WAKHAN SURPRISE
Our Glimpse 77 yesterday (04/25) was of the Wakhan Corridor – a skinny finger of northeast Afghanistan separating Tajikistan and Pakistan extending all the way to China. Click on the link to get the photo. Note the large alluvial fan in the center on the Afghan side of the Amu Darya. Now look closely and you’ll see a tiny white dot on the edge of the fan next to the green of the river bank.
What could that be? Well, here’s my photo of it close up. Certainly no Afghan village. It’s a modern windowless compound completely isolated with no roads, trails, or any other habitation for many miles in any direction, reachable only by helicopter. Any guesses? It’s a CIA interrogation center, where captured Taliban are brought for rather intense debriefings. That’s the Wakhan Surprise. I’ll bet many of you canny old TTPers, however, aren’t surprised at all. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #78 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
WHY IS THE FBI HIDING THE NASHVILLE TRANNY TERRORIST’S MANIFESTO?
[Note by JW: Women have more testosterone receptors in their brain than men. As they have no testicles, their ovaries produce well over a magnitude less testosterone than men. To compensate for this, a child or teenage girl’s developing brain produces more receptors. Thus, when a gender dysphoric young woman like Audrey Hale takes testosterone injections to try to be a man, it can send their capacity for aggression to fully psychotic levels.]
If the Nashville shooter had been a straight constitutional conservative would the FBI be blocking the killer's manifesto, or would it be scrutinized for months on every mainstream media platform from day one?
Twenty journals, five laptops, a suicide note and various other notes written by Hale were seized from the house she shared with her parents as well as two memoirs, five Covenant School yearbooks and seven cellphones, according to a FBI search warrant. The FBI is refusing to release them. Can you guess why? Of course you can.
SPY LETTER ABOUT HUNTER BIDEN SHOWS HOW DEMS ARE UNDERMINING DEMOCRACY
In the closing address at last month’s Summit for Democracy, Secretary of State Antony Blinken piously proclaimed, “As President Biden has said, democracy doesn’t happen by accident. It requires constant effort.”
Or in the case of the 2020 election, it required deceiving American voters.
The House Judiciary Committee has revealed that Blinken, then a top Biden adviser, orchestrated the letter from 51 top intelligence officials claiming that Hunter Biden’s laptop was nothing but a Russian disinformation campaign.
Blinken contacted former acting CIA chief Mike Morell, who swayed scores of other former top officials — including three ex-CIA chiefs — to sign that letter to debunk the biggest threat to the Biden presidential campaign.
Polls show that Biden would have lost the election if the media had accurately reported the contents of that laptop.
ONE PICTURE, FOUR COUNTRIES, AND A SURPRISE
This is the Wakhan Corridor traversed by Marco Polo on his way to China in 1273. The river is the Amu Darya, known to Alexander the Great and the ancient Greeks as the Oxus. The Wakhan is the finger of northeast Afghanistan designed in the late 19th century to prevent the Russian Empire in Central Asia from touching the British Empire in India. It now separates Tajikistan from Pakistan with its fingertip the only border Afghanistan has with China.
Thus you’re looking at four countries. The river forms the Tajik-Afghan border – Tajikistan is on the left, Afghanistan on the right, in the center distance are the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan, while in the far distance are the Karakorum mountains of China. This is a fabulously exotic remote part of our world with people living here tracing their ancestry to the troops of Alexander. Oh – and the surprise? I’ll tell you tomorrow. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #77 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
GLOBAL WARMING AND ORIGINAL SIN
Algore’s “Inconvenient Truth” 2006
[Welcome to this Monday’s edition of TTP Archives, to reprise a TTP article of years ago and to ask what you think how it applies to today on the Forum. “Global Warming and Original Sin” was first published on December 7, 2006 – over 16 years ago, well before Warmism morphed into the meaningless canard of “Climate Change,” which alarmists are morphing again into “Climate Crisis.”
Ereyesterday (4/22) was “Earth Day,” Climate Communism’s anti-humanity holiday of denouncement of all the sinful things human beings are doing to Mother Nature. Thus, TIME magazine proudly features this essay: The Case For Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday.
