What confuses the issue here is that Spain did originate humanism and much of the basics of the enlightenment. This was before 1492, of course. The Jesuits forced the humanists to flee.
Here's the thing. Read this from the wiki article I linked to earlier
"The juridical doctrine of the School of Salamanca represented the end of medieval concepts of law, with a revindication of liberty not habitual in Europe of that time. The natural rights of man came to be, in one form or another, the center of attention, including rights as a corporeal being (right to life, economic rights such as the right to own property) and spiritual rights (the right to freedom of thought and to human dignity).
The School of Salamanca reformulated the concept of natural law: law originating in nature itself, with all that exists in the natural order sharing in this law. Their conclusion was, given that all humans share the same nature, they also share the same rights to life and liberty. Such views constituted a novelty in European thought and went counter to those then predominant in Spain and Europe that people indigenous to the Americas had no such rights."
That sounds good, doesn't it? But the fact of the matter is the Jesuits in the Americas operated a regime of unprecedented brutality. They wiped out all records of 3 thousand year old civilizations. Even the Nazis couldn't manage this with the Jews.
And they did it while believing everything written in those two paragraphs. You have to remember the Jesuits did everything out of love for mankind. When they tortured a woman in the most brutal ways possible, they did it because they loved the woman. They believed that if they cut off her tits, she might suddenly see the light and be saved. Obviously a soul is more important than tits. It's the same as when they tortured Indians to death for having Mayan writings. They did it out of love for the Indian people.
I'm well aware of the Catholic argument that the Inquisition was the real source of the enlightenment. It's just hard for people who are not Catholic to buy it.
Here's the thing. Spain, which was the only country in Europe completely controlled by the Jesuits, was not the source of freedom and human rights that the article claims.
That's interesting. No powerful merchant class in Spain, so no development of capitalism, so no industrialization of the manufacturing of guns and cannons. So Spain would still be using blacksmiths to make guns and cannons, meaning they would all have different bores and lose fitting cannon or rifle balls.
The Jews might have been involved, but the British government knew exactly what was going on, they had to send in warships to shell Chinese cities to force the Chinese Empress to all the sale of opium. This was the later half of the 1800s, with a more or less free British press. Every educated Brit knew what was happening and why.
Well, bear in mind here that before 1492 the Spanish had the largest collection of Greek and Roman writing in Northern Europe. Including Aristotle. It was the rediscovery of Aristotle in Europe that started the scientific revolution. If the Spanish hadn't kicked out the Jews and Muslims, Spain would have been the center of the Renaissance.
BTW, the pope had agreed to give the Spanish royalty a large percentage of all church collections if they kicked out the evil Jews and Muslims and allowed in the inquisition.
Not only that, but how to use the capital. Can you imagine how rich Spain would have been with Jewish bankers handling that gold and silver from the new world?
Instead, and this is very strange, Spain ended up giving all it's gold and silver to the very same Jewish bankers it had kicked out. Except now they were living in Amsterdam, and the Dutch used this gold and silver to finance a world wide merchant empire.
Here's an odd factoid. China ended up with almost all the silver from the New World.
Notice that they both have those enormous noses. And they're both short. The Romans were the same way. Romans and Greeks were white, but clearly very different than northern Europeans.
Alexander the Great spread Greek civilization by conquering most everything between Egypt and Afghanistan. This started a lot of ethnic intermixing, Alexander himself married some Afghan tribeswomen. After that the Greeks never had a nation with ethnically secure borders.
The Bysantine empire was a greek civilization, but the people in the empire were very racially mixed. Also after the Roman conquest Greece was no longer a center of Greek civilization, but more of a remote outpost, There were much larger Greek populations in Egypt and elsewhere. So there was no effort to keep non-greek populations out of Greece.
So before British colonialism the concept of "Greek" implied an ethnic group throughout the middle east, one of many. The British brought in the concept of a nation-state that was ethnically more or less homogeneous. This was foreign to the mid-east since they had always had empires, which by their very nature were multi-ethnic.
Even more, every British officer had spent 10 years in school learning all about the Greeks, the Classical greeks were more real to them then the Turkish empire. So they really pushed the idea that "Greece" was the inheiter of the ancient Greeks. In fact, the land of Greece had been a remote province of several empires settled by all sorts of ethnic groups for 1000s of years.
Companies like H1bs because it's hard for them to quit and get a higher paying job. The H1B visa belongs to the company, they can only get another job if the other company has H1b visas.
So, let me get this straight. "Libs" can't stop Japan from killing whales, yet they somehow controlled the design and construction of the power plants.
And who are these Japanese Libs who control Japan?
There's a big question on how dangerous low levels of radiation is. The authorities calculate the danger based on a scaling down of the damage done from high levels of radiation. They take the measurable damage to DNA and other cell processes from a high level of radiation, and then say 10% of this radiation will cause 10% of the damage from the high level.
The problem is that there has always been a certain level of background radiation, and from the beginning life has adapted to this. If a cosmic ray pops off a molecule from a strand of DNA, the cell is designed to replace that molecule with an identical one.
So for radiation to damage DNA, it would have to be high enough to overwhelm these repair mechanisms. So it's possible that up to a certain level, radiation causes little or no damage.
