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WHEN MOORS RULED IN EUROPE

The title of this post as indicated above is also the title of a great documentary movie which should turn the heads around of most people who think they know European history.

To begin with black people ruled one of the greatest societies Europe has known. I said BLACK PEOPLE RULED ONE OF THE GREATEST SOCIETIES EUROPE HAS KNOWN.

Just as startling to most would be the fact that when Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella on behalf of the Catholic religion burned all the books of the Arabic people they were burning all the books about themselves as well as the books about everybody else in the world. In both cases they burned books of science, philosophy, history. They burned everything. They sent Columbus to the new world to destroy anything anybody in the new world had written or created. Then they brought back the new world’s gold to smear on all the statues and what not in all the Catholic churches in the world.

Being at times quite interested in profit motive and such, I used to sit in the “Cathedral” in Segovia and think. One of the things I thought about was how I could possibly remove all the gold from that church and take it back to south america and help rebuild some of what the Spanish world had done to “latin” america, not to mention Utah. Wow! Could I come through with a torch and melt the gold off the statues? How many people would I have to bribe to turn their heads while I heisted, hefted and hauled ass?

If you have read my novel, NINE ELEVENS, or any the posts and promotional materials about it on this site, then you know that I talk much about al Andalus, the Andalusia that existed before the vicious Vassals of dark ages posing as Christian saviors of Europe invaded northern Spain with the intention of destroying southern Spain in the name of Christ and the Holy Roman Church – but mainly the church.

The truth about the books is that the more than seventy libraries in Andalusia established by the Islamic rulers is this. The Chinese print mills coming into existence were used to make those books. The first mill went to Baghdad. The second went to Cordoba the capitol of Andalusia.

WHAT WAS IN THOSE BOOKS?
Well, the people of al Andalus, Andalusia, more or less collected copies of all the books ever created in Europe. Then they translated them to Arabic. So, the knowledge of everything was essentially in Arabic libraries. They were created by the Islamic invaders, the Jews, and the original Christians of southern Spain.

But where did the black part of the Islamic people come from? The etymology of the word ‘moor’ means black.

So al Andalus had the vigor and courage of the black moors of north Africa, the math and science of the Arabic world, the embedded Christians, and the Jewish people who remind me of Minnesota because in Minnesota I saw that attitude of “you betcha, we can work with that.” And many of those jews in al Andalus were fantastic translators especially Sahrah, the mother of the novel’s voyager hero Phoenix. The Phoenician Jews, if you will, were the family that controlled the largest commercial shipping enterprise the world had known.

The more I learn about Spain the more I realize that most countries are several countries. In Germany are essentially the north and south and very different and glad of it. Spain is Galicia, Asturia, Pais Basco, Catalan, Murcia, Andalusia, Castillia and let us not forget the tiny little northern country of Andorra.

Perhaps this post will help make it clear how important it is that Alhambra stay important and still stands where once stood one of the greatest civilizations that ever existed.

Annnnnnd, well, how can I put this? Maybe …
Go stuff yourself, Columbus!

When Moors Ruled Europe

 

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The Latter Day Saints of Maya Prophecy or Last Flight for Mercury

So, what about Maya prophecies whose time of fulfillment coincides with our date of 20/21 December of 2012? If asked, any hip Maya individual will smile knowingly and say, “those crazy gringos! What Maya prophecies?” Because no such related Maya prophecies really exist? Only conjecture? Granted, good money making conjecture? We will see!

And … without a knowledge of 21st century science when the ‘prophecies’ would have been made in the year, say, 700CE, what, minus exact scientific terms, would be the worst imaginable catastrophe a prophecy could fulfill that would occur in the week preceding the celebrating of the anniversary of the birth of Christ a la 2012?

So, two important questions: will the Maya prophecy, real or not, come true? and what is the worst possible disaster that could be foretold for 2012’s close out sale?

A short and pithy book will appear in a couple days on Kindle by CanDo Jack ( http://www.amazon.com/author/candojack ). The title of the book is The Latter Day Saints of Maya Prophecy. And, hey, if you have One Click Kindle Delivery you can get it fast and read it in time to light out for Mars should fear take control.

I will tweet when the book goes up.

The book considers: one, the idea that such a prophecy exists has a very interesting source story. And, two, the fact that a prophecy does NOT exist has never prevented greedy “prophecy experts” from making a buck off it and three, the fact that a prophecy does not exist has never prevented terrorists from using it as a date to schedule an incredible catastrophe. And, four, such a catastrophe could be the most devastating catastrophe ever experienced by humanity. And the most novel, and the most feared for the last fifty years by threat knowledgeable US Defense experts. And is more threatening now than ever before.

More on that beginning with a little background.

