Ancient African Math/Science Shatters Stereotypes

Finally, more physical proof against the racist notion that Africans are culturally not all that science/math oriented, the old "dark Africa", "song-&-dance" routine. Thousands of books and manuscripts uncovered in what is now Mali, especially around Timbuktu, are just being studied, with stunning results: African scholars in an unfathomably wealthy civilization independently developing sophisticated math, astronomy, and other sciences, even while Europe was still crawling out of the Middle Ages...

From the world's oldest astronomical observatory to Timbuktu scholar Abul Abbas, who commented in 1723 on much earlier scholars' work in the same city - thus showing they were building an independent body of work (and whose conclusions show his lack of contact with, hence independence from, Europe), African mathematical and science achievements have heretofore been largely kept in the dark. All this, and so far only 14 out of more than 18,000 manuscripts have been translated and examined.
Let the racists read it and weep...

An article in the New Scientist (unless you subscribe, you can't get the full article though) reports the discovery and recent restoration and study projects of thousands of ancient manuscripts, called the Timbuktu or Mali Manuscripts, in/around Timbuktu, the site of an unfathomably wealthy, sophisticated civilization.


"In just a handful of the documents translated so far they have overturned the
received wisdom about early African science and astronomy. The scholars of
Timbuktu, they have discovered, were way ahead of their time."

In 1591, Moroccan invaders destroyed many documents and raided schools and universities in the city, mainly after their wealth. Much was lost, but there are still thousands of documents, many of them hidden in walls and tombs, which are only recently being restored and studied, in large part thanks to the renowned astrophysicist from S. Africa, Thebe Medupe.

In the 2003 documentary film Cosmic Africa, Medupe travels throughout Africa, visiting various indigenous societies seeking to find out their knowledge and understanding in the field of Astronomy. More recently, he has been working on the Timbuctu Manuscript project, teaming with other scientists to study the texts for knowledge of science and math. The results are astounding.

"We can now say with confidence that sub-Saharan Africans were studying math and science over 300 years ago," says Dr. Medupe.

Medupe himself is the motivating power behind what has become a rather sudden and stunning revelation of African intellectual achievement and advanced civilization, long buried under what he calls "Eurocentric" history. As he said in an interview,

"...when I was 15, I started to question why everything was Eurocentric.
Textbooks were using European things and so on. So I used to ask myself whether
it was because there was nothing Africa can offer. I refused to believe that. It
remained a very big question for me for a long time, until I came across a
review on African ethnoastronomy. I was very excited."

In making the film Cosmic Africa, he says:

We decided to select remote communities, where contact with the outside world
was minimal, but also living communities where you could clearly and graphically
show that astronomy was an important part of their lives. That's why we selected
the Bushmen, who live on the border of Botswana and Namibia, and the Dogon
people of Mali, West Africa. The Dogons still live the way they did 500 years
ago. They were dignified, and very hospitable. At the beginning, it was not easy
to get information from them — that's how they protect their culture from being
eroded. But once we won their trust, it was very pleasant to live among them.

We also read about a stone observatory—stone structures in the Sahara desert in
southern Egypt that were erected more than 6000 years ago; that's more than a
thousand years before the Pyramids. The stones were erected to mark the
directions of north and of the summer solstice sunrise.

One evening with the Dogons, I went with two old people to look at the stars. I
asked them what was the most important constellation for them. They said the
Pleiades, a star cluster, which is very important throughout the whole of
Africa, actually. The stars are used for planting and agriculture. I asked this
guy [for] positions of the stars, and he gave me the rising times and positions
at different times of the year. I checked with my laptop, and he was very much
correct. To me that proved he knew what he was talking about.

The Egyptian stones apparently contain alignments similar to those done a thousand or so years later at Stonehenge in Great Britain, but they are smaller in size. The Bushmen made out constellations just like the ancient Greeks and other peoples. To me, it shows the commonality between Africa and the rest of the world.

Medupe just discovered the tip of the great civilizations that were Africa, full and rich civilizations with original advancements in such fields as astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, medicine and climatology.

