God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

 

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World by Cullen Murphy

Intensely thought provoking, this extremely in-depth and well researched book covers more than a thousand years of mind control and takes you up to the present day.

Recommended reading for all free-thinking people.

Excerpts:

Torquemada, who was the head of the Inquisition.

No series of events in recent times has produced more invocations of the Inquisition than the prosecution of the war on terror since September 11, 2001. The enactment of tough new legal instruments, the use of extralegal surveillance, the detention without trial of suspected enemies, the reliance on torture in interrogations, the pervading atmosphere of religious suspicion: taken together, these developments help account for the fact that a Google search of “inquisition” today yields upward of eight million entries.

In the year 1231 Pope Gregory IX appointed the first “inquisitors of heretical depravity” to serve as explicit papal agents. Thus began what is called the Medieval Inquisition, which was launched to deal with the menace posed to the Church by Christian heretics, notably the Cathars of southern France. The newly established Dominican Order, whose priests and nuns are identifiable to this day by their white habits, was instrumental in combating the Cathar heresy. Its founder, Dominic Guzmin, is the man celebrated in the 1963 song “Dominique,” by the Singing Nun (said to be the only Belgian song ever to hit No. 1 on the American charts). The inquisitors solicited denunciations and, as their name implies, conducted interrogations. Their efforts were highly localized, there was no central command. The inquisitors were aided in their work by the papal bull Ad extirpanda, promulgated in 1252, which justified and encouraged the use of torture, wielding philosophical arguments that have never wanted for advocates and that would eventually echo in the White House and the Justice Department. Within a century, the work of the Medieval Inquisition was largely done. One modern writer, reflecting on what makes inquisitions come to an end, calls attention to a simple reason: an eventual shortage of combustible material. The Dominicans were nothing if not thorough. As a Catholic growing up with many Jesuit friends, I remember hearing a comment about the difference between Dominicans and Jesuits: Both orders were created to fight the Church’s enemies, Cathars in the one case, Protestants in the other.

The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It

Book Review - Five Stars

The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It by Shawn Otto

Snookered: Corporate greed of Big Tobacco contrived an ingenious end game to bank forty years worth of ill-gotten gains at the expense of untold suffering by people from cancer caused by tobacco. An industry was born that would plunder the world into of an era of science deniers. It was discovered that the American public could be sold anything, even a war, and buying politicians was cheaper than paying taxes or employees.

This huge but fast moving book gave honest answers to why anti-vaccination, climate change and a host of other happenings led to a science denying divided country.

I loved this profoundly honest and extremely well researched book. I consider it to be a “must read.”

Excerpts:

Political and religious institutions are pushing back against science and reason in a way that is threatening social and economic stability.

Inaccessibility makes science and technology more into a matter of belief than know-how, making people more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns.

Throughout 2009 and 2010, raging battles were fought in GOP primaries throughout the country as energy-industry-funded groups recruited and promoted Tea Party candidates to run against Republicans who had voted for the cap-and-trade bill, utilizing evangelical Republican foot soldiers, and knocking the offenders out with relatively small investments. Climate science became equated with Obama and socialism in Republican talking points, and the technique of bashing science or promoting brazenly anti scientific positions became a political identity statement. By late 2010, fully ninety-four of one hundred newly elected Republican members of Congress either denied that global warming was happening (it was all a vast hoax by scientists, they said) or signed pledges to oppose mitigation.

A classic example is the intellectual flight from fascist Europe in the years leading up to World War II. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Berlin was the world capital of science, culture, and art, and these aspects fed off one another. Persecution, particularly of Jews, homosexuals, and artists’ spurred emigration that turned the United States into an intellectual mecca.

Science took an important leap in public consciousness during World War II, when it transformed from an exploration of nature into a means to win the war for democracy and against the tyranny that had overtaken Germany, Italy, and Japan. Radar and the atomic bomb were both Allied inventions that had major impacts on the war’s outcome, as did sonar, synthetic rubber, the proximity fuse, the mass production of antibiotics, and other key wartime innovations, with many of the efforts led by emigrants from an increasingly antiscience Third Reich.

Savages & Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire through Indian Territory

 

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Savages & Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire through Indian Territory by Paul VanDevelder

An in depth look at the driving forces and historical powers, both religious and political, behind the mentality that drove American founders to expand and perpetuate their greed for expansive land acquisitions they called, Manifest Destiny.

