AN ADVENTUROUS LIFE
Last spring I received an email from a fellow named Ryan Trapp. He had just published a book entitled Chasing 193: The Quest to Visit Every Country in the World.
Every sovereign country, for him, meant all 193 UN member states (although for me that also includes states the UN refuses to recognize: Taiwan, Kosovo, and Somaliland – add the two UN observers, Palestine and the Vatican, and the real number is 198)
Less than 100 people on earth had ever done so, he told me, 2% of the number of people who had climbed Everest (over 4,000). He had interviewed 34 of these folks for his book, and had been unable to contact me to be one of them. Due to the book’s popularity, he was writing a Volume II, and now that he had tracked me down, asked if I would be interviewed for it.
I consented, entitling the interview An Adventurous Life. I thought I’d share it with you, especially at this time of year when it’s good to take a break from our world going bonkers. Answering Ryan’s questions was an interesting experience of self-exposure and self-reflection. It’s fairly lengthy at over 6600 words so it’s probably best digested not all in one go. I hope you enjoy it. Photos at the end.
An Adventurous Life: Jack Wheeler Chapter for Chasing 193 Vol II
Join the forum discussion on this postCHRISTMAS BRINGS PEACE TO THE WORLD
Why do billions of people, Christians and non-Christians alike, look forward to Christmas?
It is a holiday that makes almost all children, and most adults, happy. Globally, it has evolved into a non-threatening holiday that non-Christians can embrace with good cheer. Merchants of all faiths love it because it means more sales. And it is a joyful holiday that promotes peace and good will toward others.
There are, of course, those who dislike Christmas – atheistic socialists who hate anything to do with religion and commercial activity, fundamentalist Moslems, and those who are openly hostile to even the origins of Christianity.
Some Christians are, and have been for the last two centuries, unhappy about the way Christmas is celebrated as it has moved away from its religious roots -- perhaps without fully realizing that the secular Christmas celebrations around the globe, for the most part, also carry the indirect message of helping others, along with peaceful and happy coexistence.
WHAT IF THE NEXT PRESIDENT BEHAVES LIKE OBAMA?
How will the country wake up from its coma in 2016 to reality in 2017?
In the next 12 months, the lame-duck, legacy-starved Obama administration will double down on its executive orders, bureaucratic fiats, and circumvention of the law. Obama will seek to fundamentally transform America, contrary to law, effecting change in ways he was not able to by adhering to the law.
The media, as it has the past seven years, will not only ignore the illegality, but also rationalize and commend it.
Then comes 2017.
If a Republican is elected president, what will the media and its liberal sympathizers do should the next chief executive decides to follow the Obama modus operandi?
When Obama issued executive-order amnesty and non-enforcement of immigration laws, the media kept silent, happy that the noble end of open borders justified any means necessary to achieve it. In 2017, we will have a precedent that any American president can simply build a wall, close the border, and deport whomever he finds in violation of federal law.
Or, also taking his cue from Obama, he might allow individual municipalities to nullify federal laws as they see fit: The Endangered Species Act null and avoid inside Salt Lake City? Gay marriage illegal within the city limits of Mobile? Gun control mandates too much of a hassle for those living in Laramie? Texas towns free to burn coal as they please?
MARCO AND THE GANG OF EIGHT
Marco Rubio has been criticizing Ted Cruz’s stand on immigration, especially regarding where they stood on the “Gang of Eight” bill. Let’s look at the facts.
The Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill passed the Senate after a series of votes in June 2013. Democrats, who controlled the Senate at the time, unanimously supported the bill, while most Republicans opposed it.
The four Republicans on the gang — Marco Rubio, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Jeff Flake — of course voted for it, and also agreed with Democrats on a plan to kill almost all GOP amendments.
Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid allowed just a handful of amendments to reach the Senate floor. One, from Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, would have prohibited the legalization of illegal immigrants in the United States until after the administration could prove it had maintained "effective control" of the borders for six months.
Rubio voted against the Grassley amendment. Sen. Ted Cruz voted for it.
DO GOVERNMENT CLIMATE FRAUDSTERS BELONG IN JAIL?
Another week, another study showing that our official climate data gatekeepers have been exaggerating the extent of “global warming” to make it look more scary, more urgent, more desperately in need of extra funding for our official climate data gatekeepers.
This one, co-authored by meteorologist Anthony Watts (of Watts Up With That? fame) shows that at least half of the “global warming” in the US since 1979 has been fabricated by NOAA.
While satellite records have shown no global warming for at least 18 years, the land based data sets like the ones maintained by NOAA for the US Historical Climate Network (USHCN) continue to show a warming trend.
