The Great Deception

The

GREAT

DECEPTION

A MAGAZINE FOR DISCUSSION OF RADICAL IDEAS

APRIL,2022 v.1

Introduction to the Great Deception

The purpose of this journal is to open a discussion based upon concepts that combine contemporary scientific knowledge, the environment, law and political leadership from the historical perspective. My purpose is to show a direct link on contemporary issues from the perspective that many people are deceived into believing the past has no bearing on the present or that modern times are in some way better because civilization was or is an evolutionary advancement upon the past. In the age of specialization and advanced technology many gain a lot of knowledge about specific subjects but lose sight of the interconnectedness of every subject that I highlighted. I read of environmentalists who specify environmental problems but lack the knowledge of the overall environmental degradation. I read of scientists saying there was no creator yet presume that knowledge makes them into their own gods and that their knowledge of their not being any god who created gives them the right to act as gods. I read about how we need to preserve democracy but at the same time try to limit it to two versions of how to preserve by attempting to silence minority voices. I read about civilization being less savage and wonder if we don’t sacrifice more lives through crimes and wars and statesanctioned punishments than were ever committed by “less-civilized” peoples who sacrificed lives to appease their gods. I read about a few people who are very rich and the well-off supporting themselves with debt that can be more crippling than poverty. I read about women being treated as equals and not as chattel and then i read about the prolificacy of rape, child molestations, and harassment by the vey bosses who say that it needs to stop. I read about people being more attracted to democracy and it will win over autocracy and then i read about how in the 21st century more leaders are becoming more autocratic and supposedly free people electing autocratically-inclined leaders. I read about how a global marketplace will solve the world’s economic woes and then I read how only those controlling benefit. I read about the wonders of technology making us more free because we can do less and have, amazingly, more freedom, and then I read about the cravings for those technological wonders consuming all of the free time. I read about colonizing another planet and then I read about the planet we now live on.

As you can see I read. I’ve always read. When I was eight I read the Classics Illustrated Comic Books and so when I was nine I read all those books that had been illustrated into those comics like Great Expectations, Two Years Before the Mast, Moby Dick, Crime & Punishment.

Then I read the entire Bible, biographies of every president, all of Durant’s histories. Then by twelve or thirteen when they were new off the press, Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Carson’s The Silent Spring and Kuhn’s The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. I am not telling you this to impress you with my intellectual prowess. I’m not overly bright. I read a lot because I wasn’t overly bright or ever perceived by others to be. So I read to try to become as bright as other kids. But I remained continually dumb and baffled and unable to understand why my town had separate bathrooms for men and women but a third for Coloured without distinction of sex and I just couldn’t figure that how because I was pretty that their were male and female Coloureds but when I asked about it I realized how stupid I was because they told me if I couldn’t figure

that out I must be as stupid as those Colored. Well that’s not what they really told me they didn’t say stupid as those Coloureds, they used a different word, not Coloured. So here I am, old, and still not comprehending anything, So I have decided to formulate a magazine where I will fumble stupidly through my confusion annd tell everyone they are wrong about everything and I’m asking anyone who can wade through my poor writing to write back if they have any feelings of confusion in the same way I do and explain in better ways than I might be capable of, if there is a better way to survive than the path we are treading. I want to publish how we can save our species, our world and actually understand the human species. I don’t understand it at all. I don’t see how knowing anything means you understand anything if your knowledge doesn’t answer the question of why that knowledge seems inconsistent.

So I’ve written three articles here that I would explain positively except that I seem to have become quite skeptical as all the years of my life have still not given me an understanding that human knowledge makes them intelligent. Unfortunately I’m an old man who was never bright enough to earn more than a subsistence income but I really do need your help before I die to have some type of hope. So any contributions anyone is willing and can shed light on the questions I have raised will be willing to share will be welcomed and printed but I can’t pay as this magazine is a free inquiry and nothing will be copyrighted but open sourced to explain if there are any positive solutions. I want there to be, but I haven’t been able to become intelligent enough to figure them out.

The first article is about human leadership from an historical perspective entitled “the Big Man vs. The King.” It is the theme for my first issue. And I try to explain why I think maybe a big man who leads by giving is better than a king than leads by taking. The second article is about the planet Venus and about why we don’t have to fear becoming like Venus, we only have to fear becoming extinct. And the final argument is about the wonders of using water energy to supply our needs that was the first energy source that people used for damming and irrigating and the first kings used to both enslave people and alter the environment. I try to explain that that was when the environment began to erode, not when we began to use fossil fuels. I present some scientific evidence to that effect, I hope enough to disillusion people that all we need to do is to stop using fuels and exchange it for other methods of consuming resources. At the end of each article I list sources I have read. The sources may not agree with what I write. That’s probably why I am so confused, I tend to read so much. I read people who say one thing is true and then read something that says what I just read isn’t true, so I encourage anyone who does read my articles to use all of the sources to help explain the confusion that results from variances and discrepancies of the “truth”. Ultimately the goal is to open a dialogue to show me, us, the species of whom we are, how we can survive. Because ultimately I have not found any answers in technologizing ourselves into the future when I try to puzzle my way through the history of mankind that that is the cause of our imminent demise. {For anyone wishing to have their own ideas or solutions, or if you just want to communicate privately I have set up an email. There will be no website because I am expecting no recompense and therefore choose not to use any of my meager retirement to pay for the

maintenance or design. A simple dialogue, a search for solutions that are not the cause of the problem.)

The Big Man vs. The King In this article we are going to attempt to decipher the development from the more evolutionary (basic) style of human development contrasted with the forced leadership style of civilization (top down). The leadership of humans around the globe split into both basic and top down. But very early in the development of top-down leadership there was a need for an expansion of controlling more areas both out of the same need for an extension of more control over both people and land. But this created a continued need for more area to support the growth that needed more people to support the expanded growth. Settled self-supporting villages became cities So basically I am going to attempt to contrast the leadership of “big men” who led more or less by giving to and fulfilling the needs of the community in order to establish power and wealth and the kings who inherited or fought for their power and maintained it by force, ritual, and demand. These traits are the traits of “civilized” leadership, the traits that people serve the leader rather than being supported by the leader. . I do not like the terms primitive and civilized too much in actuality. To me basic and top-down are more apropo because I am not personally inclined to think of top-down leadership as in any way superior or more advanced than basic leadership. While I firmly do not believe in chaotic or anarchic leadership, my thesis is that topdown leadership is a perversion of, and not an advancement over basic leadership. Humans, as a species, unlike chimpanzees or gorillas did not evolve with characteristics that would have allowed our earliest ancestors to survive in a top-down leadership community. It is totally incorrect to say we are a violent race because chimpanzees are violent. At one point we may have developed from a common ancestor, probably themselves from earlier ancestors that had also diverged. I am not going to dignify or discuss that we “evolved” from apes. We developed with our great ape cousins from not well-known ancestors. What I would like to urge you to do is to examine the cultures of gorillas, chimps, bonobos, and orangutans. (There are also some differences culturally between Sumatran and the Borneo orangutans and the Eastern and Western gorillas.) We all evolved with different physical characteristics and survived in different environments. You also might compare our lesser cousins the gibbons. The gibbon is an ape and not a monkey; it is often considered less intelligent and therefore a “lesser”ape but they too

have their own unique culture The point is that a species doesn’t evolve successfully if it does not develop a culture to survive in its environment. I don’t want to suggest that we evolve with an innate culture but a culture (which includes how a species organize itself and the type of leadership it needs) but that the culture and the species must evolve together to ensure species survival.. The importance of the culture and the necessity of each species to “need” a type of leadership for that species to evolve successfully.. The chimp is not more aggressive than a gorilla simply because they are genetically closer to humans than silverbacks. Although both have more or less a top-down leadership, the silverback leaders are more benign, more centered on family and the alpha is more concerned about the welfare of his community and even after his prime is respected and cared for by new alphas. They seldom combat for leadership as it falls upon the largest and strongest. The chimp, which some argue are more genetically similar to bonobos that they are nearly the same species, like the eastern and western gorillas. Indeed bonobos are not newly discovered, they were known in the past, there were bonobos captured in the 18th through the early 20th century that were simply thought to be chimps, and it is only much more recently that we discovered the vast cultural differences between the two and they were classified as separate species. And now once again a debate has arisen as to whether or not they are two species. Modern ethnologists tend to think there was one species until an alteration of the Congo River and an environmental landscape divergence. So the chimps that were cut off to the north of the River with a less forestry-type environment and in order to survive needed to become aggressive and needed to be led by the most intimidating and those who could form the strongest leaders. The females were relegated into inferior societal roles and leadership needed to be constantly challenged to insure the strongest leadership. New leaders who successfully replace former leaders take over the women of the former leaders and attempt to kill any infants and/or youth of the former leaders to both lessen future challengers to their own position as well as to insure stronger alliances to defend the community from predation. Amazingly, the thing bonobos and chimpanzees both needed for species survival was for leaders to create alliances. It is also a trait we will discuss that the basic big man leadership had to utilize for human survival. But it is not true of all members of the ape family. The orangutans never form alliances, adult males primarily attempt to totally avoid each other. Although there is a slight more communicability among the Sumatran orangutans. But if some of what I have described of chimp behavior seems similar to top-down human leadership it could not have originally been that way and humanoid species probably could not have survived at all with such a leadership. Because of our extreme physical inferiority we would have been too susceptible to prey and also because early humans depended so much on each other for survival, a successful leader would have had to have been someone who recognized and supported each individual’s strength. I am quite convinced that the closest animal society to early hominids was not any ape society, but wolf society. And for very similar reasons in that they, like humans, needed each other to hunt. They needed a plan, they needed to surround the prey in a similar way and with similar leadership qualities.

The alpha wolf had to insure an equitable share. Yes, the others in a wolf pack let the alpha eat first, then he backs off and makes sure all the others are fed before finishing his own meal. But you see the wolf , like the humanoid, lacks certain physical capacities to be a successful species. So for both to survive the leader has to be the one who recognizes and utilizes each member's strengths and the one who knows his own dependence on the pack.r. The wolf can’t

simply jump on the back of a prey and slice its throat with its claws like a cat. And it also lacks the speed of a cat. Now I’ve been told I am ridiculous because the wolf, at top speed, has about the exact speed of its prime prey. But that’s exactly why it is too slow. The wolf pack has to out-endure its prey and then when a prey tires and falls behind, surround its prey. The wolf can never accelerate faster than its prey and for that reason it is too slow to be a successful predator in the manner of other successful predators. But once surrounded, the wolf again lacks individual strength to take down a prey. If one wolf attacked an antelope the antelope would easily win any battle. The tired antelope would simply face the lone wolf and gore it to death. Does anyone know how a bullfighter takes down a bull? First, the pull is harassed by teams of picadors and poked and jabbed and weakened and hurting so much it has lost all of its rationality. Try facing down a bull on your own in an open field and waving a flag or your shirt.

