Wade Frazier

Hi: Nobody can call me a materialist, and here is a good place to reiterate a longtime theme of mine. The greatest scientists often had a worldview that verged on the mystical. The best of them say what science has to say about the physical universe is about what happens and they quest for why, and that science cannot answer the question of any intent behind the universe. The same goes for the journey of life on Earth. The story that today’s science tells is one of history and process, not intent. But far too many scientists have tried turning science into a quasi-religion, and that is as bogus as what organized religions do. Some scientists have spoken out against it, but far too few. Today’s science is not equipped to address those issues, and the greatest scientists knew it well. There is a battle these days between materialists and religious fanatics. In one corner are “intelligent design” advocates and Bible bangers, and in the other are materialists and “skeptics.” It is a battle of fundamentalists that I became weary of when I was a teenager. When I wrote my big essay, I mentioned the Flat Earth society, to show how people can cling to beliefs that are obviously false. All societies have had beliefs that are obviously false. If some thought that my mentioning the Flat Earth Society was perhaps going too far to make my point, 2017 has been the year of resurgence in Flat Earth thinking, incredibly (1, 2, 3, 4). People can believe anything, and can justify anything. Those kinds of activities make it easy to wonder if humanity is really a sentient species, or if we are, just what sentience means. An assumption often found in mainstream science is that evolution is purposeless and even random. Other scientists have challenged that idea, and the ideas of Lamarck are finding new relevance in these days of epigenetics. While I know that the materialistic models of consciousness are invalid, the story that my big essay tells is also one of process and history, not of intent. Each of us has our own intent, and whatever creator may exist has yet to let me in on the joke of why physical reality exists, although I have my educated guesses. So, archosaurs rose to prominence after the Permian Extinction, and the mammal line of reptiles became marginal nocturnal burrowers for the next 180 million years. Why one line of life became dominant and the other relegated to the margins is a primary study of scientists, and their innumerable hypothesis are almost always couched in energy terms, in one way or another; sometimes subtly, and sometimes explicitly. The reasons that scientists discuss for why archosaurs rose to prominence and the mammal line (therapsids) did not generally revolve around how fast archosaurs grew, how fast they could move, how they breathed, how fast they reproduced, how they regulated their body temperature, what and how they ate, and similar energy ideas. Maybe archosaurs thrived better in the greenhouse Earth of the Triassic, while the icehouse Earth of the Permian led to synapsid dominance. Those are all, in one way or another, energy ideas. Dinosaurs were easily the largest land animals ever, and scientists are still not sure why. Dinosaurs are called “charismatic” animals, meaning that they capture the human imagination. I played with my toy dinosaurs as a child, and had toy mammoths and other “charismatic” figures, such as Dimetrodon, in my collection. Sauropods had brains the size of walnuts, while other dinosaurs were quite encephalized. Dinosaurs enjoyed a 135 million year Golden Age, and while some scientists today suggest that mammals would have eventually displaced dinosaurs on their own, I don’t see it. Without that bolide event and its aftermath, which may have been a gigantic volcanic event triggered by the bolide (likely an asteroid), I strongly doubt that mammals would have ever risen to dominance, icehouse Earth or not. The Cretaceous Extinction cleared the way for those marginal mammals to rise to dominance, and they did not waste time. About ten million years after the Cretaceous Extinction, a Golden Age of life on Earth began, maybe even its most golden, and that time is called the Eocene. Alligators lived near the poles, reefs abounded, and it was a ten million year period of earthly life at its most verdant. But all good things come to an end, and the early Eocene was kind of a freak occurrence, ten million years of warmth that came during a gradual cooling over about 100 million years, as the volcanism that produced the carbon dioxide that made the Mesozoic so warm steadily declined. From about 50 mya to 38 mya, Earth gradually cooled from the 200 million year hothouse Earth to the icehouse Earth that we live in today. That cooling caused the greatest extinction so far in the Age of Mammals, and has been called Paradise Lost. When that cooling period was over, the remaining life was adapted to an icehouse Earth, and there were no more major extinctions, until the one that humans have started. Best, Wade

Hi: There may be no more battle-tested idea in science than Darwin’s idea of descent with modification. No organism just magically appeared, but had an ancestry rooted in other organisms. However, in English-speaking countries, studying mass extinctions was a taboo for more than a century, because Darwin’s uniformitarian ideas became a dogma. Western science has been making up for lost time since the 1980s, and all mass extinctions are studied today, and some heavily. Even the end-Cretaceous Extinction is still controversial. In the end, mass extinctions are ecosystem collapses, and one compelling hypothesis is that they are energy failures, for one reason or another, and the multi-tiered energy systems that power ecosystems are disrupted, leading to the collapse. This is also the most prominent dynamic proposed for why civilizations collapse. Degenerative disease seems to have a similar dynamic. A set of hypotheses that keeps rearing its head is the periodicity of mass extinctions. Scientists keep proposing a bolide event cause, and a recent hypothesis is that dark matter is the agent of periodic mass extinctions. Another is that the 30 million years or so between many mass extinctions are because it takes that long for multi-tiered ecosystems to become unstable and vulnerable to collapse. These controversies will not end anytime soon. But what scientists agree on is that ecosystems take very different directions after mass extinctions. The change in organisms in each geological period since the Cambrian is what made the lines of demarcation in the first place. Each period had markedly different assemblages of fossils. In general, life has become more energy efficient and resilient over this eon, which are concepts that can be in opposition. The quest for efficiency can lead to a lack of resilience. We can see that in financial terms, as heavily leveraged companies can be very “efficient” in generating profits, but they also lose their resilience and collapse in financial storms, as we most recently saw in 2007-2009. The global financial system is being propped up by endless money printing, and the next collapse will dwarf the previous ones. In the wake of the greatest mass extinction of complex life ever, a kind of reptilian sheep dominated the landmasses as no animal did before or since, but that was the last gasp of the line that mammals arose from for the next 180 million years, as a previously marginal line of reptiles rose to dominance, and they dominated until 66 million years ago, when the biggest bolide event in the eon of complex life happened. The reign of archosaurs then ended, and the age of mammals began. One idea is that mass extinctions halted encephalization more than once. Being brainier can be a big advantage. Predators often outsmart their prey. Some dinosaurs were pretty encephalized, some had hands, and if not for that Cretaceous-ending bolide event, there might be space-faring dinosaurs today instead of humans. Many bird behaviors were dinosaur behaviors, and dozens of dinosaur species were known to have feathers. Mammals were small, rat-like burrowers for nearly the entire reign of dinosaurs, with the largest mammal about raccoon-sized. But their small size is partly why they survived the calamity when dinosaurs didn’t. Being marginal has its advantages. Best, Wade

