA testing, it has been determined that aboriginal Australians and Negritos are relict populations of the original migration from Africa, and they lived in their energy niches ever since, at least until Europeans invaded. While Australia was relatively isolated, I imagine that they kept out Third Epoch people like the Andamans did, by killing any strange people arriving in boats (which Native Americans didn’t do, which led to their extermination). The !Kung people of Africa are also a relict population of the original humans that conquered Earth, living in their energy niche in the desert (too hostile for Third Epoch energy practices to work), and they have a click language, which is likely how the original human language sounded. Those relict peoples all had strikingly similar religious rituals, which give us a window into the human past. Best, Wade

Hi: It took a few weeks, but I finally received a book with an interview of Ed, and read it last night, along with an interview with Noam in the same volume. That interview is where some of the quotes in Ed’s obits came from, such as this one. While Noam seems to give interviews weekly, not so with Ed. He only gave a handful that I am aware of, and I think that Ed was OK with that, as he wanted his work to speak for itself, and it was never about him. It was about our world and how to make it better. That said, Ed was a man of his Epoch, and his work revolved around the Fourth Epoch’s politics and economics, or, at least, the retail versions of them. No Godzilla and free energy on his radar. My work was a little too radical for him. In fact, I have had to coin a new term for my work, which is “Epochal.” The so-called radicals are not really very radical, operating within the confines of their Epoch, unable to imagine anything beyond it, as all peoples have always done. I am not picking on them. Noam and Ed are examples of what high-integrity scientists and scholars have been like in the Fourth Epoch, if a little blinkered by the paradigms of their Epoch. Now, I will spend the rest of my year’s “spare” time working on Ed’s big bio, fielding feedback from his pals, and then making the abridged Wikipedia version. Next year will be working on my essay update, which is way overdue because I resumed my career and my “spare” time is very limited. I am going on all cylinders and then some, and I don’t see any daylight for another decade, if I am lucky, and then it will be time for my dotage. So, I expect that my forum postings will slow down next year, as they did at times this year, as something has to give. Best, Wade

Hi Krishna: I was just reading this map this morning, which is from the 1930s. Well, the purpose of my big essay is to not just understand human history, but the history of life on Earth. There are some so-called “principles” of history, but they have always ridden on the energy issue. I think that the concept of energy Epochs of the human journey is critical to understanding how human history has unfolded as it has, and what the future may be. Unfortunately, when one society got the upper hand in the energy game, it played it to the hilt on its neighbors. That is really the story of colonialism. A rising Europe turned the global ocean into a low-energy transportation lane and thereby conquered the world, setting off the greatest demographic catastrophes in the human journey so far. Those conquering Europeans were the oceanic equivalent of the Mongol hordes. When higher-energy societies engage lower-energy ones, the lower-energy ones don’t have a chance, and this goes back to the Neolithic Expansion and earlier. Sure, some groups will fare slightly better than others, but it is like studying who became house slaves versus field slaves; they were all still slaves. The so-called post-colonial era of “freedom” has really been anything but that, as the USA took over the colonial mantle from its weakened rivals, with the terror states that it erected. That has really been the primary thrust of Noam’s and Ed’s work over the years. On India, I think that it was too big and powerful of a colony to be subjugated outright forever, similar to China, and the USA did not have nearly the strategic interest in India as it did the oil-rich Middle East or East Asia, and it was never really a threat to go communist. None of William Blum’s work, for instance, mentions any American interventions in India, while the USA intervened everywhere else in the post-colonial world. This “friendly” relationship is partly reflected in millions of high caste Indians living in North America. You might say that India got “lucky” with the Americans. If they had been sitting on huge oil reserves or went communist, it would have been a different story. India made a certain sense for the British to conquer and subjugate, but the same did not go for the USA. It already had a continent to exploit and slaves to raise and pick the cotton and tobacco, declared all of Latin America to be its imperial hinterland, etc. China and India were going to regain their freedom a lot faster than smaller nations such as Kenya. Hitler thought that England’s rule of India was a poor colonial model. He preferred the Anglo-American experience in North America of exterminating the inhabitants and taking their land, which became his model for Germanic “settling” of Eastern Europe. As long as scarcity and fear are humanity’s operative principles, the future looks grim. Introduce abundant and harmless energy to humanity, and an entirely different game awaits. Best, Wade