Timbuktu ... was one of the major cities of West Africa from 800 until just over
400 years ago. It was very prosperous, and had many learning centers, with
people collecting and writing books on law, poetry, astronomy, optics,
mathematics. This history of scholarship in Africa extended over large parts of
the continent. Ancient manuscripts are found all over West Africa and even in
East Africa. They are written in Arabic and in local African languages. ...In
Mali alone, there are around 200 private libraries, and literally hundreds of
thousands of books.

One of the sites featured in the film, Nabta Playa, is believed to be the world's earliest astronomical site.

The potential significance of Nabta as a ceremonial site was further
strengthened by the discovery of an arrangement of stone megaliths (large free
standing stones) on the western edge of the Nabta basin. Some of these stones
had been carefully shaped, and weighed up to one and a half tons. They appeared
to radiate out from a central point.

It is estimated that the Nabta site was built and used around 4800 B.C., and scientists say it shows evidence of having been used for astronomical purposes as well.

But most powerful in their refutation of the Eurocentric view of scientific development perhaps are the Mali manuscripts, some dating back 600 years, including beautifully drawn diagrams of the orbits of the planets in a geocentric universe, which demonstrate complex mathematical calculations and algorithms that were as accurate in some cases as anything we have today. And when as Muslims they needed to accurately determine the location of Timbuktu and Mecca, they surpassed the Greeks by inventing the functions of trigonometry.

This should be food for thought for the far right and racists, now apparently on the rise again, who try to delude the world into believing black intellectual and scientific accomplishment never existed or even cannot exist. But then, thought is something they avoid at all costs. And how can we expect non-thinking people to recognize higher intelligence?

David Horowitz Celebrates Racism: Margaret Kimberly Offers a Balance

I wanted to write much about the $15 million Horowitz-Coulter Fascist Let's-Make-More-Racists LuvFest promoting our New Gestapo Empire under the guise of demonizing Islam, but I ran into this great columnist...
and here's her column:

Christian/Jewish Fascism Awareness Week
by Margaret Kimberley (source: Black Agenda Report)
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Right wing propagandist David Horowitz has declared October 22nd through October 26th Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. Horowitz is one of the biggest beneficiaries of right wing welfare, mostly from the hands of ultra-conservative foundations run by the Scaife and Bradley families. He has received more than $15 million in handouts to promote a white supremacist, pro-war agenda.
The current Horowitz obsession is focused on Islam and on keeping Americans whipped into a frenzy of fear and hatred against all Muslims. The very term Islamo-Fascism is a cynical creation of neoconservatives, designed to insure blind adherence to the Bush war on terror scheme.

The biggest perpetrators of terrorist acts are and always have been governments, not individuals of any religion. When the United States refers to "state sponsored" terror, it must be looking in the mirror. War is the very worst act of terror that can be practiced, giving governments permission to kill and commit brutal atrocities that would be loudly condemned if committed by individuals.

If the world's major religions are compared in terms of body count, it is clear that Islam should not be seen as the enemy. The two nations now in the fifth year of a plan to commit wars of aggression in the Middle East are Israel and the United States. If there should be warnings about particular religions and allegations of fascist connections, the perpetrators are Christianity and Judaism, not Islam.

It is manifestly unfair to label entire groups based on the behavior of a few. The Israeli lobby actively promotes war, but it can't be said that all American Jews are themselves pro-war. Around the world Bush is seen as the bogeyman representative of American Christianity. Many Christians may resent the verdict of guilt by association, but they would do well to remember that Muslims are also entitled to make their own pleas of individual innocence.

Instead Muslims are called upon to denounce any act of brutality committed by another Muslim, and to defend their religion from slanderous attacks. What is good for the Muslim goose, should also be good for the Christian and Jewish ganders. Therefore, October 22nd to October 26th in the year 2007 should also be known as Christian/Jewish Fascism Awareness Week.

The lawyers who wrote memos defending torture are all Jews and Christians, so are the members of Congress who advocate for endless warfare. All of the neocons who spent years plotting the occupation of Iraq and now the destruction of Iran are Christians or Jews. None are Muslim, nor are they atheist, agnostic, Baha'i, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hindu, or practitioners of Voodoo. All attend churches and synagogues and in fact brag about their religious piety.
Norman Podhoretz, father of neocondom, said of the prospect of bombing Iran, "I hope and pray we will...." Crackpot preacher Rev. John Hagee founded Christians United for Israel, whose sole reason for existing is to guarantee the killing of thousands of Iranians. Hagee wants war and wants Bush to start it whenever he feels like it. "We do not have a declaration of war for Iraq, and neither does the president need one to expand it into Iran." Giving political leaders permission to kill as they please is Fascism 101.