Not the brightest of animals,the bull nevertheless who has not been weakened physically to the point of exhaustion and so enraged his limited rationality has gone, will not fall for that trick, he’ll go straight for you. Just as a drunk in a fight might lunge towards their opponent and miss, the bull’s intellect has been impaired to the point where all he wants to do is attack without calculating or being capable of altering the direction when the bullfighter changes direction. So with the wolf he has no chance to conquer his now surrounded prey, so the wolf feints attack in several directions at once, the animal doesn't know which way the attack is going to come from, perhaps he will stumble, perhaps he will simply entangle his own feet in attempting to turn and face every wolf that has surrounded him, in confusion, he becomes frightened and he loses his own sense of self-defense. He might hesitate due to that confusion and is at that point when the wolf can seize his opportunity. One may leap upon the back, two others might attack from the sides and the now helpless prey is doomed to be dinner. A lone wolf could survive but not on his evolutionary preferred game The wolf and a powerful but the teeth are dull and not razorsharp like the cat’s teeth. THe wolf news to bite multiple times and if he managed to get on the back of a large animal singularly he can’t sing his claws into the prey’s back and would be thrown off. So the wolf needs the pack to find his meal. And the wolf needs a leader who recognizes that. But the wolf did evolve with a characteristic that allows himself to smell his prey and plan his attack before the prey is going to be able to sense or recognize his presence so that the wolfpack will form into a formation before the chase. So, likewise, early humanoids also were inferior in their abilities to capture their dinner. Even small game could prove elusive to a humamois, still lacking any tools . But we also evolved with strengths. Smell would do us no good because we are almost the slowest animal on earth so even if we had the wolf’s sense of smell a herd would simply move away faster than we could approach. So we developed two key characteristics that allowed hominids to develop—we could run or walk without tiring for longer durations than any species other than horses because of our ability to release accumulated body heat and secondly we can see at greater distances than almost all species except birds of prey. And like the wolf we could track our prey and plan our attack not through smell, but through our visional acumen that could detect motions and disturbances in the environment from a great distance even prior to our being able to spot the prey. So like the wolf our survival and our culture that allowed for our species to evolve successfully depended on our working as a group and the necessity of leaders who recognized and could organize using each member’s strengths.

it doesn’t take a lot of ingenuity to realize we weren’t born with a spear in our hands But we did evolve with a capacity to not only use but to develop tools. And we did evolve with the ability to learn better methods to survive. One of our first steps in development after the development of tools was to combine with the wolf and hunt together. It has been suggested that this alliance might have formed after we developed fire. Fire was very early in our ability to survive and adapt. Early hominids needed to learn to control fire for warmth, but even more importantly, before we could climb down from trees we needed fire for protection—to keep away animals who might find us easy prey. Some think wolves might have circled near the fire hoping for a lone individual who might venture from the fire and then men began to throw scraps of food to the wolves. Eventually the wolf might be coaxed to come closer and then they would come for the expected meal and in this way they came to join our “pack”. As early man probably did observe wolf, but wolf observed us as a potential meal they came to recognize probably sooner than we did that we had similar weaknesses that led us to need each other in the way they needed their pack and so they were willing to join our pack. And then we used their abilities to smell and together a bond was formed. But this bond was because of our similar needs for community and similar weaknesses that required a pack-tpe hunt. And man probably realized the wolf could also aid in our protection. They could smell approaching predators to alert us and they allowed us to venture singly more easily from the campsite. Today we love our dogs but want to eliminate wolves. Kind of ironic if you consider that without the wolf, now domesticated into dogs settling in villages probably would have never been possible because they gave us the protection to do so. You might say that without our joining forces there never could have been civilization. The domestication of the wolf made further humanoid advancements from simple hunter-gatherers possible. The wolf allowed us to hunt individually somewhat more possible but more importantly it allowed for us to begin to be able to develop stronger tools because they could defend us while we searched for metals, while we forged them into less crude stone tools. Craftsmen began to appear to develop ornaments, cooking utensils and pottery. They allowed us to settle into villages and began to maintain crops while they stood watch and alerted us to possible danger. The neolithic age of mankind and the domestication of the wolf occurred coincidentally nearly simultaneously. If you believe in a God then you must believe men and wolves were created to aid each other. If you don’t believe in a God, then the evidence of how the wolf enabled our own ability to domesticate is all there in our history so that the two species with such similar needs for community could so easily bind together so it stills almost seems that our species were meant to join forces. So at the least, scientifically you must recognize the wolf gave us abilities we could not have had without joining forces and we could not have developed on our own simply because our brains got smarter.

We are now going to move into the evidence from anthropologists of the probability of early leadership roles in human society. The Big Man vs. The King. Of course by the time the anthropological evidence began to be studied the two existed. But we have found that across the globe there were still communities of the older Big Man leadership still co-existing with the King style of leadership. Bur there are presently only isolated communities in Afica and the south pacific.

Now you might think I might start with Margaret Mead who probably is still the most well-known anthropologist. She was very good at self-promoting. But a survey in 2016 of anthropological professors in US universities overwhelmingly discredit her research. She is accused of distorting the data and representing it in a manner than suited her peculiar interpretations of sex and social development. Secondly, her studies were only in Samoa, with a top-down leadership but which she interpreted much more idealistically and egalitarian than other researches, or even first-hand encounters by initial western contact. As much as I may have been influenced by her social concepts—and she was the first anthropologist I ever read—I am not including her research as a source because almost all of her research has been discredited.

Yes, Alice Dreger swears by her and has defended her. But Alice Dreger is a bioethicist and has never done any field work and her defense primarily centers around Mead’s social concepts. They’re fine, I a comfortable with most of them myself, but they tell us almost nothing about our subject or what they do tell us are primarily disputed by other field anthropologists as well as analytical anthropologists based on field work.

So we shall begin with looking at the research of the man most commonly thought to have been the first true field anthropologist, Bronisław Malinowski. I have read all of his works and it his works that have set the standard—and with the exception of Freedom and Civilization—almost universally acclaimed for setting the standard for field anthropology no matter what disputes might have come later they are all grounded whichever side of any issue anthropologists might take later, no one much disputes Malinowski’s research. Now having said this I must caution that Malinowski began his research in the early 20th century and nothin by the 20th century is going to be what it was before the 18th when western contact began. And of course all cultures evolve over time spans due to environmental factors and human movement. But to establish our thesis we must begin with what we know before we can theorize. And I think what we know will illustrate the basic human culture of evolution and the top-down human culture of those that allowed or developed into kingships.

Malinowski was of course not the first anthropologist by any means and he himself pays a lot of debt to Rivers. Malinowski’s importance however is in his methodology. First he believed that in order to understand any culture one had to study how the culture functioned. The function of a society is to understand how its culture fulfills its basic needs. The culture develops in a manner that fulfills all of the basic needs of the society such as food, shelter, reproduction, protection. But all of the cultural phenomena such as economy, myth, religion, food gathering, and kinship are interconnected in a way that provides the best cultural developments to accomplish the biological needs of the community. In contrast, a culture that does not fulfill the functional needs fails to provide a cultural society that can find contentment or satisfaction in that society. In this way a culture fails. Malinowski also believed that only in a society that satisfies the functional needs of its members can grant freedom to the individual . His book Freedom and Civilization remains quite controversial because although it was an anthropological essay written against the rise of totalitarian states in Germany and Russian it has often been criticized because it contrasts freedoms curtailed by any society where all of its members' functional needs are not met.

There are other anthropological theories. One is diffusionism which basically says cultures meet and meld. Of course that is true. But when they do it is often because the stronger culture tends to impose upon the weaker. At the same time cultures can diverge by separation. A prime example of both can be seen in native America. When the Navajo and Apache separated from their native culture in the Pacific Northwest their cultures needed to diverge from the cultures of the Northwest simply because of environment. At the same time the Navajo adapted some of the farming concepts of the Pueblo but diffused their culture on top of it. The Zuni, on the other hand, seemed to have separated themselves by transferring their homeland further south. You can also see a lot of diffusion upon Pawnee culture when the Siouxian tribes moving west after being driven from their homelands by the expansion of the Iroquois . The Pawnee communities were seldom fortified and they easily became partially diffused by the newcomers and began to adapt to a culture more akin to the invaders. They tried to maintain their identity but many were captured and became slaves. The Pawnee were matrilineal and the slavery of their woman challenged the structure of their culture. So of course there is diffusion of cultures but it is basically created by overpowering or unsettling of one culture by the other, so proponents of diffusion basically feel that some cultures are better. And of course when Europeans expanded their culture globally this is exactly what they attempted to accomplish by diffusing “primitive” cultures into their own. But an example of a people whose culture has been diffused on multiple occasions is the Japanese. They have eagerly accepted the newer influences of other cultures but have somehow maintained many of the traditions.

But of course the Japanese are as 21st century as anywhere in the world but they maintain certain ritual and artistic traditions that allows them to remain connected to their own past.

Herskovitz in his studies of Africans brought to the Americas illustrated how no matter how much peoples cultures there remains a remnant of the past within them in their behavior and approach when there culture is diffused, Ans, my personal belief is that in people around the globe there remains a sense of freedom and equity which was inherent in our very manner of how we were first able to adapt and survive as a species. The history of man shows that subjects of any top-down leadership will try to unshackle those chains. Even if it is not by revolutionary means, a revolution of dissettlement remains within each. Sometimes leadership can change, or seem to change in societies that allow some type of choice. But the feeling remains within each of us that we somehow have given away our individual humanness and feel we are not being treated properly by the leaders. The racist person is expressing this dissatisfaction by transferring this need to being hampered not by the leaders but by others who are taking away his freedom. It doesn’t matter who blames who, it is all a form of racism which is not limited to whites being racist against blacks. Jewish people can express racist attitudes towards Palestinians and vice versa. And racism is a powerful tool for the top-down leaders to keep us from recognizing that the inner resentment is a human resentment against a leadership that exploits rather than gives. Racism, and nationalism is a type of racism, confuses us into believing that our personal importance to the society is not caused by the leadership but by each other. Psychosis of any kind is another way in which the inner longing or genetic memory of our pre-history manifests itself. Substance abuse, etc. In democracy we try to express our vote for leaders whom we believe will serve us. The overtly devout follower of any religion or who abandon themselves to cultic leaders are all attempting to return to the days before history began. And of course we try to violently unseat the top-down leaders or to become one of them.

