Ed Herman, the Left, and My Life's Work

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

As I recently wrote, I am going to make lemonade from the lemon that Wikipedia served up, and this coming series of posts will be the raw material for a new essay, which has been on my list of things to do for years.  The territory will be familiar, but there will be new material, and it will ultimately deal with my effort to help initiate the Fifth Epoch.  

I was a bookworm from the time I could walk and was raised to be a scientist, although I did not shake my mother’s bad habits until I became an adult (tabloids at 13, and TV at 18).  I read the newspaper daily, from age 9 or so, beginning with the local newspaper, graduating to the LA Times when I was in college, and during my first stint in LA, I subscribed to the Christian Science Monitor, thinking that I was getting alternative news.  I had a lot to learn, and my lessons began when I met Dennis.  

The day that I met Dennis, he spoke in front of a thousand people or so, with several camera crews recording his talk.  A week or so later, I saw the only positive TV account of him that I know of, by a Canadian TV station.  A week or so after that, I saw the version presented by a Seattle TV station, which was in the Big Lie category, which was my first inkling that the news might not have been about discovering and reporting the truth.  The next three years was an education of the kind that you can’t buy, and when I read an “investigative” report on Dennis in the LA Times, in early 1989, I said to myself, “They can just make it up as they go.”  I met Gary Wean about a month before reading that LA Times article, I had long since been radicalized, and two months after meeting Gary, Mr. Professor and I sprung Dennis from jail, in the biggest miracle that I ever witnessed, which we all knew was a case of divine intervention.  It was our “friends” at work once again.  

I cannot recall that exact date, but it was around the same time that we sprang Dennis from jail that a roommate told me about some guy named Noam Chomsky, and I had never heard of him before.  The next year, in early 1990, while driving to my job in LA of all places, I heard on the radio somebody who might have been Uncle Ed promoting a new magazine titled Lies of Our Times (LOOT).  I was so ready for its message, and after I moved to Ohio later that year, one of the first things that I did was subscribe to it, and my education in the alternative media began, although the first page of my first issue of LOOT is still the one I remember the best, as the New York Times could make it up as it went along.  All newspapers can make it up as they go, and the TV news was worse.  That sums up the American media, although it would be many years before I wrote my first essay on the subject.  When Ralph McGehee was forced into the rocking chair by his friends at the CIA, as he was silenced in the Land of the Free, I bought what I could from his intelligence library, including the LOOT issues that came out before I subscribed to it, so I have every issue from LOOT’s existence.  

LOOT was the beginning of my media studies, and the past year and more of studying Ed’s work, so that I could write his bio, is probably the last such stint in my lifetime, of studying how the media operates.  In those days of study in the early 1990s, on a vast array of subjects, I got my hands on all sorts of alternative media literature.  Noam wrote an article in LOOT every month, Ed was LOOT’s editor for its entire existence, as well as its leading writer, and I had a growing appreciation of Ed’s lucid writings.  Even though I was an eager student, it still took me about two years to really understand what Noam was saying.  After two years of study, the movie Manufacturing Consent came out, which was about Noam’s life (which briefly featured Ed), and a month or so after watching the movie at Ohio State (it was the most popular documentary in Canadian history to that time, which played on national TV globally, but it has never aired on an American TV station, which proved Noam’s point in spades), I was driven from my sleep to write a 17-page letter to Noam, about how nobody, anywhere, mainstream or alternative, even mentioned free energy, other than attacks on Dennis.  Imagine my surprise when I received a gracious reply from Noam a couple of weeks later, as he described my letter as “tantalizing,” but he said that he did not know anything about the subject and advised me to seek an “expert.”  Well, there weren’t any, so I had to become my own.   

We traded letters a few more times, and I sent him my second “book,” which was really a diary of my days with Dennis and Ralph Hovnanian’s quotation collage, and our correspondence ended on a friendly note.  I was given the polite brush-off, but I never held that against Noam.  He had plenty on his plate, and his attention to my correspondence out of the blue was an honor and delight.  

