Sexual Deviants Here and Abroad

In the past I have shared some of the silly proclamations that come out of the Islamic world from time to time.  Now, according to a page from the Middle East Forum, a fatwa has been issued saying it is okay for Moslem women to prostitute themselves during a jihad, because “necessity makes permissible the prohibited.”  Yes, jihad may not be one of the “five pillars of Islam,” but it is considered so important that women can do things for jihad that would make them the victims of honor killings, if they even hinted at doing them in any other situation.

The ‘Sex Jihad’.

Meanwhile closer to home, you’ve probably heard the news from last Thursday about the Supreme Court of the United States striking down a key provision of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.  I wasn’t going to say anything about it, because enough people have talked about it already, and I only want to speak out on a subject that controversial if I know the facts and I have something to say that hasn’t been said by someone else.  Well, my pastor made same-sex marriage the topic of this weekend’s sermon, and he started by stating the court case that led to the Supreme Court ruling.  Quote:

“This week, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in response to a lawsuit by Edith Windsor who declared discrimination for not being able to claim her deceased same-sex partner as her legal spouse and so receive federal tax exemptions from her partner’s estate.
The portion of the DOMA law that has been ruled against is a provision that denies federal benefits to legally-married gay couples.
Gay couples, under federal law, will now be considered ‘married,’ if the state they are living in has provision for same-sex marriage.
The rulings, though, do not impact gay marriage rights in the 38 states where it is currently not legal on the books.”

Unquote:  Did anybody see that besides me?  The plaintiff wants her dead partner declared to be her spouse.  Not only is this a step toward legalizing same-sex marriage in the whole country, it’s a step toward legalizing necrophilia, too!  I predicted years ago that if same-sex marriage becomes legal, necrophilia can’t be far behind; see my messages from April 30, 2012 and May 16, 2008.

Finally, I don’t think I am the only one who is tired of the homosexual lifestyle getting shoved in my face constantly.  It’s vastly overrated, for a start.  Those who practice it have appropriated the term “gay” for themselves, but to use the original meaning, I can’t remember seeing any of them happy, except in bars and at their pride parades.  In addition, I don’t meet that many homosexuals in real life, unless most of them are still in the closet; I never believed they were more than a small percentage of the population, like 3%.  Yet it seems that the media has to do a gay interest story every week, as if we’d forget they were around if they didn’t.  Today, for example, Bing.com ran a picture on its home page of a few rainbow flags from a gay price parade.  Or maybe the elite of our society want us to forget that a lot of people still think homosexuality is wrong.

Moshe Feiglin, a conservative Israeli politician, echoed similar sentiments to mine last year when he said, “Gays, kindly return to your closets.”  In the advanced nations of the world, most of us are too busy with life to be concerned about what our neighbor does in the bedroom.  If a person who happens to be “gay” also has useful talents/skills, like the basketball player who “outed” himself a few weeks ago, we will accept them for what they can do.  On the other hand, making one’s sexual preference the most important characteristic of himself or herself is just plain sick.

The Xenophile Historian Newsletter, #22

I am sending this out right now:

 

The Xenophile Historian Newsletter, #22
( http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/ )

Greetings once again to all my loyal readers!  Charles Kimball is here, to give you the latest news on my world history website.  The good news is that I am still in Kentucky; so far the only trips out of state this year have been to Baltimore in January, and Oklahoma in April.  The bad news is that I have not worked a day since the last newsletter; the Great Recession may be over elsewhere, but here the economy is still as bad as ever.  Fortunately I am starting to have some success with my LegalShield business; if that takes off I won’t need a job anymore.  In April I got a new business website, at http://charlesskimball.legalshieldassociate.com/ .

======================================

Long-time readers will know that at the end of 2010, I started writing a complete history of Latin America & the Caribbean, and have finished four chapters so far.  I still have to write a paper or two to cover the region’s recent history (1889 to present), but after getting done with Chapter 4, I took a break from that to revisit one of my older history projects–Russia.  You might think I was going to write about what has happened there since 1999, and while the last Russian history paper badly needs updating (I broke off right when Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin), I didn’t do that. Instead I went with a “prequel”; I greatly expanded the section discussing the various peoples who lived in northern Eurasia before there were any Russians.  That section became the new Chapter 1, covering Russian history up to 862 A.D.  Here is a link to the new chapter, and a list of the subheadings in it:

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/russia/ru01.html

Chapter 1: Before the Russians (before 862 A.D.)

