Friday, February 26, 2016

This Is What Courage Is - EVERY SINGLE DAY

Warning: the video below contains some imagery that can be hard to see, but ultimately we feel Jonathan's story is too important to leave untold.


Boy Born With A Rare Skin Condition Shows Incredible Determination



At first glance, Jonathan Pitre from Russel, Ontario might seem like your average 14-year-old boy. Like many other boys his age, Jonathan dreamed of being a professional athlete; specifically, he wanted to be a pro hockey player. Unfortunately, something got in the way of Jonathan's goal - he was born with Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB), a rare condition that brings his skin a constant intense pain.

Despite his crippling condition, Jonathan shows an incredible amount of strength and determination. His journey is something that truly must be seen to be appreciated. If his story touched you as much as it touched us, make sure to share this video with your friends on Facebook, and pass on Jonathan's incredible journey.

My Beautiful Women

An Incredible Story - 




The Full Story - 20 minutes and 27 seconds.


The Most Decorated

On this day in 1971, the most decorated combat hero of World War II is tragically killed. Audie Leon Murphy wasn’t supposed to be a hero! In fact, when he first tried to join the military, the Marines rejected him because of his small size. The paratroopers rejected him, too. Disappointed, he joined the infantry.

The young Texan wasn’t one to be kept down! He soon proved himself to be a skilled marksman and a brave soldier.

Perhaps his most famous demonstration of bravery occurred on January 26, 1945. He was in the small town of Holtzwihr, France, with his unit of only 40 men. They’d been ordered to hold a particular road until reinforcements arrived. Unfortunately, the Nazis chose that moment to attack. Murphy’s men were badly outnumbered—there were up against 250 Nazis and 6 tanks!

Murphy ordered his men to fall back into the woods, even as he picked up his field phone and called for an Allied artillery attack. As Allied fire fell, he was able to take control of a burning tank. Perhaps more importantly, he took control of its machine gun! Germans were all around him, but he fired on the Nazi infantry for an hour until his ammunition ran out. He was talking on his field phone the whole time, helping to direct Allied artillery fire! When his ammunition was finally exhausted, he left the tank. Refusing medical treatment for his injuries, he organized his men into a counterattack. In the end, Murphy and his 40 men rebuffed the 250 Germans.

“I expected to see the whole damn tank destroyer blow up under him any minute,” Private Anthony Abramski later testified. “For an hour, he held off the enemy force single-handed, fighting against impossible odds. . . . The fight that Lieutenant MURPHY put up was the greatest display of guts and courage I have ever seen. There is only one in a million who would be willing to stand up on a burning vehicle, loaded up with explosives, and hold off around 250 raging KRAUTS for an hour and do all that when he was wounded.”

After the war, Murphy came home to a hero’s welcome! He’d earned 28 awards, including the Medal of Honor and some French and Belgian honors. He earned every American medal for valor. He’d done all of this, and he was only 20 years old! He was soon featured on the cover of Life magazine, which brought him to the attention of Hollywood. The soldier-turned-actor would go on to act in dozens of movies, and his memoirs would be made into a film, To Hell and Back. He also became a songwriter.

Despite these successes, everything was not rosy for Murphy in these years. He was candid about the fact that he suffered from “battle fatigue” (today known as post-traumatic stress disorder), and he struggled with insomnia. Nevertheless, he apparently didn’t know how to stay away from military service. He joined the Texas National Guard in 1950, hoping that he would be called to serve in the Korean War. It didn’t happen. He later transferred to the Army Reserve.

Murphy was killed in a private plane crash on May 28, 1971. After his death, he was buried with full military honors in Arlington Cemetery. Finally, just two years ago, his home state of Texas posthumously awarded him its greatest military honor: the Texas Legislative Medal of Honor.

The poor son of sharecroppers was not supposed to be a hero—and yet he was! Determination, perseverance, exceeding expectations . . . . How AMERICAN.

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If you enjoyed this post, please don't forget to “like” and SHARE. Our schools and media don’t always teach the stories of our founding! Let’s do it ourselves.

