Part 3 begins as the Australian ice age ended around 13,000 BC. This was followed by 130 meter sea level rise that swallowed up over 1/4 of the continent. The encroaching sea forced coastal First Australians to move inland, leading to competition over food and water with inland tribes.
There is a marked change in the cave drawings around this time, with richly adorned human figures leisurely engaged in ceremony replaced with armed stick figures in detailed battle scenes (the oldest anywhere in the world).
This episode profiles specific cultures that grew up around Sydney, and in Tasmania and the Kimberley, as the continent was divided up into more than 200 discrete nations.
My favorite part of the film concerns invention of the boomerang, which is unique to Australia. The oldest boomerang (its wood preserved in a peat swamp) is 9,000 years old. They were used mainly to drive waterfowl (who mistook the weapon for a hawk) into a waiting net. They were also used in battle, for butchering, for digging out fire pits and for making music.
The second episode covers Australia’s ice age between 25,000 and 13,000 BC. Unlike prehistoric Europeans, who migrated to south during their ice age, indigenous Australians found ingenious ways to survive both the cold and the most severe drought in human history.
Both cave paintings and fossil remains indicate that indigenous Australians were hunting gigantic megafauna (massive kangaroos twice the size of humans and giant crocodiles, lizards and marsupial bears) prior to the Australian ice age. Scientists believe it was more likely the ice age that wiped them out than early aborigines.
Although temperatures reached as low as 20 degrees below zero, up until 15,000 BC early Australians (and the prey they hunted) accessed water via lakes from from glacial melt. After the lakes dried up, they compiled an extensive record (referred to as “the law” or “dreaming*” and transmitted orally and via cave drawings) of where to locate underground water in the desert and when it would be there.
Fossil records suggest indigenous Australians underwent a major dietary change during their ice age, shifting from from fruit and macropods (kangaroos, wallabies and related mammals) to reptiles, bush tomatoes and a kind of bread they made from grinding grass seed.
*Dreaming refers to a complex cultural phenomena in which aboriginals connect with their Spirit Ancestors though stories, ceremony and art to preserve the essential knowledge they need to survive.
This is an amazingly beautiful documentary series about the early 60,000 year old culture of indigenous Australians. According to archeologists, indigenous Australians were the first people to leave Africa 70,000 years ago. They traveled along the coast of Asia and presumably reached Australia around 60,000 years ago. The remains of Mungo Man, discovered in New South Wales in 1969, was determined by carbon dating to be 42,000 years old. This makes it the oldest human skeleton discovered outside of Africa.
Surprisingly, it’s only in the last decade that archeologists have been studying the culture in which Mungo Man lived. They have only recently discovered cave paintings of flightless birds that became extinct 40,000 years ago, as well as enormous stone shelters carved out by his contemporaries and ground edge knives and axes.*
They have also discovered a network of cave maps extending more than 1000 meters (through the Australian desert) depicting the location of hidden underground water holes. It appears these networks were used for trade, arranged marriages and settling disputes between neighboring tribal groups.
This archeological evidence suggests that by 30,000 BC indigenous Australians had expanded right across the Australian continent with a a well developed kinship system and cosmology of religious beliefs.
*This technology only appeared in Europe 10,000 years ago.
This lecture is the eighth in the Kanopy American History course The Skeptic’s Guide to American History. My initial reaction is that Stoler probably isn’t nearly skeptical enough. The South, which still refers to the Civil War as the War Between the States, sees states rights as the primary cause of the war.
Unfortunately Stoler doesn’t really resolve this controversy. However he rightly points out that the immediate cause for Lincoln’s declaration of war was not to end slavery, but to “preserve the union.”
However he never addresses why the union needed to be preserved, ie how did preserving the union protect the democratic interests of the American people? I personally suspect that “preserving the union,” mainly protected the interests of the merchants, bankers and early industrialists, just as preserving the European Union protects the interests of merchants, bankers and industrialists. Similar ultra-national unions will always reduce the input ordinary people have into major decisions that affect their lives.
Stoler begins by talking about the collapse of the Whig Party in the 1850s following the passage of the deeply unpopular Kansas-Nebraska Act. This law, which created the states of Kansas and Nebraska. deferred the decision to the states whether to allow slavery or not. From the 1850s on, the newly created Republican Party, which committed to end slavery everywhere, would be America’s second major party.