This book is a classic of historical revelations that needs to be read and comprehended. I loved its numerous comparisons to humanistic worldly happenings.

Excerpts:

The southerners, including President Andrew Jackson, were hearing none of it. They wanted the Indians’ land, not their trust and friendship. By 1830, southern legislatures were determined to remove Indian tribes from their midst, and they were ready to use whatever means were necessary to accomplish the task. As historian Morgan Gibson has pointed out, nineteenth-century America was a sociopolitical environment controlled by fiercely ethnocentric leaders and followers who, despite all rhetoric to the contrary, regarded all other races and peoples as subhuman.

On July 8, 1970, Richard M. Nixon became the first president in history to deliver a speech to Congress on the subjects of federal Indian policy and Native American rights. After characterizing the termination era of the Eisenhower administration as “a national disgrace,” Nixon challenged lawmakers to join him in writing a new story for Indian country. “The American Indians have been oppressed and brutalized, deprived of their ancestral lands, and denied the opportunity to control their own destiny, yet their story is one of endurance and survival, of adaptation and creativity in the face of overwhelming obstacles.

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 prompted an abrupt and dramatic return to the nihilistic paternalism of the past. The cause for that turnabout was neatly summarized in an article published in Forbes magazine that observed, with searing, atonal irony, “Now, at a time when the United States seems to be running out of practically everything, Indian reservations constitute one of the least-known repositories of natural resources on the continent.”

a secret committee made up of industry experts and their counterparts in conservative think tanks, such as the Rand and Heritage foundations, called the Strategic Minerals Consortium. The SMC was charged with the task of studying the problem of mineral scarcity and finding a way to gain easy access to mineral treasures in Indian country, Secretary of the Interior James Watt came up with a plan of his own, one that was eerily reminiscent of the strategy devised by Congresswoman Beck, Senator Watkins, and Commissioner Myer thirty years earlier. Watt proposed that Congress use its plenary power over the tribes to declare all treaties null and void. Then, the Indians should be moved off their reservations and into closer proximity to white citizens, in urban centers, where they could be more easily assimilated into mainstream society.

By 1983, however, most tribes had stepped into the modern era. By then, thanks to the Indian Education Act passed by Congress a decade earlier, thousands of young Indians had been trained as chemists, biologists, and lawyers in the white man’s colleges and universities. Rather than disappearing into urban America after graduation, many returned to their reservations with the intent of protecting their natural resources, their treaties, and their tribal sovereignty.

Our 51st Wedding Anniversary - December 20, 2020

 

Our 51^st Wedding Anniversary

Jane and I were married December 20^th, 1969. It wasn't the shortest day of the year but the longest night.

The very best years of my life have been spent with my very best friend and my sweet loving wife, Jane. We have actually been together for more than fifty five years and have lived our dreams to the fullest.

Ongoing adventures inspired us for even more and more of these marvelous shared escapades.

We began with canoeing, fishing, and camping and trips around Lake Superior to Niagara Falls, Florida, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Hawaii...never a dull moment.

Next I had an over-powering inspiration to to sail away, I knew this was going to be doable. The kind of boat I wanted was simply beyond our financial limits, so we would just build a boat. Easier said than done. Jane and I researched the subject and came up with a realizable five year plan. We were going where the wind blew, when the spirit moved us, and the price was right. I became keenly aware of the fact that youth only comes to you one time.

This intense life altering episode of our lives ultimately generated the Travel of Dursmirg series of books available in paper and digital editions, Sailing Beyond Lake Superior, Sailing the Sea Islands, Sailing the Florida Keys, and Sailing to St. Augustine.

I was laughed at behind my back and nicknamed Noah. My good friend Skip Koloski said to me, “Anybody that criticizes you has never had an original thought in their entire lives.” My dear old dad gave this useful bit of philosophy; “Friends are happy for your success, your enemies are jealous.”

Amazingly we encountered people who would say; “You are so lucky to have that 46-foot yacht, how did you get it?” My response was “We just didn't watch TV for five years.”

We lived aboard our dream boat for fifteen glorious years, the best years of our lives.