Hi: The Cambrian Explosion saw the development of organs such as kidneys, livers, eyes, gills, and brains. The Cambrian Period was the Golden Age of Arthropods, as they dominated the period, and my beloved trilobites were at their peak influence. The Cambrian was punctuated with mass extinctions (1, 2), and ended with what might have been a big one. Since life had yet to colonize land to any significant degree, the early mass extinctions were all accompanied by, and probably caused by, anoxia, which means that oxygen levels crashed. Global oxygen levels were likely below today’s, maybe significantly below, and anoxic events plagued the oceans for hundreds of millions of years. Those anoxic events are where the oil that we burn today came from. Carbon dioxide levels were probably many times higher than today’s. The reason for that is volcanism, which is what adds carbon dioxide to Earth’s carbon cycle. Volcanism is driven by the radioactive decay of the primordial elements that formed Earth, and as the decay continues, the heat generated has declined, and scientists estimate that in a billion years or so, the radioactivity will decline to the point where plate tectonics will stop, which will sound the death knell for life on Earth, and Earth will be on its way to looking like Mars, as its oceans will eventually be blasted into space by a growing Sun, which will eventually envelop Earth. Carbon starvation may be what kills off life on Earth, if the loss of water doesn’t do it first. During the age of mammals, some plants developed a new method of photosynthesis, to cope with our declining carbon dioxide levels, but in the early days of complex life, the oceans were warm and carbon dioxide was abundant, although plants did not yet exist to take advantage of it. There is great debate today on the role of oxygen in evolution and ecosystem development. Peter Ward has been a prominent oxygen promoter, but many scientists have taken him on, as is normal in science. But oxygen and carbon dioxide are the two key gases for life on Earth. Nitrogen is, too, but it is less than 1% of a human body, while oxygen and carbon comprise more than a third, and hydrogen is almost all of the rest, as it is part of water. When the Cambrian Period was over, the next period saw great diversification of ecosystems, mollusks came to dominate, and some got pretty big. Vertebrates first appeared in the Cambrian, but their day in the sun had yet to come. After a hundred million years of fast evolution in warm seas, the first ice age of the eon of complex life caused the first big mass extinction, which wiped out about 85% of all species. Since complex life had yet to colonize land, this extinction was the only one of the Big Five that was exclusively an oceanic event. All of the Big Five are controversial today, as far as what caused them. The first fossil evidence of plants migrating to land happened before that first big extinction, and after that big extinction began the migrations that led to us. Reef ecosystems greatly expanded as plants began migrating to land, followed by animals, and arthropods first, just like they dominated the first oceanic ecosystem. The Devonian Period was the Cambrian Explosion for plants, as most features of plants today were developed in the Devonian, as vascular systems, leaves, roots, and seeds developed then. The first forests appeared in the Devonian. It would be more than 200 million years before the next big evolutionary event in plants, when flowering plants evolved, which was a symbiosis with animals and the greatest partnership in the history of complex life. During the Devonian, long after plants and arthropods migrated, along came fish out of the water. But just as fish began their migrations, those first forests took so much carbon dioxide out of the air that Earth cooled once again, and the greatest ice age of the eon of complex life began. The Devonian ended with a series of extinctions that is the second of the Big Five. There is great controversy today on the fish migration to land. Peter Ward performed work that suggested that low oxygen was responsible for “Romer’s Gap,” but recent work that is closing Romer’s Gap, led by Jennifer Clack, challenges the idea. The first amphibians appeared during the Devonian Extinction events, and after the Devonian Extinction they eventually came to dominate, and vertebrates dominated land, just as they achieved dominance in the oceans in the Devonian. The first land plants reproduced by spores, but they need wet environments to do that. The evolution of seed plants allowed plants to colonize dryer locations on land. Similarly, amphibians had to lay their eggs in water. The evolution of amniotes allowed vertebrates to live outside of the swamps in dryer lands. That ice age put an end to the global rainforests (ice ages are far dryer than warm periods, as less water evaporates from the oceans), so seed plants and amniotes came to dominate land. Oxygen levels skyrocketed far past today’s levels, as the forests blanketed the land and sequestered carbon dioxide. Most of today’s coal deposits were formed before the rainforest collapse. During that high oxygen period, gigantic arthropods, amphibians, and fish lived, including the largest freshwater fish ever. It was a good time to be a shark. Although 95% or so of species extinctions don’t happen during mass extinction events, but during the intervening years, mass extinctions have the distinction of radically shaking up ecosystems, and what came to dominate after the mass extinctions were usually marginal species before the extinction, and the entire ecosystem could appear radically different from how it did before the mass extinction. The Devonian Extinction spelled the end of armored fish and sea scorpions, which were the largest arthropods ever. Oceanic lobe-finned fish (our ancestors) were also thought to have been driven to extinction in the Cretaceous Extinction, before the amazing discovery of the coelacanth in the 1930s, but humans are putting them at the brink of extinction today. After the collapse of the Carboniferous rainforest, reptiles rose to dominance on land, and the ancestors of mammals were originally the dominant reptiles. The Permian Period saw the collapse of those high oxygen levels, and the formation of a supercontinent, Pangaea, is generally thought to have been the trigger for the biggest extinction event in the eon of complex life (so far! ), called the Permian Extinction, and like the Devonian extinctions, the Permian Extinction was only the last in a series of extinction events that punctuated a 20 million year period. The greatest reefs in Earth’s history existed in the Devonian, and after 100 million years, they began to recover, to only be wiped out again in the Permian Extinction. The Permian Extinction wiped out more than 90% of Earth’s species, and like the other Big Five events, there is great controversy today on just what caused it. The Permian Extinction was so great that it ended an era, as the Paleozoic Era ended and the Mesozoic Era began, which lasted nearly 200 million years, which was also a time of a hot Earth, thanks to volcanism, which was related to supercontinent dynamics. The ancestors of mammals lost their dominance, to be displaced by archosaurs, and the mammal line largely hid in their burrows for the next 160 million years. Best, Wade

Hi: Every aspect of the history of Earth and life on Earth has controversy. Some areas are more controversial than others. There is a general consensus that Earth is about 4.5-4.6 billion years old. After it formed, it was battered by asteroids and planetoids, in what is called the Late Heavy Bombardment, but even that is challenged. Today, scientists think that life on Earth may have appeared more than four billion years ago (bya), and that major impacts happened all the way up to two bya. So, early life on Earth may have lived with huge impacts for two billion years. Those are all relatively recent ideas. In the past couple of years, I have seen prominent scientists make the case that life began in oceanic hydrothermal vents, freshwater ponds, and came from Mars, where life in the solar system may have started. Those controversies won’t end anytime soon. But, what is important, IMO, is to understand the evidence and arguments. The so-called Hadean Eon was a time of fire and chaos on Earth, but once it ended about four bya, Earth seems to have quickly become the water planet that it is today. The next eon lasted for about 1.5 billion years, and is called the Archaean. Most of the iron ore that humanity has mined came from banded iron formations (BIF), which are up to 3.7 billion years old. BIFs only form in the presence of oxygen, so, oxygenic photosynthesis may be that old. So, the most important metal of the Industrial Revolution was originally refined by the earliest life. The remains of later life provided the energy to further refine it. The remains of other life comprise the most important fuel of the Industrial Revolution. Industrial humanity is one big detritivore, devouring the handiwork and remains of ancient life. That early photosynthetic life not only made the iron deposits that humanity plunders, but it also saved Earth’s ocean from being blasted into space, like what happened to Mars’s ocean. Venus lost all of its water, too (as did Mercury and our Moon). Earth got oxygenated by oxygenic photosynthesis, which also formed the ozone layer, so life saved life, and made land-lubbing life, like us, possible. Humanity is riding a wave of life, even as it destroys life at a prodigious rate. Evolution happened from the beginning, and it happened one atom at a time, one molecule at a time. More than three bya, the parent of all life on Earth today lived, which had DNA, enzymes, membranes, and all life on Earth uses ATP as its fuel. The reproduction trick had to be learned from the very beginning. Respiration and photosynthesis are the essential energy behaviors of life. Once Earth became oxygenated, life learned to respire with oxygen, which gets more bang for the buck than any other kind of respiration. At least once, and maybe only once, an Archaean bacterium either ate or was invaded by a “modern” bacterium, and it was perhaps before Earth was oxygenated, as hydrogen may have been the energy-transfer element that they had in common. Complex cells were then born. That happened around two bya. It took almost another billion years before those complex cells ganged together to form multicellular lifeforms, and plants appear to have preceded animals. Predation and grazing happened early on, as life learned to eat each other. There is great controversy today on just when Earth’s ocean was oxygenated, and it may have come in phases, with the instance that led to animals happening a little less than 600 million years ago (mya), at the tail-end of a tumultuous period of global ice ages, punctuated by warming phases. Those gyrations may have provided the impetus for the appearance of animals. The first large animals hardly looked like animals at all. After tens of millions of years of evolution, those early animals were swept away in the first of many mass extinctions of large life. Those extinction events usually had profound impacts on Earth’s ecosystems, as previously marginal life came to dominate in the aftermath of the mass extinctions, and entire ecosystems could be dramatically altered. The mass extinctions had numerous causes, but in the end, they were likely cascading energy failures, as multi-tiered ecosystems collapsed when one or more of the links were removed. From the rubble of a mass extinction came the seeds of the next period of complex life. The most important period of animal life was the Cambrian Explosion, when all of today’s phyla of note were born. There has been very little biological innovation since then, at the fundamental level. For us animals, the varieties of complex life which have graced Earth for the past half billion years have been the most fascinating, and I’ll sketch that journey in coming posts. Best, Wade

Hi: Over the years, I have seen the advances in mass spectrometer data and how it has been used. The technology keeps improving, and the results are being used on an ever-wider array of problems. Most people are probably used to hearing about the results of dating, using radioactive decay. But that is only one aspect of it. Mass spectrometer data is also used for stable isotopes, and that data can be more fascinating. Life preferentially uses lighter isotopes, and water, for instance, has its lighter molecules liberated easier from water surfaces by sunlight, and can also be used to help reconstruct ocean temperatures. Those differences can be detected by today’s mass spectrometers, even when the sample is too small to see with the naked eye. It has been used to tell when the ancestors of whales began their migrations into the sea, as freshwater and marine isotopes leave their mark on the teeth of such animals. When meteorites and Moon rocks were subjected to testing, they conformed to the prominent hypotheses of how the solar system and Moon formed (they are the oldest rocks yet discovered), and fringe “exploded planet” hypotheses (if we can even call them that – they were more like legends) became even less tenable. Those kinds of tests led to certain hypotheses prevailing over others, but I have seen people completely discard all spectrometer testing as unreliable. Of course, they don’t provide much evidence to support their position, and even when they do, they have very weak arguments for why spectrometer data is unreliable. Similarly, I have seen even scientists challenge and discard global warming evidence. Most such scientists sold their souls to the hydrocarbon lobby long ago, but I have seen other scientists make obviously invalid and extremely weak arguments to dismiss the data. One dismissal I have seen is to challenge the data on increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The challenges have been based on saying that the data is collected too close to cities and volcanoes (such as Mauna Loa), when such challenges don’t survive minimal inspection. Those challenges are of the hand-waving and straw-grasping variety. When I have relied on spectrometer and related data, I have been dismissed as “Mr. Orthodox,” but the dismissers could never tell me why my reliance was misplaced. When I revisited Velikovsky’s hypotheses after many years of studying scientific findings, practically none of it held up to even cursory scrutiny. Navigating that morass of hypothesis, theory, and evidence takes time and sharp tools of discernment, but developing a big picture perspective requires nothing less. How I developed my big picture perspective is important. This series of posts will be more about what that picture is, but will return to the evidence periodically. Best, Wade

