The Astrology of Politics .

I have always looked at Astrology to see what "may" happen in politics ( not that I believe in it ). This election seems so predicable, you can "guess" the predicament . A decade a go I was a ghostwriter for a publication called (1)>>Mountain Astrologer  I would write out my weekly predictions on a paper and fax them "anonymously" to a third party writer . I would assume anonymity for fear of reprisals in case any of my predictions came true . I spent from years 2003 to 2006 writing , faxing up until 2006 when I made ( or nearly made it)  on a final paper on the then Senator Obama who was jumping ahead to the Presidency . My astrological newsletter was called Times and Seasons named after an (1.2)>>old Mormon paper that on the same line of thought was edited for the  american public in the 1830s , by the way that Mormon newspaper claimed that the Millennial  reign of Christ was going to happen around 1840 ( which Joseph Smith founder of the Mormon Church believed) & never happened to the latter . So I borrowed the name of the newspaper . Condensing what I say here , around 2006 I wrote my last lines for that paper , it was about President Obama . All the "signs" looked good for him to be President . (2)>>DELL HOROSCOPE predicted a win for Obama two years before he became President . So writing about the Obama win , as I as looking at the signs , weighing in on how his chart looked from a computer software used by astrologers . (2.1)>>Obama seemed to have a long line of " retrogrades" , one prediction was that he would not make it on his first term , (2.2)>>be yes assassinated . All other astrologers also predicted what looked like a national crisis with Obama as President . So looking back what I wrote then , I was guilty of predicting  ( as well) that Obama would not make it to his first term in office . Now it's 2016 and his term in office is nearly over , I just ponder how things could change so fast that making predictions alone may not make any sense . Today we can have a few laughs of predictability. Not to undermine the seriousness of predictions . Here a Chinese master of the art predicts that Hillary Clinton will win   Master Thean Y Nang is a Buddhist Feng Shui master and Chinese astrologer based in Malaysia who correctly predicted the 9/11 attacks and the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and most recently foresaw incredibly bad luck for Malaysia in 2014 – when one of its passenger jets disappeared with all on board and another was shot from the sky over Ukraine – long before any incident occurred.According to Thean, there are two black stars present in 2016, which means that the Year of the Fire Monkey will see an increased number of international conflicts, as well a global economic stagnation and political tensions."The presence of two black stars indicates that women are having more power. There will be more women holding top management positions in financial and commercial circles as well as in politics across the world. Thus, the probability of the candidates for president in USA and Taiwan, namely Hillary Clinton and Tsai Ing-wen respectively, is very high," Thean writes in the latest edition of his annual predictions book. It’s no

coincidence that Clinton and Trump in particular stand out . It's similar to how Clinton , and Obama did in 2008 . So far, the stars are aligning as such for Clinton, whom polls show is leading rivals in both parties consistently. As for the Clinton email controversy — a months long ongoing investigation into her use of a personal email address during her tenure at the State Department —it wont matter . It's already been tried in the law courts of Congress , the hearings (committees)  to investigate Clinton . She may have been as the Washington Post says , The report’s revelations weren’t particularly revelatory: Clinton violated department policies and went further than predecessors in her use of private email, but she wasn’t the first to take this path.  (2.2)>>Trump might call her "crooked" as such , she was exposed to the public , you can't put her on trial again . Politics allows men and women to play with forces normally allocated to the gods. This is why Kings believed in their divine right as divine representatives; out of this reasoning came the sovereign immunity laws which placed them above the law. Today we have checks and balances to prevent dictatorship and the like but now the executive branch is elevated due to war. At every level we tried to prevent the distortion of the misuse of power. The biggest mistake made was to grant personhood to corporations who are a non living entities but operate freely to maximize their interest to lobbyist. This problem was not addressed in 1789 because they did not exist, ergo there are no checks and balances for the distorting power of corporations. I will only give a primary example where they are not checked. When underdeveloped countries reveal the discovery of vast natural resources and solicit corporations to help them extract oil, diamonds, etc., corporations want complete control over decisions. Since these countries are sovereign and they want to retain the decisions making power, corporations have been known to employ extra-legal means to get their way like arming opposing factions in these countries. There have been countless polls about Donald Trump chances of becoming president, but forget about the statistics — it’s time to look into the stars.Christian Ene, astrologer and tarot reader, of tarot-astrology.co.uk, has charted Donald’s natal chart as well as “his qualities and defects” and how planetary alignments during 2016 will affect the real estate mogul as he advances in the campaign. Ene’s chart has entered the 2016 elections Reddit, and has garnered interest with both Trump haters and lovers alike.Ene’s verdict —  Trump will not become president.  Trump was born under a Full Moon, Ene says, and it’s common knowledge that this kind of energy is hard to handle, and can be linked to lunacy. Explaining some of the more outlandish comments he has made on immigration and Muslims.This year, Saturn crosses into Sagittarius and Trump’s natal Dark Moon will be influenced by planetary restrictions and karma. An apparent indication that it will be quite difficult for the billionaire to activate the good side of the natal Moon, or win the election. “Instead, a powerful Dark Moon brings many problems and controversies,” Ene said.