One reason for this discrepancy, the study suggests, is that NOAA has been cherry-picking its raw data. That is, it looks like US government scientists and bureaucrats have committed a gargantuan fraud costing US taxpayers countless billions of dollars. Shouldn’t they be criminally prosecuted for doing so?
NO WISE MEN
Especially in Washington DC
HALF-FULL REPORT 12/18/15
When I was 16 years old, I went to the Amazon by myself and was adopted into a clan of Jivaro headhunters – the ones who shrink the heads of their enemies killed in murder raids.
I learned that their sense of reality was the polar opposite of ours. This week I learned that it’s not.
Two weeks ago, the theme of the HFR was derangement. Last week’s was absurdity. We’re way beyond both this week. We’re into hallucinatory reality.
The Jivaros’ religion, you see, is based on taking a hallucinatory drug they call natema made from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine which they boil to make a tea.
The hallucinations experienced under natema are very similar of those of LSD. The experience is orchestrated by the clan’s uvisheen or shaman, so that when he directs the participants to see the Jaguar God or the Snake Goddess leap out of the campfire, they do – and know it’s real because they can confirm with each other they are seeing the same thing.
It turns out that use of banisteriopsis tea in religious rituals is widespread among native peoples in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil – such as the Quechua (descendants of the Incas), who call it ayahuasca, the vine of the soul.
The basis of their religion is that the drug enables them to “part the veil” of what we think is reality, and see a “higher” reality. In other words, they believe that the hallucination is reality, the real reality, while what normal people call reality is a hallucination, that “reality” is an illusion.
This inversion or hallucinatory reality is of course a form of full-blown insanity – and is what we are experiencing now in America, from believing that homosexuality is normal and heterosexuality is not to “Islam is a religion of peace.” Yet this week we seem to have reached an apotheosis of this reality-inversion.
MY MERRY CHRISTMAS THANKS TO TTPERS
I’m writing to wish TTPers a Merry Christmas, and to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for making mine more merry.
My Christmas figures to be merry, because the odds are now substantial – and are rising – that it won’t be my last.
When I saw in July the blood test numbers that led to the diagnosis of multiple myeloma, they were all very bad.
The turn around began in late August, after the first 3-week round of outpatient chemotherapy. The decline in my cancer symptoms was spectacular, said my oncologist, who couldn’t keep the amazement out of his voice. The worst of my bad numbers plunged from 93 to 5.
There’ve been further declines, some of them substantial, in chemo rounds 2, 3, 4, and 5, which was completed last week. I don’t know why I responded so spectacularly well to outpatient chemo, but I’m sure the prayers of TTPers and others who’ve been praying for me have had a lot to do with it.
Enough about my cancer. Jack Wheeler asked me to comment on the cancer afflicting the GOP. Here we go.
WHAT TO READ 2015
Merry Christmas! And welcome to the fourth annual TTP What to Read.
We initiated this tradition with a list of the books I read and recommended in 2012, the first What to Read. That was followed a year later with What to Read 2013, then What to Read 2014.
It’s a week before Christmas to give you a chance to provide a Christmas present from the list. The links are to the Kindle edition on Amazon, each with multiple comments and quotes.
You can inexpensively gift someone instantly with the Kindle edition – I read all of these on my iPad – while there’s still time for Amazon to deliver a hard copy, or there’s your local bookstore.
I kept the list not to all the books I read this year, but to just those I thought would be of real interest to TTPers. There are several I think it quite important for you to consider.
I’m sure you’ll find at least one or two fascinating either for yourself or someone you care for. Or a regressive libtard you want to educate and/or infuriate.
And, please let us know on the Forum what books rang your bell this year. Here we go.
OBAMA’S FINEST HOUR OF UTTER FRAUD
Sometimes I wonder how the left can remain so woefully ill-informed on the subject of climate change.
Then I read articles like this piece of complete Chait that one of America’s leading liberal commentators has just produced for New York magazine and all becomes clear: because ‘progressive’ journalists who write about the environment don’t do research or due diligence — only fluffy sentiment and green propaganda.
Let me show you, with reference to Jonathan Chait’s article — excerpts from which I’ll put in italics, with my gloss below — what I mean.
This weekend, leaders from 196 countries approved the first global agreement to limit greenhouse-gas emissions in human history. The pact is a triumph of international diplomacy shared by diplomats across the planet.
The agreement is non-binding, carries no penalties and is entirely voluntary. That’s why everyone signed: because it meant nothing — not because any diplomatic skills were necessary.
Obama’s climate agenda has lurked quietly on the recesses of the American imagination for most of his presidency. It is also probably the administration’s most important accomplishment.
That last sentence is probably true — but only because from Syria to Russia to Obamacare to Benghazi to Common Core to the proliferation of divisive #blacklivesmatter identity politics lunacy, everything else on the administration’s watch has been an even bigger fail.