Hi: Cosmology is far from settled. In the past year, universal effects predicted by the models of cosmic inflation have not been found, bringing up the question of whether inflation really happened. The Big Bang is far from a universally accepted event. My thinking is that when the ETs finally come into the open, we can ask them what they think. That said, it seems very likely that elements heavier than hydrogen were made in star cores, as the pressure of gravity fused nuclei. I consider it very likely that Earth is part of a star system that formed several billion years ago from the detritus of a formerly exploded star. Star systems form from what are called accretion disks, as gravity draws together the detritus in the galactic vicinity and fusion begins again. White and brown dwarfs may outnumber the other stars in our galaxy. Today, cosmologists hypothesize the existence of dark matter and dark energy, which supposedly makes up most of our physical universe, but they have not been observed. The foundations of cosmology are anything but firm, and the principles underlying the technologies that my pal was shown will mean a wholesale revision of physics, and the religion of our Epoch, materialism, will also go into the dustbin of human ideologies when the Fifth Epoch arrives. So, there are great limitations in today’s scientific practice, particularly where Godzilla’s realm is concerned. Just like there is no free press, a true democracy, or a free market, there is no purely pursued science today. That said, some areas are less restricted than others, and I have yet to hear of a fossil dig that has been classified. Scientists can study geology, cosmology, paleontology, and even anthropology relatively free from interference from the global rackets. So, the story of the journey of life on Earth that I tell in my big essay I believe is relatively “pure,” and all hypotheses and theories are subject to challenge, always, as new evidence come to light, as investigative tools improve and scientists find ingenious ways to use them. In many fields, big questions are still there, begging to be addressed. That said, in coming posts is the big picture that I see today. For me, what is more important than the “right” answer on any of these issues is understanding how the questions are raised, how they are pursued, what the evidence is, how it is interpreted, and the like. Trying to imagine a star forming, how plants and animals first colonized land, how dinosaurs and early humans lived, is kind of what it is all about, for the best scientists. It is the process of science that is important, not any extraordinary finding of the day, which may go into the dustbin tomorrow. The ideal of science is reproducible evidence. For instance, what I and my fellow travelers learned is easily reproducible; just go bring disruptive energy technology to market or demonstrate a working free energy prototype. People will then begin to learn how our world really works, if they survive the experience. I will focus on my home planet and the solar system it resides in for the following narrative. A lot of it will be in my upcoming update of my big essay. Best, Wade

Hi: Well, I’m not quite done with Ed yet. The New York Times (NYT) had an obituary that was its second on Ed. The NYT’s first was perfunctory. As the NYT was Ed’s favorite target, it could have been far more scathing. I think that Ed would have liked the NYT’s obit, as it illustrated his work quite well. One part read: “One case study, for example, asked why a single Polish priest murdered by the Communists was more newsworthy than another cleric killed by a Washington-sponsored Latin American dictator.” Actually, it was why the Polish priest’s death was more than 100 times as newsworthy. That obit deftly underplayed the magnitude. The next part of it stated: “Manufacturing Consent was severely criticized as having soft-pedaled evidence of genocide in Cambodia, Rwanda and, during the Bosnia war, Srebrenica.” That is actually wrong. The conflicts in Rwanda and Bosnia had not yet happened when Manufacturing Consent was published in 1988. In the second edition of Manufacturing Consent, published in 2002, only Serbia/Kosovo is mentioned in Yugoslavia, and only in comparing the disparity of how the media described the events as “genocide.” Bosnia and Srebrenica were never mentioned in any edition of Manufacturing Consent, and neither was Rwanda. Ed wrote about the events in Bosnia at length later, and again in the context of the media’s treatment of the events. Ed was a media critic above all else. The next section of Ed’s NYT obituary is very misleading, too: “Dr. Herman and Professor Chomsky argued that in assessing the killings they were seeking an accurate count rather than relying on unreliable reports by survivors. In the civil wars in Rwanda and Bosnia, they said, the victors had exaggerated the toll to justify their rise to power and their pro-Western policies.” “In the case of Cambodia, they said, the toll had been overstated by enemies of the brutal Khmer Rouge Communist regime, which, the authors wrote, had “dealt with fundamental problems rooted in the feudal past and exacerbated by the imperial system.” “Among their critics was Professor Gitlin, who wrote in an email, “It’s crucial to their Manichaean view of the world that the suffering of the Cambodians is less important than their need to pin the damage done to Cambodia in the 1970s primarily on the American bombing that preceded the rise of the Khmer Rouge to power — bombing that was indeed heinous, ruinous, and did contribute to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, but that was only the prologue to the horrendous crimes that followed at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.” Gitlin’s email treads very closely to the “genocide denial” charges that have always been falsely attributed to Ed and Noam. The entire point of Ed’s and Noam’s writings on Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia was how the American media treated those events, not the objective truth about any of them. Those were all nefarious genocides in Ed and Noam’s framework. Ed would have pointed out that their work on Cambodia was explicitly about the American media’s treatment of it, particularly in contrast to the slaughters in Indonesia and East Timor, which were constructive and benign bloodbaths/genocides, which the American media either cheered or was silent on. Regarding Rwanda, Ed wrote extensively about how the media had literally turned reality upside down. Ed wrote for many years about the situation in Yugoslavia and how the media misrepresented the situation there. So, Ed would have likely congratulated NYT on performing its propaganda function by almost completely missing the point of his work. Ed’s work was focused on the media, and the NYT in particular. Any cursory reading of Ed’s and Noam’s work shows what it was about, but the NYT turned it on its head, as usual. The NYT’s obituary was a fitting tribute to Ed, proving his point. That said, I saw black eulogies when Howard Zinn died, and it was nice seeing Jeff Cohen get the last word. The obituary could have been worse. Best, Wade

Hi: More on the big picture. I regard the other side as very real, just as everybody who had an NDE does, had OOBs, etc. That said, we are here for a reason, and for all of the undeniable cruelty of this dimension, this is an important place where consciousness comes to evolve, in Creation’s basement. Love is the energy of Creation, and we have come to find and express it in Creation’s densest, cruelest dimension. We are either Creation’s idiots or its bravest denizens, or both. Manifesting love and sentience in this dimension is no easy trick, and those mired in fear here have my sympathy. The orthodox scientific position is that the physical universe came into being in an instant called the Big Bang. However, there are increasing challenges, even from within the mainstream, that the universe had a more “quantum” beginning, as it slowly flashed into existence. Flashed into existence from what? Are time and space truly infinite, with no beginnings or endings? Seth has said as much, but you will also see a spectrum of mystical opinion. On the other side, time and space eventually lose their meaning, even what we call form, as beings evolve on their way back to the godhead. But while we are here, they define our existence and are important. Einstein said as a half-joke that according to his general theory of relativity, if you removed all matter and energy from this universe, time and space would go with them. The quantum paradox shows that our scientific theories have a long way to go, and what my friend was shown blows today’s mainstream physics out of the water. I can’t claim that my mystical orientation brought me to my strategy, but when I stood back and looked at it, of amassing enough integrity and sentience to form the choir, that might be able to make a dent, with its harmonic and practical effects, I realized that it was in alignment with the mystical principles that I was taught. Seth’s statements on practical idealism stuck with me and helped comprise the stars that I steered by during my days with Dennis. If we had failed the integrity tests, we would not have gotten very far at all. If I think about it, I suppose that my mystical training did have something to do with developing my strategy, as my mystical radar would have gone off if I had strayed very far (I have lived far from the saintly life). But when I think about it more, my theme of integrity and sentience merely reflects what I learned during my journey, of what worked and what didn’t. It was kind of like I learned the truth of those mystical ideas as I went out and tried to make a dent. It was a most secular education, however, and often it was only later that the mystical significance came clear, even when crazily mystical events propelled me on my journey. That voice in my head only made suggestions the first two times that I heard from it. It was up to me to live it. That seems to be how it works here. The most enlightened channelings are only pep talks. They can’t do much of anything for us other than lend some perspective. We are the ones living here, not them. As I think about my Epochal perspective of the human journey, of each Epoch riding on the energy surplus of each mode of production, how much of that came from my mystical background? In ways, it does not seem that way at all, and in others, I can see the connection. I’ll say this: when that voice spoke to me the first time, I literally had no idea what I was getting into. The idea that I had been set on the pursuit of the biggest event in the human journey only began coming clear to me in the past decade, when I began studying for what became my big essay. Do I thank that voice, or curse it? My life was wrecked more than once because of my journey, but I can’t regret it, even though my life has been filled with cruelty, often directed at me. It seems to have come with the territory. Dennis had it infinitely worse. Mr. Professor had a ruined and prematurely ended life, thanks to meeting me. Brian’s life was shortened due to his adventures on the fringes. I had it relatively easy, I am the last man standing in my circle, and I carry on partly for them. Even when I was 16, with my first energy dreams, I knew that energy was a big deal, but I had no idea how big. Only two things undeniably exist in our universe: energy and consciousness. As I studied the journey of life on Earth, those also became the evident themes, as life continually found new ways to harness, preserve, and use energy, and humanity took the game to levels never seen before, with our “intelligence” and tool-making abilities. We are at the brink of becoming a truly sentient species, or we are going to leave Earth to the cockroaches and bacteria, and with each passing year, the muddle-through middle-ground options continue to shrink. And almost nobody knows or cares, as they egocentrically pursue their lives of quiet desperation, with their existence defined by scarcity and fear. In ways, the lessons of my journey were a booby prize, and in others, they showed me what would not work for manifesting a world of abundance, love, and sentience. Even if all of that mystical stuff was just wishful thinking, I would not change my approach. Coming posts will get more into the details of the big picture that I see, and the learning never ends. Best, Wade

