The metaphysical folks are always very good at connecting astrological phenomena with what is happening, or has happened in the world. Their analyses of after the fact stuff are often remarkable, as hind sight is 20/20 and makes all things clear. It’s much easier to look at something after it has happened, and then cherry pick the astrological evidence to show that it was foretold in the stars. Politicians are as expert as astrologers at doing that, and with much more deadly results.

Some psychics are genuinely able to pick up on omens, patterns of happenings that presage something about to occur in the world. Often however they take things too far, as is a very human trait, and see omens in everything that is going on, and usually negative omens, as is also a very human trait.

But the sensitive among us could get a lot of practice in connecting dots from just looking at history. And the practice would serve us in good stead when the dots were not as solid as most mundane dots. It looks as if, every now and then I will have to post an article about something that is now taken for granted, but is actually untrue, and has an interesting history that rarely comes to light.

I don’t usually deal with matters like mundane dots because we live in a media controlled society in which thinking is frowned on, and ‘I saw it on TV’ is an authoritative statement. It’s usually too much trouble to deal with decades of overlaid ignorance based on connivance in the past.

But I was asked some time ago in a round table conversation about what I thought was the most heinous crime ever committed on humanity. The other participants had mentioned various genocides, wars, bombing raids and so on. My example was not known to them, and it didn’t have anything directly to do with killing people, though indirectly that occurred. Truth was the initial victim and everything followed from that.

My opinion needed lots of explanation because those I was talking to were much younger and part of a generation steeped in killing people with weapons as the most obvious criminal act. So I explained my dot connecting, giving details about the worst of crimes from my viewpoint, because the whole of humanity is now involved in its consequences. Here is a summary for those interested in mundane dots.

At last, only a few decades too late, people have been talking about breaking free from the grip that foreign suppliers of oil and our greed for oil have on this country. Oil and oil men are responsible for more of our problems than most people imagine. It’s obvious that we go to war again and again over oil. And yet the solution has been known for years on becoming free from the tyranny of foreign oil producers, most of whom have now been antagonized by the antics of our 91 point IQ President, and his cowboy diplomacy.

I did mention in my articles in the 70’s nearly forty years ago that the oil companies were buying patents in renewable energy systems to stop them being implemented. Give them credit for cunning and foresight. They do look ahead where their money is concerned. Often much further than the politicians they control.

For people in our history challenged country it may be a stretch to realize that the whole current oil and environmental catastrophe began here, in the U.S.A. in the 1930’s. It is still going on, and constitutes possibly the greatest legal crime against humanity besides the wars, some of which it was responsible for.

And it wasn’t and isn’t considered criminal yet because it was the criminal politicians involved who made the laws about it. Well, there wasn’t any doubt in my mind, it was and is, to my mind, totally criminal. Seventy years later it is still going on, has affected everybody in the world adversely, and wasn’t, and, as I said, isn’t considered criminal, because of the politics of the rich people involved.

Here is how it started. In the early 1930’s patents for three processes had been obtained by DuPont, our major chemical company. These entailed: making paper from wood, making nylon from coal, and making plastics from oil. The thread connecting that fact with all the current wars, world environmental and fuel problems, including global warming, will not be too difficult to see as we connect the dots.

The profit potential of these patents was awesome, even though every single one of these processes entailed the danger, not then fully realized, to be fair, of pollution, and the danger, perfectly well realized, and deliberately ignored, of using non-renewable resources.

Oil and coal particularly are actually sources of ancient sunlight. It is the energy of the sun from millions of years ago that is released when these fuels are burned. We cannot make coal and oil to replace what is removed from the Earth. They are non-renewable. There is a definite and restricted amount of these materials available in the Earth. Wood could be a renewable resource but only if greed is not allowed to run rampant in the timber cutting industry. Greed has so far always won in all three industries.

The far future is of no consequence to the CEO’s compared with instant profits, and politicians cannot see further away than the next election. The so-called savage Indians considered the consequences of any tribal action for seven generations before undertaking it. The greedheads of today’s industries cannot comprehend such a policy, based as it is on the survival of the human race and its resources.

So, what happened to bring about the DuPont crime against humanity for the sake of enormous profits? There was one major obstacle to these immense and almost unimaginable profits. At about the same time as DuPont received their patents, machinery was invented that could separate the fibers of the hemp plant from the stalk.