The Book of the FUTURE.

If there is any book you should have that "accurately" predicts world events , this book nails it better.Out of 20 chapters, only 5 deal with actual eventualities for the new millennium. The rest describe formations affecting the new millennium and how these configurations manifested in historic events in the past.This account of modern history as seen through the lens of astrology charts our evolution from social enslavement to individual freedom. Meece scans the vast landscape of human destiny to detect the larger astrological rhythms of the future.Horoscope for the New Millenium has an amazing amount of info which i have found in no other astrology book of any kind.Its lists of outer planetary cycles are useful beyond measure, especially considering what is going on in the world these days. Mr. Meece gives us not only the Modern Humanity Chart (Neptune conjunct Pluto, 1892), but what your own natal contacts to that chart can mean for you. The Revised World Order Chart of 2030--Saturn and Uranus in Gemini-- is interestingly included for consideration.This book covers art, economics, politics (the U.S. chart--using Lynes' version for 4:47 pm--is well-covered and presented in comparison to the Modern Humanity Chart), Revolutions and their outcomes, Holy Wars, and so much more. The historical info/dates alone would be informative for the non-astrologer!As in the other reviews here listed, i agree that many of his predictions are already being born out, this being 2004, while, of course, some predictions are now moot--Gore ain't the prez, as it quirkily turns out. ( Pretty much of this book is found at this website : http://philosopherswheel.com/book.htm ) Not many astrologers look deeply into mundane historical astrology and the evolution of humanity. This is a in depth look at the major planetary cycles and how they have affected the unfolding of human potential. Now that we are in a period of accelerated human evolution, his book is a very timely addition to our understanding of our present historical situation and potential future. It will be a stretch for many who are not deep in there understanding of Astrology, but is is a stretch well worth making. his book was amazing! For anyone who's interested in learning what the future will hold . . . even those who don't believe the idiotic horoscopes that appear in the daily newspaper. Eric Alan Meece rises above zodiacal simplification and superstition-based astrology to elevate astology into a science and an art. He explains, with remarkable accuracy, the several astrological factors, from sun sign to moon sign to outer planets, that correspond with personality traits. Astrology revolves all around archetypes, and assigning them to celestial bodies and periods of time. His discussion of the different generations, each with the expected corresponding astrological combinations at time of birth, is a must-read, and his description of different generational waves is so true it's scary. Meece convincingly shines insight onto famous paintings in a way that archetypally connects countries around the world, body parts, and the four elements. Even skeptics (NOT cynics) will find inspiring matter in here.

Epilogue .

Astrologers are excellent astronomers - planetary positions for astrological software are calculated directly from data from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Predicting when signs will be in the sky can be done with math. The personality traits arbitrarily assigned to positions of things are not mathematical.Mankind is far too complex a psychological being to be categorized by a mere 12 signs based upon the position of the sun alone.  (See WILLIAM STICKEVERS blog on his predictions.  http://tinyurl.com/zntfrxj )

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

(1)>>   Mountain Astrologer .     http://mountainastrologer.com/tma/. is a bi-monthly English language astrology magazine, written for professional astrologers and astrology students of all levels.  On America’s political stage, this scenario plays out through two established parties where most citizens connect the Democratic Party with liberal ideas and the Republican Party with conservative ideas. The truth is, since campaigns cost a fortune, the majority of elected representatives end up essentially forced to perform major legislative favors for those who fund their campaigns. The result is that both parties now largely serve the interests of the very wealthy, that is, the corporations. Since the Clinton era, both parties have delivered “the goods” to their highest paying sponsors. (1.2)>>old Mormon.Joseph’s prediction that some of “the rising generation” would not die before Christ came is consistent with his prophecy in 1832 that the generation living at that time would not all pass away before the Missouri temple was built. Both predictions pointed to the end of the nineteenth century as the time when the Saints could expect the Second Coming. Joseph’s cryptic and puzzling-sounding reference to “two days, etc.” and “2,520 years” is an allusion to a popular interpretation of Leviticus 26:28 in the light of Daniel’s prophecies. That popular speculation theorized that a period of two and a half “days” of a thousand years each, or more precisely 2,520 years (seven times 360 days, with each day representing a year), would culminate in the Second Coming. At this point Joseph was apparently using the same methods of calculation promoted by the Millerites but coming up with a different end date, that of 1890. According to Joseph, too many things needed to happen before the Second Coming for it to occur in 1844 or even shortly thereafter.  In 1844, the year of Joseph Smith’s death, another major event took place in the history of American Christianity. Ironically, this other event involved another man from upstate New York, named William

