SUPERFICIALIDAD

por Jaime Galvis V.

A la economía de consumo se ha sumado últimamente la sabiduría de consumo. Así como la primera ha sido un motor de progreso, empleo y producción, la segunda ha perjudicado seriamente el cuociente intelectual de la ciudadanía. Las consejas, la ciencia de revista, los conceptos de telenoticiero, la sabiduría de relleno, están afectando muy seriamente la capacidad de raciocinio del ciudadano medio. En Colombia, esa tendencia de hacer afirmaciones sin fundamento tiene una larga tradición, pero con la limitación mediática y el bajo nivel de alfabetismo no tuvo la resonancia que tiene actualmente la ignorancia ilustrada. 

Circulaban cuentos ingenuos tales como el de la Atenas Suramericana, el segundo himno nacional del Mundo, después de la Marsellesa, el rosario de próceres sin méritos etc. Con el progreso de los medios de comunicación, surgieron toda una serie de infundios de muy amplia difusión acerca del calentamiento global, la biodiversidad, la contaminación visual, la contaminación auditiva, una interminable lista de sustancias cancerígenas, the political correctness, el CO2 en la atmósfera, el colesterol, los triglicéridos, la grasa saturadas, las grasas insaturadas, el gluten, el feng shui, las profecías mayas, el Imperialismo Yankee, el mercurio, la capa de ozono, la deforestación, la minería a cielo abierto, el agotamiento del agua, el fenómeno del Niño, Los Iluminatti, los ovnis, la sísmica petrolera, los cultivos transgénicos, los plaguicidas, la celulitis y mil temas que han llevado a la población a acumular creencias absurdas. 

En medios de comunicación tan novedosos como el Internet pululan los videos de pseudociencia y superchería. Si todo esto se ha difundido mundialmente, en Colombia además se han creado toda una serie de falacias, por ejemplo la historia acerca de los páramos como fuente de la hidrología nacional, esas pequeñas tundras pretenden preservarlas de la actividad humana, prohibiendo la población de áreas por encima de 2900 metros de altura. Esos naturalistas de cocktail nunca supieron que el Imperio Inca tuvo su asentamiento en zonas por encima de 3000 metros de altura y allí desarrollaron toda una civilización. De esas cumbres andinas provienen cultivos tales como la papa, la quinua, el amaranto, la arracacha, etc. Allí se desarrolló la cría de auquénidos, chichillas y cuyes. Ese gran novelista de la vida en la puna, Ciro Alegria, decía que los habitantes de las alturas eran las gentes más sanas del Perú, porque allí no había endemias. 

Otro tema absurdo de la sabiduría de revista es la minería. Altos funcionarios pontifican que esta actividad está poniendo en peligro la agricultura y arrasando las selvas. La sabiduría de telenoticiero ignora que la minería es una actividad puntual, no hace mucho un grupo de ecólogos pudo observar en Google Earth la mina de hierro más grande del Mundo, Carajás en Brasil, el comentario unánime fue ¿es tan pequeña? Es tan acentuada la desinformación que en una población del Tolima, Piedras, hubo una oposición casi unánime a la instalación de una planta de separación de minerales de Anglo Gold Ashanti, por la simple ignorancia, ya que no se trataba de establecer allí una mina, sino una operación industrial. La explotación minera en California y Vetas, actividad más que centenaria, ha recibido la satanización de toda la prensa amarilla. Lo menos que le atribuyen es el envenenamiento del acueducto de Bucaramanga. Esos genios mediáticos ignoran que la gran metrópolis de Africa del Sur, Johannesburgo, está construida sobre la mina de oro más grande del Mundo. 

Otra conseja amplísimamente difundida es acerca de la biodiversidad del Andén pacífico de Colombia. El que se tome el trabajo de recorrer esas selvas puede darse cuenta de la escasez faunística. El clima hiperhúmedo es tan hostil a la vida como el desierto. Para proteger ese emporio de vida, se ha obstaculizado persistentemente el desarrollo económico de esa zona. Se han cancelado proyectos de puertos, hidroeléctricas, carreteras, minas, etc., condenando a la población del Chocó geográfico a una miseria sin solución. La ignorancia mediática convirtió los extensos terrenos del antiguo Ingenio Sautatá en una reserva natural impoluta, el parque Nacional Los Catios, que se convirtió en una barrera para impedir la carretera a Panamá y a Norte América.

Izquierdismo vergonzoso

Por Jaime Galvis V

La evolución de las corrientes políticas de izquierda está tomando un giro inesperado y vergonzoso. Luego de la Segunda Guerra mundial la expansión del Comunismo en el Mundo se consideró un hecho inexorable, los países iban sucumbiendo ante la invasión militar y propagandística. Europa Oriental se vio sojuzgada por déspotas dogmáticos, intransigentes e ineptos manipulados por la Unión Soviética. China fue gobernada por un régimen draconiano y absurdo que causó incontables muertes y una miseria atroz. Gradualmente se establecieron regímenes satélites en países de Africa, Asia y en Latinoamérica, Cuba. Todo esto se derrumbó en la Perestroika cuando se descubrió la absoluta incapacidad de la dirigencia comunista para manejar la economía. Esto lo predijo un brillante intelectual montenegrino, Milovan Djilas, en 1959, en un libro titulado “La Nueva Clase”. No hubo un solo régimen comunista que lograra el desarrollo económico. 

Ahora después de semejante debacle, surgen en América Latina corrientes ideológicas de extrema izquierda que pretenden repetir el desastre, paulatinamente se han establecido unos regímenes en los cuales se presenta una simbiosis entre el Marxismo-leninismo y la tradicional cleptomanía iberoamericana. Una curiosa mezcla de dialéctica y desfalco. Esto le ha imprimido a los regímenes de izquierda una dinámica increíble;  la Unión Soviética se arruinó en setenta años, Venezuela lo ha logrado en menos de veinte.

Naturalmente el Marxismo de opereta latinoamericano tiene sus matices, en Argentina la izquierda presenta una notable propensión al nepotismo, lo cual es un rasgo común con los dos dinosaurios del Marxismo-leninismo, Cuba y Corea del Norte; pero a diferencia de los antiguos colosos del Comunismo que se distinguieron por ser patriarcales, en Argentina el matriarcado tradicional simplemente se vistió de rojo, toda una sucesión de amazonas tales como Evita, Isabelita y Cristina. Las mencionadas damas mezclaron equitativamente el populismo y la corrupción llevando el País a la bancarrota. 

En Brasil, sede teórica del Foro de Sao Paulo, la folclórica simbiosis del Marxismo y la corrupción llego al extremo, los gobiernos de Da Silva y Roussef, han batido el record de ministros destituidos por desfalco, cuando los primeros que han debido dimitir eran los dos jefes de Estado. Los personajes del Partido de los Trabajadores resultaron más voraces que los políticos tradicionales. 

En Bolivia se presenta un cuadro muy especial, un líder indígena del narcotráfico gobierna el País, un personaje pintoresco que funge de marxista-leninista. Afortunadamente parece que no ha entendido las doctrinas, lo cual ha salvado a dicho país de la ruina en que cayó Venezuela. Vocifera contra el Capitalismo y el Imperialismo Yankee pero no ha cometido disparates de fondo.

En Chile gobierna una izquierdista dogmática que está empeñada en evitarle al País los horrores del desarrollo económico.

En Colombia la situación tiene aspectos de tragicomedia. Una dinastía decrépita está en “negociaciones” con un grupo de delincuentes cuyas actividades siempre las presentan con un disfraz político. Esto es un despropósito de tamaño descomunal, algo así como que Italia entablara conversaciones de paz con la N´dragueta o con la Mafia. Un País con cuarenta y cinco millones de habitantes, paralizado por cuenta de un “proceso de paz” con un puñado de facinerosos que posan de izquierdistas. Más aún estos últimos pretenden que Colombia adopte su Marxismo trasnochado.

México es un caso especial, allí tuvo lugar la primera revolución del Siglo XX, la cual sumió al País en una espiral de barbarie. Toda una serie de caudillos de horca y cuchillo asolaron el País durante varias décadas. Luego el abuso y el atropello se institucionalizaron bajo la dirección del “Partido Revolucionario Institucional”, el cual bajo normas propias institucionalizó el saqueo del tesoro público, la repartición de prebendas, las trampas electorales y las trapisondas de un sindicalismo desbocado y corrupto.

Paul Rosenberg - Production Versus Plunder (Ch 1 - 7)

By Paul Rosenberg - April 04, 2015

The Daily Bell is honored to present Paul Rosenberg's Production Versus Plunder as a weekly Saturday series. First, an introduction, from Paul ... 

I am greatly pleased to run Production Versus Plunder as a serial here at The Daily Bell. We'll post one section each week, running from beginning to end.

Production Versus Plunder is a history book, but I'm sure it's unlike any history book you've ever read. And I'm sure of that because I tried for decades to find a general history that made sense to me, and never found one.

I went to some of the best schools in my home town, got excellent test scores and, considering how much I hated school, secured some fairly decent grades. I was able to make sense of math, of science, and of more or less every subject but one: history. I was able to remember the dates and pass the tests, but it never made sense to me.

I could understand how math worked. I could verify it, test it and use it. To use an old '60s phrase, I could grok it. It was the same with science: I might have to work at it, but once I did, I could understand how the various materials and forces interacted; it made sense.

I could never get that from history. It was a jumble of disconnected facts and unsupported theories. I was able to ignore the problem once I left school, but it stayed in the back on my mind. For decades I read all sorts of history books (good ones, bad ones, crazy ones), trying to make sense of the subject. I spent a lot of time in museums. I absorbed a lot of data, but I still had no depth of understanding.

Finally, in the autumn of 2008, I had my breakthrough. The pieces finally came together and this book was written, at white heat, over a three-week period.

One thing I learned is that the history textbooks we received in school were political. They began with a mandate: That the past must be made to support the dominant cultural paradigm, or at least not make it look bad.

And that is precisely the wrong way to do history.

So, welcome to a history book that makes sense. Production Versus Plunder covers the civilizations of the West, from their earliest beginnings to the near future. I hope to revise it in 2016, to reflect new discoveries and my own increased knowledge, but there will be no change to the narrative: The story remains the same.

Welcome aboard,
Paul Rosenberg

Production Versus Plunder:
The Ancient War that Is Destroying the West

Chapter One: What Is Man?

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. – Psalms 8:4-5

It is an arrogance of modern man to think of himself as superior to his dim-witted and unimaginative ancestors. He is not. We are not. There have been no significant changes to the human species in 30,000 years, and perhaps not in 100,000 years. Our images of grunting cavemen are self-flattering nonsense. We are them; they were us.

Yes, our current style of living is far more advanced than that of our distant ancestors, but only because they – slowly and with great struggle – were able to create our current mode of living on earth, and to pass it down successfully to us. Hundreds of generations of men and women labored and suffered to bring us to where we are now. It was not magic and it was not because we deserved it; it is only because of their benefaction. They lived in dark times, fighting toward whatever bits of light they could find – opposed by other men nearly the entire time – and they scratched through enough thorns, weeds and underbrush to bring humanity to where we find ourselves now. We have no right to insult them and to devalue them. It is cheap, and it is false.

AN ANCIENT SUPERIORITY

While we presently lead far more advanced lives than any of the ancients, there is one aspect of ancient existence that was superior to ours, and that is self-image. The core of this is captured in one of our older texts, the book of Genesis. A passage in the second chapter reads:

The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but among them there was not found a helper suitable for him.

This passage points out the most obvious conclusion of men who live in direct contact with nature: Human superiority.

A great number of contemporary men, insulated from the world of nature, walk around with a highly-cultivated sense of inferiority and self-doubt. Our early ancestors did not bear these burdens; certainly not at the levels of modern, institutionalized man. Early man was immersed in nature, and there was absolutely nothing in nature that came remotely close to being his equal. Our ancestors knew for certain that they were superior to the animals. Nothing in the animal world could reason, could talk, could create. Some of them were friendly enough, some were useful and some were serious threats, but none was remotely man's equal.

The acknowledgement of superiority is a long-lost human trait, at least for most of us, and when it does appear, it is generally in a corrupted form, featuring a sadistic thirst for domination. We will examine modern self-loathing in a latter chapter, but for now it is worth noting that this original form of acknowledged superiority seems to have been universal (living in daily contact with nature, it couldn't be avoided) and it seems not to have been destructive. In fact, it probably empowered a good deal of human progress.

THE INPENETRABLE PAST

For the last half-million years, our planet has experienced a string of at least four ice ages. In each of them, a huge portion of the earth has been covered with ice and snow and the rest of the planet was much colder than it is now. And, in each case, the surface of the earth has been radically changed, wiping out much or all evidence of human life before the ice came. Millennia of moving glaciers, runoff, winds, rock falls, and other geological changes would almost certainly erase most traces of what had been before. We simply don't know what happened before the end of the last ice age in any detail. We don't know what humans built and we know little of how they lived during the ice ages.

It has been suggested¹ that evolution and migrations through these four ice ages separated the races of men. This may well be true, but the theory has little support from evidence at the current time, and, given that glaciers, runoff and hundreds of millennia are not kind to artifacts, not much may be forthcoming.

The surprising thing about the ice ages is that they were very, very long. Warm periods, such as the one we now live in, are the exception. Most of the time, earth is half-frozen². Look at the following graph of temperatures and ice volume and consider that the world is in its current state only at the peaks on the graph. These warm peaks, called "interglacials" have generally lasted in the range of 10,000-12,000 years, meaning that we may be approaching the end of a warm period and closing in on a new – and very long – glacial period.

The last ice age on earth ended at about 8000 B.C. In the years near that point, whatever humans that had survived the ice age began to spread out over the earth. We have little information on what these people did during the ice age. Since humans now and then are the same, we can carefully imagine ourselves in such a situation and guess how they would have behaved, but evidence is lacking.

The traditional view of early man is that he lived, almost universally, as a hunter-gatherer, and while it is certain that many groups of humans lived that way (and some still do), that may not be a fair generalization. A portion of the idea's popularity may come from the fact that it is a simple explanation and because it fits with our self-flattering opinion that we are different and better than our distant ancestors. It may be that men lived as hunter-gatherers (foragers, in more scientific terminology) for a hundred thousand years before they learned agriculture, but we do not know that for sure – the ice age would have wiped out a lot of evidence.

Nonetheless, we do find evidence of foragers previous to the end of the ice age and we don't find evidence of farming. So, we will stay with that model, given the caveat mentioned above.

During the times of foraging, most humans organized themselves in small clan groups, probably in the range of 20-50 people per group. This was probably a highly-functional type of grouping, and may have some sort of instinctive base as well, since human minds are very comfortable keeping fifty individuals clearly in mind, along with all of their abilities, needs and personal traits.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Inside the clan, decisions were generally made by informal consent, and clans cooperated with other friendly clans to form loose tribal associations. They also interacted violently with unfriendly clans. These were not mass wars as we know them, but they could be violent and deadly, generally being fought with stone axes, arrows and spears.

THE MINDS OF THE FORAGERS

The foragers thought the same thoughts we would think, if we were in the same situation they found themselves in, and if we found ourselves with the same small knowledge base they had. These people concerned themselves with the same things humans always have: How to escape fear, pain, and sorrow. How to increase security, pleasure, and joy. How to realize their dreams of something better. Beyond this, they needed to find some way to make peace with the hard areas of life:

• Sickness and death
• Existence itself
• Shame
• Fear
• Helplessness

These factors, and certainly others, led to the first philosophies and religions. Religion is, after all, just a type of philosophy that focuses on what philosophers call metaphysics³. So, because these folks did not have a great deal of knowledge, their philosophies would have included a lot of conjecture on things they couldn't explain. Having the faculty of imagination, they would have exercised it at some length, seeking clever answers to their questions. And, over time, the best and most entertaining of such imaginings turn into myths.

These early religious myths tended to focus on imaginary beings and powers that lay behind nature. This could have begun in ways as 'modern' as saying "The principle of the sun, which we do not yet understand," rather than saying "the Sun God," but, the simplest ideas are the ones that tend to stick, and the Sun God would have quickly displaced more scientific explanations.

HOW MANY?

There were very few humans on the planet at the end of the last ice age, and the available areas for living were as large as they are now. This meant that any group of humans would be almost entirely isolated from all other groups. This made the transfer of information slow and uncommon.

The US Census Bureau produces a report called Historical Estimates of World Population. According to this document, there were only about five million human beings on earth at the end of the last ice age. That is less than one-thousandth of the current world population, spread over the same area. (And the earth is mostly empty space even now.) Imagine every human being on the earth wiped out, save only those in the city of Baghdad, and then scattering these survivors all over the earth. That was precisely the condition at the end of the ice age. Humans were very few and widely scattered.

Aside from speech, which is not especially accurate over time, functional methods of transferring information barely existed – presuming that you found a group that you wanted to share information with. If you wanted information to last, you carved it into stone. So, not a lot of information was retained and shared.

  YEAR                                 POPULATION (millions)

10,000 BC.............................................. 5
8,000 BC................................................ 5
6,500 BC................................................ 7
5,000 BC................................................ 8
4,000 BC...............................................10
3,000 BC...............................................14
2,000 BC...............................................27
1,000 BC...............................................50
500 BC................................................100
1 AD....................................................200
200 AD................................................230
400 AD................................................220
600 AD................................................200
800 AD................................................220
1000 AD..............................................300
1200 AD..............................................400
1400 AD..............................................350
1600 AD..............................................500
1800 AD...........................................1,000
2000 AD.......................................... 5,000+

The result of this incredibly low population density was not only that information traveled slowly, but that groups of humans were generally unopposed by other human beings. This lead to development without much stress from the outside. Once a group of humans found a way of life that worked for them, they could develop it among themselves with very little exterior pressure. Bear in mind that the greatest obstacle for productive men has always been other men. That was much less the case at a time when there was almost no one else around. This allowed ideas to develop without what we might call "natural enemies."

THE INVENTION OF COOPERATION & HARMONY

It is not entirely natural for humans to get along. We tend, naturally, to favor those who are most closely related to us (with whom we share more DNA) and we have usually existed in conditions of scarcity, which has often-enough led to competition. Imagine two separate groups of foragers, attempting to gather food from the same forest: They would – based solely upon animal-level instincts – dispute whose food it was, which would lead to aggressive and perhaps violent behavior. This is common in our times and would have been no less in the past, at least where groups of humans pressed upon each other. In such conditions, human instincts are very similar to those of animals, and they push us to act as animals do – to defend, to attempt dominance, to show status, and so on.

However, as we have said before, we are not merely animals, and we can override instinctive impulse with reason. Specifically, we can imagine better ways of handling problems, or remember how they were handled in the past – in ways that were superior to mere instinct, which leads to injury and death, possibly in great numbers⁴.

Most importantly, we can override our instincts. We can control them.

We have learned to recognize when impulses strike us and to restrain them before thoughtless actions are taken. We interrupt the instinct and introduce into that moment a command to take a better, more rational course of action. Our ancestors knew, just as we do, that envy, greed, fear, and impulsive actions can cause great harm. They learned to monitor their own thoughts with vigilance and to maintain harmony, against some of their instincts.

Humans created cooperation and harmony – we were not born into it in some mythical past.

This is the foundation of human progress and it began no later than the end of the last ice age, at about 8,000 B.C.

