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THE WORLD’S OLDEST WAR

Marcus Aurelius – Hapsburg Palace, Vienna

[This Monday’s Archive was first in TTP on September 23, 2016. Obama’s execrable 8 years were finally coming to an end, and the Dems losing their minds over the possibility of Trump. Ten years later, again finally, both Europe and America are done with the world’s oldest war, with scores of mosques in Texas and an Islamofascist from Uganda running New York, with mass patriot protests all over Europe, now, against the Moslem invasion of their countries and the governments that allowed it.  This time, at last, it’s time to finish the job.]

 TTP, September 23, 2016

Vienna, Austria.  This is a particularly apt place to discuss the world’s oldest war.  It’s been continuously running for almost 14 centuries, and it’s getting worse today.

First, however, let us note that Vienna has more history, beauty, charm, class, and friendly people than just about any city in Europe.  It leaves Paris in the dust.

Just one example.  Vienna was founded by the Romans as Vindobona in 15 BC on the south bank of the Danube.  On March 17, 180 AD, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius was in his ornate tent in the center of the Vindobona fortress, having just won a victory over marauding Germanic tribes.

For many centuries, the street in Vienna along the traditional location of that tent has been called Schwertgasse – Sword Street.  That’s because on that day in 180, the Emperor’s son, Commodus, murdered his father with a sword thrust.  In the movie, Gladiator, Commodus smothers him – but nonetheless, the movie depicts real history.

Aurelius to this day is revered by Austrians.  That’s why there’s a huge statue of him in the courtyard of the Hapsburg Palace or Hofburg in the center of Vienna.

For the next thousand years, the people south of the Danube adopted and lived by Christianity, oblivious to the war that had emerged in the Middle East, Asia Minor, North Africa, and Spain between their fellow Christians and people calling themselves Moslems.

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HALF-FULL REPORT 05/29/26

Welcome to another exuberant Half-Full Report! I’m Rod Martin, filling in for the irreplaceable Jack Wheeler, with lots of good news to share. Let’s get started.

We begin with our HFR Loser of the Week - John Cornyn (RINO-TX). What can you even say for an incumbent U.S. Senator — since 2002! — who dropped $111 million dollars, outspent his opponent nearly 10-1, and still lost by 2-1?

Oh, that’s easy. You can say Donald Trump now owns the Republican Party.

No sitting U.S. Senator has lost to a primary challenger since Dick Lugar (RINO-IN). Now Trump just took out two in two weeks. But that’s not the half of it: Trump is now 117-0 in 2026 primary endorsements!

But it just gets better. Democrats are losing the map, with hits from all sides: the end of racial gerrymandering, errors in the census, and above all, Americans fleeing to red states by the millions. Top it off with mass deportations and the story gets ugly for the Dems. We have details.
 
China’s map isn’t much better. Trump is bringing about China’s Great Reversal. It’s a story the Enemedia won’t tell (and frankly doesn’t understand).
 
This HFR is chock-full-o’-goodness: why Trump is in no hurry to open the Strait of Hormuz, why China won’t approve Russia’s desperately-needed gas pipeline, why ExxonMobile is leaving Delaware, why Sam Altman finally quit fearmongering about AI job destruction, plus Ron DeSantis’s first-in-the-nation abolition of property tax on primary homes.
 
All that and more in tonight’s Half-Full Report. Let’s dive right in!

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SOLAR WARMING

[This Archive article is "Solar Warming", originally published in TTP on September 29, 2005: almost 21 years ago.  Think of the trillions of dollars wasted on the hoax of Global Warming aka “Climate Change” since then. Yes, trillions, the greatest scam in human history, which perverted science (the only way a scientist could get a government or NGO grant was to “prove” it with GIGO computer models, never to disprove it which is the essence of real science), when it was nothing more than an evidence-free rationale to replace a failed Marxism (after the collapse of the Soviet Union) for fascist control over everyone’s life.