Gentle reminder: History posts are copyright © 2013-2015 by Tara Ross. 
I appreciate it when you use the FB “share” feature instead of cutting/pasting.

#TDIH <https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/tdih?source=feed_text&amp;story_id=1242431629101398>  









Good Quotes to Stop Arguments











EXPEDITION PHOTOGRAPHY - DON'T MISS THIS!

AMAZING VIDEO THIS IS TRULY AMAZING TAKE TIME TO WATCH THIS - WHAT A GREAT JOB TO HAVE!
 Richard Sidey lives in Wanaka, New Zealand and earned a Bachelor of Visual Communication Design with Honors in Wellington. He has spent over a decade photographing the Polar Regions and various remote areas of natural interest working on Expedition Vessels. For his project “Speechless” he has endeavored to document scenes of outstanding natural beauty and interest through the eyes of a film-maker. The viewer is not told what to think and can create their own experience from this individual journey.



The original video has been deleted from YouTube, 
so here are a few:








GRATITUDE

This Film Shaped "Everyone Matters": 
GRATITUDE by Louie Schwartzberg



Six minutes of PROFOUND BLISS.
Life-changing, in its eye-opening truth.

Photos That Couldn’t Have Been Timed Better
















And finally, Rafael Benitez, the magician!!


Great Timeless Quotes on Government

“In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame; two is a law firm and three or more is a government.” ~John Adams


“If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.” ~Mark Twain


“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of government. But then I repeat myself.” ~Mark Twain


“I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” ~Winston Churchill


“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.” ~George Bernard Shaw


“Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.” ~Douglas Casey


“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” ~P.J. O’Rourke


“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” ~Frederic Bastiat


“I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.” ~Will Rogers


“If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free!” ~P.J. O’Rourke
“In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.” ~Voltaire


“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you!” ~Pericles
“No man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.” Mark Twain


“Talk is cheap, except when government does it.” ~Anonymous


“The government is like a baby’s alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.” ~Ronald Reagan


“The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.” ~Mark Twain
“There is no distinctly Native American criminal class, save government.” Mark Twain


“What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.” ~Edward Langley


“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.” ~Thomas Jefferson


“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.” ~Aesop


"Power ruthlessly enforces its power upon the powerless to bring everything and everyone under the dictatorial control of that evil Power." ~ Jack and Margy Flynn

The American Civil War Then and Now

WOW  This is REALLY incredible - click on the link and see the pictures of WHEN and then it magically transitions to NOW!  Including awesome quotes from real people!

Don't miss this opportunity to see these awesome pictures!!
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ng-interactive/2015/jun/22/american-civil-war-photography-interactive

Guardian photographer David Levene travelled across the US photographing the sites scarred by the American civil war




http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/22/photographing-the-american-civil-war-in-2015-recreate-iconic-photographs
Blasts from the past: photographing the American civil war in 2015
The American civil war then and now – interactive



















Hagerstown Pike, Antietam, scene of the Battle of Antietam, September-October 1862. Photograph: Alexander Gardner/Library of Congress/David Levene for the Guardian

I was wading into the North Anna river, camera in hand, trying not to get sucked downstream by the current. In my hand was a 150-year-old photo by Timothy O’Sullivan of a group of Union soldiers bathing in the North Anna towards the end of the American Civil War. I had been warned that the bridge O’Sullivan stood on for his picture was gone, and halfway across the water, I realised that there was no way I could achieve his vantage point and re-create the shot.
My journey had begun a week earlier in Washington DC. Armed with a sheaf of large-format prints of 23 original photographs of the American civil war, my plan was to take my own photos from exactly the same spots. The camera position, height, lens angle and perspective all needed to be as close as possible to the original, to give a sense of how these historic sites have transformed.