Introduction
The First Steppe Lords
The Cimmerians
The Scythians
The Sarmatians
The Kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosporus
The Goths
The Huns
The Avars
The Rise of the Bulgars
The Khazars
The Magyars and Petchenegs
The Main Ingredients — The Slavs and Varangians

Of course this meant a renumbering of the chapters already in that folder.  The old Chapter 1 is now Chapter 2, and it just covers Russian history from 862 to 1682.  Likewise Chapter 2 became Chapter 3, Chapter 3 became Chapter 4, and Chapter 4 became Chapter 5.  I also had to locate and update the links to those pages from other parts of the website.

This is the first time I have done a prequel on the site, unless you count The Genesis Chronicles, which are basically a prequel to everything else.  Regular readers will know that when I start an historical narrative I like to go way back, further in the past than most historians will go.  With my North American history series, for instance, I did not start with the Pilgrims, Jamestown or even Columbus –- I started with the ice age.  I did not do that with the Russians, however, because I composed most of those papers in 1990, before I had developed the writing style I am using now.  Back then it made sense to breeze through the pre-Russian tribes, from the Cimmerians to the Khazars, but now the early birds will get equal time, in part to give me a chance to mention the interesting archaeological discoveries made over the past twenty years.

Okay, here is the link again.  I hope you enjoy reading my newest history paper as much as I did researching and writing it!

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/russia/ru01.html

======================================
 
Regular readers know that I have some off-topic humor (funny pages, pictures and jokes) in a folder on The Xenophile Historian, which you can reach from a page named "Just For Fun" ( http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/kup9.html ).  Now, because I have started posting links to YouTube videos on some of the history pages, I have created a page with links to all my favorite videos that are both funny and history-related.  If you have a broadband connection, click on the link below, watch and enjoy!

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/fromyoutube.html

In the same folder, I also composed several new essays.  First, I looked at a disturbing trend; is the human race getting dumber?

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/articles/dumber.html

On the other hand, we are better off than the vast majority of people who have ever lived.  This essay counts the ways:

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/articles/youvegotitmade.html

And here I looked at how declining intelligence, depopulation, and political correctness could put us in another dark age:

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/articles/DarkAge.html

Are we living in a kakistocracy (government or rule by the worst)?  Here are some thoughts on where the political Left is taking us:

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/articles/2lefts.html

And Florida seems to have become a very weird place since I moved away from it.  Here are my observations on that:

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/articles/Florida.html

And I used to post the essays about topics besides history, politics and philosophy on one page, which I simply called Chapter 4.  As you might expect, after fifteen essays, that page was getting quite large, so each of the essays now has its own page, with links to them from the Chapter 4 page.

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/kup4.html

======================================

Among the pages that already existed on the site, I made the most changes/updates to the European history.  Chapters 1, 9, 10, 12, and 13 have each been divided in two, to make indexing by search engines easier.  Chapter 14, which covers the years from 1914 to 1945, was the longest, so I divided it into three parts, for World War I, the interwar years, and World War II.

Chapter 15 became two whole chapters.  The first part is still Chapter 15, but now it just covers the Cold War years (1945 to 1990), and has been renamed “A Continent Divided.”  Events from 1990 to 2001 went into the new Chapter 16, which has tentatively been named “Europe Today.”  That title could change if anything earthshaking happens over there in the near future; for instance, I’m thinking of calling Chapter 16 “Eurabia” if the rapid growth of Europe’s Islamic community continues.  There isn’t really anything new in either chapter yet.  One of these days I will have to write down what has happened in Europe since 2001, and this arrangement makes room for such an addition.

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/europe/eu15.html

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/europe/eu16.html

For Chapter 8, I split the long section about Frederick II, the most interesting Holy Roman emperor, into two parts, and inserted a new section, about the Mongol invasion of Europe, between them:

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/europe/eu08b.html#Mongols

For Chapter 9, I added the William Tell legend to the paragraph on how Switzerland got started.  That expanded the paragraph into a whole new section:

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/europe/eu09a.html#Swiss

Also in Chapter 9, I added a few words to footnote #22, about last year’s discovery of the bones of King Richard III:

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/europe/eu09b.html#N_22_

For Chapter 14, I added two footnotes covering incidents where Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were shot, long before World War II, but both recovered.  Imagine how that could have changed history!

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/europe/eu14a.html#N_6_

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/europe/eu14b.html#N_15_

The first chapter of my North American history was divided, too, for the same reasons as the European pages were divided; to improve indexing and make room for more Google ads.  In Chapter 3 I added the German Coast Uprising, a major slave rebellion that was forgotten until its bicentennial arrived in 2011:

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/northam/na03b.html

For Chapter 5 of The Genesis Chronicles, I added a section on Boskop Man, a South African caveman who had a brain much larger than ours.  Would "cave nerd" be a more accurate term here?

