The Gilded Age Part I: The Disney Movie

Bill O'Reilly writes history books.  This is an important fact, at least I think it is. He's one of the few people that include a works cited in his books, at least one of the few conservatives.  Still, he ignores things like the Jewish Wars while writing about Jesus which is about as jarring a void as the time he left out the regulators when he wrote his tell-all of Washington.

In reality it just makes for good propaganda.  Without things like the Jewish Wars, the Jews could have easily killed Jesus.  You add the Jewish Wars into play & it suddenly becomes glaringly obvious that the Romans killed him & why.

The same thing with Washington, it wouldn't be prudent to let the American people know that the founder of our country sold one of his biggest cavalry units to the British because they supported Thomas Paine & wanted an egalitarian nation with no slavery.

Those two tiny facts rewrite a pretty good chunk of history.  They also turn history into politics.

Now, if you are American, the only people that know what the hell the Jewish Wars were are the Jews.  It was their great epic of failure to shake off the Roman Empire. When you know why happened and what they were, it's easy to see that Jesus was killed because he was a threat to Rome.  When you don't know about them Jesus was killed because the Jews are greedy.

Little things like that make the difference between learning to hate Empires for killing Jesus & learning to hate the Jews for it.

It's kinda sorta a big deal.

In America the real big one is the Gilded Age.  It was a term coined by Mark Twain

It's important because if you are Libertarian, Republican, or conservative, it's the economic policy that you are supporting & the one that was flag shipped by Ayn Rand.

NO! NO! NO! NO! IT'S AN ORIGINAL IDEA!!!  IT'S NEVER BEEN TRIED BEFORE!!!  NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!

Now hold on this is actual history, you learned it in high school.  They made a Disney musical about one of the things we're going to cover here and...

NO! NO! NO! NO!  LIAR!  COMMUNIST PLOT!  CONSPIRACY!  LIBERAL INDOCTRINATION!  NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!  OUR IDEA IS NEW AYN RAND CAME UP WITH IT AND IT WILL WORK!!!!!!  I WIN!  I WIN!  I WIN!

I know, I know, this is a touchy subject.  It's hard to talk about because it takes us back to a time when there were no regulations on business.

NO! NO! NO! BUSINESS HAS ALWAYS BEEN REGULATED!  WE'VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE!  NEW IDEA! I WIN!  I WIN!

And this was about the time that there was no minimum wage, no unions, no labor protection, no OSHA Laws, where it was just the worker & the employer that determined wages & the government had now interference in how business or trade operated.

So let's take a step into the Wayback Machine &...

NO! NO! NO! NO! NO! LIES!  LIES! LIBERAL LIES!  WE WENT STRAIGHT FROM WASHINGTON TO LINCOLN TO REAGAN! THE GILDED AGE IS A LIBERAL LIE!  THERE WAS NO SUCH THING AS STANDARD OIL!  LIES!  LIES! LIBERAL LIES!

Unfortunately, as you can see, this is going to be a political post.  There are no two ways about it.  You can't get in the Wayback Machine & go to the time when the conservative economic policy failed, & not have it instantly turn into the political.

LIES! LIES! LIES LIBERAL LIES! LIES! LIES! NYAH! NYAH! THIS NEVER HAPPENED! DON'T LOOK IT UP!  ALL LIES!

So If you can ignore the conservatives trying to shoot down their own history, we'll start in 1899 New York & talk a little about the News Boys Strike....Why?  Because being a Disney musical it's really the only part of the Gilded Age that you're probably familiar with.

Just, um, just try to ignore the conservative talking points.

This was a strike of homeless children.  They were mainly orphans & runaways that slept in the streets & worked all day selling newspapers in New York City for maybe enough money to eat.  This was a child labor strike.

NO! NO! NO! NO! THERE WAS NEVER CHILD LABOR IN AMERICA!  THIS IS ALL LIES!  LIBERAL LIES!  DON'T LISTEN TO HIM!

Anyway, the strike was over wages.  What happened was that there were no work regulations against Child Labor, no regulations concerning the eight-hour day & no minimum wage laws.  If you owned the business you could pay your employees anything you wanted, & in almost every case that meant you were paying them as little as possible.

In New York there were two major papers in competition with one another. 

One was owned by Joseph Pulitzer called The New York World

And the other was owned by William Randolph Hearst & called The New York Journal.

