Central Asia. The very words evoke the ultimate in the remote, the exotic, the unknown full of wonders.
Here you will find the ancient cities of the Silk Road still in all their splendor, and one of the glitziest cities you’ll ever see built yesterday in the middle of nowhere. Here you will find the Mountains of Heaven, the Door of Hell, and the Seven Pearls of Shing.
An enormous area in the center of the Eurasian continent – larger than India at 1.5 million square miles – the “Five Stans” of Central Asia were once part of the Soviet Union. Now independent, each is different, fascinating in its own way. While most all world travelers dream of visiting all five, few do. What’s more, those few that do rarely experience the coolest places in each.
That’s what we’re going to do in September. Ready? Here we go. And, okay – this is the Door to Hell:
From its start, the Trump administration has been plagued by charges of “chaos.”
From the revolving door of senior staffers — including two secretaries of state, three national security advisers and two chiefs of staff — to the president’s brash and sometimes boorish personal style, to his politically incorrect taunt-tweeting, Donald Trump has refused to conform to his political opponents’ conventional notions of what constitutes an effective White House operation.
Yet, because Trump is such a Black Swan, his has been the most effective administration since FDR’s first term.
And it’s being accomplished in the teeth of the so-called “Resistance,” which includes the overt hostility of nearly all the mainstream media, the embedded civil service, the Democrats, the never-Trump Republicans, rogue elements of the intelligence and investigative agencies, and Robert Mueller’s witch hunt regarding charges of “collusion” with the Russians.
If you want to understand why Donald Trump is President today (and why he could very well win a second term), look to the Democrats' hysterical response to two of Trump's major foreign policy achievements over the past week.
Last Thursday (5/10), the President traveled to Joint Base Andrews to greet three American hostages whose release he had secured from North Korea. Unlike his predecessor, Trump did it without sending the offending regime an unmarked plane loaded with hundreds of millions in hard currency.
The return of these American captives should have been a moment of celebration and bipartisan unity. So how did Democrats respond? By blasting Trump for the way he welcomed the U.S. hostages home.
Seriously? How do Democrats take a positive event such as the release of American hostages and turn it into an excuse to attack Trump? Are they so deranged with hate they can’t see their behavior helps Trump, not hurts him?
Whatever uproar is occurring from and at Monday's (5/14) opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, that change of venue -- promised by several presidents of both parties and mandated by Congress in 1995 but accomplished only by Donald Trump -- constitutes an extraordinary development in the seemingly endless history of the Middle East.
And the suspicion is that, after not too long, it will be seen as a hugely positive one.
This isn't happening because of Trump alone, obviously. But the man, possibly because of his lack of foreign policy preconceptions, has a unique knack for seizing the moment and moving forward as he is doing in Korea.
He allows his gut to prevail over the advice of a legion of experts. Thanks to that, and believe it or not, Donald Trump may actually bring peace to the Middle East.
The GDP of North Korea is less than half that of Fairfax County, Virginia, and only a little more than half of Vermont’s, which has less than 3 percent of the population of North Korea.
Iran has a GDP smaller than either Virginia (despite having 10 times the population) or Belgium (with seven times the population).
Russia has a GDP which is smaller than that of Italy, Texas or South Korea. The GDP of California is more than twice that of Russia, even though the Russian population is three-and-a-half times that of California.
The Trump administration has made a bet that it can reach agreements with each of these three countries (North Korea, Iran and Russia) to reduce military tensions because it understands that it is dealing with economic pygmies, whose economies are going nowhere.
[We all know how desperate Democrats are to rig elections with voter fraud. Often, it’s the only way they can win. It’s why they hysterically oppose Voter ID. Yet as Joseph Stalin said, “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.” Today, the “who” is computers. Here, computer security expert Bruce Schneier explains what to do about this. –JW]
Today, we conduct our elections on computers. Our registration lists are in computer databases. We vote on computerized voting machines. And our tabulation and reporting is done on computers.
We do this for a lot of good reasons, but a side effect is that elections now have all the insecurities inherent in computers. The only way to reliably protect elections from both malice and accident is to use something that is not hackable or unreliable at scale.
Recently, there have been two graphic demonstrations of how bad our computerized voting system is.
This could have been the worst week for Trump’s enemies yet.
Hostages released, the Iranian deal was torn up, a new embassy at the speed of Trump, and some dark and twisted discoveries that the institutional left desperately tries to hide. More MAGA packed into one week than anyone thought possible.
We lost a national treasure. The Boy Scouts of America, an American icon for more than a century. RIP.
All this and more in this week’s Half Full Report.
[Just wanted to make sure you saw this. We have room for only one, possibly two more couples. Carpe diem!]
What are you doing this Fourth of July? You may be spending it with friends and family, of course.
But if not, consider that it’s on a Wednesday this year, the middle of the week, so you may be able to get the week off. If so, how about celebrating the Fourth with your fellow TTPers in the most enchanting – and safest – country in Europe?
You first learned about Portugal’s history and why Rebel and I call it California in Europe back in January 2014. We held three TTP Retreats there in that year and it’s time we had one again.
In the years since, Portugal has been discovered as the coolest “must-see” destination in all Europe. That’s because Portugal has got everything. Fabulous climate, beaches, food, wine, history, charm up the yingyang, and the sweetest, nicest people in Europe.