Hi: It is time to report on a book that I recently read, on the rise of civilization, titled Against the Grain. I bought another of that author’s books, and will digest it, too. Not that I agree with his entire hypothesis, but his book was a good source of information, and part of it will make it into my big essay update. In a way, the book was a history of the Third Epoch, although the author likely did not see it that way. He focused on the rise of civilization, but because the author, James Scott, is a political science professor, his orientation is social organization, so his work was all about the state versus the “barbarians” who lived outside of states. IMO, that orientation stunted his perspective, but there was also good stuff in the book and, as usual, for works like his, I’ll plunder his footnotes. Scott’s work mostly focused in the rise and fall of Sumer, but also took in the other pristine civilizations, and he noted that they were all based on grain. Grain had the virtue of ripening at the same time and being easily taxable. There has been debate for millennia on the rise of civilization, and the two positions are that the people joined civilization for the benefits it conferred, and that civilization was a way that elites could exploit the energy surpluses created by the masses. Scott made the second argument and went even further: civilization was a creation of elites, as they were nothing more than criminals who enslaved the masses to build civilization. Scott argued that there was no agricultural surplus until incipient elites created peasants and slaves to produce it. Otherwise, the “surplus” was spent by people in leisure. Nobody tried to save grain for a rainy day. I doubt that it worked quite like that. Also, Scott also bought the “there was no collapse” thesis promoted by some sloppy scientist/scholars. He also tried to universalize the process, but the New World’s dynamic of civilization was dramatically different from the Old World’s, partly because the New World’s “barbarians” did not have domestic animals of significance. Part of his work I agree with, in that the intensively farmed fields became the “grain core” that formed the basis of civilization, with its energy surplus, and controlling that surplus was what civilization rode atop. If the grain core failed, so did civilization. But Scott was quite speculative on the ends of early civilizations, primarily attributing it to epidemic disease. But if a civilization was built around an energy engine, and there were not many places on Earth conducive to building the first ones, and the agrarian mode of production only worked in a few places early on, why would it be abandoned forever, as the ruins of many ancient civilizations attest? Wouldn’t it get used again, when the epidemic passed? And since the grain core had the densest populations, when they were abandoned, where did the population go? Into the waiting arms of the barbarians? Humans have been intensely territorial since the late Second Epoch, and those migrations from collapsed grain cores can’t have been peaceful, and I doubt that a large fraction of the civilized peoples survived the collapse. Scott argued that the collapse was often just an elite political collapse, while the peasants did fine. Again, I have my doubts. It may have happened in some instances, but far from all. That said, his book gave plenty of food for thought. I may have to add another “golden age” to my narrative: the golden age of the barbarian. Scott showed how the “barbarians” of Eurasia, primarily mounted on horseback, also exploited the grain core with attacks, which in the “best” situations evolved into a protection racket (or they conquered and set themselves up as the new elite), similar to the games that urban elites played, so the barbarians also enjoyed the benefit of the grain core’s energy surplus. That dynamic did not play out in the New World, without horses, draft animals, and milk, so Scott’s hypothesis is far less than universal. But Scott ended his book with a lament, that the two primary civilization-related activities of barbarians dug their own graves: selling their neighbors into slavery in the grain cores, and becoming military protectors of the grain cores from other civilizations and other barbarians. That “golden age” was not too golden. What Scott got right, however, was describing the environments that were conducive to building civilizations, and focusing on Sumer, the first civilization, was appropriate, and Eridu, the first city, farmed, fished, herded, and even did some gathering, and only later was the “grain core” developed. Scott is of an anarchist bent, and it pays to keep that in mind when reading his work. That he embraced the sloppy work in Questioning Collapse says a lot about him as a scholar (he praised Yoffee, but Yoffee helped edit the book, which arguably libeled Jared Diamond). That said, it pays to read “heretical” works, as there can often be something to them. Best, Wade

Hi Krishna: Yes, we have always been reshuffling the deck of scarcity. The human journey has seen brief golden ages of relative abundance, until the energy ran out. You are right, that scarcity is insidious, and once people accept it like the air they breathe, then they can’t even see how they constantly bend under its force, like constantly leaning into the wind. People don’t even realize that they do it. Part of what I am doing is pointing out that issue. Only if people become aware that they are doing it can they dare to imagine something else, which is part of the point behind my choir idea. It is part of being sentient. However, I don’t expect to find many people willing and able to do that, but I don’t need that many of them, not relative to the more than seven billion people that we share the planet with. The so-called “left” is more “advanced” then the “right,” as far as their souls’ development (mature souls versus baby and young souls) and personal integrity goes, but yes, like everybody else, they can’t see past their Epoch, stuck in scarcity, unwilling and unable to see past it to abundance. This is part of the conundrum. Best, Wade

