"The continent of North America was settled in several waves by Siberian hunters, each wave accompanied by the theft of land and conquest. In what bank is that stolen wealth kept today? The arriving Europeans discovered a collection of half-naked warrior tribes killing one another for land, water, game, wives, and simply as a sport - just like anywhere else in the world thousands of years ago. Only some cultures had grown out of it, others had never risen, yet others had gone over the hill and slid back into barbarism. This begs a question: by what measure do we determine which stage of cultural development is the correct one and deserving of being frozen in time?"
The above is but a minor excerpt in what was read today on even my local talk radio here in the HEART of FLORIDA TM, that features barely literate announcer-types all vying to be the next Limbaugh. A tongue-in-cheek riposte to America-Haters, Inc., aka modern liberals. I like to encapsulate it all into two points of interest; without Rome, we'd all be speaking German today. Without America, we'd all be speaking German today. No, not Japanese, because Germany would have developed the a-bomb first then blasted their former allies to the stone age just as soon as they could. Japan has nothing any conquerer would want and actually thought the Germans were going to let them have Australia and Indonesia. The only thing that has changed from old Julie Caesar warning the world about the Germans, and today, is the fact that dinosaur droppings became more important than gold deposits and who'd a thunk the Arabs would have lasted this long as a thorn in civilizations side.
AND...as I was recently explaining to the ever lovely Lisa...the reason the Amerind languished while other civilizations flourished was because their women had yet to invent knitting. Not the gee-gaw trinket knitting, but the let's-clothe-the-world, knitting. They arrived in a land of plenty, lots of food, water, and building material. Problem was, they spent all of the warm days planning for the cold days then come the cold days did nothing but await the warm days. Vicious cycle time. Along came the Euro's who'd figured out this cool way to make clothing that allowed them to peek outside the teepee come snowfall and the North American continent was forever changed. Meanwhile, down in South America, gigunda cities were being built because there WERE no cold days but there WERE warlords that anointed themselves deities...just like Egypt and they even had pyramids too. Building big cities without cement meant slaves and lots of them and that kept the warlords super busy and since no one had the time to sit down and invent new stuff, BINGO, the Euro's conquered them in a cakewalk. Did it take me too long to get around to saying that the GUN was, after knitting, the most important invention of all time?
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