What if the Black Plague had killed off almost all Europeans? Then the Reconquistanever happens. Spain and Portugal don't kickstart Europe's colonization of other continents. And this is what Africa might have looked like.
The map – upside down, to skew our traditional eurocentric point of view – shows an Africa dominated by Islamic states, and native kingdoms and federations. All have at least some basis in history, linguistics or ethnography. None of their borders is concurrent with any of the straight lines imposed on the continent by European powers, during the 1884-85 Berlin Conference and in the subsequent Scramble for Africa. By 1914, Europeans controlled 90% of Africa's land mass. Only the Abyssinian Empire (modern-day Ethiopia) and Liberia (founded in 1847 as a haven for freed African-American slaves) remained independent.
This map is the result of an entirely different course of history. The continent depicted here isn't even called Africa [1] but Alkebu-Lan, supposedly Arabic for 'Land of the Blacks' [2]. That name is sometimes used by those who reject even the name 'Africa' as a European imposition. It is therefore an ideal title for this thought experiment by Swedish artist Nikolaj Cyon. Essentially, it formulates a cartographic answer to the question: What would Africa have looked like if Europe hadn't become a colonizing power?
To arrive at this map, Cyon constructed an alternative timeline. Its difference from our own starts in the mid-14th century. The point of divergence: the deadliness of the Plague. In our own timeline, over the course of the half dozen years from 1346 to 1353, the Black Death [3] wiped out between 30 and 60% of Europe's population. It would take the continent more than a century to reach pre-Plague population levels. That was terrible enough. But what if Europe had suffered an even more catastrophic extermination – one from which it could not recover?
To read more - http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/africa-uncolonized
Kansas resident Amy Grant noticed that every time she went to her local prayer booth to pray, she would suddenly develop ‘intense migraine’ pain. New revelations from Edward Snowden reveal how Obama and the NSA have developed a way to ‘wiretap’ the prayers of all Christians and archive what people have been praying for in a large database.
The END TIMES are truly upon us, my friends. The Age of Liberal Darkness is here. The Bible warns that the day shall come when Christians will be hunted down and persecuted by non-believers, forced to accept the Mark of the Beast lest they get tortured.
Today when I woke up, I prayed for the usual: 1) Obama to get impeached 2) The Atlanta Falcons to win the Super Bowl 3) A safe upcoming school year without any tragic stories 4) China’s economic demise 5) A good breakfast.
It is terrifying for me to know that my simple prayer, which maybe lasted about 2 minutes, was probably wiretapped by Agents of Obama and there is some government database that has an archived recording of my conversation with God.
For more - http://christwire.org/2014/08/obama-nsa-now-wiretapping-the-prayers-of-all-christians/
R.E.M.’s Out of Time is the most politically significant album in the history of the United States. Because of its packaging.
In 1985, the pop charts were full of Prince and Sheena Easton and the youth of America were being corrupted. Tipper Gore and other elite women of Washington formed the “Parents Music Resource Center” (PMRC) to put pressure on the creators and distributors of “objectionable” music.
There were Senate hearings, and eventually those little black and white Parental Advisory stickers started appearing on albums.
This set off a wave of censorship across the country.