More than a year ago, I began researching Maya history for a fact filled novel entitled Nine Elevens. The term ‘MayaN’, capital N for emphasis, is reserved as an adjective for the language of the Maya people who exist, by the way, primarily in Guatemala. They have been there for certainly three and probably five thousand years. They are the reason you can have bananas on your cereal.

Not to get lost in word misuse and Maya abuse but here is a quote from a review of a review of Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto.” The review of the review is at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/08/278950/-Maya-vs-Mayan

Quote:
One is a Maya, two or more are Mayans?

Well, no. Here’s the convention used by Mesoamerican archaeologists. Always choose “Maya” unless referring to a language, in which case the word is “Mayan” (there are at least two dozen living Mayan languages.)

The people are Maya, not Mayans. Our reviewer writes of “a Mayan urban center.” Those in the know would say “a Maya urban center.” He speaks of “Mayan culture.” Nope. Say “Maya culture.”
Unquote.

That entire gotcha may seem to be more archeological language detail than is required. But, keep it in mind for the next week or so because that detailed knowledge may be handy for making some judgments about the credentials of Maya Prophecy ‘scholars.’

My novel, Nine Elevens, began with my discovery that the Mountain Meadows Massacre occurred on a 9/11 date, 1857 specifically. The location, specifically, was about thirty miles west of Cedar City, Utah. Personally, until that point the only thing famous to me about Cedar City, Utah was that in 1993 I arrived in Utah from my home near Munich with two goals: one, sharing Utah’s weightless white wonderful ski slopes with my wife; and, two, renting a plane in Cedar City to fly her around the entire Grand Canyon.

Years later my interest in the Cedar City area was resurrected with the story of The Mountain Meadows Massacre and a trail of 9/11s which took me eventually back to the land of the Maya on the date 9/11/911.

I was hooked. My brain, joined by my heart early on, spent the next three months with the Maya. I was with them in the first great civilization, then through the classic civilization and six hundred years later to meet the Spanish Conquistadors.

By then my Classic Maya twin brother heroes Pacall and Exall had created themselves and gotten ship wrecked on a small island in the Caribbean. The island’s chief cannibal was explaining to the tree bound twins how he would prepare them for supper. Writer’s responsibility to ensure the story continued demanded that the twins be rescued. But, by whom?

Fortunately, the writer’s background brain delivered, under threat of an inaugural case of writer’s block, the character, Phoenix, the first Phoenician Jew. At least the first Phoenician Jew, sailor, explorer, cosmopolitan, dilettante, inventor, scientist whom the writer had ever encountered. And the first to reach Maya.

And neither Maya nor the Caribbean were ever the same again. And the etymology of Caribbean, cannibal, was restored if for no other reason than to honor James Michener, whose 672 page novel, CARIBBEAN, introduced those cannibals to the readers of the world in 1989. That tome sits next to its German cognate cousin, KARIBBEAN. They stare at me from my bookshelf to ensure I give them proper recognition. They stand shoulder to shoulder with an older sister, Iberia, whose Michener knowledge base and influence provides some help on the al Andalus chapters of my NINE ELEVENS. Remind me sometime to tell you the tale of how I happened to have in hand a half read copy of IBERIA when I arrived in Spain from Denmark in 1980 to work with Iberia Airlines. And forgive my typing a final sentence to this paragraph as my heart takes a brief leap back to high school where I first read Michener’s Bridges at Toko Ri instead of reading Chemistry, the only course I ever failed. Even then Michener wrote long books.

BREAKING THE MAYA CODE by Michael D. Coe introduced me to the cast of characters who did the breaking. The documentary by the same name is primarily favored by David Coe. Linda Shele’s extensive contribution and her taking a teenaged vacationer in tow. That charmingly brilliant kid became Dr. David Stuart who wrote the amazing book, THE ORDER OF DAYS: THE MAYA WORLD AND THE TRUTH ABOUT 2012. David’s knowledge and his tenacity in getting and securing that knowledge thrilled me and rescued me from a multitude of gotchas about the ‘Maya prophecy’ with the same vigor and analytical thinking that allowed my hero, Phoenix, to rescue Pacall and Exall, two of my Maya heroes from NINE ELEVENS.

At this point you may see growing in the knowledge that I have categorized the world of Maya ‘researchers’ into those looking for the long story of the real Maya and the short story of those looking for what can be boxed and sold in 2012 in time to be ready for the first social sensation of 2013.

But let me let Dr. David Stuart say what I want to say about that better than I can. I choose to let him say that in the book that will appear as mentioned on Kindle in a very few days.

And let me leave the laying out of potential events to that book as well.

For now, let this article persuade you go back to the top of this page and click on SHOP to buy my NINE ELEVENS and read it for yourself.