The war began around 20 years after the birth of practical photography so the medium was in its infancy. Photojournalism or documentary photography had yet to be conceived, and the photographers who took their cameras to the battlefields were the first of their kind.
Matthew Brady, the godfather of early American photography, produced his defining work during the war. He had teams of people working for him on location (photographers such as O’Sullivan and Alexander Gardner), each with their own wagons, travelling darkrooms, wet-plates, processing kit and staff. All of the photographs were captured on glass plates and had to be processed immediately using a mobile darkroom. Later they would be viewed using stereoscopes, so that they appeared 3D.
Civil war photographers were keen to include people in their photographs wherever possible – even to the extent of dragging bodies of dead soldiers into shot. Typical exposures lasted one or two seconds, so “set-ups” were commonplace in order to avoid motion-blur in the photographs. I knew that my photographs would also be more engaging if there were modern-day people occupying the same spaces as the soldiers, so I would set up my tripod and click away as the scene developed in front of me, waiting for an ideal composition.
Some of the shots were trickier to re-create than others. Photographing the McLean House at Appomattox, Virginia, where Robert E Lee finally surrendered his Confederate army on 9 April 1865, was a struggle. The house was bought in 1891 by a firm which dismantled its 80,000 bricks planning to rebuild it in Washington DC as a tourist attraction. The company went bust and never realised its vision, and in 1948 the house was reconstructed from its architectural drawings. It’s now in exactly the same place as the original ... within one or two feet.

Brady invested over $100,000 of his own money to produce some 10,000 plates during the war. He hoped that the US government would purchase the entire archive, and when they refused he went bankrupt; $25,000 for the entire collection from the Library of Congress didn’t clear his debts, and by the end of his life Brady was blind and penniless. He died alone in the charity ward of a hospital in New York City.
Today, each glass negative has been scanned and stored at the Library of Congress in high resolution. They present a picture of the civil war in razor-sharp detail – a peek into the wartorn America of 150 years ago.

Home Free - Angels We Have Heard On High –

Really AWESOME harmonies!!
Enjoy!!


QUOTE OF THE DECADE

“A liberal’s paradise would be a place where everybody has -

guaranteed employment
free comprehensive healthcare
free education
free food
free housing
free clothing
free utilities, 
and only law enforcement has guns. 

And believe it or not, such a place does indeed already exist:
It's called Prison." 
---Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff's Office--- 

The Parable Of The Oranges

I would like to share a modern-day parable that I will call “The Parable of the Oranges.”
Consider what this story teaches you about the power of real intent.

There was a young man who had ambitions to work for a company because it paid very well and was very prestigious. He prepared his résumé and had several interviews. Eventually, he was given an entry-level position. Then he turned his ambition to his next goal—a supervisor position that would afford him even greater prestige and more pay. So he completed the tasks he was given. He came in early some mornings and stayed late so the boss would see him putting in long hours.

After five years a supervisor position became available. But, to the young man’s great dismay, another employee, who had only worked for the company for six months, was given the promotion. The young man was very angry, and he went to his boss and demanded an explanation.

The wise boss said, “Before I answer your questions, would you do a favor for me?”

“Yes, sure,” said the employee.

“Would you go to the store and buy some oranges? My wife needs them.”

The young man agreed and went to the store. When he returned, the boss asked, “What kind of oranges did you buy?”

“I don’t know,” the young man answered. “You just said to buy oranges, and these are oranges. Here they are.”

“How much did they cost?” the boss asked.

“Well, I’m not sure,” was the reply. “You gave me $30. Here is your receipt, and here is your change.”

“Thank you,” said the boss. “Now, please have a seat and pay careful attention.”

Then the boss called in the employee who had received the promotion and asked him to do the same job. He readily agreed and went to the store.

When he returned, the boss asked, “What kind of oranges did you buy?”

“Well,” he replied, “the store had many varieties—there were navel oranges, Valencia oranges, blood oranges, tangerines, and many others, and I didn’t know which kind to buy. But I remembered you said your wife needed the oranges, so I called her. She said she was having a party and that she was going to make orange juice. So I asked the grocer which of all these oranges would make the best orange juice. He said the Valencia orange was full of very sweet juice, so that’s what I bought. I dropped them by your home on my way back to the office. Your wife was very pleased.”

“How much did they cost?” the boss asked.

