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L i k e U s ! ! !

THE REMOTEST SWIMMING POOL

st-pauls-poolThis is St. Paul’s Natural Pool on Pitcairn Island, where in 1790 Fletcher Christian and his mutineers of the Mutiny on the Bounty settled, and where their descendants live to this day. They were awed by the uninhabited island’s lush beauty, with huge banyan trees rising above them like giant cathedrals, and thought it a Garden of Eden where anything grew, coconuts, bananas, taro, breadfruit, mangoes, guavas, passion fruit, yams and sweet potatoes in the rich volcanic soil.

Pitcairn has no beaches, though, so this was their swimming hole – and still is for Pitcairners today. They are happy to take you here, and to the island’s colorfully named spots, like Where Dick Fall, Oh Dear, Break Im Hip, Down the Hole – and to Fletcher Christian’s Cave, his lookout for British warships hunting them (they failed for 25 years) .

It’s not easy to get here – fly to Tahiti, then remote Mangareva from where you sail for two days on a supply ship. But you’ll be so welcome upon arrival. You stay in one of their homes in Adamstown and be treated like family. It’s a travel experience like none other. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #63 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

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THE UNIQUE BEAUTIFICATION OF KAYAN WOMEN

kayan-womenThe 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)

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THE TOMB OF CYRUS THE GREAT

jw-cyrus-the-great-tombIn the vast valley of Pasargadae there stands this simple tomb with nothing around it for miles and miles. It has been like this for many centuries, for it entombs the founder of Persia, Cyrus the Great (600-530BC). Revered as the liberator of the Jews from their Babylonian captivity in 539 BC, hailed by Herodotus for his humanity and wisdom, this small structure symbolizes the humility of an extraordinary man. Yet the tomb is a structure of engineering genius, the oldest built on principles of base-isolation withstanding the countless earthquakes Persia has suffered for the last 2500 years.

I was first here in 1973 when Persia (renamed Iran in 1933) flourished under the Shah. Here I am in 2014, when everyone I met expressed admiration for America and their contempt for the mullah tyranny they endured. I hope to return once more when the Land of Cyrus will be free again. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #146 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)

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THE HIDDEN NORTH FACE OF KANCHENJUNGA

north-face-of-kanchenjungaThis 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 in late October. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #31 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

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HALF-FULL REPORT 01/02/26

Buckle up, TTPers.  2025 was the warm-up, the prelims.  POTUS is just getting started. He well knows that 2026 is the Make or Break year not just for his presidency but for America.

Yesterday (1/01), he identified the crux issue, the single most necessary issue of the moment:

So off we go on the 1st HFR of the new year – and what a year it promises to be.

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HALF-FULL REPORT 11/21/25

You knew it would come to this.  Dems are so infected with TDS they have increasingly been driven out of their minds until now, finally, they have jumped the shark into full-blown, flat-out, unvarnished treason and actual criminal mental illness.

Remember the date, Tuesday November 18, when: Six Democrats Openly Call For Military And Intelligence Services To Disobey President Trump’s Orders.

Remember their names: Democrat Senators Elissa Slotkin, of Michigan; Mark Kelly, of Arizona; U.S. Reps. Chris Deluzio, of Pennsylvania; Maggie Goodlander, of New Hampshire; Chrissy Houlahan, of Pennsylvania; and Jason Crow, of Colorado.

 

On that day, these Seditious Six posted a video on X entitled Don’t Give Up The Ship.  This is what Treason looks like:

POTUS is absolutely right, they all belong in prison.

A lot more here, fellow TTPers. You’ll be amazed at how Trump in his first term was betrayed by his own people too. Here we go…

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WHAT TO READ 2025

Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World
Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World

Happy New Year’s Day!  It’s already 2026, but still time to let you know what books I found interesting in 2025.  It’s high time I did so, as the last edition in this series was What to Read 2023. You might consider reviewing it as well, as there’s bound to be something in that ’23 list that will fascinate you.

My goal is to make this ’25 list contain books that will seriously intrigue you.  So here we go.  What I’ll do is provide the Amazon link to each so you can consult the reader reviews then decide for yourself if it’s worth the purchase.  I always get the Kindle edition as it’s cheaper plus it’s on my iPad in a few minutes.

I have very eclectic interests, so there will be a wide variety of topics, at least one or two (hopefully more) of which should ring your bell. They all rang mine! So here we go.

We start with the McCloskey/Carden book above.  It’s a summation of McCloskey’s masterpiece trilogy explaining how the world stagnated in total global wealth for thousands of years, then suddenly skyrocketed 30,000% in the last 250 years.

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GLOBAL WARMING AND ORIGINAL SIN

Algore’s “Inconvenient Truth” 2006
Algore’s “Inconvenient Truth” 2006

[This Monday’s Archive was originally published in TTP on December 7, 2006. It’s relevant now due to the Climate Doomer black comedy farce this week in the Amazon -- Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Swarm Disastrous COP30 Climate Conference in Brazil – in which California’s Gov. Newscum made a total fool of himself..]

 

TTP, December 7, 2006

It takes a brave politician to stand up alone against a tidal wave of religious hysteria. Such a man is Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma. He has publicly denounced man-made global warming as a "hoax" and held a hearing in Congress yesterday (12/06/06) to expose it as such.

One of those who testified was Dr. David Deming, professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Oklahoma, who described the incredible dishonesty of scientists who have become global warming advocates.

Jim Inhofe is waging a valiant struggle, and it would have been helped had he someone to testify about how "global warming" is an issue of religious fanaticism, rather than just misguided science.

"Global warming" (or more specifically man-made or "anthropogenic" global warming) is a secular religion believed in by people who have abandoned Christianity.

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THE NYT MISFIRES WHEN IT ATTACKS TRUMP’S USE OF THE DHS

The Trump administration has been using all available resources to track down and then imprison or deport the “worst of the worst” illegal aliens in America, the ones whose criminality extends beyond living illegally in this country.

However, for the New York Times, there’s a problem with Trump’s efforts to make America safer: He’s using DHS resources, which Congress intended to be used...to make America safer.

And if you think that’s nonsense, you’re right, but it’s the Times, not I, that’s nonsensical.

When Trump took office, he turned the DHS loose on illegal aliens who’ve engaged in murder, rape, drug dealing, sex trafficking, pedophilia, and other vile and violent crimes.

By mid-March 2025, ICE had already arrested staggering numbers of criminals:

“In the first 50 days of the Trump Administration, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) has made 32,809 enforcement arrests. To put this figure into perspective, in the entire fiscal year 2024, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations made 33,242 of these at-large arrests.

As of Tuesday, ICE has officially made more at-large arrests in the first few weeks of President Trump’s presidency than the entire last year under the previous administration.

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THE WORLD’S MOST FREEDOM-LOVING PEOPLE

Laas Geel, 5,000 year-old rock art, Somaliland
Laas Geel, 5,000 year-old rock art, Somaliland

[This Monday’s Archive was first in TTP on March 7, 2013, shortly after the depressing spectacle of an Anti-American President’s 2nd Inauguration.  Thank Providence we now have a seriously Pro-American President today. On Friday (12/26): Israel Becomes First Country To Formally Recognize Somaliland As Independent State. Somalia is a completely failed state, the land of pirates, scam-artists, and Ilhan Omar. No country in the world deserves its sovereignty recognized more than Somaliland, yet every other UN country except now Israel insists it belongs to Somalia which is hasn’t since 1991.  Today (12/29), Bibi Netanyahu meets Trump – let’s hope that POTUS realizes: Recognizing Somaliland Would Be Trump’s Ultimate Response to Ilhan Omar.(Note: all photos ©Jack Wheeler)]

 

TTP, March 7, 2013

Hargeisa, Somaliland. Who are the most freedom-loving people in the world?  Certainly not Americans.

Someday, Americans may find the courage to no longer sell their birthright of freedom for a mess of government entitlement pottage, as Esau sold his birthright to Jacob (Genesis 25:29-34).  That’s someday, it sure isn’t now.  Right now, the people who love freedom more than any other are a group of Moslems in the Horn of Africa.

They are the people of Somaliland, who would rather be impoverished and free than sell their freedom for pottage.  Their story is a heroic saga, epically inspirational.  Let me tell it to you.

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‘JOBS AMERICANS WON’T DO’ – THE LIE THAT BROKE A NATION

Charlotte, N.C., is making headlines this week because dozens of construction sites have gone silent. ICE swept through the region, and the labor force evaporated almost instantly.

A major American city discovered, in real time, that its building boom was being held together by workers who couldn’t legally be there.

Watching that footage hit me hard, because I’ve seen it before — not on the evening news, but in the slow collapse of my own childhood community.

I grew up forty miles north of Louisville, Ky., in a one-stoplight town held together by tobacco, construction, and the kinds of gritty jobs that built the region’s character.

My dad ran a small construction contracting business and held a small tobacco base, which gives you the legal right to grow a certain weight of tobacco.

My brothers and I worked tobacco as teenagers, starting at 12 or 13, and my brothers did construction with Dad as soon as we were old enough to hold a hammer.

Then illegal labor arrived, and things began to shift.

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THE DEMOCRATS’ ”PARTY” MAY FINALLY BE OVER

In 2020, we figured out that Democrats were manipulating elections to win, whether through changing the way votes were cast and counted or through out-and-out fraud.

In early 2025, DOGE taught us that innumerable Democrat institutions functioned solely because of taxpayer money. And now, as 2025 draws to a close, we’re seeing that the Democrats have presided over corruption at a previously unimaginable scale in America. With each of these pillars exposed, and the financial ones being cut down, can the Democrat party survive much longer?

Let’s you and I count the ways it may not.

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THE TTP PERSON OF THE YEAR 2025

For America.

We’ve decided to mimic Time Magazine and use "Person of the Year" even if it's a whole bunch of people. Worry not, I won't be mimicking anything else from Time.

It is with great pleasure and honor that TTP announces that the agents of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are/is the Person of the Year for 2025. No one deserves it more than them.

Here's a reality check on what ICE does from something a friend of mine conveyed:

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REALITY CAUGHT UP TO ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’

fossil-fuel-plant

For decades, the monolithic and sacrosanct international climate change hierarchy went unquestioned.

Western nations in particular spent trillions of dollars over the past half-century to subsidize expensive but erratic wind and solar energy while demonizing carbon fuels as toxic threats to the planet.

Like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion dogma, climate change orthodoxy was embedded into every aspect of Western culture, from the corporate boardroom to the university campus.

Question whether man-made global warming was truly responsible for increased temperatures rather than natural, often centuries-long cycles of heating and cooling of the planet, and one was labeled a climate crank.

Everything from declining fertility to forest fires was ridiculously attributed to climate change.

But the causes of both demographic crises and charred landscapes were more likely the result of new affluent lifestyles that saw child-rearing as too expensive and time-consuming, and misguided forest policies or underfunded firefighting.

Yet reality has caught up with the near-religious climate change cult.

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