I read Manufacturing Consent in the early 1990s, and soon got my hands on all of Ed’s writings that I could.  When I wrote my site as it largely stands today, in the late 1990s, I began corresponding with Ed.  As with Noam, Ed was easy to reach and a pleasant correspondent.  Ed was a better writer than Noam, very witty, and I began calling him Uncle Ed back then, and I even have an email or two from Ed, signed off with “Uncle Ed.”  Those early days of media studies and correspondence with Ed and Noam were a generation ago, and what a privilege to be in the audience while those men were in the primes of their political writing careers.  The USA may never see any others like them, along with Uncle Howard and a few others.  Uncle Noam is going to go down in history as one of its leading intellectuals and arguably the greatest that the USA ever produced, while most Americans have never heard of him.  

This post begins what will be quite a series of posts, which will be grist for that essay.

Best,

Wade

 

Edited July 20, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

To continue that thread that I began on Ed, the Left, and my life’s work, the essay that these posts will be grist for I don’t intend to be scholarly, but it will mainly be memories of my journey.  I don’t plan to consult many books and other sources of information as I write it, but I will primarily ransack my memory.

I just took a short spin through my emails, and it looks like I began using Outlook in earnest in 2000.  I used Netscape’s email program, as I recall, before then, but I doubt that I will find those emails.  I have everything going back to 2000, I believe, but I think that I began emailing Ed before that.  My first correspondence with Noam was 1992, I contacted Ralph McGehee in 1996, in preparation for publishing my first site, but I had no public presence for a couple of years soon after that, and if I had to guess, I think that I began trading email with Ed in 1998 or 1999.  It was always friendly, and I really can’t recall what our first emails were about, other than praising Ed and eagerly sitting at his scholarly feet.  Our first exchange that sits clearly in my memory is when Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were campaigning to have Milosevic delivered to the kangaroo court tribunal at The Hague.  I naively donated to Amnesty International in those days, and receiving their pleas to help their campaign to have Milosevic captured and delivered to The Hague was shocking.  I asked Ed about it, and he agreed that it was scandalous.  He said that he only donated to local human rights groups anymore, and he mentioned a few around the Balkans.  I think that we traded those emails in 1999, or it might have been as late as 2000.  Ed exposed Human Rights Watch as an imperial tool early on, and I asked him to do something similar for Amnesty International, but he said that he was not planning to, so it was nice to see him give Amnesty similar treatment in later years.  

In those days, I contacted lefties, looking for free energy allies, but nobody was home.  I had my email address on my site until 2002 and took on all comers, in those days of Internet innocence.  Noam’s gracious response was one of the few that I ever received from the Left.  One day, I wrote to Ed that energy was the basis of all economic systems, and that it was the key to humanity’s future, and he agreed, but his focus was on banking and the exchange aspect of economics, and he said that he needed to get into the energy issue one day, but he really never did.  I certainly did not hold that against Ed; he was unparalleled as a media analyst, and had his hands full with that.  Brian and I began collaborating in earnest in 2001, and Brian was a Lefty.  I tried several times to introduce Brian to Ed, but Ed never took me up on it.  It is a lasting source of sadness to this day.  Back then, I saw it as the best chance that the Left had to begin comprehending the free energy issue.  Brian and Ed were both former Ivy League professors and had plenty in common, going back to Vietnam Era protests.

During our NEM days, Brian said that his and my job was enlisting the Left, but nobody was ever home.  Almost all that we got were catcalls, and Brian played the Paul Revere of Free Energy for several years before he began openly wondering if humanity was a sentient species.  One of the more memorable groups were environmentalists, as Alden Bryant soon learned (and as I learned many years earlier), and I later learned that environmentalists had been treating free energy like the enemy since at least the 1970s.  Everybody slammed the doors in our faces, and it took me many years to understand what we were seeing: a general addiction to scarcity, or, perhaps, a better way to say it would be that their adaptive behaviors for surviving in a world of scarcity stunted their perspectives, and when I discovered Uncle Bucky’s work in early 2003, it all began to become clear to me.

After receiving a polite silence from Ed after about a half-dozen attempts to interest him in free energy, and to also introduce him to Brian, I gave up and never tried again, after about 2004.  I never held it against Ed, but it was emblematic of the problems in attracting the Left’s interest, which to this day is still the likeliest ally that I know of, but they have their ideological commitments that blind them to the bigger picture.  I probably did not contact Ed much for the rest of my midlife crisis, which finally ended in 2006.  

Best,

Wade

Edited July 23, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have an eidetic memory, and have only met one person whose memory I can tell is better than mine, and his is truly extraordinary.  Like me, his memory is not as good as it used to be, but for many years, you could pick any day on the calendar from 20 years previously, and he could tell you, in detail, what he did that day.  Mine is not nearly that good, but I have vivid memories of all years of my life, going back to age two, and I have been thinking about my early years of reading Ed’s work.  1990 was a particularly memorable year for me.  I got married, Dennis got rooked into the plea bargain that nearly cost him his life, I had another great hiking summer, I moved away from the town where I was raised, never to return, began to put my wife through graduate school in Ohio, and began the studies that resulted in my site.  My alternative media studies began that year, starting with my subscription to Lies of Our Times (LOOT).  The first page of my first issue of LOOT is still the one that I remember best, as I saw that the New York Times could also make it up as it went along, which was a situation that I was all-too-familiar with.

To once again address Wikipedia’s charges that I am a careless plagiarist and copyright infringer, back around 2000, I asked Ed for permission to reproduce those images that I copied from LOOT.  Since my site is non-commercial, I could play the Fair Use card for every quote and image on my site, but I virtually always ask permission, going back to Ralph McGehee and my 1996 site, which has led to some amazing exchanges (1, 2).  

Ed was LOOT’s editor, and he was happy that I presented those images.  LOOT was long-defunct by then, and Ed was happy to see some of LOOT survive in my work.  One day back then, Ed wrote that what I had done with my site – putting my essays all under one roof – he hoped to do with his work one day.  Alas, he never did, as his work is scattered around the Internet.  But, frankly, Ed’s output was so prodigious that it would have been quite a task.

When I subscribed to LOOT, Noam was the main attraction for me.  I heard of him for the first time the previous year, so I finally got to read the work of this obscure figure.  As I have written, it took me about two years to really understand what Noam was saying, as it was so radically different from anything that I had been taught before.  In a LOOT issue in the autumn of 1990 was an ad for Ralph McGehee’s book, and reading it was a seminal moment of my awakening.  

Ed was not the main attraction for me in those early days, and I had no idea who he was when I began reading LOOT.  I began subscribing to Z Magazine a year or two later, and have continually subscribed to this day.  Somewhere in those first two years of media studies, I began to gain an appreciation of Noam’s sidekick.  Ed’s work was easier to read than Noam’s, and Ed was pretty funny as a writer.  Ed had a dry wit, and he dealt with very heavy material, such as genocides.  That is not an easy dance, to inject a little humor into such dark material, but Ed deftly did it.  I began obtaining books early in my studies, and steadily built my personal library that stands at about 2,000 books today.  Manufacturing Consent was probably the first book of Ed’s that I bought, and by the time that LOOT’s final issue came out in 1994, I was decidedly impressed with Ed.  It was probably around that time when his monthly articles in Z Magazine became the main attraction in Z for me, and I began thinking about him as Uncle Ed.  From 1990 until his death, hardly a month went by that I did not read something by Ed.

When I wrote my site, largely as it stands today, between 1997 and 2002, I used a lot of Ed’s work, such as his The Political Economy of Human Rights, written with Noam.  I wrote about the suppression of his first book with Noam, I reproduced Ed’s National Security State propaganda framework, I used Ed’s writings on Yugoslavia, I summarized the propaganda model, etc.  He was firmly Uncle Ed to me, by the time that I contacted him in the late 1990s, and Ed did not disappoint as a correspondent.  