Although Lincoln, a Republican, only received 39.8% of the popular vote in 1860, his strong support in northern states mean he won a majority of the electoral college. Lincoln campaigned on a platform of allowing slavery to continue in states where it was legal but preventing its spread to western states as they joined the Union.
Stoler also reminds us that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (freeing slaves in the states that had seceded) didn’t take effect until January 1883 and didn’t free slaves in any of the Union states.*
By early February 1861 (a month before Lincoln’s inauguration), seven states (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina) had seceded.
After Union forces fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina (April 1861), four border states (North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee) also seceded. Four slave states (Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky) remained in the Union.
Stoler denies that conflict over states rights caused the war, arguing that various Northern states also lobbied for for states rights at different times (eg when they opposed the war the US launched against Mexico in 1846). I fail to see the logic of this argument. Just because the North agitates strongly for states rights over specific issues doesn’t mean the South can’t do so as well.
He also denies that a profound difference in their respective economies (with the South being primarily agrarian and the North being mainly industrial) was the root cause of the war. He argues this difference had been present since colonial times without leading to war.
He also poo-poos the distinct difference their respective cultures (with the South possessing an aristocratic planter class not present in the North) as the main cause of war. Here he points out that the North was just as racist as the South and hardly more democratic for the average worker.
*In Stoler’s view, Lincoln’s main goal with the Emancipation Proclamation was to buoy up Northern support for the war, despite massive numbers of casualties, and to open the Union army to extremely motivated ex-slaves. In his next lecture he also identifies dissuading the UK (where the population strongly opposed slavery) from entering the Civil War on the Southern side as a primary motivation.
Slavery Routes: A Short History of Human Trafficking
Part 1 476 AD -1375 AD: Beyond the Desert
DW (2020)
This series explores slave trading that followed the fall of the western Roman empire in 476 AD. Although debt and conquest-related slavery clearly occur in ancient Greece and prehistoric civilizations, wholesale slave trafficking to remote locations only began after the fall of Rome.
Following the fall of Rome, the barbarian societies that replaced Roman civilization (the Goths, Visigoths, Slavs in the Northeast, Byzantine Empire, Berbers and Nubian and Arab tribes). For several centuries Slavs from Eurasia were the preferred slaves. This would cause their ethnic label to be confused with the Greek word for slave.
As Arab armies began expanding into Egypt after 641, the economy and demand for slaves increased exponentially. As oil wouldn’t be discovered for another 1200 years, slaves would serve as an essential source of energy for territorial and economic expansion.
In less than a century, the Islamic Empire would occupy the entire southern coast of the Mediterranean. When Baghdad became its capital (762 AD) thousands of slaves were needed to remove the coating of salt* that covered the soil around Basra to enable cultivation. It was during this period Muslims first began using African slaves. Under Islamic law, only non-Muslims could serve as slaves. Slaves who converted to Islam had to be freed.
Over the eighth century, the Islamic Empire expanded into the Caucasus, the Balkans, Turkey and Russia.
After Cairo became the new capitol of the Islamic Empire in the tenth century, Berber slaves taught their Muslim masters how to use camels for transportation. This enabled military and political leaders to cross the Sahara Desert for the first time to the rich capitol of the the Mali Empire Timbuktu. The Mali emperor employed more than 12,000 slaves from sub-Saharan Africa to work his gold mines – representing, at the time, the world’s largest gold reserves.
Once he he declared Islam the official religion, more than 1000 slaves would leave Mali every year for distant outposts of the Islamic World. Mali rulers also enslaved more than 12,000 natives of sub-Saharan Africa to work the emperor’s goldmines.
By the end of the Middle Ages, there were six main trading routes for exporting sub-Saharan slaves to territories north of the Mediterranean and in some cases as far as China and Japan. Between the 7th and 14th century (when Europe entered the slave trade), it’s estimated a total of 3.5 million Africans were captured and sold into slavery by Islamic traders.
Ironically in the 21st century, light skinned Tuaregs in North Africa still enslave sub-Saharan Africans who become prey to traffickers trying to flee economic oppression and violence in southern Africa.