Miller. (2)>>DELL HOROSCOPE. http://www.completehoroscope.org/horoscopes/barackobama-president-horoscope.htm. Honestly this astrologer admitted he was wrong about Obama losing the 2008 election.  Astrolgers faced a problem with Obama , yea , his actual birth date . Since no one really knew where and  the "birth-er " debate boiled over . However, a few weeks after the conference ended the Obama campaign released a copy of his birth certificate to the public, and it had a conspicuously later birth time of 7:24 pm on it.   There was something perplexing about the fact that Patry had been given a slightly wrong birth time for Obama from someone, As perplexing, albeit minor, as this was, the sense of relief that astrologers had over finally having a confirmed and accurate birth time for Obama was enough to cause everyone to quickly forget Patry’s announcement and move on with studying the election.  There were still some questions about the authenticity of the newly released copy of the birth certificate, since it was a digital reproduction rather than a scan of the original birth certificate, but this never seemed to turn into a major

Here is my attempt at writing
the "future" . My TIMES &
SEASONS was a daily
almanac that I used to fax to
Mountain Astrologer . I hope
they burned all copies of
it.

issue (the “Birther Controversy” that happened a year later in the summer of ’09 does count).  (2.1)>>Obama. Obama had captured the imagination of the disillusioned and potentially rebellious US populace. AGAIN this is "recurring" . It's vary similar , as the American populace seeks alternatives to the political system . This is also evidenced by his natal T-square in fixed signs with Mercury (Leo) opposing Jupiter (Aq) with Neptune in Scorpio in the 9th House at the focal point. The T-square by transit to Obama’s natal sun at 13 Leo on Election Day from the Scorpio sun and North node in Aquarius is activating a potential solution for the economic scenario that emerged with the September 08 planetary configuration. Once elected, Barack Obama had  inevitably experience diminished support from his own liberal base as the shine wears off and he faces the necessity to balance futuristic goals and humanitarian concerns with the legacy of war, debt and economic constriction. A dramatic source of this disillusionment will occur if Obama persists in pursuing nuclear power as a viable energy source. The Plutonian shadows of Nuclear energy are nuclear weapons and nuclear waste. Addressing the challenges of potential Armageddon and toxic radiation of the environment are necessary before nuclear energy can be implemented safely.(2.2)>>be yes assassinated. Between 2008 and 2012 a handful "predictors" feared that Mr. Obama would be assassinated because he is the first African  American President. As much as the would psychics , there were real credible threats .  In 2009 the Secret Service stated that the volume of threats against Obama was "comparable to that under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.  U.S. President Barack Obama's wife, Michelle Obama, made a ghastly statement when she stated to the Secret Service" Just tell me when - where to run". This statement clearly infers that an assassination of her husband involving the Secret Service is just around the corner. Mrs. Obama's statement indicates that the White House is leaking future assassination insinuations in an attempt to prepare the American public for what is about to transpire.     (2.3)>>Trump might call her "crooked" as such . Donald Trump has decided to dub her “Crooked Hillary.” This isn’t quite true: Though investigations into her activities have occupied much of the past 25 years, her accusers, from Whitewater to Benghazi, never really get the goods. But what Clinton has been is nearly as problematic as being crooked: Hunkered Hillary. At the first sign of conflict or accusation, Clinton circles the wagons, shuts her mouth and instructs those around her to do the same. This generates a whole lot of smoke, even if there’s no fire. Her secrecy elevates the accusations — whatever the accusations are.  According to this character, Clinton's only problem is excessive caution because she has been under  excessive fire and attacks for all these years. he apparently accepts this Clinton narrative that Colin Powell's use of private email systems somehow justifies her behavior, but this a ridiculous argument because he did not employ his own email server, and security savviness in the State Department advanced considerably from 2005 to 2009. A really relevant question unasked is how much the State Department spent on IT operations, and especially computer security during this period. Clinton simply ignored any security considerations, and the potential security consequences of doing this. This weak excuse that she did this for personal convenience, and she now acknowledges this mistake, is absurd. What is more inconvenient, going through the effort of establishing a email server or simply asking the appropriate people in her own department whether what she planned on doing could be a security problem. She made no effort to do this, and this really challenges the appropriateness of her becoming the President. 

ALEX HALEY'S ROOTS REVISITED .

ALEX HALEY'S 
ROOTS REVISITED
*********

There is so much I like to write about this, but I decided to leave it as it is . There is so much to say about ROOTS, and the new ROOTS soon to air this Memorial Day weekend . I am sure that ,  what ever Haley wrote then  is being "interpreted" for a new generation.

