IRAN - Before & After; Castle Rock-WA

When Iran had a modern culture … looking forward.

This photograph, taken in 1960, shows an Iranian woman at the beach nearly two decades before the Islamic Revolution reshaped the country.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Iran was undergoing rapid modernization under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In major cities, many women pursued higher education, entered professional careers, and chose their own styles of dress. Beachwear, Western fashion, and public recreation were common sights for many Iranians, particularly in urban and coastal areas.

However, it is important to note that Iranian society was diverse. While many women embraced modern fashions, others continued to wear more traditional clothing, with customs varying by region, community, and personal beliefs.

Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the new government introduced sweeping social and legal changes, including mandatory dress regulations for women in public. As a result, photographs like this offer a glimpse into one aspect of everyday life in Iran before that historic turning point.

Iranian women today, forced to wear the oppressive, & humiliating, burka.

Notice the men & boys (in the background, because males & females must stay separate) are wearing clothing that allows the skin to breathe & feel a cooling breeze - while the women are draped in black = a color known to cause sweltering, as well as inhibit any breeze, whatsoever. It's cruel - and dehumanizing.

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Before the Jimmy Carter years, Iran was a modern country - the Jimmy Carter years literally emboldened the iranian terrorist's overthrow that firmly established the iranian sharia revolution: that catapulted iran back to the Middle Ages.

Women were forced to wear the burka.

Women were forced to stay behind harem walls … and couldn't leave their house without a male escort: a woman n the streets alone would literally be murdered for daring to be outside, alone.

Women were no longer allowed to voice an opinion; dogs were treated better than a woman.

Women were treated as breeders = they had no other value.

A woman's wealth immediately became her husband's possession following marriage.

Men were permitted to marry a 6 year old girl.

Sharia religion was the ONLY religion allowed - bully terrorist "encouragement" to follow sharia law, was strictly enforced; to disagree with it, or to refuse to adhere to it, was an immediate death sentence.

Children were the property of the husband = women had no rights; children could be taken from the wife & handed over to in-laws, if that was the husband's "punishment" for a "disobedient" wife.

Americans shouting for sharia "rights" IN America, and in Iran, HAVE NO FRICKING IDEA what they are shouting for: they do not know the History of Iran.

I remember those Days.

I remember the Jimmy Carter spinelessness that jeopardized Americans & destroyed the modern Iranian culture, when he gave in to the anti-American stance and the hostage crisis of 1979 (when 52 Americans were held captive). My brother Mahlon, was deployed to those troubled waters, aboard a naval warship during the 1978–1979 Iranian Revolution.

PLEASEKNOW HISTORY FACTS before engaging in foolishness & playing a fool's game.

DOROTHY ANDERSEN~Historic Discovery of Chronic Lung Disease

Dorothy Hansine Andersen:  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Hansine_Andersen)

They denied her surgical training because she was a woman.

So she went into the basement, studied dead children—and uncovered a disease that had been killing thousands in silence.

New York City, 1935: The basement morgue of Babies Hospital was cold, heavy with the smell of formaldehyde and cigarette smoke. Dorothy Andersen stood over the body of a three-year-old girl, scalpel in hand, eyes sharp with dissatisfaction.

The chart read: Celiac disease.

It was a familiar label. Too familiar.

Children who wasted away. Children who ate constantly but starved anyway. Doctors prescribed banana diets and hope. Most of the children died.

But Andersen had seen too much to accept that answer.

These children weren’t dying like classic celiac patients. Their bellies were swollen, their limbs skeletal—and their lungs were always clogged with thick, glue-like mucus. Celiac disease didn’t do that. Not ever.

So Andersen lit another cigarette and cut deeper.

Dorothy Andersen had been underestimated from the beginning.

Brilliant, driven, and ambitious, she had applied for surgical residency after medical school—only to be turned away. Not because she lacked skill, but because she was a woman.

Surgery was for men.

Women, she was told, could study pathology. They could study the dead.

So Andersen became a pathologist.

She wore hiking boots instead of heels. Built her own furniture. Smoked through autopsies without apology. She took up space in a profession that didn’t want her - and once relegated to the basement, she decided she would not waste the position.

If she had to study death, she would do it until it saved lives.

Inside the child’s abdomen, Andersen found the pancreas - and froze.

It was wrong: instead of healthy tissue, the organ was hard, scarred, riddled with cysts. The ducts that should have released digestive enzymes were completely blocked. The child hadn’t starved because she couldn’t eat.

She had starved because her body couldn’t digest anything.

This wasn’t celiac disease.

This was something else.

Andersen pulled nearly fifty autopsy files labeled “celiac disease” and worked through them methodically. Night after night, she compared lungs, pancreases, intestines. The same pattern appeared again and again: destroyed pancreatic tissue, thick mucus, malnutrition despite constant feeding.

The disease had been hiding in plain sight.

She named it Cystic Fibrosis of the pancreas.

But identifying the killer wasn’t enough. These children were dying on pediatric wards across the country. Andersen needed a way to diagnose them before they reached her autopsy table.

So she created one.

She developed a test to measure pancreatic enzymes by extracting fluid from the small intestine—an invasive, difficult procedure, but revolutionary. For the first time, doctors could distinguish cystic fibrosis from celiac disease while children were still alive.

