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Submitted by Erico Tavares of Sinclair & Co.
The Hard Life of the First American
A forthcoming book titled “Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton” provides a very detailed account of what might have been the life of this remarkable American ancestor, who roamed Washington State 9,000 years ago. His skeleton was found by chance almost two decades ago, enabling scientists to glimpse into an era which is all but forgotten.
While genetic testing is still ongoing, the thin shape of his skull suggests that he is from Polynesian descent, not Native American as was previously thought. Some two thousand after the end of the last Ice Age humans were already crisscrossing the planet.
At 5ft 7 inches and 163 lbs (74 kg) the "First American" was very sturdy, going after big game animals such as deer, antelopes and sheep. However, he survived primarily on fish and marine mammals, drinking glacial melt-water. He was likely right handed.
But this man had a very hard life. He died at 40 for unknown reasons, after sustaining some major injuries during his lifetime, including major blows to the head, as well as broken ribs as a result of an impact trauma that never healed properly. His shoulder was damaged from the constant stress of throwing spears. And most incredibly, a spear lodged deep into his pelvis was also found, which must have been very painful to live with for several years.
His man-made injuries raise some interesting questions. While they may have resulted from an accident, like a spear gone astray during a hunting expedition, squaring off with patterns from other ancient tribes suggests that serious conflicts among humans must have been a regular fact of life back then. Our ancestors from that era lived in a world which was far less than idyllic.
And this legacy continued throughout the centuries. Native Americans appear to have been in a constant state of warfare, with many tribes becoming extinct well before the arrival of Columbus. Not only did these tribes have to compete for food but also genes, where problems associated with inbreeding likely led to the common practice of raiding one another for women and slaves. The arrival of the Europeans did not make things any better, and not before long they were also fighting among each other.
It took us 9,000 years – the equivalent of 225 Kennewick Man lives – to get to where we are today. Thankfully things are much better now. Cooperation, education, innovation and exploring new frontiers have proven to be incredibly more productive endeavors to our survival and quality of life than warfare and conflict.
And yet, as a species it appears we still have a lot to do here. If he were alive today, the First American might have agreed.
As we embark on yet another ever widening gyre of military violence, I would like to remind all of the truth and veracity of our overlords in these matters...
Submitted by Matt McCaffrey via The Mises Economics Blog,
The 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I seems like an ideal opportunity to spread a message of peace and economic cooperation; sadly, 2014 has so far been a year of new and renewed conflict far more than one of reconciliation.
By now, talk of the horrors of war is nothing new. Everyone knows about the total destruction war brings; in fact, we’ve known for millennia. As Lew Rockwell points out, “just about everyone makes the perfunctory nod to the tragedy of war, that war is a last resort only, and that everyone sincerely regrets having to go to war”—but war continues all the same. Even classical military strategists like Sun Tzu believed war should only be used only as a last resort, and argued that military campaigns could bankrupt states and ultimately, destroy them. Art of War actually states that “no country has ever profited from protracted warfare,” and cautions generals to “fight under Heaven with the paramount aim of ‘preservation.’” Yet as far back as we have historical records, these sorts of ideas have fallen on deaf ears among governments and military organizations alike.
Economics offers many insights into war making and why it persists, but the most fundamental explanation is an institutional one. It’s tragically simple: warnings about the horrors of war go unheeded because the power to make war—as well as “justify” it in the eyes of those forced to fight and finance it—lies in the hands of the state and its business and intellectual allies. States are monopolists of organized force, and as such decide when and how to use their power on a grand scale, especially when they wish to confront other monopolists.
In fact, economic reasoning tells us that conflict is an integral part of the logic of states, which are inherently prone to warfare and imperialism. That war is an essential and practically inevitable behavior of government has been known since ancient times: for instance, Art of War begins by stating that “War is the greatest affair of state, the basis of [its] life and death, the Tao to survival or extinction.”
The central problem is that government is based on the use of the “political means” rather than the “economic means” of social organization. States are not producers of goods and services in the market; rather, they operate by forcible redistribution. They are therefore founded on a conflict of interest between the rulers and the ruled, especially between the winners and losers of the redistribution process.
Furthermore, because state decisions are not guided by entrepreneurial calculation, they result in the waste and destruction of resources, resources that must be replenished if the ruling class hopes to continue to consume. States therefore search constantly for new sources of revenue to support themselves, and to that end they use traditional methods of public finance: taxation, borrowing, and inflation. But these policies ultimately compound their difficulties, generating poverty and inequality, and intensifying social conflict.
Every way they turn, states face recurring economic problems and the need to distract or suppress the victims of exploitation; war making serves the dual purpose of (a) disguising fundamental social conflicts by refocusing attention and/or blame, and (b) providing economic gains to the state and its allies. This then is one economic explanation of how organized violence on a small scale leads to organized violence on a massive scale.
If we want to understand why war persists, we have to take account of the economic foundation of the state. We can’t reason in an institutional vacuum, like the many people throughout history who believed it was enough to simply point out the obvious calamity of war, while leaving the power to make it in the hands of a ruling class.
Despite this week's brief rise above previous resistance at 1.0986, lack of follow through buying and the subsequent sharp retreat (a long black candlestick was formed on the daily chart) suggest top is possibly formed at 1.0998 and consolidation with mild downside bias is seen for retracement of recent rise
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