HOW HAPPY CAN A YOUNG BOY BE?
And his father too. I started taking my son Brandon on expeditions with me at age five. Here we are in the Serengeti during the Great Migration. He saw three lion kills happen yards away, a baby born in a Masai hut – he’s never forgotten his first great adventure to this day, over 30 years later.
I encourage you in every way to take your children, grandchildren, nephews or nieces on an exploration of one of our planet’s many wondrous places when they are young. It will be formational for them, a founding experience of awe for what a magically extraordinary world they are privileged to live in. And your seeing it through their eyes will be a shot of youth elixir in your veins. It will be a life-memorable bonding experience for you both. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #92 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
KEEPING YOUR SANITY WITH THE VIRTUE OF HAPPINESS
Happiness is not a smiley face, and a happy life is not a perfect Facebook profile of blissful moments and beaming selfies building on a continual upward trajectory.
We are biological, not mechanical; our minds are not computers - though some functions of our brains are similar. Our lives are full of rhythms, cycles of expansion and contraction, ebb and flow.
So a human life that is happy is not a trivial matter of being lucky, of getting what we want; of pleasant pastimes or the absence of responsibilities or pain. A human life that is happy is an accomplishment; a triumphant, sometimes even a heroic creation.
Some of the most deeply and genuinely happy people I’ve known have overcome tremendous physical or psychological hardships to get there. As with any big, long term project, it takes work; it’s complicated and time consuming - more like a great symphony of harmony and counterpoint than a simple catchy jingle. To create a life that is truly happy over time takes discipline, passion, and courage.
A happy moment can be a matter of luck; a happy life requires virtue.
THE BLUE CITY OF CHEFCHAOUEN
My wife Rebel and I love this uniquely picturesque ancient Berber village in Morocco where everything is painted in shades of blue. Suffused in soothing blue, there’s no more relaxed place than just about anywhere. Everyone is welcome from the wealthy staying in sumptuous boutique hotels to backpackers in hostels. There are no “tourist spots,” for every café and bar is where the locals go themselves. (It’s pronounced shef-shah-win, by the way.)
Berbers – “Amazigh” (Unconquered) in their language, are the original people of Morocco having lived there for over 12,000 years. They are directly related to the reindeer-herding Lapps of Lapland in northern Scandinavia (they share the same mitochondrial DNA haplogroup U5b1b). Both are descended from the same stock of Cro-Magnon Ice Age hunters in Western Europe that split in two 15,000 years ago – one moving far north, the other south crossing the Gibraltar Strait to Africa.
One more reason why Morocco is so magical. Would you like to experience the Magic of Morocco with us next year? (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #21 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
ON INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY WHAT REAL WOMEN KNOW ABOUT REAL MEN
FLASHBACK FRIDAY: THE TOMB OF CYRUS THE GREAT
In the vast valley of Pasargadae there stands this simple tomb with nothing around it for miles and miles. It has been like this for many centuries, for it entombs the founder of Persia, Cyrus the Great (600-530BC). Revered as the liberator of the Jews from their Babylonian captivity in 539 BC, hailed by Herodotus for his humanity and wisdom, this small structure symbolizes the humility of an extraordinary man. Yet the tomb is a structure of engineering genius, the oldest built on principles of base-isolation withstanding the countless earthquakes Persia has suffered for the last 2500 years.
I was first here in 1973 when Persia (renamed Iran in 1933) flourished under the Shah. Here I am in 2014, when everyone I met expressed admiration for America and their contempt for the mullah tyranny they endured. I hope to return once more when the Land of Cyrus will be free again. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #146 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
HALF-FULL REPORT 03/10/23
TTP honors and celebrates International Women’s Day this week! Where to start, Step One:
Step Two would be to honor and celebrate actual real female XX-chromosome women – and not mentally-ill gender-dysphoric actual real male XY-chromosome men pretending to be women.
Step Three is to ridicule and laugh at woke idiocy claiming that such men are XX-chromosome women.