The novel has several adventures I did not even mention here. Ever been to Big Sur? It will take you there. Ever played poker with people like Jesus and his Papa, the Big Deal? It will take you there. Ever run off the cliff with lemmings, it will take you there? Ever steal a Spanish galleon from the conquistadores? It will take you there.

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“Be Nice” and “Let’s Get to Work”

POTUS’s victory speech was the best he has ever delivered IMHO. Two things stand out for me. Both were near the end. They were, “Be nice” and “Let’s Get to Work.”

The gist of “be nice” has two variants. One is done in the way one places the silverware precisely on the place setting. The other is “nice to the hilt.” Id est, be ever so nice until you get the ‘other’ precisely and inescapably in the line of delivery of the dagger. The former is, at best, precursor to the latter and always poor cultural conditioning. Being ‘nice’ to the loser is an insipid bit of propriety. It is perilous silliness non pareil.

Obama’s speech remarking as to the wonderful qualities of Romney and his family invites the knock at the door that reveals not the policeman come to warn you a serial killer is about but the serial killer himself whom you are too embarassed to confront directly so you invite him in for a drink. He accepts and you cannot help but think that when he finishes that drink he is going to slaughter your entire family. So, “just how long?” you ask the God of Etiquette, “must I be nice?”

Why not be nice to the voters, Dear POTUS, and simply say, “I think we have learned a lot from this political battle. The most important thing I learned came suddenly in the first debate. I learned I had been conditioned to be nice all my life. And there I was in a world wide arena in a battle to the death. I was being nice and he was shifting for a position to slit my throat in the approved Mormon ritual blood oath manner. I have studied that moment of realization at length and I have come to the conclusion that Mitt Romney is a psychopath, without remorse, without guilt, without conscience, incapable of compassion, incapable of fairness, determined to be deadly. And I am telling you now, dear voter, we have escaped death by a hair and we have come too close to losing all that we hold dear.”

Had the election gone the other way we would not have noticed immediately that the dagger had pierced the skin but with each denuding of a layer of our rights we would grok a little more that the aim of the psychopath’s dagger was to plunge to the hilt leaving us not a fig leaf to cover the core of our legitimate propriety. And then demand we pay for our own burial.

I am really not being so hyperbolic here. Cults are or become superlatively plotted. Romney’s bunch is historically more dangerous than Scientology (Dianetics). The plotting is on a more visceral, animal cunning, level and perpetrated by a far less educated bunch.

In the year prior to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Brigham Young executed an incomparable reign of terror in Deseret (Utah)which by the way was part of Mexico when the Mormons settled there. Young’s gestapo hunted down and slit the throats of any Mormons who decided to opt out, especially those who tried to leave Utah. The year following the massacre the Mormons, like overcrowded rats were so crazed they were anxious to attack the US military that was being sent to straighten things out.

The treatment of women and the thorough conditioning, compare the number of GOP women voting for Romney, had to be a major reason for the women of my novel, Nine Elevens to develop as strong minded capable, women of reason in each of the settings spanning 1100 plus years. They taught me a thing or two and I am so pleased with them.

Let’s get to work.

I have probably written as much relative to the 2012 election of BH Obama as I wrote relative to the 2008 election of the president.

Since the election of 2008 I have criticised the president a great deal. Those criticisms are not forgotten. It is now time to freshen them and try to ensure they are considered.

In 2008 I was just getting to know the president. The unfavorable things about his personality were at that time just guesses.

By 2012 I know far more and some of my guesses became frighteningly real.

But, it is well worth taking a breath and appreciating the difference between a psychopath and a person of tremendous executive capability who is, I trust, willing to learn.

Some books helped me to understand some things.

If the demagogues waving the “he ain’t amurrican” flags had read [not likely] Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman they would have learned enough about Obama and his heritage to know that challenging his birth rights, loyalties, and capabilities were consummately silly, tawdry, and unnecessary and would ultimately fail and turn to rotten eggs in their faces. The book taught me a lot. Having spent some time in Indonesia myself I understood Obama’s mama and thus Obama himself a lot better.

Recently I have been reading Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men. The president had his hands full at first not knowing and then trying to resolve the problems he had with some bad choices in selecting his administration. He was fortunate that not quite all of his choices were men. Suskind get’s down to detail born of incredibly patient and painstaking research in illustrating how much those choices had to affect his growth as our national CEO.

Michael Lewis’s description of Obama’s decision making processes are significant and ‘right on’, a term that certainly came along before Lewis’s time and Obama’s too. But, I think that term is the correct one.

Much of what Obama needs to do he already understands and must have on his calendar. He has learned a lot. He was serious when he said, “Let’s get to work.”

I’m ready. Are You? I am sharpening my criticisms on my side and I hope the president is evolving action responses that make an old man look like a second childhood amateur.