Then came the summer of 1948: During a brutal heatwave, Andersen noticed something alarming: her cystic fibrosis patients were collapsing from dehydration far more often than other children. Along with colleague Paul di Sant'Agnese, she discovered the reason - CF patients lost extraordinary amounts of salt in their sweat.

That insight led to the sweat test, a simple diagnostic tool still used worldwide today.

In 1938, Andersen published her landmark paper, “Cystic Fibrosis of the Pancreas and Its Relation to Celiac Disease.” 

Pediatric medicine changed overnight.

She didn’t just identify a disease; she:

Defined its pathology

Created diagnostic criteria

Developed testing methods

Enabled enzyme therapies that allowed children to absorb nutrients.

Dr. Dorothy Hansine Andersen.

In the 1930s, most children with cystic fibrosis died before age three. Today, many live into their 40s, 50s, and beyond.

Dorothy Andersen never softened herself to fit the system. She climbed mountains. Taught surgeons using hearts she’d studied in the morgue.

She never married - she never apologized.

When she died in 1963, a colleague wrote that her devotion to medicine was “complete.”

But her true legacy is simpler - and far more radical.

When medicine shrugged and said, “Some children just die,” Andersen said: find the real reason.

When textbooks were wrong, she trusted her eyes.

When denied the career she wanted, she created a different one - and changed medicine from the basement.

What Is Cystic Fibrosis? https://asthma.net/clinical/cystic-fibrosis

She was told women couldn’t be surgeons.

So she saved lives another way.

And thousands of children lived because she refused to accept a wastebasket diagnosis.

A WIDOW WHO LOVED ARCHEOLOGY

She didn’t sneak into Nazi territory. She walked in calmly, rang the bell, and asked for a room. A polite woman with perfect German, pleasant manners, and a gentle smile. A harmless tenant, surely. Only she wasn’t harmless.

Her name was Lise de Baissac, SOE agent —

and the Wehrmacht commander who rented her that room had unknowingly welcomed a ghost of British intelligence into his home. Every morning she greeted him with warmth. Every night she slipped into darkness, explosives under her coat, whispering to resistance fighters:

“We work quietly, or we do not work at all.” He thought she was a tenant.

She was surveillance. She was sabotage. She was death walking silently through his hallways. But the story didn’t start in Normandy. It began in black sky, September 24, 1942.

A Whitley bomber roared over France and a slim figure hurled herself into the void. Thirty-seven years old. Alone. A parachute beating open over enemy land.

She hit the earth hard, heart pounding, hands digging frantically to bury silk and British cloth.

Moments later she became “Madame Irene Brisse,” a widow who loved archaeology.

A bicycle, a sketchbook, a soft voice. A quiet woman admiring Roman ruins. Invisible.

But in her basket lay coded messages, detonators, maps of German positions.

And in the shadows she built the Artist network — a dozen French fighters becoming hundreds, then thousands. “They never look for fire inside ash,” she murmured.

So she placed herself one hundred yards from the Gestapo headquarters and turned her apartment into a sanctuary for incoming SOE agents. Briefing them, arming them, teaching them how to live… and how not to die.

They passed her on the street every day.

They never saw the blade they brushed against.

Then, betrayal. June 1943. The Prosper network fell; screams echoed in German cellars. Time evaporated. She burned every trace. Radio smashed. Documents gone. Then across a moonless field she sprinted to a waiting Lysander, three minutes to live or die.

As the plane lifted, searchlights clawed at the sky.

She didn’t blink.

London welcomed her home. Safety. Recognition. Rest. She refused.

Eight months later, she jumped back into France.

Different name. Same fire. D-Day was coming.

Every mile she pedaled carried weapons. Vegetables on top. Explosives beneath. A smile for the Germans she rolled past. “They think women are invisible,” she whispered. “They should fear what they cannot see.”

And when she needed lodging in a garrisoned town?

She rented a room from a Nazi commander.

Imagine the audacity. Tea with your enemy.

Bread and butter — with names and troop movements learned between bites.

Then disappearing into the night with that information to maim, sabotage, and cripple the Reich.

June 6, 1944. Normandy burns. German reinforcements roll— but the roads explode, bridges vanish, trains derail, fuel depots erupt.

The feared Das Reich division should have reached Normandy in three days. It took seventeen.

Seventeen days bought by bicycle chains, coded whispers, and dynamite.

By quiet hands disguised as harmless ones.

By Lise.

Two years undercover. Two parachute drops. Two network lives built and rebuilt from ash. Torture always a breath away. Execution always a heartbeat near.

She survived.

She earned the MBE, the Croix de Guerre, the Légion d’honneur. But medals were nothing.

The Resisters said the only title that mattered: “She was one of us.”

After the war she vanished into ordinary life, planting flowers instead of bombs, watering roses where she once watered courage.

She never asked for applause. Heroes seldom do.

Lise de Baissac lived to ninety-eight. A quiet woman on a bicycle who broke an empire with silence and steel.

She proved a truth the Nazis never understood: Courage is not loud.

It is patient. It is ordinary in daylight, unstoppable in darkness.

And she proved one more thing: Sometimes the most dangerous weapon in a war … is a woman the enemy never bothered to fear.