Ed was not your typical Lefty.  He did not have the “conspiracy phobia” that many in the Left did, and Ed was a structuralist extraordinaire.  In his Doublespeak Dictionary, Ed wrote about the Magic Bullet and “conspiracy theories.”  The cover story of one LOOT issue was about the forged backyard photos of Oswald.  Ed was appreciative of my account of Gary’s adventures regarding the JFK hit.  Those events had all happened by 2002, which was about the time that I tried interesting Ed in free energy and began trying to introduce him to Brian, to no avail.  Ed was far from the only Lefty that I contacted in those days, but on the subject of free energy, only he and Noam ever gave me the time of day.  All of the lesser lights blew me off, and I rarely even heard back from them.  

Best,

Wade

Edited July 24, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I don’t have much time this morning, but in the conclusion of After the Cataclysm, Noam and Ed noted the American media’s achievement of erasing the American bludgeoning of Indochina, turning the USA “from causal agent to bystander,” as it righteously moralized about the Khmer Rouge, even though the USA supported Pol Pot after Vietnam overthrew him and ended the Cambodian genocide.

I don’t want to be too hard on them, but there is a cottage industry in science and scholarship that strenuously denies that humans had anything to do with the megafauna extinctions, including our cousin species.  Paper after paper is churned out that argues that climate change did it, or various “anything but humans” hypotheses.  

IMO, the similarities are not coincidental, and are all about defending one’s in-group.  It is the American state being defended regarding the media and Indochina, and it is humanity, or perhaps the ancestors of the world’s indigenous peoples, being defended regarding the megafauna and human extinctions.  

As I noted regarding the history profession, in one of my site’s oldest essays, the documents obtained are less important than the bias of the historian sifting through them.  To me, these are just examples of my journey’s primary lesson.  That is the reason for our predicament, and all other factors pale to insignificance.  

As Noam noted, Ed was a model of integrity, and that, more than anything else, attracted me to him.  

Best,

Wade

 

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Ed and I had a friendly correspondence over nearly 20 years, apparently so friendly that I am disqualified from ever editing articles related to him at Wikipedia.  I began to try introducing Ed to Brian between around 2001, when I began collaborating with Brian, and 2004, when my NEM experience ended.  Ed was never interested.  All that I received was polite silence, and in 2003 and 2004, during our NEM effort, the Richard Heinberg experience was very educational for me, in a number of ways.  

It began in early 2003, when I read some of Uncle Bucky’s work, after one of his pupils called me a “comprehensivist” and I did not know what he meant.  The comprehensive lightbulb finally went on for me, which I had been unwittingly groping toward for many years, arguably since I could walk.  Mere weeks after finishing with my introduction to Bucky’s work, I read this article by Heinberg, on the eve of Iraq’s invasion.  Iraq’s invasion may have been the most emotionally agonizing time of my life, and that is saying something.  I had witnessed the USA’s turning into Nazi Germany, with aggressive wars that may be far from over.  If humanity survives, the USA’s invasion of Iraq may be seen as the first salvos of World War III, and Bush and Blair will be seen as the 21^st century equivalent of Hitler and Mussolini, and here we are again, attacking Russia, like Napoleon and Hitler did.  If it turns into a shooting war, those elite plans to make a survival enclave on Mars might be timely.  

Heinberg’s article was the first time that I read Peak Oiler work.  I vaguely knew that the oil would run out one day, but I was not familiar with Peak Oiler work.  Heinberg published his first Peak Oiler book a few weeks later.  I got familiar, fast, and read books that Heinberg relied on (Catton, Tainter, Deffeyes) before I contacted him in May 2003, through an activist that we had in common.  

Heinberg’s work was quite interdisciplinary, which appealed to my budding comprehensive awareness, and we had several convergences in our work.  One was that Heinberg was Velikovsky’s assistant, and I had been on the fringes of that controversy for several years by that time.  Velikovsky was decidedly multi-disciplinary in his approach, although I doubt that much, if any, of his catastrophic work is valid.  He got points for advocating catastrophism when uniformitarianism was a dogma, but I don’t see that his work merits much beyond that.  Velikovsky was famously attacked by Brian’s erstwhile buddy Carl Sagan, debunker extraordinaire, and Sagan’s dishonest attack arguably kept the Velikovsky controversy alive far longer than it should have.  