Hi: Ed and I surprisingly had professional overlaps, too, and they were not insignificant. I did not realize the extent of them until I worked on his bio. Ed taught economics at Wharton (and was very good at it, as one of his pupils once told me), and I went to business school. Ed taught at one of the top institutions on Earth, and I was a record-setting business school student, and I was led to business school in my first instance of otherworldly guidance. When I began my auditing career, I worked on banks, some of the largest on Earth. My idealism tried to make sense of my business school training in the real world. It was not easy to see, and led to a funny event. I saw the Savings and Loan Scandal from the inside, before it became a scandal. I was assigned to a very high exposure audit of one of the world’s largest savings and loans banks as it was going under, in what became one of the most famous and earliest events of the Savings and Loan Scandal. I was still trying to figure out my profession, and what the partner who ran the job told me, a month into that engagement, helped me figure it out years later. There was a fatal conflict of interest at the core of my profession: we were providing financial regulation, but the targets of our regulation paid our salaries. It was like hiring the cops that “policed” you. That practice turned public watchdogs into corporate lapdogs, and rendered my profession essentially worthless. We only kept honest companies honest, and that conflict of interest exists today. I am the only accountant that I know of who has ever publicly pointed it out. Many years ago, I read Ed mention the conflict of interest in the auditing profession, and it was the only time that I ever saw it mentioned in any media, even though Ed worked on the fringes. Ed and I never discussed it, but it was one of the many Twilight Zone moments of my journey when I began doing Ed’s bio, and learned that his early claim to fame was pointing out conflicts of interest at savings and loans! Ed and I were professional comrades-in-arms, pointing out how the emperor was stark naked, but that was not part of our relationship, strangely. However, it did lead me to trying to wake Ed up to a bigger picture in economics, but Ed never went there. I can sort through my emails with Ed and find when it was, but I think that it was about 15 years ago when I tried to get Ed to think about economics in energy terms. Ed admitted that he probably should undertake that task, but he never did. Ed often pointed out the Chicago School’s bogus economic framework. Very early on, as I tried to make sense of the world, economic theory bothered me. I got plenty of it in school, but it seemed obsessed with prices and money. I intuitively knew that it was missing important aspects of economic reality. It did not seem to deal with the real world very well, especially after my first wild stint with Dennis. There were no such things as free markets. They were as mythical as unicorns, but economists and the media treated them as if they were real. Economic theory was bedtime stories for adults. But it was not until I studied for my big essay that I was able to articulate what the problems of economic theory were. Neoclassical economics, which is what economics of both the right and left are based on, is an invalid ideological framework that ignores the real world in favor of social theories of market equilibrium. When I completed the 2002 version of my site, one of Bucky Fuller’s pupils called me a “comprehensivist,” and I did not know what he meant. He had me read some of Bucky’s work, the lightbulb went on for me, and my work has been consciously comprehensive ever since. I was a seat-of-the-britches comprehensivist but did not know it, and seeing Bucky present a comprehensivist perspective was the final step in crystallizing the paradigm that I had been groping toward for 20 years. I long ago saw how greed and fear were cornerstones of economic and capitalistic theory, and I knew that there was something wrong with that, but it still took many years for me to describe just what the problem was. Right after reading Bucky’s work, I was introduced to the Peak Oilers. I saw the disdain that scientists had for economists, but I had yet to more fully understand the problems with economic theory, although I was getting there. I began to see how economic theory was founded on an assumption of scarcity. After interacting with the leading Peak Oil spokesman, who feigned interest in free energy technology, I was able to finally express what I had been seeing for many years: people were addicted to scarcity. Another way of saying it was that people have made many adaptations to scarcity, and their adaptations are how they eat and survive. Free energy and what comes with it will put an end to scarcity and usher in a super-epoch of abundance. Nearly everybody reacts to the idea of free energy and abundance with denial and fear, which could take many guises. What all of those reactions of denial and fear had in common was the understanding that free energy would end the world as they knew it, and they had dug out their niche of hell and were not about to budge. Even if free energy could turn Earth into something resembling heaven, all that they could see was their niche disappearing. When I finally read a book on energy and economics, as I was writing my big essay, the last pieces finally fell into place for me, and I clearly saw the big picture of how off-base modern economic theory was. But I had already been writing for years that all dominant ideologies on Earth are founded on the scarcity assumption, and how all will become obsolete in the super-epoch of abundance. I gradually realized how we were swimming upstream against all dominant ideologies on Earth. As I elucidated the Epochal framework of my big essay, which was years in the making, I gradually understood that nobody in world history saw the next Epoch before it happened. They could not even imagine it. Then it became very clear to me why people reacted to the idea of free energy and abundance like they did. They will only begin to understand when they can experience it, not before. It took a 40-year journey for me to come to that understanding, and I was not there yet when I tried to introduce Ed to Brian, back around the time of our NEM days. I tried it more than once with Ed, but he never took me up on it. With Ed, you would get a polite silence. I never even tried to tell Ed about my bizarre journey. But Brian was an ex-astronaut, fellow Ivy League professor, advisor to presidential candidates, and explorer of the fringes. Brian had some credentials. But I was never able to interest Ed in interacting with Brian, to my lasting sadness. That was a delicate area for me. On one hand, he was Uncle Ed to me, and I had been learning at his scholarly knee for more than a decade. On the other, free energy and abundance blows all of today’s economic theory out of the water. Ed was a scientist of a scholar, and one of his hobbies was astronomy, and Brian was an astronomer to boot. How could Ed pass this up? Well, he surely had his hands very full with the work he was doing, and probably considered this free energy stuff to just be a distraction from his important work, and I could not blame him for seeing it that way. However, the public arrival of free energy will be the biggest event in the human journey, by far. Nothing else comes remotely close, as humanity will form a Type 1 civilization. So, after those attempts to interest Ed in energy and economics, and free energy and abundance, I stopped, and never brought it up again for the remaining 13 years of our relationship. Ed was far from alone, however, and the last thing that I would ever do would be to get on Ed’s case. I greatly respected what he had committed his life to, and worked with him inside of that framework. It turned out that I never interested anybody in the so-called radical left in free energy. Their ideology got in the way, as it does for nearly everybody, which is one more reason why I know that I seek needles in haystacks. The rad left is hacking at branches, IMO, just like all of the other activists on Earth. Rad lefties can have sophisticated reasons for denying free energy’s possibility and desirability, and I have called such deniers Level 3s. In ways, they are the most frustrating level to deal with, with their “laws of physics” and “conspiracy theory” objections. I long ago learned to relinquish judgment of the situation and just accept it. If I could not get Ed interested, what chance did I have with any other lefties? Progressives could be particularly obtuse on the subject. Reshuffling the deck of scarcity, playing the exchange game, is not going to solve humanity’s problems, as we have our toes over the edge of the abyss. As Uncle Bucky said, there are no political solutions to this problem. Retail politics are meaningless, and sitting American presidents are puppets and know it. JFK was the last president who thought that he could make a dent, and he was rudely disabused of that notion. But for what Ed had focused his efforts on, media analysis, he was best that I had seen or heard of. So, I stayed within Ed’s framework in our relationship, and here I am, carrying his spears, even after he is gone. I carried Mr. Mentor’s spears for many years, then Dennis’s, then Brian’s, and now Ed’s. I also helped carry Ralph McGehee’s and even Gary’s. Carrying their spears was among my life’s greatest honors and pleasures, but there is nobody left in my life to carry spears for, other than my wife and cats. Carrying spears is in my blood, but I think that carrying Ed’s is going to be the last time that I do it for anybody. It is time to get my task done, and I have devoted the rest of my life’s “spare” time to its pursuit. With this post, I am going to stop reminiscing about Ed and get on with the task of writing my final bio for him, making the Wikipedia version, publishing it, and doing battle with Wikipedia’s “editors.” Part of me is not looking forward to it, but as with Brian, I am happy to do it for those giants among men. I have also had offers of help from Ed’s pals, so this might go easier. We’ll see how it goes. Best, Wade

Hi: Ed’s pals helped get a decent obituary in Washington Post, which Ed’s last article lambasted. That obituary was far better than the black eulogies that the mainstream published when Howard Zinn died. I traded email with Ed when Howard died, and Ed called Howard an “awfully good man.” The New York Times, which Ed spent much of his media analysis career studying, had a perfunctory obit that made the rounds in the mainstream. All in all, not bad. Here is another eulogy from one of Ed’s pals. I have a lot more to write on Ed. The subject of structural analysis versus conspiracy theories is near and dear to my heart, and is a highly controversial issue amongst the Left. As Uncle Mike stated, many in the Left have a “conspiracy-phobia,” but Ed was not one of them. In his Doublespeak Dictionary, Ed defined a Magic Bullet as: “One that wends its way through several bodies, smashing bones on the way, but ends up in pristine condition, conveniently located for police attribution to the gun of choice.” In his Doublespeak Dictionary, Ed defined a Conspiracy Theory as: “A critique or explanation that I find offensive.” Ed’s deep structural analysis was invaluable, which informed his advice on reforming the media. He cautioned media activists from thinking that a few clever laws were going to do the trick, not with the deep structural constraints on the media that he and Noam examined. Ed read my account of Gary’s conversation with John Tower three weeks after the JFK hit and was intrigued, and even leaving that conversation aside, which I consider incontrovertible fact, the Magic Bullet is indeed arguably the key piece of evidence that shows what a sham the Warren Commission was. Ed and Noam did not always sing the same song, such as Noam’s Rethinking Camelot, which challenged the idea that the CIA had any motivation to kill JFK (it certainly did, IMO). Ed mixed it up with the “Left” often, such as his fisticuffs with the “Cruise Missile Left,” which was behavior that Noam would not engage in, as it tended to “divide the Left,” which Noam thinks that “conspiracy theories” also do. That is a big subject that I won’t get into today, but I wanted to show that Ed was not a typical leftist. Ed reviewed my site long ago and said that I did it how he wanted to do it, organizationally, to put his work all under one roof. Ed’s work is scattered far and wide, and his output dwarfed mine. He would have needed a full-time assistant to put all of his work under one roof. Ed was a man of his generation, and writing books and articles for publication in print was his style, and that was fine. The stacks of his books next to my desk right now comprise a gold mine of insightful analysis, but Ed also took advantage of the Internet, and many of his later works were primarily or exclusively available online. It is beyond my means to do it, but a very worthy project would be to put all of his work online on one site. But it would be a monstrous task. I may host some of his work on my site as it disappears off of the Internet, as a book on Srebrenica already has from its original site, but has been preserved here for now. For my big essay, I have been hosting documents that have disappeared from the Internet, which I used in my essay. Even though it was once erased by one of Wikipedia’s “editors,” who I believe was somebody’s employee while defacing Brian’s Wikipedia bio, Brian’s doctoral thesis exists only on my site today, after NASA removed it from theirs, soon after I published Brian’s Wikipedia bio. Coincidence? I have experienced many such “coincidences” during my publishing career on the Internet. I don’t lose any sleep over it, but I doubt that they were all “coincidental,” and I may host some of Ed’s work on my site one day, as it slowly disappears from the Internet. So, I can see the virtue of books these days, although I have yet to locate Ed’s The Great Society Dictionary, which was a precursor to his Doublespeak Dictionary. Best, Wade