LIES! LIES! LIES! LIBERAL LIES!  NEWS PAPERS WEREN'T INVENTED UNTIL 1942!  DON'T LISTEN TO THE LIBERAL LIES!

Anyway, Hearst & Pulitzer spent most of their time at one anthers throats as they competed for more business.  They were fierce business rivals that would do anything to undercut the sales of their rival papers.

But they weren't about to compete about labor.  What they decided is that they could get more money by paying their child labor as little as possible, so they came together & negotiated the wages that they would pay their starving child labor force.  This way they would both make higher profits without undermining their own work forces.

And that caused the children that worked for them to strike.  They were already living in the streets & now they weren't making enough to even eat.  What did they have to lose?

NO! NO! NO! NO! THERE WAS NEVER CHILD LABOR IN AMERICA!  THIS IS ALL LIES!  LIBERAL LIES! REGULATIONS FORCED CHILD LABOR NOT CORRECTED IT!

And then when the strike actually happened they split the cost of the private paramilitary strike-breaking forces that they hired to beat & murder their striking labor base.  That's right, they hired people to beat & murder orphan children to assure they can continue to keep the orphaned kids starving to death.

The concept caught on in Newspapers across the country.

The strike spread as far as Butte Montana & it wasn't until the authorities stepped in to keep orphans from being killed that it actually broke, which forced Child-welfare programs in both the Federal & State Governments in order to keep children, employed full time, from living on the streets.

NO! NO! NO! THOSE POLICIES ARE BAD!  LET THE CHILDREN STARVE!  DOWN WITH REGULATIONS!  DOWN WITH WELFARE PROGRAMS!  IGNORE THE LIBERAL LIES!

Anyway, Disney went on to turn it into one of their worst musicals ever, I mean, who wants to listen to Bill Pullman sing?  Besides, they cut out all those gruesome murders of children in order to keep it family friendly.

But it stars Batman.

I

I'll leave you with this:

The Cold War VI: Three Days of the KGB

I have an interest in philosophy.  If you get a doctorate in history, the ironically cheap ink on the archival paper will read "Doctorate of the Philosophy of History"  Or something like that, I don't know, I'm not a prof.

Essentially, to simplify it, history classes go like this:

• Here, this is a civilization.
• Here, this is their economic philosophy
• Here, this is their social contract

And then they expect you to take A+B+C & figure out how it all got so fucked up.

That's why you don't see any historians support Objectivism. 

Nope, we've seen that shit before.  We know why that doesn't work & progress is the act of making entirely new mistakes & thinking of entirely new ways to fuck shit up.  Aren't we supposed to be progressing as a civilization to a point where we all lay around while our Robotic Cybernetic Solar-Powered Swedish Nympho Sex Slaves feed us grapes? 

That's progress.

Insanity is making the same mistakes & expecting entirely different results.  Objectivism is insanity.  It's also the economic & social philosophy of Ayn Rand.  Her philosophy is what the TEA Party, the Libertarians, the GOP & most everybody that listens to Rockabilly believes & follows.

This is Ayn Rand:

She looks a lot like Joe Pesci

And her Philosophy is really what Anton LaVey co-opted

Anton LaVey was sort of a rock-star wasn't he?  He's got a spooky stare & a snake.

Now you can read Any Rand, she's written a few books that only idiots think are interesting & well written, (cough cough) Atlas Shrugged (cough cough) or you can say "fuck it," & just read Anton LaVey.

Either way you are getting the same information, but with Anton you're getting that information with a little more style & class & a lot more little devil horn hands, head banging,  & some really kick-ass music.  You might even get a mosh pit or two & really, he's just a lot more fun.

Don't take that as an endorsement, they are both full of shit, we've seen their philosophy fail miserably.  I'm just saying, if you want to go down in flames, have fun doing it.

My buddy Bryan, old MCT, he gave me the philosophy book that I agree with the most.  Now that shit  really blew my hair back.  To blow one's hair back it has to be a new idea, what Bryan gave me was a philosophy book where you almost have to go, "yeah, that will work," when you finish reading it.

It was On Liberty, for those of you keeping track.

I was horribly in love with a girl named Pip & she gave me a philosophy book that I agreed with the least.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra!

I remember reading it & thinking: "Where the fuck is the philosophy?" There was really nothing in it that you could actually try.  Philosophy is supposed to be, you know, materialistic or at least functionally so.  Materialistic enough where you can actually try to apply it to the world in some way, shape, or form.

