Welcome to the 250th Fourth of July HFR! We’ve done something completely different for this auspicious moment. Instead of a weekly review, I asked members of the TTP Team to each write a message of their own on the significance of this day: Rod Martin, Joel Wade, Mark Deuce, Michelle & Greg Pryor, TTP editor Mellie Smith, TTP administrator Miko de los Reyes, and yours truly. Mike Ryan sends his regrets being in the field solving a company’s engineering emergency.
You’ll want to read and savor them all – then be sure and share your thoughts on our 250th in Comments or the Forum. Please – join in yourself. We want to hear from you. Here’s to a joyous 250th Fourth of July to all TTPers!
[This Monday’s Archive was in TTP on July 1, 2016. Ten years later, the Democrats are more of a death cult than ever. What can each of us do to help our POTUS get rid of them?]
TTP, July 1, 2016
Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, Indonesia. There couldn’t be a more appropriate and exotic place to discuss death cults than here. In the distant highlands of central Sulawesi undiscovered by any Westerner until little over a century ago, are a people called the Toraja who take propitiation of their deceased ancestors to a limit unmatched anywhere else.
Yet most interestingly, the Toraja have combined their ancestor worship with a devout Christianity. Tana Toraja (the Land of the Toraja) is a Christian haven within the world’s largest Islamic population. Churches here are as plentiful as mosques elsewhere in Indonesia, while a giant statue of Christ towers above Tana Toraja high on a mountaintop.
The Toraja are a people with deep pride and confidence in the worth of their culture. If there were anyone among them who lacked that pride and confidence, who felt ashamed and apologetic of their culture, they would be despised. If that someone felt so ashamed and apologetic that they wished and worked for their culture’s destruction, they would be regarded as demented.
There are such people among us, among our fellow Americans. There is a name for these people: Democrats. And it is critically important to understand something fundamental about them.
This morning [6-29-26], in a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that the President may fire FTC commissioners at will, overruling Humphrey's Executor and holding that the FTC's for-cause removal protections violate the Constitution's separation of powers.
For the first time in 90 years, Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution is restored. The blow to the Deep State is crippling.
The case is Trump v. Slaughter, which you can read in full here. But the essential portion is this, from page 35-36: “Our Constitution creates three branches, but only one President. That President is not all-powerful—not by any means. But he is not impotent either. He and he alone is vested with ‘the executive Power’ of the United States.”
The majority continued: “If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, we overrule it.”
Trump v. Slaughter squarely asked the Supreme Court to admit what has been obvious since 1935: Humphrey’s Executor was a constitutional disaster. If you’ve heard of the case, you might think it’s about Trump firing an FTC commissioner. That’s not the question.
[TTP: This article is a deep dive. It will take about 15 minutes to read.
And it is worth every minute!]
Yes, this administration has a plan.
Yes, there is going to be a reset to the global financial system.
Yes, it is already being executed.
No, it is probably nothing like what you think.
Over the last fifteen months, a series of seemingly unrelated moves, tariffs, military operations, legislation, regulatory shifts, defense pacts, have been playing out across different theatres at the same time.
Most people are watching each one in isolation.
The tariff people are talking about tariffs. The military people are talking about Iran. The crypto people are talking about stablecoins. The economists are still saying so much but nothing at all. Almost nobody is connecting them.
This article aims to connect them. What follows is the full picture of what is actually being built, how each piece locks into the next, and why the result is a new global financial architecture that will define the next fifty years of American power. By the end, you may gain clarity on something that most of the world has not figured out yet.
[TTP: Today’s articles were chosen specifically to show the results of thinking rationally and the refusal to do so.]
The deepest mind of the modern age sat in a lecture hall and admitted that a priest had out-thought him regarding the beginning of the world.
This is the story of how thinking all the way to the end stops looking like an argument and starts looking like awe.
In January of 1933, in a packed hall at Caltech, Albert Einstein listened to a Belgian priest explain how the universe began, and then he stood up in front of a room full of physicists and said it was the most beautiful explanation of creation he had ever heard.
This was not a man easily impressed, and it was not a conclusion he had wanted to reach.
A few years earlier Einstein had told the same priest, to his face, that his mathematics were fine but his physics were abominable. The idea offended him.
The priest, Georges Lemaître, was arguing that the universe was not the eternal, static, always-having-existed thing that every serious scientist assumed it to be.