Next Week three network channels plan to air the "rebooted" ( my opinion , watered down ) version of Alex Haley's controversial  quasi - historical novel Roots.  While researching for my blog post I came across numerous articles about Haley's work. As stated by Newsweek, Roots remains the third most-watched miniseries of all time. It is also still considered the definitive mainstream portrait of slavery in the U.S. Airing in 1977 to an America still adjusting to a post-civil rights reality, the show was both controversial and educational. Honestly I will try to give my perspective on it . The reception about Roots has not been good over the last decades.The Author Alex Haley has been accused of perpetuation of fraud . Way back in 1977 as a young boy sitting in the living room watching the ABC movie of the week . I remember , that before the mini-series began there was a "parental warning " about "nudity, violence" , what they left out of the picture was a bunch of white actors/ actresses calling a bunch of black actors/ actresses the (1)>> " N WORD" in  the miniseries ( The same with the sequel : Roots , the next generation ) . I was in shock as a young boy seeing actor Ralph Waite from THE WALTON'S tv show cussing , showing lust after some semi-nude captured African women who were being horded up on board the ship the  (1.2)>>Lord Ligonier. The worst offender in the first episode was Captain Davies and “Girl on Ship”. Capt Davies was

played by (1.2.b)>>Ed Asner , he was "guilt ridden" captain of the Lord Ligonier. A character that was never really part of book.  The Museum of Broadcast Communications recounts that for the first episode of the televised version of Alex Haley’s Roots, “the writers created a conscience-stricken slave captain, Thomas Davies,” played by Ed Asner, “a figure who did not appear in Haley’s novel but was intended to make white audiences feel better about their historical role in the slave trade.” Conscience-stricken or not, Asner’s slave captain is depicted delivering his human cargo to the slave dealers in colonial America. And no one picketed Rootscome awards season for endorsing slavery for obvious reasons, even though by Asner’s reasoning they should have.While everyone agreed that the recreation of the slave ship’s voyage made for frighteningly realistic television, none of the Roots production team gave much thought to what shooting this scene would mean for the black performers involved. The case of Rebecca Bess is the most glaring example in this regard. Credited as “girl on ship,” Bess appears near the end of the first episode as an enslaved woman delivered to Captain Davies’s room as a “bellywarmer.” In the scene the sixteen-year-old Bess, who had never acted professionally, stares with terror at Asner’s character, her arms covering her bare breasts. While Captain Davies says he “does not approve of fornication,” it is implied that he rapes the young girl, signaling that this Christian character has too been debased by the slave trade. The next day (at the start of the second episode of the series), the young girl (still topless) climbs the rigging of the ship and jumps into the ocean to drown. Here I am citing some of the examples to how the directors and producers added "shock value" to the miniseries  , which through it's eight parts , if you "watched" as a young person , these images will be forever implanted.

 Haley claimed that his alleged “direct ancestor”, (1.3)>>Kunta Kinte, came to America in 1767 aboard the Lord Lignonier, a British slaver. Yet a check of the records available show slave ownership records for this same Toby as far back as 1762, five full years before he allegedly was brought to America. These same records also shred much of the oral history he claims was carefully preserved by his family. I remember reading Roots was like reading the "bible" in some ways . Kunta Kinte is brought to America as a slave , he marries , he fathers Kizzy , and in the African tradition he holds up his newly born to (1.4)>>Allah ( god) to the starry heaven beginning a new tradition for his future progeny  . It vary biblical , here Haley injected the first "myth" to his story . That Alex Haley's view point is that HIS ancestors were chosen by God . I was not referring to other African Slaves in the Haley's story ,( you have to pay vary close attention to the story line , not have missed it )  whom were written in as secondary characters, since Haley himself was embellishing an old myth to suit the line of Kinte for himself . There so may critical points to the book , one of which is the portrait of the whites themselves who enslaved the Africans . The whites all of them were painted as being evil degenerates , sadistic , without any godly morals . At the end of the mini-series , we encountered the ONLY "friendly whites" in Haley's story , they were dirt poor , dumb , and helped old Chicken George fight off a bunch of Klan . With all the misery in the story about slavery . Haley's book was politically painting a wrong picture about American history that All WHITES are evil , it left out numerous positive credible sources that would have made a better story .

Plagiarism ? NO!

When Haley was alive, he dodged calling “Roots” non-fiction or even historical fiction. He preferred made-up hybrid descriptions like “faction,” much like Norman Mailer used “factoid” to describe his own colorful and Pulitzer-winning reporting of the political events of 1968.It is not news to black scholars that Haley made mistakes. He, or perhaps lazy assistants, as Haley claimed, might have swiped passages from others, including less celebrated black scholars like Margaret Walker, who also sued Haley for allegedly plagiarizing passages from her Civil War novel “Jubilee.”But, a huckster? A “hoax”? A “fake”? A “con”? Those are Nobile’s words. He’s a good reporter, good at uncovering facts, but I think he missed the larger, more important truth. If “Roots” was a hoax, it was a hoax Americans wanted desperately to believe, which says something more important about Americans than anything Nobile says about Haley.But plagiarism is the least of the problems in "Roots." And they would likely have remained largely unknown, had journalist Philip Nobile not undertaken a remarkable study of Haley's private papers shortly before they were auctioned off.The result was featured in a devastating 1993 cover piece in the Village Voice. It confirmed - from Haley's own notes - earlier claims that the alleged history of the book was a near-total invention of (2)>>Harold Courlander, the first hundred pages were lifted from the book " The African". Unfortunately, the general public is largely unaware of how Haley’s monumental family autobiography, stretching back to 18th-century Africa, has been discredited.Indeed, a 1997 BBC documentary expose of Haley’s work has been banned by U.S. television networks – especially PBS, which would normally welcome such a program. Harold Courlander, who was white, wrote a novel called "The African" in 1967. The book had a similar story of a slave's capture in Africa, his horrific experience as cargo on a ship and his struggle to hold on to his native culture in a harsh new world. While there are major differences between the two books, Courlander and several expert witnesses testified that Haley had used "The African" as source material — both for his 1976 book and the 1977 TV miniseries, which was seen by about 140 million viewers.