This technical advance made it possible to use the totally renewable resource of hemp on a widespread industrial scale for the first time. It had been used on a lesser scale for hundreds of years. And the hemp products were ALL better than those that could be produced using the DuPont patents. This may surprise some of you who were born well after the 30’s. It certainly hasn’t been publicized because of the power of the opposition.

Here are a few bits of historical trivia about the use of hemp. The U.S. Constitution is written on paper made from hemp, as is the Declaration of Independence. Hemp paper is a wonderful, strong paper.

Our first national flag, the original Old Glory was sewn on cloth made from hemp. It makes wonderful, strong cloth.

When Abraham Lincoln read by the light of an oil lamp, the oil was made from hemp. Kerosene lamps and heaters could be totally supplied from by-products of hemp. And kerosene is the basis of jet fuel nowadays.

Henry Ford’s first autos were driven by his favorite fuel, gasoline made from hemp. Diesel’s engines were designed by him to run on fuel produced from plants like hemp.

When you go to an art gallery and look at the wonders of the art of Masters like Rembrandt, you are looking at paints made from hemp.

The Conestoga wagons, the prairie schooners, were covered with tough canvas made from hemp, as were the strong sails of the sea-going schooners and the legendary tall ships, and the China tea clippers.

Mr. Levi’s original ‘wear like iron’ jeans were made from hemp cloth, and so was the parachute harness that saved many lives during the wars after heavier than air flying machines became possible.

Hemp is probably the world’s greatest renewable resource for making ANYTHING that can be made from oil or wood. Over 25,000 superior, biodegradable products can be made from hemp. Note that ‘biodegradable.’ DuPont plastic products can stay around for thousands or even millions of years without decay…totally useless to the Earth’s system of recycling everything with the help of bacteria. Plastic is already choking parts of the oceans and killing sea creatures.

Gasoline and methanol fuels can be made from hemp more efficiently than from coal and oil, and in so doing there is zero production of acid rain or sulfur. Hemp fiber-board is much stronger than wood. Plastic, rayon and cellophane made from hemp are also biodegradable.

Your grocery bag needn’t be of paper from a tree, or a plastic product involving toxic waste. Forests needn’t be cut down for you to get the Sunday paper. Hemp produces four times as much paper per acre as trees, and grows well in 48 states, AND it doesn’t need pesticides!

I could go on, but the point is pretty clear already I hope. With the knowledge available about hemp it is a no-brainer. Hemp is in EVERY possible way superior materially and environmentally to the stuff used now.

Tobacco states could grow it, and both release us from tobacco subsidies and go a long way to making us self-sufficient as a producer of gasoline, without involving pollution. So why isn’t something so beneficial in every way happening now? There is only one reason. DuPont could not make any money from hemp, and money is God in this country. To DuPont in the 30’s the hemp industry was not a potential benefit to humanity, it was a competitor to be crushed, according to standard big business practice, which always involves politics.

Here is how they managed that ambition, to the inestimable loss of the world’s health and environment; it was politics as usual.

The chief financial backer of DuPont was what used to be called an oil baron. He was Andrew Mellon, who also just happened to be the Secretary of the United States Treasury.

The new system that made hemp easily available was not seen by him as a remarkable opportunity for the whole world to benefit. It was seen as the possible loss of billions of dollars to his friends in the oil, timber, cotton, and synthetic fiber industries. We are all familiar nowadays with politicians who manipulate laws, news and circumstances to benefit their cronies in industry. It isn’t a new phenomenon.

So Mellon had a few secret meetings, standard practice then as now, and appointed his nephew-in-law to the critical position of head of the Bureau of Narcotics. Then the Hearst newspapers, that were in the plot, did the same propaganda job for Mellon that they did to bring about the Spanish American War.

You probably remember that the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst realized that America’s first attempt at empire building was a great opportunity to increase the circulation of his paper. He employed top rate artists and photographers, of the caliber of Frederick Remington to go to Cuba and draw or photograph violence, torture, and anything that would sell The NewYork Journal. These things are still used to sell papers. Good news doesn’t get the circulation numbers up. Hearst’s famous quote to the artist Remington was, “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”

And largely because of the efforts of the Hearst newspapers President McKinley, to avoid being called ‘soft’ went to the aid of the Cuban rebels against the Spanish government, and American warships destroyed the Spanish fleet outside Manila in the Philippines.