 

Today, the article argues that Climate Hoax has been a hideous insult to the memory of Americans who died in military service to defend our freedom.  Now finally, with the UN admitting there is no Climate Apocalypse on the horizon, the hoax can be abandoned – albeit 21 years late.]

TTP September 29, 2005

Take a close look at this rock and you’ll see it’s a fossil: it bears the imprint of a leaf.

The leaf is 50 million years old and is from Axel Heiberg Island in the High Arctic of Canada, 600 miles from the North Pole. It was given to me by a scientist working there while I was on one of my North Pole expeditions.

He explained that 50 million years ago the Arctic Ocean was warm – not just ice free, warm. The weather back then on Axel Heiberg, which is far more north than all of Siberia, was like Florida is today – with forests, including huge redwood trees, and lots of animals like alligators and turtles.

The entire Earth was warm during this period known as the Eocene, which lasted some 22 million years (55-33 mya, million years ago). Al Gore probably thinks George Bush and SUVs are responsible. Clearly, according to Gore’s way of “thinking,” they also caused the Medieval Climactic Optimum between 1000 and 1300 AD, when farmers grew wine grapes in northern England and raised sheep and dairy cattle in Greenland.

Eco-fascists like Gore hype the threat of “Global Warming” because they believe it is currently the best way to gain fascist control over people’s lives. Thus they hype hysteria over “greenhouse gases” – and never discuss the extraordinary benefits of more CO2 in our atmosphere.

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WHY DEMOCRATS DO NOT BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY

[This Monday’s Archive was originally in TTP on October 29, 2016, the eve of the election of Trump 45. It is a ‘nutshell history’ of how the Democrat Party lost its patriotism. It’s important for you to know how the Dems got there, with AAG Todd Blanche confirming yesterday (5/17) that DOJ Has a Ton of Evidence the Dems Rigged the 2020 Election that stole the presidency.  Which also confirms Dem intentions to rig the midterms this coming November. As a must-read Archive, please let me know your thoughts on the Forum – JW.]

TTP, October 29, 2016

They did once.  In the Reagan years, my best friend in Congress – indeed, my best man at my wedding in 1986 – was a Democrat, Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson.

Charlie was as pro-American as they come.   “A larger-than-life America-loving Communist-hating true-blue patriot who used his power and influence to the max to stick it to the Soviets big time,” as I described him.  He was a passionately partisan Democrat who wouldn’t hesitate to put his country before his party, who had the utmost respect for Ronald Reagan.

I can only imagine the depth of Charlie’s revulsion and disgust over what the Democrat Party has become today.

It has been a long time coming.  Here’s how and why it happened.

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CINCO DE FARSA – THE FIFTH OF FARCE

Welcome to the TTP’s annual May 5th tradition of explaining la verdad, the truth, about today. That’s so you’ll understand why it should be called Cinco de Farsa, The Fifth of Farce.

Last Tuesday (05/05) millions of us gringos celebrated May 5th. Yet Cinco de Mayo is a phony tradition, a joke on Los Norteamericanos, then exploited as a marketing gimmick by Tex-Mex restaurant chains as an excuse for us to get wasted on José Cuervo.

Yet before you get lost in Margaritaville, here’s the true history of Mexico. You’ll learn more about Mexico’s history in ten minutes than you ever did in school or anywhere else. With plenty of cool maps so you can win any bar bet on what really happened – plus an awesome John Wayne video clip at the end that’s very explanatory.

To begin with: Nobody in Mexico cares about May 5th. Only we, us gringos, pretend to. For if you ask just about any reveler at the nearest Pancho Villa’s Cantina or some such Mexican-themed bar anywhere in the US just what is being celebrated on May 5th, you’ll get either a blank stare or “It’s their July 4th ” ignorance. So here’s the real story.

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HALF-FULL REPORT 04/17/26

Tuesday (4/14), Louisiana’s Sen. John Kennedy at the top of his game, bullseye truthful and belly-laugh funny at the same time.  True, true, true… the caveat is that the GOP is not just “far from perfect.”  It’s become too far from being patriotic.

