Barú

Barú island (it’s really a peninsula, but everyone calls it an island) is exactly what you would expect from a beach known as “White Beach” – gleaming white sands and waters in every shade of blue. It takes about an hour to arrive from Cartagena by boat and most tourists stay overnight in hammocks strung between the palm trees.

The map to the right is Columbia. It has an interesting climate because it's shores are both in the Caribbean as well as the Pacific. Baru peninsula (island) is just north of Cartagena on the Caribbean.

It is easy to understand how Columbia would be a place such sailing ships would visit. Columbia could receive ships from the West Indies, cart the cargo by mule to the Caribbean and put the cargo on sailing ships to the east coast of Europe and into  the Mediterranean Sea. 

This should be fascinating with a great deal of history revealed.  

Real gold bullion and pieces of eight.

December 5, 2015
Posted by Joseph R Fonseca

Colombia (click here) has found the wreck of a Spanish galleon that sank off the coast of Cartagena and is thought to be laden with emeralds and gold and silver coins, President Juan Manuel Santos said on Friday.
More details will be provided at a news conference on Saturday, Santos said from his Twitter account.
The San Jose sank in 1708 in the Caribbean Sea close to the walled port city of Cartagena. It was part of the fleet of King Philip V as he fought the English during the War of Spanish Succession.
"Great news! We have found the San Jose galleon. Tomorrow we will provide details at a press conference from Cartagena," Santos tweeted.
The government's claim on Friday did not shed light on a legal wrangle with Sea Search Armada, a U.S.-based salvage company which had a long-standing suit against Bogota over ownership of the wreck. SSA said in 1981 it had located the area in which the ship sank.
SSA and the government were partners back then and following international custom, they agreed to split any proceeds. The government later said any treasure would belong to Colombia.
In 2011 a U.S. court declared the galleon property of the Colombian state.
(Reporting by Helen Murphy; Editing by Sandra Maler)

The coin to the right is a maravedí. It may have been coined in Liberia during the 11th to 14th century. Before 1492 and Columbus. But, it was the smallest denomination of Spanish currency.

 






The coin to the left is the next denomination, a Spanish real.

 
The coin to the right is literally a piece of eight. The silver coins which were mostly probably minted from South American silver, were divided to 'make change' in trading of goods. These while valuable also represent a time in history when coin's value was according to the value of the silver. Literally, it was a trading commodity. 

The Spanish Galleon San Jose sank in the early seventeen hundreds. It would have silver coins and pieces of eight on board to carry out commerce.

...A 1783 Chalmers (Maryland) Shilling (click here)
Although dividing a Spanish dollar into eight parts or "bits" was probably satisfying, it was even more fun if one could divide it into nine or ten bits. These underweight "short bits" started to become a problem in the Annapolis area and John Chalmers and another silver smith, Thomas Sparrow, decided to do something about it. Sparrow and perhaps Chalmers made sets of dies for three pence, six pence and shillings, and offered to convert the "bits" into coins which had a defined weight and purity for the very modest of charge of 8%. Although these coins were unofficial, the powers at be seemed to be okay with it because there is no record of any proceedings taken against Chalmers and his partner.

Today the Chalmers coins are quite scarce with perhaps a couple hundred shillings known. The three and six pence pieces are much scarcer. The piece shown below is the more common "short worm" variety. The "worm" is the prize that the two birds are fighting over on the obverse....

September 5, 2015
By Tribune wire reports

...The ship, (click here) which maritime experts consider the holy grail of Spanish colonial shipwrecks, has also been the subject of a legal battle in the U.S., Colombia and Spain over who owns the rights to the sunken treasure.
In 1982, Sea Search Armada, a salvage company owned by U.S. investors including the late actor Michael Landon and convicted Nixon White House adviser John Ehrlichman, announced it had found the San Jose's resting place 700 feet below the water's surface.
Two years later, Colombia's government overturned well-established maritime law that gives 50 percent to whoever locates a shipwreck, slashing Sea Search's take to a 5 percent "finder's fee."

A lawsuit by the American investors in a federal court in Washington was dismissed in 2011 and the ruling was affirmed on appeal two years later. Colombia's Supreme Court has ordered the ship to be recovered before the international dispute over the fortune can be settled....

Stop being afraid, it is crippling and not very American.

Stop asking questions and go looking for your own answers. (click here)

Friction:

How Radicalization Happens to Them and Us
By Clark McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko

I purposely chose this book because it is online and free. No excuses. Nothing to say there aren't others in the public library.

Muslim Clerics and Imams have to take a special interest in young women and men that come from the Middle East to the USA. The social seclusion and self determined directions have to be discouraged and made mandatory to dispel any such behavior and activity. They will seclude out of habit of oppression, that is not the American culture. What they may find as distasteful requiring punishment is strange and anti-social. They are not to judge or be judged. Rather they are to seek acceptance in a society open to opportunity. It is the opportunity to self-expression and success they need to seek. A sincere community will have places to find emotional help and redirection to the opportunities.

The idea the couple would be home is justified as they had a nice house WITH A GARAGE. There are many things that can happen in a garage and driving down a street of a suburb completely undetected except for a 'hello wave' by a neighbor watering their lawn or racking leaves.