This documentary looks at the importance of language, symbols and coding in enabling human ideas to endure over time. The narrator, physicist Jim Al-Khalili begins 5,000 years ago when written language first developed in Mesopotamia.
According to Al-Khalili, writing was the only form of “information technology” until 1804 when Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented a mechanical loom. The latter used a primitive system replicate intricate patterns in weaving silk brocade.
This would be followed, in 1840, by the invention of Morse code and the electrical telegraph. These two inventions enabled rapid transmission of information nearly anywhere in the world.
Next would be the computer, first conceptualized in 1936 by Alan Turning, in his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem”*
Turing was trying to discover whether it was possible to create a set of rules to carry out complex mathematical operations. He was trying to test his theory that rules-based calculations could be carried out by machine.
Claude Shanon of Bell Labs would develop the technology (computer code) for communicating these “rules” to modern computers. All computer coding is based on complex strings of 1’s and 0’s (originally designating the on-off status of an electrical signal). These are known as binary digits or “bits.”
*The Entscheidungsproblem (German, “decision problem”) is a famous problem of mathematics formulated by David Hilbert in 1928: Is there an algorithm that will take a formal language and a logical statement in that language outputting “True” or “False” depending on the truth value of the statement?
From Millionaire to Madmen: The Story of John McAfee
Directed by J Aubrey (2020)
Film Review
This documentary recounts the bizarre story of John McAfee, multimillionaire inventor of the world’s first commercial anti-viral software. Free McAfee software (currently owned by Intel) is everywhere. In fact I can recall inadvertently downloading and having to remove it from my hard drive at least four times. McAfee himself has made an X-rated YouTube video explaining how to uninstall it:
He founded the software company McAfee Associates in 1987 and ran it until 1994, when he resigned. After writing some self-help books and starting a yoga institute, he moved to Belize to avoid a string of lawsuits.
While in Belize, he built a lab for an American microbiologist who was researching the antibiotic properties of a local plant.
Embarking on a heavy drug and alcohol spree, he became noticeably manic and paranoid. Complaining that the regular entourage of Belizean prostitutes he engaged were plotting to kill him, he built a police station for his small village of Carmelita and hired a police force to staff it.
His paranoia only increased after the Belize Gang Suppression Unit raided His property based on an allegation a hit man he hired had kidnapped and beat up a local gang member. McAfee was also arrested on a charge of manufacturing methamphetamine and released due to lack of evidence.
In 2010, the microbiologist he was financing fled the country claiming McAfee had drugged and raped her.
When the Belize government charged him with having his next door neighbor killed In 2012, McAfee fled the country for Guatemala. Following his arrest by Interpol, he faked a heart attack and was flown to Florida.
Although McAfee never faced criminal prosecution for his neighbor’s death, the family sued him in US court, which ordered McAfee to pay them $25 million for wrongful death.
He left the US once again to avoid this and other civil judgements against him. In 2020 he campaigned from international waters to become the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate.
Translated by Vrouwen voor Vrijeid (Women for Freedom)
Film Review
This Dutch documentary attempts to pinpoint the main corporations and individuals responsible for the Covid plandemic.
It begins by examining the key institutional investors that own the vast majority of the global share market. Going company by company, filmmakers reveal that approximately 8-10 institutional investors own 80% of the stock of nearly all global corporations. Some of the smaller institutional investors include mutual and pension funds. However the top three of every corporation they examine include BlackRock* and the Vanguard Group.**
The film looks at the institutional shareholdings of company after company, including Google, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Phillips, Boeing, Airbus, Coca Cola, Pepsi, all the mining companies, all the oil companies, Cargill, ADM, Bayer (the largest seed producer in the world since their acquisition of Monsanto), all the textile and fashion brands, Amazon, Ebay, Master Card, Visa, Paypal, and all the banks, tobacco companies, defense contractors, insurance companies, processed food companies, cosmetic brands and publishers and media outlets.***
In every case, both Vanguard Group and BlackRock are both within the top three institutional investors.
They also own stock in each other’s companies. In fact, Vanguard is the biggest shareholder in BlackRock, which Bloomberg refers to as the “fourth branch of government” because it both advises central banks and lends them money.
We don’t know exactly who owns shares in Vanguard as it’s not a publicly traded company. However we do know that it’s a safe place for many of the most powerful families in the world to hide their wealth (eg the Rockefellers, Rothschilds and British royal family).