So in some inner sense any cultural attempt at diffusion and transforming, melding, or transforming a culture can never totally eliminate the cultures we inherited all the way back to our original culture that allowed our species to become successful as a species.

Diffusionism is not terribly different than Evolutionism, adapted by Spencer into social darwinism in which cultures “evolve” into better cultures by advanced “intelligentism” . Of course my whole premise is that while is the basic tenet that most of us look at the past as inferior is utterly hogwash. The tenant of inferior people and inferior cultures and that cultures evolve only positively, while widely accepted because it is widely taught and what we are expected to believe is the most hideous tool of top-down leaders, to convince us the society they allow us is just natural evolution. I think I have an extreme distaste for Darwin because his ideas were seized upon to convince people that the rich, the powerful and the class system was in place because they were more advanced evolutionarily. Not much different than early kings being appointed by the gods. Now they can claim they are appointed by nature. Hogwash.

Boas opposed Evolutionism because it supposed some cultures were more evolutionarily advanced and he suggested each culture evolved on its own. So Boas avoids the racism, Boas says no culture or race is higher or lower on the evolutionary scale and he vehemently rejected social darwinists and had a somewhat similar distaste for Darwin that I feel because of the way it was utilized to purport cultural and racial superiority. His school of anthropological thought is referred to as Historical Particularism. People’s ideas and cultures can only be based against itself and not others. He didn’t reject Darwin’s work scientifically, he rejected Darwinists projection that every society must go through every stage of evolutionary cultural development.

Boas set the stage for 20th century anthropology by demanding that for a culture to be understood one must see how environment, history and language interrelate, that cultures develop as they only within context and that imposing one's cultural or preconceived notions upon another could not lead to that understanding. So he rejected the orthogenetic interpretation of Darwinism. His interests in geography, physiology, field anthropology, linguistics, science, and history and his scholarly pursuit in all of these areas led him to these conclusions. Unfortunately, it appears to me that the orthogenetic concept of Darwinism still prevails among non-scientists and it is that concept that most people understand. It’s pretty simple to understand because top-down societies are hierarchically arranged and therefore supported by the hierarchy. The economic and political hierarchies maintain their hierarchies by teaching orthogeneticism . The religious hierarchies challenge because their god arranged the hierarchy and not man. The important thing to both sides is to insure the lessening of understanding truth, and that what does not support truth is unacceptable because all knowledge is useless if there can be no understanding. In our area of intense specialization people gain vast amounts of knowledge about history, or about physics, or about medicine, etc but they often lack understanding and conflicts arise even within their own fields because they lack any knowledge any other fields and yet the very concept of orthogentics is that one is more advanced when he can master one field and gain greater knowledge. Boas rejected the concept that this led to truth or is proof of a higher intellectual evolution. Truth can only come when disciplines are combined. Because only then can you see the entirety of what really is.

And so someone can write something on social media or a commentator can say something about an issue that can be regurgitated because people often lack the understanding to see the ridiculous. For instance you go to the doctor with a sore toe and a blister on your leg. The doctor will tell you “I can only treat one issue at a time—but what if the sore toe and the blister might be related. So the doctor has a lot of learned knowledge about sore toes and he might also have a lot of knowledge about blisters but he doesn’t have any understanding to relate the two. So he’ll treat the toe and refer you to a blister specialist but the blister specialist doesn’t know anything about sore toes so he doesn’t even have the knowledge to relate the two. But there is someone else who knows a lot about the connection between blisters and sore toes but he’s at Mayo clinic or John Hopkins and is studying the relationship and god help you to get to see him. But he has written about the relationship between how blisters and sore toes are related so you read his analysis on the internet and you go back to your doctor and tell him you found an article on the internet that explains how sore toes and blisters might be a system of blah-blah and the doctor becomes offended that you might suggest he lacks understanding and isn’t interested in pursuing the issue and dismisses your issue. In the same way a scientist could have a lot of knowledge about how things work scientifically but he dismisses all religious knowledge, thus totally ignoring any sense of respect for the fact that the knowledge gives him is not under his control since he knows. Nations in order to defend extremely advanced weaponry to kill with without seeming to comprehend that the more advanced the weaponry the more devastation it will cause to people, the environment, and the social effects upon both those that the weapons are targeted against but those who are using the weapons. Magnificent computer games that are designed take people mindlessly into realms of unreality designed as entertainment with no comprehension apparently that the social dynamics are effected and can lead to mindless and unreal beliefs. The problem with knowledge in a fied or with technological marvels is not in themselves but they disconnect from understanding the effects. Before something is created or done we do not connect the dots to all possible consequences. Before we alter the is we need to understand what the effects on the is and what will be the new isness.

But because of a misconception of learned orthogenetic thought at all levels of our society that imbibes us with a false truth that any technological achievement means we are more evolutionary progressed and more intelligent we don’t seem to understand that everything alters what is changes our entire environment into a new isnessand that the environment is what allowed us to be an is. When a culture alters its environment it doesn’t make them more advanced intellectually or culturally superior to a culture that hasn’t. This is what Boas spent his life trying to inform people that orthogenetic thought was scientifically just bad science.

Of course Mead and Benedict developed the Cultural and Personality model which is, as I stated earlier, basically a manner of idealization and romanticism to fulfill their own concepts of sexuality and equality of females, but as an anthropological concept mostly debunked because the very concepts they proposed were not the standards or practices of the cultures they were observing which is why they have generally been considered to have misapplied those ideologies upon their studies. Levi-Strauss adapted a Structuralist model, similar to Malinowski's in that he thought you had to look at the entire structure of a culture, Levi-Strauss essentially focused on cultures developing to satisfy its intellectual needs and focused on myths and the fulfillment of the myths for the societal structure which seemed to be rather circular and

once again, in my view, like Mead, imposing his own concepts upon cultures. Leslie White totally missed the boat because his focus is on evolutionary growth of a culture based on its technological growth and energy consumption. Of course they have an effect on a culture, that goes without saying but his Neo-evolutionism is merely saying a culture “advances” evolutionarily by its consumption of resources and still implies a superiority by the more advanced technologically with diffusionism thrown in as technology spreads globally. Well of course that is exactly where we are, and my objection once again is that it is extremely racist in qualifying technology and the cultures that lead in technological advancement as superior.

Marvin Harris then came along and refined White by saying Hindus didn’t eat cattle because it was economically beneficial rather than because of religious taboo. And not to get too far into that discussion, but aren’t religious structure and economic development always tied together?

Didn’t “religious” rituals always have a lot to do with the economic power structure? So I don’t see any point being made here. There are also Feminist Anthropologists like Shistak who argue there were also women leaders and women kings, but again basically pointless (not wrong that there were, but totally wrong they were better leaders because history is replete with examples of femal leaders being some of the most cruel and bloodthirsty) and not at all about cultural development per se, but to prove their own ideology.

The anthropologist who interests me as totally relevant, and who published his own field studies the same year Malinowsky published his first strides, is Alfred Radcliffe-Brown. Radcliffe-Brown proposed a hybrid of Structuralism and Functionalism. Now Radcliffe-Brown hit on something really important that Maiinowsky missed. An organism is only interested in its own biological needs. But in a community however, no matter the species, the biological needs of the community are paramount to the biological needs of a species, like say, the snow leopard. So this requires a structure to that community and it is that structure that formats the needs of the community. So first of all within a community, there is the social group. There are all forms of social linkages within communities. There is the family, clan, moieties totemic or religious, classes and castes, etc. Within each social group there is a structure for the interactions between the members of each group. These social groupings lead to status, whether patrilineal or matrilineal, whether some social groups have more value than other social groups, etc.

There are also dyadic interplay between the individuals in the groupings, master-servant, husband-wife, parent-child,etc. And finally there is the interaction between individuals within a group and the interaction between groups. Interactions can be cooperative, they can be acommodatory, or they can be conflictual.

So let us keep Radcliffe-Brown in mind. Because even though Malinowsky primarily studied the culture of a basic society and Radcliffe-Brown studied the top-down society of the Hindus in the Andaman-Islands, everything Radcliffe-Brown suggested about the structure within the Andaman society still needed to play a role in the Papuan society. There still remains even in Malinowsky’s work in Papua and Melanesia, there is still familiar relationships, there are still kinship groups, there are still relationships between communities and there are still dyadic interplay within these groups. And because of that, as Malinowsky points out, there are still “disagreements” and “problems” as I imagine there were from the beginning of our species.

Any community, of almost any species that is a communal species, will have interactions within

that community and with other communities of their species. The bonobos are noted as a “peaceful” species, but they do “discipline” with ostracism and occasionally corporeal.

Malinowski describes in some detail about the kula-ring. The kula-ring is a method of gift-giving between 18 different islands and the groups on the island and with Papua.. The kula gift is a trinket and can have no intrinsic use. The value comes from the amount of times it is given. It is not supposed to be hoarded but given away again and again. To give a kula gift increases the status within his group of the receiver. Participants can travel by canoe up to 100 miles to give a kula gift. There are two basic types of gifts. The red-shell necklaces are given to the north in a clockwise manner and the white-shell armbands are given to the south in a counterclockwise manner. In the Trobriands chiefs dominate the gift giving and receiving and maintain their status as chief. But in the Dobu there are hundreds involved in the gift-giving and there can be more than one recipient even within a single matrilenage. These gifts increase the status and prestige of both gver and receiver. The giver plays down the importance of the gift as a useless trinket which increases his status. The receiver admires and over-values the gift which increases his status. Of course this is a silly little game. It has several purposes.

Expanding on the kula, Marcel Mauss explains the gift forms a mutual partnership, binds loyalty between the participating communities, and commits them to mutual obligations like hospitality and assistance, and if necessary protection. Seems a better method than warring over each other’s possessions. And that is another aspect of the kula. It creates a culture that is based on giving to each other in support rather than hoarding and expecting subservience. But participation in the kula has to be earned by giving within one’s own community and earning the status to participate in the kula. The giver always receives higher status than the receiver so the receiver to maintain his status must quickly become a giver otherwise the status he earned by being a participant in the exchange would lessen and he would fall from grace, so to speak.

Now as I mentioned in the chiefly dominated communities the kula works differently. It is dominated by the hierarchy and maintains their status as lords and masters over their communities and while their can still be mutual advantages between the power-brokers (chiefs) in maintenance of peace between the giving communities it continually reinforces their status over their communities by preventing members of the community from ever being able to move to a higher status.