Yes, precisely! What an admission – that we are burning the planet up with our CO2 pollution is not a scientific fact but a religious belief, faith over fact. Back in 2006, TTP revealed the cause of this fanaticism. It couldn’t be more timely to discuss it now. The TTP Team is looking forward to your thoughts on the Forum.]
"Global warming" (or more specifically man-made or "anthropogenic" global warming) is a secular religion believed in by people who have abandoned Christianity.
The vast majority of global warming fanatics are from Western cultures. Not a lot of Chinese or Hindus or Moslems are in a tizzy about it. These fanatics are almost all ex-Christians, born and raised in a Christian culture which they grew up to reject.
Yet what they didn't reject and still retain is a belief in Original Sin, that human beings by their nature are deserving of divine punishment. What happens when you believe in Original Sin yet reject Christianity's salvation from it? The politically correct option of the moment is to believe in Global Warming.
THE GOLDEN MADRASA
The Golden College or Madrasa of Tilla-Kori was built by Samarkand ruler Yalangtush Bakhadur in the 1650s to house and teach the best and brightest students of his realm. It stands at the center of the wondrous Registan public square complex of the Silk Road oasis city of Samarkand, known to the ancient Greeks as Marakanda.
It was centuries old when Alexander conquered it in 329 BC. For a thousand years as Central Asia’s great entrepot on the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean, it was a cosmopolitan center for Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Nestorian Christianity. Incorporated into the Islamic world in the 700s, sacked by Genghiz Khan in 1220, rebuilt by the time Marco Polo in 1272 described it as “a large and splendid city,” Tamerlane made it his capital in 1370.
I was first in Samarkand to stand astonished at the Registan in 1963. Seeing it now, far more impressively preserved than in the Soviet days, made me gasp – especially how Tilla-Kori is once again lavishly decorated with gold. You’ll gasp too, for it is only one of the innumerable sights you’ll see and experiences you’ll have with your fellow TTPers by joining our Heart of Central Asia this September. If you dream of having a fabulous adventure of a lifetime, let me know at [email protected] and we’ll talk about it. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #223 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
TRUTH IN SIGNS
FLASHBACK FRIDAY – WITH THE ANTI-COMMUNIST GUERILLAS IN CAMBODIA
July, 1984. The KPNLF – Khmer People’s National Liberation Front – was the Anti-Communist guerrilla movement fighting the Soviet-backed Vietnamese Communists in Cambodia. When I was first there in 1961, Cambodia was then a land of serenity, with a gentle and tranquil people who were at peace with themselves and the world. Now it was a land of indescribable Communist horror.
It was such a privilege to be with these brave men willing to wage war against that horror and bring freedom to their country. I told their tale in Turning Back the Terror, the February 1985 cover story for Reason magazine. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #20 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
HALF-FULL REPORT 04/21/23
Watching this Ukrainian soldier – a double amputee who lost his legs fighting for his country’s freedom – propose to his lady hit me very hard. An emotional tsunami overwhelmed me and washed me out into a limbic sea.
I cried tears of joy for the happiness of this couple, for the courage and beauty of their moment. I cried tears of bitterness for the war that lost his legs, lost the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainians – men, women, children and babies – the war being senselessly waged upon them by the most monstrously evil man on earth and his Kremlin regime.
And I cried tears of deeply painful confusion for the shock of so many conservatives poisoning their souls with Kremlin propaganda, causing them to root for evil to triumph over good, for freedom to succumb to slavery and mass murder. All I could think of for solace through the tears were the words of Luke 23:34: “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”
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A lot has been going on this week that’s critical for TTPers to know about and understand – but before we continue, let me thank Mike Ryan for his astounding HFR last Friday (4/14). Mike’s unique skill set enables him to detail precisely why the EPA is such a hugely dangerous national security threat to America. Please consider copy-and-pasting his argument to send to your Congressman, Senator, and local media.
Mike and I are tag-teaming every other week on the HFR, and he keeps raising the bar on me! While Skye keeps raising the bar on himself! See the last two Skye’s Links of yesterday (4/20) and last week (4/13) to see for yourself. The value of TTP has increased immensely thanks to them. I encourage you to take advantage – it’s your TTP!
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Let’s start with the most terrifying event of the week.
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)