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UKRAINE STRIKES RUSSIAN GRAIN TERMINAL

It may not sound like much but Russia's grain terminal in Novorossiysk is one of the best defended areas in Russia. Partly that's because the city is also home to Russia's Black Sea fleet and partly because Russia is the world's top exporter of grain and this is a major port where those exports happen.

A "massive" Ukrainian drone and missile strike on Russia's port of Novorossiysk has damaged two major grain export terminals and hit the last big Russian naval base on the Black Sea, reports say...

Most of Russia's Black Sea fleet is docked in Novorossiysk - one of the largest ports in Russia - after it was forced to vacate its former home base of Sevastopol, in the Russia-occupied Crimean peninsula, which was too exposed to Ukrainian attacks.

A major grain trading company confirmed to Russia's TASS news agency that its terminal had been hit, while another told Reuters and Russian outlet RBK the same.

The Russian agriculture ministry announced on Wednesday that it was working to redirect cargo flows to ports in the Baltic and Caspian Seas as well as land routes. It did not make any reference to Ukraine's attacks but said it was "taking into account current logistical constraint."

There's video of Russia's air defense struggling to take out all of the drones last night.

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THE CUNNING GENIUS OF AOC’S ‘WOKE’ REBOOT

After meeting Zohran Mamdani, Graham Platner, Abdul El-Sayed, and Francesca Hong, AOC doesn’t seem so scary, does she?

Why, she’s almost quaint, traditional, and (slightly) old-fashioned by comparison.

Tread carefully, Republicans: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is still America’s most dangerous Democrat and still the odds-on favorite to win her party’s 2028 presidential nomination.

And if she captures the nomination, there’s (roughly) a 50%-50% shot she’ll win the White House. Don’t underestimate her: She’s media-savvy, camera-friendly, photogenic, and her PR instincts are as sharp as Sardinian swords.

Consider how deftly she just rebooted the “woke” narrative.

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US NAVY TWA 800 WITNESS BREAKS THE CONE OF SILENCE

[TTP:  This is a follow-up to an article published in July.]

William Teele, back in the day

With the release this week of TWA800: The Full Story—A Navy Whistleblower Comes Forward, filmmaker Brian Lerch has shown the power of AI to penetrate the shroud of secrecy surrounding a seemingly mysterious event, in this case the July 1996 demise of TWA 800.

At the heart of Lerch’s documentary is the testimony of ten-year Navy vet, William Teele. Teele has been trying to tell his story for years.

I first spoke with him in 2014 and included his account of events in my 2016 book TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-up, The Conspiracy.

A few paragraphs in print does not do Teele’s account justice. With the help of AI, Lerch was able to dramatize Teele’s 15-minute narration by recreating the environment in which Teele operated. In the first 45 minutes of The Full Story Lerch walks the viewer through the details of the investigation, including its many failings.

One incontestable failing is that no single public proceeding has ever explored the case as a whole—the physical evidence, the witnesses, the CIA animation, the dissenting opinions.

By segmenting the public hearings, many of the government’s arguments have gone unchallenged. That said, so balanced and apolitical is Lerch’s retelling that a mainstream reviewer would be hard pressed to criticize it.

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THE SUPERTREE GARDEN

gardens-by-the-bayThe world’s most spectacular nature park is the 130-acre Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. In the gigantic greenhouse of the Flower Dome, virtually every rare flower on earth flourishes in abundance, while the Cloud Forest is a wonderland of tropical waterfalls seemingly falling out of the sky high above.

Dominating the park are the 160-foot high Supertrees, towering vertical gardens covered in orchids, ferns, vines, and exotic plants. There are elevated canopies and walkways between them. Exploring the astonishing display of hi-tech botanical artistry and genius that is Gardens by the Bay is absolutely awe-inspiring.

TTPer Cassowary was kind enough to guide me through the park as Singapore is his home. Perhaps he’ll tell us more about it on the Forum. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #102 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

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EXCELLENCE TAKES MORE THAN TIME

We can learn a lot about gaining our own expertise from seeing how the great masters gained theirs.

Back in the 19th century, Sir Francis Galton in his book “Hereditary Genius,” argued that performance of skills for mature adults improves rapidly at first, but then at some point “Maximal performance becomes a rigidly determinate quantity.” What limits any significant improvement beyond that, in Galton’s view, was whatever nature endowed us with.

Other researchers – as far back as 1899 – added to this that it may take over 10 years to become an expert. The idea that this is a relatively orderly process, moving from novice to intermediate to expert, led to the belief that we can judge expertise through someone’s social reputation, education, accumulated knowledge, and length of experience.

There’s truth to this, of course, but it’s missing something important.

Because it turns out that people’s level of training and experience don’t always predict high performance. From psychologists to software designers, to wine experts, to decision makers and forecasters on investing, research has shown that the amount of time spent in the field is not a reliable measure of performance.

Something else is essential, which K. Anders Erickson and his co-editors map out in their tome, “Expertise and Expert Performance.”

What makes the difference between a Mozart or a Beethoven and somebody who can play quite well? What makes the difference between a Michael Jordan and a good overall basketball player?

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NOTHING SAYS ‘BIG TENT’ LIKE A GOOD COMMUNIST POGROM

Hasan Piker, a close ally of Abdul El-Sayed, is calling for "Marxist-Leninist" punishment for those who criticize Michigan’s Democrat Senatorial candidate.

As radicals and antisemites like Piker flood the Democrat Party, establishment figures are struggling to justify their alliance with extremist candidates.

Ironically, Democrats are now fulfilling the false narrative that they used against President Donald Trump after the Charlottesville protests.

They are maintaining that there are "many fine people" in the Democratic Socialists of America party, despite its leaders seeking to destroy our constitutional system, open our borders, defund the police, and embrace virtual anarchy.

Now, some of these fine people are calling for moderates to be purged as radicals take over the Democrat Party.

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THE GOLDEN MADRASA

golden-madrasaThe Golden Madrasa or College of Tilla-Kori was built by Samarkand ruler Yalangtush Bakhadur in the 1650s to house and teach the best and brightest students of his realm. It stands at the center of the wondrous Registan public square complex of the Silk Road oasis city of Samarkand, known to the ancient Greeks as Marakanda.

It was centuries old when Alexander conquered it in 329 BC. For a thousand years as Central Asia’s great entrepot on the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean, it was a cosmopolitan center for Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Nestorian Christianity. Incorporated into the Islamic world in the 700s, sacked by Genghiz Khan in 1220, rebuilt by the time Marco Polo in 1272 described it as “a large and splendid city,” Tamerlane made it his capital in 1370.

I was first in Samarkand to stand astonished at the Registan in 1963. Seeing it now, far more impressively preserved than in the Soviet days, made me gasp – especially how Tilla-Kori is once again lavishly decorated with gold. You’ll gasp too should you ever be fortunate enough to come here. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #223 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

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KEEPING YOUR SANITY XIX

[This Monday’s Archive is the 19th in the Keeping Your Sanity series I wrote during the Fauci Covid insanity. It was in TTP on May 24, 2021.  It remains really good advice for all of us today on how to keep our brains young.]

We’re listening to one of the greatest geniuses of modern times, Richard Feynman.  One of the secrets to his genius is that, all his life, he kept the curiosity we all have as a child.

That was when, for all of us, the world was as young as we were.  Remember?  Everything was new, and fascinating, we were endlessly curious, we wanted to know why and asked questions about all sorts of stuff.

Remember how time went by much slower when you were young – and how you’ve noticed that the older you get, the faster time goes by?

Let’s not do that.  Let’s have time slow down, and recapture our curiosity of youth – by having our brain grow physically younger.  We’ll do that in a small place in our brain that’s Greek for “seahorse.”

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AFRICAN FLATDOGS

flat-dog-crocHere in Zambia and elsewhere in Africa, crocodiles are nicknamed “Flatdogs.” You can see why. They spend much of their lives lying flat on the mud bank of a pond or river. Yet when on the hunt they can attack with astounding speed and surprise, leaping unseen from muddy water upon an unsuspecting target twenty feet away in an instant. This happened to a young boy fishing along the Luangwa River near our encampment just days ago. Africa is unforgiving of the unwary. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #142 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)

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HALF-FULL REPORT 08/07/26

Yesterday’s (8/06) NY Post cover requires this massive correction:

GOP Midterm Prospects Improve IF The SAVE America Act Is Passed In The Senate As Dems Nominate Fascist Nazi Radicals

There – fixed it.

To begin with, as TTPers are aware, Socialism IS Fascism (TTP, August 14, 2025).  Which is why every patriot should relabel the DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, as the DFA, Democratic Fascists of America. But that only begins to describe what’s going on.

The guy pictured above is a Moslem Fascist Nazi named Abdul El-Sayed, mentored by another Moslem Nazi named Hasan Piker infamed as saying “America deserved 9-11.”  And the White girl flanked by niqab (head-covering)-wearing Moslem girls ecstatically giving Abdul a Nazi salute?

She and those of her ilk are his voter base enabling him to win the Dem Michigan Senate primary on Tuesday (8/04).  They are the cheerleaders for Michigan’s Islamist (Moslem Fascist Nazi) community who have taken over entire cities like Dearborn and Hamtramck. Here is an X post this morning (8/07) of Moslem imams in a Dearborn mosque praying: “Oh Allah, kill every Jew, Christian, and American.”

Folks, I guarantee this is a real Learning HFR. Lots here to absorb.  Let’s roll!

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THE ANTIDOTE TO SUICIDAL EMPATHY FOUND IN CEUTA

I am a newbie unknown on X, yet this post on Saturday afternoon (8/01) has gotten 147,000 views.  Yesterday (8/02), Ceuta mayor Juan Jesús Vivas said there were still 10 to 15,000 Moroccan Moslem invaders there. Today (8/03), Vivas reports there are now 3 to 5,000 left.

Here is the full text of my post.  The lesson is clear.  Like stray cats, don’t feed them, they stop coming around.  This is how moral common sense saves Western Civilization.

Simple message of civilizational salvation that needs to spread far and wide

JW X Post August 1, 2026

Numerous reports confirm that by last night: “More Than 48,000 Migrants Return To Morocco from Ceuta” (cf. NY Times, Reuters, France 24 etc.) What happened?  Anti-suicidal antipathy, the antidote to suicidal empathy, that’s what.

So what happened?  They got hungry, nobody fed them.  All markets and restaurants were closed.  They had to sleep in the streets on asphalt and concrete, nobody tented or housed them. They had no clothes, many not even a shirt, no blankets, nothing.  They were not welcome, they got anti-suicidal antipathy, not suicidal empathy.  The local Ceuta residents universally told them, “Get the eff out of here, go back to where you belong!”

And so they did.  Is there a lesson here? Ya think??

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GAZA, IRAN, AND SEEING THE WHOLE BOARD

Yesterday, President Trump announced that Hamas has agreed to be fully disarmed and hand over the government of Gaza to a new body under Trump’s Board of Peace.

Some of you are telling me the Gaza deal can’t last. You’re not seeing the whole board.

There are two default assumptions at work here.

The first is that Islamist radicals can just spontaneously produce missiles, guns, and money from thin air. They can’t.

The second is just black pilling, which is frankly stupid. So you’re demoralized: big whoop. You’d have been more demoralized in the summer of 1940, or for that matter of 1942. And you’d have been just as wrong. Get over yourself. Look at the facts.

First, Israel beat the crap out of Hamas, one of the most bloodthirsty terrorist groups on Earth. They are as murderous with their own people as with the Israelis, and have been for decades.

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MEET THE NEW CHIEF OF POLICE

On July 22nd, Madison, Wisconsin police encountered a suspicious person who they thought might be trying to break into cars or steal bicycles.

Indeed, they found the suspect—one Corey Ruiz, whom they apparently tried to detain as he rode away from them on either his bike or someone else’s.

A struggle ensued as three officers tried to subdue Ruiz, and Ruiz allegedly pulled out a knife and cut an officer with it.

Despite this use of a deadly weapon, the cops tried to take him down with a non-lethal TASER, which we talked about in a previous article here.

It proved ineffective, so an officer shot Ruiz; a measure that was effective in stopping the threat.  The suspect died.

As is the fashion so often on modern police departments, the leadership felt the need to schedule a press conference to offer some explanation of the event ahead of the investigation being finished.

But this day, it got taken to another level.

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“BORING FROM WITHIN” – THE DSA’S DEMOCRAT PARTY PROJECT IS FROM THE BOLSHEVIK PLAYBOOK

The Democratic Socialists of America have achieved some shocking successes in primaries in the U.S. this year, especially in New York and now Denver where a youthful far left radical defeated a 15-term incumbent and member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

The past is prologue and frequently a window into the future. The analysis provided here examines a specific historical claim: that the DSA’s decades-long push inside the Democrat Party follows the same “boring from within” logic the Bolsheviks used against the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks in 1917 — a small, disciplined vanguard using a broader coalition’s legitimacy and infrastructure to gain position, growing more candid about maximalist goals as it consolidates power, with no intention of remaining merely one faction among many.

Drawing on current reporting on DSA’s 2026 platform, primary results, and funding ecosystem alongside the historical record of the Russian Revolution, this analysis works through where that parallel holds structurally, where it breaks down (method, institutional context, and end-state most notably), and what the primary-and-midterm evidence to date suggests about DSA’s odds of consolidating versus stalling out.

Let’s get cracking!

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DARWIN’S DARK ROAD

In the autumn of 1924, a field worker from the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor travelled to Charlottesville, Virginia, to examine a baby.

Her name was Vivian. She was about seven months old. The man examining her was Arthur Estabrook, one of the most accomplished investigators the Record Office ever trained, and he had come to determine whether she was feebleminded.

The examination appears to have consisted of holding a coin in front of her eyes.

She did not focus on it. Estabrook testified that she had failed the test given to a baby of about six months, and recorded that she showed backwardness. On that basis he declared her feebleminded, like her mother.

Her mother was Carrie Buck. Three years later, on the strength of that record, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the Supreme Court of the United States that “three generations of imbeciles are enough,” and Carrie Buck was sterilized by order of the state.

Vivian went to school. Venable Public Elementary, Charlottesville, four terms from September 1930 to May 1932. In her second term she earned an A in deportment, a C in mathematics, and Bs in everything else. In April 1931 her name was entered on the honor roll.

She died the next year, at eight years old.

The record book is still there. The grades are still in it. Anyone could have looked.

Nobody did, because by then the question had already been answered.

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