I took this photo of Mount Rushmore looking straight on from a helicopter – so it may be from an angle you have not seen before. This election week and on Veterans Day this Friday (11/11), it may be worthwhile to think of these four heroic Americans from a different perspective, to reflect on the almost unimaginable -- in the light of our comfortable lives we live today – challenges they faced and triumphed over to create and sustain our America.
It is worth asking what would they say to us today, what advice and counsel would they give us on how to face and triumph over what unimaginable – to them during their lives – challenges of ours as Americans today.
JW’s world travel map up 2013, needs updating to the present
As you may know, I’ve had memorable experiences in every country in the world. Ever since I was a young teenager, the world has been calling me to explore it – and I’ve been responding deeply to that call for well over sixty years now.
And yet… and yet… I must confess to you that I’ve barely begun, barely scratched the surface of the wondrousness of our Earth.
There is a literal endlessness to what there is to learn, witness and infuse your soul about the history, culture, people, and sheer magical beauty that surrounds our planet.
Can you feel it – the world calling you to experience and explore it? The call may be loud and persistent. It may be faint, drowned out by the daily humdrum of life – or under the illusion that you’re too old or somehow unable. But however loud or faint, it’s there in most of us – for how else did we humans populate the entire globe? To seek, to know, to experience, to explore is a very deep part of what it is to be a human being.
The Call of the World is part of the glory of being human – of using our unique, unique of all life on earth, capacity for self-consciousness, of our human ability to appreciate and live in gratitude for being a part of this glorious Earth and Universe.
You know that for almost a half-century now that I’ve made a living enabling people to respond to the Call of the World. This year, with the two year-long Dark Covid Winter ending, that response will be in the Himalayas, Central Asia, Atlantic Paradise Islands, and so much more.
I am hoping, of course, that you will be joining me on at least one of these explorations. More than that, however, I want you to answer the Call of the World that most resonates within you.
Is there a forest, a scenic wonder, a historical town or place near you that you haven’t been to and wondered about? Bet there is. What about somewhere nearby that your kids or grandkids don’t know about and would think is very cool?
Mitch announced that he plans to retire if MAGA wins the election. So long, Mitcheroo… it's time for you to go. We have a country to save, and there is heavy lifting ahead.
Elon is firing about half of Twitter employees and canceling the famous Twitter rest days just before the midterm elections.
Brazil is telling the world that everyone is tired of rigged voting machines. It turns out that the thefts are so simple that even a child can steal an election. Voting machine tampering projects at school science fairs have students demonstrating the problems with SQL Injection. A type of database manipulation.
Pfizer is rerunning their political script while a new epidemic is created to justify its recently patented vaccine. This time for the kids.
Russia and China seem to be showing a high-level interest in DNA warfare, as in perhaps Manhattan Project levels of interest. War is changing fast, but the Russian Officer Corps is bugging out. Nobody is quite sure why.
Nice place for a clean modern nuclear power plant?
How about a bit of good news to start the links today? Sanity is returning to energy plans in Poland. Westinghouse has been tapped for Poland’s first production of nuclear energy, built on the Pomeranian Coast of the Baltic Sea. It’s a beautiful place as you can see, where it will be supplying beautifully clean energy for the Polish people. All part of Poland’s plans to have 0% dependence on energy from Russia.
And sanity may be returning to Germany, too. “It would be rather irresponsible to avoid fracking for ideological reasons,” Christian Lindner, Germany’s Federal Finance Minister says. Meaning, “Screw your climate change agenda, we need to stay warm in the winter!”
Our two parties have both changed, and that explains why one will win, and one lose in the midterm elections.
The real rulers of the Democrat Party are the hyper-rich of Big Tech, Wall Street, Hollywood, the corporate boardroom, the administrative state, the media, and the legal world. Almost all these institutions have lost public confidence and poll miserably.
In contrast, Republicans this election cycle concerned themselves mostly with material issues of the battered middle classes—inflation, the price of fuel and energy, a secure border, crime, parental control of schools, and realist foreign policy.
Donald Trump also recalibrated the Republican Party and helped to turn it into a nationalist-populist movement that would rather win rudely than lose politely. Thus on Nov 8, the party of rich regressives is going to on the canvas with the party of middle-class populists standing triumphantly above them.
This is today’s (11/02) RCP Senate projection. Note projected victories for Laxalt in Nevada, Masters in Arizona, Walker in Georgia, Johnson in Wisconsin, Vance in Ohio, Oz in Pennsylvania, and Bolduc in New Hampshire.
With the most accurate pollster, Trafalgar, reporting Tiffany Smiley is only 1% behand and gaining on Dem Sen. Patty Murray in Washington, we just might end up with a 55-seat GOP majority.
Thus it is with infinite reluctance and lingering disbelief, what calls itself the progressive media is starting to concede the outlines of the overwhelming rejection the Democrats, the Biden administration, and Congress have earned and are likely to sustain next week.
Here’s why this crushing defeat is so well deserved.
It is my opinion that this midterm election will not be a "red wave" or a "red tsunami." I predict a Red Flood of almost Noahic proportions.
First will come the overwhelming rejection of the Biden agenda on November 8. Then will come the rejoicing by most of Red America. But after that, the illegalities will begin, starting with challenging the vote counts and the calls for recounts. Then it will escalate to violence unless there is a plan to nip it in the bud.
They have demonstrated that nothing is too outrageous, illegal, or demonic when it comes to cheating and violence, so those two tactics will be at the forefront of efforts to negate the massive Red Flood come Wednesday morning. After all, with Biden stopped in his tracks, no more of their insanity will likely get passed.
Six years ago, the Russian navy formed a new army corps whose job it would be to defend Kaliningrad, Russia’s geographically separate outpost on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.
This year, when the war in Ukraine began to go badly for Russia, the Kremlin yanked the entire 11th Army Corps from Kaliningrad and sent it into Ukraine. Where the Ukrainian army quickly destroyed it.
The formation, deployment and destruction of the 11th Army Corps tell a story that’s bigger than the tragic tale of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The corps, sandwiched between two NATO countries along a strategic sea, was supposed to give Russian forces an advantage in a global war.
Instead, it became cannon fodder for a Ukrainian army that, on paper, was weaker than the Russian army was. Now Kaliningrad is all but defenseless, and the threat the oblast’s troops once posed to NATO … has evaporated.
We have a unique capacity to envision an immense variety of possible future states. This allows us have ideals and strive for them, to plan, to learn and grow… and to want things.
This has everything to do with how we spend our money… and the joy or misery we experience from it.
In an essential way this orientation toward the future is what makes us human. We can imagine something we want to achieve, something we want to avoid, something we want to have, and then we can plan and aim ourselves toward achieving, avoiding, or gaining possession of whatever it is.
But there’s a downside. A really big downside that happens to huge numbers of people today, that can lead to depression, shame, and self-loathing. Let’s talk about how to avoid this.
July 12, 2001. I took my son Jackson when he was nine years old on an overland expedition across Tibet this summer. Here he is at the Sera Gompa, a Gelugpa (Yellow Hat) Tibetan Buddhist Monastery just outside Lhasa, Tibet’s capital.
Several hundred monks live here, teaching young acolytes and conducting prayer ceremonies for villagers in the area – albeit under the watchful eye of Chinese Communist government agents. Being here was a very educational experience for Jackson, which he still remembers. Always try to take your kids or grandkids on travel adventures when they are young – they’ll never forget them either.
On September 12, 1683, Ottoman Sultan Mehmet IV as the Caliph of all Islam was on the verge of realizing the great Moslem dream of conquering all of Christian Europe for the glory of Allah. The great obstacle in his way – the city of Vienna – was about to be overwhelmed by the Sultan’s gigantic army of 140,000 Islamic Taliban of their day.
On the Kahlenberg hilltop above Vienna, the commander of the Christian forces, King Jan III Sobieski of Poland, gave the order to attack. Twenty thousand armed horsemen galloped down the slopes of Kahlenberg, the largest cavalry charge in history, with the Polish King and his Winged Hussars in the lead. The cavalry trampled the Ottomans and made straight for their camps.
Ottoman commander Kara Mustafa fled out of his tent and barely escaped with his life (it didn’t last long – the Sultan ordered him strangled). With the Christian victory at The Battle of Vienna, the Moslem threat to Europe was over. Sobieski wrote a letter to Pope Innocent XI, paraphrasing Julius Caesar:
“Venimus, Vidimus, Deus vincit” – “We came, We saw, God conquered.”
In turn, the Pope hailed Sobieski as “The Savior of Western Christendom.” Indeed he was, and still is so revered by the Polish people to this day – with no apology.
For the people of Poland stand out among those of all Europe for their pride in being part of Western Civilization – symbolized for them by this statue of their Hero King trampling the Ottomans in the beautiful Royal Baths Park in Warsaw. They will make sure visitors to the statue note that underneath the right forearm of the fallen Turkish soldier is a book – the Koran.
For 500 years, from Ca. 1000 to 1500 AD, the Byzantine Christians on the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus labored with love to decorate the interior of their humble churches tucked away in hidden valleys of the Troodos Mountains.
Once a small Mexican fishing village far from everything, Zihuatanejo (zee-wah-tan-ay-ho) – Zee-wat to locals – has become a paradisical escape hatch for many seeking refuge from our pressure-cooker world. 150 miles up the northwest coast of Acapulco, Zee-wat is its own world of peace and serenity.
Stroll on the beach or along the Paseo del Pescador (Fisherman’s Path) with its shops, bars, and restaurants unbothered. Just relax surrounded by flowers, warm water, and blue sky. All the worries elsewhere in Mexico, much less in the US or anywhere else are not here.
The Igreja de São Francisco (Church of St. Francisco) was built 800 years ago on a ledge overlooking the Douro River in Porto, Portugal. 500 years later in the early 1700s, the people of Porto devoted themselves to making its interior supremely magnificent.
Most breathtaking is the polychrome wood carving depicting The Tree of Jesse springing from the reclining body of Jesse of Bethlehem, the father of King David, and showing the genealogy of Jesus through the branches of the tree that are the Twelve Kings of Judah, ending with Joseph and above him the Virgin and Child. Above the Tree to the ceiling is intricately carved woodwork deeply covered with hundreds of pounds of gold leaf.
I took this photo of Mount Rushmore looking straight on from a helicopter – so it may be from an angle you have not seen before. This election week and on Veterans Day this Friday (11/11), it may be worthwhile to think of these four heroic Americans from a different perspective, to reflect on the almost unimaginable -- in the light of our comfortable lives we live today – challenges they faced and triumphed over to create and sustain our America.