Friedrich Nietzsche applies to jack shit.  He seems smart, but if you can't put your philosophy into something that can be organized, categorized, tested, & implemented than all it is is masturbation.

It's religion.

Masturbation, religion, same thing, go read LaVey & have fun with it.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche loudly proclaimed that "God is Dead!"

At the time I was trying really hard to be an atheist & even I read it & thought: "pretentious."

Now I am 100% certain that there is a God & he hates us & it's actually probably a she because bitches dey be vindictive & I still think that Nietzsche is pretentious.

But now, you know, that whole internet thing has taken off & it contains all the information that you will ever need to know but sometimes you have to put it together & now I look at the internet & think Nietzsche was dead fucking wrong.

I log onto the internet when I want to know something.

I log onto the internet when I want to find an explanation about how the world works.

Knowledge, infinite knowledge is the definition of "God" in just about every culture.

I log onto the internet when I want to masturbate.

Masturbation is very much like religion.

The internet is God because it is infinite knowledge & thy laptop is thy temple because it what I use to masturbate.  

The only difference between the internet & the real God is that the internet doesn't hate us.

That was my philosophical riff.

You can implement it by trying to achieve a Millian Liberal social contract & beating off to internet porn.  Maybe add a dash of  big Jim Connolly for the economy.

Fucking Micks.  Mad rage in his eye.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us talking about the greatest spy movie ever made:

Three Days of the Condor

The book was actually Six Days of the Condor & worth picking up because it is also the greatest spy novel ever written & hella fun to read.

But we can't talk about the book because it was actually the movie that inspired one of the most successful KGB operations of all time.

Everyone in the KGB looks like a red featureless silhouette of Sean Conner in From Russia With Love.  And they all have yellow hammers & sickles on their chests.

What happened was, one day the KGB sat down & watched a Robert Redfrod spy movie because all spies love spy movies & they were already in the habit of snatching ideas from James Bond movies...no bull shit.

In the movie, Robert Redford works for the CIA as an analyst in a little office where he just reads.  Books, journals, comic strips, anything & snatches the clever ideas & plot points that the writers come up with & gives them to the CIA to try out.

And some of the other people in the office look for potential codes & operations in newspapers & publications from all over the world.

And then someone kills everyone & the plot was turned into an action movie called Mission:Impossible & it stared Tom Cruise & not Robert Redford but was really the same movie with far more action.

The thing is that Tom Cruise had a different job from Robert Redford's.

And the KGB had already gone bye-bye by the time it was released.

The CIA never had an office like Robert Redfords, but after watching the movie, the KGB assumed we did because it seemed like a really good idea at the time, so they opened up one of their own in Moscow.

It seemed to work really well, so they gave it more & more funding, & by the time the USSR fell, they were employing 2,000 people to read as much as they could & steal as many tricks as they could.

Knowledge, infinite knowledge is the definition of "God" in just about every culture.

They weren't just pilfering ideas from James Bond movies, they were taking ideas from everywhere they could & just about every successful KGB operation following the release of that movie, had actually taken the idea or part of it from that office in Moscow.

Dick Tracy Serials.  Comic Books.  Detective Novels.  History Textbooks.  Movies.  Trashy Romance Novels.  Pornography.  Children's Books.  News Papers.  Magazines.  Fucking Greeting Cards.

And then boom.  Psychic spies.

Nope, the KGB put absolutely no money into it.  They got the idea out of a book & wanted us to think that they were researching it so we would spend money researching it & not something else & it gave us another spy movie.

And they lifted an idea out of a book that would become a River Phoenix spy movie.

And that turned into an operation that was successfully caught by the FBI, only recently & turned into a pretty good television show:

And this was all because someone in the KGB watched a lot of Robert Redford films because, well, he really is a pretty good actor, isn't he?

Yeah, there wasn't very much to that story.

Had to put a shit-ton of filler into it.

I'll leave you with this:

People of the Sun III: The Pyramid Builders

I have this occasional reoccurring dream, well, it's more of a nightmare.  It happens whenever I get really seriously stressed out & I wake up with my jaw so sore it hurts to open it.    It's the same dream over & over & over again & I've been having it since I was in my middle twenties.

Some of the people at my last job, the one at the Health Department, my boss in particular & one of my coworkers give things like reoccurring dreams some significance.  Maybe it is a Freud thing, maybe it's a New Age thing, a question that you didn't know to ask, or a premonition, or maybe just the source of my worries & stress.