Hi Krishna: I don’t need to tell you how India suffered under British rule. I doubt that any of it was random, but the fates of peoples were tied to the dynamics of the time, although fate sure could seem capricious. Some did better than others, for various reasons. The Osage, like all aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere, suffered greatly, if they survived at all, when Europeans invaded. Are you referring to the Osage’s relative affluence because oil was discovered on their “worthless” land? I have taken business trips in Oklahoma, you could not pay me enough to live there, and in the airport at Oklahoma City was a big picture of Osage Indians being driven in their cars by chauffeurs, and the exhibit stated how they got rid of each car when it needed any repairs, as they were so rich. What the exhibit did not mention was that many of those rich Indians were murdered by whites, to get their hands on their wealth. The Cherokee invented an alphabet and had a higher literacy rate than American whites, but that did not stop the Trail of Tears. Over my years of traveling the USA, I have seen many exhibits and memorials about the aboriginal natives, and while some were kind of disgusting, such as the rich Osage exhibit, most of the rest were respectful and told a story that I never got in school. I saw one just last week in Leavenworth, as the exhibits told about what Indian life was like before the whites invaded. In fact, I am going to attach pictures that I took of an exhibit. I recall one that I saw in upstate New York on my Bucket List road trip in 2013. It was about the slaughter and razing of an Indian “village” in the 1700s, although the “village” looked identical to a colonial town of the day, as the Indians had completely adopted European ways and lived in houses with slate roofs, glass windows, etc. But no matter how “civilized” they were, they lived on land that the invaders coveted, so an excuse was made to destroy their town and steal the land, which was standard operating procedure. The killers undoubtedly sold some scalps after it was over. I have found that when you got into the details of the trajectories of any peoples, it was always understandable, in that you could see the dynamics that led to their trajectory. It can often be a mystery, particularly with preliterate or vanished peoples, but as more evidence is adduced, the story becomes clearer. An example is the Classic Maya. When I was born, the fate of the Maya was a complete mystery and the leading interpretation of the evidence, of a peaceful forest people, is now known to be just one more romantic fiction. That said, the rise and fall of the Maya is another fascinating study that is not nearly finished. I was about to write my Third Epoch posts in this little series, so this is an appropriate place for a little vignette on the Maya. To me, the Mayan trajectory was kind of a New World parallel to Sumer. Agriculture was not invented in the Yucatan or Mesopotamia, but crops were imported into a seemingly unpromising region and clever water management practices made the land arable. City-states then arose, with the usual trappings of agrarian civilizations, with peasants, elites, soldiers, slaves, a professional priesthood that conferred divine status to the new elites, etc. Alluvial Mesopotamia did not have handy stone, so the monumental architecture was made of earth and wood, and those mounds are excavated and studied to this day, at least until the USA invaded the region to steal the oil. But the agricultural methods were not sustainable. In Sumer, soil salination did them in and siltation clogged the irrigation canals, and in the Yucatan, a 50-year drought finished them off, but their unsustainable practices exacerbated it. As with Sumer, the lowland Mayan civilization collapsed with starvation and endless wars between the city-states, and like Sumer, the place was abandoned by the survivors. In Sumer, the ruins eroded and were buried in the silt of “progress,” but in the Yucatan, the forest reclaimed the land, and the ruins were not rediscovered until whites began exploring them. As with Sumer, when the central core collapsed, the center of Mayan civilization moved to lands that had not yet been depleted, and the northern Yucatan and nearby highlands became the center of Mayan civilization, and the lowlands were permanently abandoned. In Sumer, civilization moved upriver, with later centers such as Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria, and the original cities are buried under silt in a desert today. Best, Wade