“Well, that was another problem. I didn’t know how many to buy, so I once again called your wife and asked her how many guests she was expecting. She said 20. I asked the grocer how many oranges would be needed to make juice for 20 people, and it was a lot. So, I asked the grocer if he could give me a quantity discount, and he did! These oranges normally cost 75 cents each, but I paid only 50 cents. Here is your change and the receipt.”

The boss smiled and said, “Thank you; you may go.”

He looked over at the young man who had been watching. The young man stood up, slumped his shoulders and said, “I see what you mean,” as he walked dejectedly out of the office.

What was the difference between these two young men? They were both asked to buy oranges, and they did. You might say that one went the extra mile, or one was more efficient, or one paid more attention to detail. But the most important difference had to do with real intent rather than just going through the motions. The first young man was motivated by money, position, and prestige. The second young man was driven by an intense desire to please his employer and an inner commitment to be the best employee he could possibly be—and the outcome was obvious.

How can you apply this parable in your lives?

Excerpt from: “Living with a Purpose: The Importance of ‘Real Intent.’", Randall L. Ridd

Where One Country Ends And Another Begins

Slovakia, Austria and Hungary


Norway and Sweden

 

Netherlands and Belgium

 



Poland and Ukraine

 

Haiti and The Dominican Republic, which have very different environmental protection laws

 

Zipline that connects Spain and Portugal

 

USA and Mexico

 

Macau and mainland China. Macau drives on the left side of the road, mainland China on the right. This is their solution for when you cross the border​.

 

Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay

 

Bolivia and Brasil

 

USA and Mexico



Denmark and Sweden

 

Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium

 

USA and Canada

 

Sweden and Norway

 

A woman in Lithuania speaking to her friends in Belarus

 

Germany and Czech Republic

 

Germany and Czech Republic

 

Egypt and Israel

 

German, Poland and Czech

 

Monday, February 8, 2016

Popular Song to Old Dance Scenes - This Is AWESOME!

66 (Old) Movie Dance Scenes Mashup to Mark Ronson -Uptown Funk ft. Bruno Mars

VERY COOL!!


It's The Blasted Door....!!!

Scientific proof!  What a relief to finally learn this! 

Ever walk into a room with some purpose in mind, only to completely forget what that purpose was? 

Turns out, doors themselves are to blame for these strange memory lapses. 

Psychologists at the University of Notre Dame have discovered that passing through a doorway triggers what's known as an Event Boundary in the mind, separating one set of thoughts and memories from the next. Your brain files away the thoughts you had in the previous room and prepares a blank slate for the new locale. 

Thank goodness for studies like this. 

 It's not our age, it's that blasted door!

The last words of Steve Jobs -


I have come to the pinnacle of success in business.

In the eyes of others, my life has been the symbol of success.

However, apart from work, I have little joy. Finally, my wealth is simply a fact to which I am accustomed.

At this time, lying on the hospital bed and remembering all my life, I realize that all the accolades and riches of which I was once so proud, have become insignificant with my imminent death.

In the dark, when I look at green lights, of the equipment for artificial respiration and feel the buzz of their mechanical sounds, I can feel the breath of my approaching death looming over me.

Only now do I understand that once you accumulate enough money for the rest of your life, you have to pursue objectives that are not related to wealth.

It should be something more important:

For example, stories of love, art, dreams of my childhood.
No, stop pursuing wealth, it can only make a person into a twisted being, just like me.

God has made us one way, we can feel the love in the heart of each of us, and not illusions built by fame or money, like I made in my life, I cannot take them with me.

I can only take with me the memories that were strengthened by love.

This is the true wealth that will follow you; will accompany you, he will give strength and light to go ahead.

Love can travel thousands of miles and so life has no limits. Move to where you want to go. Strive to reach the goals you want to achieve. Everything is in your heart and in your hands.

What is the world's most expensive bed? The hospital bed.
You, if you have money, you can hire someone to drive your car, but you cannot hire someone to take your illness that is killing you.

Material things lost can be found. But one thing you can never find when you lose: life.

Whatever stage of life where we are right now, at the end we will have to face the day when the curtain falls.

Please treasure your family love, love for your spouse, love for your friends...

Treat everyone well and stay friendly with your neighbours.