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/genesis/gen05.html#Boskop

The Chinese and Southeast Asian papers were first composed in the late 1980s, when the papers I wrote were much shorter than the papers I’m writing now, so with them I did the opposite of splitting — I merged some of them together.  For China, Chapters 5 & 6 are now merged to make a larger Chapter 5.  With Southeast Asia, I merged Chapter 1 with 2, and Chapter 5 with 6, reducing the total number of chapters from eight to six.  In both folders, the other chapters were renumbered accordingly.

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/china/index.html

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/seasia/index.html

Don’t worry, I did not delete any content.  If anything, I will have to add more, to cover what has happened in both regions since 2000.

======================================

Finally, I switched the search engine on each page of The Xenophile Historian website, from Picosearch to a customized version of Google.  Picosearch served the website well, so I hated getting rid of it, but it had its limitations, the biggest one being that if the website grew to have more than 250 pages, I would have to pay $20/month to keep Picosearch running.  In fact, the website had grown past that point already; I managed to avoid paying by excluding Picosearch from the largest folder; obviously that isn’t a long term fix.  Well, Google has a limit of 5,000 pages on its custom search engine; that solved my problem, because I don’t expect the website to ever have that many pages, at least while I’m managing it.

======================================

What’s next?  I haven’t made up my mind on that yet.  Because I spent most of the past eight months taking care of old business, I will probably go back to composing new papers.  Chances are I will write another Latin American history paper, because I have gotten nothing but favorable comments on those so far.

======================================

That’s the latest website-related news.  If you missed older issues of the newsletter and want to see them, they can be downloaded in a zip file from
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/download/index.html .  And the links below go to topics I mentioned in previous issues, that are still valid.  Please visit them, if you haven’t already:

The Xenohistorian Weblog, this site’s official blog.

https://xenohistorian.wordpress.com

My world history textbook, "A Biblical Interpretation of World History."

http://www.rosedogbookstore.com/biinofwohi.html

http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/worldhis/index.html

 

Take Care and God Bless,

Charles Scott Kimball

The Mongol Horde in Poland and Hungary

I know, I haven’t posted anything here in a few days.  When you see a dry spell like that, it means one of the following:

1. I’m out of town.
2. Writer’s block, I couldn’t think of anything new to write.
3. I’m busy working on something for the website.
4. Something else in the real world is keeping me busy.

 

This time it was number 3.  I started composing the next Xenophile Historian newsletter yesterday, and today I added two new sections to Chapter 8 of my European history.  Previously I had one long section covering Frederick II, the most interesting of the Holy Roman emperors, called “Frederick II, Il Stupor Mundi.”  But recently I realized that I had only given the briefest description of one of the main events of his reign, the Mongol invasion of Europe.  Therefore I split that section into three.  The first part, covering the years before 1240, remains the same, including the name.  The second part covers the invasion, and the third part, for events after the invasion, is now called “The Embattled Empire.”  Because the second part is completely new, here it is.

 

The Mongol Horde in Poland and Hungary

The ongoing struggle between the two most powerful leaders of Christendom not only scandalized Europe, but also put it in great peril. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, a barbarian chief named Temujin brought the tribes of Mongolia under his rule. In 1206 they convened a kurultai, a grand congress, at which Temujin was proclaimed Genghis Khan, the "Universal Ruler." Now that all of Mongolia was his, Genghis Khan sent his armies forth to conquer the rest of the world, for the same reason that the Arabs attacked the Byzantine and Persian Empires after Arabia was united; they needed to fight and loot somebody, and they could no longer do it to each other. Most of the Great Khan’s wars were inflicted upon Asia, but in 1221 one of his armies raided Iran, crossed the Caucasus and entered Russia. This raid was a roaring success; it caught the Russians and steppe barbarians before they could form a united front, and delivered a series of crushing defeats, before returning to Mongolia in 1223. Consequently you could bet your last gold coin that someday the Mongols would come back for more.

But first they had to take care of business at home. Genghis died in 1227. and the Mongols elected his son Ogotai to succeed him. Ogotai wasn’t as aggressive as his father, but many of the folks around him were, so the empire, which now stretched from the Caspian Sea to Manchuria, continued to grow. New campaigns were launched in China and Iran, to finish the conquests that Genghis had started. It wasn’t until 1236 that the Mongols got around to invading Europe again.

