Commentary On Recent News

OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE

Now that Covid has mostly passed millions of people are visiting the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Mexico City. Remember what we saw in the compound posting, "The Aztec Prophecy", April 2018. That posting is about more than "The Aztec Prophecy". The first five sections are about "The Aztec Prophecy".

The Aztecs were very special to God. They had the prophecy that they would see an eagle, perched on a cactus, devouring a snake. That was where they were to build their capital city, and the result was the city of Tenochtitlan. This prophecy is on the Mexican flag.

But the Aztecs were at a lower level than they thought. They had the prophecy right but the snake in the prophecy was actually their chief god Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent. The wings of the eagle resemble the sails of the ships by which the Spaniards would arrive.

The most important part of the prophecy is the cactus. The eagle is perched on the cactus but the snake isn't. The cactus represents the real God, the Spaniards had Christianity. The tilma (cloak) of Juan Diego was made of cactus fibers. It has been miraculously preserved, at the shrine, for nearly five hundred years. Plant fibers usually deteriorate fairly quickly.

This is absolutely amazing and now Our Lady of Guadalupe is by far the most visited Catholic shrine in the world, which is what God had planned all along.

CUSTODY OF LOCKERBIE BOMBER

One of the suspects in the bombing of the Pan Am jet that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 is in U.S. custody. The majority of people that were killed were American. Syracuse University, downstate from here, lost a lot of students.

A bomb, in luggage with a timer, is believed to have been put on a plane in Malta, it was transferred in Frankfurt and then onto the doomed plane in London. The bombers were eventually caught because, probably due to airline delays, the bomb exploded when the plane was over land, instead of over the ocean. This made a forensic investigation much easier.

I once went through Lockerbie on a train.

Image from Google Street View

The bombing was purportedly done by Libyans to avenge the U.S. bombing of Tripoli, the Libyan capital, in April 1986. This raid tends to get forgotten today, maybe because the catastrophic meltdown at Chernobyl happened a few days later. But this 1986 U.S. air raid on Tripoli, done to avenge Moammar Gaddafi's alleged support of terrorism and the bombing of a nightclub in Berlin that was popular with U.S. military personnel, was quite interesting.

The U.S. bombed one of it's own former air bases. What is now the main airport of Tripoli was once Wheelus Air Force Base. The U.S. turned it back to Libya in 1970. When it was a U.S. Air Force base there was an entertainment crew on the base. One of it's members would later play the role of Reuben Kincaid on The Partridge Family.

Image from Google Earth

The raid targeted the home of Moammar Gaddafi. It was long suspected that he had been forewarned shortly before the raid. It is now believed that the Prime Minister of Italy warned Gaddafi by telephone.

Much of the world condemned the U.S. air raid, although a lot of the condemnation seemed half-hearted. The vengeance sought by Moammar Gaddafi's government ultimately led to the bombing of this plane. But he also recruited an African-American street gang in Chicago to undertake terrorist activity against the U.S. 

On the subject of the now-defunct airline, Pan-Am, the first public flight of the new Boeing 747 was made from New York to London early in 1970. The deadliest air accident, not including terrorism, was at Tenerife in 1977. A Pan-Am and a KLM (Dutch) plane collided at the fog-shrouded airport. Did you know that the Pan-Am plane that was involved in this collision is the same one that made the first 747 flight?

XI JINPING VISITS SAUDI ARABIA

In the recent posting, "Remembering Jimmy Carter" October 2022, we saw how international finance works. The U.S. took advantage of it's dominant position early in the postwar era to get the dollar widely accepted as the international reserve currency. The U.S. dollar still has momentum behind it.

You may notice that the currencies of countries like Britain and Canada are more subject to changes in value, relative to other currencies, than the U.S. dollar is. That is because the value of a currency, like the value of consumer goods, operates by supply and demand. Getting the U.S. dollar as the defacto reserve currency in the world ensured that there would be continuous demand for it, thus steadying it's value.

But there is nothing written in stone that the dollar has to be the reserve currency of the world. China is trying to get it's currency used more in international transactions. A step toward this was to get it's purchasing of Saudi oil in Yuan, rather than in dollars.

INDIA-CHINA BORDER CLASHES

Part of the trouble with these periodic border clashes between India and China is that the two countries don't play the same sports. India has more rivalry with Pakistan but at least the two countries play the same sports. India and Pakistan now act out their rivalry on the cricket pitch and there hasn't been another war between the two in over fifty years, after previously having three wars within 25 years.

Did anyone notice that, when Xi Jinping visited India in September 2014, India's Mars mission was arriving at it's destination at the same time as Xi Jinping was arriving in India? Maybe that wasn't a coincidence. Just a reminder of how capable India's rockets are.

But have India and China ever thought that western powers might have an interest in planting discord between them because we don't want the two most populous countries to gang up on us?