Richard Morales

🇺🇸🇮🇹

[Glenn Beck @glennbeck]

I get why so many people are frustrated or skeptical about this Iran MOU. On paper, it looks like a massive compromise: $300 billion in unfrozen assets, a fixed schedule to lift sanctions, and immediate oil export waivers for Tehran. But what were we expecting when on one side, Trump is facing an apocalyptic regime that wants the world to burn and on the other, an American public that has no stomach for war? He played the cards that were actually on the table.

I’m sick and tired of the politicians and podcasters who bitch and complain no matter what Trump does. They scream that the war has to stop, but the second he stops it, they turn around and yell, "what kind of deal is this?!" If the goal is to actually end Iran’s regime, history shows there's only one model that works: total WWII-style defeat, occupation, and denazification. That requires American boots on the ground and an Iranian people ready to build a free country from the rubble. But NO ONE, myself included, wants boots on the ground.

Is this MOU what Trump wanted? I doubt it. But he did exactly what a leader of a Republic should do: he listened to the people and found a way to end this. A dictator would have kept on going. At the end of the day, a president can only go as far as the people will carry him. Right now, our appetite for war stops at the gas pump.

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

Eureka!! Hope you all are enjoying the World Cup

[Richard Morales @Rickjm1961]

@Dr_TheHistories @histories_arch That goes for the entirety of the West Asian region and throughout North Africa.

[Dr. M.F. Khan @Dr_TheHistories]

A Turkish journalist has sparked intense debate after claiming that much of modern Turkey was once part of the Christian Greek world and that many people living there today descend from populations that were forcibly or gradually Islamized over the centuries.

According to her statements, vast regions of Anatolia were Orthodox Christian and Greek for centuries before the spread of Islam transformed the demographic and cultural landscape. She argues that many families of Greek and Armenian origin eventually lost their original faith and identity, adopting Islam and a Turkish national identity instead.

The journalist describes the disappearance of churches, the destruction of Christian cemeteries, and the gradual erasure of a civilization that had existed in Asia Minor for more than a thousand years. She also claims that many descendants of Islamized Greeks have been taught to view Orthodox Greeks as enemies despite their shared ancestry.

“I have seen firsthand what Islamization does to culture and freedom,” she stated, warning that Europe should learn from the historical experience of Anatolia and protect its cultural heritage and identity.

Her comments have reignited discussions about the forgotten Christian history of Asia Minor, the existence of Crypto-Christians, and the complex ethnic origins of many people in modern Turkey. For many Greeks, these remarks are seen as a rare acknowledgment from within Turkey of the deep historical roots of Hellenism in Anatolia and the dramatic changes that followed the Ottoman era.

#drthehistories

[Vintage Rock N’ Roll 🎸 @RockNRoLL_85]

Share a killer song that mentions Texas or a town in Texas!

[Richard Morales @Rickjm1961]

@RockNRoLL_85 Looking down the and can’t believe Amarillo by Morning - George Strait is not on the top of the list.

[Ahmed Al-Khalidi @khalidi79397]

Colonialism is bad, right?

Wrong.

The Aztec Empire ran sacrifice at industrial scale. Excavations of the Huey Tzompantli, the skull rack next to the Templo Mayor, have uncovered hundreds of skulls of men, women, and children. Spanish eyewitnesses described tens of thousands. The Aztecs fought "Flower Wars" whose purpose was capturing live victims for the altar. Hearts were cut out of living people. Subject peoples hated Aztec rule so much that Tlaxcalans made up most of Cortes's army. The conquest was largely an indigenous uprising against an indigenous empire. The sacrifices ended under Spanish rule.

India: burning a widow alive on her husband's funeral pyre. British records from Bengal alone documented thousands of cases between 1815 and 1828. The British, with Indian reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, banned it in 1829. When priests told General Napier it was sacred custom, he answered: my nation also has a custom, we hang men who burn women alive. You follow yours, we will follow ours.

India: Thuggee cults murdered travelers by the tens of thousands over centuries as offerings to Kali. It was a hereditary profession. William Sleeman's campaign in the 1830s wiped it out.