The power of the press to construct public opinion, not to mention hysteria, had been proven. And an American politician will do ANYTHING rather than be called soft. Both of these principles were noticed by the shrewd men of big business, and have been ruthlessly applied ever since.

But the job of the newspapers this time was different. It was deceit as usual of course, but the target was different, and for different reasons. The Hearst family owned huge tracts of timber which would immediately become as good as money using the new paper from wood technology of DuPont. So the Hearsts and Mellon conspired to outlaw the hemp industry, using the power of money and the press to influence the making of new laws.

The papers began a non-stop campaign to introduce Americans to the new word ‘marijuana’ and then ran totally fictitious stories about the effects of it, always using the word ‘hemp’ in association with it.

Then came movies like Reefer Madness, and the group worked hard to make the public hysterical about marijuana, which was always associated by them with the word ‘hemp. You already probably know how the PR firm hired by the AMA did the same thing with the words “socialized medicine,” to protect the income of American doctors; and government propaganda did the same with communists and “Dirty Red,” and the journalists always manage to put “Satan” and “Witchcraft” together, though they have nothing to do with each other. Now they do it with Moslem terrorists, and Islamic insurgents.

It took a few years then to embed the falsehood firmly into the public psyche. That was before TV. Now it can be done in three days by constant repetition to a TV addicted American public. Witness the falling towers and Dean’s scream.

This technique ALWAYS works when the media cooperate. Hitler and his establishment were past masters at using it against the Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. People get so used to associating one thing with another that anyone who questions the newly conditioned minds is dismissed as weird.

This knocks intelligent, informed people out of the equation, and makes things easier for the manipulation of opinion to occur. There is still a high percentage of people who think that Iraq and Saddam were involved in the 9/11 attacks. The administration knew this to be false from day one, but encouraged the idea for their own purposes, which now we know.

This Hearst/Mellon public relations blitz paid off big in 1937 when a manipulated Congress put a prohibitive tax on hemp, by treating it as the Bureau of Narcotics suggested…always for public safety, as now. Commercial hemp is NOT marijuana and has zero use as a social drug, but the years of well financed lies won out as they so often do. And even now no politician can risk trying to remedy the situation because the money inspired media would scream that they were ‘soft’ on drugs.

So now, less than a hundred years later, we have destroyed the world’s timber resources, the lungs of the Earth and coherers of the soil, for the benefit of the chemical industry. We have needlessly poisoned our water and air so that the same people can become very rich and able to influence government policy with their money. These three things have damaged our environment to a dangerous level, possibly beyond the point of no return.

DuPont, Monsanto, Standard Oil and Dow Chemical are protected from the competition we are all told is the secret of efficiency and success in business, by the laws on marijuana that were put in place by political chicanery.

And we know from the Du Pont fluoride incident in New Jersey during WW II, and from the collaboration of Standard Oil with Faben in Germany during WWII, and Monsanto’s persecution of farmers and the ruthless enforcement of their genetically modified seeds and companion fertilizers, that none of these institutions have the slightest regard for the havoc they have created and are wreaking on humanity and its environment all over the world. Only profits matter.

All this, and yet I repeat, industrial hemp is NOT marijuana, and has no psychological effect. Marijuana is also useless for industrial purposes. But the lies have won for seventy years. I blame government propaganda for much of the drug problems we now have. If they hadn’t lied for years about the terrible dangers of marijuana, as was discovered by the 60’s generation who bothered to check them out, then that same generation would have believed them when they told the truth about the hard stuff. This is even discounting the effect of the CIA making hard drugs the currency in Asia during the Viet Nam War, even though they knew they were making addicts of thousands of American servicemen in the process.

Since the 60’s the establishment has worked on dumbing down American education, always saying the opposite of course. Well informed, thinking people are a danger to a government controlled by corporations. The scheme has worked well. The current administration is ignorant of science, and is indeed anti science because facts of science conflict with their fantasies. American education, which was so fine decades ago, is the laughing stock of Europe.

When I taught mathematics at college level in England I always encouraged my students to go to Foyles, the great London bookstore for new and secondhand books. It always had a minimum of 3 million books on its shelves. I would suggest that the students looked for second hand American mathematics text books published around 1925 to 1930. They were wonderful. The mathematics was integrated. Each book would contain several branches of mathematics all woven together with great skill.