Notes:

1. See The Evolution of Civilizations, by Carroll Quigley, published by Liberty Tree.
2. In the last ice age, what are now Indianapolis and St. Louis were covered with glaciers – the same as Greenland's current state. Even the areas where soil was exposed were much colder than they are now.
3. Metaphysics asks, "What is the nature of existence?" and it tends to ask questions about what might exist beyond our sight and analysis.
4. Killing unprotected humans is not a particularly difficult thing. In ancient times it was generally accomplished with a stone ax or with a mace. Any healthy, post-adolescent male can kill with a mace-blow to the head, and even a small ax wielded by a child could kill in the days before antiseptics.
5. binra • a month ago

The stories we tell are that which expresses, embodies and reinforces the self we believe true. And so we look out and see the world through the filters and distortions and are validated to ourselves. By mutual reinforcement are stories made into accepted reality or collective currency of belief and definition. No story is truth. All stories are true in their moment of experiencing. The true of you is a unique signature vibration that is inviolably recognized You - and felt in terms of freedom, joy, peace, and creative endeavour. This becomes covered over, broken or lost in the story of our life in the world as it has been lived for millennia. From such belief comes attempt to regain it, heal it or get it back - as an act of our own power. The victim and victimizer split mentality is the source of a purely personal sense of independent authority, but its operation is 'hidden' for the most part upon others and on the world itself. This is the role of the story of the mind of justifiction; to validate and assert the self and its reinforcing tribe or group or god or ideology at the expense of competing ideas.

Investment within the scripts and props of asserted self becomes identity in story. Which is a mental overlay of a segregative self sense.
The separating movement operates as a denial and a forgetting of a prior unity or communion. It unfolds the idea of a separate independent entity amidst an essentially hostile environment to which it adapts and seeks to map and control to its own believed needs.

The Is of pure awareness is timeless or always now and is not Itself modified by the play of projected idea within it - but it is reflected there because idea is reflection. One knows existence through awareness of idea. One may accept ideas to be one's self - and thus engage an idea-centric exploration of such idea.

Man - you and I - is an idea within infinite Mind - as is everything. However belief has all the power given it until no longer accepted meaningful, and thus can be used to deny and limit our awareness of Being Itself - its innate or primary qualities - in favour of running a set of ideas we then take to be our self. This is like Narcissus looking in his reflection in the pool - caught in a loop of attention that denies an expanded perspective.

Because we believe our thinking - generally speaking - we presume to have arrived at a clarity of which our forebears were ignorant. But our thinking is the means of an ignorance of what is currently communicating Itself as Life knowing Itself. Don't let truth get in the way of a good story - goes the saying. And this is an apt description of putting an aligned open awareness on hold so as to give attention exclusively to an investment of persistent attention - which constitutes intention and desire - or value.

Garbage in/garbage out is a computer programming saying. But what goes out - the fruits - is determined by what comes in. What we choose to accept becomes the nature and the measure of what goes out and thus returns as our interpreted experience of the world. The unconscious mind is a device by which what we don't want to allow into our daily surface story driven awareness, operates unseen, airbrushed or denied by force of will. And so the surface self can assert itself at variance with what it actually believes, because what it does attests to what it actually chooses regardless what it says or makes story of.

The story of the 'ascent of man' is of a discoverer and in some sense conqueror of the world - but such story merely reflects un-owned or unrecognized consciousness in the act of self-limiting deception for its own reasons. But there is always an integrative perspective available by which to align with what truly moves, enlivens and inspires. Stories can be used to reflect us to ourself in ways that awaken and inspire.

It is all a matter of where we are coming from; the attempt to manufacture a self-presentation, or the presence of life within us. It may be that we have cofused the two and have adulterated who we truly are with fears that cause us to doubt and act accordingly. But the presence of life felt within us - will communicate out - as will a war and struggle within our self.

An undistorted presence opens a clarity on all that is present, including the trace or memory or focussing into the idea of the past. Clearly the mind knows that to assert or weave its own lie into the story of the passed is to manipulate the perception, experience and reaction of the present. What it doesn't know is that the manipulator is by definition manipulated and essentially feeds its own life force to that which uses it because it was made freely available. The difference between a lie and a good story is that a lie costs all that is good. But a good story serves the remembering of who we are and what life is without having to contract into forgetting that it is a story.

There is unbounded Life in any moment - but the momentum of the themes of our story can deny us the savour. The destination sets up the journey. Enjoy the journey. Why not!

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Stan • a month ago

I have a small problem with your population figures, not that they are wrong, it's just that I can't get my head around how we got from 5 million to 7 billion without a whole lot of incest. We, then should all be, by now, brothers and sisters after inter-marrying for thousands of years We should, all of us, be retarded. Can anyone explain this to me ?
Many thanks

Kratoklastes  Stan • 20 days ago

It depends on how you define 'incest': it's certainly the case that excessive breeding within a small group that includes reproduction between siblings (or parents mating with their own children), will eventually lead to congenital problems - e.g., Tay-Sachs in Cajuns, Quebecois, and Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews. But so long as there is a reasonable distance between related individuals (e.g., more distant than second cousins) the risks are almost insignificant (compared to the risk of individuals even less-related).

5 million is a large 'base' population, although the problem of 'core' groups of 50 presents a much thornier problem. Given that selective infanticide was, and is, common in subsistence societies, it's most likely that this primitive form of eugenics 'weeded out' infants who presented abnormalities that impeded function.

It's interesting that Bushmen (who live in small, subsistence hunter-gatherer groups) have more genetic diversity than 'outbred' Asians and Europeans, despite being significantly different from 'the rest of humanity'. I confess I know nothing about their reproductive practices, but their genetic diversity and apparent lack of systemic genetic disorders would indicate that they must 'manage' their breeding pretty sensibly.

Refraining from schtupping parents, siblings and first cousins ought to be enough, statistically speaking... but all bets are off if you behave too much like Avram and Sarai (half-siblings) or Lot's daughters (who gang-schtupped their father): the statistical distribution of malformed genes catches up with your gene-group eventually.

Bill Ross  Stan • a month ago

"should, all of us, be retarded. Can anyone explain this to me"

Sure. We ARE collectively retarded:)

binra  Stan • a month ago

Opening an etymological dictionary as a child showed a family tree of languages. We are all cousins. Darwin's discoveries reveal the oneness of all life. There's no market for a healing agent or energy source that cant be patented and wielded to create artificial scarcities. Likewise identity. There is a segregative differentiating force to a self-specialness that learns to 'see' what is wrong with everyone ELSE, and justifictionalize itself at expense of extending worth to others - who are mere extras or supporting cast to the script of me, myself,I.
Aligning with such a miser-y of self can only result in retardation - but in a form that generates ingenuity in maintaining the deceit that it is actually wealth acquiring.
If retardation means cut off or inhibited from flowering our full potential - then one can look out and see that what seemed normal is in fact stunted growth.

MetaCynic  Stan • a month ago

If it wasn't for all the incest maybe the average IQ would now be 200 instead of 100.

binra  MetaCynic • a month ago

Incest operates within idea just the same. I have no reason to believe IQ in and of itself is a good thing. Banksters presumably use high IQ to screw everyone and everything - not that they aren't also manipulated. For thousands of years Jews often married their richest girls to the cleverest boys. This has effected a eugenic shift with a lot more intelligent creatives in their overall population. Some use their gifts to bless humanity. Some don't.

David Scott Lynn • a month ago

I read the Kindle version of Paul's book a year or two ago. It is on my VERY Short List of Must Reads. ... I look forward to re-visiting the book here and reading the Comments. Daily Bell readers usually have a LOT of good stuff to add to conversations!

Danny B • a month ago

Paul, more reading for the curious.

The Real Reason The Vatican Has The Biggest Telescope On The Planet
"Guy Consolmagno, Leading Astronomer for the Vatican stated, “Very soon 
the nations will look to aliens for their salvation.” Consolmago 
believes that humans are not the only intelligent beings created by God 
in the universe and added these non-human lifeforms are described in the
Bible as the Nephilim."
http://www.neonnettle.com/sphe...

Re: human intelligence and human consciousness. You should do a very thorough reading about "white powder of gold". 
http://whitepowdergold.com/
It can't be easily dismissed because modern research with brain scans, etc. shows that it does indeed increase intelligence.

binra  Danny B • a month ago

A slave race to be exploited or a guiding and supported reawakening into a greater consciousness.
These two currents operate in our mind as the opening of a polarity within which to experience physically.
A greater consciousness, or a life more abundant as Jesus put it - reintegrates the awareness of the levels of definition and belief that generate the experience of one's world as a purely external event.
The awakened may say, "there is nothing outside You", but this You is synchronous and one with its experience - which is not translatable into terms of a language that arose from the separation of such a knowing.
Monotomic gold - like any other methodology - will only bring in the fruits of the current capacity to receive. If one is seeking intelligence, one demonstrates and teaches one does not have it.
When one can do more with less one needs less to do a lot.

One of the ideas is that the Greys are retarded humans from a parallel universe, who really messed up and degraded their capacity to feel or to breed. Our timeline is right on track to do likewise. For the enslaving of Life corrupts and a corrupted mind is a parasite within the body politic.
There are diets and protocols for identifying and ridding oneself or parasites.

There is an idea that a mixture of hidden tech 'ufos' and holographic displays will be used as the false flag event by which to induce giving over sovereignty to a UN that will then in effect say "checkmate!"
I can see that there is nothing the will to power will not do to get it - but I am also of the faith that evil serves an agenda of which it is totally unaware - not least because I choose to get a positive outcome from what seem negative events.

Sometimes the story of Job comes to mind - a humanity subjugated to every kind of deceit and disease that yet contains a forbearance or residual capacity to come through it to what might be called an inhuman perspective - or perhaps the expansion and fulfilment of humanity to its true nature.
People have always looked to aliens for their salvation - in terms of seeking something OUTSIDE themself. It is true that our definition of self limits our perspective and that we need to transcend such limited thinking. But never to give power away.
You cannot really give power away, but you can believe you have. What if it is still You and yours to share?
If you cannot meet another Terran being in love's honesty, what chance an ET?

Anything can be easily dismissed! The mind can choose what it gives attention to for its own reasons - and does so most of the time regardless of science, reason or truth - is that not so?

MetaCynic • a month ago

From my quick research, it seems that humans who are physically and behaviorally similar to us appeared on the scene about 70,000 years ago. This means that all which we are intellectually capable of today was possible 70 millennia ago. Someone once observed that a late 18th century European would not feel too out of place in ancient Rome 18 centuries earlier.

Other than gunpowder, telescopes and the printing press, what did late 18th century Europeans have that ancient Romans did not? And how far removed from the Stone Age were the ancient Romans? Maybe 4,000 years? According to the prevailing version of history, for about 64,000 years humans similar to us with the same intellectual capacity and with the same powers of observation accomplished not much more than break rocks with rocks. Then it took mankind a long 4,000 years to figure out how to make metal tools, grow food and build durable buildings. After that nothing much happened for about 1,800 years. Then during the last 240 years there occurred an exponentially explosive growth in the application of practical knowledge to the mastery of nature. We are today probably still closer to the beginning of this remarkable modern day process than to its end.

So what's going on here? Are we to believe that humans with the same brains as ours had to go thru 70 millennia of painfully slow growth in the development of language and writing and in the observation and understanding of nature in order to acquire sufficient knowledge to produce the sudden eruption in intellectual and technical achievements that we have experienced in less than three centuries? Maybe so. But maybe human civilization in the distant, misty past went thru many multi-thousand year cycles of sisyphian ascent and then, for whatever reason - climate change or suicidal wars - underwent total obliteration with scarcely a clue surviving of its great accomplishments.

Why did it take so long for pivotal geniuses like Aristotle, Gutenberg, Michelangelo, Newton and Mozart to emerge? Are they random genetic freaks who just popped up unexpectedly in the last 2,500 years to move civilization along, or were such towering minds commonplace many thousands of years ago but their achievements obliterated and long forgotten along with their civilizations?

Blank Reg  MetaCynic • a month ago

This might also explain the Fermi Paradox. Perhaps every intelligent race goes through this same stage in development, and only a tiny few get past it to an era of freedom, abundance, and star travel.

asadstateofaffairs  MetaCynic • a month ago

I think that if you research further you will find something called archaeological anomalies. Meaning evidence of previous civilizations more highly advanced that the above narrative allows. Something is amiss with the story we have been told. This article and the comments are pure gold, distilling hundreds of hours of research into an hour of reading!
Here is just one to ponder:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

binra  asadstateofaffairs • a month ago

There's the story we are told and there's the story we want to hear. Originally I believe these are one and the same. They SEEM now to be different.
The story we don't want to get out or be shamed by generates a raft of stories by which to hide.
The stories we don't want to hear blow our cover, for they expose us to aspects of our life that are disturbing, dissonant and uncomfortable, and so we make stories to justify not having to actually listen.
Children may be told simple stories in lieu of what they are not yet ready to understand.
How much of the withholding of information in the belief that people cannot accept or handle it. Lots of what goes on humanly in our world is mind-buckling and therefore it is natural that we don't open to it casually because some aspect of our consciousness knows not to look there now.
To realize the garden fence does not define the limits of your thought is to open to the world beyond - but what we find will be resonant with what we are looking with. A fearfully disposed mind sees everything in its framing and attracts its own fulfilment. Discernment is the capacity to identify the underlying impulse within coercive narratives.
The ignoring or denial of anomalies uncovers investment in a model at the expense of reality as it unfolds - and that operates coercively to delay paradigm change - yet actually brings it on. For awareness of such coercive behaviour invalidates allegiance in the model and opens it to question. However, the foundations of the old paradigm are deep set within the idea of self as well as the idea of power that operates in the world. But the story of rising up from primitive ignorance to an evolutionary pinnacle is just that, a story. A wilful ignorance is invoked as a result of deep trauma, and a split off dissociated sense of self operates to look away from its past. There is much fear beneath the mind of Man. While bringing it to light promotes healing, keeping it in the dark fuels a shadow power. For people follow those who seem to offer protection from such fear and that is where a Foxy Loxy mind gets between the medicine and the medicine man - and they are making a killing out of it.
The detour into fear is a wilful self limiting as a result of seeking power in the world. Who gains the world loses their Soul. Few have any sense of what this actually means, so adapted to darkness of fear-thinking is the 'split mind'.
A wilingness for truth activates a journey of discovery NOT fuelled by fear and self-seeking.

MetaCynic  asadstateofaffairs • a month ago

I agree that a great many archaeological anomalies which don't fit the present historical narrative are, for whatever reason, simply swept under the rug. Two books by Christopher Dunn, a mechanical engineer and machinist, deconstruct in considerable detail the Great Pyramids of Egypt and other huge artifacts of that era. Based on all kinds of physical evidence, he concludes that these monuments and other thrown away construction scraps scattered around were cut and shaped by large, sophisticated power tools. Dunn argues that the precision of the pyramids' blocks and the symmetry of complex compound curves in large scale ancient Egyptian sculpture are simply impossible to produce with any sort of hand tools especially with those attributed by archeologists to that era.

For example, the computer controlled cutting tools available today to America's stone cutting industry could scarcely match the unnecessary precision of the millions of stone blocks used to construct the pyramids. Furthermore the entire output of America's mechanized limestone industry would need to be tripled to quarry, cut and deliver all the blocks used to construct the Great Pyramid in the time frame allotted to its construction by archeologists. There are huge granite blocks within the Great Pyramid which today could be lifted into place only with the largest of cranes available. A few attempts have been made over the years by academics using primitive methods and copper hand tools to mock up small pyramids and they have failed to match the precision and quality of the originals.

Yet academics want us to believe that an ancient Egyptian ruler had the power to mobilize and divert from more urgent uses vast resources of scarce material and primitive labor just to build a colossal burial place for himself. Dunn also speculates that since there is no physical evidence whatsoever that anyone was ever buried in the Great Pyramid, this structure could have in fact been a power plant and probably preceded by thousands of years what we today regard as ancient Egypt. Archaeology as a discipline is only about two centuries old and is largely dominated by academics. Of course its 'experts' resist non credentialed outsiders who do have highly specialized knowledge from treading on their turf. Yet it is just such outsiders, examining things from another perspective, who are needed to gain new insight to move this discipline along.

Rock Tyler  asadstateofaffairs • a month ago

The story even gets a little deeper. Suggest you check out "Forbidden Archeology: or, the shorter version, "Hidden History of the Human Race." The jest is evidence does exist that the sophisticated human species has been around a very long time. Also recommend a check out of Michael Tellinger and what he has discovered in South Africa. These are not isolated sources either. This article, while I appreciate the effort, does not lead us to the subject in my humble view. I highly suspect there is a lot of history/artifacts/knowledge that has been discovered but, so sadly, remains under lock and key.

Danny B • a month ago

Paul, you didn't get where you are without a LOT of reading. I have quite a few recommendations for further reading. They fall into 2 parts.

Collective consciousness;
Read Brain Josephson concerning the "extended mind". http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~...
The Princeton EGG, http://noosphere.princeton.edu...

Sheldrake investigated communication at the quantum level. This ties in with the work of Prof. Josephson, http://www.sheldrake.org/about...

The second subject relates to DNA anomalies.

There are indications that part of human DNA Is from extraterrestrial sources. Keep in mind that the complexity of DNA does not lend itself to an evolutionary process of just a few million years. Also, our mitochondria are foreign bodies with their own DNA. The evolutionary process to adopt mitochondria as the cellular powerhouse would have taken simple cells many millions of years to accomplish. This argues for for an evolutionary process far longer than what was available on our young star.

It was originally claimed that 50% of our DNA was "junk" DNA. Nature doesn't work that way. 
http://www.soulsofdistortion.n...

We do have DNA that isn't well accounted for; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
http://3tags.org/article/myste...
Our DNA also is reported to have abilities not well understood; http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_...

It is impossible to argue against evolution in it's most basic form. Survival demands that animals conform to their enviornment. Pygmies are short and the Masai are tall. Then, there is selection based on desire.

"New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet"

There is evidence of atomic explosions thousands of years before the Christian era. I suspect that they were caused by aliens rather than indigenous races. http://www.theepochtimes.com/n... The technological base required to produce atomic weapons would most surely leave remains.
There are a billion habitable planets in our galaxy,,, many of them far older than Terra. I expect that various groups drop by every now and then to see how we are making out. If Josephson and Sheldrake are correct, we could easily be in contact with other races at the quantum level. Many inventors have claimed that their ideas came to them in a dream

bailintheboat • a month ago

Tracing the human migration, they recently discovered copies of Louis L'Amour, most often found in what appear to be ancient fall out shelters of the 1900's, among the Red Deer Cave People of southwest China. For more information visit the Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology. Jokes, jokes. They did find copies of Plato in Antarctic ice caves though, along with western garb and drawings of bows and arrows and such. Go figure.

If I was leading up to something, with time, patience, and the desire, it would be that man's time on earth has been very short, an explosion, with a mind, at least capable, of understanding such things as quantum theory, suggesting a creation event and a purpose.

RED • a month ago

Refreshing piece!
I look forward to more.

davidnrobyn • a month ago

I really appreciate your first two paragraphs. Thank you, Paul, for speaking truth to modernity.

Praetor • a month ago

History, I wonder if that is a misused word, it sounds contrived, "History". History of what, the first humans or the first civilization of gathered together humans. Take, Petralona Cave, Northern Greece, a skull imbedded in the cave wall, 700,000 years old or Gobekli Tepe in Urfa, Turkey, ruins dating from 9600 BC or Dunmore caves in Ireland, it goes on and on. Caves are where, they survived these Ice Ages and the Inuit are our best example of peoples surviving very cold weather. So, our history is a manipulation to benefit the few, of course. Myths and folklore, meet reality, it is being dug-up as we type. A question asked of an Inuit, "What is your religion" the Inuit's reply, "We don't believe, We fear". This fear maybe the reason the Inuit went north, to get away from the insane manipulators of History. And why not, they already survived the last Ice age, what is 40 below, anyway. We have no clue what happened on this earth, before the manipulation began. But, it will become known, in time, thanks to Internet Reformation of Information. knowledge Information, is what will do them in!!! And their phony HISTORY.

autonomous • a month ago

I am very much looking forward to this series. In spite of its beginning with the inexplicable theory of evolution. Nothing in nature or in rationality comes close to this theory (or, rather, these theories.) Humanity made much understanding of creation before rejecting God as its creator. The 'progress' we have made since has been in ways to subjugate and kill each other more efficiently. That seems more to involve a theory of devolution than of evolution.