Hi: For the rest of the year, I will be working on Ed’s biography, in my “spare” time. What I published the week before he died was only intended as a rough draft, and I expected that when Ed saw what I had done, I could collaborate with him to take it the rest of the way. Ed was kind of an invisible man in his writings, even to the extent of often writing “this author” when referring to himself in his writings. He rarely wrote in the first person, and biographical details were sparse in his writings. I was hoping to get more from Ed after he saw my rough draft. When I did not hear from him for months and he largely stopped publishing anything, I guessed that his health was poor, and I was sorrowfully right. So, I am going to slog on to the finish line without Ed’s input, but Ed looped me into his circle of pals in my last email from him, several have offered to help, and we will see how it goes. It looks like I might have found the source of the “correction” of Ed’s New York Times obit, as FAIR mounted a campaign to get it corrected. FAIR made the same point that I did, that the “having soft-pedaled evidence of genocide” charge was fraudulent in of itself, never mind that they allegedly “soft-pedaled” evidence that did not yet exist, in the New York Times’s original obit. Ed and Noam never remotely did that. Instead, what they did was analyze the media’s performance on reporting bloody events that were very similar, with one key difference: “Was the crime perpetrated by us [the USA, client regimes, or allies] or them [official enemies of the USA]?” Ed and Noam’s work was about exposing the media’s double-standards on reporting such events. What Ed and Noam did do, as scientists, was seek the most reliable sources of information about such events and see how the media handled them. Their focus was on the media’s treatment of the events, not the events themselves. Pretty much without exception, in situations for which “we” committed the murders, if the media even covered the events, the victims were “unworthy,” even if they were American nuns, and actual American-sponsored genocides would receive complete silence in the American media while they happened, such as in East Timor. Arguably even worse, if “we” did it, the perpetrators could often be lionized nearly to the point of sainthood, and Ed contrasted the “good genocidist” Suharto with the “bad genocidist” Pol Pot. If “they” committed the crimes, any rumor would do, and the more lurid, the better. The media treated “their” victims as saints, with even hagiographic coverage. The media even plays up largely or wholly fictitious events, such as the “Racak Massacre” or Iraqi incubator story to justify bombing campaigns, and a massacre of 500 soldiers becomes “genocide” when “they” did it, while our outright genocide of several million people either passes in silence or, incredibly, becomes a heroic deed, a “constructive” genocide. As another example, arguably humanity’s greatest mass murderer in the past generation is lionized in the West as a heroic figure. Ed and Noam did a Q&A back in 2009 on how their propaganda model had aged since Manufacturing Consent was first published. Their work is Orwell for the 21st century, and I have been reading a bit of Noam’s work since Ed’s passing, from the Noam shelf of my library. My Ed project has made my Ed shelf perhaps larger than my Noam shelf, if we leave out a quarter-century of Ed’s Z Magazine articles. I am expecting one heck of a eulogy for Ed in the next Z Magazine, and this was a wonderful remembrance from one of his friends. The best mainstream obituary on Ed that I have seen so far naturally did not come from the American media, but British, as the British media did not get its ox gored as badly by Ed over the years, and The Independent is where Robert Fisk works. Best, Wade

Hi: The Second Epoch began by boat, as the Founder Group ferried across the mouth of the Red Sea. Descendants of the Founder Group also made it to Australia by boat. So-called “archaic” humans and elephants never made it to Australia, being boat-less as they were, as the deep-water gulf between Southeast Asian islands and Australia was too far to swim across. The elephant family was the most successful land mammal ever before the rise of humanity. Where they lived with an evolving humanity, in Africa and Southern Asia, they learned to avoid humans and survive the onslaught, but everyplace else, the arrival of humans meant the extinction of the elephant family, from the “mammoth steppe” of Eurasia to the entire Western Hemisphere, along with almost all of the other large animals. While the large animals lasted, there was a Golden Age of the Hunter Gatherer, at least until the easy meat went extinct. We know that chimps are genocidal, with about half of male chimps dying violently, but when chimps were isolated south of the Congo when gorillas left the area and never returned, during a glacial interval, and the food supply doubled for those chimps, they became more peaceful than any human society ever was, as scientists have yet to record even one