Saddle up for another great HFR ride!

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TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIAN HEROISM

 

This is where is started in 722, the Holy Cave of Covadonga, where the Virgin Mary told Christian Knights to reconquer their country stolen from them by Moslem invaders.

 

This is where it ended in 1492, where the last remaining Moslem ruler, Boabdil of Granada, surrendered to King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile.

It took 780 years for generation upon generation of Christian Knights to fulfill their pledge to Holy Mary.  This October, Rebel and I with your fellow TTPers will retrace and relive from start to finish this epic triumph of Christian heroism known as The Reconquista.

 

To entice you to join us, just for this week – as we have to secure airline flights within Spain for everyone – we offer $500 off if you place your deposit by Friday (4/17).

To avail of the $500 off.. You just enter the code: 4SPAINSPECIAL

All the details, descriptions, and photos are here:  Triumph of Christianity: The Reconquista of Spain - October 9-19, 2026 .

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EUROPE HAS A NEW LEADER

[This Monday’s Archive was first published in TTP on March 25, 2016. The ten years that elapsed since that date and that of yesterday (April 12, 2026) are vivid testimony to how power corrupts so much that an inspiring advocate of freedom can become an advocate of crushing it. There is irony in the title given the events of yesterday.]

TTP, March 25, 2016

In May of 1989, I had a cup of coffee with a young man in a café in Nickelsdorf, Austria.

In his mid-twenties, he had crossed an unguarded section of the border with Hungary just two hundred yards away to meet me.  There was mud on his shoes from the fields he had crossed.

He was a founder of an Anti-Communist freedom movement in Budapest called Fidesz (the Hungarian acronym for Alliance of Young Democrats).  Since 1983, I had made it my business to meet people such as him.

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AS CHINA FALTERS, MEXICO RISES

China is losing its grip on global manufacturing, and one of the biggest new winners is Mexico.

That does not make Mexico a rival in the way it did China.

North America is reorganizing around American power at exactly the moment China is becoming older, costlier, riskier, and weaker.

Mexico is rising not against the United States, but because it is plugging itself more deeply into the only industrial system on Earth that is actually positioned to win.

The sheer size of the bilateral relationship is remarkable. U.S. goods trade with Mexico reached $872.8 billion in 2025, with U.S. exports at $338.0 billion and imports at $534.9 billion.

In 2023, Mexico replaced China as America’s largest source of imports, a position China had held for twenty years.

That’s a quiet revolution. For years, the world economy rested on a simple arrangement: America consumed, China manufactured, and the foreign policy class pretended this was both permanent and wise.

It was neither.

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IRAN – A LONGER VIEW

The prognosis of the Iran war is now so couched in politics and so warped by the American Left that the public has grown tired and wants it all to go away.

But in truth, the situation is so fluid that any accurate prediction is impossible.

Yet there is good reason to believe in an eventual outcome quite favorable to the U.S. and one far better than the status quo ante bellum.

The Strait of Hormuz

Prior to President Donald Trump’s most recent announcement that the United States would first blockade and then reopen and control traffic through the Strait, only a few ships were going through, mostly those aligned with Iran, opposed to the U.S., or neutral.

Thus, the Strait was disrupted to a far greater degree than during Iran’s earlier efforts at closure during the “Tanker War” phase of the Iran-Iraq War, as well as its chronic harassment of shipping in 2018-19. And now?

If Trump quickly clears and secures control of the Strait, and if allowable traffic reaches, say, 60-70 percent of prewar levels and if the U.S. avoids a full-scale war, instead responding disproportionately to any renewed Iranian attempts to close it — then, within one to two months, oil prices will begin to taper off.

The American challenge with the war is not military but political.

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TRUMP, IRAN, AND THE THEATER OF MORAL PANIC

Pearl clutchers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your credibility.

