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?
THE HIDDEN NORTH FACE OF KANCHENJUNGA
This is one of the truly great mountain sights on earth yet never seen – except for professional mountaineers and those on our Himalaya Helicopter Expeditions. Kanchenjunga at 28,169 feet (8,586 meters) is the world’s 3rd highest mountain (after Everest and K2), with a drop from summit (the peak on the left in front of the cloud) to the glacier at it base of 12,000 feet straight down.
You can be awed by such a picture, but to actually physically be here, to witness this magnificence personally so that it is forever a part of your life, is to feel a depth of awe that has to be experienced to be understood. Kanchenjunga is part of the Himalayas, now on the border of Nepal and Sikkim, once an independent kingdom now absorbed into India. We fly right up the North Face, and into the Amphitheatre of the Southwest Face as well.
We’ll be here once again next late October. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #31 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
SKYE’S LINKS 03/23/23
The Dawning of the Age of AI
It's Not the Age of Aquarius
Not at All
___________________________________We were warned that today would come, and TTP members are well prepared for a government that rapidly falsifies information for the sake of power. Truth to our utilitarian career climbers is just another story. Now they have AI tools that are quickly growing and evolving and not evolving at a biological rate but at the rate of Moore's Law.
Bill Gates is warning that this affects everything as the machines can now spoof real-time events and records, make videos, and possibly (likely) alter official documents. If you own a Kindle device with downloaded books, you have probably noticed that the books on your machine are edited and changed without notifying you.
If the AI systems in healthcare deem your life not worth the effort, your treatment will be denied, and no reason will be given.
They tried to arrest Trump on bogus charges to create a demonstration that the Left's rent thugs could turn into a riot. They put the wrong guy in charge, and everything Alvin Bragg touched became a big problem for the Lefties. It seems that Alvin hid a lot of evidence from the grand jury.
Money is no longer leaving ESG investments. It is a full-on stampede to get out of the type of investments that crashed three banks this month, forcing the merger of UBS and Credit Suisse.
Just like that. Five hundred years of Swiss Banking integrity have been flushed away. Remind me again where the Davos gang meets.
EXPLAINING THE LINK BETWEEN LIBERALISM AND MENTAL ILLNESS
Why are conservatives happier than liberals? Why do leftists report more anxiety, depression, and neuroses compared to those on the right?
Social scientists are perplexed — as well they should be, considering that for every one conservative social scientist, there are 10 liberals. But across all age groups, all incomes, all races, and both sexes — in every single measurable way — conservatives are happier than liberals.
Musa al-Gharbi, writing in the quarterly journal American Affairs, details the phenomenon and offers some insight into possible reasons for the “well-being gap.” “Why is it,” she asks, “that maladjusted, anti-social children gravitate toward left-wing parties as adults? Why is it that liberals are far more likely to be depressed, anxious, or otherwise neurotic compared to conservatives?
Is mental illness involved?
WHAT HAPPENED TO STANFORD?
Stanford was once one of the world’s great universities. It birthed Silicon Valley in its prime. And along with its nearby twin and rival, UC Berkeley, its brilliant researchers, and teachers helped fuel the mid-20th-century California miracle.
That was then. But like the descent of California, now something has gone terribly wrong with the university.
Students at Stanford Law School recently shouted down visiting Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan. He had been invited to give a lecture by the school’s Federalist Society.
The judge never even got the chance. The law school students drowned him out. They flashed obscene placards. They screamed that he was “scum.” One yelled he hoped the judge’s own daughters would be raped.
The debacle revealed three disturbing characteristics about the Stanford law students. The list of serial embarrassments reads like the suicides of Greek tragedy, where divine nemesis follows hubris.
ROME IN AFRICA
The best place to see Roman ruins is not in Rome or anywhere in Italy. It’s in Africa – specifically on the Mediterranean coast of Libya. This is the Roman theatre at Sabratha built in the 1st century BC. Over 2,000 years old, it’s still mostly intact. Starting as a Berber village, the Phoenicians founded the city as Sabrat by 500 BC. Then came the Greeks, then the Carthaginians, and after the Punic Wars came Rome.
The Libyan coast was a lush fertile place back then. So much so that Sabratha and the other major Roman city nearby, Leptis Magna, produced several million pounds of olive oil per year – sale of which to Rome enabled them to achieve great wealth. It’s a shame that Libya remains today in chaotic civil war. Hopefully the day is not off when experiencing Rome’s most magnificent remains will be possible here again. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #79 photo ©Jack Wheeler)