Bill Ross  autonomous • a month ago

Well, until the rule of law was rationalized away, the honest and productive were "in control", on an evolutionary path to excellence and progress for civilization.

Since it was rationalized away, predators have been "in control", placing us on a de-evolutionary path to doom, since predators feed on death / servitude, so, that is the direction they coerce us to. Fools, they have not pondered what happens after "no prey".

Marten  Bill Ross • a month ago

Amen Bill, well said and thank you DB for this excellent article

autonomous  Bill Ross • a month ago

Well stated.

Notre Dame de Trois Pistoles • a month ago

I too, am very impressed with the clarity that you bring to the discussion of human evolution and development. You set the hook for me when you addressed the absurdity of recorded history that is used in schools and the incredible amount of misdirection that is applied to satisfy a given country's indoctrination of its citizens. I respect honestly as well as new ideas and perspectives. I look forward with relish to your next installment.

lone_hell_survivor • a month ago

I have read several articles by Paul and find him to have one of the most brilliant, intuitive, clear-thinking minds. As such, he must be experiencing continuous frustrations with his interactions with average persons. I am looking forward to reading his series.

2prickit • a month ago

Some topical notes from Wikipedia.

Envy (from Latin invidia) is an emotion which "occurs when a person lacks another's superior quality, achievement, or possession and either desires it or wishes that the other lacked it".[1]

Bertrand Russell said that envy was one of the most potent causes of unhappiness.[2] Not only is the envious person rendered unhappy by his envy, but they also wish to inflict misfortune on others. Although envy is generally seen as something negative, Russell also believed that envy was a driving force behind the movement towards democracy and must be endured to achieve a more just social system.[3] However, psychologists have recently suggested that there may be two types of envy: malicious envy and benign envy—benign envy being proposed as a type of positive motivational force.[4][5]

Beginning in the early 14th century, the popularity of the seven deadly sins as a theme among European artists of the time eventually helped to ingrain them in many areas of Catholic culture and Catholic consciousness in general throughout the world. One means of such ingraining was the creation of the mnemonic acronym "SALIGIA" based on the first letters in Latin of the seven deadly sins: superbia avaritia, luxuria, invidia, gula, ira, acedia.[3]

Note: see DSM-5 The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) is the 2013 update to the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) ...

Bill Ross  2prickit • a month ago

"Manual of Mental Disorders"

beware. These are observed (and labelled) behaviors that self-alleged "experts" have generalized and classed into normal and abnormal "behavior" AND sell us snake oil alleging to "fix" us.

Show me someone who claims to be "normal" and I will show you a liar (no such thing as "normal" when we are all unique individuals).

2prickit  Bill Ross • a month ago

FIFTH EDITION | DSM-5®

Truly amazing that a QUACKERY be regarded as a “medical profession”

“The most comprehensive, current, and critical resource for clinical practice available to today's mental health clinicians and researchers of all orientations. DSM-5® is used by health professionals, social workers, and forensic and legal specialists to diagnose and classify mental disorders, and is the product of more than 10 years of effort by hundreds of international experts in all aspects of mental health. The criteria are concise and explicit, intended to facilitate an objective assessment of symptom presentations in a variety of clinical settings- inpatient, outpatient, partial hospital, consultation-liaison, clinical, private practice, and primary care”.

My friend ordered the pocket edition on line. We perused it laughing at the seriousness of it all, the codes, etc. I am so flabbergasted at how easily, if one be “certified” one can devastate the creditability of a defendant in criminal and civil “court” with these professional opinions as to character assination.

Ochie  2prickit • a month ago

Happening to a friend. A quack labeled him in family court during his divorce. He lost custody of his son and was only allowed supervised visitation. The anguish of that drove him to parking himself in one of their hospitals and refusing to leave until they correct the character assassination and restore custody and visitation of his son. This is a man that was employed as a high level engineer working on space program technology.

Bill Ross  2prickit • a month ago

yep, I'm one sick puppy, according to THEM. Just one "label" by the court jesters and, anything you may say or prove is, by definition: insane.

BTW, that is exactly "how" the late not so great evil empire, USSR kept their gulags / asylums filled with "dissenters"

Here, we just drug the decreed "abnormal" and only jail them as "dangerous offenders" if they refuse to take their "meds". Much cheaper than jailing them.

2prickit  Bill Ross • a month ago

And very profit capturing device belonging entirely to monopoly BigPharma.

dave jr • a month ago

I can see this is going to be a fascinating series. Thank you Paul for sharing this. I'll be looking forward to Saturdays!
.
Production vs. plunder, is the same as Bill's analogy of predator vs. prey although maybe more attuned to the human condition compared to a wider animal condition in general. It is ground zero in my opinion, as it deals with the basic fundamental of how humans choose to interact. So, if I may tune it a bit further, 'production' already being a necessity of life; 'trade' of production is the interaction. How about 'trade vs. plunder' or 'trade vs. take'. The difference, having to do with peaceful consent, the necessary environment for an economy.

FauxScienceSlayer • a month ago

An excellent analysis of pre-Holocene era reality is "Underworld" by Graham Hancock, at 750 pages it is an epic work. When the three mile high polar caps melted, sea level rose 440 ft in two thousand years. All previous coastal settlement were inundated multiple times. Some ice dams broke suddenly releasing floods that wiped out existing developments along rivers. There are unexplained artifacts that extend back millions of years. Everything we are taught about history is rote indoctrination, which leaves out the hidden hand of the private, multigenerational, international crime syndicate banking system. This is explained in "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G Edward Griffin, another 750 page epic text. To understand the current false paradigm reality you must first reject everything you have been taught that is not first principle, empirical based reality. Then construct your own reality matrix, or incorporate an alternative from sources that you Trust. The History tab at my website contains well researched analysis of the obscured past reality. But it is current events that will expose the entire elitist FRAUD. The Griffin "Jekyll Island" information is well summarized in....

"All Wars Are Bankers Wars" on youtube, explains the stage setting, directing and profiting of elites using WAR. Then see....

"How to Steal an Airplane, from 9/11 to MH-370" a Corbett Report on youtube explains the "non-interuptable autopilot" systems.

"9/11 Conspiracy Solved, Names, Connections, Details" on youtube explains some of the financial crimes covered by 9/11 treason.

Bill Ross • a month ago

PR: "I was able to make sense of math, of science, and of more or less every subject but one: history. I was able to remember the dates and pass the tests, but it never made sense to me."

That is because math and science are logically consistent bodies of knowledge (relationship between action and consequence, as confirmed by scientific method). Once the "rules" are understood, it is possible to deduce further knowledge and have a general understanding from which one can deduce (and verify) further logical implications, making progress. Intellectual disciplines based on study of natural law are comprehensible, can be proven and "grokked". Most importantly, armed with physical science knowledge / comprehension, sorting REAL fact from fiction is a relatively straightforward process:

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

And, since science underlies all technology, if we are to have industrial economies, and fabrication of science is impossible, the teaching of science is relatively unsubverted. The application of science, especially at the power / economic nexus is highly subverted / controlled by charlatans. Further, due to the stellar accomplishments of science, all sort of pseudo scientific "disciplines" have sprung up, attempting (and succeeding) in fraudulently misrepresenting bunk as scientific fact in various social "science" disciplines, such as economics, psychiatry, history...

The difference between true and alleged fact / science can be easily determined as discussed in the link above. Take history for example. Taught as an excruciatingly incomprehensible litany of alleged facts, dates, people, with no discernible knowledge (relationship between action and consequence). A further fact / fiction differentiation of such social "sciences" is there is absolutely no understanding of the forces and "why's" of historical events, framed within the "decider" of natural law. The "message" of fake history is that a forcefully imposed hierarchical social / economic "organization" of masters / slaves is the ONLY possibility for "civilization" and, it takes "great men of history" to effect change and the rest of us are just powerless pawns "whining to arbitrary authority". This is TOTAL BUNK. There are natural law principles at work, shaping history. There is REAL (suppressed) knowledge pertaining to history, civilization and mankind:

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

As to the title of Paul's book (Production Versus Plunder), I am assuming he has arrived at the same conclusion as I, by studying the same evidence, with slightly different terminology. I use predator / prey.

Or, economically, the eternal war between the productive (produce more than they consume) and the unproductive (greedy, consume more than they produce). The balance of power between productive / unproductive is the determining factor as to whether a civilization (peaceful division of labor) lives, or DIES:

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

...and subversion of history and suppressing knowledge regarding social / economic organization has only ONE point: Predators attempting to maintain a "division of spoils" as opposed to "division of labor" economy, now imploding to a "war of all, against all" in pursuit of the stored production of late western civilization, as REAL history proves it always has and must.

Production Versus Plunder Part 2

By Paul Rosenberg - April 11, 2015

Last week we introduced a new Saturday serial, Paul Rosenberg's Production Versus Plunder: The Ancient War that Is Destroying the West. Today, Part 2 ...

THREE GROUPS FORM

We have no good way of knowing how the few and scattered humans on earth migrated at the end of the ice age. We have only a limited and fuzzy idea of where they came from and how they moved. What can be deduced from the available information is that three general groups began to form in the greater Middle East – in the area from Arabia to the steppe of southwestern Asia. We know precious little about these groups, but we do know enough to understand their general characteristics. The figure below shows the general distribution of these groups. This particular distribution is from a later time, but it does show the general pattern we are discussing.

When discussing these groups, it is important to repeat what we have previously mentioned: That there were very few of them, that they were widely scattered, and that there was very little interaction. These groups were in radically different geographic areas and almost certainly had migrated from different places. In all likelihood they were completely ignorant of each other for some time.

Following the end of the ice age¹, there were several thousand years of quiet time: Not many humans and precious little interaction between them. During such times, groups of humans tend to build specific characteristics. We tend to call these groups-with-characteristics "societies" or "cultures."

Over time, three early groups developed their own cultures – cultures that informed their ways not only of daily life, but of looking at the world. More importantly, over time – and this was thousands of years – manner of living guides the development of human character. Indeed, the historic nature/nurture arguments² are moot in such a case – both nature and nurture are operating. Specific types of nurture become normal within the group and are passed down from generation to generation. And, since the group is more or less isolated and closed, the gene pool is refined and passed down as a fairly consistent set of genes. These groups formed slowly and there were multiple generations' worth of time.³With both isolation and time, groups of humans, such as these first three, produce distinct societal structures, including structures of cooperation and/or rulership, and of gods and worship.

These three groups are of two primary types: Farmers and nomads. Again, over time, different styles of living teach different lessons to men. In particular, farming leads to a cooperative model of thinking and living, while nomadic hunting and herding lead to a warfare and domination model of living and thinking.

Farmers learn to rely upon their neighbors. They help build each other's barns, share tools, lend their expertise for repairing their neighbor's equipment, and so on. They also respect each other's property lines. So, in farming, there are long histories of mutual help and respect for property.

Herdsmen, on the other hand, tend to mistrust their neighbors and to hide information from them. When the nomadic herdsman finds good grazing land, he does not share that knowledge with another herdsman. If one finds a hidden water hole, he does not disclose the location. So, the overall balance is much more toward not helping a neighbor. Similarly, property is less respected in nomadic cultures. And, of course, they developed different methods of warfare.

But, beneath all the details there are two different sets of assumptions regarding the world and human existence. The farmers developed what economists now call a positive-sum view of existence and the nomads developed more of what we call a zero-sum understanding of existence.

Briefly, a zero-sum assumption is that there is a fixed pool of any specific good and that in order for you to have more, someone else has to accept less. This is the essence of the common slogan, "there are only so many pieces of pie." If you want an extra slice, someone else has to accept one less. A positive-sum assumption, on the other hand, assumes that the pool of assets can be expanded. In other words, if there are not enough slices of pie for your liking, you can make a new pie for yourself.

The important thing about zero-sum and positive-sum assumptions is that they form a mental pattern, an analysis program in our brains. This is one of the human software routines we discussed earlier. Positive- or zero-sum routines form in human minds and – if not analyzed and adjusted – color wide areas of thought. This affects all sorts of opinions and judgments. People take these basic views of the world as givens: things they don't need to waste time examining; things that are considered to be known. This built great differences in the thoughts of the farmers and the nomads.⁴

Young nomads were instructed to take, from a world of limited resources.

Young farmers were instructed to use the world intelligently and to create food.

These early farmers, for the first time we know of, discovered a post-parasitic way of living on earth. They did not feed off of what already existed, as do parasites. Instead, they became actors in cooperation with the earth, and made it produce food for them.

Of course, animal husbandry does ride the line between the parasitic and the creative, but it never fully crosses it. The farmers did cross it, firmly and permanently.

THE NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN NOMADS

The northern nomads lived in the flatlands above the Black and Caspian Seas, in what are now southwestern Russia, Ukraine, and western Kazakhstan. They tended to be taller and with longer rather than rounder heads. They were pastoral, war-like, patriarchal, and worshiped sky gods.

The southern nomads lived in the flatlands of Arabia. They tended to be slight-boned, had long heads, were pastoral, war-like, patriarchic, and worshipped storm gods.

It is difficult for modern westerners to understand the structure and incentives of such societies. Most westerners expect cooperation in life. Most of the time, the storekeeper does not try to cheat us, we don't steal metal exposed on the sides of buildings, and so on. In short, we expect people to "play nice" because of the programming in their brains, not because they are forced to do so. We complain bitterly about the stupid criminals that do arise.

This assumption of cooperation did not exist in these groups of nomads. They were not the same as us in their assumptions regarding life upon earth. We Westerners derive (more or less) from farmers who presumed cooperation and creativity. These nomads assumed dominance and scarcity.

The nomad existence was based upon a plunder model, placed on top of a clan model. At the base was the family clan. In these small groupings, there would have been a good deal of sharing and cooperative decision-making, but the final and large decisions would have been made by the senior male. For these clan groups to join together and form a larger group, a central dominator was always required.

What these people saw as "normal" was a dominator in charge, with a structure below him. Each clan, of course, would have a protected place within that structure, along with certain privileges and allowances.

The rigidity of these structures led to hatreds that could endure for centuries. When an outside group forcibly alters one of these societal hierarchies, the occupants live with tilted floors, so to speak, until the structure is righted.

The rigidity of this structure derives from the fact that it is a collection of clans, and the clans nearly always remain for centuries. Added to this, clans tend to constantly compare themselves with the other clans, and oppose any changes in status between them⁵. Because of these status-conscious and enduring bonds, the structure is not permitted to modify. Thus, the inconvenience and the humiliation of altered hierarchy endures.

Nikolay N. Kradin, in his paper, Nomadism, Evolution and World-Systems: Pastoral Societies in Theories of Historical Development, explains that the nomadic empire is organized on the military-hierarchical principle, and survives by exploiting the nearby territories. He goes on to say:

The most interesting and novel feature of the steppe empires was their dual structure. From outside they appeared to be despotic aggressive state-like societies because they were formed to extract surplus product from outside the steppe. But from within, the nomadic empires remained based on the tribal relations without the establishment of taxation and exploitation.

So, this structure is based upon clan relations at the base, and upon plunder in the overall. This is more or less as one would imagine it to develop, given enough information.

James DeMeo argues⁶, with much evidence, that physiological damage due to drought and starvation contributed to or caused a variety of cultural and character traits among the southern groups of nomads. DeMeo finds that the root cause was the spreading of deserts (and subsequent starvation, devaluing and mal-treatment of children) at approximately 4000 B.C.

THE CENTRAL FARMERS

The central farmers tended to be shorter, stocky, with round heads, short hair, no beards, and worshipped a fertility goddess. This group lived in the highland area of what is traditionally Armenia, extending into the Lake Van area of what is now eastern Turkey⁷. Settlements at several locations in the Alznik province of Armenia date to 10,000 B.C., before the ice age had fully ended⁸.

The most likely structure of their "society" would have been a decentralized farming structure, similar to later farming groups that functioned beyond the edges of state control, such as in the early American colonies. (No state had ever existed at this early time.) The natural clan group certainly would have formed some sort of base for these people, but since farming scatters and moves people across landscapes, this clan structure would have been dispersed⁹, reducing the strength and effects of the clan.

It seems that these farming groups kept an older forager tradition to gather in much larger groups for a few weeks every year. At these gatherings, they would conduct ceremonies and festivals, make marriage arrangements and trade goods. A standing monolith and building, dated to approximately 8,000 B.C. at Nevali Cori in western Armenia, was probably one of these ancient meeting places. It was located only three kilometers from the southern bank of the Euphrates River, a convenient meeting place.

These gatherings would have been very much like the religious camp meetings of strict sects such as Methodists in the 18th and 19th centuries or of various Pentecostal groups in more recent times. Obviously the pretext for such modern gatherings differs from ancient tribal meetings, but many aspects, such as ceremonies and marriage arrangements, would have been almost the same. Again, these people were the same as us, only with less information. We should expect their behavior to resemble that of modern people.

MALE AND FEMALE GODS

As mentioned earlier, these early humans had a very limited amount of knowledge of science and the forces that shaped the natural world in which they lived. But, they did have powerful minds and creative imaginations. So, they tried to imagine what made the world work, just as we would in the same situation. Over centuries, ideas such as these tend to shape themselves into forms that are easily repeated. This is no less a problem in our time than it was at the end of the ice age.

For example: Our common story of Adam and Eve's fall from paradise is supposedly based upon the Bible. But the ubiquitous form of this story – eating an apple – is nowhere to be found in the Bible; no apple is ever mentioned. Yet the story is repeated endlessly, merely because it is easy to draw and because "everyone else" seems to do it. Precisely the same thing happened to the myths of the ancients.

The gods of the ancients tell us a great deal about the central assumptions they made about the world. The nomads, as mentioned above, saw the world as a place of scarcity and struggle against other men. They developed war gods and patriarchal structures.

"Patriarchal" is a term much abused in modern times, as if to imply that there is something evil in maleness itself. But the issue is not maleness per se, but dominance and submission. The problem arises when instincts for expansion are mixed with an ignorance of a creative principle. In such cases, the strongest one – almost always a male – "improves" himself by taking from others. So, "patriarchy" was the personification given to the central principle, being the easiest way to repeat it¹⁰.

The farmers, on the other hand, developed female gods and cooperative cultures. Again, this is not because there is some inherently superior value in being female, but because of the creative principle – the opposite of scarcity. Female gods were developed because the female embodies creation and productivity: Her body literally brings forth new human beings.

For reasons that we will explain later, modern gods tend to be of the dominator type. For this reason, female gods are seen by some moderns as a dominator with a female face. This is not what female gods were to the earliest farmers. The female god was not a dominator, she was a catalyst – not striking from above, but working with. They were magic embodiments of the creative/productive principle.

Inanna may have been the first goddess (she was most certainly among the first) and the name itself indicates that it may have originated in the pre-Sumerian language of the Armenian farmers. She was, as mentioned above, the personification of the creative principle. Accordingly, her male consort was characterized as the force in the grain and as her priestly lover.

We will close this chapter with some passages from Inanna's myth-poetry. In them you will notice the glorification of creation and production in many forms: The production of the female body, the production of the grain in the fields and the production of the herds. You will note the erotic aspects as well, which are odd and even troubling to many modern people, but were entirely sensible and laudable to the most-ancient farmers. After all, they were fundamental to the magical process of creation. Sex made them partners with the gods. It was glorious, not shameful.

Last night as I, the Queen of Heaven, was shining bright,
As I was shining bright and dancing,
Singing praises at the coming of the night.

He met me - He met me!
My lord Dumuzi met me.
He put his hand into my hand.
He pressed his neck close against mine.
My High Priest is ready for the holy loins.
My lord Dumuzi is ready for the holy loins.
The plants and herbs in his field are ripe.