violent death among bonobos. Instead, life is one big orgy. It was an economic revolution born of relative abundance that led to female dominance. Kind of like the opposition to the idea of human-induced Global Warming, generously funded by the hydrocarbon interests, there is a cottage industry of scientists and scholars that strenuously disputes the idea that humans had anything to do with the megafauna extinctions. They generally attribute it to climate change, but their arguments don’t withstand even casual scrutiny, and this is a good example of the tunnel vision of specialists, or those with an agenda other than discovering the truth. Humans had the unprecedented means, motive, and opportunity to kill off the world’s easy meat (and no history of conserving their kills), as well as drive all other human groups to extinction. It was very likely not a gentle process, as some scientists hypothesize. IMO, many or most of those “contrarian” scientists are defending either their in-group, humanity, or have some misguided solidarity with the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Western Hemisphere, where the most spectacular extinctions happened. I am highly sympathetic to what happened to the world’s indigenous peoples under the European boot, but there is no sense in denying the obvious, which only leads to a delusional mindset. Our reality may not be pretty, but denying its unsavory aspects sure is no path to enlightenment and righting the swiftly-sinking ship. Today, it is thought that when the easy meat still existed, humans briefly lost their territorial nature, as conflicts were easily solved by moving to the next valley, where more easy meat was there for the killing. But once the easy meat was gone and humans became territorial again, then human-on-human violence escalated, as they fought over their dwindling energy base. It was not as bad as a 50% violent death rate of male chimps, but about a third of hunter-gatherer men of the late Pleistocene died violently. Women became war booty, and the hunter-gatherer goal was exterminating one’s neighbors and taking their territory and women. Strange men in one’s territory were killed on sight with no questions asked, as the assumption was that they were there to steal women. The late-Pleistocene was anything but a Golden Age. But the Second Epoch saw humanity’s population grow by a factor of a thousand, from maybe five thousand people when the Founder Group left Africa and conquered Earth (part of the evidence is a “bottleneck” in human DNA), to about five million when humans began domesticating plants and animals, 10 kya. If you are not indigenous to South-Saharan Africa, you are a descendant of that Founder Group, and all human societies are very similar in how people behave and interact, as they retained the traits of those behaviorally modern humans of 60 kya or so. DNA testing has confirmed the status of relict groups from the original migration, and they all have strikingly similar religious practices, of dancing and singing rituals, which are used to foster in-group cohesion, to prevail against their neighbors in battle. That so-called hunter-gatherer religion was supplanted by the organized religions of the Third Epoch, which arose wherever civilization did, as the professional priesthood stamped it out. In the late Second Epoch, where the easy meat was extinct and the plants conducive to it, women domesticated plants as an adjunct to their gathering duties. Humanity then became sedentary like they never had before, and the agricultural village formed. It was “Neolithic bliss” in the golden age of the early Third Epoch. Those villages often broke a pattern that stretched back to at least gorillas, as many societies became matrilocal (the men left their natal groups to mate), and those were the human journey’s most peaceful preindustrial peoples. The Second Epoch, like the First, took place during an ice age, and the ice age impacts were profound and perhaps even seminal. A cooling and drying Earth drove marginal monkeys from the trees, into becoming apes, drove chimps to the margins of the shrinking rainforest, drove marginal chimps into the woodlands, where they eventually evolved into people, may well have been related to a subsistence crisis that caused the Founder Group to leave Africa, and the vagaries of the Younger Dryas may have spurred the invention of agriculture. Necessity has long been the mother of invention. Best, Wade