The mini-series it's self was one of the first in a long run mini-series to follow on TV . ROOTS is the king along with SHOGUN . Here is what the rest of the social media has been saying about Haley's book . It's not good :

“Roots” was based on the late Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning runaway best-seller, which was billed as a factual account (albeit with some fictional embellishments) of his family’s history from Africa through slavery in the South to present times. Black thinker Thomas Sowell, who has written prolifically on race and slavery, makes the same point as Crouch—even if not quite as bluntly. Regarding the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Sowell remarks that Roots “presented some crucially false pictures of what had actually happened—false pictures that continue to dominate thinking today.”For instance, “Roots has a white man leading a slave raid in West Africa, where the hero, Kunta Kinte [supposedly, Haley’s ancestor] was captured, looking bewildered at the chains put on him as he was led away in bondage.” Moreover, even “the village elders” likewise appeared perplexed by the sight of these “white men” who were “carrying their people away.” In glaring contrast to this depiction, Sowell correctly asserts, the location from which Kunta Kinte was taken—West Africa—had been “a center of slave trading before the first white man arrived there—(2.2)>>and slavery continues in parts of it to this very moment.” He adds: “Africans sold vast numbers of other Africans to Europeans. But they hardly let Europeans go running around in their territory, catching people willy-nilly” (emphasis added).According to Sowell, Roots did more harm than good in fueling “the gross misconception that slavery was about white people enslaving black people.” In reality, “the tragedy of slavery was of a far greater magnitude than that.” Slavery knew no racial boundaries. “People of every race and color were both slaves and enslavers, for thousands of years, all around the world.” Sowell likens slavery to cancer in that it transcends time and place. He concludes: “If reparations were to be paid for slavery, everybody on this planet would owe everybody else.”

 Thomas Sowell hit a point , one issue is that Haley missed a lot of historical research about Africa in the 1750s . The lack therefore of any thing "historical" in Roots was not exactly the point . If their being any kind of exaggerations by the author alone . The story unfolds tranquilly enough. (3)>>Born in 1750, Kinte grows up in a peaceful, sheltering community along the Gambia River in West Africa. He is well schooled in math and writing and the Islamic faith. At age 17, Kinte is snatched from his youthful idyll by the evil, club-bearing “toubobs,” or white people.When he finally regains his senses four days later, Kinte finds himself chained in the stinking, claustrophobic hold of an ocean-going vessel, manned by ugly toubobs, all of them seemingly British or American. After a hellish journey, he arrives in Annapolis, attempts to escape four times, and is subdued only after some poor, white bounty hunters chop off half his foot. The year is 1767.In Haley’s tale, it is the whites who enter the forest and enslave the blacks, not Arab slave traders, not other blacks. Since Kinte is unconscious through the period of transaction, the reader has no picture of African participation in the slave market, nor of any Portuguese or Hispanic involvement in the slave trade.As a Muslim, Kinte does not sense any virtue in Christianity. Indeed, it strikes him as crude and hypocritical. Coming of age during the revolutionary period in Virginia, Kinte sees the revolution as inherently fraudulent: “‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ Kunta liked that, but he couldn’t understand how somebody white could say it; white folks looked pretty free to him.”

Historical Errors ?

A book as massive as THE BIBLE . As a novel
ROOTS was entertaining literature with
a message , but not historical .