Another convergence was that Heinberg wrote about free energy as a possible solution.  He wrote about some of the exact situations, even down to the people, such as Sparky Sweet, that I had been involved with.  Heinberg wrote about them in a semi-ridiculing way, but I always give people the benefit of the doubt, until they demonstrate to me that there is no doubt to give them the benefit of.  I even did it with Mr. Skeptic.  I contacted Heinberg in a very friendly and welcoming way, eager to give him some inside perspective on the very situations that he wrote about, and was more than happy to introduce him to Brian, which was about the same time that Brian invited me to help him establish NEM.  

Heinberg was not interested.  Not only was he not interested, he explicitly stated that until we could agree that humanity is quickly running out of energy and is using too much of it, that there was no point in discussing the issues any further.  He was begging the question, as free energy would make his arguments pointless.  I walked away from Heinberg, stunned by his response.  What made Heinberg’s response doubly bizarre was the he was onboard with the idea that 9/11 was an inside job (which was very “unlefty”), but he could not seem to comprehend organized suppression, which would have orders of magnitude more motivation for elite involvement than 9/11 would have had.  Heinberg was a prototypical Level 3.  

During the next year, our little NEM effort tried to get Brian visibility, using him as a kind of battering ram to open doors.  But an interview on Jeff Rense’s program was about all that happened.  Brian tried and tried to get into “progressive” venues, and found no takers.  Not only was nobody interested, Heinberg was being feted like a conquering hero across the entire Left/environmentalist spectrum.  As I bought groceries at my local progressive store in May 2014 (when Mallove was murdered), a cover story featuring Heinberg greeted me as I walked through the door.  The same month, there was an interview with Heinberg in Z Magazine, which I had subscribed to for more than a decade by that time, and it was Ed’s primary publishing conduit by then.  While Brian’s message was one of healing and abundance, Heinberg beat the drums of doom.  Brian was completely shut out from all “progressive” venues while Heinberg got the red carpet treatment at those very same venues.  It was kind of mind-bending to me at the time, but Bucky’s work helped me understand what I was seeing: people were addicted to scarcity.  Perhaps stated more precisely, people were addicted to their survival mechanisms in a world of scarcity and fear, including their adoptive ideologies, and were not about to let go.  

Many years of derision and denial, from all quarters, became clear to me in those days.  I wanted to walk away from NEM in May 2014, even before Mallove was murdered, as I could tell that our efforts were doomed (from the inside, as our motley crew did not have what it took to make a dent, with inexperience and naïveté a leading reason, but they also did not understand the integrity issue), but Brian begged me to stay, and I poured $15K into NEM over the next several months and quit right after our conference in September 2004.  My money, given as a gift when I did not want to be there, was completely wasted.  The years 2003 and 2004 were very dismaying to me, I was in the darkest phase of my midlife crisis, and I went quiet for years, while working 60-hour weeks at my day job after I resumed my career, after those several years of study and writing that became my site as it largely stands today.  

I was not finished writing about Ed and the Left yet, and am still kind of involved, writing Ed’s first biography, no matter how it has gone with Wikipedia.  

Best,

Wade

Edited July 27, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

After the NEM disaster, I went quiet for years.  Brian immediately moved to South America after our conference, and spent the rest of his life there.  Mallove’s murder before the conference and John Mack’s death the day after the conference ended convinced Brian to get out of Dodge, and fast.  He did not want to become another cautionary tale, although he already was.  

I was replaced on the NEM board by a famous free energy name who soon led what Brian called a “rebellion” that booted him out of NEM.  That was no surprise for me, with what I had been through, and it was not the first time that it had happened to Brian.  