O Dumuzi! Your fullness is my delight!
I bathed for the Shepherd Dumuzi,
I perfumed my sides with ointment,
I coated my mouth with sweet-smelling amber,
I painted my eyes with kohl.

He shaped my loins with his fair hands,
The Shepherd Dumuzi filled my lap with cream and milk,
He stroked my pubic hair,
He watered my womb.
He laid his hands on my holy vulva,
He smoothed my black boat with cream,
He quickened my narrow boat with milk,
He caressed me on the bed.

Now I will caress my high priest on the bed,
I will caress the faithful shepherd Dumuzi,
I will caress his loins,
I will decree a sweet fate for him.

As the farmer, let him make the fields fertile,
As the shepherd, let him make the sheepfolds multiply,
Under his reign let there be vegetation,
Under his reign let there be rich grain.

The King went with lifted head to the holy loins.
He went with lifted head to the loins of Inanna.
He went to the Queen with lifted head.
He opened wide his arms to the Holy Priestess of Heaven ...

Notes:

¹I am discussing the ice age as if it ended quickly at 8000 B.C., which is not true; the ice receded for several thousand years, then stopped receding at about 10,000 years before the present time. So, there is a certain amount of simplification built into this discourse.

²The argument as to whether human character is the result of heredity (nature) or experience (nurture). In actuality, it is both, with a third factor added: Previous choices. The major choices humans make have enduring effects both within and upon them, which are encoded into their characters to one extent or another.

³There is also a strong possibility that these groups had been separate and isolated from each other well back into the ice age, which means that they could have developed separately many times longer than humans have developed in all the years since the ice age. However, this is all conjecture – we simply do not know.

⁴Again, I am simplifying. There were certainly individuals in each group that differed from the descriptions I am attaching to them. Furthermore, such characteristics among groups of humans are constantly varying and competing. So, while I firmly believe what I write here is accurate, it is only a general statement and certainly varied greatly among individuals and between sub-groups.

⁵Again, this status consciousness is related to a zero-sum understanding of life. If what one wants is scarce, it must be grasped firmly, and re-taken if ever removed. A human with a positive-sum view of life might rather mourn the loss briefly, then go out to replace it.

⁶In his book, Saharasia

⁷Interestingly, this is the same area that Genesis points to as the landing-place of Noah's Ark.

⁸Some of the more important finds were made in about 1980 by the archaeologist Hans Georg Gebel.

⁹As we will examine in the next chapter, these farmers had not yet invented crop rotation, and were required to abandon their fields every several years and move to the next fertile area.

¹⁰And, so that the female half of humanity takes their fair share of blame, we should add that females tended to reward such behavior by seeking a strong male. Scarcity tends to create poor characteristics in all humans.

·         Nobleharbor • 5 days ago

Some simple ideas that have alternates: Farmers as positive influences... Yes it's certainly possible. However there have been those who did NOT take care to learn the natural cycles of the land (Climax Forests & Grasslands) and all the complex processes that make up any human interaction (Permiculture). In many cases instead of farming/gardening, you have "mining"... They mined the soil for mono-crops. It works... for a while, but in the end the results are depletion, and eventually deserts. Entire civilizations were dispersed or wiped out by such practices. (As is currently underway in Central California)
Same with nomadic cultures. There have been parasitic instances, but the complex relationship of predator/prey can result in sustainable natural processes. As in predators keep the herds bunched and under pressure, the herds move from over grazed to newer feeding. Waste products combined with hooves produce water trapping stippled ground, well fertilized. Plants expand because they are not over grazed creating an abundant micro-climate (Carbon sinking in bacteria at the root level) that moderates & disperses conditions contributing to harsh infertile deserts.
So it's just not all that simple. One thing I agree with though, humans can ether cooperate with understanding or succumb to fear & superstition/intolerant beliefs. We do have a choice.
For further reading see: "Cows Save The Planet, and other ways of restoring soil to heal the earth" by Judith D. Schwartz 
ISBN: 978-1-60358-432-6

Richard Greenfield • a month ago

You seem to have forgotten, or are unaware, that human remains have been found in the Western Hemisphere that date back at least 11,000 years. Where they came from, and whether they were of a nomadic or of a farming culture is a matter of speculation, but the oldest skull found to date -- the skull of a young woman found in Brazil in 1975 and given the name "Luzia" seems to have definite Negroid features.

To quote a passage from Wikipedia: "Her facial features include a narrow, oval cranium, projecting face and pronounced chin, strikingly dissimilar to most native Americans and their indigenous Siberian forebears. Anthropologists have variously described Luzia's features as resembling those of Negroids, Indigenous Australians, Melanesians and the Negritos of Southeast Asia. Walter Neves, an anthropologist at the University of São Paulo, suggests that Luzia's features most strongly resemble those of Australian Aboriginal peoples. Richard Neave of Manchester University, who undertook a facial reconstruction of Luzia described it as negroid."

Danny B • a month ago

Paul, just to add a bit to your narrative. There was a great deal of interaction between older hominid races and modern man. The Basques
have a very high percentage of Neanderthal blood / genes. http://www.aoi.com.au/bcw/nean...
The Neanderthals had a LONG time to acquire resistance to many pathogens. They passed it on to us. Fully half of our human genome is "virus-like". It is probably related to disease resistance.

Another must read book is http://www.urzeitcode.com/engl...
It offers pretty good proof that an organism can revert to an earlier genotype. VERY interesting.

One more book is; Seed of Knowledge, Stone of Plenty. http://www.amazon.com/Seed-Kno...
Absolutely fascinating. There is very good proof that the early monoliths were electric devices for increasing yields of seeds.

2prickit • a month ago

#10 “And, so that the female half of humanity takes their fair share of blame, we should add that females tended to reward such behavior by seeking a strong male. Scarcity tends to create poor characteristics in all humans.” – The theme of one of the greatest epic poem of the Western Tradition the Iliad by Homer can be read as such. The Greeks as the story goes were set out to re-capture Helen. She was taken by a Trojan strongman. Close reading reveals the layout; Troy was an empire situated between the Greeks to the south Troy controlling the water route to just that same area referred to, Armenia, as is described in the earlier Greek tale of Jason an the Golden Fleece. We know the Greek cities and colonies are nowhere referred to as a centrally controlled empire until much later, when in Athens so much talk of it comes from Plato and Philosopher Kings. The weak ? point of the epic story is –did Helen want to be abducted? And there is my point regarding Inanna and what westerners now call lust.

RED • a month ago

The "Notes" section of your presentation perform an important function in explaining the underlying reasons and necessity of your "generalizations" and "overall" conclusions. Well done!

At the risk of being presumptuous, the apparent analogy between Left wing Socialism / Communism / Marxism / Fascism, etc. that seek division of perceived finite resources of the "pie", (and resolution via the act of plundering wealth distribution) and those who follow Free open markets and the opportunity to Increase the size of the pie for everyone (production) is not lost on me.

I have not read any of our other works or newsletter yet......but fully intend to do so!

Bill Ross • a month ago

Ok, lets cut to the chase:

Its between predator (greedy, those who consume more than they produce) and, the productive (those who produce more than they consume: IF the predators leave them alone), else:

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

As to the BS false choice between nature versus nuture: Know thyself:

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

dave jr • a month ago

What are we calling the ice age? How do we know it isn't migrating poles or a wandering of the earths axis of rotation? Could an asteroid 'bump' or alter the axis a little more dramatically? What is an ice age in one geographic area could be a warming and drying in another. Over thousands of years, areas rich in settlements (farming) would be affected; where nomads, who basically followed animal migrations, not as much.
.
Also, are all nomads plunderers and all settlers producers? Or are the "production vs. plunder" archetypes more evenly distributed among humans and different cultures have a different tolerance toward plunder. We know that hard times can change a persons view individually as he needs to rationalize his method of survival. Civility is easier when there is plenty. So "nature vs. nurture", as a wholesale characteristic of any given culture is suspect to me also.

Marten  dave jr • a month ago

According to Edgar Cayce, pole shift was the culprit ?!?!?!

Production Versus Plunder Part 3

By Paul Rosenberg - April 18, 2015

Modern people are so deeply trained in the belief that dominant overlordship is the way of humanity that they no longer believe anything else is even possible. But coercive rule has not always been; it was created at a specific historical period.

This passage covers, briefly, some of the details before coercion was institutionalized.

Continued from last week...

Chapter Two: Civilization Created & Overrun

Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Throughout this book, we will generally address specific cultures, to some extent reinforcing the idea that cultures are the natural order of humanity. We will do this because the mass of humanity has indeed organized itself in this way and because it is far more convenient for our purpose of analysis. Nonetheless, it is important to be clear about the fact that culture is not simply a good or preferable thing – culture is also limitation.

Once people conceive of themselves as "an Armenian," as "a Jew," or any other flavor of cultural identity, they introduce a specific pattern into their minds and accept it as "Me." That is an inherently limiting thing. We humans are massively adaptable and creative beings; to limit ourselves to being "Armenian," Jewish," "Irish," "Brazilian" or whatever is a stupid thing to do – it limits our thought processes and our creative output as beings.

Culture, per se, is not a good thing. It has value only to the extent that it is the least impractical thing among the other options at hand.

So, for the rest of this book, we will address culture as a given, but it is important to understand that it is not something that is noble, pure and sacred. Culture is actually a transgression against a fully whole, healthy human being. Granted, there have never been many humans who we could justly characterize as healthy and whole, but were they to emerge, culture would be a formidable barrier to them, and they would find crossing it a struggle. They would justly condemn it as a false god.

FROM ARMENIA TO SUMER

As mentioned in the last chapter, the first group of truly productive human beings on earth were, as far as we know, gardeners that emerged from the last ice age and appeared in the area of what is now Armenia. They tended to be short, stocky, with round heads, short hair and no beards, and embraced a fertility goddess.

Because they had no knowledge of crop rotation, they were forced to move from one area to the next every several years, after they had depleted the soil in their fields. This would have seemed normal and sensible to them, as it would have matched other aspects of nature, such as women being fertile for only a limited number of years. It is thus no surprise that they accepted soil losing its fertility as fact. As a result, crop rotation would not have been sought and indeed was not discovered for a long, long time.

This, however, was not considered especially problematic, since there was no shortage of land. The earth was all but empty; if you wanted new land, you could simply take any piece you wanted.

The map above shows some of the earliest settlements of these people, as they slowly moved away from Armenia, seeking fertile new fields. Note that they followed the Tigris River into what was much later called Sumer (or, mistakenly, Sumeria), an area often referred to as Mesopotamia and currently contained within the state of Iraq.

BECOMING STATIONARY

As these farmers moved slowly across the face of the earth, they happened upon places where they could become stationary and not have to move every few years. These were in the river valleys of the old world that flooded every year. (Properly termed alluvials or flood plains.) The group of farmers we are following found such a place in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. The valley flooded every year and a new layer of topsoil was deposited. Irrigation ditches could be built to extend this flood effect over a large additional area. This allowed the farmers to stay in one place, build permanent houses, and avoid the strains of moving every few years.

Carroll Quigley, in his The Evolution of Civilizations, explains this as follows:

At the risk of considerable oversimplification, we might say that these earliest agriculturalists appeared in the hilly terrain of western Asia, probably not far from Armenia, about nine thousand years ago. Because they knew nothing about replenishing the fertility of the soil, they practiced "shifting cultivation," moving to new fields when yields declined in their old fields. In consequence, they expanded steadily, reaching Denmark and Britain in the west and China in the east before 2000 B.C., that is to say, within five thousand years. In the course of this movement they found, in various alluvial valleys, sites adapted to permanent large-scale settlement because, in such valleys, the annual flood replenished the fertility of the soil by depositing a layer of fertile sediment; and, accordingly, the need for "shifting cultivation" ended and the possibility of permanent, eventually urban settlement was offered. This possibility was realized in four alluvial valleys of the Old World, in Mesopotamia during the sixth millennium B.C., in the valley of the Nile shortly afterward, in the valley of the Indus river early in the fourth millennium B.C., and in the Huang Ho Valley of China late in the third millennium B.C.

Life in these Pre-Sumerian settlements followed a routine based upon the rivers. During the flood season (which lasted for months) the farmlands were partly or fully flooded by the rivers. During this season, the farmers built, maintained, or extended irrigation canals to bring water to adjacent areas. Animals were moved away from the flood zones to prevent them from drowning. As the waters receded, seeds were sown and crops were cultivated. Finally came the dry season when crops were harvested and stored. Then, the cycle repeated.

It would be difficult to overstate the value to these early farmers of being able to remain stationary. Food was plentiful, goods could be accumulated, and large communities could be formed. This led to immense variety and specialization. Music appeared in variety and with many experimental new instruments. Written language developed, basic mathematics, and much, much more. It was the birth of man's intellectual life.

Prior to this moment, men and women certainly had the same creative capacities, but their creations never left their small groups. Now, they inspired each other. Humans played off one another, helped one another, and corrected one another in very specific ways. For example, if you had the fortune to be born with unusual musical talent, the odds of finding a kindred soul among forty or fifty others would be fairly low. But finding someone of complementary talents among a thousand was possible and perhaps even likely. And once you found each other, utterly new worlds of exploration opened to you.

Farm communities created an undreamed level of prosperity and human growth. Humans had long been capable of such growth, but they lacked the interaction that made it possible. Now, ideas could be compared, experiments conducted, results written and distributed, and the knowledge shared among thousands. Mankind began to flower. It may have been the most exciting time our race has ever seen: Humanity awoke and the world opened wide unto them.

THE FIRST CITY

As our first farming culture spread out from Armenia, only some found their way to the Tigris-Euphrates flood plain. Most of the others began to spread in other directions, as Professor Quigley notes in the passage above. They literally brought the knowledge of farming from one end of the Eurasian landmass to the other.

There is not a great deal of solid information available on these groups, since they were small, moved regularly, and existed a long, long time ago. But a few early settlements have been unearthed.

But in addition to the small settlements, a much larger one has been uncovered and quite well examined. This early city (the earliest ever, so far as is known) is now calledCatalhoyuk and is located on the Konya plain of central Turkey. It thrived between about 7400 BC and 5900 BC. And, most interestingly, Catalhoyuk functioned with no master and no overseer. There was no courthouse, no elite buildings, no central administration of any kind.

Here's one of the early drawings of Catalhoyuk:

After James Mellaart, "Çatal Hüyük", Thames & Hudson Ltd., London, 1967

Much more has been discovered since this drawing was made, and it turned out that this was only one part of the city, which had a population of 8,000 people, and perhaps 10,000. As it was learned, these people were individualistic, clean, prosperous, peaceful, they ate well, women were treated equally to men, and they were highly artistic.¹

This settlement, which was a center on the prehistoric obsidian trade routes, dates from well over a thousand years after the ice age had fully ended. While it is very, very early from our perspective, it was certainly not "early" from the perspective of these farming groups.

NOTE:

¹You can find much more detail on Catalhoyuk in issue #37 of Free-Man's Perspective.

·         acudoc1949 • 17 days ago

What an interesting view of history.

Don Duncan • 21 days ago

Perhaps the need to move changed, if this early settlement discovered (developed) sustainable farming methods. Crop rotation is not necessary or desirable if multiple, compatible crops are grown year round. No plowing is necessary if you use Masanobu Fukuoka's "...Natural Way of Farming". The soil gets more fertile, not less. It was once thought that the soil had to "rest" and "lay fallow". This worked, but not for the reasons assumed. The ground simply returned to its natural state, growing multiple compatible, enriching plants. These were called "weeds" and considered to be worthless. As if nature's way was not worth studying, and therefore a valuable lesson was ignored. Isn't it amazing how such obvious solutions to problems go unobserved? All the farmer had to do was respect nature and learn from it, but he kept making the same mistakes for millennia. It continues to this day as farmers mono crop, causing unnecessary problems, and respond by applying costly chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides which slowly destroy the land, and the integrity of the produce.

Bob_Robert  Don Duncan • 20 days ago

10,000 years of historical perspective, and the necessity of staying in one place, sure do make for fascinating answers to problems.

Bill Ross • 21 days ago

Now; here's a new "twist" on central bankers:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/du...

I was WRONG. They do have "some" (although unknown) standards.

Danny B  Bill Ross • 21 days ago

Bill, read here and you can watch the next color revolution right from the start;
http://sputniknews.com/world/2...
Edit; I'm wondering how the tax authorities plan to charge her the value added tax on her use of a non-depreciating asset. I see it as a labor operation just like an actress.

o     

Danny B • 21 days ago

On a side issue, there have been hundreds of Ooparts found all over the world. Many of them, like silver chains from coal fields, are unarguably manufactured objects. It isn't clear how they arrived in coals seams from the carboniferous period. 
http://www.6000years.org/frame...
There are hundreds of these objects that argue for VERY early civilizations. BUT, it you examine early hominid remains like Lucy ( 3.2 million years ), she had a very small brain case. It is hard to imagine a direct hominid descendent of 180 million years old as adequate cranial capacity for advanced developments. Many ice-ages have come and gone. They may very well have scrubbed away many artifacts. I can't see how man could have been around for 180 million years,,, and his descendents have the cranial capacity of Lucy.

Then, there are the Paracas skulls; http://www.collective-evolutio...
They are evidence, to me, of a natural progression from an earlier man much like ourselves. 26% of births in America are Caesarian. Man is born EXTREMELY premature. As his head gets ever-larger, babies will have to be born even more premature OR, they will have to have cone heads. 
A human can't take care of itself for about 5 years after birth. None of the great apes are born with a handicap so dangerous.

This shortening of gestation with an extremely early partum is very hard to understand. How could it have developed in the short time since Lucy? 
There are 40 billion habitable planets in out galaxy. I think that the ooparts were dropped off by early visitors.

Bill Ross  Danny B • 21 days ago

If the Morlocks prevail over the Eloi (war against intelligence "won") , nature (biological adaption to environment over eons) may eliminate this redundant "capacity for intelligence" resulting in Lucy (very small brain case) as the real, as opposed to effective norm.

FauxScienceSlayer • 22 days ago

We live in a false paradigm reality bounded by faux science, fake history, filtered news, financed by a fiat currency and directed by Demonic Warlords. The described cultural ORIGIN MYTH is a deliberate deception. Humans have been in existence for millions of years, creating complex societies that are easily wiped away by Nature. In the epic text, "Underworld" researcher Graham Hancock describes the complex cultures that existed world wide during the last Glacial Maximum which ended 12,000 years before present. At the start of our current Holocene interglacial WARMING period, 12,000 YBP, there was a mile high ice sheet from NYC to Seattle, three miles thick over Canada. All of that ice pack melted in less than 2,000 years, with NO CARBON DIOXIDE and NO HUMAN cause, just like multiple Glacial/Interglacials before. This ice melt raised sea levels 440 feet. Massive ice dams broke sending 100 foot high surges down river valleys. Hancock documents written languages over 15,000 years old, and highly accurate navigation charts showing the former coastlines. Underground coal mines have recovered abandoned shafts with timber braces dated to 40,000 years ago. Some coal deposits have produced human produced tools and art objects embedded in the coal seams.

"Those who control the present, control the past. Those who control the past, control the future" ~ George Orwell

It may seem pointless to conceal evidence of ancient humanity, but in a false paradigm reality, run by homicidal psychopaths, anything they can do to restrict knowledge is power for their demonic uses. Find and share Truth....it is your duty as an Earthling.

acudoc1949  FauxScienceSlayer • 16 days ago

Great comment, FauxScienceSlayer!

Bill Ross  FauxScienceSlayer • 22 days ago

"seem pointless to conceal evidence of ancient humanity"

no, predators profit by repetitive algorithms of crime: "those who do not know history, are doomed to repeat it"

the fraud (and consistent, no exceptions failure) of fiat currencies (promises of "some men") is one such engineered "doom" (profit center for predators, costing civilization).

part of THEIR general "war against intelligence":

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

Bill Ross • 22 days ago

"large communities could be formed. This led to immense variety and specialization. .... Written language developed, basic mathematics, and much, much more. It was the birth of man's intellectual life."