Horowitz and his gang have carried out a very sinister plan. They fit the description of fascists to a T. They believe in endless wars of aggression, the destruction of the last vestiges of civil liberties, and subservience to a corporate power. Yet they have succeeded in wielding the epithet of fascism because of Democratic party treason to Bush, a corporate media that deliberately withholds information from the public, and the apathy and confusion that dominate American life.

Americans do need to be aware of a fascist threat, a threat that comes straight from the White House, Wall Street, and the halls of Congress. It can only be fought if its presence is acknowledged and if citizens know that they still have the power to stop it.

Politicians will be of no help in this struggle. Looking to them for salvation is useless when they are in fact the source of the problem. The Democratic congressional victory is nearly one year old and has yielded nothing but one victory after another for the Bush regime.

In a little more than a year, November 4, 2008, a new president will be elected. Another Fascism Awareness Week should be declared at that time. It should be declared to remind us that the fight to maintain democracy will not end with George W. Bush. That is the awareness we really need now.

(Ms. Kimberley' maintains an edifying and frequently updated blog at freedomrider.blogspot.com. More of her work is also available at her Black Agenda Report archive page.)

Civil Extermination: Mob Justice or Justified Security?

"Almost God." Except that God is supposedly just. Now we have Israel cutting off electricity and food supplies to the people and families residing in Gaza in retaliation for rockets fired into Israel from the same area. The Israeli government justifies these measures as necessary security to put an end to the rockets, stating that families in Gaza "harbor" the "terrorists" who shot the rockets in the first place.

Congratulations, Israel. You have the power to confer life and death. And what better way to show off that power, and thus impress and hence deter your enemies, than by giving the civilian population under your thumb a slow "almost death", plunging them into the nether world of neither being exactly alive nor being exactly dead?

You know that "terrorists" have families, and those families must be punished for the crimes of their rocket-launching relatives. And nobody's saying the Palestinians in Gaza are drowning in tears over the Israelis' terror. So what's there to lose? The Mafia used this technique with success - i.e., punishing the families of those who do them wrong - so why not Israel? Why isn't the greater purpose of Israel's protection enough justification for applying mob justice?

Of course, we all hear "there will be international outcry." But who gives a damn about the so-called "international outcry"? Israel is a sovereign state, unlike that gulag archipelago commonly referred to as "Palestine" or "the territories". Nobody has the right to mess with Israel. Nobody has the right to criticize a sovereign state doing what it sees fit to solve a problem involving its own security.

Same law applies to, of course, to all sovereign states, such as the U.S. Nobody has the right to tell the U.S. it shouldn't invade Iraq to take their oil or force democracy on them against their will (as if that was even a logical premise for any reasonable creature to discuss), since they are a sovereign state and invading Iraq was essential to U.S. security. And nobody has the right to tell Burma not to make dissidents disappear the way they see fit to protect their own security, which is clearly threatened by these dissidents, monks or otherwise. Nobody has the right to tell oppressors not to oppress, and nobody has the right to tell invaders not to invade, or the right to tell racists, such as the janjaweed in Darfur, not to exterminate the population they want to loot, rape, pillage, then kill off, and finally subjugate. That is, if the oppressors, invaders, and exterminators happen to be "sovereign states". Like the U.S., like Burma, like Sudan.

Unless, of course, you're a superpower or in the "superpower loop". In which case you have the right to do whatever you damn well want to do, and the whole world be damned. No wonder former Mexican President Vicente Fox referred to Pres. George W. Bush as "cocky". That's the superpower perk. So GW is "cocky", and so is Israel. Compassion is old-think. Aggression and pre-emption and Mob justice is new-think.