Though thirteen years had passed since the first invasion, the Europeans had done nothing to prepare for the second one. They could not unite against a common enemy, to start with. The original Russian state had broken up in the mid-eleventh century; in its place were about eleven petty states, of which Novgorod was the biggest and Vladimir was the strongest. Nor would any help come from the west, while the pope and the Holy Roman emperor were locked in their vicious quarrel. Thus, when the Mongols returned they were able to defeat their opponents one by one, just like they had done the first time. From 1237 to 1240 they conquered the Volga Bulgars, the Russians, the Alans and the Cumans.(23) Next it was the turn of central Europe, and the Mongol army split in three for this; one force invaded Poland, one force invaded Transylvania, while the main force, led by Batu Khan (Genghis Khan’s grandson) and an excellent general named Subotai, invaded Hungary. No doubt they were planning to make the pasturelands of Hungary their advance base, the way the Huns, Avars and Magyars had done. Before the whole European campaign had started, Ogotai Khan’s strategists had predicted it would take sixteen to eighteen years to conquer Europe; because they had taken Russia and the Ukraine in four years, you could say they were ahead of schedule at this point.

The Mongols in Poland sacked Lublin, Sandomierz and Krakow, the capital, which the king of Poland had abandoned to them. Continuing on into Silesia, they encountered an army of Polish and German knights roughly the same size as their force and smashed it (the battle of Liegnitz, at modern Legnica, April 9, 1241); then they moved into Hungary to rejoin their comrades there.

Meanwhile in Hungary, a large group of Cumans (estimates of their numbers range from 40,000 to 200,000) fled across the border, offering to become Catholics and join the Hungarian army if King Bela IV would take them under his protection. The king accepted, but a lot of Hungarians did not trust the new recruits, especially after they saw the king take the side of the Cumans, in a dispute between them and the nobility. When the king ordered all his troops, including the Cumans, to assemble in the city of Pest, riots broke out and the Cuman khan was killed. Believing they had been betrayed, the Cumans pillaged the Hungarian countryside, instead of defending it. What remained of the Hungarian army advanced to the Sajó River, which was flooded at the time, and they captured the only bridge across it. The wet, forested terrain favored the Hungarians, and they had the element of surprise when they took the bridge, but their advantage was short-lived; in his most brilliant victory, Subotai outflanked and ambushed the enemy camp (the battle of Mohi, April 11, 1241). The Mongols overran all of Hungary after that, and the king fled to an island off the Dalmatian coast.

Unlike European armies, Mongolian armies move best in cold weather; during the winter of 1241-42 they crossed the frozen Danube, and even sent an experimental raid into Austria. However, Ogotai Khan died back in Mongolia, and word of his death reached the army in Europe the following spring. The whole royal family, including Batu, was expected to take part in voting for Ogotai’s successor, so Batu had to go to Mongolia. The army marched down the Danube to the Black Sea in 1242, and then headed east across the steppes. Bela IV returned from exile to take the Hungarian throne again, ruling until his death in 1270. Modern historians do not like the idea that one man, five thousand miles away from the action, can change the course of world events; they might point out that the Mongols did not have the resources to hold onto anything west of Russia for any length of time. Myself, I prefer to think that the khan’s death saved central Europe from some horrid atrocities. If the Mongols had continued into Germany or Italy, they would have made the tenth-century raids of the Magyars look puny by comparison.(24)

Footnotes:

23. The Cumans were a Turkish tribe that settled the Ukraine in 1060, the last nomads to arrive before the Mongols. They were a tribe of many names: "Cuman" was the Greek/Byzantine name for them, while the Russians called them Polovtsy, other Turks called them Ghuzz or Oghuz, and the Mongols called them Kipchaks. Finally, if you meet a modern-day Hungarian with the last name of Kun (as in Bela Kun, the communist leader), you know he is descended from those Cumans who took refuge in Hungary in the 1240s.

24. Frederick’s favorite hobby was falconry, and he wrote a 589-page manual on the care and training of falcons which still exists, called The Art of Hunting with Birds. The book was richly illustrated with pictures like this one, which shows Frederick with a hooded falcon.

 

Later on, when somebody asked Frederick about the Mongol invasion, he said half-seriously that if the Mongols conquered his empire, he would like to become the Great Khan’s falconer!