Hi: I have put up my final “pre-death” bio draft on Ed, and will now begin work on my final big bio for him, and then it will be off to the Wikipedia version, then doing battle with the “editors.” We will see if I can get it all done this year. I have been in contact with a bunch of Ed’s pals, and our interactions are bringing up memories of Ed. Here are a couple. These will also make it into an essay that I will write about Ed, kind of like I did for Brian. I can’t overemphasize the scholarly learning experience that I got at the knees of Noam, Howard, and Ed. While Noam and Howard were among my most gracious correspondents ever, Ed was the only one of that trio that I kept in contact with. Interacting with Ed could be very educational, and one anecdote came to mind yesterday. If you look at the list of Ed’s books, it is obvious how collaborative he was, and several of the people that I heard from since Ed’s death were his collaborators, and they all remarked on what a wonderful collaborator and man Ed was. One collaborator was Christopher Black, and they wrote an article together on Louise Arbour, which made the compelling case that she was really a war criminal, not somebody who should be a prosecutor in war crimes tribunals. I’ll use that article in Ed’s bio, and while rereading that article yesterday (I read all of Ed’s Z Magazine articles for 25 years, and they were the first thing that I read in each issue for as long as I can remember), it took me back to the 1990s, when Ed was helping to educate me, and not just with his prodigious published output. I began the full-time work that led to my 2002 site in 1997, and sometimes wrote letters to the editor, such as this one that predicted something like 9/11. I donated to Amnesty International in those days, and I began getting pleas from them to ask the authorities to deliver Milosevic to The Hague. The Hague’s war crimes tribunal was obviously a kangaroo court from the outset, and I still had a bit of naïveté to shed. I was shocked when I got those pleas from Amnesty International, and I asked Ed about it. He agreed that it was scandalous, and wrote that he only donated to local human rights groups anymore, and he mentioned one in the Balkans, if I recall correctly. I never donated to Amnesty International again. In 2002, Ed wrote a couple of articles in Z that exposed Human Rights Watch as an imperial tool (here is a later article). I asked him if he was going to follow it with one on Amnesty International, and he said that he was not planning to, as Amnesty was not as bad as Human Rights Watch. I was tickled when I read Ed and David give it to Amnesty in Enduring Lies (p. 67) more than a decade later, and he wrote an article in Z little more than a year later that repeated it. The next anecdote is kind of funny. People have been attacking or promoting my work for more than 20 years, and back around 2001, a woman began promoting my work. She was one of those New Agey Beverly Hills housewives, and our relationship did not last that long, maybe a year or two, but as the drums began beating for the Iraq invasion, which I wrote plenty about, desperately (and that letter was written exactly 15 years before Ed died, as I just realized), I got that woman in contact with Ed. I can’t overemphasize what a wonderful correspondent Ed was. He was so friendly, honest, and insightful that almost anybody who interacted with him wanted more (until they got one of their oxen gored, which has been the case with me, too, over the years), and so it went with that woman activist. Actually, it got “worse”: she got the hots for him! It was kind of embarrassing, not only because Ed was a devoted husband and about 75 years old at the time. I was not trying to play matchmaker, but it is easy to see how a woman like that could fall for Ed, even just through correspondence. I never heard how that “romance” ended, but I am sure that Ed was able to end it amicably. Oh, the hazards of being Ed! Best, Wade

Hi: The eulogies are coming in for Ed (1, 2, 3). I am also hearing from some of his closest colleagues, and so far, nothing but praise for my bio draft and offers to help tackle Ed’s Wikipedia bio, as we will likely be fighting the hacks. I have had my work at Wikipedia summarily erased by the “editors” before, several times, and had battles over Brian’s bio before it ended up in pretty good shape that I can live with. This figures to be a bigger battle, but for Ed’s memory, it will be worth it. I hope to have a Wikipedia bio up by year-end. Here is an interview with Ed that I gleaned off of the Internet. Here are some videos (1, 2, 3, 4). Best, Wade

Hi: Boy, have I been hearing from some heavy hitters about Ed since yesterday, and with offers to help on my bio project. It brings tears to my eyes. A giant has left us. Best, Wade

Hi: I will be getting over Ed’s death for a while. Ed had a good run, living to be 92. If I have remotely as productive a writing life, it will have been an insanely good run. Ed has been my role model on that score. Ed and I only corresponded. I had an idea that I might visit him after I finished my bio project on him, but that day will never come. The bio project will include improving some Wikipedia articles related to Ed, and I will write an essay like I did about Brian. But I obviously did not know Ed as well. That said, we had a wonderful writing relationship over about twenty years, and we corresponded every year, sometimes multiple times. I literally addressed him as “Uncle Ed” fairly often, and he even signed off an email or two as Uncle Ed. He was delightful like that. Ed was funny, which was part of my attraction to his work, but the quality of his work brought me to him. What a giant. In the past few years, I remarked on the huge shoes that he, Noam and Howard would leave to fill, and he replied, “They aren’t empty yet!” As with Brian, when Ed asked me to do his Wikipedia bio, I think that he knew that the end was coming, even though he stressed in recent years that he was in relatively good health. Ed brought me into his circle, I heard from some of them yesterday, and the theme was about what a wonderful man he was. I published that biography draft one week before he passed, and after fixing a couple of typos, I am going to preserve that draft on my site. My final bio will be beefed up a little, and maybe with some help from Ed’s pals. I always thought that Ed was a better writer than Noam, but that is like comparing the virtues of Buddha and Jesus. Ed had an article in Z Magazine literally every month until his 90s, so I read Ed’s work every month. It was always the first thing that I read in each issue. While Noam is one of history’s most prolific writers, as well as humanity’s most towering intellectual today, I read Ed’s work more often, partly because of Z Magazine. Even though I have read Ed’s work since 1990, when I subscribed to Lies of our Times, the process of writing that bio draft was somewhat mind-boggling. Last spring, when I began the project, I did not have his early Vietnam writings, so I immediately bought them and studied them, and then worked my way through his oeuvre. I had already read most of it, but rereading older works and then studying his newer works over the past several months was an unforgettable experience. Even though Ed said that his health was good, as I worked on his bio, I wondered if he would live to see it finished. His public writing dropped off in his last months, and I heard from him only once since he asked me to do his bio. I wondered if his health had slipped, and now I know. When Ed passed, the angels were lined up ten deep, with trumpets. I’ll meet him in the “flesh” on the other side, one day, after my earthly work is finished, and I hope that I have 30 more good years ahead of me. Ed was crazily prolific, clear into his 90s, and is my inspiration. There is a lot more to write about Ed, and I will in the coming weeks and months. Best, Wade

Hi: I found out in the past hour that Uncle Ed has died. I literally got home from an all-nighter at the office to get this news. I am grief-stricken at the moment. As I am sure many of my readers suspected, my next step, after publishing a draft of his bio, was to do battle at Wikipedia. Ed’s Wikipedia bio is truly execrable today, and this project came about when I remarked in my birthday greeting to Ed how terrible his Wikipedia bio was, and he asked me to rewrite it. Being Ed, he was emphatic that I was under no obligation to, even though that Wikipedia bio was sickening to him. But writing his bio was truly a labor of love. I told Ed that I would get something good at Wikipedia this year, and that is still my plan. As with Brian, I would gladly do battle with the “editors” at Wikipedia on Ed’s behalf, and I can easily live with Brian’s Wikipedia bio as it stands today. I hope that I will be able to put up something as lasting at Wikipedia for Ed, but I will always have the originals on my site, where Wikipedia’s “editors” can’t get at it. Best, Wade

Hi: Well, I lied a little. One more post or so on the other side, before I get into this side of the veil. When I saw that entity rip the rings off of the channel’s fingers, it was Hermes ripping them off of Tom Massari’s fingers. Tom was a Seth channel, and I don’t know if he is still at it or not. I was at the sessions when Hermes began coming through, before Tom learned to remove his rings (about five of them, as I recall, as Tom was a musician, with that artistic affectation), before channeling. I attended at least 50, and maybe more like 60-70, of Tom’s sessions before moving away to Ohio. Other than the session when I met Seth, in November 1986, as I chased Dennis out to Boston, the sessions were all held in Tom’s home, between LA and Ventura. There were usually about 20-30 of us who attended, jamming his living room. His wife was the social glue of the events. We generally left Tom alone, as he prepared for the sessions. Hollywood types often attended, such as Elizabeth Perkins, whom I sat near but did not even recognize, as Tom/Seth/Hermes/Abrum comprised the main event. My future wife had to tell me later that Perkins was there, with an actress pal who was a regular who acted in soap operas but never got her big break, I believe. Seth flirted with that aspiring actress in the sessions, and it was delightful to see. None of the entities had personalities remotely like Tom’s. Going to Tom’s channelings every two weeks for more than two years was quite an experience. I have all of the sessions on tape, and plan to digitize them one day. Tom once told me that he once got a message on his answering machine from Jane Roberts, who threatened him with legal action if he did not stop channeling Seth. Tom said that Jane was a pretty negative person, and that Tom did not even know who Seth was for a long time after he began channeling him. Channeling in our world of scarcity and fear can be quite a scene. J.Z. Knight attacked the first woman who became a “full body” channel like her when she channeled Ramtha. The original Michael channels looked askance at others who channeled the Michael entity, as they considered their version to be the only genuine or “best” one. I was close pals with another public channel, who gave me private sessions, and I became quite the channeling student over about a 30-year period. The channels themselves could act scandalously, even when the material was excellent. I have seen “skeptics” use that channel discord and different flavors of the messages to dismiss all channeling as some kind of scam or delusion. That is what “skeptics” do, as they defend their faith. They attack anything that challenges materialism, or even the scientific establishment. I attended about a hundred channeled sessions over the years, and have had dozens of readings, both by channels and psychics. It has been many years since I have had a reading or attended a channeling, and I don’t plan to again. I rarely read channeled material anymore. I did my time, got my value, and moved on. The teachings are not all identical, which is another arrow in the quiver of the “skeptics,” but, to me, all that it means is that creation is a big and diverse place, that there are many ways to look at it, and that they all have their validity. It pays to never get too stuck on any one of them. But people often become fanatics of one particular teaching (and New Age groupies abound), and you can see how organized religions work when you see that. Some channelings are better than others, and some channels are fraudulent, or are “channeling” their subconscious or not very enlightened entities from the other side, and channeling “distortion” is always a risk and part of the phenomenon. But that is a small proportion of the channels out there, IMO. As with everything, it pays to be discerning. I have noticed a New Age/conspiracist bent to channelings in recent years, and I don’t want much to do with it. It is not like channels don’t acknowledge Godzilla and friends, because they often do. In my private sessions, I have even been advised on how to deal with them, such as from Zoosh, who said that naming names is where I could get into trouble (I already knew that ), and one channel did not understand how high the interest in us went. Like I stated, you have to be discerning, and I take no channeling as gospel, and the best channels say to never do that in the first place. However, with all of the diversity in channeled teachings, there were some constants that could be seen, and I’ll list some here: I never saw a modern channel deny that reincarnation was a fact; We are all in physical reality for a reason, and each reason is unique; Oblivion awaits nobody; We are all ultimately one, and we are all equal in the Creator’s eyes; It is all about love, which is the energy of creation. To me, that is the gist of the channeling phenomenon and what I took from it. If I had not already been mystically awakened, I doubt that I would have gone down the channeling path at all, or it would not have meant much to me. Mystical students can also see controversies play out on the nature of physical reality, from positions that it is all a big accident that the Creator never intended to it is a halfway house for “fallen” souls to regain their divine awareness, or that it is specially created as Creation’s basement, where form is born, and without it, Creation would be a missing something important. I am somewhat sympathetic to all of those views, but I just keep marching on the path put in front of me, and that can sort itself out later. I am surely in no position to adjudicate the truth of that controversy. Maybe I will be let in on the joke after my earthly life has ended. Best, Wade