All because an environmental shift had occurred because of division of labor and common goals in building fixed infrastructure, increased population density and, the survival VALUE of peaceful co-operation and NEED to communicate and understand each other led to an intellectual Renaissance in this new frontier away from hunter-gatherers. New CHOICE possibilities were enabled by this environmental shift:

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

stay TUNED. Eventually, the hunter-gatherers will return and consider those who farm and build (produce) to be tasty prey, worthy of "raping and pillaging". Now called barbarians who are not only "past the gate" they ARE the gate.

Praetor  Bill Ross • 22 days ago

Yeah, hunter-gatherers, barbarians, savages, I think we renamed them, they are now called "government". The "LAZY" few who did not want to get their hands dirty producing their own sustenance, they forced other people to do it for them. We can find these people in the large marble and granite houses, we built for them. The question is why, fear maybe one answer, but not the whole story. The hunter gatherer are weak they don't eat well.

Bill Ross  Praetor • 22 days ago

are weak 'cuz they don't "deal with reality" (and, are therefore "unfit to survive") as the honest and productive do. They, as parasites can only last as long as the productive host. Not long now, as our faux "division of spoils" "economy" implodes to "war of all, against all". They are pigs, $hitting where they eat.

Praetor  Bill Ross • 22 days ago

Agree, I say feed them the poison pill, and let us get on with building the real world.

Production Versus Plunder Part 4

By Paul Rosenberg - April 25, 2015

Violent overlordship, as we mentioned last week, is not eternal and in fact did not exist for long periods of time. In this week's segment we will describe its beginnings.

It is important in our time to understand this. If rulership is eternal and inevitable, as we are taught, then all we can do is fight about how to divide the scraps that our rulers deign to leave us. But if rulership is not inevitable, a new world of possibilities opens to us.

Continued from last week... 

THE RISE OF VIOLENCE

No student takes seriously the seventeenth-century notion that states arose out of a "social contract" among individuals or between the people and the ruler. – Will and Ariel Durant

The boundaries of human life have, for a long time, been set and maintained by violence. But it was not always thus. The reign of plunder began in specific places and in specific ways. The first settled group to have this lesson thrust upon them were the Pre-Sumerian farmers of Mesopotamia. Professor Quigley¹ describes it this way:

The chief event was the invention of agriculture, metallurgy, and civilized living by the Highland Zone peoples and the subsequent linguistic and cultural submergence of these peoples by inflective-speaking longheaded pastoralists who pushed in waves from the Flatlands by the two post-glacial dry periods. One of the chief results of this process, a result seen most clearly in Europe, was to create a political and social structure in which patriarchal, warlike, horse-loving, sky-worshiping, honor-seeking Indo-Europeans were established as a ruling class over peaceful, earth-loving, fertility-dominated, female-oriented peaceful peoples. This pattern, first established in central Europe almost four thousand years ago, was not destroyed, in spite of Rome, Christianity, and later migrations, until the appearance of industrialized urban society in the last four generations.

Farming created large stores of food, typically as grain, which did not rot if carefully stored. Following shortly were other imperishable goods, such as clothing, furs, tools, and so on. By any ancient standard, these farmers were stunningly rich. And while our farmers were happy living cooperative, productive lives, there were others who operated, not by a cooperation model, but by a plunder model. Our farmers were now immobile. Stationary targets are easy to hit and sedentary people are not well suited for combat. They were easy victims.

The first plunderers were the nomadic hunters and herdsmen described previously. At some point they expanded into new areas and discovered that rich, stationary farmers were easy to rob. The consciences of these people were informed by sky gods who imposed power from above and by clan groupings that featured dominance, submission and structure. They were emotionally suited to plunder. Furthermore, these people had the necessary skills for rapid movement and killing; they hunted, captured and killed mammals regularly. They would also have resented the prosperity of the farmers and their wealth, as it made them look second-rate, something that would not be permissible in their hierarchical, "we must be the head, not the tail" view of the world. Outsiders being richer and better was not a contradiction that they could bear.

These nomads could easily remove the spoils of conquest, either to a safe place or simply to the next settlement for the purposes of barter. And it is likely that their first actions against the farmers were simple looting missions.

In some places, some of these nomads would have been so successful that they drove the farmers away, leaving them to either look for new victims or return to their previous lives. Before long they developed a third option: Steal only a limited amount, not enough to drive the farmers away. This way, you can work the same ground, as it were, for life. Thus, the first rulers were born. Like it or not, the probable scenario is that governance began as persistent theft, with hierarchical nomad groups sustaining plunder at a level that was low enough for the productive farmers to accept their rulership with limited resistance.

On the farmer's side, giving a fifth of his crops to the thug every harvest was a lot less bad than facing death, or going back to being a traveling gardener or a forager. So he grimaced and accepted it, as would most modern men. To illustrate this point, here are the words of modern man in a similar situation: An exceedingly remote Tibetan nomad, commenting upon his first ruler²:

The Panchen Llama owned areas and appointed officials to settle our disputes and collect taxes. He was our lord, although he never came here himself. Our taxes were heavy in those days, but we never went hungry.

This series of events could easily have been predicted in advance. It was the incentives that the players faced that led to precisely this situation: Stationary, peaceful farmers colliding with nomadic herding and hunting societies could hardly turn out any other way.

AND GOD CHANGED

One way this "conquest of the productive by the plunderer" shows up in the archaeological record is in the mixing of the gods. We have said that the early farmers held to female gods based upon the productive principle. We have also said that the nomads held to male dominator gods. Sumer was eventually overrun by a nomadic group called the Akkadians. Dianne Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer³, studying the development of the goddess Inanna, report the following:

In the cycle of Inanna, we encounter aspects of the earlier Sumerian Dumuzi (her male companion) as well as the more politicized Akkadian Dumuzi. The Sumerian Dumuzi... is characterized as the force in the grain and as the priestly lover and attendant of the Fertility Goddess, Inanna. The Akkadian Dumuzi, coming from the northern nomadic peoples who emphasized the arbitrary will and power of the gods is characterized as the shepherd, the astral heavenly bull, and the king who has "godlike" powers.

Whether imposed by force or accepted by intermingling over time, the dominator male gods of the nomadic plunderers were mixed with the productive female gods of the cooperative farmers. Again, this was entirely sensible, since extracting plunder openly is an expensive process. Violence is never cheap. So, the sensible ruler would certainly prefer to have his subjects give willingly, and because the gods were super-human, they were the obvious tool to use. Since the gods did not speak directly to men, their "true message" was a matter of interpretation and could be turned to the ruler's advantage, if done carefully.

Although the first instances of rulership were mostly naked impositions of force, an ethic was later created that said that the gods, if obeyed, would assure great harvests and prosperity. Furthermore, clever priests were added to the equation. These first public intellectuals promoted a theology in which the king played a 'legitimate' role. Thus, rebellion against the king became rebellion against the gods.

Under this new theocratic regime the female god – formerly the friendly catalyst of production – became an arbitrary withholder of prosperity⁴.

Soon enough, the rulers began building temples and monuments under the rationale that these things would help them connect with now-arbitrary gods, who had been removed to somewhere above, not with them on earth. The gods had become high and glorious, and the people were low and dirty. Only very special men who were very specially prepared could move between the two worlds. By convincing people that special men, massive structures and dramatic statements were necessary to reach the gods, a larger share of crops and labor could be collected more easily.

The first priesthood and state theologies were developed at these times. Related to this is the fact that many monuments of this era featured inscriptions regarding the importance of properly worshiping the gods. Such inscriptions had relatively little religious importance to the rulers; rather, they were designed to encourage tax compliance. They were apparently the world's first propaganda campaigns.

Details varied from place to place and time to time, but since all the incentives of the time led directly to this line of development, it was, again, nearly inevitable. The subjects had acclimated to being ruled and the rulers wanted more power and glory. The rest was obvious.

This more elaborate religious model mentioned above began in Mesopotamia in about 5400 B.C. and was also present in Egypt at a very early date.

THE HORRIFYING HISTORY OF SUMER

One sows, another reaps. – Ancient Proverb

Our first farmers from Armenia suffered a fate common to a shocking number of the true innovators and benefactors of mankind: They were overtaken by aggressive and abusive outsiders who claimed the innovators' discoveries as their own. Worse, the names of the innovators – who paid the dues, who expended heroic effort, whose genius it was that created human progress – were completely forgotten, and their usurpers were given their credit. Humanity's greatest benefactors have thus suffered the greatest injustice. In this case, as in so many others, a modern proverb is every bit as true as the ancient one shown above: No good deed goes unpunished⁵.

An annotated time line of human life in Sumer⁶ shows this process:

Prior to 6000 B.C.

Gardeners travel down the Tigris River from Armenia into the land that will eventually be called Sumer. Stumbling upon the fact that they could create permanent settlements in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, they remain and create stationary agriculture. In effect, they create civilization. They become, as Samuel Kramer says, the "first farmers, cattle-raisers, fishermen, weavers, leather workers, woodworkers, smiths, potters and masons." Nonetheless, we have no written record of these people, few artifacts and only traces of their language. We don't even have a name for them.

Shortly after the Tigris-Euphrates Valley was settled, Semitic nomads from what are now Arabia and Syria begin to raid the agriculturalists. At some point thereafter, they invade and remain, setting themselves up as a dominant political group. In other words, they make themselves the first stationary rulers, collect a portion of the harvest every year and claim a monopoly on the right to dispense justice to the agriculturalists, all by force of arms.

6000-5400 B.C.

The agricultural settlements continue under the coercive rule of the nomads. Technologies and arts continue to develop, albeit more slowly.

5400 B.C.

A new group of invaders, apparently originating in central Eurasia, arrive from the north. These are more effective than the southern nomads and overrun them. They develop more efficient schemes of rulership and control. It is likely that they leave much of the previous ruling elite in place as middle managers.

Eridu, the earliest city in southern Mesopotamia, is founded. Monuments and temples begin to be built. A new myth is propagated, retelling the story of the goddess Inanna, and stating that she had to travel to Eridu in order to receive the gift of civilization. This is fundamental to the new strategy of using the gods to create the moral legitimacy of the rulers and to decrease the difficulty of tax collections.

Groups of cities are built around temples, eventually almost within sight of one another.

5400-3000 B.C.

City-state governments continually organize and control daily life. Creativity decays.

3000 B.C.

A powerful ruler appears and organizes all of the city-states of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley into a single empire. A list of kings calls this man Etana, and describes him as, "the shepherd, who ascended to heaven and consolidated all the foreign countries."

3000-2000 B.C.

A variety of kings and dynasties rule and fight for rulership of what is now properly (and finally) called the Sumerian civilization. They exercise great care in organizing and regulating human life. Creativity and production finally fail and the civilization irreversibly degrades.

2000-1750 B.C.

The death throes of civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. They are overrun by the Babylonian empire of Hammurabi. The name, Sumer, ceases to be associated with any living group.

NOTES:

¹ Again, from The Evolution of Civilizations, published in 1960.

² National Geographic, June 1989

³ In their book, Inanna

⁴ This change would have greatly affected the psyches of the farmers (almost certainly damaging them), making this a fascinating field of study. How might humans think of themselves and experience themselves differently if they presumed that the divine principle was with them, warm rather than aloof, and creating alongside them? And if they were included in the physical act of creation, in which divine magic erupted as sexual ecstasy? The issue here would not be the truthfulness of these beliefs, or even their broad usefulness, but the emotional health they might engender. Scientific examination in this area could be of great value.

⁵ This is so common that it indicates structural causes. The innovator is hated and the exceptionally healthy man must be eliminated. Humanity seeking comfort in stasis is a potential explanation, unfavorable contrast being punished is a similar cause, and others are possible. In any event, this is a phenomenon worthy of close examination: The smart kid is picked on, the superior man is despised, Jesus must die.

⁶ This outline is partly based upon Samuel Noah Kramer's essay, "Sumerian History, Culture and Literature," which appears in the book Inanna, mentioned previously. Kramer (1897-1990) was one of the world's leading Assyriologists and a world-renowned expert in Sumerian history and Sumerian language. An Institute of Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies is named for him at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel. Recent studies and findings were also used.

·         Jerome Bigge • 12 days ago

The productive were plundered by the non-productive who through hunting and conflict had created the weapons necessary to allow them to treat the productive as serfs. Today the non-productive form governments to rule and exploit the productive, a tactic that seems to date back to before the dawn of recorded history. Today government claims to "benefit" us, but the early rulers at least were more "honest" about what they did.

CeterisParibus • 13 days ago

It's a great yarn. We little people who scratch and scrabble and go unrecorded throughout history are actually its makers, though not its tellers. Propaganda was invented by the looter, the man with the club, to opiate the looted, render him senseless with religion to pick his pockets. These inventors of human culture and artifact couldn't tell a con-man from a camel. I think I need more story.

Praetor • 14 days ago

So, the 21st century is shaped by, personality types. A and B. A's, aggressive hyper active overachievers who only know action as a way of life, and the B's, relaxed laid back underachievers who only know R & R as a way of life. Well, I think there is a third type. A plus B = Z type, and this is where you find Natural Law of the Unseen Hand of Human Action, and the Z types will not tolerate the excessive compulsive behavior, nor the symbiotic relationship between the two types, that have ruled this world way too long. Its way past time the Z types, restore the balance and moderation, that Natural Law demands, so the human race can live free and liberated live where true free markets dictate the course of planet earth!!! Not a bunch of psychopaths at the extremes of life.

Fabian • 14 days ago

Very interesting serie, thanks. But I'd like to add that in my opinion some societies are geared towards accepting this subservience to a higher undeserving authority. Take England for instance and their Queen. Moreover, I remark that societies that accept this subservience tend to be more successful than those who reject it. Great European countries that went through a revolutionary process, like France or Russia, didn't fare as well as those who chose the stability provided by this auto proclaimed authority.

Praetor  Fabian • 14 days ago

I have a DNA structure, that tells me, the Monarchs are descendants of leaches. Sorry, I don't buy it. The Monarchs of the doom fiat, they are the reason the worlds in a mess.

Fabian  Praetor • 14 days ago

Praetor I'm not bashing for the monarchs, it's just an observation and some thoughts. I'm from Switzerland and it's one of the least monarchist country in world in facts. But, with the exception of Germany, it looks to me that countries that kept this structure are doing better on aggregate (by the way USA has a quasi monarchic structure with the deification of the presidential function).

2prickit • 14 days ago

Curiously universal astrologic powers are not mentioned; but that of anthropomorphic primal hierarchy is. The archeology and literary source material of this history does make reference to Egypt, although it does not venture to trace humanity any further back into time. It is now known that the largest of pyramids on earth (3) are astrological observatories that have been dated by the position of the Constellation Orion at 10,500 years BCE, which date corresponds precisely to that of the official estimated ending of the one Ice Age Mr. Rosenberg’s history begins at and therefore cannot take up the civilization referred to by Plato: Atlantis and Meterrainian commerce; or the technology that built the pyramids in Egypt, as well as those in the Americas and other known pre -interglacial structures. His history tells only, so far, of a sorry state of state protection: Mud walls for Paradise!

Marten  2prickit • 14 days ago

EdgarCayce, made the same dating about Giza.....Interesting

Sydney • 15 days ago

I like this series a lot. Fascinating really. Great stuff and direly needed. There are compelling world views out of which freedom arrises!!!!

I still remain compelled that human beings standing alone as individuals rely on their good name, honesty and integrity to survive, so they are good by necessity, in relation to other human beings. A individual becomes anonymous as a member of a group. This human being then commits themselves to the well being of the group and gives up the standard of good and bad in relation to another human being and instead judges good or bad, right and wrong as what is in the best interest of the group. So they choose differently still within their own self interest. So even if they perpetrate horrible crime against those outside the group they rise in status and power within their group as long as the group perceives benefit to the group. The individual, certainly the individual outside the group be damned. Quite literally. I guess ultimately this needs to be done in secret or with great force or both. I guess the group that rises to power is the government, priestly class of taxers, going back to the “hunters”.

Thank you and Best Wishes!

Jim Johnson • 15 days ago

Fascinating read. I have obtained a copy of Rosenberg's "A Lodging of Wayfaring men" because of it, which is proving equally good. Until we gain a grasp to the origins of consciousness, I think it a mistake to assign petty political motivations to the Gods of old. Wal Thornhill is doing profound work on the plasma basis for the universe, which may finally point us in the directions needed to resolve this 'elephant in the room' mystery

Don Duncan  Jim Johnson • 13 days ago

There is nothing "petty" about using fear and violence to motivate servitude. Faith and force are deadly tools that deserve to be exposed as an immoral, anti-human destructive conspiracy. Remove the moral or mystical aspect of rulers and they are seen as the parasites they are. This makes their life more difficult, less safe. The less power rulers have, the better off the ruled. And those not ruled at all, live best of all.

FauxScienceSlayer • 15 days ago

We live in a hegemonic dystopia ruled over by ruthless Demonic Warlords, however, "This too will pass."

In the meantime, if your opponent refuses reason, resort to ridicule...."Piñata Planet Syndrome"....satire for these times.

Dimitri Ledkovsky • 15 days ago

Since Anthony Wile bugged out things just haven't been the same.

Fabian  Dimitri Ledkovsky • 14 days ago

Maybe but it's not a reason to bail out.

Bill Ross  Dimitri Ledkovsky • 15 days ago

the only constant is change. And, you "imply" DB needs to change "for the better". How 'bout some constructive criticism so they have a chance of pondering suggestions and doing so?

Bill Ross • 15 days ago

As to democracy "solving" this, hah!

Predators do not expect their food to "agree with them". And the democratic consensus is: "something from nothing" (from the productive, destroying productivity) and, the law no longer controls "democratic excesses" (people voting powers they do not lawfully have to "give"), the same "mistake" (tactic of arbitrary power) that gave us the Nazis.

Bill Ross • 15 days ago

PR: "Creativity and production finally fail and the civilization irreversibly degrades"

The common cause (unproductive STOP the productive and creativity is diverted from production to personal defense) fate of EVERY known civilization.

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

I know this will be "interpreted" as racist, BUT is the "point" of massive immigration to dilute cultures and the social / economic knowledge possessed by the body politic, to destroy "social / economic consensus", to weaken societies prior to the global plunderers "asserting control"? Is the "common interest" (peace) consensus being forged within the "internet reformation" sufficient to overcome this "divide and conquer tactic"?

PR: "It was the incentives that the players faced that led to precisely this situation: Stationary, peaceful farmers colliding with nomadic herding and hunting societies could hardly turn out any other way"

Very true, also from what I consider a more realistic perspective / way of stating it:

The environmental facts of the stationary tied to farming for survival versus foragers tied to plunder for survival has these possible choices / consequences allowed by natural law:

- Foragers decide to become farmers, could have worked, but no plunder nor glory, just work (yuk, ask any "entitled")

- Farmers decide to become foragers. Long term doom: nobody to plunder (prey)

- Foragers go elsewhere. Won't work, eventually exhaust prey, must come back.

- Farmers decide to fight. Scenerio 1, all time and energy (life) diverted to defense, no production, no survival. Scenario 2: Create standing army, devolves to homegrown plunderers a predator swap, no survival.

- Farmers and plunderers "compromise" with plunderers collecting a tithe and "ruling". Historical tit for tat rise / fall of civilizations based on relative balance of power between predator / prey.

Until the heretics came along with "Declaration of Independence", right to "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" TOTALLY REJECTING the moral / lawful / survival validity of "rule of man" plunderers, nor any merit of plunder / predators as pertains to western civilization (the rules by which we peacefully cooperate / trade for MUTUAL self-interest), a replacement of "rule of man / predators" by "rule of law":

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

...until central control of education / media imposed a lobotomy on most, replacing objectivity, respect for knowledge, fact and evidence with "opinion" from false "experts" making false "arguments from authority", the social mental disease of "expertitus" "promising" "something from nothing", thrusting us right back to "rule of man / predators".

so, now, we are AGAIN faced with this false choice:

- "be reasonable" and compromise with predators, leading to long term doom.