And another superpower perk is being able to declare nations as "rogue", "evil" or "terrorism-sponsoring", thus cancelling their above-mentioned rights as "sovereign states" to do whatever the hell they want to do. So Iran doesn't get those "rights". We can condemn Iran. We impose sanctions. And Iraq, pre-invasion Iraq, was also condemned, hence opening the door to invasion, war, and occupation. Their status as a sovereign state was basically cancelled by the Superpower. We call the shots. We name the nations that get left alone, and the nations that get crushed. Baddest guys on the block. We are the sovereign of all sovereign nations.

So back to Israel and its mob justice in cutting off lifeline supplies to Gaza. You see, the Palestinians in Gaza are NOT a sovereign state. They have no rights. Their livelihoods have already been cut off, and they are in a state of poverty and dire need. Compared to the Israelis, who are in many ways on a roll. Nobody recognizes the Palestinians, their government, their right to exist or even live. They are definitely OUT of the Superpower loop.

They are relegated to the term "terrorists", which is the lowest of the low in terms of status. It means one can be picked up and jailed at the slightest provocation. It means one is essentially not human. So cutting off their power or food is not inhumane. And Israel would NEVER do this to a large community of animals, would they? But terrorists do not have the rights accorded to animals. And all Palestinians, including infants and children, are, at least in Gaza, terrorists. It's a form of civil extermination. You exterminate their right to self-determination, even insomuch as it means going out and making a living, or keeping one's family alive by one's own efforts.

Perhaps one can imagine why Palestinians are reluctant to recognize Israel. All they have in defense of their own right to exist as a people is their right to say "no" to oppression. And the right to oppress is afforded to sovereign states. So if they recognize Israel's sovereignty, then they are recognizing Israel's right to oppress and subjugate them and bulldoze their dignity beyond recognition. Would you, in their shoes, be ready for that?

On a more pragmatic note, will this tactic work like it worked for the great Mafia? Will it silence the rockets and attacks on Israel? In the short term, we'll see. In the long term, not a chance in hell. Life, especially human life, just don't work that way. Not in Burma, not in Sudan, not in the American south of yesteryear (or still?), and not even in Israel.

Nobody is "almost God." God always takes responsibility for His actions.

The Right-Wing Extremist in the Heart of the Left

Peace between Israel and Palestine is universally agreed to be the cornerstone to stability and security in the entire Middle East region. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is universally seen as the source and fuel for all other mideast crises - crises so bad many feel they could, or inevitably will, lead to Armageddon...

And yet no reasonable, logical, or even compassionate path to that peace is ever considered. Seriously. By the people that count. By the players.

According to polls, people in both Israel and Palestine want peace. They are ready to compromise to reach it. A majority feel a 2-state solution is the best under the circumstances to resolve the demands of both sides.

When someone says "two states" you think of two contiguous entities. You do not think of one powerful, homogeneous and contiguous entity, and another set of archipelagoes connected by "corridors" and "checkpoints". Who would want that? Who wants their country, be it Israel or Palestine, to forever take on the color and flavor of occupation? Who wants that "war zone feel" or "checkpoint atmosphere" forever in his backyard?

When one thinks of "solution", one thinks of something people can live with realistically for the long term. Then there has to be some human element taken into account. It can't be based on fantasy alone. It must have something to do with people and families on the ground.

It can't work when Palestinians are exclusively called "terrorists". When Israelis are given a carte blanche to do whatever they want with the "terrorists". Because "terrorists" are never human beings. Note the label "enemy combatants". The purpose of this label is to dehumanize the labelees. It makes them non-human. They're not "one of us" in any shape or form, and so we can do anything to them. Torture can be redefined. In the same way, calling Hamas or Palestinians in general "terrorists" precludes having to think about their side of issues. They are, in that case, not really people at all, but an "enemy" to be "combatted". And in the world of "combat", anything goes.

Top former U.S. officials have sent a letter to President Bush strongly urging that the U.S. have "genuine dialogue" with Hamas, the democratically-elected government of the Palestinian Authority. Of course, we all know the official U.S. position is that Hamas is "technically" a "terrorist" organization, and therefore, we cannot talk to them.

This is extremely stupid, and will do absolutely nothing good. Hamas is not the sort of organization pictured in such films as "Air Force One". But people are acting as if it is. They are not trying to kill children or threatening our way of life. They simply want to represent their people, and their people's dignity, humanity, and freedom - and ability to actually live. That is really being called into question. Not talking to people means we don't consider their humanity at all. We consider them as non-entities.

