#historians

The Doctrine of Discovery is still embedded in American property law today. It was cited by the US Supreme Court as recently as 2005 to deny Indigenous people ownership of their own land. A doctrine written by a pope in 1452 is still being used by American courts in the 21st century.

Most people have never heard of it. That is not an accident.

Here is what they do not teach in history class. Pope Alexander VI, the man who divided the so-called non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal and authorized the conquest of Africa, was personally corrupt. He used his position as pope to secure money and personal favors for his own family. The man who gave Europe permission to enslave millions was doing it for personal profit.

The Vatican knew this. They repudiated the doctrine in 2023. But they stopped short of rescinding the original papal bulls. The documents that authorized the invasion of Africa and the enslavement of its people remain on the books to this day.

CNN Data Guru Reveals Grim Forecast for ‘Melania’ Movie

CNN data analyst Harry Enten revealed that he was shocked by just how badly Melania Trump’s much-hyped documentary is predicted to bomb.

The 37-year-old data guru said that Melania—which Amazon invested $75 million in—was projected to earn as little as $1 million on its opening weekend.

Lance Rosen

Trump's "Ante-Diluvian Era" Is Over...He Is Drowning In Humilating Defeats (Intro to a series)

What Will He Do Over The Next Six Months? What Should We Do To Preempt It?

[Ante-Diluvian: means "before the flood," specifically referring to the time period before the biblical flood in the story of Noah's Ark. In everyday conversation, it is commonly used—often humorously or critically—to describe something or someone that is extremely old, outdated, or hopelessly out-of-date. Also a term used in reference to the mythology surrounding the lost continent of Atlantis.]

Introduction--

When we write about or study history, it isn't simply to chronicle significant past events. We are making an attempt to recreate in both our minds and those of others the most impactful contributions to the advancement of human progress as a whole, in order to learn from them. Conversely, we want to study the ways in which corrupted or criminal institutions and individuals wielded outsized power to obstruct and negate the potentials of such advancements.

Oligarchs and empires are as timeless as the various forms of slavery and oppression which have been the hallmarks of their regimes. Progress, whether scientific, cultural, social, or economic, is seen as a threat to their status, therefore they feel compelled to crush, corrupt, or control it. Not incidently the more malignant reactionary oligarchs and authoritarian types share similar patterns of behavior and personality disorders, and their actions are often very predictable.

So, among other things, we are trying to grasp what makes people tick, what motivates them, what are their strengths, or their fears, how they act in a crisis, how they develop their economies, how they govern, their methods of education, and the discoveries they generated. And just as important, how they make functional societies dysfunctional, sabotage their own futures, blunder into wars and other catastrophes through miscalculation, and why they continue the same patterns of mindless neglect and seemingly endless cycles of violence. We study the causes of conflicts between religions, nations, tribes, social classes, oppression of ethnic or gender minorities, divisions due to rigid adherence to ideologies, philosophies, and cultural paradigms. We read about it all for the purposes of making sense both out of events in the past and the present, but also to give us deeper insight into what the future might hold for us.

There is a fine line between typical corruption, which one could write off to human nature if there really is such a thing, versus conscious criminal intent on the part of leadership. We measure the relative success or failure of governments in part by the degree to which they erect guardrails to protect the public from the dangers of criminal oligarchs. Our laws are made based upon both past precedent, and modern necessity. Those guardrails which the United States once had were the work of countless unsung heroes who toiled for most of their adult lives, in some cases becoming martyrs for their efforts. Regardless of the outcomes those people were successes, not failures, because of the righteousness of their causes. They won, though not all saw victory within their lifetimes. And writing the histories of these heroes is in no sense a mere academic exercise, rather it is an honor.

Both precedent and necessity are destroyed when oligarchs and their technocratic henchmen decide to obliterate them, because such things are considered personally inconvenient to their self-interest. In other words, by their very nature, oligarchs have criminal minds. Libertarian billionaires such as the Koch Brothers are among the worst examples of this worldview.

Trump himself views government and existing US Constitutional settled law as an obstacle to whatever might be his next and most important transaction that benefits himself, and his relationship to the law itself is how to break or evade it without getting caught or being held to account. He has to win every transaction, even if he has to annihilate his counterparty to do so, because he is pathological in his identity, demanding attention, adulation, and obedience. If he can't announce to the world that he is the "winner" of any given deal, he won't agree to it, because his ego won't let him.