Slavery was a universal indigenous institution. Dahomey and Ashanti were built on slave raiding and sold captives for a thousand years to Arab traders before any European ship arrived. Pacific Northwest tribes held up to a quarter of some village populations as slaves and killed them ceremonially at potlatches. The Comanche ran a captive-raiding economy across the Southwest. What colonizers introduced after 1807 was the first attempt in history to abolish slavery globally. The Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron spent fifty years hunting slave ships and freed about 150,000 Africans. African kings protested. The King of Bonny complained that abolition was destroying a trade ordained by his gods and priests.

The Dahomey kingdom's "Annual Customs" beheaded hundreds of captives and slaves every year to honor dead kings. Documented by European visitors for two centuries. It ended when France conquered Dahomey in 1894.

Sailors called Fiji the Cannibal Isles. Chief Ratu Udre Udre kept a stone for every victim he ate. His pile holds nearly 900. Shipwrecked sailors were killed and eaten. Within a generation of missionaries and British administration after 1874, the practice was gone.

Nigeria: In parts of Igboland, newborn twins were left in the bush to die and their mothers ostracized or killed. Missionary Mary Slessor spent decades in Calabar rescuing abandoned infants until the practice collapsed.

Indigenous genocide of indigenous people. In 1835, two Maori tribes invaded the Chatham Islands and slaughtered the Moriori, whose own law forbade them to fight back. They killed, enslaved, and ate them. The Moriori population fell from about 2,000 to barely 100. No European did this. British colonial law ended it.

Add headhunting in Borneo, the Philippines, and Nagaland. Female infanticide in India and Polynesia. Foot binding in China, dismantled partly by missionary campaigns. Every one of these ended under pressure from the colonial powers we are taught to treat as history's unique villains.

Colonialism was not charity. The Belgian Congo was a horror, conquest was for profit, and rule was without consent. But the ledger has two sides and one has been erased. Pre-colonial societies practiced slavery, human sacrifice, widow burning, infanticide, and genocide, because cruelty is not a European invention. The first civilization that tried to abolish these practices worldwide is the one you were taught to be ashamed of.

If "indigenous" means innocent and "colonizer" means guilty by definition, that is not history.

[Richard Morales @Rickjm1961]

@khalidi79397 @realDonaldTrump In honor of 250! Has anyone studied what the world would look like today if not for the colonizers!! Had Homo sapiens, Phoenicians, Greek, Roman, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch…never ventured beyond their borders. Colonization=Global Development!

[Richard Morales @Rickjm1961]

@realDonaldTrump In honor of 250! Has anyone studied what the world would look like today if not for the colonizers!! Had Homo sapiens, Phoenicians, Greek, Roman, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch…never ventured beyond their borders. Colonization=Global Development!

[Richard Morales @Rickjm1961]

@ShorealoneFilms Same exact training occurred in my Spring Branch neighborhood in Houston shortly before the Venezuelan assault. Something must be brewing. Cuba?

[Richard Morales @Rickjm1961]

Exactly how is this divisive?! Division against murdering psychopaths?! https://t.co/eOXgRt6KZe

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

Reminder: the Crusades were a response to over 400 years of Islamic aggression against Christians and Europe.

632: Muhammad dies.

635: Muslims conquer the Christian city of Damascus.

636: Muslims conquer the Christian city of Antioch.

637: Muslims conquer the Holy Land.

639: Muslims conquer the first Christian country Armenia.

641: Muslims conquer the Coptic Christian country of Egypt.

650: Muslim armies reach southern Italy and Cyprus, taking thousands of captives as "slaves" and "concubines."

711: Muslims invade Spain, and by 715, they have overrun most of it.

717: Muslims besiege Constantinople but are repelled.

730: Muslims invade France, only to be stopped by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours.

792: The ruler of Al-Andalus calls for the invasion of France, and Muslim armies are assembled to attack it again, but they are repelled.

827: Muslims invade Sicily and Italy, persecuting monks. Sicily remains under Islamic rule until 1092.