The film also explores how wealthy families use nonprofit foundations to shape global politics in their own interest without attracting public attention. The big three featured in the film are George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the Clinton Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
All these rich and powerful elites meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland every January and mingle with world leaders and significant non-profit groups, such as Greenpeace and UNESCO.
Chairman and founder of the WEF is Klaus Schwab, a Swiss professor and businessman. In his book, The Great Reset, he states that the coronavirus is a great “opportunity” to reset our societies. According, to Schwab, our old society must switch to a new one because the consumption society the elite has forced on us is no longer sustainable. Under the new society he proposes, people will own nothing and rely primarily on the state to get their needs met.
*BlackRock, Inc. is an American multinational investment management corporation based in New York City. Founded in 1988, initially as a risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $8.67 trillion in assets under management as of January 2021.
**The Vanguard Group, Inc. is an American registered investment advisor based in Malvern, Pennsylvania with about $7 trillion in global assets under management, as of January 13, 2021. It is the largest provider of mutual funds and the second-largest provider of exchange-traded funds in the world after BlackRock’s iShares.
***What this means, In essence, is that a handful of individuals control all public information.
The Story of Energy: The Physical Laws that Govern the Universe
Spark (2019)
Film Review
This documentary explains how scientists came to understand the nature of energy (which came to be expressed in the two laws of thermodynamics) in the 18th-19th century. The history of science has always intrigued me as it’s so rarely taught in public schools.
In the 18th century, what we now call science was referred to as “natural philosophy.” German-born Gottfried Leibnitz was the first “natural philosopher” to study the properties of energy. He believed the universe could be described by the same principles that drove simple machines invented during the Renaissance. He eventually concluded that the world is machine driven by a living force put there by God.
Together with the French doctor Papin, Leibnitz devised theoretical principles for capturing heat energy for useful purposes. A hundred fifty years later, engineers would use these principles to develop the steam engine.
The science of thermodynamics would be launched by French military engineer Nicholas Carnot. In his 1824 book Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, Carnot recorded his observation that heat can only flow from a warm area to a cool area.In 1850, German physicist Ruldoph Clausius developed mathematical formulas for both the first and second law of thermodynamics. The first law states that energy can never be created or destroyed – it can only change from one form to another. The second law states that all systems move from a state of low entropy to one of high entropy.
It was only through the discovery of atoms* that Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann was able to prove that entropy existed. According to Boltzman, heat is transferred when heated highly excited atoms excite other atoms.
*Boltzmann and others were able to mathematically prove the existence of atoms long before scientists developed the technology to “see” them.
This documentary is about the life of Hedy Lamarr, the glamorous movie star who invented frequency hopping radio transmission. This technology is currently used used for GPS, wifi, bluetooth, military satellites, cellphones and nuclear launch technology. Most of the film is based on an interview she gave Fleming Meeks in May 1990 for Forbes magazine. She was 76 at the time.
Born in 1941 in Austria as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, Hedy starred in her first movie in Austria at age 17. She married a Nazi munitions manufacturer at 19. Fearful of persecution for her Jewish background, she secretly fled to London four years later.
She landed a studio contract with MGM, starring with Charles Boyer in her first major film (Algiers) in 1938. During the war, she briefly dated Howard Hughes, who built her her a chemistry lab in her home after she improved the aerodynamic design of his aircraft. Together with composer George Anthell, she developed a radio guidance system fir Allied torpedoes using frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology.
A strong advocate for women’s equality, she hated the way the major studios type cast her as a pretty face, and produced three films herself.
Lamarr was married and divorced six times and had three children she raised as a single mother. During her stint at MGM, she, like many other stars came under the care of “Dr Feelgood” (Dr Max Jacobson). Jacobson, who worked for MGM for roughly 20 years (until he lost his license in 1974), gave many stars all “vitamin” shots to help them work the 70-80 hour weeks demanded of them. The shot’s main ingredient turned out to be methamphetamine.
Her ongoing amphetamine addiction was responsible for major work and family difficulties. When interviewed in 1990, she had a total income of $300 a month from Social Security.
The US government never paid her for her invention, and she died in 2000.
Full film can be seen through your library on Beamafilm.
The Most Revolutionary Act 