THE JUGGERNAUT
It was the 1980s. Reagan was in charge of the country now, and the US was engaged in an urgent rebuilding of our military.
Vietnam was still a fresh wound and the country was emerging from a crisis of confidence in itself and in its institutions.
On the other side of the world, the menace known as the Soviet Union was churning out weapons and had just invaded Afghanistan.
Europe, so the thinking went, or the Middle East at large, might be next.
Or perhaps both at once. Or perhaps they would just pound the US with a surprise nuclear first strike.
Nikita Khruschev had sworn to bury us.
The Soviets weren’t building all of their stuff for show, and were openly preparing for The Big One with us. The Soviet menace blared from every side—TV, books, and movies—and had transfixed me. My America and this entity were on a collision course.
My idiotic pacifist classmates told me I was paranoid. I knew better. I knew the things I was reading were fiction, but behind it was a very real, deadly, and evil menace that was killing and enslaving many people on the other side of the world.
On this particular day I’d left the video arcade by way of the bookstore and sat down in the mall reading a Popular Mechanics issue that had a rather gripping cover. It was a very well-drawn Soviet T-72 tank—charging towards the viewer in exquisite detail with a gun bore about three feet wide.
The issue talked about America’s new M-1 Abrams tank, its close cousin the German Leopard 2, the British Chieftain, and some other vehicles I’d never heard of before.
How did these US and NATO tanks stack up against the Soviet tanks? Our brand-new M-1 was “probably the best all around tank,” it said, “but expensive compared to the opposition.” And somewhere out there would be a new Soviet “T-80.” I read on….
It seemed America had a tank problem—and a big one.
Mount Athos, Greece. The Monastic Community of Mount Athos has been independent from the rest of the world for over a thousand years. In all that time, no woman has been allowed to enter. 20 Eastern Orthodox Christian monasteries, home to some 2,000 monks, are scattered along the Athos peninsula at the apex of the Aegean Sea. The most dramatic of them is Simonopetra built in the 1200s on a huge granite rock hanging on a cliff 1,000 feet above the sea.
[Note: 20-point Trump Gaza Plan appended in full below]
[Durk and I had many a conversation about a nutritional formula that he and Sandy were very proud of creating. There is a mechanism in your body responsible for so many aging maladies, and their formula either stopped it or slowed it way down. They called their formula AGEless for good reason. I’m so grateful to Greg and Michelle making it available.—JW] 