Of course the kula is not the trading of commodities or bartering exchanges of materials. That is separate. That can be done with the matrilineal itself or between matrilineals or between islands. But once again in the Dobu communities one can increase status by exchanging something of more intrinsic value in exchange for something of lesser intrinsic value. For Malinowski functionalism survives as a needs system to fulfill the biological needs of the members of any society and the practice of gaining in status by what one gives to the community is illustrated by the kula but that is symbolic in that it reinforces that one earns respect , power and leadership by giving more to others than he takes. In contrast, he saw In the Trobriand chiefdoms a lot of cheating, stealing, and dissatisfaction. Sometimes it went to the point of killing another to get advantages. But we can see the interrelationships that Radcliffe-

Brown explains, what is lacking is the class system that locks people into one social strata in the Dobas, but this appears once again in the Trobriands Damon would later claim that Malinowsky was wrong and only a few were able to participate in the kula and that there was an equal dissatisfaction due to hoarding. Malinowski did note it was not utopic. The kula offered an opportunity to advance in status but Malinowky never claimed there were no manipulations attempted to achieve such status. But Fortune’s claim that it led to murder and was rife with deceit and murder has not been supported. Kuehling and others more recently have totally refuted Fortune’s claims as non evidentiary Now I want to turn our attention to Marshall Sahlins whose 1972 work Stone Age Economics has sparked almost all of the anthropological intellectual debate since. Sahlins began as a student of Lesley White and his first work was influenced by White whom we’ve already mentioned. If you are old enough to remember you might recall Sahlins became politicized in the ‘60’s and began the “teach-in” as a form of political protest against the war in Viet Nam. But Sahlins politicizations came after his field work and it was that work that later influenced his political and economic concepts. What Sahlins discovered and first published in 1963 was a varying degree of political systems between the “undeveloped” eastern Melanesian islands against the greater Polynesian chiefdoms. In this work Sahlins defines what he calls the “big man leader”. Now this is going to be the focus of the rest of this article and what Sahlins described vividly in Stone Age Economics. I will list in my references all of the pickiness and disputes and refinements of Sahlins research. Some are just plain picky and say it’s not that way in such-and-such and others say, well maybe Big Man were getting an advantage. I’m not going to do more than reference them because Sahlins himself pointed out variations and also that big men did try to earn an advantage for themselves. But I do want to mention Gananath Obeyseekere whose debate with Sahlins sparked a serious anthropological debate with Sahlins in the 1990’s. Now , for the life of me I do not understand Obeyseekere’s point so if anyone can explain it to me please feel free .In essence it seems to me that Obeyseekere objected to Sahlins portrayal of the Big Man because it implied cultures thought differently from each other and Obeyseekere said men of all cultures and times thought alike. If that is indeed Obeyseekere’s point then please explain to me why even people of the same culture and the same historical time frame do not think alike. The debate centered on whether the Hawaiians who killed Captain Cook had a different rationality than Cook. Obeyseekere said that to say the Hawaiians' rationality was different than Cook’s would be to imply that the indiginous peoples' rationality was in some way irrational and inferior. Well to bring this into very contemporary focus are we to imply that Putin and Zelensky have the same rationality? Even if more of the world is condemnatory of Putin that does not mean Putin’s rationale is inferior intellectually.

Putin’s rationale, I’m certain, is quite well-founded by his standards and quite rational but it is not “rational” by his opponents standards in the same way that their rationale might seem objectionable to Putin. Of course both based their rationale on their own perceived needs of power and influence just as did the Hawaiians and Cook. And Sahlins actually illustrates in his work that there were different rationales in the development of the different cultures as they developed differently from each other. So I remain at a loss to understand Oberseekere’s rationale in thinking everyone thinks the same.

Okay the second point that needs addressing is the relationship of modernity to the effectiveness of Big Man leadership. And of course modern Big Men are going to more closely resemble modern chiefs, or kingly rulers. So it seems of little use to me to explain that the modern island leadership has less effective Big Man rule and more effective Kingly style leadership because what we are doing is diffusing our modernity upon the Big Man leader and that presently the Big Man is more a leader only within kinship groups. It is also of little use to debate whether there are “big women” in governance or power today. The role of women currently has little to provide evidentiary evidence of women’s historic role, etc. In some communities the women had different roles than any other communities. There have been observations of women being considered inferior and/or mistreated. There are now women in some leadership positions in island governments. Island governments are top-down and current observations are observing a diffusion of the Big Man role. It goes without saying that it would be nonsense to suggest evolutionary human leadership has not been affected by contact with post-historic evolutionary leadership. And while in my next issue I am going to try to focus on the development of top-down leadership and how it occurred, top-down leadership’s very role in being top-down is to alter any non-top-down leadership just as the more current conflict between top-down democracy and top-down autocracy are each attempting to overpower the other. The nature of top-down leadership is to believe in its superiority, by whomever and whenever it has occurred.

Sahlins Big Man focused primarily on accounts of Bougainville Island and Papua New Guinea where he saw a leadership style as “reminiscent of the free-enterprise rugged individual”. The Big Man deals for his own benefit to achieve greater equity for the community. He certainly gains for himself but from a position that he bargains for the benefit of the community which assures his status of followship. If he fails to lead in a matter of equitableness that benefits the community then his leadership will lose its followship and others will be able to gain his followship by providing more equitable leadership. Sahlins admits there were varying degrees of Big Men all the way up to the kingships that predominated the highly stratified communities of Tonga, Hawaii, New Zealand and the Society Islands. But there were also less stratified chiefdoms like Fiji, and Tahiti and Samoa which were definitely hereditary kingdoms but had fewer classifications.

What Sahlins proposes in Stone Age Economics is that to solve the issues of economic and social stratification is by practicing a more equitable economic concept of “ownership” That does not mean utopic equality where everyone has the same of everything but where everyone’s functional needs are met and where there are no stratified classes. It does not mean there are no differences of opinions. It does not mean there is never a jockeying for influence. It does not mean that everyone will always be able to accept the situation. With no direct evidence of the original colonization of the south pacific settlements themselves, I quite believe it is probable that such differences led to leaving an island and settling upon another.

Indirect evidence however is ripe in the historic era. The religious groups who moved to more accepting communities, or, like the Puritans who came to America and founded their own community or others who might have come for economic reasons. When leadership becomes intolerable or acceptable people move or begin new ones. The Comanche were somewhat

notorious for founding new Comanche tribes if they did not accept the leadership. To a lesser degree other plains Indians (forgive me for using the term “Indian” by I am talking os specific tribes and Native-American is somewhat generic, I could try to write the different tribes personal names but that would then cause confusion as to which group I am talking about) also would sometimes found new communities if they disagreed with a chief who might have a majority support. It began to become evident when some tribal leaders would argue for peace and some members would leave the community to continue their fight to remain free. I imagine that mankind colonized the globe not just for exploratory reasons or habitat disruption but for reasons of disagreement with leaderships. Some wandered even into regions where the environment was harsher. There is no utopic human society but human society must strive to fulfill its people with all of its basic needs and when a society does not accomplish that then either the society attempts to change its leadership or it attempts to remove itself from said community to form its own. But the essence of any communal society has to be the most effective way to fulfill the basic biological needs of the members of the community. Even chimpanzees have been noted to move to other chimp communities or to split from a parent community. So what we are trying to define is the kind of leadership that enables a human community to thrive and to fulfill the biological needs. I suppose in the strictest sense it could be argued top-down societies do succeed. But they succeed by expansion of the community so that some are not important and are therefore expendable. In a stratified community the levels of importance to the community are defined from the top down.. The leaders always take the most for themselves. The supporting classes are supplied in varying degrees from subsistence to abundance and the bottom become the slaves, servants, ghetto-dwellers or homeless.

Ultimately some may show some concern, some may try to help feed or shelter the expendables. But this altruism could simply be a means of “lordship” of itself. Why give out the scraps so the bottom class does not starve instead of ensuring the bottom have as much as they need to begin with? Why take everything and then give back a portion instead of ensuring equitability in the first place. If the evolutionary development of hominid species had been of this nature then the hominid species could not have survived. This is why Malinowsky said freedom is not something given but something taken away. In that way the individuals were free because they did not follow leaders that exploited them or recognize their value to the community. Our species survived evolutionarily because it followed leaders who gave more than they took. The Big Man gets a lot of power and a lot of influence but doesn’t live in a bigger house or demand a whole pig to himself. His influences come from alliances based on what he gives. The stratified leaders in a top-down society gets his influence from what he takes. The owner of a business pays people to do the work and then takes the profit for himself. The owner sees himself as of more importance and therefore entitled to any wealth created. But his wealth would be nothing if someone else didn’t create it for him. But his thinking doesn’t recognize the importance of those who create the wealth so everything he has is actually taken, or stolen, from his community of workers. If the owner were a”big man” he would recognize that. But he thinks differently and then he teaches, or attempts to teach the actual wealth creators to think in the same way. When the wealth creators, the real wealth creators, object to it and try to unionize or to get more of the benefits he uses any means possible to prevent it. His, the owner, the king, the congressmen or president gains power by taking more and by deluding people into believing he is giving them jobs, or welfare, or

whatever, and by deluding them into believing his economic system of taking wealth from what he himself did not create is beneficial and they are better off giving him the wealth and the power. He tells them he created the idea so all the benefits belong to him rather than that the idea is a gift to all and the benefits should belong to all. A top-down society exists by a leadership coterie that takes from the community to create his wealth and his power. The human race could not have possibly have been a successful species if it had evolved in such a manner.That it was a successful species for over 100,000 years before stratified human society existed is proof when you compare the meager 7000 years it has taken stratified society to take everything not only from other members of their community but from their environment and to their unacknowledged brink of the extinction of their own species, but also the multitude of other species they have already caused to become extinct. This is why some say the last seven thousand years are the sixth great age of extinction upon the earth. Top-down leadership has from its beginning been a delusion to convince its followers that it is an evolutionary advancement in our species. After the asteroid that caused massive global extinction and ended the era of the dinosaurs the earth’s climate changed and estimates range from 10-100 thousand years before the extinction period ended. It wasn’t crash, all dinosaurs and the other species who died in that extinction immediately dropped dead. And roughly 75% of all species then in existence did die. The other 25% became the ancestors of the new evolutionary species development. In only 7000 years mankind has intelligently destroyed 83% of the species of plants and animals that were in existence at that time he intellectually advanced to civilized society. Now please tell me how we have become more intelligent by developing stratified levels of importance for both other species and for members of our own species. Please tell me why it was our advanced intelligence that led us to believe that we were dominant and could control and transform nature to our advancement. Please explain to me how we can survive on a planet with such vast intelligence when there are no other species but ourselves. And please tell me what good alternative energy sources are going to do when we not only eliminate other species but pollute the water so we can’t drink it, the air so we can’t breathe it, and the ground so we can’t live upon it.