846: Muslims invade Rome and force the Pope to pay tribute.

848: A third invasion of France occurs, and they are repelled for the third time.

909: Muslims occupy Sardinia.

937: The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is burned down by Muslims, and more churches in Jerusalem are attacked.

1009: Destruction of the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem.

1012: Beginning of al-Hakim’s oppressive decrees against Christians.

1071: Muslim Turks attack the Byzantines and occupy much of Anatolia.

1094: Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos asks Western Christendom for help against Muslim Turkish invasions.

1095: Pope Urban II finally declares the First Crusade.

[Richard Morales @Rickjm1961]

@fworksconfetti @RogerBlumberg Take it that it was one of those episodes that resulting in the cow on your arm ????

[Real Country Music @real_kuntry]

If That Ain’t Country

[Larry The Cable Guy @GitRDoneLarry]

RIP David Allen Coe. @Ron_White and I both met and got to hang out a while David at Willie’s 4th of July concert years ago and as an old country fan it’s one of my favorite memories from the road. I then got to sing “You never even called me by my name” with him on stage. Crazy day. Thanks for the tunes David. Gonna listen to him all day tomorrow on my way to Texas . His version of “Please come to Boston” is a banger.

[Traces of Texas @TracesofTexas]

Speaking of El Paso, the fabled Pancho's Mexican Buffet got its start in that West Texas city back in 1958. Traces of Texas reader Franco Ruiz kindly sent in this photo and asked "Traces, when's the last time you raised the flag?" I thought about it and can't remember, exactly, but it must have been in the 1980s. And then I thought that it's a shame that there is a whole generation of Texans that have grown up not knowing what "raise the flag" means. I realize that there are still four Panchos in Texas, but unless you live in D-FW or Houston, you're not going to be tasting the epic goodness of their sopapillas.

When's the last time YOU raised the flag?

[Richard Morales @Rickjm1961]

@TracesofTexas My dad’s favorite spot when I was but a child!! There was Panchos, Felix’s in the Montrose and that was about it for Tex-Mex unless you ventured into the Houston 2nd ward!!

[Richard Morales @Rickjm1961]

@RadioRomaX I benefited from the previous law as my great grandparents immigrated from Sicily in 1886. I now own a villa, live half time in Italy and contribute considerably to the Italian economy. I know the law was greatly abused but there must be a better way than cancel the entire system

[Richard Morales @Rickjm1961]

@mamboitaliano__ Absolute favorite!! The €3 vino bianco sold at the mercato della carne in a plastic jug!!!

[Texas Music Office @txmusicoffice]

We are saddened to learn of the passing of Augie Meyers over the weekend. He was a true pillar of Texas music, and he will be sorely missed. Our hearts and thoughts go out to his family and friends.

Augie Meyers was born in San Antonio, Texas, a city whose rich blend of Mexican, German, and country traditions helped shape the distinctive sound he would later bring to American roots music. Growing up surrounded by conjunto, rhythm and blues, and rock ’n’ roll, Meyers developed a lifelong love of the keyboard. His early fascination with the Vox organ would become one of the most recognizable sounds in Texas rock, giving his music a warm, swirling tone that fans instantly recognized.

Meyers first rose to national prominence in the 1960s as a founding member of the Sir Douglas Quintet, the band behind the hit song “She’s About a Mover.” His signature organ riffs helped define the group’s Tex-Mex rock style and made the song a classic of the era. Over the decades he collaborated with numerous artists across the Texas music scene, including longtime friend Doug Sahm, and remained a respected figure in roots, rock, and conjunto-influenced music.

Later in his career, Meyers continued to build his legacy as a member of the Texas Tornados alongside Doug Sahm, Freddy Fender, and Flaco Jiménez. The group blended country, rock, and Tex-Mex traditions and earned a Grammy Award for Best Mexican-American Performance in 1991. Through decades of touring, recording, and mentoring younger musicians, Augie Meyers became not just a keyboard player but a cultural ambassador for the musical traditions of South Texas, leaving behind a sound and spirit that will continue to inspire generations.