I was in the darkest phase of my midlife crisis in those years, and I wrote what some consider my most inspiring essay, in early 2006, and I wrote it as a kind of therapy for myself, to make it clear what I was pursuing.  In those days, it was like walking around with a big, emotional spike in my chest.  After years of pestering me about it, Krishna finally convinced me to contact the father of the Free Software Movement, Richard Stallman.  Krishna thought that free software and free energy activists would make natural allies, and it seemed to make sense to me, and I contacted Stallman in the summer of 2006.  We had a cordial but ultimately frustrating correspondence over about a month.  Like Heinberg, Stallman was another entrenched Level 3.  Stallman was another one of those 160+ IQ people that I have interacted with.  I have found that the “smart” can be the most stuck in their conditioning, amazingly.  The big trap for the “smart,” at least in the West, is what I have called the “rationalist-materialist paradigm,” and materialism is usually a wide-enough net to catch them, and their barriers to comprehension include these features:

• A denial of the abilities and attributes of consciousness, other than rational thinking;
• The thought that the corpus of mainstream scientific thought and its findings, often called “the laws of physics,” the “laws of nature,” and the like, had revealed all the secrets of the universe or were close to that goal (the standard “skeptical” stance), and that the tools of mainstream science were the only worthy ones;
• A denial that elites and other interests would or could manipulate the world economy and key global events from behind the scenes, usually dismissing all such activities as being an untenable “conspiracy theory”, as they irrationally confused evidence with theories.  Our experiences were no theory.  
  

Also, their keen “intelligence” usually made their ideas impervious to argument.  Stallman was far from the first or last like him that I encountered, but he was kind of a quintessential example of it.  During the same month that I interacted with Stallman, I wrote an open letter to the Free Software Movement.  Other than Krishna, I doubt that I have heard from anybody else in that milieu.  Krishna even worked on Stallman, but came away frustrated, and Krishna noted that Stallman did not understand rather mundane issues such as the demographic transition, and did not seem interested in understanding.

During that summer of 2006, I quietly wrestled with my midlife crisis, and its theme was that my life’s work was an exercise in futility.  Humanity was going to flush itself straight down the toilet, taking most of Earth’s ecosystems with it, and all that I could do was stand by and watch, and even get dragged along for the ride, although I might get “lucky” and die before it really hit the fan.  

My midlife crisis began in 2000, and did not begin to end until the end of August 2006, when Dennis arrived at my home, unannounced, to invite me to Washington D.C. for an eve of the election demonstration of the technologies that he was currently working on.  The demonstration was being arranged by the sitting president’s energy advisor.  The last place on Earth where I wanted to be was at the White House, having tea with Bush and Cheney.  Brian talked in front of the White House less than two weeks after Dennis invited me to the White House, in another of the innumerable bizarre synchronicities of my life.   I turned Dennis down instantly, along with his offer to be on the board of his new venture.  With Mr. Professor’s death, which sent me into the dark phase of my midlife crisis, I was the only person outside of his family that Dennis deeply trusted, but I wanted no part of another radical business venture, no matter how noble.  

For me, the rich irony of what Dennis was involved with in those days was that he had developed high-MPG carburetor technology.  It was like I had come full circle from my teenage dreams of more than 30 years previously, with Mr. Mentor’s engine.  With what Dennis, I, and other free energy revolutionaries knew existed, squeezing more energy from a gallon of gasoline was child’s play, but was also a way for Dennis to get a leg up, like his heat pump was, but the capitalist game is rigged to the extreme.  What we encountered was capitalism on steroids.

A few years later, when Dennis was finally forbidden to be involved in the energy industry in the USA, and I read the FTC’s clever lies as they went after Dennis, soon after David Rockefeller called Dennis at home, I thanked my lucky stars that I did not get involved with Dennis again, as the Feds would have shown up at my house.  Several years after those events, I met with Dennis’s assistant, who kind of replaced me as Dennis’s sidekick, and he said that he nearly soiled himself when the Feds arrived at his house and served him their papers.  It was familiar territory for me, which I never want to see again.  

When Dennis left, it sent me into new throes of agony, and my psychologist wife began insisting that I seek professional help, as she did many years previously, and I once again got trauma therapy.  By late 2006, the clouds finally began to part, and my life’s longest stretch of emotional agony ended (which was actually rivaled by my life’s previous several years, as I write this, which I may never be able to publicly discuss).  By early 2007, I began the study that resulted in my big essay.  If you had asked me exactly what the result of my upcoming years of study would produce, I would not have replied with writing my big essay.  That big essay was beyond my wildest dreams, even in 2007.

