The Crusades: The Spread of Islam

Oh man, oh man, oh man, oh man.  Honestly oh my fucking God.  Allah in all his glory give us a hand on this one.  If either side of this debate has anything to say about the following couple of posts, there will be blood.

I mean, we're going to be talking about the religions of Abraham & Freddy Mercury here & that's going to angry up the blood.

And we're going to be honest about it too & that's going to get the blood to boil.  Because, well, let's face it.  Honest history, when dealing with Religion, all religions is totally Un-PC in the way that the conservatives like & the liberals hate...& at the same time, it's honest in a brutal sort of way that the liberals like & the conservatives hate.

And that's just the political side.  We haven't even come to the religious side where anything remotely insulting or dark said about any religion, particularly the religion you are following leads to a tumult that is generally followed by bombs & beheadings, stonings & crucifixions.

So to avoid this, we are going to put all the mockery & humor aside, like we always do, & approach this topic with deadly seriousness.

No, I'm joking, we're going to do the same shit we always do.  Only this time, it might actually get us killed by a crazy-wackjob fundamentalist....of the Muslim variety.  The fundamentalists of the Christian variety will kill us if we make it to the next post.

For starters there's a misconception that we have to clear up:

Bull Shit!  Serious Bull Shit!  DING!  DING!  DING! Bull shit detector is on overload here.

Islam doesn't mean peace.  Islam means submit.

Because you know how word, or at least Etymology obsessed we are here, the word Islam literally means "submission to the will of God."

It comes from the root word aslama which means, "resigned, retired, surrendered, & submitted."

So, where does this whole peaceful thing come from?

Well, Islam, as a word also comes from  either a conjunctive with the root salima which means "safety" or salam which does, in fact, mean "peace."

Despite all of that, Islam does NOT mean peace.  It means submit.  Still, Islam is a peaceful religion.

Bull Shit!

Out of all the Abraham religions there is only one that is peaceful in it's creed & you would NOT know that by looking at MOST of it's flag waving, gun-totting, Peace-Bashing, wife beating, concealed carrying, pro-war, queer-stoning, anti-homless , anti-Christ, card-carrying NRA followers.

That rant being said, I bet you can't guess which is the only religion of Abraham that condemns violence.

That's right, it's hard to tell isn't it.  One of the religions was peaceful, but historically, all the religions of Abraham kill in the name of G_d.

Islam was no different.

Alright, you see that map that reads "The Spread of Islam 622-750 CE"  it's the spread of Islam.  That's how you can map it out on the globe.

There are words in that spread that sort of stand out.  Little phrases & what not. 

• Conquest of Mecca
• Battle of Hunayn  
• Battle of Tabouk

He, Muhammad, sort of spread Islam by the sword.

No, not that Muhammad.  All he spread was entertainment...& sort of Civil Rights.

Yeah, that's the Muhammad we are talking about.

He sort of got his followers together, armed them, & then went to war in Saudi Arabia, which, after his death, was sort of completely conquered by the people that followed him.

And then the Rashidun Caliphate spread things through Persia, which we all know from earlier posts was Zoroastrian.

What we don't know, what we haven't covered yet is the fact that the Zoroastrians are the reason that Islam, Judaism, & Christianity, are all monotheistic religions.

You see there were certain scribes responsible for the writing of the Torah over the years.  Together, they spell JED.  They were J.  E.  & D. & before things with the Jews were really solidified the Assyrians came storming in & the burned down the 1st Temple almost right after Solomon built it.

They looked like this:

And we really don't know all that much about them.  They aren't as famous as a lot of the ancient peoples.  Mainly, we know who they were because Yossarian was an Assyrian.

Three person joke that was.

Look close, you see that symbol above king Jehu?  If you are familiar with Zoroastrianism you've seen that shit before.

Anyways, when the Assyrians came rolling in, a scribe broke into the temple & pilfered what we know of the Torah to date.  That's sort of where we get the Book of Deuteronomy from.

Before the Assyrians came rolling through the Holy Land, the Abrahamic God had a wife.

That's right, like millions of Americans, God had a divorce.

The Jews won't admit to it, but it's right there in the Archeological record.  Her name was Aisha. 

She was a fertility goddess.  That is her from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which you are familiar with if you know the Noah story.  She is also mentioned in the Old Testament, the Torah, in the Book of Exodus.

She was even mentioned by Moses, who was around just a little bit after Akhenaten who was a Pharaoh that tried to convert the Egyptians to monotheism. 

And he worshiped the sun god Amun...but the Egyptians hated him & his new religion & now scholars wonder if Moses wasn't a follower.

Anywho....

After Yossarian's people came storming through the Persian people did the exact same thing & this time they took the Jews into exile...& then totally converted to Zoroastrianism which was the world's first monotheistic religion & totally condemned slavery.

So they let the Jews go.

And when the Jews got back, they had a complete Torah & only one God.

And then, Alex came storming through, messed things up, made the men hairy, & about a thousand years later the Muslims did the same thing.

But they couldn't kill the followers of Zoroastrianism outright, not like they could the pagans that refused to convert, so instead they just taxed the hell out of them & oppressed the shit out of them until they converted by choice.

And then they went into North Africa, where they took over the Berbers & used them as foot soldiers to takeover as much of the old Roman Empire as they could, which is why Italians, & particularly Sicilians have olive skin, dark hair, & brown eyes.

LOTS of raping.

Things were going good, until they went into France and got stopped by Charles Martel in the
Bataille de Poitiers & were forced back to Spain, who acted like Ireland & never really stopped rebelling until they kicked the last of the Muslim rulers out.

You read that right, the French stopped them.  They used to be pretty very extremely kick ass.

 And then they started a massive slave trade through Africa, & a smaller one of preferred sex slaves brought from the Vikings which is where we get that nasty word used in Lethal Weapon 2 which we've already learned about in an earlier post.

At the time we are talking about, Istanbul was still Constantinople, & controlled by the Byzantines, who were actually the Romans, or what was left of them, & still very upset about the fact that their empire was conquered, bit by bit, by barbarians & Muslims.

Eventually all the barbarians became Christian & not pagan & the Byzantines formed a sort of shaky alliance with them.  You see, their land was now in Muslim hands, & that land was their holy land, which they were NOT allowed to enter, so they hatched a plan to reconquer it & launched the Crusades.

That is sorta kinda where our story starts, &, for good or bad,  when our story stops, the Islamic Empires were in a bit of trouble due to infighting.


I'll Leave you with this:

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: