Every summer, people flock to Spain to join in the running of the bulls. This is something that I think that is an outrageously silly sport, but I guess that some people like it. Where did this come from? While Wikipedia thinks that bullfighting might have started in Oman, I have a theory that this whole fascination with bulls, and messing with them, might have come from the ancient Minoan civilization.
A few years ago, when I was reading the Story of the World Volume 1 to my daughter, I read about the Minoan civilization and how their kids used to leap over bulls. I didn’t really make the connection then between the bull fighting of today and the Minoans of yesterday. After all, the Minoan civilization took place in the Greek area thousands of years ago, and bullfighting is in Spain today. Different location, different time.
I’ve been reading Gavin Menzies’ new book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis. He was the author of 1421, which is a really interesting book about his hypothesis that the Minoan civilization may have been an advanced civilization, and may be the city known as Atlantis. It’s a pretty interesting book so far.
The Minoan civilization, it seems, may have traveled outside of their local area, trading with Egypt, India, and even beyond. Menzies hypothesized that he traded with Spain. He also discusses evidence that the Minoans put bulls on their ships and took them to places like Spain, where there were natural resources to mine.
So if the Minoans were in Spain (among other places), and they brought their bull-leaping along with them, couldn’t it be possible that the custom of bullfighting and running with the bulls came from there? It is an interesting possibility.
Yesterday, I was watching lecture 1 of the Teaching Company’s History of Freedom. It was very timely, considering everything that has been going on in the world today.
Obama seems to think of himself almost in god-like terms… or at least he lets others call him the messiah, take photos of him with the appearance of a halo around his head, and sometimes makes speeches surrounded by Greek columns. He doesn’t reprimand the people who treat him with god-like qualities, at least not publicly, so it seems to me like he thinks that it is okay. A Persian King, I think that it was Xerxes, decided that he had some pretty god-like qualities as well. It is said that he whipped the seas of the Hellespont on the way to fight the Greeks because the sea wasn’t obeying him. They have a lot in common, it seems.
It didn’t work out well for the Persians. The Greeks were free people. The Athenians, along with twenty-eight other city-states, fought back with a vengeance. Freedom meant something to them. They won several battles, including the Battles of Marathon, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. At one point, the Persians did win for a while, and stationed some troops in Athens, but eventually, they got rid of those too.
The Athenians valued their freedom and were willing to fight for it, but not all of the Greek city-states were. There were hundreds of city-states in Greece, yet only 29 were willing to fight for their freedom. This has happened so many other times throughout history. People are often willing to trade away their freedom for a few goodies. It makes me think of the Middle Ages. Not every common person was a serf. Some were free peasants. When I read that some people actually preferred serfdom to freedom, I was surprised. The serfs did have to provide the ruling classes with food and services, but in return, they were given protection and other goodies. The Persians offered “goodies” to people under its protection, and some of the Greeks were willing to take the bait.
The other thing that struck me was that the people who did value freedom prevailed in this case. Persia was SO much more powerful compared to these Greek city-states, but they didn’t win in the end. Why? Because the Greeks had more to lose, and they knew it. They were able to fight with more heart as a result. The Americans were able to fight against the British in the American Revolution, and prevail, partly for the same reasons. Yes, I know that there were many other factors in the win, like France helping out, but if the Americans didn’t have that heart, they would have given up long before France was able to step in.
A couple of other things stood out to me as well. The Greeks valued morality and history. Even though they didn’t worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, they knew that in order to maintain freedom, the people had to be a moral people. They also believed that the gods provided a moral framework. As a side note, I think that I read somewhere that there were Greeks in the “mixed multitude” that went with the Egyptians out of the Exodus. This period of time happened after the Exodus. Is it possible that some of these Greeks could have learned some of their morality from the Judeo-Christian God, and then imbued their gods with some of the knowledge that they learned? Just a theory.
Do we value our freedom like the early Americans, or like the Athenian Greeks? I know that some of us do. If you value your freedom, please try to do your part to preserve freedom. We are under attack from the inside. I’m not sure what your part is, but if you know what your calling is, please do it.
I’m a little concerned. I’m not a big fan of Obama’s, but I think that there is the possibility of an assassination attempt on his life this week. My concern comes from this video of Louis Farrakhan, taken two days ago:
From the video, Farrakhan said “people tomorrow — maybe in a few days — are going to kill their leaders who have been selling them out”. This is not a conditional statement – this is a threat. He says that people ARE going to kill their leaders, maybe in a few days. A few days from the day that he made that statement would be tomorrow…
So why do I say that Obama in particular may be a target? I say that primarily because of these videos right here:
First, Farrakhan was practically worshipping Obama. He called him the Messiah.
Last year, Farrakhan’s love affair with Obama seem to have ended. He called Obama an “assassin” and a “murderer”…
Now, we have Farrakhan threatening to murder black leaders. I noticed that it he said plural leaders, not singular leader. The most obvious target for Farrakhan would be Obama. Obama has disappointed the Nation of Islam leader, no doubt. In the video, he talks about black leaders who want the big house and the big car… he could have also said “takes a million vacations”. Not sure who else the Nation of Islam could be targeting though.
I hope that I’m wrong… but something very strange is going on. If someone wanted to make an assassination attempt on the president’s life, that would be a very difficult thing, wouldn’t you think? Why? Because the Secret Service is always around to protect him. Now normally, they do a great job. Lincoln’s Secret Service agent wasn’t doing such a hot job on April 14, 1865, when he decided to go to the bar next door instead of protect his president while watching a play. What has been happening in the news over the last few days? Members of the Secret Service were being accused of prostitution. Whether they are guilty or not, couldn’t this weaken the Secret Service to some degree? Is Obama’s Secret Service detail as strong today as it was a week ago?
We can only hope that the Secret Service still is strong, that I’m wrong about who the NOI is threatening, and that I’m wrong that they’re making a threat at all. The facts don’t seem very encouraging to me. If you’re going to choose a day to pray for your country, the next couple of days would be a good time.
Several years ago, I wrote a web page called The Fall of Ancient Greece. I was reading America Alone at the time, as well as listening to a lecture on Ancient Greece. I decided to make the page because I saw similarities between Ancient Greece and the current world situation (including the United States).
Today I was adding Pinterest buttons to my Squidoo pages, and I noticed that my Fall of Ancient Greece pages were among my most popular. For a while, I was a little confused, but then I thought about the world situation, and how Greece is falling apart. I hadn’t thought about that page in months, but all of a sudden it is popular.
You never know when a page will become trendy. Sure, capitalize on things that you think people will like at the time, but also make web pages (if you’re a content producer) about the things that really interest you. You never know when your hard work will pay off.
The SOPA act (Stop Online Piracy Act, methinks (arrr…)) that is currently going through Congress is looming huge in the minds of people that produce content, such as myself. This bill could be an income killer… say… SOPA decides to shut down Yahoo! Voices or Squidoo because some idiot on the sight decided to upload something that was copyrighted. I think that these fears are legitimate, but we never know how things will work out in reality. I’m glad that I have material up on several different web sites.
The main people that I think that these laws are trying to target are web sites like Pirate Bay, who facilitate a lot of theft of copyrighted material. While ending blatant, purposeful theft is admirable, the law looks like it goes a little too far. However, if they soften this bill just a tad before publication, there is a small chance that this bill could help honest content producers. We’ll have to wait to see whether this will have a positive or a negative effect, but a podcast that I was listening to today made me realize that there could be some beneficial effects to honest people.
The podcast that I was listening to normally uses a song in its intro. They refer to a web site that visits other sites and cuts and pastes large sections of other people’s articles into it. All that is gone now. They have a new web site that has many links and shorter paragraphs describing the links. The podcast begins with some music that is not identifiable as any copyrighted song that I know of.
Since I set out to make money through content production, I’ve been pretty careful about not using other people’s copyrighted work without permission. I use a lot of Creative Commons work, a smattering of my own photos, and works that are in the public domain. On occasion, I do use an image under the “fair use” provision, such as when I’m writing about a company and use a logo. There have only been a few times that I have knowingly used copyrighted material without asking. I do my best to be honest.
As a result, I don’t have to change much if/when the upcoming law is passed. In addition, the people that at one time were cutting and pasting articles from other places now have to do exactly what I am doing, which puts us more on an even playing field.
There are many things that cannot be copyrighted. For example, you cannot copyright a list of ingredients, like what you would find in a recipe. Me and my lawyer-to-be husband had an argument about using a clownfish and a Dory-like fish in an aquarium together. The list of fish, I argued, cannot be copyrighted, but if you decided to arrange the tank like the one at 42 Wallaby Way, then you could have an argument for copyright infringement there. Similarly, summarizing a news story in your own words also cannot be copyrighted.
I’m not in favor of something that can put me out of business, or even bite into my earnings, obviously. However, if SOPA in it’s final form is written so that it makes it harder to shut down a web site (investigate complaints and give infringers a chance to fix any copyright issues that they might accidentally have a problem with), then there is a small chance that SOPA may not be as bad as it looks like. I’m not getting my hopes up, but if everybody that is trying to be legitimate but changed their ways as far as copyright infringement goes, then that might be a good thing for legitimate content producers in the end.
Those of you who think that Coca-Cola is being really generous by helping out the polar bears might want to take a look at their bottle of Coke. According to the 2-liter bottle of Coke that my husband picked up for me, they only want to save the home of ONE polar bear.
That’s right, they only want to save ONE polar bear. If you notice, my Coke bottle says “Protect the Polar Bear’s Home”. Anybody who has taken a third grade English class knows that if you want to indicate the homes of PLURAL bears, you would write “bears’ “, with the apostrophe on the end. As a homeschool teacher, I know that you teach this in third grade English class, because I taught it to my daughter last year.
In most cases, I wouldn’t bother to point out a simple grammatical mistake like this. When someone makes a grammatical error on their blog, a message board post, or in a small business situation, I can sympathize – we all make grammatical mistakes once in a while. When a larger publication, like the New York Times or some book publishing house, allows a grammatical mistake to slip by them, I shake my head, wondering how they could let the mistake pass the grammar checkers.
However, I really wonder how a mistake like this could end up going through the checks of a BILLION dollar corporation. Coca-Cola’s packaging more than likely goes through focus groups before it hits our store shelves. A lot of people look at it before it leaves the factory, yet nobody noticed this mistake? It really makes me fear for the future of the English language and for the education of our country.
I was thinking about war recently, and about how war affects the economy.
When people go to war, the whole country starts to work hard (if the people want to win). For example, in World War II, women went to work in the factories, many of the men went to war, and even the kids got in on the act, collecting things to recycle and use as war materials. People are also willing to sacrifice luxuries and save their money during times of war.
If the wartime economy booms when we are at war because people work hard, wouldn’t economies of the world boom if more people worked harder? I have heard so many people complain over the years about how so many people don’t know how to work hard. Of course, there’s the whole issue of “how do you work hard if you don’t have a job to begin with” that many unemployed people are facing these days. I’ve written articles before about jobs that people can create for themselves. It does take creativity to think up your own job, but it is possible.
I have more work available to me than I could possibly do, running my business.
Wealth is not a fixed pie, where if one person has part of it, somebody else goes without. Wealth is created when people create things. Whether they are producing food, art, content, electronic gadgets, or inventing new and better ways to do things, the more people do, the more wealth we all have. It is true that there is some amount of competition, but we all know that monopolies don’t produce the best results (think DMV).
Do something productive today. Or tomorrow (because today is Sunday, a day of rest for many).
The East Coast of the United States was hit with a snowstorm this weekend, including New York City, home of Occupy Wall Street. They’re allowing tents there now though. I have poor tolerance for cold, which is why I have a cold weather sleeping bag, but I think that this would be pretty cold. Still, it looks like people are still hanging on.
Interestingly enough, the last time that the entire East Coast was pummeled with snow this early on in the year was during the Civil War. We were also in the Little Ice Age back then. So we’re repeating weather conditions that haven’t been seen since the Little Ice Age, but we have to worry about Global Warming. More interesting about the connection than that is that the economic conditions, the ideological split, and the division that we are seeing resemble the time before the Civil War – except that it is on a global scale.
If you have a subscription to GBTV, I recommend that you watch Thursday’s show. The information that he is giving out is SO important. I learned more than 16 years ago that the end times were upon us, and I’ve been learning and preparing for the times ever since. I’d do more if I had the means and if I could. The information that he gave out today is vital for your survival, if you haven’t been in the preparation mindset.
That being said, I think that tomorrow’s project that I need to accomplish is to write a free eBook about preparation. If you can’t get GBTV, then my eBook will be available. I usually would make a web page about topics like these, but this document is going to probably be several pages long – much more than I can comfortably handle on a web page. You can’t copyright ideas, so I should be safe with creating a book from today’s notes – especially since I have more to contribute than was in this show today.
I have difficulty finishing some of the larger projects that I’ve been working on, but I should be able to finish this one in about a day. If you’ve been looking for information about how to prepare for the last days, then look for my book in the next few days. I know that a lot of us Christians are hoping that the Rapture occurs before things get too bad, but things could potentially get REALLY bad before the Tribulation starts. Back in 1995 when I first learned about all the stuff going on, I estimated that it would be about 10 years before things got really chaotic and the rapture occurred. My estimated date was six years ago. We can’t count on the disappearance of Christians to spark the Tribulation. We may see it get so bad before we leave, that when the Christians are taken from the world, nobody notices.
There is nothing to fear as long as you stay with God. While we may have trouble on this Earth, nothing will happen to us that God doesn’t allow. I’ve seen so many instances where God miraculously protects people, even from certain death, because he has more for them to do.
Last week, the world lost a great innovator: Steve Jobs. People on Wall Street are trying to change the world through protest. People from Mother Theresa to Ghandi have been changing the world for centuries. Here are some things to keep in mind if you want to change the world:
1. Start with yourself. It won’t do you any good to change the world, even to gain the whole world, if you lose your soul. Evidently, Steve Jobs didn’t do this, as he claimed to be a Buddhist, but if you don’t repent of your sins and develop a relationship with Jesus Christ, you will find out that everything that you do in life amounts to nothing in the end. Sure, you might still change the world, but you’ll regret not taking care of your soul first. Just like the pilot will tell you to put your air mask on first before helping a small child, it’s important to take care of yourself first. In addition, becoming a follower of Jesus will help you prevent making ethical mistakes that can bring all of your hard work down in the end. Ask Bernie Madoff, or any politician whose adulterous relationship was discovered.
2. Take care of your family. Families might not be glamorous like being on television can be, but like the proverbial butterfly whose wing flaps cause a hurricane halfway across the world, creating a strong family can change the history of the world forever. For example, a girl recently traced every president’s ancestry (except one) to John of Lackland. Even President Obama’s ancestry goes back to him. Some people see this as a conspiracy, but millions of people (including myself) can trace their ancestry to him. Think about what would have happened if John of Lackland didn’t take care of his kids and let them camp out in front of the palace instead of teaching them to work hard? While John’s career did have quite a bit of corruption, at least he had enough sense to make sure that his kids were taken care of.
One person that didn’t take care of their family was Eli in the Bible. He may have been a great mentor to Samuel, and might have been a wonderful High Priest, but he didn’t take care of his kids. They turned out so rotten, in fact, that God killed them. On the other hand, the Pilgrims have some pretty successful descendants (they are not in my family tree, but I can trace my ancestry to Jamestown).
3. Serve others. This may seem like it’s backwards, but it’s true. People didn’t buy iPads because they liked Steve Jobs; they bought iPads because they are a good product. People watch Glenn Beck because he entertains them and provides them with information. While you can fool some people for a short time through manipulation, in the end, people will see through it.
Serving others can start with small things, like doing the best at whatever job you are in. Make it a point to smile, even if you’re the check-out person at Wal-Mart. You never know how you will affect someone. If you have time, help someone at your church or volunteer at your local school. Again, you never know how you’re going to change someone’s life.
If you’re doing these things, you never know what opportunities may await. Rosa Parks never meant to stir up trouble when she refused to move on the bus. Steve Jobs might not have imagined how much the computer would change the world. If you’re doing the right thing and the opportunity presents itself, seize the day. You never know what will happen.
Where Did the Running of the Bulls Come From?
. It was very timely, considering everything that has been going on in the world today.
at the time, as well as listening to a lecture on Ancient Greece. I decided to make the page because I saw similarities between Ancient Greece and the current world situation (including the United States).
