God Emperor Trump is a larger-than-life mythical figure. Then there is the living human being – who we discovered this week is not a superman. He is a man who has just broken his promise to America. What a shame, as it overshadows what a truly awful week it was for the Fascicrats.
For the past two weeks in our exploration of the greatest mountains of the Himalayas, we’ve learned the route to Everest, Lhotse, and Cho Oyo, and that to Makalu and Kanchenjunga. This week we explore Manaslu and Annapurna.
We first note that the five “eight-thousanders” (over 8,000 meters high) we’ve been to so far are on Nepal’s borders, while Manaslu and Annapurna (along with Dhaulagiri, we’ll get there next week) are entirely within Nepal. (Shisha Pangma is in Chinese Tibet.) So we get to go completely around them.
We ended our experience with Kanchenjunga by returning to our home base in Kathmandu, the famed Yak & Yeti hotel. We’re up at dawn the next morning to board our ultra-high altitude AS 350 B3 Eurocopters and head north for Manaslu. Here’s the trekking route around the world's eighth highest mountain at 8,163 meters/26,781 feet.
The most popular Democrat in America today is… Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
A newly elected Member of the House of Representatives, barely a month in office, with no prior accomplishments whatever is the newest political rock star.
Should we laugh? Cry? Fear her, or celebrate her celebrity?
Why has AOC (Airhead of Congress) become so well known, so popular among Democrats, in so short a time? Here’s why.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think,” wrote the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft in the opening to The Call of Cthulhu, “is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
In the Lovecraftian mythos, this refers to the occult world of the Great Old Ones, eldritch gods from outer space, as old as time itself who lie beyond our ken, dead but still dreaming. If we could only grasp their existence and see how fragile our imaginary world really is, we would go mad. Thus, we go on believing in an illusion and subconsciously hope Cthulhu and Azathoth never show us their true faces.
With the Democrat Party embracing full hardcore totalitarian Leftism, the secret to being a successful Democrat is very similar.
While President Trump was holding his Monday (2/11) rally in El Paso for a packed stadium, the hapless Beto O'Rourke was hosting his own pathetic anti-wall protest, his "March for Truth," a quarter of a mile away.
His little march attracted about three hundred people. Beto spoke Spanish while his supporters waved Mexican flags, and his gathering was close enough to the Trump event that the big rally's music could be heard.
It may be safe to say that Beto's potential run for president is over before it has begun. He is a self-serving, anti-American intellectual lightweight like Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and every other Democrat who has thrown his hat in the ring for 2020.
There is a famous poem by Sir Walter Scott published in 1805 that perfectly describes people like Beto, Obama, Hillary Clinton, Schumer, Harry Reid , Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Left:
“We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom — and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair. Here in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.” --President Donald Trump, February 5, 2019This was the President’s Declaration of War upon “Socialism,” i.e. Marxism, Fascism, and Communism.
After all, the three greatest mass-murderers of all time were “Socialists” – Hitler the National Socialist (30 million), Stalin the leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (40 million), Mao the leader of “the Socialist revolution” of the Chinese Communist Party (60 million).
The reason Trump's outspoken opposition to socialism is so timely, more necessary than ever in our country, is the catastrophe of America’s schools. While few were noticing, our educational system -- from the earliest years through college -- has been turning, indeed has turned for the most part, into a virtual indoctrination program for socialism.
“Mankind is doomed!” Headline writers have been writing that headline since the invention of printing — and someday it may come about.
For about four decades, that headline has most often been applied to the threat of global warming. Every couple of years, some notable comes out with a pronouncement that the governments of the world only have 5 or 10 years to make fundamental changes or we are all toast. The deadlines come and go, without action, and most people carry on with life as they always have.
Today, a number of Democrat politicians are telling us we have only 12 years to get rid of airplanes, farting cows and other hazards. Al Gore, of course, endorsed the policy proposals. Let’s thank them for sharing.
Meanwhile, there is a real crisis that is much more likely to adversely affect most people’s lives much sooner and with greater consequences than climate change, and that is the rise in government debt as a percentage of GDP in many of the major countries.
MABA – Make Alexandria a Bartender Again.
Miss Occasional-Cortex certainly earned her sobriquet of “3B” this week – the Bug-Eyed Brainless Bolshevik – for the childish lunacy of her “Green New Deal” (the link is to the actual bill she submitted to Congress yesterday 2/07). As one wag observed: “It looks like something a four year-old in Soviet Russia dreamt up.”