Haley's search started with a family tradition about a proud and rebellious slave ancestor who - had been given the name   the slave-name of 'Toby' - was always proud of his African name 'Kintay' along with a few remembered African word supposedly passed on down through the family. Haley tracked 'Toby' to the slave plantation of John Waller (named, for some unknown reason, 'Reynolds' in the TV miniseries - see here for a long list of differences between the TV miniseries and the book), he used the few remembered African words to track down Toby's birthplace to The Gambia in Africa, and he even found the ship - called the Lord Ligonier - which he believed had brought Toby to America in 1767.The book ends when Haley, having gone back the village of Juffure in The Gambia, visits a local oral historian - a 'Griot' - who tells him of one Kunta Kinte who was captured by white men in the woods and taken as a slave. It is a thrilling and moving moment. Through that moment, not only Alex Haley, but millions of other Black Americans learned to value their African lineage - at the time, it was a significant moment in the Civil Rights movement, and part of the raising of Black awareness.But Haley was not a professional historian - he wrote for Playboy magazine - and when they began to check his genealogical research, family historians Gary Mills and Elizabeth Shown Mills found LOTS of mistakes.One of the worst was that the 'Toby' on the Waller estate came to America, not in 1767, as Haley claimed, but in 1762.Worse still, 'Toby' died eight years before Alex Haley's great-great-great-grandmother Kizzy (who Haley said was Toby's daughter) was born - so he CANNOT have been Haley's ancestor.Other historians, including a BBC documentary, have shown that the 'griot' who Haley met in Juffure was not a griot at all, but a 'nice old man' who had been pressurised by the Gambian tourist board into saying what Haley wanted to hear - certainly Juffure has profited from the tourist trade generated by Haley's book.

 Roots still has its supporters, but nobody nowadays tries to claim it is true - they argue instead that perhaps Haley's ancestors didn't come from Juffure and maybe weren't the people Haley thought - but they MUST HAVE come from Africa, and they WERE SURELY captured and brought as slaves on a slave ship - so the story is true in spirit, even if the names are wrong. There is one particular aspect that is probably exaggerated greatly in Roots. Since the slave was a valuable piece of property (as sad as this sounds), it was probably not realistic that a slave's master would deliberately brutalize something so valuable. Punishments were common for slaves who misbehaved or tried to escape, but some portions of the novel (and especially the TV mini-series) showed slaves being abused and even killed for no good reason.As for CONTENT, the information above about Haley's errors of fact, and possible exaggeration of setting could be set against what the pupils are learning in the classroom about the general facts of the slave Trade to come to a conclusion about the video's factual accuracy. However, this in no way takes away the importance of the historical representation of slavery that Haley depicts in his novel. It is an accepted and verified historical fact that slavery is one of the most inhumane movements every practiced by the human race.Roots was a phenomenon in itself; hugely successful, and accepted by both black and white, it set the standard interpretation of slavery and the slave trade for a generation, and played a powerful role in the resurgence of Black awareness and the civil rights movement .

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

(1)>> " N WORD". In the old TV series Roots , the white slaveholders constantly used racial slurs , though I might imagine that the white  actors/ actress may have been uncomfortable using the N-word .The history of the  N word  is often traced to the Latin word niger, meaning Black. This word became the noun, Negro (Black person) in English, and simply the color Black in Spanish and Portuguese. In early modern French, niger became negre and, later, negress (Black woman) was unmistakably a part of language history. One can compare to negre the derogatory N-word  and earlier English substitutes such as negar, neegar, neger, and niggor that developed into its lexico-semantic true version in English. It is probable that n-word  is a phonetic spelling of the White Southern mispronunciation of Negro. I honestly find the word offensive as much as saying a four letter word to some one . It's ingrained in the "consciousness" of the individual that a word can have a powerful effect .  It's like like taking a slap in the face . We also must remember that the few nasty words in our vocabulary started out hundreds of years ago as innocent "words" that now come