No, the delusion began when some men thought they could control other men and the nature that they lived within. The delusion is that civilization occurred because mankind as a species evolved into a more intelligent mankind. And the truth is a few greedy bastards who probably had no status and nothing to give, a few outcasts seized upon the idea to take everything from others and from the environment

prime anthropological sources: A note on the use of resources: My purpose is to present a concept of leadership and to present it as more probable to the evolutionary nature as the more probable alternative, It is not to detail any person field experience in anthropology. But my readings began as far back as 1970 and over the years I .have kept records and my personal impressions of both field and theoretical anthropology. I have deleted references to Mead, as I mentioned as her fieldwork is mostly disdained currently but I do still believe her books have nevertheless left a positive impression upon me. The sources don’t always agree or align themselves with my arguments but I have listed the sources that I read that I feel do shed a bit of light on my own concepts. As you may note there is a very heavy concentration

on three authors-malikowski, herskovits, and sahlins–who have been most influential. I have included most of the works I have read that are from pre-1950 because they can shed more light before more extreme modernization occurred that have affected the results from earlier. Before writing this article I did research on what some of the more current revisionists and studies are indicating. In the last three months I have read roughly 300 papers from more contemporary sources from the 21st century but have included only a few–mainly ones by authors who would probably challenge my own argument. For the Native-American sources I have only included the ones I found most interesting. Like most Americans who grew up with cowboy-and-indian movies I became interested in Native-American culture and I imagine I must have consumed several thousand pages worth of books, and articles even before I began logging everything I read. To list them all would probably require 50 or 60 pages. But my intent is to offer anyone interested to read the same sources and to familiarize yourself with other concepts if you care to take the time so that you can have a clearer path in developing your own concepts and see whether you think there is any rationale in my, admittedly, extreme approach.

South Pacific Malinowski, B. (1913). The Family Among the Australian Aborigines Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific Malinowski, B. (1924). Mutterrechtliche Familie und Ödipus-Komplex. Eine psychoanalytische Studie (in German) Malinowski, B. (1926). Myth in Primitive Psychology Malinowski, B. (1926).Crime and custom in primitive society Malinowski, B. (1944). A Scientific theory of Culture and Other Essays Malinowski, B. (1947) Freedom and Civilization Raymond Firth (1957) An Evaluation of the work of Bronislaw Malinowski James Urry Oxford dictionary of national biography v.36 “ Bronisław Kaspar Malinowski, anthropologist Lynn Hume (1991) Them Days: Life on an Aboriginal Reserve 1892-1960 Lynn Hume (2009) “ Indigenous Traditions Of Oceania and Australia” in The World’s Religions: Continuities and Transformations (eds P.B. Clarke & P. Beyers) John Patrick Taylor (2008) The Other Side: Ways of Being & Place in Vanuatu Margaret Critchlow and William Rodman Papers (from Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego) Llewellyn Lew Toulmin (2017) The Female Chiefs Of Vanuatu in Asia Pacific Journal of Research Margaret Jolly (1996) “Women’s Rights, Human Rights and Domestic Violence in Vanuatu” (research article) Robert Codrington (1891) The Melanesian Studies In their Anthropology & Folklore W.H.R. Rivers (1914) The History of Melanesian Society, v.1 W.H.R. Rivers (1914) Kinship and Social Organisation A.B. Deacon (1934) Malekula: a vanishing people in the New Hebrides (ed. C. Wedgwood) Sydney Mankind (1936) Journal of anthropological society of new south wales v.2, Issue 1

A.S. Webb history and diary of Aoba 1857-1922 Gananath Obeyeseekere (1992) The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific

Gananath Obeyeseekere (1990) The Work of Culture Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology Marshall Sahlins (1958) Social Stratification in Polynesia (Monographs of the American Ethnological Society) Marshall Sahlins (1962) Moala: Culture & Nature n a Fijian Island Marshall Sahlins (1972) Stone Age Economics Marshall Sahlins (1976) The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology Marshall Sahlins (1976) Culture and Practical Reason Marshall Sahlins (1981) Historical Metaphors amd Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Island Kingdoms Marshall Sahlins (1985) Islands of History Marshall Sahlins (1995) How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example Marshall Sahlins (2000) Culture in Practice Marshall Sahlins (2002) Waiting for Foucault, Still Marshall Sahlins (2004) Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa Marshall Sahlins (2008) The Western Illusion of Human Nature Marshall Sahlins & David Graeber (2017) On Kings Rosemary Levy Zumwalt (2o19) Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist Maurice Godelier & Marilyn Strathren (Eds) (2000) Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power in Melanesia Lamont Lindstrom (1981) Big Man: A Short Terminological History (Vol. 83, American

Anthropologist, pgs. 900-905) Ian Hogbin (1934) Law and Order in Polynesia: A Study of Primitive Legal Institution Lyneth Dave !(1979) Rank, power, authority: A reassessment of traditional leadership in South Pacific societies (The Journal of Pacific History) Northern America George E. Hyde (1998) The Pawnee Indians Richard White (1982) “The Cultural Landscape Of The Pawnees” (Great Plains Quarterly) David J. Wishart (1979) “The Dispossession of the Pawnee” (Annals of the Association Of American Geographers) Weston LaBarre (1991). Shadow of childhood: Neoteny and the biology of religion

Weston LeBarre (1954) The Human Anvil L.R, Bailey(1964). The Long Walk: A History of the Navaho Wars, 1846–1868) Peter Iverson(2002). Diné: A History of the Navahos Stephen Blog (1997)Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest Doane Robinson (1904) A History of the Dakota Or Sioux Indians

Stanley Vestal (1934) Vestal, New Sources of Indian History 1850-1891 J.W. Williamson (1922) The Battle Of Massacre Canyon: The Unfortunate Ending Of The Last Buffalo Hunt of The Pawnee Luther Cressman (1977) Prehistory of Vanished Peoples Pekka Hämäläinen (2008) The Comanche Empire Pekka Hämäläinen (2019) Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power Barbara J. Mills (ed) (2000) Alternative Leadership Strategies in the Prehispanic Southwest James E. Snead (2008) Ancestral Landscapes of the Pueblo World Ruth Underhill (1919 “Victory in Olive-Gray” (the Atlantic Monthly v. 124, pp. 62) Ruth Underhill & Edward Castetter (1935) “Ethnobiology of the Papago Indians” (University of New Mexico Bulletin #275) Ruth Underhill (1953) Red Man’s America Anthony R. McGinnis Counting Coup and Cutting Horses: Intertribal Warfare on the Northern Plains, 1738-1889\ {An interesting new dissertation on Horses & Native Americans, I came across this dissertation a couple of years ago—it does have some relevance to our topic here, in that the Native-American Author disputes the evidence that horses had become extinct in the Americans for thousands of years and wasn’t reintroduced into the western hemisphere until the arrival of the Spanish. I have not seen any follow-up research that verifies this claims but if her thesis can be proven correct it would upend all currently accepted knowledge of Native-American culture and force a complete reevaluation of what we currently believe of the development of the indigenous cultures of the western hemisphere, at least of the northern hemisphere. At this point in time I know of no archeological that supports her theories.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF THE AMERICAS AND THE HORSE: DECONSTRUCTING A EUROCENTRIC MYTH By Yvette Running Horse Collin A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Indigenous Studies University of Alaska Fairbanks May 2017 © 2017 Yvette Running Horse} Southern Americas R. B. Ferguson (1990). "Blood of the Leviathan: Western contact and warfare in Amazonia” American Ethnologist 17(2) pg. 237-25 R. B. Ferguson(2003). "The birth of war." Natural History 112(6): 28-35.

R. B. Ferguson(2011). Born to Live: Challenging Killer Myths. Origins of Altruism and Cooperation (R. W. Sussman and+ C. R. Cloninger: 249-270.

Howard Campbell (1957) Zapotec renaissance: ethnic politics and cultural revivalism in southern Mexico Herskovits Melville J. Herskovits (1926) The Cattle Complex in East Africa Melville J. Herskovits (1928) The American Negro Melville J. Herskovits & Frances Herskovits (1934) Rebel Destiny, Among the Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana

Melville J. Herskovits (1938) Dahomey: An Ancient Wes African Kingdom Melville J. Herskovits(1940) Economic Life of Primitive People Melville J. Herskovits & Frances Herskovits (1947) Trinidad Village Melville J. Herskovits (1948) Man and His Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology Melville J. Herskovits & Frances Herskovits (1958) Dahomean Narrative: A Cross-Cultural Analysis Melville J. Herskovits (1959) Continuity & Change in African Culture Melville J. Herskovits (1962) The Human Factor in Changing Africa Africa M. Fortes & E.E. Evans-Pritchard (eds) (1940) African Political Systems

Theory Claude Levi-Strauss (1974) Structural Anthropolgy Leslie White (1949) The Science of Culture: A study of man & civilization Marvin Harris (1975) Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture A.L. Epstein (1969) The Craft of Social Anthropology David Bidney (1963) Concept of Freedom in Anthropology David Bidney (1944) On the Concept Of Culture And Some Cultural Fallaxcies Ian Hogbin (1934) Law and Order in Polynesia: A Study of Primitive Legal Institution Robert Spencer (1954) Method and Perspective in anthropology Francis L. K. Hsu (ed.) (1954) Aspects of Culture and Personality a Symposium Gerald Weias (1973) A Scientific Concept Of Culture

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, (1922) The Andaman Islanders: a study in social anthropology

Could Earth Become Venus?

First of all there is a question of just how planets are formed. The older model, the core accretion model, falters beyond the solid planets here in our own solar system and could have only developed four planets and a different model would have been necessary for the outer gaseous planets. Thus we developed the disc-accretion model and then Lambrechts & Johansen formulated the pebble accretion model. Basically however, the subject of how planets themselves form is not yet a settled scientific question although the most current evidence probably rules out core-accretion, the model popularized by Carl Sagan.

