How the invention of the plow led us all to Trump and the brink of nuclear extinction
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There must be a special hell for Donald Trump. I just read that he’s waived the ban on cluster bombs, nested bombs that can blast shrapnel over a wide area. But since God died, there’s no hell to punish him. Which brings us to the idea of hell itself. Why did we invent it?
I introduce hell for a reason. Hell is the ultimate punishment—because it’s the only justice available for crimes that can’t be punished on earth. Historically, the poor have relied on hell, because it was the only way they could take their revenge on the people who raped, abused and oppressed them. Most certainly their powerful overlords invented hell as a social safety valve, and a way to protect them from the outrage of the angry masses.
We all know that we, modern humans, began as hunter-gatherers. I read a good piece in the Guardian about that last week. The title says it all: “How neolithic farming sowed the seeds of modern inequality.” In other words, the shift from hunting to agriculture changed everything. For the first time, with agriculture, humans could create food surpluses, and store those surpluses for later use. Control of those surpluses led to the division between the ‘have’ and the ‘have-less’. Rather than explaining, here’s a text diagram of the process:
Surpluses => storage => protection => controllers => hierarchies => power => competition => war => invention => industrialization => resource extraction => acceleration => environmental and social stress => system collapse.
Jared Diamond and many others over the past half century have been predicting system collapse, though it hasn’t completely happened yet, despite our wiping out almost half of the planet’s species during the same time period. We’re still in the pre-phases, in the accelerated industrial phase to be exact.
Modern agriculture isn’t what it used to be. The industrial inputs needed to feed the world’s growing population are enormous. For example, it takes 10 calories of fossil fuels to produce a single calorie of food on our plates. Without chemical fertilizers most of our farmland would be sterile. Fully one-third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions comes directly from agriculture. Meanwhile, smaller farms are going bankrupt at an alarming rate as large scale corporate farming takes over the entire food production economy.
The competition for diminishing resources—fossil fuel, food and more—is already heating up. And from the little diagram above you can see that what comes after competition is war. The wars in the Middle East have been raging on, non-stop, for the last 15 years, with tens of thousands of lives lost, millions displaced and trillions of dollars spent—while income inequality on the social side and climate change on the environmental side spiral unchecked.
Industrialization is a process that favours large scales of economy. Which has led to business consolidation, fewer, larger corporations, and control of those corporations in the hand of fewer people. Fortunately for them, now that God and hell are dead, those in power have acquired near total control of our governments, the police and the mainstream media to protect themselves.
Most of us don’t fight the system. We’re too deeply in debt and dependent on the system. On the other hand, Indigenous people who live on the fringes of our system do fight to protect the land and resources. As Lex Gill and Cara Zwibel report in MintPress News, many of their leaders are now targets of quasi-legal surveillance by the RCMP and Canadian government agencies as they try to protect the environment from new pipelines, dams and industrial mega-projects. It’s not too difficult to connect these lines of government surveillance to protecting corporate interests.
Corporate interests in the United States managed to distill their last presidential election down to two corporate-friendly candidates: Clinton and Trump, and we know how that turned out. Famous American whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg and author of The Doomsday Machine, is concerned. As an advisor to JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he knows that the US military had an active first strike nuclear attack plan that would have wiped out life as we know it. He suggests that those plans still exist. He closes the Democracy Now! interview saying, “A world’s worth of lives are at stake here.“
Thankfully, we can all relax now that Donald Trump is at the helm with his finger firmly on the button, ready to send us all to hell to protect American corporate interests.
Additional reading:
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/dec/05/how-neolithic-farming-sowed-the-seeds-of-modern-inequality-10000-years-ago
https://uclpublicpolicyanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/where-does-social-inequality-come-from-hunter-gatherer-to-agriculture/
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-1289-3_5
https://www.mintpressnews.com/canadas-widespread-surveillance-of-its-indigenous-communities/235309/
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/10-calories-in-1-calorie-out-the-energy-we-spend-on-food/
https://www.google.ca/search?q=co2+is+making+our+brains+fuzzy+youtube&oq=CO&aqs=chrome.0.35i39j69i60l3j69i65l2.4888j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
http://www.sustainabletable.org/982/agriculture-energy-climate-change
https://www.nature.com/news/one-third-of-our-greenhouse-gas-emissions-come-from-agriculture-1.11708
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/american-oligarchs-plotting-biggest-heist-u-s-history/
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/6/doomsday_machine_daniel_ellsberg_reveals_he
There must be a special hell for Donald Trump. I just read that he’s waived the ban on cluster bombs, nested bombs that can blast shrapnel over a wide area. But since God died, there’s no hell to punish him. Which brings us to the idea of hell itself. Why did we invent it?
 |
| A look inside unexploded cluster bomb |
I introduce hell for a reason. Hell is the ultimate punishment—because it’s the only justice available for crimes that can’t be punished on earth. Historically, the poor have relied on hell, because it was the only way they could take their revenge on the people who raped, abused and oppressed them. Most certainly their powerful overlords invented hell as a social safety valve, and a way to protect them from the outrage of the angry masses.
