SCANDAL IN MOSCOW OVER THE ELITE RIDICULING PUTIN
Moscow's high society has been rocked by a scandal after a pair of prominent Vladimir Putin cronies were heard insulting the Russian despot.
Billionaire oligarch and former Russian senator Farkhad Akhmedov and high-profile Moscow music producer Iosif Prigozhin, both public supporters of Putin, have been accused of calling him 'Satan' and a 'dwarf'.
An audio recording of what is a 35-minute phone call between the wealthy pair was posted on Telegram Messenger, then shared by Ukraine's Channel Five and quickly jumped on by other outlets - as well as Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB).
In the audio clip, the pair are heard eviscerating Putin's invasion of Ukraine, slamming his Kremlin entourage over their failings, and even insulting his height.
WHAT A REAL CANNIBAL LOOKS LIKE
On the remote north side of the island of Malekula in Vanuatu, there lives a cannibal tribe called the Big Nambas. The men wear a penis gourd wrapped in pandamus fibers, and eat “man long pig,” cooked human enemies. You have to trek over mountains of thick jungle to reach them. When I was able to years ago, there were a few men who continued the practice. This gentleman is one of them. I was in no danger as they were very kind and gracious to me.
That wasn’t the case a century ago when the first explorers, Martin & Osa Johnson, reached them. Their 1918 film, “Cannibals of the South Seas,” made the Johnsons famous, and you can see it on YouTube. Today they are far more benign. It is an extraordinary experience to meet a culture of fearsome reputation and realize they are people like you and me. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #103 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
NASHVILLE AND TRANSVESTITES
[Note by JW: Andrea Widburg is understandably confused by the refusal of the media to call the Nashville child-murderer pictured above a “transman” – a female who “identifies” as a male, when any and all men who so identify themselves as female are automatically labeled a “transwoman.” Audrey Hale in every news story is called by her born name, never her male name of Aiden, always referred to a “female,” “her, “she”, never “male,” “her/him”.
The solution is to abandon any woke-trans terms at all, use people’s pronouns according to their birth identity, and use the trans term that actually applies to them: transvestites: men dressing and pretending to be women and women dressing and pretending to be men. This will henceforth be the terminology in TTP regarding any “trans” issue.]
When newspapers publish stories using the phrase “her testicles,” it’s easy to add laughter to the tears that always accompany reports demonstrating the complete breakdown of reality in modern America.
There is no laughter, though, when trying to decipher the biological sex of the school shooter who killed three children and three adults in Nashville, before the police appropriately terminated the killer’s existence.
THE COMING CONSERVATIVE COMEBACK IN BOTH AMERICA AND CANADA
Biden and Trudeau in Ottawa on March 24 Headed for the dustbin of history?
However the contemptible national political media of the United States try to disguise the fact, the Biden administration is a disaster. Canada is a close second.
As a result, in America, either Mr. Trump or Governor DeSantis will win, and as of now, Mr. Trump has the advantage. Most people finally see the proportions of the perversion of the intelligence agencies, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the prosecution service in the psychopathic frenzy to destroy Mr. Trump.
As for Canada, Quebec has effectively begun the formal extirpation of the English language and the prime minister has taken it upon himself to make to the world on behalf of all of us the confession that our forbears attempted some form of genocide on Indigenous people.
No government that has acquiesced in the first and proclaimed the second is fit to be re-elected.
THE MONEY THAT MADE US HUMAN
[Joel Wade’s Keeping Your Sanity Through the Virtue of Trade and Money today (7/25) bears directly upon this. Money and trade are what have made us human for 90 millennia.]
On display in the National Museum of Congo in Brazzaville: “Ancient Money.” I took the picture because this is the money that made us human 90,000 years ago. They are tiny Nassarius gibbosulus estuarine snail shells too small for food, perforated with small holes to string on a necklace, used as money “before the establishment of the CFA” as the sign says, the Central Africa Franc in 1945.
These are the same species of shell that was the first jewelry in history unearthed at seashore sites in Morocco and hundreds of miles inland in Algeria some 90kya (thousand years ago) – meaning they were traded. For the first time in history, a species began to exchange things between unrelated unmarried individuals to share, swap, barter and trade, and over great distances.
Other animals do not barter. This, maintains science author Matt Ridley, is what made us distinctly human, enabling us to cooperate with other groups or tribes, to innovate, to evolve ever more complex cultures. This little shell, used as money, is the founding of human culture. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #61 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
KEEPING YOUR SANITY WITH A COMPELLING VISION
(This will be my last column for a while, while I dive in fully to finish writing my next book, Mastering The Emotional Side of Money. In the meantime to continue keeping your sanity I recommend my most recent: the Mastering Emotions, Moods and Reactions Workbook)
When we think of what we'll be like ten years from now, most of us imagine that we'll be just like we are now. Yet when we look back ten years, we’re usually different than we were then.
Of course we are different today than we were ten years ago - unless we've removed ourselves from any experience of living. Life is a continual anti-entropy endeavor. If we don't expend energy to create order, the natural tendency of things to move toward disorder takes over.
We will be different than we are now in ten years. That's a fact of life. The question is, how will we be different; and will we be different mostly as a result of events, or through conscious choice?
ELEPHANTS IN THE SAHARA
10,000 years ago, the Sahara was green, with lakes, rivers, and such an abundance of animals it was a hunting paradise for people who lived here. You’ll find their petroglyphs carved on to rock outcroppings like this that my son Jackson and I found on a Trans-Sahara Expedition in 2003.
The Milankovitch astronomical cycles that drive Earth’s climate produced a West African monsoon that greened the Sahara back then. When the cycles shifted ending the monsoon, the Sahara turned dry desert as it remains today. Political cycles that permitted a peaceful crossing of the world’s greatest desert have also shifted, making this too dangerous now.
A Trans-Sahara Expedition is one of the world’s great adventures. Hopefully, one will be possible again in the not-too-distant future. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #7 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
CALAMITY ISLAND
FLASHBACK FRIDAY – THE CRUSADER FORTRESS IN THE CAUCASUS
This is the fortress town of Shatili in an extremely remote Caucasus region in Georgia called Khevsureti. It was built by the Crusaders 1,000 years ago. The Khevsur people who live here trace their ancestry back to these Crusaders and until the 1930s still wore chain mail in feud-battles with other towns. I took this picture in 1991.
American traveler Richard Halliburton (1900–1939) saw and recorded the customs of the Khevsurs in 1935. The Khevsur men, dressed in chain mail and armed with broadswords, wore garments full of decoration made up of crosses and icons. They don’t do that anymore, but they proudly retain their Crusader Christian heritage – for Georgia adopted Christianity in the 4th century AD. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #85 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
HALF-FULL REPORT 03/24/23
For Aristotle 2,360 years ago and many philosophers since, courage is the most important moral virtue over all the rest, such as honesty, integrity, empathy, fairness and so on – because courage is what enables a person to act virtuously in any way like being honest.
A Courageous America wouldn’t stand for the Presidency of the United States to be stolen in broad daylight. A Courageous America would get rid of Woke CRT, DEI, Tranny Tyranny, and Climate Fascism in a heartbeat. Nor would it tolerate for a moment our city streets to be sewers of homelessness, with DA’s refusing to prosecute criminals and no one safe to walk the streets.
We have become, on the whole, a Nation of Learned Helplessness – the Left’s goal for America as people who feel helpless to fight or get rid of what’s ruining their lives and their country are so easy to control. Just look at how meekly so many millions accepted the lockdowns and other fascist restrictions on their freedom over a Chinese flu bug.
How bad is it? How about the Pentagon arguing for child-sex changes among our military’s children?