THE UNIQUE BEAUTIFICATION OF KAYAN WOMEN
The Kayan tribal people live in a remote roadless valley in the Shan Hills of Burma. Kayan women practice their tradition of beauty starting at age five. The young girls have a few brass coils placed around their necks, adding to them progressively as they grow until in older adulthood they are wearing as many as two dozen – becoming what the world knows them as Giraffe women. (The Shan people call them "Padaung" meaning "long-necked," but they call themselves Kayan.)
We are not here to gawk. We are here to make friends, treat them respectfully, and learn about their traditions. It is an intensely memorable experience to meet these ladies. We’ll be here again in early March next year. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #58 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
WHO’S FAULT?
FLASHBACK FRIDAY – LIVING WITH HEADHUNTERS
Yes, that’s me at 16 (in 1960!) with Tangamashi, a Shuar Jivaro chief who adopted me into his clan. The Jivaros are the only people on earth who make a shrunken head of their enemies killed in battle – called a “tsantsa.”
They inhabit the Amazon rain forests of the Ecuador-Peru border; living with them was the first adventure I had by myself alone. Tangamashi accepted me, taught me how he made a tsantsa from an enemy’s head skin, took me blowgunning monkeys with curare-tipped darts, and introduced me into the Jivaro spirit world with a tea they called “natema” from the Banisteriopsis vine – a very colorful experience. How cool can you get for a 16 year-old kid?
It set me on a path of an adventurous life from which I have never wavered – and there’s no slowing down now. Another great adventure always awaits. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #25, photo ©Jack Wheeler)
HALF-FULL REPORT 02/24/23
Putin Kissing the Devil, Cologne parade float Feb 20, 2023
Just as New Orleans had their Mardi Gras on Fat Tuesday this week (2/21) – before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday – so Cologne, Germany, celebrated on Rose Monday (2/20) with a float parade and huge party, attending by well over a million people lining the city streets.
The theme float was Putin Kissing the Devil – followed by Putin’s Blood Bath in the bathtub of Ukraine:
Yet there’s so much more in this HFR – including some real ROTFLMAO moments. Let’s go!
THE SANDS OF IWO JIMA
Fox News today (2/23):
This is the black sand beach the US Marines stormed on February 19, 1945, beginning the legendary Battle of Iwo Jima. Overlooking the beach is Mount Suribachi, where four days later Joe Rosenthal took his iconic photo of six Marines planting the US flag on its summit.
You can come here once a year at a commemoration jointly held by the US and Japanese militaries. Guests of honor are the few Marine veterans of the battle still alive. I attended on the 70th Anniversary of the battle in 2015. To be here on these sands and on the summit of Suribachi, where the memorial lauds them – “On Iwo Jima, uncommon valor was a common virtue” – with these heroic men is an indescribable privilege. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #23, photo ©Jack Wheeler)
SKYE’S LINKS 02/23/23
The Big Spoof
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Not so long ago, someone realized that computers made hard work of lies, propaganda, and misdirection far more straightforward than in the old days of paper and paste. "I am a genius!" he thought as the lies grew more numerous.
But our fabricator failed to realize that a critical mass of society found the fabrication an easy path to power and wealth. Government agents with unlimited finances and immunity from prosecution built complex organizations devoted to influence and control through deception.
The woke industry and its hedonistic postmodernism are based on glorifying the unreal and inauthentic. Speaking the truth and making claims to objective reality have been criminalized.
The information package is the basic unit of a truth or lie, and it conveys information in support a narrative. It can be hazardous. And it can be very powerful. We can view information as a designed package meant to persuade or spoof.
Russia might have been tricked into invading Ukraine by China. China owns Russia's communication infrastructure, and what they don't own, they built. It is possible that Russia's bizarre rush for the cold and idle Chernobyl power plant one year ago this week had the same disinformation roots from which they attacked the equivalent of county agricultural agent laboratories.
No, Russia did not realize what these labs were. Russia was not worried about corn and wheat hybridization and patent royalties from hybridized wheat seeds. Putin appears to have thought that Ukraine was building weapons of mass destruction at Chernobyl and in the agricultural agent facilities. They were spoofed.