I don't know.  The point is that they told me to look up the key images in my dreams to find something more about myself.

I never believed in things like that, but hey, they were trying to help, so why not?

Pyramid
Association: - Communication with the higher consciousness, - old knowledge.
Question: - Which higher planes of consciousness do I want to reach?
Answer:- Well that's a no brainer.

Human Sacrifice
 If you are the sacrificial victim, the dream may be a reflection of your attitude. Do you always ‘play the martyr’? Perhaps you have tendencies of self-punishment & self-denial. You may feel that other people undervalue your talents & good qualities.

Heart
To dream that your heart is bleeding or aching represents desperation, despair, extreme sadness & sympathy. You are lacking support or love in some a situation in your life.
 

Wait, no, it's me we're talking about.  I've always been a materialist.  A communist, an individual that has never really been all too mystic.

Much better.

Anyway, according to the mystics, the psychologists, & the people that actually put a lot of meaning into your dreams, I am depressed because I play the role of a martyr in my search of a higher consciousness. 

Shit.  It's actually not that bad is it?  I was sort of hoping it would end up completely ridiculous. 

But the thing is, that reoccurring nightmare is actually a lot more vivid than North by Northwest.  I can find exactly where the dream takes place on a map.  The people that ritually sacrifice me are always the same.  I know exactly what the knife they use on me is made out of.  I know the drug that they use to subdue me.  They wear authentic dress.  The only thing out of place in that nightmare is me & the nose rings.

I'm the one that doesn't fit.  I'm white, of European decent.  I speak English.  I'm kinda sorta very vaguely Catholic.  I'm also dressed as a typical American male.

The most disturbing part of the dream has always been myself.  I can never get around the fact that I'm wearing jeans & a flannel.  Before they give me the drugs I try to explain to them that, no, I'm not dressed appropriately, but they don't understand English.

I try to undress but, no, they won't even let me take off my Doc Martins.

They don't understand that they can't ritually sacrifice me when I'm dressed like the cast of Singles.  They have to at least wait for me to strip nude.

But they have never seen Singles.  That movie hasn't been released yet.

Anyway, I've always just thought that this was a dream based off of something that I had to study in college & for some reason, despite all of the awesome horrible things that I learned in school, these people sort of stuck in my subconscious, so whenever I get really stressed out my brain decides to take my grungy ass back to a valley in the Andes & scare the ever loving shit out of me for punishment.

So today we are going to talk about the Sican Culture, also known as the Lambayeque Culture because they were located in the Lambayeque valley & were the predecessors of the Moche Culture & if you are interested, the Museum of Natural History in Chicago has some pretty cool relics of the Moche Culture.

But first, there are about 82 Pyramids in Egypt & they were all built by the Ancient Aliens that gave us the Stargate.

I only bring Egypt up to use as an example,  When people think of a Pyramid building culture they usually always think of Egypt & then they thing of the Giza, or the three at Giza.

Let's put it into a little more perspective.  Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, lived closer to the invention of the I-phone than she did the building of any of the pyramids that you think of.

By the time that she died, the pyramids were already ancient & Egypt had stopped building them thousands of years ago.

The Sican people built 26 in the Valley of Túcume alone.  They build about 36 in the middle era & about 76 in the late era.

26+36+76=138 & this is from 750-1375 AD.

Of course, Egypt built theirs in a desert & some of them were even built out of stone, so you know, the erosion didn't take hold & left even their mud brick structures in actual pyramid shape.  In the Valley of Túcume, well, they look like the Badlands & not so much like actual pyramids any longer.

That's what happens when you build pyramids out of mud in a region prone to flooding.

They were also, the Egyptians, using their pyramids for a singular reason.  In Egypt, all the Pyramids were tombs...unless you really believe Ancient Aliens, in which case they were either electrical generators, spaceships, or interstellar radios....with tombs built into them.

In the Sican Culture the pyramids they built were actually homes & temples & civic centers.  But, mind you, they were all single family homes.

In Europe everyone lives in a castle, in the Túcume Valley, everyone lived in a pyramid, or on a pyramid, & by everyone that meant that it was only the upper one-percent & everyone else had to worship them.

It's great if you are a Republican.  You got to force your people to build you a giant pyramid so that you can live above them & they were forced to worship you & every time it rained, you were allowed to ritually sacrifice some peeps from the middle & lower classes.

