OF COURSE SHE CAN
FLASHBACK FRIDAY – SWIMMING THE HELLESPONT
July, 1973. The Hellespont is the famous strait separating Europe from Asia, where the Black Sea after flowing through the Bosphorus at Istanbul and a widening called Marmara empties into the Aegean Sea of the Mediterranean. One of the great stories of Greek Mythology is Leander swimming the Hellespont to tryst with Hero, the woman he loved but was forbidden to see.
Thus he swam at night, and she lit a torch for him to swim to. One night a storm blew out the torch and the strong currents swept Leander onto the rocks to drown. So I first swam the Hellespont at night in 1960 and almost drowned myself (LIFE Magazine, Dec. 12, 1960, pp 91-94).
This was the second time, swimming from Leander’s village site of Abydos on the Asia side to Sestos, Hero’s village site on Europe’s. Here I am having reached the Sestos shore.
The Hellespont is where the Trojan War was fought, where the Persians crossed to lose against the Greeks at Marathon and Salamis, where Alexander crossed to conquer the Persian Empire. Lord Byron swam the Hellespont in 1803 to make all the legends and history a part of his life. I was determined to do the same, twice to make sure. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #100 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
THE HANGING MONASTERY
The architectural wonder of the Hanging Monastery was built on a vertical cliff face by the Tuoba people of Inner Mongolia over 1,500 years ago (in the 490s). Devout Buddhists and brilliant engineers, they defied gravity by inserting huge wooden crossbeams deep into the cliff to suspend the monastery’s temples, shrines, and monks’ living quarters, connected with bridges, corridors, and boardwalks, out into space.
Liao Mongols in the 900s rebuilt and sustained it, and it has been carefully refurbished and restored in the centuries since. While it remains primarily Buddhist with statues and depictions of Sakyamuni (the historical Buddha of 5th century BC) and Maitreya (the future Buddha), the monks welcome reverence to Taoism and its founder Lao Tzu (4th century BC), as well as Confucius (551-479 BC). Thus you also see shrines and statues of them like nowhere else.
It is a unique and inspiring experience to be here. We’ll be here again in our next exploration of Inner Mongolia sometime soon. ((Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #116 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
SKYE’S LINKS 09/07/23
Narrative Damage Control.
Can the Deep State Save its Political Ship?
The Federal Government relies on political narratives to assert control. Federal agencies are fundamentally narrative management organizations built up during a previous time when lies could be told with impunity. Federal agents with guns attempt to beat political beliefs into the populace when the lies fail. Love it or hate it, it is the system.
Things are getting tougher. First, the narrative-making process appears to have less competency, elegance, and professionalism. You know what is said about going woke leading to “going broke” in the private sector. The government sector is not immune, as social hires were found to be winging it all through COVID-19. They seem to be winging everything.
Federal Narrative Control agents have their hands full as the lunacy from the bureaucrats is getting more challenging to enforce. Government agencies have lost coordination among themselves.
Medical information is falsified, crime statistics are outright lies, Bidenomics is not working, and people act as if anarchy is the rule, whether in shopping malls or at the ballot box.
The ship is on fire, and the damage control crews don’t know how to put the flames out. Instead of authenticity, competent insiders are abandoning ship for the private sector.
The Fourth Turning grumbles on. Anarchy is spreading even while some courts earnestly try to restore faith in the law. A profound problem is that many courts promote anarchy, if not evil. President Trump has much to say about this.
Let’s have a look over at Skye’s Links.
THE ARIRANG MASS GAMES IN NORTH KOREA
The spectacle takes place in the fall at the May Day Stadium in Pyongyang. I attended in 2010 and 2012. It has to be seen to be believed. You’re looking at 10,000 dancers, acrobats and performers on the stadium floor. The background screen of a rising sun and Korean letters is a “card stunt,” 30,000 students holding colored cards composing it.
The number “65” is for the 65th anniversary of the surrender of Imperial Japan in World War II (August 15, 1945 – I took this photo in 2010), their Liberation Day (our V-J Day). The snowy mountain depicted below the 65 is Mount Paekdu, where all North Koreans are taught their country’s founder Kim Il-sung defeated the Japanese and won the war (he was actually at a Soviet army camp near Khabarovsk, Siberia at the time).