Hi: On that Big Picture, what comes across very clearly in the many accounts that I have encountered is that while the “other side” is real, it also goes back to the idea of “Wherever you go, there you are,” in that people’s experience of the other side is highly dependent on them. While physical reality is very “objective,” and while that saying of “creating our reality” is true even here, it happens instantly on the other side, where there is no time, anyway, not like we have here. If people expect Saint Peter to hand them a harp, he will. If people want to run away from the light, they can. There are still Romans hanging out in Elysium, and that harp-strumming “heaven” is still open for business. All beings that leave physical reality are in charge of their realities in ways that are not evident in physical reality. The realities on the other side are truly infinite. But, paradoxically, all of creation is one, which is the message of the Infinite Spirit when it manifests in physical reality. Seth said it as, “There is no separation of the self.” I remind myself of that when subjects of earthly personalities, souls, soul groups, mid-causal entities and the like are discussed. They are all aspects of the whole, and all of the slicing and dicing of the other side from here is, to a degree, unproductive activity and can serve to lead away from the truth instead of nearer to it. It pays to not get too focused on the other side, and not get too set on how it is. You will find out when you get there. One phenomenon that deserves mention is that when people encounter mystical material, they often try to twist it to justify their behavior. I have seen people justify murder with even the most enlightening mystical material. People can use anything to justify anything, and they do. As Seth said, violence is never “justified.” All of those self-righteous justifications are not paths to love or enlightenment, although all roads eventually lead home. Ending up in the lower astral, or “hell,” as it is commonly called, is just the result to how beings choose to live, and they rarely stay there for “long.” Most people end up in the mid-astral pretty quickly, or “Summerland” and other terms, while only those who expressed the highest love and enlightenment while here immediately go to the celestial realms of the upper astral. Beyond the Astral Plane is the Causal Plane, and beyond that other planes of increasingly fine vibration, which eventually lead back to the source of Creation, called the Tao, Godhead, and other terms. Physical reality is the “basement,” but is also the foundation. Form begins here. I have known some very accomplished psychonauts, who have made visits like Michael Roads has, visiting heavenly and hellish future Earths, and they sometimes brought back earth-shaking inventions. When Dannion Brinkley had his first NDE, he was shown a contraption that allowed people to easily contact the other side, and part of his mission was building it. The “Creative Moment” is when the big breakthroughs happen in science and technology. In studying these subjects, the saying of being so heavenly bound to be no earthly good richly applies. We are here for a reason, and while denial of anything beyond physical reality is a choice, even if a delusional one, it is less painful in the end to simply acknowledge that there is far more to Creation than what meets our senses each day. Some talented psychics make livings contacting the other side for people who want to connect with departed loved ones. The predominant message is that the deceased are alive and well, in their new reality, look forward to when those still on Earth pass over and they can be reunited again, but they usually deflect too much inquiry into their Astral Plane lives, as they advise the earthly to maintain their focus on their lives. What we do while we are here matters. Turning Earth into heaven or hell is our choice, and few know it better than activists like me, who have been on the “heaven on Earth” project for our entire lives, to only see the “hell on Earth” people running the show, as the masses shuffle along to the drumbeat. My recent bio draft of Uncle Ed’s life and work is highly appropriate for this subject matter. The USA is the greatest force of evil on Earth, while Americans pretend that we are humanity’s savior. Yesterday was Veteran’s Day, and the USA worships all aspects of its warfare activity. No American soldier has truly defended the USA since the War of 1812. All other American wars were about imperial expansion and maintaining it. The USA even started the War of 1812 with its land-grabbing ways. A huge, delusionary engine labors mightily to turn darkness into light, to get people to worship violence, and nearly everybody plays along. As Seth said, the means become the ends, which was one of the stars that I steered by from the very beginning of my adventures. I will now leave aside the other side, and focus on the Big Picture on Earth, while drawing in otherworldly perspectives when it seems warranted. Best, Wade

Hi: Back to the Big Picture stuff. As I have written plenty, materialism is just another religion, which you know when you have a mystical awakening. Until you have had one, you really can’t relate. It is like the difference between theory and knowledge. If I had not had my mystical awakening, I doubt that I would have become a student of spirituality, as I was well on my way to becoming a scientist, and most scientists drink the materialistic Kool-Aid each day, although the greatest scientists usually had a worldview that verged on the mystical. After his mystical awakening, Brian was a big advocate of scientific testing of paranormal phenomena, and I performed my own experiments when I was young. While the experiments could be amazing, it was the spontaneous events that could really bowl you over. I don’t want to hear from that voice anymore, but I know that it was real. I have people who want to “fix” me, but I am fine as I am, and am not interested in having any more life-risking adventures. That voice has a lot of explaining to do. I became quite the student of NDEs over the years. Just this year, a close relative shared his OOB/NDE with me, which he rarely talks to anybody about. He is a very public figure, and I doubt that he wants that story circulating. Crazy world. Every year or so, I will read NDE accounts submitted to a site (and here). They are not even the famous ones, but just your normal everyday NDEs. While nothing trumps experience, and reading first-person accounts is a treat (Testimony of Light is one of the best, and Everyone’s Guide to the Hereafter is one of a number like it, of what a “normal” afterlife is like), scientists have also dipped their noses into the subject. Next to my bed today is Handbook to the Afterlife, which I have been reading often (and “rereading” is more proper, as I reread my favorite stuff all the time). Handbook to the Afterlife does not try to convince its readers of the reality of the afterlife experience, but just summarizes what has been reported from a wide array of sources, from NDE experiencers to channels to religious texts. This past year has often seen Is There and Afterlife? next to my bed, and it sits on my office’s floor today, in one of my stacks, which does assess the evidence for an afterlife. Handbook to the Afterlife and Is There an Afterlife were both written by scientists, and it shows. I have a lot of respect for taking a scientific approach, but it could be rather amusing when reading of Klimo’s encounter with his deceased atheist father. Klimo’s parents did not want to hear about any of the afterlife “crap” that he studied as a scientist, but Klimo’s father came to him in a hyper-real state soon after he died, bewildered as to where he was, and he kept trying to get into bed with his atheist widow, who soon called her son, asking what to do about her ghost of a dead husband. Even while Klimo was staring at his deceased father, in a hyper-real state where he could see every pore on his body, Klimo did his best to keep up his scientific skepticism, questioning what he was seeing, as he was seeing it. Jane Roberts always questioned just what Seth was, and I appreciate that kind of skepticism. Jane knew that something odd was happening, but she was never quick to slap a label on it. I have attended around a hundred channeled sessions, beginning with a Seth session, have had many private readings, and the like. I have done my time, and there is certainly something genuine about those events. It was not just people making it up, and the most startling validations often came when I least expected them. Watching an entity strip the rings from the channel’s fingers in about a second, as the rings bounced off the floor, they were so violently removed, while his hands never moved while his fingers were a blur, was a sight that I will take to my grave. That was not the channel doing that. Nobody would do that to their hands that way. For every session after that, the channel carefully removed his rings before the session began, so that if the other entity came through, he would not have to go through that again. In that instant of ring-stripping, the entity was sparing the channel’s fingers, as his light body was extremely intense on the channel, whose hands were in a death grip on each other while the session lasted. When the session was over, the channel would peel his hands from each other, obviously in pain. The other entities did not do that to him. The theme of my many private sessions is that I have been around the block a few times as a soul, did my fair share of screwing up over my soul’s lifetimes, and am on special assignment, perhaps my final assignment in physical reality, to help humanity right the ship before I leave the stewardship of Earth to the next generation. My studies of the human afterlife yielded one insight above all: it all begins in the heart, and it would pay to keep our minds open when we pass over. Belief fanatics have the hardest time passing over, whether it is a fundamentalist Christian who is waiting to be handed that harp by Saint Peter, the materialist who fiercely believes that oblivion awaits, or the New Ager who has a highly specific expectation of just what will happen. A popular meme among New Age conspiracists these days is: “Run from the light!” We live in a highly limited reality, bounded by time and space, which are not restrictions on the Astral Plane, and nobody’s notions of what awaits in the afterlife is going to be completely accurate. It is just the nature of the issue, just like you cannot travel to a foreign culture and be completely prepared for what you will encounter. The learning comes from the doing. What comes across very clearly in the wealth of after-death accounts that I have digested over the many years is that wherever you go, there you are. You don’t suddenly become somebody different when you pass over. Indeed, you become more yourself than ever when you pass over, as the layers of fear are shed, sometimes quickly, and sometimes very slowly. One concept that is relatively new to me, or at least in the way that I think about it, is that physical reality, for all of its rigors and trauma, is where my earthly personality was born. The soul kind of prepares the raw material for my existence, but the personality known as Wade truly did not exist until I was born into physical reality. I will exist forever, but I was truly born when I came to inhabit this body. There is something about physical reality that is essential to creating new leaves on the soul’s tree. Can there be a better way? I think that anybody who lives here must think that, with all of the immense cruelties of our reality, but somehow, this “school” is not only where our souls come to learn and grow, but our personalities (AKA “fragments” a la Michael, and other terms) need physical reality, with physical bodies, to even exist. The process of becoming physical is a crucible of creation, and the soul’s tree would not have those leaves, or not in the way they exist, without physical reality to grow them. A lot more is coming on these subjects. Best, Wade

