THE PROBLEM
FLASHBACK FRIDAY – WITH MBUTI PYGMIES IN THE CONGO
August, 1971. The gentle Mbuti people live in the Ituri rainforest, one of the world’s densest jungles, in northeastern DR Congo. They are among the most ancient of all human populations, with their ancestors having hunted in these forests for over 60,000 years. The tallest among them is under five feet.
It was on my first visit to Africa that I was able to spend time with them. They live in scattered bands of a few dozen each, always on the move in search of game, sleeping in small makeshift huts of branches and leaves, and far away from villages of Bantus who always try to enslave them.
Their music is hypnotic. To the beat of drums of hollowed-out logs, they sing with a polyphonic complexity that is extraordinary. I’ll never forget the performance they gave for me. Alas, no tape recorder – much less videocam back then! (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #65 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
THE HYPOGEUM OF MALTA
The extraordinary rock-cut necropolis known as the Hypogeum (hi-po-gee-um) is the only prehistoric underground temple in the world. For over a thousand years (3500-2500 BC), the temple and burial complex (eventually housing 7,000 skeletons) was carved out and down – dozens of chambers, with rock-cut replicas of above-ground temples including simulated corbelled roofs. (A corbelled roof uses stone slabs that progressively overlap each other until the room is roofed over.)
The Megalthic Maltese learned to cut from the limestone bedrock with tools of stone and antler horn for they had no metal. These folks figured out all by themselves how to build extraordinary temples to their gods and goddesses close to six thousand years ago. Nobody taught them. They were the first. Only one reason Malta is one of our planet’s most fascinating places. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #109 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
SKYE’S LINKS 03/30/23
Death Threat, White Powder Mailed to Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg's Office.
Late today (3/30), Alvin conned the grand jury into perpetuating the maskirovka farce, which will be eventually laughed out of court, and explode Trump’s ratings in the polls to Jupiter. The headlines of the moment are huge, but actually, this is hilarious.
Trump Indicted After Manhattan DA Probe For Hush Money Payments
What did the ‘Crats and the MSM want to distract you from noticing? How about…
This is such a terrific Skye’s Links – all the way to the voice of optimism must-read at the end. Welcome and enjoy!
IT WILL NEVER BE ENOUGH FOR THE TRANSVESTITE CROWD
[Note: edited to make it clear that “trans” actually means “transvestite”]
I try to bring humor to everything. I’m a comedian. Comics try to find humor in the worst of conditions. Yet not only can I not see the “funny” in the Nashville shooting, I don’t want to seek it.
The “trans” [more accurately the transvestite] movement asked for tolerance, then acceptance. Then they just wanted to use the restroom of their preference for their safety, despite a lack of violence against trans people and a bushel full of trans attacks on kids. We allowed it. We should regret it. A lot.
People have lost their jobs for refusing to play make-believe with the small portion of the country plagued by a mental malady called “gender dysphoria.”
Despite all the ass-kissing the trans [transvestite] crowd has enjoyed, they feel they are being “genocided” out of existence. So much so that they are planning a “day of trans vengeance.” This just days after one of them slaughtered little children in cold blood in Nashville.
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)