A week ago, on Easter Sunday — Easter Sunday, forsooth! — President Trump horrified delicate souls by issuing this minatory post on Truth Social:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F–kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. That meanie used a bad word, called the Iranian mullahs “crazy bastards,” and taunted them by saying, “Praise be to Allah.” How disrespectful can you get?

There was worse to come. On Tuesday, as zero hour approached, President Trump went whole hog.

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

Oh, oh, oh! Can you believe it? He just threatened to destroy the storied civilization of Persia, Cyrus the Great, Darius, and the Achaemenid Empire! The collective knickers of the anti-Trump establishment were twisted tight. . . . The frenzied knot of moralizing mouthpieces competed mightily to show the world how lustrous their consciences were.

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UGLIFICATION AS CONTROL – THE ASSAULT ON BEAUTY

This morning at 4 am, something not unusual (for me) happened: I woke with an insight after falling asleep mid-chapter reading C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.

Ransom, his main character, was based on J.R.R. Tolkien, and I had been having a conversation with Professor Tolkien in my sleep.

What I wrote down was this: Triptych: Wealth. Power. Beauty.

These are the three things humans desire. Beauty is generally within our reach. Wealth and power must be worked for but are achievable in our great Western civilization. And these are precisely the things that socialist and Marxist movements, or indeed any ideology that seeks control over others, work to destroy.

It’s not that they hate the good and the beautiful so much as that the desire to dominate is more powerful. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron and Saruman knew that domination of others is easiest when people are hungry, diminished, and surrounded by the drab and the ugly.

Of the three, I am most fascinated by beauty.

 

Power and Wealth

Everyone knows about the first panel, wealth. As socialism creeps into a system, we see more and more confiscation of wealth: progressive taxation, expensive regulatory tangles, redistributionism, and equity.

Promises of fairness harden into, as the hobbits in “The Scouring of the Shire” discovered, the powerful gathering far more than is ever shared back out. The ordinary man is “given” just enough to stay fed but hungry, kept dependent upon the government.

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A HAPPY LIFE IS NOT PERFECT HAPPINESS

There’s a great misunderstanding about what it means to live a happy life, and it can be summed up in the popular symbol of the smiley face.

Now, I like to smile. I love feeling that kind of glowing, delighted state of emotional bliss.

It’s wonderful to be full of joy and love and laughter. But feeling those things doesn’t in and of itself make for a happy life; and just because you don’t happen to feel them in the moment doesn’t mean you are unhappy.

In fact, if simply feeling those emotions all the time was what constituted happiness, then it would be a simple matter to find the right combination of drugs that would perpetually bathe our neurons with joyful chemicals, and we could all be perpetually happy.

But this smiley face view of happiness is not the whole story, at all. And we all know it.

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FLASHBACK FRIDAY – QARI BABA

jw-with-qari-babaAfghanistan, 1984. Yes, that’s me with the legendary Qari Baba, Commander of the Harakat Mujahaddin waging a war of liberation against the Red Army of the Soviet Union – and my dear friend. I told him he looked like a combination of Genghiz Khan and Buddha, and he couldn’t stop laughing. We had so many extraordinary experiences together – like blowing up the Soviet High Command of Bala Hissar in Ghazni.

After the war was won with the final Soviet retreat in February, 1989, Qari Baba became the Governor of Ghazi Province. Then Pakistani Intelligence (ISI) created the Taliban to seize control of the country. Qari Baba had to take up arms anew against them. In March of 2006, he was assassinated by a Taliban hit team on orders from the ISI. I will never ever forget him. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #111 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

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FLOWER HIGHWAYS, FLOWER TRAILS

azores-islands-flowers

For miles and miles, the roads in the Azores Islands are lined with flowers on both sides. Even the foot paths and trails are strewn with flowers.

maderia-azores-paradise

As you know, I’ve been to every country in the world. I know of no place on earth more beautiful, more flower strewn, more peaceful, serene, and safe than Portugal’s island paradises of Madeira and the Azores in the Atlantic. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #196 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

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