UNBRANDED'S JOHN FITZSIMONS, TOM GLOVER, BEN THAMER AND GENGHIS KHAN

UnBranded’s Johnny Fitzsimons, Thomas Glover, Ben Thamer Not Covering the Miles of Genghis Khan, but……

By Fletcher Christian Lowe Huntington CPW News Service

     Border to border from Mexico to Canada is a good stretch of up to 2000 miles depending on where, exactly, one begins the journey.  On horseback it's a trip filled with adventure and perineum aches and pains.  So was Khan's trek across Mongolia and Asia.

 

     In the 11^th Century, Genghis Khan, controlled 12 million square miles mostly on horseback. Horses did not exist at the time in the Americas having died out about 11,000 to 13,000 years earlier during the Pleistocene Age, but not before crossing the Bering Strait land bridge to Eurasia and Africa.  The Spanish conquistadors brought them back leading the first native American Indian, not a plains Indian, but Florida Seminole named Sonowhanie or "keeper of memories" to shout out in Seminole "what the hell is that?"

     “I loved the film UnBranded about four Texas A&M students who following graduation made the horseback trek from Laredo, Texas to the Canadian border through the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Park on tamed wild mustangs,” said Texas A&M economics major Thorsten V. Friedman.  “Along the way they celebrated Theodore Roosevelt whose family had done battle with other New England China traders for a quick sea route from China to Europe,” said Friedman who noted the great battle over the control of public lands' and resources that was showcased in recent times in the bitter battle between the Koch Brothers who were bifurcating over the control of the Koch petro-chemical empire.  This led one brother to assert ill-gotten gains from stolen subterranean minerals on public lands.

     “I have studied the influence of Genghis Khan who has been recently reincorporated into Chinese culture and history from a place of semi-disavowed memory.   The complicated relationship of the Chinese and Mongols made acceptance of the differing cultures tentative, but it was hard to argue with the success of Khan who, thousands of years before the Russell’s Pony Express from Missouri to San Francisco, had already set the standard for horse mounted courier service covering up to 200 miles per day on the short legged Mongolian ponies.  The Soviets tried to erase completely the memory of Khan from their Mongolian subjects, but now we see the Chinese embracing that memory. One has to wonder if the Russell Pony Express riders weren’t high tailing it across the Western United States to connect to Khan’s great Spice Road along which opium from the Middle East would be transported before David Sassoon cornered the opium market in Basra, Iraq, by ships of the British navy and beating the old overland route.   Sassoon was soon leading the British East India Company that would eventually control the sea lanes from Europe to the Orient.    In time they would establish an Indian spice trading colony in Vietnam and eventually negotiated by military might the British Colony of Hong Kong further north which thrived on the opium, spice and silk trade,” said Friedman  who came to Texas A&M to study economics under chief White House economic advisor in 2000 and 2001, Dr. Morgan Reynolds.

     “Well, one cannot underestimate the power of this ancient….okay….let’s call it ‘spice’….trade to undergirt every other aspect of a nation’s economy.  By the time of Caleb Cushing's negotiation of the Wangia Treaty whereby the leery Chinese were assured that the Americans would not treat the Chinese as the Brits had done….dump as a trading chip cheap opium from Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, India and Turkey on Genghis’ Mongols and Chinese people, Caleb Cushing and his friends were well on their way to crossing North America not by horse flesh, but by an iron horse,” said Friedman.  Friedman credits Dr. Lowell P. Wigglesworth with Friedman’s growing knowledge of the relationship of the transcontinental railroad to U.S. opium imports and the outbreak of Civil War under the guise of ending slavery.  “Yea, we ended one form of slavery and instituted another,” said Friedman.   “You’ve heard the term ‘hell on wheels’….well, these guys are brutal and ‘hell on wheels’,” concluded Friedman noting Dr. Reynold's assessment of his tenure at the Bush White House as chief economics advisor.

     According to Friedman, Dr. Reynolds has the sixth sense of a wild mustang and when it came to sniffing out the truth about the U.S. economy in the Post-911 environment he was as rightfully jittery as a maverick herd in wolf country.  “I trust that my education was enhanced by his eye-opening assessment of the current economic and cultural conditions in the U.S.,” said Friedman who, in spite of a shared name, does not share a great enthusiasm for Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman was the economic advisor to the 1980’s Reagan-Bush White House.  “Friedman was the Darth Vader of 1980’s, 1990’s all the way up to the laisse-faire S&L bamboozle, the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the 2008 meltdown based on the bamboozled housing bubble during which the richest Americans had sold Joe Sixpack on adjustable rate mortgages, sub-prime mortgages and the garbage-bagging of the Black Scholes credit default formulations that Robert Merton’s professor at Harvard, Paul Samuelson, said was the creation of a Frankenstein monster in America.  From Al Greenspan’s ‘put’ which was, as we all now know was a ‘poot’ to Hank Paul’s Chicken Little dance, it was all BS folks and it’s bad for you.   Now we know why the opioids flowed so freely along the Silk Road to deaden the pain!  Whether your ass has been chapped by a 200-mile-a-day ride or by the nightmare of the 2008 meltdown, people need relief,” said Friedman, “but it's those who both import and pass the laws to prohibit that gain the greatest relief while, like the Soviets and Chinese, they sweep the inconvenient memory of Ghengis under David Sassoon’s Persian rug.”