You can't make peace with non-entities.

So the Israeli and Palestinian people will never get what they want, as long as the right-wing Israeli in our foreign policy is King of the Hill. Democrats also have this right-wing thing in their hearts - they fear the spear. Saying in any way, shape or form "no" to Childe Israel, that petulant kid who always gets his way, is a sure way to political death in the U.S. So what drives U.S. policy is not the American, Israeli or Palestinian people, their desires or needs. No. It's what some Zionist right-wing Israelis want to be truth by fantasy. And that means getting their way.

Logic, reason, and compassion be damned.

Betrayal: The "Peace Process" Moves On Forked Roads

Bridgethought of the Day: Native Americans used to say of the Europeans when they invaded their lands, "White man speaks with forked tongue." Now when Israel moves into Palestinian lands, they follow a forked road: one for propaganda purposes, the other for their own purposes which do not involve giving the Palestinians their own "contiguous" state, let alone a "right of return".

That kind of "peace process" is a roadmap to nowhere. Well, not exactly nowhere. It's a roadmap to disaster. Hello, genocide. Hello, oppression. Hello, war without end. Goodbye, compromise. Welcome to Mideast Security Hell.

Now we have former President Jimmy Carter taking the undeniably brave stand of telling it like it is vis-a-vis Israel and the Palestinians. He said to Amy Goodman regarding his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,

“The word ‘apartheid’ is exactly accurate. This is an area that’s occupied by two powers. They are now completely separated. Palestinians can’t even ride on the same roads that the Israelis have created or built in Palestinian territory. The Israelis never see a Palestinian, except the Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians never see an Israeli, except at a distance, except the Israeli soldiers. So within Palestinian territory, they are absolutely and totally separated, much worse than they were in South Africa, by the way. And the other thing is, the other definition of ‘apartheid’ is, one side dominates the other. And the Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people.”
Carter lays much of the blame for the lack of momentum toward a solution on the absence of debate in the U.S.: “It’s a terrible human rights persecution that far transcends what any outsider would imagine. And there are powerful political forces in America that prevent any objective analysis of the problem in the Holy Land. I think it’s accurate to say that not a single member of Congress with whom I’m familiar would possibly speak out and call for Israel to withdraw to their legal boundaries or to publicize the plight of the Palestinians or even to call publicly and repeatedly for good-faith peace talks.”

That's nothing new, either. This is the policy of the United States since Israel was formed. The difference being that after so many years, the obvious apartheid and oppression have only increased, not mitigated. The Israelis are acting like the National Socialists who once oppressed them, not at all like people with a "higher moral authority" driving their actions. Oppression is nasty. Oppression is bad. It's evil. It's wrong. Face it.

There is no motivation for Israel to shape up, either. The Palestinians have very weak and inappropriate "supporters" indeed in the Arabs. The totalitarian dictatorships that make up Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and previously Iraq - now replaced by a Disaster Area in Explosive Phase One - were perfectly content to buy off Yasser Arafat with bucks which he fed to his cronies, wife, and God only knows what else, but certainly did no good to the Palestinian people.

The money and oil such governments have are, in their view, nothing more than pocket money to spend on personal luxuries and pet fantasies. Like the fantasy of Prince Bandar who loves to promote himself as a "friend to Presidents" and a power-broker in the superpower game of chess, wherein Palestinians are mere pawns.

Meanwhile, Israel is secretly implementing another plan to divide Palestinian territory into little pieces of a land-locked archepelago joined by roads over which they have no control. Who cares? Palestinians are a topic that's verboten here. No politician in his right mind will touch it. They are supposedly "untouchables". And so here are the results:

(Source: http://www.btselem.org/English/)
When the Roadmap to Peace has to be paved by Palestinian bodies - men, women and children - what kind of peace, really, is at the end of that supposed Road? Since when was peace or democracy achieved by force, at gunpoint? When did ethnic cleansing become acceptable international policy? Obviously, the U.S. govt. is cool with it. But it never did, and never will, achieve any kind of peace. And peace and security are 2 sides of the same coin. Security doesn't mean war, guns & checkpoints. It means trust.

Try building trust at the end of a gunbarrel. Or a bulldozer. Or try depriving families of water, electricity and food. That ought to create a lot of trust.