- "be unreasonable" and stand your ground.

Where "reason" is defined as "agree with predators" and "unreasonable" is defined as dissent.

YOU CHOOSE:

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

Production Versus Plunder Part 5

By Paul Rosenberg - May 02, 2015

Surveillance is nothing new. In fact, it goes back some seven thousand years. Then, as now, it quietly destroyed productive modes of life. Furthermore, it was fundamental in setting one class of people (rulers) above all other people (the ruled).

This two-class division of humanity was not always with us; it began in specific ways, which we'll examine today.

Continued from last week...

THE PROGRESSIVE CHOKING OF CREATIVITY

As illustrated by last week's time line, the great benefactors of humanity – the unnamed first farmers – experienced a stunning explosion of creativity and very shortly found themselves the effective prisoners of barbaric, ignorant men who harnessed and slowly ruined what they had created.

At first, the farmers simply gave up a portion of their harvest and tried their best to work around the stupid, barbaric rulers. It was only when a more clever set of rulers arrived that the more serious damage began. This, more serious damage, was two-fold:

1.       Piece by piece, their actions were restricted and monitored. It is difficult enough to create useful things when a man is fully unopposed, but if, before he acts, he must also consider whether or not he will be punished, creativity is forced to overcome additional and large obstacles. The more controls, observations and punishments, the fewer useful innovations arise.

2.      More importantly, their range of thought was restricted. The imposition of a dominating, arbitrary, punishing god upon men's thoughts is inherently intimidating, and intimidation powerfully opposes creative thought. When men fear that new thoughts will be punished, they allow few to pass through their minds, and admit to even fewer.

It is important to remember that the cities we are discussing here were small by modern standards. That meant that the ruler was never terribly far away and there was often no dark corner to hide in. The watcher was close and records were kept. Hiding was difficult.

As successive waves of rulership rolled over the Tigris-Euphrates valley, the structures of government and their associated theologies and punishments occupied more and more of men's minds and activities. During the semi-creative city-state period (5400-3000 B.C.) temple complexes like the one shown below¹ were common.

The Government Buildings of Uruk in 3400 B.C.

Image courtesy of R. K. Englund, UCLA

One of the primary features of these temple complexes was that they separated 'ordinary' men from their rulers and, especially, from the holy places. Restricted passages, courtyards, and great stairways had to be traversed in order to reach the important places. This had multiple effects:

·         It instilled the idea that the rulers, priests and gods were of a different class than the average men. They were literally above and figuratively above.

·         When a man was given access to the special places, he felt as though an honor was bestowed upon him. He had attained a special status and enjoyed the feeling. He would now be considerably less likely to turn against the regime.

·         The king, seeing that his subject was proud and moved to be admitted to his presence, was confirmed in his own eyes as being of a higher class of humans and worthy to rule. The kings of old often did consider themselves gods, and this effect of reflected glory contributed considerably to it.

·         Occupying a position of power (able to call forth violence) and being associated with the gods, made the ruler a very powerful imposer of shame. That gave them a terribly powerful weapon to use in securing the acquiescence of their subjects.

Another function of the temple complex buildings and palace buildings were as halls of records. This love of control and order extended all through the years after 5400 B.C. For example, an archive has been unearthed at a city called Ebla, dating from 2350 B.C. The room was ringed with shelves and held approximately 2100 clay tablets. On the tablets were administrative records of:

·         Textile accounts

·         Metal accounts

·         Tax deliveries

·         Temple offerings

·         Letters

·         State reports

·         Scribal exercises

·         Villages (hundreds)

·         Large animal herds (thousands of animals)

·         A wool industry

·         Large quantities of gold and silver

·         Tribute paid to a superior city named Mari

This is but one example of Sumerian record-keeping. Thousands of additional tablets have been found, recording things such as:

·         An appointment to a clerkship

·         The establishment of a Food Office

·         Legal documents in regard to slaves

·         Legal document in regard to an office

·         Agreements between parties

·         Deed of sale of palm grove

·         Deed of sale of a male slave

·         Receipt of purchase money for a pair of slaves

·         Documents in regard to loans of silver

·         Promissory notes

·         Acknowledgments of loans of grain

·         Acknowledgment of loan of dates

·         A bond

·         Receipt for silver

·         Receipts for grain

·         Receipts for vegetables of various kinds

·         Receipts for different kinds of beans

·         Receipt for dates

·         Receipts for figs

·         Receipts for straw

·         Accounts of the receipts for corn

·         Account of the receipts for bronze

·         Statement of silver, corn, oil, etc., received and at hand

·         Statements of shiploads of grain delivered

·         Statement of corn, wheat and vegetables delivered and at hand

·         Statement of garments at hand

·         Statement of chairs on hand

·         Storehouse accounts: corn, wheat, grain, vegetables, beans, dates, bronze

·         Accounts of the cost of the tilling of fields, as wages, feed of oxen,

·         Renting of fields to different persons

·         Account of fields, their measurements, condition

·         Enumeration of belongings, as implements, weapons, victuals, silver

·         Assignments of garments

·         Expenditure of sesame oil

·         Grain for the temple of En-lil

·         Grain for temple offerings

·         Flour and grain for temple offerings

·         Temple offerings and porphyry stone for couches for the deities

·         Lists of wages paid to officials, employees, artisans and laborers

A final and crucial area of importance was the general psychology of the people of Sumer. Enough records exist to reconstruct the general mind-set of the Sumerian period; that is, in the period of serious decline. Kramer says²:

A Sumerian tended to take a tragic view of his fate and destiny. They were convinced that man was fashioned from clay and created for one purpose only: to serve the gods by supplying them with food, drink and shelter so that they might have leisure for their divine activities.

You can see here the result of the long centuries (millennia, in fact) of indoctrination by rulers and priests. Holding a tragic view of life means that very little action will be taken to change anything. By this point, these people had accepted that their role in life was little different than that of slaves or intelligent beasts of burden.

At about 2200 B.C., near the end of the Sumerian empire, a father writes this to his son:

Do not speak ill, speak only good. Do not say evil things, speak well of people. He who speaks ill and says evil---people will waylay him because of his debt to Shamash. Do not talk too freely, watch what you say. Do not express your innermost thoughts even when you are alone. What you say in haste you may regret later. Exert yourself to restrain your speech.

Worship your god every day. Sacrifice and pious utterance are the proper accompaniment of incense. Have a freewill offering for your god, for this is proper toward a god. Prayer, supplication, and prostration offer him daily, then your prayer will be granted, and you will be in harmony with god.

Note the caution, the uncertainty of mind, the fear of being impious. This is what control, regulation and fear breed. It created a mass of people who were easy to rule but unable to adapt, arise or create. Thus Sumer, the place of humanity's greatest explosion of progress, descended into uselessness and was overrun in full.

By the time of the death of the Sumerian empire, rulers the world over were trying to conquer city after city and string them into empires. This lasted for more than five hundred years, during which time there were Egyptian, Babylonian, Hittite, Assyrian, Kassite and Elamite empires.

NOTES:

¹This is an excavation grid from the city of Uruk, which was constructed at about 3400 B.C.

²Again, from his essay Sumerian History, Culture and Literature.

·          Kevin Tebedo • 5 days ago

"The darkest hour in any man's life is when he sits down to figure how to make money without earning it." Horace Greely

Kevin Tebedo • 5 days ago

This whoosh of yours. Is it supposed to be condescending and make me look foolish? It does the opposite Bill. It is the fool who says in his heart there is no God. We are not on the same side. The world view you espouse is exactly that of Stalin, Mao and dare I say Hitler. Tyrants are agnostic. Freedom is found only in Christ. It has been an interesting exercise communicating with you. In a battle it is likely you and I would not join. We are done.

Bill Ross  Kevin Tebedo • 5 days ago

"make me look foolish?"

that is your monopoly power, not mine. I have only the ability to make myself look foolish / wise or whatever and point out the wisdom / foolishness of others. Proceed on the following assumptions and you get the following consequences (according to history, no exceptions):

"There is a god" (assumption): attempting to impose speculative "knowledge" regarding "god's will" on "heretics" (disbelievers)

"There is no god". (cannot prove) Therefore, there is no gods (natural) law, only "rule of man", attempting to impose speculative "opinion" on "heretics" (free mankind)

"God exist / not is unproven" (FACT), therefore of "no force and effect" so far as natural law (action leading to known consequences under known environmental conditions) is concerned. We can know only that for which there is evidence to prove hypothesis. Use scientific method to determine truth. Consequence: Continuous renaissance, a general adaptation to excellence (understanding and dealing with reality), peace (collective survival), ultimately, reach for the stars, look for "fit" intellectual company.

I am on the side of fact and reason, YOU ask me to "believe" without evidence. I WILL NOT. Who's the fool here, and, is the definition of fool a subjective "those who disagree with you", as opposed to objective those who disagree with provable reality"?

Lyn Morris • 6 days ago

...now I can understand why atheists are such losers!

Kevin Tebedo  Lyn Morris • 5 days ago

The prince of this world blind man's eyes. He gives them minds full of rubbish leaving them thinking they are intelligent and really at the heart they are fools. I was once blind but now I see.

Bill Ross  Kevin Tebedo • 5 days ago

the mote in YOUR eye

Kevin Tebedo • 6 days ago

Religion: A system of foundational presuppositions used to answer metaphysical questions. Atheism has a system of foundational presuppositions used to answer metaphisical questions. Ergo, atheism is a religion. As a matter of historic fact, the political view of atheism, that being Communism/socialism, has murdered millions in comparison to other religions. The existence of God is a separate issue than that of religion . The article Production vs. Plunder is quite remiss in not making this distinction. It must do so if the author wishes his missive to be taken seriously by thinking individuals. HK

Lyn Morris  Kevin Tebedo • 5 days ago

And I would add: blaming God(big g) for the men's(humankind's) serious flaws in trying to get the easy life by having everything provided by kings, gods(little g) is a huge omission of distinction.

Bill Ross  Kevin Tebedo • 6 days ago

BS: A system of foundational presuppositions used to answer metaphysical questions. 'cuz if it is not observable and measurable, it is unsubstantiated opinion.

Q: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
A: as many as you allege, since they have no mass nor dimension, not proof (nor, perhaps, existence)

TRUTH: A system of foundational symbols (language) used to describe, with 1 to 1 correspondence (no more, no less) observable, measurable natural phenomena which can then be used to build a logically consistent intellectual model of reality, used to answer REAL questions. No presuppositions that are not confirmed by natural law / observations.

AKA: scientific method:

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

pretty vague (ergo, unfounded, bordering on rude) criticism of a worthy article regarding the foundations / observed phenomena of history and rise and fall of civilizations and reasons thereof.

Paul Rosenberg

I guess you will believe it when YOU are plundered, or wake up to the fact. Or, did the devil make them do it?

Kevin Tebedo  Bill Ross • 6 days ago

Bill, science, observation, measurable data cannot answer metaphysical questions. One cannot prove or disprove God with science. God exists outside your opinion or mine.

Bill Ross  Kevin Tebedo • 6 days ago

Thus, I have ZERO interest in speculation (metaphysics).

"God exists"

a "foundational presupposition" in your terminology.

And, if God exists, the burden of proof is on those who so allege. The rest of us just shake our heads at this profound waste of speculative "effort", and wait for the evidence.

BUT, I do have "issues" with HOW the religious are manipulated against objective reason (interfering with reality consensus) and, in your terms, acknowledging the supremacy of "god's laws":

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

Kevin Tebedo  Bill Ross • 6 days ago

Bill, you are wrong my friend. If God exists the burden of proof is on Him, it, she . . . Our burden is to be open to all possibilities and not shut our minds off just because something doesn't jibe with want we wish or want to be true.

Bill Ross  Kevin Tebedo • 6 days ago

whoosh, logical fallacy of "proving a negative"

we're done

Kevin Tebedo  Bill Ross • 6 days ago

Whoosh, only if your foundational presupposition denies God existence, would it be a negative. And thus the unscientific mind is exposed. The circular reasoning of false science: if science can't prove it, it doesn't exist. And if it does not exist then science can't prove. So, we are back to God being God outside of any proof of science. Now, how does all of this apply to the article of origin?

Bill Ross  Kevin Tebedo • 6 days ago

not very truthful, eh, you reversed my point to appear to "win" (to fools):

ME:
-to allege "god does not exist" is to make the logical fallacy of having to prove a negative, so, I don't.
-to allege "god does exist" is to depend on "foundational presuppositions" and NO evidence, so I don't

YOU:
-only if your foundational presupposition denies God existence (I did NOT presuppose this)

so, by misquoting me, you fooled yourself and got your "high" of believing your "intellectual" superiority and, trumped (your delusion) an assumed idiot (me). You some kinda lawyer (sophist)?

I still don't get YOUR original "point" regarding this article being "unserious". It is that it is not "god approved" and, therefore not "what you want to hear" (truth)?

I shoulda said WHOOSH!!!

Kevin Tebedo  Bill Ross • 6 days ago

Bill, God does exist, and the proof is quite evident. It takes a leap of faith, and closed eyes to science, to deny. So, it is the one who denies that is guilty of fallacy. Truth is reality. The article in question blames religion for much of the world's ills and tyranny. I do not disagree with this. My main point was that religion and God are two seperate things. Atheism is a religion which begins with a faith statement, there is no god. In human liberty questions men would be wise to search the mind of the Creator. The founders and the framers did, regardless of their religion. To your question, I am an entrepreneur, scientist and an amateur Constitutional scholar. We are both students of liberty.

Bill Ross  Kevin Tebedo • 5 days ago

@DB: lost post?

The Daily Bell Mod  Bill Ross • 5 days ago

Just Disqus's occasional bad habit of apparently randomly sending things off to moderation queue… (and not having moderators available 24/7!)

Bill Ross  Kevin Tebedo • 6 days ago

You have not run afoul of an atheist (fools) or believer (also fools), but an agnostic (show me the PROOF, ELSE you are wasting your effort and my time). So, you are disputing my atheism, which does not exist. A falsely framed "philosophical" "argument", falsely treating me as a strawman, to toot your "god" horn.

what you don't KNOW can kill you, just as what you "believe" you KNOW can kill you. The "my god is better than your god" WARS have been very costly for mankind, just as the "my philosophy is better than your philosophy" and self-alleged "right to forcefully impose it" WARS have and are deadly, with escalating collateral damage.

The ONLY thing I agree with you about is that atheism is based on "god does not exist" assumption and is THEREFORE also a false "philosophy", as is religion with absolutely no way to know of god's existence or "will" outside of natural law, which is a "creation of god", if he/she exists, else, "what IS", if god does not exist. In either case "natural law" is a force not to be dismissed, else, ultimately be smited by the costs of divergence from reality. The "judgement" for hubris, if you will, strategically denied by arbitrary power (rule of man) for all of history, a growing peril, here and now, given nukes and "poor losers".

I provided a link above regarding HOW the religious and secular have been manipulated to be "at odds" and, where the common ground lies, so we can cooperate and turn as one against our common enemies (slavers). Another WHOOSH, right over your head.

THINK, be FREE, "live and let live":

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

and, this is not about penetrating your dogmatism. If is to tip the unconvinced sitting on the fence to the side of established fact and reason.

EUbrainwashing2015 • 7 days ago

I do not care much for nations, nor royalty (whilst being a native of the British Isles) or anything else of the sort either - including most certainly religion. None of that is any-more than the past generation's false paradigms; which they were sold, swallowed, died for and passionately believed in just as undoubtedly tomorrow's majority will support the coming new order with similar simple allegiance and vigour.

Bill Ross  EUbrainwashing2015 • 7 days ago

Can't wait until we meet extraterrestrials, that'll unite us in "common interest" against what may not actually be (but will be alleged to be) an enemy, or, at least one that can be defeated.

...as Nixon reportedly mused with Brezhnev, attempting to de-escalate.

feeling particularly cynical (realistic) today?

I suggest that "global and total war against predators" is the cure for what ails us.

EUbrainwashing2015  Bill Ross • 7 days ago

Not so sure that a extraterrestrial species that have advanced sufficiently to have sorted space travel will still be thinking that "global and total war against predators" provides for anything good. Indeed if such a prospect of visitors can be legitimately envisioned, which I do not rule out, maybe they are not too fussed to make themselves known just yet; whilst we still are drawn towards rulers instead of leaders, psychopaths instead of philanthropists.

Bill Ross  EUbrainwashing2015 • 7 days ago

Agree with you, but, bet they (if exist) once did think "global and total war against predators" was a neccessary step to childhoods end and maturity beginning.

Unless the predators are dealt with, scientific advances will continue to be turned to a means of enslavement and war. We will not be crusin the stars so long as they keep us in the mud fighting each other and / or them, to their profit.

To be among the stars, spacers have, as a necessary step defeated their predatory impulses. Progress requires peace and cooperation. Predators are incapable of this and root cause of war.

I like the "Gort" solution from "Day the earth stood still". Quicker than natural law inevitably triaging those unfit to survive (evil, ant-life, line spelt backwards). I would much rather "do something" than debate this resolved issue to death.

Should point out watch the original "day the earth stood still" (1950's). The new, improved version "accidentally" omits the reason we are considered by ET for destruction is our predatory behavior, which is not to be tolerated among the more evolved. And, in the "new, improved" version, Gort is a blunt instrument of destruction as opposed to selective "smiter of those who initiate aggression"

amanfromMars  Bill Ross • 7 days ago

Perhaps all reading here would like to consider the opportunity presented and benefits which can be quite effortlessly provided by extraterritorial forces if extraterrestrial beings are a giant leap too far for mankind to process and accept is just a small quantum communications step for them to protect and further exploit ......... IT Futures and Cyber Derivatives with Virtual Options and Real Hedges

And not so much a Fifth Column, more AIRevolutionary Guard ....... Unifying Virtual Force with Immaculately Resourced Assets and Titanic Head Quartered ‽ I Kid U Not.

EUbrainwashing2015  Bill Ross • 7 days ago

I agree and go one step further. It is not so much 'predatory behaviour' that needs to end as it is the usurpation of human society, human energy, human vitality into the servitude that is the acceptance of and belief in the cult of 'the state'. Belief in some prevalent form of the cult of 'the state' is the precursor for all organised and destructive predatory behaviour outside of the primitive.

Since the existence of 'the state' provides a mechanism ideal for those of pure psychopathic personality types to thrive and rise, almost exclusively, to the positions of greatest 'authority' and power it is inevitable that 'the state' manifests as having ,first and foremost, a psychopathic personality itself. The state is psychopathic.

Not only do I think that it is improbable that any species developed enough the employ space travel is still so under developed it needs to find the very few planet where life has evolved and then still act in a primitive and predatory manner.

I think it most improbable a species could develop the intellectual or economic means to achieve the significant developments necessary whilst still being hobbled by the ineffectiveness the illusion for the necessity of 'the state' will inevitably cause.

Bill Ross  EUbrainwashing2015 • 7 days ago

" it is improbable that any species developed enough the employ space travel"

..., the west is NOW organizationally, financially and collective "vision / ambition", incapable of sending a man to the Moon, let alone Mars, assuming the first "success" was not a Hollywood stunt.

EUbrainwashing2015  Bill Ross • 7 days ago

We are a long way from meaningful space travel. We do not even know how to protect humans from the radiation prevalent in space.

Blank Reg  EUbrainwashing2015 • 11 hours ago

I work with the people who solve those problems. We're a lot closer than you think.

