From Mel Brooks ‘Space Balls’

Cultural Myopia or New Study Challenges The Beginning Of Civilization

“Following the transition from foraging to farming, hierarchical societies and, eventually, tax-levying states have emerged. These states played a crucial role in economic development by providing protection, law and order, which eventually enabled industrialization and the unprecedented welfare enjoyed today in many countries”

Yep. In short other words, rich nations versus poor nations.

“Only where the climate and geography favored cereals, was hierarchy likely to develop. Our data shows that the greater the productivity advantage of cereals over tubers, the greater the likelihood of hierarchy emerging”

The lowly sweet potato, turnip, beet, carrot -these stayed in the ground until time for preparation and consumption- none of which led to the ‘hierarchy’ crucial to the rise of civilization where people like Elon Musk dream of leaving a ‘hierarchical development’ called a trashed Earth behind (with all of its’ poor, doomed schmucks abandoned by the elites once enough stupid people have been sacrificed to sort the technical aspect.) They ‘hope’ for ‘escape’ before the war-mongers weapons sales propping up billionaires bring on World War III (noting if weapons sales were halted tomorrow, the Western economies would collapse.)

“We challenge the conventional productivity theory, contending that it was not an increase in food production that led to complex hierarchies and states, but rather the transition to reliance on appropriable cereal grains that facilitate taxation by the emerging elite. When it became possible to appropriate crops, a taxing elite emerged, and this led to the state”

Yep again. In short other words (again) when the theft of foodstuffs became an option, this enabled the sociopath rise to rule.

“Suitability of highly productive roots and tubers is in fact a curse of plenty, which prevented the emergence of states and impeded economic development”

Right. In effect, this “curse of plenty” amounted to a ‘pre-civilized’ clean environment without means of mass destruction, no oligarchs, no 1%, no world wars, and no need to escape a trashed planet (an escape that is little more than a fantasy in any case.)

“The extension of the empire has meant the growth of private fortunes. This is nothing new, indeed it is in keeping with the most ancient history” -Gaius Asinius Gallus (from Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome)

Don’t miss this one: Loos In Space

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