At the current time however there is more of a consensus on the development of the solar system. I am not inclined at this time to more than give a basic outline as there is much written about the process. “Before the solar system existed, a massive concentration of interstellar gas and dust created a molecular cloud that would form the sun's birthplace. Cold temperatures caused the gas to clump together, growing steadily denser. The densest parts of the cloud began to collapse under their own gravity, perhaps with a nudge from a nearby stellar explosion, forming a wealth of young stellar objects known as protostars. Gravity continued to collapse the material onto the infant solar system, creating a star and a disk of material from which the planets would form. Eventually, the newborn sun encompassed more than 99% of the solar system's mass, according to NASA. When pressure inside the star grew so powerful that fusion kicked in, turning hydrogen to helium, the star began to blast a stellar wind that helped clear out the debris and stopped it from falling inward.” (Nola Taylor Tilson, Space.com 2021).

This expulsion of the debris developed into all of the matter in all of its various forms of planets, moons, comets, asteroids, etc. As we are concerned in this article with Venus we can stop there and concern ourselves with the development of Venus.

So we know to a degree certain facts about Venus that are related to whether Venus could have ever been “earth-like”. Venus is a rocky planet like earth, it is very nearly of the same size, However the atmosphere is much denser with very high concentrations of CO2 (roughly 96.5%).

This forces the heat on the surface to extreme temperatures far beyond the surface of Mercury.

We know little about Venus’ core and if that inner core could be a reason for the atmosphere on Venus. Certainly excessive volcanism has to have an effect in the way it can have effects here on earth. There are 167 identified volcanic sites of at least 100 km. across. Only 1 such complex (in the Hawaiian Islands) exists on earth. Nevertheless this does not necessarily mean it is more volcanically active but to a surface that formed into a crust much sooner than that of earth, possibly indicating a cooler core and thus eliminating the formation of oceans. Of course the theory that Venus could have had water at one time is subject to the concept of water on earth having originally came via comet ice. That theory has been put to rest.

There are two hydrogen isotopes. Hydrogen with one isotope, found primarily on the sun, and deuterium hydrogen with two isotopes. Unfortunately ocean water is mixed. In fact if our water came from comet ( deuterium) ice we would not have our oceans as they exist. If it were all living creatures in the sea suddenly have a severe pH imbalance. Some of them would be able to adapt due to buffered systems built into their bodily fluids; others, not so much.

Immediately, the equilibrium level of water vapor in the air would begin to decrease, on average, the world becomes a place less prone to precipitation, as the amount of energy input remains constant, but the heat of vaporization of most of the water on earth increases. Replacing the volume of all the world’s oceans water with deuterium oxide also affects the mass of the planet and gravity. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration there are 1.335 billion cubic kilometers of water in the oceans, about 1.335E21 kg; changing all of that to deuterium oxide will add 1.48E20 kg of mass to the Earth. Since the Earth’s mass is 5.97219E24 kg, the total mass of the Earth increases by 0.0025 percent. Gravity will be correspondingly higher by just that amount. This wouldn’t change much for us here, but almost immediately GPS would stop working, most geostationary satellites would need to be adjusted, and many other space objects would begin to deorbit. The moon’s orbit would change, with its periapsis and apoapsis coming closer (thanks, Kerbal Space Program!). The period of its orbit decreasing slightly, but fortunately the Earth’s additional mass would exactly cancel out the additional gravitational forces between the Earth and the sun. Less than fortunately, the question doesn’t specify the angular momentum and linear momentum of the additional mass, so I can’t comment on how the Earth’s rotation might change, except to note that it will probably cause more tidal waves.

This means the water on earth came from earth itself. And what the studies of Serafian have shown is that water on earth was mostly accreted at the same time the rocks formed on earth and that earth was “born” a water planet. With some speculation it can also demonstrate the earth was born with similar concentrations of carbon and nitrogen which allowed for the elements necessary for life to begin in the manner we think of as life. Now no such thing ever occurred on Venus as the crust solidified itself almost immediately and to even have formed water from deuterium bombardment is unlikely as the heavier atmosphere would have mostly likely caused comet bombardment to burn themselves up in the higher atmosphere without ever reaching the surface to create a water planet. In fact the heavy atmosphere had to contribute to the quick cooling of the planet’s crust which in turn of course caused the extreme lack of irradiance making it almost impossible for Venus to ever have had a more earth-like atmosphere in an exact converse of Mars whose atmosphere is to thin to keep an active flow of water. Now there may be deposits of water beneath the surface according to recent discoveries by the Chinese Zhurong currently exploring Mars. But the problem would remain that if that water could rise to the surface the low magnetism of Mars would probably rule out surface water remaining upon the surface, or being able to create an oxygen rich atmosphere. Primarily because an oxygen atmosphere needs chlorophyllic production within the water and that requires a certain ph balance that requires certain requirements from within the core. So despite Elon Musk’s claims that nuclear bombs exploding the polar ice caps that would not alter the weak magnetism that prevents the collection of atmospheric alteration to remain as the

newly created water atmosphere would not be able to remain any more significantly that the weak atmospheric conditions currently on mars. The magnetism of Mars is approximately 1500 nanotesla while earth’s is 65,000 nanotesla. The magnetism of a planet allows its atmosphere to remain in place and Mars’ is so weak it mostly is blown into space by solar weaks. So to create a stronger atmosphere on Mars it would be necessary to first create a magnetic strength capable of maintaining that atmosphere. Of course Venus has for all intrinsic purposes no magnetism except the residue of the sun’s magnetism around the planet. This would presume to be a contradiction of what I have just stated. This is something of an unknown process of how this is actually possible. The probable scenario is its proximity to the sun and the effect of the sun’s own magnetic field which again leads to the speculation that Venus was born very dry and cooled very quickly so that the gaseous atmosphere in the early development of the planet almost certainly prevented Venus from ever having a normal atmosphere. Venus probably developed without any earth like atmospheric conditioning. On much more known ground the earth was born with an atmosphere similar to Venus, and not vice versa. But earth had a plentitude of carbonate rock which pulled CO2 from its atmosphere and in turn created a water planet perfect for the development of plant life to begin “breathing” the atmospheric CO2 and exhaling free (O2) into the atmosphere. At issue here is that while oxygen is extremely common in the universe, indeed third to only helium and hydrogen which we have already seen forms into stars and elements that in turn cast out heavier elements like oxygen. So oxygen is the most common element outside of stars along with deuterium hydrogen. But the problem is that while oxygen is extremely common O2 is extremely rare. We think we may have detected a star system with free oxygen some 100,000 light years away but this is only very recently and is not yet completely confirmed. Oxygen is common and combines easily with other elements but as far as O2 it appears it is only formed in a process called photosynthesis. This of course puts to rest any mythological aliens having visited earth or landed in Rosewall or elsewhere. They simply wouldn’t have been able to survive in an O2 environment so if they had ever visited it would have been necessary for them to “chloroform” earth in a manner suitable for them to exist here. So very sorry, not only was Venus never “earthlike” no place else was either.

There are two other factors that negate the possibility of Venus having ever had a similar atmospheric condition. One is the vastly weakened magnetic field. This prevents an active dynamo and this implies there is no active conductive liquid so either the core and the surface are the same temperature so that the core is not cooling or the core is totally solid. The weak magnetosphere around Venus means that the solar wind is interacting directly with its outer atmosphere, as we have mentioned. Here, ions of hydrogen and oxygen are being created by the dissociation of water molecules from ultraviolet radiation. The solar wind then supplies energy that gives some of these ions sufficient velocity to escape Venus's gravity field. This erosion process results in a steady loss of low-mass hydrogen, helium, and oxygen ions, whereas higher-mass molecules, such as carbon dioxide, are more likely to be retained.

Atmospheric erosion by the solar wind could have led to the loss of most of Venus's water during the first billion years after it formed.[118] However, the planet may have retained a dynamo for its first 2–3 billion years, so the water loss may have occurred more recently] The erosion has increased the ratio of higher-mass deuterium to lower-mass hydrogen in the atmosphere

which is about 100 times greater compared to the rest of the solar system. Whether the core is indeed solid is not known and would depend on the sulfur levels within the core which have not yet been able to be determined. So additionally any water that Venus ever had would not be hydrogen 1 necessary for earth-like waters.

The other factor of course is its extremely slow rotation on its axis. The Venus year is 224.7 earth days but its day is 243 earth days. So that more than one rotation around the sun is required before the sun could rise again which would make any kind of lifeforms that flourish on earth with our 24 hour rotation, so if ‘life’ exists or ever existed on Venus it was certainly not ever earth-like life or was the planet ever capable of having an earth-like atmosphere. And as Sarafinian has proven the deuterium hydrogen that was cast out from the sun is not the same hydrogen cast out but the same hydrogen of the sun which means that those atoms were in the very rocks (what he has proven) and further studies by Bergin & Cleaves suggest are probably older than the formation of the sun itself.

So populist Carl Sagan and his environmentalist advocates quite frankly have no basis for suggesting the earth’s atmosphere could run away and become like the atmosphere of Venus.

Our atmosphere has altered to some degree and our atmosphere corrects itself with new species development. So the future will not be the end of life on earth but the end of man and put to folly the notion we are more intelligent than the earth or that we, or any species can reshape the environment that allowed us to exist and still be able to exist in the environment.

We can only exist in the environment we developed within, and my recurrent theme is that we cannot say there is no creator in order to make ourselves creators. There is certainly a creation and mankind was an evolutionary byproduct of that creation. To assume we are intelligent enough to create an environment that is different from the environment that we evolved into is not at all intelligent but the utmost folly. {I would also like to direct your intention to the most current research I am aware of on this subject which was published by Mike Wall in October of 2021}

References for further reading.:

Mike Wall “Life on Venus may never have been possible” published October 14, 2021 Michael Turbet “Day–night cloud asymmetry prevents early oceans on Venus but not on Earth” Lambrechts, M., Johansen, A. “Rapid growth of gas-giant cores by pebble accretion. Astronomy & Astrophysics” 2012 Ted Bergin & Isle Cleaves science 2014

The Problem With Water Power There is a lot of talk in today’s world about alternative energy to replace fossil fuels in our society today. There is a lot of talk about finding natural or clean energy sources. One of the frequently mentioned alternatives by governments (although not so much by environmentalists) is water power. I’m not sure why governments cling to water power projects and irrigation when we have a very long history of trying to harness water to supply needs, And therefore we have a long history of understanding that it is very harmful to the environment. In fact the very beginnings of government are tied to our first attempts at damming and irrigation.