EUbrainwashing2015  Blank Reg • 6 hours ago

Ask them how to protect humans from the radiation they will be exposed to in a spacecraft that can be launched from earth, where of significant interest you can travel to in something less than a human lifetime, how the ship will be powered and propelled, how a human can endure long-term weightlessness, and how air, water and food will be provided. There are many ideas but nothing practical.

dave jr  Bill Ross • 7 days ago

I wouldn't be surprised at all if someday we are introduced to the extraterrestrial. But I don't think they will have come from a different part of the galaxy. I think they will be a stand offish tech trick manufactured right here on earth. But the hucksters had better hurry...information and discernment is spreading fast. Their own libraries of knowledge are becoming obsolete.

EUbrainwashing2015  dave jr • 7 days ago

You mean a sort of psyco-op 'false flag' alien invasion, as a Serge Monast style event: one there is no evidence for other than the idea itself presented as fact. But sure, following the hoodwinking event of 911 we must all learn to: accept nothing, question everything.

Praetor • 7 days ago

Kings of old often did consider themselves gods, they still do, that is their problem, these monarchs of doom and glum. Apocalypse, end of the world, end times, all come from these usurpers of liberty. And the sad fact is, in our time they have the ability to do just that, end the world. Our problem is, how to get rid of these loons, without killing all of us, in the process. When their imagined authority over us is challenged, their reaction becomes suicidal, just to maintain that authority, because, they know they be mortal, and they do not believe in "its a good day to die". As in the ancient hero's story of Uruk, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, as written on the tablet "lapis lazuli", Gilgamesh the tyrant ruler of the city Uruk and Enkidu a wild hairy hunter living with the animals, and the creation of the gods to rival Gilgamesh. The moral to this story, being, the inevitability of ageing and death. The usurpers of liberty found out, they be no better than the average Joe, and they be not gods at all, one day they will die. The reason for the pyramids, the search for the fountain of youth, the experiments with DNA, cryogenic freezing and all the other insane manipulations of chemical indigestions (pills), all to find Immortality. Kings of old often consider themselves gods, they still do. That is the problem!!!

Bill Ross • 8 days ago

Also, Catholic Priests, using information gleaned from confession built social maps of who was interacting with who and profiled people in order to identify opponents and quash revolutions.

The Communication infrastructure of caller ID (know who's communicating with who) achieves the same thing and now, this along with the internet has created "social networking". Those who provide this capability and control the information have the ability (if participants foolish) to detect budding re-evolution and squash the instigators like bugs before anyone is the wiser. This is the "point" of adding backdoors to our IT devices, to make our property spies for arbitrary power.

And yes, being spied upon (and terror of being perceived as enemy of power) does have a very chilling effect on free speech, innovative thoughts and actions. Combine this with lobotomized skool, suppression of real information and history and, you get what we've got: a social / economic lobotomy, extinct innovation and productivit,y a civilization spiraling down the drain to the dustbin of history (if we are lucky), nuclear war, if not.

It was no accident that the British Empire outlawed slavery. They were not saints and, their rulers were perhaps as evil intentioned as ours. The difference is that past rulers of western civilization were smarter, or at least better informed. They had direct experience with slavery and KNEW it cannot and never can be profitable. Slaves control their own work output and, when the "what's in it for me question" is not answered to their satisfaction, reduce work output such that it costs more to care for and attempt to control them than can be gained in profit. Slavery, by input costs and output production IS UNPROFITABLE.

Any unprofitable social / economic organization eventually implodes to "war of all, against all" and mass starvation in the absence of a REAL self-interest answer to the "whats in it for me" (for the potentially productive) question:

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

This was all KNOWN "as A fact" centuries ago and, perhaps still is. The difference between slavery THEN and slavery NOW is that then, there was NO viable ANSWER to the "whats in it for me" question apart from "obey, or be whipped". NOW, the "whats in it for me" question has a counterfeit "fiat currency and derivatives" ANSWER whose "value" is NOT established by us (free market), but by forcefully imposed "decrees of man": "trade in this ONLY, or else". We have seen they are serious regarding "or else" by the smiting of Hitlers Germany (bartering manufactured goods for natural resources, decreeing war on Jewish Banksters and, Jews in general), Iraq / Hussein (Oil bourse in Euros) and Gaddafi (gold backed pan-African Dinar).

And now, China, Russia and BRICS plus some key western "allies" are flirting with alternative "medium of exchange" ("money"), financial trade systems, etc.

A very big "hot button" has been pushed for a very dangerous feral beast, trapped in a corner by its own lies and consequences.

The internet reformation "watches", the unseen brain thinks. the unseen hand (of our collective choices), free market chooses: fit, or not?

see more

dave jr  Bill Ross • 7 days ago

Excellent post, Bill. How to get slaves to produce the whips to be used upon them? Dad might say, "go outside and choose the switch off a tree with which to exact your punishment". This is a terrifying decision to make because one just knows a twig won't do. This psychology stunt may work when the child is dependent on the patriarch for his well being. The patriarch model goes into the dumpster when self proclaimed authoritarians are actually dependent on informed...former human chattel.

lulu  Bill Ross • 7 days ago

'The greedier people are, the faster the stored wealth of our civilization is consumed.'
And as you also say here "Any unprofitable social / economic organization eventually implodes to 'war of all, against all' and mass starvation in the absence of a REAL self-interest answer to the 'whats in it for me' (for the potentially productive)…"
I definitely see this happening all around me in the here and now with people frazzled trying to keep up and all the consequences that go with pressure yet not pushed enough as yet to pull back and see the broader picture or investigate the details of the same. And then I hear: Elon Musk reported on mainstream media declaring that cheap and abundant renewable energy is at our fingertips and he will deliver it, CBC radio discuss the new 'sharing economy' which will transform the world (for the better of course) as subsequent generations run open sharing options alongside , considerations that Edward Snowden is a plant of the USA CIA, the New Democrats (sort of socialists) might actually win in conservative Alberta, and police in Baltimore are being charged with the murder or manslaughter of Freddie Gray, etc. This all happening seemingly very very recently amidst all the current frenzy yet creating a real or illusory picture ( which no one knows for sure how to interpret) that things are improving. 
Good grief. Yes, people plod on as there appears no way out from the relentless march of the predator/prey human story. Or is there?

Bill Ross  lulu • 7 days ago

"Or is there?"

Of course there is. Has, many times in history as civilizations rose and fell (were "taken down by barbarians", productive "gave up").

Once the predators have AGAIN totally decimated the productive (lack of vigilance). and, residual productivity (the civilized remnants) are "hiding their light under a bushel" (as the bible puts it) and, we are all starving and being hunted as "long pork" (as in 100 Years War), then, from this position of "equality of impoverishment" (where nobody can enslave the productive and "put on airs" of being superior, then, from a position of equality on the edge of survival, sanity may be able to prevail.

So long as there is something left to steal and inadequate Blowback, predators will DO the only thing they KNOW: prey, ON YOU.

BLAME your skool, history teachers and lyin MSM for not already KNOWING these crucial facts of civilization. The barbarians are not only beyond the gate, they ARE the gate. Really think our predatory "gatekeepers of truth" want people to know they and all they strive for are merely a crop, to be harvested?

and, the "law"? Don't even get me started.

The BIGGEST LIE is that "evil does not exist", or, if it does, can be "reasoned with". And "reason" is compromising what cannot be compromised: survival.

Production Versus Plunder Part 6

By Paul Rosenberg - May 09, 2015

Any freedom advocate has to be amazed by the fact that millions of people seem emotionally bound to their abusers. Today, we'll explain how that began and uncover its roots.

Continued from last week...

THE GREAT TRADE

During the years between 5400 and 3000 B.C., a great trade took shape, a trade between great numbers of humans and the hierarchical states that ruled them. This was a trade, not of money and goods or even of fear and safety. Instead, it was a psychological trade. And, being psychological (thus internal) meant that the trade was difficult to clearly identify.

It is unlikely that this trade was purposely developed. Rather, it arose unexpectedly as several factors came into play in the same place and time:

·         The painful conflicts built into human character

·         Rulers trying to convince their subjects to pay taxes willingly

·         A populace with their actions increasingly constrained by regulations

·         A populace with their thoughts increasingly constrained by fear of punishment

The first point above is of great importance. Humans are internally conflicted beings. This is inherent in human nature – we are all born to it and suffer accordingly.

We love family, we seek faithful mates; we know that children are happier and better when they are raised with two loving, committed parents. Yet, we have animal mating instincts that would drive us to other sexual partners.

Likewise, we see and value hard work, honest dealing and loyalty. Yet, we have impulses that would drive us to grab what is available in front of us, whether it be honest or not.

This set of inherent conflicts can certainly be trained and controlled to a very considerable extent (in fact, most of us do control ourselves quite well most of the time), but it takes considerable time and effort, and thus remains a universal problem. It has driven many developments in religion and philosophy... indeed, it is involved in almost all expressions of religion to a greater or lesser extent.

The crucial factor here is simply that most men and women do feel conflicted, insecure and confused, and that they lack the time, skill or desire to fix the problem. It is too hard. So, they find ways to work around it, most notably to seek belonging in a group, with the half-conscious thought that by being merely one of many, blame and shame will not attach to them.

The Great Trade was, and is, this:

The state and/or church presents themselves to men as a superior entity – higher than man. To be joined to them provides sanction from a higher source than that of their internal conflicts.

In our times we often hear this expressed as: People need to belong to something larger than themselves. They need to sublimate their confusion and conflicts into a higher entity.

In effect, the man or woman's internal conflicts become less important than the entity to which they are joined. It is the great assurance from the great adult, and it is ever-so-easy to accept, since perhaps every other human you've ever known has done the same.

Note that blame for this trade does not lie with the state. Frankly speaking, the rulers weren't smart enough to have figured this out in advance. They merely watched as it developed and slowly learned how to take advantage of it. The majority of blame lies with the people who flocked to the deal. Again, it was so much easier than having to make peace with one's self.

This trade is the magic secret of politics and of rulership. People wanted the Divine Right of Kings. They need to think of their Leader as a superior being. Rulers and politicians merely play their roles as public theater.

You can also see from this why political science is so seldom scientific: The magic ingredient buried in it is anything but, and indeed, may not be explicitly named without calling millions of comfort-transactions into question.

ANALYZING THE CHARACTER OF THE SUBJECTS

We have now been analyzing the charters of the subjects at some length, but before we leave the subject, it is important to explain why such discussions have some validity. After all, making grand pronouncements about millions of greatly varying individuals is beyond the scope of normal human ability and this tends to make such discussions seem almost arrogant. However, it is, in some very important ways, easier to analyze many than it is one, so long as we realize that any individual may vary from our conclusions. This is actually the same technique that is used in the analysis of gasses:

Trying to analyze the motions of each individual molecule of a gas is a practical impossibility. They push against each other randomly, impart momentum back and forth, and travel at constantly varying rates of speed. To measure each one, chart each one and determine from a study of 10x1024 individual molecules what will happen from compressing them would be a ridiculous waste of time and energy, presuming that we had the capacity even to do it. But we can tell – almost perfectly – what a volume of gas will do, if we take it as a whole. Compress it and it heats, decompress it and it cools. This we can determine with great precision. In the same way, we are often more accurate in analyzing the character of a mass of humans than we are when trying to analyze just one.

THE CHARACTER OF THE RULERS

One final but important area of exploration is the mind of the ruler. Rulers and subjects face very different sets of incentives, which greatly affect not only their actions, but their attitudes.

A first fact to reestablish is that the rulers of this era were generally from a different cultural background than that of their subjects. As mentioned earlier, the consciences of these people were informed by sky gods who imposed power from above and by clan groupings that featured dominance and structure. They were emotionally suited to plunder. Thus, to rule over others was far easier for them than it would have been for average farmers.

Perhaps the primary incentive for these rulers was simply to stay in power. One reason for this was simply that humans experience increased levels of pleasurable hormones1 when in positions of power. It literally feels good. Another was that being deposed could mean death. Add to that the related perks of status and wealth, and not many rulers walked away from power. Plus, they wanted to pass this great advantage along to their children, and to see them prosper and rule after them.2

The incentives above, however, are fairly common among rulers of every era. What set this era's rulers apart was the need for ferocity. Whether (early) to get farmers to capitulate, or (late) to keep sub-rulers in obedience when you were away, the newness of the rulership enterprise plus the extremely low population density made extending power difficult. Ruling one settlement could be done fairly well if the settlement was not large and if you remained there. But if you wished to rule another three or four nearby settlements as well, you needed to extend your power. And, since soldiers were expensive, other methods were required.

This difficulty was solved with ferocity and fear. The rulers of this era were especially willing to boast of the horrible pain and punishments they inflicted upon anyone who rose against them or refused them. They wanted people to hear about these things and to fear disobedience.3

And, as mentioned in the previous section, the ruler had to play the role of being a better class of human, embodying the Higher Power.

Here are a few quotations from the period:

The Assyrian ruler, Ashurnasirpal II:

I stormed the mountain peaks and took them. In the midst of the mighty mountain I slaughtered them, and, with their blood, dyed the mountain red like wool... I carried off their spoil and their possessions. The heads of their warriors I cut off, and I formed them into a pillar over against their city. Their young men and their maidens I burned in the fire... I flayed all the chief men who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins; some I walled up within the pillar; some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes... Many within the border of my own land I flayed, and I spread their skins upon the walls, and I cut off the limbs of the royal officers who had rebelled.

The Poem of Culgi:

I, the king, was a hero already in the womb; I, Culgi, was born to be a mighty man. I am a fierce-looking lion, begotten by a dragon. I am the king of the four regions; I am the herdsman and shepherd of the black-headed people. I am a respected one, the god of all the lands.

King Lipit-Ectar:

I am a king treated with respect, good offspring from the womb. I am Lipit-Ectar, the son of Enlil. From the moment I lifted my head like a cedar sapling, I have been a man who possesses strength in athletic pursuits. As a young man I grew very muscular. I am a lion in all respects, having no equal.

I am a gaping dragon, a source of great awe for the soldiers. I am like the Anzud bird, peering about in the heart of the mountains. I am a wild bull whom nobody dares oppose in its anger. I am a bison, sparkling with beautiful eyes, having a lapis-lazuli beard.... With my kind eyes and friendly mouth, I lift people's spirits. I have a most impressive figure, lavishly endowed with beauty. I have lips appropriate for all words. As I lift my arms, I have beautiful fingers. I am a very handsome young man, fine to admire.

I am Lipit-Ectar, king of the Land. I am the good shepherd of the black-headed. I am the foremost in the foreign countries, and exalted in the Land. I am a human god, the lord of the numerous people. I am the strong heir of kingship. Holding my head high, I am established in my position.

NOTES:

1Seratonin in particular.

2I am bypassing the important topic of sociopathy here. It will appear in the second edition of Production Versus Plunder.

3It is of some interest that the first ruler of men mentioned in the Bible is also the first man with an impressive legend: Nimrod, the mighty hunter.

·         Kevin Tebedo • 3 hours ago

I like Mr. Rosenberg's juxtaposition of molecules and individuals in attempting to determine behavior. I'm reminded of a line in Men in Black where K tells his protege that "a person is smart but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." One thing about rulers. All people are conflicted and self-aggrandizing, the non-rulers and the rulers. All men are the same regardless of their position or status. No man or woman can be trusted with power. Not you, not me, not anybody. Some will have enough ethical moorings to with stand using power to fulfill their own lusts, some won't. Either way men must be checked and held accountable for their individual actions. Nobody gets to hide behind the vial of government for excuses of misuse of power. Hence the Nuremberg trials.

2prickit • 11 hours ago

“Comfort-transactions sets of incentives most men and women do feel conflicted, insecure and confused, and that they lack the time, skill or desire to fix the problem.”

the result of social engineering: various systems of indoctrination beginning with government public “education;” (individual “failures” are now often “treated with Psychotropic medication and other forms of behavioral manipulation); Main Stream Media and Play Station entertainment devices continues as a social suave, enabling individual confidence throughout the remainder of ones’ civic- corporate “life”; --- until the advent of a godly successor Papa-Momma Rat combination rules us? But I error in supposing they be Rats generating us precious little mice, as their offspring; ------rather, and evidently, we currently are under the rule of a brother-sister duet: Sister Hillary is sure to be up next! And, however well versed in “the Law,” one might just believe that the US Constitution forbids dynastic rule.

Praetor • 11 hours ago

Easer analyzing the mass, than analyzing the one. The reason for governments and mega-cities. Keep the pressure on, and easer to control, take the pressure off, and loose control. Make a law to tell the mass you can't do that, because, one did that once apon a time. The one was punished for his individuality, but, the mass was told there is no individuality, see what happens when you become an individual, and are not apart of the mass, you are punished. Human individuality and liberty, of course has been their nemesis since time began. You can't be a human god, when someone else thinks he is a human god, a god sets the rules on how everyone live and dies, how can there be different rules, when you be god, you be perfect, your rules must be perfect. The beginnings of tyrannical socialistic collectivism. Today is no different, than yesterday, they still think this way. They believe themselves to be gods, their problem is true gods don't die. They say power corrupts, no power makes you insane and a danger to civilization, because, these insane human's think they are gods. Truth is, all humans are liberated from the collective and we have to find away to do away with these monarchs of the collective, same today as yesterday. Sad thing,so many think these megalomaniacs, believe, they are gods.

Bill Ross  Praetor • 11 hours ago

heretec:)

don't let them burn you at the stake, for being different (and thus, by definition, dangerous)

Praetor  Bill Ross • 11 hours ago

They don't like people like you and I, Bill. We don't conform or compute, in their minds. We could be a problem. And isn't it grand. Thing is, I don't want to be a god, I want to be left alone to live, to live as I choose. To do no harm, to do my own TPP (partnership) with my neighbors. To not be subjected, to a blowhard bean counter in some sector of the world, that I care little about. They don't like people like us!! We are un-collectivized.

Bill Ross  Praetor • 10 hours ago

"their minds" are full of dogma. Their choices, by divergence from objective reality, dooms them.

the "trick" is to walk the fine line between vexing them and nudging them towards the doom they seek and, avoiding becoming collateral damage in THEIR war on reality. After all, what can "false gods" do, apart from attempting to create THEIR reality, which all of natural law is totally opposed to.

When all is said and done, our hubristic "rulers" have peni$ envy for the power and glory of natural law.

Praetor  Bill Ross • 10 hours ago

Ah, yes the reason for the towers of babul. They still build those. Must be the cold water, their trying to get above. You may have hit the nail on the head.

Rexangelion  Praetor • 7 hours ago

"Remember that there will be difficult times in the last days. People will be selfish, greedy, boastful, and conceited; they will be insulting, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, and irreligious; they will be unkind, merciless, slanderers, violent, and fierce; they will hate the good; they will be treacherous, reckless, and swollen with pride; they will love pleasure rather than God; they will hold to the outward form of our religion, but reject its real power. Keep away from such people. Some of them go into people's houses and gain control,...but they will not get very far, because everyone will see how stupid they are...and evil persons and impostors will keep on going from bad to worse, deceiving others and being deceived themselves." (Edited and condensed for clarity from the Good News translation of II Timothy 3)

Can there be any better explanation than this, just before a Great Paradigm Shift (the New Age of Aquarius)? Check out this link: http://www.redicecreations.com...

Bill Ross  Praetor • 8 hours ago

well, if you want to get all mythical:

"god" thwarted THEM by "confounding languages" so cooperation in building the tower of babel was impossible.

"they" attempt to thwart us (self-rulers) by confounding knowledge, hoping we will be too confused and too busy fighting other idiots to cooperate against THEM.

FauxScienceSlayer • 14 hours ago

"Congress Tells Court that Congress Can't be Investigated for Insider Trading" ~ posted at The Intercept

Martha Stewart gets a tip, makes $5K spends a year in the grey bar motel. Queen Pelosi gets a tip, makes $70K with her VISA IPO and she's an entrepreneurial genius. We have allowed the hidden rulers, the banking Demonic Warlords to have control over the political puppet show and the parrot press echo chamber. These genocidal psychopaths have repeatedly stated that 90% of humanity MUST be exterminated, and now have the fatal threat vectors to accomplish this goal. Willful ignorance will not spare you from this Apocalypse....

