Rectangular to polar conversion
In an attempt to break up the pointless Columbus arguments, I've often tried to focus on the world as seen from the North Pole.

Even thinking within a purely White European perspective and a specifically Northern perspective, there's no reason to defend Columbus. He never touched North America. He found some Caribbean islands and thought they were part of Indonesia.

History has verified the vastly earlier and deeper Euro connection made by the Norsemen, which is wildly unsurprising.

If you look at the world from the North Pole, you can see that America, Asia, Europe and Greenland have always been linked by ice and linked by the Northern tribes. No need for epic journeys of exploration. The longest land-to-land jump is Faeroes to Iceland, about 200 miles. Many of the jumps are a short walk on ice or an easy day of rowing. Eskimos to Yakuts to Lapps, all pretty much the same people, and they've been migrating and trading forever.

The Danes settled Greenland by 1000 AD, and from the west side of Greenland it's overland to either side of Hudson's Bay. River crossings, not ocean crossings. Here, for instance, is Ellesmere Island as seen from Greenland.

Plain fact: There wasn't any discovery of this hemisphere. It's a null concept. As long as people have been wandering the world, they've been circling through both sides of the globe.

= = = = =

The new Silk Road shows this change of focus clearly.

The original Silk Road connected China and Indonesia to Venice and Madrid and Lisbon. At that time the flow of resources was one-way going west. Columbus and Magellan were sent out to find a shortcut for the Silk Road, so that Venice and Lisbon could get resources from Indonesia and China without passing through Turkish and Arab territory.

They blew it, but their mistake led to a new and better source of tropical goodies for Europe.

Columbus and Magellan worked with a rectangular view of the world, and reinforced a rectangular view. They obviated the Silk Road and factored both China and Russia out of the world-trade picture for several centuries.

When you see the world like this:



the paths from Europe to NYC or Europe to Cuba are dominant.

But when you see the world like this:



the Silk Road and the Arctic are dominant, and the Americas are no longer needed.

As I noted above, the circumferential trade and migration around the Arctic is OLDER than the horizontal trade between Madrid and Cuba or London and NYC. The new Silk Road reverses Magellan's factoring and falls back to the older form.

When you see the world in polar form, it's clear that the Eastern Hemisphere no longer needs the Americas. When you can carry resources BOTH WAYS between China and Europe overland without interference, you don't need a shortcut. When you can drill oil and move oil around the Arctic, you don't need Suez and Panama and Houston and New Orleans.

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Later thought: Looking at that LITTLE red ring around the Arctic raises a couple of questions. Why is Canada sticking with USA STRONG's loony evil crusade against RUSSIAN_HACKING? Canada has a big part of the ring, and could benefit by turning its oil pipelines northward instead of southward. MUCH shorter pipe that way. Same for Denmark, which is idiotically fighting the Russian Nordstream pipeline through the Baltic Sea. There's a lot of Danish territory on that ring. Greenland, Faeroes. If the West was still capitalist, those links would be seen as beautiful opportunities. The West is no longer capitalist. We're debtist. Those links would increase actual business, which is the ULTIMATE SIN ABOVE ALL SINS in the eyes of the banking tribe.

Think of a wide multi-pipeline running mostly on land around the edge of the Arctic. It would need serious maintenance and security, but it would be a steady permanent carrier for oil and gas in both directions.

Another later thought: 20 years ago China was rectangular, focusing on improving the Magellan path. China bought the Panama Canal and started building a new wider and easier canal across Nicaragua, which we had started in the '30s and abandoned. Now China has also abandoned the Nicaragua crossing, factoring out the Americas.

Labels: Emersonian justice

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