And it was socially acceptable for the upper class to wear enormous nose rings.

In my nightmare, they are silver & not gold & that ALWAYS made me uncomfortable.  Not only was I out of place, but the people that were going to sacrifice me were wearing the wrong nose rings.

It's the little shit in dreams that always freak the fuck out of you.

Whatever.  They only had one real style of jewelry.  Whatever.

So why did they build all of those Pyramids?

Back to me.

My senior year of High School was the absolute best year of my life, weather wise...I think it was my senior year.  It might have been my senior year.

That year came with a thing called El Niño.  Which is Spanish for "The Niño."

It looks like this:

Now, if you are living in Illinois, El Niño means that the summer is going to be nice & cool & not horribly hot & the winter is going to be nice & cool & not horribly cold.  El Niño, in Chicago, means that you are going to have one year of absolutely perfect weather.

El Niño means that Chicago weather is not actively trying to kill you for a change.

But that is Chicago.

In the Valley of Túcume El Niño means something completely different.  It means something like this:

Now that does NOT make for a perfect senior year of high school.  That sucks.

The thing with the Sican Culture is that they knew a shit-ton about Astronomy & Botany & really next to nothing about climate & weather & what caused things like rain & flooding.

For them, all of that was related to the gods.  Thunder meant that the gods were bowling again.

The gods caused the thunder & the lightening & every time it rained it was the gods calling for a blood sacrifice to prevent a massive flooding that would drown the 99% that was living beneath the safety of the pyramids.

So they would pull a commoner or twelve up onto the pyramid, drug them, cut their throats open with an obsidian knife, & then ritually remove their hearts to prevent the floods that spelled the end of their world.

And then they would tell their people that, since they were ordained by god, they followed the rules, killed some of the lesser people & prevented the floods.

It seemed to work...unless it was an  El Niño year.

When Chris Farley struck, the valley flooded & the upper class sacrificed hundreds of commoners to appease the gods & prevent the floods, but the floods came anyway & washed the farms & the homes of everyone else away, leaving only the pyramids.

And that caused the people to flee onto the pyramids & rise up against their rulers.

Now, we have mentioned it in a previous post, but the people came to the conclusion that the old pyramids were embedded with evil, so they rose up against their leaders, ritually burned down the old pyramids, or at least the homes on top of the old ones, moved their civilization a little further down the valley & built it up again.

They chose new leaders, new priests, built new pyramids for the upper class to live in & did the whole thing over again, from scratch.  A total reset.

It seems odd, but even in modern times, when leaders fail the people one too many times, there is a revolution & the old order gets purged & killed & a new civilization is created.  The differences is that today we understand a lot more & generally use firing squads & guillotines.

But sometimes the weather still plays a part in it.  Or at least sometimes climate change does as we have learned in a previous post.

In any case, this post has a very, VERY important moral behind it.  Especially if you are a parent.

Whatever you do, DO NOT, under any circumstances, tell your children that thunder & lightening is just God bowling.  If you do, they are going to build tens of dozens of massive pyramids in a valley in Peru & ritually sacrifice hundreds of thousands of people to assure that God gets a strike or at least a spare & I am going to have another culture to have nightmares about.

I'll leave you with this:

People of the Sun Part 2: Aztecs

I once drank my own piss.

It really didn't taste as bad as I thought it would.

Now hold on, I didn't do it on purpose.

You see there are certain advantages that come with being a man & when you are on a road trip out to a place called Karney Nebraska in the hopes of getting a job at the local news paper, well, you use those advantages.

Men can kinda, sorta take it out & use an empty coffee cup in order to save time on the road.

Of course, three hours later, the danger is that you forget what is in that coffee cup.

And the contents of that cup go from your coffee cup to your mouth to your window, your dashboard, your steering wheel, & a little on you as you swerve uncontrollably in a dead panic & try to find the first possible turn off.

It really doesn't taste like anything, for the most part it is sterile, but the fact remains, human waste is not something that you want to regularly consume.  And we have already covered why.

I only bring it up because it is sorta, kinda, important to the story.

Now we have already covered how we think that people first came to America & we have covered one of the more pressing of the million question marks of pre-Columbian Americas.  Now, we'll talk about one of the more familiar civilizations.

I'm pretty sure there are things here that you didn't learn in school because, well, you were deemed too young by the powers that be.

In this case, the story you heard in school is on the Mexican flag.