Hi: Each Epoch of the human journey has its controversies. The First Epoch has many, including just when the human line began controlling fire, the exact line that was ancestral to today’s humanity, how many relict lines existed and when they went extinct, when Homo sapiens first appeared on the evolutionary scene, when they became behaviorally modern and how, what migrations happened past Africa – who and when – and many other fascinating issues. The so-called Middle Stone Age began about 500 thousand years ago (kya), although most scientists argue that it began less than 300 kya. It happened around the time that Neanderthals split from Homo Heidelbergensis. Homo erectus still walked on Earth back then, as did the “hobbits,” which may have been island-dwarfed australopiths, and if that is the case, the control of fire may be pushed back to Wrangham’s range or the invention of fire quickly spread to all human-line species of the time. I consider it likely that the original human-line migrants past Africa controlled fire. The path to finding out more is the anthropologist’s mantra of “do more digging!” I will follow those issues with interest for as long as I am able. When I make my essay update, and next year is the plan, after I get done with my biography project on Ed, there will be updates on chimps and bonobos. The USA’s political machinations are driving bonobos to the brink of extinction, in standard American genocidal fashion. The study of chimps and bonobos reveals a lot about human nature and the human journey. After a career spent studying them, Frans de Waal puts chimp social intelligence on par with humanity’s. That is consistent with many new findings of scientists, as dates of evolutionary events are almost always pushed back by new evidence. There is recent work that argues that the evolution of Homo sapiens was more like 300 kya instead of the currently accepted 200 kya. This is normal science at work. Darwin argued that the two greatest achievements of humanity were the mastery of language and the control of fire, and the view of scientists has not changed much since then. I mark the beginning of the Second Epoch to when the Founder Group left Africa about 60 kya or so. Once again, it was probably a marginal group facing a subsistence crisis that made that migration. And they made it big. All humans outside of sub-Saharan Africa are direct descendants of that Founder Group. The Founder Group mastered language, had Earth’s most sophisticated toolset, used fire as a key tool, and nothing could stand in their way as they conquered Earth. Next up is the Second Epoch. Best, Wade

Hi: One concept in my big essay that came out of writing it was the idea of energy-driven golden ages, of both life on Earth and in the human journey. I had more than a vague idea about them before I began writing my big essay, but by the end, they became obvious. For non-humans, they arose because some organism learned a new energy trick or inherited an ecosystem free from competition in the wake of a mass extinction, and enjoyed it unhindered until some barrier was reached, such as breeding to ecosystem limits or increased competition. The golden ages never lasted forever, as energetic limits were reached. Human golden ages were very similar, always had to do with tapping a new energy source, and the early days of each golden age were easy living. Humans always blithely blew through that energy source, without any awareness or concern that what they were doing was unsustainable. Richard Heinberg likened humanity to pond algae, which breeds to the limits with a nutrient infusion, to then die off. I see his point. Humanity is egocentric to the point of threatening its self-extinction. Also, those golden ages often were enjoyed by marginal organisms or humans, which is where the important innovations usually hail from. Apes were likely marginal monkeys, forced out of the canopy, and learned to live on the ground. Chimps were likely marginal gorillas, forced to the rainforest’s margins, and human line members were marginal chimps, forced even further away from the rainforest and learned to walk upright. Instead of a marginal existence, their descendants eventually conquered Earth. While fruit is still humanity’s ideal food, moving away from the rainforest meant dietary changes, to roots, more seeds, meat, and eventually cooked food. Fruit never needs to be cooked, as it is designed to be eaten, unlike almost all other foods that people eat. About 80% of what is called nutrition is energy, usually measured in kilocalories. Crafting stone tools was a big step in the human line, and australopiths are the likely inventors. There is controversy over whether Homo habilis was the first member of the genus Homo, and even whether it was an ancestor to humanity at all. But there is no debate over Homo erectus. Homo sapiens definitely arose from Homo erectus, and their members are certainly in the Homo genus. Most of the growth in the human-line’s brain happened during the time of Homo erectus. There is great controversy today on just how humanity garnered the energy to fuel its energy hog of a brain, which uses about 25% of a human body’s energy. The energetic benefits of walking upright, which increased the human line’s range, an increasing toolset, cooking, meat, and shrinking the digestive tract are all hypothesized to have contributed to the human-line’s growing brain. However it happened, the explosive growth of the human line’s brain is unique in the history of brains, and nearly unique in the history of organs. It is likely that Homo erectus invented cooking, although Richard Wrangham thinks that it might have been before then, and some think that cooking was a more recent innovation. I will follow that controversy with interest, but there is no doubt that the control of fire was a critical invention in the human line and led to human dominance, if not humans themselves. To this day, human civilizations are built around the control of fire. Controlled fire in my car’s engine is how I will get to work this morning. Best, Wade