When I came to America in the 70’s and worked as senior editor on mathematics and science books in Chicago I was stunned at the difference. Each branch of mathematics was treated as a separate entity. I had to spend a great deal of time checking that we had the right proportion of Hispanics, African Americans and other ethnic groups in the photographs that cluttered the text. This was to ensure that education committees could accept the books.It benefited the mathematics not at all. The only photographs in the old texts were appropriate ones of famous mathematicians, not of grinning multi-ethnic children posing with props.

Using the Bible as a science text is so far beyond stupid that Europeans cannot understand why there are no riots in the streets of people furious about the destroying the thinking abilities of America’s children. But Americans have been taught to be passive about everything done by the ‘authorities’ and are only allowed to be angry about things that don’t affect profits. People angry about real issues are immediately labeled crackpots.

The greenhouse effect due to carbon dioxide emissions on global warming is largely due to the fact that the U.S.A. burns non-replaceable fossil fuels for 93% of its energy needs, and is obviously willing, indeed anxious to wage continual war to continue this process. And calling people names instead of discussing their viewpoint is now an American art form.

It will be noted by the unprogrammed that the politicians who want the wars that enrich their friends are very anxious not to fight themselves, or to let their children fight in them. It’s always easy to persuade other people’s children to go and be killed for national security. Cheney received five deferrals of his draft, and the President didn’t even finish his stint in the combat-avoiding National Guard that his family influence ensured. None of the hawks have ever been in combat and all have ignored the warnings of the professional soldiers.

So what has hemp to do with this diminishing oil supply for which politicians are prepared to sacrifice other people’s children. Messrs Ford and Diesel both had the intention to use plant-based fuels in their vehicles. Fuel made from the totally renewable resource hemp can be used in gasoline and diesel varieties, not to mention the kerosene used by jet planes.

If hemp were to be grown to provide fuel ingredients it could reverse global warming because of the oxygen generated in the growth process. According to Osborn, an expert on such matters, rural pasture land could produce enough biomass to end our dependence on foreign gas and oil. And the least valuable hemp product is the part used to produce biomass fuels, and each acre of that is currently worth more than an acre of corn or wheat. And I repeat, it doesn’t need fertilizers, the chemical cause of farm bankruptcies everywhere.

If this deliberately circulated lie hadn’t prevailed there would have been no need whatever for the several wars that have been fought to ensure or acquire supplies of oil. None of our troops would have been in the Gulf War or the Iraq conflict. We could make all we need here and probably sell it to the world too.

When Oregon finally restricted logging in 1991, the state used a retraining program, and the timber workers became auto mechanics, health care workers and other kinds of workers. Programs like that could retrain workers now producing toxic fertilizers, paper treated with toxic chemicals, and tobacco and coal, among other products.

During the last Great War to end all Wars, the laws against hemp production were suspended because of possible shortages of all that could be made from the superior hemp products. It could be done again to aid in a more serious campaign in which the air and water of the entire world are at stake. Suspending the laws was a tacit admission of the quality of the products made from hemp. After the War the prohibitions went back on.

This is an horrendous crime against the whole of humanity, and the Earth, and deserves far more than this trifling essay, but I will end with three quotes about the subject. The final corporate one says it all. Read it with care. It is the basis of the influence of big money on our government and was said as a matter of course in a business document.

“Make the most of the Indian hemp seed, and sow it everywhere.’ George Washington 1794

“Since 1937, about half the forests in the world have been cut down to make paper. If hemp had not been outlawed, they would still be standing, oxygenating the planet…”
Alan Bock…Orange County Register 1988. And, though Mr. Bock didn’t mention it, preventing mud slides and soil erosion, that devastate deforested places like Haiti .

“…the revenue raising power of government may be converted into an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization.” DuPont Corporation Annual Report, 1937 page 25.

With oil men running the government of the USA and other countries, and our lily livered politicians too frightened even to use the word hemp because of the consensus of ‘tough on drugs’ lies about it, we are in a perilous position. But the answer is there to several of our current major problems, and is very simple. Grow hemp. Don't hold your breath. Just don’t let Monsanto get a grip on genetically modified versions of it. Blessings, Douglas