Now, to be honest, the story you heard is correct.

What you heard in school was a story about a tribe of natives that were wandering through the desert in search of a home.  One of their priests had claimed that they would arrive when they found an eagle eating a rattlesnake while perched on a cactus.

The story is true.  What they taught you in school is certainly true.

But it is not the whole story.  The entire story is a bit more twisted & largely ignored because of cultural sensitivities.  It was one of those things that they told me not to teach because it might be a little insulting.  Another example would be the mutiny on the Russian submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that was for other reasons.

The whole story starts with a wedding.

Now we have already briefly talked about how horrible Hitler's wedding was & how much worse his honeymoon was, but believe me, this was the type of wedding that the wife was not going to complain about.

Back in the day in Europe & America & Asia & Africa & well into today, the whole wedding thing was sometimes used to solidify alliances.  One family marries into another family & the in-law thing meant that there was loyalty between the families, nations, tribes, whatever.

Sending your daughter to marry a prince is sometimes a little girl's dream.  She was going to be a princess with daddy, but in this case, she was going to be a queen.

It's good to be the Queen.  It was probably also done under the assumption that even a king had to listen to his wife & he probably wouldn't be touching that if he turned his back on her people or went to war & killed her daddy.  And then, on the other side, a king is probably not going to go to war with his daughter or sister.

It was a safe alliance.

The Aztecs at the time were an upstart tribe with no real power & the prospect of marrying into a larger & more powerful tribe was, well, it was enough to make them feel a little safer.

But things get lost in translation.

So the Aztec king was pleased with his bride & he consummated the marriage on the wedding night, just like he was supposed to.

And then to honor the union, he invited the princess's tribe to a feast, along with her father.

The thing is, well, the princess was the main course.

Of course her father didn't know this.  He had no idea that he was eating his daughter.

But he did find out quick when...

...I'm not a very good cook...

..I think the term is "flay."

Anyway, they flayed her alive & they saved the skin for after the feast.

And then, to honor the wedding & the union of the two tribes, the high priest wore the princess's skin & did a ceremonial dance in front of her father.

Like I said, lost in translation.  Instead of being honored that the Aztecs served the king his daughter's heart in a nice stew, & then wore her skin & gave him a dance to unify the tribes under the eyes of the gods, he was a little upset.

Actually, no, he was very, very upset.

And he sort of declared war on the Aztecs right then & there, which sent them on the run.  And he sort of chased them onto an island in the center of a murky lake, Lake Texcoco, in the desert of present day Mexico.

And that was where he saw the eagle with the rattlesnake perched on the cactus & told his people that this was the sign, they needn't run any further.  They had found their new home.  So they called it Tenochtitlan where they turned it into the greatest city on earth & from there forged an empire.

That was the part that you don't learn until college.

And with the exception of Lia & my sister, every married woman I know has bitched about her wedding not being perfect.

Perspective ladies, perspective.  You have had a wonderful wedding compared to Eva Braun & the first queen of the Aztecs.

The Aztecs, by the way, called themselves the Mēxihcah Tenochca.  "Aztec" was a  Nahuatl word for them & they weren't exactly fans of the Aztecs because of the, well, the queen & the ritual sacrifice thing.

Not that the Nahuati actually were clean as far as human sacrifice goes.

You see this story really starts in another city called Teotihuacan.

For the Aztecs & just about every other people in the region, Teotihuacan was the city of the gods.  It marked the place where the gods had once lived & come from the underworld to the earth & for them, just like it is for us today, the city was in ruins.

They all worshiped the gods that came from there, but the names & rituals change depending on the tribe.  They knew slightly less about the city than we do.

Today we know that the entire city was ritually burned by it's own inhabitants.  It wasn't burned from an invading army in a time of war.  It was burned & abandoned by it's own people to remove an evil stain that controlled the city.

This wasn't unusual, from the Southwest United States all the way down to the Southern tip of Chile, the native populations would ritually burn their old civilizations to the ground to cleanse them of the evil that had taken control of them.

It reset their civilization back to zero.  A lot of the time, it meant that the civilization was destroyed along with a lot of the technology & it was only the aspects of their religion that continued.

We know this because of the different counts on the Mayan calendar. 

You know, the one that proved that the world ended in 2012.

One of the Mayan short count resets came with the destruction of Teotihuacan.