Chapter 1, Before the Russians

Previously, I had the following papers in my Russian history series:

1. Medieval Russia (before 1682 A.D.)

2. Imperial Russia (1682-1917)

3. Soviet Russia (1917-1985)

4. Commonwealth Russia (1985-1999)

Now I have completed and uplifted a fifth paper. You might think it covers Russia after 1999, and while the last paper badly needs updating (I broke off when Vladimir Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin), I didn’t do that. Instead I went with a “prequel”; I greatly expanded the section covering Russia before the first Russian state was founded, in 862 A.D., finally doing justice to all the various peoples living in northern Eurasia before there were any Russians. Here is a link to the new chapter, and a list of the subheadings in it:

Chapter 1: Before the Russians

o Introduction

o The First Steppe Lords

o The Cimmerians

o The Scythians

o The Sarmatians

o The Kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosporus

o The Goths

o The Huns

o The Avars

o The Rise of the Bulgars

o The Khazars

o The Magyars and Petchenegs

o The Main Ingredients — The Slavs and Varangians

Of course this meant a renumbering of the chapters already in that folder. The old Chapter 1 is now Chapter 2, and when I get done removing redundant paragraphs, it will just cover Russian history from 862 to 1682. Likewise Chapter 2 became Chapter 3, Chapter 3 became Chapter 4, and Chapter 4 became Chapter 5. I just finished updating the links to those pages from other parts of the website.

This is the first time I have done a prequel on the site, unless you count The Genesis Chronicles, which are basically a prequel to everything else. Regular readers will know that when I start an historical narrative I like to go way back, further in the past than most historians will go. For my North American history series, for instance, I did not start with the Declaration of Independence, Jamestown or even Columbus – I started with the ice age. I did not do that with the Russians, however, because I composed most of those papers in 1990, before I had developed the writing style I am using now. Back then it made sense to breeze through the pre-Russian tribes, from the Cimmerians to the Khazars, but now the early birds will get equal time, in part to give me a chance to mention the interesting archaeological discoveries made over the past twenty years.

Okay, here is the link again; check it out. I hope you enjoy reading my newest history paper as much as I did researching and writing it!

Your Hometown’s True Name Revealed

Want to know what the name of your city or state really means?  Click on this map:

And click on the link below to find out what’s going on here.

‘Atlas of True Names’ charts original town names | Fox News.

However, I see one error already.  Des Moines is translated to mean “Of the Monks.”  That’s what we thought it meant for three hundred years, but go to my message from last November 14 to find out what it really means (hint:  it was an Indian joke).

Years ago, I read some fantasy novels like Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Earthsea” trilogy, which suggested that magicians could get control over a person, animal or object, if they knew that person or thing’s true name.  I wonder what power you will gain by knowing the true name of a place?

Happy Birthday, West Virginia!

Yes, the state next to Kentucky, the youngest state in the eastern US, is 150 years old today.  What more can I say?

West Virginia, born in war, marks 150th birthday | Reuters.

My Brother’s Next-Door Neighbor

My brother Chris lives on the edge of the Everglades, so he gets quite a bit of wildlife parading past his house.  Bobcats, owls, possums, raccoons, sometimes even a Florida panther.  A few years back he set up a camera outside to take pictures of them.  Look who it snapped last week, just a few minutes after he turned the camera on:

Yes, that’s a full-grown black bear.  I remember back in 1969, there was a TV show called “Gentle Ben,” about a family in the Everglades that was friends with a 600-lb. black bear.  Is a camera the way they got acquainted?

Six Million African Muslims Convert to Christianity Each Year (?!) | The Muslim Times

Back in the 1990s, I learned that this is the first time since the seventh century when Africa had more Christians than Moslems.  I had assumed this was mainly because of a highly successful missionary program on behalf of the churches, but it turns out there is another factor, too — a record number of Moslems are converting, after learning that Christianity offers them more hope than Islam.  This is the best news I’ve heard in quite a while; too bad it isn’t getting more attention.

Six Million African Muslims Convert to Christianity Each Year (?!) | The Muslim Times.

 

And for those who prefer video, here is what Al Jazeera said about the conversions.  They’re afraid that while Islam has been trying to convert America, it could lose Africa!

 

 

 

A Lexingtonian Kryptonian?

You’ve probably heard that the latest Superman movie, Man of Steel, is now in the theaters.  I wasn’t planning to go, because earlier this week I read a review that said it wasn’t very good; the movies Christopher Reeve did were more enjoyable.  However, I just learned the new movie has a redeeming factor — the actor who plays the villain, General Zod, is a native of Lexington.  I think I mentioned in a previous blog entry that George Clooney was born in Lexington, but moved away at the age of twenty.  Now my current home town is getting representation in Hollywood again!

Lexington native Michael Shannon is a long way from home in ‘Man of Steel’ | Movies | Kentucky.com.

Men Do Listen!

Here’s proof that husbands do listen to their wives.  This story is perfectly logical to all males:

Milk and Eggs

A wife asks her husband,
"Could you please go shopping for me and buy one carton of milk,
And if they have eggs, get 6."

A short time later the husband comes back with 6 cartons of milk.
The wife asks him, "Why did you buy 6 cartons of milk?"

He replied, "They had eggs."

(I’m sure you’re going back to read it again!)