Hi: When the cooling was over, the Eocene ended, paradise was lost, and the Oligocene began, which was a cold time, when the Antarctic ice sheets were developing. Mammals had achieved their maximum size by then, and some plants developed a new form of photosynthesis to cope with declining carbon dioxide levels. Mammals had different digestion strategies, and the big grazers and browsers duplicated guilds that dinosaurs had. Primates first appeared on the evolutionary scene during the last 20 million years of the dinosaurs. Mammals always had relatively large brains, but recent research shows that primates took it further, packing more neurons into their brains than any other mammals. A primate packs in about six times as many neurons per gram of brain tissue as rodents do, which are close cousins that also evolved in canopies. Another principle of evolutionary theory is that biological features are often evolved for one purpose, and then are “drafted” into other functions as opportunities arise. Densely-packed primate brains are energetically expensive to possess, and another principle of evolutionary theory is that nothing gets a free ride. The biological feature is used or lost. “Use it or lose it” is an evolutionary adage. The primate brain is thought to have partly evolved to navigate the canopies, and also to remember were food is. Fruit, the primary simian staple, ripens at different times and places, and larger brains and higher intelligence seems related to those who have to hunt for fruit, from monkeys to chimps. In the Oligocene, monkeys began evolving into apes in Africa, as they slowly left the canopy. Some monkeys made it to South America, which is one of the most spectacular and improbable migrations in the Age of Mammals. The Oligocene ended with a warming period, which began the Miocene, when Africa began colliding with Eurasia, and Africa’s apes scattered across Eurasia. When times were warm, mammals easily migrated between the continents (North America, Europe, Asia) via the Arctic, but that route closed during the cold times. The Age of Mammals is marked by many migrations, which often displaced the “natives.” The Age of Humans has had similar dynamics. What became whales began migrating into the ocean during the hot Eocene, as archosaurs had done 200 million years earlier. The reigns of archosaurs and mammals had many similarities. I’ll now begin moving the narrative to the rise of humans. Best, Wade

Hi: As the title of my big picture thread states, it is A big picture, not THE big picture. Nobody on Earth sees THE big picture, but I am constantly approached by people selling me their big picture, which is almost invariably some version of the scarcity and fear song, whether it is secular, galactic, or cosmic. I hear no end of people promoting the various New Age/conspiracist flavors of the day, the free energy inventor who “has it!”, and so on. We have enough of scarcity and fear in our world, ungrounded “activists” who play the anonymity game, heroes, messiahs, groupies, cheerleaders, “insiders” spinning grand yarns, etc. I am doing something different, and it is not easy to understand. Best, Wade

Thanks Krishna: That UNESCO document is exactly the kind of document that the USA stopped funding back in the 1980s. I devote a section of Ed’s bio draft to his analysis of the media treatment of the USA’s withdrawal from UNESCO. Yes, back to those imperial anomalies that you pointed out, illiteracy is relatively cheap to remedy, so you can have very poor nations with high literacy rates, and as the West has outsourced things such as programming and call centers, poor nations with high literacy rates are where they can end up. As you know, India has been one of those places. In my lifetime, India went from more than 80% illiterate to nearly 80% literate, and the most literate state in India is one of the poorest, Kerala, which Western progressives have long cited as a model of what even poor humans are capable of. As long as people are not living under imperial oppression, improving human welfare is very feasible “on the cheap.” The capitalists don’t like it, obviously. As I begin work on Ed’s bio, I have found myself reading Uncle Noam’s work (on Ed’s and his propaganda model, which I will write more about in Ed’s big bio), and a work that attempts to make a connection between Noam’s linguistics and political work. On a related note, The New York Times corrected the blatant “error” in Ed’s obituary a couple of days ago. That obit, even with that “correction,” is largely a smear on Ed, so I am likely going to refer to it when I write Ed’s big bio in the coming weeks. Best, Wade