MANIACS
HALF-FULL REPORT 10/07/22
I just returned back home, jet-lagged and wigged-out from three intense weeks exploring Central Asia with your fellow TTPers.
Frankly, after leading back-to-back explorations of Ireland, then to the Stans of West Turkestan, I’m not at all sure I can come close to Mike Ryan’s mind-blowing tour de force HFRs of 09/02, 09/09, 09/16, 09/23, and 09/30 for all last month. Mike – you raised the bar on me so high it’s out of sight!
So here goes. We’ll start with something that happened to me a few days ago at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Uzbekistan’s capital. Tashkent. I had come down to the lobby bar to get a bottle of mineral water and standing there was a young fellow I guessed to be in his 30s and looked Russian
I said hello to him with a smile, which he returned then held out his hand to shake which I did. He asked in English where I was from, and I replied, “America, I’m American,” then asked where he was from. He put his hand over his eyes and began to cry.
Wiping away the tears, he explained, “I am crying for my country, my Russia, and what is happening to it.” I rested my hand on his shoulder, looked into his eyes with heartfelt sympathy, and simply said, “I understand.” Instantly he embraced me with a bear hug.
Clearly it was something he needed. We nodded to each other in acknowledgement, and went our separate ways. The interaction lasted less than a minute but I’ll never forget it.
SKYE’S LINKS 10/06/22
Who Did It?
Nord Stream 1 and 2
A Tale of Two Pipelines
Was it Biden, Putin, or that Pesky Swedish kid? Somebody must be responsible, and threats of nuclear war are in the air. Let's have a look.
It's funny what can happen under tremendous pressure.
The economy can wreck, law enforcement can become detached from reality, politicians can invent new enemies as a distraction, and the physical chemistry of trapped natural gas under extreme pressure can lead to problems.
Elon Musk did it, he finally bought Twitter, and he plans to change the world. Those January 6 avengers and their henchmen have lost another round.
What if poor operating practices by the same gang that brought us Chernobyl wrecked the pipelines? How can anyone with military experience seriously think that the alleged special forces team decided to hang around for seventeen hours between pipe failures? C'mon, man.
And c'mon over to Skye's Links. You won't read this anywhere else…yet.
THE SNAKE WALLS OF KHIVA
The inner city of the ancient Silk Road oasis of Khiva has been unchanged for centuries. Surrounding 40ft-high snake walls that writhe around the city have protected it for centuries, enabling defenders to shoot, spear, and pour burning hot oil on attackers from three sides.
Khiva’s labyrinth of narrow lanes adorned with blue and aquamarine tile mosaics is a living museum for you to explore. On the Oxus or Amu Darya River in deepest Central Asia, Khiva was ancient when Alexander the Great seized it in 329 BC.
It survived the depredations of Arabs in the 8th century, Mongols in the 13th, Tamerlane in the 14th. The Khanate of Khiva continued to flourish on the Silk Road until conquered by the Russians in the 19th. Today in Uzbekistan, it remains as the best-preserved of the ancient oases of the Silk Road, yet unknown to the outside world.
It need not remain unknown to you, however. We were just here last week, and will be here again next May. Join us and make Khiva a part of your life.(Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #226 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
BURMA’S SACRED GOLDEN ROCK
Some three hours’ drive east of Rangoon brings you to Mount Kyaiktiyo, at the top of which (3,600ft) is a gigantic granite boulder covered in gold leaf perched on the edge about to fall off. But it never does, held in place, legend says, by a strand of the Buddha’s hair put underneath it 2,500 years ago. Ever since, the Golden Rock has been a sacred pilgrimage site for the Burmese people and Buddhists around the world.
There are very few people here other than pilgrims, who devoutly pray, circumambulate the rock, and reverently place small strips of gold leaf upon it. It’s a marvelous experience to be among them. I plan to be here once again in an expedition soon – you might consider joining me. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #112 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
THE COMING GREEN ELECTRICITY NIGHTMARE
Hundreds of billions in new subsidies will bring expensive, unreliable, eco-destructive power
Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) wanted regulatory reform, in part to reverse some of the Biden Administration reversals of Trump era reforms intended to expedite permits for fossil fuel projects.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) needed Manchin’s vote in the 50-50 Senate to enact his latest spending extravaganza, the Inflation Reduction Act, which was primarily a massive climate and “green” energy subsidy arrangement. It gives Schumer allies some $370 billion in wind, solar, battery and other funding, tax credits and subsidies. In exchange, Schumer would offer a path for Manchin’s reform bill.
THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY’S DO-OR-DIE MOMENT
Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 2012, is widely expected to sail into a third five-year term at this month’s 20th Party Congress starting October 16. This will make him the longest-serving party chief since founding leader Mao Tse-tung.
It will also represent a risky departure from a system of collective leadership and orderly succession that had given the Chinese regime an important advantage over its less stable authoritarian peers.
Paradoxically, the party’s renewed commitment to its “core leader” is coming at a time when the Chinese government faces a daunting array of foreign and domestic challenges, most of which have been prodigiously exacerbated by Xi’s own policy choices.
In effect, the CCP appears to be succumbing to the authoritarian curse of one-man rule, binding itself to the flawed judgment of a single personality and potentially dragging the entire country down with it.
THE THINNEST VENEER OF CIVILIZATION REMAINS
The great achievement of Western civilization—consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit—was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature.
But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright.
As a result, the once prosperous Greek city-states, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded—as civilization went headlong in reverse.
We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis.
RUSSIA’S MILITARY MUTINY AND THE FALL OF TSAR PUTIN
Indeed, it was on the basis of a tendentious tract about the historic 'unity' of Russians and Ukrainians that President Putin justified his invasion of an independent neighboring state.
But another word, also with great resonance in Russian history, now hangs over the Kremlin's flailing military campaign. And that word is: Mutiny. Myatezh – мятеж – in Russian.
Remarkably, it was raised on Moscow's main TV channel last week by the woman described as Putin's propagandist-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, during the nightly discussion program on the state of the 'special military operation.'
The striking-looking Simonyan is the head of RT, the Kremlin's English-language broadcasting network, but here she was speaking to a Russian audience.
THE MOST ANCIENT SYMBOL OF REVERENCE FOR EXISTENCE
Yesterday, I found this religious decoration on the outer wall of an old mosque in the three-thousand year-old Silk Road oasis city of Bukhara. I’ve seen it in many places throughout the world, such as ancient ruins of India and Rome. Yet this is far older – it was carved onto mammoth ivory by Ice Age hunters in Ukraine 12,000 years ago.
From time immemorial has it represented eternity, prosperity, the centeredness of all that is. Why? Look up into the sky on a clear dark night. All people have studied the heavens for eons. You could always know where you were by finding North, for the two front stars of what we call the Big Dipper point to it – always.
The Greeks called it Mega Arktikos, the Great Bear – why we call Far North the Arctic today. The ancients saw the Bear every year rotating around Celestial North – now occupied by Polaris, the North Star – through all four seasons, while all the stars in the sky circled around it every night. What do you see in this depiction of that seasonal rotation?
Yes, a Swastika -- Sanskrit for “the goodness of existence.” The most heinous perversion of symbolic art in world history was to take the symbol for the goodness of existence used by people for a dozen millennia – and still revered by Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems and many others to this day – and twist it into a symbol of horrific evil. It’s an informative lesson of history. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #225 photo ©Jack Wheeler)