This is an intimate get-together of no more than a dozen TTPers to discuss the world in depth with me. And I might as well give you a warning up front.
In addition to learning more about the world than you thought possible in under a week, you run the risk of falling head over heels in love with Portugal. I describe it as utterly captivating, and once you are there you’ll easily understand why.
You’re looking at the death warrant of the Mullah regime in Iran. It’s the final green light given to the Iranian people to overthrow the rulers they hate.
Iran’s economy is right on the brink. The new sanctions – which the President will enforce with a hammer, right on all the Euroweenie (particularly German) companies doing business the Tehran Terror Master – will push it into the abyss.
The protest movement – growing silently and spreading widely – will quickly become too massive to contain. Regular soldiers, Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards), and even Basij (paramilitaries) are joining the protests – or refusing to attack them – in droves.
We are witness to an astounding moment in modern history. This month, May 2018, will see the simultaneous solving of the two greatest world threats, that of North Korea and Mullah Iran. And peacefully, without war.
Rather than horrific war with South Korea or possibly nuclear war with the US, the President has made offers China’s Xi and North Korea’s Kim can’t and won’t refuse. All three will be standing on the awards podium in Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Mullah Regime will now implode, collapse upon itself, without an outward explosion of war with its neighbors – much like the fate of the Soviet Union. The revolt of the Iranian people will have bloody moments – hopefully not many – but the Mullahs are doomed.
That this has been accomplished by a man upon whom the Left and Deep State has waged savage, relentless, and morally despicable war since his election is virtually miraculous. Anyone who now denies the extraordinary genius of this man is willfully and perversely blinding himself to the obvious.
We are in the midst of a truly historic presidency. Take time to savor it. And take time to watch, then read, below the President’s brilliantly courageous speech yesterday (5/08), followed by the text of the statement he signed.
“Follow Stormy Daniels so you can stay informed of what’s important in our country,” satirically tweeted Roseanne Barr.
The Fake News Media gave more coverage last week to the claim of an aging pornslut that she had consensual sex with Donald Trump than they did to actual news.
Despite this, the president’s job approval rose. Which mystifies the Lying Swine.
“Perhaps the most surprising result at the end of a week convulsed by scandal was a Rasmussen poll finding President Trump with a positive approval rating of 51 percent, the highest level since March of last year,” wrote Tina Nguyen in Vanity Fair.
Reuters, as you can see above, is so stunned by Trump’s approval gaining 10 points since last month they refused to publish their own poll.
Most Trump supporters think he did have a fling with Stormy, knew lawyer Michael Cohen paid her $130,000 to keep her mouth shut, this poll indicates. But we don’t care.
Why aren’t we as scandalized as leftie journos think we ought to be?
Explosives require careful handling. Sometimes they blow up in your face.
After the 2016 election, the so-called deep state was confident that it had the power easily to either stop, remove, or delegitimize the outlier Donald Trump and his presidency.
Give it credit, the Washington apparat quite imaginatively pulled out all the stops. But now the administrative state’s multifaceted efforts are starting to unwind, and perhaps even boomerang, on the perpetrators.
In truth, it’s not just Washington apparat. The entire multiplex world of the establishment is crumbling in a variety of arenas, from entertainment to Silicon Valley to the workplace.
It would probably give Robert Mueller a nervous breakdown, not to mention James Comey, Andrew McCabe and the rest of the FBI cabal, past and present, but at this point the special counsel seems to be actually causing the reelection of Donald Trump.
Most of the country, other than the greed heads in the media and extreme Democrat Party operatives, no longer gives a hoot in Hades about the "Russia Probe." They're frustrated and sick of it.
There's a dawning national consensus of "enough already" reflected by Judge Ellis when he demanded to know exactly what Paul Manafort's possible money laundering schemes of years ago had to do with Trump colluding with Russia in the 2016 election. The same might be said of Stormy Daniels, whose Russia connection is even more remote.
But let's skip past the subplots of the moment to the greatest of all unintended consequences of this endless investigation -- the decline and fall of the Democrat Party.
“What did they know and when did they know it?” and “It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up” are two of the biggest journalistic clichés of our time.
But clichés or not, sometimes they are true and they both apply (and then some) to the astonishing Eric Schneiderman situation.
This appalling scandal should be nothing less than a spiritual crisis for the Democrat Party and so-called liberals and progressives everywhere.
It should. But it probably won't be, even though the level of hypocrisy is stratospheric. And that is the essence of the problem.
But the initial question immediately arises. Since now six women (the NY Post has the latest per the cover story above) have reported near identical pathologies on the part of Schneiderman.
Massive Trump Rally – Washington, Michigan, April 28, 2018
When President Trump presided over a business roundtable in Cleveland last weekend, it was one of several events he has hosted in the Midwest since Election Day.
Trump held a raucous victory rally in Ohio just a few weeks after he won the presidency, and has since made frequent trips to Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan: He will visit Elkhart, Indiana today (5/10)
Trump skipped the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month and instead campaigned in central Michigan. The president’s courting of voters in the Heartland is a shrewd political calculation by Team Trump. The POTUS has this figured out:
Democrats have been counting on the Great Lakes to deliver a Big Blue Wave this November to help win back control of Congress, but with no compelling message aside from impeachment, no policy agenda for the economy or national security, and no tactical strategy to lure swing voters back, Democrats might reverse the historical trend of the out-of-power party gaining more power in the midterm election.