But before we begin I am going to state what should be obvious. Gas, coal and other carbon byproducts are quite natural sources of energy as much as any of the suggested alternatives such as solar, wind, geothermal, and water. The problem occurs with oil products when we try to make oil into a controlled source to provide energy. In the process of conversion of any “natural” phenomenon we distort its naturalness so that it is no longer natural. When we convert any natural source of energy into a controlled source the process of conversion makes it no longer natural. So all talk of using natural energies is absurd if you mean you are going to convert its naturalness into a source that can be controlled and diverted by unnatural means. Now of course using water as an energy is “cleaner',' right? It would not pollute our atmosphere in the way burning fossil fuels do, right? And the greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere began to expand with our consumption of burning fossil fuels around 1750, correct? At least that is what we are being told. Well take a look at this study by Dr. Ondrej Mottl of Bergen University.

“HUMAN IMPACT ON ENVIRONMENT amazing - one of the most fascinating things,"

says Ondrejj Mottl.

The object of his fascination? Mud. Dr Mottl and his colleagues have been extracting "mud cores" from the depths of lakes and wetlands. These long, tightly compacted cylinders of earth contain a record of exactly what grew in that soil when, going back millennia.

"They're our window to the past," says Dr Mottl, an ecologist based in Bergen, Norway.

Analysing these cores of mud, looking at the pollen that has settled in each layer, has brought an entirely new understanding of when human activity started changing vegetation.

Scientists had expected to see the first "signal" of human intervention a few centuries ago, when landscapes really started to transform during the Industrial Revolution. Pollen records from the mud core research have led them to radically

readjust that assumption, and track our species' first impact on the natural world back to about 4,000 years ago.

It's a discovery that has major implications for the future of our forests and other natural landscapes. ut what exactly did they spot that led them to rethink theories about when man had started to impact nature? The team found in the mud an uptick in the rate of change - layer by layer - of pollen composition. Basically, each layer began to look more different from the other in terms of the plant pollen it contained.

The scientists chose to look back 18,000 years to capture the era time when the planet had started to emerge from the last ice age. Earth was defrosting, so almost every environment was changing.

"The last 10,000 years was - climate-wise - relatively stable, so [that's when] we're able to pick up the influence of humans," says Suzette Flantua, a global ecologist also at the University of Bergen, That influence started as soon as we - humans began to clear wild vegetation to make space for ourselves, our crops and our livestock.

"We see that trend [in vegetation change] picking up at different points," says Dr Flantua. It's earlier in Asia and South America, and slightly later - about 2,000 years ago - in Europe.

According to many biologists and climate scientists, we are now in a period of the Earth's history that can be dubbed the Anthropocene - an epoch of human influence on our planet. More than three quarters of the Earth's land surface has been altered by human activity.

The mud core findings don't only change assumptions about the past. They also provide a valuable insight into where our planet's natural environment is heading.

The uptick in change, detected in that long-buried pollen, is continuing ever faster.

We're going to continue to get that large scale human influence and on top of that there's climate change," says Dr Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist based at the University of Michigan.

It means, somewhat ironically, that if forests are to lock up as much carbon as possible and help us to minimise the impacts of climate change, we are going to have to intervene more in exactly how those forests grow.”

Or this study by the same university:

the paper, the authors assess global patterns of rates of vegetation change from the last deglaciation, through the Holocene, and up to the recent years, covering all continents except Antarctica. Rate of change is the magnitude of change over a defined period of time, and it can be used to describe “

if an ecosystem is changing faster or slower. This assessment provides crucial insights into the degree of change that vegetation endured over the last 18.000 yr on a global scale."Vegetation always changes to some degree through time. It changes because of climate or humans, or due to both. By looking into responses of vegetation during the last 18.000 years, we see that the degree of vegetation change has not been synchronous in space, meaning that vegetation changed at different moments and magnitudes. During substantial climatic changes, such as when the world warmed after the last ice age 18 thousand years ago, some areas responded similarly, like across temperate zones. However, we see this pattern wasn’t necessarily echoed in the tropics, so there was no such thing as one global vegetation response to climate," says Dr. Suzette Flantua.

Their outcomes are based on 1181 fossil pollen records derived from the open-access Neotoma Paleoecology Database, a global data resource that stores multiple kinds of fossil, palaeoecological, and paleoenvironmental data.

Analysing such large quantities of data is no small feat. Mottl explains that estimating rates of vegetation change based on existing metrics had been seen as unreliable in the palaeoecological community due to various issues. However, together with UiB and international colleagues, they came up with a new approach which has been presented in related paper and recent R package, called R-Ratepol.

"The process of developing a new rate of change method resulted from a workshop with a lot of scientific discussions with other members of our team. Then I basically got my

head down and figured out a way to apply the theory into the code.

For me that is the best part, to find an issue, put it into code, and then solve it" Mottl laughs.

The paper shows that approximately 4000 years ago, rates of vegetation change started to accelerate up until the present and such patterns are unambiguously global.

"It gave us a good understanding of the impact of our paper. Since most ecologists, studying current ecosystems, have records dating back decades or in some cases 100 years, so they are inclined to think that more drastic changes in vegetation started more recently.

We show that the legacy of an accelerated change goes even further back. It has major implications for how we perceive our natural world right now," Mottl explains.”

So what these papers are showing us is that when we began our first attempts at cultivating land and converting water into irrigation channels and our early damming attempts is when the carbon footprint in the atmosphere began. It began for two reasons, less vegetation decreases the amount of atmospheric O2 levels, therefore increasing the atmospheric CO2. But what seems to be lacking in the general knowledge is that water vapor is a greenhouse gas itself.

Irrigation thins the volume of water causing increased evaporation which in turn causes increased atmospheric water vapor. The result being we need more water because it evaporates faster and we build dams which replace vegetation and meter out water and as cultivation expands to continually feed people who can no longer feed themselves the cycle grows and grows. So from the very beginning of our intelligent leaders who didn’t want to feed themselves and then those leaders needed others to keep order over the many supplying the food for the few so they needed more food so they began attacking other communities for more workers and cultivating more land and increasing the people that need to be fed and both the devegetation caused by increased needs to feed those who didn’t feed themselves and the increased needs to control water for the harvest to be controlled to have enough abundance for those who didn’t harvest for themselves continued to spiral and that is when man began to alter his atmosphere, not when we began to use fossil fuels. It was the few depending on the many to supply their needs that causes the greenhouse gasses to expand and as more and more want to consume more and more unnaturally and be supplied with the food for survival and eventually the means for transportation so they don’t need to walk and houses with controlled temperatures so they needn’t feel the natural effects of the natural environment and what we have here is why there is climate change. It is not the burning of fossil fuels but of living unnaturally to insulate us from our environment which forces us to supply these needs by altering the environment in very unnatural ways. So my friends don’t talk to me of climate change and fossil fuels when you don’t understand that it is the entirety of civilization that is unnatural. And not too intelligent in my opinion because while we may have the knowledge to develop greater technologies we don’t seem to have the understanding that new technologies designed to alter the errors of past is going to exacerbate the issue because new technologies require more energy and what is unnatural can never overcome the alterations in the environment that they create. It is replacing the natural with the unnatural and the recognition

that we can’t create a designer earth. Now that would be intelligent because it would be understanding our knowledge.

Now it might seem that evaporated water simply falls back to earth so there’s no problem here.

But the truth is only 52% of evaporated water returns to earth as rain. So 48% extends further into the atmosphere as vapor and 28% of that remaining percent remains there as a greenhouse gas. When we think of greenhouse gasses we hear only about carbon dioxide. But methane, nitrous oxide and water vapor also collect in the atmosphere as greenhouse gasses.

Get that in your mind. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. And since only slightly over half of evaporated water returns to earth, every use of water conversion increases the natural amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Now the greenhouse gasses collect mostly in the troposphere where most of us live our lives. The troposphere is only the lower 6.2 miles of our atmosphere.

Of course if you climb to the top of Mt. Everest you’re getting close to being in the stratosphere.

But unless you fly in a jet above 33,000 ft or are on a satellite orbiting the earth we don’t enter those. Our weather and our lives are here in the troposphere. And the greenhouse gasses affect our lives here in two ways—the first is by allowing enough heat to remain on earth to maintain our water cycle and by keeping the surface at the temperature that makes most lifeforms on the earth able to survive. If there were no greenhouse gasses the earth would be much colder and if they increase significantly then we face our current situation, the temperature begins to warm.

So mankind from the dawn of civilization has been increasing by increasing the water vapor in the atmosphere in our attempt to control the water and by reducing and attempting to control vegetation which itself increases the greenhouse effect. So please do not believe increased attempts to control water will decrease the accumulation of greenhouse effect. Please understand if we had never used fossil fuels but had used only water power from 1750 to present we probably would not even be here right now. The earth would be exceedingly drier, much less vegetation would be able to survive, our cattle would die for lack of grazing grounds, the entire earth would be desert and ocean and as most of the evaporated water returns to the oceans there would be less movement in the ocean temperatures where the atmospheric streams generally begin. Remember only 52% of evaporated water returns to earth. By lessening, to some extent, our reliance on controlling water for our energy needs the use of fossil fuels might possibly have extended our species and other species from becoming extinct.

Now let’s turn to our long history of attempting to control water and how that attempt has affected our environment unfavorably for our survival. Now the beginning of the use of water goes back to our discussion on how man became civilized by abandoning a leadership of communal support to a leadership of communal ownership. Now it is said humankind realized the advantage of farming because he could settle in communities and life would be easier. Well that’s kind of bull malarkey. It was certainly probably easier for the leader who could rely on others to provide the food for him. It was probably easier for the overseers of the work. But it was not easier for people who had to build the canals and work in the patties or fields. And archaeological remains show the workers had a less nutritious diet and probably were more unhealthy. And if people had really thought the agricultural life and harder work were more advantageous why would slavery have been needed for civilization to arise? It is also a thousand profanities to try to explain the reason people willingly allowed themselves to be enslaved was it was more advantageous when they realized they could settle in communities.

Well people were already settling in communities across the globe and in many places where they did not have to be enslaved. No, you will have a hard time convincing me that people saw an advantage to harder work, dominant leaders who used them for their advantage and limited

their movement by demanding them supply their (the leaders) need. This was not an advantage to anyone but those who had no skills to participate properly in a community. These “kings” saw an advantage to themselves but I have a very hard time believing it was because of increased intelligence or that people willingly thought such a lifestyle could be an advantage. Controlling nature and controlling people go hand in hand and neither were the common progression of humans adapting to society in a better way, they arose out of unscrupulousness and not from an advancement in knowledge. I certainly wouldn’t think it advantageous to myself to be forced to do work for a leader instead of simply grabbing a peach off of a tree. I wouldn’t have found it advantageous to be beaten if I didn't do enough work to supply someone else’s needs who didn’t even bother to insure I had enough. Who in fact would take more and more as his needs to control me expanded with his need to have more people to control my effort and more people who needed to have their efforts controlled . And I certainly wouldn’t have liked my freedom to move to another community restrained because my leader was not fulfilling my needs. This is the beginning of the delusion. And somehow we still persist in trying to install the concept that this was a willing move because humankind had advanced in intelligence.