In June 2007, I wrote an open letter to the radical left, which to this day is the closest thing that I could find to kindred spirits (Ed, Noam, and Howard were their patron saints), but they are generally ideologically opposed to the idea of organized suppression, and what my friend saw blows mainstream physics out of the water, which lefties cannot wrap their minds around.  

After having no contact with the public since 2002, I began to join forums where I had seen my work discussed, and I quickly discovered that the Internet had become a xxxxx Festival during my years of seclusion.  I was attacked wherever I appeared, and Mr. Skeptic usually arrived, even the day after I appeared, heaving his disinformation bombs.  After Dennis was finally run out of the USA, Mr. Skeptic quietly folded his tents and disappeared, as his 15-year crusade was finished.  I am more than half-convinced that he was on somebody’s payroll during his vendetta, as Bill the BPA Hit Man was, as many professionals and psychopaths were sicced on us over the years.  Working for the forces of darkness pays well, for a time.  I finally got the message when I joined a forum that was full of trolls, and as they ganged up on me, I was expelled from the forum.  After that experience, I decided that the only forum that I would join in the future would be mine, which would be a xxxxx-free zone.

In the summer of 2007, I wrote an essay that was inspired by some activists who contacted me, and that essay brought Brian back into my life (although it blew those activists out of the water), who said that that essay was the best thing that he had read in a long time.  We began collaborating again, Brian told me his tale of being run out of NEM by the other board members, and through his contacts, early the next year I did my first public interview, followed the next year by what will always be my favorite, when Bill Ryan and Kerry Cassidy interviewed me and Brian for their Project Camelot.  I won’t have another interview with Brian.  There is a lot more to come on these issues, but I now begin what will be a crazily busy next few weeks at my day job, so my posts will slow down.  

Best,

Wade

Edited July 31, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

At the same time that Dennis was being run out of the USA, Brian wanted to approach the DOE and test Obama’s “visionary” energy policy, in which he allegedly encouraged radical energy innovation.  Brian’s site might not be long for the world, as it keeps going down.  Here is the DOE proposal on his site, and here it is on mine.  I was evicted from my home at about the same time that Brian asked me to help him.  Of course, I did, but writing my parts of the proposal (big picture, further obstacles) was memorable, as I wrote it while boxing up my library for the move.  While I wrote it, I wondered what Brian thought that we would accomplish.  In his last book, which I helped edit, he admitted his co-dependency with Washington, D.C.  You can hear Brian talking, here, about how our proposal was received.  I had spoken at DOE hearings before, with Dennis, and while educational, it was an exercise in futility.  Dennis and Brian kept banging on the Establishment’s door, kept banging on any doors that they could, while trying to mount a mass movement.  I carried the spears in five mass movement efforts before deciding that they did not have a prayer.  There are not enough people with the right stuff for that approach to work.  Those are just the numbers, and no judgment is implied, but I am constantly approached by naïve newcomers, who have never gone out and done anything of significance, who think that they have the magic answer to harness sociality, and that they will succeed while the best of the best never had a chance.  What suicidal folly.

Greer has done the same thing.  They try to get either the elite or the masses involved.  Neither group is going to help, as their self-interest marks the true north of their awareness.  Self-serving people are not going to help this along at all, and because personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity, the people who can help are going to be very few and far between.  I am seeking a middle ground that has never been sought before for this epochal task, and I am intimately familiar with what does not work.  There are no short-cuts or easy answers, not for the biggest event in the human journey, but that does not prevent newcomers from constantly trying, and the standard beginner’s activity is to rush out and proselytize to their social circles, telling them the “good news,” to only get rudely awakened: their social circles don’t want to hear about it.  I constantly hear tales of ostracism from those newcomers.  The best of them finally get it out of their systems and become willing to learn and put their bright ideas in the dustbin.  

There is plenty more to come, but it took nearly 40 years, from my teenage dreams, to my real world early awakenings in my profession, through the war years with Dennis, through years of study, to getting back in the game for a little while (1, 2), to more study, to finally arrive at my current approach.  If you told me what lied ahead, when I had my teenage dreams, I would not have believed any of it.  

Best,

Wade