Remember the bank robber Willie Sutton, who was asked, "why did you rob banks?" He said, "because that's where the money is." That form of moral sickness is what 85 million Americans voted for. Trump is a larcenist who entertains himself by raping women, and allegedly children. His supporters don't care what he is, so long as he gives them what they want and gets rid of those whom they hate. They are narcissistic in the same way as he, and that is their common bond.

In a sense, history is isochronic, meaning that we can conceptualize at any single instant a point at which the past, present, and future, all converge within the same physical space/time. For example, when we learn of a great discovery or invention a millenia or more ago, archeologists and historians will set about "reverse-engineering" it in order to document how it happened, and sometimes that helps us to make an innovation in the present which benefits society. That innovation, and the method by which it was made, is then passed on to future generations, potentially improving their quality of life. One concerted action, which gives added meaning to the life of a person long dead and serves to improve the lives of people right now, and thereby increases the potential of those coming after us. That is "isochronicity," when past, present, and future are each <changed> in effect by a human discovery or intervention, made in one moment of time.

One useful example of this idea is the great composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who was raised as an orphan after age ten, who labored in obscurity for decades as a Choirmaster, first in Weimar, then for his church in Leipzig at St. Thomas school. And he died in 1750 with most of his works and instruments boxed up. Hardly anyone knew of him, aside from a small circle of musicians and connoisseurs through his son C.P.E. Bach. Only a handful of his compositions were printed or published in his lifetime. It took Josef Haydn, W.A. Mozart, and Beethoven decades later to cement Bach's legacy and build upon his breakthroughs, (in counterpoint, the fugue, all of it) and thus was classical music revolutionized through his impact on them. These composers, by rediscovering Bach and changing the significance of his life fifty years after his death, simultaneously changed the past, present, and future of music.

As one might have already guessed, it works the other way too. Orwell understood this as thoroughly as any writer who took up the subject of authoritarianism. To stop progress, the oligarchs will commission "court historians" to either rewrite or suppress the past, in order to rob people of their history so they won't know how to act in the present, thereby destroying the potential of the future for those who might threaten their power and control.

Reactionaries by nature are not simply in conflict with society's natural inclination to improve its condition, but with time itself. They are trying to wage war in the present to go back in time to an era in which power and wealth resided with a few. Therefore their existence is inherently a failure, because it is rooted in a futile effort to reverse time, in opposition to the laws of the universe as they are understood by organized societies. This is why the study of their histories are akin to an autopsy on a murder victim which purpose is to determine a cause of death. There is no joy in either writing or reading about it, no excitement of discovery, just compiling evidence of their crimes. It is more like a forensic investigation, since there's nothing new or alive to pass on which is of benefit except for the knowledge of what we should never have allowed to happen.

That is the quandry of being an oligarch. They don't create anything themselves because they are mostly uncreative people. They are losers in life regardless of their status, whose natural end will either be cause for celebration, or a galactic sense of relief. Their positions are due to their talent for stealing or misusing that which is created by others, combined with a fluke of reproduction which enabled many of them to be born wealthy.

For example, the twisted Nazi trillionaire Elon Musk "invents" nothing. He "acquires" the work of others through means which are ruthless, unethical, and in a world which was sane would be wholly illegal. He is the main beneficiary of his work, which defines him as the opposite of a genius. He is a self-obsessed greedy racist and misogynist who wants to become a trillionaire just to be the first to do it, no matter how many democracies he topples or people that have to die as a result of his "great innovation," DOGE. His personal motives for going to Mars are perverse, in that he is a racial eugenics advocate who is driven by his obsession to deposit his "super-genius" DNA on extraterrestrial ground, because spreading his sperm samples throughout the solar system represents his concept of immortality. He cares less about scientific progress and more about perpetuating his genetic code. Just like Adolf Hitler did, with his sponsorship of Dr. Josef Mengele's Auschwitz experiments on blue-eyed twins.

When historians look back in time to write about the two Trump presidencies, they will start by studying his mind, how it works, how it doesn't work, and why he is the first ever criminal psychopath to have become a President of the United States. They will attempt to understand how someone with the mentality of a carnival barker con-man, and personal history as a lifelong sexual and financial predator, now collapsing into dementia-related psychotic behavior, managed to succeed through some method of mass hypnosis in sharing his psychosis, corrupting tens of millions of people, and nearly destroying a 250 year old nation-building project in only ten short years.

Notice, we said nearly. We aren't quite there yet.

Coming soon, Part 1--