So what does history show us to be the result of this vast intelligence? Increased salinization of the land from irrigation that was caused by increased needs for irrigation to supply increased foods to supply the growing needs of the support necessary to keep this system going. This forced the need for the leaders to take over more lands, control more people to supply their needs and more support. This is how cities developed, not because people thought it more intelligent. Of course now you need personal servants and workers within these cities and more armies to conquer more lands as the land increasingly becomes more barren. This of course is told to us as being due to the development of man’s intelligence which is why we moved to cities.

Well the fertile lands of Sumer dried up and became desert. North Africa dried up and became desert. The fertile valleys of the early farming areas in China dried up and became desert. The Mayan leadership continually shifted to new areas of dominance as the land in one area disallowed continued existence. This is the history of civilization. This is the history of our first attempts to control nature. And this when we began to degrigate and alter our environment.

Fossil fuels won’t be used for centuries. Fossil fuels are taken to as an improvement over water power. Fossil fuels are more advantageous and less harmful to our environment, at least visibly, because it was fairly obvious at the time of their widespread use that water power was causing communities to have less water. Fossil fuels seemed endless in supply and water was finite.

They were more efficient in creating more wealth more rapidly and they allowed for a new burgeoning class of leadership. Of course they didn’t seem to understand that fossil fuels need to be cooled and therefore they were still deleting water supplies (most fossil fuel plants in the world even today still use water as a coolant). So what exactly do we have here? A well known environmentally unsound and very unnatural way to create energy with a history of not succeeding although we still use it for irrigation and we still build dams and we still build hydroenergy plants.

As far back as 1200 B.C. some Greeks were beginning to notice that draining swamps and cutting down forests were creating less water power. Of course other Greeks ignored the warnings. As science began to develop in the 18th century Fourier was able to hypothesize that the earth’s atmosphere was necessary to keep the earth warm enough for life and that without the atmosphere the surface would be much cooler. Then in the 19th century, John Tyndall and Eunice Newton Foote separately showed the heat collecting effects of carbon dioxide and water vapor and suggested that these gasses in the atmosphere probably were responsible for

Fourier’s discoveries. In 1896 Svante Arrhenius published his calculations on how humans were altering the environment. He published how human release of CO2 And vapor into the atmosphere were increasing the temperature of the earth. In 1912 there was an article published in Popular Mechanics specifically warning that in a few decades the gasses released in our atmosphere would become problematic for continued survival. So the fact that man’s effect upon the environment is not something recently discovered but something that has been continually ignored for at least 3200 years when the first known discussions of human effects first began to be talked about.

So where has our intelligence increased? Well I’ve been told we can develop technologies to remove the greenhouse gasses. Wonderful. Then we’ll have global cooling. Or we’ll develop technologies to create oxygen in the atmosphere. Wonderful. Then we’ll be over oxygenated and all plant life—including our food plants will die. Well we’ll develop artificial foods and we’ll grow them in controlled environments. Wonderful. I suppose. But what about feed for cattle? Of course all this unnatural technology will still require energy. And all that energy has to be harvested from natural resources that have to be controlled and all that control of any energy source requires the natural energy source be converted into something that is unnatural. There simply are no natural energy sources once they are converted into an energy that was not natural.

Water is finite. The more we use it the less we have and it simply doesn’t all return. And all of our Wonderful technologies to control the damages we do to the environment will have a Unwonderful consequence. Now to truly announce ourselves as an intelligent species we have to understand that. Yes we may have the knowledge to alter our environment but the more we alter what nature gave us the more it exponentially alters nature and it will alter itself naturally from the effects of human alteration which will means it will wipe out the species that believes it can create its own environment.

So ultimately what our attempts to control water have illustrated to us for several thousand years is that the more we attempt to control water the drier our environment will become because irrigated and dammed water evaporates more rapidly and only half of that evaporated water returns to earth. The other half becomes a greenhouse gas. Water has a very low albedo effect and so more evaporation of water increases the surface by increasing the vapors in the greenhouse gasses in our troposphere which means more heat is trapped on the earth which means more warming temperatures which means more melting ice which means more evaporation. And while water does not have a high albedo effect,ice does. But as ice melts the effect lessens, just as fresh snow has a very high albedo effect of 0.8 or 0.9 as it melts the effect lessens. And when snow is dirty it can have a very low albedo effect. This is why after a six foot snowfall in an unshaded area the snow will melt very rapidly with warming temperatures and one foot of snow along the side of road that has been left from snow plows and mixed with soot and asphalt scapings can still be alongside the road well after all of the snow on the ground has melted. With less polar ice the problem is not rising sea waters but less albedo, so warmer temperatures which cause higher temperatures. My blood boils when I hear supposed scientists talk about melting ice causing sea levels to rise. Melted ice has the same volume as unmelted ice, thus the same volume of water. If there were no sediment in the melted ice and no runoff from our rivers of sediment into the oceans then melting polar caps would actually lower sea levels as there would be more evaporated water. Ocean water though does evaporate slowly because of its volume just as irrigated or dammed water with less volume evaporates more rapidly. So the concern of melting polar ice is not that it will increase the ocean levels but that

there will be less albedo and more heat. With more heat trapped onto the surface the temperatures rise causing more evaporation, more evaporation alters the 52% figure of water than returns to earth and more will become vaporous within the tropospheric greenhouses which in returns increases the evaporation rate. Sediment, especially unnatural sediment from runoff from landfills and other man-made facilities, as well as natural sediments flow into the ocean rising ocean sea levels and lessening the volume of river waters causing more evaporation of consumable water.

Our governments would have us believe we can develop a strategy to lessen our footprint on the atmosphere without considering a strategy for our footprint on the land when it has always been about our footprint on the land which is altering the environment. Our governments would lead us to believe if we wean ourselves from fossil fuels in increments by 10-50 years then there will be no further increase in greenhouse gasses. The problem is that if we continue to degrigate our land and continue to spread out the volume of our water sources and those sources continue to be inundated with soot both natural and unnatural the sea levels will rise from the runoff and our fresh waters will evaporate at an ever-increasing pace and too much evaporation at a faster pace than nature can absorb it means less will return to earth. And the land will become increasingly arid. I have read forecasts predicting that tropical areas of earth will become too hot to live in. Well the temperate areas of earth will be worse as they will become too arid. The problem is we have removed the natural environment for plowed fields and highways and cities none of which absorb the rainfall to increase the wetness of the human land habitat and all of which causes more sediment into the waterways upon which we survive. So a bigger problem for our survival is not fossil fuels in our atmosphere but the continued depletion of our water sources. The fossil fuels we have burned for the last 250 years are only icing on the problem of environmental degradation that began 5-7,000 years ago when a few tried to force the majority to do the work for them and began the first attempts to alter the environment by controlling water. The control of water is the dawn of top-down leadership and top-down leadership is itself unnatural for any species. In the coming issues I will attempt to show just how unnatural top down leadership is and why we will never survive as a species by allowing top-down leadership to show us the way from our environmental predicament.

So here is the final point. Water control, whether for energy or for any other use other than as a source of life is unnatural, very very unnatural. From our first attempts to do so we have not shown ourselves to be an intelligent species because in doing so we have affected the environment and forced our environment to change. We cannot expect to continue attempting to conform our environment to our whims by eliminating one aspect of that attempt and yet continue to conform it to supply all of our needs in unnatural ways. If we have a real desire to survive as a species upon this planet, or any other if we think we can just move elsewhere, then we must recognize that we cannot control the environment. Attempts to do so cause the environment to react because the very nature of the environment is to change with change. If a meteor hits the earth with enough impact the environment must alter, species will die. Funnily enough the earth rights itself but always seems geared towards creating new life forms to survive in the new environment. Well you may think I’m nutty and we’ve been doing this for seven thousand years. Now consider this. Consider how long humanoid species survived overall before he decided he could control the environment. Consider that the environment has already changed and is continuing to do so at an increasingly rapid pace. Consider (not counting ones that we ourselves obliterated) how long other successful species have survived, And then tell me if our “intelligence” is anything but folly because our survival as a species won’t even be a footnote in the annals of this earth. One more thing I would like you to ponder, We

think there must be some other ‘intelligent' species somewhere else in the universe. Maybe we haven’t found them because if they really had the intelligence we think we have it is almost a certainty they could not have survived.

Sources to consider:

History of water power: WIREs Water

Stephanie Rost “Water Management in Mesopotamia from the sixth till the first millennium B.C.” it.

Stavros I. Yannopoulos, Gerasimos Lyberatos, Nicolaos Theodossiou, Wang Li, Mohammed Valipour, Aldo Tamburrino, Andreas N. Angelakis “Evolution of Water Lifting devices (Pumps) over the Centuries Worldwide” it.

MG Gibson “Violation of fallow and engineered disaster in Mesopotamian civilization” it.

IE Kornfeld”Mesopotamia: A history of water and law” it A.Tamburrino “Ancient Water Technologies” it. s.Marjanizadeh, AS Qureshi, H. Turral, P. Talebzadeh “From Mesopotamia to the third millennium trajectory of water and use in the Karkheh River Basin Iran” it Richard Chen, M.L. Kavvas, N.Ohara, M.L. Anderson “Impact of Water Resources Utilization on the Hydrology of Mesopotamian Marshlands” it.

Shuanglei Wu, Yongping Wei, Brian Head, Yan Zhao, Scott Hanna “The development of ancient Chinese agricultural and water technology from 8000 B.C. to 1911 A.D.” it Keke Li Zhifang Xu “Overview of Dujiangyan Irrigation Scheme of ancient China with current theory” it Delphine Driaux “Water Supply of ancient Egyptian settlements: the role from the Old to New Kingdom (ca, 2543-1077 BC)” it

Abdallah Gad “Water culture in Egypt “ Katko & Vuorinen Eds., Environmental History of Water: Global View of Community Water Supply and Sanitation, IWA Publishing, 2007, ISBN: 9781843391104

Aëtius, On the opinions of the philosophers V.30.1. In Longrigg, J. Greek Medicine.

From the Heroic to the Hellenistic Age. A Source Book. London: Duckworth, 1998, p.

31.

Airs, Waters, Places. In Hippocrates Volume I, with an English translation by W. H. S. Jones. The Loeb Classical Library Aphorisms. In Hippocrates Volume IV, with an English translation by W. H. S. Jones.

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