Such as Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders did regarding a man winning an International Women of Courage Award at the White House on Wednesday (3/08):
Step Four would be to denounce tranny-worship as misogyny, hatred and disrespect for real women; define the term “woman” in state and federal law (such as Title IX) as “a person with an XX and not an XY chromosome”; and publicly label anyone who claims a man with a Y chromosome can be a woman as a “biology denier.”
Oh, and demand that Justice Ketanji Brown recuse herself from any SCOTUS case regarding Title IX, as she testified she doesn’t know what a woman is.
There is so much more in this HFR!! Jump right on in… this is going to blow you away!
THE MYSTERY OF THE REEF OF HEAVEN
In a remote corner of the Pacific Ocean, off the island of Pohnpei in Micronesia lies one of the world’s great archaeological mysteries: the only ancient stone city built on a coral reef. No one knows who built it or how.
Micronesians say their ancestors called it Soun Nan-leng, The Reef of Heaven. Their name for it today is Nan Madol, the City of Ghosts.
On artificial islets connected by a series of canals are massive walls up to 25 feet high enclosing temples, tombs, ritual centers, and platforms for thatch homes – all made of giant columnar basalt stone. Eons ago, lava flows on Pohnpei cooled into vertical pillars. Over a thousand years ago, ancient Micronesians began hauling these basalt logs miles away to build this stone city. With an average weight of 5 tons, 10,000 pounds – and some up to 25 tons, 50,000 pounds each – how they did this remains unexplained. It lies deserted today, abandoned and lost for centuries.
Paddling a kayak through the canal maze of Nan Madol to clamber over these monumental stone complexes in solitary silence – for visitors are rarely here – leaves you in a state of unforgettable awe. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #6 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
SKYE’S LINKS 03/09/23
It's All Fake
The Crisis of Inauthenticity
____________________________________________________________________________Here is a thought exercise:
How fake and inauthentic must information be to be manufactured and inauthentic?]
Everything is fake, from musical performances to Congressional committees and elections to national policies and the science of war.
The English language is poorly equipped to differentiate the degree and direction of inauthenticity, and this is a growing problem.
Tucker Carlson is unleashing the J6 videos on Fox, and the ratings are more significant than for all other television in the same timeslot combined. We are talking about landing on the moon levels of viewership, and the left is in a total freak out.
No doubt, something big will be done to bump the narrative. But now, it's pretty clear that government is as fake as the news.
It is ever more crucial to discern the difference between the real and the fake, to have the courage to state it, and the culture not to tolerate punishment for that courage.
This, my friends, is why you are a TTP member. Come over to Skye's Links and talk about the inauthenticity problem.
THE VIDEOS SHOWING THE TRUTH ABOUT JAN 6 HAVE THE DEMS IN PANIC
Now, the Justice Department also kept a lid on that video footage and in fact, in some cases, DOJ did not share it with criminal defendants who had been charged on January 6 in violation of their constitutional rights.
We felt it was a public service to bring what we could to you. There was no justification for keeping the secret any longer and a powerful argument to be made that sunlight is always and everywhere the best disinfectant and in fact, because it was video evidence, it is to some extent self-explanatory.
Democrats like Chuck Schumer reacted with hysteria, overstatement, crazed hyperbole, red-in-the-face anger. What is that? Well, it's not outrage, of course. It's fear. It's panic. Here’s why – and why the McConnell-Romney GOP is in panic as well.
DOES THE GREATER IDAHO MOVEMENT PRESAGE A NATIONAL DIVORCE FROM THE POLITICAL LEFT?
They said it was an absurd waste of time, but now, the progressive coastal regions of Oregon and Democrats in Idaho are getting a little worried about the “Greater Idaho Movement,” with at least 11 eastern Oregon counties officially voting to leave the state and join their more conservative neighbors in Idaho.
Democrats were saying that the move was impossible, but with momentum growing they are now suggesting that the break-up is “bad for the country.”
Yet it makes perfect sense for red counties to want to break away from blue states after the kinds of chaos leftists have created within our nation in the past few years alone. When Dems say this would be “bad for the country” what they really mean is that it will be bad for them.
If people have the ability to choose and take their county and their land with them, why would they stay under the governance of a leftist dominated place?