FIVE FEET AWAY FROM AN 800-POUND GORILLA
©2019 Jack Wheeler
You know the adage about the “800-pound gorilla” going wherever he wants to – such as five feet from you in the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda. It is one of the world’s great thrills to be this close to these giants and feel at ease doing so. They are “habituated” to small groups of people whom they ignore. You of course are very quiet and do nothing to alarm them, just observing the little ones playing, mothers nursing, young ones climbing trees, huge male silverbacks watching over their families.
Gorillas are vegetarians, males eating up to 75 pounds of vegetation a day – thus they spend most of their waking hours chewing! The biggest silverbacks never get anywhere near 800 pounds by the way – 450 to 500 pounds at most (like the fellow in the photo). Big enough, believe me.
Rwanda is one of the best-run countries in all Africa. President Paul Kagame deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for healing his nation after the genocidal horrors of the 1990s. That’s far in the past now in this beautiful, peaceful land. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #93 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
SKYE’S LINKS 02/16/23
The times are turning our way! For starters, Texas bans Citigroup from participating in a $3.4 billion state bond offering because of the bank's anti-gun ESG policies. Warning to Woke Banks: Don't mess with guns or oil if you want to do business with the Texas government!
Texas Drops Citi From Huge Muni Transaction Over Gun Policy
This issue of Skye’s Links has so much cool stuff for you to know that here might be a shortcut – scroll through the graphic or photo that starts each Link and stop at the ones you find most interesting. It could be Elon’s tweet about the most dangerous yet obscure deep state government agency – or Rep. Nancy Mace lacerating Twitter’s main censors –or funny ones like:
USING THE DEMS’ INFAMOUS BOLAND AMENDMENT TO DEWEAPONIZE THE DEEP STATE
[I’ve known Mike Waller since the 1980s in the middle of the struggle to overcome the Boland Amendment preventing aid to the Contras. Now, Mike wants to use a Boland strategy against the Dems. It’s very clever and I’m encouraging him to expand on and “unpack” his strategy. The picture on the cover above is of Carlos Fitzeral, the Contra who saved my life in a firefight with the Sandinistas. --JW]
The House “weaponization of government” hearings kicked off an excellent start for public awareness. But without a legislative agenda, the short-staffed subcommittee will show little enduring accomplishment.
House reformers don’t believe they can force some of the necessary changes because the Senate and Joe Biden oppose them. So they haven’t prepared a strategic legislative agenda.
Yet, there is reason for hope and change.
An earlier generation of House Democrats blazed the trail for today’s House Republicans. Some lateral thinking and historical precedent can help today’s House leaders hack away at the weaponization of the federal government.
NOW WE KNOW WHO’S IN CHARGE OF JOE BIDEN
Most people watching Joe Biden believe that he’s a puppet who says and does what he’s told. He seems to be a “useful idiot,” as the 20th century’s communists would have said. The big question, then, is who’s really in charge in the White House? Barack Obama? Valerie Jarrett? Susan Rice?
Nope, a Bloomberg report intimates. It’s really Jill Biden, and she intends to see her decrepit husband run again.
According to a Nancy Cook article at Bloomberg, the person with whom Joe doublechecks every decision he makes is his unelected wife, Jill Biden, a school teacher who wrote a shoddy dissertation to justify a truly meaningless doctorate in education. Writes Cook:
THE LOST CITY OF DJADO
In the remotest center of the Sahara Desert lies an unknown, unexcavated mysterious lost city known as Djado. No one knows who built it or when. Lying on the ancient Roman trade route from the Saharan salt mines of Fachi and Bilma to the Mediterranean, the Djado oasis flourished for a thousand years (the 1st Millennium AD), but has been forgotten and abandoned for many centuries.
The only people who live near Djado in the vast desert wasteland where Algeria, Libya, Chad, and Niger come together, are the wandering Toubu nomads with no permanent settlements. It is an indescribable experience to explore such a wondrous lost city right out of an Indiana Jones movie that you have all to yourself. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #17, photo ©Jack Wheeler)
NO, SLAVES DID NOT BUILD THIS COUNTRY
Not long ago, Disney ripped off any pretense of being a family company and dove head-first into the social justice muck with an episode of “The Proud Family” that featured a slam poetry segment that echoed the fringe critical race theory claim that “slaves built this country.”
It soon surfaced that the writer of the show is a very loud and proud social justice radical named Latoya Raveneau, who has a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and wants to introduce “queerness” to the shows your kids watch whenever she gets the chance. She also bragged that no one at Disney is trying to stop her.
First things first, we need to torpedo this idea that slaves built this country. The idea that white people were sitting in rocking chairs sipping tea while black people did all the work from 1619 to 1863 is, frankly, stupid. It purposely shoves aside the industriousness of an entire country looking to build a new world and make something for itself.
Meaning the idea that reparations are owed to the black population of the United States by the taxpayers of this country is equally stupid.
YOUR NEIGHBORS IN BORNEO
Live on a private houseboat exploring the jungles of Borneo by river and families of Orang Utans will be your neighbors.
To get here, you fly from Indonesia’s capital Jakarta to a small town in southern Borneo, Pangkalan Bun, on the Sekonyer River. You hire your own houseboat called a klotok (shower, nice bed, good warm food and cold beer) and English-speaking guide to take you up river through the jungles of the Tanjung Putting Orang Utan reserve. You’ll see proboscis monkeys, hornbills – and more wild orang utans than any other place on earth.
Spend time among them and you’ll understand how smart and human-like these gentle giants are. It’s an endearing experience never to be forgotten. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #72 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY, TTPERS!!
Welcome to TTP’s celebration of Valentine’s Day, 2023!
Today is for celebrating the love and friendship that bless our lives. A day for feeling an infinite gratitude for having love in our hearts and being fortunate enough to have it returned.
It was Pope Gelasius I who, in 496 proclaimed that February 14 would be the feast day of Saint Valentinus of Rome, as he was martyred on that day in 269 on order of Emperor Claudius II for refusing to renounce Christianity.
Almost nine centuries later, England’s greatest poet of the Middle Ages, Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400), created the tradition of Valentine’s Day celebrating romantic love
What’s fascinating is how in recent times, Valentine’s Day is celebrated worldwide, and not only in Christian countries like throughout South America. The day is a big deal now in Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. In Thailand, couples on Valentine’s Day get their marriage licenses on the back of an elephant –
INCREASING YOUR SANITY WITH ARISTOTLE’S GOLDEN MEAN OF ADVENTURE
Aristotle and his student, young Alexander
Joel Wade is on a break this week, so it’s my turn. Alexander the Great famously said that while he owed his life to his father, he owed his ability to think from his revered teacher, Aristotle (387-322 BC).
So let’s talk this week about how we can use Aristotle’s philosophy of “the Golden Mean” to increase your sanity – physically, inside your brain. Ready? Here we go!
AWE AT RILA
In a hidden remote mountain valley there is a Christian monastery built over a thousand years ago by the students of a hermit who became the patron saint of Bulgaria, St. John of Rila. The colonnade you see leaves you awe-struck. Earthquakes, fire, pillaging by Ottoman raiders, all through the centuries the Rila monks would build it back ever-better and care for it immaculately.
It is little wonder that the Rila Monastery is a World Heritage Site. The picture you see is only one small section of the magnificent frescoes of the exterior archways – and the interior is equally extraordinary. There are nine more World Heritage sites in this Virginia-size country, like the 3,000 year-old (and still flourishing) city of Nessebar on the Black Sea. Bulgaria is one of Europe’s true undiscovered gems. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #74 photo ©Jack Wheeler)