“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
Pablo Picasso

History by algorithm. The automatic suggestions and prompts from the invisible guiding hand to increase awareness of the twisting path of civilization beginning in England. Yesterday the journey began with this suggestion.

(approx 10 min)
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWPLjg10D2A]

Of course there is an essential Warrior Queen, Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians. (warning ad in the middle about 6 min)

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C95kW84csg]

a little more scholarly account I found with my own search (about 1 hr 11 min)
[video:https://youtu.be/YJ78whSSo7E?t=207]

After watching the videos, I am once again wondering how the name America was used for the New World.

Merriam-Webster's answer

Who Is Amerigo Vespucci?

German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller is credited with first using the name America in 1507 on a large 12-panel map based on traveling accounts of explorers of the New World, and in particular those of Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. The map, entitled Universalis Cosmographia, was included in the book Cosmographiae Introductio (Introduction of Cosmography) along with a translation to Latin of Quattuor Americi Vespuccij navigations (Four Voyages of Americo Vespucci), which is said to be written by Vespucci but that some historians believe is a forgery.

Waldseemüller labeled the part of the world that he envisioned as explored by Vespucci, America, feminizing the Latin form of Vespucci's given name, Americus. He chose the feminine form to be consistent with the Latinized names of other countries at the time, such as Europa and Asia. It was geographer Gerardus Mercator who extended the name America to include all of the Western Hemisphere.

Beginning in the 17th century, America was used metaphorically by English writers to refer to a place in which one longs to reach.

• Licence my roaving hands, and let them go
• Before, behind, between, above, below.
• O my America! my new-found-land
• My Kingdom, safeliest when with one man man'd.
• — John Donne, "To His Mistress Going to Bed," 1654

Wikepedia's Answer

It is generally accepted that the name derives from Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer, who explored the new continents in the following years. However, some have suggested other explanations, including being named after a mountain range in Nicaragua, or after Richard Amerike of Bristol.

Or maybe a few letters from the Kingdom of Mercia were moved around.

Enough of the musing, back to the algorithms for better understanding of history.

Silicon Valley Corporations Are Taking Control Of History Zerohedge June 10, 2022. where certain text in the article written by Caitlin Johnstone was enhanced with bold formatting.

Twitter has imposed a weeklong suspension on the account of writer and political activist Danny Haiphong for a thread he made on the platform disputing the mainstream Tiananmen Square massacre narrative.
...
The notification Haiphong received informed him that Twitter had locked his account for “Violating our rules against abuse and harassment,” presumably in reference to a rule the platform put in place a year ago which prohibits “content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occured, and when the content is shared with abusive intent.”

“This may include references to such an event as a ‘hoax’ or claims that victims or survivors are fake or ‘actors,’” Twitter said of the new rule. “It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.”

That we are now seeing this rule applied to protect narratives which support the geostrategic interests of the US-centralized empire is not in the least bit surprising.
...
Haiphong is far from the first to dispute the mainstream western narrative about exactly what happened around Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 as the Soviet Union was crumbling and Washington’s temporary Cold War alignment with Beijing was losing its strategic usefulness. But we can expect more acts of online censorship like this as Silicon Valley continues to expand into its role as guardian of imperial historic records.
...
This idea that anyone can ever be an impartial arbiter of objective reality is logically fallacious and is invalidated by facts in evidence. It is clear that imposing regulations on people’s efforts to understand world events on the platforms where people have come to congregate to share ideas and information will necessarily lead to an information ecosystem that is skewed to the benefit of whatever power structure is imposing those regulations. When that power structure is an alliance of oligarchs and government proxies whose interests are served by the ongoing dominance of the US-centralized empire, the information ecosystem will be biased in favor of that empire.

The most impressive feat of engineering in the 21st century has been of the “social” variety. The social engineering necessary to continually keep people confused and blinkered about what’s going on in the world despite a sudden influx of information availability is one of the most astonishing achievements in the history of civilization, despite its depraved and destructive nature.

The link to Tiananmen: The Massacre that Wasn’t includes an excerpt from an article written by the New Yorker, Nicholas Kristof (who tried to run for Governor in Oregon this year)

“The question of where the shootings occurred has significance because of the Government’s claim that no one was shot on Tiananmen Square. State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the square shortly after dawn as proof that they were not slaughtered. …

The central scene in the [eyewitness] article is of troops beating and machine-gunning unarmed students clustered around the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of Tiananmen Square. Several other witnesses, both Chinese and foreign, say this did not happen. …

There is also no evidence of machine-gun emplacements on the roof of the history museum that were reported in the Wen Wei Po article. This reporter was directly north of the museum and saw no machine guns there. Other reporters and witnesses in the vicinity also failed to see them. …

“The central theme of the Wen Wei Po article was that troops subsequently beat and machine-gunned students in the area around the monument and that a line of armored vehicles cut off their retreat. But the witnesses say that armored vehicles did not surround the monument – they stayed at the north end of the square – and that troops did not attack students clustered around the monument. Several other foreign journalists were near the monument that night as well and none are known to have reported that students were attacked around the monument.”

All I really know is my experience and observations in Beijing and other parts of China, April-May 1989 were dramatically different than the evening news reports my parents were watching in the Untied States. No cell phones or daily calls to reduce their worries from the narrative on the TV.

What is on your mind today?