As the years advanced we had to change our game plan because of 22% runaway inflation devouring our hard fought savings.

We bought a handy man special apartment complex on four acres of park-like land adjacent to the tourist attraction, The Fountain of Youth, in Saint Augustine, Florida, with owner financing. Jane and I bought ourselves a huge job that paid about a nickel an hour with no vacation days. The first two years we owned the business every cent that came in went directly back into upgrades that we did ourselves. We only increased rents when we had a turn over and had renovated that apartment...there were 26 units. Our first year we had 26 turnovers, and the second year none. The Arab oil embargo gave us a real financial jolt. Heating oil was 16 cents a gallon when we bought the apartments. It then shot up to $1.30 a gallon. Our boiler burned 22 gallons an hour. This could have put us out of business. Our good friend Ed Weber was an instructor of heating and cooling systems and came to our rescue. With his ingenious innovations and adjustments we were able to cut the fuel consumption by two thirds, and he saved our business.

We needed a convenient place to dock our boat that was also our home. Each day we rowed ashore and then had a long bicycle trip to our new apartment business to start work before six a.m., not returning until after dark exhausted. We did extensive research on the subject and amazingly found what we were looking for across the street from our apartments. One glitch was that we would need to build a 540 foot long pier through the marsh. The land we would buy was contingent on our procurement of a dock building permit. We did our own soundings of the ground strata, and hired Harbor Engineering Company for the permits. I had done all of my own surveying, designing, and materials lists. Each pressure treated piling would need to be jetted down with water pressure to solid strata. The decking would be of prestressed concrete that was actually springy like our ferrous cement sailboat.

Three months of dock building while at the same time managing our apartment business, and we had our own private dock for or 46 foot sailboat that was also our home. Amazingly from our new dock we could sail out into the ocean in twenty minutes without having to go through any bridges.

Another interesting thing was that this creek was the same one that Ponce de Leon had sailed up looking for the Fountain of Youth more than four hundred years earlier.

Read about this amazing story in our book Sailing to St. Augustine.

The dock building project soon opened up even more adventures for us. We became commercial fishermen with our own shrimp trawler, Secotan, purchased a go-fast 26 foot Colombia sailboat El Barco, and we enjoyed several years more of fabulous boating adventures.

The tuning point in our lives came with another handy man special. We bought a VW camper van.

Traveling across the US, Canada, and Mexico plus extensively in Europe where we would keep one of our three camper vans and spend three to five months each year mostly bicycling using the van as our home base. From Norway and Sweden to Spain and Portugal and the British Isles to the East block countries. We biked, hiked, climbed the mountains, and sampled the beer, wine, and fabulous foods.

Living in Mexico has also been a part of the over half-century of our lives together.

Read more about our Yucatán adventures in our books, Yucatan’s Magic and Yucatan for Travelers.

Then click to take a tour of our house.

Now the corona virus has taken the lives of more that 3,000 American lives in a single day, that is more casualties than the entire terrorist attack on New York 9/11. These numbers continue to escalate each day and are expected to quadruple after the Christmas/New year festivities….thank you Donald!

Jane and I continue to enjoy our lives together appreciating every precious minute in our lovely tropical sanctuary in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico.

Photos from our two-week honeymoon trip to Mexico City and Acapulco.  We flew from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Dallas, Texas, and then to Mexico City. 

2020 OUR YEAR IN REVIEW

2020

Our year in review, sharing more than 55 years together with my best friend, my wife Jane.

We started the year in Chetumal, Quintana Roo, Mexico, on the Caribbean coast where we booked an apartment with all the amenities for two months, from mid-November to mid-January, escaping the clamorous Mérida holiday season. This was a six hour bus ride south of Mérida, we traveled light, but as always brought our folding bicycles.

Our location was fantastic. With the central market a block away we indulged ourselves in fresh produce, sea food, and numerous great eats. Every morning early we biked to the nearby bay front to enjoy our sunrise breakfast in perfect serenity with nature at at it’s finest. Great Mexican coffee is conveniently available all across Yucatán at OXXO convenience stores, and we got our daily fix there.

Days we biked, exploring the areas many historical places, visited our grandchildren, sampled local eateries. Afternoons and evenings we stretched out in our hammocks reading books on our Kindle readers plus listening to audio books and noteworthy podcasts. We had a giant screen TV we didn’t use once, but the internet connection kept us tuned into the world and connected with family and friends.