Find and share Truth....it is your duty as an Earthling.

Kevin Tebedo  FauxScienceSlayer • 3 hours ago

Martha Stewart went to prison not for insider trading but for lying to the federal investigators. She was actually acquitted of the insider trading charge.

Bill Ross • 15 hours ago

PR: "One final but important area of exploration is the mind of the ruler"

Machiavelli, in "The Prince" (ruler "how to") advised: The FIRST TASK of any aspiring ruler is to conquer YOUR own passions and rule (control) yourself:

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

So, if ANYONE wants to rule, including self rule, this is what must be done.

...and, there are formidable APPEARING (mostly internal) barriers erected by the social "engineers" (psychiatric "profession", social "scientists", central control of information and skool), Pavlov conditioning YOU in favor of social consensus (herd "truth") as opposed to the truth provable by you, a unique individual, pondering the unique aspects of your environment, which constitutes your "reality":

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

So, free YOUR mind. All else follows, especially the crucial ability to ignore idiots, starting with the fool in YOUR head.

...and YOU wonder why rulers have such contempt for YOU.

The REASON that the west is in servitude is because YOU do not develop / exercise the ability to "control yourselves", leaving a power vacuum for others to do so.

Marcopolo  Bill Ross • 7 hours ago

Well stated.
Given my time on the planet and my education...way back, I would posit they had not achieved a required level of perfection in social engineering and education which from my point of view, draws me to alternative sites like the DB and others and interact with those, generally, of freer minds, and see the game that is being played.
I question what the demographics are of the visitors and especially the posters on the various alternative media sites that are not entertainment focused (Facebook and its ilk), but focus more on taking the "red pill" of expanding knowledge and truths and alternatives to the current "rulers" and the "rulers rulers"?
Having children I would posit they have more perfected the craft of social engineering in the schools. While there is a view to "equal rights/opportunity," also creating an economic model which requires two producers that, only in rare cases, negates the parents being more involved and having an impact as respects truly "educating" their children, thereby fomenting a class that questions and seeks change to the status quo. This supports the servitude, allowing the vacuum not only to be created at an early stage, but to have it fully filled in the form desired.

'Production Versus Plunder' ~ Part 7

By Paul Rosenberg - May 16, 2015

There have been lots of complaints about governments sticking their fingers into school curricula... and the people complaining have been right; setting knowledge free from the state was the key to its growth. We'll cover the story this week.

Continued from last week...

Chapter Three: Classical Civilization

Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft. – Pericles

Even though there was a long and dark period following the catastrophe of 1200 B.C., men did, eventually, re-gather themselves and begin to move forward again. But this was not a cold restart. Tremendous amounts of knowledge had been assembled and passed on. Men knew what had been done and more or less how to do it. They still may have suffered from a delusion that a great hierarchical empire was necessary as a catalyst for human progress (as evidenced by the fact that they kept trying to rebuild them, and perhaps by the fact that hierarchy is still considered necessary and good), but they did understand many things, such as:

• Farming.
• The calendar and seasons.
• Trade.
• Seafaring.
• Rudimentary navigation.
• Basic mathematics.
• The use of currency.
• Accounting.
• Reading and writing.
• Metallurgy. (Brass, copper, iron.)
• Military technologies.
• Music.
• Art.

The Greek Dark Age was shockingly long. The previous, warlike, Mycenaean civilization vanished at some point between 1200 and 1150 B.C., along with writing and many other things. Stunningly, no visible progress occurs for almost four hundred years. As shown above, there was not an absolute lack of knowledge at this time, especially for the Greeks, whose lives were closely aligned with the sea. All through these dark years, there did remain a sea-faring culture that had not failed at 1200 B.C. – the Phoenicians. This Semitic merchant culture was thriving in the Mediterranean during this time and they definitely had outposts where they interacted with Greeks. The later Greeks (after the roughly four hundred years of silence) certainly borrowed heavily from the Phoenicians, who had long organized themselves into city-states and collaborated in leagues or alliances when threatened. They also developed the first alphabet.

The Phoenicians thrived between 1550 B.C. and 300 B.C., a period that is interestingly offset from land-based civilizations of the era, and is, also interestingly, in synch with the Biblical narrative of the Semitic Hebrew civilization.

In any case, the Greeks most certainly had retained knowledge available to them. Nonetheless, they were unable to use it for four hundred years. Again, this indicates an internal, psychological, reason for dark ages, and not external reasons.

Power devolved throughout this period, ending up in the hands of aristocracies. Slowly, equality grew among the different sects of people, leaving the fundamental unit of organization as the family. It seems to have been at this point that development restarted.

THE RISE OF THE INDEPENDENT MYTH-MAKER

When the Greeks did begin to recover themselves, one of the first things they did was to create stories. This was not mere entertainment, but stories with moral lessons as central elements. And, very importantly, these stories were not sponsored by, censored by or approved by any state institution at all. They evolved almost entirely separate from imposed authority. Stories were accepted and writers rewarded solely upon merit. A good story teller would prosper and a bad one would not.

Homer seems to be the first great Greek poet to arise. He was, as is still commonly known, the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and seems to have lived and written in the late 9th Century B.C., close to four hundred years after the great Catastrophe. Herodotus says that Homer lived four hundred years before his own time, which would place him at around 850 B.C.¹

Sappho was another famed and early Greek poet, living approximately between 620 B.C. and 570 B.C. In history and poetry texts, she is sometimes associated with the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Sapho's poetry was well known and greatly admired throughout antiquity. Most was lost, but her immense reputation has endured and is attested to by a few fragments of her works that have survived.

Many other poets flourished between the 5th and 7th Centuries B.C., creating all sorts of stories and songs, covering virtually all aspects of life and generally conveying some sort of message.

Recitations of poetry, especially Homer, were very popular at Greek festivals of the period. By the 5th Century, there were a great number of playwrights, such as Thespis, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Theater performances were extremely popular and were little-connected to the state. What we think of as entertainment began in Greece, and it was one of the primary ways in which the Greeks revived themselves and came out of their dark age.

It is very important to understand that the Greek myths were a radical departure from those of previous civilizations; they were written so that people could find meaning in them. The holy writings of the previous state/church systems were primarily rules of behavior. Do this, and things will go well. The Greeks had stories that were meant to address the reader's inner life. The theologies of the empires addressed men's actions; the Greeks had stories that addressed men's souls. And there was something else: in the Greek myths, men were not small, insignificant, and powerless before the gods. In the Greek myths, man challenged the gods, and sometimes won! They beat the gods through superior thinking. This was a radically new intellectual development.

THE SEPARATION OF KNOWLEDGE AND STATE

During the long period prior to 1200 B.C., there were very strong ties between knowledge and state/church systems. The intellectuals of the era – the priests – were the keepers of the most important technical information of the time, astronomical knowledge. They spent considerable time studying the positions of the sun, moon and stars during the various seasons and their association with precipitation, freezes and floods. The obvious reason for this was to keep track of the right times to plant their crops. They built a variety of naked-eye observatories, usually featuring a round, artificial horizon and a set of posts or pillars around the edge as measuring devices. Then, after a few years, they could predict with some assurance when the last freeze or flood might be expected. This system was eventually replaced by the calendar, but the important issue is that this knowledge was strongly controlled by the state/church system, with the knowledge often being mysticized. This was obviously useful to the cause of rulership.

Mechanical and other types of knowledge prior to this time generally concerned technologies, not science per se. In other words, it concerned the end uses of things, not the operating principles. The Greeks, however, were about to change that forever, and the first of them to do so seems to have been a man named Thales.

Before Thales (624 B.C.-546 B.C., but these dates are uncertain), Greeks explained the origin and nature of the world through myths of gods and heroes. Phenomena such as lightning or earthquakes were attributed to actions of the gods. Thales attempted to find reasoned explanations of the world, without presuming the supernatural. In other words, he and others like him began to inquire not just about how things worked, but why they worked.

According to Herodotus, Thales used his knowledge to predict a solar eclipse.² This would have been a monumental thing in the ancient days, equivalent to being able to read the mind of god. It was certainly a story that was repeated often. Some of Thales' conclusions later proved to be highly inaccurate (such as the belief that the continents floated on the oceans and that earthquakes were caused by collisions), but his method of looking for reasons was a gigantic leap forward.

Thales was a moral teacher as well. A few of his still-valid and highly-influential principles were these:

That for which we blame others, let us not do ourselves.

Be rich, yes, for success is sweet. However, do not be rich badly.

A happy man is one who is healthy in body, resourceful in soul and of a readily teachable nature.

It is with Pythagoras, however, that modern science begins to take shape. Pythagoras seems to have lived between 580 and 490 B.C., though, again, these dates are not certain. His pivotal discovery was that music was based on proportional intervals of the numbers one through four. He believed that this number system, and therefore the universe's system, was based on the sum of the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4, which is 10. Pythagoreans swore by these numbers (which they called "the Tetrachtys of the Decad"), rather than by the gods.

According to legend³, Pythagoras discovered that musical notes could be translated into mathematical equations one day as he passed blacksmiths at work and thought that the sounds emanating from their anvils (when struck) were beautiful and harmonious. He decided that whatever scientific law caused this must be mathematical and could be applied to music. He spent time observing the blacksmiths to learn how this had happened. He examined their tools and discovered that it was because the anvils were simple ratios of each other, one was half the size of the first, another was 2/3 the size, and so on.

Pythagoras thus discovered the numerical basis of musical harmony. He spent a great deal of time examining this subject and decided that all of the universe could be understood and predicted with numbers. It was one of the most important intellectual discoveries in history and almost all subsequent science has used this fundamental premise.

Pythagoras went on to discover the trigonometric theorem named after him, the square root, that the earth was round, that all planets have an axis, and that all the planets travel around one central point. He also went on to form a complex cultic group around his teachings and became highly secretive. After this point Pythagoras, or at least his followers, seem to have become overly enamored with their own doctrines and ran boldly into grand pronouncements for which they had no evidence. The Pythagoreans developed a series of mystical beliefs that later affected Plato.

NOTES:

¹Some modern scholars question Homer's actually existence. His stories, however, are evidence of his existence, as are the beliefs of all the ancients (including Herodotus). Added to this, there is no direct evidence that speaks otherwise.

²This seems to have been the eclipse of May 28, 585 B.C. as determined by modern astronomic calculations.

³And all we really have are legends, as none of his writings remain to our time.

* * * * *

To be continued ... 

·         binra • 38 minutes ago

I have reason to believe the Greek 'dark age' is in fact a calendar error. That our dates for antiquity are cross referenced from a foundation of one Egyptian document in which the lineage of Pharoes has been written/interpreted as a linear succession - where more likely they included various contemporaneous city state 'kings'. The thing about having investment in a model is that everything else is bent to 'fit' in with it rather than have a lifetime of acquired credibility and reputation undone.
We view all things through the lens of our own conceits - or perhaps if more gently said, through the distortions of our current value construct - which is currently operating what I might call a dark age - although there is an invitation in progress to descend to a deeper level of fear and confusion for those who find it their identity and protection from wholeness of being.
In order to communicate with or access the consciousness of another, one has to vibrationally match it. Even to access the consciousness of our personal past, one has to match it. The conceit of the age is that everyone before us was essentially more ignorant as we are now 'rational beings' & blah etc. The control mind of mapping out 'otherness' in order to manipulate it, makes all things appear in our own image. Life is Infinitely Richer than that. Looking at the mechanics of anything does not show the consciousness that communicates through it.
History was not important to many of our own forebears excepting as to mythologise tribe wisdom - which operates multi-layered information that modern mind cannot much read beyond some the plot line. I see 'known' history as having moved into a kind of adolescence that eschews anything from the childish unless it can be made to witness and support an idea of independence and self-specialness or superiority.
But maturity often comes as a result of the breakdown of the construct of self to thus allow a fresh and more integrated wholeness of being to operate from a true foundation rather than a reactive urge to independence. Curiously the idea of personal independence is the idea of separation or disconnection from Life within a framework of coercive power and all that unfolds from it. Creativity is not associated with coercion but with a free and spontaneous imagination - ingenuity is associated with coercive agenda. But clever thinking is not 'progress' excepting to the private agenda that seeks to deceive by it. And which comes to believe power is thereby gained and maintained by falsity and so believe there is no truth but as power defines and determines.

Seeking_Truth • an hour ago

I love the Daily Bell. This series, 'Production Versus Plunder' is great.

The Daily Bell gets intelligent comments; unlike the inane comments that other blogs get.

Kudos to the Daily Bell, the writers, the readers, and those who submit intelligent comments. It's a bright spot in these dark ages.
I seek Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. What do you seek?

Want to read a great book? I'm in the middle of "The Golden Mean", by Nelson Hultberg.

2prickit • 2 hours ago

HOMER. His poems formed the basis of Greek education and religion:
Having not been told or certified in the endeavor, but rather wanting the experience of reading primary source material for myself; and, also, in doing so I discovered a means to blot out the effects of Main Stream Media, including Hollywood type entertainments;--- to the point of becoming infatuated with the reading---; I found myself wanting to take sides in a rivalry against Dante and Virgil, clever Statists, lying, with fake take-a-ways on Greek Epic verse and culture. However, recently, I discovered Lucian of Samosata; --- “The whole existence of pagan theology, which, at the time [Rome 180 CE] these dialogues were written, was on the decline and may be said to have received its coup de grace from the raillery of Lucian.”

http://lucianofsamosata.info/D...

Praetor • 3 hours ago

Education. No such thing. Indoctrination Centers, more like it, and if you happen to show some modicum of higher intelligences, you are tested, to see if you really are smarter, and you pass these test, they may give you a basic education, to see how far you can go. There be no education in the good old US of A, only indoctrination centers, which they call, public education. For over 100 years, education has not existed in the U.S; it is a lost endeavor. The only education children will get, is in the home, and if you have been dumbed down, your children will even be dumber, then you. It looks as if the U.S. will be even dumber. U.S. for dummies. History will be even more irrelevant, in the future U.S. of A. Thank to our, all knowing, all seeing, government. The dark ages have already started.

Kevin Tebedo • 3 hours ago

Paul, it is interesting that you note the histroy that Pythagoras discovered the fact of the mathematical relationship of music. Intimating, of course, that the truth of this relationship was always there and that Pythagoras discovered it. What has your study shown, if any, was Pythagoras' thought on the origin of mathematical relationships? What or who created the reality if this relationship? In Pythagoras mind?

Bill Ross • 5 hours ago

@Paul R: l am REALLY enjoying your perspective of the same "elephant in the room" that I hunt.

Paul Rosenberg  Bill Ross • 4 hours ago

Thanks, Bill!

Bill Ross • 5 hours ago

"THE SEPARATION OF KNOWLEDGE AND STATE"

is equivalent to stating "the severance of control of the intelligent by idiots".

ponder these key points regarding skool:

many aspects of education (to learn reality so you can be a part of civilization) have been taken out of the hands of parents and under control of self-alleged "experts":

- cannot attend unless children vaccinated morphing to social "services" seize children of parents who refuse to so so.
- any children who exhibit different (individual) behavior are diagnosed as "ill" and ruthlessly drugged and seize children of parents who refuse to allow this.
- considered to be "unfair" to separate out the more promising students for broader and deeper learning, according to ability, to find and nurture future geniuses and intellectual giants, those capable of rocking the boat of civilizations and history. The result is that most intelligent students are bored to tears, can readily perceive educational BS, rebel, tune out and drop out. An "educational" destruction of "best and brightest." Because of the alleged "unfairness" of education calibrated to a students ability, the "lowest common denominator" of indoctrination that will achieve the perception of a "good" report card for "educators" is "taught". Even the concept of objective testing, marks (competition) is considered unfair and "emotionally damaging" to vulnerable "hearts and minds" who need to be lied to and not face facts and reality else allegedly be "emotionally damaged"
- children who exhibit "suspicious behavior", such as a toy gun or "unpopular T shirt" in show and tell or an essay on hot button topics such as "Mom and Medical Marijuana" are reported to social "services" and placed at risk.
- Increasingly, parents are marginalized / bypassed and their children, some as young as five years old are tazered, placed in handcuffs and hauled off to the pokey. This from those alleging concern regarding "emotionally damaged" children.

I could go on and on, but all of this and much else regarding our ability to exist in a peaceful division of labor civilization, on a collective path to excellence by the knowledge of reality we learn, comply with and make life better for all who choose to participate (produce, trade) has been INTENTIONALLY SUBVERTED by central control tyrants using forceful repetition (Goebbels) of alleged fact to decree a restricted "reality" where the ONLY allowed / conceivable (restricted perspective) "reality" is "they master, others serfs".

WE were warned, did not exercise vigilance and allowed ourselves and our children to be lobotomized and Pavlov conditioned to collective ignorance and servitude:

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

And, the basic issue is very SIMPLE. The last Renaissance (start of exponential growth of civilization) overcame religious dogma (those who claimed to represent unknowable "gods will" are IN CONTROL) and established the supremacy of fact, reason and natural law, which none should dare oppose (history proves the no exceptions smiting by "unintended consequences" of all who have tried), at their own peril:

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

The supremacy of fact and reason (proven knowledge) is not under direct dispute by our slavers. They avoid a confrontation on this field of battle, at all costs, having already lost and will again. What is "under dispute" is who (rule of man) occupies the position of "master", to be able to "decree of man" the "official" interpretation (forcefully dominent perspective) of truth and what it means.

So, the state and its rationalizing "intellectuals" have seized the position of "blessors of truth and interpretation" AND, the only information that is ALLOWED to penetrate our once free market, now regulatory / monopoly captured information outlets (MSM) and skool is "what is approved" and re-enforces the LIE of state "usefulness", masking a very dangerous conspiring predatory force as "for your own good".

Somebody oughta make a law. Oh, wait, they did:

http://www.nazisociopaths.org/...

but it was "educationally" rationalized away and hidden in some well guarded dusty texts and records of past court proceedings / argumentation, or, perhaps destroyed by our "guardians of truth".

And, states occupying the "guardians of truth" position is a bald faced lie...

...for the same reason that "we, the people" are the final line in the sand against tyranny, we are also the guardians of knowledge, especially regarding HOW to live together in a peaceful division of labor civilization. This knowledge is resident in us, our social networks and our families.

"Our enemy the state" knows this, which is WHY they must DESTROY all competing methods of social / economic organization, especially the family and our means / ability / possibility to "teach our children well".

And, as Paul points out in his book, once the social / economic organizational fabric of the civilized is destroyed (or controlled by barbarians. destroying the peace), according to history, Dark Age is NEXT. The ONLY thing that is new is nukes which will either vastly deepen the destruction, or, be an "Extinction Level Event" for all of us.

see more

FauxScienceSlayer • 5 hours ago

Thales was CORRECT in his assertion that "the continents float on oceans and earthquakes are the result of collisions", but with a twist. Earth has 259 billion cubic miles of mostly molten rock at +2000C, upon which the thin, less than 40 mile thick cooled crust floats. Unknown until the third generation of GPS in the late eighties, but the Moon not only lifts the oceans an average of 3 feet daily, but also this thin curst, see Wiki/Earth_Tide for details. Pulling these thin, floating plates causes rips in the undersea rift lines which fill with magma that solidifies, ratcheting the continents apart and for the leading edge to subduct the adjoining plate, as the San Andreas is being overridden by increasing pressure, then sudden earthquake release. The Earth has over 2 million cubic miles of fissionable Uranium and Thorium in its mantle, subject to VARIABLE decay rates caused by solar and cosmic rays, and partially protected by a VARIABLE magnetosphere. This hidden climate change force first described in "Motive Force for All Climate Change" posted May 2009 and under the Geo-nuclear tab at the FSS site.

Find and share Truth....it is your duty as an Earthling.