There really is no roadmap to peace right now. What they're talking about is a forked road: one road to Israel, and the other road to a junkyard of flammable, volatile human debris. But that's just talk. In truth, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians want hatred, distrust, and failure. So why do the power-brokers, the Israelis with their Superpower pals, keep traveling in that direction?

Bush Torture Policy Showcases Totalitarian Leanings

A totalitarian America: Couldn't happen here?

Take a look at how American adopted its secret torture policy and think twice.

It's Cheney/Bush again, consolidating executive power, eliminating checks & balances, signing secret executive orders, circumventing Congress, the Constitution and International Law, re-writing the meaning of legal terms that restrict their agenda, obfuscating and propagandizing like hell to keep the public completely in the dark and punishing anyone who dares move them toward accountability - in general, behaving like any totalitarian, Machiavellian dictatorship.

Sans open repression. Sans martial law, at least for now - the latter having been opened as an Executive Privilege, hence possibility, by one of those fanfare-free "Presidential Directives" that zipped out past the celbrity-dazed public and their attendant media ... all looking at everything, anything, but this...


According to the latest New York Times expose, once Cheney/Bush got the itch to torture as a supposed weapon in the so-called "war on terror", they were unstoppable.

Not the legislative branch - who's gonna tell Congress? - not the judicial branch - thanks to Ashcroft, Gonzales & other cronies; not the Constitution, not democratic tradition, and not, certainly not, international law or those pesky Geneva Conventions - No, none of these could get in the way of the Cheney/Bush torture agenda.

And not being familiar with torture, the CIA went straight to the experts in Egypt & Saudi Arabia for advice & guidance. Totalitarianism is a learned skill, apparently.

The McCain anti-torture bill (McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act), after much blitz, was a wash after the bite-numbing afterthought at the end basically saying to the CIA, who were conducting the torture in the first place, "Guys, gee, we're not saying that what you did was against the law!" Thus, creating of an anti-torture bill another useless piece of paper, in the long series of useless congressionally-inspired pieces of paper.

Notice the trend: Congress' pieces of paper get shunted, vetoed or nullified in the form of lesser-known addendum; Bush/Cheney's pieces of paper become the Law of the Land. That's why We the People get this feeling of overwhelming powerlessness. It's called Fascist Creep or Totalitarian Cancer. It starts with a few signing statements and Presidential directives and, before you know it, maybe even before our much-anticipated general presidential elections (!), you've got martial law... and nuclear war! And... the United States run by a closet King, the invisible strongman Cheney and his sidekick signer, known affectionately as "W".

Are you afraid for democracy yet?

No, we should fear the terrorists...?,,, Don't we need torture to stop them from taking away our democracy and freedom? Aside from the well-proven fact that torture fails to effectively obtain good intelligence and only exacerbates the problems that led to terrorism in the first place - aside from this, torture also makes what we call "detainees", who have never been given due process, potentially INNOCENT VICTIMS. They were arrested in other countries, accused of crimes not clearly defined, and given no due process, here or in their home countries, and essentially stripped of their humanity based on suspicion or accusation only.

Presumably, this policy has been blessed with the Holy Advice of our ever-present backroom Advisor in All Things Foreign & Terror-related, namely Israel, in order to "win the war". Israel, sitting on a time-bomb for 60 years and all they've won is a lot of neighbors who are either totalitarian or hate Israel or both, is still considered the Grand Master in the field of anti-terrorism. So we can look forward to more wars and more total failure in the field of international relations. Thanks to their uncompromising Principles: both Bush/Cheney and Israel share a strong belief in Goliath's First Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Engage in Diplomacy.

Of course, when was the fear of oppressing innocent victims ever a major concern in international relations? If it was, would torture even be "on the table"? The only second thoughts anyone seems to be having is reflected in the final line of the NYT article: "what happens when one of our people is captured and they do it to him?"

But if we were really afraid of losing democracy, then we should pay more attention to how Bush/Cheney are gaining the power to break the law in spite of the will of the American people - or even the will of people of the world... or worse yet, lose the very freedom & democracy we're supposedly torturing potentially innocent people to gain.

Consider impeachment seriously. So we can have another election before Armageddon...