back and bite like a bullet . (1.3)>>Lord Ligonier. was an 18th-century slave ship built in New England that in 1767 unloaded slaves in Annapolis, Maryland. The ship was made famous by the novel and television series Roots, as the ship that brought the main character, Kunta Kinte, from the Gambia to the United States.A surviving advertisement records the arrival of the ship with a cargo of slaves at Annapolis in September 1767. This was the basis for Alex Haley's assertion in Roots that his supposed ancestor Kunta Kinte was brought on that voyage. The TV series based on the book invented a failed slave uprising during the voyage.  While (1.2.b)>>Ed Asner character in Roots was highly developed, full of metaphors on tortured ethics and the morality of slavery, biographer Alex Haley would later admit he had no idea who the actual Captain was who had commanded the historic slaver which had kidnapped his ancestor.In a series structured around the will of Haley’s ancestors to survive, Bess’s “girl on ship” stands out as the only character to choose death over the horrors of slavery. Bess came to Roots via Eddie Smith, a local black stunt coordinator in Savannah. She received $187 for diving from the ship into the ocean, which she had to do twice because the camera failed on the first shot. Bess did not know how to swim, so the stunt coordinator gave her lessons in the pool at the Ramada Inn where the cast was staying. Director David Greene recalled that Bess was eager to earn the money to help her parents because her mother was in the hospital. Audiences described watching Roots as a physically and emotionally wrenching experience, but creating these realistic representations of slavery often came at the expense of black performers.  (1.3)>>Kunta Kinte. Haley claimed that his sources for the origins of Kinte were oral family tradition and a man he found in the Gambia named Kebba Kanga Fofana, who claimed to be a griot with knowledge about the Kinte clan. He described them as a family in which the men were blacksmiths, descended from a marabout named Kairaba Kunta Kinte, originally from Mauritania. Haley quoted Fofana as telling him: "About the time the king's soldiers came, the eldest of these four sons, Kunta, went away from this village to chop wood and was never seen again." However, journalists and historians later discovered that Fofana was not a griot. In retelling the Kinte story, Fofana changed crucial details, including his father's name, his brothers' names, his age, and even omitted the year when he went missing. At one point, he even placed Kunta Kinte in a generation that was alive in the twentieth century. It was also discovered that elders and griots could not give reliable genealogical lineages before the mid-19th century, with the single exception of Kunta Kinte. It appears that Haley had told so many people about Kunta Kinte that he had created a case of circular reporting. Instead of independent confirmation of the Kunta Kinte story, he was actually hearing his own words repeated back to him . (1.4)>>Allah (god). Kunta Kinte's African-Muslim identity was part of a much larger movement that took place many years before Kunta was born in the novel Roots. At the height of its expansion, Muslims lived in the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and India. During their religious expansion, Muslims gained a vast amount of land, and Muslims held religious and political influence over the Middle East. Muslims had control over different Christian and Jewish territories in the West, and they influenced the actions and lives of these two religious groups. Muslim attitudes towards women were influenced by African groups. The persistent signification of Haley’s mythology in black cultural representations suggests that Roots entertains some semblance as a canon portrayal of African-American history in the minds of African-Americans in particular, Americans in general.  (2)>>Harold Courlander. Approaching 70 when “Roots” debuted, Harold Courlander was shocked to read it. For the previous 30 years or more, Courlander had been traveling the world collecting folk tales and writing about his findings.In 1978, Courlander sued Haley in a U.S. District Court in New York for copyright infringement. The suit cited 81 passages that had been lifted from Courlander’s “The African,” as well as the plot and certain characters. Haley’s defense fell apart when, during discovery, the plaintiff’s lawyers found three quotes from “The African” among his typed notes, notes that he had apparently failed to destroy.The last thing the judge wanted to do was to undermine a newly ascendant black hero. Midway through the trial, he counseled Haley and his attorneys that he would have to contemplate a perjury charge unless they settled with Courlander. They did just that to the tune of $650,000, or about $2 million by 2005 standards. In return, Courlander agreed to keep quiet about the suit, which he did until he died in 1996.The media paid scant attention to the suit and even then failed to explore the real gist of the scandal: namely that the author of a “nonfiction” book plagiarized from a fictional one. (2.2)>>and slavery continues in parts. Actually,  think the brutality of slavery, not just in the physical sense, but in the social sense as well, is many times minimized in historical presentations.  Hollywood certainly has a checkered past when it comes to presenting historical fact or even accurate depictions, but as this genre of films goes, Roots is pretty good.  I do agree with post #4 in that a minority of slaveowners were actual sadists, but the physical violence (not the least of which was sexual abuse) against slaves, in my opinion, does not receive enough emphasis in cinema or literature, and even in historical texts.  (3)>>Born in 1750, Kinte grows up. In his book: The World and a Very Small Place in Africa, Donald R Wright (2004) points out that Juffue was far from the quiet idyllic backwater it appears as in Haley's book - it was a busy commercial centre, a few miles from the British slaving port. It was part of a western Africa regularly swept by famines, wars and slaving raids.And although in Roots, Kunta Kinte is captured by white 'toubobs'; in reality he would almost certainly have been sold by Black Africans as part of a commercial business deal.And - most controversially of all - it has been suggested that even the depiction of the Middle Passage in Roots might be overdrawn. Although it is fairly certain that everything that happened to Kunta Kinte DID happen to some African slave at a  time on some ship, it is arguable that slave ships as brutally cruel as Haley's Lord Ligonier were rare - it was in the interests of slave traders to keep their cargo strong and healthy, records show that a greater proportin of sailors than slaves died on the Middle Passage, and most of the classic horrors of Middle Passage turn out to be abolitionist propaganda.

Is The Republican party REALLY "dead" ?

With all giddiness , Patrick J. Buchanan said this week : "Bush Republicanism Is Dead and Gone" (1)>>How about the rest of the Republican party ? Pat Buchanan declared that Trump’s rise represents a rejection of 25 years of Bush Republicanism— an ideology which Buchanan says has destroyed America’s once-great manufacturing core, flooded the country with low-skilled workers, and drained the treasury with ill-advised foreign adventures in the Middle East. Trump seemed to scandalize the collective consciousness of professional Republicans with his Saturday debate performance in which he launched a full-throated assault on Bush Republicanism. Trump repudiated all three pillars of Republican globalism: namely, military adventurism, immigration multiculturalism, and trade globalism. Credibly , the Rolling Stone Magazine of 2008 prophetically stated :

"The failure of the administration of George W. Bush — and the accompanying crisis of the Republican Party — has caused a political meltdown of historic proportions. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Bush enjoyed the greatest popularity ever recorded for a modern American president. Re­publicans on Capitol Hill, under the iron rule of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, fattened their coffers through a fearsome operation overseen by corporate lobbyists and GOP hench­men that functioned more like an empire than an old-fashioned political machine. "Republican hegemony," the prominent conservative commentator Fred Barnes rejoiced in 2004, "is now expected to last for years, maybe decades."

From Reaganism to Trumpism?

With (2)>>Donald Trump almost certainly the Republican Party’s candidate for president, pundits in and out of the conservative movement are predicting devastating effects for the party.The combined might of the Republican Party’s best and brightest—16 of them at the outset—proved, in the end, helpless against Trump’s unorthodox, muscular appeal to the party’s voting base. With his sweeping, 16-point victory in Tuesday’s Indiana primary, and the surrender of his major remaining rival, Ted Cruz, Trump was pronounced the presumptive nominee by the chair of the Republican National Committee. The primary was over—but for the GOP, the reckoning was only beginning. FOX News perfectly stated :

"On Sunday, Douthat wrote, “In an unhealthy system, the kind I suspect we inhabit, the Republicans will find a way to crush Trump without adapting to his message. In which case the pressure the Donald has tapped will continue to build — and when it bursts, the G.O.P. as we know it may go with it.”Yes, exactly. The Republican Party is dying because the GOP in DC has gone corporate and K Street. They attack any Republicans who dare hold them to their promises. They’ve gone to war against Heritage Action for America, Club For Growth, the Madison Project, etc. They’ve blackballed any political consultant who does work for outsiders."

What’s happening to the Republican Party is different in many ways, of course. But what we saw in the 2012 primary — the attempted rejection of Mitt Romney by populists desperate for an alternative — and what we’re seeing now in the polls are their worst nightmare . People just did not see it , they voted Obama back in , which created a paradox . If Romney would have won out the election in 2012 . We right now would be electing Romney for his second term . The Republican party would have faired much better in that alternative. A chief concern among congressional Republicans is whether Trump will be a strong enough candidate in the November election to ensure that the party maintains control of Congress. The Trump coalition, which appeals to both the hardest part of the hard right and to a lot of disaffected working-class economic moderates, seems to stem from the Tea Party . It's VARY odd that the GOP jumped to avoid Trump . (3)>>The Trump rhetoric is strangely mirroring the last years of the anti- Obama dialog which the GOP congress has spewed out . ”  Trumpism is the antithesis of Reagan-ism , the GOP follow " Reagan"  the myth.But is the Republican Party actually crumbling? Political parties are powered by coalitions that alternately work together and compete for dominance, and no party is inherently stable. There can also be gradual shifts, however, that fundamentally reshape political parties and the coalitions that constitute them. Trump has certainly shaken up the GOP—whether the rift in the party is beyond repair remains to be seen.

NOTES AND COMMENTS:

 (1)>>How about the rest of the Republican party ? At first glance, the collapse of the Republican Party seems rapid and unex­pected. When viewed within the larger context of American history, however, the party's breakdown looks familiar, even predictable. As in earlier party crackups — 1854,1932,1968 — the demise has involved not a single, sudden explo­sion but a gradual unraveling followed by a sharp and rapid deterioration amid major national calamities. If Bush and the Republican majority in Congress ac­celerated the demise of Ronald Reagan's political era with their assault on tradi­tional American values and institutions — including the rule of law itself — it is a decline that began two decades ago. (2)>>Donald Trump . Trump's numbers in national polls when matched up against Hillary-are SO CLOSE . We could have a landslide unless there is a major get out the vote movement for the GOP- something they do horribly.Trump is disqualified for the presidency by his erratic temperament, his ignorance about public affairs and his scary sympathy for authoritarianism.  Like "Crooked Hillary" , Trump has a few skeletons in his chest  . Donald Trump "seems terrified to release his taxes" because they may reveal his true net worth, his donations to liberal causes, or something even seedier, Sen. Ted Cruz suggested on Meet the Press. It’s important to note that Trump hasn’t been charged with any illegal activity, and it’s reasonable to argue that he was unaware or even a victim in some cases. But Cruz has a point that the mogul has been linked to the mob for decades. Trump was first tied to the mafia in the 1980s, when a $7.8 million subcontract for Trump Plaza was awarded to S&A Concrete, according to Fortune. The company, as Cruz correctly says, was partially owned by Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family.Trump himself acknowledged as much in a December 2015 interview with the Wall Street Journal, admitting that S&A Concrete was "supposedly associated with the mob."(3)>>The Trump rhetoric. Donald Trump’s policy agenda may or may not represent a wholesale rejection of latter-day Republican orthodoxy. But what he’s selling, purloined slogan and all, is the same old Reaganite promise of a Golden Age restored. It’s as empty now as it was four decades ago.