We all know that we, modern humans, began as hunter-gatherers. I read a good piece in the Guardian about that last week. The title says it all: “How neolithic farming sowed the seeds of modern inequality.” In other words, the shift from hunting to agriculture changed everything. For the first time, with agriculture, humans could create food surpluses, and store those surpluses for later use. Control of those surpluses led to the division between the ‘have’ and the ‘have-less’. Rather than explaining, here’s a text diagram of the process:
Surpluses => storage => protection => controllers => hierarchies => power => competition => war => invention => industrialization => resource extraction => acceleration => environmental and social stress => system collapse.
Jared Diamond and many others over the past half century have been predicting system collapse, though it hasn’t completely happened yet, despite our wiping out almost half of the planet’s species during the same time period. We’re still in the pre-phases, in the accelerated industrial phase to be exact.
Modern agriculture isn’t what it used to be. The industrial inputs needed to feed the world’s growing population are enormous. For example, it takes 10 calories of fossil fuels to produce a single calorie of food on our plates. Without chemical fertilizers most of our farmland would be sterile. Fully one-third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions comes directly from agriculture. Meanwhile, smaller farms are going bankrupt at an alarming rate as large scale corporate farming takes over the entire food production economy.
The competition for diminishing resources—fossil fuel, food and more—is already heating up. And from the little diagram above you can see that what comes after competition is war. The wars in the Middle East have been raging on, non-stop, for the last 15 years, with tens of thousands of lives lost, millions displaced and trillions of dollars spent—while income inequality on the social side and climate change on the environmental side spiral unchecked.
Industrialization is a process that favours large scales of economy. Which has led to business consolidation, fewer, larger corporations, and control of those corporations in the hand of fewer people. Fortunately for them, now that God and hell are dead, those in power have acquired near total control of our governments, the police and the mainstream media to protect themselves.
Most of us don’t fight the system. We’re too deeply in debt and dependent on the system. On the other hand, Indigenous people who live on the fringes of our system do fight to protect the land and resources. As Lex Gill and Cara Zwibel report in MintPress News, many of their leaders are now targets of quasi-legal surveillance by the RCMP and Canadian government agencies as they try to protect the environment from new pipelines, dams and industrial mega-projects. It’s not too difficult to connect these lines of government surveillance to protecting corporate interests.
Corporate interests in the United States managed to distill their last presidential election down to two corporate-friendly candidates: Clinton and Trump, and we know how that turned out. Famous American whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg and author of The Doomsday Machine, is concerned. As an advisor to JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he knows that the US military had an active first strike nuclear attack plan that would have wiped out life as we know it. He suggests that those plans still exist. He closes the Democracy Now! interview saying, “A world’s worth of lives are at stake here.“
Thankfully, we can all relax now that Donald Trump is at the helm with his finger firmly on the button, ready to send us all to hell to protect American corporate interests.
Additional reading:
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/dec/05/how-neolithic-farming-sowed-the-seeds-of-modern-inequality-10000-years-ago
https://uclpublicpolicyanalysis.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/where-does-social-inequality-come-from-hunter-gatherer-to-agriculture/
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-1289-3_5
https://www.mintpressnews.com/canadas-widespread-surveillance-of-its-indigenous-communities/235309/
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/10-calories-in-1-calorie-out-the-energy-we-spend-on-food/
https://www.google.ca/search?q=co2+is+making+our+brains+fuzzy+youtube&oq=CO&aqs=chrome.0.35i39j69i60l3j69i65l2.4888j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
http://www.sustainabletable.org/982/agriculture-energy-climate-change
https://www.nature.com/news/one-third-of-our-greenhouse-gas-emissions-come-from-agriculture-1.11708
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/american-oligarchs-plotting-biggest-heist-u-s-history/
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/6/doomsday_machine_daniel_ellsberg_reveals_he
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