Hi: I am going to make a few posts on how I see the big picture. I have written plenty on the subject before, but there will be some new stuff in it. It won’t be THE Big Picture, but the one that I see, from my limited perspective as a mortal human. I can’t overemphasize that anybody’s worldview should be based on experience as much as possible, and on theirs as much as possible. Learning “vicariously” through others can also be very useful (“There be dragons!”), but everybody that I know and know of with a radical perspective got theirs primarily through their own experiences, which woke them up. Without that awakening through their experiences, they would still be in thrall to their conditioning. You can’t begin to see the big picture if you drag around that baggage. The population management ideologies are the most deadening to one’s awareness, but perhaps the most insidious is the religion of the industrial Epoch, which goes by materialism and other terms. Almost everybody that I respected in the free energy field had a mystical awakening, based on their experiences, always, and once you have that, you can no longer drink the Kool-Aid of materialism. That awakening has ruined many scientific careers, such as Brian’s. Materialism is just one more false faith. That said, there is a great deal of “mystical” disinformation out there, vended by various parties for various reasons. Some is innocent, and some is less so. But one person’s disinformation is another person’s truth, and in realms that cannot be validated very easily by experiments, these can be highly contentious areas that I will tiptoe through. I was trained to be a scientist since I was knee-high, but as I look back, my mystical awakening ruined me before my career could begin, and sent me on other paths. After my mystical awakening, I became quite the student of spirituality, and the mystical section of my library is arguably the largest, at several bookcases and stacks of channeled magazines, going back to the 1980s. I know people who have had NDEs, and nobody who had ever had an NDE could be convinced that death is the end of existence. Lots of “skeptics” and debunkers try to invalidate NDEs, but their efforts are pedestrian if not fraudulent. I never had an NDE or OOB, but I have as little doubt as there can be that death is not the end. I have had way too many paranormal experiences of my own, and do not fear my coming death, as I reach 60 years old next year. I have already outlived quite a few of my pals who were younger than me, and I look forward to seeing them again, as well as the older generations that have already passed on. I have been burying about one relative a year lately, as my parents’ generation dies off. My guess is that Mr. Professor is going to meet me when I pass, but maybe not just him. I have a very long list of people to catch up with when I pass over, to enjoy their presence again, to make amends when necessary, and the like. The other side is not a dull place to be, but I still have work to do while I am here, and I take it very seriously. So, here comes that series of posts over the next week or so. Best, Wade

Hi Krishna: I made some posts on the physics of Mr. Mentor’s engine. I work at a company that makes use of Mr. Mentor’s pressure intensifier concept, and you can imagine my reaction when I saw it used and the technicians began explaining it to me. Mr. Mentor is likely not the first person to come up with the intensifier concept for fluids, but his innovation was original in engines. When I have encountered some of his other inventions in my life, it has been a bittersweet experience, as they were all stolen from him, which is typical. They don’t give out Nobel prizes for technological advances, but yes, his engine would be big stuff, compared to what else is on the market today. Hybrid cars take advantage of using the car’s momentum to recharge in the batteries while braking, which is another feature of what Mr. Mentor’s engine did. If free energy makes it past humanity’s inertia and the organized suppression, Dennis, Brian, and Mr. Mentor will become historical figures. In a world of scarcity and fear, beggars and thieves dominate, and it is the ideal environment for Godzilla to operate in. That is the main reason why Godzilla so avidly keeps the lid on free energy and related technologies. He reacts to the idea of abundance like almost all people do: with fear. No need to be too hard on him, and I have some respect and even admiration for him, as he has attained mastery of his game, even though it is a dark one. He has some dark and heavy karma, however, but so does the USA, as my Uncle Ed bio made clear, for those with eyes to see. But with all the justified wonder at Mr. Mentor’s engine, Dennis’s heat pump, and other suppressed technologies, the free energy issue is really about integrity and sentience, not technology. Technology is really only a small part of the puzzle, but in the free energy field’s state of arrested development, it is dominated by inventors and scientists. Free energy efforts that focus on inventors and scientists are doomed. The efforts have to raise their games far higher than that, which is, of course, what my work is all about. Only a comprehensive approach has a prayer, IMO. Best, Wade

Hi Krishna: Keep thinking! The engine definitely worked - a company built one and drove it in the Rose Parade - and I have heard the marveling over it from scientists and engineers, but it was not invented to do free energy, but to just wring more energy out of a gallon of gasoline. Whether it could do free energy is still an open question for me, and as we were wiped out while building a prototype of it, it may always be at the “open question” level for me, although some scientists thought it was more than possible. Compared to what I already know exists, it is no big deal. But compared to everything else on the market today, it is marvelous and a real brain-breaker. It was my introduction to the energy issue and the beginning of my bizarre journey, which started more than 40 years ago, how time flies. Best, Wade

Hi: I often write about “waking up” and how important it is for what I do. Another term is being “radicalized.” But the awakening never ends, and there must be eternal vigilance against falling asleep to the siren song of our conditioning. In the West, that song plays 24/7. Most Americans’ heads would explode if they read my Ed Herman biography. It was interesting to see Dennis’s gradual awakening on certain issues. When I met Dennis, his company was in its death throes as it was being wiped out by the local oligarchy. A phony bankruptcy suit by an electric company hit man, which the federal courts fraudulently allowed, was strangling the dying company. Dennis had been rooked into pleading guilty to fraud for unintentionally bouncing some checks as his company was being illegally wiped out in the mayhem of the USA’s first energy crisis. But when I lived with Dennis in Boston, he still believed in the USA’s legal system, saying that if you pressed far enough into the legal system, you could find justice. Then came the Ventura experience. After that, Dennis called our legal system the “just us” system. How the heck could Dennis still believe in the legal system after Seattle? Coming to understand that we live in an evil system is not a fun process. I resisted the primary lesson of my journey every step of the way, until I had it beaten into my head in no uncertain terms. Ever since, I have constantly heard from people who deny the truth of my life’s most important lesson, in their naïveté. They don’t want to believe it, either. I am sympathetic, but if people are not awake in this field, they unerringly travel the well-worn paths of disaster. After Dennis’s last run-in with the USA’s “justice” system, which even the sitting American president’s energy advisor was powerless to influence, Dennis still implores the American government for help to make his idealistic dreams come to fruition. Is that called being a slow learner? My point is that “awakening” does not happen in an instant, but is part of a process. My radicalizing moment on the witness stand was merely the culmination of several years of gradual disillusionment, which began in earnest with my college graduation. After those Ventura days, I would never see the world the same way again. But the learning never ends, and although nothing that I learned after Ventura was “radicalizing” to me, nor could anything have been truly radicalizing to me after those Ventura days, my studies and further experiences since then were important for developing the perspective evident in my big essay. I only began understanding the true Epochal significance of free energy in about 2010, after reading a book published by an oil company, of all things. So, I respect the many roads that people can take to the free energy issue. While my path was set long ago, it took a long time to get there, and the learning never ends. Best, Wade

Hi: I just published phase one of my biography project on Ed Herman. I hope to finish the project this year, and then it is off to my long-overdue update of my big essay. Best, Wade