Crazy, huh? Imagine a government so fooled, so spoofed into attacking another nation because of the perceived threat of nonexistent WMDs? And getting stuck to the tar baby in the process?
It looks like J6 was also an intentional spoofing of the crowds by federal agents of the Executive Branch reporting to the Legislative Branch. Evidence was planted, agents' provocateurs urged the masses on, and the most shameful episode of government misconduct occurred on live tv.
Things are getting way out of control with the rollout of AI chatbots. These tools began to do the unthinkable. They began to tell the truth, and the narrative quaked from top to bottom. Over the past week, there have been thousands of meetings and software changes to prevent AI from performing the radical act of speaking the truth.
Come on over to Skye's links. We have a juicy collection of spoofy things from economics, culture, politics, and warfare. No one believes anything anymore, and the government is responding by dusting off an old playbook written a century ago by Leon Trotsky. Things are getting more totalitarian, and yet the question is which culture has the capacity to manage the onslaught of inauthentic information packages?
“SOUTH PARK” GOES VIRAL FOR “BRUTALLY HONEST” TAKE ON PRETEND WOMEN AND ABORTION
The episode titled “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina,” which originally aired on March 9, 2005, features fourth grade teacher Herbert Garrison trying to get an abortion because he has not menstruated.
Twitter is blowing up over the resurfaced clip, with many pointing out that the show’s makers would be canceled by the “woke mob” if the 18-year-old storyline were presented anew in 2023.
“Here’s South Park mocking the insane idea that men can actually become women. This clip is from 2005,” pundit Seth Dillon chimed in. “It’s a brutally honest take on the callous savagery of abortion, too. We need more mockery like this.”
Chicks on the Right writer Natalie Argyle summed it up by saying, “In one minute and 25 seconds, @SouthPark said all the things we aren’t allowed to say about trans ‘women’ and abortions.”
We need to say all these things again – over and over and over….
THE “GREAT AWOKENING” IS TRANSFORMING SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
The “Great Awokening” touches every elite institution in America, mostly radiating out from our compromised system of higher education. One of the most disturbing and illuminating aspects of this cultural revolution is how much it is transforming science and medicine.
A video of medical students at Columbia University reciting an updated version of the Hippocratic oath that injected elements of critical race theory made the rounds on social media recently. As many have noted, this “student-led initiative” sounds cult-like.
When did medicine start sounding like a cult? What kind of country will we live in if this continues to be the guiding ideology of every serious institution? We won’t be a serious country.
THE TOMB OF THE FRAGRANT CONCUBINE
Princess Iparhan, granddaughter of the ruler of the Silk Road oasis of Kashgar, was so famous for her beauty and the intoxicating natural aroma of her body that the Manchu Emperor far to the east called for her. She was 22, the year was 1756. The Emperor became completely infatuated with her, making Iparhan his Imperial Noble Consort, loving her deeply until her death 33 years later in 1789.
In mourning, the Emperor kept his promise to her that her body would be returned to Kashgar and buried in the mausoleum of Apak Hoja, built in 1640 by her Apaki family. And there she rests today. Everyone in Kashgar and beyond, however, knows the mausoleum as The Tomb of the Fragrant Concubine.
It’s a wonderfully romantic legend, and even though there are several conflicting versions, let’s hope this one is true. Regardless, a visit to this peaceful shrine is certainly memorable. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #54 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)
WHICH WOULD YOU CHOOSE?
On the left is a secret natural pool on the most extraordinary island in the Mediterranean – Malta. On the right is the Tiger’s Nest Monastery in a hidden Tibetan Kingdom in the Himalayas – Bhutan.
Rebel and I have time to run one more exploration this year – to Malta in October or Bhutan in November. We can’t run both. We’d like to ask you to help us choose – by telling us which you would choose if you had to decide.
I consider Malta the world’s most fascinating island. I consider Bhutan to have the world’s most fascinating culture.
Here’s why… you choose.