Yet with this, you couldn’t have clearer proof that Global Warming – defined in the bill’s first sentence as “human activity is the dominant cause of observed climate change over the past century” – is the Left’s substitution of Marxism as the new ideological rationale for full fascist government control over everyone’s life.
That in fact is why 3B’s crusade is a cause for celebration. So is the whole week.
There are no adequate words. All there is, is to join the chorus of acclamation that President Trump last night (2/05) delivered to Congress and America the greatest State of the Union address ever in our history.
There are simply too many quotes and moments to mention here. Below you can watch it entire – whether you watched it last night or not, it will blow you away – but first some observations and the best memes.
The domination of the President over the Democrats in the House Chamber was overwhelming. They were headlighted-deer stunned to find they were attending a Trump Rally – and joining in, chanting USA! USA! USA!
There were moments when you cried, when you laughed, when you cheered and shouted with joy – and those when you just shook your head in smiling amazement, as when the entire US Congress, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Presidential Cabinet, and Supreme Court Justices joined in singing “Happy Birthday” to Holocaust survivor Judah Samet, celebrating his 81st birthday after surviving a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue last October.
So here’s a collection of quotes and memes to enjoy.
©2019 Jack Wheeler
Last week in our exploration of the highest summits of the Himalayas, we ended our Route to Everest at the Red Hat Tibetan Tengboche monastery.
Having now been to world’s 6th, 4th, and highest mountain of all – Cho Oyo, Lhotse, and Everest -- this week we continue on to the giants of Makalu – the world’s 5th at 8,485m/27,838ft – and Kanchenjunga – 3rd highest on earth at 8,585m/28,168ft.
Get ready for a photographic extravaganza – many of these pics might take your breath away. Like the one above – the entire ridge line you see is over 8,000 meters, over 26,000 feet. I took it in one of our ultra-high altitude helicopters at 23,000 feet.
Isn’t this the most beautiful headline you’ve seen in quite a while? Especially because it’s from CNN written by it’s hyper-lib editor Chris Cillizza on Wednesday (2/06): THE COMPLETE AND UTTER COLLAPSE OF VIRGINIA’S DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
What’s going on in Virginia “is a classic example of the truism that evil always destroys itself, because that is the nature of evil,” thinks Unseen1.
If you haven’t been following events there (thus missing out on delicious schadenfreude), here’s a synopsis of the beautiful nightmare unfolding for the Dems:
But, as you can see, it wasn’t a good night for Bernie Sanders, Ms. Occasional Cortex, and all the other Dems including Pelosi who grimaced and refused to stand.
A SOTU is a speechwriter’s nightmare. It consists of a laundry list of the president’s (alleged) accomplishments, followed by wish list of the bills the president wants Congress to pass. It’s hard to weave a coherent, uplifting theme into that mishmash.
And SOTUs are too long. They last, typically, an hour or so. One of the first rules of the thumb I learned as a fledgling speechwriter was nobody is interesting after 20 minutes.
There are exceptions to every rule. President Trump spoke for 82 minutes, the longest SOTU since Bill Clinton spoke for 84 minutes in 2000. Clinton’s SOTU that year was excruciating. But, for me, time flew by Tuesday night.
The nadir of the amoral egotism of what might broadly be called “Me-ism” has been reached by the avant garde of the Democrat Party in their race to the bottom of the electoral depths.
The renunciation of any notions of sacrifice, patriotic pride, the spirituality of life, or the recognition of anything except the smash-and-grab politics of endless atomized grievances and instant gratification of convenience, has reached what must, in its way, be the end of its history.
As the party of infanticide and open borders, they are indulging in a frenzy of primal extremism from which they will not recover.
There were laughter, tears, raucous cheers and awkward silences. But more than anything else, it was a punch in the gut that President Trump delivered Tuesday night.
Time after time, on issue after issue, he laid down a marker about the remaining two years of his term — and the outlines of his re-election campaign.
Speeches that are too long — as this one was — often smother their key points in windy verbiage. But there was no mistaking Trump’s meaning or his intent to seek a second term on the platform of a strong economy, strong defense and secure borders.
The state of the union is frighteningly divided and hostile, but the state of the president’s aim is sound. For all the talk of chaos and churn in his administration, Donald Trump knows what he’s about. As he always has, he’s playing to win.
