THE FORBIDDEN GODDESSES
[Salman Rushdie is in the news today (4/15) with the publication of his new book, Knife: Meditations of an Attempted Murder. As are the terror-masters of Iran with their massive missile and drone attack upon Israel on Saturday (4/13). Thus this Monday's Archive, written on August 17, 2022 in response to the knife attack on Rushdie days earlier on August 12, should be a must-read. For it exposes the great skeleton in the Islamic closet, the “Satanic Verses,” the truth of which drives the Mullahs of Iran and their followers into criminal insanity.
TTP, August 17, 2022
In the 1st and 2nd Centuries AD, there arose in what is now northern Iraq an Arabian kingdom called Hatra, named after its capital city. Made wealthy with the caravan trade from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean, the Arab kings of Hatra built magnificent temples to their gods and goddesses.
The one you see above is known to archaeologists as The Lady of Hatra as what the Arab Hatrans called her is not known. Three others, however, are definitely known – for they are the Forbidden Goddesses, worshipped and adored by Arabs 2,000 years ago, hated and feared by over one billion people today.
Here they are – Al-Lat in the center, flanked by Manat, and Al-Uzza – the daughters of Allah, the subject of the Koran’s “Satanic Verses.” Funny thing is, almost no one save for scholars on the history of Islam and Moslem fanatics knows what these “Satanic verses” are. So what are they?
FLASHBACK FRIDAY – THE CRUSADER FORTRESS IN THE CAUCASUS
This is the fortress town of Shatili in an extremely remote Caucasus region in Georgia called Khevsureti. It was built by the Crusaders 1,000 years ago. The Khevsur people who live here trace their ancestry back to these Crusaders and until the 1930s still wore chain mail in feud-battles with other towns. I took this picture in 1991.
American traveler Richard Halliburton (1900–1939) saw and recorded the customs of the Khevsurs in 1935. The Khevsur men, dressed in chain mail and armed with broadswords, wore garments full of decoration made up of crosses and icons. They don’t do that anymore, but they proudly retain their Crusader Christian heritage – for Georgia adopted Christianity in the 4th century AD. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #85 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
A TWO-FER FOR UNDERSTANDING THE CONSTITUTION
HALF-FULL REPORT 04/12/24
It’s just too irresistible to start this HFR with the greatest clickbait headline not just of the week, but of modern times. Ready?
Daily Mail, 4/06: Why Sydney Sweeney And Her Double-D Breasts Are Being Hailed As Proof That Woke Culture Is Dead.
“Sydney Sweeney is one of Hollywood’s hottest rising stars, with a recent hit in rom-com Anyone But You, and Spider-Man spin-off Madame Web. Still only 26, Sweeney produces her own films and has unexpectedly become more than an actress.
The all-American blue-eyed blonde with corn-fed curves has become a cultural phenomenon, her unashamed sexuality embraced by America’s conservative Right as proof that woke culture is dying, if not already dead. Movie critic Amy Hamm says:
‘We’ve spent years being chastised for desiring or admiring beauty – because beauty is rare and exclusionary, and to exclude is to hate – or so we’ve been scolded to accept by today’s diversity, equity, and inclusion fanatics. We aren’t supposed to admire Sweeney’s beauty; but we’ve done it anyways. The times, they are a-changin’.’
Yes, they are. From J.K. Rowling’s courageous success against tranny-worship to Sweeney being an unapologetically sexual woman movie star, the culture is shifting rapidly from insanity to sanity. America is becoming normal once again.THE ROCK-HEWN CHURCHES OF LALIBELA, ETHIOPIA
900 years ago, the Church of Saint George (Bete Giyorgis in Amharic) was not built – it was hand carved downwards from a horizontal rock ledge. There is nothing like the rock-hewn churches in Lalibela anywhere else in the world.