So the Aztecs were about as likely to sacrifice a human being as the Mayans & all the other people who followed a religion that originated in a city that was destroyed by its own people who, over the centuries they all thought was the city of the gods & worshiped the ruins accordingly in order to honor their gods & prevent the end of the world through an offering of human blood.

One of the big differences, however, was the the Aztec priests & nobility would eat you after they killed you.

They were called chinampa's & they were one of the reasons that the Aztecs were able to survive & thrive when so many people were out to exterminate them because of that whole normal wedding faux pas.

A chinampa is a floating garden.  When you are stuck on a little island on a murky lake, you have to come up with creative ways for eating in order to survive & thrive so your people can eventually become strong enough to leave the island to kill their enemies & forge an empire.

They literally made floating islands that they used for farm land & harvested it on canoes.  Early hydroponics. 

Lake Texcoco was their protection as well as their farm fields.

It was also their water source & that leads us back to me drinking piss.

They used human waste as fertilizer, so the Aztecs were farming on the lake, they were emptying their waste into the lake, & they were drinking that same water.  Is caused a lot of dietary problems.

These problems were solved, in part, by the Chili pepper, which aided in the digestion that was becoming an issue because of the consumption of their own waste.

They would actually mix it into a drink with coco, which isn't half bad, & use it for just abut everything else.

The thing is, when you are stuck on an island & living off of what you can farm, protein is a problem.  Unlike a lot of the other tribes in the area, they didn't exactly have chickens, at least for the first years before they became an empire & they were stuck on an island surrounded by enemies.

Thankfully, they weren't opposed to eating human beings & like all the other religions, they practiced human sacrifice.

Babies taste of chicken.  We know this because cannibals say that humans taste like chicken, so you figure that babies taste of chicken as well.

Not that they were eating babies.

Most of the time, they were eating their enemies.

The Aztecs didn't kill people when they went to war with them.  They considered killing your enemy excessive.  You were doing the people a disservice by killing your enemies.

When the Aztecs went to war, they fought to capture & not kill.  A captured enemy could be ritually sacrificed.  A killed enemy was no use to the gods.

This is another difference as most other cultures in the region sacrificed their own people, of a specific age & gender & did not eat them afterwards.

The Aztecs, on the other hand, killed people from other tribes, didn't care about their age or gender, & then the royalty & priests had a nice feast with chili flavored chocolate to wash it all down.

 This meant that to assure a steady flow of sacrificial victims, the Aztecs were nearly always at war & if they were not, they would simply go to the tribes that they had conquered & choose the people that they wanted to kill in order to offer their blood to the gods & prevent the end of the world.

This tactic meant that when Hernán Cortés finally came to Mexico to conquer the region, with only a handful of soldiers, he was able to find literally thousands of people that the Aztecs had already conquered to rise up against them & help exterminate them off the face of the earth.

But first Cortés had to make up his mind about conquering them or learning from them.  When he first arrived he was dead set on conquest, until he saw Tenochtitlan & came to the conclusion that it was the biggest, most populated, & most architecturally advanced city on earth & became convinced that trading with them would be the better choice.

But that attitude changed from conquest to knowledge to genocide the moment he saw the temple & watched the human sacrifices.

The Aztecs, after they took the heart out of their victim would boil it until it blew up & use the blood to paint the inside of the temple that sat on top of their pyramids.

Imagine the smell.

It was enough to change Hernán's point-of-view for a third time.  After witnessing the human sacrifices he concluded that, for the good of the world, the Aztecs needed to be completely exterminated & the people that the Aztecs had already conquered & were occasionally used as human sacrificial victims concluded that they were better off under the Spanish than they were the Aztecs.

The war had begun.

And it wasn't just the Spanish versus the Aztecs, it was the Spanish & everyone the Aztecs had conquered versus the Aztecs.

The Aztecs didn't stand a chance.  Once again the entire world was against them.

But the really amazing thing is that all of this took place within the span of 200 years.  The Aztecs went from a nomadic tribe on the run from everyone else, to the world's biggest & most populated city & Mexico's largest empire, to nothing in the span of just 200 years.

They were not so much a flash in the pan as they were an explosion in the pan.

But hey, that's what you get when you eat your wife & dance around in her skin.  That is kinda, sorta, the moral of this story.  Whatever you do, do not flay your bride alive, serve her to your guests, & dance in her skin.  It is a regularly occurring wedding faux pas, but one that you want to avid at all costs.

I'll leave you with this: