This is the view of the lakes of Bariloche in Argentine Patagonia. It was taken in January of 2023 from a viewpoint called Cerro Campanario. This really is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. I was here exploring Patagonia with your fellow TTPers. Hope to visit this place again sometime soon! (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #251 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
Enter “The Old Man of Storr” in Wikipedia, and it wants to talk about the steep rocky face of the mountain in the background called “The Storr.” Google or Duckduckgo the images and you’ll get all these photos of rocky pinnacles and spires. So where’s the Old Man? It’s the most famous feature on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, yet you never see the Old Man himself. Well, here he is.
Look at the three sections of rocks in the foreground. They form a man sleeping on his back. In the first section on the left, you can see in order his forehead, eyebrows, large nose, both lips open snoring, and chin. In the third section on the right, you see his feet with his toes sticking up. In the middle section – well, now we know why he’s embarrassingly renowned, for there is the Old Man’s manhood standing tall and proud.
Ask any Scottish friend of yours if he knows why the Old Man of Storr on Skye is so-named. Then send this to him. He’ll no doubt say, “Well, laddie, this calls for a wee dram or two for us to properly toast the Old Man!” (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #297, photo ©Jack Wheeler)
LOUISVILLE, KY — Representative Thomas Massie has accused the Jewish population of rural Kentucky of being the cause of his primary defeat.
After taking the stage to concede the race to Ed Gallrein, an angry Massie squarely laid the blame for his loss on the "dirty Zionists" of the tiny country towns that dot the Ohio River valley.
"I couldn't reach Gallrein to concede. He was probably lost with his supporters in yet another small-town Kentucky synagogue," declared Massie. "Yes, the deck was stacked against me by the Hebrew population of rural Kentucky. We ran a great campaign, I'm really proud of our team. We just couldn't overcome the Hasidic powers that control the farm towns of Appalachia."
Watching as the votes were tallied, Massie's campaign manager Randy Barnes stated that the Congressman had performed well in a few areas, but could not overcome the losses in heavily-Jewish areas of backwoods Kentucky. "Those nudniks really put the kabash on us," sighed Barnes. "Despite Israeli influence over the little villages of Kentucky, we showed a lot of chutzpah out there on the campaign trail. Mazel tov to Ed on his victory."
At publishing time, Massie had announced that he would now pursue his lifelong libertarian dream of opening a pot store.
~ Babylon Bee reporting.
Xi, Trump Agree Iran Must Open Strait Of Hormuz And Never Have A Nuke — Prez Also Claims China ‘Would Love To Be A Help’. That’s the story for today’s (5/15) New York Post cover. So what’s the real story behind the curtain?
For that, let’s see what the HFR’s favorite China expert has to say, Ken Cao. For openers, he observes at the onset (5/13):
“Trump Walks Into Beijing Holding ALL The Cards, While Xi Jinping Has Never Been This Weak Before Meeting Trump. President Trump is heading to Beijing at a moment when the balance of power may be shifting dramatically against the CCP. From China’s economic slowdown and collapsing consumer confidence to the failure of BRICS dedollarization to Beijing’s growing geopolitical exposure through Iran, this video breaks down why Trump enters these negotiations holding far more leverage than most people realize.”
Now combine this with the geostrategic masterpiece Rod Martin gifted TTP on Wednesday (5/13): The Map Is Closing Around China. Rod’s brilliant tour de force is an absolute must-read.
Rod’s description of how Trump is weaving together a military-industrial complex between Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia all with America to contain a predatory China gives you a new level of appreciation of Trump’s genius.
Putting the insights of Rod and Ken together and your appreciation goes stratospheric.
Another fabuloso HFR – saddle up!
[This Monday’s Archive was originally in TTP on October 22, 2009 – and could not be more timely with President Trump’s summit meeting with Red Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing two days from now (5/13). It focuses on the Chinese inversion of reality known as “losing face” – and the necessity of American diplomacy to not care about it. Let’s see what happens this week!]
TTP, October 22, 2009
The headline on Bloomberg today (10/22) is dramatic: China’s Economy Grows 8.9%.
So the Scam of China continues, one the greatest feats of cook-the-books fraudulent accounting in history, but at least it’s a teachable moment in Chinese – and Communist – metaphysics.
Shanghai-based M.I.T-educated economist Andy Xie calls all of this panda-nomics. Xie’s panda is not like the real ones in the bamboo forests of Sichuan Province but the cartoon one of Kung Fu Panda. It’s all make-believe.
Which brings us to the nub. For Chinese, and for Marxist Communists, there is no difference between make-believe and reality. There is no such thing as reality. There is only what people believe. If people believe something is true, it is. If they don’t, it isn’t, it doesn’t exist.
This is best exemplified by the Chinese concept of “face” or lien.
The concept of face - as in "losing face" or "saving face" - plays a critical role in Chinese culture and the way most Chinese deal with reality - a way that is fundamentally opposed to that of Americans.
If your "face" is the primary concern of your life, controlling your conduct and morality, then you believe that reality is what other people say it is, not what it is in fact.
Telling a lie, for example, is not morally wrong, no matter what the lie. It is only wrong if people find out you have lied, for their finding out causes you to lose face.
In late April, Australia signed a deal to buy eleven new frigates from Japan.
That sounds like a procurement story. It isn’t. Across the Indo-Pacific, a new order has come.
Like South Korea, Japan is beginning to arm the anti-China coalition.
With frigates from Japan and nuclear submarines from America, Australia is becoming a serious maritime power.
The First Island Chain is getting harder. The Straits of Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok through Indonesia are being secured.
And the United States, far from withdrawing from Asia, is building a stronger, more distributed security architecture that prevents the next world war before it can start.
That is the backdrop as Donald Trump meets Xi Jinping in Beijing today.
The Enemedia will obsess over tariffs, rare earths, soybeans, oil purchases, fentanyl precursors, and whatever carefully negotiated communiqué emerges from the room. And yes, those things do matter.
But what really matters is the map.
Few predicted that blaming Israel and the Jews who support it would flare up in the early 21st century—and in America of all places, where there are nearly as many Jews as there are in Israel.
After all, Israel is the only consensual society in the Middle East. It holds regular elections and maintains tripartite judicial, executive, and legislative checks and balances.
Free speech is found in the Middle East only in Israel, where religious apostasy, criticism of one’s own country, gender equity, and tolerance of gays are guaranteed in marked contrast to all its neighbors.
It was once common knowledge that Israel had survived the huge numbers of its enemies because its tiny population was better educated, freer, more adept at Western technology, more tolerant of dissent—and because it enjoyed the goodwill and bipartisan support of the United States.
True, the recent affluence of the Gulf States has presented a thin veneer of Westernism that has fooled many in the new anti-Israel media. But just because Qatar did not censor a celebrity newsman’s broadcast from Doha does not mean Qatar is a free society. After all, no Western journalist would dare schedule a broadcast from Qatar with a Qatari who had condemned the regime for its intolerance or announced his religious apostasy from Islam.
So why and how did millions of Americans begin to express hatred for Israel and, albeit more subtly, the Jews who support it?
President Donald Trump has been compared to many historical figures, by opponents (who claim he’s another Adolf Hitler) and by boosters (who cite Andrew Jackson or Teddy Roosevelt).
With his blockade of Iran, though, maybe we should start comparing him to Gen. Winfield Scott.
In the mid-19th century,
Scott was America’s preeminent military mind, the architect of victory in the Mexican War and the “Grand Old Man of the Army.” As the Civil War loomed, he developed a plan to defeat the Confederacy with the smallest number of casualties possible.
He called it the Anaconda Plan — and like its namesake it was about applying a squeeze, and squeezing hard, until its object was squeezed to death.
Rather than winning a single decisive battle or a series of major confrontations, Scott wanted to cut the Confederacy in two by seizing control of the Mississippi River, while choking off the South’s foreign trade — upon which it was enormously dependent for both money and materiel — with a naval blockade of its Atlantic and Gulf ports.
Scott’s plan had few takers at the beginning, when enthusiasts on both sides thought the war would be finished in months, with daring cavalry charges and the like.
But when that didn’t happen, the plan became the basis for the Union war strategy — and it worked.
The South was beaten on the battlefield, but its loss came in no small part because it was being economically squeezed on all sides.
Today, Trump is following a similar strategy both at home and abroad.
They built the trap. Now they’re standing in it. A Virginia court blocked the Democrat’s redistricting map. The left screams “activist judge.” They built this weapon – now it’s pointed at them.
On April 22, 2026, a circuit court judge in Tazewell County, Virginia issued a ruling that sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party’s midterm strategy. Judge Jack Hurley declared all votes cast in the previous day’s redistricting referendum “ineffective” and barred state officials from certifying the results or taking any action to implement the new maps that Virginia’s Democratic-controlled legislature had passed.
The map in question was not a minor adjustment. It was gerrymandered to favor Democrats in ten out of eleven congressional districts and, if implemented, would have handed the left a structural House advantage heading into November’s midterms.
The Democratic response was immediate and predictable. Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones vowed to fight the order, declaring “Virginia voters have spoken, and an activist judge should not have veto power over the People’s vote.”
The attorney general of a state that spent years building the legal architecture for federal judicial intervention in electoral processes was now complaining that a judge had intervened in an electoral process. The irony is not subtle. It is, however, historically significant in a way that most of the coverage being produced right now is completely missing.
Some 98 percent of the 10 million residents of Hungary are ethnically Hungarian, and Hungarians speak, well, Hungarian.
Almost no one else does. So when Hungarians chattered among themselves about the April 12 general election, their EU neighbors read into the chatter what they chose.
Voters knew that 4-term prime minister Viktor Orban had exceeded his sell-by date. His government had grown stale, sclerotic, and shady around the edges. The globalists only really knew that Orban opposed illegal immigration and was a friend of Donald Trump.
For them, that was enough to open their hearts and their checkbooks. One time Orban ally, the 45-year-old Peter Magyar opposed Orban. A win for Magyar was thus a rejection of Trumpism, a triumph of good over evil, democracy over fascism, open borders over nationalism. Hoorah!
They all fell. . . . and better still, the left paid for its own humiliation,
From 2001: A Space Odyssey
“Open the pod bay doors, Hal”
“I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I think you know what the problem is just
as well as I do….”
The above clip was science fiction sixty years
ago. It isn’t now.
Thanks to “progress” and AI tools, you are
about to have a government minder in every
corner of your life. Some of you have already
invited it into your home like a vampire—hello,
Siri or Alexa. They can listen to you and your family 24/7, and that Wi-Fi in your house can also track you in the structure.
Now, your car is about to join in.
Your personal car will no longer be your own. Section 24220 of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed by Democrats with Republicans helping and signed off on by His Royal Senescence in December of that year, says that in all 2027 new vehicles will have infrared sensors tracking your eye movement and physical activity to detect impairment.
If you flunk the ongoing tests conducted probably fifty times a second, the car will limit your speed or even self-disable.
You do not have to be an engineer or particularly imaginative to see, however, that this is just the tip of a nightmarish iceberg that James Cameron himself could have designed.
It looks like a crack in a road, but this is in the Afar Triangle of Djibouti, where a triple junction of tectonic plates is tearing Africa in pieces. Plates spreading apart is called a Rift. I’m standing over where three gigantic rifts – the Red Sea that has split Arabia and northern Africa in two, the Gulf of Aden that will split off Somalia from the rest of Africa, and the Great Rift Valley of East Africa currently ripping Africa itself asunder – originate. Here the once intact Africa Plate began to tear in three directions.
Ironically, here is where humanity did the same. Genetic scientists have determined that some 60,000 years ago a small band of Africans (less than 200) rafted from what is now Djibouti to what is now Yemen in Arabia – and that incredibly, every human on earth today except for those who stayed, is descended from them. That means, e.g., all Europeans, Chinese and Asians, Australian Aborigines, North and South Native Americans, descended from those 200 people long ago.
Two amazing facts from this tiny country. There’s a third – it’s the best place in the world to swim with whale sharks, an unforgettable experience. All in Djibouti! (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #238 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
This is “Tatik-Papik” (Grandmother-Grandfather), a stone monument built in Soviet days as homage to the mountain people of the Transcaucasus Highlands of Armenia and Azerbaijan. After both became independent with the fall of the USSR, Armenia seized the Azeri part, known as Nagorno Karabagh. Since late September, war has broken out anew, with Turkey supporting the Azeris and Russia supporting the Armenians.
The dispute could be settled easily with a “land swap.” There is an exclave of Azerbaijan called Nakhchivan (see The Land of Noah, Glimpse #3) separated by a sparsely inhabited corridor of Armenia called the Mehgri Strip running to the border with Iran. It could be swapped for the Armenian-populated portion of Karabagh. Result: Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan are united and whole, Armenia and Armenian Karabagh are united and whole.
Should be win-win achievable given recent peace agreements achieved by our genius POTUS between Serbia and Kosovo, plus between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan don’t you think? (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #71 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
This is Caño Cristales, a river flowing through an ancient tableland in a remote roadless region deep in the forests of Colombia. Known as The Liquid Rainbow, geologists consider it the world’s most beautiful river.
The colors are due to endemic riverweeds that grow only here, clinging to the rocks of the riverbed, and the crystal clarity of the water. It is not easy to get to – fly a light plane to an airstrip, take a boat upriver for miles, then walk a few miles more. But then you get to explore one of the most beautiful sights nature has to offer – replete with dozens of small fun waterfalls, surrounded by an uninhabited forest teeming with tropical birds.
No wonder National Geographic calls Caño Cristales “the River of the Garden of Eden.” Yet it is only one of the many extraordinary experiences in this huge country – for Colombia is larger than Texas and California combined. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #22 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
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.
This masterpiece of baroque art is an awesome tribute to the importance of Christianity to Western Civilization. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #234 photo ©Jack Wheeler)