He was arguing that it had a beginning. That if you ran the expansion of the galaxies backward far enough, everything collapsed to a single dense point, a moment before which there was no before.
Lemaître called it, with a poet’s ear, a day without yesterday.
Einstein hated it, and the reason he hated it is the most revealing part of the whole story.
[TTP: Today’s articles were chosen specifically to show the results of thinking rationally and the refusal to do so.]
Every day, thousands of Los Angelenos take a deep breath, step out of their houses, and plunge themselves into a transit experience straight out of Mad Max. The city’s buses have become rolling homeless shelters, replete with drugs and feces.
Its trains are home to murder and mayhem. As Daquan, a daily rider who works near the North Hollywood station told us, “You could kill somebody down there and just get away with it.”
The transformation has been swift and stark. Between 2020 and 2025, crime in the system more than doubled.
What drove the change? L.A. Metro’s dedication to creating an equitable transit system, where all Angelenos—drug-addicted, homicidal maniacs included—can effectively ride free, without consequences.
In other words, Angelenos have been condemned to die underground, all in the name of racial justice.
Activists and their allies in city government have spent years laser-focused on driving cops from the L.A. Metro’s buses and trains. Their argument: making people pay to use the trains is racist.
The world knew Durk Pearson as a brilliant scientist, bestselling author, and pioneer in the field of nutrition and life extension. His groundbreaking research challenged conventional thinking and inspired millions of people to take a more active role in their health.
I had the privilege of knowing Durk personally for more than 30 years. Beyond his extraordinary scientific mind was a man deeply committed to the principles of liberty and the United States Constitution.
One thing many people never knew was Durk's profound admiration for James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution." He believed passionately in the Constitution, especially the First Amendment and the protection of free speech. His respect for Madison was so great that he even adopted "James Madison" as an alias for his mailing address in Tonopah.
To Durk, freedom of speech was far more than a constitutional right—it was the foundation of scientific discovery. He believed that science advances only when ideas can be openly discussed, debated, questioned, and tested without fear of censorship.
He often reminded us that today's accepted truths were once considered controversial.
Over the many years that Greg and I worked with Durk and Sandy Shaw, I came to appreciate that his passion extended far beyond nutrition.
He believed that individual liberty, personal responsibility, and the free exchange of ideas were inseparable from scientific progress. Those principles shaped not only his writings and research but also the way he lived his life.
That is the Durk Pearson I will always remember—not only as one of the most brilliant scientists of our time, but as a man of conviction who believed that knowledge should be free, truth should be pursued, and every individual should have the freedom to think, question, and decide for themselves. Happy Independence Day!
Dedicated to the memory of Skye who was Durk Pearson
Greg and Michelle Pryor are the owners of Life Priority, a licensee of Pearson & Shaw nutritional formulas. They are long time subscribers to TTP.
Have you ever felt that in striving toward a goal of some kind, that there’s something holding you back? Something that you can’t see or grasp clearly, but you feel it’s there, slowing you down—like you just can’t get traction?
This is something that most of us have experienced to one degree or another.
Maybe we find we hit a wall with how much income we earn; or we find a pattern in our relationships that limits our sense of closeness; or we feel there’s some obstacle in our work that we can’t seem to overcome.
It can feel like there’s a threshold that we can’t seem to cross, no matter how hard we try. We struggle to improve whatever it is, but it’s as though there’s something working against us, like a gravitational pull that keeps drawing us back within a certain range.
When this happens, what we may be experiencing is the effect of a rotten belief.
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. On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, 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.
Cap Haitien, Haiti. On a steep mountain top three thousand feet high above the north coast of Haiti, stands this staggeringly gigantic fortress.
It is the Citadelle Laferrière, revered by professional distortionists of history as "the greatest monument to black freedom in the Americas." What it really is instead is a monument to totalitarian insanity.
In 1807, the leader of a victorious slave army against the French named Henri Christophe (1767-1820) seized Haiti and proceeded to re-enslave his people. With their slave labor, he built La Citadelle – 20,000 slaves died under the lash or from utter exhaustion building it, hauling hundreds of cannons, tens of thousands of cannon balls, and millions of bricks and rocks 3,000 feet up the steep slopes to the site.
Finally, in 1820, Christophe’s slaves rebelled, his body dissolved in a huge vat of liquid lime, the mortar for the fortress’ bricks. The Citadelle has been a deserted ruins ever since. I was the only visitor there. So much for "the monument to black freedom." Haiti has never experienced a single day of freedom in its entire existence to this very day.