The privacy standards of the USA are a friendly basis for secrecy. I think the couple was using the garage covertly and may even have practiced their route to and from the holiday party.

But, I can easily see them leaving with the weaponry and body armor in the SUV. He went into the party and was dressed appropriately without weapons. He later returned with spouse with weapons and a plan. They may have worn ski masks to hide their identity.

They could disrobe in the SUV and assume everyone seeing them from the waist up would never detect them as the killers. They had a strong reputation of being wonderful people. No one would have a reason to mistrust them.

They could drive the SUV with their cache of weapons and body armor into the garage and close the door. Mission accomplished.

Why would the couple think such an attack would work to change policies that scarred Daddy's reputation? The internet.

I am not stupid, they were obviously destroying their cyber records in anticipation of something, either a search of the premise or they would be dead and baby would not have to know what the parents did. But, I have to ask did they actually believe they were going to be dead. Was the destruction of the cyber records to protect others in that they were dead or was it to destroy any possibility of linking the attack to them if a search of the home was conducted.

If a search was necessary there would be much more to implicate them in the attack than cyber records, they would have gotten caught. But, no one ever accuses criminals of being geniuses.

Have a better day, I really need to finish by Christmas decorations.

A child born to an American father inside the USA can be left behind to be raised as an American in a Wahhabism strictness and rise to be President. Then the USA military enters into the holy war that will succeed.

The fact the mother and father are now dead, the baby falls into a sphere of uncertainty to his rise to power in the USA. The parents didn't bargain for the fact child protective services would enter the picture. The baby's family has a history now. The mother was from Saudi Arabia and perhaps the baby can be placed with relatives there, but, not likely as the child has a USA birth certificate. But, to place the child with the family in the USA raises the fact the baby was in danger in a garage that was a black hole to everyone's knowledge. It is something to worry about.

I sincerely think the parents were leaving the child with their grandmother as a babysitter and expected to be home when they had finished their revenge on a public employer for disciplining Daddy.

If Daddy is discredited, what does that do to baby? It is exclusively a dilemma for the USA because the Arab nations in the Middle East are primarily lead by Kings or dictators. That single line of ascending to power insures the country and it's people will fall into the hands of a capable leader.

The violence is justified for the killers because they are assuming political power without the title of power. People have to learn a lesson for the insults of working in the USA against a man's reputation. Those disciplinary papers have to stop.

Happy Holidays. What is better than to hit Americans right between the eyes with violence during a month long holiday season that begins with Thanksgiving. Muslims are very familiar with month long holidays and what transpires during that time.

One other thing. Last night Rachel Maddow had a couple of lawyers talking about the MYTHS created in the USA about gun control and these incidents are orchestrated by the government to control power and take away defense. That is very low information voter talk. It is my opinion those lawyers were talking to a community of people to raise money.

The audience could be inside or outside the USA or both. People do read subtitles and the lawyer talking in English proves they are in The West and are reputable to their statements.

Retired Captain Malcolm S. Nance had something very interesting to say.

He stated Daesh is a cult and there have been other cults in the history of Islam. A couple of things came to mind.

1. Were the past cults at all successful and could that be emboldening Daesh when there is every reason to believer they will fail because of a faux and defeatable. Daesh will be defeated. They have no methods of rising above barbarism otherwise they would have and portray themselves as an advanced practice of Islam. They will be defeated for multiple reasons.

2. Saddam Ba'athists are known to have tortured people and it is that expertise that went across Syria where it wasn't before.

3. Because Daesh may be viewed as a cult and perhaps intimidation to The West; is a cult of belief respected within leaders of Muslim nations? Is the reluctance to fight Daesh by American allies due to the fact they actually connect it to a religion and some strange justification OR are they intimidated by the backlash?

I assumed he is retired as a Captain because of other photos. He needs to speak more about his expertise in relation to what he knows and understands about Daesh. His military ranks are not elaborated in the online media. That sir is racism.

...Author Malcolm W. Nance (click here) is a 20-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community. He has been deployed on anti-terrorism and counter-terrorism intelligence operations in the Balkans, Middle East -- including Iraq and Afghanistan -- and sub-Saharan Africa....

...Nance is a decorated combat veteran of military operations in Beirut, Lebanon; Bosnia, Syria, Libya, Iran, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. Nance specialized in foreign languages, tactical interrogation and Human Intelligence. He became an instructor in wartime and peacetime SERE where he trained Navy and Marine Corps pilots, Navy SEALS and other high risk of capture soldiers, sailors and marines to survive captivity as prisoner of war^. He conceptualized and spearheaded the Advanced Terrorism, Abduction and Hostage Survival school (ATAHS), a special survival program designed to train Special Mission Units, Navy SEALS and select members of the US Intelligence community in resisting torture, exploitation and escaping terrorist captivity by al-Qaeda. At ATAHS, he led an al-Qaeda simulation group to expose high risk of capture trainees to the Al Qaeda organization and its abduction and attack tactics....

His decades of intimate, first-hand knowledge of terrorist strategy, tactics and attack methods is captured in the ultimate handbook that cuts through terrorism theory, mythology and fiction to reveal the hard realities of 21st century terrorism methodologies and tactics....