They are never taught a word about the events a few days prior to their Liberation Day (i.e. Hiroshima and Nagasaki), nor to whom the Japanese surrendered. Hands down, NorkLand is the world’s most bizarre country. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #88 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
WYOMING’S “POOP” RAMPAGE IS AN INSIGHT INTO TODAY’S HOMELESS
The headline at the Daily Mail was eye-catching: “Squatters take over Wyoming city: Vagrants leave millions of dollars worth of damage to motel and 500lbs of human feces in downtown area - as Casper fights off a homeless invasion.”
It was an image at odds with how we think of Wyoming; that is, a clean, naturally beautifully conservative state. But the homeless plague is everywhere, and the situation in Casper reminds us that most of today’s homeless are not just ordinary people down on their luck; they are dysfunctional drug addicts who are the inevitable result of 60 years of leftist drug policies.
The Daily Mail has the details behind the headline:
Squatters have taken over a Wyoming city after some left millions of dollars worth of damage to a motel and others left 500lbs of feces in the downtown area.
Casper, the second-largest city in the state, is home to 60,000 residents but now also has about 200 homeless people.
Some have seized various properties that are empty or abandoned, including an abandoned Econo Lodge motel that hasn’t operated since November.
Casper Mayor Bruce Knell described the extent of destruction as akin to ‘third-world-country stuff’.
FIGHTING DEM MONSTERS WHO ARE USING RATIONALES ONCE USED AGAINST THEM
Democrats are adopting arguments and rationales once used against the left to silence or jail them. Pundits and politicians are becoming the very thing that they have long condemned in this age of rage. It is realization of Nietzsche’s monster theory.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Those words from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche capture the fear that the struggle against the ideas and people we oppose will twist us into the very thing we hate.
For Democrats, that moment has come in an age of rage against former President Donald Trump in particular and conservatives in general. It’s an age when reason and restraint are strangers.
In various areas, Democrats have embraced repellent concepts in the effort to silence or even jail their opponents. What is most striking is that legal arguments now used by the left were once used against the left.
THE LEFT DID THIS TO OUR COUNTRY
In the last 20 years, the Left has boasted that it has gained control of most of America institutions of power and influence—the corporate boardroom, media, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the administrative state, academia, foundations, social media, entertainment, professional sports, and Hollywood.
With such support, between 2009-17, Barack Obama was empowered to transform the Democratic Party from its middle-class roots and class concerns into the party of the bi-coastal rich and subsidized poor—obsessions with big money, race, a new intolerant green religion, and dividing the country into a binary of oppressors and oppressed.
The Obamas entered the presidency spouting the usual left-wing boilerplate (“spread the wealth,” “just downright mean country,” “get in their face,” “first time I’ve been proud of my country”) as upper-middle-class, former community activists, hurt that their genius and talents had not yet been sufficiently monetized.
GRAND ESCALANTE STAIRCASE
As you can see, this place is aptly named. It is simply phantasmagorical – nature on LSD. Then again, so much of southern Utah is too, for close by Escalante are the Vermillion Cliffs, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon, Zion Canyon, Monument Valley and a lot more.
The entire area is Navaho country, so it is no surprise their native religion is based on peyote, a cactus containing the hallucinogen, mescaline, with the Navaho belief that nature surrounding them was designed by the Peyote Bird.
However, it is not necessary to take any hallucinogen to achieve a sense of ecstasy being here – just a deep appreciation of what a wondrous world – a breathtaking world – it is that we are all privileged to be alive in. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #180 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
Z GENERATION: INTO THE HEART OF RUSSIAS FASCIST YOUTH
[No, this is not about America’s Gen Z, named after the Xers and Y Millennials. It is about Russia’s, named after the tactical insignia of Russian troops occupying Ukraine, which they support with a Nazi-genocidal fervor]
Red Square, Moscow
Alina is 19. She loves fashion, and watching pirated Hollywood movies with her mechanic boyfriend Sergei.
But since February 24, 2022, when President Vladimir Putin sent an invasion force into Ukraine, Alina's online life has become scarily violent. She is one of the Z Generation.
She shares and re-posts propaganda about Ukrainian neo-Nazis and child-killers, backed up with warnings of the threat to Russia from shadowy NATO organizations. The people of Ukraine, she believes, can be saved only by wiping out their culture, their government and their language.
Her homepage is plastered with apocalyptic images of a burning White House in 'Fasciston DC'. The Ukrainian flag is renamed 'the Devil's Swastika' and Putin is 'Russia's savior'.
How did Alina, and hundreds of thousands of young Russians like her, become so consumed with online violence and hate?