Returning back home to Mérida our daily routine of biking out to breakfast and shopping the local markets for fresh food was a slice of paradise, and preparations for our annual Europe trip were set in motion.

Then corona virus arrived in Mexico from Spain and Italy and next a private jet and two charters of Mexican skiers arrived from Aspen, Colorado, infected with the virus and promptly spread the bug.

The American president confidently assured us that the China virus as he called it would disappear when the weather warmed up and everything would be back to normal by Easter...it was just the sniffles! As casualties increased daily with no end in sight, the Mexicans began to call this the Trump virus.

America became the world’s number one hot spot for virus with daily deaths reaching over 3,000 in a single day by early December. This is more deaths than from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The number is expected to quadruple after the Christmas/New Year holiday. Private hospitals in Mexico are now demanding huge deposits for admission that have driven many to sell their cars and homes.

Compounding this problem is the fact that Mexico does not require quarantine on incoming air passengers and the secretary of health did not order sufficient flu vaccine medicine for this year.

This will be a very interesting time in history, if we live!

Word of Honor: A Peter Wake Novel by Robert N. Macomber

 

Book Review: Five Stars

Word of Honor: A Peter Wake Novel by Robert N. Macomber

The author delivers again in this breathtaking ongoing progression of America's naval influence as it expands into a world superpower. I especially loved the book’s fast moving pace of action taking the reader on a wild roller coaster ride of history. Peter Wake’s struggle, from heart warming love to poisonous personalities, kept me glued to this enthralling and mysterious narrative.

EXCERPT:

United States had invaded at the wrong place in Cuba at the wrong time of the year: the jungles of eastern Cuba during the summer fever season. Malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, typhoid, and dysentery had greatly weakened the regiments.

Word of Honor is part of the award-winning Honor Series of historical naval novels featuring Peter Wake.   

Knickerbocker's History of New York by Washington Irving

 

BOOK REVIEW Five Stars

Knickerbocker's History of New York by Washington Irving

Written when New York was still New Amsterdam, this seventeenth century philosophic author with his extensive treasure trove of adjectives depicts early colonization along the Hudson River where peace and harmony with the Indians still prevailed. Laced with archaic spelling and old Dutch axioms makes for a good look back into an evolving history that formed one of the building blocks of America's original thirteen colonies.

Excerpts:

The question which has thus suddenly arisen is, What right had the first discoverers of America to land and take possession of a country without first gaining the consent of its inhabitants, or yielding them an adequate compensation for their territory? “a question which has withstood many fierce assaults, and has given much distress of mind to multitudes of kind hearted folk. And, indeed, until it be totally vanquished, and put to rest, the worthy people of America can by no means enjoy the soil they inhabit with clear right and title, and quiet, unsullied conscience.

The European worthies who first discovered America clearly entitled to the soil, and not only entitled to the soil, but likewise to the eternal thanks of these infidel savages, for having come so far, endured so many perils by sea and land, and taken such unwearied pains, for no other purpose but to improve their forlorn, uncivilized, and heathenish condition; for having made them acquainted with the comforts of life; for having introduced among them the light of religion; and, finally, for having hurried them out of the world to enjoy its reward!

Born in the USA: The Book of American Origins by Trevor Homer

 Five Stars

Born in the USA: The Book of American Origins by Trevor Homer

A fascinating, interesting, and eye-opening look at the good, bad, and ugly things that made America a world leader.

I loved the well-edited, enlightening, and informative glimpses into this fast moving delivery of true history in the making that made the book a five star read.

Excerpt: Considering the atrocities performed by the defeated Nazi regime and the high financial cost of the war, it might have been understandable if America had insisted on large-scale reparations along the lines of those following World War I. For the first time in history, a nation-state decided to do the precise opposite. America was the only country left that could provide funding on a scale large enough to be meaningful. It was only America that could make a difference. In 1945, the USA lent Britain $3.8 billion and France $1.0 billion. Between 1948 and 1954, it gave further advances totaling over $16 billion to European countries, including former enemies, to promote economic stability. Sums such as these were enormous for the time. The United States, in effect, averted the paralysis of the world’s capitalism.