Christianity was established in Ethiopia in 330 AD and has flourished ever since. Experiencing the devotion still so very much alive in one of the oldest Christian countries on earth is inspiring. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #26 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
SKYE’S LINKS 04/11/24
There’s not a whole lot of good news in Dodge this week, at least concerning the economy or Key Spy Powers Reform. The new Speaker seems to have lost his bearings in regards to the FBI, while the Left continues to blow smoke about inflation. Gold’s up, the dollar’s down, but there’s a new eclipse on the horizon!
They are trashing the Constitution, and it’s bipartisan:
Conservatives Enraged by Speaker Johnson Move to Scuttle Key Spy Powers Reform
JURY NULLIFICATION: AN ESSENTIAL SUBJECT
Our legal system is out of control. The arguments over how we got here are the stuff of chickens versus eggs, but regardless – today, lawyers and judges run the United States as a command bureaucracy; paralyzing any and all parts of the institutions when things do not go their way.
Most of them have forgotten whom they work for and shamelessly stymie the people out of running their country as they would prefer. That is not even a democracy, let alone the Republic we are actually supposed to be.
Whether civil or criminal, the process is a punishment demanding huge sums of money and work to prevail through, and in both cases, the lawyer class is empowered.
We have a “lawyer” branch of government that is almost the whole. The other two branches, which are also littered with lawyers, are playing minor supporting roles in the American act.
THE SANDS OF THE TAKLA MAKAN
When Marco Polo crossed the Tien Shan mountains and reached the Silk Road oasis of Kashgar in 1273, he faced an enormous desert of endless dunes called the Takla Makan, meaning “You go in, you don’t come out.”
To avoid this fate, the Silk Road at Kashgar splits in two – above to the north of the dreaded sand sea via the oases of Aksu and Turfan, and underneath to the south via the oases of Yarkand, Khotan, Charchan and Charklik. The two routes came together beyond Lop Nor, the eastern extension of the Takla Makan, at the oasis of Dunhuang.
His father Niccolo and uncle Maffeo had earlier taken the northern route to first meet Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, but now with Marco they took the southern route. They traveled in caravans of two-humped Bactrian camels, often crossing dunes on the edge – just like the photo you see. In 2008, I retraced Polo’s route along the southern route – part of it by motorized hang glider. He would be fascinated, I’m sure, to see what a camel caravan looks like from the air! (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #13 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
CHINA’S DEMOGRAPHIC COSTS OF A WAR OVER TAIWAN
Taiwan is now a geopolitical hotspot. Bloomberg Economics assesses the global economic impact of a war over Taiwan at $10 trillion – dwarfing the blow from the war in Ukraine or the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some nations are trying economically and militarily to deter China from reunifying Taiwan by force. In fact, the best deterrent is to make China aware of the potentially unbearable demographic consequences of war.
On February 29, China’s National Bureau of Statistics released population figures for 2023, with only 9.02 million births and a fertility rate of only 1.0, far less than the official forecast of 15.5 million and the fewest births since 1762, when the total population was just 200 million.
Last year, China officially acknowledged that its population shrank in 2022 for the first time in 60 years, nine years earlier than government projections had anticipated.
The implications of these datapoints are hard to overstate. This means that China’s demographic crisis is far worse than expected. As a result, all of China’s economic, foreign, and defense policies are based on faulty demographic data.
IS THE GREAT WOKE ILLUSION IN RUINS?
In 2021, Joe Biden was elected after a bitterly fought campaign that deposed the incumbent Donald Trump. Democrats eventually captured, for a time, both the House and Senate, ensuring the most left-wing government in modern American history.
Americans were then set to witness a great experi-ment. For the first time in their lives, a truly radical socialist program would supposedly fundamentally transform the way America dealt with the border, immigration, the economy, race relations, foreign policy, energy, law enforcement, crime, education, and social questions such as religion, gender, abortion, and schooling.
In a sense, we were all to be lab rats of sorts, to be experimented on by the radical left and their various critical theories. Now in the last year of the Biden term, we can see the results of that experiment—and the unfortunate disasters that followed.
But first, how was such a radical move to the left even possible in a center-right America?