West of the Himalayan giants of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri in Nepal lies a roadless high wilderness inhabited only by Tibetan nomads called Dolpa. The region is named after them, Dolpo. The Dolpa practice the ancient pre-Buddhist animist religion of Tibet called Bön. They worship sites of nature they consider holy. And holiest of all is the Sacred Lake of Phoksundo.
What would be an ideal place to escape from all the lunacy washing over our country – for a few days to a second home?
Let’s see… it would have to be a First World country with all the civilized amenities of modern life, and a cultured, educated, and welcoming people many, many of whom speak English.
A First World country that brushes aside all Woke nuttiness engulfing the US as silly rubbish to be ignored, and traditional Christian family values revered instead. That is not much farther away than a US cross-country flight. That has Goldilocks weather, not too hot, not too cold. That has sunsets in the ocean, fabulous food and wine, incredible castles in the sky, history that’s thousands of years old yet so hip and current it’s the cultural capital of its continent.
We’ve had Glimpses of this place before: The Europe That’s Still There, and The Portuguese Riviera. Yes, the Ideal Escape Hatch for us is Portugal – a quick overnight flight getting there, a morning flight return.
Halfway between Samoa and Fiji in the South Pacific lies the French Territory of Wallis and Futuna. It’s so hard to reach I had to charter a King Air private plane to get here in 2016. The capital is Mata-Utu on Wallis Island which the native Polynesian islanders call Uvea. French missionaries arrived at Uvea in 1837 to convert the islanders to Roman Catholic Christianity. They were Marist Brothers, a branch of the Society of Mary. Today, 99% of the native islanders are Catholic.
EL PASO, TX — Witnesses reported that a migrant woman gave birth right on the U.S.-Mexico border this morning, sadly making only the top half of the baby American.
Sofia Perez had traveled all the way from Venezuela in an attempt to secure American citizenship for her new baby. Unfortunately, according to the nurse who delivered the baby, the top half of the baby came out on American soil, while the bottom half came out on Mexican territory.
"I'm sorry, ma'am. Your baby's chest and head have all the rights and privileges of an American citizen, but he's still Venezuelan from the waist down," explained immigration attorney Benjamin Rodriguez. "Wherever the baby's bottom lands on the way out, that's the ball game. Baby Armando will have his bottom half deported, while his top half may stay and do as it pleases."
According to legal experts, baby Armando's top half would be eligible to apply for a Social Security card and would have access to an American education, but his bottom half must return to Venezuela. "If only Ms. Perez had scooted just 10 inches over, baby Armando would be fully American," sighed law professor Roger Valentine. "If just his left foot had landed in Mexico, we could have cut the foot off, and then he'd be set. It's a tragic situation."
At publishing time, ICE had detained Ms. Perez and baby Armando, but only his legs.
“I thought being on the left was a mental problem. The empirical evidence is so overwhelming that it never worked anywhere, and they refused to accept it… But what I discovered is that being on the left is a disease of the soul. The left is built on envy, hatred, resentment, and unequal treatment under the law. They are very violent, and since they have no way or arguments to answer, they go for physical violence.” -- Argentine President Javier Milei
On Tuesday (6/23), New York Democrats elected two Socialist Nazis and another borderline-so to be their Congressional candidates this November. Their districts (7th, 10th, 13th) are so deep Dem they are shoo-ins. Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez are 30-something nobodies who’ve never had a real job, accomplished nothing in their lives except being unhinged “activists”, and are Hate America/Hate Israel/Hate Jews Nazis (the truthful label for someone being rabidly “Pro-Palestinian”).
The third, Brad Lander, is just another run-of-the-mill sleazy Dem local politician who’s been around for decades and says what’s needed to be elected. He’s Jewish but since the district he’s running for has both lots of Jews and Moslems he pretzels himself in appeals to both. The “Hateful” label the NY Post applies to him doesn’t fit like it clearly does the other two. Actually, the incumbent Congresscritter Brad took out on Tuesday, Dan Goldman (D-NY) has made a career out of his unrelenting hate for Donald Trump – why many residents of MAGA-land are cheering his loss. . Especially this resident:So – does this mean Democratic Socialism aka Democratic Fascism is going to sweep across America now? Read on to find out! LOTS more good news in this HFR!